ombre

Milchick's vocabulary has always reminded me of "signifyin'" - the transgressive wordplay that African-American communities have long used as a statement of worth, joy, and protest. And in the context of a show that is both deliberately color-blind and world-building around worship of a bunch of crazy white 19th century peeps, I find this totally fascinating. Someone posted an excellent interview with the actor who plays Natalie over in the Perpetuity Wing thread. She talks about how Natalie is a true believer. Ever since listening to it I've been debating everyone else in the show in relation to that question - where are they on the true believer spectrum? Which then begs other questions. Why and how did they come to work at Lumon in the role they serve? How has their belief changed in the course of events? (The part of me that studies American slavery also sees these questions in relation to the ways that belief in the validity of slavery changed over the course of the early republic. To generalize, earlier generations were more likely to see it as a crappy system but they were too deeply in debt to do anything about it. See Jefferson's comment about having the wolf by the ears. Later generations developed all sorts of religiousish and scienceish justifications for slavery and gradually became more consistently True Believers on it.) I am most curious about Milchick. He's done nothing to show us true belief. He strikes me as a man who is doing a job. An increasingly strange job. He's speaking the lingo and doing the things, but I'm guessing that he's not really a believer and thus he's kinda flying blind. The kindness strategy was an attempt to get to the end goal (Cold Harbor completed), but it's neither in line with the corporate disdain for innies nor getting the job done. A very, very tough position. And particularly interesting as it's quite apparent how his various kindesses are, in themselves, exquisite psychological torture. I mean, f the job is making widgets then they're very unserious. If the job is surveillance then they're knocking it out of the park! I've assumed the dental tools were to remove Irv's chip. Which would make it very, very hard for him to ever return. He truly would be dead to the show. I watched quickly over the weekend but I always seem to get more out of a slow rewatch during the week. I'll write more about my thoughts from that later. Only want to say that a lot of people are asking about Mark's cold. We did see that Petey was coughing a lot and having other symptoms (bloody nose, iirc). He was also living outside in a broken greenhouse in the show's endless winter, so there's no way to tell if it was from reintegration or from his circumstances. It seems clear that the show is using cold-like symptoms to show that integration is taking hold and to remind us of the risks of re-integration. I doubt that they'll get into, say, what's happening on a cellular level to cause those symptoms. That would probably be relatively boring. It's enough for it to show that he is (slowly) re-integrating and that re-integration is dangerous.

This was so excellent. Thank you!

Because Mr. Tillman is a beautiful man and in a cruel, hard world we deserve to see his in both business formal hotness and business casual hotness. (or because as middle management he has to dress up to be fit to meet the board's reps but dress down to be Mr fun for the innies. And the very act of eating his time changing his costume is indicative of the life of middle management.) (but mostly because it is worth the world getting both formal and casual fineness.)

I can't remember the last time I so enjoyed the pace of a weekly show. I don't watch all that much TV and really only look forward to one or two shows per year. I'd honestly forgotten the pleasure of having a week to ponder over a show and get to anticipate the next developments. I'm liking how this season is giving some episodes entirely to one world or the other. The first ep drove home the fact that for the innies they are literally there for every waking moment. There is no rest. They may feel rested if their outie is generous enough to sleep well and regularly, but they themselves literally just work and work and work. That may have been clear in the first season, but it wasn't *visceral* like it was in the first ep of season 2. By having two episodes set entirely in the innie world and ending with the revelation that they haven't actually had the band back together again... And now they never will (presumably, what with irv being terminated or whatever)... It feels like it's really ramping up the sense of their loss. I feel like the outie world has lost some of its urgency. I assume that this next ep will switch back to the outside world and ramp up that tension there. I'm looking forward to it. And I'm looking forward to getting to hear folks on here. As I say, my specific training makes it hard to break out of my perspective on the show. It's a real pleasure to get to hear so many of you guys chiming in with what you're bringing to it and picking up on! Thank you!!!

There's a similar and really beautiful idea in studies of film music. Music is an excellent trigger for memory. The music used in films and tv (particularly but not only music that exists independently of the film. Stuff not written for the film) brings with it a huge range of memories for the audience. People who know those specific pieces get memories of other times they've heard it and it makes incredible layers of meaning. The filmmaker has little control over what those layers will be, only knows that they are or aren't using music that does or doesn't have widespread distribution in the moment when they're making the film. And they have *no* control over what happens afterwards, of course. If you want more control you can use stuff written for the film, but even then, you never know if it will become popular on its own. Anyway, using pre-composee music can create situations where people bring thick layers of meaning when interpreting your piece, even if you have little say in what those interpretations will be. (and, conversely, of course, it can be incredibly alienating to see a film filled with music you don't know. It can communicate that you're not the intended audience.) There are layers like that going on here. To me, the tv/vcr cart evokes pre-college education. It's the communication method for when the teacher was sick or otherwise stepping back. It feels ever so slightly infantalizing (for all the reasons discussed in someone else's earlier post). That's probably an interpretation they could predict evoking. But this episode probably has a higher than usual number of elements that would evoke unpredictable responses. Until now we've mostly been in the office and the cues have been kinda corporate cringe. But here... People have very different responses to winter. Some love it, some hate it. The dead seal is an impossible thing (seals, as far as I know, don't climb cliffs and navigate shallow streams!), so it, too, would bring unpredictable interpretations. And people probably have a wide range of experiences with big dead creatures. Similarly, the tent set-up are unusual enough that people would probably read it in different ways. To me, it seemed like a fire accident waiting to happen, and made me incredibly anxious. On the other hand, an adult reading a story and showing pictures to the audience is probably familiar to most viewers, but it's another crossed signal, encouraging us to see the adult mdr team as children. By using open-ended symbols like this, it makes for a more destabilizing viewing experience. Hence a more in-depth conversation about this ep than most of the others!

