Tag Archive : CULTURE

It was 2016, and Aneesh Chaganty was fumbling through the most important phone call of his barely-begun career. The young filmmaker had been given 15 minutes to convince actor John Cho to star in Search, a mystery about a father trying to track down his missing teenage daughter. The characters’ ordeal—and their entire relationship—would be told via a series of screens, as its hero uses everything from Facebook to FaceTime to Reddit to solve his kid’s disappearance.

Other films have taken the same web-centered approach, like 2015’s horror hit Unfriended, but Chaganty wanted to do something different: “The Memento of screen movies,” he says. For Cho, however, the concept didn’t click. “It was the first time I’d spoken to a celebrity in my life, and I completely botched the call,” says Chaganty. “I didn’t tell him we were trying to do something new. His hesitation was that this wouldn't be a movie movie—that it would just be a YouTube video.”

Chaganty, 27, didn’t give up. He still had Cho’s number, so he decided to text him, to see if they could get some actual face-time together. The two eventually met for coffee in Los Angeles, no longer separated by a device. “He sat down, and I stood up and just pitched my ass off,” Chaganty says. He wound up selling Cho on the film, and a year and a half later, Search was screening at the Sundance Film Festival, where it would win multiple awards—and be scooped up for $5 million by Sony’s Screen Gems division. Newly retitled Searching, the movie opens today in several cities, following a highly promising limited-release opening weekend.

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Co-written with Sev Ohanian—who produced Fruitvale Station, Ryan Coogler’s breakout debut—Searching is the latest film to deftly employ small-screen habits to tell a big-screen story: This year alone, there’s been the speedy text-message chain that kicks off Crazy Rich Asians; the soul-baring YouTube videos of Eighth Grade; and the parent-baffling emoji-missives of Blockers. It’s a marked change from the countless goofy interfaces and Finder-Spyder searches that dominated movies and TV shows starting in the ‘90s. Now a new generation of filmmakers, many of whom came of age in the digital era, are finding ways to ensure the online experience is presented as IRL-ish as possible.

“Ever since [1998’s] You've Got Mail, people have been this trying to figure out how technology falls into a story,” says Chaganty. “House of Cards was one of the first shows to have text messages pop up, and that was revolutionary in its own time. But I think the success stories we’re seeing now is because people are saying, ‘How can we keep it accurate and realistic, and still serve the tone of the movie?’”

In Searching, Cho plays David Kim, a recent widower who’s constantly in touch with his only daughter, Margot (Michelle La). When Margot doesn’t come home after school one day, David begins scouring her online life—Venmo transactions, Facebook friends, livestream archives, even old Tumblr posts—in an attempt to figure out where she went. He also enlists the support of a deeply concerned detective (Will & Grace’s Debra Messing), whom he communicates with largely by FaceTime.

Much of the early part of the film plays out on David’s computer, including an opening montage that condenses the first 16 years of his daughter’s life, as well as the final years of his wife’s cancer battle, into a series of clickable videos, calendar events, and email exchanges. It’s a niftily constructed and unexpectedly moving sequence, one that serves as a reminder of just how much of our existence plays out in front of us on-screen.

Chaganty began thinking about filmmaking when he was 8 years old, having seen a photo of writer-director M. Night Shyamalan in the newspaper India West. “I vividly remember thinking, ‘He looks like me. I want to do that,’” Chaganty wrote in a letter he posted to Twitter last week. As a middle-school student growing up in San Jose, California, he began using hand-me-down, slightly outdated cameras he’d been gifted by his parents, two movie-loving software entrepreneurs. Chaganty made home movies with titles like The Shed and The Attic, inspired in part by the no-budget short films Shyamalan had made as a kid. “I thought, ‘Oh, he made movies using the means I have now—which is no means,” says Chaganty. “Those really got me into filmmaking.”

He and Ohanian, 31, first met at University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Afterward, the two collaborated on Seeds, a touching short-form travelogue shot using Google Glass. Chaganty would end up working in the company’s Creative Labs division for two years until quitting his job to pursue Searching. “I called my dad up after I started at Google, and told him about my day,” says Chaganty. “He was like, ‘Awesome. But remember: You’re coming back here to make movies.’ They’ve been very much, ‘Don’t chase a paycheck, chase your dream’ since I was growing up.”

While writing Searching, Chaganty and Ohanian took in as many crime-culture artifacts as possible, from the big-screen version of Gone Girl to Netflix’s Making a Murderer to episodes of Serial. Because the movie takes place on screen, the two wrote what they called “a scriptment”—essentially a 50-page outline featuring dialogue and action descriptions, but downplaying the technical specifics.

“Early on, we realized this couldn't be a script that said, ‘INT. — GOOGLE CHROME — FACEBOOK — TAGGED PHOTOS — NIGHT,” says Chaganty. “If you're trying to convince actors to be in a movie, that’s the worst way to do it.” And while the film itself was shot in less than two weeks, Searching’s editors spent months putting together the David Kim’s on-screen world: “Every single asset you see‚—whether it's a line of text on a text message, or an email window—had to be created from scratch.”

The glut of online ephemera in Searching means the filmmakers were able to spread hidden in-jokes, clues, and messages throughout the film—including a nod to the man who unknowingly helped launch Chaganty’s career nearly two decades ago. “There's a moment where we log onto Facebook,” he says, “and a news item that says, ‘M. Night Shyamalan: Filmmaker agrees to meet with super-fan director after director’s surprise cameo in film.’ Hopefully, someone will send him a screenshot, or tell him, ‘Go watch Searching.’” If so, it would give Chaganty a near-perfect twist ending of his own.

As we’ve taken our small-screen destiny into our own hands—skinny bundles, “over the top” content, a device-agnostic smorgasbord of streaming—our hands have become empty, idle. Channel surfing feels futile, if not obsolete. TV is no longer a remote-controlled menu to peruse as much as it’s a Tube Goldberg machine carrying our eyes from one diversion to the next. Choice is everywhere; agency, not so much.

Algorithms forever recommend what to watch. Autoplay functions cue up the next episode without waiting for your input. With nothing left to do but gaze and glaze, a viewer’s chief responsibility is to not fall asleep (lest you wake to find yourself five episodes into an unwitting binge of Hell’s Kitchen). It’s strange, then, given its role as the architect of programmatic passivity, that Netflix is handing back the reins via choose-your-own-adventure experiences it’s calling “interactive content.”

