The Good, the Bad, and the Weird is the name of a popular Korean movie released in 2008, shortly before I moved there to teach. It is an anachronistic spin on the wild west of the Far East in 1939, taking place in the Mongolian (Manchukuo/Manchurian) desert during the Japanese occupational period.
Other than stylistically, the movie is not that interesting. I recall it being an imitation of an amalgamation of Spaghetti Western tropes (a genre already quite weird in its Italianification of the American Wild West). It’s fun to see Imperial Japanese armies and desert bandits scramble across the desert on horseback with all the rugged-individualist tropes of the Western, right up to the Mexican stand-off. One protagonist sports an impeccable emo haircut.
Travel is about seeing these idiosyncrasies, like the Talking Heads True Stories album cover adopted as a local bakery’s logo. This sort of thing can show up in unexpected ways in unexpected places, like knockoff brands that spell things wrong. Words or images put together in different contexts, filtered through other languages and cultural scripts—these riff on the known and twist into create uncanny valleys.
Something as simple as seeing a brand you know written in a font you know but reset in another language’s alphabet can open a rift to weirdness. Not always and not necessarily, where the known begins to veer off course. Similarly, as I shared in an earlier post (and will likely revisit), even anarchism expressed as graffiti takes on a different flavor and context than when its discussed online or packaged into political discourse.
These Amstel pint glasses always throw me, and seem a little uncanny in the same way an extra limb protruding from someone’s shirt throws me and seems uncanny in an AI-produced image. “That’s not right,” I think for a moment, and maybe chuckle, then I step back and realize it is right, according to the context. Its uncanny resemblance is right and real and makes sense, but I have to shift my context.
In the wake of a world that’s been increasingly globalized since the 1960s, this happens a lot. Snowden Todd mentions a recent trend in South Korea of backpacks and jackets with the National Geographic logo on them despite people not knowing what National Geographic is. Viktoriia Vasileva conceptualizes the weird through a lens of branding and fashion: “Weird is the only safe heaven that lies between phony and real. It makes the mundane interesting, the manufactured forgivable, and the out-of-touch grounded.”
That post, along with the “kid with a Balenciaga plastic bag full of bread sticks captured by Tinko Czetwertynski and put in context by Dan Thanwley” (see previous Substack link) inspired me to pay more attention to this and write this post. Recognizing this kind of weird is global and capitalistically and technologically mediated spurred me to focus on what “lies between phony and real.” Having an eye for seeing the weird and untangling it is something I enjoy a lot about being in other countries.
A more technologically, capitalistically globalized world has both generated more “weird” and made it accessible through cultural imitation and commodification, with all its dissonances. The original source’s meaning is always getting lost somewhere, like what inspired Sergio Leone to make Westerns, what National Geographic is, or how Balenciaga is a status symbol. But why not have emo hair while fighting off bandits and Imperial soldiers in Manchukuo? Why not wear a yellow square logo on your backpack or jacket because the design is chic? Why not carry bread sticks in a Balenciaga plastic bag?
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What’s weird and why? Writer/academic Erik Davis (who wrote a book on 1970s counterculture weird) discusses the political weird is in the context and the history of the weird. . . um, I mean, the word, “weird.” He calls “weird” a waste-basket term that is quite shifty over time, playing with cultural norms. Donald Trump is quite weird, but seems more normal now (only to get called out for his associated weirdness with J.D. Vance, yet no one seems to mind his ramblings about Hannibal Lecter). AI-generated images seem weird and uncanny, over time they will seem cheap and banal, but utilized in the right way they could potentially get formidably weird again: “weirdness can also flip into its opposite, and become banal. Psychedelic imagery is a great example here, or Halloween monsters, or snarky self-referential animated cartoons. Weirdness, then, is a moving target.”
Noah Smith points out how the narrative has flipped, how what was-weird (non-normative) has become normalized, and how “weird” means two different things for Republicans and Democrats. For the former, it signifies “outgroup,” for the latter, “the unrest of the 2010s.”
The 2010s upended a lot of norms: The Arab Spring, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Trump’s ascendency, Black Lives Matter wokeness and everything which became associated with that. An overabundance of memes, incomes disparities, #metoo, &c.
Dividing a world into “normals” and “weirds” is Manichean, dualistic: a struggle of lightness and darkness—Good stigmatizing Evil. It’s a way to make people othered and dehumanize them. In between there is the weird and the ugly and the beautiful. Globalizing capital has begotten unexpected divisions and tensions. In the margins it has begotten some weird—
Things. Like. . . technology (with all that technology encompasses) and the things and Frankenstein’s monsters that technology has created. And technology and its outcomes have exacerbated these tensions with the illusion of mediating them.
Mary Harrington’s progress theology, a way of culturally and religiously framing an obsession with the technologizing spirit, mastering of the material world and substituting this mastery for everything beautiful and good, (is it inverse Manichean: positioning matter against spirit as good over evil?) puts this illusion in an American industrial context.
The good, the bad—each side of a war wants to annihilate the other side, or at least have them surrender to their ideals. In between, middling and tempering is the weird, the ugly, skewed into the beautiful.
Anyway.
That’s it for today, seeing beyond good and evil. Thanks for reading and I hope to see you again.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (11/12) Movie CLIP - Three-Way Standoff (1966) HD (youtube.com)