I’m not an especially nostalgic person. It could be the consequence of being raised around severe faith, or maybe it was the heavy depression that set in around puberty, but looking backward has always felt somewhere between homework and picking a scab—something done not out of comfort but of morbid obligation. I am enjoying aging, my thirties have been more comfortable than my twenties, which were worlds better than my teens. Rewatching something like The Sandlot feels less like the gold ol’ days than it does recalling a plate of undercooked chicken that once induced food poisoning. Only 90s kids will understand this anhedonia.
Still, relics from the past find their way to shore. I’m a bit too old to blame it on Saturn’s return, a little too young to pin it to a midlife crisis, but I’ve noticed more and more media from my glory days circling back into my ever-softening orbit. Over the summer, I drove past my childhood house for the first time in probably 15 years. It felt at once as familiar as the apartment in which I live now and as foreign as a place I’d never been; a ghost of someone I’ve never known that’s haunted me for decades. The books and movies and music to which I’ve been returning are leveling the same effect: they fill the indelible imprint of something that I can’t quite remember ever making contact. Of course, maybe that’s a matter of taste. Where some kids might have been digging into Pavement records and Kurt Vonnegut books, I was the proud owner of a Velvet Revolver CD and declared Finding Neverland one of the best movies of the century. Whatever, at least I was happy.*
So in today’s Blood Jump, we’re reviewing millennial media that, for better or worse, have found their way back to fresh soil. This one will be strange and self-indulgent, but faithful readers are no doubt used that by now. Darren Aronofsky’s Pi. Incubus’s Morning View. Let’s begin.
Running the Numbers
Some movies—Pulp Fiction, Goodfellas, even Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—are damned to a life in the dorm room. Their posters wilt from bong hits and BO while college freshman debate whether Denis Villeneuve is the new David Fincher. It’s a sentence often dictated through little fault of the films themselves; I hung a Fight Club poster from my wall in the quad (radical honesty, thank you) because I’d seen one hanging in the first dorm I’d ever visited. But Darren Aronofsky’s oeuvre—of which I am a fan—seems to have waltzed into that particular prison on its own accord and kicked its feet up while the guards take lunch.
Pi, Aronofsky’s 1998 debut, is a reliable sample slide of all the director’s highs and lows and something of a codex to his enduring claim to a spot on the film-bro mantle. Pi’s appeal toward the latter is largely twofold. Before Steven Soderbergh was selling movies from his iPhone to Netflix, Pi introduced a new generation to DIY filmmaking with success at scale. The well-documented production process was an exercise in polarity between extreme conservation and bullheaded ambition. Total costs were less than $140,000 (unheard of for a movie of Pi’s success and legacy, even for the time), actors wore their own clothes and composer Clint Mansell used his own equipment, outdoor shoots were conducted illegally to avoid permit fees. Lest anyone be accused of pinching pennies, though, Aronofsky also indulged in his trademark excess: the crew shot over 23 hours of footage on 16mm film (the final cut is 84 minutes), Mansell’s score leaned heavily on samples and ate up a healthy chunk of the budget, Aronofsky paid a cabbie to keep his car in a shot for a scene that would ultimately be scrapped. That sort of uncompromising indulgence against a budget scored by begging friends and family for cash is hard candy for aspiring artists, and when Pi won the directing award at Sundance ’98, it felt like a signal to young filmmakers that they could do it, too.
Even if Aronofsky had started his career traditionally, though, it’s hard to imagine something like Pi wouldn’t be a hit with undergrads. Pi follows Max Cohen (Sean Gullette), a math prodigy who’s too smart for his own good. Max uses that big ol’ brain to pursue patterns that he hopes might make a chaotic world make sense: he’s built a supercomputer (named Euclid, wink wink) designed to predict the stock market, he debates his mentor, Sol (Mark Margolis), over abstract strategy games, he becomes entangled with a chain-smoking Kabbalist over the Torah’s relationship to perfect circles and golden ratios. Of course, great genius often comes at a cost, and Max suffers from paranoia, hallucinations, and brain-drilling headaches that threaten his relationships with local kids enamored by his math skills and local women enamored with… something, presumably. Max is the sort of galaxy-brained antihero that B-minus proto-nihilists dream of becoming in a world freed from report cards, and his covert grandeur gets a heavy underline when a group of Wall Street goons lay some muscle on him to exploit his work. Smarts ain’t as easy as they looks.
