Cinemorphosis

Tag: horror

  • Johnny Carson Was Prozac Before Big Pharma Perfected the Formula

    Johnny Carson Was Prozac Before Big Pharma Perfected the Formula

    I’m listening to Carson the Magnificent on Audible, Bill Zehme’s lush tribute to the King of Late Night. Zehme is a skilled writer, no doubt—but he suffers from an affliction familiar to many stylists: chronic purple prose. His descriptions don’t sparkle; they sprawl. Reading him is like eating an entire wedding cake when a slice would have sufficed. He’s so enamored with his own flourishes that Johnny Carson occasionally vanishes behind the velvet curtain of Zehme’s adjectives.

    Still, what he lacks in restraint, he makes up for in ardor. Zehme clearly loves his subject, and his affection pulses through the pages. Carson emerges as a sort of secular priest of television, delivering nightly benedictions of laughter for thirty years. He wasn’t edgy or groundbreaking—he was dependable, a soothing presence at 11:30 PM, like a warm bath or a glass of room-temperature white wine. He was comfort food for the collective American psyche, Prozac before Big Pharma perfected the formula. A totem from a time when a single man in a suit could stand at the crossroads of politics, culture, and showbiz and crack wise to a nation that hadn’t yet shattered into a million niche audiences.

    I was never much of a Carson acolyte myself. Dick Cavett had the brain. Letterman had the bite. Carson? He had commercials. What I remember most is that the show seemed designed to lull you into a trance of polite chuckles and bland banter. It wasn’t bad, exactly—it was just relentlessly there. Watching The Tonight Show felt less like a choice and more like a ritual, a nightly genuflection before the glow of the TV set. People tuned in not out of excitement, but out of habit. He was the head caveman, murmuring jokes by firelight, while the rest of us nodded and laughed, grateful to not be alone in the dark.

    To skip Carson was to risk social exile. You didn’t want to be the one who missed what the country’s collective subconscious had passively absorbed.

    As I listen to Carson the Magnificent, I find myself pining—not for Carson, but for the era he ruled. A time when a singular voice could still cut through the noise and hold the country’s wandering attention. That cultural unity is gone now, and maybe for the best, but I can’t help mourning it a little.

    Zehme will, I’m sure, delve into the darker recesses of Carson’s psyche—and I’m ready for it. I’ve already mainlined The Larry Sanders Show three times, with a fourth round likely on the way. That show remains the gold standard for peeling back the sequined curtain to reveal the neurotic, solipsistic soul of late-night television. If Zehme gets even halfway there, I’ll consider the audiobook time well spent—even if I have to wade through another paragraph that reads like a thesaurus suffered a head injury.

  • Case Studies in Performatosis: Black Mirror’s “Joan Is Awful” and “Nosedive”

    Case Studies in Performatosis: Black Mirror’s “Joan Is Awful” and “Nosedive”

    In the grand medical theater of Black Mirror, few disorders are as virulent and tragically funny as Performatosis—the compulsive need to live life as if constantly auditioning for an invisible panel of social media judges. Two episodes in particular, “Joan Is Awful” and “Nosedive,” offer prime case studies in this terminal condition. Both protagonists—Joan and Lacie—aren’t just victims of technological dystopia; they’re emotionally exhausted performers collapsing under the weight of their own curated identities. And like all great tragicomedies, they bring it on themselves with a smile, a filter, and a legally binding Terms of Service they definitely didn’t read.

    “Joan Is Awful” is what happens when you outsource your entire identity to an algorithm and then act surprised when it turns on you. Joan, a blandly competent tech middle-manager with questionable morals and a perpetual expression of secondhand guilt, becomes a literal character in a TV show about her own life. But this isn’t just surveillance—it’s a forced performance, one she never auditioned for but can’t stop starring in. Her daily decisions are reinterpreted, exaggerated, and broadcast to a global audience craving content, not character. The real tragedy? Joan begins modifying her behavior to match the awful version of herself the algorithm is producing, proving that once Performatosis sets in, the line between self and spectacle evaporates faster than a TikTok trend.

