read

If there is any coherent message to the sprawling folk-art practices of Goonworld, it is this: kill yourself. Not literally, but spiritually. Where mainstream porn invites the straight-male viewer to imagine himself as the man onscreen, gooner porn constantly reminds viewers that they are alone, that they are masturbating to porn because no one would ever deign to sleep with them.

What are these gooners actually doing? Wasting hours each day consuming short-form video content. Chasing intensities of sensation across platforms. Parasocially fixating on microcelebrities who want their money. Broadcasting their love for those microcelebrities in public forums. Conducting bizarre self-experiments because someone on the internet told them to. In general, abjuring connective, other-directed pleasures for the comfort of staring at screens alone. Does any of this sound familiar? Do you maybe know some folks who get up to stuff like this? It’s true that gooners are masturbating while they engage in these behaviors. You could say that only makes them more honest.

I had to do so much active work during the first 40 minutes of the film—which felt unintentionally farcical to me—to understand what he was telegraphing: people sublimating traumas into trying to push revolutionary movements but disconnected from the principles of it, so they only produce chaos.

Anderson has a practiced talent of pace and structure, and it makes sense so many reviewers have dubbed this an "American epic," because it looks and plays like one, even if it lacks the essential heart and soul of one. It reminds me of the brand of prank/social experiment in which someone sets up a fake gourmet restaurant, where they serve pedestrian takeout carefully organized on fancy dishware to resemble high cuisine.

On the backstretch of 2025, it portends profound losses in the battles that loom on the horizon. Where we need honest self-assessment and bold political imagination, we are still passing off posturing as revolt, empty measures as countermeasures. In that sense, Anderson’s film does capture our moment: To date, we've proven incapable of rising to meet it. We haven’t even found the language or self-awareness to name it. We can’t begin to imagine what collective resistance looks like, or what shape communal support in the face of economic collapse might take.