Plutonic Rainbows

A doorway opens in the basement of a furniture showroom, and on the far side is the backrooms: an endless grid of yellow-wallpapered offices under humming fluorescent light, corridors that lead nowhere and then fold back on themselves. If you've spent any time online in the last few years you already half-know this place. Kane Parsons built it as a teenager filming found-footage shorts in his bedroom, and the internet quietly decided his version was the definitive one. Now he's directed it as a feature for A24, and the dread that made those clips spread survives the jump to 110 minutes mostly intact.

Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, who slips through the door. Renate Reinsve is Dr. Mary Kline, the therapist who goes looking for him. Parsons keeps the geometry deliberately broken, dead ends and objects half-swallowed by walls, closer to Escher than to architecture. When the film trusts that emptiness it's genuinely unnerving, and the cast holds the human thread together, Reinsve especially, who plays calm as a thin lid over something coming apart.

Most critics have responded to the restraint. The comparison that keeps surfacing is Annihilation, and it earns it: both films treat an impossible space less as a puzzle to be solved than as a thing that slowly rearranges whoever walks into it. Deep Focus Review called the debut remarkably assured, and Variety found it extraordinarily effective, with scores clustering high and the British site HeyUGuys handing it full marks.

My problem starts where the blood does. Almost everything terrifying here could have arrived in a PG-13 package, and that isn't a content-warning quibble. The backrooms work because they withhold. There's no monster you can name, no wound you can point at, just the wrongness of a space that should be safe and isn't. When the film reaches for graphic violence and a steady drip of profanity, it swaps that withholding for something far more ordinary, and the spell thins. Plugged In made the same complaint more bluntly, and they're right. Saint Maud understood this: it holds on one woman's certainty and never once steps outside it, and the horror is the airlessness. Backrooms knows it for an hour, then forgets.

The other honest caveat is narrative. There isn't much of one, and the film won't spoon-feed you lore. If you need a plot that resolves, the long stretches of wandering a liminal nowhere will test you. I didn't mind. The point was never the answer.

So you get an open-source internet myth, a thing that belonged to everyone and no one, somehow ending up on a cinema screen with Ejiofor in it and not curdling into a theme-park version of itself. Parsons trusted the room to do the work. Where he trusts it, this is one of the most unsettling things A24 has released all year; where he doesn't, it's a competent horror film with a knife. I'd have taken the whole thing a notch quieter.

M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart opens with three Cambridge students performing a ritual on a hot May night, then refuses to tell you what it was. I'm only about fifty pages in, so I'm writing from inside that withholding rather than out the far side of it. The refusal already feels deliberate rather than coy. The characters can't remember either, which puts the reader and the people on the page in the same fog, and that seems to be the point.

Harrison is an odd writer to arrive at through fantasy, because he spent the 1970s and early 1980s building the Viriconium sequence and then walked away from it. He's talked about deciding to stop writing about people hitting each other over the head. What he turned toward instead has the furniture of the supernatural without the reassurance of it. His lineage runs through Arthur Machen and Charles Williams, writers for whom the uncanny was a moral and spiritual problem, not a special effect. You can feel that inheritance in how the early chapters handle Yaxley, the sorcerer who set the ritual going: not a robed magus but a seedy, faintly embarrassing presence, the kind of man you'd cross a damp street to avoid. It's the same trick T.E.D. Klein pulls in his slow, withholding horror, keeping the dread offstage and the people resolutely ordinary.

So far the book works by residue. The ritual is over before it's explained, and what remains are the things it left behind in each person. One character is plagued by visions. Another is convinced something small and malformed is following him. The narrator gets the strangest and most domestic affliction of all, an intermittent smell of roses, arriving with no flowers in the room. A monster you can point at; a smell you can't.

The theme I can feel forming, and I might be wrong this early, is escapism and what it costs. Unable to move on, one of the characters invents an elaborate private mythology, a lost European country called the Coeur, complete with forged histories, partly to comfort the other. I suspect Harrison is setting that consolation up to fail. A story you tell yourself to survive grief is still a story, and the cells decay on their own schedule regardless of how good the fiction is.

