I didn’t have much of an appetite for the Oscar’s this year.

Normally I’d be all in, enjoying the glittering and flimsy spectacle as much anybody, but this year felt different, and whatever spirit or anticipation I’d typically bring to the affair was just not there. In fact, I was dreading it, imaging it another long– really long– continuation of all the sneering, bitter arguments that were ceaselessly looping through my media feeds.

Social media has begun to feel like tuning in to some late-night AM radio call-in show. The voices, disembodied and angry, fire from the dark, each one inveighing some furious certainty. There is no complaint too small or too large, and each one comes obsessively detailed by the over-confident sender. There’s an urgency to all these declarations, too, as if impulse more than thought, and the momentum always moves forward– retreat or rumination, let alone a kind of sympathy, utterly unthinkable.

To willingly step into this each day, as I do, is an act of madness. To me, it feels like being closed in a room with a hundred growling dogs while the unmediated grievances of the world strobe in front of you. It colours your mood, this, so even before something of “actuality” happens in your physical life, you’re already tense and combat ready– you’ve already become somebody you don’t want to be. And I swear, if we could somehow tap into the cataract of doomed energy that feeds this monster, we would be masters of the universe.

Initially I had imagined the Internet as something almost utopian. It would be democratizing and unifying, kind of like The Force, and united by the millions we would be able to destroy evil Death Stars. Instead, it’s proven to be infinitely divisive, revealing that the Internet itself might be a horrible Death Star.

The limitless options presented by technology have moved us away from what had been commonly shared. Whatever our interests may be, however perverse, remote or idiosyncratic, we can find a subculture dedicated to that passion or hatred online. We are never alone, but our channels never seem to be open, either. Living in gluttonous echo chambers of our own devising, we now customize our experiences, changing them to suit our needs rather than adopting to the mean. In this way, popular culture is being eradicated, with each person becoming a hermetically sealed culture unto themselves.

Naturally, the idea of compassion or empathy withers in this climate of radical tribalization. It’s now completely normal for people to proudly boast of de-Friending somebody who disagrees with their politics or to happily live within the paradox of being tolerant of everything but intolerance. If you step into Twitter, far from finding a marketplace for the free exchange of ideas, you find a war zone. Every once in a while you pop up from your trench, fire off a few salvos at the enemy, and then duck down again—kind of like a shooter game.

The Internet in the age of Trump ( who I believe saw and exploited this rather than created it), is a grim landscape lacking in kindness.

Full of hall monitors ready to pounce on anybody not adhering to the common orthodoxy, it’s a place you go to confirm your certainties and your enemy’s idiocies. It is a place where fighting, where aggression is the entertainment, and it is perhaps the loneliest place on the planet.

Thin and trembling, he had a big, bushy grey beard and a pitiless look that suggested a hard, unforgiving life. Anti-social and hostile, he shot me a dismissive look when I was first wheeled into the room. “Goddamn it, “ he rasped at the nurse, turning his body away from me as if disgusted, “ what have you done with Carole? I want Carole, not this guy!”  In spite of his fulminating, it was clear that he was not used to getting his way, and without further event he carried his disappointment back behind the separating curtain to his small bed.

Suffering a very serious respiratory disease, each breath was a battle for him, his life reduced to a war that he struggled angrily through everyday. His middle-aged children, bearing Tim Horton’s coffee, appeared every morning when visiting hours began and left much later at night. They talked quietly but without tenderness, as if jockeying for position as their father neared death, and when the nurses walked out of the room they whispered racist jokes to one another. It seemed a display of solidarity rather than love, and embedded within was the unspoken and unsentimental hope for reward.

It’s spooky at night in the hospital. The directionless sound of heavy equipment rolling down the hallway echoes off the walls, and suddenly, startling you from sleep, nurses wordlessly appear, their flashlight beams passing over unfamiliar walls like spectres. The rooms here, they’re not haunted by the past, but by the present.

