THE BOARD???

This... is everything I was thinking of about this whole thing. Thank you for writing this, I couldn't have put it better myself. It pains me to see people try and defend this movie so it is a relief to see some people here with some sense and competent media literacy.

Edit: also, extremely glad to know that you're a fan of the book

Here lies my full thoughts on the Electric State movie adaptation released earlier this month. I knew it was going to be bad, but this is almost impressively so.

Mild spoilers for both the book and the movie, though the book isn't overly plot reliant and the movie is eminently predictable within five minutes of watching

Let me begin by saying the fucking up of the film's source material is a feat not easily accomplished. Simon Stålenhag is a brilliant artist and writer. His illustrated novels are at once sinister and sentimental. They deal with childhood wonder and the broken promises of the real world; with humanity as society and individual. They are about love and loss and the blurring of those lines. All this is depicted in some of the most gorgeous, haunting art I have ever seen. He has written five books. I recommend them all.

The Electric State book is his third work, and to me, his most compelling. That stands for both the art and the actual prose. While Stålenhag's visual pieces are undoubtedly what he is most known for, I've found myself enjoying his written word more and more, even in translated English. The book speaks to abandonment, to the disenfranchised, to the consequences of unchecked consumerism and mindless entertainment.

Speak of the devil...

It would almost be funny (if it weren’t so depressing) that Netflix took such a story and ground it into the Marvel-blockbuster mold, eviscerated any remaining shred of ethos or emotion, and drowned it in Hollywood prestige. Electric State, the movie, is a 320 million dollar shit taken directly on its source material, and I mean that in multiple ways.

PLOT

The first and most egregious transgression was the butchery of the story. The two iterations are related only in the most basic terms; Michelle, a young orphan, goes on a journey to find her long lost brother. Stålenhag's themes of childhood disillusionment, the cataclysmic effects of rampant consumerism, of a society that turns to mindless stimulation instead of dealing with their problems, and the world that attitude creates? Gone.

I struggle to comprehend the boneheadedness of whoever rewrote the plot for the movie. I understand that if you’re trying to make a movie as widely comprehensible as possible, the mysterious worldbuilding of Stalenhag is not compatible (perhaps something we should have thought of before, hmm?). He explains very little about the state of the world, except for how it affects our characters.

But there is concrete worldbuilding if you can infer it. I can only conclude that the writers simply didn’t. Instead, they gutted the entire plot in favor of a bland Robot Revolution Blade Runner schtick that has been done to death and back. And don't even ask if they did a compelling twist on it... because you know they didn't.

The plot details are so catastrophically assbackwards that my gorge becomes bouyant thinking about them. They are also so plentiful I would never finish this post. Instead, I am going over the central aspects of Stålenhag's work that Netflix fucked over.

WHITEWASHING THE MILITARY

In the film, Michelle is an orphan because her family died in a car accident. This is actively sanitizing her origin in the books, removing not only complexity but also Stålenhag’s criticism of the military industrial complex. In the book, Michelle's mother was in the US Air Force, and served as a neurocaster pilot during a global war where the technology was first used. As a side effect of the experimental tech, she (and hundreds of other pilots) developed an addiction to a chemical called neurine. The army fired her without compensation or help for the affliction they gave her, and she eventually died of an overdose, leaving Michelle and her brother orphans. They stayed with their grandfather until he, too, died of chemical exposure from his job assembling war drones, at which point the siblings were forcibly split up by CPS, and Michelle was sent far away to be fostered, while her brother was kidnapped and experimented on by the government. I struggle to conceive of what the purpose of removing this backstory could possibly be, apart from relieving the story of its commentary in order to be more digestible. Because that's what art should aspire to be, after all.

WHITEWASHING CONSUMERISM

The dystopia we see in Stålenhag’s book is not a typical nuclear wasteland. It is generally still as functional as it ever was. It is simply that consumerism has progressed faster than in our world. People have checked out with neural headsets that drown their brain in formless pleasure while the world slowly decays around them. Cities are silent. Gargantuan corporate machines lie in ruins. There is no “Robot Revolution,” no “Electric State” as they claimed in the movie. The war was one fought by world powers that left their countries devastated, and capitalism swallowed up the remains.

The neurocaster headsets were kept in the film, but became a cheap “phone bad” metaphor, again scrapping a far more interesting concept. In the book, it becomes something else; something far stranger and more silent. The eeriness of the apocalypse Michelle travels through is that it’s full of people. They’re just not doing anything. Humankind has checked out, sending their minds to be entertained in gigantic server farms in the Rockies. And slowly, a hivemind emerges from this neural coitus occurring on a planetary scale; a kind of ur-sapience that is entirely beyond human minds...yet fundamentally human. Hordes of people move silently through the dark, their headsets connected to strange new machine gods in the night. The people are notably smiling, at peace. Perhaps it’s better this way is a thought that comes to mind, after going with Michelle through the cruelty of the world before.

