Lightyear will makes lots of money, and sell even more toys.
The running joke about Disney-Pixar movies is how well they imbue feelings into objects and lifeforms that don’t often clearly display them. Finding Nemo is about how fish have feelings. Ratatouille is about how rats have feelings. Cars is about how automobiles have feelings. Even Pixar’s logo, a little anthropomorphized lamp, seems to have feelings.
Similarly then, Lightyear is about how white men have feelings.
Lightyear centers on Buzz Lightyear. You likely know Buzz as a starring character in the vaunted, 27-year-old Toy Story franchise about a boy named Andy and his secretly sentient batch of action figures, dolls, and playthings. However, Lightyear is not a continuing solo adventure of that tiny plastic hero (who was voiced by Tim Allen). According to Disney and Pixar lore, Lightyear (2022) is the actual 1995 sci-fi flick that inspired the Buzz Lightyear toys in Andy’s universe. Andy saw Lightyear and wanted the action figure, which his mother purchased for him in the original Toy Story.
Buzz Lightyear in the Toy Story movies is simply a toy representation of this original, fictional Buzz Lightyear (who is voiced by Chris Evans). Despite their differences, a shared idea of both Buzzes Lightyear — daring, stubborn, strong — is understood by Andy and by us. It’s a pretty high concept for a children’s movie.
Lightyear itself is a sweet musing on the value of friendship, an origin story that gives the titular character a sense of purpose, and a zippy ride through an often-gorgeous cosmic world. There’s also a hilarious robot cat named Sox; I am frightened by my own affection toward Sox. All in all, Lightyear is easily in the top half of Disney and Pixar’s filmography. It’s a charming and, at times, acutely funny space adventure.
Yet, there’s something beneath the surface that compromises Disney and Pixar’s proficient storytelling. It’s the idea that Lightyear exists not to just give us a free-standing movie about this space ranger’s feelings, but rather to take advantage of Disney’s very lucrative intellectual property. For a character whose famous words are “to infinity and beyond,” Lightyear feels predictable, content to play within Disney’s plum boundaries rather than push Disney and Pixar into a thrilling future.
If you think about Lightyear’s existence too much, your brain may start to itch with questions.
Lightyear is animated the way Andy from Toy Story is animated, so does Andy perceive Lightyear as an animated movie, or is it live-action? Can Andy, who is 6 years old at the start of the first Toy Story, even understand what the movie is about? And how does Lightyear even exist in our own universe, 27 years after its debut? How did it get here? And why is it here?
Like a faceless god, the movie does not give any concrete answers to those queries. Instead, it gives us a story about failure (kind of) and friendship.
This Buzz Lightyear, along with his bestie, space ranger Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba), is part of a crew responsible for exploring an unexplored planet. They quickly discover this uncharted world is a hostile one, full of giant bugs and strangling vines, which is made even more complicated when some decisive action from Buzz leaves the entire crew of their turnip-shaped spacecraft stranded there indefinitely.
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Pixar
Buzz is intent on righting his wrong, trying again and again to travel back home by hyperspeed — the velocity needed to get the entire crew to jump through space. He gets closer with every attempt, but still faces the nagging problem of the unbreakable relationship between time and space. Each of Buzz’s trips are just minutes for him, but they’re four years for his marooned friends, all of whom are aging normally. Buzz doesn’t see a problem with this because he sees sacrifice as virtuous (it’s one of the qualities that makes him similar to Chris Evans’s other major Disney character, Captain America). This is, in fact, the Buzz Lightyear we know and love — one who is brave and loyal, and doesn’t always have the best ideas.
There’s a question implicit in the higher-budget, better-cast, more winking IP adaptations. You can feel it in The Lego Movie, in many of Disney+’s TV series, in the stills for Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Barbie film. Sure, it seems to say, this is a project based on a familiar intellectual property, made to almost-surgically extract dollars from the wallets of longtime fans … but can’t it still be creative? Isn’t it still fun?
