The Miss: Is 'The Mist' This Summer's 'Under the Dome'?

IT was such a big movie that I haven't seen it, but I have heard of it. I've seen the memes. The memes are OK, and I watched the 80s movie which is frankly a pretty effective if silly horror movie. Stephen King is doing alright lately. But for every good media product, there is a subpar product created as reaction. Stephen King has provided society with a fair amount of media products as his bestselling books regularly get reconfigured into television and film, and that makes sense: King is a prolific writer with a huge audience. Sadly, his admirers often fail to elevate the material, and a recent case is all the example we need.

Today, we are gathered at this sloppy blog to discuss and explore The Mist - the 2017 Netflix special. Apparently it started its sad life as a new series for Spike TV. Spike TV's last major show was MXC and that was over a decade ago. You're going to ask something about why I would watch a show made for Spike TV. Because, let's face it: I should've known better, right? Let me answer for my actions: sometimes you know the trainwreck is coming and you just have to make sure you see it happen. I saw it on Netflix (where it had been dumped fairly quickly for an American exclusive), knew it would be pretty bad without any research, and dove right in.

I vaguely recall a movie of The Mist released in 2007, based on Stephen King's novel by the same name (at this point I won't read it anytime soon). The movie had weird bugs that the protagonists had to shoot when they were in a supermarket. Big things loomed in the dark. Were they dinosaurs? Then, at the apportioned time, the mist blew out of town, and everyone had endured personal struggles, survived, and grown as people. I assume this TV series is aiming to do the same, but since it was written by committee with little regard for coherence or impact, I also assume it will kind of spin around in annoying circles for 10 episodes.

All you need is a coping mechanism, and you can watch this show.

It opens, kind of like Under the Dome did, with the destruction of an animal. In Under the Dome it's a cow that gets split into two steak-like halves, in The Mist it's a dog that gets eviscerated. And a soldier wakes up without any memory of what's going on... oh yes, friends, you've entered a zone of mass entertainment you've probably stumbled over before. The dead dog looks a lot more realistic than the dead cow, though. If you have Netflix, you can see for yourself. Actually I'll spare you the trouble:

Big mystery: who did the dog piss off to get done like this? Also: nice one, SFX people.

The same team is responsible for The Mist as made Under the Dome. I'm sure that the key people are unchanged. There's a deep connection between the shows. I can sense these strange coincidences... the casting seems similar. The locations seemed to have been scouted the same ways. The special effects: again I'm getting some deja vu. The writing is what really seals its fate. Something about the situations and the handling of characters and the bizarre missteps they have to take in order to make plot lines viable just reminds me of the 8 or so episodes of Under the Dome I watched.

North America's Ice Clusterfuckmas: A Retrospective, A Remembrance, a Reverie; pt. 1

Transformers were blowing up, lighting the dark with that eerie blue glow, as if very slow and quiet lightning was striking. Giant and even perfect storms were inbound. Even staunch winter people were feeling dread in the pits of their stomachs. Ice was everywhere, and Christmas was around the corner.

When all was said and done tens of thousands in Ontario were without power for Christmas and nobody was talking much about Rob Ford, who was insisting it was not a state of emergency kind of thing. Really, on that point, I would agree with him. In Canada snowfall, and even ice leading to power outages, is generally considered as not exactly a cause for paralysis and gnashing of teeth. It's considered a good occasion to grouse good-naturedly and take one's time getting to work or anywhere else, if going is even worth it. When the power goes out it's considered good green-energy policy, or used to, before the country filled up with the kind of people who simply refuse to wear coats to bed. Those kinds of people can move to New York, as the saying goes.

Lots of countries would be strangled with hundreds of deaths and immense chaos, but in Canada – even on Christmas and with ridiculous weather – it is merely good hours for road crews, bad news for travelers,  obviously a few deaths and varying degrees of discomfort. For some it is probably even an excuse to politely skip an uncomfortable gathering. Generally it can be agreed upon that a non-electric Christmas is a worst case scenario for the ~70,000 people who had to deal with it. The rest of Southern Ontario got the first 'white Christmas' in years, and the coldest, and the most beautiful.

