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Singularly Felt but Universally Relatable
A take-it-all-in hacktivist mystery. No spacetime for blink-and-you-miss-it shenanigans. Mild spoilers for A Murder at the End of the World below.
Imagine yourself an adolescent with no knowledge of British idioms, culture, reference points – British life, in general. Now imagine picking up a random Agatha Christie novel and reading the first couple of chapters. Would you latch onto it? Would its unapologetically English characters, class tropes, and personification of European vignettes resonate? Christie was my introduction to murder mysteries. As a high schooler, I must have read most of her catalogue. At times, the prose and characters were difficult to get a grip on, but worth grappling with regardless. The twists and turns so worth it.
Christie knew how to construct a setting, place characters in context, prescribe them motivations, interests, and suspicions, and lead the reader down several rabbit holes of possibilities. It did not matter if the cultural touchpoints were not always obvious or easily understood, at least to this reader unfamiliar with the world of twentieth century Britain at that time. The author was doing enough to keep you engaged and develop the people you were following. The strangeness of the stage provided plenty of intrigue.
Sometimes, she cheated. A clue left unshared or a spurious revelation plucked from speculation that could not possibly be confirmed until the author was ready for us to hear it. And Then There Were None was guilty of this; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd the exact opposite.
Not every mystery writer sprinkles their literature with puzzle pieces to the full picture. Nor do they need to. It may be fun to go through a Sherlock Holmes story with the aplomb and brilliance of the eponymous detective, but alas, that is not easy given the number of red herrings overlaid within the narrative. When entering the world of a murder mystery, we are also conditioned to be suspicious of everyone and ascribe intention or ulterior motives to every little action. We cannot let anything go. It is as much a game to play as it is a story to absorb. Pleasantly surprising, then, when we happen upon a thriller or murder mystery having gone in blind – now we have to re-read or re-watch it at some point; what clues did we miss along the way?
This brings us to FX’s A Murder at the End of the World, created by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij. With “a murder” in the name, the only surprises ahead are the ones you are expecting. It is a whodunit that primes the viewer to be doubtful of everyone and everything. Except this one actually plays nicely on the trope of revealing a grand master plan, instead dwelling on the evolving mess at hand.
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Modernism of the Soul
“I was writing this paper on the notion of attention span disappearing. I don’t think the issue is attention, you know, I had a professor who always used to talk about that. And then he was telling me his son was playing a video game, and he tried to play it, and he could only play it for five minutes, and he got completely like, he was like ‘I can’t even’, you know, attend to it. We would never accuse the professor of having a short attention span because he could only stand that for five minutes. Though he accused his son of having a short attention span because he couldn’t read a book for five minutes. But that same kid could play that video game that the professor couldn’t play for five hours. And the reason why is we’re bookish people, we’re biased towards the book. And so the issue isn’t attention, for me, it’s interest. And that is a crisis. I think, my kids, I don’t want them to be disinterested in everyday life…It’s not that they can’t pay attention to it, they just don’t…they’re not interested in it. To me, boredom is an excuse, it gives you a crutch. What you’re really saying is, ‘I’m not interested in things that I probably should be interested in’, you know, like everyday life, like time passing, like a slow film. I don’t think they can’t pay attention, I just don’t think they’re interested in it. And that to me is more of a crisis.”
– Filmmaker Kogonada in an interview at the 2016 Berlinale Talents Summit
A haphazard rumination on something foundational. I want to share a corner of the human condition in countenance of the humanist tradition. An avenue towards compassion, empathy, and warmth towards all those who share this shrinking world.
Despite humanity’s seeming connectedness, we are distant. We have not yet reached a stage where technology is able to replicate true connection. But we revel in its distraction and unfulfilled promise. We are a species that evolved needing the presence of others around us, in every sense. We now live in a world of reflective and transparent surfaces, translating each other’s thoughts and personalities through flat screens. Interpreting events having lost ourselves in the gossamer that obscures their true nature.
From within this context and through just as fiddly a medium, I implore you to consider the still frame. The unmoving, lingering shot focused on extracting the remarkable from the routine.
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Bringing the Factory to the Farm
A morsel of your time, if you please, to dive into a surreal vision. A moment under the darkening firmament with a gaggle of green learners, rendered speechless by the immutable.
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A late evening in July 2013. My colleague and I have just finished a day’s worth of sessions at a school a couple of kilometers from the homestead where we are residing. This is a joint elementary-secondary, about 7 clicks away from the small but busy village center of Busolwe, Eastern Uganda. We have supported facilitating a set of reading, writing and debating competitions to close out our time at this particular location. Part of a community-led program to foster higher literacy rates and championed by the local library and Elder Council.
Our host and supervisor, the local librarian, has left us and returned home for the night. We are to finish our conversations and join him and his family for dinner at a reasonable time. The kids, of course, have to stay. They live at the school most of the year, sleeping in dense rooms in stacked beds, sharing meals in the same rooms where they study. They do the chores too – some have already started sweeping the hallways in preparation for mealtime. The teachers, who double as caretakers, and most of whom have not been paid for many months, have retired to their quarters or trundled home.
I am speaking with a few of the older students trying to convince them of impossibilities.
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In Dread and Promise
The crowd was mostly young. Bookworms, sweatered paramours, and fans of underground rock slowly filled the Edinburgh Festival Theatre in anticipation of a performance that would end the 2016 Edinburgh International Festival. We sat on the upper tier, far from the stage and yet able to see every nook and cranny. The theatre’s curvature made it appear as though we were on the edge of a concave lens, just a short lean away from tipping ourselves into the hundreds of seats below.
The program read: “Mogwai & Mark Cousins”. We were there to witness a non-narrative film of archived footage assembled by Mark Cousins called Atomic, Living in Dread and Promise. The feature was scored by the Scottish band Mogwai, with many in attendance solely to see them play.
And that is what they did. With no bombast or introduction of any kind, they strolled out into the orchestra pit, equipped themselves, and began the show. Their strides out were greeted with mild cheers silenced quickly by the dimming lights and deafening volume of their instruments. The vibrations reached into our bones as a large projection illuminated the space above the stage. A man’s face appeared. He began, “The government has decided, that in the present state of international tension, you should be told how best to protect yourselves…”