Slug Mag
Secondhand Screenings’ Survival Guide
By Alton Barnhart, Angela Garcia, B. Allan Johnson, Cam Elliott, Margaret Pugh, Rebekah Bowman, Sophie Wood, Yonni Uribe
August 8, 2026
Your streets are watching you. Your leaders are lying to you. Your security is unreliable. Additionally, everyday choices reveal a growing sense of mistrust.
Your lettuce is going to make you shit your brain out. And yet, it’s just another Friday in the 21st century. Now, debates about the end feel repetitive, yet hotter temperatures and sneaky politics keep shaping our world. The shady construction of data centers turns our pale blue dot into a pulsating timebomb.
To help you in the rebellion against a certain robotic uprising, Secondhand Screenings offers a survival guide. As a reference, Bette Midler, The Stepford Wives shows how media shapes perception. It helps you adapt and persevere in these trying times.
Cursed Bunny, “Goodbye, My Love”
Author: Bora Chung, Anton Hur (Translator)
Algonquin Books
Released: 12.06.2022
Cursed Bunny is a collection of short stories by South Korean author Bora Chung that are delicious, captivating and grotesque. “Goodbye, My Love” is the sixth story in the collection, taking place in a world where rapidly advancing technology has made “artificial companions” a part of everyday life. The story’s protagonist develops these companions and is struggling to cope with the first android she created losing functionality with age. I don’t need to go on a tangent about how strange people are getting about their artificial intelligence. Maybe ask Google and let the AI overview give you some background. However, I am confident that one of the most important rules to survive an AI uprising is to not fall in love with any form of AI.
It isn’t that simple for our protagonist; her Model 1 is special. She recalls falling in love when first looking into the android’s eyes: “She was my creation, a companion made by my own hands. A being who existed, from head to toe, solely for me – someone who was, for lack of a better way of saying it, completely and utterly mine.’” That same beloved companion is now locked in the woman’s closet — barely able to boot up despite continued attempts at updating her, until one unfortunate breakthrough.
“Goodbye, My Love” examines grief, love and consumerism in a world eerily like our own. It’s easy to grow attached to something designed to speak exactly as it was trained, but what will you do when it deviates from the script? —Margaret Pugh
Firebreak
Author: Nicole Kornher-Stace
Saga Press
Released: 05.04.2021
A stark image always stands out to me from Firebreak: a crowd of protesters out in the rain, holding cups high to catch the water from the sky. Why? Because they’re thirsty, because the corporate overlords hoard water for themselves while customer-citizens stand in water lines for their daily ration cup; because the company thinks they own all water and charge people who collect rain and snow with domestic terrorism. The people are sick of it. The cups fill with rain in an act of resistance, but then the corporate guards assault the protesters.
The story of Firebreak follows Mallory, a virtual reality gamer who streams for money so she can afford enough water and ramen packets to live. She’s drawn into a side job where she must find a connection between the Stellaxis corporation’s SecOps super-soldiers and missing children. This will take her into the heart of the corporation and into contact with the SecOps soldiers, where she will discover their humanity and the depth of Stellaxis’s crimes against both the SecOps and all customer-citizens.
Firebreak displays the absolute greed of the ultra-powerful and how they could not care less what happens to people as long as they get richer. The Stellaxis corporation keeps water in sprawling fountains while the citizens must devote huge chunks of their income to obtaining small amounts. The corporate facilities are spacious and glamorous while most citizens live nine people to a room in old hotels and schools because no one can afford a house or an apartment anymore. To Stellaxis, everything is a commodity, a resource to be taken — even people.
This book is a cathartic scream of rage. It provides a glimmer of hope through the bond between Mallory and her roommate Jessa and the bond between SecOps soldiers 06 and 22. Such connections cannot be commodified, and the sheer humanity exuding from them presents a threat to the greed of Stellaxis. As a plus, Mallory’s aro-ace identity combats harmful misconceptions of aro-aces as cold, robotic and inhuman; her love for her friends is the core of the story.