Starting in late 2017, Netflix piloted the idea in a handful of children’s shows, peppering installments of Puss in Boots and Buddy Thunderstruck with moments that asked viewers to pick a prompt: Should Puss kiss Dulcinea or shake her hand? Should Buddy and Darnell have a Wet Willie contest or work out and “get jacked”? The decisions gave you a glimmer of control, but Netflix’s latest ambitions lie more in a Sliding Doors or Clue direction: complex stories for grown-ups that reward their choices with starker consequences.

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Netflix’s first concerted push into interactive TV, “Bandersnatch,” aired at the end of 2018. A standalone episode of dystopian sci-fi satire Black Mirror (of course), it told the tale of a video­game designer who tries to adapt a choose-your-own-adventure novel that drove its author insane (oh, of course). Not a fourth wall was left standing. The result, a time-­bending existential thriller with terrifying overtones, was twisty and meta enough not to feel like a gimmick. But it’s difficult to imagine another, less shrewd show pulling off such structural contortions.

Not to say they won’t try. As Todd Yellin, Netflix’s vice president of product, told me before “Bandersnatch” premiered, “We’re starting to hear other stories. There’s a rich vein.” Corporate coquettishness aside, more experiences are in the offing—and judging by the company’s prodigious investments in anime, romantic comedy, and other genres, plenty of them.

Netflix knows the value of our choices well. We’re already being prompted to navigate narrative junctures; it’s called “personalization.” We watch shows, so we’re offered new shows. We watch those shows, then learn about still other shows. Each time we bump from one to the next unravels a Boolean knot, an if-then dance of demographics and precedent—who you are, what you’ve watched—that seeks to keep you right where you are rather than discovering the charms of another streaming platform.

Interactive TV may support more insidious ends, though. We’re already on the cusp of relinquishing our subconscious to technology: VR headsets that track our gaze and see our pupils dilate; virtual assistants that read our mood; sneakers that can tell we’re getting tired because our running stride falters. These are reactions, not choices. They don’t have an opt-out feature. And while they might not seem it, our narrative choices add up to a near-biometric signature too, a portrait visible only in aggregate. Do we seek chaos? Play it safe? How long does it take us to select an option about breakfast cereal versus one where we can urge a character to commit suicide? Netflix already famously pores over every byte of viewer behavior data. Now the buttons we choose, the prompts we pick, the tastes they suggest could become part of that great graph that defines how the company sees us. Television in the age of psychographics.

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Officially, Netflix sees the interactive option as a “lean in” alternative to the “lean back” nature of conventional TV. But what really changes, experientially? Choose-your-own-adventure storytelling is, at its root, curiosity dressed up as control. By the third time you’ve followed one of the paths in “Bandersnatch” to an arbitrary ending, the only reason to loop back to try another tributary is a completist’s sense of duty. (What’s a watercooler moment when everyone at the watercooler saw only a portion of what’s possible?) When the show finally ends, you feel respect for creator Charlie Brooker’s ingenuity, but you don’t come away feeling changed, as you might after a tightly written, sharply edited, well-constructed hour of television. The more malleable the story, the less cogent the experience.

Videogames, the only real analog for interactive storytelling, have always balanced the trade-off by choosing their illusion, giving players pockets of free will in a straitjacket. You may not affect the outcome in an adventure game like God of War or Red Dead Redemption 2—you’ll get there or you won’t—but navigating the challenges in the story offsets the determinism with a visceral sense of autonomy. (Multiplayer games like Overwatch and Fortnite do away with explicit narrative entirely, baking their lore into the background so as not to interfere with their compete-die-repeat Groundhog Day-ness.)

Netflix’s choose-your-own-adventure content will find its audience—first through novelty, then because creators will tease ever more fireworks out of the form. But interactive TV starts at a disadvantage: It is arriving just as we’ve learned, in so many ways, not to interact at all.

Peter Rubin (@provenself) wrote about the Tetris effect in issue 26.11.

This article appears in the February issue. Subscribe now.

Professor Christine Blasey Ford was a teenager when she says Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh tried to rape her. You know the story by now. She didn’t report it at the time, but has come forward now that Kavanaugh is close to being confirmed as a justice to the highest court in the land. On Friday morning, President Trump tweeted that he had “no doubt” that if it had happened, Blasey Ford would have reported it right away.

That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works. I know this because this is my story, too, and the story of millions of people. Don’t believe me? Look at Twitter today. Look at the hashtag #WhyIDidntReport. Read the cacophony of stories—each different but the same. Stories of assault by strangers, friends, family members, teachers. The hashtag exposes the sheer banality of rape in America. Sexual assault is not rare. It’s common. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, there were 320,000 sexual assaults in the US in 2016. And 77 percent of people who experienced rape or sexual assault say they did not tell police.

That number is likely much higher. Though the NCVS data is the best the US has for now, critics have long warned that in addition to suffering from the risk of underreporting that befalls all self-reported surveys, its methodology specifically discourages reporting. In a study from five years ago, the National Academy of Sciences found that the government’s survey was probably vastly undercounting sexual crimes. That report found that a separate survey devoted to sexual assault and rape would have more accurate results.

Tweets are not a replacement for this data. But they can augment it. The stories told today give texture to the statistics that tell us this is common. Three hundred and twenty thousand—even if that number is low—is too big and abstract a number to really fathom. But the tweets shared this morning are real, and individual, and impossible to forget.

In an era of misinformation and bots on social media, when we have daily coverage of the pain that can be inflicted by social media, this hashtag is a reminder of how powerful these mediums can be in bringing people together. (Of course, it was also Twitter that the president used to share the tweet that so startled sexual assault survivors this morning.)

But it’s also worth remembering that a hashtag doesn’t tell the whole story of sexual assault in America. Not everyone is on Twitter, and many people aren’t comfortable sharing their stories—even vaguely—in such a public place. But for some, it’s a crucial outlet to validate our identities at a time when it feels like those in power would like us to be silent. Or invisible.

I say our, because I am included in this. When I read Trump’s tweet this morning, first I stopped breathing. When the most powerful person in the land denies your lived experience, it feels like someone punching you in the diaphragm.

When I breathed again, I paced the room, thinking about when I was a teenager, three years older than Ford at the time of her alleged assault. I was in college, and a boy I trusted date raped me in his room. I told a few friends and then didn’t mention it for years. I didn’t report it. I had a lot of reasons not to, but chief among them was: I didn’t think anyone would care. Why were you in his room, I thought they’d ask. I had previously reported a much less serious sexual assault—groping—in high school, and nothing had happened. Why go through the public embarrassment of that again? I didn’t even tell my family about it for 15 years.

