There is something particularly piquant about the mixture of elements in this story:
Biden to warn Beijing against meddling in South China Sea
A rusting wreck called the Sierra Madre in the South China Sea, with Philippine marines stationed on it, at the centre of a diplomatic flashpoint.
I was mentally tagging this as #futureaesthetic, or “the future’s here today”. Or is it like a projection from the past about what the future would look like? Or is it just that many of the elements here – the wreck, the film name resonating around it all, the name The Second Thomas Shoal, the set up for a new film, about marines on the edge of a global conflict on a rusting hulk, the geopolitical heft focused on this point of fragility – an accidental artefact of geopolitics – feel like they’re of the past, not new, the newness being provided only by the conflict, and even that of course, well established…
