Eating sh*t, not eating sh*t, straight-up swallowing a Super Big Gulp of sh*t
The hook in the trailer and early teasers for Peacock’s “Poker Face” was that Natasha Lyonne’s character Charlie Cale had a gift for lie detection; she’d casually say “bullshit” when someone’s claim didn’t pass her smell test. In the series itself, this conceit is present and correct! Yet it’s more of a loose connective tissue that becomes less rote with each episode, and admittedly the changeup does keep the writing fresh. Also it’s nice that Charlie’s talent gets to exist as its own mystery, without a damaged-superhero origin story to pathologize someone who’s otherwise a pretty normal chick living in survival mode. It should be seen as normal to read for filth.
I like “Poker Face” and its absurdist character studies quite a bit, even if showrunner Rian Johnson’s thematic kinda—Trojan horse is a hall pass on plunging deeper still into the nature of bullshit itself. As writer-director of the “Knives Out” mysteries, pompous and slick-talking dolts are Johnson’s stock in trade lately, and his projects come to us in an era of snake-oil salesmen and desperate hustle-culture wannabes, lying to us constantly, trying to trick us and operate on us constantly. It’s a rich field of inquiry.
Social media algorithms build us feedback loops of what’s considered “relevant” to us, and now this includes anyone morally bankrupt and engagement-thirsty enough to game themselves into our attention span. And everyone’s favorite new time-wasting AI toy, ChatGPT, has been called “more of a bullshitter than the most egregious egoist you’ll ever meet, producing baseless assertions with unfailing confidence because that’s what it’s designed to do.” In a sense, a lot of us are complicit in AI’s big lie because we want to see how canny its valley is and that requires belief on our parts, a submission to being smothered by the soft clean pillow of techno-utopianism, if only momentarily on our lunch breaks. The implications of this generative cyber-bogeyman beyond that are too upsetting.
Bullshit is certainly a hallmark of extrovert chinstroker tech-clowns like Elon Musk (toootally not parodied in Rian Johnson’s “Glass Onion”), and it’s hard to say whether the elastic truth of guru arrogance is more dangerous in popular simping-for-billionaires contexts or in niche environments like Keith Raniere’s “executive success” cult NXIVM, which blended classic MLM schemes (and eventually sex slavery) with neurolinguistic programming, a widely critiqued 1970s pop-psych relic that when used for evil is like Scieno auditing or the abusive dad of cognitive behavioral therapy.
In both the above instances of bullshit, there’s a reliance on getting gullible people to subscribe to a leader’s harebrained ideas. The archetypal cult member, the received wisdom goes, devours this sort of rhetoric like a skate rat to a Super Big Gulp. But in watching the two seasons of HBO’s “The Vow” docuseries on the cult, it became clearer that a hallmark of these kinds of groups is recruiting borderline-smart people who think they’re not gullible, who would swear up and down they’d never be taken in by something so manipulative, and subsequently flattering their pick-me narcissism until their defenses are down. And perhaps these recruits become devout believers or perhaps they just get addicted to their proximity to the top dawg and the power they think it confers, but somewhere in the timeline, they all say “whatever the veracity is here, I’m making a choice to go with it.”
And that’s the American way, at least for non-sociopaths. We go with it. We eat shit every day because there’s something we want out of the transaction. Women (feminist ones!) who take a wait-and-see attitude when they’re well aware the men they’re putting up with are a burning warehouse full of red flags. Customers on help lines who hear “your business is important to us” chirped vacuously at them on loop for an hour because the call center won’t hire enough staff. Democrat voters watching our electeds shrug and say “we tried everything” after eunuchizing their social-package bills in concession to Republican demands.
Millions of Americans — maybe not a supermajority but for sure a force big enough to quake some venture capitalist spaceboots — are Charlie of “Poker Face,” reflexively going “bullshit” under our breath. It’s a resonant and satisfying quasi-motif, a vamp of prole protest in a breezy, surface-level show.
