As if Apple needed another kerfuffle, it appears that one of its marketing efforts for the movie F1 has raised the hackles on the necks of some. You almost have to be tuned out completely to have missed the plethora of marketing methods Apple has already been pushing around the racetrack to get this movie to the starting line. But there’s always more.
Apple started pushing out Apple Wallet notifications to users of that service announcing that they could receive a discount for movie theater tickets via Fandango by purchasing those tickets with, yep, you guessed it, Apple Pay.
I saw the notification late last night and just swiped it away the way I do the majority of these mosquito-like pests. Too bad I didn’t take a screenshot.
But Casey Liss, of The Accidental Tech Podcast trio grabbed one and posted about it on Mastodon, accompanied by a vomiting emoji.
Those who felt as ill about the promotion as Casey did quickly jumped in, condemning it and pulling out the enshittification label that we’ve all become familiar with since it was coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022.
Yes, it is advertising, but I’m not sure it was enshittification. Perhaps we’re reaching the point of shitting all over that label and diminishing, yet revealing its power in sort of a weird turning in on itself way that proves the original meaning behind the original term even while mucking it up by using it too frequently.
Granted there aren’t too many who lust for the ever increasing onslaught of advertising and marketing pitches we’re bombarded with hourly. I’m certainly not one who does. But advertising and marketing, as overused and overwrought as it has become, in and of itself isn’t enshittification, no matter how fast it grows like weeds rapidly enveloping every corner of our Internet usage.
My grandfather used to say that “a weed is anything that grows where you don’t want it to.” Most of today’s advertising certainly feels weed like. And it keeps getting worse, especially when pushed at us from sources we don’t expect it from. Amazon we expect this from. Apple not so much. Though there is a history there.
In my view of things, Apple advertising this promotion is really not that much different than a podcast advertising its latest merch to its audience or promoting a fundraiser. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not shitting on The Accidental Tech Podcast, which does both of those things. I actually pay for a subscription and occasionally buy their merch and donate when they fundraise. Captive audience marketing is an age old technique and it works. I’ve used it myself. Even so, it can grow old and tip over into enshittification.
But there’s a larger point.
Eventually most users tune out. I used to deliver a curtain speech pitching the next play or special offer before every performance at a theatre I ran. Initially they were wildly successful. Eventually returns diminished. That may be anecdotal, but I believe the more ads increase the more they become the blandest of white noise or even a turn off to the product. Again, anecdotally I had initial interest in the F1 movie, but after the inundation of advertising I’ve already decided my interest has waned. So I’m certainly not going to be contributing to Apple’s goal of finally putting butts in theater seats for one of its movies. I’ll catch it sometime down the line on streaming.
Overhyping, as a facet of enshittification can too easily create diminishing returns, gradually enshittifying the very business models of the enshittifiers. Mosquitos can’t feed when everyone within their range packs up and goes indoors and they eventually move on or die out.
We just haven’t reached that tipping point in this bloodsucking business model we’re trapped in currently. In his original post outlining the enshittification of early social media platforms Doctorow says “the same forces that drove rapid growth drove rapid collapse.”
I doubt we’ll reach that tipping point in advertising. Because there’s a whole new frontier that the enshittifiers are just waiting to exploit and that’s AI. Google’s moving away from search faster than its search rankings are dropping and there’s no secret on the path it’s choosing.
I’ve often imagined that perhaps AI could be one of our salvations in the advertising scheme of things, figuring out better than humans seem capable of doing when enough is enough. But those driving that racetrack see the possibility of too many dollar signs to make that more than just a wild imagining no matter how much sense it might make.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
I’m finding myself attracted to very complex and complicated films and streaming series these days, even if they are flawed. That is certainly opposite of the minimalist and often stark aesthetic of Brutalist architecture where everything must have its functional point. Make no mistake, The Brutalist is functionally a complex and complicated film that I’m sure some will find a brutal time watching. And that’s not just because the run time is three hours and thirty-five minutes with a fifteen minute intermission.
