Matthew Moulton (@Onideus)

So like, there's this movie called Vivarium, came out in 2019 and uh... this movie is FUCKED! I mean, it's "uncanny valley" to the extreme. Warning, spoilers ahead! So like... the movie is basically about some kind of alien entity that kidnaps young couples looking to buy a new home and they wind up trapped in this sort of recursive housing track maze so like if they try to walk away from their particular dwelling, they eventually just come right back to it, almost as if they're trapped on a tiny planet made up of nothing but housing tracks. And so like they wind up trapped in this place and food and supplies and such randomly show up each day, but they can't figure out how or why and then one day a "baby" shows up, which at first ~seems~ like a human baby, but they quickly learn that it's like the alien that kidnapped them... like the alien kidnapped them to raise a clone replacement and so then eventually when the clone is grown up, having been raised by the trapped couple, the clone then goes and "replaces" his alien counterpart. It's um... it's actually WAY more disturbing than that, but that's the general synopsis. But like, I got high and then I was watching it and... it got me thinking about how abject, how WEIRD everything was in the movie and... it made me realize that... what if this was similar to like the perceptual awareness of an animal in relation to humans. Like, think about like a CAT for example... a young little kitten, all eager to explore the world and then this ~thing~ that ~seems~ sorta cat-like... but really huge... OH MY GAWD WHERE IS TAKING ME, WHY AM I IN A CAGE, WHAT IS THIS... and then they get taken home by these weird alien cat-like creatures, these ~humans~ and then they get TRAPPED inside a house or an apartment and, like, you know because cats don't really have long term memory... well they keep forgetting where they are, so for them, it really is like being trapped in a recursive, unending maze... completely NOT NATURAL. And then like... all the WEIRD stuff that humans do, like where they seemingly vanish out of existence... you see, doors to cats would be like how in the movie the alien is able to like pull up the sidewalk and then he can escape into a whole other reality. And then, maybe that's how cats perceive different parts of the house, like the BATHROOM for example, for them, that's like entering a whole other REALITY with different laws of physics and shit... or at least that's how the cat see's it. So anyway... I just thought that was... really weird. Like how this weird ass movie can actually help us to kind of understand what it must be like for our pets and animals and such... and it could even help us to understand aliens (if they exist). Like, we could encounter aliens and they might do things that we completely miscomprehend on every level.