The original Gremlins was a surprise hit. A genuinely freaky, low budget creature feature, which just happened to strike a cord with a mass audience.

Probably because of the merchandising of the original Baby Yoda; the mogwai Gizmo. Who I clearly remember knowing about as a kid, just as knew about Wicket from RoTJ, or ET. Despite those movie being arguably unsuitable for my age group. Which Gremlins definitely was, unlike the sequel, which is cartoonishly unscary, intentionally so IMHO.

(2/?)

The corporation whose building the story of the Gremins sequel takes place in, Clamp, stands in as a proxy for the studio I suspect.

G2 predicts the UX nightmare of the modern "smart office" and "smart home". With a line from the Clamp CEO, having just escaped the place with our heroes as its overrun by Gremlins. I remember it as;

This isn't a place for people, it's a place for things, and if you make a place for things, things come.

(3/?)

I don't know whether Joe Dante was familiar with Terry Pratchett's Diskworld, and the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions. But I strongly suspect this is a reference.

If they hadn't been released the same year, I would have assumed this was lifted directly from Pratchett's 1990 novel Moving Pictures. Where the Diskworld's weak reality is further thinned by the comic fantasy equivalent of cinema and the Things start to climb through the screen.

(4/?)

There are many reasons I wish Pratchett was still alive, but one is that I'd dearly love to see a Diskworld take on social media platforms, crypto, and the #MOLE Training hype bubble. Pratchett's H P Lovecraft inspired, eldritch Things would no doubt have had a field day with their Disworld equivalents.

Anyway, this all started with thinking about another author, comic writer Alan Moore, creator of V for Vendetta and Swamp Thing.

(5/?)

The first version of V for Vendetta was a comic serial published by DC between 1992-95. In his 2003 retrospective film The Mindscape of Alan Moore, Moore said he wrote it to issue a literary warning to the people of Britain about the dangers of mass surveillance. Instead, he said, successive governments practically used it as a reference guide for how to ramp up authoritarian practices, and especially passive spying on their citizens.

(6/?)

#Comics #AlanMoore #VForVendetter

I'm certain George Orwell would be feeling the same way about 1984 if he'd lived to 100 and stayed sharp. I imagine if Aldous Huxley had somehow lived to 130, he would be starting to feel distinctly nervous about Brave New World going the same way.

I often wonder if Charlie Brooker is feeling this too, as DataFarming corporations increasingly throw off the pseudo-liberal reputation laundering, and openly build out the technofascist solutionism of Brooker's Black Mirror stories.

(7/?)

Moore goes on to say that after he noticed this, and a few similar curious coincidences, he came to believe that - to paraphrase Asimov's third law - any sufficiently intentional art is indistinguishable from magick.

(8/?)

To spell is to cast a spell he says. To encode a fictional vision into the form of an artwork brings it closer to become reality.

Staying within a strictly rational paradigm, this can be interpreted as a nod to the way the experience of art influences the way people frame our understandings of the world, changing our actions in it. Changing our cultural worlds, which in turn changes an objective material world.

(9/?)

Moore says he goes further, believing that the material world is not a pre-defined set of objects that we perceive and alter, but a sort of soup of patterns and potentiality. That reality is determined as much by what we all think as anything we do.

But either way, he certainly won't be designing any more dystopias, and neither will I.

(10/?)