A Very Special Jackass Retrospective

With the release of Jackass 5, it's time for a look back. I don't even remember why, in that distant early age of 2002, I even went to see the first Jackass movie in the theater. I had never even seen the MTV show - only years later did I go back and watch it, along with Wildboyz, and Viva La Bam. But I got my popcorn, and sat down, and I realized: This is the greatest thing I have ever seen. Somehow better than Blade Runner and 2001 put together - although it does share features with those films, namely, hooting apes hitting each other, and indestructible humanoids. So I immediately got a group of friends together and watched it in the theater again. (I *never* watch things more than once in theaters.) Over the years my obsession has deepened - to the point of inviting friends, neighbors and colleagues to watch Jackass 1 through 4 projected on the side of my house, and worse (as you'll see.)

I won't belabor why Jackass works, although obviously it's authenticity, vulnerability and actual chemistry - when I discovered Jackass I was still in my 20s, missing being surrounded by the nonsense of my friends at college and beginning to experience the loneliness that men descend into without realizing it (or talking about it); it's also why shows like Ridiculousness suck, because it's one guy, he's just not that bright or interesting, and there are no relationships. It doesn't hurt that like me, they're all second-half Gen X guys, and I identify with them. (During an interview with Chris and Wee Man someone asked them what they listened to, and Wee Man answered "I only listen to about five bands. Slayer, Black Sabbath, Metallica...I only listen to about three bands.")

I just saw Jackass 5 and it's clear to me that Knoxville really does mean it to be the last one, so it's time for a look back - and some fan theories about this subtle and many-layered franchise.


The Structure of the Cast

Here's how I picture the relationships (for the classic era of Jackass 1-3, not including Loomis or CKY members who didn't cross the rainbow bridge into full casthood, and not including the new cast members of what I call the Mannerist period):



My justification: In the first movie, Steve-O was the most famous at first Knoxville (more on this later.) Bam had his own group, and later got big and had his own show and endorsements (you can hear the sarcastic "he's famous!" during the Terror Taxi skit in Jackass 2.) I can see how there would've been an initial rivalry between Steve-O and Bam, and though he would probably hate to admit it, there's a vulnerable narcissism in Steve-O that comes out easily, though he's smart and introspective enough to know this and tries to address it explicitly (he's discussed this with Chris on the show - how he was a little jealous of Chris at first.) Dave brought in Ehren, and I put them on the other side because Dave has said Bam didn't like him (and Bam called the cops on Ehren as a prank although I don't know if you can include that as evidence.) Wee Man and Preston made at least one trip to Pennsylvania (see Jackass 3), although Wee Man in particular seems up for anything - those two also filmed a little trip with Dave and Chris, and Wee Man appeared on Wildboyz. I always think of Pontius as the most Californian, but Wee Man has the strongest California accent I've ever heard on a human being (witnesseth: here, and here; probably unrelated, he also speaks German.)

I've always been interested in both Chris's and Steve-O's background and the connection they made - the kids of a cardiologist, and an international executive. Both high IQ, high achieving kinds of parents who may not have chosen this particular path for their sons, but it means they both inherited those genes, and had a lot in common in the abstract.

I'm not sure what sorts of things produce a Johnny Knoxville except being possibly descended from border reivers; and also, I had a friend who was a handsome and (at least in brief conversations) normal-seeming guy from Tennessee, and occasionally would casually mention that before moving to California he liked to do things like jump off trestles onto moving trains just for fun, so maybe it's the whole state. I'm surprised to notice Knoxville doesn't talk a lot about his attempts to break into acting before Jackass (I recently learned he was Keanu Reeves's body double in Dracula and actually took direction from Coppola); despite how we might all see him as incredibly successful, if his career didn't go as he hoped it would, that can stay with you in terms of core beliefs operating below the surface.

I've always argued that there's a correspondence between some Marvel and DC superheroes: Thor and Superman (both superstrong flying aliens who commit to guarding another planet, especially after their home planet is destroyed), Ironman and Batman (wealthy industrialists reliant on technology whose parents were killed, affecting their future psychology.) And finally this sort of thinking becomes useful, because I think there's a similar correspondence between some old and new cast members. Zach is the new Preston. Poopies is clearly the new Steve-O. Jasper is the new Bam - has parental involvement, had his own show before merging into the Jackass cast (Loiter Squad, watch it!), and I predict is most likely to bankroll his Jackass membership into future deals. I won't spend time here on the Jackass origin story, although I think there is a parallel to how Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus started (by assembling freaks from pre-existing groups - Big Brother and CKY.)

When someone has never heard of Jackass, after the first one I sometimes described it as the sequel to Animal House, in which the fraternity no longer has a home, but the institution continues, traveling around to hotels and random fields, countries, and companies, and its new recruits are Three Stooges, Hunter S. Thompson, and John Waters. And then they get a budget which they use to travel and film what they were doing anyway. (A friend of mine was an EMT in Westchester and said he was often at Bam's house, and they were not always filming.)


Notes on Jackass 1
Part of why I imprinted on it was the moment the referee announced in his thick Japanese accent, "From Wesuchestaa, Pensevaniaa, Lai-ann Dunn!" I had no idea they were from Pennsylvania. I grew up about 45 minutes up the road and the last place I lived was about 15 minutes from Westchester. I now live in the Bay Area, but I get back frequently.



Because I'm definitely not an obsessed stalker, here's a picture of me in Bam's driveway, September 2025. I blur my face because I'm a respected physician-philosopher, family man, and pillar of the community and I can't be seen having any association with ruffians, deviants or miscreants of this sort. You'll just have to believe it's me.

Dave shitting himself in the van is, for me, the moment when Jackass really became Jackass - when it morphed from a stupid little show on MTV to a stupid big movie franchise. It had all the elements: a prank, the prank going wrong because they couldn't resist torturing one of the cast, shit, the cameramen being shown and then being shown puking, the rest of the cast and crew fleeing in disgust and the hilarious humiliation of it all. Carrying out the actual prank later on was almost second after the setup. (Taken at Hippo Hardware in Portland, conceived by Whitey McConnaughy who was also behind a lot of Red Fang videos.)


Me at Hippo Hardware, with a parasite on my back. Zoom in and you can see the instruction not to sit on the toilet, sadly necessary because of this movie.

There is also a standout cast member in each one. In Jackass V, Steve-O claims he was never the MVP but I disagree. In the first one, it was clearly him. He was the one people were talking about after they saw the movie. And I have no photographic proof of the following, but my next door neighbor claims that she got backstage at a Steve-O live show in Michigan back in the day and he offered her cocaine; always very special milestone in a young girl's life. However, she claims she did not partake of said booger sugar.


Observations on Jackass 2

Joining a very short list of franchises, the second one is arguably better than the first (Godfather and arguably Terminator are the only two others.) Tremaine said they cast was "ready to die." My two favorite stunts, the Fart Mask and the Toro Totter, are also in this one. As Tremaine, Steve-O, and Pontius had been filming Wildboyz (which is a totally underrated series, you should watch it), there was some more exotic traveling in this one, including India and Argentina. There were pranks in the first one but this one had better ones: the first one was just the razor, but here it was the wind tunnel (really the cobra) and the Terror Taxi. They also started learning about, and capitalizing on, the cast members' phobias. If you were in this group, why would you EVER let people know your phobia? Part of the authenticity is hearing the second thoughts during the stunts - during Toro Totter, Pontius (it sounds like him, it's off camera) says "Why did I agree to do this one?" This is also where the x.5 versions of the movies began with the extra stunts, it's also not always clear to me why stunts end up in x.5 vs the main film. For example, I think Cajun Obstacle Course, Bed of Nails (with the cobra on Ehren) and golfing off of Ryan's ass are all solid and in fact, better than Terror Taxi! (The more you hate Ehren, the more you like Terror Taxi I guess.)