Lightyear ratchets that up yet another notch. The whole premise of Lightyear is that the Buzz Lightyear action figures in Toy Story were actually just promotions for this movie; that this film is not just the IP we know and love but something more authentic. Lightyear is, according to Disney-Pixar’s retrofitted storyline, the actual real-deal story. And in a creative landscape devoted to ransacking the past, isn’t this a pretty clever idea?
This is slightly complicated by a sensibility in Lightyear that, as an audience, we’re smart enough to understand the way money-grabs work. It’s hard to take Disney’s smirking critique about consumerism too seriously because Disney is the force that it pretends to laugh at.
The very many movies in the Toy Story franchise are about how these cookie-cutter toys actually are individuals with human feelings that aren’t disposable. This nifty caveat allows for new Lightyear merchandise and Toy Story toys, plushies, tents, and costumes to exist side by side in Disney’s stores.
Lightyear is very much mining existing nostalgia and brand name to pad its box office haul. Depending on its financial success, there may be several more Lightyear movies in the future. The ability to keep churning out Buzz Lightyear content is especially convenient for Disney since 2019’s Toy Story 4 was supposed to be the end of the Toy Story movies.
But the funny thing is: There’s plenty in Lightyear that’s good enough to stand on its own. It didn’t need to be about Buzz Lightyear. “Brave and loyal without the best ideas” could apply to lots of characters. It’s Buzz’s friendships that make this movie.
First, with Alisha. While Buzz reacts to tragedy by trying to force correction, Alisha adapts. She leads the rest of the crew in creating a home for themselves on this new planet: constructing buildings and living spaces, building labs to cultivate resources and sustenance, and learning to defend against the planet’s very large bugs. Scientists and architects and engineers thrive.
Alisha also starts her own life.
She begins to date a fellow crew member, which blooms into romance. As the years tick by, Alisha and her partner have kids and their kids have kids. Buzz, who returns as often as a leap year, misses out on so much of her life.
Alisha doesn’t resent him. She knows her best friend needs to try to save his crew — even if they might not need saving, given how well they’ve adapted. She understands that Buzz will keep charging into space four years at a time, so she gives him a robot cat named Sox (Peter Sohn) to keep him company.
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Pixar
Eventually, Buzz’s final space run is successful and he has the solution to get everyone home! But unfortunately Buzz returns 22 years into the future, and his adopted planet is now under siege from a robot threat. Buzz and Sox are the colony’s best hope, but also find themselves responsible for Alisha’s sunny, but extremely green granddaughter, Izzy (Keke Palmer), and her companions, the cowardly Mo Morrison (Taika Waititi) and octogenarian ex-con Darby Steel (Dale Soules). It’s time for the lessons of friendship, round two.
Izzy, her ragtag crew, and Buzz inevitably teach each other about heroism and life — the kind of lessons that Pixar is so adept at telling. These emotional beats are hit so precisely, Pixar should think about charging its competitors for the clinic. Buzz will grow a heart. Izzy will learn more about her grandmother. Sox will learn to love despite his android circuitry.
Lightyear’s conclusion telegraphs another movie: Buzz, Izzy, Sox, and all the friends they made are strapped in and prepared to fly into hyperspeed. And while I’m sure it’ll be a great time, I’m just a little more hesitant about joining along.
The appeal of Buzz Lightyear — the toy and now the astronaut — has been that the character dares to dream despite an entire world telling him it isn’t practical. His existence is supposed to be a testament to endless possibility, and his adherence to it is so stubborn that it borders on frustrating. Lightyear gives us a fleeting glimpse into that, but this good-enough movie isn’t the slightest bit concerned with the unknown. There’s no thought to mapping out a future for the character that feels the slightest bit surprising or inventive, especially compared to the places that the original Toy Story took him.
The box office might go to infinity, but we’ll never get anything beyond the limits of intellectual property.
As crypto crashes, the state of cryptocurrency and insurance is nebulous.
The crypto industry is cratering. Bitcoin prices are at their lowest since 2020; one platform has barred users from withdrawing funds, and many of the biggest crypto companies, including Coinbase and BlockFi, have announced layoffs. This disruption reflects the economic turmoil rippling through the broader market, but also serves as a stark warning to everyday people that, generally speaking, crypto can be valuable one day and worthless the next.
