Baby Invasion

Post-cinema, operating after the erasure of the reality/artificiality distinction, where there is only an endless (non)locality set in a perpetual (non)present (even just the houses of the rich we see here are themselves testament to an age of unreality). Korine is undoubtedly doing something, but is it really necessary to sit through another eighty minutes of it after watching eighty minutes of AGGRO DR1FT (2023)? Probably not. Interesting that he really doesn’t show any shoot-em-ups.

On the other hand, it thematises and puts before us, if it does not indeed exemplify, what seem to me to be the three fundamental characteristics of the algorithmic-AI immonde unfolding before us (writing in April 2025): (1) the destruction of long-term knowledge and desire (proletarianisation); (2) the folding of the textual symbolic into the audiovisual, intensifying the co-incidence of the flow of consciousness and the flow of what is projected onscreen(s) (the cinematic condition); (3) the generalisation of an irreducible epistemic uncertainty about the “reality” or otherwise of everything we see, hear, read, know and imagine (epistemological doubt), producing mistrust, anxiety and a sense of the uncanny character of (non)existence. All of these interact with and reinforce one another, contributing to an infernal spiral that leads to the growth of a desert of nihilism that is also an “immense regression”, and the film can justifiably be considered as an exhibit in the trial (and the ordeal) of this (non)epoch, even if one imagines that the filmmaker might eschew such judgments.