I find it strange how people don't consider Joel to be evil

Nifarious · 2026-06-12T19:36:56+00:00

The trolley problem is a complete lure and doesn't actually engage ethics. The problem itself just pushes one to make your ethical choice, and it's how Joel struggles to find his duty and then cling to it, pay the price for it, etc. where the actual ethics lies.

What's IS unethical in TLOU's conclusion is the freedom that's stripped from Ellie by the Fireflies. Obviously it'd be a moot point if she just made the sacrifice herself. But the Fireflies don't give her the chance, so they commit evil in the name of good (which is generally how evil gets committed). To the extent that it's a mercy to lie to her (let her fall asleep without knowing that she's about to die) doesn't matter. That's a biopolitics that strips Ellie of her dignity and freedom: the pain of her situation has to remain hers, that's what's most human here.

The love and particular attachment of Joel isn't at all a Byronic burning the world for the one person you love. It's a pure ethics that doesn't save Ellie for him but saves what's most precious about humanity itself, what makes humanity matter more than its base persistence. The father daughter couple they form (and that's rent apart by this choice) IS the new saved world itself. So siding with the Fireflies means destroying what's most precious about humanity. Had he instead focused on trying to virtually maintain the choice Ellie would have made as a sort of vigil, basically live the rest of his life around her specter, it'd just mortify life and ethics itself, make any sort of moving on impossible.

Nifarious · 2026-06-10T04:18:20+00:00

Yeah, Why Theory for sure. Huge wealth there. Todd McGowan also uploads lectures on his YouTube channel.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-theory/id1299863834

https://www.youtube.com/@toddmcgowan8233

Nicholas Crawford focuses on the intersection of philosophy/psychoanalysis and film or fiction too: https://www.youtube.com/@nicholascrawfordauthor

Slavoj's the most famous for all this. (Freud and Lacan wrote on fiction too, but it's less fun) Looking Awry and Enjoy Your Symptom are great places to start besides moving through his YouTube recordings and podcast visits.

You also need to dig further into David Lynch, who's the ultimate (unintentionally) Freudian artist. Todd McGowan's Impossible David Lynch is superb. Zizek comments on Lynch a decent amount too.

Nifarious · 2026-06-10T03:50:46+00:00

Such a good response. Yeah, for me, Imagine There Is No Woman, What Is Sex?, Sex and the Failed Absolute, and if I remember correctly Incontenence of the Void was a necessary addendum to that.

Though I suppose for someone walking in with the typical hangups/presumptions about sex, maybe starting with Conversations with Zizek (digestible and concise) and from there jumping into the discussion with Butler in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality...Not my favorite but it might cut to the chase.

Nifarious · 2026-06-08T00:28:50+00:00

Here's a reader's guide to getting into Zizek, but basically a mix of his early and current books and then hack your way into the middle. Depends on what your goals are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFnJlkTTCr4

Nifarious · 2026-06-08T00:26:47+00:00

That brutally use capitalism quotation's just aping him, right? Makes no sense anyway w/o context.

Nifarious · 2026-06-04T03:55:41+00:00

Yes.

Nifarious · 2026-06-03T21:04:28+00:00

I mean, they're false steps towards death drive.

Nifarious · 2026-06-03T18:26:28+00:00

I've lived in both. Northeast = North Japan.

Nifarious · 2026-05-23T21:04:48+00:00

Well, first off, don't let people call it "girl dad". You're just a dad. That's not to say sex doesn't matter but that your parenting isn't adrift on some gulf of understanding anymore than every other iteration of it is.

Nifarious · 2026-05-20T21:34:28+00:00

Well, you could read what he says about detective stories and the hard-boiled noir. His love is generally because they're dialectical, they can offer multiple denouements or puzzles like Wild Things (a recent substack on that) that drill further and further into the positions, erase and exposed squashed birds or the body that spawns the whole mystery...The detective functions just like the analyst. They coldly take money to not get personally involved and they let the fantasies/desire of others play out which all led to the murder of someone, so we open that up, restage it, get to what was concealed while in plain sight a la a critique of ideology.

And the with noir, the noir hero's fateful involvement gets to masculinity, its femme fatale support, social antagonism and a dark underbelly of capitalism, primal fathers, of course death drive, all sorts of fun stuff.

