George Clooney, Ocean’s Eleven, and the Unbearable Burden of Truth

by Milaine Thia, resident writer at 3shotcine

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I first watched Ocean’s Eleven in the depths of 2020. Ocean’s Eleven, not to be confused with Ocean’s Twelve, Thirteen, or Eight, because eleven is the most chic number in the alphanumeric system. In writing this sentence I have just discovered that this movie came out three months after 9/11 in 2001. As I write this sentence, it is now the 11th of September. Like many of the easter eggs hidden in this movie headed by George Clooney, this fact is important to note, but its relevance has yet to be revealed to us. We shall return to it in due course. For now, file it away into the casino of your mind.

I don’t remember much from the period of my life when I first watched Ocean’s Eleven. We were in the middle of another lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19, and I had recently been told by my therapist that I was not, in fact, normal for staying awake until 3am, thinking about how much everyone in my life must hate me. I recall that I ate an obscene amount of polenta with mushrooms (very strange for someone who lived in Malaysia, but less strange when you consider that I was deeply Unwell, mentally speaking).

One of the few things I clearly remember is what it felt like looking up from my daily bowl of gruel and seeing George Clooney glide up the escalator of a casino wearing a tan jacket over a red shirt, his skin glowing warm from the orange light overhead. Head, shoulders, knees coming into frame, haloed by a massive chandelier in the background. Dark eyes, strong brow, hair combed back just so.

Distantly, I thought that I might be hallucinating. How could anyone move with such ease? He steps off the escalator without even looking down. It’s almost like he’s gliding towards me. Me, with my desperate fear of scraping my knee on the ridged escalator steps every time I get on. Me, gingerly tucking my shoelaces into my sneakers for fear that my foot should get swallowed and mangled by the gaps between steps. Me, too anxious about germs to clutch the handrail, yet also terrified of losing my balance and falling down. Every time I approach the end of an escalator, my mind plays out a scene of my foot colliding with the landing and twisting my ankle, collapsing and dislocating my wrist in short order. All this worry packed into my little brain. George Clooney’s easy, smooth grace in performing an everyday action felt like butter melting into the warm toast of my mind. How enchanting. How absolutely alluring. 

I was transfixed by the story that followed. Freshly released from incarceration, Daniel Ocean is desperate to return to his life of hijinks by robbing three Las Vegas casinos, one of them being the Bellagio. (Yes, theydies and gentlethems, canonically I have stepped on the same floors as Thee George Clooney and upon those tiles shall perhaps a scrap of his dermal shedding remain!)

He recruits a group of buddies (1 Ocean + 10 dudes = Ocean’s 11) to assist him in this quest. All men are all equally valid (I suppose), however it must be known that this group is very similar to BlackPink in that some people serve cvnt at all times (Rusty as played by Brad Pitt, Banger as played by Don Cheadle, Yen as played by Qin Shaobo) while some people kind of just show up (Matt Damon (I forgot his character’s name), Saul, Reuben). Most important to know is that the casinos they want to rob are owned by the big bad who is presently making moves on Danny’s ex-wife, Tess, stunningly played by Julia Roberts.

What was not to love? Crime! Romance! Depicted in a stylish and fashionable way! Starring the one and only George Clooney as Danny Ocean! Scenes of him flashed passed my eyes, 116 minutes feeling like a 20 second fever dream. George Clooney eating, George Clooney sitting, George Clooney walking, George Clooney being beaten up. George Clooney going up to Julia Roberts in a crowded restaurant and telling her that he will never lie to her again. George Clooney looking like that in a black turtleneck.

I was thankful that I had not been able to watch Ocean’s Eleven upon its release when I was five years old. It seemed improbable to me that anyone could survive the experience of seeing George Clooney’s face projected across an entire cinema screen. I was convinced that the human eye was incapable of holding that amount of beauty within even the most sturdy of corneas.

