EPISODE 915: THE AFTERLIFE OF TORTURED POP STARS
Also, the Many Uses of Inflatable Seals
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Hi and welcome to Pop Culture Spirit Wow, the Substack that dares to take advantage of the title of Taylor Swift’s new album, just like the entire rest of the media landscape. (Please Forbes, do tell me about Taylor’s lyrics.)
Today I have for you what Catholic forgiveness looks like in Michigan; gay furries doing crime for good; Star Trek: Discovery writer Sean Cochran serving amazing final season; and the afterlife of not one but two pop stars.
Let’s dig in!
THE WOWND UP
In Michigan a Catholic bishop finished daily Mass with a reflection on “Forgiveness as the Heart of Christianity” in which the bishop explained that he wasn’t angry with Joe Biden, “he’s just stupid.” The bishop went on to explain what he meant by stupid, which probably no one needed to hear, because they were seeing an example of it right in front of them.
Welcome to 2024. Please keep your seat belts fastened and make sure your tray tables and seats are in their full upright position.
Speaking of torture, Taylor Swift released her new album Tortured Poets’ Department twice on Saturday morning, once at midnight and then again 2 hours later with 15 more tracks in what she called her “2am surprise.” She also posted her first video, which features a really disturbing turn of phase plus a good look at my apartment!
“Your wife brought us flowers, I want to kill her” is um, pretty dark.
At this point Swift’s songs are treated almost like sacred scripture, with every lyric a possible reference to something or someone else. Most speculation has focused on her ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn, who has a group chat with fellow actors Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott called the Tortured Man Club, after the tortured characters they’ve been asked to play. But maybe it’s about Matty Healy, pop band The 1975’s front man, who Taylor dated for 3 months and once posted a photo of himself kissing Phoebe Bridgers with comedian/writer Bo Burnham as “Gay Poets Society.” Other songs have people thinking they’re about Taylor’s current boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs’ Travis Kelce.
Probably the weirdest flex relates to the fact that Swift’s last lyric on the original album is the word “dazzling.” Rumors have been swirling that Taylor is going to appear with her Best Bud Ryan Reynolds in this summer’s X-Men film Deadpool & Wolverine. The character she’s been thought to play? Disco queen and pop star mutant, Dazzler.
Also, how very Marvel-end-credits-scene of her it would be of her to leave a hint at the very end of her album.
And in Payson, Utah, Kevin Bacon returned to the high school where he shot Footloose, 40 years later. The student body had been trying for months to get Bacon to come to the school’s final prom. The thing that convinced Bacon was the students’ commitment to use their prom day to create 5000 resource kits of essential goods for people in their community; as part of the 40th anniversary of Footloose, Bacon’s SixDegrees.org foundation is trying to generate 40,000 kits to help people in need. Bacon came and joined in the event, thanking the students for “turning what could be just a movie star coming back to get a pat on the back, into something really positive.”
DON’T !%!# WITH THE FURRIES
One my favorite sentence to have written in a long time: The gay furry hacker group SiegedSec has relaunched its campaign to dox and otherwise punish transphobic organizations. Last year the organization attacked government agencies in five states, defacing websites, disputing computer systems and releasing private information of government figures in response to their attacks on trans people. “Be gay do crime,” they wrote on their website.
On April Fool’s Day of this year they hacked the River Valley Church in Burnsville, Minnesota, using the church’s Amazon account to buy $6200 in inflatable sea lions (see above) and later releasing the pastor’s personal information, after he publicly attacked Joe Biden for declaring this year’s Easter Sunday as Transgender Day of Visibility. And now they’ve released the private information of users of the right-wing Real America’s Voice and making their data “[go] poof.”
Responding to concerns from the queer community that this makes queer people seem like they don’t respect the law, they said, “[T]he thing is, these types of people will blame the LGBTQ+ community regardless of what we do. They will look for a reason to hate, they won't listen to reason, they want to spread lies to shun people different than them.”
A VERY SPECIAL DELIVERY
Last week I got a press release about a new service: After-life messaging. At EternalApplications.com (aka “Eternal App”), you can create audio, video, or text messages that will be delivered to the people you want after you’ve died.
I signed up. (Of course I did.) Here are some glorious details:
You get to choose the date of delivery to have them sent to your loved one’s email or phone number, and you have a 50-year window.
I’m not confident Amazon or Apple is going to be here in 50 years. I’m pretty sure my email or phone number will not be the same.
But Eternal App, a new start-up? Hey, eternity is in the name.
While the service bills itself as a way to send a message to loved ones, as far as I can tell, you don’t have to establish any sort of proof of relationship with the person you’re sending your messages to. So we could be talking a parent sending a message to their kids. But it could also be a stalker who wants to perpetually haunt someone after they’ve died, or someone wanting to tell a childhood bully to burn in hell.
