#90: America's main industry is fighting people on camera
A week of movies, TV shows, and novels that all had me wondering: USA.......... are you okay?
Death by Consumption
2/17/26 - 2/23/26
First things first: this email may have arrived in a different part of your inbox, because I have relocated to Substack for reasons that are too boring to get into here (my old indie platform seemed to be falling apart, so I’ve sold out yayyyyyy). The good news is I finally have a working url — deathbyconsumption.com — so we are a real, official, grown-up website. All this means nothing for you; the emails should keep flowing as usual, so just drag this into your primary inbox or whatever, and gmail should resume treating these weekly emails as the priority they are. And now that all that boring stuff is out of the way: snow, huh?! What a concept! The Great Blizzard of ‘26 was beautiful for a day, but now all this snow is just in the way, and I simply refuse to find myself midway through March and still trapped behind slow walkers on snow-narrowed sidewalks. MELT, BITCH.
This week: I saw the new Sam Raimi film and once again was horrified at how people act in movie theaters, I marveled at how much Willem Dafoe looked like a lesbian in the 80s, I was chilled to the bone by the men of Love is Blind, I loved the new HBO show that exposes how broken Americans are, and I read the debut novel from a two-time Survivor contestant that’s totally not based on Survivor, wink wink to any CBS lawyers.
Send Help (2026) — at Nitehawk Prospect Park
This is a perfect January/February movie: campy, over-the-top, genuinely shocking at times, and just perfectly stupid. Which is all to say, this sure is a Sam Raimi movie, all right!
Dylan O’Brien and Rachel McAdams are both fantastic in this, and while I always expect her to be great, I realized I’ve become weirdly proud of him, as if he were my very own son. You’re doing great, Dylan! They do a She’s All That kind of thing with Rachel McAdams here, where they throw her in a bulky cardigan and an ugly skirt and you’re expected to believe Rachel McAdams is physically repulsive to men, which is more than a little insane. But she’s such a good actress she actually kind of pulls off the transformation from mousy office worker to empowered, feral island woman. What can’t she do!
There aren’t “twists,” per se, but the back-and-forth between Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien does keep you guessing who will get the upper hand. The smartest thing the movie does is to avoid moralizing — these are both bad people, in different ways, and if you’re rooting for either of them you’re missing the point. We do get some perspective on why they’re so fucked up, but it’s handled well, used more to flesh out the characters rather than forgive them. Like the best fights on the Real Housewives, both characters are completely in the wrong, and the best way to enjoy it is to free yourself from having to choose a side at all. This is a knowingly stupid movie, yes, but it’s also a bleakly funny glimpse at the coldhearted rot at the center of America, where the job market is slowly collapsing and many of us (especially women, of course), are forced into toxic workplaces. When you’re given the chance to flip the power against your abusive boss, how far would you take things?
The only downside to the movie — and this is something I’ve complained about before, but I don’t care, I’m doing it again — is the fact that people have completely lost the ability to watch a movie in public. We were surrounded by the worst-behaved theater audience I’ve been subjected to in a while, a collection of people who were all convinced that we all paid $20 specifically to see the film with the addition of their own audio commentary. The more the people around us threw out unfunny one-liners, the more I fantasized about doing to them what Rachel McAdams was doing on screen to Dylan O’Brien.
Two Gen Z girlies behind us couldn’t make it through a scene without adding a “joke,” like in a scene in which Rachel McAdams makes a sauce to go with the fish she’s caught on the island, causing the girl behind me to screech, “SAUCE?! A WOMAN AFTER MY OWN HEART!” Wow, what a hilarious thing to yell! I’m sure it must have been hard for you, to watch a movie that somehow didn’t revolve around you, so I’m thrilled you managed to find a way to make us all aware of your uniquely sparkling personality! Sam Raimi should be paying you to see his film! In fact, we should all turn our seats around and watch you instead of this movie, since you’re clearly the most interesting person in the room!
Look, if you’re going to speak during a movie, you really need to assess whether you’re actually a funny person or not. Most people simply don’t have the personality to pull off a genuinely entertaining mid-movie outburst, I’m sorry to tell you! The majority of the time, adding your own “joke” to the movie we’re all watching just makes you sound like everyone’s lamest coworker, awkwardly reheating week-old memes in a sad attempt to pass as humorous. We can’t all be the genuinely hilarious woman who was in the theater with me when I saw the horror movie Barbarian a couple years ago — when that film’s main character passed up her 4th or 5th easy opportunity to escape, this theatergoer groaned out loud, mostly to herself, “I’m so sick of this bitch,” which made the entire theater burst into laughter. If you’re going to yell something in a movie, you better make it worth our while, and none of the people in my showing of Send Help had the charisma to pull it off. Normally I’d be enraged at the girl next to us, who spent the whole movie scrolling Instagram, but compared to what else was going on in that theater, I was just relieved she was quiet.
All I’m saying is: movie theaters are dying and while it’s easy to blame the corporations for their own collapse, I can reserve some of the blame for these people who can’t ever shut the fuck up.
To Live and Die in LA (1985) — on Criterion
From the neon-stylized opening credits to the Wang Chung-composed soundtrack to the quaint concerns with counterfeiting $20 bills, this is a gloriously 80s film, and has to be one of William Friedkin’s best. He’s the master of Bleak Cinema, giving you a miserable look at the institutional rot beneath our society, and unfortunately since we never seem to learn our lesson as a nation, his films are still relevant over 40 years later. He’s also smart enough to lean into the fact that Willem Dafoe looked exactly like a glamorous lesbian in the 80s, so why not work that concept into the movie?