A movie like Pi is about as deep as you’re willing to dig. It’s steeped in enough mathematical theory to remain plausible enough for pseudo-gurus like Jack Dorsey to laud it for making math cool, but a reappraisal in the smartphone age—a24 released a 4k remaster for the film’s 25th anniversary and has put it up in multiplexes on Pi Day for two years running—reveals some fudged numbers. Concepts like pi and the Fibonnaci sequence struck the right balance of familiarity and inaccessible intrigue at Pi’s release, but they feel almost rote with Reddit in our collective pockets; worse, a good deal of the movie’s math has since been easily refuted. Pi’s notoriously complex structure is similarly deceptive, likely more a consequence of Aronofsky and Oren Sarch’s chemistry in the editing bay than a script born of brooding erudition. Pi weaves compelling paths and nodes across its adrenalized story arcs, but none surface much more than a man on the wrong side of a drill bit.
But then, even a quarter of a century later, Pi works. Mathletes might not get off on it, but scrutinizing Pi’s intellectual bona fides is as valuable as poring over high school transcripts two decades into a career. The movie’s muscle, and what makes Aronofsky such a guiltily compelling artist, lies instead in its deep well of earnest curiosity. For as sophomoric of a character sketch as Max can be, his approach to faith and science remains vital and compelling. Max is a synecdoche of Pi’s greater dearth of cynicism, as surprising and welcome in the post-Twitter 2020s as it was in the post-everything 90s. And, goddamnit, it’s just so delightful to see a movie this slick and efficient burst through its microbudget topsoil. Pi’s reversal film barks its grain and sheen in a 4k rescan, its editing would lay the ground for Aronofsky’s calling-card jump cuts, Mansell’s score drools and tweaks in a manic IDM stupor. Pi’s low-budg bravado earns its jersey in the dorm-room HOF rafters, but its endearment toward a sober search for meaning keeps its joints limber in the next century.
Morning, Again
A suburban kid’s search for danger is typically asymptotal: they run as close to a boundary as is possible without actually crossing it, high off the possibility of veering off the edge without letting the comfort of home leave the rearview. An evangelical upbringing planted my own feet a little more squarely in the familiar, but young eyes are meant to wander. The What Would Jesus Do movement of the late 90s and early 00s put secular media—arts and entertainment that weren’t branded with explicitly protestant messaging—in its crosshairs, an efficient decision for communities determined to limit their children’s exposure to texts that ran counter to their preferred doctrine. In my own home, non-Christian music was severely scrutinized, if not flatly verboten. That made brasher mainstream acts like Marilyn Manson terrifying, but something more anodyne—like Incubus, an edge-lite Malibu hard rock band that shared the California crunch of some of my more familiar Christian acts—as seductive as any $15 CD could be on the other side of an FYE.
To a moody kid in a fundamentalist household, an album like Incubus’s Morning View felt like a gift from the God they’d one day lose faith in. The band’s fourth album found them enjoying whiffs of mainstream success for the first time. “Drive,” the last single from 1999’s Make Yourself and a mandatory staple in college-green acoustic jams across the country, had reached number nine on the Billboard Hot 100 charts and marked a schismatic turn from the white-dread funk rock of their previous albums. Morning View, released at the height of TRL’s grip on teenage wallets (and less than two months after 9/11), capitalized on “Drive’s” success: it found the band a little more grown up, a little more laid back, and a little less hesitant to play into their image. The result was something that could comfortably share a CD changer with Switchfoot and P.O.D. but also carried enough intentionality to earn priority spins. And, crucially for kids in conservative households, it was the first Incubus record that didn’t say fuck. If you could make it out of a Sam Goody without your folks realizing what the band name meant, you’d scored a summer with an album that wasn’t bent on your eternal salvation.
If Morning View fits comfortably with the Christian hard rock of the early aughts, though, its musicianship has saved it from a legacy of dust-collecting amid a pile of Jars of Clay CDs. Incubus had spent the decade prior pounding the Santa Monica pavement and picking up any gig that would allow a group of grimy high schoolers through the door. By the time they had the label and budget that allowed them to rent Morning View’s Malibu beach house à la live-in studio, they were playing with a synergy and ease that saw them freed from the pressure to prove themselves to the world in favor of making the music that sounded right in the room.