WHITEWASHING QUEER RELATIONSHIPS

One of the rare few things I see people enjoying about this movie is the implied relationship between Chris Pratt and his male robot companion. And I am all for more representation! If representation was the goal, however, what's baffling is that they entirely removed a far more integral queer relationship: that being of the protagonist, Michelle!

In the book, a large portion of Michelle's reflections goes to her first romantic partner: another girl named Amanda met in foster care. Amanda and Michelle's connection is one of the few moments Michelle remembers feeling safe and happy after her family was torn away from her. She has a few months where life seems tolerable. They are each other's refuge against the world. And then Amanda breaks up with her, after it is implied she was forced to undergo conversion therapy by her father, an abusive priest. This is the moment that made Michelle who she is in the present day, a huge turning point for her character, and it's just... erased in the film. Interesting that they removed a clear, central, complex queer relationship to replace it with a barely mentioned implication between secondary characters. This is a deliberate and fucking cowardly change. They straightwashed the protagonist, removing core events and character aspects so that bigots in the audience won't be challenged.

DEFENSE & FINAL THOUGHTS

There is sparing defense of this movie; most equate to “it’s not great, but it’s just fun! Can’t a movie just be fun?” And I say, absolutely. Simple fun is not a sin. Entertainment is not a sin. If this were the latest Marvel movie, I would not be writing this.

I am pissed because Netflix specifically adapted a work whose entire message is the dangers of mindless entertainment; of formless pleasure, and absolutely especially mindless entertainment peddled by powerful corporations!! It is about the lethal flaws and base cruelties of humanity; blind greed and misery; and fighting for love in the face of it all. The movie ignores all of that; assassinates the characters and completely bastardizes the story and themes. It at best utterly stupid, and at worst malicious.

I hold no delusion that the Russo brothers actually cared about being true to the vision of the artist. They fundamentally did not understand the book, and admitted as much themselves! This is a direct quote: "We just looked at the images, and the story that he unfolds in the graphic novel. It is very opaque. It’s kind of hard to understand it. You get it in glimpses." Dear lord, its almost as if... as if... It's being subtle with its storytelling! God almighty, make it stop! The board is going into conniptions!

There’s also the fact they used AI for voice acting work, or that they've stated that generative AI is "inevitable" in creative industries, or that they neglected to even mention Stålenhag in trailers until public backlash. Simply put, Netflix and the Russo brothers don't give a shit about respecting, elevating or adapting art. They don't give a shit about creating something that makes the heart resonate or breaks the brain out of its mold. They don't care about voyaging into the burning core of the soul, about evoking things too difficult or powerful to describe outright. They aren’t interested in saying anything at all.

What is even the point of all this? There's a simple answer. It’s in the promotional articles surrounding the release of the film (the ones before it came out). They vary, but there’s one fact you cannot avoid:

The Electric State is one of the most expensive movies ever made. It is the most expensive Netflix movie ever made. That is what headlines latch onto, because there is nothing else this movie can flaunt to justify its existence. Three hundred and twenty million goddamn dollars.

There is a world where money equals passion. A world where it equals skill, pathos, and most of all, where it equals good goddamn art. It is a world inhabited solely by streaming service CEOs and Disney execs, and is therefore to be avoided like an outhouse with a wasp hive down the hole.

The Electric State is a wonderful book. It is resonant, it is beautiful, it is dreadful and melancholic. It speaks to the dark, heavy seabed of the soul. It drips with fog and fear, whispers about monsters of our own making and sends you spiralling into the dark with only the dimming ember of love to tell you where or what you are. It is a haunting dirge for humanity.

The Electric State is a repugnant movie. The blind idiot forces of greed which Stålenhag decried have stripped his story bare, ran it through algorithmic filters and focus testing until what is left is a pallid mass-market blockbuster wearing the flayed skin of an artist's passionate work. It is notable only in that it is symbolic of the "art industry," (a phrase I find near antithetical), one where stories are marketed on their prestige, their price tag, where content is dully manufactured according to standard, packaged and shipped out to be half-watched at two times speed. Because this is not about art, about stories, about people. For them, it never was.

And it still looks like shit.

Managing to be more VFX intensive than an Avengers movie is insane to me. How in the hell is that possible.

Now I've seen A Quiet Place Day One, an update to my death angel analysis post coming soon!

Fuck Turkey Tom.

This is a rant, just fair warning.

I feel like turkey tom is a fucking asshole of a youtuber. Any time he covers someone he just HAS to put certain things in a negative fucking light. And with how popular his channel is, I feel as though it's harmful.

