Artism: A Primer

The Spectrumtacular Vision of James Nguyen and the Environmentally Differently Abled.

A few days ago, the internet was briefly amused or horrified, depending on one’s perspective, by the spectacle of police ramming a vehicle through a barricade set up by climate protestors and drawing weapons on them when they didn’t get the giant metal hint.   The setting was the Burning Man Festival, a conclave of wealthy degenerates coming together to listen to music, take drugs, and immolate a giant heathen idol reminiscent of Bohemian Grove.  Originally, the festival was held in San Francisco but it was subsequently moved to the Nevada desert so that the narcotics, naked perverts, and flaming trash would feel like a novelty rather than part of daily life.  In any case, the only road in, the one blocked by the protestors, passes through the Paiute reservation, where the natives, proudly uncucked by the white man’s forked-tongued pieties, went on the warpath against the ideological equivalent of smallpox blankets left on their highway, their tribal police re-enacting Little Bighorn with a Dodge Ram.

Hearing the protesters speaking afterwards, blithely indifferent to the rage and mockery their pointless and counterproductive actions invited, reminded me of similar incidents in Europe, where the same sort of people, with recognizable phenotype and speech patterns, have been busy smearing artwork with food and motor oil in addition to getting themselves beaten and manhandled by angry motorists for similar style protests as the one in Nevada.  While it is clear that the people funding these movements are rich political actors who face no real consequences for the havoc they cause (and probably went to Burning Man), the street-level protestors are interesting. 

Separated at birth?

Unlike Antifa, which seems to attract violent radicals steeped in sexual confusion (with no small amount of pedophilia), and Black Lives Matter, which draws grifters and the opportunistic, groups like Climate Extinction seem to be from across the spectrum, which is to say, the autism spectrum.  Please note, I am not mocking autism, nor am I casting aspersions (aspergsions?) on the autistic.  The modern right simply could not exist without its cadres of ASD warriors, Order 66ing the likes of Shia LaBeouf and various shrewish killjoys. Nick Land has built an entire philosophy on the idea that the future will culminate in a full-spectrum (as it were) singularity; I have my doubts, but it is notable that wiser men than I have seen their potential.  While, like berserkers, the autistic can be difficult to control once they are engaged in battle, in a leaderless resistance-type scenario their hive-minded fury against those who would threaten the things they love, especially when they involve some combination of pixels, Japan, and women, make them formidable as either allies or foes.  This is exactly the point, however.  We must be mindful that autism can be weaponized against us as well as by us.  The Climate Extinction pavement kamikazes, willing to have their simple as’s  pounded by Norfmen to make their point, are an example of this looming threat.  We must understand this mindset if we are to combat it. 

We are all of course familiar with the enviro-autist in its holotype form, Greta Thunberg.   In understanding how she came to be in her mature state, it is important to consider how her mind processed information during her formative years. From a young age, as is now typical, Thunberg was bombarded with apocalyptic propaganda depicting a nightmarish future doomscape rendered devoid of both meaningful human existence and cute animals, a scenario vouched for by the entirety of the world’s grant-dependent scientists, this catastrophe being the inevitable result of simply continuing to live in an air-conditioned, three-bedroom home in a suburb.  Most of you reading will no doubt have had similar encounters with such material in your younger years; I still recall the dire warnings of the inevitable demise of the Amazon rain forest predicted to occur some time around the year 2000.  Similar stories abound.  Most of us on the neurotypical side of the rainbow come to understand at some point that powerful people lie and manipulate emotions to get what they want -more power-  but the autistic are blessed or cursed with a thoroughgoing earnestness that precludes their easily spotting a grift.  They simply lack the faculty of understanding emotional nuance, subtext, and pretense.  It’s why they send all their money to e-girls; it’s why they become libertarians.  But it’s also why, when they finally do come around to the fact that they are being played or mistreated, they are as relentless as Ahab pursuing white whales.

Thar’, she blows!

I firmly believe that it is through art, rather than science, that the deepest insights into human nature can be found.  Fortunately, in understanding the relationship between environmentalism and autism, the world has been given a gift in the form of film director James Nguyen.  If you are not familiar with his work, you should be, for more than anyone else his oeuvre offers a deep and profound insight into a mindset that is characteristic of our times.  Now, to be clear, I cannot definitively confirm that James Nguyen is autistic.  He has not declared himself to be so in public, nor am I a professional qualified to diagnose thought-processing disorders in others.  However, in support of that contention, he made Birdemic.

Birdemic is widely considered one of, if not the, worst films ever made, a staple of YouTube ‘so bad it’s good’ channels and the subject of its own documentary, which tells the story of Nguyen’s attempt to get his film into a festival by driving there in a car covered with glued-on papier-mâché birds and his website address, misspelled (by him) as bidemic.com.  Unlike the mysterious Tommy Wiseau, whose The Room seems to have had an equally mysteriously decent budget, Nguyen made his (now trilogy) of Birdemic films with whatever he happened to have in his bank account, and it’s still hard to tell where the $10,000 he saved up from his telemarketing job went on the first installment.  Nguyen’s inspiration for the film was Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, which he watched repeatedly and monomaniacally for years, the eponymous cinematic avians laying eggs in his brain until they hatched in full glory in his 2010 magnum opus (he actually somehow found Tippi Hedren and somehow got her to do a cameo in his first film, then re-used the footage in a background shot in Birdemic, crediting her for a role). 