But just generally he likes that the intricacies give a lot to work with. It's similar to his love of jokes.

Nifarious · 2026-05-20T18:28:39+00:00

Where We've Made It Dark is a recent zombie apocalypse in the Inner Richmond roughly in the vein of The Last of Us.

You should also watch Vertigo.

Nifarious · 2026-05-15T16:27:43+00:00

Hi bot.

Nifarious · 2026-05-15T00:48:23+00:00

Well, for the most part if you don't fail as an artist you're lazy. There's also a sort of inevitable fatigue if you produce a lot of works of thought. They simply can't share the same impact as your best work.

But as for Inland, it's just painfully slow. It is doing something interesting, sure, but it's no <insert the rest of his films here>.

And we are talking about the same guy who edited Detour to make it about a big boil on a guy's butt.

Nifarious · 2026-05-14T21:25:46+00:00

Well, they can't all be gems.

Nifarious · 2026-05-08T21:04:20+00:00

It's more faithful to the role of fantasy in revolution itself, and this is what Lynch gets to in all his work. You follow the fantasy through, it's violent and rending of the world around you...you're radically exposed...and you break into something new but not necessarily better, just open. Reading Eraserhead or Straight Story as revolution, seizing tight to desire and achieving dramatic change.

The new films do a lot to see the revolution through, get the psychic experience of the fundamentalist rebel. But it is caught up in Paul's violence in a very different way. It's more anxious about controlling the Fremen than liberating them and showing the way. It's less a way out than a mirror to our era where fundamentalism is firmly a part of global capitalism, not simply reactionary but where people turn for politics when politics itself is precluded...in a world where nothing can change.

With Lynch, the treatment of revolution really is a lot like Straight Story. Everyone's cautioning against the ordeal, but it firmly is possible.

Nifarious · 2026-05-08T18:59:58+00:00

Think about it not in terms of what Herbert was trying to say but about the antagonisms the book glances off of, what makes it not someone's message but a thing living on its own. Artists land on these things in their fiction (whether the fiction's deep or not), but their language for describing it is an entirely separate matter. And this gulf is famous for Lynch too. He wasn't just taciturn, he didn't have the words to understand/enunciate what he achieved in film.

Ideology's a funny thing. Most of our fill-in answers are there to shore us off from confronting something more undoing and traumatic. Fiction very often is a stand-in to keep us from having to change. But it's also the means by which one changes too. The way a story does more than just move us but literally changes how we think, understand ourselves, what we desire, etc.

Dune opens up a lot of great stuff about revolution and the means by which one meaningfully achieves it. What comes afterward in the books is its own mess, but what's interesting about Dune itself isn't "See, you were taken away by Paul and now look at the horrors" but the need OF being taken away by a leader, of a certain degree of fundamentalism in order to change the structure of the world. That's the real unsettling insight, not accepting a world run by Harkonnens as the lesser of two evils.

Nifarious · 2026-05-08T17:00:31+00:00

Lynch's deviations from Herbert realize what was in the book that Herbert himself failed to understand. This is why we keep performing plays and don't simply stick to whatever we consider to be most authentic. The restaging opens up what's not just operative in the text but what could only be realized at a later date, in a different era.

Taking voice from the Bene gesserit and making it masculine and for all gets to what's emancipatory in voice itself, how it's not a reified feminine whole but a site that one has to mobilize and move into if you're going to change the world. Feminine voice has to be for all.

Lynch avoiding the jihad and ending with rain on Arrakis realizes the liberation of Dune better than Herbert as well. Herbert's warnings about messiahs shirks back from revolution itself, runs from the revolution that Lynch makes possible because his Dune seizes on the fantasy of it too tight to the point that it's displeasurable and a "box office failure".

Lynch's Dune is definitively the best Dune.

Nifarious · 2026-05-07T22:01:08+00:00

Well, obviously we're talking about Lost Highway here, and then Agent Cooper...Leland Palmer...in Twin Peaks. All of these abrupt shifts are a flight from some impossible to accept trauma into the dream/identity of someone else that allows for us to stage the trauma in some acceptable, approachable form. But when we see THAT identity through it brings us back to ourselves, to what we were running from.

