Reality Breakdown Reviews
September 5, 2023
I’m still figuring this newsletter out. One of my initial goals was to get back to more ‘fanzitory’ writing—interviews and reviews, just as I used to do with my old fanzines (except, hopefully, better). Thus begins the Reality Breakdown Reviews section.
ONCE UPON A TIME IN UGANDA (2021)
Cathryne Czubek, director
SOMEHOW, IT’S BEEN NINE years since I travelled to Uganda to write about Wakaliwood, a home-grown action film studio in the Wakaliga section of Kampala, Uganda. Filmmaker Isaac Nabwana refers to his neighborhood as a slum, and each of his films is a small masterclass in how to creatively thrive under adverse conditions. My Vice article was among the first of their big profiles, but not the press that really got them noticed (a later BBC profile was huge for them). The not-quite new documentary Once Upon A Time in Uganda—released two years ago, but only recently streaming—examines Nabwana’s relationship with Alan Hofmanis, an American film curator who became Issac’s assistant director and global ambassador of Wakaliwood.
The filmmakers here do a great job of itemizing the hurdles facing your average DIY Ugandan action filmmaker: cost and availability of computer and video equipment; lack of security from theft; risk of serious disease and/or injury for cast & crew; lack of access to equipment repair and sufficient scrap with which to build props, jacks, and dollies; lack of reliable access to health care, mail, internet, electricity and/or plumbing; and, crucially, the crushing classism of Uganda itself, an invisible force field that Nabwana took pains to emphasize to me in 2014, and which he repeats in the film.
There’s a lot to this story. Each film has a narrator, the VJ (Video Joker, not Video Jockey: think of it as a running commentary track by an insane interdimensional imp). Wakaliwood’s film distribution is physical, done through networks of street sellers hawking freshly-burned DVDs. I don’t remember drones being part of their arsenal in ’14 (this film relies on them), but I assume Nabwana has one by now. Isaac repairs his own motherboards; his resourcefulness perhaps masks the technical time lag between the developed world and equatorial Africa. I suppose AI is just as available in Uganda as it is here, if power and internet are up to it (both were spotty during my visit). I’d love to see what he makes of it.
I’m in this film, in one of the final shots. There’s a short procession of foreign visitors—‘mzungus’—from a variety of wealthy countries, all getting massacred by Isaac on green screen. I’m the last mzungu in the bunch. I got shot, blood spurted, I did a hammy flip-flop, and although the whole thing feels off-putting now, making Isaac laugh onscreen felt like a win.
I caught up with Hofmanis five years after my trip, at the LA premiere of Nabwana’s Bad Black, in the palatial Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. Alan did a Q&A afterwards and then Isaac Skyped in. It was his Hollywood debut, and the full house roared its admiration from 9,400 miles away. Talking with Alan afterwards, I confessed I’d felt like a ‘douchebag’ when I recalled all the many weird gaffes I found myself making in urban Uganda. He laughed. “Every visiting mzungu says this.”
THE UNDERTOW; SCENES FROM A SLOW CIVIL WAR (Norton, 2023)
Jeff Sharlet, author
I BOUGHT THIS ESSAY collection in hardback, knowing nothing of the author but one long and eye-popping Twitter thread. Sharlet is capable of nimble prose, but the opening profile of Harry Belafonte is such a deft piece of writing that the rest of the book never meets the high bar it sets. For most of the remainder of the essays, Sharlet’s reportage feels so outdated it borders on reckless. The book mainly consists of the author road tripping into Dumbo America to learn what makes MAGA tick. Personally, I think this approach exhausted itself by 2017 (in contrast to the evergreen value of studying parallels from past American insanity, especially antebellum times1). But Sharlet commits to his assignment, driving from church to church, state to state, from one Ashli Babbitt memorial to the next, eventually finding himself in the parking lot of a great plains megachurch, wondering if he’s going to get shot.
These people: what will they do with their share of AI? Sharlet quotes a US citizen certain that Hillary Clinton was dead and CGI (or at least “green screens”). Later, a woman starts sobbing and has to collect herself before she can share her terrible secret; the Clintons “eat the children.” People so easily led—by grifters, and trolls, and bots, really by any clown with a bad enough idea—seem like the kind of people who could really use their own cinematic universe. Unreality is already a big market. When Fox disappointed their audience after the ’20 election, OAN and Newsmax moved in. Imagine the market power of a dedicated station or streaming service or platform where the MAGA deadenders can go to live in a reality where everything works the way they want it to. It sounds like the kind of hyperbole a punk band would’ve sung about in the early 1990s. And yet we can see it from here. It’s close now.
DANNY DUNNY, INVISIBLE BOY (Archway Paperbacks, 1974)
Jay Williams and Paul Sagsoorian, authors
THE ADVENTURES OF DANNY Dunn span 15 books, published between 1956 and 1977. These science fiction adventures had a set cast: Danny, his mom, the absentminded-but-lovable professor she works for, and Danny’s quick-witted school chums, Irene and Joe. I remember the villains always being mean kids or the US military. The books hit the different Stations of the Cross for any boy’s adventure series: the time the gang goes to space, the time they get shrunk, the time they go back in time. I loved these books as a kid, but didn’t read every one. I don’t think I read Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, one of the early books that seemed to foresee our current era, barely more than a year old now, where computers can be given spoken prompts and produce intelligent output.
Reading Invisible Boy as a child, I remember my disappointment that Danny wasn’t actually invisible. He’d visited Saturn and hobnobbed with Ben Franklin, so what gives? Instead, the ‘invisibility’ is the ability to spy. The Prof. builds a life-sized mechanical dragonfly equipped with sensors. When the kids slip on a helmet, they see and hear what the dragonfly does as it flies under their command, as innocuous as a literal fly on the wall (thankfully, at no point does it occur to Danny to fly into the shower room at the nearby women’s college; such a thing wouldn’t be possible in his wholesome universe).
One of the oddest omissions in science fiction is this inability to picture a world in which drones are everywhere and nowhere, able to flit about undetected, observing, recording, broadcasting2. In 2014’s Interstellar, a film set 50-plus years in the future, there is a scene with a chimney-sized Indian drone (I remember watching this in a theater and thinking Oh, cool, it’s a steampunk movie now). Just this year, the real Indian army ordered a fleet of 850 ‘nano-drones,’ each the size and shape of a motionless floating tarantula. Thirty bucks on Amazon gets you one that fits in a pocket. Evolution took 300 million years to build the aerodynamic marvel of the dragonfly, but we’ll get there in what... twenty years? Ten? It seems odd that a kid’s book from a half-century ago has been the only work of fiction to foresee the inevitable; drones indistinguishable from insects.
In such a new ecosystem, the privacy threat of metadata will seem quaint. A world with fake insects is a world where drones can penetrate private homes and record us in our bathrooms and bedrooms. So it is one more odd irony of our decade that this development will coincide with the perfection of malleable video (soft content). Meaning two big things: 1) in such a world, it will almost definitely be easier for someone to fake revenge porn than to send a drone to film it. And 2) a blanket of plausible deniability will extend to everyone on Earth. Anything incriminating enough to be filmed will also, by definition, be something that can be faked. Maybe ten years from now, it’ll be considered ‘normal’ for everyone to have preposterously fake images of themselves floating around online.
Such as Joanne B. Freeman’s The Field of Blood, which taught me exponentially more about the America I inhabit than any book I’ve read about Trump or his followers.
Maybe the Hunter-Seekers from Dune count? They’re also set 20,000 years from now.