I finally understood why the international community partook in the collective fixation with George Clooney’s unbearable attractiveness. For years and years, all anyone has ever talked about is the exquisite beauty of this man, who married a beautiful and intelligent woman. Someone just like him. Everyone talks about her beauty also, how she’s so busy changing the world as a human rights lawyer even though she could be a movie star like her husband. How beautiful, we all mumble to each other, a meme passed back and forth like a particularly invasive parasite. I had long thought it was an exaggeration, but this first exposure to the Ocean’s Cinematic Universe introduced the Clooney disease to my brain and it refused to leave.

Ocean’s Twelve and Thirteen followed in quick succession, each instalment pulling me further undertow. I was fascinated by everything that George Clooney did, finding charm in every one of his promises. That crime can happen without a victim - we know that the casino boss will be compensated richly by the insurance companies, insurance being a shady industry predicated on ripping off everyday people as well. Do crime for good! There can be gunfire without victims, all the excitement of Brad Pitt going pew pew boom boom in the dark with none of the cleanup.

Time is both precise and elastic, compressed along a tight timeline that must be followed with extreme detail, but malleable enough to accommodate the mysterious lives of its protagonists. The heist must take place on a specific night when a fight is happening, the electromagnetic Pinch will cut power for less than 40 seconds, Yen has only 30 minutes of oxygen in the cart they have hidden him in to enter the vault. Simultaneously, George Clooney emerges from prison after five years. How old is he? We do not know. The passage of time has had no effect on Danny Ocean. The outside world has not forgotten him, as evidenced by the wide network of associates he taps into immediately, all of whom love him so much they would let him into an architectural firm to steal blueprints without a second thought. Technological developments do not bother him, and neither does the fact that he’s been locked away in subhuman conditions, still a perfect fit for the suit he was arrested in. He’s not missed anyone besides his life partner and his ex-wife (no, that was not a typo, Rusty IS his first love).

I was obsessed with the way nothing was eroded by his absence, yet nothing could change without his presence. Time is not traumatising in this universe. Alone in an apartment on the top floor of a building that looked out over Kuala Lumpur, it had been three weeks since I had seen another human face in person. I wondered if my own life was capable of holding such preservative quality, whether my associates would still be waiting for me on the other side of my prolonged absence. Whether I would be the same. Whether anyone would remember me. I looked at George Clooney looking at Brad Pitt looking at him from across a poker table full of strangers, and started to think it might be possible.

I say all this in retrospect, because my brain was not able to process this information when it was happening to me in real time. None of this seemed relevant beyond how good George Clooney looked in sunglasses and a suit.

*** 

Visions of George Clooney sitting in a dark room have flickered in and out of my mind in the years since then. 

Quarantine ends. I divest from my daily slop, leave the lonely apartment and its rickety single bed of thin latex over hard wooden slats. Danny Ocean emerging into the real world. The government insists that we no longer have to fear death. George Clooney swinging casino floor plans in Brad Pitt’s face, telling him that this is their one chance to go and win it all. Russia invades Ukraine. The international community rallies to put Zelensky on screen at the Oscars. Michelle Yeoh wins and maybe movie magic is real, after all. The SWAT team leader popping open his mask to reveal Brad Pitt underneath – oh, thank god, they’ve made it. Engaged in the difficult and mind-killing work of making spreadsheets for NGOs, I think to myself that maybe I can make it through the day.

I don’t. I quit one job and start another, lose that and scramble to stay afloat. I used to want to be a writer, wrote so many words my fingers bled from how desperately I gripped my pencil. Used to be a reader also, pressing my nose so diligently into the page that my mother had to steer me around as I walked. I realise it has been two years since I last read a book. Apply to a list of writing programs and mentorships and try to send things out to the world. Do not hear back. They’ve moved on with someone else, someone better. Dreams die all the time under capitalism. I know that I am not special. Even so, it feels like I should be.

Staring at a patch of corporate-issue drywall in my corporate-issue office, I think to myself, The life I am living is so unglamorous, so distasteful. So devoid of craft. What would Danny Ocean think of these conditions? I am not robbing three casinos. I am not even robbing one. I am barely even making a living. I feel like Rusty, sitting at a table of drunk and expensively dressed celebrities, trying to explain the rules of poker to people who are overjoyed at the prospect of gathering cards of the same colour. I press a cold glass to my face and wonder how I might feel if Danny Ocean were to walk in on me right now, at this moment of my life. How small I might feel with a third-person’s perspective of my mental squalor. My spiritual lack of interest in anything other than how my boobs look in a Uniqlo top. How much I want him to save me from myself.