    Meanwhile, in “Nosedive,” Lacie lives in a pastel-colored prison of positivity, where smiles are currency and emotional repression is a public service. Her entire life is a performance designed to earn ratings—every cup of overpriced coffee, every chirpy interaction, every dead-eyed compliment is another step up the social ladder. But like all performances, hers eventually cracks, and when it does, it’s not just a fall—it’s a nosedive into social exile. Her descent is more than a narrative arc; it’s a diagnosis. She’s suffering from terminal Performatosis, unable to stop performing even as her audience turns on her. The episode’s final, cathartic scream-off in jail is less an act of rebellion and more a final gasp of unscripted truth.

    What links Joan and Lacie is not just the technology that invades their lives, but the deep, internalized need to be seen—and more dangerously, to be liked. They are not characters living in dystopias; they are mirrors of us, the perfectly average user who has confused validation with identity. The systems they’re trapped in are just more honest versions of the ones we already use—systems that reward curated personas, punish messiness, and encourage self-policing with a faux-empowering smile. In both cases, the platforms don’t just reflect reality; they rewrite it, edit it, and package it for mass consumption—leaving the person behind feeling like a glitch in their own story.

    Performatosis, as diagnosed through these episodes, is not about ego. It’s about survival in a world where being real is risky, but being performative is profitable. Joan and Lacie suffer not just because they’re being watched, but because they’ve handed over their stories to people—and systems—that care more about ratings than reality. Their eventual breakdowns are not mental collapses; they’re acts of resistance. Unscripted, unbeautiful, and gloriously human. And if we’re smart, we’ll take the hint: stop performing before you forget the script was never yours to begin with.

  • Facebook, Bigfoot, and the Digital Swamp of the Reptilian Mind

    Facebook, Bigfoot, and the Digital Swamp of the Reptilian Mind

    When I was a child, going to the grocery store with my mother was a mundane errand—until we reached the checkout line. There, stacked beside the gum and glossy TV guides, was a fever swamp in newsprint: tabloids. They screamed in all-caps about alien babies, Bigfoot sightings in Milwaukee, swamp druids kidnapping hikers, and celebrities melting in real-time under the cruel lens of long-range zoom. I remember wincing. Even at that age, I sensed these were not harmless distractions but invitations to devolve—open doors to the primitive brainstem, the part Phil Stutz calls the “lower channel,” where we stop being people and start becoming lizards with opposable thumbs and credit cards.

    What I didn’t realize then was that these headlines—designed to hijack the amygdala and pump cortisol like candy—were just the analog prototype. The final form? Facebook. Facebook is the digital version of that tabloid aisle, now algorithmically juiced and weaponized to deliver an intravenous drip of the grotesque. My feed, once a sleepy scroll through family birthdays and vacation humblebrags, has transformed into a daily assault of schadenfreude, scandal, and shameless clickbait. Like a bored demon trying to stir chaos in the marketplace of thought, Facebook now mimics TikTok in its race to grab you by the reptilian brain and shake.

    I stay on Facebook for one reason: radios. I’m a radio hobbyist (listen to FM mostly) and belong to a clutch of charmingly niche radio groups where grown adults argue about antenna angles and trade photos of 1980s Japanese receivers like they’re Monet originals. I also use it to message my wife. But every time I log on, I feel like a sober man walking into a dive bar filled with uncouth drunks swinging pool cues at shadows.

    Facebook isn’t just a swamp. It’s a bubbling cauldron of cultural sludge, stirred hourly by algorithms that mistake engagement for intelligence and outrage for insight. It’s a symptom of our collective cognitive degradation—and a primary contributor. It’s an empire built on the backs of half-truths, low-resolution thinking, and viral tantrums. And yet, here I am—wading in, knee-deep, every time I want to tell someone about a new DSP radio chip or the joy of a clean AM signal at midnight.