Although the companies that people use to buy and store crypto are in some ways similar to banks, these platforms don’t have the deposit insurance that bank or investment accounts have. If the companies that operate these platforms were to fail, there’s no guarantee that people would be able to recover the value of their crypto. This lack of protection reflects the fact that regulators are still catching up to the crypto industry. It also serves as a reminder that while crypto platforms might seem secure — some are publicly traded companies — they’re operating in an industry that has almost no rules and few safety nets. Even UST, a “stablecoin” cryptocurrency that’s supposed to track the value of the United States dollar, crashed last month, eviscerating the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars.
“My sleep was severely disturbed, I lost 4 kilograms of weight in a few days, I was in an extremely depressed state,” Yuri Popovich, a Kyiv-based web designer who transferred his family’s savings into UST amid the war in Ukraine, told Recode. “Unfortunately, in our country there is no legislation covering such types of losses.”
While investing in crypto remains incredibly risky around the world for many reasons, regular US bank accounts enjoy some protection offered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Founded during the Great Depression to boost trust in the financial system, the FDIC is designed to guarantee that account holders will recover at least some of their money in the event of a bank’s collapse. Banks fund the FDIC, which, in turn, insures bank accounts up to $250,000.
Since crypto platforms aren’t technically banks and don’t pay into the FDIC system, individual crypto accounts don’t have this form of protection. Meanwhile, crypto investment accounts aren’t generally backed by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, which insures accounts that are managed by brokerage firms, like Fidelity or Vanguard, up to $500,000 if the firm fails.
“Most people are buying cryptocurrency to speculate, right? They think of it as an investable asset,” said Lee Reiners, the executive director of Duke Law School’s Global Financial Market Center. “If you buy Apple stock, there’s really no insurance right there, either. The concept of insurance doesn’t really apply now.”
The risky nature of crypto has become a bigger topic of discussion as several crypto companies show signs of faltering. Coinbase, one of the world’s most popular crypto exchanges, said in an earnings report last month that users could theoretically lose access to their crypto if the company went bankrupt. (Coinbase later tried to walk back the warning in a blog post, and said there’s “never a situation where customer funds could be confused with corporate assets.”)
Things have only gotten worse for the crypto industry lately. In the wake of the UST crash, the Securities and Exchange Commission is reportedly investigating whether the company behind the coin, Terraform Labs, violated securities law. And last week, Celsius Network, a crypto platform that isn’t an actual bank but purports to offer high-yield cryptocurrency lending, suddenly barred its users from withdrawing from the platform; securities regulators in several states are now investigating that decision. Downtime can be extremely costly for crypto investors, since the value of a single coin can swing by hundreds or thousands of dollars within just a few hours. Amid all of the disruption, the price of bitcoin is around $20,000, a sharp decline from its November high of nearly $70,000.
“At the moment, there is no easy way for customers to determine the nature and extent of their exposure to the bankruptcy of a crypto trading platform,” Dan Awrey, a Cornell law professor, told Barron’s last month. “Customers should assume that a platform’s bankruptcy would expose them to significant delays in recovery, at the end of which they may only get back just pennies on the dollar.”
But there are other risks, too. A crypto wallet can be hacked, and once someone has stolen what’s in it, that crypto can be incredibly difficult to recover. Some people try to avoid this risk by protecting their crypto with what’s called “cold storage,” which amounts to storing the keys that people use to access their crypto on a hard drive that’s not connected to the internet. This method comes with the same kind of risks that any other piece of physical property does, and those risks are even more significant for companies that store lots of other peoples’ crypto in cold storage, and for crypto mining operations that produce new cryptocurrency using warehouses full of powerful computers.
“You got earthquake, flood, fire, lightning, wind, hail,” said Ben Davis, a team leader at Superscript, an insurance program that covers crypto and is registered as a broker on Lloyd’s insurance marketplace. “If you have a lot of very expensive equipment all in one place, you’re gonna want it insured.”
