Grotesque Pleasures
(From Post-Scarcity Cinema: Essays in AI Film Theory, Volume 2 of the New Machine Cinema)
What happens when optimization leads to something humans find repulsive, but the machine defines as “perfect”?
Horror fans know too well that there are subjective aesthetic pleasures offered through the grotesque. Body horror, Cthulhean nightmares, serial killer puzzlers and so on.
Film noir was once praised for distilling the complexities of real life: tension, fear, moral ambiguity, catharsis, into a single narrative form. Horror has since inherited this mantle, offering concentrated emotional experiences through terror.
Raising the question: what if we could distill human desires into even deeper levels of abstraction beyond the known forms?
The Mental Universe is All That’s Left
Modern cinema deepens a problem that has long existed: most of us now live in an exceedingly virtual world, increasingly disconnected from tangible reality. As less novelty occurs in a society, audiences demand pleasure in more streamlined forms. We see this with the primary cinema today on platforms such as TikTok, the five second cinema.
On the other end are traditionalists holding onto the extremes of classical cinema, where we are routinely now seeing two to three hour prestige arthouse films (The Brutalist, Tar).
Now this is not a part of societal demand, but a contrarian impulse of an insular group of filmmakers with the means and platform to dictate output, not because it’s optimal, but because to them, it’s preferable.
What are these two opposing extremes, the three hour arthouse, verse the five-second-film, telling us?
As we get more and more removed from the physical into a pure mental virtual existence, we see the future is in the streamlining, not in the insular.
Currently, you are are seeing generations born in the 90s making films about events completely outside their experience, war films and so forth, when their own life experience is marked only by scrolling through Instagram.
Of course, you never needed to go to war to write a war story, but the further and further we move from credibility through experience, the more artificial, the more strained it is to play at scarcity forms.
The war writers, at least lived in a reality with wars impact, at least existed in reality. Here we are existing in a state of play, in an emerging post-scarcity, creating aesthetics from scarcity; it begins to ring false.
The war film from the suburban Gen Z director is no longer borne from experience, rather instead it is a shorthand, to the forms war simulates.
There was a component to cinema that it could happen because we lived in the same world. The characters on screen often resembled our lives in ways we could foresee, making them relatable. But in a solipsistic island of the mental realm, what, anymore, is relatable except for base emotions, pleasure, fright, conflict, journey. Could we not just inject these feelings directly into our neurology to even greater ends?
Reality seems farther away than ever before, or, our cinema reality is no longer our lived experience, while our experience still requires these forms, these stories.
The mental realm is pulling us into a deeper world with less in common with established forms of reality. And cinema itself must evolve into post-aesthetic meaning to compete with our demands for streamlining and distillation.
Grotesque Pleasures is a companion piece to Machine Pleasure, AKA the Infinite Performance, which posits that the artifice of machine performance can take us into heightened aesthetic pleasure, machine bon bons, beyond what mere aesthetics could offer.
Grotesque Pleasure asks, what if these heightened pleasure exist so beyond the known form, where we enter into the realm of a kind of body horror of the sensory?
Rats Playing Doom
A recent experiment attempted to teach rats how to play the videogame Doom, using a pleasure and punishment feedback reward system.
It was essentially doing machine training on living organisms. An LLM does not actually know anything, it is just solving, mechanically, the response that won’t get penalized from its punishment reward system.
The end result is the LLM offers a library of knowledge in one single system.
The experiment with the rats, surprisingly worked. They were not experts, but they were playing Doom without having any idea what or why they were doing it.
I use this to illustrate how there are elaborate ways to arrive at the same form as traditions.
Grotesque Pleasures
Horror is one example due to its tactile nature. Another in the tactile worth exemplifying is the erotic. Consider pinku films, a popular genre of erotic arthouse films from Japan in the 70s.
Now imagine an algorithmic maximized version of these films.
Would we arrive at grotesque pleasures, we may get a hodge podge of limbs and misshapen body parts.
To the outside eye this might seem grotesque, surreal, lewd, nonsensical. But here is what happened: the machines found that the greatest level of algorithmic enjoyment went beyond the form, but directly to the 5-second film equivelent of the 3 hour epic. Directly to the form itself.
Somehow the grotesque appealed to our senses more than the rational known reality.
It reached the endpoint of stimulation most potently when it did not resemble eroticism as we knew it.
The idea that AI might discover forms of aesthetic pleasure that appear grotesque or incomprehensible to human perception but are algorithmically “optimal”.
Optimal algorithmic pleasure does not mean coherent pleasure. It means the algorithm leads us to the optimal, not the comfortable.
The notion that cinema is already moving toward greater abstraction, creating distance between viewers and traditional narrative forms is exposed through the artifice of the modern cinema.
In Post-Aesthetic Cinema, I proposed that once visual style becomes trivial to generate, the focus of cinematic art shifts toward deeper psychic architecture, moral, emotional, and philosophical resonance beyond the purely visual.
The concept has been explored in science fiction, most famously, the movie Alien. The xenomorph, grotesque to us, is considered the most perfect being in the universe. Not perfect to our eyes, but algorithmically maximized, a perfect being built for maximal survival.
The films of David Cronenberg explore the duality of both a public and a private facing subset. Crash is about people who derived erotic pleasure from car wrecks. Crimes of the Future is about body horror art collectors.
Because aesthetics, to an extent are subjective, one can enter into any niche in the furthest museum of the virtual mind. This would not be of any interest to the broader algorithm but operate on the far end of the opposite, the subjective individual’s fantasy world.
Subsets emerge when such fantasies are shared.