    This is the curse of the modern enthusiast: to live in a digital kingdom that is both a community center and a cognitive landfill. I stay for the signal, but God help me, I’m choking on the noise.

  • The Algorithm Will See You Now: Joan’s Collapse in a Funhouse Mirror World: Sample Thesis and Outline for Analysis of Black Mirror’s “Joan Is Awful”

    The Algorithm Will See You Now: Joan’s Collapse in a Funhouse Mirror World: Sample Thesis and Outline for Analysis of Black Mirror’s “Joan Is Awful”

    Sample Thesis Statement:


    In “Joan Is Awful,” the titular character stumbles into ruin not because she’s evil, but because she’s deluded—clinging to a flattering self-image while ignoring the yawning chasm between how she sees herself and how others do. Her desperate need for approval blinds her to the hollow spectacle of parasocial fame, where the Streamberry audience gorges on her curated misery with slack-jawed glee and not an ounce of empathy. Meanwhile, Joan’s passive embrace of digital convenience—those sleek platforms that promise connection, ease, and relevance—costs her everything: privacy, agency, even identity. As her most intimate moments are vacuumed into the cloud, diced into monetizable data, and reassembled into lurid entertainment, Joan learns the hard way that algorithms don’t care about narrative nuance—they just want content. In the end, she’s not the star of her own life. She’s tech industry chum, chewed up and streamed.

    Outline (9 Paragraphs):

    1. Introduction: The Mirror Cracks
     Set the tone by describing Joan’s glossy, curated digital life as a carefully lit Instagram photo—harmless on the surface, but riddled with cracks. Preview the idea that “Joan Is Awful” isn’t just a satire about tech—it’s a psychological horror story about self-delusion, digital exploitation, and the death of narrative control.

    2. The Selfie Delusion: Joan’s Inflated Self-Perception
     Explore Joan’s internal image of herself as a reasonable, competent, kind professional. Contrast this with the version that appears on Streamberry: vain, passive-aggressive, and spineless. Argue that the episode’s central irony lies in Joan’s shock—not at being watched, but at being seen too clearly.

    3. The Streamberry Effect: Fame Without Love
     Analyze the parasocial dimension: Joan’s life is turned into a binge-worthy drama, but there’s no affection in the audience’s gaze. They’re not fans; they’re voyeurs. The more humiliating the content, the more addicted they become. This is the dopamine economy, and Joan is its punchline.

    4. Compliance and Convenience: How She Handed Over the Keys
     Joan doesn’t get hacked—she clicks “Accept Terms and Conditions.” Show how the episode weaponizes our own tech complacency. Her ruin begins with a shrug. She wanted frictionless tech. What she got was soul extraction via user agreement.

    5. Raw Data, Real Damage: The Monetization of Intimacy
     Dig into the idea that Joan’s emotions, her breakups, her therapist visits, even her sex life—all become commodities. They’re no longer private moments, but digital product. The episode skewers the idea that tech is neutral. It’s a vampire, and your heart is just another bite-sized upload.

    6. Algorithmic Authoritarianism: The Tyranny of Predictive Systems
     Focus on the moment when Joan realizes she’s been living inside a nested simulation created by AI. Explain how this metaphor extends beyond science fiction—it mirrors the way our lives are shaped, nudged, and pre-written by recommendation engines, targeted ads, and invisible code.

    7. Narrative Collapse: When You’re No Longer the Main Character
     Explore the existential horror of losing narrative control. Joan’s identity dissolves not just because she’s surveilled, but because she can no longer steer the story. She’s overwritten by code, versioned into oblivion, rendered into a flattened character in someone else’s plot.

    8. Final Descent: From Star to Spectacle to Scrub
     Track Joan’s downward spiral as she tries to fight the system, only to discover that her rebellion has already been commodified. Even her attempts to resist are folded into more content. Her final fate isn’t tragic—it’s product placement.