While some conventional insurance providers are slowly warming to covering crypto, there’s also an emerging crop of startups that focus specifically on crypto insurance. These include companies like InsurAce, which covers losses that result from crypto hacks, and Coincover, which offers NFT insurance, among several other crypto-focused products that come with insurance.
Some people are already filing claims for crypto losses. One judge in Ohio ruled in 2018 that bitcoin stolen from one man’s online account was legally property — not money — and should therefore be covered by the man’s homeowner’s insurance for its full value, which, at the time, was $16,000. After an explosion at a substation used by a bitcoin miner in upstate New York last month, a company that was affected, along with the crypto-miner, Blockfusion, said they would file a claim for the revenue they lost.
More recently, InsurAce’s Dan Thomson says the company paid out more than $11 million to people who bought “depegging” insurance for their UST, the stablecoin designed by Terraform Labs (depegging occurs when a cryptocurrency’s value no longer matches the fiat currency, or another type of asset, that it’s designed to track). The company also reimbursed some of its customers after hackers attacked a crypto platform called Elephant Money in April.
Although insurance is becoming a slightly bigger part of the crypto industry, coverage is still patchwork. And even when a crypto platform does buy insurance, there’s no guarantee that individual crypto holders who use that company’s platform are fully protected. Coinbase, for instance, says that while certain security events are protected by its insurance, even if the company tries to make people whole, its plan may not cover the entirety of someone’s losses. Overall, most of the activity in the world of crypto remains uninsured.
“It’s really, really, really small,” said Eyhab Aejaz, the co-founder and CEO of Breach Insurance, an insurance company that focuses on crypto. “There is just not enough insurance capacity out in the market to ensure even a small fraction of the total exposure is out there.”
This highlights a major problem when it comes to regulating crypto: There isn’t a strong consensus on what crypto is. Is it internet money, property, a scam, a digital asset, a security, a reasonable investment? And because there’s no agreement on what crypto is, it’s hard to come up with a good approach to insuring its value — or figuring out if it should even be protected in the first place.
Regulators are still studying how to approach crypto. The SEC has argued that at least some crypto products are securities, and earlier this year, President Joe Biden ordered federal agencies to start drafting new rules for the industry. A bipartisan bill from Sens. Kirstin Gillibrand (D-NY) and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) aims to protect customers’ access to their cryptocurrency in the event the crypto exchange they’re using goes bankrupt, among other proposals for regulating the industry. At least one lawmaker, Rep. Josh Gottheimer, has proposed that the government expand FDIC coverage to certain types of stablecoin cryptocurrencies, as long as they’re provided by institutions that the government qualifies. The FDIC, Federal Reserve, and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency have suggested similar plans. Still, not everyone thinks that’s a great idea or makes sense for every type of crypto.
“If crypto is an entirely speculative investment, then I think it’s unwise to put the deposit insurance and government backing behind those crypto assets,” said Hilary Allen, a law professor at American University. “Investors need to understand that what they’re doing is not putting money in a bank. What they’re doing is gambling.”
The mounting effort to regulate the crypto industry probably won’t be over anytime soon. In the meantime, all the chaos in the crypto market has more people thinking about the fate of their money. That may not be good news for crypto investors, but it’s certainly good news if you’re in the burgeoning crypto insurance business.
A gothic album, soaring with gorgeous darkness.
Even if it weren’t a brilliant album, I would admire the sheer ambition of Ethel Cain’s first full-length album, Preacher’s Daughter.
The first in a proposed trilogy of albums tracing the spiral of intergenerational trauma outward from one central tragedy, the album tells the story of Ethel Cain herself, a trans girl from Alabama, raised in the evangelical church and dealing with the emotional scars of her father’s sexual abuse. Eventually, she runs away from home and runs into the wrong guy, who ultimately murders her. It’s dark, gothic, and not for everybody. Buried within it, though, is a sound that captures something elemental about the places and themes American pop culture rarely dares touch.
