Haunting is the word I most often see applied to the artwork of Simon Stålenhag1.

Despite my best attempts, I really can’t find a better adjective to apply to his works myself. In them, people are often alone, or at the very least, very small, juxtaposed against monolithic and esoteric machinery. There’s a stark contrast of the relative normalcy of the human subjects and their surroundings with the futuristic, almost alien technology they’re depicted alongside.

Despite their cyclopean, awe-inspiring scale, one gets the sense that, in Stålenhag’s world, these technological behemoths are so commonplace as to have become little more than background noise to the people who inhabit it; the colossal sky-barges, laden with unknown cargo and anonymous passengers to inscrutable destinations, pass in the distance with the same regularity as jets coming and going from an airport, and regarded with much the same nonchalance as we would afford the average commercial airliner. It reminds me, in a way, of my earliest years; living in rural Texas, my mother would point out planes in the sky overhead, and I’d watch them cruise by with the starry-eyed wonder only a child could feel. It didn’t take long after our relocation to a home only twenty minutes away from Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport - the third busiest airport not in America, but the entire planet - for the novelty of these flying machines to fade.

Humans are remarkably adaptable creatures.

There’s a distinct sense of isolation present. Not just the alienation engendered by man seemingly playing second-fiddle to ascendant machines, but humans are so few and far between that, even when they’re shown together, one comes away with the sense that there’s still a vast gulf of distance between them all the same.

More than anything, I’m struck by the distinctive European quality of Stålenhag’s art. Or, perhaps I should say Scandinavian, as there’s little of the sun-soaked, laissez-faire Mediterranean world to find, here. The influence of Stålenhag’s upbringing in rural Sweden are plain; large, snow-covered fields bordered by dense and dark pine woods, expansive lakes, ever-present mist and cloud cover. Unlike many other European countries, Sweden is a big place; there’s a lot of empty space. A lot of dark corners and forgotten places. It is a beautiful land, no doubt, but that beauty is harsh and austere during the winter months.

More than anything, though, I find the proximity of his adolescent home to the Swedish capitol of Stockholm to be quite telling. Stålenhag was raised on the island of Mälaröarna. It’s only thirty-four minutes by car from a metropolitan area of 2.5 million people. If it tells you anything about how remote Mälaröarna is, I couldn’t even find population estimates for the island on Swedish Wikipedia. It’s literally a stone’s throw away from the largest city in Scandinavia, yet I’m sure being on the island feels as if one is an entirely different planet.

Throughout many of the pieces, the towering landmarks of this dystopian future are omnipresent in the distance. Shrouded in mist. Very much there, always present, but not close. They’re painted in shades of blue like Housman’s blue remembered hills, their scant few colors washed out and lights dimmed to winking specks by the limitations of the human eye and the curvature of the Earth.

When I was in England, for two weeks I stayed in a village of little more than two hundred warm bodies; I imagine there were more people in the nearby cemetery than there were in the small, unassuming row-homes of dark brown brick, all surrounded by fields of wheat. The nearest town is Lymm. It’s a quaint little place of only 12,000 people. Locals told me it was a boring place, and, perhaps it might be, but there is a charming quaintness to it that you’d never find in a bigger city. When one thinks of the quintessentially English small town, Lymm is the kind of place that comes to mind.

They say England is a small country - and, objectively, it is - but it feels much, much bigger when you’re there. I still have difficulty believing the oft-quoted statistic that 80% of the British population lives on 20% of the land, but the long, open stretches of rolling green hills, moors, forests, and dales speak as testament to this fact. Despite the close proximity of human settlements, the country feels bigger and more open in a way that an American who hasn’t been there would have trouble understanding.