The sentences are the reason to stay. Harrison notices things at a pitch most novels can't sustain, a Manchester canal scattered with floating styrofoam, the precise social texture of two emotionally incompetent people failing to build a relationship. He's described his own writing as built on obsessive notetaking, and the discipline shows in the editing as much as the observation. He knows which details to keep.

The open question now is whether the Coeur holds, whether Harrison lets the characters keep their invented country or pulls it out from under them at the exact moment they need it most. The ground feels stable enough that I trust him to do whichever is worse.

There's a vodka advert from 1989 I can't look at without smelling Christmas, and I've never been able to explain why. A woman in a white blouse, big lacquered hair, leaning on a rail with a half-amused glance. "When I said vodka I meant Denaka." A bottle, two tumblers of ice, the flat confidence of the line at the bottom about a world of absolutes. Nothing about it says December. It just does.

Part of it is obvious once you say it out loud. Spirits advertised hardest in the winter issues, so this is exactly the kind of glossy page that arrived stuffed inside a magazine in the week before Christmas, the thick December number you read on the floor with the heating on. The paper had a particular smell. The light in the photo is warm and indoor and slightly too perfect, the light of a party that has either just ended or is about to, and you can't tell which.

What I can't get to the bottom of is why it sits uneasily rather than warmly. It isn't a happy memory exactly. It's closer to standing in a room you used to live in.

The critic Mark Fisher had a word for this that isn't nostalgia. In his book Ghosts of My Life he called it hauntology: you're haunted less by the past than by a future that got promised and then cancelled. He put the cancellation in the 1980s, the decade when a whole expectation of where things were heading was simply switched off. The advert is a relic of the confidence that came just before. It believed in absolutes, in clean lines and certain outcomes, in a drink that could be more definite than its rivals. That belief is the part that hasn't survived.

There's a smaller ghost inside the big one. The whole advert is a pun on Absolut, right down to "a world of absolutes," a brand defining itself entirely by the rival it was needling. Absolut went on to become the vodka everyone pictures. Denaka faded off the shelves. The woman is still leaning on the rail, still half-smiling at someone, perfectly preserved in a moment that has outlived the magazine, the season, and very nearly the product itself.

The picture is warm and the warmth has nowhere to go. It doesn't leave me nostalgic so much as homesick for a winter I'm not sure I actually had, sold to me on glossy paper by a company that wanted me to believe the future would arrive as clear and cold as a shot of vodka.

The Chippendale top on Philip Johnson's tower at 550 Madison Avenue got laughed at for years. A skyscraper crowned with a broken pediment, like a grandfather clock scaled up to 647 feet. Plenty of critics called it a joke when it opened in 1984. Then in 2018 New York's Landmarks Preservation Commission made it the youngest building in the city to win protected status. The joke got a plaque.

That swing, from punchline to protected, is the whole story of 1980s architecture right now. The decade gave us postmodernism: color, ornament, columns that didn't hold anything up, facades that winked at you. After fifty years of modernist glass boxes insisting that decoration was a moral failing, the 80s decided buildings were allowed to be funny again. People hated it. They still kind of hate it. And that hatred is exactly why so much of it is in danger.

Here's the thing about preservation: taste runs about a generation behind. We never value the recent past until it's almost gone. Victorian buildings were torn down as gaudy junk before anyone thought to save them. Brutalism spent decades as a slur before the coffee-table books arrived. The 80s are sitting in that same window now, old enough to look dated, not yet old enough to look historic. It's the most dangerous moment a building can have.

The good news is that people are finally fighting for these things. Robert A.M. Stern, no fan of being asked about postmodernism anymore, published a list of fifteen "landmarks-in-waiting" and put that same tower near the top, arguing the country has no consistent way of protecting work from the late 20th century. In Chicago, Helmut Jahn's 1985 Thompson Center, a wild salmon-and-blue glass drum, landed on the National Trust's list of America's most endangered places in 2019. It looked doomed. Instead Google bought it in 2022 for $105 million and is renovating it rather than flattening it. Reoccupation is penciled in for 2027.

Not every case ends that well. Preservation advocates in New York keep a running "Po-Mo Watchlist" of threatened postmodern work, and the losses are real: the Takashimaya building got recladded, the South Street Seaport facade redone. Once a facade is gone it doesn't come back.