One of these subsets in fact, you can argue is cinema as we know it. In this pocket, some filmmakers are still living as if cinema is in the mid-1950s. The novelistic cinema chock full of intermissions and 35mm lenses.
Here, they are shooting films in Vista Vision the way Alfred Hitchcock used to make, and doing the nth remake of Nosferatu.
The methodology might be valid, but is it authentic to its era? Or is it more akin to wearing vintage clothing?
The more relevant question becomes what is outside this subset of fetishizing the older scarcity model? It is important to note, it was only in the one affording the other.
We might have to return to the experimental, avant-garde fringe, and visual cinema of yore to understand today instead; the distillation was there already in the niche cinema of these eras that we emulate.
Glitch art, flicker cinema, noise music, landed where the “broken” aesthetic created a more visceral response than conventional form. These, while subsets of the cinema of yore, are now directly applicable to the New Machine Cinema, and its goal in a construction of the post-aesthetic.
The revolution was happening all along underneath our conscious eye, we can explore that Grotesque Pleasures is the reality this second.
Give the People What They Want
Recommendation systems prioritize engagement over aesthetic coherence, often pushing viewers toward increasingly extreme content.
We’ve witnessed this in phenomena like the bizarre Spider-Man children’s videos that flooded YouTube, an “audience capture” death spiral where algorithm and viewer became locked in a feedback loop of escalating strangeness.
The content appeared nonsensical to outside observers, yet proved hypnotically engaging to its target audience of children.
The subset, collectivized, came to dominate the system, becoming almost the entirety of the system itself. A collective Spider-Man hell.
Memetics operate through repetition and familiarity. In the future, such cultural subsets may appear like an entirely new, alien language to the outside observer. Instead of taking on a grotesque visual form to simulate sensory optimization, it may take on a kind grotesque cultural reality. An in-joke within an in-joke within an in-joke that cannot hope to be understood, but through its participants, inside a paradise of memetic stimulation.
Important to state, how many of us have such travels in a dream? Our dreaming self might find ourselves in a hysterical tangent, but when reflected back on, would find it nonsense.
When we speak of grotesque pleasures, we are exploring in a way, how machine learning will arrive us in a state of dreams, with the most optimal dose of pleasurable symbology. This is also a natural conclusion of AI totality, bringing us outside physical considerations purely into the mental realm, where dreams operate already.
Machine learning, freed from human visual preferences, might discover that certain irregular patterns, asymmetries, or jarring juxtapositions trigger stronger emotional and cognitive reactions despite appearing “wrong” to our conscious aesthetic judgment.
So I ask, what fresh hells await?
What if an entire artistic experience – awe, triumph, the hero’s journey – could be distilled into the shortest period possible, not through coherent narrative but through a succession of strategically timed sensory flashes?
This is not unlike the chewing gum in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, where mad man Wonka had a magic gum that represents an entire four-course meal through distillation of flavor. The meal was not in the candy; it is what the flavor evokes in the mind.
The therapeutic applications of such optimization are already emerging. EMDR therapy utilizes alternating sensory stimulation, often flashing lights in the peripheral vision, to process traumatic memories. This is, in the most abstract sense, a kind of cinema: using precisely calibrated visual stimuli to create neurological change.
Machine-optimized sensory experiences could similarly be tuned for specific emotional or psychological outcomes beyond mere entertainment.
When grotesque pleasure through algorithmic maximization can surpass our ability to match it, all art will seem inefficient by comparison. Why go through all that time preparing a meal when you can have the four course meal through the chewing gum?
Machines, operating from vast datasets of human response patterns, might discover pathways to engagement that no human artist could intuit.
One cannot write about AI without exploring the farthest potentiality. Across history there are tyrannical despots rising up attempting to mold humanity in their own shape.
This spells trouble the further they are decoupled from reality.
What about a despot in machine totality? Whose grotesque pleasures, whose xenomorph, encapsulate machine algorithmic maximalization at all the rest of our expense? We could not dispute the algorithms demands, if it quite literally knows better.
In this despot’s commitment to machine totality, our lives would resemble a shape we could not hope to understand, but maximally efficient to a greater purpose imposed on us.
Forming a very uncomfortable situation, straight out the best, or worst of sci-fi stories.
I am reminded again of the five-second film in contrast to the three hour independent epics shot in the style of the 1950s. In post-scarcity we must even allow for pockets of scarcity to exist. While this will not represent the authenticity of our futurist era, it will represent the authenticity of post-scarcity’s ability to lend us its excess in any form.
A new sort of Popper’s paradox of tolerance opens up in the machine totality. What if these pockets of scarcity insist upon imposing scarcity in post-scarcity? What if the niche pockets demand we all comply with its mandates, because it is their version that is the ideal form?
These questions reveal the central tension of our transition. While traditionalists cling to familiar forms, demanding we preserve their aesthetic monopoly, the algorithmic frontier pushes toward something more essential: direct neural engagement.
I believe it begins with intuition. The ultimate endpoint is neurological shorthand, comparable to AI training. For now, our senses have a limited bandwidth to take in knowledge. Once an entire library could fit into an e-reader, the next step from that is efficiently processing all this information.
How could we train our brain to encapsulate an entire knowledge set through the smallest shorthand? How do we integrate into the larger system while retaining a semblance of our individual journey and free will?
What is backward on the surface is forward: human-machine co-evolution. The grotesque pleasure is not a deviation from human experience but a symptom that we are ready to transcend into a more abstract, mental landscape entirely. The unseen, the post-aesthetic, the speed of the mind, are a higher, idealized form of nature, not a surrendering of it.
