Black Dog and Minotaurs: Anybody Remember Art?

The movie Black Dog, by Guan Hu

So this is how bad global culture is getting, and how good it could be:

I walk out of the movie theater the other night feeling paranoid. I just saw Black Dog, by Chinese filmmaker Guan Hu, and as much as I enjoyed the movie, which I had picked on a whim at random, my poor brain, after 25 years of the Internet, couldn’t help feeling it had been scanned by some malignant AI.

I mean, how much more perfect could a movie be, for me? All my favorite things, it seems too specific. It has dogs—it features unusually intense relationships with pets, in fact; it has the Gobi desert, deserts being my favorite thing after pets; it has a town that reminds me of my hometown in Wisconsin, out on the unkempt edge of its vast civilization, more forgotten than any tiny country in the armpit of Russia, flayed by those spikes on the outer rim of the wheel of history; it even gives the hopeless, alcoholic hicks that populate it dimension, and a certain cool.

And yet it was made by some member of the opposite sex (ew) who grew up on the other end of the world from me. How could this evening’s eerily harmonious pairing of theme to viewer NOT be the result of the shadowy but currently benevolent machinations of some personalized algorithm? How did I get tricked into seeing a me-perfect movie? What was in that CBD gummy?

And then I heard my own voice, calling back to me from the Before Times:

“THAT WAS ART. THAT WAS ART YOU JUST SAW, STUPID.”

I mean, I was delighted to realize that on this globe of shit, somebody is still making art that can resonate with a member of the opposite sex on the opposite side of the world. That’s great! Well done, writers, actors, and especially dog actors!

But how did I get so much algorithmic sludge pumped into my veins that I was trained to forget for a moment about what really matters, and assume that everything is a personalized shopping experience that I can’t escape?

I don’t know how, but writers and artists need to find a way to function outside of this endless, sucking ocean of lowest common denominator slop and personalized manipulation.

I don’t know how, but I want my innocence back.

I want out of the labyrinth, because I seriously suspect the minotaur is awake.