At no point did this strange quality of the English countryside’s apparent elasticity seem more pronounced than in Lymm. Lymm is a forty-five minute trip by car to the city of Manchester, but, as the crow flies, is less than fifteen miles away2. You can walk there with little trouble, or ride your bike with even less (and hit a couple pubs along the way). Manchester city proper’s population is only 560,000, but the metropolitan area is damn near three million. In the heart of it’s new, modern city center, it feels much bigger. Surrounded by glass-lined towers and the sterile glow of LEDs, you could be forgiven for thinking that the metropolis sprawls for hours in either direction.

Yet, less than fifteen miles away, the roads are dark and winding. The towns are quiet, cloistered tight and surrounded by rings of forests so dense that you could be forgiven for thinking you’re at the edge of the known world.

Yet, from certain points in Lymm, if you can get high enough, you can see the towers of Manchester rising from the horizon. From those places, at night, you can see the glittering, distant lights of the city at the other end of an expanse of English countryside as dark as the night sky, the modern city as distant as the stars up in it.

I get the same sense of uneasy fascination from recalling these moments in Stålenhag’s art; that feeling that you’re standing at the very edge of a snarled, twisted, pulsing heart of something titanic, almost unknowably so, who’s tendrils are slowly creeping out into the pristine and untouched countryside like vines of kudzu. Even though you can’t always see it, you’re always aware in the back of your head that it isn’t far.

Given that he’s stated he drew heavily from his own childhood experiences, I have no doubt that Stålenhag, too, could see the lights of Stockholm glimmering in the darkness from certain vantage points on his island home.

Stålenhag’s work is best classified as retro-futurism - the fashion, the architecture, even the Saab and Volvo cars, are all distinctly of the 80’s and 90’s. As a child of the 90’s, I have no doubt he watched much of the architecture and technology of those times fall by the wayside as progress marched every forward. Most will see a lot of the Fallout series in Stålenhag’s work; much in the same way Fallout imagined a future in which the aesthetics and culture of 1950’s America stayed rooted in place while technology advanced at a blistering pace, Stålenhag’s world much the same, albeit with aesthetics and imagery drawn from a different time and place. It envisions a future where technology took a different path than our own; whereas Stålenhag’s future is populated with automatons, flying colossi, and dizzying spires of silver, the only real technological innovations we’ve seen in our time is Silicon Valley finding new and creative (and predatory) ways to siphon money out of us through any piece of technology with a screen on it, from your phone to your car to your fridge.

Of course, Stålenhag’s world is no utopia - even in the images where the machines are still functioning, floating silently through the cloud-choked sky, or quietly looming in the far distance, there’s a distinctly sinister sense one gets from them. It’s never outright stated what any of that technology is there for, but something about them just doesn’t seem on the up and up. This makes a little more sense when you read that the author out-right stated that the inspiration he drew upon for these illustrations, featured in the art books Tales from the Loop and the odiously named Things from the Flood, where this technology and machinery is seen gradually decaying, the crumbling hyper-advanced infrastructure is meant to evoke a direct parallel to the decline of the once model Swedish welfare state.

An optimistic vision of a future that never came to pass, this is not.

In 2017, Stålenhag would launch a Kickstarter campaign to fund the release of his next project, titled The Passage.

While retaining his distinct fixation of advanced technology, rust, and soaring landscapes, The Passage saw Stålenhag shift his area of focus from his native Sweden to the sun-soaked, blasted badlands and fog-soaked piney mountains of the Western United States. This wasn’t the only sharp change in direction; his previous art books were tantamount to Chris van Allsberg’s The Mysteries of Harris Burdick - which is to say, the viewer is simply presented with the images and left to extrapolate their own narrative from them, with maybe a line or two to spark their imagination.

The Passage, however, presented a rather straightforward narrative in small paragraphs with each image, which detailed the story of a teenage orphan named Michelle and her robotic companion as they wander through the aftermath of an unspecified catastrophe in search of her brother. While much is still left up to interpretation, there’s still, at the core, a more concrete narrative.

