early in the 2005 film mr and mrs smith, there’s a scene where brad pitt and angelina try to murder each other in their big suburban house, and then suddenly, seamlessly stop trying to murder each other and start passionately clawing at each other’s clothes. there’s a similar scene in this year’s amazon remake, but this time it’s in a new york brownsone, and donald glover and maya erskine stop trying to kill each other to take a psychedelic truth serum and directly explain all their issues and insecurities, saying things like ‘why didn’t you let me love you?’ and ‘i don’t need to feel safe to be loved.’

dreck. absolute abominable fucking dreck.

i’ve been thinking about the suburbs. the 2005 film is set in idyllic cookie-cutter suburbs, where the lawns are wide and the wife has her husband’s roast beef on the table as soon as he comes home. the american dream attained. the gimmick is that this grinning vision of end-of-history perfection is actually a web of secrets and lies. a violent hostility between men and women churns beneath the surface.

but you couldn’t do that in the 2024 remake. this time mr and mrs smith are millennial neurotics. they live in the city in a house with lots of earth tones. she has intimacy issues and a cat. they eat takeout and go to therapy. this is all correctly observed; this is what millennials are like, this is our lifestyle ideal. but there’s no depth metaphor and no distinction between essence and appearance. this time, both leads know that the other is an assassin; they work together. they don’t have any secrets. just feelings. and they talk about their feelings all the time.

i don’t know if you could even tell a story about what’s under the surface of the aspirational urban millennial lifestyle, because that lifestyle doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is. everyone will compliment you on your choice of art, and your entire life will be one long therapy session. it’s fully expected that you will be miserable. i think we lost something with the end of conformist boomer suburbanism, which is the idea that misery could open up some kind of alternative to the false ideal. (as adorno put it, ‘woe speaks: go.’) now, misery is just misery. talk about your feelings more. try psychedelics. there is nothing left to hope for other than this.