Some news outlets even reported that some people were enjoying the blackout as a challenge of their ability to rough it. Others asphyxiated trying to heat their homes with charcoal fires, or were overcome by fumes they brought upon themselves by running generators indoors without ventilation. It was quite a thing to hear about and quite sad. The 'bad weather' then continued into January, disrupting entire days worth of flights and disorganizing other travel situations as well. There was all kinds of talk about frustration as people waited days to get into a plane. Others went skiing and gave up on a trip to the Bahamas.

All of which sidesteps the (presumably) immense social media bitchfest, which a dedicated blogger may dig up, but I will summarize it quickly as a bunch of flimsy complaining ninnies. Not worth my time or yours, dear reader. It was the first real winter some people faced, absolutely, but who cares about how you're cold and stop complaining, please. Winter is Canada, and Canada ought to be shaming its federal government to the highest degree allowable by law because a couple of United States legalized marijuana first, after lengthy and fractious efforts to bring Canadian laws into the more logical 21st century. What is a winter storm compared to a government so adamant in its refusal that it threw a 150 year old document (among other things) into the trash just to spite environmentalists?

Meanwhile 2014 is likely going to be full of extremely big stories. 80's revivalism is going to fail. The Nerd Bubble may pop, leaving millions without a retirement strategy for their collectibles, consumer electronics, and childish knick-knacks. China is going to be a big name again, so get ready for that. That's not all, of course: geopolitical skulduggery is likely to create new extremists in, according to my calculations, a first world country. I always knew the Dutch were just pretending to be tolerant and objective, but I fear nobody else will see this coming and they will do a lot of damage before the truth comes out. That's just the tip of the proverbial 2014 iceberg.

One thing's for sure: the news will continue to make a huge deal out of small potatoes for as long as it's profitable or can cover up their intellectual, journalistic, and conceptual bankruptcy. I am currently debating doing a Predictions 2014 list, but it may have to wait, until I'm done trashing news media. I bet you Gawker, Huffington Post, TMZ, et al will say some shit and probably have employees make regrettable mistakes this year... so will traditional news media, and that's really all they do when they're not taking political money and supporting various agendas, filling the minds of otherwise undamaged people with the unhinged ideation of partisan politics (in which anyone is supposed to have a clue). That is: when it's not, you know, complaining about weather.

Spit on Apologists or Don't Stop Believing: The Decline of the Middle Ground

Before they kill all of the rest of us. There's been an ongoing crisis for the last ten or so years and you will be hearing about it soon. Anyone who pays attention to nature or depends on it for a living can tell you some things that will make you uneasy. Things that might even get you to rethink your casual, materially-prosperous, entitled and contented life in the Global Consumerist Utopia. Things like the decline of honeybees, songbirds, everything but rats and rodents, it seems. Of course it's all very far away from the sort of stuff the average person cares about, like earning enough to live, or, having succeeded at that, earning enough to prosper.

Yes, I don't mean to be snide or aggressive, but a lot of people in the world are living in a goddamn fantasy. Humanity as a whole is becoming a soulless horde of consumerists and apologists. Everyone remembers the clothing factory collapse in Bangladesh, right? Oh, that's right, it was swept under the rug by the inevitable march of time. But the apologists came out of the woodwork then, to protect the capitalist practices which 'create wealth and jobs' in the third world and 'victories for feminism'. Now, I'm not a card-carrying Feminist so I don't purport to speak for women, but I highly doubt that cheap labor and globalism are victories for women, or anyone besides executives and their slaves.

The scariest thing happening right now, besides the potential dawn of a long era of climate change, or the degradation of the environment, or the dawn of an invincible corpocracy, or even the total fucking of the world by trillion-dollar multinational corporations and their countless parasite offspring, or the emergence of well-funded self-deluded police states, or the fracturing of human society by internet individualism and sub/urban anomie... one of the scariest things happening is the collapse of honeybee populations. Google Colony Collapse Disorder for more information. Or ignore this information and go on running your mouth and taking everything for granted. Believe in the physically impossible unceasing growth of Capitalism.