It’s also very clear that, whatever happened in The Passage, it wasn’t good. The machinery in The Passage takes on a much more predatory and outright antagonistic bend than in his other works. Rather than omni-present cooling towers lurking on the horizon and mysterious airships, much of what is seen in The Passage are towering clockwork titans of ill-intent, their chassis adorned with chipping and fading paint-jobs made to resemble goofy, rubber-hose cartoon characters and corporate mascots.

Alongside these colossus are what appear to be virtual headsets that seem to offer an addictive escape for people suffering in this dystopia, all the while sapping their energy and converting them into thoughtless drones like techno-vampires.

Whatever the case may be, one needn’t be a genius to see lonesome, zombie-like, faceless humans hooked up to charging stations in empty, dimly-lit parking lots or towering, mechanical horrors emblazoned with cutesy, cartoon faces to understand that the artist is making a stab at our current consoomerist culture and late-stage capitalism that’s so thinly veiled it’s lounging on your sofa in a see-through negligee, impatiently waiting for you to put down your phone and make an honest woman out of it.

The message is quite clear; the things we once owned now own us. The machines we’ve built to serve us for our own convenience have become our masters, while the moneyed interests of the world use their wealth to snap up everything and anything so they can sell it back to us at a premium, all the while leaving those disaffected, disconnected, and isolated by the very same technology to buy their way into Pixel Valhalla as a means of escape from the Hell its very same creators fashioned for them.

While Stålenhag’s trademark ambiguity and subtlety is tones down in The Passage, he’s still artistically firing on all cylinders. His work is, in my opinion, some of the most impressive and striking digital art to emerge from the 2010’s.

It also isn’t as if the cautionary tale of predatory capitalism and blind consumerism isn’t apropos. I mean, look at this.

Compare:

And contrast:

The biggest difference between Stålenhag’s dystopia and our own is, much like the world of Blade Runner, at least his shit-ass hellhole has the decency to look cool rather than a gauche, tacky tourist attraction made on the cheap and slapped with corporate iconography.

Upon release, The Passage would be given the title The Electric State in English. For being what amounts to a picture book for adults, it was a success; publications across the world showered it in well-deserved glowing reviews. Stålenhag had already carved out a respectable name for himself online, so it is of little surprise that, when the book launched in 2018, the shifty, beady eyes of the Entertainment-Industrial Complex were drawn to him as they began to wonder - How can we fuck this up?

Amazon Studios was the first to make an attempt. In 2020, Tales from the Loop, based on Stålenhag’s book of the same, debuted on Amazon Prime. Is it any good? Can’t say; I haven’t seen it and I don’t have the time to watch it now. For what it’s worth, it seemed to be very well recieved by critics, boasted an 86% on Rotten Tomatoes. At present, it only has one season consisting of eight episodes, with no talk or apparent demand for a follow up. Perhaps more will come in the future.

I will say that, looking at stills from the show, it does seem to capture Stålenhag’s unique aesthetic, even if it does change the setting from rural Sweden to rural Ohio.

Everything I’ve read and seen suggests to me it’s a relatively faithful interpretation of Tales from the Loop.

The same cannot be said for the next cinematic translation of one of Stålenhag’s books.

When I said Amazon was the first out of the gate, they weren’t the first studio to express interest in adapting Stålenhag’s work to the screen. In 2017, before The Passage was The Electric State, before it was even put to print, the Russo Brothers of The Marvel Cinematic Universe fame bought the film rights.

Knowing what we know now, this should have been a red flag from the jump, but at the same time, the Russo Brothers had yet to make their claim to Hollywood royalty with either Avengers: Infinity War or Avengers: Endgame. At the time, they were best known for directing two of the best MCU movies - Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Captain America: Civil War, which both did numbers at the box office - and…

The film also had backing by Argentine producer-director duo, Andy and Barbara Muschietti, who are brother and sister, not husband and wife. The two were riding high on the success of their adaptation of Stephen King’s -

It, which was competently made. The fact that neither the Russo Brothers or the Muschietti siblings had directed or produced more than a scant few films a piece, again, should have raised eyebrows, but both pairs were coming off of massive box office success and the crowned heads of Hollywood were willing to take a gamble.

