misunderstood to death
the words we hang ourselves with
It is not only that language is an imprecise courier for our true sentiments that shitty misspeakings lead to even shittier misunderstandings.
Perhaps the underlying problem is that the English language itself is optimised for subterfuge; every call for nuance rings futile without grappling with the fact that the colonial tongue speaks politely while intending theft, the elitist tongue speaks to preserve what it has thieved, the patriarchal tongue lies seamlessly for its own gratification.
The language you are reading right now conceals an insatiable hunger for extraction and we are all speaking it, all of the time.
“Nigger” will always be violent because it carries the genocidal intent of a plundered continent. Spilt blood echoes in the word—even as we reclaim it and round its hinderquarter.
“Cracker” will never harbour the same brutality, no matter how much venom any individual spits into the syllables; partially because we do not live in the multiversal timeline where Europe was colonised by a quasi-united confederation of African nations; but mostly for the same reason people are immune to tickling themselves.
The English language is physically incapable of housing a verbal expression of genocidal intent unto itself.
This is why trying to reconstitute a word like “terrorist” and apply it to white supremacists works with very little political effect. The connection in the cultural consciousness of “terrorist” to islamic fundamentalism is as strong as the world’s connection between The Queen and Britain.
Rather than squeeze cubes through circular holes, perhaps the most transgressive thing we can do is tell the truth. Shift the liar’s language from the inside. The billionaire class of paedophilic cannibals and their enablers do everything in their power to obscure the truth—acquiring journalistic institutions and gutting them, enshittifying social media, disappearing whistleblowers, dumping trillions into glorified predicative text and deception technologies while pretending it is super-intelligence.
Truth is obviously dangerous. Worse, unpopular. Worse, unprofitable. Worse… boring. The truth is one of the most banal things in the world. It is why we find so much comfort in wrapping truth in story.
But a language optimised for subterfuge cannot be the lingua franca forever. Not because truth is some moral disinfectant that heals all wounds but because the structural integrity of a dishonest speech eventually withers. I know this because it is withering. Words mean less than their intentions try to conceal. What was once artful ambiguity—trickery of the craft—has hollowed into crude literalism. We’re collectively saying more things than ever and putting less of ourselves inside what we’re saying. Externalise everything for intentions beyond the self. It is a simulacra of duplicity that will keep reproducing, doubling, until the core truth of what we actually mean is a tiny, chipped tile in a massive mosaic of irony and self-censorship. All the world is grifting and no problems are solved.
You might be unsurprised to learn this ramble about language was spawned from Timothée Chalamet’s comments about opera and ballet. In the wake of the revelation that we’re all being governed by a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream—social media outrage has begun to feel a bit like watching psychosis in recrudescent cycles, viral bouts of mass delusion as collective, coping mechanisms. I’m probably late to this realisation. It’s probably what they have always been—dopamine-flooding moments to dissipate the righteous anger of the masses. Characters in The Simpsons always used to fetch their pitchforks, torches and planks-with-nails at even the slightest hint of grievance. It made me believe rallied townspeople demanding mob justice would be a bigger part of our everyday life than they have been. Instead, controversy auto-generates, herding us to rant into a glass rectangle and collect attention bucks.
If you cup your ear and slow your breath, you might have heard Epstein groaning with sadistic pleasure from beyond the grave when black American actors were called “nigger” by a white Brit with Tourettes. Oppression olympics is a term that has been overused but by god! What a riveting 100m sprint to the bottom.
Here, the language of subterfuge collides with social media, the environment maximised for conflict. Head of the matchstick; meet the striker paper. The daily grind.
In the case of Mr. Chalamet, it is difficult not to notice the intense exhibition of pretending.
Pretending that this is anything other than an dual opportunity to take out one’s worldly frustrations on a pre-approved, out-of-context video facsimile of a wigga punching bag while also jumping into the double-dutch of the attention economy.
Pretending that opera and ballet isn’t dying. Pretending that any death they’re staring down is not owed—in massive part—to their own history as recreational arts for European aristocrats and the new world cosmopolitan elites.