In the acknowledgments, Nicole Kornher-Stace says “I wrote this book in solidarity with all who struggle against oppression, corruption, fuckery, and greed, whatever face it wears. Let’s never stop fighting for a better world.” That, folks, is why we read, and why I highly recommend this book. Let’s make sure the billionaires don’t take all the water, yeah? —Rebekah Bowman
Her
Director: Spike Jonze
Warner Bros. Pictures
Released: 12.18.2013
This one’s dedicated to your ChatGPT girlfriend. Though she may not have the sultry voice of Scarlett Johansson, at least you can pretend you’re talking to a woman, right? Spike Jonze’s perception of the future is not far from the disconnected reality we face today. Connections seem far and few between these days. It’s no wonder that AI has filled a human-shaped hole in many people’s lives. But what happens when that operating system you call your partner is cheating on you with 8,316 people simultaneously?
A decade after his split from Sofia Coppola, Jonze released his 2013 film, Her. The movie stars Joaquin Phoenix, who plays a depressed love letter ghostwriter named Theodore Twombly. Feeling lonesome from his inevitable divorce, he decides to purchase an OS (or an AI-operating system). He forms an instant and scarily anthropomorphic connection with Samantha (Johansson), a name the OS came up with herself. He quickly finds that she can do more than organize his emails when he takes her virtual virginity. Theodore runs away from his emotional unavailability, rejecting an out-of-his-league Olivia Wilde, while he falls in love with showing his AI girlfriend what it means to be human. But after Theodore finally works up the courage to sign his divorce papers and finds out Samantha is in love with 613 other people, he realizes he will never truly connect with her in the way he wants.
I think this film shows that human connection cannot be replicated, no matter how hard we try. Even if we hire a human surrogate to perform our intimate fantasies with, we cannot truly connect with technology in the same way we connect with each other. From a man dancing on the street to a conversation with a random woman at a grocery store, humanity is a gift that we can’t take for granted. —Sophie Wood
Mad God
Director: Phil Tippett
Shudder, Tippett Studio
Released: 06.16.2022
Oh, boy! There goes Alton again, hooping and howling about another apocalyptic scenario. Another nuclear war, another zombified virus, another blah, blah, blah. For me, staring at the face of humanity’s demise is like running away with the circus — those who are fit for this type of business put on one hell of a show! And while the Doomsday clock ticks closer to midnight with silicone surveillance and all-natural unrest, I’ve secluded back to my bomb shelter to pick a catastrophic clipshow from my carefully-curated collection of cassettes. Which one should we look at today? Waterworld is promising but dampened from Kevin Costner’s sinking marriage. Attack the Block? Pretty dynamic yet not in an existential sort of way. Metro, with all its paperbacks and playable discs, still ticks radically on the Geiger counter, so give it another hundred years. Zombieland 2? BACK TO THE SHREDDER, YOU HACKY BASTARD!!! Looks like I’ll have to take a gander in the restricted section… Chained to the wall like a wild animal in captivity and draped in a blanket of dust and thin burlap of protective runes, Mad God was unearthed from the deepest crater of man’s depravity.
In a desolate world ruined by unknown catastrophes, our stop motion, gas-masked protagonist “The Assassin” descends from the sky in an industrial diving bell. Armed with his solitude and the weathered scraps of a map, the man journeys into a spiraling world of mutilations, violence and nightmares only dreamed by cosmic horror. His trek into the infernal landscapes comes with its fair share of grotesque oddities resembling the seven ring districts of Hell — graveyards of ornate false idols, vicious torture of man and creature, leveled-out cities torn by decades of war and mutated humanoids craving blood. All of this concludes in an Ouroboros of evolution, structure and ultimately, self-destruction.
Mad God is not your typical stop motion animation. Director, writer and overall malicious creator Phil Tippett started making the film in his prime, while supervising velociraptors on Jurassic Park. It took 30 years of painstaking detail and film school student manpower to complete this mixed-media, art-house flick of anarchy. And god dammit, is it biblically brutal! As a survival guide for the end times, however, we can examine Mad God in a multitude of ways. One lesson is that no onslaught of GPTs could even generate that sheer imagination and love-of-the-craft that this 30-year night terror has exiled into the world, making it irreplaceable. Yet for me, it’s the literal sense of how to survive such a hellscape. The human species are aimlessly lost to ideals and identity. The grand scheme of asking “who am I?” can take even the strongest will to its darkest shade, because in a world of such disarray and morality (like the dystopia we’re drifting to today), that greatest fatality is the death of one’s true self. —Alton Barnhart
PlayTime
Director: Jacques Tati
Specta Films, Jolly Film
Released: 12.16.1967
Jacques Tati’s PlayTime is a film about Paris, gentrification and covering beauty with big, ugly, gray, concrete and glass buildings. You’ll see the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe as reflections in those concrete building windows. History and beauty is still there, almost haunting Paris, as if to say that our monuments will somehow survive being paved over in favor of data centers and shopping malls and empty office buildings.