Development inched along slowly as both duos were bogged down by bigger obligations. The Russo Brothers were busy making the single two biggest movies of the 2010’s, and the Muschietti’s were wrapping up the second part of their It adaptation. Ultimately, they found a distributor with Universal Pictures in 2020, but not much progress was made as Andy Muschietti was drawn into a failed attempt to rework the much maligned production nightmare that was Warner Brother’s The Flash.

The Muschiettis would withdraw from the project to work on The Flash, leaving The Electric State behind. Given that The Flash would go on to be one of the biggest failures of the superhero genre, one must wonder if they later regretted this choice.

As production slowly ginned up, it was announced that Millie Bobby Brown was already guaranteed to take the lead role. Because of course she would. She’s Hollywood’s go-to person when they need a white every-girl, and perfectly adept at gawking at empty space that will be filled with CGI in post-production. This isn’t to disparage her acting talents - personally, I think she’s a serviceable actress in what I’ve seen her in3 - but more to illustrate the lackluster typecasting she’s been pigeon-holed in. If you want to know what I mean, look at her leading role last Netflix-produced movie, Damsel (but don’t watch it).

I know it’s popular to clown on Brown right now for a myriad of reasons, but suffice to say that I think the girl’s been in, like most child stars, a one-sided abusive relationship with the Entertainment-Industrial Complex since she broke big in Stranger Thing’s first season back in 2016. Yes, she gets plenty of work, and she’s basically Netflix’s golden child, but at the same time, I just cannot imagine that the reason she looks like, as so many people have been saying recently, a forty year old Real Housewife of New Jersey at the age of 21, is because she’s been coerced into getting an unconscionable amount of work done on herself and sheer stress from over-exposure to the media.

For reasons unknown, Universal ditched the project and handed it over to Netflix in 2022 - another worrying sign for anyone who might have been excited for this film. There was a time when Netflix was, I would argue, mistakenly synonymous with quality, because people really thought Birdbox was good. They’ve since successfully shed that reputation and instead become the entertainment equivalent of Temu; yeah, technically they’re making movies in the same way Temu makes clothing, but the product is about as thin as a sheet of paper and will fall apart after you watch/wash it more than once. If Netflix does anything well, it’s churn out disposable, forgettable movies that are technically competent, but nothing much else. Their output strictly mediocre. And that’s by design.

The average American’s attention span has been so finely shredded by the rise in short-form content that recent studies have shown that an overwhelming majority of viewers of every demographic watch television with a second screen, whether it be a smartphone or tablet, in hand. Drawing from my own experience, this behavior most likely evolved from the tried-and-true hobby of every Millennial woman I’ve ever met; coming home from work, putting on the designated fat girl sweats, popping open a bottle of red table wine (or maybe a white), and putting on The Office or Parks and Rec or some other such sitcom to play in the background while they spend the rest of the night scrolling on their social media of choice.

Like, I love my sister, but I think she’s probably gone through The Office in its entirety several hundred times and actually watched maybe ten minutes of it at most during each cycle. And, I get it - using the television as background noise is nothing new. That really doesn’t bother me. I like to have NFL games I don’t really care about on in the background while I build models. I can think back to many hours I spent with my ex-girlfriend where we’d be on my couch, one of us sprawled over the other, both of us looking at stupid shit on Tumblr and giggling over dumbass memes like this -

While Hoarders played in the background. We didn’t really need to pay attention because Hoarders was our guilty pleasure and we’d probably watched as much of it as my sister and her boyfriend have watched The Office.

This practice of second-screen watching, while less than ideal, isn’t much more harmful than putting on something to play in the background while you do your dishes. Which isn’t to say it is actively deleterious once in a while, but like putting too much hu-wipped cream on your double-fucked-fudge-deluxe-cookie-dough-caramel ice cream, you probably should limit how much you do it. Otherwise, you’ll get to the point where you have five forms of media coming at you from all directions to prevent so much as a single coherent thought from forming in your head, just to keep the dopamine flowing.

