Rhea Seehorn in ‘Pluribus’

Courtesy of Apple TV

I haven’t asked if my brother is alright with being put on blast in a newsletter, but then he didn’t ask to loan one of my favorite books out to one of his friends, who never returned it, when I was 15. So, welcome to a Top of the Line newsletter of settling scores, I guess.

It’s always a really good sign when my brother texts me about movies and TV, or it’s a really bad sign. It’s not that he doesn’t like to watch things, but he has a real job and access to “Bob’s Burgers” reruns, so when entertainment stuff breaks through to him, it’s an immediate green flag for me that whatever he’s asking about has broken the containment field of Film Twitter (sidebar: we’ve really got to stop calling it Film Twitter. We’re all off Twitter now, right?). Some classic entries in this genre include: “So Barbie is good?,” “Have you seen The Bear?” and, “Expedition 33: Five out of five baguettes.”

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Of course, this week the text was “What’s your take on the Netflix acquisition?” I texted him back a meme of Peter Capaldi as The Doctor, looking mournfully into a barren landscape and saying, “Sometimes the only choices you have are bad ones. But you still have to choose.”

Since I sent him that (and this wonderful explainer put together by the even more wonderful Kate Erbland), of course, the choosing has gotten more complicated and the atmosphere bleaker. I won’t pretend to have a clue how Paramount’s hostile bid for Warners will shake out, but I think we have seen *most *of this movie before, at least as far as it concerns the workers who make the films and shows. Even just the uncertainty will push hardworking folks out of the industry, limit what’s being made, and stifle investment in the kind of original projects that do keep the flame of Hollywood-style storytelling alive. As I also texted my brother, “It’s bad here!”

‘Pluribus‘©Apple TV/Courtesy Everett Collection

But it’s not all bad because there are simply too many things happening, and one of those things is “Pluribus.” The Vince Gilligan Apple TV show simply refuses to miss now that it’s established its premise of One (1) Romantasy Writer Vs. The Human General Intelligence Hivemind. I was lucky enough to talk to the supervising sound editors, Kathryn Madsen and Nicholas Forshager, who have at this point sonically captured probably every single street in Albuquerque, New Mexico, between this new show and “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul.” I’ll have a piece out about some of the shenanigans they get up to after Episode 7 is out.

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No spoilers, of course. But even with what they’ve done with the show’s version of Vegas in Episode 6, there’s a real sensitivity to sound and almost a sense of the sound leading the image, creating the logic of the image. All Gilligan’s shows seem really invested in emphasizing process sequences — getting to the bike to the airport to the airline to the flight to the clean clothes to Carol’s (Rhea Seehorn) front door — and leaning on something of an “operational aesthetic,” to butcher Tom Gunning. They do this in a way that I am a huge sucker for, because the lack of dialogue and emphasis on key sound cues or on building and breaking rhythmic patterns or on framing a shot to stress what we’ll hear all activates a discovery mode in my brain that makes me feel quite clever — a thing I very much enjoy and feels like a rare treat in the Year of Our Lord 2025. So thank you, “Pluribus!”

Director Park Chan-wook also talked about the importance of sound, and thinking sound-first, over on the old IndieWire recently, with respect to his new comedy of ultraviolence, “No Other Choice.” One thing I didn’t quite have space for in that article was that, to him, things like Atmos and sophisticated home theater setups and the sound quality on Blu-rays all put even more importance on how the sound of a film doesn’t just create a sense of reality or texture, but is an active part of the storytelling. Again, no spoilers, but he and his team do this so effectively that I will never look at a Bonsai tree again the same way.

Anyway, the kids would say that I’ve achieved unc status because I don’t have a Spotify Wrapped, so instead I’m thinking about sound and trying not to think about other things. See you next week!

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