Moloch Does My Hair

In Scott Alexander’s essay Meditations on Moloch, he describes a moment where he looks out into the lights of Las Vegas and thinks: “It is glorious that we can create something like this. It is shameful that we did.” “Like, by what standard is building gigantic forty-​story-high indoor replicas of Venice, Paris, Rome, Egypt, and Camelot side-​by-side, filled with albino tigers, in the middle of the most inhospitable desert in North America, a remotely sane use of our civilization’s limited resources?” This April I signed up to be an extra on Netflix’s One Piece, mostly because I thought it would be cool blog content. On the first day I knew that it was indeed cool blog content. What I didn’t expect though is that I, too, would see Moloch. This happened after standing for 3+ hours in one of the airport sized buildings of Cape Town Film Studios. Perhaps it was the being in a fake casino that was only slightly less real than a real casino. Perhaps it was something else. Whatever the reason, as I was driving home that day I felt like I understood what Scott saw in Meditations on Moloch. This Moloch was not exactly the city sized buildings you see above, though those too. It was more the hidden labour, costs and very serious processes people had to invent to create a few seconds of a goofy tv show. I. Live Dangerously On the outskirts of Cape Town, in a suburb called Green Point there is a forgettable public parking lot that a thousand people drive past everyday without knowing how or even that it is essential to the production of the hit Netflix TV show One Piece. I woke up at 4:30am to drive to this parking lot. It was my first day as an extra on the show or of anything this scale. I don’t remember why I woke up that early because I only had to be there at 6am. I think I was nervous because I genuinely had no idea what to expect. All I knew is that I was meant to get a shuttle from the forgettable parking lot to the studio. This was exciting too, because after studying film for four years in university I was finally about to be on an actual film set. I never fully pursued a career in film after I graduated, aside from editing a podcast for a month. I don’t have a good answer as to why this is but I think the fact that I used to cry the night before I filmed anything was not a great sign. So for the 7 years I’ve been out of film school I have mostly relied on my programming skills to make it through the world and earn money. Particularly programming Google Chrome extensions. Yet film still has a mysterious allure to me and I think that’s one of the reasons I agreed to be an extra, beside for the blog content obviously. I get out my car at the forgettable parking lot and see a small line of people winding their way to a person handing out waivers and then applying a weird kind of tape to their phones. I think it’s designed to break a seal when you remove the tape, so theoretically they could check each person’s tape at the end of the day and know whether or not you had ever removed it to take a picture or use faceid (god forbid). Waiting in the line I am asked to sign a document that would probably take me all day to read. The gist of it though I understood and writing this very sentence transgresses every page of whatever I signed. Or it would, except putting it on my blog is the safest place to put something you don’t want anyone to ever read. After signing, my phone is taped and I’m led to one of four mini busses, each with about 20 to 30 seats on them. The bus I’m led onto is almost full, and I’m guided towards the back, where there is one final seat available. I sit down and put the few things I have decided to take with me underneath my seat. A pocket book of Nietzsche, a Woolies bag with the new Map Men book, an Energade and some chips. Just then, I discover a problem. I try putting on my seat belt, but can’t. This is because there is no seat belt. I look around frantically trying to figure out if other people have belts, and they all seem to have belts. This is a problem for two reasons: First, the 11th commandment growing up was thou shalt not drive in a car without thy belt. It’s my mom’s favorite commandment and she’s a nurse, so I think she knows what she’s talking about. The 2nd reason is that we were going to be driving on Cape Town’s road of hell, which has, perhaps unsurprisingly, been in the news for how unsafe it is in terms of crime and accidents and or a combination of the two. So while I wanted to be an extra on One Piece, I didn’t want to be an extra on One Piece that badly. This is why when a crew member stood at the front of the bus and asked “does anyone need anything?” I said, “I need a belt.” Which everyone thought was a really funny joke for some reason, and so the crew member got off the bus as the driver prepared to leave. There was now indeed a third problem with me not having a belt. It was dark but I could see that I was sitting next to a cute girl. I now additionally had to