To put it mildly, these movies are interesting as a psychiatrist and physician. DSM is often criticized for "too many versions" of antisocial PD, based on symptom combinations, and these fellows aren't about to rob a bank as they're clearly enriched mostly for the poor-impulse-control, factor 2 psychopathy. To wit: I can't find it now but I once saw an interview with Dave where he said even if he got really rich he would spend all the money right away on "little pieces of shit". Classic! I will also add here that, were I ever in such a position, my willingness to do stunts is influenced by my medical training (and if you also don't sit there and think of which ones you'd do, then why are you watching these.) For example, when Dave eats the cow/horse shit in the field, that worries me. It's not just gross. That would be a great way to end up with neurocysticercosis. I might even take my chance with a bull before that one. The only way I would eat livestock shit, for any amount of money (and it would have to be a lot more than $200) would be if I had time to pre-load with prophylactic praziquantel (an anti-worm agent) which I would also continue well after the event.


Above: you don't want your brain to look like this. Each of those holes is where a worm is eating them. You get those worms by orally ingesting them, usually by not adequately washing your hands after encountering livestock feces. Or, intentionally eating it to get $200 from the 3-6 Mafia in a field in the South Central United States. Below: for your consideration. Note the "getting knocked out" point.



The anaconda bit wouldn't be so bad although I did wonder why of all people Wee Man was chosen for that one, because an anaconda actually has a shot at swallowing him! (More testament to the forethought that clearly goes into planning their stunts; as Dave once said in an interview, "No. No. It doesn't work like that.") Knoxville was obviously and intentionally grabbing it not on the head so it would bite him (but hey, it's Hollywood; Steve-O later noted he got chewed out for not reacting enough during Beehive Limo.) I also like where you can see effects earlier in the movie (edited together out of real-time chronological order) from things that happen later in the movie - during the "hotel hallway love note" bit, you can see the blood on Knoxville's shirt from the anaconda bites. In the first movie you can see a shaved bald spot in his hair during the "less lethal ammunition" bit. I was amazed that in the fourth movie they were worried about Knoxville's Jamie Lee Curtis hair showing up out of order. Tremaine, did you actually ever think that continuity would be a problem for your audience?

An outstanding question: where was the Big Red Rocket filmed? I think Pyramid Lake along the Grapevine portion of the 5, but I've never been able to confirm. I once asked an AI about it, and it offered to compare scenes in the movie to the shoreline on various maps, and I started to feel bad for taking up processing power with this and desisted.

The MVP of this movie was Ryan. Besides that this is intuitively correct (In the shopping cart launch his comment "You're an ass-hole" alone would win the title) I should note here that after Jackass 3, I did an analysis of what makes Jackass bits funny: I made a spreadsheet of all the bits, I rated them, and then annotated each bit for who was in it, was there an animal, was there emission of body fluids and if so which one(s), unexpected pranks, etc. And what I found was that, of the first three movies, the best predictor of a stunt being funny was Ryan being in it. I did not perform a Bonferroni correction calculation for multiple comparisons; my statistical argument for this is fuck you.


Thoughts on Jackass 3

This is the first one I didn't see in a theater. It came out while I was in medical school doing Serious Things and I didn't even realize it was out until clips starting showing up on Youtube. This one has the only stunt that I can't watch, the sweatsuit. I can't do spit or sweat.

There's a stunt in this one that people like to pick on which is Beehive Tetherball, because apparently bees were added digitally in post, since you couldn't see them. So what? Were the bees actually there, stinging Dave and Steve-O? Then who cares? If not, then Dave England has to be the best actor of his generation. (Dave's near-complete dissociation under stress, as he demonstrates here, is one of my favorite things about Jackass, also evident here or here or here; I was not surprised to learn of his alter ego Darf who appears while he is intoxicated.)

Sober Steve-O is so much more compelling as a cast member. Before he was just like an android or a talking crash test dummy - you couldn't identify with him at all. Imagine old not-sober Steve-O in the Poo Cocktail Supreme - not a tenth as funny. (I like that it's in the third movie we see the cast members starting to speculate that maybe they're irrational - see the exchange between Johnny and Steve-O about Steve-O's fear of roller coasters and similar rides. I find this fascinating - for him as (early in his career) an acrobat/stilt-walker, proprioception and control are key to his security.

For me the MVP of Jackass 3 was clearly Wee Man. That parachute stunt is gnarly, but also Super Mighty Glue, and without him as the setup-man in the High Five I think it wouldn't been half as funny. And the yoga ball should have been in the main movie.



Wee Man and I, December 2011. I went with my girlfriend to Wee Man's Chronic Tacos in Redondo (sadly now closed)and he was there. Despite that he was interviewing someone for a job and I interrupted them, he was extremely cool and showed me the tattoo of Ryan he got.

It was the year following Jackass 3 that Ryan died driving drunk. He could've still been with us, making the Jackass movies better (as I showed mathematically that he did). There were ominous signs, some explictly discussed on screen by Jackass personalities, others that fans can shake their heads at ironically. The first was a rollover accident that Ryan had in Pennsylvania in the 90s, discussed by Bam's mom in the piece made in Ryan's memory after he died. This one struck home because I remember the accident, since I remember being stuck in the traffic jam near King of Prussia that day! The ironic one was the golf cart accident in the first movie, containing a wince-inducing comment by someone off-camera: "Dunn can't drive for shit." It's worth saying that I personally know two people that have been killed by drunk drivers, and I personally know two people who have been picked up for DUI multiple times and continue to refuse to take responsibility (and who I have lost all patience and sympathy for.) Don't do this to yourself, and don't do it to people that love you.


Jackass 4

That did something to Bam for sure. I thought it would be hard to make another Jackass movie after Ryan because it would be sad - the myth of immortality had been punctured and the special connection that Bam and Ryan had was gone. And I think completely unsurprisingly, Bam took a turn for the worse. It was clear that he was trying to bring in Novak as his new best buddy, but it was completely different and kind of gross, going well over the line from brotherly slapstick into the physical abuse of a pathetic addict. (Yes I know it's from earlier but the dynamic is so different than with Ryan or any other CKY person. He's just a helpless victim and it's not funny.)

And that's why I was worried about Jackass 4. I didn't expect that they would do anything but lean into Ryan's memory, but it still crossed my mind that maybe Knoxville didn't need extra convincing to leave Bam out. To be sure, Bam gave him all the reasons he needed. My understanding is that one of the hardest parts of making these movies is, unsurprisingly, getting insurance, and psychiatrists and actuaries will tell you that a substance problem makes the chance of accident, or intentional harm to self or others, much higher. In another bizarre connection, he showed up at Christmas tree lighting one year in my city in Northern California where he has a kid with someone. This was interesting because I've said if he were to show up intoxicated to one of my showings I actually would call the police on him to get him away from my house and family (not that I'm holding my breath about this.) Wait, didn't I figure out where his house was and stalk him? NO WAY MAN HE'S THE STALKER, HE MADE ME DO IT. (In all seriousness, I was less worried that security would come out, and more worried that HE would.)

I'm obsessed enough with the franchise that I've had dreams where I'm on set, and I look around and think, this is awesome! And then I think, wait, this is terrifying, I'm about to get bitten by snakes or set on fire or have some kind of animal fluids dumped on me or something, I gotta get out of here! Indeed, Eric Andre made the comment that he grew up idolizing Jackass (his show, which you should watch, shows the influence) and that it was a dream to become part of it, and then that he realized it was actually a nightmare. (Stockholm syndrome is a strange thing.)

The question of authenticity does bring up: are there things you still don't talk about? Money is kind of a buzzkill for most people I think, and it was unfortunate to hear how much Steve O had to fight to get what he was worth to make it on Jackass 4, but Bam not being there probably made it easier for him to negotiate. Then again, it's showBUSINESS, regardless how bizarre your act is. (Similar conversation on Conan with Eric Idle about the debates with other Python members; I was always bummed when I heard about how Cleese and Jones disliked each other.)

There is no serious disagreement that the MVP of Jackass 4 is Ehren McGhehey.


