(preface)
I wrestled with the film Wildwood and wrote this essay for myself. I went to post it and was greeted by outside information that clarified many of the answers I had arrived at when working through the film on its own. Then came an epilogue of eureka and glee. I believe this encapsulates why self-reflection is an essential aspect of consuming art and I encourage others to wrestle themselves if we are to survive the coming age.
(the original essay)
Wildwood depressed me. For some reason each step I have taken afterwards has been accompanied by distant screams from within. The voices cry out behind my eyes, “Cast it out so it does not take root!” Thus:
A beautifully crafted hollow image is the most painful to watch. It wasn’t that I didn’t “agree” with everything that happened. I did. I get the movie. It is about the climate catastrophe and the older generation sacrificing the younger generation because of their outdated beliefs. It is about seeing magic in a rationalist world that stops the young from venturing into the unknown. It is about duty and fighting for what you believe in. It is about the fear of death. It is an updated Chronicles of Narnia, where Aslan is an Eagle and Christianity has been exchanged for liberal plant worship.
There was something distressingly inhuman about it, even though it screamed “humanity” constantly at its audience. When you watch it, it wants you to think it is good. Look at how much “art” happened! “It was crafted by human hands! Thousands and thousands of human hands! It was not made by a machine!”
I fear that this is a harbinger of liberal humanist battlegrounds for the coming fight against AI. They think we need to recruit human bodies to form the machine. I.e. a 21st century John Henry. It is a cruel misunderstanding of what art is. Art is never in the labor. Labor is necessary to realize a vision, but if labor is spent realizing something hollow and inhuman, that labor was simply work, not art. If this is the ground we choose to fight on, we will have lost before the battle even begins.
(Unfortunately a majority of the film’s most popular reviews occupy this ground – “the biggest middle finger to generative AI of all time.”)
This film is a contemporary pyramid. In truth, we have never stopped building the pyramids. Our culture is just as obsessed with religious temples as any that has come before, we just have different gods. Films and media are the temples of our time. The religious epicenter of any culture is simply whatever art people care about and engage with. We have exchanged religious services for media consumption, but we are still human. We can still feel truth and belief in the poetic genius when we see it, and we, like every other culture, seek to enshrine and pass down works that testify to where the human condition can reach towards at a given moment.
However, we have entered an era of objectivity. Where the thing must be “good” because it has been quantified as “good” based on empirical evidence. We assess our art as scientists and think the greatest works have the most “art” inside of them. For example, “Each frame of this movie has more “art” than that other movie.” This gets us in an inhuman situation where we forced ourselves to think that the temple must hold a god, because it is objectively “valuable” and formalisticly “beautiful.”
Think of someone in ancient Egypt. How would it feel for this individual to enter that pyramid that had been touched and cared for by all of their community? What if when they stood at the center, they were confronted, not with a god, but by the empty and cruel vanity of man. Standing inside that ornate monument, should this individual justify the pharaoh’s divinity simply because of the amount of death and toil which constructed his magnificent temple? Is it disrespectful to the slaves that gave their lives to build it, to observe something hollow at its center? And is it disrespectful to the slaves that gave their lives to build it, to seek for the pyramid to be torn down?
To the ground. We must destroy our beautiful empty temples no matter how uncomfortable this makes us feel. How can I justify this review to the laborers who spent years of their lives building this film? I can do it by arguing that the alternative is much worse. If we are to survive the coming age, we must be unafraid to reveal what makes us human. We must gather around works of art that do not reflect the vague systematic notion of humanity but works of art that could ONLY be created by a living breathing human being. This film uses labor and technology directed towards an objective surface level – the level of the filmic image. Despite the warnings of the AI bell tollers, we will always “win” against what we have created because the human condition is indescribable. Even words are the fumbling afterthought of something long dead inside our souls. As subjective creatures, we can never be “replaced” because what makes us human cannot be manifest, only hinted at. However, we can be replaced if our battle rests at the objective surface level. We must never forget that our images are nothing without their source, no matter how laborious or formally technical that image might be. We must not worship labor and efficiency because this is the language of capitalism not art.
