I watched a British thriller called The Suspect based on a headline describing it as “preposterous but strangely compelling.” It was, and I enjoyed Aidan Turner sustaining intense confusion on his face. The Lazarus Project and The Capture are much better British thrillers, but I started thinking “preposterous but strangely compelling” is a very good category. It may be all I want to see and make in this era.
The other day I searched online for Goya's painting Saturn Devouring His Son. DuckDuckGo returned this:
What a bounty of the Preposterous But Strangely Compelling! It's been a real pleasure looking at them, imagining all of these lives conjured from art print sellers' automated image generators. I had to scroll through these images before finding the original painting, though, and AI will now produce an infinite library of what they're calling "slop". It's not hard to imagine the internet becoming filled with so much junk that it's only usable by depending on AI to search it for you.
I taped up Saturn Devouring His Son on the wall in my studio so I could think about it more, but it lives among many images so the impact is unmatched. Now I am enticed to print it big for our living room.