    9. Conclusion: A Warning Disguised as Entertainment
     Tie everything back to the real world. We are all Joan to some degree—curating, consenting, surrendering. Streamberry may be fictional, but the forces it parodies are not. End with a sharp jab: the next time you agree to terms of service without reading, remember Joan. She clicked too.

  • Something Strange Happened to Me When I Saw My Childhood Home on Zillow

    Something Strange Happened to Me When I Saw My Childhood Home on Zillow

    When I was a kid, my dad worked at IBM in San Jose, and we lived at the very end of Venado Court—a cul-de-sac so serene it felt like a cosmic loophole in suburban chaos. I loved everything about it, especially the absence of cross-traffic.

    Cross-traffic was anarchy—it was second base in Little League, where the game unraveled into sheer bedlam: runners stealing, coaches screaming, fielders panicking. But Venado Court? It was home plate. Safe. Untouchable. The kind of place where nothing bad could happen—unless you count the existential horror of eventually having to leave it.

    The analogy reminds me of George Carlin’s classic bit contrasting baseball and football: Baseball is a pastoral dream, all about going home. Football is military conquest, where you march into enemy territory and get your spine realigned by a 300-pound lineman. Venado Court was baseball. It was safety. It was home.

    Recently, I stumbled onto a real estate site featuring my childhood house—5700 Venado Court, San Jose, California, where I lived from 1968 to 1971. The photos were unsettlingly familiar. My old bedroom. The bathroom where Mr. Bubble and Avon’s Sesame Street shampoo bottles once stood like sentinels of childhood innocence. The backyard, still lush with fruit trees—apricot, peach, plum, and walnut—a miniature Garden of Eden where my mother and the neighbor ladies, in some kind of euphoric domestic alchemy, canned preserves like their lives depended on it.

    The kicker? That house, my sacred childhood sanctuary, is now worth $1.3 million—the same price as my current home in Southern California. A deranged part of me toyed with the idea: sell my house, buy my childhood back, step through the front door like some time-traveling prodigal son.

    But then sanity prevailed.

    I know exactly how that story would end. Not in horror, but in ennui. I’d be trapped in a slow-moving nightmare of banality, watching my enchanted memories dissolve under the fluorescent hum of reality. The house wouldn’t feel like home. It would feel like a set piece in a dismantled dream.

    Thomas Wolfe was right—you can’t go home again. Not because it’s scary. But because it’s boring.

  • Magical Thinking #5: The Delusional Art of Repeating the Same Disaster and Expecting a Miracle

    Magical Thinking #5: The Delusional Art of Repeating the Same Disaster and Expecting a Miracle

    If insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results, then we are all a little insane—especially when it comes to our worst habits, our most toxic relationships, and our dumbest obsessions.

    Take the vampire relationship—a toxic, soul-sucking romance that drains you dry every time, yet you keep crawling back, convinced that this time it will be different. It never is. The fangs sink in, the life force drains out, and you’re left staring at the ceiling at 3 a.m., wondering how you let yourself get bit again.

    And if love isn’t your particular poison, maybe watch collecting is.

    Watch guys (myself included) have perfected a very specific brand of lunacy—thinking that selling a watch will cure our addiction. We convince ourselves: If I sell this, I’ll be free. This is the last one. I’m done. But before the ink on the eBay transaction dries, we’re rebuying it. And then reselling it. And then rebuying it again. It’s a closed-loop system of self-inflicted torment, a never-ending maze of false hope and regret.

    Dude. You need help. Read Phil Stutz, escape the Maze, and put your life in Forward Motion before your retirement fund turns into a pile of resale receipts and buyer’s remorse.

    If you think this brand of self-destruction through repetition is new, think again.

    F. Scott Fitzgerald saw it decades ago in Winter Dreams, where Dexter Green is hopelessly addicted to the walking emotional Ponzi scheme that is Judy Jones. She is his drug, his illusion, his vampire. She is untrustworthy, indifferent, and incapable of meaning what she says, yet he keeps coming back for more.

