I’m rewatching the initial episodes of Pluribus while waiting for new ones to come out, specifically to savour the film-making and storytelling now I already know what happens in each episode.
Pluribus is the antithesis of modern American drama. It is film-making with space to breathe and room to think, without rushing through the shots or clobbering you with sound. It’s the epitome of “show, don’t tell” with long stretches where you are invited to observe the characters and scenery in silence and come to your own conclusions.
I noticed music was sparely used, mostly when Carol was experiencing apocalyptic trauma in the initial episodes. And even then, it was classical music at a moderate volume instead of the usual contemporary blare of paralysing sound. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that approach to filmmaking, given how allergic I am to the way it’s usually done these days, which I find painful, insulting and manipulative.
It’s interesting how this exact thing in our opinion was a major contributor to killing Dr Who in recent decades: rushing you from shot to shot while assaulting your ears, not paying attention to quality writing, focusing on sensationalism and bombast instead of thoughtfulness and restraint. We are just rewatching The Sea Devils from the 1970s and noted that back then, there was space in the drama, room to observe the characters and think about what was happening. The characters themselves were usually calm and observing instead of rushing around in agitation, and music or incidental sounds were more sparse and subtle. It’s like The Sound Wars that killed sonic quality in much of contemporary music has its equivalent in filmmaking.
Returning to Pluribus, it’s such a pleasure to see their beautiful, careful cinematography, which already impressed us on Breaking Bad. All the scenery shots are astonishing postcards, all the general shots exquisitely set up for storytelling. It’s such an aesthetic and intellectual pleasure to watch this series.
Something from the makers:
Brett and I were talking about possible character arcs for Carol. After watching The Gap Brett thinks Carol may genuinely start to treat the hive people better, start to be curious and maybe become a bit of an ally to them, as opposed to our man from Paraguay. I’m more cautious, thinking leopards don’t usually change their spots. Having said that, I don’t think Carol is a sociopath (it bothers her that her temper tantrums result in widespread deaths); I think she’s super rude, incredibly narcissistic and also rather brainwashed, and in theory those three things can charge. I wouldn’t want to offer a probability.
Carol is so representative of the entitlement, egoism, xenophobia, loudness, rudeness, and unquestioned sense of cultural superiority that I loathe and always have, even as a child in Europe (that’s where I was when Reagan was elected), in the worst of white Americans and their inherited culture of exceptionalism, ignorance, anti-intellectualism and lack of curiosity (which ultimately found a ready bedfellow in the Resident Rump). I’m not saying other Western cultures don’t have massive flaws: they do. However, the US has always struck me as the pinnacle of that kind of institutionalised selfishness, materialism and depravity, at the same time setting itself up as the world’s policeman and genuinely and perplexingly seeing themselves as a force of moral good. The statistics (both historical and ongoing) show otherwise.😵
Carol should appeal as a heroine to those kinds of Americans. It’s interesting not just how close her surname, Sturka, is to the Latin word stercus (=shit), but how close Carol is to Karen, which became a nickname for loud entitled white women during the pandemic. The moment humans began to show high levels of concern for and cooperation with one another and did things differently to the usual American social modus operandi, she othered them to the point of apparently not considering them human, despite them showing nothing but care and concern for her. Her treatment of them is so like the historical treatment of black people in the US — use and abuse while laying claim to the moral high ground.
Her treatment of the hive people revulses me to watch. Tone, wording, body language all convey the utmost contempt and disdain, especially when she is exploiting their willingness to serve and care for her. There is no please, no thank you, no curiosity about the hive people’s experience. Were this a real scenario I’d have so many questions I’d love to ask Zosia, like does she fully remember her life before, is there anything she misses, what is hive thinking and life like, what are her favourite aspects of it — and a billion other questions on philosophy, history, you name it; these guys are walking encyclopaedias. I’d want to be good neighbours with them and to connect to them even as I was making up my mind whether I wanted to join the hive mind or not. I think it would be possible to work out a respectful arrangement with them where you could cooperate and work with them and contribute to what is important to them, and be friendly and kind to one another, and enjoy all of that.