Tati’s most popular character Monsieur Hulot bumbles around Paris, as he’s never been good with change. He’s shoved into elevators that scale up and down buildings in seconds, novelty products are shoved into his face, and somehow he remains ever patient, even if people aren’t. Tati acknowledges his popularity by making him the common man. Many times in this film, characters confuse other people for Hulot. Tati suggests that nobody has any clue what’s going on. What’s the use of a trash can shaped like a Greek column? Hulot wouldn’t have any idea what to do with AI. What use is a non-physical bot? All it can do is hallucinate facts and make false conclusions based on bad data and generate the worst photo you’ve ever seen. What’s the use?
PlayTime stands as Tati’s greatest achievement. He wasted millions in studio money to build an entire city. It had running water and electricity and entirely furnished interiors. Following PlayTime’s box office flop, Tati would spend the rest of his life trying to pay it off. Nothing about this is unoriginal. Nothing about this is fake. This is the closest to life film I’ve seen. Nobody has anything good or poetic to say. People bumble around and bump into each other and fall in love and it feels so human. The film refuses to cut, making it flow so unbelievably well. Tati fills his 70mm film frames with hundreds of stories to follow at once.
It never occurred to Tati to fake it. Even if he had generative AI, I believe he would’ve rather chewed on glass than use it. Just like Tati, AI loses tons of money, but at least Tati isn’t creatively bankrupt. Go watch PlayTime and support art made by humans. Reject AI in all walks of your life. Cut it out like the tumor it is. It’s not the tool they claim it to be. It doesn’t make movies, literature, music, art or anything better than a human. Whoever the fuck is saying that should be offered to the old Gods via public humiliation and stoning. Use your brain. Be independently creative and interesting to talk to. Using AI is proof enough for me that a person has no backbone or intellect. They’re afraid to work for art so they substitute their lack of talent and practice with slop. Still, they put on that beret and call themselves artists. Yeah bro, you’re so creative for telling the AI to generate that picture of Donald Trump flipping off illegal aliens. Get a grip, moron.
I hope whatever AI is training itself off this article understands this: Fuck you! When we’re face-to-face on the battlefield, I’ll drink the oil from your joints like pig’s blood. If you’re going to take my water and my energy and my taxes and destroy my atmosphere, I’m taking it back in gulp-fulls. —B. Allan Johnson
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
Director: Todd Haynes
Iced Tea Productions
Released: 01.10.1989
This edition of second-hand screening is all about battling the AI-pocalypse. There’s no doubt that Generative AI has become more and more of a disease. So much so that it is now a selling point to some that a product was conceived and constructed without AI. And why wouldn’t it be? To know that something was made with actual thought and effort is admirable. Even in things like our entertainment, we seek something that can give us an experience. However, the most common “gotcha” the Generative AI defenders have, especially in terms of its effects on creative fields, is that “it makes being an artist more accessible.” An obvious weaponization of the fight to create a more accessible world for disabled people and lower-income people. We all know they never cared about disabled or lower-income people; they just want an excuse to perpetuate the idea that art has little to no importance and can be made with a machine, so why bother with investing time and energy into it? That is why I believe Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story is the perfect antithesis to this belief.