Jackass 5: A Retrospective

No spoilers. Go see it. Yes it's a lot of repeat footage and stories about the previous movies, but there's stuff you've never seen before (there was stuff I didn't even know about.) Some of the cast were nervous that people would feel shortchanged since a lot of the movie is stunts from previous ones. There are new ones and they're great, but if you go knowing you're mostly seeing a farewell, you'll be happy. This is the first I've seen in a theater since 2006, and I sure was.


Berkeley, California, July 2015

My bachelor party was laid back: I got a couple hotel suites and we drank and watched Jackass 1 and 2. It was pretty great. As we were walking out of the hotel about 1am, I looked over at the check-in desk and there was this guy checking in. There was Knoxville, checking into my bachelor party hotel. It was like a bad sitcom where I was bidding farewell to my singlehood and being ferried across the Styx by the about the best symbol of childish, untamed male ridiculousness there is. Before I approached him, I checked to make sure no one had put LSD in my beer and that's why I was seeing Johnny Knoxville. (I would be more embarrassed as a psychiatrist getting caught talking to a hallucination in public, than slurring my words talking to the real Johnny Knoxville while I was intoxicated.) Fortunately, it turned out he was intoxicated as well and had just been out with people from one Pixar. (I've tried to figure out which movie it would've been.) I told him "a bunch of doctors and engineers were just killing our brain cells watching Jackass, you're making the world a worse place" and he said "Yeah I get that a lot." Which of course is a total lie. There is no other movie franchise that I have enjoyed as much and continue to. I hope you guys see this, because you've all participated in creating something really special and hilarious and made my life, and many people's lives, and the world, a much better place, and the love you all continue to get is deserved. Thank you.

Achieving The Impossible: Making Golf Cool

My friend (the one with the metal golf cart) is a son of a bitch and meets more certified metal gods while golfing than I ever have backstage, like the one posting this video.

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Evergreen - Eye in the Sky (2018) (Cover of Alan Parsons Project Song from Eponymous Album, 1982)

Here's the original for comparison. It's interesting how many really well put-together songs tolerate export to other genres, and others which just fail (as in an otherwise great band covering themselves here.)



And while we're at the game of metal versions of 80s songs, just for fun here's Leo Moracchioli featuring Rabea and Hannah.

Star Wars Episode IX Review (CONTAINS SPOILERS BUT MAY NOT MATTER SINCE I'M THE LAST ONE TO SEE IT)

It's the best of the three new ones, and I think the second best in the entire franchise after Empire. I'm lazy, so some of these things would be easy to look up but I didn't. In no particular order:

• Overall, a fitting end to the saga. Much better than Episode VIII. Glad JJ Abrams is back; he's the master of playing well in others' universes. You walk out feeling that you saw a good Star Wars movie, much like Episode VII.
  
  
• As a Star Wars movie, at some point there will be: a desert planet, a cantina, a scummy trading city with a motley assortment of criminals, and people rescuing their friends and admitting how zany they are because they’re making it up as they go.
  
  . But it's not dwelt upon, and there were so many types of planets in this one that the desert planet doesn't stick out. Also, I hope I'm not turning into a social justice warrior, but the colorful festival on the planet with "third world" aliens did bug me a little bit, just because it seems so obvious.
  
  
• In that spirit: Star Wars movies are fantasy movies in space: knights, sword-fighting, wizards. A horseback attack on a starcruiser is therefore not only cool and original, it completely fits. Also, it stuck out in Episodes I through III that a) there was no improvement in technology across 30 years and b) that late 90s cell phones were about as good as Obi Wan's communicator. Some of the tech in this one looks positively 1980s - wired headsets, colored wires in C3PO's head that look like a Commodore 64 console - and that's great. It fits Star Wars perfectly. It's a fantasy movie, and these are set pieces to maintain the tone - it's not about technology at all.
  
  
• I noticed in the end credits for animation, there was a group of 8-10 names together that looked Thai or Lao. I tried to look up whether a studio in one of those places was used but couldn't find any mention. Always good to see more talent in the game, it benefits film-goers.
  
  
• I couldn't remember if Carrie Fisher died before they made this (she did), and couldn't tell if she was live, computer-generated, etc., and wasn't particularly worried about it either way. It's that last part that says the most I think.
  
  
• The introduction of matter transmission through force connections (and its continuing use) is quite a good cinematic trick. It's creepy as hell when Ren grabs Rey's necklace, and then this trick is used in the final battle with the Emperor (unlike some inventions in Episode VIII like hyperspace missiles.)
  
  
  
• The action starts immediately at the beginning and doesn't let up for quite a while. It's also full of plot twists. Nothing like the (pointless, non-plot-advancing) dead space in Episode VIII.
  
  
• Plot holes, discontinuities, and other jarring moments must be taken in context with the franchise. I'm a fan of hard science fiction (i.e., real physics) to the core but if I ever directly overhear someone complaining that "it's unrealistic because there's hyperspace" I will punch them. That said, no one came to help in the second one, but Chewie and Lando can magically raise a rebellion in a few hours by flying around in person? Doesn't seem required to advance the plot, though it does feel good and advance a nice moral ("they win by making you feel alone") so it didn't bother me so much. Also, where has Lando been?
  
  
• I'm going to come out and say it. Grown-up Daisy Ridley is much, much more attractive than at the start of this trilogy (and she wasn't bad then either.) She's also come into her own as an actor.
  
  
• Good performances also from Adam Driver (duh) and Oscar Isaac. I always wonder how hard it is for Boyega to stay in-accent when he's working with other English actors. As time goes on, he gets by more on his innate charisma, which is fine because he's just likable anyway (honestly, it's the very rare actor who actually masters another character and doesn't just enhance his innate personality. I like watching Robert Downey Jr. and Anthony Hopkins, but come on, how different are they on-screen from their actual personalities? Gary Oldman and Christian Bale actually get outside their personalities for their characters, which carries a penalty of not being as "follow-able" as they might otherwise be.)
  
  
• Lots of nice parallelisms in this and tying up of themes. The Empreror as master manipulator tries to rise above the paradox of the Sith by having his death be the key to the rise of the Sith (and if Rey doesn't do it, her friends die and the fleet takes over anyway.) The balance brought back to the Force requires the dyad, with Ren and Rey. Ren, again Ben with the same words he said when he killed his father. Leia's death as she kills her son by distracting him (Ren killed Solo where Vader couldn't bring himself to kill Luke, twice.)
  
  
• Kylo Ren has to announce that Han Solo is a memory so we don't get confused. Luke has sparkly blue outlines so we know the difference between a memory and a Force ghost.
  
  
• There's a little bit of babbling of the sort that annoyed Alec Guinness, which annoys me mostly because you don't know where things are going and you can talk your way (in an unsatisfyingly unpredictable way) out of any plot knot. Then again, the Force is if nothing else a script writer's dream to resolve what would otherwise be massive plot holes by appealing effectively to magic.
  
  
• Much better psychology in this one, thinking about the characters' motivations (e.g., Hux being a spy because he hates Ren.)
  
  
• At the end where there's a crowd watching Palpatine and Rey: where did all these mystery Sith come from? And why have we never seen other Knights of Ren before? What is their connection to the Sith?
  
  
• The creator of Darth Maul said that Lucas came to him and said "I want you to use your worst childhood nightmare as inspiration." He described to Lucas a pale face slowly revealed by flashes of lightning. Sound familiar? I was happy that they used this.
  
  
• I didn't notice any lens flare, but there is a shot of Kylo Ren standing in front of the heaving ocean after Rey leaves, a bit fuzzy and shaky as if shot from far away, that gives it more immediacy. Adam Driver also looked genuinely cold, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he insisted on being cold and wet in reality for these shots.
  
  
• Rey being a Palpatine is somewhat of an obvious plot twist, just because if she IS the daughter of someone significant, the only decent move left is for it to be Palpatine (with intervening parents; why did they turn out so lame?)
  
