Slop’s Antithesis
An Overview
If you’ve ever been genuinely mesmerised by a film, you were likely witnessing the culmination of a lifetime of deep thought, research, and experimentation. One tell that a film stands atop a subterranean Everest of deep work is that it stays with you long after the credits roll.
In documentaries, characters aren’t invented but observed, and the environments their stories play out in are filled with the complexity and contradictions of the real world. The documentarian’s task is selection; deciding what to highlight and what to discard. Whether tracking a story as it plays out or delving into historical material, they carefully search for salient details, orchestrate ways to capture them, and arrange them to reveal something meaningful about humanity.
The ability to perceive that which is important is the genius of documentarians who need to be storytellers, psychologists, sociologists, historians, and preachers in their pursuit of the most meaningful stories. Our deep work is embedded in understanding the people we film and the world they strive within, which happens to be the same world we all strive within.
At their best, documentarians can transcend the category of “content” with work that will long outlast their lifetime. Sometimes they can even align their audiences with the swell of an oncoming cultural wave.
Joshua Oppenheimer achieved this antithesis of slop with his films The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look Of Silence (2014). Oppenheimer used the medium of film to confront mass murderers with their bloody past in a set of presentations that come together more like Nuremberg trials than documentaries.
Adam Curtis too, created something important in his distinctive archival style with The Living Dead (1995). The three-part series examines the tendency of political movements to manipulate a people’s history. If you want to inoculate yourself against the conceptual fads and fevers of your time, Adam Curtis’s quasi-psychedelic oeuvre is a great place to start.
Ezra Edelman uses the life of O.J. Simpson to explore the complicated, and at times bizarre, world of American race relations. In retrospect, O.J.: Made in America (2016) now reads like a perfectly crafted preamble to the BLM riots that erupted five years after its release. Brace yourself for an interview scene with an African American juror from O.J.’s trial.
These works aren’t entertainment. I don’t feel preached at or manipulated when I watch them. The filmmakers share the burden of the truth they uncover and refuse to spoon feed the audience with simple answers and neat conclusions. I feel challenged by them.
This platform grew from a longing to see more of this work in the world and a suspicion that others felt the same. I haven’t been able to reach the height of slop’s antithesis yet, but my hope is that with enough deep thought, research, and experimentation I will. This is where I share that work, and build toward major projects like the ones above.
My audience here has grown steadily since launch, and my paid subscribers have given me the freedom to experiment and explore the world in ways that wouldn’t otherwise have been possible. Their support took me to a small market town in the English countryside to meet Mary Harrington, a rising star of the postliberal literary underground.
I created a two-part series from our first in-person conversation, where we tried to unpack her then work-in-progress construct, The Cyborg Theocracy. Fair warning, it gets graphic. I’ve had a lot of positive feedback about it, but several people report feeling disturbed by a scene in part two.
Mary Harrington in The Cyborg Theocracy | Part Two
In this two-part series Mary and I try to unpack The Cyborg Theocracy - The moral and political order that emerges from a civilisational pursuit of liberation über alles underwritten by technology. In part two Mary and I discuss the undeniable sexed skew of Cyborg Theocracy’s priestly class and how we might resist its moral impositions.
After years of studying the woke left, Mary’s perspective helped me zoom out and situate my research within a much broader political context. Since our discussion, I’ve become increasingly interested in post-liberal perspectives like hers, and in the many other political movements now gestating beyond the Western world’s heavily policed Overton window.
This platform has also become a vehicle for exploring prose-writing, and philisophical experimentation. I’m still haunted by a few clunky pieces I’ve published, but being able to take risks before an audience is proving a very useful process to reach my goal.
My Digital Reformation piece started as an experiment to see if I could find historical context for a longstanding fascination with media technology and its role in social organisation.
It stirred up readers more than I expected, and attracted a collaborator I’m working with behind the scenes. Expect more from this, as I develop the frame and seek out others doing work in the area.
It stirred readers more than I expected and drew in a collaborator I’m now working with behind the scenes. Expect more on this as I develop the frame and seek out others working in the area.
The Reformers remains a major draw for the platform, and the continuing interest inspired me to rescue scenes that might otherwise have remained frozen in silicone in my basement.
This is just the work I’ve found most fruitful but you can view the entire platform archive here.
Thanks for your interest, especially to my paid subscribers, without which none of this would be possible.
I'd love to see an epilogue to The Reformers. Please also include any more clips of the trio describing their "research." I could use a laugh.
I was thinking the other day the best fictional films are beautiful arenas for testing memes. Especially moral memes. With documentaries, the same thing, but instead of artificially constructing characters to maximize testability (through conflict), we find them in the real world.