Viral Lows: KIMI and the Spread

"KIMI: Mute TV.  Play "Oxytocin."  "KIMI: Max Volume."
-Angela's commands to her personal Kimi

"RUN!  RUN!" 

-Angela's neighbor's commands to Angela

2022. It's late in the pandemic. New films premiere online. A movie streams exclusive to HBO MAX; its plot points fold back on the pandemic era conditions in which its distributed. Its focus is a nexus of internet implications: malevolent tech, benevolent tech, web-bred isolation, and pandemic isolation. Information spreads faster than ever. The coronavirus continues to infect. The movie is Kimi (2022, Soderbergh.)

(Internet) Issue 1: WEB 2 to WEB 3: Partial ownership, Decentralization Fiction, Surveillance, Societal Pause. Corporate Control (Brad)

Seattle, 2021.

Stilled exterior shots hone in on a pretty nice suburban home. We spy: lawn, cement, front stairs, and by the door, a newspaper.  Shots are bridged with the voice of the resident. We find him mid-interview on a television program. Circle lighting himself (and only dressed on top) is Brad, a Senior Rep for Big Tech outfit The Amygdala Corp.  Brad connects live from his basement, an effort and broadcast straddling  production and private effort. The scene is bringing prime 'Pause.' 

The set up previews the plot ahead: surveillance, evasion, constructed realities. Shot duration is brief with neatly composed frames as Brad's basement and the TV studio are intercut. Though straight forward in information, the style intimates surfaces purposely anesthetized. A foundation for a more elliptical editing style to come. Brad's appearance has the quality of a spied domesticity as well as a mediated work presentation. He discusses the uniqueness with which Amygdala's new big seller -- the Kimi, will operate. A smart home tool à la Alexa or Google Home, it's privy to direct commands and, well... everything. Kimi sees all and hears all from its owners; benign chatter and transgressions. Brad, not ironically, hails Kimis as uniquely efficient. Efficiency attributed to oversight of the company always improving the match (and recognition) of command to response. Accuracy in understanding is a selling point of the Kimi: the company structure of the Amygdala Corp is built around clarity. A claim giving the buyer the semblance of relationship; ownership of a Kimi.

The smart home tools are lauded as less artificial and less mass-programmed. There is an explanation of individual course corrections as to how Kimi analyzes commands and assesses responses. This implication extends to another notion of individuality: that there is a close relationship between the owner and the smart home. Individual agency is a consumer application of Web 3. But as the film gets going we learn this vaunted accuracy and quality of the Kimi is not derived from its owner but from consistent company surveillance (corrections.)  The misrepresentation of the Kimi is a mirror image of the lie of Web 3:  those who opt in could be sole owners of their data. AWS (Amazon Web Services) defines Web 3 and infers its Alexa (Kimi is modeled after) belongs to this application. AWS discusses Web 3's on the AWS web page: 

   "Web 3.0 aims to create more interconnections between diverse technologies, so data flows between different platforms without intermediaries. Interoperability makes data portable so users can seamlessly switch between services while maintaining their preferences, profiles, and settings." 

Moments after Brad's interview he takes a call establishing his financial stake in Amygdala. It's implied he wields the power to annihilate those threatening his position. Can he usurp its tech to obscure or own information? Is Kimi a product of Web 2 or Web 3?  Just like the pandemic's pause, like an off-beat; the smart home sits on the last rung of Web 2. The blockchain is not yet here. 

 

(Internet) Issue 2: Deception, Surveillance, Hiding in Plain Sight.  (Angela, a Jew)

Angela Childs' desk is neat, yet busy. It's adorned with a cup and large hand sanitizer pump which she accesses often.  Multiple screens with open video and audio editing apps, are displayed. Angela ( Zoe Kravitz) works at home, and, like Brad, for Amygdala Corp.  Both Brad and Angela are introduced to us inside a subspace within their private home; one made for work but also for the self conscious acknowledgement and approval of a nonspecific observer, a public eye. 