Enh. You were spot-on. In a show like this, where world-building is so important and we're learning what we can from context, the medium is the message. One could, perhaps, just bop along with the overt surface-level information. But it's a show that's communicating through other tools as well. Not wanting to engage with those other tools is absolutely the perogative of any and every viewer, but it's kinda like listening to a picture book as an audiobook. Again, that's the reader's perogative, but it will probably make for a thinner interpretation of the material.

I figure that was showing just how much he's come to distrust lumon. He no longer thinks they'll do the basic functions of keeping them alive. Otoh, it has me realizing that we've never seen any of them eat a meal (waffle party excepted). They get rewarded with snacks. They can eat up to two snacks bought with tokens each day. But I can't remember a lunch. Outies really do get all the joys of the flesh!

In the 19th century, blackface was a tool by which white performers (generally white men with marginal access to prosperity themselves) expressed displeasure with those at the top of the social hierarchy by putting on the mask of blackness to let the make subversive statements (along with other statements, which aren't pertinent to this analogy). Helena isn't happy in her life ("moppet!") and sees helly as free of those constraints and is enjoying using helly's mouth to say things she, helena, cannot say. She sees in helly a freedom that she is jealous of and wants for herself. So when she becomes helly she acts out what she thinks that freedom allows. But because she isn't helly, doesn't share her desires, her agenda, the experience of having her world limited like the innies do, she does a poor imitation. I don't think we've ever heard any of the innies discuss *anything* sexual. That scene at the campfire was like when you've got a group of pre-pubescent ten-year-olds and one young, immature, attention-hungry teen. You've planned an activity for 10-year-Olds, but the teenager makes crude jokes and makes the planned activity seem cringe. Helly might have undermined the activity, but probably not in that way, since the scope of the innies' mental world doesn't seem to include *such* sexual thoughts. And milcheck can't do anything to her because she's the boss's daughter. But he also can't let it go because it *is* disruptive. And he's mad that he's in this state of frustrating impotence when he's theoretically been given a promotion (and I think thought he'd do a better job than Cobel). Caught between rock and hard place, he explodes at all of them. Just like Cobel. Because being middle management/the hired overseer sucks.

I have often wondered if outie Irving intentionally burns the candle at both ends to see what his subconscious carries over the boundary. I am too tired to concentrate well on work this morning and all my reading about debt peonage just keeps turning back to thoughts on severance. Where my brain keeps going is here: I wonder how typical/atypical the mdr team is within lumon. Of our four refiners, only one is there for the reasons that we usually think make people go to work each day: Dylan is there for his paycheck. It's the only one (we have been told) that he can get. Everyone else is there for Reasons. Mark is there to avoid grief. Helly is there for propaganda. And Irving is there as a covert op. Oh, wait, and the person who left just before we started was the first person to reintegrate,whichbimplies some big thoughts/feels in the outside world. If that's a typical combo for lumon, man, that must be one roiling outside world! It's possible that this *isn't* a typical team, of course. Cobel is obsessed with Mark's project,and maybe that is why helly was assigned to this team. Maybe petey was carefilly targeted for recruitment by the whole mind collective (if I'm remembering their name correctly). Maybe Irving, too, was carefully recruited by outside operatives.

