A Horseshoe Theory of Being Wrong about Us
And a Theory for Why Everyone Loves Project Hail Mary
As readers likely know, horseshoe theory
asserts that advocates of the far-left and the far-right, rather than being at opposite and opposing ends of . . . the political spectrum, closely resemble each other, analogous to the way that the opposite ends of a horseshoe are close together.
A fun example of horseshoe theory is the SNL Black Jeopardy sketch starring Tom Hanks as a Trump voter. To their mutual surprise, the Trump voter and the Black contestants discover that they agree on multiple topics—for example that iPhones’ thumbprint identification is “how they get you” and that Tyler Perry movies are great because “if I can laugh and pray in ninety minutes, that is money well spent.” There is more that unites than divides us!
But horseshoe opinions aren’t always this wholesome. Some people on both the far left and the far right have insulting and unjust views of the rest of us. I think one reason the movie Project Hail Mary is so extraordinarily popular1 is that it shows us as we really are—generous, courageous, caring, and capable of rising to meet our challenges.
Note: If you haven’t yet seen Project Hail Mary, be warned that there will be spoilers in the second half of this post. If you would like to avoid them, stop reading when you get to the photo of our dog and scroll down to the (spoiler-free) Tidbit.
Both the far left and the far right apparently believe that we regular people are fundamentally lazy, selfish, and unable to resist our basest impulses.
Many on the left argue that we should cut off friends and family over political differences, rather than putting in a modicum of effort to listen to their point of view, agreeing to disagree, or talking about literally anything else. The elite media’s relentless cheerleading for polyamory2 assumes that we are incapable of resisting temptation and honoring our commitments. And we’re all familiar with the women who think they shouldn’t have to perform “emotional labor” and “mankeeping” but who forget that husbands provide emotional (and physical) labor for their families too.
As for the far right, well, they’re worse. The manosphere champions predators who use and abuse women and underage girls. They lionize pimps like Andrew Tate who profit off the suffering of other human beings. Some cite sociobiology to argue, with a kind of gleeful helplessness, that men are naturally prone to dumping their aging wives in order to take up with nubile young girls. They seem to think that men are incapable of overcoming their baser drives.
The far right thinks we are all adversaries, not allies. Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and their ilk assert without evidence that because our distant ancestors lived in tribes, we must be inescapably tribal too. They assume it’s in our DNA to hate people who are different from us. And to help us treat everyone as an enemy, Silicon Valley has created a tool so we can “cheat at literally everything.”3
We here in the offline world know that all of this is a lie. As Adam Serwer puts it in Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong, “The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone.” It is, and they are. In fact it is normal to be kind and generous. We put others’ needs ahead of our own all the time. We endure months of sleepless nights with our newborns, save the last cookies for our kids, brave forty stoplights every Friday to drive our daughter to her piano lesson, bring our wife’s basset hound mug to the hospital to cheer her up, work unpleasant and unfulfilling jobs to support our families, and sit by our loved one’s bedsides during their final moments.
We may be tribal, but we are fully capable of overcoming this instinct so we can connect with and help one another. We donate, volunteer, keep a lookout, lend a hand, give a leg up, and welcome newcomers to the neighborhood. We don’t think of this as emotional labor, but rather as the love and support we owe our families, friends, and communities.
How about you, readers? Do you have a personal story that refutes the belief that we are all fundamentally selfish and cruel? Please share your thoughts in the comments!
Warning! Spoilers Below!
Last Chance to Skip to the Tidbit!
For readers who haven’t yet seen Project Hail Mary but don’t mind spoilers, here’s a brief recap of the plot:
Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) is a middle-school science teacher who was once a renegade microbiologist. Alien microorganisms (“astrophages”) are devouring the sun and threatening all life on earth, and an international team of experts thinks Grace is just the man to solve the problem. The team has discovered a star, Tau Ceti, that is immune to the astrophages, and so they send Grace and two astronauts to the star to check it out.
Grace wakes up from his coma to discover that the astronauts have died and that he is utterly alone—until an alien spaceship approaches, manned (aliened?) by a cute little guy whom Grace dubs Rocky. Grace and Rocky banter and become buddies, and their friendship gradually deepens into a true brotherhood. Together they discover and harvest a predator species that eats the astrophages. They divvy up the predator harvest, Rocky gives Grace enough fuel so that he can return to earth, and the two friends head off in opposite directions to save their planets.
Author Andy Weir and the filmmakers make a number of choices that show the strength and worth of regular people.
First, the movie shows that we are stronger when we work together. The whole world unites to defeat the astrophages. Contrary to the opinion of some on the right, other people, no matter their race or national origin, are not our enemies. To reinforce this point, the filmmakers choose to make the two astronauts a Russian woman and a Chinese man. Rocky, a literal alien, is wise and good, and his help is necessary to save the universe. Alone, neither Grace nor Rocky could have accomplished their goal.