Angela's work involves assigned streams that are designated as her responsibility in solving. Streams are unrealized commands borne of disconnects between a Kimi and their owner. Angela surveils and corrects volumes of them. As often as we see her check a stream, we see her sanitize.  Her aquiline hands indicate ritualism as they pulse in mannered extensions and near touches; allowing time to pass and Purell to absorb.  She keeps eyes on (fixing Kimi errors) and keeps danger out (germs and people.) An oft-employed Soderbergh style defines the initial sequence surrounding Brad and the Amygdala intro. Typically speaking, a style almost elliptical in edits, atmosphere of industry, of dehydrated emotional spheres. Though Angela lives in an impressively large converted loft. The filmmaking style pivots as we move through it. Swooping camera movements scan the space, a fluidity coupled with an unexpected Vertigo motif in the movie's score. Her home decor reads ascetic techno nest; furnished with machinery and sanctuary.

It turns out that Angela is agoraphobic and germaphobic. With scant evidence of the existence of a personal life,  her social distance amplifies an emotional distance.

It is through distance that Angela seems to find control. She also finds control through her work. In discerning Kimi errors in the execution of owner commands, Angela utilizes her emotional tools -cautiousness and fear of people- to excel at her job. She observes, she detects and amplifies as she evaluates barely audible sounds and images initially obscured.

She stays in shape, intentionally works out rigorously and compulsively in an on the nose scene with a Pelaton and 'Oxytocin' playing (via her command to Kimi). Angela is terrified of being outside. She's ill at ease with any non-virtual encounters arising with other people.

There is a negation of  her humanity. She is neurotic and fearful but also transactional. She accesses virtual or cordoned off relationships (will only zoom with her dentist though a tooth is infected; Face-times her mom and her therapist, calls in flirty favors with a colleague who has fuller access, and she only lets her lover come inside briefly; ripping the sheets off to sanitize moments after coming. She hides her face and scurries away from others on the street. Her actions are so obtrusive in a normalized (even a pandemic normal) social context that the camera speeds up when she scurries and moves through public space. She runs and hides in an exaggerated style wedded to machine like music; a broken computer.  It as is if she can beat the grid; it’s one she knows so well. Soderbergh films her furtive frightened moves in a register that is nearly comic. It is no accident her beauty is hidden, her hair cut short and died an unnatural bright blue. She is in disguise because she must survive. She keeps her head down, her face covered. She refuses eye contact. 

As if she is not deserving of human connection or social existence. It’s as if she is sub-human.
Like she is a Jew.

Angela learns she's endangered by some inside her company. Higher ups who have a stake in keeping the evidence drowned out. She evades recognition. She has a goal and it is to report a crime; maybe a murder. For its victim to be seen and heard. The skittish Angela starts to evolve. A steely will shows a driven Angela hankering down to edit, separate audio tracks, beg for favors from a boozed up Russian  colleague.  There is aural evidence of a woman being attacked, but it is under the radar; it must be studied.Angela is emboldened by the experience. A dramatic event is presented to her where she has a moral choice. She chooses justice over fear. She risks exposing herself; the thing that seemed to source her referred to traumas. She must adapt or die.

 

Hints of  Polanski-styled Jewish paranoia (a person in trouble; remaining imperceptible/ undercover) figure widely in Kimi.

Like a sub species, a germ, there is viral spread and viral load: coronavirus particulates, data//information leakage and an abstraction: the Jewish people and perceived destroyer of races; the ones pulling the strings.

The company is Amygdala Corp. The company is named for a part of the brain. 

Amygdala as “the brain” is satisfyingly reflective, The literal head — a rebuke of the decentralized new web, a “smart” home, accidental slip that indicates the product ( the lie calls it assistant) is in control of the consumer.

In the brain, this small structure regulates emotional stability. It is notable for its key role mental in social anxieties and phobias such as agoraphobia and social anxiety, i.e. the distrust of others.

