Institute of Gremlins 2 Studies

Many of the jokes in Gremlins 2 are imperceptible to the modern viewer - the Cooking cable channel is no longer satire because it really exists. We are heading towards a future where the film is increasingly inseparable from reality. I call this process Hyper-Gremlinization.

Trump has forfeit the Mandate of Heaven

The stock market will do this by 2027

@elonmusk O Wretched Augury: Behold! The Abbott of Unreason! The Lord of Misrule! O Elon! Allow me to prostrate myself before thee and kiss thy velvet slipper. Oh cruel Wastrel Lord! How our legs bow and backs break under the weight of thy loathsome Auspices!

How do you make a small fortune in social media? Start out with a large one.

BREAKING: Emerging situation on the roof of Twitter HQ in downtown San Francisco. Elon Musk announced to a crowd of pedestrians he is "going out Mishima style". A Senior Software Developer has been hacking away for a few minutes now but the sword is simply too dull

Elon Musk purchasing twitter, saddling it with debt, and driving away the employees may appear irrational and wasteful - but this is precisely the point! He has flown free of the sphere of profane rationality and into a mode of antiproduction, akin to potlatch or ritual sacrifice

Upon gaining language, the Brain Gremlin is ripped from the world of nameless feeling - we can only re-enter this world through creating works of art. Just as ancient man made the cave paintings at Lascaux, it is for this reason that the Brain Gremlin sings "New York, New York".

The ending of Gremlins 2: The New Batch, in which the Gremlins are reduced to a bubbling green sludge, recalls the verse from Baudelaire that Walter Benjamin identifies as having a cosmic aspect: "The Sky! Black lid of that enormous pot / in which innumerable generations boil"

Is Marla, the Spider Gremlin’s victim, not unlike Sinema? Aware of the existential danger, they appeal to the forces of capital they serve for aid. Yet these pleas are destined to fall on deaf ears, as danger approaches unchallenged, thirsting for violence. 9/9

Even in times of crisis, service to capital displaces all other concerns: as the vicious Spider Gremlin bears down on an employee, they can only think to yell “Can I get some help here, please? I'm trapped in some sort of adhesive, polymer material and I'm on deadline!” 8/9

In “Who Must Die in Rwanda’s Genocide: The State of Exception Realized”, Krysten Sinema investigates how a state of exception “creates an atmosphere wherein a sovereign [...] strips its citizens of their sociopolitical being”, making mass death permissible if not inevitable. 1/9

Herzog uses the chaotic Amazon in Aguirre, Wrath of God, as a background against which reason & madness, human & nature, dissolve. For the same reason, Gremlins 2 is set in a busy skyscraper: the frenetic madness of the Gremlins, & that of techno-capitalism, becomes indeterminate

Or perhaps the Gremlins personify capital itself, as in "The Treatise of Garcia of Toledo", a satire in which the Pope and his cardinals toast & feast without end. Just as their gluttony "acquires cosmic dimensions", the Gremlins' nonstop carnival threatens to consume the earth

Why must the Gremlins eat after midnight? Through this act of feasting, "man partakes in the world, instead of being devoured by it". This victory, tangible, free of all abstraction & mysticism, is anathema to the harsh corporate austerity the human characters passively accept