Moloch Does My Hair

In Scott Alexander’s essay Meditations on Moloch, he describes a moment where he looks out into the lights of Las Vegas and thinks: “It is glorious that we can create something like this. It is shameful that we did.”

“Like, by what standard is building gigantic forty-​story-high indoor replicas of Venice, Paris, Rome, Egypt, and Camelot side-​by-side, filled with albino tigers, in the middle of the most inhospitable desert in North America, a remotely sane use of our civilization’s limited resources?”

This April I signed up to be an extra on Netflix’s One Piece, mostly because I thought it would be cool blog content. On the first day I knew that it was indeed cool blog content. What I didn’t expect though is that I, too, would see Moloch. This happened after standing for 3+ hours in one of the airport sized buildings of Cape Town Film Studios. Perhaps it was the being in a fake casino that was only slightly less real than a real casino. Perhaps it was something else. Whatever the reason, as I was driving home that day I felt like I understood what Scott saw in Meditations on Moloch.

This Moloch was not exactly the city sized buildings you see above, though those too. It was more the hidden labour, costs and very serious processes people had to invent to create a few seconds of a goofy tv show.

I. Live Dangerously

On the outskirts of Cape Town, in a suburb called Green Point there is a forgettable public parking lot that a thousand people drive past everyday without knowing how or even that it is essential to the production of the hit Netflix TV show One Piece.

I woke up at 4:30am to drive to this parking lot. It was my first day as an extra on the show or of anything this scale. I don’t remember why I woke up that early because I only had to be there at 6am. I think I was nervous because I genuinely had no idea what to expect. All I knew is that I was meant to get a shuttle from the forgettable parking lot to the studio. This was exciting too, because after studying film for four years in university I was finally about to be on an actual film set. I never fully pursued a career in film after I graduated, aside from editing a podcast for a month. I don’t have a good answer as to why this is but I think the fact that I used to cry the night before I filmed anything was not a great sign. So for the 7 years I’ve been out of film school I have mostly relied on my programming skills to make it through the world and earn money. Particularly programming Google Chrome extensions. Yet film still has a mysterious allure to me and I think that’s one of the reasons I agreed to be an extra, beside for the blog content obviously.

I get out my car at the forgettable parking lot and see a small line of people winding their way to a person handing out waivers and then applying a weird kind of tape to their phones. I think it’s designed to break a seal when you remove the tape, so theoretically they could check each person’s tape at the end of the day and know whether or not you had ever removed it to take a picture or use faceid (god forbid). Waiting in the line I am asked to sign a document that would probably take me all day to read. The gist of it though I understood and writing this very sentence transgresses every page of whatever I signed. Or it would, except putting it on my blog is the safest place to put something you don’t want anyone to ever read.

After signing, my phone is taped and I’m led to one of four mini busses, each with about 20 to 30 seats on them. The bus I’m led onto is almost full, and I’m guided towards the back, where there is one final seat available. I sit down and put the few things I have decided to take with me underneath my seat. A pocket book of Nietzsche, a Woolies bag with the new Map Men book, an Energade and some chips. Just then, I discover a problem. I try putting on my seat belt, but can’t. This is because there is no seat belt. I look around frantically trying to figure out if other people have belts, and they all seem to have belts. This is a problem for two reasons:

First, the 11th commandment growing up was thou shalt not drive in a car without thy belt. It’s my mom’s favorite commandment and she’s a nurse, so I think she knows what she’s talking about.

The 2nd reason is that we were going to be driving on Cape Town’s road of hell, which has, perhaps unsurprisingly, been in the news for how unsafe it is in terms of crime and accidents and or a combination of the two. So while I wanted to be an extra on One Piece, I didn’t want to be an extra on One Piece that badly. This is why when a crew member stood at the front of the bus and asked “does anyone need anything?” I said, “I need a belt.” Which everyone thought was a really funny joke for some reason, and so the crew member got off the bus as the driver prepared to leave.

There was now indeed a third problem with me not having a belt. It was dark but I could see that I was sitting next to a cute girl. I now additionally had to evaluate whether getting off this bus would also ruin a potential meet cute. I thought about it then decided our imagined relationship, though beautiful, was not worth dying for. So I picked up my stuff, went to the front of the bus and knocked on the door as everyone watched like a crazy person trying to get off a plane before takeoff. I could see the crew member look at me very confused through the window and then slide open the door to which I said, “no I like genuinely need a belt.” She replied with vague eye movements which said “oh boy.” I replied “Look, if there’s no belts, I’ll rather just drive myself.”

