I think a lot about our relationship to celebrity and to culture, and while I think Antiviral, the first movie from Brandon Cronenberg (son of David) may get at the intensity of our obsession, I’m not sure it looks like it’s got the equation quite figured out:

With intense fandom, I think most people tend to dream of living inside the fictional world they’ve become attached, or to inhabit a persona, but when it comes to actual famous humans, while a small number dream of inhabiting their lives, mostly what strong fans want is for those people to live out their fantasies of what those people’s lives should be like. When Kristen Stewart cheats on Robert Pattinson, people are angry because they believe the two have some sort of obligation to them to live out a fantasy. When utterly unfounded rumors swirl that Gillian Anderson is living with David Duchovny, Scully and Mulder fans’ hearts beat a little faster, because it’s as if a fantasy has stepped out of viewers’ brains, as if there’s a weird kind of power to the wish. When people threaten Ellen Page for dating Alexander Skarsgard, it’s not because they think he should be dating them, but because Page fails to live up to some sort of bizarre standard for the kind of woman Skarsgard ought to be dating. For the most part, we don’t want to consume these people’s flesh or feel what they feel. We want them to be our paper dolls, a desire that’s tyrannical even as it distances us from the real lives of the people we’d like to command, off-camera and on, for our entertainment.

As should be obvious, there are massive spoilers for Prometheus in this post.

I’ve been thinking about many aspects of Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s prequel to his Alien movies, but the one that’s stuck with me most is the clearest continuation of the Alien franchise’s themes: the movie’s exploration of bodily invasion and specifically women’s bodily autonomy. In New York Magazine, David Edelstein describes one of the movie‘s most harrowing and original sequences “a bit of grisly self-surgery that should inspire the pro-choice movement for millennia to come.” Livejournal user cavalorn, in a long and much-circulated analysis of the movie that’s the closest I’ve seen for a compelling argument for the coherence of some, but not all, of its ideas, writes: “I’m not even going to begin to explore the pro-choice versus forced birth implications of that scene. I don’t think they’re clear, and I’m not entirely comfortable doing so.” I’m still considering this element of the movie, and suspect I will be for some time to come. But for the moment, I feel like Prometheus is a movie that attempts to describe the quest for bodily autonomy as a sign of extreme toughness that ends up reaffirming the persistence of patriarchy and rape culture, even in the future, even as we travel beyond all we know.

There’s a lot of discussion to be had about the android David’s (Michael Fassbender) motivations for dosing Holloway, the colleague and lover of Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), the movie’s main character: does he know that it will result in her pregnancy? Is he experimenting for his own purposes or at the behest of Peter Weyland, the father he also wants dead? To a certain extent, his motivations and reasoning are irrelevant. The end result of David’s actions is that Shaw ends up with a metaphorical pregnancy against her plans and will, and when she expresses a wish to end the invasion of her body, David forcibly prevents her from doing so.

The scene of Shaw’s—abortion isn’t really the right word for it, because she isn’t pregnant, but rather infected, and the result of the surgery isn’t the termination of her pregnancy but a premature birth—seizing control of her body is undeniably, viscerally powerful, even as it’s sacrificed in small ways to the movie’s other needs. The surgery would have been urgent enough even without the medpod’s initial warning that it isn’t programmed to treat women, a nonsensical restriction on its programming that causes a slight delay in the midst of great urgency but really exists as another clue that Peter Weyland is still alive. Similarly, the revelation that Shaw has been unable to conceive a child with Holloway ends up functioning as foreshadowing, rather than as nuance. Her instant reaction to David’s diagnosis of her pregnancy is to want to terminate it. The movie isn’t interested in the possibility that, given her profound upset over her inability to have a child with Holloway, she might have some sort of connection to the thing growing rapidly inside her. Those emotions might have been uncomfortable given how that creature came to be inside her, but it would have been a fascinating, uncomfortable conversation for the movie to engage in.
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I have some quibbles with TIME’s 30-best music videos list, most notably, the total OutKast lockout, but I am grateful that it reminded me of how fantastic Gnarls Barkley’s video for “Going On” is:

Is there any group who produced so many brilliant videos out of such a small pool of songs? There’s a density to their accomplishment, and also a wonderful coherence to Gnarls Barkley’s videos, which tend to introduce an element of the strange or unsettling into a familiar door. What works so well about the video for “Going On” is the way it adds depth and power to a song that otherwise doesn’t have very specific lyrics, the total commitment of the actors to the concept — when the two main characters exchange a look before they run through their portal, the significance of their decision to cross over is clear.

The same thing was true of the video for “Crazy,” the first single off Gnarls Barkley’s first album. Rorschach blots are sort of definitionally unsettling, but they’re general, vague. “Crazy” added an eerie specificity to the images, which by turn provided unsettling shadows to the real people who were represented in them.

Then, there’s perhaps my favorite Gnarls Barkley video, the one for “Smiley Faces.” It’s much more whimsical than the previous two I’ve mentioned, an alternative history of American music (among other things) that sneaks Cee Lo Green and Danger Mouse into as many frames as possible:

The past is different when you recognize the people in the pictures. Or, in the case of the video for “Run,” the cheesy ’80s dance shows:

This is pretty clearly a hallmark of Cee Lo’s — if there was one thing that was clear about his performances and his coaching on The Voice, it was how much he loves to invoke different eras.

In stark contrast to the period throwbacks, another one of their staples seems to be body horror, delivered in variable doses. There’s the delightfully weird “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul,” which manages to take the cliche of an awkward couple in a diner and do something really strange and wonderful with it — I’d love to watch a romantic comedy this sad and frank. And Gnarls Barkley did something similarly body-horror-y in the clip for “Gone Daddy Gone,” where we’re expected to sympathize with insects and dust mites (I don’t think this is nearly as much of an accomplishment as the others, but the colors are fun, as is the inversion of the annoyingly perfect housewife trope):

I don’t know if that’s something that comes from Danger Mouse, though the video for Broken Bells’ “The Ghost Inside” derives a lot of its power from forcing us to watch Christina Hendricks dismantle her own body:

Obviously, much credit is due to the directors of all of these videos. But it’s still really impressive to see how hot Gnarls Barkley’s streak was there for a while.