This morning, I picked up my phone and tweeted about that incident. I wanted to speak directly to the president, or anyone reading his tweet and thinking it sounded right. Like the women and men who took to Twitter this morning, I wanted to declare: I exist, here is my story.

Reading through the tweets on the hashtag drives home the innumerable reasons people do not report these events. Chief among them is that they won’t be believed, and then they’ll be punished by whoever has an interest in protecting the status quo. Yet, the collectivism in a hashtag gives us all solidarity. Though it is at once the most public airing of our most personal story, it somehow feels less intimate to tweet about this kind of experience than to sit across the table from a family member or friend and tell them.

Why don’t people report? Here’s what some said.

I’m a man and it would make me seem weak.

It would ruin my career before it had even begun.

Nothing happened the first time I reported.

The person who raped me is the person I would have needed to report to.

They were a friend and I was in denial.

He told me he’d kill me if I told anyone.

Men are tweeting about how, for them, the stigma of coming out and reporting their sexual assault was too much to bear. That’s in line with research that’s been saying the same thing for years. People are sharing about how they didn't report professors or bosses who had power over their professional lives. Or how they didn't report family members on whom they literally depended for everything. They’re tweeting about police officers and administrators whom they did tell, but who doubted and blamed them.

This hashtag has power. After I had tweeted and I later saw the trending hashtag, I felt like my story was a raindrop in a lake, at once singular but part of something bigger. I was grateful.
I was floored by what so many people have gone through, even while not being surprised. The specifics of their pain: “He held my face so I couldn’t breathe.” “He was stronger than me, and my cousin.” “I was 13.”

Every woman and many men I know have a story. Or many stories. In 2016, in the weeks after the Access Hollywood tape came out, I wrote a list of the sexual assault and harassment in my life that I could remember. It wasn’t exhaustive, but it was exhausting. It had never occurred to me to write them down before because that kind of experience is so much an accepted part of life for women. “After we are leered at and groped, we get off the train, and go to work, and we don’t mention it, because why would we? This is part of being a woman,” I wrote at the time. I assumed everyone knew.

But everyone doesn’t know. That’s what the #metoo movement, and the backlash to it, has taught us. And that’s why so many people are reliving their own assaults today to share their stories. It hurts to educate people about the ordinariness of sexual assault. It means having to think about something someone might not want to think about. It means remembering the reasons you felt stifled from sharing in the first place. For many of us, it means remembering how violated and embarrassed and guilty, and above all, alone we felt.

I hesitated to tweet this morning. Even though I’d already written about my experience and told my family, and even though I really don’t feel as traumatized by it as I used to, I worried it could in some way seem unprofessional to tell my story. But this thing that happened to me when I was 18; it’s a truth I carry inside me every day.

Even now, telling feels dangerous, despite the fact that the story being told is so universal, which is exactly the point. These are our stories to tell.

Happy gnu year, and welcome back to The Monitor, WIRED's roundup of the latest in the world of culture, from box-office tallies to casting news. In today's installment: A final look at the money-making movie titans of 2018; Coachella announces its headliners for 2019; and a reminder that Hollywood is still an institutionally corrupt patriarchy struggling to keep up with the times!

Ticket Masters

The box office reached an all-time high in 2018, earning nearly $12 billion in revenue in the United States alone—and eclipsing a previous record set in 2016. Last year's big winner, not surprisingly, was Disney, which released 2018's three top-grossing films—Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, and Incredibles 2—as well as Ant-Man and the Wasp and, uh, Solo. Overseas, foreign box office totals were also up over the previous year, reaching nearly $30 billion, thanks in no small part to such worldwide smashes as Venom and Bohemian Rhapsody. And though an official tally for attendance isn't available yet, it's expected that the number of North American ticket-buyers in 2018 increased as well—which is good news for 2019. However, a different new data set is far less optimistic about the state of the industry…

Hollywood's Gender Disparity

A new study by San Diego State University's Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film finds that, despite increased coverage and awareness of Hollywood's woefully out-of-whack approach to gender equality, women are still underrepresented in filmmaking. The study notes that 20 percent of 2018's top 250 films featured women in roles characterized as "above-the-line"—an admittedly imperfect term used to describe the work of directors, writers, producers, and other key creatives. That number is up slightly from 2017, but it still amounts to "radical underrepresentation", according to Martha Lauzen, the study's author, who notes that, without equally radical steps to correct the issue, "we are unlikely to see meaningful change."

Coachella Gets a Grande Lineup

Coachella released the lineup for its April festival on Thursday, and this year the multi-weekend gathering will be headlined by Childish Gambino, Ariana Grande, and Tame Impala. (There are also reports that Kanye West was going to land a top-billed spot, but that negotiations broke down when the festival's organizers wouldn't let him mess with the design of the desert venue's main stage. Perhaps he wanted all of the lights on at once?) Also on the lineup: Solange Knowles, Bad Bunny, the 1975, and Kacey Musgraves, among 2,386 others. Sadly, neither One of Pig nor Smushy Twin made the cut.

Early on in Mortal Engines, the forthcoming movie based on Philip Reeve's book, a small Bavarian population gets consumed by the moving metropolis of "London." (The movie, like the book, is set in a future where roving "predator cities" ingest smaller towns for their resources.) As its citizens are forced to resettle in their new home, voices on loudspeakers tell them where to go and what to do. Most of the instructions are commonplace for authoritarian dystopias: stay in line, no weapons are allowed, etc. But then there's this one: "Be aware, children may be temporarily separated from parents."

The line wasn't always there—it wasn't in the book, or the original script. But earlier this year, as the Trump administration's zero-tolerance immigration policy led to detentions and child-separations at the southern US border, the loudspeaker announcement found its way in. The movie, says director Christian Rivers, isn't meant to be a "message film," but since it deals with life after a catastrophic war and the ever-repeating cycle of human nature, the line seemed fitting, and adding it amounted to little more than an extra voiceover.

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"We thought it was worth making a little comment about that," says Peter Jackson, who produced the film and co-wrote the screenplay, referencing the "horrific" acts of American immigration authorities. "They’ve become the Child Catcher of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, really."