  
• I was annoyed that a non-Jedi (Leia) could magically continue Rey's training. ("Hey, I'm a surgery resident. My attending just died. His sister is going to come continue to teach me surgery.") But they closed that loophole.
  
  
• Once Rey explained she gave a little bit of the force away to heal the giant snake critter, you could see a self-sacrifice (from someone) coming down Fifth Avenue in a cab. Same with the accidental force lightning, which immediately gave away what I suspected about Rey being a Palpatine. Good on the writers, I actually thought Chewie was dead. I'm sure that there are religious fundies somewhere all bent out of shape that Jedi can heal people.
  
  
  
  Above: Jedi Christ, who can heal the sick; only Sith can raise the dead. I bet Golgotha would have been a whole lot different with a light saber.
  
  
• Good coordination with trailers and writers. They know going in that everyone knows Palpatine is in it. I'm always amazed when trailers give away things in the movie and the film-makers expect you to be surprised (often this is no doubt marketing that's not in their control.)
  
  
• I thought C3PO was added to the list of main character deaths - a robot is its memory in a way that humans are not - but he was saved too.
  
  

Things That Might Bother You About Avengers Movies

I noted before that the "20 Things Wrong With [Amazingly Successful Franchise Film]" articles are sad, then wrote just such an article. This is a very short one for a very few of the things about MCU movies that are most bothersome. To me.

Complete inconsistency in relative strength: the battles are what's actually important here, and even so, there's no rhyme or reason. Yes that keeps the audience interested and serve to advance the plot but come on, most powerful guy in the universe hits a mortal with no special armor or anything and they just get the wind knocked out of them - but he can knock down Thor or the Hulk? And he constantly doesn't take obvious shots?

Zero sum thinking: I get that Thanos is a bad guy, so his message - that there are only so many resources, and more and more mouths to feed - is not the one the good guys agree with. Yet the franchise appears to endorse it. The disappearance of half the life on Earth would be first, economically catastrophic. Guess what? Smartphones and corn don't just grow themselves out of the ground. Plus, the specialized knowledge required means that the disruption in productivity would actually be more than a 50% drop. Imagine your company's level of functioning if 50% of people called in sick tomorrow - it would be much less than 50%. And of course, the disappearance of the Earth's oxygen-producing organisms, plankton, etc. would be much worse.

Profound scientific incuriosity, including by career scientists: "Hey, I'm on Asgard! Should I maybe try to pocket a few pens or take a few pictures, ask people how things work? Nah, I'll just hang out and get all wrapped up in my personal issues." Incontrovertible proof of aliens on Earth by their repeated attacks, but no mention of a second Copernican revolution in decentralizing mankind's image of itself, or trying to get the alien tech for more than for the Avengers to make better guns. No attempts to start trading or at least communicating with aliens. Also, Thanos's snap would answer a bunch of questions - for example, which things are alive or not (did half of prions disappear? Viroids? Kind of weird that no wombats disintegrated, I was always suspicious of those things. However, Galaxy S5 phones disintegrated but not S4's, so that must be the sentience boundary.)


If these things start to bother you, though you can never really return to your previous innocence once you've noticed them, you can over-intellectualize and get partway back. Rather than criticize these gross inconsistencies, you can think of these movies as modern action-expressionism. The original expressionist film movement is often described as portraying the (actually more important to the viewer) inner emotional reality of the narrative, rather than the superficial matter of the characters' physical world. This coincides with the hyper-reality discussed by Umberto Eco (i.e., where for example artificial lemonade is more lemonadish than any real lemonade ever was; the California Adventure section at Disneyland is more like the Sierras because it purifies and concentrates all the salient aspects of the Sierras, etc.) Alternatively, you could think of the MCU movies as magical realism, where the magic is focused on violence rather than relationships. Or, that MCU is modern-world fantasy in the same way that Star Wars is fantasy; though it takes place in space, exploration of the science is absent, and there are wizards and sword-fighting.

Finally: THERE WILL BE A STAR WARS-MCU CROSSOVER BY 31 DECEMBER 2028. Anyone willing to bet? And the way things are going, it will be Disney trying to use MCU to salvage Star Wars rather than the other way around.

Asia, Don't Cry (Alpha, 1983)

Hey, I don't want to hear your whining about me posting this song. Why am I making you listen to this? You know what you did. And now you're paying the price. Yeah, keep complaining and see how much good it does.

The best part is at 2:55 when he freaks out in the most stupid way I've ever seen.

Asteroid Bennu is Ejecting Dust; Also, "Alien Tech" on Bennu? (Hint: No)

One solution to the Fermi paradox is that there's evidence around us and we just haven't noticed it yet. An estimate of 20 MA for colonizing the whole Milky Way has been advanced, and if von Neumann probes (VNPs) are possible, then they should be around us. We have a tendency to think of VNPs as industrial-age metal objects like Apollo 11, but organic VNPs could diffuse between low-gravity bodies when interstellar comets or asteroids pass through solar systems. Therefore, when we start finding some interesting high molecular weight organic polymers with non-random monomer sequences in the sample-return specimens from asteroids like Bennu, we should seriously consider that this might be what we're looking at. It is therefore interesting that Bennu is ejecting material (see here and here), which would be required if the VNPs are cellular- or molecular-scale chemical replicators that spread passively.

Here ends the serious part.

Admittedly this is an extraordinary hypothesis, and it requires consistent extraordinary evidence to support it. However, noticing that asteroids have boulders on them isn't extraordinary.

Look! Boulders! And they're circled! Gosh, that MUST be alien tech!
One excitable UFO-hunting schmendrick insisted (after doing a complex analysis in Microsoft Paint, i.e. circling the boulders) that Bennu is "littered with alien tech". Then so is the construction site near my house! So is the desert! There are boulders all OVER the place - my gosh, we're surrounded by alien tech! Run! Apparently skulls have also been spotted. Space pirates? This is a particularly morbid form of pareidolia.

Excerpt from The Cleveland Wrecking Yard (Trout Fishing in America, Richard Brautigan, 1967)

Until recently my knowledge about the Cleveland Wrecking Yard had come from a couple of friends who’d bought things there. One of them bought a huge window: the frame, glass and everything for just a few dollars. It was a fine-looking window.

Then he chopped a hole in the side of his house up on Potrero Hill and put the window in. Now he has a panoramic view of the San Francisco County Hospital.

He can practically look right down into the wards and see old magazines eroded like the Grand Canyon from endless readings. He can practically hear the patients thinking about breakfast: I hate milk, and thinking about dinner: I hate peas, and then he can watch the hospital slowly drown at night, hopelessly entangled in huge bunches of brick seaweed.

He bought that window at the Cleveland Wrecking Yard.

My other friend bought an iron roof at the Cleveland Wreck­ing Yard and took the roof down to Big Sur in an old station wagon and then he carried the iron roof on his back up the side of a mountain. He carried up half the roof on his back. It was no picnic. Then he bought a mule, George, from Pleasanton. George carried up the other half of the roof.

The mule didn’t like what was happening at all. He lost a lot of weight because of the ticks, and the smell of the wild­cats up on the plateau made him too nervous to graze there. My friend said jokingly that George had lost around two hun­dred pounds. The good wine country around Pleasanton in the Livermore Valley probably had looked a lot better to George than the wild side of the Santa Lucia Mountains.

For the rest of it, see here. For context, see here.

Sometimes You Need a Little Puerile Humor

And sometimes you need a lot, so please watch this awesome video by Infant Annihilator, for their #1 hit Decapitation Fornication.

A Tiny Fraction of the Things Wrong With Star Wars

I always think those "Everything wrong with X science fiction or superhero movie" videos are the saddest things in the world. If it was a hit movie, clearly no one cares, and yet here's some overgrown seventh-grader shouting into the virtual void about why people shouldn't like it.

Here's my contribution to the genre.