If Carol does reform, I wonder if we will get more of her back story on whatever early experiences produced her anger and derision, which were already well evident even prior to the Big Change. She was clearly having problems with alcohol too. It would be nice if she could grow and change even at this late stage in her life and starting from such an abysmal (and incredibly immature) level.
Our man from Paraguay is another enigma. He should appeal as a hero to fans of toxic masculinity, extreme individualism, survivalism etc. I laughed at his declaration to his fellow, now-hive South Americans that they had “stolen” everything and they had no right to be there (or even exist). Sound familiar? Currently in the US that’s the rhetoric directed at the latter non-white immigrants (“illegal” or not) who work for a pittance, by a dominant culture who in fact stole everything from Indigenous Americans and then for good measure kidnapped African people for slavery, all the while maintaining their moral high ground. I’m sure the upcoming episode will be fascinating.
Thanks. It’s fascinating that you see Carol from this perspective. I took her to be a heroine, however flawed and abrasive, representing the defiant human spirit in the face of the pureed hive minds etc. Eg she represents the amazon tribe/free thinker holding out against the homogenised, privacy-deprived modern world, not the other way round.
What I don’t get about the hive people is why they do anything at all, and why it would matter if some/most of them died, if those left still retained the knowledge and memories of those people.
BTW for something with the same SW USA setting and SF undertones, but a lot dumber, try The Boroughs.
Thank you for your comment, Steve.🦎
Judging by the reviews, it seems nearly impossible for people from the USA not to see Carol as a hero however flawed, given the social scripts with which US citizens are raised. It can look quite different to a European or an Australian or someone who wasn’t raised on those particular social scripts.
It’s interesting to me you describe the hive mind as “pureed” — given they hold all the collective understanding of human history, now joined up instead of siloed. I would call that integrated, as biological hive minds usually are. I would be far more inclined to describe the existing mainstream mind as “pureed” — affected as it is by the inevitable toxic social indoctrination of Homo colossus, via patriotic ideas, marketing etc, which to me peaks in the USA, which is holding all the rest of us in the world to ransom (This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein is a pretty good introduction to why I say this, in its examination of the utter powerlessness of many traditional communities around the world to retain any kind of sovereignty over their own patches or lives in the face of corporate powers and international laws made to favour those corporations).
It’s interesting that a lot of people in reviews describe the Hive People as robotic — in part I think that’s because people judge so much by conventional external criteria. For instance, when I had difficulties with my larynx, 99 out of 100 strangers immediately treated me like I was stupid, even though I have above average intellectual and practical skills. And it’s the same with the Hive People, whose silence when with each other is mistaken for dullness, but they have zero need to speak to one another, since they are all neurally networked. They just speak to conventional humans. And by joining up like this they have already achieved a thousand times the environmental and social good than what our sorry dominant culture as it stands would ever reach in a million years — so instead we will go over the cliff, protesting all the way down that our “freedom” (that results in our daily annihilation of 150 species and countless human scapegoats and skivvies) is worth fighting for.
Re why would the Hive People do anything at all — well, why would “normal” humans? Why would hive insects? Also let’s ask your same question, what does it matter if any of them die? What are your criteria? And the assumptions behind the criteria?
The Hive People aren’t perfect, of course. No biological kind is, but what sets modern humans apart from nonhumans (and indeed some still surviving patches of functional Indigenous cultures) is that the latter still, in ecosystems, cooperate to support life as a whole, while dominant culture pulps all life, including its own “underclass”, in order to grasp materials and power. I’m not sure if you’re very familiar with these ideas — I’m a biologist — but if not, I recommend The Culture Of Make-Believe by Derrick Jensen as a good introduction, and as an antidote to the idea that Carol is any kind of hero (and in Transactional Analysis terms, she’s operating on child level, not adult level, exactly as the dominant culture likes to shape its workers to be, because then it’s so much easier for the “parent figures” to control them).
My biggest critique of the Hive People is their lack of boundary setting on narcissistic entities like Carol. But then, as a new hive, they may be emotionally unable to fathom her behaviour yet. There’s a world of difference between knowing something rationally, and being able to act on it if emotional baggage gets in the way. And anyway, that’s how the screenwriters wrote them.😉