David Robert Michell, 2018 #11, 2019 Skandies
Each year during my stint as a high school English teacher, I had my sophomores vote on a topic for the class to explore. It could have been an author, an era, a geographical region, you name it, but they always went with a theme: one year it was revolution, the next utopia and dystopia, the next alternate history. But every year, the most frequently nominated topic, and the leader for at least the first round of balloting, was conspiracy theories. I was glad it never actually won, because I wasn’t sure what I’d put on the syllabus if it did. I’d heard conspiracies were a big motif in Thomas Pynchon’s work, but I’d never made it more than fifty pages into any of his books; poking around, I found people saying that The Crying of Lot 49 was the most accessible of his novels, but it’s been gathering electronic dust on my Kindle for close to five years now. But if not for the fact that even at an extremely liberal high school I’d have to censor so much of it that it would no longer make sense, Under the Silver Lake would be a great candidate for the list. It’s about a slacker who is convinced that conspiracies are operating all around us, and that the mass media is the means by which the conspirators communicate with each other via coded messages. His ideas for decoding these messages are all extremely stupid. He religiously watches Wheel of Fortune and takes careful notes about Vanna White’s eye movements. He counts the letters in the words of pop songs. He superimposes maps offered as prizes in half-century-old cereal boxes over maps from Nintendo Power magazine to determine where to hunt for clues. These ideas turn out to work. They do indeed reveal conspiracies. And the conspiracies they reveal are also extremely stupid.
Under the Silver Lake does not really play its
content as a comedy.
It counts on viewers to recognize that what they are watching is
extremely stupid without any overt cueing.
The problem is that the movie isn’t really a satire of our
apophenic culture because the actual conspiracies touted by a
freakishly huge fraction of the populace are just as stupid as the
ones in the movie.
The spheroid Earth is a hoax spread by NASA to get people thinking
of the world as a unitary globe that should be ruled by a single
government that would secretly be controlled by the Elders of
Zion!
Covid is a hoax designed to get people to take vaccines full of
microchips that allow Bill Gates to control people via the 5G cellular
network, but everyone who gets the shot is guaranteed to drop dead
within three seven years!
Tom Hanks has been harvesting adrenochrome from trafficked
children in the basement of a D.C.-area pizzeria, as confirmed by coded
messages in a Justin Bieber song!
(Note: Under the Silver Lake cannot be a
parody of this last one, because the Justin Bieber song in question
came out after the movie.)
I could keep going indefinitely.
And, I mean—I write these articles in part to force myself
to discover my opinions about the media I take in, because a lot of the
time I finish a book or a movie and my reaction is basically
“shrug emoticon” but then when I write about it I find
myself beginning to lean in one direction or the other.
And in this case I think I’m leaning toward
“pro”.
Under the Silver Lake does seem like it
captured the tenor of our times pretty well.
I remember that in high school one of my favorite bizarre pop culture
stories was when CBS Evening News anchor Dan
Rather was waylaid by a crazy guy who beat him up while shouting,
“Kenneth, what is the frequency?”
And now half the country is glued to channels on which “Kenneth,
what is the frequency?” guys are the ones delivering the news.
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