is a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.
In writer / director Julian Glander’s new animated sci-fi feature Boys Go to Jupiter, a young gig worker named Billy 5000 (Planet Money’s Jack Corbett) hoverboards his way through life in Florida with only one thing on his mind: he needs $5,000 and is willing to deliver as much food as it takes to make the cash. At first, the delivery guy’s semi-magical, “let’s get this bread” style of thinking seems to stem from his fixation on a hustlebro streamer’s videos. But as Boys go to Jupiter’s story unfolds, it becomes clear that all of the movie’s characters have odd and somewhat dysfunctional relationships with money.
Boys Go to Jupiter bears the musicality and playful, toylike aesthetic that much of Glander’s work does, whether it’s shorts like Tennis Ball on His Day Off or games like Art Sqool. But the new movie’s focus on how the gig economy can warp people’s lives also makes it feel wildly different thematically.
That’s especially true in moments where Boys Go to Jupiter zeroes in on the ways that food delivery platforms can dehumanize and shortchange their workers, and it seems like Glander is using the services to highlight why capitalism is bad. But when I recently spoke with Glander, he told me that it was never really his intention to make an anti-capitalist work of art. Glander wanted to make a movie about the connections that society seems to have lost since the height of the covid-19 pandemic. And he hopes that, in Boys Go to Jupiter, audiences find some inspiration to make art of their own.
You’ve spoken about how pandemic-induced psychosis and interacting with delivery workers during the pandemic’s early years are part of what inspired you to start working on Boys Go to Jupiter. And I’m so curious to hear your thoughts about whether people have been able to shake that psychosis and develop a deeper appreciation for gig workers in the time since.
Psychosis is probably not the most sensitive word to use, but think on a national level, that is what we experienced — some sort of hysteria. One thing that’s been very disappointing is the way that we haven’t learned any lessons from the pandemic. I think the national attitude toward the pandemic is ‘what pandemic?’ We don’t talk about it anymore. The new antisocial rituals that we developed to keep ourselves safe from this disease are still in place, and the one that I’m really fixing on is contactless delivery, which, you know, it’s frictionless.
In theory, it’s better for workers because they don’t have to wait for you to open the door and talk to you. It’s better for a lot of people who are getting food delivered because they don’t want to have that interaction. But it’s also very dehumanizing because it takes away one of the most sacred and important things about eating a meal, which is having a connection to the person who prepared it.
How did Boys Go to Jupiter’s story evolve as you got deeper into the production process?
It was a bit surprising to me when the reviews started coming in, and the movie kind of got pegged as being an anti-capitalist movie because that was not on the top of my mind when I was writing it. I’m not sure it is anti-capitalist; it just has capitalism in it, and it’s about life under capitalism. And it’s hard to talk about that without coming across as anti-capitalist because this system is bad.
The movie started out as a very fantastical story about this boy who gets an alien. But as I wrote it and started working with the cast, it became more and more about work because it was such an obsession of mine and something that I think a lot of people want to see more stories about.
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