I think it's one of the great ongoing stories of the last decade. I've been keeping a tally and I've seen exactly two bees in the last few days, and I am fairly sure it was the same bee both times. I have a cherry tree and this year's yield was tiny - probably because of the lack of bees and the fucked-up weather. You rarely hear anything about the bee situation, and you would have had to be paying attention to apply a good narrative to it. To be blunt about it: beehives are dying off, leading to potential food crisis and, worst case scenario, a cascade of extinctions. Lots of great, non-engineered foods are possible only because of the honeybee. Fruits and nuts and anything that eats them is directly endangered. Why? Any number of reasons, but a few are becoming more and more apparent: try agribusiness and their overuse of pesticides (which goes along nicely with the GMO Narrative, a pile of shit I will try to keep out of).

This story is fantastic because two groups of people I despise ignore it (and I'm not talking about the Consumerist Masses, even though they're despicable, dumb, and deranged): the pro-and-anti GMO people. Now, food production is very important in theory and practice. Anything that can feed more people using less land probably a good investment, but there is a bit of the old hubris in the practice of genetic engineering – at least it seems like there is. I'm sure there are good people working there, but good people have been pulled into every evil thing we have ever done as a species – without them the evil ones wouldn't be capable enough.

Hippies are annoying but corporates are just as shitty: and both are largely ignoring the bee crisis. I have no strong opinions on GMO crops, but I hate agribusiness, and I hate Monsanto, like any conscious person with a heartbeat. They always believe in fixing a problem with another problem, and they've never admitted to their faults. Caught in a powerful embrace with world governments, and too rich to be subject to the law, corporations have a mindset analogous to papal infallibility. That alone makes me hate them: they could feed the poor for a million years but there would still be suffering poor. Both sides go wet for politics, but they lose their rabid erections as soon as people insist on the truth.

You could argue agribusiness feeds us, but even in the first world people are going chronically hungry. The food supply is arranged for maximum additives, engineered products, and subsidies. Before food is wasted by the consumer, it is wasted by the restaurant, the supermarket, the factory, the government, or the farmer. People would tell you that this is bullshit spread by fatalistic idealists who don't really know what's happening. People who tell you these things are apologists, and they will also tell you that all is well in the third world, to trust in your local or federal police force, to keep a fixed address, and to make as much money as you possibly can. Because they don't want to be alone, and the people who pay them don't want to fall out of power, and those people you never meet end up with more of your money than you'd think.

I guess the story goes like this: we're humans and we have such big brains. We're so smart: we can't go wrong. We deserve our excesses, and we are close to the Most Prosperous Era in History, when all problems will fade away, but we have to keep believing in the capitalist, empirical, and statist precepts that brought us to this point. No abuse of science cannot be cured by another abuse of science. Nature needs our help. We can improve nature. We are smarter than billions of years. We are more powerful than the seasons. We can do anything. We can solve inequality. We can believe in hope and progress. We can buy anything, even health, even love, even happiness. In 20 years we will construct the first artificial souls. So who gives a fuck about declining bee populations? We can solve that with either more poison or robot bees, and nothing needs to change, and we're going to be alright: I bet you twenty thousand give-a-fuck-points that Monsanto already bought the solution to the problem they, aided by plenty of other short-sighted profiteers, created.

Who gives a fuck about traffic jams? Radioactive contaminants bouncing around for thousands of years, and millions of lifeforms? Who cares about an unstable, overleveraged, dangerous food supply? As long as there's food on the table, nobody will care about this one planet we have that we are pissing away. Think about that when you see some sweaty fuck in a car, getting angry at a traffic jam, burning thousands of units of energy just to be bored and frustrated. Then look at the next one, and so on, and so on, forever. Some day, our hungry and scarce distant descendants will look back to this era and wonder if we were even capable of feeling shame.

Identity and its Discontents; Exceptionalism and You

There was a time I'd have considered someone a hipster just for using the word 'bromance'. That day is long past, but the feeling remains that too many people dance a bit close to the sociocultural archetypes they claim to hate. Not that I'd care about it at this late juncture. It's just one of the few calming thoughts I'm allowed each day. Goddamn, but I'd let them have it. And there were plenty of girls who, as soon as you and her boyfriend were smoking pot together three times a week, or playing some stupid console game together, would pronounce the entire thing a 'bromance'. It was embarrassing each time. It was just a word that had caught far too much momentum, but I never quite managed to get away from it. It was always there, lurking in someone's brain where it was least expected.