I’m sure that length will scare some off. It certainly made me think long and hard about waiting to see it at home, instead of seeing it in the theatre. As an older guy with a bladder that prefers having a pause button nearby I decided to take the risk. I’m glad I did.
During that intermission the conversation in the men’s lavatory was all about how thankful everyone was for the pause. Talk about a sharing a communal experience the way art is supposed to do. Let’s just say I’m glad there was an intermission and I can think of a number of recent longer films that would have been well served to have added one.
But the intermission speaks not just to relief, but ironically it speaks back to a grander, perhaps more audacious age of cinema, when movies had things like overtures and intermissions, and were shown in ornately decorated movie palaces, instead of gray boxes stuffed next to other gray boxes. It certainly adds weight and import to the epic scale of this ambitious movie about ambitious aims.
At its core The Brutalist is an immigrant story. A Jewish immigrant story in America after the horrors of World War II. It feels all the more resonant in this time and place. Watching the protagonist survive, struggle, and try to succeed might, in and of itself, feel like a typical American Dream story, but it plumbs the depth of American nightmare moments as well. We’ve seen these epic immigrant stories before.
We’ve also seen the epic stories of artists struggling against all odds, shedding and hurting those who love them as they pursue their passion, while suppressing and harming parts of themselves to serve at the pleasure of rich philistines who use and abuse them as extensions of their own outsized egos.
This epic story works on all of those levels, but it works because of the art of the filmmaking, more specifically the men behind the cameras. Corbet may be telling the tale of a Brutalist architect pushing for his dream, but there is nothing minimalistic or spare about how he and his cinematographer and composer uses cameras and sound to tell it.
The cinematographer Lol Crawley and his camera is everywhere and anywhere, often in odd places from odder angles, especially in the first half, using visuals that disorient as much as they reveal. The sound design and the music by Daniel Blumberg in collaboration with the director is equally surprising, and at times wonderfully disconcerting and deliciously uncomfortable.
Corbet sets us up for this by shattering expectations with the overture and the credits. Instead of credits scrolling vertically, or fading in, or overlayed on the action, they scroll horizontally from right to left. It feels wrong to western eyes and is matched by the camera work in the opening section. Literally bouncing in and out of point of view, light and dark, the cameras follow the characters stumbling from the bowels to the deck of their ship, finally landing upright on Ellis Island. We are thrown into the chaos of the scramble with as much desperate anticipation and confusion as the characters. If you’re not uncomfortably ready for something different after these first few minutes then you are not ready to surrender to what the rest of this film has to offer.
The story is divided into two parts by that intermission and unfolds with many such surprises. Part I is cinematically more intriguing than Part 2, which lags at times. There the camera and editing slow down to capture longer, quieter, yet equally intense moments and that makes sense. That’s never more apparent than the scene when a husband comforts his wife’s physical pain, knowing his solution is as wrong as it will be relieving and welcome. It’s an injection of pure agony, painfully, yet beautifully acted, filmed, and scored.
But that’s a setup for when the pace picks back up to its Part 1 tempos, propelling us to the conclusion. It’s almost too much of a shock, and that’s the intent. We’re finally delivered to an epilogue, which to me feels unnecessary and almost tacked on even as it completes the epic arc of the story. But it does allow you to sober up a bit before leaving the theatre.
Overall the cast is generally quite good with Brody standing out as the architect László Tóth. You can almost breathe his pain its so present. Felicity Jones almost matches him once she enters the story in Part 2, only failing when the script fails her. But when she’s the focus, she captivates. Guy Pearce, who I generally don’t like, does the best work I’ve seen from him, and often threatens to take the story away as the central antagonist.
All in all the story isn’t unfamiliar, but it’s told with a rawness and complexity that propels us and it forward into something larger than itself, even larger than the ambitions of its characters and those of it’s storyteller. It won’t be a film for everybody, but it is more monumental than anything I’ve seen in a while.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at 
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