Welcome to you, dear reader, but also, in a way, welcome to me. We’re here at the beginning of something: my voyage into Substack, timed to coincide with my becoming a published novelist, with my debut novel, The Great Game, hitting shelves, virtual and physical, next Tuesday, the 14th of July.
You’re getting this because you’ve either followed me on Substack or been kind enough to opt into receiving the periodic Prodigal updates, or just because you’re a close enough friend or colleague that I’ve taken the leap that you won’t mind me sticking your email address on this distribution list. If it’s not your jam, please unsubscribe at once, with my apologies — but we’ve got to start somewhere, and this is where it’s at: The Dread and the Envy, a weekly newsletter, in which I’m going to write about how I see the world of pop culture through the lens of a politically committed citizen and how I view global politics and history through the lens of pop culture.
The newsletter title is pulled from a line of the old British martial hymn “Rule, Britannia!” because I feel it evokes precisely the biggest emotions that most of us carry about with us day to day in this era of late-stage capitalism and imperial decline.
Today’s piece is about polarization. Because I figured we should start with something easy.
From Polarized Politics to a Polarized Everything
It’s beyond cliché to say that we live in polarized times. It is simply a truth that we all now wearily accept and carry about with us as a burden of everyday life. Certainly I do.
Something, however, seems to be changing. A couple of recent experiences have led me to believe that we are tipping over beyond political polarization (where there are specific polarizing issues, policies, people) and into a kind of deeply embedded operating system of polarization, where every action, interaction, thought, and engagement has polarization built into it.
Here are the things that happened to me that led me to this conclusion.
Supergirl and Pedophiles
About a week ago, I took my 8-year-old daughter Odetta to see the new Supergirl movie. I was excited to share it with her. The trailers and the early buzz suggested both that it would be a fun ride and that it would be suitable for a daddy-daughter day date.
Now, before I say anything else, let me be clear that I wanted to like this movie. I’m a big fan of what James Gunn has been doing in the DC Universe, as well as of his previous work, Craig Gillespie is a gifted filmmaker and Milly Alcock was, by some way, the best thing about House of the Dragon, which has missed her ever since she left it.
Add to all that, I’m a die-hard superhero native — one of the places I am a loyal citizen of is the DC Universe, and this is a passion I share with my own father. Taking my daughter to see this movie - as I had taken her to see Gunn’s Superman last summer, was an act of filial love up and down the generations.
Unfortunately, while there was much to like about the movie, it failed utterly as suitable entertainment for my daughter. The way it failed was also the movie’s deepest failing as a dramatic work: it has an utterly useless, forgettable, poorly drawn, inconsistent, illogical villain.
(SPOILER ALERT: I now discuss the plot of Supergirl for about 500 words. If you’d like to skip that section and jump straight to the rest of this newsletter’s argument about polarisation, feel free, but you’ll also miss some good stuff about dogs.)
The villain’s name is Krem. He’s a brigand with a penchant for face piercings and puppy torture. His motivations are genuinely baffling. He starts the movie by massacring a family of sword makers in cold blood in order to steal their swords from them, swords that he then seems to completely forget about for the rest of the movie. He never even uses the swords that he steals, nor does he sell them, or exchange them for cosmic star dust. I’m not looking for reality here. I’m looking for a credible McGuffin, and Krem didn’t supply it.
Later on he shoots Supergirl’s beloved pet dog, Krypto. Now maybe that’s just the sort of thing that bad guys do according to screenwriting manuals, except he doesn’t just shoot him; he specifically shoots him with a very slow-acting poison that we are told the brigands use as a torture tool to extract information from prisoners. What information Krem thought he was going to extract from a small yappy-type dog is unclear, given that he didn’t at that moment even know who the dog’s owner was.
Anyway, this isn’t meant to be a film review. The reason I’m going into some depth about Krem’s inadequacies as a villain is I’m pretty convinced that the filmmakers, as I say a group of talented people, came to the same conclusion. They realized that most movies are only as good as their bad guy, and they had pulled a real stinker, so they came up with a solution: they decided to elevate Krem into a supervillain by making him the head of an intergalactic pedophile gang.
If you’ve seen the movie, you know I’m not exaggerating. If you haven’t seen it, I’m not exaggerating.
This isn’t subtext. This isn’t like the extraordinary, resonant, and powerful Pleasure Island sequence in Disney’s Pinocchio. Pinocchio is a brilliant piece of filmmaking: it awakens both a child’s and a parent’s deepest fears and deepest fantasies simultaneously and it does so by suggestion.
At no point in Pinocchio does Jiminy Cricket say, “Watch out, little wooden boy, they want to stick their fleshy screwdrivers up your ass!”