That line may be the most politics-focused the film gets, but it's definitely not the only moment in Mortal Engines during which the past haunts the future. The premise is that a "60 Minute War" has ravaged Earth, destroying most of humanity, and their history along with it. The survivors have been left to roam in moving cities, looking for resources. What artifacts they've been able to recover from the 20th and 21st centuries don't offer many clues, other than the fact that people were consumed by TV, computers, and smartphones; the period is referred to in the film as the "Screen Age." (Also, based on large statues of the Minions, survivors think the Despicable Me characters might have been worshipped like gods.) Those things, like the immigration line, "make this futuristic world more relatable," Rivers says.

And audience relatability is important. Mortal Engines hits theaters on December 14, fighting for audience attention against films like Transformers flick Bumblebee and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Not being a known franchise, and coming from a book series that doesn't have the following of The Lord of the Rings, it's got an uphill battle. "We're surrounded by franchise films or sequels or whatever—Aquaman and Mary Poppins Returns—and there's all this stuff surrounding us that's got pre-determined audiences," Jackson says. "We're this sort of little orphan film that no one knows anything about."

It's impossible for me to tell you whether you're going to like Kingdom Hearts III. I also can't tell you whether it's good. What I can say, though, is that it means something to me.

I still remember beating the first Kingdom Hearts. I remember being sick, home from school, my body aching as my fingers slid over the controller. I remember white winter light peeling in through my bedroom window. I remember that, at the time, I didn't actually own the game. It was rented, and I would insist my mom or grandmother check it back out from the video store for me every week.

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Personal narratives about playing videogames are a little passé at this point, I know. So many people grew up playing videogames that almost everyone has a story like this. But Kingdom Hearts is a series that was there for me at the precise time I needed it, the exact presence I required in my life at that moment. Since age 11, the long, winding, bizarre Kingdom Hearts series has been with me. Playing the third numbered title, after all this time, isn't just playing another game. It’s a sort of homecoming.

For those who didn't spend their childhood with this series, a rough recap: Kingdom Hearts is primarily the story of Sora, an adventurous and happy young boy who teams up with Donald Duck and Goofy (yes, the Disney characters) to explore a universe full of isolated Disney-themed worlds in order to fight monsters and find their friends. It gets more complicated than that—indeed, over the course of nearly a dozen titles of various sizes since, it has gotten a lot, lot more complicated—but that's the core of it. Sora is just trying to help his friends in a vast, confusing world of anime villains, monsters born of pure darkness, and cartoon characters.

Something about it fascinated me on a deep, personal level. When I beat the original Kingdom Hearts, I wanted to know what happened to Sora next. I wanted to learn the fate of his brooding, long-haired rival/best friend, Riku. I was tantalized by the mysteries of the Keyblade, the magic sword/key hybrid that, yes, long-time Final Fantasy creative Tetsuya Nomura definitely came up with on his own.

So I joined an online message board for hardcore fans. We crafted stupid theories. We bonded. A series about the power of friendship, filtered through the lens of Japanese role-playing-game eccentricity, became a pathway to real friendships. I grew up, and my relationship to Kingdom Hearts changed, matured, and gained nuance, but those friendships remained. They influenced my choice of college. They helped develop me into a full person. I don't speak to those people much anymore, but their presence in my life fundamentally changed it and improved it.

I can't possibly separate Kingdom Hearts from what Kingdom Hearts has meant to me. But I can tell you a few things about Kingdom Hearts III. I can tell you that it manages to complete the story started in that original game in 2001 with the sort of goofy, nerdy elegance that's come to define the series, weaving together nearly two decades of complicated, insular plot lines to create moments of sincere, heartfelt connection between its impossible characters and their Disney friends.

I can also tell you that it feels great to play, the simplistic button-mashing of the earlier titles replaced by a system that resembles previous ones but transcends them, with transforming Keyblades and special moves meant to imitate Disney theme park rides that can be optionally sprinkled into the combat, making the player a sort of symphony conductor of brightly colored chaos.

And, like the other games, this one awkwardly mixes in levels that are recaps of Disney movies with an original plot that's like a Final Fantasy game if Final Fantasy was a series about the power of light and friendship. I can also report that, at one point, Elsa from Frozen sings "Let It Go" for its full runtime while Sora, Donald, and Goofy look on in awe, and I can tell you I laughed uncontrollably.

I can't tell you whether any of that will resonate with you. It might come off as unbearably twee, or naive, or confusing and poorly plotted. But for me, every moment, even the absolute dumbest, worked. It worked because of nostalgia, sure, and because of the sentimental connection I have with the series as a whole. I'm invested in these characters and the world they live in. But also because its thematic content, its ideas about friendship and hope and heroism, resonate. Kingdom Hearts III is a game about growing up, about facing tragedy and death and deciding, y’know what, screw that stuff, we have our friends and we're going to fight. It's willfully, thoughtlessly cheerful and straightforward, even in the bleakest circumstances. When I was a kid that seemed charming. Now, it seems vital, and playing Kingdom Hearts is an exercise in holding on to those optimistic parts of myself.

Sora is a hero who goes around talking about how his friends are his power, how together they can get through anything. I really, really want to believe him. Whether you like Kingdom Hearts III is largely going to be a matter of whether you want to believe him, too.

Last week, a commercial made by the producers of My So-Called Life and Thelma and Louise, the author of the Orphan X thriller series, and a left-leaning PAC went modestly viral. The commercial, “Built Not Bought,” is a highly polished, beautifully scored, Americana festooned four minute short film. By crafting an optimistic, pro-business-yet-anti-corruption message, the video aims to be a new mission statement for the branding-challenged Democratic Party. It features a diverse cast of factory workers, and a down-home rhetorical style and message best summed up by its opening line: “We stand for the working men and women. Always have, always will.”

It is, in short, exactly what you’d expect to get when you add Hollywood cinematic glamor to the political campaign ad. “After the 2016 election, my colleagues kept saying the same thing over and over,” says Mark Riddle, CEO of Future Majority, a PAC Riddle founded to support centrist Democratic politics. “‘We have a lot of very talented people in our party, the best storytellers in the world, and we don’t make good use of them. Why would you not be using those talents?’”

Fair question. But then again, Hollywood’s relationship with American politics has always been fraught. Though these days Hollywood is most often linked to Democrats, for the last 90 years both parties have made frequent use of LA’s glamor factory—often disparaging the other’s strategies as elitist and out of touch, then copying them immediately. By inserting itself into politics, Hollywood may think that it was doing something at worst benign and at best patriotic. But by giving choice candidates a broader, more attention seeking tool-set, in reality what they did was prime American audiences for a new kind of political voice—one that prioritizing grabbing and holding attention over anything else.