– God, I’m bored.

– You look bored.

– I am bored.

A man makes a lunch appointment with me to deliver a kind-but-firm reminder that I am careless with my words. The meal is a lecture about optimism and its pitfalls. It is my heart, I am told, swollen and bloated with the trust that I put in other people, that will sting me in ways that I cannot imagine in an indeterminate future a few years away. I am told by another man that my craft is wasted when I am not paid for every word. Why am I not trying harder to get published? I ask myself this question every single day. I should know that I can do better – a man reminds me of this. My new hire, freshly graduated from university and a month into his job, comes into my office. He wants to tell me, his manager, to do something that I’ve already done the week before. On his desktop home screen, there is a note he has typed to himself about this urgent task he needs to instruct me to do. I see that he has spelled my name wrong.

Danny Ocean would never do this to me, I thought to myself, feeling very much like George Clooney in Ocean’s Twelve. I am staring out of the train window on my way to work, just like how he gazes out from the Amtrak rushing back to protect his wife from the man he robbed. He would never lecture me like this. Wouldn’t, because he has never participated in recreational conversation with any woman who wasn’t his wife.  Shouldn’t, because I believe he has contributed to the macho-patriarchal trauma that subsequently led to the unfortunate lapse in judgement experienced by one Sandra Bullock aka Deborah Ocean, leading to her incarceration in the clever and fashionable sequel Ocean’s Eight. It is very bad bad horrible man of him. I know that it is. However, something in me felt refreshed by the possibility that it simply isn’t within him to care about anything besides crime and his wife.

Even Rusty, who we learn by word of mouth is somewhat of a promiscuous man (“You sent flowers?” “Dated his wife for a while.”) is aggressively celibate for the duration of the movie - we begin with him staring at strippers in the window looking miserable, and end with Tess saying, “We need to get Rusty a girl.” When George Clooney encounters Catherine Zeta-Jones in Ocean’s Twelve, he does not share a single frame of film with her throughout the movie, and she disappears into the dark night in Ocean’s Thirteen. He proves that it is possible for a man to be so absolutely dedicated to one woman that all other women simply cease to exist for him.

Something very romance fantasy-esque about this depiction of heterosexuality activated the same part of my brain that was obsessed with Edward Cullen when I was thirteen. The false promises of Chinese patriarchy working overtime, memories of my mother telling me that a man should think all women are subhuman, but if he should only find the correct virtuous woman, he might care for her genuinely for the rest of their lives. Un poco In the Mood for Love, gitu. That a man would mind his own business so very thoroughly that he would simply never dream to involve himself in yours - isn’t that a lovely thing? A loyal husband dedicated to his craft and nothing else. He could go to jail for five years and think only of you and money, a culmination of the cishetero American dream found in this criminal beyond the system. What a perfect contradiction.

Promises are made, one after another, that the economy is recovering. Ocean’s Eleven, gathered in disbelief that they might be able to walk out of a Las Vegas casino with 160 million dollars. I almost weep from joy when I see my friends again. Rusty and Danny stepping out of a strip club, heads close. They look at each other and smile. The world is bright and beautiful, like fireworks over the Las Vegas strip.

You understand? You see the attraction.

*** 

Years go by. More things happen. I find another job, ask for money, and am told that there is none available. The amount listed on the job advertisement was a lie. I take the job anyway, because I am small and defeated and can no longer be a writer. 28 is too old to be disappointed at your own lack of success. It’s positively unromantic, inconsiderate to everyone else who has to witness your disappointment. I discover that the money was there all along. 

