The young Disney star has abandoned the forward march of history, opting instead to trap herself in a recursive, unyielding cycle of digital consumption.
Actor Catherine Laga’aia, poised to navigate the South Pacific in Disney’s upcoming live-action Moana, has apparently abandoned the forward march of history altogether. Instead, the teenager has trapped herself in a recursive, unyielding cycle of consuming a single podcast clip, entirely obliterating the boundary between the observer and the digital void.
While the unwashed masses idly scroll past each viral TikTok, discarding the ephemeral content the moment the algorithm demands they consume anew, Laga’aia has chosen the arduous path of true durational endurance. By her own admission, she has subjected herself to a staggering repudiation of narrative progress; an insistence that if we cannot move forward in late-capitalist society, we must simply dig our heels into the digital sediment and replay a brief, humorous audio fragment until the words are stripped of all semantic weight.
The sheer agonizing rigor of her practice is a testament to an artist willing to look directly into the gaping maw of eternity.
I would just watch it, replay it, watch it, replay it.
To witness such a relentless, cyclical flattening of reality is to be reminded of the most punishing triumphs of the avant-garde; one is inevitably forced to consider the agonizing structuralist rigor of Michael Snow’s 1967 experimental film Wavelength, the desperate, clinging nostalgia of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and the inescapable, maddening purgatory of leaving the Shrek 2 DVD menu running unattended on a television screen throughout a childhood fever dream. Where Proust required seven volumes to excavate a single memory, Laga’aia requires only a smartphone screen and a frankly terrifying lack of concern for her own psychological preservation.
It is, perhaps, too much to expect the casual viewer—whose cultural diet consists of whatever easily digestible gruel is spoon-fed to them by the culture industry—to understand the gravity of her descent into the loop; most will simply mistake her profound meditation on entropy for a teenager enjoying a joke. Yet, as the podcast clip stutters back to its opening frame for the thousandth consecutive viewing, one cannot help but admire the sheer nihilism of a young woman actively refusing to let the next moment arrive.