Hollywood may now be a bastion of liberalism, but it wasn’t always that way. In 1928, Louis B. Mayer, the cofounder of Metro-Goldwin-Mayer, “turned MGM into the publicity wing of the Republican party,” says Steven Ross, author of Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics. (Mayer also got to spend a night in the Lincoln bedroom as a thank you for helping elect Herbert Hoover.) Hollywood didn’t make as strong a showing for progressive politics until the mid-‘30s and ‘40s—when movie stars like Orson Welles, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart worked to promote Franklin Roosevelt’s candidacy and social issues like ending segregation.

Both parties have been vying to capture Hollywood’s glitz ever since—but with very different strategies, in part because of the Red Scare. In the late 1940s, many of the actors investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee were advocating for Democrats. Creating close ties with individual celebrities backfired. Rather than acquiring glamor, political candidates acquired a whiff of communism at the worst possible moment. “That really shaped the way the Democratic party thought about Hollywood,” says Kathryn Cramer Brownell, author of Showbiz Politics: Hollywood in American Political Life. “They got really nervous and moved towards looking to Hollywood primarily for fundraising instead.” In addition to campaign contributions, Hollywood liberals from Harry Bellafonte to Jane Fonda began backing movements more than they did candidates.

Republicans took the opposite tack. Though publicly, party leaders criticized Democrats for glamorizing politics with show business, internal memos reveal that, secretly, some conservatives wanted to resurrect the chummy relationships of FDR’s presidency. In the 1950s, President Eisenhower gave actor Robert Montgomery an office in the White House so he could coach the president on how to be more photogenic and media-friendly. Instead of giving politicians’ celebrity-style poise, the strategy snowballed until politicians began casting themselves as actual entertainers. Figures like Nixon (as advised by Roger Ailes) began to credit their campaign successes celebritizing stunts like Nixon appearing on Laugh In. Eventually, Republicans started recruiting entertainers to run for office themselves—beginning in the 1950s, but accelerating over the next two decades.

Enter Ronald Reagan, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and President Trump. Despite the perception of liberal Hollywood’s political power, liberal Hollywood has actually produced vanishingly few political candidates—Al Franken and Cynthia Nixon being notable exceptions. Most ultra-successful Democrats like Presidents Obama and Clinton are politicians-first, and managed to celebritize and glamorize themselves with the help of Hollywood money and counsel.

But hang on—aren’t conservatives supposed to identify more with heartland fly-over states more than frivolous Hollywood? “Few voters, Democrat or Republican, are persuaded on who to vote for by an endorsement from a Hollywood star or group,” says Don Critchlow, an American political historian at Arizona State University. “As evidenced by many polls, they don’t see Hollywood as saviors of the Republic or protectors of working Americans.” Riddle noted that this dynamic is one of the reasons he’s sometimes hesitant to publicize Future Majority’s Hollywood collaborators.

So why do political operators, past and present, think buddying up with Hollywood is the way to go?

Because, in some ways, it works. Celebrity endorsements and appearances only go so far: “Voters aren’t idiots,” says Ross. “Oprah endorsing Obama didn’t get him elected. Celebrity endorsements just make people more likely to take a closer look at a candidate.” According to Brownell, the key benefit of working with Hollywood is celebrities’ ability to generate excitement for a person or issue. Think: Chance the Rapper leading Chicago voters to the polls, Beyoncé endorsing feminism to generate more mainstream acceptance, or President Trump tweeting about winning or witchhunts to rile up (and distract) his audience.

But in other ways, all that matters is that the people running campaigns believe their showbiz politics is working. “What politicians believe makes a successful campaign can really impact how the campaigns that come after it are run,” Brownell says. “Trump and Cynthia Nixon are both products of ideas like Richard Nixon’s—that political authority is firmly rooted in being able to get media attention.” Trump’s qualifications, as he often says himself, are that he’s able to get good ratings. The same idea powers some progressive’s longing for President Oprah Winfrey or President Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

The polish of projects like “Built not Bought” are good uses of Hollywood’s undeniable storytelling skills. But it’s important that Hollywood and average citizens alike be aware of movie magic’s role in fueling Trump-style politics. LA glitz and glam does capture attention, but ultimately, it’s a marketing technique with serious, country-shaping consequences.

Before it was even released, Homecoming was notable for many reasons. For one, it was the new project from Mr. Robot mastermind Sam Esmail. For another, it marked Julia Roberts’ first turn leading an episodic television show. And finally, the Amazon original series was one of Hollywood's first big bets on adapting podcasts for the screen.

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None of those things would matter if Homecoming fell flat. Yet, this Friday the series hit Amazon Prime and—voila—it very much soared. A little bit drama, a little bit noir, and a lot of suspense, Esmail’s new show proved to be a tense thriller that kept us pushing Play on each new installment—right up to the breath-holding ending.

Homecoming also gave viewers a lot to unpack: emotional turns, surprise twists, and a really trippy score. (Also, let’s hear it for Julia Roberts!) To dig into Amazon’s latest, we corralled WIRED’s biggest bingers—writers and editors Jason Parham, Brian Raftery, Peter Rubin, and Angela Watercutter—to break down everything they liked, or didn’t, about Amazon’s latest prestige series.

Angela Watercutter: I’ll be honest: If I start this off it’s just going to be one long Stephan James appreciation post and even though we should definitely talk about how amazing he is as returning Afghanistan veteran Walter Cruz, there’s a lot to discuss with Homecoming. What did you all think? When did the show click for you?

Peter Rubin: Even with the best shows, I’ve become accustomed to experiencing Pilot Syndrome—that wait-and-see generosity we deploy to forgive the exposition and worldbuilding contrivances that can overwhelm a first episode. Not Homecoming. From the opening sequence that zoomed out of an aquarium and into social worker Heidi Bergman’s office, to the typography and aerial shots that so define the show’s art direction, Homecoming felt like a cohesive thing, an assured and compelling fully formed entity.