Mazel!
The cost to send a video message with up to 10 recipients on that supposedly-50-year delivery window is $50. You can send 3 for $100, or 10 for $150. And it’s the same fee for audio or text. That’s right, for $150 you can send up to 10 emails to 100 recipients total.
Or you can use Gmail’s “Schedule Send” option and do the very same thing for free. I literally just sent 2073 me an email: “Hey, 2024 Me, Checking In.” Can’t wait to almost certainly not receive it.
The site also gives some ideas on things you might do that very much feel like they written by an AI: “Begin by expressing your deep love and affection for your family and friends.” “Express gratitude for the moments, experiences, and relationships that have enriched your life.” “Highlight what you admire about each person, such as their kindness, sense of humor, resilience, or creativity.”
My favorite: “Incorporate meaningful quotes from authors, philosophers, or public figures that resonate with your message.”
Goodbye, honey. I love you so much. As the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once wrote….
The desire to leave some kind of message behind, it really is eternal. And so is the desire to try and use people’s vulnerability to make a buck, I guess.
STAR TREK: DISCOVERY KNOWS HOW TO FINALE
Writing the final season of a television show is challenging. First and foremost, there’s the question of hitting the landing, both in terms of plot and character. Who lives? Who dies? Who ends up together?
And satisfying can look really different to different people. I think the ending to The Sopranos is kind of great. It’s all about giving us an experience of the endless uncertainty of the characters’ lives. But many disagree. In fact at the time it came out, the show concluded so suddenly many people thought their cable had gone out.
Hitting the landing. It ain’t easy.
Watching episode four of the final season of Star Trek: Discovery, written by Sean Cochran, this week got me thinking about how the work of concluding a show well can happen long before those final couple episodes. Finishing a show is not just about how you finish; it’s about remembering where you’ve been. So final seasons often have former stars return; they might nod to old storylines, too. Sometimes a final season is like a greatest hits album, or like the big finish to the Fourth of Day fireworks.
There can be a sweet nostalgia in all of that, but done well, there’s also a certain “gathering of the graces” from the past that can add momentum to the story’s final push. And that’s what Discovery did so well this week. Three of the series regulars find themselves trapped in a time bubble—classic episodic scifi and Star Trek material. But instead of the usual iteration, reliving the same hour over and over, they find themselves thrown repeatedly into the past and future of the ship, with two of the characters always resetting to the same physical location.
At first, doing this is just a fun nod to where the characters and show have been. We see them on the ship as it travels to the 32nd century; fighting Control, the AI that almost wiped out the Federation; battling the forces of the Emerald Chain, which is a lot less of big deal, but creates a nice fight sequence.
Along the way we get a couple new little delights, too—the ship being built in San Francisco, one wall open to the Golden Gate Bridge; the ship 30 years from now, everyone on it dead—a moment that it and of itself creates great propulsion for the story going forward. The stakes are higher than ever.
But the real power of the episode lay in its most significant flashback, to the time when Burnham was first on the Discovery as a prisoner. We get to see that version of her again and see just how much the character has grown, which is pretty astounding.
And, while the time trapped characters have spent most of the time avoiding contact with everyone else, because time travel messes everything up y’all, in this section, they end up having to reveal themselves to try and fix everything. And that’s super complicated, not only because the crew all see Burnham as an outlaw at this point, but because the person in charge of Discovery at this point is Lt. Commander Airiam, a female human cyborg who will end up having to sacrifice her life to save everyone about a year from this point in time.
God I love her look.
Burnham has to convince everyone on the bridge that she’s not the crazy criminal that they know. And in the end that means having to tell Airiam about her coming death, despite the fact that it makes everyone that much more distrustful of her, because she knows Airiam will believe it. It’s just a fantastically written and performed scene. So much energy and emotion. And it really does propel the show forward.
The other interesting thing about that moment is how it serves as a kind of fix to past seasons. That’s something else that you sometimes find in a final season—mistakes acknowledged and corrected, and/or a love letter to an important character or moment. Fans loved the bridge crew of Discovery pretty much from the beginning, but in the early seasons most of those characters had barely any lines, and certainly no storylines. To suddenly return to that time period and have a whole scene which is nothing but them talking, and not only that but deciding together on basically the fate of reality was a brilliant stroke. And it also enabled the show to celebrate Airiam, who was herself a much beloved part of the show.
Great writing—what a joy it is to see.
MOMENT OF WOW
You can’t do a thing on Footloose and Kevin Bacon and not end on The Dance!
I’ll be back later this week with a piece on kneeling in church. And next weekend, Tony nomination predictions!
Thanks for joining me. Hope you have a great week.
Loved the video of FootLoose and Kevin Bacon's early magnetism.. Some fine boy dancers, and girl dancers, too! Change a few hairstyles, it would betotally today!