Spiderhead

And The Expanding Carceral State Of Project 2025

In 2022, director Joseph Kosinski was responsible for “Top Gun: Maverick”, which generated over a billion dollars at the box office and proved the belief that after the pandemic, people were willing to return to the movies. Also, that year, he was responsible for “Spiderhead”, a dismally tone-deaf drama that landed with a *plunk* on Netflix and was immediately forgotten. The principle works a lot like the idea of creative people doing “one for me, one for them,” except that “Spiderhead” is a one-for-nobody.

Unlike the other movies this week, “Spiderhead” isn’t based on a book, but actually a short story by George Saunders called “Escape From Spiderhead”, found in the collection “Tenth Of December” (and probably online somewhere too). Saunders is a brilliantly absurd satirist who, at the time, was known for his pithy stories published in magazines and newspapers, though in 2017 he won the Booker Prize for “Lincoln In The Bardo”, his melancholy supernatural tale of the former President navigating the afterlife of regret and sorrow. So, you know, it’s good that the first feature-length adaptation of this guy’s work was penned by the “Deadpool” screenwriters.

The original source material takes place in a high-tech institution where captives are drugged with certain substances and forced to react, for the observations of staff. The general vibe is of restless scientists using prisoners to fulfill any whim they please, causing two particular subjects to fall in love, and then out and then back in. It’s a parody of mass incarceration, but also the pharmaceutical industry. It also features a drug called Darkenfloxx, which seems like a pretty clear mockery of a commercial form of medication.

Or maybe it’s not a mockery because in “Spiderhead”, Kosinski somehow convinces a fairly high-profile cast to keep repeating “Darkenfloxx” as if it’s a serious concept. Here, one of the prisoners is Miles Teller, and he’s being paired with the lovely Jurnee Smollett, though flashbacks suggest this is not the first time they have met. This is being carried out in a futuristic prison that resembles an Apple Store, because nowadays all futuristic buildings and interiors look like Apple Stores. The madman overseeing this program is a preening, ridiculous Chris Hemsworth, giving the type of performance that tests the limits of an actor’s talent but suggests there was very little direction being given on the set.

The Saunders short story features characters who are all a little too dim to grasp their surroundings. But Teller is a movie character, so as he gathers clues as to what Spiderhead really is, he makes incremental progress, first to carve out a little bit of extra freedom and then finally to try to outsmart Hemsworth, here playing a Type-A genius in the Steve Jobs realm. Structurally, the creative team here took apart a fairly slim short story and then built it back together again as a fairly conventional crowd-pleasing prison break film. As a creative exercise, it’s interesting. As a movie, it should have stayed an exercise. I can’t imagine reading that jagged and melancholic story and thinking, “Oh, this could be an adventure!”

This is technically a prison movie, so it’s worth noting that it’s exploring the common trope of prisoners being experimental guinea pigs. I can’t speak for others, but I can’t recall any opportunity that either myself nor anyone else had to be part of a gnarly prison experiment. Yes, we are an expendable demographic, so it makes sense giving us a chance to possibly shorten our sentences. But as far as medical studies go, if something worked, they would have to keep tabs on us for the rest of our lives so they could discern side effects or shortcomings. And I’ve never seen medical staff ever care that much about the inmates at his facility. If anything, they’re giving Darkenfloxx to the penitentiary guys. Trust me. I asked and asked and asked. I asked so much I got an Incident Report for Insolence. They could not make me Luke Cage.

We’re approaching the Presidential election, and it’s worth noting that, while he has attempted to distance himself from it, Donald Trump remains tied tightly to Project 2025, which has been pushed by the Heritage Foundation but is written and edited by literally dozens of Trump’s allies. It’s worth checking it out, as it’s freely available to read and it’s a thoroughly disturbing document that prescribes a massive expansion of the federal government.

While distancing himself from that document, Trump instead has pushed Agenda 47, which in fact is a very similar though somewhat less-realistic series of campaign promises that feel outlined originally on a cocktail napkin. Chief among concerns in Agenda 47 is Trump’s plan to mass-deport all illegal citizens, an ambitious outline that would involve deputizing local police officials in order to chase the possibly 15 million-plus without proof of citizenship. This is only one of several ways a Trump administration would entirely blow up the carceral state, imprisoning those in this country either in local prisons that cannot accommodate them, and/or eventually in their own lodgings — camps have been floated as an alternative. There’s also the suggestion of what would happen when states outlaw abortion, or allow it, because it’s not really a topic that interests Donald Trump either way. You can read here for more.

Project 2025 goes much further, though it’s worth noting there are two particularly troubling sections as far as incarceration. Firstly, to please the fundamentalists, there is talk of banning pornography. Which is all well and good for the culture war, except that it should be clear from a cursory glance at Project 2025 that, since “pornography” lacks a definition, they’re free to define it how they please. Consider who would and wouldn’t be considered a “pornographer”, and what would be done to them. Some of the architects of Project 2025 are the same people broadly advocating for the banning of books featuring, and about, LGBTQ people (pointedly, without reading said literature). But the other interesting section relates to the prosecution of left-leaning progressive prosecutors and journalists. Wherever you stand on that issue (you know, freedom versus fascism), the fact is such policies point to a massive expansion of our carceral state, boosting the population of incarcerated people by the hundreds of thousands and beyond. Voting for Trump in this election means a great deal, but one of them is a dramatic and gratuitous expansion of the carceral state.