Uncanny Alliances

This week at COMPACT; a mini-review of 'Smile 2'

This was the week of “closing arguments” in the presidential election, as we discussed at length in the Compact podcast. But whatever soaring rhetoric about civic comity the Harris campaign might have wanted to put forward got buried in, well, garbage, or at least the word “garbage.” First, the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” at Donald Trump’s big rally in Madison Square Garden; then, President Biden seemed to refer to Trump supporters as that too. Soon, Trump and his surrogates were LARPing as garbagemen, and MAGA true believers were even proudly self-identifying as “garbage”—a rather on-the-nose symbolic expression of in the downscaling of the GOP.

On the subject of Republicans’ evolving self-identification, Ryan Zickgraf began the week at Compact with a dispatch from the Pennsylvania evangelical church where Elon Musk, not known for his religiosity, recently led a Trump rally. There Ryan found a strange new alliance between “what remains of the religious right and something like its opposite: culture warriors, many of them tech bros, who miss the anything-goes macho nihilism of the 1990s and early aughts.” What to make of this “coalition of the sacred and the profane”? 

Strange political alliances of other sorts were the subject of two other pieces this week. Veteran film producer Greg Stewart revisits The New Radical, a documentary he helped make in 2016 that narrated the “alt-right/antifa bromance” between 3D gun pioneer Cody Wilson and anarchist hacker Amir Taaki. Going on a decade after its production, argues Stewart, the film holds disturbing lessons about the world that has taken shape in the years since. 

Meanwhile, Bruna Frascolla covered the recent mayoral election in Brazil’s largest city, São Paulo, which tends to be predictive of the direction of national politics. There, she detects the rise of a “new anti-woke center” which may “may be able to steer Brazil away from the cultural extremes of Bolsonarismo and woke progressivism.” Also on Brazil, columnist Juan Rojas’s latest looked at the feud between the country’s left-wing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and its central bank over the latter’s persistently high interest rates. Here, he shows, Lula finds unexpected common ground with his North American opposite, Donald Trump, a vocal critic of the Fed. 

In a category all of its own is Compact founder Sohrab Ahmari’s epic reportage “The Cross and the Vine of Death,” which recounts his experiences on an ayahuasca retreat. In the process, he considers the history and current appeal of this powerful drug, traditional healing and the sorts of knowledge it relies on, how all of that relates to his Christian faith, and much more. 

And that’s not all. This week we also published R. Taggart Murphy, a prominent analyst of Japanese affairs, on the decline of the once-dominant Liberal Democratic Party and what it portends for Japan’s future; Ben Burgis on the persistent concern with socioeconomic inequality in Western political thought—not just Rousseau and Marx but Hobbes and Smith; and an excerpt from Frank Furedi’s new book The War Against the Past, about how the West turned its back on its own historical and cultural legacy. 

Smile 2: A Mini-Review

Last night I celebrated Halloween in my traditional way: going to see whatever halfway decent-seeming horror flick is in the theater. What was on this time was Smile 2, a sequel of Parker Finn’s 2022 debut. Despite my usual anti-sequel stance, this is a franchise I wouldn’t mind seeing persist.

I appreciated the elegant simplicity of the first Smile’s concept: a contagious smile that takes you over and kills you from within. Neither the first installment nor the new one bashes you over the head with any particular message—unlike, say The Substance, an enjoyably icky but painfully obvious and dated feminist screed on female beauty standards. To the extent Smile involves social commentary, it seems to have something to do with therapeutic culture. The protagonist of Smile is a therapist; Smile 2’s is a troubled pop star whose lyrics all seem to dramatize her personal and emotional struggles. Some vaguely feminist message might be discerned from both films about how women are forced to perform cheerfulness, although the sinister body-snatching smile also claims plenty of male victims. 

What stood out most in Smile 2 compared to the original was its explicit meta-mediatic dimension. The smile propagates, as we learned in part one, by violently killing its host in front of a witness, who is then infected on the spot; crucially, this only works if the witness is forced to see the prior host’s brutal death in all its gory detail. This mechanism is perhaps borrowed conceptually from Cronenberg’s great movie about viral media, Videodrome, in which scenes of shocking violence are required to rip open the psyche and thereby render it vulnerable to the infiltration of an alien presence. Here, Parker, like Cronenberg, seems to also be commenting ambiguously on the power of the horror genre itself, which uses violence to “get under your skin.”

Beyond that, Smile 2 concerns a celebrity whose private life exists entirely for the public, and whose personal downward spiral has become a mass spectacle. Like the invisible smiling creature that takes over her body and mind, her fans feed off of her traumas, both as it is fashioned into her own pop hits and as it is put on display in tabloid coverage and TikTok paparazzi videos.

The best horror, in my reading, capitalizes off of what Jacques Lacan called the extimate (his rendering of Freud’s “unheimlich”): those points at which our deepest inner life coincides with what is radically exterior to us. By making the smile the object of horror, revealing its simultaneous status as a spontaneous expression of an internal state and a socially conditioned conventional sign, Finn’s films do what many of the strongest exemplars of the genre do: bring the terrifying substrate of everyday life into view.