What corporate thrillers tell us about the '90s economy

PLUS: Has Forum Brain crossed the gender divide?

Greetings from Read Max HQ! In today’s newsletter, two items:

• An essay about “corporate thrillers,” including Michael Clayton, Disclosure, The Firm, and The Devil’s Advocate; and

• an attempt to understanding “extreme beauty routines” as an extension of Forum Brain.

A reminder: This newsletter that you’re reading is free thanks to the support of several thousand paying readers of Read Max. If you find it enlightening or enjoyable, or if you think independent criticism and journalism is important even when it’s not enlightening or enjoyable, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Not only would you help me pay for housing, childcare, streaming services, etc., you would enable others to keep reading the free editions for free.

On corporate thrillers

I had the pleasure of writing an essay for Criterion about the new “corporate thrillers” collection streaming on Criterion Channel. “Corporate thrillers,” as organized by Criterion, fall at the intersection in a Venn diagram of two very important genres to me and this newsletter--‘90s Dad Thrillers, which I documented extensively here, and halogencore, a microgenre consisting of movies about high-stakes meetings, more or less--and it was a pleasure to revisit, among other classics, Michael Clayton, The Firm, and (previous Read Max recommendation) The International, not to mention to encounter for the first time not-quite-classics that are otherwise historically or aesthetically interesting, such as Antitrust and The Deal.

But for me personally, the big discovery was Disclosure, a movie I’d seen many years ago and barely remembered, and which I’d written off as a kind of Oleanna-ish stupid-guy reverse-sexual-harassment thought experiment--but which, as it turns out, is an extremely silly and shockingly entertaining document of 1990s mores and anxieties. Check it out, and read my take below:

In Disclosure (1994), Michael Douglas, only seven years removed from Wall Street, trades in his contrast collars for a toothpaste-stained tie as Tom Sanders, a middle manager for the tech company DigiCom on the eve of an important merger. Sanders isn’t a Gekko-style slick—you can tell because his hair is too feathery, too mullet-like—but he’s no slouch, either; he expertly manages a global supply chain manufacturing CD-ROM drives and arrives to his Seattle office at the start of the movie expecting a deserved promotion. But even as he ably surfs the changing tides of globalization, he finds himself caught out by the treachery of gender politics: His new boss Meredith Johnson, a former girlfriend played by Demi Moore, seduces him and then accuses him of assaulting her. Sanders, in turn, accuses her of sexual harassment; as the case unfolds, it becomes clear that more is going on than the simple assignation.

Disclosure is lethally symptomatic of its era, and, as such, lethally prescient about ours: it’s hard to imagine a movie that more efficiently compresses preoccupations about male sexual anxiety in the workplace and a disruptive tech boom dependent on Asian manufacturing into an actually-fairly-entertaining two-hour feature. But at its core, it’s a movie about being left out—thinking you were on the inside and finding yourself on the outside. Sanders is constantly missing meetings, arriving late, finding himself a step behind, catching glimpses of things through the glass walls of the DigiCom office.

Befitting the strangeness of the Great Moderation economy, the stakes are effectively nonexistent—“If this deal goes through, we’ll be rich,” Sanders tells his wife, who responds, “we’re already rich”; when Johnson’s assault accusation is levied, the biggest threat to Sanders isn’t jail or even social sanction, it’s being sent to Austin, Texas—but are cast as existential. DigiCom’s business is about to be supercharged, everyone agrees, and the worst possible outcome is to be left behind. In the movie’s inevitable virtual-reality climax, Sanders becomes something like a ghost, watching helplessly as a wireframe Johnson, oblivious to his existence, goes about deleting exonerating files.

The rest of the essay can be read here.

Forum brain crosses the gender divide

On The Cut, Zoe Dubno writes about the rise of “extreme beauty routines”--the elaborate, expensive, seeming experimental treatments, products, and regimens that are inescapable on the corners of social media devoted to beauty and wellness:

Her “stack” of beauty and wellness treatments — this is what people now call the combination of the many elements in their routine — reads to me like it’s been encrypted through the Enigma machine: “I take a copper peptide called GHK-Cu. And AOD-9604. And NAD+. I have Sermorelin, Ipamorelin, though I’m not sure what those do; I did research on them a long time ago and now I’m just in the habit of using them. I take HMB and vitamin D3, reishi mushrooms and cranberry pills and taurine and biotin, Telomere Length and HealthyCell gel packs. I give my dog, Madeline, NAD, because the first tests they did were on dogs and it was really effective and I want her to live forever.”

An argument about these routines erupted recently across Substack, as Dubno notes, when the fashion writer Laura Reilly announced the launch of a new “longevity and aesthetics” (lol) newsletter with a post about her own involuted routine:

In January alone, I’ve done Botox, Emface, IPL, scheduled Moxi / broadband light, seen my orthodontist, cardiologist, GP, OBGYN, ophthalmologist, dermatologist, plastic surgeon, trainer, and pilates instructor. I’ve renewed my health insurance and medspa membership. I’ve drawn blood three times and given two urine samples. My current skincare routine is 6-8 steps, my daily supplement stack is 17 pills (20 on Mondays) and a peptide taken subQ, and I’ve engaged at least 5 high-tech tools from my home device library (red light, SAD light, PEMF, etc). I’ve tracked every meal, macro, and relevant micronutrient. All of this, and I consider myself pretty healthy and not hypochondriac. I am n=1, but I am not alone here.