This film is more like patronage than art. Attempting to artificially realize a “consensus.” Patronage is wanting the world to be thought of a certain way and having the resources to make a mass amount of people see the world in this way. This is the logic of Pharaohs. Winning over the mass, not by touching their soul and shaping what they believe, but by constructing the worlds they are forced to perceive. I fear this film thinks art is just a fake version of the “real” world -- "the real world should become like this fake world because of how beautiful and expensive it was to craft."
This is not acceptable. We must feel the human breath in our art. Create something that is unique to yourself. We are subjective beings. I felt the objectivity of this world in every frame. All the hands on the clay, and all the hands on the writing, all the hands on it. Just too many hands. It is too much. How can any human cry out in this ornate world where the bar to be "heard" is placed beyond the capabilities of the individual? This is not saving us from the machine; this is fighting the machine on its terms. The communal artistic language of the species is slowly being moved beyond the capabilities of the individual artist, into a world of mass toil and expensive technology. And once that happens, we will find ourselves trapped in a fake world unable to cry out.
How painfully this irony slips through the fingers of this film’s makers. The film is about sacrificing the “individual” innocent in an attempt to create a fake version of life. It wears the costume of the savior while it itself holds the knife. This objective quantification art traps our culture’s most vulnerable in a simulation world of beautiful inhuman images and the inability to change them unless they become machines themselves. We are not meant to be willing cogs in an artistic machine. What the hell is happening. Can no one see the insanity of this statement?
I have probably been too hard on this film in particular. It is just painful to watch something that claims it is freeing the young while actively building chains to ensnare them. It was screaming at me to praise it, but the more it screamed at me, the more I wept.
(epilogue)
IT COULD NOT HAVE BEEN WRITTEN! THIS MOVIE WAS MADE BY A BILLIONAIRE! I KNEW IT THE WHOLE TIME. It speaks the language of money. I felt it in every frame. It is SUCH a billionaire movie. They are surrounded by formalistic beauty with empty empty teeny tiny souls. HAHAHA. Of course this man thinks art is as many little hands as possible endlessly laboring over his own bland stupid vision. CAPITALISM AS ART HAHA! And we praise it! How about we stop letting vampires tell us about the human condition. I SAID it was a pyramid without knowing any of this. We are all in the pyramid and we praise the Pharaoh for his slave labor! Haha! It is even funnier because it is NIKE who literally uses slave labor. These people are parasites who don’t want to stop sucking but don’t want to feel bad about it. They fund these vanity projects as sleeping pills. The landed gentry want to play artist so they build the fanciest prettiest most expensive stage hahahaha! They are combining technology and art, so only they have the tools to play! They will never win on fair terms so they change the rules! They feel nothing and they think the problem is that the images they look at are not constructed well enough.
How did I read all of this just from watching the film by itself? My soul immediately cried out in pain after consuming something empty. I am sure many of these 5-star reviewers felt the emptiness as well but rationally justified their praise because they want to appear as "pro-art." This whole thing is just like Jessie Plemmons at the end of Digger. That is scary. Wow. What a fun night. This is why you engage with art yourself instead of treating it like a science. Look at how many volunteer to guard an empty temple! HAHA! If you guard something you never have to look inside! We love the pharaohs and want to keep building their temples! According to these comments, Billionaires are the only ones capable of creating "Art in its purest form!" Our lives are really just an extension of theirs! This is what happens when god dies – the men with power move into the temple. Then humanity has toil without even the chance at salvation. And guess what this film tells us – our toil IS our salvation! HAHAHA! AMAZING! And we praise it
You can tell how scared he is based on how beautifully he made each frame. He has meticulously curated his outside to compensate for the chasm that is his inside. If you have something you want people to listen to, stick your neck out. That is what an actual human artist does. This man has hidden himself inside of precisely what our culture is afraid of attacking -- artistic labor. Come out of the dark and look your laborers in the eyes. See how it feels to tell them what you are actually doing, "Your toil for my temple is your only chance at salvation. If you want material art to survive, I am your savior. Your lives and labor are nothing but a costume I wear to seek love from others without having to change myself." Something tells me they won't find it as convincing when coming from your lips.
- Written 25 October 2026