Second, the filmmakers choose to make Rocky real. He is not CGI; he is a puppet that is operated and voiced by James Ortiz. The Substacker Rodrigo Brancatelli has a theory about why this matters:
Humans trust effort. . . . Effort activates empathy.
CGI . . . can do anything, move any way, fill any frame. . . . Something in human perception picks up the absence of effort. We can’t articulate it but we feel it. The image is frictionless in a way that registers as absence.
Puppet is the opposite. It can only do what its maker had the time and skill and physical ability to make it do.
Grace and Rocky’s loving friendship feels authentic because Gosling was interacting with Ortiz in person, not emoting at a green screen. The tech bros are wrong about us: We regular folks are not lazy slugabeds who are content to stare at screens. We find the most joy and the greatest rewards in hard work and face-to-face relationships.
Third, Grace is not a superhero. But he has potential, and we do too. Many viewers have noticed the religious subtext of the movie. “Hail Mary” ostensibly refers to a Hail Mary pass in football, but the spaceship is literally “Hail Mary, full of Grace.” (No one ever calls him Ryland; he is always just Grace.) When Grace emerges from his coma, he is styled to resemble a self-portrait by Albrecht Dürer. They have the same long, large nose; close-set eyes in a long, thin face; and long, dark-blond scraggly hair; and both are dimly lit and dressed in earth tones.
See what I mean?
Dürer depicted himself to look like contemporary portraits of Jesus (yes, this was controversial). Grace, too, looks like paintings of Jesus, ironically at the very moment when he is sunk in despair and degradation, raging and filthy and swilling vodka. Grace did not embark on the mission willingly. He had to be dragooned and drugged (druggooned?) and forced onto the spaceship. But his resemblance to Jesus, even at his lowest point, shows that his soul always carried a spark of the divine. Over the course of the story, Grace transforms from a regular guy into the savior of the world. The film’s inspiring message is that we—ordinary people just like Grace—are capable of such transformations too.
Most significantly, though, the filmmakers show that our greatest acts of moral courage arise from our loving relationships. Grace has no interest whatsoever in sacrificing himself out of an abstract devotion to duty. But Rocky and Grace both readily make sacrifices for each other. When Rocky learns that Grace doesn’t have enough fuel to get home, he shares his fuel, even though it means he will be stuck on his spaceship for six additional years. And when Grace discovers that the alien predators have consumed Rocky’s fuel, he chooses to save Rocky, even though it means he will never return to earth.
Let the extremes of the political spectrum express their cynicism and contempt for love and commitment all they want. We know they’re wrong. We are most heroic when we feel the most love. It is our relationships that make us great.
How about you, readers? Do you, like me, chafe at the low opinion both the far left and the far right hold of us? And do you, like me, love Project Hail Mary? Please share your thoughts in the comments!
The Tidbit
Last week, Radical Edward published a fun article about cover songs. Good covers reinterpret and reimagine the original song, or they recontextualize it to reveal new meanings. Project Hail Mary features a cover version of one of my favorite songs, Harry Styles’s “Sign of the Times.” Sandra Hüller’s stunning performance gives the song a special poignance and depth.
Apropos our preference for actual effort over computer tricks, this video doesn’t use a green screen. Everything we see is real: Styles really did put on a harness and get dragged way up into the sky by a helicopter.
It’s at 95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
I wrote a post about this topic more than two years ago (Yeesh! Stop Pushing Polyamory on Us Already!). Sadly, the elite media is still gung ho for polyamory. Take, for example, the beginning of a recent interview with Lindy West, where the interviewer says “I deeply admire the people who make [polyamory] work” and lauds the “expansiveness and fulfillment and freedom” it supposedly offers.
See A Vague Feeling of Unease Will Be the Last Thing You Remember: the rational approach to AI is to trust your gut for a discussion of this ad.
As a frowned-upon centrist, I have to say I view the habit of buying into prepackaged ideologies on either side as a dangerous intellectual laziness...
If you like Ryan Gosling, the algorithm gave me a clip of him promoting the movie on “Jeopardy” with a “Hail Mary” of a final answer (not real, and there was a behind the scenes shot of him being effortlessly charming as well) and another, where he’s very creditably throwing a football through a giant donut sign in Hollywood?
I don’t think 1 in a hundred Americans or residents of America could identify or would have the slightest clue what is meant by “manosphere”, but my admittedly indirect notions of it, derived solely from substack references and such, suggest to me it is entirely a mirror image of OnlyFans and the obsession with plastic surgery and altered bodies and - just a reductiveness in every way - among women, that has been the strangest fruit of feminism and the sexual revolution* - strange at least, to those of us who came up in the 70s and 80s when a very different aesthetic operated.
*For reasons, I watched a good deal of TV when I was a kid, at least during the daytime, and then saw/owned no television after about 1988. Thus I was like Rip Van Winkle when I noticed some time in the oughts - probably in a waiting room somewhere that the TV was always on - utterly vacuous, clownishly made-up (to me) young women on TV crying all the time, sometimes trying to win plastic surgery or a fake proposal.