Then the term hipster gained an insane amount of weight overnight. One day it was limited to the actual people one would term hipsters, and the next day it was in everyone's mouth, like saliva. Years of ubiquity and overuse have made this word so resonant that it doesn't even really mean anything anymore. This is partly because the original hipsters died more than a century ago, for the most part, and this tenth wave lacks coherence. Nobody can say that Oscar Wilde wasn't a hipster and he wasn't even [critically un-hip] England's first. Dandies were probably third-wave hipsters, even. All of which goes to say, the term is misused constantly even by people who should know better, and the critical ignorance surrounding the term or its history (1950's highpoint anyone?) just makes it an embarrassing statement on our era's ideas concerning identity.

Mostly hipster is a brand thing, now. If you think the epitome is Vice you're probably right, but then again if you didn't know that you are part of the problem. Rich people have already invested in it, celebrities pay huge sums to appear more 'hipsterish', politicians probably use 'hipster' as shorthand for politically disengaged drunks and 'creatives'. There is an aggregate concept of an hipster. He typically wears flannel and, if nothing else, a mustache. She is typically wearing one piece of denim and often a toque. Everything else is overstated but vague. Random. Hell. It's not the worst social camouflage. These days you could get by on it. But of course, no matter who you are, you are going to be called a hipster by someone you know. It doesn't matter how carefully you cultivate your interests and it can happen even without a record player.

There are few things so fearsome as the current accepted models of politics and their adherents. Anarchists are largely undisciplined and immature. Conservatives are all gerontocrats, paternalists, and varying shades of militarist. It goes without saying that almost everyone is infatuated with or ignorant of the implications of continued statism. Liberals are preoccupied with everything, like they're cats and personal rights and privileges are catnip. But really these archetypes don't exist anymore. Probably they were never true, but everyone needs some reductionism or else things become difficult to consider. You have: people who are angry, people who are downtrodden, people who are doing what they are told, half-assed people, people who have disconnected in various ways, and people who think they know what the fuck is even happening and I don't know who to blame. I don't particularly like anybody's spiel right now.

Heh, Israel pounds Gaza would be a sick name for an anarchist-hipster occupist punk group. It's cool to different people to champion one group of people fighting another. This is sometimes referred to as tribalism. This concept is followed by 'exceptionalism' which is, as it sounds, an exceptionally important type of bullshit. People with doubts about the situation that created recent global tensions: be ready to be called an anti-Semite, another term watered-down and thrown around a lot. It's like how 'fascist' used to be, in the 80's, when neoconservatism was indoctrinating its brood, fattening its captains and psychopomps, and massacring its foes in many colorful and atrocious ways. It's easier to ignore these ugly spectacles, but they still affect people. Imagine a tiny explosion, inside an aquarium that is constantly getting hotter, smaller, and busier. Imagine all the stupid things the fish would be telling each other about this explosion while the water drained out.

Yeah there's still albums to review. There's still tens of page views per day to aim for. Giving up hope is stupid and there's no grain of truth in the suggestion that the world will end on Dec 21, 2012. The Pope even said it wasn't going to happen. There are jokes. Laugh about it. Things will go on. We will not get away from the problematics of our time so easily. Maybe we'll go back to patting ourselves on the back for doing the right thing, for buying one less gadget a year, for putting one kilo less matter into a landfill, for backing 'the good guys' while appreciating the plight of the underdog, for voting, for altruism, for proselytizing our beliefs, for not giving up, for getting up earlier to exercise, for calling mom and dad because they would like to hear from you, for slapping a friend's smartphone away from them when they're not paying attention, for giving a brutal douchebag a hard time, for not shouting down our opponents, for... &c. We're going to feel good about ourselves and we're not going to think about it because feeling anything else is unthinkable and the worst kind of suffering. We are not going to become self-aware, so in some ways we are going to continue to approach disaster. I don't think we're too close yet, but that is really just hope, not expectation.

But don't for a moment forget how truly expensive all this free entertainment is. Better yet, think about that while you're out Christmas shopping and you get frustrated because you're uncomfortable standing in a slow line, helping to outsource your country's economy, or having trouble finding a parking spot.