The bigger problem with it truly lies, as it does with most things, in corporations exploiting this addictive behavior. Early in 2025, essayist Will Tavlin wrote a comprehensive barn-burner of an essay that blew the lid on tectonic shift on how Netflix Studios has pioneered and damn near perfected the art of making second-screen movies; simply put, movies that are made with the expectation that people are going to be more invested in .gifs of dancing green aliens on Tumblr than whatever’s on the television screen.

I highly recommend you give Tavlin’s article a read, as he dives deep into the history of Netflix and the how’s and why’s they came to this conclusion. But, to distill down to the most salient point, the thought process that brought Netflix to this outcome is simple; if people aren’t really paying attention to our movies… why are we even trying to make them good?

It’s a classic fuck it move. If the audience doesn’t give a shit, why should we? We could turn in a half-assed piece of mediocrity and the little piggies are gonna watch it anyways because the fuckers are so addicted to dopamine and flashing lights that most of them can’t even eat a meal without having something on the boob tube.

@bpdeditsit’s impossible / scp @Vilpero / #fyp #foryou #tonysoprano #thesopranos #youtube #mafia

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The word slop gets thrown around a lot, but, in my opinion, as I’ve stated before in other articles, this is really what slop is - a piece of media designed to distract you, made for no other purpose than to take up space. It’s just there to be there and has no greater purpose. Netflix does not make movies as we understand them; what they make is content.

Background noise in the most literal sense.

I think most of us already knew this long after Netflix’s golden age had passed. Tavlin’s essay was treated as some great revelation by many, but, in my opinion, he was just saying the quiet part out loud and confirming what most of us, on some level, already knew.

I don’t really need to say it, do I? I think I’m belaboring the point or overstating the obvious when I say that, if you’re someone who wants to see American culture rise out of the sludgy morass of mediocrity it’s wallowing in, or movies that aren’t exclusively made to pander to the lowest common denominator of society, or just want to see, y’know, good movies, this shift in production that Netflix started and other studios are adopting is less than ideal. Combine this with Hollywood’s wet-dream of generative AI that can whip up a movie for them at the press of a button and the future… well, you can put away your shades because it’s looking dim.

The Electric State ultimately dropped on Netflix, accompanied by a limited theatrical release, on March 14th, 2025. At first, reviews were middling. Conflicted. Both critics and audiences waffled on whether or not they it was out-and-out bad or just… mediocre.

In the weeks following its debut, though, the movie’s Rotten Tomatoes score dropped to an eye-watering 15% from critics. It enjoys a 76% from audiences, and I’ve seen some raving reviews from the hoi polloi, but while I don’t exactly trust uppity movie critics that enjoy huffing their own farts, I don’t really feel as if the American laity is the best barometer for judging a movie’s quality when Midside Out 2 - sorry, Inside Out 2 was the highest grossing film of 2024.

It’s one of those things where both sides are wrong, but in different ways. I believe that because I watched The Electric State.

And… yeah.

If Netflix wanted to make a movie you could throw on in the background and watch in your peripheral vision while you do literally anything else, they went above and beyond to alchemically synthesize the new golden standard for what that looks like.

It’s not the worst movie you’ll ever see. Millie Bobby Brown seems as if she’s sleepwalking through the thing, but she probably wasn’t asked to do much more. No one else in the laundry list of stars that compose the cast was doing much more. Stanley Tucci, Giancarlo Esposito, Woody Harrelson, Anthony Mackie - they all just kind of… show up and do what they need to do. Even Chris Pratt, who I tend to like more than I don’t, turns in a performance that’s really just Star-Lord (Again), But With A Mustache.