Now, “why are women spending absurd amounts of time and money on tortuous procedures designed to help them adhere to conventional beauty standards” is not a question that has never been asked before, and certainly not one that has scarcity of answers. But the particular valence of compliance is always interesting, and as I read Dubno’s piece (and Reilly’s) I was struck by the familiarity of the tone and structure of the descriptions of these extreme beauty routines: the exhaustively enumerated but still unexplained accessories, the painstaking multi-step cycles, the stubborn personal theories, the air of weary hard-won confidence from long hours of research. Over the years I have read some very similar paragraphs about hi-fi systems, S.L.R. cameras, espresso machines, and other objects of obsessive hobbyism on message boards, mailing lists, and forums.

What am I suggesting is that, in addition to patriarchy, misogyny, self-loathing, fear of the body, etc. many of the people Dubno writes about are also suffering from extreme, perhaps debilitating cases of Forum Brain.

If you’ve ever wondered why your coffee tastes bad, or what speakers you should get, and spent an hour reading presumptuous suggestions and quasi-manifestoes, opening up dozens of tabs of Google searches for acronyms you’d never heard before and products with unclear purpose, you have encountered (and perhaps suffered some symptoms of) Forum Brain. And, indeed, if you’ve ever opened one of the many skincare or beauty Reddits, and scrolled through hundreds of detailed descriptions of intricate beauty regimens, arguments about the efficacy of ingredients you’re not sure even exist, recommendations for French sun-protection products of vanishing obtainability: You know Forum Brain.

“Forum Brain” is a disease with many presentations, and many scholars disagree about whether it truly describes one single disorder or several overlapping and related maladies. But in this case I’m referring an issue concentrated on hobbyist forums (around topics like “coffee” or “pens” or “cast iron pans” or “mechanical keyboards”) or their descendants (i.e. BeautyTok) in which the object of the hobby itself (“high-fidelity sound,” say, or, in this case, “longevity and aesthetics”) is mostly treated as an excuse for the endless accumulation of poorly attested enhancing products and accessories; the ongoing development of idiosyncratic multiphase processes with ever-increasing complexity; and, above all else, discussion, debate, and discourse about the same.

The knowledge stockpiled by people addled by Forum Brain is much more about the discourse generated in the forums--fussy, endlessly debatable questions of competing technique and process--than it is about the hobby itself. Just as audiophilia is not really about listening to music (audiophiles have notoriously wack taste in music) the “extreme beauty routine” is not, precisely, about beauty. In fact, the women Dubno talks to suggest their routines are rooted less in a desire for aesthetics than for control:

Sperry told me that the morning we spoke, she “stood on her vibration plate, which activates lymphatic drainage, with her red light on and some Gregorian chants playing.” When I asked her why she engages with these practices, she said, “I think it stems from a desire for control. And, you know, in our current global climate, it’s just very chaotic. So to return to the body and to ourselves as a site of control is comforting for some people.”

This was a common theme among the women I spoke to. “We all have our little rituals of control that make us feel better,” a 31-year-old woman working on a doctorate in clinical psychology told me about the Botox she’s been getting since she was 25 and worked as a case manager in Brooklyn.

This seems like a reasonable explanation. But when I think about extreme beauty as a type of Forum Brain, I wonder if it’s actually the opposite: immersing yourself in fussy, endlessly debatable questions of competing technique and process as a way of relinquishing control, of turning yourself over to the thousands of different products and processes and strategies available for consumption online rather than actually considering .

What Forum Brain offers, I think--and to be clear I’m not trying here to describe the entirety of what extreme beauty represents or emerges from, just one aspect--is a slightly elevated version of the experience the internet has been refined to deliver: Entrance to “the Machine Zone,” Natasha Dow Schüll’s term for the anxiety-dissipating flow experienced by video-slots addicts. Like anything else on the internet--the infinite scroll, the rabbit hole, the conspiracy theory--Forum Brain allows for a kind of infinite deferral: You defer execution until you have the best possible products; you defer pleasure and self-satisfaction until you’ve zeroed in on the best possible strategy; most of all you defer any kind of confrontation with the ends to which you’re supposedly working, let alone your ultimate goals or desires.

Beauty Forum Brain is obviously more complicated and overdetermined than Audiophile Forum brain, and not just because the former is associated with body dysmorphia while the latter is associated with being annoying and spending thousands of dollars on gold-plated electrical outlets or whatever. But understanding the character of “extreme beauty” as shaped in part by the affective experience of the internet allows you to see how it, like all forum-borne hobbies, offers the same pleasure of constant refinement toward some hazily defined, endlessly deferred aim.