I'm not arguing every quirky 80s tower deserves a plaque. A lot of it was cynical, developer-driven stuff dressed up in cheap historical costume. But the best of it documents a genuine argument about what buildings are for, whether they should serve the street and the eye or just the spreadsheet. That argument is worth keeping around in physical form, not just in archives.

The buildings you find embarrassing are usually the ones about to vanish. By the time everyone agrees they're beautiful, half of them have already come down.

The advertisement gives the game away before you smell anything: a man hides half his face behind an armful of white roses, the amber bottle glowing out of the dark beside a slab of gold lettering. Escada had built its name on women's clothes and women's perfume, the house not yet two decades old and run by Margaretha Ley and her husband Wolfgang. A men's scent in 1993 was a side bet, and it aged better than most of them.

Escada Pour Homme is an oriental, and an unapologetic one. It opens boozy and bright, cognac and citrus over lavender, then settles into a spice drawer: cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, caraway, a little carnation and geranium. The base is the warm standard of its decade, vanilla, sandalwood, tonka, patchouli and musk. People who wore it reach for the same words, sophisticated, professional, the thing you'd put on for a boardroom rather than a beach. It was loud, too, the kind of sillage that announced you halfway down a corridor.

The timing is the interesting part. By 1993 the masculine market was already sprinting in the other direction, toward the fresh, clean, faintly aquatic scents that would define the rest of the decade in the wake of Cool Water. Escada Pour Homme ignored the memo. It belongs to an older powerhouse lineage, the warm, spicy school of Tuscany per Uomo and Guerlain's Héritage, a world away from anything ozonic, a spicy oriental arriving just as spicy orientals were going out of style. Being out of step is a good part of why people remember it; there's very little like it being made now, and the people who loved it have nowhere else to go.

Which brings up the part that stings. Escada discontinued it, and the secondary market did what it does to a discontinued cult scent. A used 75ml bottle runs around $120 if you're patient. Sealed 100ml examples ask $200 and up, sometimes well past $250. For a fragrance that once sat on a department-store shelf as a mid-tier designer release, that's a strange afterlife: paying vintage-collector money for something that used to be unremarkable, bought by people who simply liked how it smelled.

That rose bouquet in the ad is an odd prop for a men's fragrance, melodramatic, almost mournful, a man apparently overcome by something. Maybe that was the point. The juice inside is warm and faintly nostalgic even when it was new, and the picture sells that exact feeling rather than anything you could actually bottle.

Spare a thought for whoever signed the purchase order. Three days after Claude Fable 5 went on sale, the companies that had wired it into production watched it disappear, and the explanation they got was the same thin one Anthropic got: a government letter citing a jailbreak it would describe only out loud. The order barred foreign nationals from the model, and since no provider can sort its users by passport in real time, the only way to comply was to pull it for everyone. No transition window, no staged rollback. The model was the most capable thing on the public market on Thursday and a dead endpoint by Saturday.

Enterprises drew their lesson fast, and it should worry Anthropic more than the directive did. You can read it in the analyst notes, and it isn't "Anthropic let us down." It's that regulatory risk now belongs in vendor selection criteria, sitting right next to latency and price. Forbes put it that bluntly. That single sentence is a quiet catastrophe for any company whose whole pitch is "build your business on our model."

From the buyer's chair, whose fault the outage was never mattered much. What matters is whether the service answers on Monday, and Fable answered that badly on its first weekend alive.

The trust was fraying before Friday, too. The same launch quietly rewrote the data terms. Anthropic now requires 30-day retention on all Fable and Mythos traffic, across its own surfaces and third-party platforms, and that overrides existing zero-retention agreements. Forrester's read is stark: if your enterprise negotiated a zero-retention DPA, using a Mythos-class model voids it for that traffic, with no opt-out. Bitsight flagged the same change. So before the model vanished, the contract a buyer thought they had quietly stopped applying to the thing they were actually using.

The advice that followed more or less wrote itself. Build redundancy across multiple labs. Ask vendors point-blank about their regulatory exposure and continuity plans. Document which capabilities you genuinely depend on and line up fallbacks before you need them. None of that is new; model-retirement guides have preached it for years in the bored register of a fire-safety leaflet. What changed is that the abstraction grew teeth. "Single-vendor risk" used to mean a price hike, or a deprecated endpoint with six months' notice and a migration path. Now it means your most capable model can be gone by Friday evening over a secret nobody will show you.

