u/phasmatopia

I was surprised to learn that The Thirteenth Floor (1999) was a box office bomb. Can't tell if this is a "pleasantly surprised" reaction to what is actually a mediocre movie—or if it's a genuinely underrated film, owing solely to the bad luck of releasing a month after The Matrix.

Didn't see any problems with the writing or the direction. Effort was obviously put into the 1937 scenes: period costuming was on point; sets were great; plenty of extras to fill the frame; no obvious shortcuts. Nothing extraordinary in terms of cinematography, but still competent and well-shot, with some imaginative lighting. They seem to have used the production budget of $16 million to great effect.

In terms of acting, it was a good exercise for some of the actors playing multiple roles, with the leads getting to do some fun character work. Naturally, Vincent D'Onofrio walked away with every scene he was in, but I thought the whole cast did solid work.

Am I missing some glaring flaws? Or is this the kind of genuinely underappreciated mid-budget popcorn flick we don't often see these days?

First, to head off the misconception that "liberalism" is synonymous with "progressivism," and that *hyperliberalism* must therefore be an overabundance of tolerance—there's an argument to be made that the "sovereign citizen" movement in the U.S. is a conservative-coded form of hyperliberalism. Some aspects of "wokeism" could be interpreted as a progressive-coded form of the same.

One interpretation of hyperliberalism is the attempt to invent a political constituency of one person, for whom society's rules don't apply.

The hyperliberal subject is ordained by a higher power—usually Reason, in secular society. Any social obligation or restriction has no moral basis; any accommodation for others is either a grudging, conditional recognition of peerhood, or a *noblesse oblige* extended to inferiors.

In today's political culture, people have been trained to infer beliefs based on aesthetic disagreement, rather than identifying beliefs through dialectic reasoning. The latter would look something like "what are this person's actual beliefs and motives in regards to the social structure that sustains peaceful co-existence, *and where do those beliefs and motives align with my own*?" The former looks like "what color hat are they wearing? What cultural products do they consume? What conversational language do they use? And above all else, what if they're secretly a Fifth Columnist for The Oppressors, disguised as a politically unmotivated noncombatant?" This makes people uniquely susceptible to hyperliberalism: if they have no need to purposefully understand other people's beliefs, and therefore no need to interrogate *their own* beliefs, they're free to assume moral superiority by virtue of their own sovereignty.

To take the old Carl Schmitt formulation to its logical conclusion: hyperliberal subjects situate the state of exception within their own personhood, because no one else can possibly be as enlightened or as persecuted as themselves.

The paranoia of hyperliberalism, in which everyone is always trying to oppress The Sovereign, produces a unique form of self-induced psychosis: The Sovereign is always feverishly engaged in the political activity of protecting their own sovereignty, but almost never engaged in *coordinating with others,* beyond the temporary alliances that benefit themselves. This is a kind of superficial anti-politics, separate from the actual organizing mechanisms of society.

If people start to slip into a hyperliberal mindset, they eventually reach a point at which it's extremely difficult to bring them back into traditional politics. Any implied compromise would be a repression of their sovereignty. This is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. But The Sovereign will deny this at all costs, because in their minds, democracy is intended to protect their interests; they should have no limitations imposed on how "their interests" are defined.

Without a vocabulary to describe this radical conceptualization of political selfhood, separate from any overt political ideology, we have no way to define the problem, and no way to propose possible remedies or solutions.

(Not the documentaries.)

In another post, somebody brought up Robert Pattinson in Cosmopolis (2012), which is a film I'd filed under "interesting; weird; will never watch again" after seeing it in theaters when it first came out.

What struck me about it now, fourteen years later, was how well it captured the spirit of the very particular time in America when it came out: the Obama years; post-Bush but pre-Trump; just before Black Lives Matter took off, when "pandemic" was either the name of an interesting board game or a plotline for a sci-fi thriller.

Cosmopolis managed to soak up all the aesthetics of Occupy Wall Street, anxieties about income inequality, Silicon Valley techno-vampirism, the loss of authenticity, and this sensation of weird, lurching uncertainty, all in one bizarre little package.

I wouldn't recommend it to somebody as a great film, or even a particularly enjoyable one—but I think you could absolutely show it to somebody in their 20s today, as a historical exhibit, if they wanted to know what life was like at that time.

It's a tricky thing to define: obviously not a Ken Burns documentary, but also not a period piece, or a self-aware pastiche of a particular era. Not quite nostalgia bait or an idealized portrait of what people *wish* the era was like, either.

So maybe zeitgeist movies are those set in the "present" of their theatrical release, and manage to capture the vibes of the time without trying too hard to do so.

American Graffiti, maybe? Easy Rider? Reality Bites? American Psycho? What others, for different times and places?

Nothing against Matt Johnson. This seems to be a case of a great director rescuing a mediocre script, which apparently started out as a Blacklist screenplay.

The writers obviously read Kitchen Confidential enough to include some details from it, but misunderstood the point of the book.

Anthony Bourdain's whole rise to fame was built on challenging the romantic ideal of professional cooking. Confidential showed that kitchens weren't the white-apron artists' studios that diners would like to imagine. His whole argument was that professional cooks deserve respect because they're essentially blue-collar food mechanics: overworked; underpaid; burnt out; self-medicating to deal with the stress, going through hell and back every shift, and still (usually) managing to turn out great food for other people.

That whole thesis should have showed up in the Chef's character and his relationship with Tony.

Instead, we got the "old master seeing some ineffable genius in a flawed apprentice" cliche, the exact kind of romanticism that the real-life Bourdain made his name by exposing as a fairy tale.

If the whole point was that Banderas's character failed because he was too much of a romantic, that should have come out more consistently in the dialogue. He should have been telling Tony that he wasn't ready for the white coat until he proved he could be a good soldier, that he wasn't too much of an idealist. Not handing him the damn thing as soon as his training started.

Tony trying to talk him into making a complicated special should have been another deal-breaker. Somebody in the Chef's position should have known firsthand that nobody's there to make art—certainly not the new guy. A "special" is something used to dress up stuff that needs to get moved before it goes bad. A "signature dish" is a featured menu item that is carefully planned, from ingredients to staffing to preparation, before a customer ever sees it. It's something you rehearse ahead of time to make sure it won't fuck up your service, and it's not something you give to the new guy to prove himself.

Burning down the kitchen should have been the end of the relationship. That's unequivocal proof that Tony didn't have what it actually takes to work in a kitchen. It's why you have to earn your way onto the line one step at a time in real life. No amount of hidden genius makes up for not knowing your place on the team and holding the line. Your aesthetic appreciation for the food isn't enough to save you. Discipline is the only quality that matters. You're either pulling the oars with everybody else, or you're a liability. No recommendation letter. No second chance. You put yourself before the restaurant, you're done.

I know they had that line about "I trusted you, and that's the problem." But it should never have been a matter of trust. Professional kitchens have strict norms and protocols precisely because they're crewed by burned-out degenerates. Ignoring those protocols doesn't make sense from somebody who, we're told, was once one of the elites.

Ironically, there would have been an interesting parallel to drawn between professional cooking and professional writing. Neither tolerates romanticism for long. Idealists show up expecting to be recognized for their genius. In both trades, the old pros know that you only succeed by grinding it out for years before you earn your keep; the reward is getting to keep rolling the same boulder up the same hill, over and over, until you get old or quit, and maybe stealing a few moments of glory along the way.

Solid movie overall. I don't think Bourdain would have objected to the way he was portrayed in the film. But he might have taken issue with the way the industry was presented, given that he wrote one of the most famous books to demystify it.