Debtors prison. That's it. Maybe in combination with, like, lay-away purchasing or buy-now-pay-later schemes. There's been a thing niggling at the edge of my brain that was/is analogous to severance. And that's it. Debtors prison. I've mentioned elsewhere that irl I spend a fair amount of time working with American slave narratives. My reading at the moment is on the strange, squishy line between freedom and slavery in the areas just south of the Mason-Dixon line. Areas where it was relatively easy to run to free states and thus freedom/slavery was even more so a matter of negotiation.* Right now I'm in a bit about how civic improvements created annual taxation that could force people in tight financial situations to have to rely on "public assistance." for many, this meant forced labor in a penitentiary. Debtors prison. A kind of term slavery. This is, in effect, what lumon allows people. They can enslave their own self for a portion of the day and they don't have to know what happens to themselves. They get a gift cert to the company watering hole if their body is injured, etc. And in between the company can do... Pretty much whatever it wants as long as they don't know about it. I think this is why I'm not super invested in questions of why/how they got folks into their different spots in the park. The idea is to show authoritarian control over their bodies, their existence. When you're trapped in a small box, anything that happens outside that box feels like magic. So on the one hand, we saw the cliff behind Mark and there wasn't a tv/vcr there. And then there was. And it's absolue lately possible to look at that and go wtf! They can't override physics! But it's also possible to take it as proof of the innies' blinkered understanding of the world. Their forced narrow perspective. "Tallest waterfall in the planet" kind of perspective. *** Rewatched this ep over the weekend. The thing is can't stop thinking about is how milcheck and so seamlessly taken over the strategies and even the mannerisms of Cobel. The demands of the overseer position and the power that it affords are truly a heady, destructive combination. It's like the masks that keep popping up (waffle party dancers, the twins in this ep). You put on the mask and you become the mask. * I'm not great at remembering actors' names, so I often don't look them up. Had a bit of a shock realizing that the actor playing milcheck has a name that is from the region that I study. Ie, an area that experienced exactly this kind of intensely negotiated slavery/freedom. I am aware that my brain, wrt this show, can have a bit of "to a hammer everything is a nail"ism. I love reading other people's perspectives on the show because I find it so hard to have thoughts on the show that aren't rooted in decades of studying American slavery. But this little detail - the name "tillman" popping up in the credits, has really burrowed deep and made it just that much harder to separate the show from real life.

I am most curious for how Irving, who clearly has an agenda for irv, will react to being kicked out. If he is kicked out and not just put in a can for his usual shift.

I'm glad they didn't draw out the helly/Helena thing any longer. It's much more interesting to think about the implications than to have a mole all season. Helena effectively raped mark. Where do we go from there? Especially with helly now being returned! And if irv was going to get his death wish he sure made good use of it. And if course it's irv who could read his co-workers well enough to see through her. I do like the mirror between Helena and Gretchen. Gretchen seems clearly in the path to falling in love with her husband's innie and wishing he could be the one sharing her life. Helena doesn't seem to be in love with Mark but with her own innie. This person who seems to be making so much better use of her life despite only existing as a slave of lumon. What do you do with that kind of jealousy? One of the things that has quietly been in the "it's Helena" side of the balance sheet for me was the lighting. In lumon they've been showing her and mark with a much starker lighting and much higher contrast between their hair and skin than they used to. They've done the same in these other settings, too, and I think that adding these other settings (goat room, outdoors) has let them hide the amped-up contrast in plain sight. Helly always had an almost Vaseline-on-the-lens aura around her. Like Vincent minelli framing Judy garland with such care in meet me in st Louis. But this season her skin had felt paler, her hair darker, her pinks washed out. The difference between the evil witch and snow white. And then they really went to town with that almost reflective makeup and deep eyeliner/eyeshadow in the tent scene. They've done the same to mark, whole also ramping up the age lines in his skin, making him look older, more tired. I wouldn't be surprised if his hair is also a touch darker. And his hair is so much longer than it was last season. It's a small thing but it makes the time-line of how long they were actually out of lumon (between the seasons) really confusing for me. Some people have a time-line that's basically "soooo, that wasn't five months, that was a weekend." but I keep coming back to his hair. Small stuff, all of it, but it's been so stark to me and I'm glad it was actually conveying information.

Jeepers. Crazy !

It's interesting. I remember watching the first season 20 minutes at a time over lunch. So rich that those few minutes were satisfying and left me happy to ruminate until the next day. And then I got to the last 2 or 3 eps and just couldn't stop watching. I don't know how many eps the show has sent out for screener (I'd assume not the whole thing), but I wonder if they cut off just at that point where the season builds momentum and you're unbearably hungry to see what comes next and that poor sod is now stuck waiting along with the rest of us mere mortals. (since, as this guy shows, writers can't actually be trusted to not spill the beans way too early! :P) Might explain his immense dissatisfaction with what is left unanswered. And yeah, it's fascinating how the changing social media landscape has changed the spoiler landscape. It occurs to me that this is my longest-standing social network. By a lot. Especially if you trace this back to twop. I don't use any of the big ones and only participate in two incredibly niche discussion boards. And there's been such a long-standing set of rules here for how to deal with spoilers that I really never see them anymore! Gee... I suddenly feel kinda... Spoiled ! (In, you know, that other way.)

LOLOLOL. Considering what you thought. they were saying was going on. Lol. Just having a good time here by myself in the middle of a vast frozen tundra when DANG NAB WAS THAT TRUCK FAST AND CLOSE. I can understand your confusion! Bummer about unintentionally spoiling yourself! That article could *definitely* have used a note at the top saying Danger Will Robinson.