The missing explanation is what makes it unbankable. A deprecation you can plan around. An outage you can engineer against with retries and a warm standby. What you can't price is a shutdown that arrives on verbal evidence of a "narrow, non-universal jailbreak" which, by Anthropic's own account, amounts to asking the model to read a codebase and point at the flaws, a trick already sitting inside GPT-5.5 and run every day by defenders. It was the exact category of attack Fable's safety design was built to absorb. If that's the bar, every capable model from every lab is one classified afternoon away from the same fate, and no clause in any contract can hedge a call made on a secret.

The cost of Friday isn't borne by Anthropic alone, though Anthropic will feel it first and hardest as the one currently holding the bag. It's a tax on the whole proposition of leaning a workflow on any single frontier model, from any lab inside a jurisdiction that has now shown it owns an off switch and will use it without showing its work. The firms that spread their bets kept running through the weekend. The ones who went all-in on the best thing available spent it writing incident reports and rehearsing apologies. "Pick the safest vendor" was never going to survive a week that fit a launch and a recall inside the same seven days.

At 5:21 on Friday afternoon, Anthropic received a letter, and by that evening two of its models had vanished for everyone on the planet. Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, gone. The instrument was an export-control directive, the kind of authority built to keep advanced chips and weapons designs out of hostile hands. This time the administration pointed it at a chatbot.

The directive bars foreign nationals from using either model, including Anthropic's own foreign staff inside the United States. On paper that sounds narrow. In practice a company cannot sort its users by passport in real time, so the only way to comply is to switch the models off for everybody. A rule written to stop technology crossing a border became a global kill switch, and it worked in a single afternoon.

The stated reason is thin. The government believes someone found a way to jailbreak Fable 5, and that is most of what we have been told, because the letter carried no technical specifics. Anthropic, which actually saw the demonstration, says the technique exposed a small, already-known software vulnerability, the precise category of flaw that Fable's safety design was built to catch, and nothing a person couldn't already coax out of GPT-5.5. That last detail is the tell. The exact capability the administration judged too dangerous for Fable, which Anthropic says it had deployed to hundreds of millions of people, sits right now, unrecalled, inside a competitor's product. One model dies over a weekend; its functional twin stays online. That is not how a government acts when it has found a weapon. It is how one acts when it has found a lever.

This is the first time Washington has forced a commercial AI product offline, and the manner of it should worry people who have never touched Anthropic. The whole thing took three days from launch to recall, ran on what the company describes as verbal evidence, and arrived with no published finding and no chance to contest the switch before it was thrown. Calling it disproportionate is too polite. A government that can erase a widely used service over a weekend, citing a secret it will not show anyone, has found a tool far more useful to it than any jailbreak.

The lesson most people are drawing is about resilience, about not leaning on a single vendor. That is sensible, and it misses the point. The dependency that failed on Friday was not on Anthropic. It was on an administration choosing not to use a power it turns out to hold. Export-control law hands the executive enormous discretion and almost no duty to explain itself, and it has now been aimed at software that ordinary people had open in a browser tab. The company that spent the spring asking for a verifiable brake on frontier AI just found out what a brake feels like when someone else holds it. The rest of us get to wonder which model the off switch finds next.

The headline does the whole job before you reach the bottle. "The Classic American Beauty," it says, across a field of tall grass, and there she is in a white turtleneck, hair loose, no jewellery, no city in sight. The perfume sits small in the upper corner, almost an afterthought, a squat amber flask with a brass cap. Ralph Lauren had already learned the trick that made him rich. You don't sell the thing. You sell the world the thing lives in, and let people buy their way toward it one bottle at a time.

The bottle was Lauren, his first fragrance for women, and by the time this ad ran in 1990 it was already twelve years old. Lauren launched in 1978 alongside Polo for men, and the simultaneous release was itself a piece of strategy nobody had tried before. No designer had sent a men's and a women's scent into the world on the same day. Lauren talks about it now as if it were obvious, that his world held both, so the fragrances should arrive together. At the time it was a gamble dressed as common sense.