Cain starts many songs with just the whispery shiver of her voice over a spare guitar or piano playing a memorable hook, but eventually, every track builds to a sonic landscape that seems to extend in all directions. The simple instrumentation gives way to a lush, full sound, but one built atop darkly droning minor chords. This music is meant for big skies full of thunderheads.
The fact that the Ethel Cain within the album dies and the Ethel Cain who wrote and recorded the album is alive should clue you in to the fact that the story within the album is a heavily fictionalized depiction of the world in which Cain was raised. It has the rich characterization of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood or the works of Flannery O’Connor, and it offers a take on the dark heart of rural, white America that I haven’t seen so forthrightly attempted in popular art in ages.
The story goes beyond even the album, however. Cain is the alter ego of the 24-year-old singer-songwriter Hayden Anhedönia, who is a trans woman who was raised in the southern Evangelical church but who did not lead nearly as grandly tragic a life as her fictional self. She does, according to this Flood Magazine profile, spend a lot of time just driving around America in her truck on a whim, which may explain why she’s such an acute observer of human nature. (I’m going to refer to her as Cain for the rest of this article because that’s who is credited with writing and producing Preacher’s Daughter.)
The first thing you’ll notice when listening to Preacher’s Daughter is its sprawl. Its 13 tracks run 75 minutes in total, and only a handful are under five minutes long, with the album’s centerpiece track, “Thoroughfare,” running nearly 10 minutes.
That sprawl is also evident in the album’s sound. Cain’s alto is reminiscent of a Lana Del Rey who is slowly ascending into the sky during the rapture, but the overall production boasts an impressive sweep. Cain’s songs — she recorded three EPs prior to Preacher’s Daughter — have always been built atop soaring pop hooks, but Preacher’s Daughter seems most interested in what it would sound like to soar, even when it’s depicting horrifying despair.
Cain’s talent for storytelling is perhaps the chief reason to recommend Preacher’s Daughter. Yes, the overarching story of the album is beautiful and filled with sad grandeur. But the album’s world is built by the smallest lyrical details, which consist of precisely chosen turns of phrase that convey a much bigger picture than might initially be suggested.
In “American Teenager” (one of the album’s leadoff singles), Cain sings that she “grew up under yellow light in the street.” In “Sun Bleached Flies,” she describes the people she grew up with as “sun bleached flies sitting in the windowsill, waiting for the day they escape.” In “Hard Times,” the song that most directly confronts Cain’s father’s sexual abuse, she implores him, “Tell me a story about how it ends, where you’re still the good guy. I’ll make pretend.”
Preacher’s Daughter is one of the few recent works of art “about trauma” that actually captures the ways in which it affects a person’s thought processes. The album inexorably descends to Cain confronting her father’s abuse, but realizing what happened to her isn’t enough to escape the cycle. She runs away and just gets caught in another abusive situation. Trauma isn’t a discrete event stuck in one’s past; it’s an echo, one that fades but only slowly. When you’re stuck in that echo, escaping it seems impossible.
Preacher’s Daughter maybe works even better as a chronicle of the end of the American dream from someone who never bought into its promise to begin with. There’s still far too little art made by American Gen-Zers to determine generational touchstones for the generation’s artists, but Cain’s deep, sneering skepticism about the promise America makes to its people suggests that it is one possible theme we’ll be hearing more of in the years to come. Even more achingly, Cain knows America has failed her, but she still seems to long for it to be the place she was told it was. She has stopped believing in America, but she’s most upset that America never believed in her.
I described Cain above as Hayden Anhedönia’s alter ego, and that’s probably the best way to describe her. It also feels slightly too simple to me. To be trans is often to realize the ways in which identity is more slippery and complicated than we want it to be. There is no simple answer to “who are you,” because everyone is a multiplicity of selves, jostling for attention. Preacher’s Daughter threads that idea through the dissociative power of trauma and the broken promise of America. Life is beautiful, and life is an endless tragedy. It can be both.
Preacher’s Daughter is available on all major music streaming platforms. It is not yet available on vinyl or CD. For more recommendations from the world of culture, check out the One Good Thing archives.