Optimal Illusions by Coco Krumme

Author:Coco Krumme [Krumme, Coco]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

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As in life, so in art. Bruce Dern’s killing John Wayne in The Cowboys was a milestone, although it didn’t seem so then, as Wayne went on to star in many more films. A thread that had held a genre together was frayed.

John Wayne was the archetype of strong, controlled masculinity. He was beat by measly Bruce Dern, in front of young boys, no less. Those boys quickly grew up and finished the cattle drive in Wayne’s stead. The promise of optimization was that perfect engineering would never break. The public breakdown of large-scale systems, such as the grid or supply chains, broke this promise, just as John Wayne’s death broke a silent contract in Western films. Wayne kept on showing up on screen, just as the energy market continues forth in Texas. But everyone could now see the fray in the weave.

Often, we read about the decline of a culture or empire as something precipitated by a singular shock: the 1917 revolution that ended Czarist governance in Russia, the collapse of the Aztecs by the introduction of smallpox by Cortés and his crew. Likewise, we are wont to see metaphoric breakdown as resulting from a sudden change in zeitgeist, rather than a slow wearing thin of perspective.

Just as often, shifts in epistemology occur quite gradually, even if they are later denoted by a single event. As a child in 1989, I watched my mother and grandmother watch the TV, seemingly for days on end. I was young, but I remember the scene vividly, the black-and-white static, the broken plastic knob to change the channel, a big building and a crowd. The camera replayed footage. There was noise, there were angry shouts from the crowd, and there was a helicopter and the women crying quietly in front of me, half a world away. It had all happened suddenly, I later learned, but it had been brewing for a while. One small shout, a crowd that couldn’t be controlled, and a dictator of nearly forty years shot on Christmas Day.

The regime they’d grown up with, in Romania, had fallen. There was relief but also uncertainty. For so long, they’d stood against something. Now they weren’t sure where to stand.

Did Allen’s heroic age ever exist? Did it persist as long and untroubled as we’d like to believe? Or was it first built up as a slapdash movie set, becoming a fixture over centuries, until we could only assume it was real?

Allen founded his company when the oil and gas industry was in the pits, in part because he couldn’t stand the idea of groveling for jobs with the “majors”: the Shells and BPs and Exxons. Now, these same majors are clamoring to develop shale in the Permian Basin in western Texas, an area until recently the province of independent explorers and producers. In just a few years, the big companies have spent on the order of $10 billion to buy land. Exxon wants to change “the way that game is played” with shale, per its CEO, Darren Woods.

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