Russia and Ukraine are still at war and we forget about it. Genocide starts anew in Gaza. This time, there are no speeches at the Oscars about the plight of children dying under occupation because this time the children are brown. Everything seems to be burning all at once: My brain, the world, the people in Gaza. America vetoes another ceasefire at the United Nations. I start crying in my office in the middle of the work day and everyone tells me that they support me having emotions, they would just never do it themselves, personally. I don’t understand why none of them can just say that they don’t respect me anymore. It would feel a lot better than this.

I try to fall in love. Barely trip. I am smothered by the abjectly dehumanising experience of scrolling through requests for nice and humble girls who do not take themselves too seriously. What is it about a woman’s life that is not serious to you? Men seem to want new and difficult things from women these days, all of which did not exist when the Bible was written. One of them says that it’s too difficult for him to meet in person but wants to send me memes all day. I can’t figure out which is sadder: That he asked, or that I said yes. Another one asks me about cats that I don’t have and a job that I don’t have. I consider playing along and making up an alternate persona to protect him from the realisation that he’s mixed me up with someone else, but think that it might be unfair to the other girl he’s thinking about. I hope she’s well.

For a while, I forget about Danny Ocean. People lapse all the time, like Catholics who forget that it’s Sunday and my family’s intense, permanent scotoma around the part of Buddhism that says hoarding wealth is immoral. This is my clunky attempt at creating parallels with religion to emphasise the god-like nature of George Clooney in my mind, so that what I’m about to tell you will feel all the more shocking.

What I want to say is that after four years of living with the Clooney parasite, I returned to the altar of the Ocean’s Cinematic Universe one fine day in September 2024, ready to renew my vows. As I tootled along with my movie snack of choice, the screen flickered. A chair in a concrete room. A man shambles onto the screen. George! Pause. Wait.

Not George Clooney. Or at least, it wasn’t the George Clooney that had lived in my mind for the past four years. This George Clooney had deep wrinkles going down his forehead, huge bags under his eyes, wearing a beige tunic with a splayed collar. How deep those nasolabial folds went, covered with a smattering of facial hair that also hid the thin, thin line of his lips.

Had I put on the wrong movie? Was this all part a convoluted Trojan Horse scheme by HBO to push me one of George’s lesser known titles from his later career? I wondered if I had been unwittingly trapped in a screening of Up in the Air, one of the strangest movies of George’s career, based on the worst paperback I had ever read at thirteen years old in an attempt to understand the mindset of a middle aged man who was forced to travel to a different country every week. George looked ancient in that movie, what I assumed was an intentional choice to reflect the evil consequences of prolonged UV exposure and dehydration on planes.

Or maybe I had accidentally clicked on The Descendants, that, for some strange and cosmic reason, I had also read the paperback of when I was fifteen. He also looked horrible in that movie, reflecting the emotional ravages of having a coma-ridden wife and the moral consequences of owning 2,500 acres of land in Hawaii as a white man. George was on the cover of both of these books I had bought and read – in fact, thinking about it now, I’m pretty sure I only bought them because he was on them and reminded me of my father.

I rebooted my TV, searching again for Ocean’s Eleven. Put it on, only to find the same strange man looking back at me. Overly bushy eyebrows, thin lips, wrinkles and all. State your name for the record, a disembodied female voice said. Those thin lips formed in reply, Daniel Ocean. Oh god. This was the right movie. Oh god. This was not the right man.

Do not gasp, reader, for I was as shocked as you were. I am the one who has written 3,300 words up till this point about how much George Clooney’s attractiveness had taken over my life. For me to notice the asymmetrical tilt of his chin, the deep set crow’s feet around his eyes, the downturned corners of his mouth, disappearing sinisterly into his chin and jowls – how do you think I felt?

As I continued to watch this false movie, I persistently experienced the sensation of an egg cracking across my head. Clarity slimed its way down my back and into my eyes. It wasn’t that George Clooney had become a hag, but that he was older than I remember, more weathered than I remember, less graceful than I remember. Did he always have such an oddly shaped head? The entire first rewatch disassembled the world as I knew it. The scene of him stepping off the escalator - I mean, wasn’t he just walking? Inside my brain, the parasite started to scream.