Its afflictions are countered by the chemical oxytocin. Like in much of the film, there is a double truth here. The fear that the amygdala produces can also save one's life. The neurotic history of Angela, can, if she rises to the challenge, shift from defect to asset. Something in her history haunts her, something unspecified. When a therapist prods she quickly shuts down her computer to evade the woman. The pivot point of her emotional process is when she succeeds in tying a mysterious overheard bit of audio (overheard by a Kimi; observed only by Angela) to the visuals of a real crime. The 'film' is made. As she watches, it watches back at her, and she unleashes a sudden cry of recognition. The moment connects this past event she uncovers to unlocking her older past pain. It converges in the present. Soderbergh gives the moment a modern Hitchockian presentation. Smoky sheer technicolor shades over a bumpy collage stand with a restrained outline of a Hermann-esque moment in Martinez's score.  After this point in the movie, Angela becomes bolder and her goals and commitment to to her being able to use this connection with this incident to protecting the part of herself she could not protect in the past.

Angela had it in her along.  Hyperawareness, a talent for evasion and generalized suspicion of everybody; these were the bricks that built her survival.  Ultimately repurposed to facilitate her entry back into the world: they enable her to serve a purpose larger than her fears. Catapulted into action, she moves to reveal harm done to another. She fights against it instead of running from it. The brain's production of  fear can improve intuition, and thus protective reaction to threats. Angela slips in and out of notice; concealing her identity. She listens in on streams and reposes commands to the Kimis, as if she is the brain, she is the one secretly pulling the strings, being the brain, an elder of Zion.

The actor Zoe Kravitz (at least based on quotes in the press) identifies as a Jewish woman. Steven Soderbergh, the director is an unbrandable filmmaker slipping in and out of genres; flexible in scope and style. As far reaching in styles as he is surreptitious in his authorship ( doubling under a pseudonym as cinematographer and an additional pseudonym as the editor). 

His own identity enriches this reading of identity in Kimi. His work pivots from classic Hollywood caper series to experimental to immersive to bleak comedy. And so the director is often mistaken for something he is not. Not just a hired Hollywood hand, and not solely an independent or experimental (see Mosaic) filmmaker.  Looking at his exploration of  paranoia, many Polanski style tropes, and the Jewishness within the subject of King of Hill, The Good German, and Polanski docs, Steven Soderbergh may be mistaken for being Jewish. He is not.

Internet(ish) Issues 3: The Girlfriend Experience, King of the Hill,  and Roman Polanski+. To Find Out// To Be Found Out.

King of the Hill (1993, Soderbergh). Aaron in hiding.

The Girlfriend Experience (2009, Soderbergh.) Chelsea makes money.

Soderbergh's output inventories series of elliptical figures, soft powers, tech threats and some market discussions. (Only The Girlfriend Experience also points back to concerns of virtuality.)

Edmund Wilson, in To the Finland Station (1940), described Marx's theories and writings in  Das Kapital as syllogisms —illuminating an orchestra of movement where the commodities drive movement and actions ( causalities). They have “their own laws of movement; …revolve in their own orbits like electrons”. Kimi employs a similar conversation in which to illuminate the network of tech and finance. The metal of the actual Kimi:  mug sized pyramid with an LED light, is emblematic of "goods". It's a concrete object around which money can attach and modulate others' monetary motivations. It works by recording audio and video and creating a relation to the owner's desire. The videocamera does this too. A Kimi films, it traps subjects in the light. In sex, lies and videotape the camera does the same; metal machine intruding on relationships. It is a product of consumer aspiration (blockchain! brain!) which encompasses both  thesis and antithesis as enumerated by Marx. It's that intrinsic deceptiveness, the slippery character (is it the privatized solution or the medium of big brother? Is it the fetish commodity or the decentralized community?) making it equally capable of societal good and societal harm.