The original pitch made no attempt to describe a smell. The 1978 launch advertisement set a woman and two children beside a horse-drawn carriage in autumn light, a polo mallet in a boy's hand, and promised only that a fragrance could "capture a way of living, a certain timeless style." Introducing Lauren for women, the copy said, and the bottle sat in the corner like a detail you might overlook. The strategy was already complete twelve years before the turtleneck and the field; all the 1990 version did was swap the family for a single woman and make the country quieter.

So was the company he kept. He had been courted by Estée Lauder, the natural home for a designer scent, and turned them down for Warner Communications, the entertainment conglomerate that owned record labels and film studios. The two formed Warner/Lauren Ltd, and a media company with no perfume pedigree put out one of the most American fragrances ever made. The juice came from Bernard Chant, the perfumer behind Aramis and Estée Lauder's Aliage and Azurée, a man who built scents like architecture. Chant gave Lauren a green vegetal chypre, all rosewood and cedar and oakmoss, more forest floor than flower shop. Ben Kotyuk designed the flask. The whole thing was sold, with a straight face, as a "natural spray cologne," and that phrase tells you everything. Not perfume. Not parfum. Nothing French. A cologne, natural, the way a sweater is natural, the way a walk is natural.

Nothing about the grass and the turtleneck was accidental either. The pitch was wholesomeness, the open country, the woman who looks like she belongs to a family with land. In the two-page spread that ran in American Vogue that December, the fragrance barely registers and the woman is the entire argument. Everything Lauren wanted you to feel about the scent, he makes you feel about her instead.

The photograph hides a joke. The Classic American Beauty is Isabelle Townsend, and Isabelle Townsend was born in Paris. Her father was Group Captain Peter Townsend, the RAF officer whose romance with Princess Margaret became the great royal scandal of the 1950s, the equerry the palace could not let her marry. After Margaret, Townsend married a young Belgian woman, Marie-Luce Jamagne, and Isabelle was their daughter, raised speaking French and English, reading French and English literature at the Sorbonne between 1979 and 1982. By the time Ralph Lauren cast her as the face of his all-American dream, she had a British war hero for a father, a Belgian mother, a Paris childhood, and a literature degree from one of the oldest universities in Europe.

She signed an exclusive contract and became the brand's defining face for years. The American-flag sweater she wore down the runway in the autumn of 1989 turned into one of the house's permanent images, the kind of thing that gets reissued and reframed decades later. She worked with Bruce Weber and Richard Avedon and Peter Lindbergh, the same photographer who would soon argue that no single face could carry a whole decade. The campaign worked precisely because the Americanness was built rather than inherited. You assemble the myth out of whatever materials photograph well, and a Sorbonne graduate in a turtleneck photographs beautifully.

The fragrance had a quieter, sadder ending than the woman who advertised it. Through the 1990s the licensing passed to Cosmair, then to L'Oréal, and the formula got reworked more than once. Each version sanded a little more off the original, the oakmoss thinning, the strange earthy bitterness softening toward something safer. By the end of the decade Lauren was discontinued. Collectors now pay frightening prices for the early Warner/Lauren bottles, the ones that still smell the way Chant intended, while the thinned-out late versions ran down to clearance shelves on their way out of production.

What replaced it tells you how the whole industry changed. In 1998 Ralph Lauren launched Romance, and Romance took over as the flagship women's scent almost overnight. Where Lauren had been green and woody and a little severe, Romance was a soft rosy floral built for a younger buyer, the sort of scent that sells by the truckload at a department-store counter. The austere green chypre belonged to the 1970s; the warm floral was made to be liked, and liked sells. The brand survived the swap without a scratch, because the brand was never really about the smell. It was about the field, the turtleneck, the woman who looked like she had somewhere green to go.

Lauren the perfume is gone, reformulated into a memory and then out of production entirely. Isabelle Townsend left modelling for acting and the stage, turned up in a Whit Stillman film and a few theatre productions, and mostly stepped out of the picture she had defined. The picture outlasted them both, and it still works on whoever turns the page, which is the strange mechanics of a manufactured image: the more of it you can prove was invented, the better it does its job.