I could not believe it. Scenes that I once gasped at in wonder now lay cold at my feet, barely rousing as George Clooney emerged from prison a second time at the end of the movie. Phantoms of Danny haunted me in my sleep that night (yes, intentional, Nickelodeon hive rise). The vision of George Clooney as a perfect god, one that I had lived and died for, was gone.

Throughout my morning commute, I sat and scrolled through pictures of him on my phone, cycling through search engine prompts as if looking at other’s opinions of George Clooney’s unbearable attractiveness would bring him back to me. danny ocean. danny ocean suit. danny ocean brad pitt. oceans 11 suits. amal clooney. george clooney young. dieworkwear twitter oceans 11. His eyes continued to stay sunken, lines on his forehead casting impressions into my mind. If my life was a movie, Losing My Religion by R.E.M. would have started playing in the background.

I thought that watching the movie again might help. Desperate to recoup my illusion of perfect masculinity, I queued Ocean’s every night for a week, running through the soundtrack in my spare time. Much to my dismay, George Clooney cracked and cracked again.

Second rewatch: Did you know that he is not all that smart? The conceit of the movie revolves around Danny Ocean as the mastermind who has planned the heist down to every detail, setting into place a vast network of plans and counter-plans that will all occur smoothly and at the same time. For years I have believed this - why else would it be Ocean’s Eleven? I was nearly struck dead with the realisation that he does not actually plan anything.

Rusty: “You’d need at least a dozen guys running a combination of cons.”

Danny: “Like what, d’you think?”

Rusty: “Well, off the top of my head, I’d say you’re looking at a Boski, a Jim Brown, a Miss Daisy, Two Jethros and a Leon Spinks. Not to mention the biggest Ella Fitzgerald, ever.”

It’s Rusty who outlines the plan, Rusty who lines up the pieces. Danny just shows up, and the world moves around him. While Rusty is constantly calling, dispensing information, supervising the operation, the other members of the team scurry around swimming in the sewers, putting on disguises and tapping into servers. Danny doesn’t do any of that. I don’t think we see him displaying independent competence even once. There is no scene in this movie where he makes any concrete contribution to the heist that couldn’t be done by anyone else. In fact, Matt Damon was ready to run the operation alone. What might we call that? A man whose partner is doing everything to get his house in order, while he swans off thinking about another girl the entire time.

Third rewatch: George Clooney is not even the main character of this film. Truth is that the character of Danny does very little and reveals almost nothing about who he is. Everyone thinks “We all go way back, I owe you for the thing with the guy in the place,” is a perfect line of dialogue that distils everything we need to know about Danny, Rusty, and Reuben’s relationship to its most necessary components.

When I watch it now, I develop a throbbing headache, thinking about the time when a friend told me they think everything I say is insincere. I am always serious, I say to him, confused. He pulls a face and laughs. I write something on my Instagram about wanting people to know that I can contain tenderness. The next time I see him, he remarks that it was such a funny thing that I wrote, mocking. We work together and one day he fires me and laughs when I say that I’ll have to talk to my therapist that I no longer have money to pay for. I don’t know why he is laughing. I suppose I am one of those girls that should take themselves less seriously. I ask him to stop being cruel to me. He doesn’t. I realise that all our friendship has been – a series of things with a guy in a place. You can be cruel to a person like that, a convenient dumpsite for your unwanted furniture. He is cruel to me again. His girlfriend is, too. We don’t talk anymore. A guy from the thing in the place.

Fourth: It turns out that you can fall out of a coconut tree, devoid of the context of all in which you live and all that came before you. That is, if you are Danny Ocean. Time, previously so malleable, seemed different to me this time, constricting like a rubber band. He emerges from a jail cell with no details about what happened to put him there. Oblique references about something in New York and lying and Incan ceremonial masks without any concrete insight into the titular character’s past or future. How did he meet Tess? How long were they together? Why does he love her? How does he know Rusty? I would really like to know how old he is. I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me he was 70.