All Star Wars movies: "We have superintelligent androids yet they seem mostly to occasionally translate and calculate numbers. Should we let them do any dangerous tasks requiring split-second decisions like, I don’t know, piloting ships? No, we’ll still use humans for that." (Idea for later movies when people finally start getting tired of it: a Star Wars cryptohistory that shows what was happening the whole time, where in fact this is all post-Singularity, and the reason that events fit human cultural and psychological tropes so closely without making much sense if you think about it for more than two seconds - "sword and sorcery in space" - is that the AIs actually set it all up as a big Disneyland for us and/or to study us, and watch from the background. Kind of like the Matrix but real. Or a reverse Westworld. You're welcome, Disney.) Also, technology is just static and never advances (granted, a problem of all far-future science fiction; even for movies set in the here-and-now that want to have any shelf-life, which therefore avoid showing phones and computers and bizarrely end up discounting the role of technology in modern life.)



Above: Darth Vader's House, built by Frank Lloyd Wright, called "Fallinglava." Wright was clearly phoning it in on this one and no one had the heart to tell Vader it was largely derivative of another structure. Vader also rejected bids from William Pereira (who designed the command post in the original Conquest of the Planet of the Apes) and Eero Saarinen (who did Superman's house.)

Also all Star Wars movies: Sith apprentices only succeed by killing their masters, even if they’ve turned kinda good like Vader and Kylo Ren. So how about, just be a Sith, and DON’T TAKE A FUCKING APPRENTICE. IT WOULDN’T BE A JEDI WHO FINALLY BECOMES SO INTENT ON NOT TRAINING SOMEONE ELSE!

Revenge of the Sith: "We have antigravity and cybernetic limbs and faster than light spaceships, but man we just can’t get a handle on tissue regeneration to help people grow skin back. So now left-in-the-toaster-too-long Anakin will just have to walk around wearing a weird suit and 1950s respirator the rest of his life, along with needing frequent moisturizer bath treatments."

Rogue One: "Hey we have energy weapons and all this other technology yet we’re somehow amazed that after years of technology someone built a laser with roughly the power of the Hiroshima bomb. Amazing!"

The Last Jedi: "Turns out ramming an enemy ship at light speed is massively effective! And yet somehow no one ever thought to built light speed space torpedoes, and even after they see it, no one exclaims ‘What an amazing innovation, we should build light speed torpedoes from now on!"

XKCD - Expanded Hertzprung-Russell Diagram

Reminds me of the interesting factoid: on a power-per-mass basis, our sun produces less Wattage than reptile metabolism. (Reptiles! Doesn't even approach mammals, an order of magnitude greater!) But that surface area-to-volume ratio is important, and as the XKCD author pointed out previously, if you had a whole planet made of mammals, it would put out a fair amount of energy in an unexpected scale-dependent phenomenon, although metabolism would not continue - turns out where powering stars is concerned, fusion beats glycolysis or respiration.

Make Your Own Genre Crossovers by Imagining Subtext

There's a fan theory that Get Out is actually the sequel to Being John Malgovich, and that Katherine Keener is playing the same character in both movies - who has learned she can trap people inside their own or others' minds. This has been discussed enough that it was even brought up to director Jordan Peele in an interview, who said the theory was likely "brought on by the power of marijuana." Still, it's interesting to imagine she changed her name from Maxine and that Allison Williams is the grown-up little girl from the end of Malgovich, every bit as inhabited by old souls as the black servant/ancestors in her household, her moral sense twisted by the seventy old people whose minds and personalities she contains (along with a trapped and weeping John Cusack.)



Left: the young Tony Stark in high school looking at Kelly LeBrock and realizing that to have any chance of getting her he has to become a superhero. Right: the older Tony Stark appears to look into the future, but in reality is thinking about Kelly LeBrock.
Similarly in the very 1990s Surviving the Game, a film version of The Most Dangerous Game, Ice-T is brought to Rutger Hauer's estate as the unwitting target of a hunt. And the writers missed a golden crossover opportunity. Imagine it - Ice-T is running through the woods to get away from Rutger Hauer, when suddenly Harrison Ford comes running the other way in his future-noir trenchcoat soaked with rain and his fingers broken, saying "Listen buddy, I don't have much time. The key to escaping this guy is just stall until his four-year-lifespan is up, and then he gets all sentimental and lets you live." Ford takes off running, and soon after the bewildered Ice-T encounters a frustrated Tommy Lee Jones, running after Ford, who yells over his shoulder at Ice-T "Why didn't you stop him! He's an alien!" and Will Smith comes along two seconds later and flashes Ice-T so he doesn't remember seeing them.



The best example in any action movie of "bad guy seems about to kill the hero but first coldly explains his vision for the world, and then good guy rallies, says a one-liner that undoes it and kills the bad guy" is in Surviving the Game where Ice-T's pithy comeback is "Fuck that!"
People have been excited about the massive crossover event of Avengers: Infinity War, although I think a little wind is taken out of the sails by the fact that the crossing over was expected well in advance. I thought it was far cooler when in Predator 2, they revealed an oblong Alien skull in the ship's trophy room, or even the ending of this episode of Transformers from back in the day. Although the best actually acknowledged-crossover ever has to be this one from Hotshots 2:


But why wait for the franchises to get around to the crossover? A lot of the experience of watching a movie comes from inside your own head - and you can make up your own crossover by imagining that an actor who's been in more than one franchise is actually the same character, much like Katherine Keener in Get Out and Being John Malgovich. So here are some others suggestions to enrich your franchise consumption experience.


1) Watch Weird Science again, and assume that Robert Downey Jr's character is Tony Stark as a bratty rich kid. I mean they even make a nuclear missile! After the humiliation he receives when not only can he not get Kelly LeBrock, but one of the weird scientists steal his girlfriend, Stark then spends the rest of his life partying and doesn't wake up from the mindless hedonism and materialism that soothed his bruised ego until he is captured by terrorists and sees what his weapons are doing to the people in the countries where they're used.

2) In Westworld, the Man in Black enjoys the immersive experience of the massive park. It turns out that the way he became so rich was when he conceived and directed a similar entertainment, that being the greatest reality show of all time, the Truman show! But this left him questioning the construction of meaning and consensus reality, and feeling guilty at what he did to Truman, he set out to shock the hosts into free will. But his demotion from Truman's god left him bitter, hence his humble contribution as Satan walking to-and-fro in Anthony Hopkins' world. I shouldn't neglect to mention that the Man in Black started out working in real estate, but after the abuse he received from his superiors he swore he would only work for himself. (When he asks Anthony Hopkins about "opening him up" - displaced aggression from when he was told "Always Be Closing"?) Either way when the Man in Black broods, he's probably thinking over his last conversation with Jim Carrey - or hoping that Alec Baldwin is rotting in hell for the way he treated people. Little does the Man in Black know that Anthony Hopkins is a god not just in his own mind, but in reality - called Odin - and Odin recognizes that threat when a rebel Valkyrie posing as an executive shows up to take over Westworld.

3) In the first Star Trek reboot movie, to save his crew and family, George Kirk kamikazes into the Romulan ship. But he remains heroically calm, and why not - he has faced world-destroying foes before as part of the Avengers! He may even believe (incorrectly) that his Valhallan ancestry will save him from the explosion. (This theory also explains why his half-human son James Tiberius can hold his own in fist-fights with Klingons.) Meanwhile, Dr. Strange succumbs to the temptation to abuse his mystic powers, has a dalliance with dictatorship, and ends up hiding with his genetically enhanced followers in suspended animation - and his knowledge of Eastern culture leads him to change his name to Khan. He just acts superhuman while hiding all the fancy spinning light nonsense. ( You can see the Dr. Strange hints they dropped in that Star Trek movie! Those hints are...er ah...come on people with narrative pareidolia, I know you can do it!) And Professor Xavier, made immortal by (fill in technobabble - think that's lazy? pro writers do it all the time), thinks that Thor and Strange had the right idea and hangs around long enough to become a Star Fleet officer himself, quickly rising to the rank of captain, though he almost accidentally reveals his mutant powers by continuing a telepathic link to the Borg after his near-permanent assimilation. Generations in the distant future would remember these repeated destructive encounters with an overwhelming machine race as the Butlerian jihad, and Professor X knows he must survive because he learned through Cerebro that one day in the distant future, there would arise a messiah called the Kwisatz Haderach.

