"Parable of the Sower" comparisons, the stupid era of American politics, "Nosferatu" + "Real Life" double feature, Last Days of Tiktok
(originally published Jan 11, 2025 on Patreon)
You know, I'm going to start considering people who bring up Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower in response to current events as Hunger Games fans that saw other adults get bullied for comparing everything to it, and who also saw The Handmaid's Tale fans get bullied for glazing a book that stole from Parable of the Sower. Please don't misunderstand me, I love Octavia Butler, probably more than you do. She's my guiding light and North Star. She is also quite observant and attentive to history. Proclaiming that the "Make America Great Again" slogan the president in the second book uses is an example of prescience is not giving mother the credit she deserves! There's many cases like this to be chalking it up to some special foresight that she has that we all must learn from. We are all capable of seeing what she saw when we have a clear-eyed view of current events and where they can go.
The story starts in 2024 with fires in California, and as I type this in 2025, fires have burned through the Palisades and Malibu, still advancing thanks to powerful Santa Ana winds. Octavia Butler predicted America's brand of climate catastrophe because the trajectory was legible by 1993, when Parable of the Sower was first published. In the year leading up to its October release, Clinton was inaugurated after H.W. Bush wrapped up the Gulf War, the World Trade Center had been bombed, the Branch Davidians stood off with the police for almost 2 months before their burning compound killed all 76 of them, an east coast blizzard killed over 300 people, the Unabomber terrorized the country, an Amtrak train derailed in Alabama and killed 47 people, the Church of Scientology gained tax-exempt status, Bill Clinton sent warships to Haiti, and wildfires begin in California, destroying over 700 homes.
Fires in LA aren't the start of anything. They're the latest consequence of a century of decisions.
In terms of politics, well, Elon Musk is now at the kiddy table with Minecraft streamers while the party that used his money to buy total federal power is setting up to return to the 3/5ths rule. Open slavery soon to follow. Speaking of the LA fires, it is my right as a 21st century American to indulge in a conspiracy theory, and mine is that the upcoming land grab will ensure the American film industry won't recover to what it once was, marking another massive slip towards modern American isolationism (but now extra fascist this time). Maybe Newsom will add a Film New Deal to his 2028 platform if the GOP doesn't go full Turner Diaries and place blue states under military occupation? Lots of interesting possibilities for the decade! Nothing more to add on that front. Everything is quite stupid.
I had a good time seeing Nosferatu and reading Real Life by Brandon Taylor this past week. Nosferatu was the Gothic bliss I hoped it would be, so I'm not surprised that people online absolutely don't know how to handle it. Did Ellen accidentally call a monster to haunt her? Yes. Did that monster traumatize her and terrorize everyone she loved? Yeah we all watched it happen. Was the final scene a genuine embrace? Absolutely! The urge to make Ellen a perfect victim when she repeatedly looked into the camera and told the viewer the horrors she dreamt and experienced made her happy... is truly giving cope. She found comfort in her trauma because no one listened to her when she described it. She named her shame and kept returning to it because it brought her the ecstasy confiding in her loved ones was supposed to bring! If anything Eggers should've made it sexier. We only got one Orlok dick shot and a couple scenes of penetration, like it's really not the vampire goonerfest some reviews led me to believe. But my goodness, what a gorgeously shot, deeply immersive, and wonderfully acted film. Shit so good it makes you consider reevaluating Lily Rose Depp's performance in The Idol and ignoring your R*bert P*ttinson boycott to finally watch The Lighthouse.
Real Life gagged me in a different way, specifically as a Black person who grew up in predominantly white spaces. It's a unique form of insanity. I just did not understand how people I knew since we were kids could parrot the racism my parents used as teachable moments. Middle school during the origins of the BLM movement must have been a chrysalis that devolved them. So I ended up relating in a very sensitive way to Wallace, the main character, through the reality distortions that tokenism creates. The fact I enjoyed it so much is crazy because. despite following Brandon Taylor on Twitter for years, its campus novel nature repelled me at first. Despite being a bit of a scholar in my free time, I do not find fictional academia that interesting. My nostalgia around college revolves around how I was away from home for the first time and got to be a person separate from my parents — I wasn't really into the actual work or stress of it. Real Life soothed my worries by including classroom scenes for emotional context, not Peaked-In-School indulgence. We read about Wallace slicing nematodes apart because we're learning about how European-American delusions grate against his detailed myopia. He accepts dull, repetitive work he's good at to lighten the workload of lab's superstar senior, then gets berated for it, to show that his best intentions can't overcome the locked box of another's life. He tries to correct the technique of his Gifted™️ first year lab partner and receives hostility from her in kind because Gifted Kids™️ are the result of other inflated egos seeking to make a cult of snobbishness. He meets his friends at orientation and optimistically toasts the rest of their lives together because we just read a novel about all the ways they needle and cling to each other. That's what I'm talking about!! Make every single detail serve the theme! Turn the lake and the color yellow into characters, then combine the two during Wallace and Miller's greatest moment of trust in one another, bitch! I love that shit! If any mention of credit requirements got in between that I swear I would've bit somebody's head off.
On top of that, the more I sit with it the more I appreciate how Taylor shows the way Wallace, despite being genuinely persecuted by his surroundings, contains plenty of hurtful blind spots himself. A lifetime of homophobia and racism is traumatic. Trauma makes you selfish. There was a moment at the end where he questions the struggles of the only Asian woman in his biology postgrad, which is insane from everybody else aware of the stereotype, but why would Wallace clock that in the moment? He's drowning in a mille-feuille of desirability politics and social structures. He's not immune to similar genres of ignorance. The messiness of existing with and loving the place and people who easily hurt you, where everybody steps on toes and leaves fractures, where a sense of obligation drives you to hold onto a dream that makes you worse and where you get mad when someone points out the bubble you've made — if every campus novel was like that, I'd be happy.
I'm a bit sad that the Tiktok ban is likely to go through. I hope the potential backlash reverses it, but I don't like the implications of that either. Many things are worse and stupider than we can imagine. I'm sad for the small businesses and unlikely stars that the app brought to prominence and I hope our paths cross again down the line. Since it's not the Internet's first rodeo with losing a generation-defining platform, I have confidence people will bounce back elsewhere. I just wonder about what will happen between then and now. I've been thinking of Alternatives For Myself, but truthfully, I'm at the point where I think leaving social media is something everybody needs to do quickly because they're just disinformation machines at this point. The factors have changed and we need to be very intentional with where we put our information. Personal websites seem to be a steadily gathering wave, so if we must be online, I think it'll be great to get our own operations up, running, and established before ZuckerMuskThiel McFascism mandates all of us to post twice per day on the AI Panopticon under the threat of the Boston Dynamics machine gun dog posted at our front doors. But as someone gathering marketing knowledge for my own purposes, I understand that the more cross-platform you are, the better your reach and promotion is. I'll have to reconcile my highfalutin positions with good business, I fear. I'm considering something like: for timely updates, you can add me to your subscription ecosystem or visit my website; for everyone else, wait it out for a couple of weeks. We'll see.