InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 1

FILM REVIEWS
available as a plush toy). Alongside the wacky adverts that just
preceded them, like the Gorilla drumming along to Phil Collins’ In
The Air Tonight for Cadbury, they are driving marketing further
toward abstraction, moving away from the tropes that the
general public are familiar with in order to smuggle their
messages into their brains through other means, such as the
false pretenses of quirkiness, sentimentality, or social cause. And
so, despite how aggressively surface-level and thin Mackesy’s
work seems to be, one has to ask what exactly it is that he’s
trying to sell.
Most literally, it’s all the T-shirts and tote bags, and a new
twenty-pound version of his book composed of screenshots from
the film. But when returning to the source, his Instagram, there is
a sense of the wider project. He seems to share most of the
same pet causes with the Tories (the British right): from
supporting nurses without ever advocating for their better
treatment (he side-steps this by drawing them as angels, as
saint-like creatures only to be looked up at and celebrated) to
worshiping the royal family. Some of the only art that isn’t
nakedly recycled is his loving portraits of the rotting former
Queen and her ghoulish husband. This might seem in contrast
with his calls for kindness, with the use of mental health and
self-help rhetoric, but of course, it isn’t. This language has been
appropriated by the right in increasingly cynical ways, teaching
people to solipsistically acquiesce to the status quo; to look
inward rather than out.
Even Mackesy’s already wishy-washy gesture toward climate
change — a character saying, without context, that there is “so
much beauty we need to look after ”— can be read in this way,
knowing that Mackesy has said that these characters are all
fragments of the same person. The empty space around them,
made blank by the white snow, is intentionally non-specific
because it doesn’t represent a place but a mind, much like the
room that Jordan Peterson claims you must clean before trying
to change anything outside. But maybe that’s imagining a work
more coherent than Mackesy is capable of making. Maybe this is
15