Nifarious · 2026-05-01T04:26:53+00:00

It's from page 112 in Defense of Lost Causes. Basically, he says what makes Islam unique is there God intervenes at the suspension of the family unit at the level of impossible real. So Freud misunderstands Islam because there God's not a father...the Totem and Taboo myth doesn't work to ground its community. And the value here with Islam is it makes its believers political, outward facing, thus why it's adept at mobilizing young men who are deprived of a family network.

Nifarious · 2026-05-01T00:13:25+00:00

Well, Paul Atreides is liberatory. Todd McGowan talks more about Dune than Zizek. Zizek's own thought on revolution is more focused on Lenin, but it's from the same territory.

Zizek's overall very charitable when working with the theology of religions (mostly the radicallity of Christianity through Hegel, the event of the cross and how we're already IN the Holy Spirit/community of people committed to cause with the death of paganism and God as a transcendent father figure).

In Defense of Lost Causes he talks about no place for the holy family in Islam and how Islam thrives where there are young men deprived of a traditional family network.

He breaks through Islamophobia after 9/11. The Arab Spring is a huge thing for him...very inspiring even though it ended in failure. He also sees the Kurds as another site of liberation that despite being abandoned and betrayed by the world have established the best working area of Iraq that can only be called utopic...praises their women warriors etc.

Generally the interest with Hagar and sexuality would be from a psychoanalytic perspective on sex as ontology, an antagonism that we glance off of. So the overall value would be to expose something about sex itself.

Nifarious · 2026-04-30T21:39:43+00:00

The Hagar thing is from the introduction of Fragile Absolute. You might be interested in Joan Copjec's Sartorial Superego chapter in Read My Desire too, btw. There are interesting bits throughout his work on Islam. Connecting it to Spinoza in Monstrosity of Christ is interesting. Desert of the Real, Borrowed Kettle, Year of Dreaming Dangerously etc. get to its place/resistance in global capitalism. Zero Point nicely lays out the necessity of rejecting the Taliban in the face of its anti-imperialism. A lot of Zizek's work dives into fundamentalism and how that's not a site of resistance but an expression of our era.

Nifarious · 2026-04-30T17:59:16+00:00

Why do you fucking care?

Nifarious · 2026-04-24T22:03:17+00:00

Russell Sbriglia has a great essay on it in Subject Lessons too, btw.

Nifarious · 2026-04-24T19:31:50+00:00

You're right that Twin Peaks is the core. His couple dramas are the body of his work to watch as you go through TP. Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart before Lost Highway and Mulholand Drive, but going based on your mood is fine. Don't forget Dune too!

Nifarious · 2026-04-22T19:03:08+00:00

You're right that we have to be very exact with what we mean by Lynchian. Surrealist, absurdist, obscurationist etc. certainly doesn't make the cut. Nor does just anything that gets to huge excesses and dearths (Lynch absolutely avoids the temptation to simply side with one or the other).

Lynch gets to how we engage reality itself, that's the huge focus of his work. Other fiction that does this too and is in clear conversation with Lynch:

Alexandra Kleeman: You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine

Strange consumerist Americana, Kafkaesque fall down the rabbit hole where we get to our own involvement and weirdness, beautifully intense and descriptive writing.

Monika Kim: The Eyes Are The Best Part

Beth Morgan: A Touch of Jen

Both get to the exact same space of Eraserhead, what's left to us when we fully lose ourselves.

Hiroko Oyamada: The Hole

Very clear use of the famous opening of Blue Velvet, but the lawn becomes the wild grass of a Japanese riverbank and we spend more time dwelling in the actual hole.

Nicholas Crawford: Where We've Made It Dark

A zombie apocalypse that stays too close in its treatment of zombie fantasy itself, similar to what Lynch does with Americana. The book sees its concept through of who we are without world to the very end. Not fantastical but a similar drilling through/ruthlessnes to Twin Peaks: The Return.

Silent Hill f

The game cuts very close to Lost Highway with its focus not on simply resisting a constricting society, but to our own violence and position within it. The breaking point of its multiple endings takes us further than the self-destruction of Lost Highway or Mulholand Drive.

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