Published on February 1, 2025 11:10 PM GMT
Primer (2004)
Content warnings here
What would actually happen, in real life (circa 2004), if two typical techie engineers invented time travel by accident?
Primer is odd for being both slow-burning and fast-paced. It's short and self-contained and low-budget, yet majestic and complicated and, er, "recursive".
I haven't eaten lunch since later this afternoon.
The parallels with AI alignment, especially the ongoing totally-not-an-AI-arms-race, run deep. Ordinary (if nerdy) humans, grappling with the same ambitions and fears and uncertainties humans always have. In isolation, a well-acted drama. But amplified by technology that directly messes with causation itself... and the implications spill like dark pools, recursively unfolding into tentacles that colonize the Everett branches with iron-cold power.
It's this entirely separate world, and you encompass most of it.
Primer is one of those movies that, immediately upon finishing it, you have to rewatch it.
(Bonus: There are lots of good Primer video essays on YouTube. For the full experience, watch several of the highly-viewed ones. Some YouTube/Reddit comments alone can upend how you see the movie.)
(Double-bonus pointed out by Devin: "Yudkowsky first realized the alignment problem while writing a time-travel story (and so understanding the idea of intelligence as something like 'outcome pump')". See My Naturalistic Awakening & The Hidden Complexity of Wishes.)
Memento (2000)
Content warnings here
What if your brain's short-term memory "autodeleted" every 5 or so minutes? You get to keep the old long-term memories before your traumatic brain injury, but you can't really make new ones (because they autodelete quickly).
So how... how can I heal? How am I supposed to heal if I can't... feel time?
Realistically portraying the exact kind of memory conundrum above, Memento is easily one of the best movies about "rationality as practiced by the individual" ever made. [1]
The protagonist has that special type of amnesia, and goes to great lengths to work around it. When the "map" is a panoply of literal paper notes and photographs, and the "territory" is further removed from one's lived experience than usual... it behooves one to take rationality, bias, motivated cognition, unquestioned assumptions, and information pretty damn seriously!
I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can't remember them.
(Bonus: Memento was based on a short story by Christopher Nolan's brother Jonathan, "Memento Mori". This is one of my favorite short stories ever, and was a key influence on one I wrote about ADHD.)
Vice (2018)
Content warnings here
Remember when Zvi was talking about "simulacra level 4"? Where you're not even going at reality itself, but basically just spitting words like a "lizard" politician lusting after power?
And remember, even earlier, when Yudkowsky (building off of Tooby & Cosmides) discussed how organisms just execute the adaptations that got selected, rather than intentionally trying to maximize their own fitness?
How does a man go on to become who he is?
Put those two insights together, and you have a masterful portrayal of human emptiness. That is, what "being an elite sociopathic lizard" feels like from the inside.
Vice was directed by Adam McKay, who also directed Anchorman, The Big Short, and Don't Look Up. Despite containing at least 2 of the most quintessentially Adam-McKay-cringey scenes of his entire filmography, I still consider Vice his masterpiece. Not nearly as funny as Don't Look Up, not as well-known as The Big Short, but more restrained and dramatically-controlled than either.
In Semifictionalized!Dick Cheney's story, we see a human being turned, turning, turning himself... into a power-seeking robot. Instead of a means to an end, power becomes an insectlike reflex despite the trappings of modernity and civilization. An end unto itself, its motivation muddled and, in important ways, lost. The final triumph of automaticity.
And the comedy is alright too! At least, often enough to prevent 100% of the movie from feeling like a chaotic spiral into destruction. Only around 30-50% is like that.
It has been my honor to be your servant. You chose me. And I did what you asked.
(Bonus: The music is really bloody good, one of the most memorable things about the movie. I've literally hummed the linked song (the piano and orchestral versions!) while walking around at EAGs.)
Funny Games U.S. (2007)
Content warnings here
Remember a few sections ago, in the Primer (2004) mini-review? Where I noted the explicit connection between causality and power?
You bet that you'll be alive tomorrow at 9 o'clock and we bet that you'll be dead. Okay?
Funny Games U.S., like several of director Michael Haneke's other films, can be read as applying this idea to politics, class, Visual Media As A Whole, and that "social reality" thing I keep hearing about.
Two psychopathic guys hold a family hostage in a vacation home, and it goes about as brutally and painfully as it sounds. Yet, almost always in the background, there is coincidence and what an SCP author might call "minor causality manipulation". The two psychopaths are more powerful than they initially seem, and their power flows directly from how the movie itself handles causality.
You know, if you'd let Peter help you, it would hurt less.
Or maybe I'm reading too much into it after the 2024 U.S. election. Like many a great work (like a well-acted stage play), Funny Games U.S. is constructed in a way that allows many interpretations of what is, on paper, one drama.
Er, in case it wasn't clear by now, you should very much have your "cultured interpretation" brain kicked into high gear for all of these movies, in order to get the full rationalist themes out of them whether they exist or not.
(Bonus: This is a shot-for-shot remake of the director's somehow-better-reviewed 1997 Funny Games. Haneke wanted to set the story in the U.S., but was forced to make the original in Austria. I can see why, for aesthetic and conceptual reasons, he wanted to set this story in the U.S. specifically!)
The Holy Mountain (1973)
Content warnings (far more extreme and serious than all previous entries combined) here
Do you want gold?
Left as an exercise for the reader.
Want more reviews, but more aesthetically-in-depth and also for music instead of movies? Check out Devin's Music Review Madness!
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