That’s a good place to be for any rock group with a DJ in the band: Morning View is markedly less angsty than both Incubus’s back catalogue and their freak-on-a-leash contemporaries, and laying off the fuzz and phasers allowed the group’s talent to surface to the California tides. Drummer José Pasillas is as capable of pounding the toms on tracks like “Blood on the Ground” as he is riding the Sabian (pause) on the opening to “Nice to Know You.” Mike Einziger’s guitar riffs open up to a greater diversity of modes and time signatures than they’d had the chance on previous albums, and he even plays the pipa on the Björk-inspired “Aqueous Transmissions.” Alex Katunich proves that his bass can sound quite pretty when he isn’t slapping it, and the aforementioned DJ Chris Kilmore is afforded a new canvas for textures beyond a shoop-shoop here and there. Brandon Boyd’s voice and lyrics are as sure-strung and full throated as ever, and while they take no pains to avoid recalling the band’s angry-white-boy past, they no longer feel beholden to it.
That’s a lot of praise to heap on an album that won a primary audience of early-aught Hot Topic shoppers, and like Pi or any of Incubus’s neighbors on a CD rack, Morning View is more likely to survive on the strength of its legacy than through a new crop of fans. But that legacy is aging well, or at least better than you’d think for a band in rotation on Headbanger’s Ball. Like so much cringe washed anew, notable tastemakers have dropped their cool and copped to their longstanding Incubus fandom over the past presidential term or two, including a “Stellar” interpolation by Chicago R&B bohéme Jamila Woods and drop-ins from names like Solange and Lizzo at recent Incubus shows. The class of Morning View is growing up and looking great doing it.
Such good standing is more than most of Incubus’s peers could hope for and would seem like a great place to rest on one’s laurels. But toward the end of 2023, Brandon Boyd announced the band would be rerecording Morning View, 23 years and two bassists later. The move is undeniably Swiftian; as Boyd explains in his own Substack (let’s trade subs, Brandon!), it’s exceedingly rare for artists to own their masters, and rerecording the band’s most successful album will likely afford them a bit more due profit than they’ve earned over the past two decades.
Creatively, the effort is a bit harder to define. It’s easy to be cynical about the project, to accuse the band of looking backward and dipping back into a sure thing rather than pushing boundaries and meeting themselves where they are now. But the two singles released so far—“Circles” and “Echo”—are tender and reverent toward their source material; they feel less like a rewrite than the live arrangements of songs Incubus has played for a strong base of adoring fans over the past twenty years. There’s a noble sort of journeyman’s approach to acknowledging that something you wrote ages ago still resonates to people and honoring that admiration accordingly, to look back on your glory days and call them good. It remains to be seen how the reimagined Morning View will play (the album is scheduled for release later this year), but to a former evangelical kid looking for a window to the outside world, there’s something poetic about the endeavor. Listening to Morning View in my thirties is both as familiar as home and a memory of my chance to break out of it, a paradox of retreat and advance.
Sample Draws
Kim Gordon’s new album is as brilliant as anything I’ve heard in the past decade. I won’t say much about it here—there’s a chance I’ll cover it in a future issue—but it’s nothing short of radical that a musician that could just as easily stamp herself a legacy act continues to redefine the boundaries of what she’s capable of.
I loved Love Lies Bleeding! It’s a pulpy, horny noir that took me by surprise, especially after feeling pretty cold on Rose Glass’s Saint Maud. I’m glad I didn’t write her off. Kristen Stewart’s last decade of work has been a streak of fire, and her chemistry with Katy O’Brian is undeniable.
I’d almost included it in a previous draft of this issue, but I was really taken during a reread of William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All. Yes, so much depends upon the red wheelbarrow, but I’d forgotten how much rage and energy suffuse throughout the text. It’s worth a revisit if it’s been gathering dust on your shelf.
Thank you for reading Blood Jump. If you enjoyed this issue, please encourage a friend to subscribe. I will see you again soon for the next installment.