World Without Women

On Eno

Two posts in one week! At first I just tossed this off on Instagram but it’s been bugging me all day so, herewith, some expansion.

I went to see the Brian Eno movie last night. There were some technical difficulties beforehand that meant ticket holders for the sold-out screening were left for some time outside the Music Box, Chicago’s gorgeous vintage north side movie palace. The line snaked south down the street until it ran into some sidewalk dining, and then doubled back on itself, heading north back past the entrance to the theater. I joked to Paul that the largely graying and dude-heavy crowd looked like a convention of aging prog rockers and, I mean, I wasn’t wrong.

If you’re not familiar, Eno is a documentary about legendary musician, visual artist, and record producer Brian Eno — who basically invented ambient music in the 70s, produced everyone from David Bowie to Talking Heads to U2, collaborated with John Cale and Lee “Scratch” Perry, and, oh yeah, was in a little glam band called Roxy Music for a time. He pioneered … a million things, among them the concept of “generative music,” the idea that a piece of music could and should exist in flux, that a song could never sound the same twice. His “Oblique Strategies” cards, created in 1975, are a legendary tool for overcoming creative block that have been used by countless artists over the past forty years. He is a genius.

Eno the film, directed by Gary Hustwit, is a groundbreaking piece of AI-informed generative filmmaking that is never the same film twice. Hundreds of hours of digital footage from Eno’s archives and Hustwit’s own interviews with Eno in his studio were fed into a data set controlled by a proprietary algorithm that spits out scenes in ever-changing order in response to a variety of prompts. At any given screening the audience is only seeing maybe 1/40th of the available material (or that’s what I gleaned from the postshow discussion). Per Hustwit’s website: “The generative and infinitely iterative quality of Eno poetically resonates with the artist's own creative practice, his methods of using technology to compose music, and his endless deep dive into the mercurial essence of creativity.”

Debates about AI and auteurship aside, I loved spending time in the film with Eno, a deeply funny, intelligent, and unpretentious man who loves cats and making music, and doesn’t brook much nonsense from interviewers. The archival footage of Bowie, et al., was lovely (though I could have done with less U2 and more Devo). But as the film went on I found myself sinking into a deep, suffusing sadness because in this testament to art making and creativity, overflowing with cameos by icons of modern music, not a single word was spoken by a woman.

Tina Weymouth and the Talking Heads backup singers appear in clips, and per Hustwit Laurie Anderson plays a role in one of the film’s iterative games, but her footage didn’t surface in this run of the algorithm. Were there other women similarly buried? Perhaps, but my guess is not. I mean, it was the 70s; rock was a boys club, and the right to creative indulgence ceded to those who felt entitled to take it. Regardless, I can’t evaluate the potential films lurking in the data set. The film I saw is the one I saw, and it failed the Bechdel Test so thoroughly it didn’t even meet the bar of “women talking to each other about a man.”

I’ve been writing lately about the exclusionary, “no girls allowed” vibe of the postpunk 80s, thoughts sparked by the death of Steve Albini and memories of trying to find my place in the pre-grunge years of the Seattle scene. I also spent this week devouring Kathleen Hanna’s memoir, which is bracing and funny and great and also an excruciating, infuriating chronicle of sexual abuse and the all-consuming misogyny of the era. I’m feeling pretty raw about it all, like something broke in my brain. I’m not sure why now, but I am just over it. Over the apologists (It was a different time!), over the denials (Look at L7- there were girls in bands!), over the tech-talk (It was the algorithm!), over it all.

The talkback for the film was led by a stylish woman younger than me, with very good hair. As she was asking Hustwit a question a man from the audience hollered at her to talk into the mic: “WE CAN’T HEAR YOU!” His tone was so aggressive, his entitlement to interrupt so sure, the moderator was visibly shaken. And, you know what — I could hear her fine, because I was listening. I just wanted to find him and yell back.

I don’t know shit about filmmaking, or coding, but surely these are smart people. Could they not have shot and archived with an eye toward representation? Could the algorithm not select for gender tags? The system is neutral, Eno might say — but here’s a case for seeding it with a little bias in the name of doing better. It’s 2024 ffs, and we’re sick of this shit. Do better, even if it makes the games harder to play.

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Have a great weekend! Read Rebel Girl! A book in which Kathleen Hanna has not-so-nice things to say about Steve Albini. Here’s a link.