the internet is for girls
3 capsule reviews: A Murder at the End of the World; Doppelganger; Rabbit Hole
A Murder at the End of the World (created by Brit Marling & Zal Batmanglij)
All the way back in the 90s, Sandra Bullock starred in The Net as a young woman, an early adopter of the Internet (see her order a pizza online!) who gets caught up in some Hitchcockian suspense. A girl on the computer! What a novelty!
Almost 30 years later, the internet is everywhere, inescapable, and not only that–it is women, more than men, who drive the culture of everyday online life. (The architects and moneymen remain largely male, though. Some things never change.) Taylor Swift memes, K-pop fandoms, true crime subreddits–these are realms largely populated by women, and they constitute some of the heaviest traffic online. Leave the boys to their podcasts.
A Murder at the End of the World, the recent miniseries on Hulu, tries to portray this sea change through the sturdy narrative device of the locked room mystery. A young woman (Emma Corrin), a coder and true crime author, is invited to an Icelandic compound by a tech billionaire (Clive Owen) for an Exchange Of Important Ideas. But wait! Her ex-boyfriend is there too! And wait–he turns up dead in his room, with no sign of forced entry! Elon Musk, meet Agatha Christie.
I wanted to like AMatEotW, honest. Marling and Batmanglij were the creative team behind The OA, a bonkers series that ran for two seasons on Netflix before it was canceled to avoid paying higher residual fees. (Why do so many of your Netflix faves get axed after two seasons? Cause the price goes up.) The OA was out there–near-death experiences, parallel worlds, dance sequences that saved the world. Some loved it, others hated it, but it was unique.
AMatEotW is not unique, which is fine. Not everything has to be. But it is dull, which is where the trouble comes. The dullness takes awhile to become noticeable, as there are some elements that could have, in other hands (or other networks, perhaps) proved interesting. A tricky back-and-forth temporal structure, ruminations on AI and the future of humanity. But the ideas are no deeper than a TED talk, and the mystery itself resolves in supremely uncompelling fashion. (Partial spoiler: be careful what you say to Alexa.) Maybe Marling and Batmanglij can work with A24 next time, and let their freak flag fly once more.
Doppelganger by Naomi Klein
Do you ever search your own name on Facebook and get confronted with the fact that you are utterly un-unique? Look at all these randos sharing your name. How special can you be if there are so many of you?
A situation like this–much worse than it, really–bedevils Naomi Klein in her latest book, Doppelganger. A crusading journalist for lefty causes since the publication of No Logo back in the late 90s (yes, I read it back then bc Radiohead recommended it–you know who I am), Klein occasionally got mistaken for the journalist and feminist author Naomi Wolf. Naomi, Naomi, both online a lot–one can see how it would happen. Not a big deal, for the longest time. Just one of those funny things. Then Wolf took a sharp right turn into crazytown, railing against COVID lockdowns, vaccines, the deep state–you name it. She quickly became a darling of the New Right media ecosystem, appearing on podcasts with Steve Bannon. Which left many of Klein’s readers thinking, what happened to the Naomi we know and love?
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