I didn’t love this idea because the price of petrol would be eating away at my very cute R1 000 ($62) salary for the 12-14 hour day. Luckily I wasn’t thinking about this as a job but rather a very generous kickstarter where they actually pay you to be an extra. The crew member said, “That’s totally fine,” and so I got in my own car.

I listened to a Stratechery podcast about Microsoft earnings or something on the way to the studio and I got there 30 minutes later and much the wiser on the P&L sheet of Microsoft for Q1, they took my name at the entrance and I went to go and park my car in the middle of a muddy field so far away from home.

I send my mom a final message saying I arrived and won’t be online until tonight then put my phone in my pocket. I think it’s about 7am.

II. Masks

In the muddy parking lot at the studio, while sitting in the car preparing myself for the day I could see distant ships in every direction. But if I leaned to the left or right, they revealed themselves as fake ships with just sails. The feeling of seeing half a ship being real and another half fake, is a hard one to describe. As you move your head, your brain struggles to recalculate what it is seeing, and comes up short every time, because there isn’t exactly any category for these kinds of objects. They’re so big but clearly so fake, and yet so real, all at the same time. I get out my car put my feet in the mud and get in a shuttle. This time from the parking lot to the extras den, which is where the extras have breakfast, get their hair, makeup and wardrobe done.

The challenge the production has to solve for is how do you get normal people to go through a process whereby they have a mask applied to them and at the end of it are a character. Where no matter what the people do in terms of acting or not acting on the set, they look like they belong. The production has to run a process that is repeatable on hundreds of different people all at the same time, like building a car on an assembly line or launching starships, what’s so impressive here isn’t that the production can suit up one person but rather the metaphorical factory that can suit up any amount.

The first thing you do after you get off the shuttle from the parking lot, is you go check in again so you walk through what looks like the entrance to a concert with steel barricades on either side of you and there are like 4 people with iPads where you get to sign the same forms yet again. On the one hand it feels like a prison and on the other hand it feels like a wedding with all the well dressed people walking around and eating food in tents.

This is where I will be processed from a normal person into a character. The first step I’m told is to get my costume. My costume which I wore once during a fitting, is a very long jacket, black pants, white shirt and a bolo tie. I walk through a long hall in an inflatable tent with chairs stacked against the wall and sit down briefly while I wait to get to the front of the costume line. When I get to the front of the line I am in yet another space that feels impossible to describe. It’s like a library of books except where you’d expect to see books, you see clothes arranged just as strictly. They’re on long rails, each hugging the four walls around me. Someone takes me to my costume and helps me get dressed. Literally. I undress to my underwear in front of them, they take the clothes I’m wearing put them where my costume is and give me my costume. This is where you can see Moloch. Not in a bad way but you can see the process that undergirds the entire production. Some outfits are so complicated to put on you need a person to help put them on and check that they look right. The production elected to just have everyone get dressed with a person to make sure it’s done properly. Once dressed with my jacket on I feel like a completely different person, I feel like a sleazy texan gambler and my hair hasn’t even been done yet which when it is done, makes me look even sleazier. Slowly I was being rebuilt into something else. Something which no matter how much I cared about being an extra or not, would make me look like I was concretely in this world. Once I was dressed I walked out of the wardrobe part of the extras den as my character who I would later name Sora.

There’s something that makes you feel very existential about doing this process, every day, in the exact same order for three days straight. It reminded me of that Athol Fugard quote: “Wake, wipe, eat, drink, naai, sleep.” Every day was so similar, every day people came out of this room with the same clothes on and your brain struggles to unbundle the today from yesterday. Nevermind the fact that the actual show was shot in a casino which if built realistically is designed to break down your sense of time. And let me tell you this one was built realistically.

I looked at my phone. The red tape covering the cameras felt like a seal from a Pharaoh or something. When I got to the makeup tent, there was a desk with someone checking people in to the makeup room, they had a dozens of lever arch files full of pictures and behind them were shelves full of more files. I assumed every single extra that had been in the show was somewhere there. Each page of a file was an A4 piece of paper with a picture of you as the character from some different angles. A written list of things you were wearing and any props like buttons or pins. It was quite beautiful looking at this shelf of files of pages of people that we were kind of all the same to the process designed to transform people into characters.

In general, there was something nice about just waiting and not having to be anywhere else. I didn’t actually have any makeup. I just had hair, so I would wait for them to curl my hair and put gel in it, I had nowhere else on the planet to be. I read my Nietzsche, and I sat in this line waiting. But I’m ADHD so instead of reading I looked around and was baffled by how many makeup artists there were. There were probably 20 to 30 people just doing extra makeup. One of the reasons it takes so many people to do it is that the people that work on this show are extremely dedicated to their craft and have a sense of pride you can feel as you walk around. When I came for my fitting the walls of the extra makeup room were covered end to end in either the manga or frames from the anime. Because of this you can take a person that looks disheveled in the morning in their pajamas and know that by the time they get to the end of the process, they will look exactly the same as yesterday.