In Supergirl, Krem’s motivations are made absolutely explicit. We witness Krem kidnapping young prepubescent girls and brutally massacring their families in front of them — with knives and axes (not swords), and real-looking blood — and we are told, explicitly that he is doing so in order to build a harem of forced brides to perpetuate his “all-male race”.
Now Supergirl is a movie very explicitly marketed to young women in all its key art and trailers (none of which so much as hint at the pedophile plot line), and in much of its press it leans hard into its feminist girl-power attributes. Hence, it is presumably a movie that the studio would like parents to take their daughters to, or would like young teenage girls to see by themselves. Ratings-wise, Supergirl is a PG-13 movie. That means that under 13s can see it with the guidance of their parents.
I had foolishly assumed that this meant that some guidance was possible. If you can figure out what that guidance is, or how best to explain these plot elements to your 8-year-old daughter as she asks you, repeatedly, throughout the movie, why the bad man wants to kidnap the nice girls, then you are a better parent in the moment than I am.
I said all this in an Instagram/Facebook post, which immediately surprised me by going low-key viral, with over 15,000 views and hundreds of comments. It’s the comments you should read.
If you don’t have the time, here’s what happens: fights and arguments break out in the comment threads, dividing bizarrely on political grounds.
Roughly half the people agree with me, but many who agree with me seem to think I am taking a political position, citing, for example, the Epstein files and the prevalence of pedophilia in our broader elite cultures as the real problem. The other half, who disagree with me and who also disagree with the first half, are demanding the right for this movie to have pedophilia in it because to not do so would be being a left-wing snowflake.
One deeply fought thread points out that nobody complained about The Accountant 2, (a Ben Affleck staring hard-R action movie) which deals with a pedophilic gang, so what’s the problem with this one?
(We’ll leave aside the large group who decided to question my judgement as a parent in taking a young girl to a movie clearly and squarely targeted at young girls.)
There are others who are furious with me for my apparent ignorance of the comics that the movie is based on. For the record, a) I wasn’t ignorant of them, and in most of the history of the comics, Krem is a sort of charismatic space pirate, not remotely a pedophile and b) Since when do superhero movies slavishly follow their source material? Others are angry at my apparent deliberate confusion about how villains work. Villains, apparently, need to do things that are really bad.
I choose not to engage with any of this in the comments, and I’m not going to argue with them here — beyond observing that I, an experienced producer, screenwriter, playwright, and novelist, do in fact have some views on how villains work in narrative; and to suggest that when Coleridge wrote in awed praise of Shakespeare’s masterful depiction of Iago as a being of “motiveless malignity,” he didn’t mean that no one knew or cared why Iago did what he did.
What he meant was that Iago’s cancer was so deep in his soul, that everything he did was motivated from his own deep disease with himself, and his prime driver was not prosaic, plot-driven reasons, though he had plenty of those. Shakespeare’s extraordinary writing, illustrating every aspect of Iago’s pervasive malevolence made us fully understand — empathize with — this most multifaceted of villains.
This is not what the makers of Supergirl have achieved with Krem.
I digress. Let’s get back to polarization.
It’s impossible to read the comments underneath my Instagram post without seeing that a lot (not all) of the people are responding simply to pick a fight. Not to make any attempt to engage with my (or each other’s) substantive arguments, but because my post gives them a platform to shout an agenda from their corner. Which raises a question: when the hell did we get to a place where the statement that a family entertainment shouldn’t feature a pedophile became an excuse for a fight?
It turned out that my Instagram post was only one tiny piece of this. The entire internet, it appeared, had decided to take Supergirl as a battering ram to hit each other with. Here is a representative selection of headlines:
“After questionable remarks from star Milly Alcock, new tracking shows ‘Supergirl’ on track for $200M loss” — Fox News / OutKick
“Woke ‘Supergirl’ Movie Belly Flops in Theaters” — American Greatness
“New York Times blames ‘misogyny,’ fans for ‘Supergirl’ flop after disastrous opening weekend” — Fox News / OutKick
“Supergirl Now Faces Feminist Backlash Over Milly Alcock Comments” — Cosmic Book News
Now there was a time when blockbuster movies were supposed to have a political point of view. And that time wasn’t even that long ago. You don’t have to go back to The Manchurian Candidate, All the President’s Men or Taxi Driver. The Black Panther films are works of genuine cinematic genius, and they clearly have things to say about what it is to be black in America and in the world. Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy is, I think, the most insightful cinematic response to how America changed after 9/11.