Why does he get to live like this? These days, I cannot stop thinking about the decay of my potential. Sally Rooney published Conversations with Friends when she was 26, Normal People at 28. I’m 28, writing a too-long essay about George Clooney that nobody will read. One of my college classmates is now a writer on SNL. Many of my college peers are very successful. The children at our alma mater are fighting to end a war but all that matters is that we can pay for our trips to Lake Como. I mean, I can’t. They can.

I think of the money that wasn’t there to pay for my salary and that emerged strangely after the fact. Maybe I should have tried harder to become an Economics major in college. Dwelling on the past doesn’t help, but thinking about the future is somehow worse. My mother has begun making noises about how she conceived me at 28. For my education, I owe the going rate of a house. I will be paying for it until I am dead. All these choices I’ve made have led to this moment and have changed my future. Danny Ocean was never charged of a crime, and it wouldn’t matter anyway because we don’t know what the crime was. We don’t know anything about him beyond the moments captured by the camera’s observation.

The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics posits that the qualities of an electron (e.g. its position) can only ever be determined at the point of measurement. That is to say: we don’t know anything about an electron beyond the exact moment we decide to perceive it. That is to say: Danny Ocean is an electron in the atomic particle of Ocean’s Eleven. That is to say: The moment of observation says more about us than it does about the electron.

Fifth (yes, I was not joking about how many times I watched this movie): The outline of the vault in the floor plans is distinctly penis shaped. Hee hee. Also, hot man do crime for no reason. There is no dying relative or debt; in fact, he barely exists within the economic system of this world. Moments after he leaves prison, he emerges a transformed man in Atlantic City, wearing what I now know to be a houndstooth check sports coat with a faint red windowpane overcheck, with notch lapels and ventless rear over a red shirt and dark brown flat front slacks with plain-hemmed bottoms. These are not clothes that one simply finds hanging from trees in the street, yet George Clooney has conjured them out of thin air without any kind of effort. He flies across the country again and again, unfettered by questions of finance and economy. Danny Ocean is desperate to get the 160 million payout for no reason other than the abstract psychosexual drama playing out in his mind.

In Ocean’s Twelve, Rusty gets a backstory. He falls in love with Catherine Zeta-Jones along the Danube and they have ice cream together before he yeets himself out of a window. We know he needs money for his failing hotel businesses. Before that, he’s bored. He’s bored. Boredom is good enough. People have gone to war because they were bored. Just look at the state of the world now, the state of our apathy driving forward murder in the Middle East. George Clooney doesn’t even care enough to be bored; doesn’t express a single negative emotion throughout the entire film, not even when he’s looking at the lost love of his life. You could argue that he’s expressing complex emotions in the wriggle of his eyebrows and constriction of his throat. Should you? I think of my therapist telling me that it is not our job to decipher what other people do not tell us. I wonder what it says about me that I try, anyway.

Sixth: Danny promises that he won’t lie, but he’s also never honest. Brad Pitt says: I need a reason. And don’t say money. Why do this? George Clooney hits back with a plea about how the house always wins unless we go hard at the right time, making my heart sputter the first time I saw it. You could not resist George Clooney when he looks at you like that and asks you to change your life. Immediately after, they joke that his speech was rehearsed. Or was the quip about rehearsal a bit? Was the speech a bit? When we find out he got divorce papers from Tess the day before his release, he smiles with eyes like a dead fish. He promises not to lie, but he’s certainly not about to be honest. Even the way he orders his drink: Whiskey, and whiskey. Just say you want a double whiskey, Jesus fucking Christ.

Everything is subject to external conditions that will not be acknowledged, everything needs to be second-guessed and analysed, everything emerges from his mouth in the same grating double-speak that seems to define my life these days.

A beautiful girl who has made a living vlogging her life as a private chef glows on my phone screen. I’m so thankful to all my followers, this house belongs to all of you. However, only I shall live here. I am so, so rich now, richer than any of you can imagine, but do not worry, nothing about me will change. There’s no angle, Rusty. But I’m trying to fiscally cuck my ex-wife’s new man. 

On Bumble: I feel a real connection here and want to see where it goes, but I’m not ready to commit. Also, I’ve been using ChatGPT to come up with replies to your texts. George Clooney kisses Julia Roberts so tenderly on her cheek: I just came to say goodbye, and here’s a phone in your pocket that we’re going to use to contact the man we’re robbing. 

