french fries Magazine - S/S 2022 issue 5

Photography Sandro Miller

KILL THE IMAGE

David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart” echoes the nuance of the counter-culture. A science of fictional solutions to tell us how to battle what lies within us. A perception of the enemy being ideological and imaginary. A discovery that we are our own enemies.

We build machinery, and the machinery comes to dominate us. A complete disorder arises where there is no sense of our belonging in history. Yet our mindset, a system, has established a formula in life. To graduate from a good university, get a high-paying job at a company, buy a house at a young age as a symbol of success, start a family regardless of not laying the groundwork of self, and save money to travel and spend after retirement. 

Video games, social media, and the internet trigger people’s dopamine with the instant hit of fun, sass, and jazz, but some, if not everyone, may not know yet that society has become a game everyone plays. A gamified reality, a 5D internet, and a physical ‘double-tap to like.’ The ladderized tier of society has reached new heights with additional levels demanded to be unlocked before someone can fit in. Once dopamine is controlled, reality is possessed, then the vibe of the video game industry being bigger than Hollywood is summoned.

What if the screens we look at hundreds of times per day are just a black hole sucking us into its void and creating fake memories? We are constantly projecting ourselves on the screens, manifesting the complete-narcissistic sides of us. A shift is coming. Instagram that centers around influencer culture - imagine watching everyone create the brand that reflects their internet self - is slowly paving a way for a new generation of Zoomers whose interest lies in maintaining  their anonymity, the children of cancel culture.

Religion and beliefs intermingling as ornaments of self, the dubbed ‘aesthetics’ social-media generation seems to devour in a heartbeat. Perhaps two of the many reasons for the rise of faith point at nihilism and totalitarian liberalism. The young writer Honor Levy, born Jewish and deeply connected to the zeitgeist, is now a downtown New York-literati-Zoomer-visionary-artist Catholic. She and her cyber-community friends, “TradCath”, are sincere in expressing their faith. 

In this issue we also intended to join the other side of the coin. Think of being a graceful, bizarre child of the universe. All the good blend with the bad, but the substance of superficiality and substantiality still come together. The amorous and the arrogant, the abstract and the bland, and the spiritual and the blasphemous. Reflecting the duality of the present by ambusing the impermanence of the thought-of permanence of facts and beliefs to create a collective blackout. Post-prophets on the darknet rejoice over the hybrid consumption and accelerated identities this issue aims to fuel. Once again, Wild at Heart - the freedom to be and feel free, but also the freedom to choose not to be and feel free for personal reasons some may not understand. We are trapped in a vicious cycle; history repeats itself over and over.

Imagine our faceless faces one day. No one knows us, not even Google who will have forgotten privacy and its essence. Yet it may sound impossible now that algorithms always learn, stomping down the fear of losing one’s identity by letting numbers, codes, and machines dictate what we will look like. We will be everywhere. Our doppelgängers will multiply. Is this a radical culture of disappearance and appearance?

The sweet temptation to get numbed, to hide, to run collides with the burning desire to  come back without feeling the same way ever again. This issue is for the wild hearts who have joined us since our birth, whose faith has unwavered, not even in the midst of despair and questioning of self-identity. For you, David Lynch dives into the infinite possibilities of Consciousness. Bárbara Sánchez-Kane rejects gender politics and uses her own body to seek different structures of identity, lust, and sensuality. Mark Tennant imagines a faceless utopia. Emmanuelle Seigner takes us to “Frantic” and “Bitter Moon” with authentic stories. Punk icon Vivienne Westwood pushes the culture, giving a new outlook on fashion’s dystopian present. 

René Daumal once said that man achieves inner spiritual progress by his own efforts, by a human discipline that is not a gift of God but can be learned from other men. He may not have finished his last book “Mount Analogue”, but the words he left stand as a symbol of a never-ending journey of restless souls.

Here’s to more duality and infinite adventures that defy whatever is it we desire to defy.

Alina Ferraro & Guilherme Ferrari