    Dexter isn’t just in love with Judy Jones—he’s in love with the idea of her, the fantasy that someday she’ll become what he wants her to be. She won’t. And as he wastes years orbiting her gravitational pull of destruction, real life passes him by. By the time he wakes up from the dream, it’s too late.

    Sound familiar? It should.

    Because whether it’s a vampire relationship, a doomed watch-buying cycle, or a delusional romance straight out of Fitzgerald’s nightmares, the result is always the same: life keeps moving forward while we stay stuck, trapped in our own bad decisions.

  • EVIL: WHERE SCIENCE AND THE SUPERNATURAL BLEND TOGETHER

    EVIL: WHERE SCIENCE AND THE SUPERNATURAL BLEND TOGETHER

    Evil follows the adventures of a tall, chiseled, impossibly handsome priest, David Acosta, who looks like he bench-presses church pews for fun. He’s got two sidekicks: Kristen Bouchard, a psychologist with the looks of a supermodel and the brains to match, and Ben Shakiv, a tech-savvy assistant who’s there to remind us that even in the battle against Satan, someone needs to handle the Wi-Fi. Together, they travel to the darkest corners of the earth—by which I mean upscale suburban homes—where they confront demonic activity with a cocktail of theology, piety, and science. It’s like Scooby-Doo for adults, only instead of unmasking Old Man Jenkins, they’re reporting back to the Diocese after wrestling with the forces of hell itself.

    Adding a spicy dash of drama to the mix is the forbidden love between our hunky priest and Kristen, who, let’s be honest, is only human, and no one can resist a priest with a jawline that sharp. Their missions are a delightful blend of exorcisms and scientific investigations, all while offering sly, not-so-subtle satire on social media, technology, and the big, bad world of power. It’s like watching The X-Files meet The Exorcist, with a dash of Project Runway thrown in for good measure.

    No battle between good and evil is complete without a proper villain, and Evil delivers one wrapped in a crisp suit and the smarmy charm of a man who’s never met a moral boundary he couldn’t slither past. Enter Leland Townsend, a pencil-necked agent of Satan who oozes the kind of slick, synthetic charm that makes used car salesmen look like monks. If you looked up unctuous in the dictionary, you’d find his face grinning back at you, practically dripping with synthetic sincerity. He’s less a mustache-twirling villain and more a corporate devil—HR-approved, disturbingly polite, and disturbingly effective.

    But the true stars of Evil? The fashion. The main characters strut through supernatural horrors in coats so exquisite they could be on loan from the Louvre, each one worth more than my first car. And let’s talk about the priest’s wrist game—a white-dial Patek Philippe that retails for the cost of a small house. Nothing says “vow of poverty” quite like a $50,000 timepiece. This isn’t just aesthetic indulgence; it’s a quiet, winking commentary from the writers: if you’re going to go toe-to-toe with the devil, you might as well do it in couture. After all, nothing repels demonic forces quite like the confidence of someone dressed like they just stepped out of a Milan runway show.

    Beyond the sartorial spectacle, what is Evil actually about? The show thrives on one central tension: the ambiguity of evil itself. Is it supernatural? Psychological? A fusion of both? The show refuses to let us settle comfortably on any single answer. Take the episode where Kristen Bouchard’s daughters are up at 3 a.m., faces glowing in the eerie blue light of an iPad running some unholy ghost-hunting software. They swear the house is haunted. Their mother, an atheist clinging to the comfort of logic, insists there’s a rational explanation. Evil dangles both possibilities in front of us and then, just when we think we’ve landed on an answer, it yanks the rug out. It never gives us the luxury of certainty, instead keeping us suspended in a deliciously maddening limbo where science and the supernatural blur together. And that’s its brilliance—an exquisite, unnerving dance on the knife’s edge of belief.