The question, of course, is whether that’s due to Sam Esmail’s work adapting the original Gimlet podcast—something you talked to him about, Angela—or if it’s simply the podcast’s merits shining through. I came in having never listened to an episode of the podcast, which honestly felt like a bit of an advantage; I never thought about how Julia Robert’s Bergman stacked up to Catherine Keener’s, or how James as Walter Cruz matched Oscar Isaac’s portrayal of the soldier who entered the secretive “Homecoming” program for help integrating into civilian life. However, they both gave measured, naturalistic performances (as did Bobby Cannavale as Bergman's super-shady boss, Colin, and Shea Whigham as the magnetically bespectacled DoD official looking into what exactly happened at Homecoming), so it seems like a win-win.

Jason Parham: I think because TV, as a medium, has undergone a kind of bloat in the last half-decade—as it stands, there are simply too many TV shows to keep up with—I often look for small aesthetic flourishes in a series. More than plot or award-worthy acting, what can pull me in? The Good Place, Atlanta, Random Acts of Flyness, Pose—each show has its own particular set of aesthetic quirks. Where Homecoming excels in this regard, and to Peter’s point about it feeling like a fully formed entity, was Esmail’s visual vocabulary. All of it had the sheen of a Hitchcock noir-mystery—but it didn’t feel at all dated, or out of touch.

There's a particular sense of paranoia that runs through each episode and Esmail does a fantastic job—maybe even more so than on Mr. Robot; though I only made it through Season 1 of that show, so take this with a grain of salt—of translating that paranoia to the screen, and often without dialogue (an even more impressive feat given Homecoming is based on a podcast). The overhead shot of Carrasco (Whigham) descending into a maze-like stairwell. The hazy, hushed lighting that haunts just about every shot. The use of split screens, or of aspect ratios to delineate between the past and present, heightening the sense of claustrophobia. It felt like gazing into a petri dish and watching people’s lives play out in disastrous concert. I couldn’t take my eyes off any of it.

Watercutter: Jason, that’s absolutely it. I’ll admit, and I’m in the minority here, it took me a while to get into the Homecoming groove. I enjoyed Roberts and James’ chemistry, but I wasn’t gripped until the fourth or fifth episode. It was those flourishes, though, that kept me coming back. The show doesn’t give us a lot in the beginning—sure, Shrier (Jeremy Allen White) says he doesn’t trust Homecoming but the mystery doesn’t unravel until much later—but those notes of more to come made me want to keep digging. It is, as Jen Chaney noted on Vulture, the best of WTFTV.

Raftery: Like all of you, I admired Homecoming for its medium-bending stylistic flourishes; its intoxicating corporate-noir-meets-Hitchcock set-up; and its performances (I especially enjoyed watching Shea Whigham–who’s played so many memorably ball-busting alpha-males–sweat it out as a neutered middle-management lifer). But one of the reasons why the show had me hooked from the get-go came down to pure math: With each episode clocking in at around 30 minutes, I didn’t have to worry that I was throwing away time that could be better spent elsewhere.

My Wired coworkers know all too well my frustration with Netflix’s dramas, which are invariably in need of editing–with the exception of the excellent Mindhunter, I can’t think of a single Netflix series that didn’t overstay its welcome at one point, either with sloggy episodes, or with drawn-out episode orders. But a five-hour, fast-burning thriller like Homecoming? That seems doable, especially our way-too-packed prestige-streaming era, in which it feels like a half-dozen new offerings are being shoved down the internet’s tubes every week.

And even though Homecoming could have ultimately shed an episode or so and still not lost the plot–I’m not sure how much we needed Sissy Spacek’s character, as much as I love her performance–I think Esmail and his writing team did a fine job of stripping the story down to its high-end-pulp essentials. The streamers like long-playing, long-running series–it keeps viewers stuck within their eco-system. All too often, creators have abused that privilege. But Homecoming proves you can accomplish a lot in just a few hours.

Watercutter: Also, what did you all think of the music? It was intense. Also, I felt like I had Shazam open for quite a bit of my binge—just like, wait, what is this?? (Fun fact: During that scene where Heidi freaks out a little bit and pulls all of her desk tools under her head and lays down on top of them, the song playing is from The Conversation, which Esmail had mentioned was an influence on Homecoming.) And any show that ends its season with—spoiler alert!—Iron & Wine is OK by me. Any other musical queues strike you all?

Raftery: It took me a while to realize just how deftly Esmail and his music-supervision team were incorporating classic film scores into Homecoming, but once I did, it became a welcome spot-the-tune semi-distraction: I loved hearing John Carpenter’s haunted synth-score for The Thing being repurposed for a white-collar thriller, or catching David Shire’s classic All the President’s Men cue play out in one of its final episodes. Esmail is clearly a movie obsessive: Mr. Robot was loaded with references to everything from Kubrick to The Third Man to even Risky Business. But Homecoming takes it even further, with its soundtrack-swipes and numerous Hitchcock nods–all of which are so carefully grafted into the show, they never once feel like fawning homages. It’s a uniquely mixed-medium show: A drama that’s based on a scripted podcast; structured as a TV show; and shot and stylized like a patient, claustrophobic ’70s thriller.

Watercutter: And what did folks think of the show beyond its flourishes? Personally, once I felt invested in everyone I found it to be quite wrenching, really. I enjoyed the suspense questions—What are the goals of the Homecoming facility?, What’s that drug doing to the returning soldiers?, Why can’t Heidi remember what she did while she worked there?—but there was something about Walter and Heidi’s struggle to connect in such a sterile environment that just killed me. I know that’s a really obvious point to make, but at the same time I think those kind of core relationships are lacking, or very thin, in a lot of suspense thrillers, so I was glad to find them here. Also, the back-and-forth scenes as Heidi, Carrasco, and Walter’s mother Gloria (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) start putting the pieces together had me holding my breath at times. Carrasco

Parham: Beyond the visual and auditory highpoints, I found the series mostly compelling. It’s the breed of narrative that sits in that fragile corridor between truth and fiction—one that seems almost too ideal, too devastatingly ripe, for our fractured moment. It’s a story bizarre enough to be believable: Geist, a Fortune 500 corporation known for developing food and skincare products, wants to manufacture a drug that cures soldiers of PTSD. So they build a facility with the goal of transitioning veterans back into the real world—only the truer, darker aim isn’t actually to get these men ready for family and work life, but to rid them of their psychological war wounds so they can re-enlist. Of course, the other catch is just as gutting: the drug doesn’t just wipe clean symptoms of anxiety, social isolation, depression, or explosive bouts of anger, it erases whole memories.

