Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Over the past year, there was so much to be afraid of that fear itself grew fatigued. Was the solitude of lockdown passing into a new systemic withdrawal? Or were we practicing turning our blind eye to kids on the streets with guns?  Nothing felt as eerie then as the bourgeois comfort that now at last, double vaccinated, we might be getting back to normal. As if there was a proven “we,” let alone any structure of normality available. As if we had not learned yet that the phantom known as our norm had been a deluding pipe-dream for so long. As if the panoramas of fear had not taught us that hope and our future were Ponzi schemes. As if we didn’t know in our bones that the precious “it” — our culture — might be ending, so should we (quietly and discreetly) get whatever we could while there was still time?  So even among the pursuers of our liberties, there could be a secret plan of acquiring tactful guns, living on high ground, putting together a goodies satchel of Proust, Musil, Parker, and Mahler, and stockpiling toilet paper.  I hoped to make that short paragraph mischievous, as if that was the surest way of getting at you. But black comedy is a showoff relief now, our trick for sidestepping gravity. Blackness went noir in the last century, as horror was glossed as genre. So I want to find an example that can be unsettling.  On May 14, 2021, Amazon Prime streamed all ten episodes of Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad. Wasn’t that splendid, and a sign of our improvement? Many said that this event was eagerly awaited, not just because Jenkins had achieved a high reputation with Moonlight, but because between the publication of Whitehead’s novel in 2016 and the delivery of the work on film, America had been convulsed by, among other things, the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter response. Even in the crowded world of streaming shows, intensified by Covid stay-at-home life, The Underground Railroad was anticipated. (But note how this way of describing what happened makes it sound as if white America had been waiting patiently for George Floyd to provide a prompt for our indignation. We are so appealing when we’re angry.)  Nothing but opinion can come next, and ordinary opinion has mattered more during Covid because the external view of critics has been minimized by our intense domestic living with television series. So the reviews for, say, The Queen’s Gambit were very positive, but they felt irrelevant next to the way word-of-mouth was making our secretive romance with that show as infectious as the trance attractiveness of Anya Taylor-Joy. Chess became a new home craze, but then the binge was gone as if it had never existed. We have to learn to swim with the streaming. But is The Underground Railroad a test of swimming or drowning? The reviews were very favorable, though I felt a curious wariness that did not properly convey the peril and the exhilaration in yielding to its current.  I found the show more expansive because it was so beautiful, while facing several looming facts of shame. In his novel, Whitehead had alluded to the “railway” as not just a network of abolitionists trying to get black people out of the South and the reach of slavery, but as an actual railway system. What amazed me in the film was the realization of tunnels, tracks, and locomotion in a surreal design for rescue. It was so unnerving that it made the mythology within the show suggestive of how the word “underground” signifies a depth of thought and action striving against surface tyranny. To speak of an underground reminds us of how the United States had a mild war; it knew neither bombing nor Gestapo on the stairs. It was mainly a movie war for us.  Audaciously — in defiance of every realistic objection that there had not been a real railroad — Jenkins had believed enough in the mystery to get at a true underground of America. That adjective denoted more than “railroad,” for the underground force was an idea