collective understanding of the horror of the Other has become near-completely welded to a specific depiction of trauma in the last decade. this depiction is genuine and well-intentioned but bubbling under its surface is condescension, pity, and an unconscious complicity in presenting the infliction of trauma as iconography of power, as a microcosm of the human experience. this complicity is survived by irony, echoing and reinforcing the iconography, ensuring that the traumatized stay branded like cattle.

it's hard to imagine an image that can carry this glut of information more effectively than Ricky recalling hiding under a table as his co-stars get mauled, only able to keep a straight face by speaking through the SNL skit. and his meat-grinder sacrifice of horses to keep the creature tame, Halloween (2018) syndrome, the insistence on drawing more blood, discharging strength.

but if this perverse infrastructure could somehow be documented, like the insulindian phasmid, it would present a path forward that is otherwise impossible, the only meaningful movements not in the language of dated narratives, the only expression that doesn't have to actively dodge its own fascistic impulses.