The Hollow Shell at the End of Nostalgia: On the End of the Star Wars Saga (The Nostalgia Trap, Part 7)

Star Wars was always going to be one of the cultural artifacts we touch upon in the “nostalgia trap” series. It’s an active cultural institution, and one that it looked like you could set your watch by fairly recently – the future of Star Wars on film is, of course, up in the air after Solo, which was a perfectly fine movie released just a month after an Avengers movie, and thus did poorly. But Lucasfilm has only ever done Nostalgia pieces. Getting angry at Star Wars for nostalgia is like getting angry at Star Trek for being utopian.

Flavors of the Strange: On Weird Fiction and Further Affects

The past thirty years has been quite a ride: in the 1990s, one of the biggest phenomena on television was the X-Files, which wrestled with the hidden weirdness of the 20th century (mostly in the form of aliens.) At the core of the UFO mythos was a nominally apolitical distrust of authority – the government was hiding something from us. They were hiding the truth. Of course, much of this distrust was coupled with (the publicly disavowed) white supremacist ideology. This gave us what could be called the Interbellum Consensus, sitting as it does between the Cold War and the War on Terror: the UFOlogical Weird and the Militiaman Hauntological.

Interrogating the Immanent: Mapping the Weird Procedural

What I'm getting at here isn't just the juxtaposition of a classic mystery genre with the weird but something that emerges from that juxtaposition, and what it says about us and the world that we live in.

Cancer with the Stars: On the Space Western, the Alien Series, and Gothic Marxism

The Space Western I described above is a fantasy for libertarians; Alien is a nightmare for socialists. The horror here is that Late Capitalism slipped the surly bonds of Earth and is spreading throughout space, consuming everything it touches.

Unpacking the Trash Can of Genre: Practical Literary Theory

When you select a genre and decide your going to produce a book, comic, film, or similar within it, you’re essentially taking a whole set of unexamined assumptions and saying that you’re going to abide by them to the exclusion of everything else. This is a mistake.