Love is Blind, season 10, episodes 1-9 — on Netflix
Every season of Love is Blind is a horror show about women who have been cursed to heterosexual hell, but nothing prepared me for the nightmares that the Ohio-based season had in store for us. These are some of the scariest people ever put on television. Most of these people literally voted for JD Vance to be a Senator, and then voted for him again to be Vice fucking President of our entire country, okay? So you know these people don’t give a shit about anything. The men on this season have the intelligence level and personality of those macaques that keep beating up Punch the monkey.
Chris is the obvious villain, but his body-shaming of Jessica felt so obvious and almost forced — like a performance from a tiny man who’s desperate to turn his 15 minutes of fame into a career as a right wing podcaster (and it’ll probably work!). Alex is the most genuinely terrifying one, with his shifty lizard eyes and inability to say even a single thing with conviction. That man is hiding some dark and terrifying secrets, and with his “nomad lifestyle” I will not be surprised when some true crime TikTok girly gets her corkboard and red yarn out to reveal an uptick in disappearing women in every city Alex visits.
The show got lucky with its first and only successful couple, and it felt like the producers wasted years trying and failing to chase that initial high, serving us rose-colored edits of some clearly fucked-up couples. But now, with the nightmare that is the entire state of Ohio, it feels like they might finally be retooling the show and making it into what it always should have been: a PSA to women about specific men to be avoided at all costs.
If we can keep this show running for the next decade-plus, we will have compiled an FBI’s Most Wanted list of all the single men women should most avoid in the entire country. This show is performing a valuable public service to all women, and I think it should be taxpayer funded.
Neighbors, season 1, episodes 1-2 — on HBOMax
Neighbors is, unfortunately, the show America needs right now. This new HBO show, produced by A24 and the malevolent spirit that lives inside Josh Safdie, tells various stories from around the country of neighbors at war with each other. Each episode is less than 30 minutes and covers two different stories, so the episodes are quick and dirty, told at whiplash speed, with TikTok-inspired edits and absurdist interludes that, somehow, captures the vibe of living in the United States right now: we are a nation of idiots at war with each other over the stupidest things imaginable.
The show is often cruel and unforgiving, using distorted lenses and unflattering angles to show the worst of the participants, with most arguments edited to make both sides look absolutely deranged. No one comes out of this looking good, least of all our country. The portrait of America that emerges after only the first two episodes is a nation of petty, miserable people squabbling over the tiniest plots of land, willing to draw a gun on neighbors if they’re perceived to lower our property values by even a dollar. Each episode strives for a happy ending, but the participants’ happy endings always come across as more coping mechanism than actual happiness.
I’m making the show sound more bleak than it is, and, depending on your tolerance for laughing at people, you may find it bleak. But I’m not ashamed to admit I screamed with laughter throughout most of the two episodes I saw; despite the cruel nature of the show, I found the participants almost always extremely charming, if not relatable at times. (My absolute favorites are, of course, the elderly Indiana gays who I refuse to believe aren’t plucked from a Christopher Guest film — the first time we see them, they’re sitting in a hot tub that appears to be in their living room.)
Who hasn’t felt absolutely overwhelming frustration at the tiny, ridiculous slights from an obnoxious neighbor? We’re a nation on the verge, at each other’s throats over extremely important and vital issues, so maybe what we need most is a show that exposes the pettiest, least-important arguments in our country, and gives us all a chance to laugh at it. This is a cruel show, holding up a mirror to a cruel nation, and if you weren’t laughing, you could cry.
Escape!, by Stephen Fishbach (2026) — hardcover
This debut novel by two-time Survivor player Stephen Fishbach feels like a book he’s been working on since his first time on the show, 18 years ago. Focused on a Survivor-esque reality show called “Escape!,” it tells the story of the types of people drawn to reality TV — on both the contestant and production sides. Kent, a grizzled hero who has already won a similar reality show, is cast on season one of “Escape!” and marooned on an island alongside a collection of other reality TV has-beens and newcomers, all various mishmashes of recognizable types (and, for a Survivor fan, Stephen drops endless Easter eggs dropped throughout the narrative — I truly lost count of references). Also out there is Miriam, cast to be the “nerd,” a reality TV newbie who may or may not be in over her head. And on the production side we follow Beck, a disgraced producer eager to prove herself once again. Miriam and Kent are playing the literal game on the show, but Stephen never lets you forget that there’s always more to the story than what you see on screen: “There are always two games. The one you’re playing against the other contestants, and the one the producers are playing against you.”
What starts as a silly, tongue-in-cheek look at the behind-the-scenes process of reality TV turns deadly serious, with twists and melodramatic turns worthy of their own Sam Raimi adaptation. While the characters sometimes feel a bit blurred at the edges, not quite fully real (but perhaps that’s just a meta-commentary on the act of thinking you can know a character based on their TV edit?), it’s a true page-turner, with more than enough clever insights on the types of personalities (and personality defects) that have kept the reality TV engine humming for decades. But reality TV, of course, turns a mirror on society, and what it shows us is we’re a nation of paranoid lunatics, overeager to turn on someone else before they can get one over on us.
YIKES, bleak week! I blame the snow. As always, you can reply to this email, or forward it to someone who might love it — or better yet, someone who might hate it and want to fight about it with me. I love fighting over email! You can also, I think, comment on it on Substack?? I don’t know, we’re figuring this brave new email world out together.
I’m so sick of this bitch