In this week’s Dispatch: after playing Wheels of Aurelia, I decided to look at its main inspiration, Il Sorpasso. And a capsule review of Luth Haroon’s INSERT/DATE/HERE.
This week on exp.
Even I wonder why I wrote about this one but it is on Switch Online in the west!
Wheels of Aurelia is now delisted on the App Store, though in some respects the story of the control tech companies have over access to art has evolved in the face of both Steam and itch.io delisting/deindexing NSFW games under demand from payment processors reacting to the pressure of far-right activists. There’s a great resource here that can help you pressure the payment processors in return.
I made myself sick of Threes before 2048 was even a glimmer in a cloner’s eye, and I think it’s important to reflect that the things that ultimately stopped me playing it were very deeply considered: there’s a great Wired article that goes into just how deeply they thought about it all.
exp. Capsule Reviews
INSERT/DATE/HERE (Luth Haroon, 2025)
Play INSERT/DATE/HERE and then come back, ok?
How do you feel? Did you keep clicking? Did you stop? Did you just close the window after it said game over, or did you continue? How long did you click?
…
When INSERT/DATE/HERE was shared by friend-of-the-zine Mare Sheppard, it was made clear what it was about–and I don’t think when you start playing, that you can really have any doubt what you’re doing from the first click anyway. It made me think of the “Death From Above” sequence from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which (in a reading which absolutely requires the author be stone-dead in your mind) I always read as a meaningful juxtaposition of how some people kill by pushing a button vs. the gritty reality of on-the-ground warfare. A touch of nuance with your exciting Hollywood-style story where any action is justified by the fact you’re fighting “real” baddies.
But the reality of this kind of warfare is the person pushing the button doesn’t even really think about if they’re fighting baddies. They aren’t thinking about them as people at all. And if they did, they wouldn’t care.
In INSERT/DATE/HERE we face a genocide that has been streamlined into a series of clicks, likely performed by a drone operator, miles away, sitting in a chair in front of a computer just as you are. What they are doing has been so disconnected that it is as if they are poor, special Enders, allowed to do what they’re doing without ever really having to understand it. So disconnected that the clicks you just performed could very well have been as real. The perfection of dehumanisation.
I clicked. I clicked until I hit my quota and then I watched what that actually meant. And then I clicked, over four hundred times, to symbolically bury every single person I killed–until it was clear that not every one could be found. Because of course, many of the murdered will never be found, or counted, or their existence will simply be disputed, whether we have seen it with our own eyes or not. As I write the window remains open, knowing that there will be no closure, there is nothing I can do, and that tomorrow the same thing will happen again.
Free Palestine. Donate: gazadirect.com (verified direct aid campaigns) / UNRWA / PCRF / MSF
exp. Du Cinéma
Il Sorpasso (1962)
Claimed as an inspiration for Wheels of Aurelia by Santa Ragione, I was interested to discover the influence to be less straightforward than the setting of the Via Aurelia, with both game and film using the beautiful setting to try and dig more deeply into the Italian society of their era.
Italy is in the honeymoon period of post-fascism in Il Sorpasso, while in Wheels of Aurelia, the characters have already lived through a decade of the “Years of Lead.” In some respects, both works lull you into a false sense of security that they really aren’t about much more than what you see. In Il Sorpasso, it immediately feels… expected. Almost formulaic. A shy student lets a brash character, Bruno, use his telephone, and seems to end up kidnapped out of politeness. Their adventure, of course, opens him up. Maybe he’ll start to believe in himself?
Well… no. In retrospect Il Sorpasso is prescient in theme: that trying to be carefree in the face of your failures may ultimately have a cost to those who believe you. Bruno is charming, insightful, but his failures are not that he’s blunt or that he’s incapable of taking anything seriously. It’s that he’s a would-be rapist and an absentee father, one who returns to find his teenage daughter in a relationship with an elderly pedophile* and after realizing his own irrelevance does his best to at least get some money out of it—but ends up abandoned, with only his mousey thrall left to impress. But his lesson has worked too well, and as always, it’s the next generation that suffer.
If you’re unfamiliar with commedia all’italiana (Italian-style comedy)—and listen, I was—that something called a “comedy” could be not just so annoying (Bruno honks his fucking car horn a million times in this) but so deeply bleak comes as a surprise. The cinematography is stunning, the women are beautiful, but Il Sorpasso says: don’t let it fool you. As Wheels of Aurelia explores, for many, it did.
*I had to look this up, the age of consent in Italy is fucking 14 even today. Christ.
Other Zines
A free one-page trifold zine by CrimethInc. that you could print out and just leave places (if you’re an American.)
A huge collection of free zines focusing on individual Palestinian families seeking support that you could just print out and leave places (whether or not you’re American.)
And Finally…
Matt Farley’s 2013 film, Local Legends, is streaming for free on Youtube for the next week (until the end of July) and it is, arguably, the best, most honest statement on how it feels to make art–to make anything–in the modern world. You should watch it.
Next week on exp.: A trip to paradise.