It is important to note that people mean different things when they say a film is bad.  Sometimes one simply doesn’t like a movie but concedes that it was well-made.  I have no interest in Barbie, for example, but I’m sure it was put together by a crew who knew what they were doing and featured talented actors.  Then there are movies that are lazy cash grabs, with crew and players phoning it in; this includes everything Steven Seagal has done post Executive Decision.  There are also movies that are on some level intentionally bad, films like Sharknado, where everyone involved knows what they are doing but are in on the joke, and the audience knows this going in, with the cheese being part of the charm.  The sort of ‘bad’ I’m writing about here is different, a film that seriously tried to be one thing but ended up as something else due entirely to a profound defect of creative ability.

Birdemic is bad in every way it is possible for a film to be bad, and so fast and furious does the badness come that one can find something freshly baffling with every repeat viewing.  For example, in the scene below, the two leads are supposed to be falling in love, and Nguyen seems to have envisioned communicating that by showing them dancing in a club to romantic music.  However, Nguyen clearly didn’t give the actors any direction beyond ‘dance around,’ and since the music was added in post-production (as is the norm with movies), without this, they just kind of flail and shuffle.  While it is easy to be distracted by the spastic dancing, pay attention to the lyrics of the song.  The piece is called “Hanging Out With The Family,” and is performed by Damien Carter (weirdly, he has a full band and background vocals in the audio but appears alone on screen).  Even more weirdly, the song begins as a Nickelodeon-esque cheery ode to a family reunion but quickly evolves into a bizarre paean to incest as the reunion-goers put on makeup, dance, and “hook-up,” with grandma literally pulling them off of each other.  It’s one of the creepiest things I’ve ever heard, especially given that the context is supposed to be a romantic scene between two adults, who dance to it in epileptic obliviousness.

Noah Cross approves.

Only one so far over the spectrum that his house landed on a witch could make a creative decision like that, and they are ALL like that.  The plot of the movie, such as it is, is that a telemarketer hits it rich with stock options and falls in love with a Victoria’s Secret model (did I mention Nguyen was a telemarketer?) just as a poorly-explained environmental catastrophe causes all the birds in at least part of California to begin attacking humans.   The birds also explode in fireballs, make Stuka dive-bomber noises, and perhaps spit acid (again, unclear), all for unexplained reasons, none of which seem remarkable to the characters in the movie.  No character reacts to anything in a way recognizable to anyone neurotypical and the dialogue is written and delivered as if by an AI trained by Wizardchan.   What stands out most, however, is the film’s environmental message, presented with the subtlety of product placement in a Transformers movie.  Nguyen picks up a big green hammer and swings at his audience for 93 minutes.  The birds aren’t the problem; you are.

The speech doesn’t exist on the internet in pure form, presumably because it is too raw for the world. Skip to 7:07, and do watch both parts; Phelous is pretty funny.

All of this should not detract from James Nguyen’s real achievement.   He has created, as an act of very outsider art, the world’s first autistic movie.  Not a movie about autism, or featuring autistic actors, but a fully realized autistic universe in which the rules of autism govern human life, with anything resembling neurotypicality banished and unseen.  Even the alpha males are autistic.  I’m not kidding.  It is a fusion of art and autism that can only be called “artism.”  That the message is one of green radicalism is not an accident; it is in Nguyen’s artismic vision that we can clearly see the kind of world the enviro-autist would create if given the chance. 

What does this world look like?  It is one of human passivity in the face of vengeful nature.  Nguyen is clearly aiming for something like the Jurassic Park movies, where science does something-something and the animals slaughter helpless humans, but lacking the money, talent, time, energy, creativity, actors, sets, scenery, computer skills, marketing ability, force of personality, etc. to realize such, Nguyen has to settle for people swinging coat hangers at gifs.  This can lull the unwary into dismissal, but this is a mistake.  Nguyen believes that we have abused the earth and that we deserve to be punished in some kind of retributive apocalypse.  Our “sick addiction to fossil fuels” will not merely lead to our destruction as a consequence of environmental cause and effect, but as a moral reckoning.  Gaia is a vengeful goddess, and that vengeance is not the fire and fury of the Old Testament, but rather, the passive-aggressive hope of a weak, put-upon telemarketer that more primal creatures than he will hurt those jerks in their big, expensive cars. 

The eagles got Becky.

This is why Birdemic works in its badness; a well-crafted film along the same lines simply wouldn’t communicate the beaten-down weakness of lonely, maladjusted (mostly) men who toil away in unseen downscale laptop jobs, facing daily a system that empowers those most able to take advantage of environment-dominating technologies to get money and girls, or those women similarly shut out of meaningful relationships by their sad weirdness.  The planet, however, can never reject you, and simping for Mother Earth gives one the chance both to grasp at meaning by means of a cause and to screw over all those tourists coming to view paintings beyond the ability of anyone now living to create.  Birdemic, in its way, is a can of split-pea soup hurled angrily at The Birds, an outcry against the personal immiseration the lost and lowly feel in the presence of greatness. 

In fairness to Nguyen, he feels that he has made a genuinely great film, and is baffled that anyone doesn’t get what he is going for with his work.  While he concedes that his overall film was constrained somewhat by budget and his novice skills, he maintains that he has something important to say, and he said it.  I tend to agree.  Birdemic is a vital film for our time, a window into the sort of soul one seldom encounters at any deep personal level (other than on Reddit).  There is a great longing for meaning among our brothers and sisters on the spectrum just as there is among us so-called normal minds in rightist spaces, and if we don’t supply it, someone else will, to Rembrandt-sliming, hand-to-pavement-glueing, Tube-enraging effect.  Let us make sure our great asset is not co-opted by the forces of Big Green, which is of course just old Big Red (the watermelons, as they say).   Let us come together, normies and autists, hanging out with the family, having ourselves a party, so long as we avoid scandalizing Big Momma.

James Nguyen, who may himself be a sentient gif.