Fuck Netlfix And The Russos For What They've Done To This Book - Blog Posts

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.