The only person who seems to be trying is Ke Quan Huy, but that poor guy puts his heart and soul into everything he does. Probably because he’s afraid of being cast back into the Dalit-caste of untouchable erstwhile child actors he was thrown into post-The Goonies after breaking out of it with his career-rehabilitating turn in Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Overall, though, the movie is… well, it’s so fundamentally unserious about its own existence that I hesitate to call it such. It’s not a movie. It’s certainly not a film, and I’d vomit on myself if I tried to call it kino. There’s nothing to it. Watching it is the equivalent of eating a bowl of the perennial broke college kid struggle meal, ice soup.

The special effects, while decent for the most part, are nothing special, and there are times at which they lapse into Playstation 2 Game levels of uncanny where the budget was running thin. The plot? Wafer thin, floated along by a color-by-numbers, plug-n-play script that could be stripped of all specific nouns and repurposed for another of Netflix’s Second Screen Movies. When things do happen, the action is muddy, blurry, and usually devolves into the usual CGI cluster-fuck you’d expect from a movie directed by Marvel Cinematic Universe Alumni.

But, above all else, The Electric State is an ad. The iconic monocle-wearing legume, Mr. Peanut, appears as a crusty, disturbing robot voiced by Woody Harrelson, who’s basically the Martin Luther King Jr for animatronic rights.

The issue is that all of Stålenhag’s pointed critique of consoomerism present in The Passage is not lost, but inverted into something of a sick self-parody that left him no doubt regretting having ever turned over the movie rights to the Russo Brothers.

The Electric State is not just an ad for Planter’s Peanuts or any other company that paid a small mint to have their goggle-eyed mascot ram-rodded into the background. It’s an ad for Netflix and the grim vision they have for the future; it’s one that you will watch unfold out of the corner of your eye while you doomscroll Elon Musk’s boomer-con memes on your phone. It’s a future where the corporate stiffs generate sound and fury with generative AI to keep you distracted while they find innovative ways of prying your ever-dwindling income right out of your hand. It’s a future drop-shipped by Temu - convenient, but laughably, almost insultingly cheap and half-assed.

When the movie wrapped, I could not believe that the eye-watering budget of $275 million dollars (which could realistically be as high as $375 million, not including marketing) was necessary to bring The Electric State to life. Regardless of what the exact budget was, this is now one of, if not the most expensive movies ever made. Yet, it didn’t feel like it. It certainly didn’t look like it. I’m left convinced that this was a boondoggle, a racket, a money-laundering scheme for everyone involved.

From the beginning, The Electric State wasn’t meant to make a statement. It was barely meant to entertain - it was intended to be white noise to fill the room while you scroll through your favorite goth e-girl’s booty shots on the ‘Gram or finish your Genshin Impact dailies. It’s all computer-generated spectacle with no substance.

I cannot belabor this point enough - it is not a serious movie.

And that’s a shame, since Stålenhag is a serious artist. I don’t say that because his works are melancholy and brooding - those qualities alone do not equate to serious art. Artists like Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton made comedies, but they were fundamentally serious men who held themselves to high standards for their genre. You can watch Lloyd in Safety Last, soyjak at the spectacle of him dangling from the face of a clock, and be perfectly entertained, but there’s still more to the comedy, Lloyd’s talent as a performer, and the sheer effort it took to film the scene that gives anyone who wants to think more about it red meat to chew on.

What I mean is that Stålenhag, nor the aforementioned actors, did not make cheap, disposable content that was made without thought or serious effort.

Stålenhag’s work is, more than anything, evocative. It suggests emotions, but it does not tell you what to feel. It does not beat you over the head with a narrative, but invites you to create your own with the information drip fed to you. Nothing is spoonfed to you - your encouraged to do your own thinking. Fill in the blanks on your own.

The Electric State could not have been a less unworthy adaptation of an artist of his caliber.

I’ve seen a lot of people saying that The Electric State - the book, I mean - is one of those things that would be difficult to accurately translate to a cinematic medium. This I wholeheartedly disagree with.