If one chooses to combat all this pretending, one must entertain it, which brings its own kind of pretending. Speak in soft caveats—he shouldn’t have said “no-one cares”, he should’ve said “most people”, he should’ve been more articulate, his wording was wrong. One must pretend that opera and ballet are owed some degree of civility or politeness. Or that a millionaire actor being a cheeky about the cultural relevance of heritage institutions that’ve spent the bulk of their existence serving ye olde kings, queens and nobilities as arenas of classist, racist and misogynistic exclusion is punching down. How positively gauche of him.
If we stop pretending, we can all admit his wording is no more egregious than how many of us speak in our everyday lives about our anxieties with close friends. It is lateral violence at best, if violence at all. Spontaneous, candid and uncensored in ways many of us wish we could be. In truth, his passing comment is more tame than the Looney tunes episode where Bugs Bunny masquerades as a conductor to fuck with an opera singer then twangs the banjo after basically killing him.
I am yet to see a single contest of Chalamet’s point—whether it is pearl-clutching in tone or more thoughtful in critique—that hasn’t either completely misrepresented what he said, received what he meant in bad faith or taken a snarky, scenic route to prove the core point of his overall concern.
The pretence of it all is less theatrical than his own cinematic performances, less melodramatic as a campy pantomime but an era-specific third thing—indignation as reality television; vapidly real but so aware of its own documentation that it veers prismatically back into unreality. Crude, cash-grubby improv appealing to the basest desires where intention refracts and obscure even to self.
You know you’re mad—disproportionately so—but you also know that this madness cannot go to waste, it must be fuel for self-enrichment, it must be performed, it must be capitalised. To exploiting our own madness is to be in control.
What if the madness isn’t at Chalamet (or the paedophilic billionaire cabal we’re feeling powerless to stop, or the cost of living crisis, or genocides)?
What if—in the precise moment that Chalamet said that nobody cares about these terminally ill art-forms—he spoke too candidly about the inevitability of dying?
Are we so uncomfortable in sitting with the thought of dying—its slow decline, our inability to escape it, the grief it leaves behind—that, in protest, we’d rather weaponise the more dishonest contours of this language to conceal the fact that—even though most people cannot name a ballet outside of The Nutcracker or an opera singer outside of Pavarotti or perhaps Susan Boyle or an aria outside of Largo al factotum (Figaro) without a bout of rampant googling—we are sad that these art forms are dying? Not because we care them beyond an ambient respect for the difficulty of their craft but because we register dying as all-consumingly sad.
It’s clear that Chalamet is concerned with the dwindling cultural dominance of cinema as an art-form. He seems genuinely terrified that he boarded the ship of cinema long after its golden-age has sailed away. He is probably right to be afraid. Or rather, his fear is understandable.
But it is ultimately, an inevitability entirely out of his control.
Because sometimes, art just fucking dies. Sometimes its better to let it go than to press its ribs into dust trying to resuscitate it or zombify it for profit.
Cinema is dying and he can feel it. He knows the generation under him would rather watch their internet faves do real-life quests, rather watch streamers play video games than play video games themselves, rather watch intentional facsimiles of real life than the intentional pageantry of movies. Chalamet understands that the future is far less interested in films and that is why he tries so desperately to go viral in his press tours and collabs with underground British rappers for promotion.
Streaming is cheaper and more convenient than going to the cinema, just as cinema is cheaper and more convenient than attending the opera and ballet. The decay of the movie theatre’s cultural dominance is analogous to opera/ballet because art always suffered from the extractive whims of a capitalist thirst for extraction out of its control.
What this viral moment is really about is an unrelenting anxiety of mortality.
Perhaps Chalamet’s biggest crime is having the hubris to believe his particular art of choice is exempt from perishing in the way that has happened to opera or ballet or jazz or rock & roll or break-dancing or hand-drawn animation. Not necessarily decline in popularity or importance but a more ambient transition of their spirit away from their original bodies. The institution of cinema has enjoyed a century of cultural dominance but senescence is part of the deal for all art. It has to be, for it must reflect the culture that facilitates it.
Why are we so hung up on not letting things die? Have we not seen enough movies (or billionaire ex-mormon weirdo documentaries) about how the consequences of seeking eternal life turn the seeker ghoulish and villainous? If we love and care about art, all we need to do is enjoy it. To wish for the art to retain its relevancy forever is the wish of a monkey paw.
Good stuff.