Today though, even the slightest whiff of a political agenda, even one that’s not in the movie but mildly in the press tour of the movie or in an off-the-cuff remark that the star of the movie makes, becomes weaponized. Not just against the sweet 26-year-old actress from Australia who thought that maybe she was allowed to speak her mind now that she was a movie star, but against the people who liked the movie and then back against the people who didn’t like the movie but who didn’t like it for the wrong reason, and on and on and on.
The discourse around Supergirl is my Exhibit A that we have moved to some new level of polarization, beyond the political, beyond any actual issue or personality and into a general mechanism that informs every aspect of how we make, market, consume and discuss culture.
AI Shaming
To take a different example: you’ll all have noticed that in about the last three months, the global conversation on AI has shifted dramatically. Stage 1 was a general excitement and enthusiasm for a new technology unlike any that has come before it. Stage 2 was a darker, more pessimistic conversation about its ramifications whether it will replace us in our work and our lives, and the potential for a roboapocalypse.
Then, just for a moment, it felt like there was going to be a real and useful debate
A brief lived Stage 3 emerged which saw the leaders of AI companies calling on each other and on the government for sensible regulation. Essentially, they were saying, yes, AI is a complex technology that holds within it both huge potential for the betterment of the world and huge dangers, just like every major technology since gunpowder has done. That felt like a moment of real potential. It didn’t last.
Instead we entered Stage 4: where we are now is that all complexity has disappeared from the discussion and the lines are, simplistically put: you’re either for humans and creativity, or you’re for the robots and the oppression of all mankind.
Even worse than this simplicity is the fact that neither side of the debate seems to have any actual proposals how to actually manage the most powerful technology every unleashed.
The pro-AI side, loosely speaking, despite conceding the possibility of a global apocalypse, are all hell-bent on rushing forward as fast as possible towards it, seemingly on the rationalization that if someone is going to do it, it might as well be them. On the other side, there’s an awful lot of behavior that Douglas Adams’ creation, the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal would be proud of i.e., people sticking their heads in the sand, believing that if you can’t see your problem, it can’t see you.
Spoiler: it doesn’t end well for either the ravenous Bugblatter Beast or for those who surprise it.
AI polarization came into my own life recently. Let me give some context to set the scene.
I am, and always have been, an early adopter of technology, that’s something I got from Douglas Adams directly as it happens, who was a big figure in my early professional life. I had a personal website in the early 90s, I ran an internet entertainment company in the early 2000s,
I am, also, and always have been, also a creator who venerates the work of other creatives — artists and artisans alike. I have run companies and managed productions that have made television series, movies, and large-scale theatre shows, employing hundreds of people. I am also a working screenwriter, whose career has been disrupted in recent years by the contraction of my industry.
As such, I am deeply worried about what AI will do to the livelihoods of creatives, particularly as it removes the training grounds for young writers, executives, producers, editors, and the like. But I am not built like a Bugblatter Beast, so I have cautiously and deliberately set about understanding the applications of large language models in my own creative process: this has been a process of trial and error and gradual education as both the models and my facility with them has improved. Using these things wrong is bad for the brain and bad for the work. But using them right - as research aides, formatting tools and proofreaders - can significantly improve creativity. In no case are they replacing me or any other humans in my work flows, and in no case are they doing any actual writing for me, I like doing my own writing, that’s why I’m a writer. I use them as tools, and they are proving useful as such.
To give one concrete example, this article is being dictated into Wispr, an AI dictation app which has increased my speed of output about two-fold, because whilst I am a fast typist, I am a much faster thinker and talker.
I’ve also become an advisor to a small AI startup which focuses on self-development through journaling. The app, Fable, is the brainchild of one of my oldest friends, Simon Hill, who is one of the most moral and thoughtful people I know. His objective in building Fable is to give everyday people a sort of pocket genie who can help them think through the chaos of their lives, organize it into a narrative that makes satisfying, emotional sense, and lead them to a deeper understanding of their own development and meaning.
A few weeks ago, a mutual friend introduced me to a fellow author, entrepreneur, and creative producer with whom I appeared to share many interests. The introduction went as these things normally do: friendly initial email, friendly responses, the introducer was moved to bcc, and we started arranging to meet.
A few hours later, I received the message below.
Thanks for reaching out. Unfortunately, while reviewing Prodigal’s past work, we realized that the brand has a history of using gen-AI (specifically, the Fable Immersive Journal for Everyone). XXXXXX has a very strict policy about not partnering with creators who incorporate gen-AI in their products, meaning we won’t be able to work together.
I stared at it, confused. First, I was intrigued that my little production company was being referred to as a brand. Secondly, I was intrigued at the idea that we were going to be working together. I didn’t think we had got there yet. We’d only just been introduced. We hadn’t met. The idea was that we were going to have a chat to get to know each other, something that, until this email, my correspondent had seemed quite keen on.