Steven Spielberg has spent nearly fifty years pointing at the sky and refusing to tell us exactly what's up there. Close Encounters of the Third Kind ended at the moment of contact and then cut away, trusting that the withholding was the point. Disclosure Day, which I flagged back when it was only an announced return to UFOs, premiered in Paris on June 2 and opens in American theatres on June 12, and it takes the opposite bet. This time the evidence isn't hidden. It's dumped on all eight billion of us at once.

The premise is the most interesting thing about the film, and possibly its trap. Spielberg told CBS News that the story imagines "what would happen if they decided to do a data dump across the entire world all at once," with a shadowy faction trying to stop the release. He's called it a bookend to Close Encounters, and he isn't shy about why the subject still grips him: "I absolutely think that they have been here, and they are here." Whatever you make of that as a worldview, it gives the movie a conviction that a lot of effects-driven spectacle lacks.

Emily Blunt anchors it as Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City weathercaster who starts the film as an ordinary professional and then, after a CGI cardinal flies into her apartment, begins speaking in languages she's never learned and receiving classified information out of the air. Josh O'Connor plays the cybersecurity expert carrying the proof; Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, and Colman Domingo fill out a cast that, on paper, has no business being this deep for a chase movie. David Koepp wrote the screenplay, Janusz Kamiński shot it, and John Williams scored it, so the craft pedigree is exactly what you'd expect from an Amblin production at a reported $115 million.

I'm writing the day before wide release, off the festival premiere and the critics who caught preview screenings, so this is a read on the film and its reception rather than a seat-in-the-theatre verdict. The early split is the interesting part, more telling than any single rave or pan.

The enthusiasts are loud. The first social-media reactions, collected by The Hollywood Reporter, ran to "Spielberg's best film in 20 years" and "a dense roller coaster ride blending chase film, love story, and mystery." Blunt, talking to Empire, made the Close Encounters connection explicit: "There are definitely questions posed by Close Encounters that are answered in Disclosure Day." That line is either a thrill or a warning, depending on how much you believe those questions were better left open.

Den of Geek landed in the warm middle at 3.5 out of 5, framing the film as a coda to a lifetime of alien movies and a king returning to his throne. Their critic's point is worth sitting with: this isn't the ecstatic awe of Close Encounters, the sweetness of E.T., or the dread of War of the Worlds. It's something older and calmer, a storyteller circling back to his favourite question with the equanimity of someone who no longer needs to dazzle you to make it land.

Then there's the cold end, and it's pointed. The Los Angeles Times critic Amy Nicholson wrote that the aliens are here but the wonderment isn't, and her diagnosis cuts to exactly the bet I opened with. The film, she says, "speeds around frantically, talking constantly and explaining little," where Close Encounters was "a popcorn masterpiece of withheld information." That's the risk baked into the whole concept. If your subject is total disclosure, you've thrown away the very thing that made the 1977 film hum, which was the ache of not knowing.

I lean toward thinking Nicholson has found the real fault line, even if she's harder on the movie than I'd probably be. Mystery is cheap to evoke and expensive to pay off. Spielberg built his reputation partly on never quite paying it off, on the shark you don't see and the light behind the mountain. A film whose entire engine is the release of proof is structurally committed to showing you everything, and showing everything tends to shrink it. Rolling Stone's David Fear caught the same doubleness from a friendlier angle, calling it a kind of career retrospective in miniature, full of traces of Duel and Minority Report, not top-tier Spielberg but more than enough of his presence to warrant the ticket.

The timing is its own character. The film arrives into a real-world disclosure movement, the Pentagon dribbling out declassified reports and grainy footage of things nobody will name, and Spielberg has clearly read the room. A movie premised on a government hoarding eighty years of proof doesn't have to work hard to feel plausible right now. That tailwind probably helps the box office and complicates the art, because it's easier to make a conspiracy thriller land when half the audience already suspects the conspiracy is real.

Disclosure Day lands, a day out, somewhere short of the best-in-twenty-years raves and well clear of the LA Times' near-dismissal: a confident, well-made film that explains a little too much, the work of a director with nothing left to prove and one last thing he wants to say about the sky. I'll see it this weekend, and my bet is the warm, qualified middle, which is no bad place for a fifth alien movie to land.