Ethnoreligious supremacy comes back in a big way in the 2023 general election and we discover that there have been campaigns on TikTok full of propaganda targeting 18 year olds voting for the first time. We thought they would be better than us. It turns out 18 year olds can want me dead, too. Next to a turquoise pool, George Clooney says that they want to rob, “The Mirage, the Bellagio and the MGM Grand.” Reuben scrambles to his feet, falling for it hook, line, and sinker. A calendar in a hospital is evidence of a terrorist plot to invade the free world. Echoes of weapons of mass destruction in Afghanistan that are never found. Two Palestinian women are arrested for crying too loudly in Malaysia. They will be sent back to Gaza from whence they came. We will let refugees from Palestine in unless they get too sad and angry. Don’t you know? The death penalty is a thing here. There are conditions to survival.

In a convertible with the top down, Rusty asks: “Didja get the cookies I sent you?” Danny replies: “Why do you think I came to see you first?” Knowing that he went to Frank Catton before anyone else, we are complicit in his deception. You could argue, spiritually, he might mean what he says - maybe spiritually, he feels that this is the first reunion, but also actually, it’s not. Actually, he went to Atlantic City first. Actually, he’s lying. Actually, Rusty, you’ll always come second. Actually, they won’t stop until everyone in Gaza is dead, why don’t you get it yet. Zelensky tweets to congratulate Trump on his second term as president and I think about death.

Seventh, the last: I know Plato hates to see Steven Soderbergh coming. Basher is sitting in his hotel room, multitasking between watching TV and manipulating explosive materials to look like precious gems. On his dinky screen, a building blows up. As the resident pyromaniac, Basher is transfixed by this vision of a phallic object exploding. Through the windows behind him, we see the real demolition happening, yet he’s oblivious to this fact. The original cut of the movie had a scene of the New York-New York Hotel and Casino being blown up. It’s not actually in the film, because three months before its release, two planes crash into the World Trade Center on September 11. (I told you this would be relevant.) It’s considered depressing to remind the general public that people have died. It’s uncouth to say that the United States is sending its military to Afghanistan for petrol. So they’ve used CGI instead to create a new fake hotel that doesn’t exist, and blow that one up, instead. Don Cheadle isn’t actually watching anything – he’s just surrounded by green screens. In fact, he isn’t even mentioned in any of the cast credits.

I’m serious, he’s not credited anywhere for this movie.

In 2001, Don Cheadle asks for top billing with Clooney, Pitt, and Damon. The producers say no. In an act of radical self-erasure, Cheadle says, take my name out of the credits. As far as the documentation is concerned, the character of Basher might as well not exist. In a way, the entire credits sequence of Ocean’s Eleven is a work of found poetry – blackout spaces where he’s supposed to be. If we all see it happening but it’s not written down anywhere, is it really happening? We don’t talk about that. He is confident and strong and has the worst British accent imaginable. He comes back for another two movies, anyway. Just like me going to work on Monday. He doesn’t care. He’s now the Iron Patriot in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. George Clooney is just some old guy who apparently terrorised everyone on set with the worst pranks known to man.

It inspires some thought within me - something about life passing you by if you become too preoccupied with the virtual world, something Theory of the Cave and the shadows on the wall, something about hiding dangerous and lethal things by masking their appearance with a pleasing façade. Something about how we all know Don Cheadle is not really watching the TV, and even so we willingly suspend our disbelief because it means that we get to forget that real life is boring and unromantic and full of arguments over money. It was so easy to change the scenery outside a window, to preserve some communal delusion that nothing horrific is happening. It almost seemed silly not to do it.

I have a philosophical discussion with a seventeen year old, the two of us trying to figure out whether there is any difference between the appearance and the reality of things. The seventeen year old is so sure, firm in her conviction that there is something sacred to be found in the truth. I will always know, she says. I will always know what the truth is, and that matters to me.