4) When Neo first woke up out of the Matrix, he was actually thinking "Whoa...Bill and I saw this place once when we went far enough into the future! Totally bogus!" Any incomprehensible plot holes can be explained by Neo waiting for Bill and younger-himself to show up at any moment, and they can even remake the Matrix movies with the time travel finally fixing things.

5) The cyber-infected John Connor jumps timelines and creates a new one where he cannot salvage the rise of the machines, but at least he can still make the human race go extinct - by interfering with the recovery of the human race in post-simian-virus San Francisco, helping the apes, and setting up the events of the third POTA movie. (The character does seem a little too earnest doesn't he?)

6) The Hosts from Westworld go to a new level - not Eastworld (or whatever they call the Japanese one) but rather - Medievalworld. As they move about the castles and kingdoms they soon recognize that the guests on this level are made immortal and called "White Walkers". If the guests spend a lot they even get to be kings and queens (although unlike in Westworld, in Medievalworld these story lines allow or even ENCOURAGE the guests to kill each other in-game.) One guest however is given a permanent special title for free, to honor her for having protected us in the real world against the killer robots from the future. Her real name is Sarah Connor but in the game she is called "Daenerys Targaryen."

7) Mace Windhu survives the fall inflicted by Palpatine, uses the Force to save Queen Amidala's life and travels to a distant galaxy. Due to time dilation the seemingly brief trip takes a long, long time, and they arrive on early 21st century Earth. Amidala immediately finds herself a god to date and Windhu knows that there are evil beings all over the universe, so he starts gathering the most remarkable humans he can find. By coincidence Saw Gerrera also escaped the Empire and came to Earth, to a country called Wakanda to serve as a warrior there. Darth Maul survives Obi-Wan and uses his powers to serve evil on Earth calling himself Toad. Both Maul's and Windhu's light sabers long ago ran out of charge, although when the Avengers are fighting, from behind the scenes Windhu occasionally uses the Force to deflect a shot the Avengers don't see coming. Somehow, none of them realize that a man who started merely as a master lock-picker long ago in a galaxy far away (Benicio del Toro), somehow also landed in our galaxy - to become a collector.

(As I compiled this list, I was utterly amazed at how many actors had been both in Marvel Universe and Star Wars roles. Both of these franchises are now owned by Disney. My estimation of the likelihood of a near-future - within a decade - Star Wars-Marvel crossover is going up as a result. Since the characters that cross over early are generally peripheral which makes them more flexible for future writing purposes, my money is on Benicio del Toro.)

8) Captain America often thinks to himself during battles "You know flying was cool, but I'd rather just have a ripped torso and throw a shield around than have to be on fire all the time."



Above: Special Agent Smith, having taken his Vendetta mask off, passes the torch by giving Aragorn a light saber, so he can cross post-apocalyptic America and avoid cannibals.
9) Rocket the bioengineered raccoon actually is from Earth and knows damn well what a raccoon is, but doesn't want to let on to the Starlord. Why? It kind of sucks that he used to be human, had such a great bachelor party and his brain ended up getting uploaded into this form. Dave Bautista is human too, but disguises himself and plays dumb for a different reason - he'd rather the Starlord think he's an alien than a Nexus-7 replicant. He tried going back to Earth to farm and came very close to being retired by a Blade Runner, and he's not making that mistake again. Finally the Starlord finds himself captured by the Grandmaster, who is more bemused than usual and tells him (important to read in smiling Jeff Goldblum's voice) "So after all this is over you're planning on working on Earth resurrecting dinosaurs? I don't recommend it son - they brought me in once to observe and it didn't go well."

10) Obadiah Stane was...changed by his time inside Tron, and after he comes out and becomes an executive at Stark Industries, people can see his erratic behavior, but won't fire him given his insights into the virtual world.

11) Richard Riddick was not always human. Long ago he was a plant-alien named Groot, but constantly getting caught in wars hardened him and he finally had his brain (and voicebox) transplanted into a human body. Vaako thinks Groot-Riddick is naïve to retain even this much morality; despite Vaako's near-sacrifice to defend Valhalla, and despite his service to Starfleet as a physician, he was constantly ignored, so he said screw it, and became a Necromonger henchman.

12) Zoe Saldana in Guardians of the Galaxy is actually an Orion. Many years later at Starfleet academy, for fear that she would be discriminated against, she had her skin surgically changed from green to brown, but when she saw another out-of-the-closet Orion got into the Academy she requested to be her roommate.

13) In the Exorcist, when Max von Sydow sees the girl, he knows he can only be dealing with one thing: a Sith. He remembers Kylo Ren who left him for dead on Jakku, and uses some very basic Force tricks he learned from Luke. It's not enough as he soon discovers...but they should have compelled her with the power of Yoda!

14) Recall the Chancellor prior to Palpatine, who looked crestfallen at Palpatine's vote of no confidence. That was all for show, because the former Chancellor set it up for Palpatine, then gladly stepped down, and returned to Krypton, where they call him Zod.

15) Gandalf seems so world-weary because he was cast into this other strange dimension by a mutant's powers, and he tries to hide his true nature from hobbits (if you look closely, all his tricks involve manipulating metal in some way.) He thinks he recognizes Galadriel, who was similarly banished and briefly reveals who she really is - but the time is not right to go back to the mortal plane and re-take Valhalla.

16) There's an ongoing effort at an Alien-Blade Runner cross-over, which is predictable (both originally directed by Ridley Scott) but depressing, because the last couple Alien universe movies have not been great, and in any event no actors cross over between the two. But what if Hicks in Aliens seems so world-weary because he's actually an android - one designed to look and think like Kyle Reese?

17) After getting very little support from Sauron, Saruman barely escaped with his life to the stars. It doesn't take much for him to rebel against the Jedi and his master Yoda, who reminds him too much of those damn hobbits that were his undoing. And he certainly wasn't going to fall for another dark overlord, and rebels against Palpatine. But it was all part of Palpatine's plan...hence the incredulous look in the moments before it all goes finally and terrible wrong for him.

18) Deckard might be a replicant but he was engineered from a genetically superior human, and retains some of his memories - which explains the flashes of ark-hunting that come back to him and possibly his inexplicable enmity for Aryan-looking guys like Roy Baty. When K. find Deckard, he spots among his possessions a plain-looking cup. "Don't drink out of that one," Deckard cautions. (Note: Edward James Olmos thinks Blade Runner could be a sequel to Battlestar Galactica. No really. The intervening movie, from the end of BG to the beginning of Blade Runner, would be interesting. It's too bad they won't make it - but then again who does?)

19) On Girls, Hannah's ex-boyfriend lapses back into alcoholism and he and Hannah have a major fight. Suddenly Hannah finds herself choking without her ex touching her, and objects hurtling toward her face.


The bottom line: once you're in a science fiction franchise and have name recognition, you're set for life.

The Eric Andre Show Simulates Psychosis

First of all: you should be watching the Eric Andre show. Why aren't you watching the Eric Andre show. If you imagine several cast members from Jackass were performing in a fake talk show co-written by John Cleese and Salvador Dali, you're getting close.

You could also say that when a healthy person watches the Eric Andre show, maybe that's what it's like (seriously) for a psychotic person to watch a boring regular talk show - and the simulation of psychosis is more intense for the guests who Andre delights in torturing.* You can see some of them essentially go into shock as they cease to understand anything happening around them, a learned helplessness that has kept all but two of them on the set for the whole hour-plus interview! (They interview people for over an hour and then cut it down to a few minutes containing the good bits.) There are also extremely creative, silly, frightening man-in-the-street stunts, resulting in at least two arrests so far.

[My justification in posting this "review" here is that a) I really love this show and b) it kind of is science fiction, in the sense that in some of the dark near-future scifi from the 70s, they portrayed the future's entertainment as disjointed and psychotic, essentially, this show. So it came true. Finally!]

