What Happened Today: March 21, 2022
A warning to Israel; Russia changes war aims; Reviewing the new post-pandemic movies
The Big Story
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly demonstrated that he’s a canny political actor who knows how to deftly maneuver in defense of his nation’s interests. So why did the skilled Zelensky appear so wrong-footed in his virtual address to Israel’s Knesset on Sunday night, hectoring the Israeli lawmakers with Nazi analogies and counter-historical claims that Ukraine saved Jews from the Holocaust instead of appealing to the two nations’ common interests? Zelensky urged Israel to send more military support to Ukraine, including its Iron Dome missile defense system, and impose sanctions on Russia, a country with which Israel has to maintain good relations given that Russian forces in Syria now straddle its northern border. It may be the case, as some U.S. political insiders are speculating, that the real point of the speech was for the White House to use Zelensky as a messenger to warn Israel that if it doesn’t fall in line with U.S. priorities on the Iran deal and other strategic initiatives, then it risks being ostracized as a pariah state. That would explain why Zelensky wasted his time on impractical requests he knew he had no chance of getting—like the Iron Dome, which can’t simply be exported to Ukraine. It would also explain why Zelensky chided the Israelis for not choosing sides, telling the members of Knesset that “indifference kills” while taking shots at Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s attempts to mediate between Ukraine and Russia by saying that there should be no mediation between good and evil, according to The Jerusalem Post. If the intention was to gain support from the Israelis, the speech appeared to have the opposite effect. “If Zelensky’s speech was given ... in normal [nonwar] times, we would have said it bordered on Holocaust denial,” commented Yuval Steinitz, a Likud minister and former cabinet minister. If indeed the speech was delivered on behalf of Washington, D.C., then its heavy-handedness, while doing no favors for Ukrainians in their hour of need, might still have served its purpose.
Read it here: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-701817
In The Back Pages: Two New Movies Ask: Can We Ever Go Outside Again?
The Rest
→ Russia is shifting its war aims from total “demilitarization” and “denazification” of Ukraine to a territorial settlement, according to senior White House officials. The assessment of Russia’s shifting objectives was echoed by Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who recently said that Russia has abandoned its plans to depose Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Moscow’s changing approach appears to be a result of encountering heavier-than-expected resistance in Ukraine.
→ After multiple cross-border missile attacks from Iran-backed Houthi groups targeted oil and desalination facilities in Saudi Arabia, the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a statement on Sunday saying it will reduce its oil output. In the statement, the Saudi government said it is “relinquishing its responsibility for any shortage in oil supplies to global markets in light of the attacks on its oil facilities by the terrorist Houthi militia.” The Biden administration formally removed the Houthi movement from the U.S. lists of “foreign terrorist organizations” and “Specially Designated Global Terrorists” in February 2021, shortly after taking office. Earlier this month, leaders of both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates declined to take a call from President Biden about coordinating oil production after the start of the war in Ukraine—a deliberate slight meant to repay the White House for the repeated snubs it has delivered to the Gulf Arab countries in the course of pursuing a new grand alliance with Iran, the Sunni Arab countries’ chief strategic rival.
→ Despite the Ukrainian city of Mariupol going without power for weeks and suffering constant bombardment by Russian forces, Ukrainian officials rejected a demand from Moscow to surrender control of the city by 5 a.m. Monday. The southern coastal city of Mariupol sits astride the Sea of Azov and is a key piece of terrain for controlling the region that Russia has been attempting to capture for almost a month without success.
→ Half a million mourners filled the streets of Tel Aviv on Sunday to grieve the loss of Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, a preeminent leader of Israel’s religious Haredi community, who died on Friday at the age of 94. Called the “Prince of Torah” for his encyclopedic knowledge and daily devotion to learning––he spent up to 17 hours a day engaged in the study of Jewish texts––Rabbi Chaim was seen as a singular figure in the Haredi community, with visitors coming from across the world to consult him on matters of Jewish law, seek his blessing, and pay their respects. While many noted the extraordinary traffic caused by his funeral––people could not make it to work or school on Sunday as roads were completely closed––Reb Chaim, were he alive, might not have noticed. “He opened a book of Torah at the age of three,” one mourner told The Jerusalem Post, “and only closed it last Friday, 91 years later.”
→ Germany is beginning to worry about a potential energy shortage if the country is unable to wean itself from its dependence on Russian gas. Germany is in talks with the United Arab Emirates and announced a “partnership” with Qatar on Sunday, in the course of seeking new trade partners. At the same time, Berlin is looking at ways of increasing its domestic energy production—a move Russia has long opposed, including by covertly funding European and American activist organizations who advocated against increasing nuclear power and fracking for more natural gas. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Germany has resisted calls for an immediate embargo of Russian energy, worrying that doing so would deprive the country of adequate energy supplies to keep its own economy stable. In an interview on Friday, Robert Habeck, Germany’s minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, confessed that, when it comes to securing adequate energy for his country, a moral dimension “does not really exist.”
