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I WAS EAGER TO SEE CLOUD, the new film from Kiyoshi Kurosawa, in large part because his 2001 film, Pulse, is one of the first I remember that really understood and articulated the (potentially) isolating, atomizing nature of the internet.
Not to say that I appreciated what Kurosawa was going for at the time. Pulse was a horror film that presented the internet as an avenue to the afterlife, with spirits attempting to imbue the living with suicidal ennui. Despite sharing the same milieu as the college-aged kids in that film—early access to high-speed internet, dorms that were wired for connectivity, and class activities that had begun to migrate out of the classroom and into cyberspace—the sense of alienation was totally foreign to me. The internet was a gift, a boon, a research tool that couldn’t be beat and a way to submit work without having to trudge to a printer. Cyberspace complemented, but did not replace, meatspace.
As the years have gone on, I have come to believe Kurosawa’s vision of the technological future is closer to correct than my own. Closer, but not quite right. Because the internet encouraged both isolation and alienation from general society alongside the cultivation of weird, random connections that would allow those with petty resentments to stew in their grievance and imagine ways to make the world worse for everyone else. It is these connections that drive Cloud, a movie about the omnipresent fear that, in a hyperconnected society, it feels like everyone’s running some sort of grift, everyone’s looking for an angle, and that someone, somewhere, has found a slightly better angle for their grift than you have.
Ryôsuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) is the least-reputable of individuals in the modern internet ecosystem: the flipper. The middleman, the retailer, the guy who snaps up a product and then sells it via auction sites on the dark web trafficking in stolen (or phony) merch. He’s the reason every fan-focused site has a limit of one unit per household; he’s the reason the limited-edition movie or print or Funko you want is listed on eBay for three times MSRP shortly after it goes on sale. As the film begins, he’s scamming a family out of their life’s work in order to make an enormous profit. By film’s end, his various enemies have joined forces to try and take him down; it is only with the aid of a young man who might be the literal devil that he could survive.
There are nuances of Kurosawa’s film that are difficult to understand without fully comprehending Japanese society—elements of the relationships between older students and younger students, for example, likely went over my head—but the basic logic of life on the internet transcends national borders: scam or be scammed. And when everything online is a scam, satisfaction can only be achieved in the real world, the world of blood and bone.
I’ll simply recommend you see Cloud, which is in theaters now, because it’s of a piece with a series of recent films about the odd little communities the internet has caused to form. Most recently, and still in theaters, is Ari Aster’s Eddington, a social satire about how life during the pandemic went totally insane because we spent most of our time staring at little boxes that live in our pockets and are algorithmically programmed to drive us insane. Then there’s Red Rooms, another movie about the ways in which the internet generates a sort of primal amorality, one that might only be combatable via a similar sense of amoral depravity. Cloud veers towards Eddington’s sense of the absurd more than Red Rooms’s grounded examination of the web’s ultimate depravities, but all three share a potent dread of the world we’ve built around us.
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I’M A BIG FAN OF THE SPHERE, the giant snow-globe-shaped monstrosity in the heart of the Las Vegas Strip. I love the gaudiness of it and I admire the technological feat of creating a building-sized 16K LED screen. It’s a $2.3 billion monument to human excess, a fact only heightened by the hilarious incongruence of the one movie truly shot for the screen is a blisteringly anti-human nature documentary by Darren Aronofsky about how we’re a plague that should flee Earth so it can heal from all we’ve done to it. I was literally there last weekend, watching Aronofsky’s Postcard from Earth for a second time. That’s how much I love the Sphere.
I put this out there because I need to explain that I’m both disgusted by the idea of deforming The Wizard of Oz to show on the giant interior screen of the Sphere and also fascinated by it. I repulsed and attracted simultaneously, the two magnetic poles of my soul at war with each other. Do I admire artistic intent more or obscene spectacle? I don’t know. Inside me, they wrestle.
All of which is to say that I had a fun time discussing the idea of The Wizard of Oz coming to the Sphere with Peter and Alyssa on Across the Movie Aisle even as I find the whole spectacle completely repellent. It is, truly, an immaculate representation of Las Vegas itself.