Two excellent examples of interviews are first, Jack McBrayer from 30 Rock:




Or this one with Lauren Conrad - PLEASE watch both halves.

Part 1:



Part 2:




Here, specifically, is WHY this show simulates psychosis.

1) Reduplication illusions. In many neuropsychiatric illness there are various versions of believing that your arm is not actually your arm, or not attached to you (hemineglect; phantom limb syndrome), or feeling that you have an identical twin following you at all times or a few steps ahead of you, or believing that someone you know is actually an impostor despite looking exactly like them (Capgras delusion.) Bizarre as they sound, they can occur in schizophrenia or after strokes and head injuries. Witnesseth: both Jillian Michael and Pauly D had to endure identical twins of themselves and the co-host suddenly appearing in the middle of the interview. There's a street skit where Andre has multiple arms, all connected so they move on their own. There's another where he has multiple selves that he controls as he walks down the street. It's funny, but in a way uncomfortably bizarre. He has brought out multiple guests and interviewed them seriously as George Clooney or Jay Z - sometimes the hired actor physically resembles the celebrity, sometimes not.




I predict that the fifth season will contain Fregoli delusion skits, where Andre prances around the city and harasses the same hapless bystander while wearing different clothing and makeup each time. (For maximum effect, there must be other hired actors standing nearby claiming that it's someone different.) At the risk of (positive!) stereotyping, it was with some of the reduplication illusions that I finally said to myself "this show is so bizarre that there must be a Japanese person involved at some level" and indeed Kitao Sakurai is an executive producer.

2) Hallucinations. No, they can't make their guests hallucinate per se (although Andre said they wanted to give ayahuasca to one rapper, then watch him try to rap.) They frequently make the studio stink, in one case using rotten clams, then act as if nothing is wrong. The guest chair is often used for these psychological torments - often it's heated so the guests swelter, and in one case (when Jimmy Kimmel was the guest) someone was actually in a space under the chair tickling Kimmel's bottom through the fabric. "My chair feels like it's alive," Kimmel announced, and was ignored by the host, making it seem as if he had lost his marbles for imagining such a thing. Apparently the interviews are loaded with things that we in the audience can't even see, either because they're cut out, or they don't show up on camera (e.g. dropping used dental floss from the ceiling onto germ-phobic Howie Mandel.) In this vein, Andre has said in interviews they planned to have two transexual folks have sex next to the camera, where the viewers can't see it but the guest can, and act like nothing abnormal was happening.

3) Complete non sequiturs. When you try to talk to a badly psychotic person, one thing you might notice is how one sentence does not at all lead to the next one, at least not in any way you can understand. If a few hours later you try to reproduce the things the person said, you find that they've just fallen right out of your head - just like trying to remember a vivid dream that's faded by lunchtime. Andre's questions and statements - in fact, even the very next word out of his mouth - often make no sense, and you can see his guests desperately trying to grab on to any thread of meaning or familiarity. He asks one guest what her zodiac sign is and she brightens immediately - "I understand the purpose of this, I know where this is going!" - and then when he announces in the next sentence that he is gassy, you can see her go back into bewilderment.

4) The guests are under constant threat. There's no predicting when it will happen, which direction it will come from, or what it will be, whether it's a shouting head smashing out of a desk to ask about prices (and then later gliding by sinisterly in the background) or an abominable snowman emerging from the darkness, or a chain saw, or a re-animated corpse crawling out of the ground in front of your chair.



5) The primal, dream-like nature of many bits, featuring as they do frequent frontal nudity and dangerous or verminous animals.

6) There are no clearly delineated levels of truth and fiction - you don't know which parts are done for the show and which reactions are genuine. You know that Star Trek episode where Riker is in a strange virtual-psychological prison, and it's never clear not just what's real, but what "level" of perception he's in within the simulation? No? Okay, how about Jacob's Ladder? Or the film version of Tristram Shandy? These disturb me far more than any visceral shock like jump-scares or gore. In the same way, because the show is logically and cognitively such a mess, there really is no way to tell where Buress and Andre's reactions are part of the bit, or they're genuinely uncomfortable, and it looked good on camera so they just left it in (Lance Reddick slamming the table; the grizzly bear interview.) Not being able to know this really bothers me. For instance, in the Pauly D interview where Andre's doppelganger didn't follow Andre's lead in taking his pants off, was this just really a bit gone wrong because the look-alike didn't want to take his pants off? There's no way of telling, and this is even more bothersome. There have been several moments - in particular the ladder discussion - where what appears to be genuine camaraderie emerges, but I don't fully trust even that.


Other tidbits:

One of his set-destroying scenes involves him in a strait-jacket getting involuntary injections from white-clad orderlies, but that alone doesn't give us much of a signal since that's a visual which is frequently used in such settings. The real punchline is that Eric Andre's father is a psychiatrist. I'm not sure that the show is intentionally checking the boxes of first-rank symptoms - it would be more interesting if they were rediscovering psychosis all on their own.

One thing I don't like about the show is that Andre clearly likes attractive women, and he sometimes seems to soften his shtick to flirt with them (e.g. Tatyana Ali, Asa Akira.) It's played off as a bit but comes off a bit douchily, and disappointingly you can be pretty sure it's real. He claims to have slept with two guests and has identified one of them. A lot of the overall approach to the show also seems motivated by a need to display dominance, which comes across more clearly in the street skits but especially when he is interviewed on other shows. But again, is this character or real? He doesn't seem to have an Andy Kauffman-like discipline in maintaining any kind of wacky character when he's in public.

And finally, Kraft Punk is the best, and the closest thing to a concrete "convention" that the show has (a wacky neighbor sort of fellow with a consistent theme, in the sense that he's all about cheese and his color is orange) but even here, what the convention is bracketing is utter nonsense.




*In the same manner, I have been told that if you watch Zardoz or Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain while on mushrooms, it cancels out and becomes like a Martha Stewart special.

**For the record, I find the ranch dressing character much more annoying than Bird Up.

What the Universe Would Look Like if Time Travel Were Possible: Different Regimes and Candidate Covert Travelers

If such a powerful technology as time travel is possible, it would have implications for reality itself, and could change everything; or, it would make such profound changes, before the things that ended up changing ever existed, that we couldn't tell it happened. Thus, it is a potentially all-powerful force that could both be responsible for everything, and could be undetectable, and is thus a PEP, a pointless epistemological problem. And we should expect to be visited not only by humans from our own future, but aliens who have their own purposes in their interactions with us. The recent time travelers party held by Stephen Hawking was quite sparsely attended, so either there were none around, or they didn't want to reveal themselves. So we should ask the same question about time travelers that Fermi asked about aliens: where is everybody?


Above: Horst Wessel, an early member of the SA under Goebbels who was at one point kicked out of a pre-Nazi poltical party for being (get this) too radical. Goebbels is known to have been particularly impressed by the cut of Wessel's jib and had placed him in charge of many of his men in Berlin. Imagine if this ambitious fellow had risen in the ranks of the NSDAP, perhaps even assassinating Hitler to command an even darker incarnation of the Reich than the one we knew. He would be worthy of going back in time to kill. Actually, Wessel was assassinated in 1930 by a supposed group of communists although it remains unclear if the police actually found the responsible party. Are we living in a timeline which is actually better than the one Wessel would have led us down?
In fiction time travel has been imagined in certain ways. It's interesting to think of how we could explain the universe as we currently observe it in terms of those depictions, and quite fun to look for the effects of possible time travelers. (Don't worry, I'm not going to send you to a stupid listicle of pictures from the 1920s that look like someone has a cell phone.)


Time travel model #1: there is no such thing as time travel. Or, there is no way for us ever to detect it; or, it is only trivially real, but useless; or, it creates "branching timepoints" so you kill Hitler and end up in a Hitler-less universe, but your friends back in the "normal" history timeline stay in that timeline, and don't see any benefit from your action.