Of course this includes a QA step. Once everyone’s hair and makeup is done, everyone lines up like they’re in the army for inspection. You are corralled by the head of the extras, Chad into a big square. After that the head stylist will walk around with assistants past the nearly 100 people and make sure each person looks perfect. On one day when I didn’t look perfect, before the head stylist could even get to me I was pulled out of the line by another stylist who noticed my hair was not curly enough. It would have been so easy for her to just let me stay in the line but she proactively pulled me out of it, and then got someone to spend another 40 min doing my hair. This is all without knowing whether I’m even going to be in the show I might just be a blur in the background. This is what I mean when I say that people here take extreme pride in their work. Ultimately you as the character are the product of that work so whether or not you’re in the show the way in which you exist reflects better or worse on this entire team.

III. Waiting

The places you wait as an extra are numerous but not infinite there are primarily three. The extras den, the holding area and the studio. To recap, the extras den is the place where the extras meet in the morning, it has the hair and make up, breakfast stuff and is where the cars drop you off. It’s several large tents right next to each other. The holding area is used while you’re shooting, it’s right next to the studio. The extras den is a 7 minute drive from the studio and holding area so once you start shooting you hang out in the holding area. The tents of the extras den and also the vibe is much more permanent, fixed and real. While the holding area is flimsier, darker and chaotic. The holding area is hundreds of chairs inside a tent facing the front as though there should be a stage for a show there. It kind of looks like the chairs by an airport gate, except without a plane to get on to. In many ways your job is to wait patiently in one of these three places. You can speed up the time by reading books or talking to people or being so into the show that every nook and cranny of the set is interesting to you.

There is one caveat to this though. You can’t wait on a phone. Which is again a good or bad thing depending on how you look at it. If you look at it as though someone is taking your phone away, it feels bad if you look at it as a social club where as an experiment phones are banne, then it feels good. I picked the second option.

So the last thing you do before you leave from the extras den to the studio and holding area is hand your phone in. I walk to the three big briefcases colored black, at the back of the extras den. There is a crew member behind each one. My phone is off, has the red pharaoh tape seal all around the back of the cameras and the front facing camera. I give them my phone, Apple watch and car keys. They’re sealed in a plastic bag and put in a neat slot in one of the briefcases. Not having my phone feels good and so refreshing almost immediately. All I have with me now are my books and I head outside to board a shuttle from the extras den to the studio.

I do a lot of reading over the three days I’m an extra, but somehow also less than I would have liked. I had my pocket Nietzsche which I read on set sometimes. At some point while on this journey I read a line from Nietzsche which felt so apt it felt like it was written for me. This is: “A sure way to irritate people and to put evil thoughts into their heads is to keep them waiting a long time.” I read this while waiting the longest i’ve ever waited in my life, but I don’t remember there being any evil thoughts in my head. Though there definitely were in some other people’s heads who were saying vile things under their breath while smiling, because we didn’t stop for lunch soon enough. It was really weird. I didn’t experience any of this animosity, despite the entire job being the thing Nietzsche said would cause it. While I was tired and excited to go home past a certain point of the day, I was also extremely content just watching the show get made. It was super interesting seeing the director work with actors, watching how the crew moves and in general getting to be a fly on the wall without any responsibilities and just appreciate the ambiance of the set.

Still, the feeling of waiting is a specific kind of waiting. It is a waiting where you are constantly looking over your shoulder to see if there is anyone that needs you or if there are any updates. It’s most similar to waiting on an airplane that’s stuck on a tarmac. You’re doing stuff and busy but some part of you knows that you’re waiting and whenever anyone enters the room you feel a similar feeling to an announcement while in the stuck airplane. Maybe they’re saying we still need to wait or maybe they’re saying we need to wait but soon we will be waiting in a different place. In both cases you’re still there for the long haul but even so your mind cares about the specific details around you.

IV. Dreams

Being an extra on the show was being in a dream. Things aren’t coherent, you can’t remember how you got to where you are. You find yourself repeating the same movements over and over again. In my case I found myself in a casino doing all of the above. Just like dreams, you have limited agency in an odd world, yet fully believe your surroundings. Despite seeing some admittedly strange things, your brain just glosses over them and tells you the world is real. You are there and you are along for the ride.

