Landscape With Invisible Hand Book Author M.T Anderson Interview

  • last year
In this interview, “Landscape With Invisible Hand” author M.T Anderson talks about what the alien species on Earth in his book are interested in and how this film is a reflection of some of the moments happening in our lives. Check it out.
Transcript
00:00 I really wanted to capture the mood of the present and I think what that is is
00:04 like we all spend our days trying to sell ourselves now in one way or another.
00:09 We're trying to sell ourselves all the time and yet also at the same time we
00:13 feel like the wealthy are floating above us not even knowing what our lives
00:20 are like.
00:23 I think of the book as a science fiction satire. So yeah this is set in a world
00:30 where Earth has essentially become like a financial backwater in an alien race's
00:38 like giant galactic financial empire. So we're just sort of like here to have our
00:43 resources extracted and yeah so everyone is trying to deal with that.
00:50 Adam is an artist. He is kind of a sensitive kid who has watched his world
00:55 be colonized and he's trying to make sense of that.
00:59 Well the the Vov are very interested in in making a profit off of Earth. They
01:04 think that we're very adorable though. That's not necessarily a good thing.
01:10 Well I mean in a weird way the Vov kind of almost own us. They are so
01:17 financially powerful. Their money is so powerful that yeah we have to do all
01:22 sorts of things to dance around to be part of their system.
01:27 The Vov are really interested in human romance because they just reproduce
01:32 through some sort of like weird asexual means. So they're super interested in
01:36 romance so they want to watch us fall in love. And so people actually rent
01:42 themselves in a sense so that the Vov can watch their relationship develop.
01:47 But what I really feel like is all of us end up doing this sort of performing our
01:53 own lives now. You know if you think about social media all of us are sort of
01:58 curating a life, making a life that's like an artistic object because we want
02:03 everyone to feel like ah we're successful. Ah you know we love our wife
02:08 or our husband more than anyone else. That kind of thing. So there is a way in
02:12 which we all currently are producing a fake life that looks a lot like our real
02:20 life. And the anxiety of that was one of the things I was really trying to
02:24 capture. I hope that people find in it a reflection of this moment that we're
02:30 living through right now. And that people can say oh this is sort of how I feel
02:35 right now. I feel like I'm trying to to turn my life into something that I can
02:41 sell to my friends. So that my friends think that I'm leading the perfect life.