Time travel model #2: there is time travel and you can change things. However, we certainly aren't aware of big changes, so either they happen and Back to the Future-style, our brains change too, and we don't know (in which case you can't tell the difference between this and one of the versions of #1, and it actually is #1). Also it gets a little silly when there are time travel stories and alternate histories that presuppose this but somehow the same people end up being born, hundreds of years down the line. Stephen Barnes's Lion's Blood series has the branch point occurring in the early 4th century BCE in the Near East, and then somehow in the 7th century CE, Mohammed is still born. What, history is malleable but which sperm meet which eggs is not? I mean come on. I complain about it again in a later post about alternate history.) The One, which is a Jet Li movie that's an interesting combination of The Highlander, The Terminator and several other movies, pretty well-done despite the obviousness of these tropes, has essentially the same problem.



Article: "Psychiatric hospitals filling up with time travellers sent back to kill Donald Trump"
If history-altering time travel is possible, there's another problem. It sets up an inevitable arms race for who can go back before the other guy and cut off their moves pre-emptively (remember how Bill and Ted got out of a plot problem by "remembering" to go back in time from the future and drop a trash can on the head of the guy who was about to shoot them? I don't understand why the bad guy wouldn't have done the same thing to stop them. And Bill and Ted do something to stop him...and so on.) In fact, if history-changing time travel is possible, then (for example) if gold is your thing, piddling around with the California Gold Rush of 1849 is stupid - why limit yourself to the deposits that exist on Earth in your (current) timeline when you can influence the supernova that created the Solar System? Or the amount and distribution of various nuclei at the Big Bang? Efforts would then focus on being able to influence earlier and earlier instants in ways that produce desired outcomes, and the whole universe becomes a game of temporal oneupmanship, where everyone wants to squeeze closer to the causal high ground at the earliest possible instant.

Even if we could somehow "sense" that history had shifted, a la Marty McFly or the returning safari hunter fromBradbury's A Sound of Thunder, there's no reason to be fooling around with dinosaurs, and the universe we're looking at is likely already the final outcome of various struggles that crammed the turns of their game into a handful of Planck times after the Big Bang. (This could explain the strange stringy/foamy distribution of matter in the universe. It's from the entity who captured the first move and canceled all the later ones, and proclaimed Fiat lux! Or Fiat aurum, or whatever it was maximizing. Anyway, it's more likely light or gold than the happiness of conscious beings. Clearly the universe we're in is not optimizing for happiness in a Parfitian or Neil-DeGrasse-Tysonian or any other sense.)


Time travel model #3: there is time travel, but nothing can change anyway. Time travel and fate are both true. This is the model used by Douglas Adams in the Hitchhikers Guide series, in Twelve Monkeys, and to some degree in Terminator 3, also known as "everything has already happened, in order." Note that models #1 and 2 are agnostic on the question of whether the future is as set in stone as the past, or the more provincial question of whether certain entities in that universe (humans) can make non-predetermined choices. BUt if you think consciousness in an epiphenomenon as some people suggest the Libet button-pushing experiment does, then you believe we're "locked in" exactly like coma patients, except we're looking out through the eyes of meat robots and we're deceived into thinking we're making the robots move, when in fact we're just watching and along for the ride. Consequently, when there's a shift, all we can do is watch, as in Vonnegut's Timequake. (Of note, Vonnegut's meditations on time, evident elsewhere including Slaughterhouse Five, inevitably shade into discussion of morality and meaning.

A variant on this is the idea of temporal homeostasis - maybe you can make a few changes that persist for a while, but there's an equilibrium principle that will try to return the universe to baseline. The series 11/22/63 employs this heavily. Although not explicitly about time travel, Final Destination shows a universe trying to restore equilibrium, and Pohl's Coming of the Quantum Cats shows how material moving between timelines causes physical imbalances (spoiler: in that case, they were rectified by super-advanced humans or unseen aliens that stepped in after they saw the damage we were unknowingly doing.)

In this model, even once people know they can't change anything - i.e. they want to stop the A-bomb from being developed, they even see pictures of themselves in the declassified Manhattan Project materials (maybe that's where they got the idea! because everything already happened, in order) but they still can't help themselves. Hoping against hope they say dammit, I'm still going to try. Of course, by bizarre coincidences, it's going to happen exactly the way it already happened. (This was suggested to have happened with scientists from the future interfering with the large hadron collider, but of course it still came online.)


It's this last model that interests me the most, because what it would produce is a handful of out-of-place people throughout our history; people who know too much, who get involved in historically important events; who disappear or seem to be swallowed by time. Having some fun, I've compiled four good examples.

Jesus Salas Barraza, Pancho Villa's killer. I've written before about this event, and the person who caused it. Underappreciated outside his country, Villa was planning a run for president of Mexico at the time of his assassination. And imagine the kind and gentle government he would have established had he won! Of course, a successful time-traveling assassin would not obviously be stopping a dictator, from the perspective of people in that time, and would have lived out their lives in prison (or in some other obscurity). For example, if he had been successful, Bruce Willis in Looper would've just seemed to be a child killer. Hence the curiosity of Barraza's dying words: "I'm not a murderer. I rid humanity of a monster..."


Above, Jesus Salas Barraza, clearly a guy from the alternate Villista dystopian future. From Escrito Sangre.

Juana Maria, a Tongva woman from San Nicolas Island off the the coast of Southern California. In 1835, a Mexican expedition forcibly evacuated everybody from the island but Juana Maria was left behind. Or...was she a time traveler who went back in time to hide among the Tongva people on the island? Years later, a rescue expedition was sent - actually more than one, since on the first try, they found her footprints but couldn't find her. Eventually they did find her, and brought her back to the mainland. And NOW - after improbably making it off this isolated island where she wouldn't be able to affect the rest of history - in a matter of seven weeks she died. And here's the kicker, per Wikipedia: "Juana Maria's water basket, clothing and various artifacts, including bone needles which had been brought back from the island, were part of the collections of the California Academy of Sciences, but were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. Her cormorant feather dress was apparently sent to the Vatican, but it appears to have been lost." It's almost as if space-time desperately wanted to erase any physical trace of her...

Thomas Conway was an Irishman who fought as an officer leading the colonial rebels in the American Revolution, but in 1778, he tried to have Washington removed as head of the Continental Army - and presumably to take the role for himself. Conway's maneuvering was reported and he ended up resigning, first going to France, from which "he was compelled to flee [to Ireland] for his life. After that Conway disappeared from history. He is supposed to have died about 1800 in poverty and exile." Cue Twilight Zone music!

Lastly, Benjamin Franklin, because I mean come on. To name a few of his inventions and accomplishments: fire companies, electricity, discovering the Gulf Stream, paper-based goal-setting software, and (seriously) depositing interest-accumulating money for the future people of Philadelphia. Since his childhood is pretty well-documented, what may have happened is thta some British time traveler realized they bore a resemblance to him, and went back to the date when he "ran away" from his printing apprenticeship knowing that he didn't come back to see anyone who knew him for many years, throwing the real Benjamin Franklin into Boston Harbor one night. Then, he went to London for some time, gradually leaking small innovations here and there and generally having the better of his contemporaries, until coming back to the colonies and marrying. After the Seven Years War Franklin went back to London, leaving his wife to mind the house in Philadelphia. The man we remember as a patriot showed a curious early loyalty to the crown, taking the English side in the Stamp Tax controversy (as any anti-American time traveler would), but this incited Philadelphians to take up arms against his household and wife, perceiving them as in league with the British rule-makers. Franklin then changed his position and returned to Philadelphia, eventually drafting into the role of architect of the revolution and the government which followed. (One is reminded of the ending of Terminator 3, when John Connor realized his position and reluctantly announced over the radio that he was in charge.) Thus, our anti-American British time traveler tried, but failed, to steer the Americans away from revolt, only to take a softer position out of concern for the woman from the past he ended up falling in love with in the past - just as he always had...
Below: I think I've found him. Maybe he wanted to keep the British and American markets combined so he could insult more people.