He talks ill of transgender people, or puts anything related to trans people in a negative light (For example, the one video about a person named Poppy - I couldn't even get through the video - the introduction of it was that Poppy is transgender, a furry, and has "MPD", and then asks if you wanted a person like that to be your therapist. Like what the fuck?). He talks ill of furries (because having anthropomorphic animals as characters is such a bad thing right? and not just being a mascot for yourself or a story or anything? Like how sports teams have mascots..) He talks ill of any mental disorder out there and just stigmatises it. In the video about Poppy he says that OSDD is just "a mild reform of having multiple personalities-referred to as being 'plural'. The thing is being plural isn't recognised as being a real thing, at least not yet." (direct quote). He's spreading so much false bullshit. After hearing that part I was done with the video but this is not the first video I have heard. It's every single fucking one. I often let youtube just autoplay, and even asking youtube to not recommend that channel doesn't help, as his videos still pop up.

But the issue is he's spreading this hatred and false information to so many fucking people. He has (as of right now) 1.22 million followers. He's not using his platform and audience to do any god damn good. It's just fucking making fun of people. Not even informing or educating. And even if he directly isn't saying things like 'fuck trans people', because he correlates so much shit negatively, the audience might just connect it. The top comments on his videos are usually just full of hateful rhetoric.

When you click on newer comments theres good comments like how they wouldnt trust turkey tom on any mental health topic or like why does he have to be so hateful towards these things - but I feel like these comments get drown out by all the hateful ones.

He spreads misinformation. He spreads hatred. He reels people in with a documentary style video, but seeps the cracks with garbage. Like those videos of people using ramen to fix things. But even then its so obvious.

In conclusion, just. Fuck Turkey Tom. I genuinely dislike him as a youtuber.

here comes Stella!! I know she is bad but i still love her for some reason

hoot hoot💅

Oopies I accidentally made the Freikorps, I didn't know they would organize and install a fascist government, when I made them I was just trying to protect the Republic. I'm sorry that I created the language coached in a fighting a future civil war (or race war). I didn't know they would become fascist paramilitaries. Well I guess we live and learn...

Alright y'all be real with me, was Joker Folie a Deux actually bad or are redditors being confronted with the fact that they didn't actually get a movie they've built their personality around again?

tbh i'm expecting it to be some shit like "omg Harley had agency? killing myself women don't do that, what happened to chad alpha Joker who I want to be like"

The thing that I hate the most rn is the fact that Wilbur went "we're not gonna talk about what happened. Here's our tour"

Motherfucker what do you MEAN?! If you were innocent, YOU WOULD TALK ABOUT IT! THERE'S NOTHING STOPPING YOU! IT'S NOT LIKE YOU'RE GOING TO JAIL AND YOU CAN'T DESTROY YOUR CAREER ANYMORE THAN IT HAS BEEN

I'm showing up to this topic three years late, but the overrall fandom response to Scott's response about his political donations is really strange to me in hindsight.

I guess I'm not super surprised that people took his words of not being racist or queerphobic at face-value, but I am disappointed.

At best, we don't know the guy, and being able to evaluate whether he definitively is or is not bigoted is just something that's hard to do with the limited information we have, especially since we don't know how genuine his online persona is. He doesn't elaborate very much on his political views in his reddit post [link] other than specifically saying he's a Christian republican and pro-life.

But even beyond that, most white, allocishet, able-bodied, and otherwise privileged people will deny any accusations of bigotry without reflecting on themselves first, because acknowledging the bigoted things we are taught and complacent in immediately feels like an attack. It takes conscious work to actually respond in a constructive, repairative way to that, and Scott's post feels really dismissive, especially in that he outright refuses to apologize for supporting the candidates in question. The whole post had a "I'm sorry you feel that way" overtone, which is not a proper apology let alone a solution. I feel that someone genuinely invested in disproving those accusations, i.e. not because it hurts their ego, but because it hurts others, would put more care into their response.

Not to mention, even if Scott genuinely isn't queerphobic, and especially if he isn't racist, it's not enough to not be those things. You have to actively unlearn and fight against them. I will give Scott that he has supported organizing against queerphobia with donations to the Trevor Project, but I'm not sure if he has supported any antiracist organizations or movements.

He states he supported a politician thinking they could help "bring the Black community out of poverty," but doesn't elaborate further. From what I understand, that's not necessarily an acknowledgment of systemic racism, as many racists will acknowledge that Black people struggle, but then deny that it's the fault of systemic oppression.

Regardless, neither of these erase his donations to queerphobic and racist politicians. And his admitted pro-life stance is most definitely informed by some amount of misogyny, which is rampant in American Christian spaces.

That's really a lot of words to say that as much as Scott defined our childhood and seems like a nice guy, we shouldn't take his statements at face value at all. We have little information, and what we do have doesn't seem to paint a pretty picture.

It's been three years and I can only hope his opinions and donation patterns have changed, but without any solid evidence, I don't feel comfortable giving him money or benefit of the doubt.