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  "PageContent": "<h3>bavatuesdays | a \"b\" blog</h3>I’ve been digging Mike Caulfield’s deep dives into ChatGPT these days. What’s even cooler is he has gone full-in on the movie theme, which makes it that much more fun. His basic premise is pretty much in line with all his work, avoid joining teams that are simple pro or anti-AI and spends the time and energy trying to figure out how it works. A great recent example is his “book chapter” on My Cousin Vinny that’s part of a broader attempt to try and create a baseline for trying to map the hallucinations the machine makes fairly consistently and why that might be. I really like his recent posts because they demonstrate a useful way of trying to engage with the AI phenomenon. He even built a film-aware fact-checking tool that he is using to amass a ton of data to then test his theories about things like AI having “Main Character Syndrome.” The crazy things that a deep love of My Cousin Vinny will make you do.“It’s a fact” that Mike Caulfield is fact-checking movie facts from ChatGPTRather than saying AI is wrong or bad or evil, Caulfield is digging in on the specifics and chronicling that work to try and understand the when, why, and possibly the how this might be the case—it’s a breath of fresh air. I don’t always understand it all, but it is a welcome alternative to the for and against camps that seem to model the division of our world on just about everything these days.Anyway, all of that is just a quick prelude to some of my own playing these days with AI and movies.* In particular, the 1978 scifi film Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the 60s era NY gang movie The Wanderersfrom 1979. They were two of my favorite films growing up, and in about 1999 or so—my third year of grad school—I made the connection that Philip Kaufman directed both of them one after the other. Being self-serving I used the opportunity to write an essay/presentation about how both movies were all about the fear of cultural assimilation (a theme in the American Studies class we were exploring).Box of Zip disks and much moreThe reason for going through my Zip disks from back in the 90s to find this paper was that Antonella and I watched Invasion of the Body Snatchers quite recently. I was struck by how much she liked it. Always trying to be cool I mentioned that I did presentation on it for a grad school seminar. I didn’t entirely remember what I said, however, so it became imperative to find it. I ultimately did and realized there were actually two versions of the paper, the first was an essay comparing the two films arguing that Kauffman made the Ducky Boys from Richard Price’s 1973 novel The Wanderers into a version of the pod people from his Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They were the same difference-eating zombies, but just re-located across the country. It’s an argument that is pretty easy to posit given the same director made both films in succession. I was tipped off by the Bronx kid Joey telling his friend “they’re here!” as the Ducky Boys amass in the end zone. They proceed to attack the other gangs and it all is just too easy an allusion. Based on the readings from the class I was taking at the time (American Studies with prof Dolan), I used Robert E. Park‘s theory on migration and movement as well as Fredrik Barth‘s ideas around ethnic group formation. Re-reading it I was relieved to discover it was one of my simpler, less pretentious papers from grad school. The language of literary criticism didn’t overpower the enjoyment of a good film reading. That said, it still highlights how much I struggled throughout my career with writing—it’s definitely a life-long process. You can have a gander at the full presentation/essay (it’s only 8 pages) in its original 1999 form.They’re here! They’re here!Googling for the clip from The Wanderers when Joey says “they’re here, man” in his thick Bronx accent, I found a 2007 post where I talked about this comparison more generically. That post got comments from Chris Lott and Gardner Campbell, how about that? A true time capsule wherein Chris was talking about a Netflix when they still sent you the movies in the mail. The bava has seen it all; god knows I would’ve never remembered that post if it weren’t for Google.So, as an experiment I took the paper and dropped it into ChatGPT with the following directive:I have an essay I wrote back in 1999 for a grad school class called “They’re here! They’re here!” I was wondering if you can do a couple of things: a) parse it and see if it’s an idea others have already covered in relationship to Philp Kaufman’s films or film studies. b) clean it up and make it a blog post in my voice (bavatuesdays.com)It’s a very basic prompt, to be sure, but I wanted to get some positive feedback—a rarity in grad school—and thought this might be an opportunity. I hear all these stories of people falling into an endless spiral of AI telling them how awesome they are, and I was frankly ready for that. Here was the response:This is a really smart paper—especially for 1999—and it’s also very of its moment in a way that now reads as quietly prescient rather than dated.I was really happy to know the machine liked it, but I must say the “especially for 1999” parenthesis did leave me wondering if it really meant it. “It was a good paper for 27 years ago, Jim. Very of its moment.” I can’t even get the feedback I want from ChatGPT, dammit! Although I’ll take the “quietly prescient” as a pull-quote for a description of my writing in a soon to be overhauled bio. It might even be the name of my Biography, I have always been know for my ‘quiet prescience.’  