by Nestor Barstow
Everything requires a car. Some people love it. Most hate the expenses that come with needing a car to go to a job to make money for rent and utilities and the fucking insurance for the car in case someone in another car hates you more than you hate needing a car. Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! A car is a weapon. Bullitt. Some people love it. Make the car faster, louder, bigger. Two-Lane Blacktop. Make it shine. Show other car people how fast and shiny and big and loud you made it. That’s a sick ride, dude. What year is it? Thunder Kiss ‘65. All original? Gone in 60 Seconds. Cars are girls. Boats are girls too. She’s lookin good. What’s your other ride? Where ya headed? Vanishing Point. Drive, Baby Driver.
The first three entries into The Fast and the Furious franchise were about how fast and far amateur gearheads could push the limits of doing cool car tricks and how useful those car tricks are to committing crimes. Even before films had sound we had guys revving and racing their cars. All of Hollywood’s outlaw hot rod movies culminate in this legacy showcase. Tokyo Drift even introduced new stunt driving in smaller cars without emasculation (even though Bow Wow plays a character named Twink.) Drifting is car dialectics, the act of oversteering against traction to take the entirety of a turn without crashing by increasing the contradictory movement of rightward momentum with a left aim, or vice versa.
By the time they got to Fast 4, CGI replaced many of the practical stunts. The storylines moved further and further away from illegal street racing and heists to covert statecraft and espionage, but with cars. "Must a name mean something?" asked Alice doubtfully. Fast 7 introduced demonic neuromancing to control Paul Walker’s ghost. The supposed final film Fast Forever is planned for a 2028 release, and is likely to conform to current trends with partially AI-generated scenes or writing. The car tricks will look cool but not because of skilled professional drivers. “Of course it must," Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh, "my name means the shape I am— and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.”
My first two viewings of Harmony Korine’s AGGRO DR1FT were from a pirated rip in 360p resolution giving the thermal-imaging oranges and blues and reds an impressionistic smudginess I really enjoyed. But then I saw it a third time in 1080p and it lost the allure with the generative AI too crispy, the details too detailed. The vibe was gone. It felt like a mechanic’s drift pin tweaked a lopsided camshaft carrier, making the engine run smooth. Too smooth. No backfires. Human hands didn’t make this; a calculating, unreal machine did. The slow-mo footage of a Lambo with the top down crossing a Miami bridge in the rain looks just as described. This isn’t Stan Brakhage. This is a Winamp visualizer.
Every Korine film is about not realizing you’re in a class war from the POV of the temporarily unembarrassed lumpenprole standing in the lobbies of high rises thinking ‘I made it finally!’ Korine is a career grifter. Hell, he’s said it’s hereditary. He was born a grifter.
As Jordi Mollà, BO the assassin in AGGRO DR1FT, says: “The old world is dead… we have been flattened by a great force.”
BO's a lone assassin looking for a better work/life balance and to achieve this he joins an assassination collective to take out a Big Boss like at the end of a video game level. Reading a director into their work is tired, simply because it is almost always true. Korine has sought the auteur title through most of his work and it is his pugnacious defiance to deny it. The creation of film has never and will never be a solitary affair. The labor needed requires a collective effort whether or not that involves collective and equitable gain. President of the Board of Directors to The Paris Review is a direct funding source for EDGLRD, and by now everyone knows the CIA’s involvement with the founding of The Paris Review. Korine also has major support from the third wealthiest family in the UK with a “strategic investment” by the Reuben Brothers, David and Simon.
This money is, of course, circular, as Harmony and his ex-wife Rachel attended a Friends of the IDF fundraiser in November 2023 on an indie filmmaker’s salary. The organization took in ten million that night. Rachel and Ivanka Kushner are besties, often posting Instagram concert photos together. Harmony sold the Kushners a painting titled Blue Checker (2014) which Gagoisan valued at $120,000 before it was stolen from the lobby of a building owned by Kushner Companies. The largest tenant of this building is OpenAI, leasing nearly half of the space. In ARTnews, Korine feigned shock about how a one hundred and two inch painting can be stolen from a high-profile building. It is worth noting that Jared’s father Charles Kushner was convicted of tax evasion, eighteen counts of illegal campaign contributions, and witness tampering. That last conviction stems from trying to extort his brother-in-law by hiring a sex worker, secretly recording it, and mailing the tape to his sister. Well, it works in the movies! Trump later handed him a full pardon.
