Movies for Robots
Given the right-wing accelerationism that has marked the response to the pandemic carried out by the governments of my country, state, and city (New York City, where a death toll approaching 25,000 ostensibly constitutes a successful response to the virus), it has been a troubling time to engage with Inventing the Future, the new feature by Isiah Medina. Based—a word I use advisedly and with the blessing of the film’s credits—on Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ 2015 book of the same name, one of the more visible texts to emerge from the tendency towards a tech-driven, future-oriented thinking on the left over the last decade gathered under the name accelerationism, it is a film whose complicated relationship with time in terms of both form and content rhymes with a sense that its own is other than the present. Some significant part of our responsibility, if we are to be the sort of viewers the film requires to function as a legible object, lies in determining not only whether that time is in the past or the future, but whether it is at all, and then if so, wherever it is situated, how?
I apologize, let me clarify: the preceding sentence is the only point in this essay at which I’ll attempt anything like matching Medina’s baroque design in prose. Beyond the difficulty inherent in dealing with a film concerned with concepts whose worst-case interpretation seems to be playing out in real time, entered a world newly abounding in time-without-work that nonetheless bears no resemblance to the time-withoutanxiety or -distraction bourgeois convention defines as necessary for reflection and analysis. I should note that the recognition that this kind of time has never been evenly distributed, and more critically, that it is not necessary but only conventional, were among the major themes of Medina’s (2015). Nevertheless, such knowledge has proven little practical help in finding my way to a mental space felicitous to a film whose visual and aural surfaces, whose density of composition, consistently push at the limit of my ability to make sense of experience. It is a strange and harrowing catharsis.