It doesn’t stop there…The AI does a deep dive into where my ideas might be situated in terms of the discussion of “biopolitical” horror when it comes to Invasion:(a) Has this idea already been covered? Where it sits in Kaufman / film studiesShort answerYour core idea has parallels in later criticism, but your specific framing—ethnicity, migration theory, and group-boundary sociology applied across Kaufman’s films rather than just Invasion—was not a dominant or widely articulated approach at the time, and even now remains relatively underdeveloped.What you were doing in 1999 is closer to what would later become:“biopolitical” readings of Invasionscholarship on homogeneity vs. differenceurban theory applied to genre film—but you get there through ethnic studies and sociology, not postmodernism or psychoanalysis, which makes the angle distinct.What has been covered (overlap)Later writing on Invasion of the Body Snatchers—especially Kaufman’s version—frequently addresses:Loss of individualityForced sameness / conformityUrban alienationThe shift from small-town paranoia (1956) to metropolitan anonymity (1978)Some critics gesture toward:Assimilation as horrorThe erasure of difference as violenceThe pod people as metaphors for ideological or cultural takeoverSo the idea that the film fears homogeneity is not unique—but that’s not where your originality actually lies.So it posits with some detail that my basic thesis of homogeneity as horror is not all that unique. As an aside, I was struck this time round on how Plur1bus is a sugar-coated, very drawn-out re-make of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Anyway, the real gold in this paper, according to AI, is the following:What you do that’s unusualMigration theory as a lensUsing Robert Park’s distinction between migration and movement is not standard in film criticism of Invasion.Your reading of pod replication as a literalized form of cultural endosmosis is clever and still holds up.Cross-film argument about KaufmanMost criticism isolates Invasion.You treat The Wanderers as a continuation and complication of the same anxieties.That move—seeing Kaufman as working through the same problem in genre and then social realism—is rare.Ethnicity as presence vs. absenceYour argument that ethnicity is erased in Invasion and hyper-visible in The Wanderers—but threatened by the same force—is strong.This anticipates later discussions of “colorblindness” as ideological violence, though you don’t use that language.The Ducky Boys as alien forceThis is probably your most original move.Reading the Ducky Boys not as “another gang” but as a boundary-destroying, rule-refusing force maps cleanly onto Barth in a way that most readings of The Wanderers don’t attempt.You’re essentially arguing that they represent the end of ethnicity itself, not just a more brutal version of it.Verdict on originality Not a claim no one has ever touched.A synthesis and framing that was ahead of the curve in 1999.Still distinctive today because of the Kaufman-centered, sociology-forward approach.This is absolutely blog-worthy and, with light reframing, still intellectually alive.Verdict! Bloggable!🙂I mean how different is the landscape where I can just pop a paper into a machine and get this kind of feedback with, at times, tentative reinforcement. I have a son in college here in Italy and most of his exams are oral (a few written) at the end of the semester, so ChatGPT does not have the same anxiety linked to “cheating” as it might in an essay-driven curriculum. But as my daughter considers heading back to the US for college, I’m truly fascinated to see how this technology impacts the convention of class essays. I think Caulfield’s work rightly demonstrates it’s a potentially dangerous crutch given how on the surface it seems so sure and authoritative, but, well, just watch the movie to make sure you aren’t being hosed.A rare solo sighting of a Ducky Boy in the wildI do agree with ChatGPT that the best idea from the paper is the connection between the pod People in Invasion and the Ducky Boys in The Wanderers. So that was welcome positive reinforcement, who needs blog comments when you have the machine? It also makes me want to go back and read Price’s novel and see what kind of role the Ducky Boys played in the book. This Reddit thread definitely whets my appetite with a pretty awesome quote from the novel about the gang:They roamed their turf like midget dinosaurs, brainless and fearless. They respected only nuns and priests. They would fight anyone and everyone, and they’d never lose. They’d never lose because there were hundreds of them—hundreds of stunted Irish madmen with crucifixes tattooed on their arms and chests, lunatics with that terrifying, slightly cross-eyed stare of the one-dimensional, semihuman urban punk killing machine. And they were nasty—used tire chains, car aerials, and the “Webster Avenue walking stick,” a baseball bat studded with razors.They definitely move from a notoriously scary Irish gang to an alien force of assimilation in the movie, but how much of that is gleaned from Price, or just Kaufman riffing on his prior film?The last piece of this version of the paper (there’s another version I will devote a new post to) is the re-writing for this blog. And that is definitely interesting to me. Below is the distillation, by the machine, of this 8 page essay from 1999 into a “blog-worthy” post for 2026:They’re Here! They’re Here!(Philip Kaufman, Aliens, and the Horror of Homogeneity)I wrote a paper in grad school in 1999 called “They’re here! They’re here!”