War and Peace & Outlast (Alaska, 2026)

 War and Peace is taking me a while, folks.  I know you are waiting for the review, but it's slow, big, 1400 pages in 10 point font.  

It's a bit of a soul destroyer too.

Take Pierre, for instance.  At the novel's start, he's idealistic, interested in what Bonaparte is up to in the rest of Europe, and a galumphing, socially inept outsider.  He's charming.  

But he inherits a massive fortune, folks toady up to him, and he is gullible enough to believe their flattery. He doesn't go to war against Bonaparte as many of his peers do.  He stays at home and manages his enormous wealth instead.  He just doesn't think about politics any more.  He is manipulated into a marriage (Helene's family stand to profit through the connection).  It ends badly (Helene has an affair).  Pierre then flees, becomes a Freemason, and is set to change his life entirely . . . except he doesn't.  He goes to parties instead.  (That's as far as I've gotten with Pierre.  We'll see what happens next.)

It all makes one think about how weak humans are.  Well-intentioned, but easily seduced by money, and, well, sex.

This seems especially trenchant these days (jeez, Antje, why?  What could possibly make you think of the corrupting influences of money,  and sex?).

Enter, of all things, a reality TV program.  Outlast is kind of a Survivor reboot but without tribal council.  In the 2026 Alaska version there aren't even challenges, per se, beyond the challenge of surviving in Alaska's wilderness with primitive supplies.  

An interesting schism happens in this season of the show.  In its end stages only two teams survive.  One, a team of young athletic folks (primarily Texans).  The other, a selection of folks that runs the gamut from model to chef to wilderness expert.  The Texans, hooting and hollering, vote off their ailing friends one by one, and wind up as a duo.  The other team votes off no one.  In fact they even take in an extra player, one who tries to betray them and steal their boat after which they forgive him and take him back in to their team.

Interviews with individual players about what they would do if they won the money show the model talking about wanting to pay for care for her mother with dementia, and the wilderness expert wanting to pay for his knee surgery.  One Texan want to buy more party boats, the other wants to buy a second house.

The team of five make it to the end, all five of them, but the Texans, just the two hooting and hollering young men, win.  Toxic white masculinity triumphs again, it seems.

However, the team of five's exit interviews are striking: the model thinks she made her team lose because she was too slow, but the rest of her team disagrees, they hug her, pat her on the back, tell her to not be so hard on herself, point out that she's the only woman that made it to the end and to be proud.  The Judas who tried to steal the boat and was forgiven cries to the camera and says his team healed something that was cracked inside him, something that goes far beyond the show.  The chef, often thorny and cantankerous during the preceding weeks, breaks down weeping and says that the last month was hard, but the worst part is that it is over and he can't be with his closest friends anymore.  The five person group refers to each other as family.

That five person group represents the kind of life one wants (love, acceptance, survival, warmth, healing).

The two person Texan group represents prevailing culture (Win at all costs.  Get to the end.  Never mind the middle.  Get to the end, the cash.)

You can tell I love the five person group: there's something in there about how to be human because the end really is just death.  To get to the end ruthlessly?  For what?  What about the life in the middle?  Can that be warmer?

I'd like Pierre to get his shit together and think about this.  He needs to watch Outlast.

It is true that Tolstoy is illustrating many of the themes Outlast captures: War and Peace.  We have not figured any of this out, as humans, and continue to be selfish, manipulative, and miserable.  

However, it is also obdurately true that:

The Texans won and can buy duplicates of resources they already have.  

&

I am pretty sure I saw one of the Outlast players on the team that didn't win stocking carrots at Whole Foods.