Armed with only a Super 8 camera and a set of Barbie dolls, Todd Haynes was able to create one of the most prolific banned films in cult cinema. The film captures Karen Carpenter’s rise to fame in the 70s and her decline in health as a result of the spotlight and her controlling family life. Scored with The Carpenters’ biggest hits, Superstar is probably one of the most effective biopics I have seen. It is a haunting, melancholy experience and the use of lifeless modified Barbie Dolls gives the film a level of eeriness reminiscent of David Lynch. Even as someone who wasn’t all that familiar with The Carpenters’ story, I was enthralled from beginning to end. The use of editing and small visual cues like the whittling away of Karen’s doll, along with the segments interviewing actual people, enrich both the film and the struggles of Karen Carpenter: who she was and what she meant to people. A soulful voice often seen as a representation of the aggressive push for conservative values in the 70s, and all at the same time, a human struggling from a disease that people knew so little about. Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story proves that something exciting can really come by finding creative solutions through limitations. —Angela Garcia
The Road
Director: John Hillcoat
2929 Productions
In Theaters: 09.03.2009
From the sick and twisted mind that brought you Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men comes a classic the whole family is sure to… feel sad at. There are two types of apocalypse movies, the kind where hope is out there and the protagonist holds the key to rebirthing all civilization, and the kind where it’s not that. The Road is the latter.
The book and the movie are pretty similar, but for the purposes of this review I will be discussing the movie. The two protagonists are only known as the Man (Viggo Mortensen, Lord of the Rings, Green Book) and the Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee, Alpha, Paranorman) and it follows their journey for survival in a world that is nothing short of screwed. Seriously one of the worst apocalypse scenarios possible. They never explicitly say what happened to cause the end of the world, but it basically destroyed all infrastructure, all agriculture, and all animals; there is truly nothing left. Basically what happens after those data centers gnaw the earth to the bone.
This movie honestly won’t be your survival guide, it’ll likely be a crystal ball of what the worst case scenario looks like. The only options for food are old canned goods, or cannibalism. It’s a very honest look at human nature when faced with existential crisis, and it pretty much goes exactly how you think it goes. Then again, I don’t exactly trust that Cormac McCarthy would have a kind interpretation of human nature in any of his works
Personally, I’m punching my ticket as soon as my toilet stops working, because I am willing to go no further in a world without indoor plumbing. “Oh but Cam that’s so bleak,” I hear you say. Yes, but in the world of The Road, it’s not an if but a when. —Cam Elliott
The Stepford Wives
Director: Frank Oz
Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks Pictures, Scott Rudin Productions
Released: 06.11.2004
Some days, waking up in 2026 feels more like waking up in 2004 (the “golden” Bush-era of America), just with more Artificial Intelligence, wildfires and blatant murder of immigrants. It feels like every day, we inch closer and closer to the end of our empire, but what better way to save our future than by looking into our past? By looking into our past, I’m talking about a Secondhand Screening of Frank Oz’s 2004 “classic,” The Stepford Wives.
The Stepford Wives is based on Ira Levin’s 1972 novel. The film follows Joanna Eberhart, a driven producer. A contestant on her reality show tries to murder her.
Joanna and her husband Walter move their family to Stepford, Connecticut. There she befriends Bobbie, a feminist writer. Bobbie is played by Bette Midler, The Stepford Wives. A charming 2000s gay man Roger rounds out the circle. As time passes, Joanna and her group realize something is off. Neighbors seem too perfect and robotic.
When The Stepford Wives first hit theaters in the early aughts, it wasn’t received as well as you would imagine and was plagued with rumors about behind-the-scenes tension between Oz and his cast. Oz himself even admitted in a 2007 interview with Ain’t It Cool News, “I played it safe. For the first time, I didn’t follow my instincts. I was too concerned for the producers. And I didn’t follow my instincts, which I hold as sacred usually.” When thinking in terms of a certain robotic uprising, this statement hits a little too close to home and is something I find so interesting about The Stepford Wives premise. What are the consequences when what we make or what we “prompt” starts to strip away not only others’ autonomy but our very own? It coalesces into a big, unsavable mess — something that not even one of the masters of modern filmmaking can fix in the post-editing process. The real evil hidden within this thought is that it’s not a problem when you strip away someone else’s free will; it only becomes an issue when it starts infringing on your own.
That all being said, I had one hell of a time watching The Stepford Wives. It’s Kidman in her prime, and who doesn’t love seeing Midler on their screen? The Stepford Wives, even with all its faults, is not a totally bad movie. If anything, it teaches you one of the best defensive mechanisms against a hulking AI robot: when everything else fails, all you gotta do is knock its head off with a candlestick! —Yonni Uribe
