I have found it so difficult to write lately. There are so many horrors, and the only bright thing that I’ve clung to over the last few months has been diving into Southeast Asian and East Asian cinema and television. It has felt like a whole world opening up to me, in the midst of all the uncertainty and destabilising sense that any day could bring a new disaster into this world. I’ve been thinking about the three American shows that I still watch, and how they feel weirdly connected to each other, in spite of the fact that they all thread different ground, in how they feel like they are commenting on this moment.
We now live in a world where the United States has become an irrational actor on the international stage that can’t even be trusted to act in its own self-interest – which has always been a source of great harm for many parts of the world but at least had a level of predictability to it. What happens when the intellectual resources required to determine that self-interest have been obliterated in the replacement of institutional knowledge with sycophants who at best are out solely for self-enrichment and at worst suffering from the kind of brain-worms (sometimes literally) that would require post-cult deprogramming. There’s still an ongoing genocide in Gaza and deliberate settler violence in the West Bank and the institutions created after 1945 have once again proven desperately inadequate to stop or ameliorate any of it. There’s a land war happening in Europe where a country is conquering territory from another. Fuel prices will rise astronomically because whoever planned the joint US- and Israeli attacks on Iran overlooked or didn’t care to calculate the economic importance of the Strait of Hormuz for global trade, and international air traffic will never be the same because who would want a layover somewhere in reach of Iranian drones. And maybe the most absurd effect of just these last three weeks is that from the perspective of here, Australia, always so far removed from everything, the biggest effect is uncertainty and inconvenience: there is always horror and shock and disbelief as news stories and pictures roll in, but the tangible thing that has a shape in my life is the idea that travelling to Europe to see my mum will become even more difficult, and that the rise of fuel prices (plus all the inflationary knock-on effects) in a country deeply addicted to inefficient, large SUVs will create even more political space for a right-wing party to rise. It’s been a slow-going process in Australia, not due to any meaningful cultural difference to European countries but due to the make-up of the electoral system that has compulsory and preferential voting and favours large parties. The self-destruction of the centre-right Liberal party, stuck in a constant belief that a move further right could reinstate its political might but instead just moving the Overton window for an anti-establishment party to move into, has done its best to bridge the gap between the politics that I used to know in Austria. The State election in South Australia this Sunday – which returned the ruling Labor party (successful because it now occupies the entirety of the centre spectrum of politics, left to right) back into power but, with votes still being counted, will give Pauline Hanson’s One Nation its first seats in the lower house of a state other than Queensland – shows where all of this will go in the next few years. All of this is deeply familiar and in combination with Neo-Nazis successfully making their way into other movements by co-opting anti-trans positions, capitalising on disinformation, cashing in on major parties making former fringe positions acceptable, a dark omen of what is to come.
Here are some of the moments of the three shows I do still watch that have stuck with me. It has taken a long time for the new season of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters to come out. I have to admit that I was a little bit concerned that the producers of the show had taken fanboy criticism of not-enough-monster-too-much-personal-stuff seriously during the first two episodes, but now we’re back to where the show shines and is at its most brilliant: showing the human impact of living with the overwhelming sense of fear of something that is too large to ever meaningfully defeat, in the context of institutions ill-equipped to deal with it, or too greedy to resist trying to profit from it (what a twist it has been to watch Dominique Tipper play a villain for a change). This is why Godzilla and all the other affiliated Monster-verse monsters have always felt so different for me, why I enjoy spending time in this universe: they withstand the Hollywood doctrine that the adversary has to be defeated at the end, because their main feature is that they will always return, that their presence is constant, that the next catastrophe is inevitable. They are the perfect embodiment of the unease of uncertainty, of something uncontrollable that determines how people live their lives. This sentiment might be more pure in its origin from a deeply traumatised post-nuclear bomb Japan, but it holds up still: how can humanity co-exist with something that poses an existential threat, the potential for much destruction, and yet has no feasible solution beyond a dedication to studying it for deeper and more meaningful knowledge? There is no military solution to the problem – in an early episode of Monarch, the US throws a nuclear bomb at Godzilla and it does little to contain him.