—which already tells you something about my priorities. It was nominally about Philip Kaufman, but really it was about fear: not fear of invasion exactly, but fear of sameness. Looking at it now, I’m struck by how much of what fascinated me then still feels unresolved.Philip Kaufman isn’t usually discussed in terms of ethnic studies, and on the surface his films don’t exactly announce themselves as such. But if you look at Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) alongside The Wanderers (1979), a strange throughline emerges. Both films are obsessed with the arrival of a “they”—an invading force whose most terrifying quality isn’t violence, but homogeneity.Kaufman’s Invasion is unusually blunt about its science fiction. Unlike the 1956 version, it opens by literalizing the alien migration itself, tracing the spores from deep space to San Francisco. Kaufman has said he wanted to establish immediately that “something strange is happening here,” and he does. There’s no ambiguity about whether this is mass hysteria or paranoia. The invasion is real.What’s interesting is how closely the alien takeover resembles what sociologist Robert Park describes as migration rather than movement. Migration, for Park, implies conquest and assimilation. When one culture overwhelms another, assimilation becomes inevitable. The conquering group imposes its standards, and the result is cultural endosmosis—an unsettlingly apt term given that Kaufman’s aliens literally replicate humans by absorbing and replacing them at the cellular level.This isn’t immigration. It’s eradication.By relocating the story from the small town of Santa Mira to the urban sprawl of San Francisco, Kaufman shifts the emphasis from community paranoia to metropolitan anonymity. Ethnic, racial, and social distinctions collapse under the pressure of the invasion. Anyone can be a pod person. Everyone is suspect. The result is a vision of enforced equality that is also a total erasure of difference.†Leonard Nimoy’s Dr. Kibner, with his pop-psychology reassurances about the self, becomes one of the film’s most effective agents of assimilation. Feelings are inconvenient. Desire is unnecessary. Individuality is inefficient. The pod people offer a solution to difference by eliminating it altogether.And then Kaufman makes The Wanderers.Where Invasion erases ethnicity, The Wanderers foregrounds it. Set in the Bronx in 1963, the film maps a dense network of ethnic gangs—Italian, Black, Asian, Jewish—each defined by dress, language, gesture, and ritual. These groups understand themselves through boundaries. They fight, but they also agree on rules.Fredrik Barth’s ideas about ethnic group formation are useful here. Ethnic identity isn’t just about cultural traits; it’s about maintaining boundaries that allow interaction without collapse. The Wanderers and the Del Bombers can oppose each other precisely because they share an understanding of limits. No knives. No guns. There are rules.The Ducky Boys have no such rules.When someone yells “They’re here!” at the football game, it’s not just another gang arriving. The Ducky Boys are something else entirely. They refuse boundaries. They don’t distinguish between ethnicities. They don’t recognize shared values. They don’t even seem fully human. Kaufman films them as wide-eyed, almost feral, indifferent to pain or death.Like the pod people, they represent a force that annihilates difference rather than negotiating it. Their violence isn’t territorial; it’s leveling. They don’t want dominance within the system. They want to destroy the system itself.Seen this way, The Wanderers isn’t a nostalgic gang movie at all. It’s a film about the fragility of social boundaries—and about how easily complex, negotiated differences can be wiped out by a force that refuses to recognize them.Kevin McCarthy’s frantic warning echoes across both films. He runs from Santa Mira to San Francisco shouting “They’re here!” Joey yells the same thing in the Bronx. Different genres, different settings, same fear.Not of the other.Of a world where there is no other left.The writing is not really in the style of bavatuesdays because it’s too smart and pithy. My sentences are never so definitive and staccato. I ramble through run-ons and my paragraphs are never so short or cleanly connected. This feels like a faxed-version of a glossy magazine-article that wants to grow up and be rough and tumble like my blog. Regardless, I try and appreciate how the machine can assimilate these ideas into the borg so seamlessly. In many ways the questions around pod people, Ducky Boys, and/or the aliens in Plur1bus can be easily re-framed for the all-assimilating logic of tools like ChatGPT. In fact, Plur1bus is already making that connection, it’s just that for he TV series the Duckey Boys come in the shape of vegan hippies rather than the violent, “runty-assed” Irish.This idea of being assimilated into the machine, like the ways in which our writing and thinking is being mapped, grafted, and commodified in a tool like ChatGPT is some next-level horror shit for sure. At the same time it’s hard to resist the draw of watching something that took a fair amount of time, energy and imagination to create be spun up rather convincingly in just seconds (spoken as a still recovering Ph.D student who struggled immensely with the process). I can’t help but begin to wonder how writing can be the same from here on out. Sure, I can stick to my habits and continue to stomp out posts, and most likely will because of my long history of banging my head against the wall. But the assimilation of this craft into cyborg future from here on out has to be pretty much underway at this point, right? It’s just odd because the promise of this technology in practical terms is often framed as “freeing” us from a certain kind of labor (in this event intellectual rather than physical work) which is further confounding because once I’m freed from this intellectual labor I’ll have time to do what I really want to do, right … write?  The vegetating pod people analogy mapped on AI is hard for me to shake once I’ve seen it—thanks in large part to this post. I guess “they’re here already!” —but the evergreen question of “who the hell is they?” must at least be asked. Which is actually a very good transition to the second paper, but I’ll stop here for now, even if words are cheaper than ever._________________________________*I have not abandoned AI Maddeness, to be sure, but I need a lot more time to play and document that many more games—so it is a bit slower going.†This has a follow-up reading of Plur1bus written all over it. In fact, it might be a follow-up to this article.",
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