What Homecoming becomes, then, is a sharp critique on systemic abuse, and how the corruption of such power infects everything, and everyone, it touches. For me, the saddest realization was how easy it remains for veterans—already discarded by the same government they so proudly served—to be exploited, and held captive. Stephan James brings humanity, if a bit of naivety, to Walter Cruz, but in doing so sheds light on how the system can, at every turn, fail people, even as they continue to believe in its good.

Watercutter: Yes, that’s it! Which is why when it all comes together in the end…

Parham: What made the closing scene so satisfying, for me, was all the brilliant stylistic work Esmail did in the lead-up to those last few minutes. The scene rejects the isolation, darkness, and near-violent panic that shadowed characters all season. We’re in a northern town, far from the swamps of Tampa, the skies are as radiantly blue as we’ve seen them, and the score that augments the shot—Iron & Wine’s “The Trapeze Swinger”—carries with it none of the soundtracked terror from earlier episodes. It’s as if this scene exists in an alternate universe. I won’t spoil the final shot, but how it culminates—for Walter and Heidi, at least—is just as surprising: with a flash of tangible, no-strings-attached hope that everything, for the first time in a very long time, might actually be OK.

The past seven days have brought another Democrat looking to be president, another Trump associate being called to testify before Congress, another potential escalation—and then de-escalation—in the tension between India and Pakistan, another sign that California is struggling more than many states with climate change, and another album from Solange. (It also brought another Oscars, but whether it's upset over Green Book's wins or gossip about Gaga, that already feels like a lifetime ago.) It's not all been re-runs, though; there have also been big developments in ongoing stories that people have been discussing for some time. What have people been talking about online this last week? We're glad you asked.

What Not to Say in Your Outside Voice

What Happened: You'd think that an attorney would know better than to attempt to intimidate a witness via social media, considering how much trouble it could get everyone in. You'd think.

What Really Happened: It was the (now deleted) tweet that got everyone's attention. Ahead of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's testimony to Congress last week, Florida Republican representative Matt Gaetz tweeted the following message: "Hey @MichaelCohen212 — Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she'll remain faithful when you're in prison. She's about to learn a lot."

Well, that's certainly a thing. And one that got a lot of people's attention, not least of all the media, because of course.

Some had some theories about where this tweet actually came from.

We'll come back to that later. For now, let's be thankful that Gaetz seemed to appreciate see the gaffe here. Just kidding.

The tweet remained up until the Speaker of the House sent out a particularly pointed subtweet of her own.

That, in turn, prompted Gaetz to finally apologize.

Turns out, an apology wasn't enough to handle the fallout of the tweet. Not from Michael Cohen, who had more important things on his mind—we'll come back to that soon enough, too—but from the Florida Bar, which launched an investigation into Gaetz over whether or not he violated professional conduct rules with the tweet. It may not be the only investigation he faces; a Democratic lawmaker has asked for an House Ethics Committee investigation, too.

Oh, and remember the question about whether or not the president was involved with the tweet in the first place?

For his part, Gaetz denies this. But, really, what is true anymore?

The Takeaway: For those who thought that this entire story seemed too cliché to be true, you're not alone, apparently.

The Michael Cohen Hearing

What Happened: For those hoping for epic political theater, last week's public testimony from former personal attorney (and infamous “fixer,” although, says who?) Michael Cohen proved to be not only worth the price of admission, but everything anyone could have hoped for.

What Really Happened: So, how did that whole Michael Cohen testimony on Wednesday go, anyway? The answer, as might have been expected, was "particularly explosively." So much so that things started exploding as soon as his opening statement leaked to the press hours before the hearing itself.

The statement, which really should be read in full for the appropriate effect, is available in many places but this Washington Post annotated piece is perhaps the best primer. It was, to be blunt, pretty damning stuff, although of course there were those who simply brushed it off as the ravings of an admitted liar. The hearing itself, however, proved to be just as amazing. Some brief highlights:

Heady stuff, and enough to give the media a lot to pick over and analyze for days to come. (And not just how poorly the Republicans fared.) The president, who was out of the country at the time of the hearing—stay tuned, we're about to get to why—let his spokesperson do the talking for him, for once.

Well, OK; he waited a day before commenting directly, at least.

All other kinds of interested parties had a lot to say about Cohen's testimony, as well.

Still, at least the Republican Party had a plan to make sure that people didn't pay too much attention to everything that Cohen was saying.

Yes, that's right. We should all stay focused on the president's historic meeting with North Korea. There's no way that could go wrong, right?

The Takeaway: For those wondering just how bad this was for the president, you might want to read this Twitter thread. But, suffice to say: This was a historic event when it came to demonstrating just how bad things have become.

The North Korea Summit Goes South

What Happened: If the Trump administration had hoped to drown out any and all bad news last week with a successful summit with North Korea, reality took a very different turn. Really, it wasn't a good week for the president.

What Really Happened: Getting back to why President Trump was out of the country during the Cohen testimony: He was in Vietnam for the second US/North Korea summit, a prospect that worried some, not least because of concerns over how far the president would go to get a deal he could boast about. Despite attempts to silence the press, initially, hopes were high.

Late Wednesday, however, it suddenly became obvious that things weren't going according to plan.

The hastily-rescheduled press conference confirmed what people were suspecting: The talks had fallen apart.

There's something odd about this sticking point, however; while Trump said that he was willing to ease some sanctions but North Korea was asking for all sanctions to be lifted, that's not what North Korea is saying they asked for.

Some after-the-fact positioning so North Korea could save face, or a case of the president lying? It's genuinely difficult to tell. On social media, some were arguing against those calling the summit a failure for Trump, as the hashtag #TrumpFail started to trend.

Funny story about giving legitimacy to a dictator; even though the summit fell apart, that didn't mean that the president wasn't willing to find some way to bow to North Korean interests in a truly dangerous, damaging way.

It didn't escape anyone's notice, either.

All told, this trip really didn't go so well for the president. But there's always next time, right?

The Takeaway: You know the traditional thing where Donald Trump says something today, and there's usually a tweet from the past where he completely contradicts himself? This time, it's not a tweet; it's far longer.

Takers and Fakers and Talkers Won't Tell You

What Happened: Oh, don’t worry; as bad a week as it had been for Trump before Thursday, things actually got worse when news emerged that he'd overruled experts to help his son-in-law.

What Really Happened: As last Thursday afternoon rolled around, Trump was surely glad to get back to the United States, where everything was calm and … You know where this is going, don’t you?

