Pitt — blondish, blue-eyed, square-jawed, possessed of a physique that became a touchstone for personal trainers — is one of the most movie star–looking movie stars out there. He’s a powerful industry player, a tabloid staple, and, in the words of Doreen St. Félix, "the last good-looking white man." The contradiction of his three-decade career is that his best roles are almost entirely supporting ones.
It's not that Pitt seems at war with his looks — a lot of those supporting roles, including his latest, revel in them. But the interesting thing about his career has been the context in which he's seemed most comfortable deploying them, as an object of envy or resentment for other men — a guy's guy ideal, an expression of (sometimes intentionally toxic) masculine ambitions and insecurities. He's a character actor in a movie star’s body.
Think of it this way. If a researcher wants to test the efficacy of a new drug, it is vitally important that the patients not know whether they’re receiving the drug or a placebo. If the patients manage to learn who is receiving what, the trial is pointless and has to be canceled.
In much the same way, as I argue in a forthcoming paper in the journal Erkenntnis, if our universe has been created by an advanced civilization for research purposes, then it is reasonable to assume that it is crucial to the researchers that we don’t find out that we’re in a simulation. If we were to prove that we live inside a simulation, this could cause our creators to terminate the simulation — to destroy our world.
If you added up the seconds that a good surfer actually spent riding the waves, it would amount to only the smallest fraction of an entire life. Yet surfers are surfers all the time. They are surfers while they are working their crap jobs, daydreaming about surfing. They are surfers when they wake up at 4 in the morning. They are surfers when they walk the board down the hill to Bondi Beach. They are surfers when they drink their predawn espressos. They are surfers when they paddle out on their boards. They are surfers when they wait and wait for the right wave. They are surfers when they wipe out, thrashing around blindly in the waves, praying the board doesn’t crack their skulls. They are surfers when they sit by their trucks with their friends after surfing, silently eating their grain-bowl meals.
And the thing about surfers? They don’t seem to regret all that time they don’t spend standing on boards and riding waves. Not only are they surfers all the time, they are, it seems to me, happy all the time.
The basic premise of ghost stories — that invisible intelligences prickle, unnoticed, around us, that we are being watched by unknown actors, with unknown intentions, that objects can become animated and think for themselves — has come true. The Turn of the Key, and novels like it, point to a new reality. We are all, constantly, haunted.