I wrote back and described as best I could in a short email my nuanced views on AI and gave a little more detail on what my friend Simon’s company actually does. This was greeted by an even stranger message:
XXXXXXX does not (and will never) knowingly commission any artist, writer, or creator of any kind who has, is, or is intending to use AI generative elements in the final iteration of their art, creations, or content.
Putting aside that this sentence seems almost definitely to have been written and sent by a large language model, I recognized the polarized operating system at work, and disengaged.
I am sure that many of you reading this could point to similar moments in your own recent lives. Indeed, a brief survey of social media reflects dozens of biographies, thousands of biographies that now include a statement as to their owners’ position on AI. Agents say they won’t sign authors who use AI. Publishers cancel authors who are found to have used AI to edit or write their work, even as it is increasingly apparent that unsolicited scripts and manuscripts and job applications at those same companies are being evaluated by AI bots. So somehow it’s fine for the gatekeepers to use AI to evaluate creative work but not for creatives to use it for the same purpose.
Meanwhile, Netflix buys Ben Affleck’s AI filmmaking startup, Michael Caine licenses his voice to an AI audiobook of the Odyssey, even as Christopher Nolan releases his resolutely anti-AI, anti-CGI epic of the same story. The contradictions and hypocrisy in all this are so manifold it would take an LLM an age to count them.
The battle lines have been drawn, and it doesn’t matter that the last thing we need, when confronting the most transformative technology in humanity’s history, are battle lines. What we need is national level co-ordination and regulation.
I don’t even think this is truly about AI. Most of the anti-AI people, I strongly suspect, are using AI whether they admit it or not, because AI is largely now built into every software product, app, website, search engine, and connected device that we own. It has quickly become almost impossible, unless you are very, very determined about it, to navigate the world without activating a large language model.
Meanwhile, those same people who are publicly most passionate for AI, AGI, super-intelligence, and the rest of it are all banning their kids from using phones, tablets, or social media. If you want proof of this, just check the wait lists on Silicon Valley’s most elite Waldorf and Montessori schools.
Once again, this is a polarization operating system that has become so embedded within us that we can’t find a way to shake it, even when discussing arguably the most important topic currently facing humanity.
Polarization and the Death of Story
I think the Polarization Operating System takes us into a more profound and more dangerous place as a civilization. Figuring out the hows and whys and solutions for that, though, is somewhat above my pay grade, and definitely beyond the scope of one substack post.
What I want to speak about in conclusion instead is how the polarization operating system profoundly destroys storytelling.
It is often said that story is conflict; that to write a good story, you need your characters to disagree, and have a powerful force of opposition working against their objectives. Loosely speaking, this is true — or at least I agree with it without opposition.
You might think, then, that stories full of polarized characters who profoundly disagree with each other would be good ones. Or that stories that launch into the world full of people willing to take polarized positions on the issues they explore would be more popular.
Sadly, this is not so. What a story really thrives on is argument, and for argument to be compelling, the audience has to have sympathy with both sides.
A polarized operating system renders this impossible — both for the characters who operate within it, and for the audience members or readers who are receiving them.
Good and satisfying storytelling demands not just opposition but ultimately resolution, or, in the classic Greek model from which every school of Hollywood screenwriting is derived: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
We have no shortage of thesis and antithesis, but in a polarized world, no synthesis is possible.
What you end up getting, I’m very afraid, is villains and heroes who proclaim much but believe little, and dramas full of sound and fury and platitudes, signifying nothing. Villains rather like Krem and movies rather like Supergirl.
I hope I have avoided this trap in my forthcoming debut novel The Great Game but I am fearful that the audience’s reaction to it will be just as polarized as everything else in our sorrowful and scary times. The fact that I have put an Indian character at the heart of a Sherlockian mystery — and, worse, have allowed him to question both the great detective himself and the young Winston Churchill — will be seen not as me trying to have thoughtful fun in a canon I love, but as me picking a polarized fight.
We’ll see.
Thanks for sticking with me till the end of this long first substack. Writing it is sort of an experiment for me. As an about-to-be-published author, social media is a necessary tool to put my wares in front of audiences, but I have, as you are probably gathering, I harbor a deep suspicion of the algorithm-driven soundbite nature of much social media. Substack and its siblings, along with long-form podcasts, offer an antidote to this. They give space for the full argument. They depend on readers like you who read to the end, and by that simple act, weaken the grip of the polarization operating system.
Oh, since you’re here and asking so nicely, here’s a link to find out more about the book.
Arvind Ethan David is a writer and producer of television, plays, audio and books. He thinks too hard about things. Did we mention he has a book coming out?