Opplopolis mood board
I’m just going to throw a bunch of images up here. Maybe the relevance will be obvious, maybe not.
Merry-Joseph Blondel - Portrait of Félicité-Louise de Durfort
Anna Chapman’s mugshot. There was a vice magazine article that I wish I could find interviewing some of the tech CEOs Chapman was spying on. Fascinating stuff. All of them insist that she may have been a spy, but she wasn’t spying on them. One detail I found interesting was that she tended to forget herself and go off on ideological rants at the drop of a hat. Carla kind of does this in chapter 2.
Obviously I got Carla’s whole aesthetic from the video for Grimes’ Flesh without Blood. Um! Actually! When this video came out Opplopolis was already on chapter 14! Carla didn’t even look like this anymore!
From the same video. Look at those glasses. Now usually I’m like “what a coincidence,” but Grimes is very online, and some of the things she’s said are very similar to NPWIL plots, so I dunno. It’s possible she saw this back in the day. Which, I mean, fair play, just — I see you c.
Clive of India
and his statue in Shrewsbury.
Final Fantasy 12
Gary Panter’s Jimbo (Luke’s shirt in chapter 2)
Dan Clowes - Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. I was not thinking of this book when I came up with the movie plot, but I reread it years later during the hiatus and, yeah, I ripped this off without realizing it. It happens sometimes. (I’m not going to mention that this was the name of Grimes’ boat. I’m through talking about Grimes.)
This is a bad screenshot of Julie Taymor’s Titus, but if you know the scene, maybe you can get the influence.
Night of the Hunter
Rene Laloux - La Planete Sauvage
Little Lord Fauntleroy
Oingo Boingo’s The Forbidden Zone. This poster is up in the common room in Luke and Birdie’s apartment. Don’t take this as an endorsement or recommendation by the way! This movie carries just about every content warning you can think of. The very first scene has blackface in it. The transphobia is shockingly contemporary. If you’re an adult who knows right from wrong then maybe you can wade in and get something from the aesthetic of it, but this is not John Waters-style subversion — It’s meaner than that.
Bohemian Grove. Of course.
Nicolas Poussin - Et in Arcadia Ego
Faraday disk
The Prisoner’s Lotus
Arthur C. Danto - The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. This is the book Agnes returns to Pangolin’s room in chapter 11.
All of Luke’s usernames are references to Xenogears.
Rez
Telly Savalas
The VR episode of Murder She Wrote
The Lawnmower Man
Jan Svankmajer’s Alice finds a key in a can.
Rene Laloux again - Gandahar. We had a laser-disc(!) of the English-language version of this movie (Light Years) when I was a kid. Consequently, there’s a little Gandahar in everything I do.
Paris rooftops
Final Fantasy 8
The Prisoner again.
The album cover for The Velvet Underground’s Loaded.
The logo from Zap comix 0.
Lucky’s monologue from Waiting for Godot. I’m just going to explain the joke because it’s not that much of a joke. See, if Gronov was playing Lucky, then Quinton was presumably playing Pozzo in a complete reversal of their real-life roles. That’s it. Told you it wasn’t much of a joke.
The last scene in Killer 7.
Gandahar again.
A Blaw-Knox tower
I’m editing at a rate of 12 pages a day (on days when I work on it) so I’m more or less on track. I may put something up next Friday, or I may not.