Soderbergh movies often concern: the financial market (The Informant!, TGE), ominous internet (Kimi, sex, lies..), isolation /persecution (TGE, King of the Hill, Kafka, sex, lies...) and capers/conspiracies are often present.  Spy thriller style meted out care of mumblecore aesthetics, along with spare decor and dialogue. Main characters battle accusal of crimes, suffer because they lack money, uncover a conspiracy, or hide for survival. The aforementioned battles are all frequent tropes and concerns in the films of Roman Polanski. In movies such as Rosemary Baby (from a novel by Ira Levin containing many more explicit mentions of Jewishness), The Tenant, Frantic, to The Ghost Writer, Polanski 's protagonists are hunted, chased, and persecuted. They must discover that their own partner or their own government or their own apartment building is conspiring against them. To excuse anxieties and pure neurosis; to refuse ones own paranoia tinted fears is revealed as a fatal flaw. They must acknowledge and explore the fear in order to survive. In the final act of Soderbergh's Kimi, it is revealed that Angela's life hinges on the very same.  Her ability to hide and remain closed off to people now must be employed to detect the enemy yet remain undetected. It is a Jewish quality in that it can be needed for a Jew to survive. Similarly, it is hard not to see the role that hiding out and not being revealed (for one's Jewishness) in Polanski's own life (from the ghetto in WW2 Poland) has informed his artistic work in film. Soderbergh's King of the Hill contains one of the first filmed appearances of Adrien Brody. He plays a character who teaches the impoverished hero (Aaron Kurlander, possibly also a Jewish character) how to hide. Brody's character Lester is an endearing small-time criminal helping (semi) abandoned 12 year old Aaron get out and about of his shantytown motel room without the motel workers discovery. If they get a chance, they will padlock the room and steal all its belongings; his parents were not able to pay the bill. It is strongly suggested Lester is good at hiding because he has always had to. There is one comment by a street cop who questions A on Lester's whereabouts. "Where's that Yid you hang out with hiding out?? Lester....oh yeah, Silverstone. Lester Silverstone." Nine years later Brody won the Academy Award for Best Lead Actor in a film, in Roman Polanski's The Pianist. Portraying Wladysaw Szpilman, a pianist who must first hide he is a Jew, and then must hide that he exists at all; in a bombed out home to survive the Warsaw Ghetto, survive the Shoah.  Perhaps Roman and Steven watch each other's films. They make pictures dominated by those who must hide.

Soderbergh served as Executive Producer on two (favorable to Roman) Roman Polanski documentaries: Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (2008), and Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out (2012.) He even legally petitioned for Roman to be freed from his decades old legal persecution as well.

Soderbergh confronts the uncertainty of a moment. The specific placement of the plot in a Silicon City and specific moment of the Covid shutdown aptly foreground the transmission of threat and control that governing powers can exert dominance. Kimi confronts the shortcomings and deceptive allure of Web 3. 

In the end, Amygdala Corp's Kimi is a problem the company can't beat. Web 3, people can learn to maximize their own space and commands to override the brain. As the product fulfills its initial false promise, it saves Angela and serves justice once she finds a way to take control of the smart device away from the company's power. The problem can also be the solution. The end of the movie is beautiful. It conjures  perfect resolutions. Hunted and outnumbered victims are saved. Angela conquers all that holds her back, against all odds.  We get to join in the fantasy that survival can be (well, it can be!) achieved at the last possible moment. 

Angela overcomes what paralyses her and transfers it to the currency to survive. She decides to trust her fellow. It's a big leap, and for Jews it is perhaps our biggest current hope and biggest long shot. That we won't have to hide. We won't have to rely only on ourselves. A neighbor will see. They will hear. Bearing witness. They will come to our aid, through their own personal risk, and we will save each other. This is a joyful moment to re-watch Kimi now, as an American; a Jew in the Diaspora.
In the end, the traumatized Jew are saved by being eyed. Not eyed by big brother/ big brother specifically, but by the eyes of a watcher, the eyes of a neighbor (Kevin), the eyes of an ally.

evade

I'm Kevin