Luigi Mangione is exonerated. He stands in front of a crowd cheering for him, holding signs, wearing shirts with his head printed on. The mayor of New York introduces him to the mic.
"First of all, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for supporting me through my incarceration. Your words, your gifts, they meant a lot to me. I'd also like to give props-" Luigi smiles, looking up from the folded paper at the crowd.
"We love you!" Someone shouts.
"I want to give props to all my brothers at the Metropolitan Detention Centre, Brooklyn, for keeping me safe and keeping it real. I know there's a lot of people out here today wondering what I'm thinking, now that I'm a free man." Luigi says, looking across the crowd. They cheer louder.
"I want you to 3D print a gun and hunt down a billionaire."
The screen goes dark.
"Here billy, billy, billy." Comes a strange echoey voice, childlike.
Flash. A man runs through a multistorey carpark, running towards a Lexus. He's looking behind him. Trips, falls. In the background there's a hooded figure that disappears behind a column. He reaches the car, opens the door, in the backseat there's a woman wearing a cat mask that tasers him.
A district attorney, played by Ted Lavine, spins round.
"We can’t charge him for the same crime twice!"
Two cops look at each other and frown.
The first line of a chorus plays, acapella.
Next shot. Twenty businessmen sat in a circle in an empty swimming pool. Hooded youths empty sewage into it.
What about us?
A well-dressed couple are ballroom dancing at gunpoint.
What about, What about, What about-
Quick shots in succession. Willem Dafoe. Timothy Chalamet. Julianne Moore. Someone takes a gun from a 3D printer, chambers a round and points it at the camera.
An epic orchestral version of Earth Song starts playing as we watch billionaires getting gunned down on a sinking yacht, getting cut in half with giant buzzsaws, wrecking balls smashing through office walls and destroying board meetings, hooded hoodlums crouching in clouds of teargas.
Luigi Mangione standing in a window. Still. He looks over his shoulder and pouts.
"Now you're living in my world."
Super Luigi World
Coming Soon
The trailer ends. The edges of the frame expand, outward and upward. A disembodied voice welcomes us to the Las Vegas Sphere, the biggest screen that had ever existed. I snorted at such a ridiculous statement. Antarctica was the biggest screen, dark for half the year, so large it would need hundreds of satellites shooting lasers down at its surface, so big it would be difficult for anybody to see, save for outer space. Yet those dimwitted rocket scientists at NASA seemed intent that all orbiting craft would travel across the equator rather than pole to pole. When was the last time you saw the planet photographed from below? Do not trouble yourself, dear reader, for such a thing has never been attempted. There is a horizontal prejudice that exists in the Western mind due to its adoration of sentences, comic books and tennis. To travel through space was to dismiss all notions of direction, for there were none. Every point was simultaneously the centre and edge of the universe, meaning that relational words regarding space were, at best, pointless. I was laughing to myself at the fallibility of our anthropocentric world view when the movie started.
The Las Vegas sphere was built with no particular purpose in mind. Everybody working on it didn’t question the notion of having a huge curved screen to show films on, when 99.999% of films were shot with a flat screen in mind. To get around this inconvenience, the boffins at Sphere decided to use AI to fill in the rest of the frame. If there was a scene indoors, viewers could look up and see the ceiling, and so on. For decades film-makers have been desperate for such advances in technology, wasting so much time framing and considering composition for different shots. Kubrick himself famously lamented "the reason why cinema will never be a true artform is that you can turn from the screen and you see the room you're in. We need to empower content creators so they can film the sky, or even the ceiling." - therefore it is oddly fitting that I am at the premier of an AI improved version of 2001: A Space Odyssey!
The famous theme song for the film begins, and the energy in the audience shifts immediately. All eyes are drawn to some tiny monkey men about 500 metres away, then the eye is drawn upward to the prehistoric sky.
"Ooo." People say, pointing at a cloud. I squint so hard I worry I am damaging the lenses of my eyes. It seemed the media wizards at Sphere hadn't considered expanding the image at all, and so the viewing experience was like trying to watch it on a tv at the other end of a football field. Then there was a cut, another shot, though the sudden change was extremely jarring as the entire screen switched from the sky to some rocks, then back to the sky again. The edibles I had eaten a couple of hours earlier were in full effect, I start to sweat profusely, squirming in my seat, realising there was nowhere to turn to escape the inside of the orb.
The film went on in this manner, each cut from one shot to another had an extremely disorientating effect, particularly as my attention was focused on the fingernail sized original film that seemed to shrink further and further as time went on. I wondered to myself, out loud, if this whole system was a wasteful gimmick and the venue would be better suited to showing immersive theatre. Maybe they could show The Tempest with all of its storms and whirlpools and Patrick Stewart as Prospero bellowing onstage in his thick Yorkshire accent. Or perhaps this curved screen would finally reinvigorate the aborted medium of virtual reality films, total submersion in 360 degree space, custom cinema that could be watched via virtual reality headset or other Spherical cinemas. But to try and fill in the unfilmed space of old movies seemed not only to be a waste of money, a misunderstanding of cinema and added no value whatsoever, it was also a symptom that the carcass of Western culture had the last of its marrow sucked from its bones. American entertainment executives had no ideas left. The reservoir was empty. The only concept that remained followed the logic of a four year old child - make it bigger - but all that had been added was the cultural equivalent of polystyrene packaging. There was no depth, weight or purpose to the filled in projection, it simply existed around the image as if a painting had been mounted onto a pile of dust on a windy moor.
As I mused over what a terrific waste of time and money everything had been, I realised the film was reaching the end. The entire room turned into a psychedelic horizon, the shapes and colors from the camera effects developed by Trumball back in the 60s were now amplified and enhanced as the whole room became submerged in the cosmic light show. Many members of the audience were convulsing within a few seconds. After several minutes it seemed the entire room was experiencing some sort of seizure brought on by the overload of visual stimuli. Only I remained, standing out of my seat, wishing to float through the air and towards the screen as if I was attempting to fly in a dream. Instead, the film stopped suddenly, lights went on and hundreds of medics poured into the auditorium to save the audience from their overexposure to color. What was the point in offering such an intense experience and then falter when it started? Did these people just hold DMT smoke in their mouths before blowing it out quickly? Would they order a banquet and be satiated with a single unsalted French Fry? Would they undress a lover, notice pubic hair and call their Mommy to come pick them up? I step onto the seat in front of me and deliver a monologue about how audiences and studios were complicit in the tepid, sexless, bloodless, drugless media that they suckled at like a security blanket, mistaking arts and culture as a comforting salve against the corporate fascism they had enabled, rather than as the absolute expression of the monsters and angels that lived beneath our skin. I begin to sing, sing with my full chest, each lungful being thrown from my body like an explosion, leaping down the rows of chairs like it was a big staircase. I sing without words, but with meaning. It is the bellowing of an animal, it is opera, it is the song of reality.