In the West, Andrei Tarkovsky is an obscure name in the history of cinema who’s best known for making movies best appreciated by insufferable Film Bros - a pejorative that once described a very specific kind of movie enthusiast that was the world of cinema’s equivalent to the music scene’s Guys Who Are Really Into Collecting Vinyl before that, too, became popular, but has now bloated to include anyone who demands more from their cinematic entertainment than what’s on offer from current Marvel movies.

In his home country of Russia, he’s considered one of the best to ever do it, and among film critics, held in much the same regard. It’s debatable if any other Soviet-era Russian filmmaker comes close to having the impact on the visual language of cinema that Tarkovsky did.

Tarkovsky’s films were typified by their slow, ponderous paces, long, drawn-out takes, metaphysical, esoteric and religious themes, and surreal imagery. His best known film in the West, if not in general, is 1979’s Stalker - a dream-like film written by science fiction authors Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, based on their own deeply strange short story, Roadside Picnic.

The film has a grueling runtime of over two and a half hours, and centers around a trio of men on their journey through an empty, misty, and abandoned Eastern European wasteland simply called The Zone in search of a legendary room in which one’s greatest desire will become manifest.

Stalker is arguably Tarkovsky’s most influential film; not only did it directly result in the well-regarded video game series, also named Stalker, but directors take cues from the intensely melancholy and hazy, phantasmagorical aesthetics regularly to this day4. But it is a difficult film.

Dialogue is sparse throughout much of the movie.A significant amount of runtime is little more than long, unbroken shots of the men simply walking through rainy fields of overgrown grass and decaying industrial sites. The imagery is unsettling, reminiscent of the liminal space trend of today, and often feels like watching men navigate a half-remembered dream. Very little is explained and, by the end, most viewers will come away with few answers and many questions. It’s one of those movies where everyone who watches it will come away with a different interpretation. It gives you a lot to think about and will linger in your head long after the credits role. In many ways, the best way to describe Stalker is with the word I opened with - haunting.

And Russian. It is very much a product of the Soviet Union, and the type of cultural artifact that perhaps typifies that time, place, and the outlook of the people there better than any other.

More than that, Stalker is a fundamentally serious film directed by a serious artist. A movie that never tells you what to think, but leaves you to draw your own conclusion. An artist who does walk behind the audience to guide them, and trusts that they will engage with the film in the way it was meant to be engaged with.

Tarkovsky is the type of director that I believe could have made a faithful adaptation of The Electric State. The aesthetics and the director are a match made in Heaven5. But, in today’s current cultural landscape, a man like Andre Tarkovsky would never be allowed behind a camera. A pitch for a film like Stalker would be roundly rejected from every studio for being boring or slow or too hard to understand. And, I get that - Stalker is not a film for everyone. I’d argue that it’s not a movie meant to be enjoyed so much as experienced, and I don’t really fault anyone who doesn’t want to spend two and a half hours watching stone-faced Russians contemplating the nature of the universe in relative silence.

But, without Stalker, without Tarkovsky, the cinematic landscape would be a lesser place absent the unique touch that they brought to the medium and the vision they spread among future filmmakers. They’ve influenced art both high and low, films both the most erudite kino auteur and Joe Mainstreet can appreciate. Serious artists and serious films will never occupy the top of the box office charts. And that’s fine. I don’t think most of them really want to be there. But there needs to be a place in the wider culture for them to do their thankless work. There needs to be a niche for them to be serious, to explore, to push boundaries, so that what they find in the unexplored wilderness beyond convention can trickle down and percolate throughout the wider scene and, like a nourishing rain, enrich the larger culture and the medium as a whole.

What happens to a culture when there is no place for serious artists and their works?

Well, for a small fee of $17.99 a month, you can fire up The Electric State on the tube and see it unfold from behind your phone screen. You don’t need an artist like Stålenhag or Tarkovsky to show you that dystopia.

You’re living in it.