There are places of relative safety, attainable by privilege or luck of birth, but the fact still remains that there are things that exist in the world that are uncontrollable, unpredictable, and mostly incomprehensible. At its best, and the television show I think is currently the best version of the story apart from the magnificent Godzilla Minus One, Monarch is about the joy of discovery and science and research, exemplified by its doomed trio made up of Bill Randa, Lee Shaw and Keiko. The cost of their dedication to researching the monsters is their personal lives: they sacrifice for their important mission but on the way, they lose sight of Keiko’s son, Bill’s adoptive son, who grows up alone and resentful, carrying his parents’ trauma, and ultimately passing it on to his own children. Sometimes the show plays this passing on of trauma and traits (from the mother, stuck between two men whom she loves and who love each other, to the son who marries two women and has two families, to the daughter who would rather cheat on her partner than commit to a relationship – and runs away from someone who still looks at her with love after she’s done the worst thing to be with someone who doesn’t know her anymore at all) as ironic in its parallels, but when it’s played seriously, as a sign of emotional dysfunction and disorientation that moves through generations, it’s deeply haunting. I found Secrets and Trespass, the third and fourth episode, very moving. There’s Keiko, who has just returned from a decades long exile and is trying to orient herself in a world she doesn’t quite recognise anymore: but there is so much joy in her discovery of what science can do now, and in finding her long-lost son engaged in the same project she has dedicated her life to, and good at it. There’s Cate, who feels responsible for the emergence of a new monster, who carries her guilt like a heavy burden that forbids her the connection to people she has shared the last few months with, who flees back into a past where she was a different person because she doesn’t want to be recognised for who she is now: and yet, the idea of having an impact, of being brave, of showing up for other people, of love, makes her return. The general societal question of how to exist with the kind of uncertainty that the monsters introduce into civilisation becomes a very private question about how to build relationships and family, how to create a bubble of love and safety in spite of the terror and danger.
Then there’s The Pitt, a show about what it means to provide essential care in the context of a failing and increasingly uncaring political system that creates conditions of suffering that all, eventually and inevitably, end up in the emergency department. This season teased a story about ICE told from “both sides”, but in the end, the two sides are the victims and those who try to care for them in spite of the deliberate cruelty, whereas the two ICE agents themselves present as monstrous, hulking, intimidating ghouls who upset everyone, who are responsible for those in need of care fleeing out of fear, and some of those who provide that care leaving as well, out of caution. A woman, hurt in the chase, is forbidden from letting her family know where she is. The care she needs is interrupted and questioned by those responsible for her suffering, who have ceased to see her as human. The empathy of the doctors and nurses always comes at a personal cost to them because there is so little time to rest and recover, but the lack of empathy, and that lack becoming a national doctrine, is shown as the monstrous perversion that it is. A nurse who intervenes when the agents harm the patient further is arrested, the very act of caring for those made precarious by an inhumane system is made into a danger for those who provide it. This airs a few months after ICE agents in Minneapolis killed residents who did nothing but stand up for their neighbours. All of this happens in the context of workers who are already emotionally on the edge from the toll that their jobs exerts on them, some traumatised from the experience of working in an emergency room during COVID, others from the mass shooting event that was at the centre of last season: but this state terror, making its way into their place of work, is a different kind of beast. It’s the deliberate cruelty of the state, not just the quieter horror of a management system that values efficiency and profit-making above everything else, not just the way that individual trauma can express itself in ways that harm other people (like Robby’s cruel reaction to doctors he is meant to mentor struggling with the emotional toll, even though he himself is struggling) around the characters. It’s the system they operate under while trying to maintain dignity for their patients, which has now become an act of resistance.
Every new season of Industry feels like a further descent into the abyss. It feels like the only way out of it is to literally to be out of it: to leave the show, preferably alive, and then to never be heard of again. Within the show, it doesn’t seem possible that any of the characters will ever crawl their way into anything that doesn’t resemble a further step towards both a personal and a societal hell, and it’s almost like the small moments where something else feels possible – maybe these characters will finally stop fucking each other over and instead come together, after all these years (you can complete the sentence differently if you wish) – only exist to make the inevitable break even harder when it happens. The show teases that Yas and Harper could find a way out together but it’s a temporary mirage, forever a path not taken. A lot happens this season, inspired by real events about a German payment provider, mixing in a Russian spy story and beginning to document the rise of the far-right across Europe in all of its unholy alliances. What stuck with me, because they literally went there, was the episode where Yas travelled to Austria to meet the kind of demonic creature that does feel exclusive to Europe: a man afforded his aristocratic title by his British visitors even though his family would have been forbidden to use it since the end of WW1 in his actual home (maybe a nuance lost on international viewers), the kind of self-styled European intellectual who arrives at pure racism behind the lens of identity politics and turns out to be a literal Nazi if you scratch him a little bit (or look at his art collection). There might be an initial distaste and reluctance, a bad taste left in the mouth purely on aesthetic, not even ideological grounds, but if the man can be useful for the cause he can still sit at the same table, along with his equally racist wife, maybe even opposite Harper, to spew his racism in a way that mimics a polite dinner conversation. It’s not even the worst thing that Yas does this season, not by far, but it brought me right back to these years of anxiously awaiting election results that would return larger results of the right-wing extremist party in the context of a right-wing centre party that was too happy to invite them to form government to maintain power – except now it’s happening all over the continent.
These are three different takes on the current moment, but to me they feel connected and show how television can still be relevant, how in spite of the crisis in production, the impact of AI and streaming, the lack of commitment to allow ambitious shows more seasons to grow, meaning can still be found.
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