An emergent genre explores how class conflict is always part ghost story, and how the only answer is insurrection. --- Interpreting Parasite and Us in tandem, regardless of their differences, helps us understand crucial and complicated elements they share. In both movies, the violence enacted by the subterranean specters is emotionally and morally fraught — exactly who deserves to suffer or die like this, and why? Is it doing anyone any good? Once we understand these movies as Revolutionary Gothic, it becomes clear that’s the wrong question. We’d have to start with: Why wouldn’t we expect spectacular violence to erupt from the hidden violence of forcing human beings underground? Why would we expect the ghosts we’ve created not to haunt us? […] Revolutionary Gothic is less about the inevitability of overthrow than the inevitability of rupture, of all that haunts us coming back for a reckoning. These stories don’t try to comfort us with victory; they unsettle us with the implications of ongoing defeat.

I have two main problems with the marriage equality movement: 1. That its operation takes a tremendous amount of money, energy, and attention away from far more pressing issues. (Sometimes this is clear and direct, such as California spending $43 million on Prop 8 while $85 million was being cut from HIV/AIDS services. Sometimes this is more subtle, the successes of which can be measured when every single straight person I know uses their approval for same-sex marriage to demonstrate their allyship to me.) 2. That its strategies actively work against movements for queer economic justice, by removing capitalism, meaningful immigration reform, and gender/sexual deviance from the discussion entirely.

Why the sci-fi visions of the 50s and 60s didn't come true. That pretty much answers the question of why we don’t have teleportation devices or antigravity shoes. Common sense suggests that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them alone. Most will turn up nothing, but one or two may well discover something. But if you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.