SEX ON THURSDAY | The Art of Predestined Failure: Friends With Benefits

Urban Dictionary, a “crowdsourced online dictionary for slang words and phrases,” defines friends with benefits as:

Two friends who trust each other enough to engage in sexual activity without fear of hurting the other’s feelings. Ideal scenario for folk who are not interested in a serious relationship… Not a boyfriend or girlfriend; neither party has to refrain from dating other people. … A smart alternative to random hook-ups. (Urban Dictionary)

I have some problems with this definition and am here to deduce why “friends with benefits” is a system set up for failure, designed to fuel its own demise. I am a victim of failed friends with benefits relationships, and this is my story.

‘The Zone of Interest’ and Creeping Desensitization

Content Warning: Genocide

Adapted from a Martin Amis novel, Jonathon Glazer’s The Zone of Interest follows the inner lives of Auschwitz Commandant Rudolph Höss and his wife Hedwig, focusing its attention on family strife and workplace politics rather than the unspeakable horrors happening on the opposite side of the camp’s walls. Constantly breaking the 180-degree rule, diverting into avant-garde infrared sequences and displaying long, would-be boring depictions of domestic life, the film sets out to put off its own audience, confronting both the ability of cinema to narrativize evil and the startling comfort of an audience in engaging with it. Nearly every scene is set against a vomit-inducing soundscape that combines the machinery of death with the human reactions that it inspires (and the subsequent gunfire and dog barks part and parcel to the repression). It’s one of last years’ most difficult films but also one of its most essential, a treatise on the ease with which horror is tuned out just as its modern analogue is more visible than ever. 

The obvious comparator text for The Zone of Interest is Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, possibly the definitive visual document of the Holocaust and a film most notable for its refusal to show a second of archival footage. Glazer, who isn’t painting with a documentary canvas, must represent Auschwitz as an operating camp, but he too restrains his camera from ever actually depicting images either of genocide or those doomed to it.

GLASGOW | Don’t Let Them Erase You 

Yes, new technologies and trends in society are dehumanizing us and promoting the gentrification of a people as a species. But we need to learn how to survive, stay conscious and thrive in the coming world: Trying to prevent these changes is futile when the path has unfolded this far.