Spinal Tap (1985) and Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (2025). The original Spinal Tap film was the first ever one I saw of the 1990s - in a private high school party in Bendigo, Australia. It deftly parodies the 1970s and early 1980s wave of British and United States heavy metal - sending up some key folklore narratives and risk events. I could relate to the AOR / PR scenes and interviews when I wrote for La Trobe University’s Rabelais student newspaper in 1994 and dealt with both major and independent record labels in Melbourne. The film has many quotable lines of dialogue and scenes that have influenced subsequent artists: an example of how cultural and knowledge transmission in a particular epistemic community can occur.
The 2025 sequel has been criticised by people who expect it to be like the original film. Rather, it is a call back; a “look back in anger” (David Bowie); and a meditation on what it is like to get older; to get the Tap back together; to do one final gig; and to settle some old scores. For those of us who enjoyed the film it is a hilarious 83 minutes again with some old friends that we never expected to see again: a gift of celebratory mock joy about the twists, the turns, and the downward social mobility that can (not-so-unexpectedly) occur in midlife.
American Psycho (2000). The original Bret Easton Ellis novel (1991) was a flashpoint in Australian censorship rulings. Ellis situates today’s toxic masculinity in its Reagan administration era roots: the dog-eat-dog world of Wall Street mergers and acquisitions firms; white conservative and reactionary gun culture; fears of homelessness and the underclass; serial killer chic; and the yuppie life of getting that hard-to-get restaurant reservation. Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner’s script satirises the class, gender, and corporatist politics of this 1980s milieu that the United States President Donald Trump formatively evolved from - notably in several hilarious scenes of status-based competition about who has the best designed business card.
From both Machiavellian and Straussian perspectives this thinly-disguised Hobbesian competition of M&A arbitrageurs trying “all-against-all” is both zero sum - and the true Ruling Class who have the real power are not even in the room - this is the kind of stupid hypercompetition that is the bane of mid-level managerial experience. Harron plays this as a mixture of thriller; period piece; and melodrama - before in the rising tension period of the third act venturing straight into what the actual phenomenology of a dissociative, schizoid break with Reality feels like.
Christian Bale is a standout as Patrick Bateman who adopts the persona and the identity of his in-group enemy Paul Allen. No-one notices - or ever takes him that seriously. In the closing moments - no-one notices or cares about Bateman either. It’s a Recognition failure (Johann Gottlieb Fichte) of the exalted ego-Self which has become rigid in a neurosis-driven society (Karen Horney) and that has turned in on itself. If you can look beyond the very obvious “toxic masculinity as serial killer” surface pretext then there is a lot more here about how 1980s society in the United States actually worked - and why and how many people become disposable, expendable, or just simply “excess to requirements.”
The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-6, Live Anywhere, and Join The New Rich by Timothy Ferriss (New York: Crown Publishers, 2007, 2009). I originally read this book by Ferriss soon after Disinformation publisher / current owner Gary Baddeley decided to move the site to a user-generated content model (it was peak Web 2.0). This is very much a book of its time: labour hire arbitrage; task and workplace automation; and the expat life of becoming a digital nomad. It very much captures its time period - just as ‘Downtown’ Josh Brown’s essay You Weren’t Supposed To See That likewise captures the end of the COVID-19 era’s 2020-22 bubble in Substack newsletters; Robinhood-enabled crypto trading; and to parlay it into a Harriman House book deal for retail traders and investors.
For the past few months I have eyed off a copy in Readings Carlton’s store for $AUD50. As Disinformation, Dangerous Minds, and Magick School’s Richard Metzger once noted to me: “Books are really expensive in Australia”. Then a copy suddenly turned up for $AUD3 in my local Salvos thrift store (thank you to its donator). The paragraph structure and formatting style that Ferriss adopts in this book (as well as in his subsequent ones) are a good writing model for digital platform based download products and Amazon Kindle ebooks. Ferriss offers in this book a now influential framework to begin to arbitrage your respective life situation; to cut costs; to become more effective and efficient; and to diversify new income streams, in order to be more self-sustainable in your creative life.