And in this nocturnal climate, the man changed. He refused to sleep, choosing instead to sit in a chair at the end of his bed, breathing heavily and staring hard. Frightened of dying, of the darkness of night, he talked to himself until dawn, his unknowable interiors made briefly audible, cryptic fragments shaken loose from his speeding mind:

That dirty slut is going to end up in jail.

I’ll be back in the mud again.

There are only four directions in this world.

The meadows will never get greener.

And sometimes he’d move about. Bent like a terrifying hieroglyph or a primitive cave painting, he’d tilt into view, looming prophetically, and existing between worlds he’d stare furiously through me, holding fast to the small things that remained to him before eternity swallowed him whole.

The future in which the Spike Jonze directed movie is set is suggested rather than primary visual architecture. It’s familiar but slightly dislocating, men wear High-Waisted pants, such as you might see in the Civil War, the technology is just a little smaller and swifter, and the city in which the film takes place drifts back and forth between a smoggy LA and a smoggy Shanghai.

Saturated in lyrical oranges and ambers, a dreamy, narcotic ambience presides, as if one of remembrance rather than projection, if that makes any sense. Even in the heavy, coarse fabrics of the clothes people wear, or in the forest imagery existing as backdrop in an elevator, you can feel a yearning for something authentic amidst the increasingly spacious and abstract world of technology.

Joaquin Phoenix, sporting the melancholy moustache of another, somehow European era, falls in love with an operating system played by the voice of Scarlett Johansson. He’s probably in every scene in the movie and he’s simply terrific. Gentle, nuanced and empathetic, his performance is the very opposite of the kind of grand scale acting we’ve come to expect from the likes of Christian Bale, and this dose of humble realism is immensely appealing.

The entire movie was appealing, actually, and it felt like relaxing into the lives of friends who were easy to be around. It was intimate but not needy, and it evoked our shared feelings of falling in love, of tumbling into one another and living in those times when everything is golden and funny and precious and even the colour of your partner’s sweater spoke to a greater truth. This was accomplished deftly, in small, perfect ways, and in spite of it being an abstracted, artificial relationship, it was still the most familiar and convincing depiction of love that I’d seen in years, including, of course, the awkward, tender and melancholic drift apart.

Sweet, charming and a little bit sad, it was a fun film to be a part of and it stayed with us, remaining a companionable presence, like an absent friend, as we shared drinks across the street—each one of our minds drifting off to a different point in time, and then happily returning to our present company.

Me: That steak was good.

Rachelle: It was.

Me: Really glad I’m here cuz after the US election really didn’t feel like I’d had enough politics!

Rachelle: Haha!!

Me: What movie would u like to be watching right now?

Rachelle: Babe: Pig in the city.

Me: Yeah, that was good– no nudity though.

Rachelle: Babe was nude.

Me: True.

Me: I thought Lincoln might emancipate a nude slave or something.

Rachelle: Ur thinking Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

Me: Nude vampire slaves? Why r we here????

Rachelle: U still in the theatre?

Me: YES!

Rachelle: Poor, brave pickle!

Me: Where are u?

Rachelle: Walking home from the subway.

Me: Why didn’t u tell me u were leaving?!

Rachelle: U were asleep. Snoring so horribly, I was embarrassed to know u.

Me: The usher has woken up 3 people that I’ve seen, so I wasn’t alone.

Rachelle: You were probably asleep for about 20 more wake-ups!

Me: Hope Lincoln gets assassinated soon.

Rachelle: That’s not very nice, he was a great American!

Me: Lots of “acting” in this movie. Wigs everywhere.

Rachelle: It’s a nice night for a stroll, and look, I just found a five dollar bill on the street!

Me: ur a very lucky woman.

Rachelle: You make your own luck, they say!

Me: I think there’s about 45 minutes left in this movie.

Rachelle: Why don’t u just leave?

Me: Still might be some tasteful nudity.

Rachelle: U want to see Lincoln nude, don’t u!

Me: No! I’m just not leaving till the slaves are free, dammit! I care!