Supreme & Lopatin & Emergency

I wanted to share my part two on procatalepsis this week, but I don’t have much that’s fit to print. Maybe what I want to express will reveal itself over the next week or two and it’ll be so insightful that it breaks me apart. Maybe once that happens I can finally assemble myself into a fully realized person, at long last unburdened by the thrumming compulsion to (over)write myself, to make myself make sense. OR, maybe I’ll entirely abandon the idea of writing yet another piece where I provide further comment on my endless need to provide further comment. Maybe I’ll simply accept the fact that I learned a new word and fired off an inconclusive dispatch about adding this word to my rhetorical arsenal. Maybe I’ll move on.

Earlier this week I took myself to a bargain matinee of Marty Supreme at my local indie theater. I liked it, it was too long, but every frame serves a purpose. The character is insufferable and following him is stressful, but Timothée Chalamet’s performance is pure movie star, etc., etc. The film’s score is a revelation, no qualifiers needed. It’s slick, propulsive, and heavily synthesized. It works in tandem with carefully deployed, non-diegetic 1980s needle drops. Marty Supreme is set in the 1950s so having the bulk of the music invoke a different (but also past) era adds to the thrilling cultural mashup that filmmaker Josh Safdie pulls off here. I left the theater thinking about the film’s composer Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never) and his relative short-lived synth pop duo Ford & Lopatin (fka Games). That project and their excellent 2011 concept album Channel Pressure is so entwined into Marty’s DNA. “Emergency Room,” Channel Pressure’s lead single, is one of those songs that just stuck for me from the moment I encountered it almost immediately upon its release. It pops into my head out of nowhere at least once per year and I always welcome it. I like how detached it feels, how measured it remains in its capacity to keep listeners at a remove. The music feels like knowing you need a hospital when you have no idea what’s wrong. And at the same time, it’s oddly soothing. The emergency will pass, the professionals will know what to do, you’ll walk it off. 

As I've listened to "Emergency Room" on repeat all week, it's hard not to hear it as an eerie anthem for what we're currently living through. A national crisis unfolds while most of us can still stream songs and enjoy weekday movie excursions. Remember roughly two weeks ago when half the internet decided that everyone's feed would be nothing but 2016 nostalgia for a few days? It was as if we thought that publicly chiding our former selves for how loudly we proclaimed that year to be “the woooooorrrst” might, by science or magic, bring about a do-over. If only it were so simple.