→ An exciting opportunity: UCLA’s distinguished Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry “seeks applications for an assistant adjunct professor on a without salary basis.” Yes, you read that right. “Applicants must understand there will be no compensation for this position,” the ad reiterates. We’ve reached a new low in higher education’s “adjunctification”––a process by which the academy exploits the huge surplus of unemployed doctorates to hire teachers cheaply and without benefits or long-term contracts. More than half of all U.S. faculty members are now part-time or contingent employees. What is new here, however, is the prospect of lowering adjuncts’ wages from a pittance to literally nothing. The next UCLA job posting might seek professors who are willing to pay the school for the privilege of teaching there. How else can the university continue compensating the men’s basketball coach, Mick Cronin, $4 million a year?
→ Following up on that little aside from last week, when The New York Times announced that the Hunter Biden laptop revelations—you remember: the revelations that were declared dangerous disinformation and censored out of existence—were authentic and share legitimate information about the shady business dealings of the president’s son: Rumors are now swirling, especially among giddy members of the conservative media, that the Justice Department, which has been investigating Hunter Biden for months, will be delivering an indictment of the president’s son in a matter of days.
→ Dolly Parton is coming back to the big screen for her first film role in more than a decade: a starring role in a film adaptation of Run, Rose, Run, a best-selling mystery novel that she co-wrote with paperback best seller James Patterson. The movie is being adapted by actress Reese Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine.
The Scroll’s editorial fellow David Sugarman reviews KIMI and Bigbug, two new films about people scared to leave the safety of lockdown
At this moment of collective COVID-19 optimism, with mask mandates ending and case counts continuing to fall, two new films consider characters who are unready or unable to venture out into the opening world. KIMI, a thriller from Steven Soderbergh, and Bigbug, a dystopian flop from Jean-Pierre Jeunet, feature characters who, out of habit or trauma or fear, won’t stop staying home. These are films about the lives they’ve built inside: idle, streaming TV, happy enough. It’s spring and the world is new again, yet there’s a nagging sense that the technological nests we built of necessity won’t be so easy to leave.
In KIMI, Angela Childs (Zoe Kravitz) is not ready to leave anything. Hoping to head out of her Seattle apartment for the day, she packs up her Purell, her masks, and her meds, then stands at the door, unable to cross the threshold. Instead she stays: The groceries are delivered; the therapist Zooms in; she rides her Peloton and gazes out the window. Though Angela lives in one of the most expensive cities on the planet, Sodenbergh sets her up in a vast sun-drenched loft, where she can pad around drinking tea. Angela’s morning is not what flourishing looks like, but it is a kind of life.
Angela pays for this boho-chic existence by working at Amygdala, a company that makes the KIMI, a smart speaker akin to Amazon’s Alexa except in one crucial way: The KIMI relies on human employees like Angela to listen in and correct the technology’s functioning. Angela, who happily uses her own KIMI to play music and—in the film’s climax—save her life, is central to that deeply discomfiting consumer loop that defines this digital age: We get content in exchange for our data, which companies use to improve the technologies that continuously get better at giving us what we like and at monetizing who we are. To watch KIMI is to wonder why Angela—why I—would do anything else at all? Here she is and here I am, homebound and having our smart speakers do shit for us. Put KIMI back on, I say, because it is, after all, an extraordinarily good film.
Less good is Bigbug, a film set in the French suburbs in 2045. In this near future, humans are waited upon by anthropomorphic robots and inhabit homes kitted out with Jetsons-level conveniences. Via a smart speaker (KIMI and Bigbug share an enthusiasm for this technology), residents can request snacks, scents, and entertainment, while the robots themselves can do just about anything, from homework help to sexual favors. They even attempt to claw back power from their human overlords—an effort that initiates the film’s action, centered around a tedious group of people locked inside by righteous robots trying to save them from evil robots.
The future Frenchmen aestheticize and cherish the artifacts of our earlier digital age: old Macs, dial-up modems, first-generation robots. There is powerful nostalgia in all of this—those halcyon days when AI neither opined about philosophy nor tried to kill us. But the film also depicts a plausible future when everything that was once on-screen has been loosed upon the world–– targeted ads blimping past our open windows and robots roaming the streets to collect our data or scan our retinas. Even the natural world has fully forfeited to technology and corporatization. In the wake of climate catastrophe, forests and beaches are technological fabrications, with microclimates and topographies tailored to each consumer. There is no longer a meaningful difference between inside and outside except for the modicum of safety and comfort that “home” provides (a considerable benefit, to be fair, in a world besieged by evil robots) and, perhaps more than anything, the home’s role as a place to demonstrate, by way of one’s consumer choices, a sense of self. The characters in KIMI and Bigbug curate their apartments with analog technologies—books, vinyl records, fountain pens—that advertise the inner lives of the inhabitants. I am a person of substance, such purchases suggest.
This pair of films depicts our late-pandemic uncertainty, giving us characters stuck in the present before concluding with visions of the future. KIMI ends with our hero outside, happy in the sunshine as she eats an “egg thing” at the food truck with her new beau. Bigbug ends with a scene of technological triumph, the good robots prevailing over bad. Finally freed to live whatever dismal dystopian life is available to them, Bigbug’s humans instead decide to stay in, enjoying their technology in renewed domestic harmony. Outside remains a tumult of ads and corporate-sponsored experiences; inside, at least, the robots know just what I like.
David Sugarman is an editorial fellow at The Scroll, and teaches at NYU Gallatin and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. You can follow him on Twitter @David_Sugarman_.