“The question is,” as Alice says to Humpty Dumpty, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” The finances of AI are old hat at this point. It is Saudi money laundered downwards, forwards, and backwards between the US government, Amazon, SoftBank, Elon Musk, and Microsoft. But the mechanics and anatomy of an AI film make as much sense as reopening a cauterized wound. Using AI is actually dangerous filmmaking. Now, Korine is clearly a contrarian child in an old man’s body, thinking he’s just poking against acceptable social mores. He says this isn’t filmmaking, it is something new like GTA Vice City (2002). His production company is named EDGLRD. No irony, no redeeming hidden quality. No one wants actually dangerous art because it weakens the argument of what art is in service of defining what danger isn’t. In works of art we desire the facsimile of danger. All else is a threat to defend against. This art works for the IDF in service to genocide. This art works in service to capital and market capture. This art works in service of annihilation. International capital only wants the never-ending AI money machine running because all other extractive industries are plateauing at best. AI is not an artist. It cannot create art even in minor use-cases because it gets the stink on it. The insistence from AI boosters that this is as inevitable as the automobile supplanting the horse is what the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit called hyperstition. The CCRU were middle class University of Warwick tweakers Sadie Plant, Nick Land, and Mark Fisher, and hyperstition is just a shorter way to say self-fulfilling prophecy. It was couched in dense theories of philosophy and schizoanalysis with a sprinkling of occult thought, Lovecraft, jungle music, cyberpunk, and lots of amphetamines. This is all fun to read because they weren’t actively destroying the planet or selling everyone on an inevitable doomsday. Well, Nick Land still is, but fuck that elderly twig-armed racist posing as a nihilist.
When Harmony Korine first announced AGGRO DR1FT, and before he admitted the extent of generative AI, I was excited and my first thought on the description alone was that he had read some CCRU, specifically an early experiment they performed where techno-demons could be summoned by harnessing a syzygy of planetary alignment in a ritual performed by an artist collective named 0[rphan]d[rift>] using a circuitry sigil that later defined CCRU iconography: the numogram. I can’t explain it all, just that it is reminiscent of the Kabbalah tree of life but with recursive time-chaos and it was caught up in the Y2K scare.
Korine’s follow up, Baby Invasion (2024), is Cute Accelerationism Watership Down. The desire of imperceptibility during the coming purge.
The movie (not really a movie but a livestream MMO) begins with a screen full of tabs and pages open l-r coindesk current prices, a discord DM with a big tiddy goth anime girl, icheat[.]io for counter strike hacks, drugs[.]com open to quaaludes and two concerts playing, an onion instance for a chan, malware bazaar, task manager, a notepad with command lines, a LAN admin tree, a windows doc folder titled turbo_launch, a command window to initialize unreal engine with ASCII EDGLRD. Things an idiot thinks a hacker would have open. There is an interlude where a white rabbit phases in and out of view as ‘the player’ reaches a save point. Korine said he had to include it for the artsy critics requiring a semblance of a narrative.
These babies are robbing cribs. They're demons in bibs with glocks. Stacking paper like alphabet blocks.
In their book Cute Accelerationism, Amy Ireland and Maya B Kronic eviscerated Baby Invasion before it was even born. They had foresight like Cassandra and Fiver seeing the destruction awaiting us by using the cute baby demons and livestream chat emojis to launder more AI into Harmony Korine’s work. They say in a passage, “on the lip of the unrepresentable, Cute has been calling to an anonymous entity. It’s assembling itself out there, using whatever junk it can find, its diffident yet insistent booping of human culture tracked from inside history by a word as fresh and plastic as the syndrome it locates and cultivates. ‘Cute’ shifts along with the cultural phenomena it tags, snowballing the process and facilitating access as it tentatively hollows out a passage for the Thing that is pressing, finding points of ingress, soft-soaping its way in under cover of whatever feels good at the time… Cute, in its obligingly squishy positivity, has tended to take on whatever characteristics are available—appearing now as insurance against the demise of the Oedipal status quo, now as titillating grotesquerie, now as aesthetic mode of the literary avant-garde, now as symptom of the post-modern evisceration of grand narratives, now as a form of political resistance, and so on, and so on. A needling suspicion remains: perhaps the apparent loss of reference to crafty intelligence is only a mask for some seriously cute moves. What could be shrewder than shifting attention from the fangs by growing the eyes?"
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Nestor Barstow is a writer, sculptor, noise maker with No Coast Noise Collective, and an electronics technician in Omaha, NE. He has previously published in The New Inquiry and numerous defunct online lit blogs and zines.