Walking into the studio for the first time is something I will never forget. Inside of the airport hanger sized building is a huge casino. There is a slight misty haze in the air, all the slot machines work enough that you can put cute little fake coins with skull and crossbones on the face of the coin, in the machines, pull a lever and watch as you see images on the slot machine roll around in front of you. Sometimes they will even line up (no coins will come out the bottom though) so you have to celebrate purely that they lined up. The closer you look though, the more you start seeing the seams of reality. Just like when you look at numbers on a watch in a dream and see weird figures where there should be numbers. You notice that some of the little images spinning in the slot machines don’t exist in the One Piece world, like laser guns. Or at least you think they don’t. Yet, the slots are real enough that all the layers of the dream start constructively interfering. The costume you’re wearing, the costumes other people are wearing, the set, the sounds, they all collapse into a singularity of purpose and suddenly you are no longer you and the set is no longer a set. Instead you are Sora, a sleazy gambler, and you’re walking around a casino. The dreamlike nature of the experience comes from how you are still aware of the cameras and the other weirdnesses without care, like how in a dream when something weird happens you just believe it. For example, you see the huge working bar in the middle of the casino and notice drinks being put into people’s hands seemingly every few seconds like clockwork. But no one ever drinks from the cups they pickup.

Weirder yet, suddenly you find yourself being handed a drink by a waiter then not drinking anything. Instead you just hold the drink, trying not to spill anything, waiting for the assistant director to yell cut, then giving it back to her untouched. There was all a certain dream logic to it that made sense at the time.

Being in the casino felt only slightly less real than an actual casino. I say this as someone that’s never been to a casino. Take one of my favorite moments. Playing a casino game called Baccarat while the crew were filming a scene. We were at a very authentic looking casino card dealing table filled with endless fake gambling chips. At the start we just helped ourselves to them whenever we wanted but it got boring, there were no stakes. Then we realized something, every now and then the assistant director would inevitably yell “CUT.” So we decided to make this a game mechanic. What if on every cut we got a chip to bet with? Then the game would have actual stakes as opposed to just taking chips from the pile whenever we felt like it. Indeed we did this and the Baccarat dealer whose name I forgot taught us how to play Baccarat. Baccarat kind of made sense to me which was weird because I’m not a big gambler, read: at all. The Baccarat dealer was also really into it. This is in contrast to a croupier at a different table who just waved his hands when the camera was rolling. So Sora, the Baccarat dealer, and funnily enough the cute girl from the bus, as well as some guy that was dressed like a pimp happened to play this long game of Baccarat while the crew were recording the same take of a scene over and over again. It felt so real, I felt like I was winning a lot too. Every time the assistant director yelled cut we each took a chip from the house and then bet with those chips. I remember looking around, laughing with these people and feeling like, how is this not a casino. We are dressed like we are in a casino. We are playing on what feels identical to an actual casino furniture and ambience. In a few minutes they get the scene and we are told to move somewhere else and the illusion breaks and I miss my Baccarat friends. Were we ever friends or were they Sora’s friends? I didn’t have my phone so couldn’t exchange numbers and I completely forgot their names so it feels more like they were Sora’s friends. Or the people you meet in a dream.

With all that being said, the infrastructure required to build these dreams is huge and very real. I became more attuned to this after watching the 2nd season of Nathan Fielder’s tv show The Rehearsal. The show is ostensibly about the topic of airplane pilots and copilots but this is just a cover for what it is actually about which is showing what you could build and buy with an HBO tv show budget, as it turns out the answer is basically anything. The genius of the show is in showing the immense amount of work that goes into constructing a modern set, and more than that how given this immense amount of work and money, you can effectively trick your brain into believing the set is real. I highly recommend watching the show because it shows exactly how much attention to detail goes into the construction of sets but even more so because of the weird place sets inhabit in our lives as spaces in and of themselves. Like what does walking through one of these sets look like and feel like to the crew. The Rehearsal is one of the only shows I’ve ever seen that makes this the focal point of the show itself.

While Cape Town Film Studios now looks like the small city you see above, it used to look like this.

It’s incredible to me how much physical space and things had to be built to turn this empty plot of land into the small city we now see there. And I think it’s a good thing, the world is a better place because this studio exists even though it exists for reasons which are so weird when you think about them.

Also, I have to put this in the essay even though it has no relevance to this article but street view is magic, I love that we can catalogue human progress with google street view so well. That I can just hop back in time multiple intervals at a completely random spot in Cape Town. It’s just baffling when you think of how insane it is we can do this basically anywhere. So thanks Google for making street view is my point here. Also, somewhat more relevant to this article I can show you this amazing sign I drove past every day but couldn’t take a picture of because i was driving:

It reminds me of the ads in Washington DC just for members of the pentagon

Outside the dream world my phone is ringing, or would be ringing if it weren’t off and locked in a suit case and covered in special tape.