As reported by The New York Times, President Trump ordered then-Chief of Staff John Kelly to grant top-secret security clearance to son-in-law Jared Kushner last year, despite concerns by intelligence officials and the White House's top lawyer. Kelly was so disturbed by the order that he quit in protest—no, sorry, he "wrote a memo about how it wasn't his fault." Potato, tomato. You know how it is.

The report was quickly picked up by other outlets. It's almost as if people care about who gets security clearances that they probably shouldn't have.

The fact that the president had overruled his own intelligence people was, unsurprisingly, very much at odds with the way in which the issue had been addressed by administration officials in the past.

But that's not to say they didn't know what was going on wasn't a problem, apparently.

The timing of this would appear to be an issue for the administration.

Meanwhile, it's the substance that's an issue for … well, everyone else in the United States, really?

For those wondering why this is such an issue, here's one explanation:

Here's another, arguably more speculative, definitely more serious, one:

Maybe we're all overreacting, though! Perhaps there was a really good reason for it.

The Takeaway: If only there was some sign that the man who advised Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman shouldn't be given top secret security clearances. If only.

Meanwhile, in Another Hipster Coffee Shop

What Happened: Let's wrap up this week with something lighter, of sorts. If you have ever thought to yourself, "Hey! Twitter doesn't seem to do anything about all the ideologues on the platform, what would it take to get one thrown off?" Congratulations; You got an answer this week, and it was perfect.

What Really Happened: Maybe you remember Jacob Wohl. He's a far-right activist, who you may recall tried unsuccessfully to create a sexual assault conspiracy against Robert Mueller. He is, shall we say, someone that is going places, as long as it’s understood that those places may include being a punchline.

His journey towards that destination went farther last week when he gave an interview to USA Today in what seemed to be an attempt to tout his genius and strength in the surreal electoral playing field that is 2019.

In said story, Wohl boasted that he planned to create fake Facebook and Twitter accounts to, quote, "steer the left-wing votes in the primaries to what we feel are weaker candidates compared with Trump." Funny thing about announcing your intent to essentially duplicate the Russian troll operation during the 2016 election in a national newspaper: People notice.

Yes, a man famous for using Twitter to report on how hipsters in hipster coffee shops were repeating right-wing talking points ended up being banned from the platform after declaring his intent to weaponize it. There's no small irony here, and as should only be expected, a lot of people couldn't pass up the chance to use a favorite Wohlian construct to talk about his banishment.

It wasn't all jokes about Wohl's former meme-worthy status, however. There were some other things to consider about his removal. Well, kind of.

Wohl responded to the news with an amazing YouTube video in which he declared that the ban was actually good news, really, because look how viral he'd become before heading to the conservative conference CPAC to push a new conspiracy theory about Democratic lawmaker Ilhan Omar. Guess how that went?

Once again: This man got a profile in USA Today where he claimed to be an important figure in national politics. Just in case you're wondering how 2019 is going.

The Takeaway: It’s worth considering this when it comes to Wohl getting banned from Twitter.

When Stephen Hillenburg premiered SpongeBob SquarePants in 1999, there’s no way he could’ve known what would become of his animated creation. Sure, he may have foreseen success: the cartoon's years on Nickelodeon, multiple feature films, even an eventual Broadway musical. What was less imaginable then, though, was the fact that Hillenburg's titular tetrahedral goofball and the rest of the gang from Bikini Bottom would cast such a sway over the meme-loving corners of the internet.

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The double helix of SpongeBob and the internet is so prevalent you don't even register it. Imagining the web without Hillenburg’s creation is like imagining it without Google or Facebook (where at least one post in your feed on any given day would feature SpongeBob, Patrick, Squidward or another undersea character.) The show is simply part of online culture's fabric—a part that Hillenburg, who died today at age 57 after a battle with ALS, built whether he knew he was doing it or not.

“SpongeBob is one of the most significant television series in meme history,” says Know Your Meme managing editor Don Caldwell, noting that the show currently has 90 sub-entries and some 290 entry search results related to the show—that's more documented memes than either The Simpsons or My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. "SpongeBob clearly resonates with a large part of internet culture like no other, and I don't think this is simply driven by nostalgia.”

Figuring out why the internet grew attached to SpongeBob is like trying to figure out why the internet likes (or dislikes) anything. It just happens. But something about Hillenburg's show proved irresistible to memery. The show’s characters—and its titular hero specifically—are expressive enough to communicate a mood in a single frame. The show's wholesome, if slyly subversive, tone makes recontextualizing those faces all the funnier. (My personal fave: An image of SpongeBob making a rainbow with his hands juxtaposed with the words “Nobody Cares” in bold Impact font.)

The result is memes like Evil Patrick (aka Savage Patrick or Angry Patrick), which uses an image of the pink starfish making a slightly sinister face to convey anything remotely devilish, Tired SpongeBob, which can basically relay any kind of exhaustion, and Krusty Krab vs. Chum Bucket, which illustrates any kind of rivalry where one thing is superior to the other (Marvel vs. DC, etc.). There are many, many more—far too many to count—and each one is as familiar to internet users as the last.

There’s a reason for that familiarity. Although Hillenburg originally came up with the idea for SpongeBob (then SpongeBoy) a few years before his debut, his cartoon hit just as internet access began to get faster and easier. As the web grew, so did the show's popularity; its fans are some of the first digital natives. Add to that the show's cross-generational appeal and international reach—at one point, it aired in 170 countries—and you've got a majority of the internet covered. Put an image of any of the SpongeBob characters online, and more will get the reference than won't. Scenes from Bikini Bottom are the lingua franca of the meme world.

And while the bulk of the show’s popularity amongst meme-makers is due to the creators themselves, a lot of credit also goes directly to Hillenberg. He stepped away from the show’s day-to-day operations in 2004 after the first animated feature and, as Caldwell points out, SpongeBob’s early seasons provided a lot of the insightful commentary that the internet glommed onto. “The show's first three seasons, prior to Hillenburg's departure,” he says, “dealt with real issues in an authentic and clever way, which I suspect has a lot to do with its enduring cultural relevance online.”

Today, that is obvious. As news of Hillenberg’s passing hit the internet, social media, and the show’s subreddit filled with tributes, more than a few of which thanked the creator not just for his show but for the memes that came out of it. His character lived in a pineapple under the sea, but his legacy survives in a much bigger world.