V. Missing People

As you know I drove myself to set on the first day because there was no seat belt on the mini bus. What I didn’t know is that somewhere between checking in at the bus and checking in at the parking lot and checking in at the extras den, I was lost. You’d think three separate check in points would make this impossible, alas though, it is very possible as I would soon find out. I think it’s possible because the processes that govern the world of the studio, the show and all the other microcosms work really well if you don’t stray outside of them at all. Since I checked in once at the bus and then again at the studio, that seemed to break the process. They’re running a factory though so if the process breaks for one person or item that’s totally acceptable.

When I arrived at the studio after driving here’s what had actually happened. My name had not been ticked off somewhere so it looked like I told someone I was going to drive myself to the studio and then for whatever reason I didn’t arrive. Honestly it’s kind of impressive that they have this level of precision with one person. I can hardly blame them for calling my agent and saying, “hey Caleb didn’t arrive” and I can hardly blame my agent for calling my mom saying “hey Caleb didn’t arrive.” From my mom’s point of view and according to her screen I had sent a message at 7am saying I would be offline until tonight and then 2 hours later received a call from my agent as my emergency contact saying “hey Caleb didn’t arrive.” So she did what any good mother would do and panicked, so did the rest of my family. This was all happening while my phone was triple locked with seals from the pharoah and turned off in a briefcase, so it’s an understatement to say i had no idea what was going on. It would be more accurate to say I was as separated from the outside world as I had ever been, and I’ve been to some pretty remote places where there’s no cell signal for days. Meanwhile from my perspective, I was standing in the fake real casino studio. I was trying to do something I found very difficult which was follow instructions, you see they had asked me to walk past the camera. It just felt so wrong that when they told me to do it I couldn’t do it. On the 2nd take I managed to be brave and walk very unconfidently in front of Joe Magnolia and no one yelled at me so it felt like a success. In the outside world, while this was happening my mom and family were about to explode out of sheer anxiety that I had now been missing for like 2 hours.

I was beat and ready for lunch so when we took a break for lunch I joined the long line; where one of the crew members happened to hear me say my name out loud and then turned to me and said, “oh so you did make it.” I thought nothing of it at the time but this happenstance encounter is the only reason my family found out I was not missing, otherwise it would have been another 7 hours before we wrapped and I looked at my phone.

VI. Prison

Being an extra is kind of like being a prisoner. But in a good way. It satiates the part of you that has always wanted to go to prison, purely so you can finish all the books on your to read list. As an extra you are giving up control of your body to something else, something that you can’t touch, hear or see. It both spiritually and physically inhabits your body all the same. You have no responsibilities or freedoms except for being at certain places at certain times. And there’s something really nice about that compared to my normal life. There’s this song by Frost Children I love called Falling which has the line “Tell me the way to live, I’m falling apart. Take over, take over, my body, my body.” And that’s a pretty accurate description of what it feels like to be an extra.

I’ve been working on a startup called Pelicart since May and the feeling I have when I arrive at work for it is the opposite of being an extra. It’s one of ambiguity and total freedom. I could work on marketing, or adding features or fixing bugs or talking to customers or literally anything. I have a phone I can check at anytime and depending on the weather I will have either blocked all dating apps or be checking them obsessively. Nobody tells you where to stand and what to do in my real life. It’s so hard to know if you’re doing the right thing and if you are doing the right thing you might only find out months or years from when you do it. The ability to choose infinitely is suffocating in its own way. Such that being told exactly what to do for three days felt like a vacation for me.

I opened this essay talking about how it’s glorious yet shameful that Vegas exists. And that I had a similar experience on the set of One Piece. The more I’ve written about the experience though the less it feels shameful that we built the infrastructure and processes by which a show like One Piece can be produced and the more it just makes me feel uneasy. During the day I was one cog in the machine making One Piece. At night on the way home I stepped briefly outside of the process and felt ‘this is Moloch.’ In part I still believe it is. As I drove home every night I remembered the huge number of extras eating lunch and throwing away piles of disposable cutlery. I remembered the scale of the buildings that had to be created and the processes required to check in and out an extra. Thinking of these though, shame might be the wrong word. It was maybe more an unease and fear at a process that I couldn’t quite hold in my head. So, no, I don’t think building the infrastructure or the processes for this is exactly shameful in the way Vegas might be. Yet, I still feel Moloch’s presence when I think of my time on One Piece, but it manifests itself as a feeling of unease at the sheer volume of stuff required to make the show and simultaneously a feeling of glory that humans can do these things if we try to.