This statement returns to me as I consider all of these things: George Clooney, myself, subatomic perception, and the nature of truth. I wonder what would change about my life if any of this mattered or didn’t matter. Think about it, crying at the hope that this child has put into the world and herself. In a universe so littered with Danny Ocean’s impact, her words are a rupture. For a long time, I do not allow myself to believe that she is right.

Watching George Clooney kiss Julia Roberts in the backseat of his boyfriend’s car for the seventh time, I think to myself that delusion seems fun. It shows up looking like he does, wearing a pair of aviator sunglasses and a sharp suit that has materialised out of nowhere. In this movie that consists of a thousand perfect paradoxes, he is simultaneously George and Danny, handsome and ugly, old and ageless, mastermind and bum, loyal husband and horrific misogynist. Dozens of questions are floated – about Danny, about the plot, about the relationships he has with the other characters, but always at the last second, Ocean’s Eleven cleverly scrubs itself clean of any identifying information that might allow us to answer them, allowing its audience to enjoy a perfect conservation of their imaginative faculties that requires no moral activity, no spiritual commitment of any kind. You can see why it was the biggest blockbuster in the months following 9/11.

The idea of friction without consequence is so seductive during times of disaster. To decide that something is true requires effort. Effort that could so easily go away if we simply absorb the worldview that life is full of these little contradictions where everything can be true and not-true at the same time, and theoretically anything is possible. You can pretend that a group of men infiltrating an underground location in the desert in 2001 are doing so for the right reasons. In 2024, genocide is not about occupation, it’s about hostages. We will all survive past 2020. Equally, anything can be impossible. Trump won’t win. Trump won’t win again. Guns that go off without any bloodshed. Racism is not real. Saul has acid reflux the whole time and only pretends to die. The God of Death will not have this elderly balding man on this day. 

You can convince yourself that men living out their dreams of capitalism and sexual ego will not hurt anyone in the process. Nobody will actually get beaten up because the henchman will have been paid off. There is nothing happening in Gaza, Afghanistan, Iraq. All around us nobody is dying, nobody at all. Love is George Clooney looking into your eyes, fiddling with his wedding ring with a wry smile on his face. It has never crossed your mind until this very moment that Andy Garcia could have murdered Julia Roberts for leaving him. His violence is a threat to everyone except the one person he is most statistically likely to murder, and we can believe that because we want to be deceived. I want to believe that I can love a man and not fear for my life.

Danny Ocean’s effervescence, his lack of commitment to anything except his desires: All this enchanted me. It contrasted so perfectly with my own stolid reality of constantly longing, specific wants rooted in a superego so preoccupied with honesty that it had formed a bland and charmless life. I wonder if I am the only person alive that knows what it means to be intensely earnest all the time. I am driven crazy by the suspicion that other people seem to go around with an attitude of perpetual unfeelingness.

Ocean’s Eleven as an electron promises that life is just Danny Ocean looking clever and fashionable as he walks around expensive hotels, looking the way that he does in a tuxedo. You could lose your mind over a man like that. Who could blame you? At the moment of your perception, everything about him would be true. He is the god that you think he is. He moves easily because life is easier when all you need to do is tell the person in front of you exactly what they need to hear, so that you can get exactly what you want out of them. All you have to do is lie. Stay lying.

In 2020, the lines of reality blurred just enough for me to see a vision of myself in Danny Ocean, recklessly applying the Copenhagen interpretation to every appearance of George Clooney’s stupid, beautiful, hideous face in a moment of desperation to see only the best case scenario and nothing else. I thought: Why can’t I have this? Why can’t George Clooney live rent free in my mind while the world is burning around me? There was no harm in letting Danny Ocean stay like this, a parasite in my own private quarantine. I was seduced by his face, seduced by the possibility of being a champion of the spoils of capitalism without having to live through its actual consequences.

Looking at Danny Ocean, I think to myself, I want what he has. This world, where I am sincere and emotional and trusting, is too difficult. I want to go to another one. I want to shake that version of George until his brain falls out of his head and I can screw it into my skull. I want to harvest Danny Ocean’s eyes and heart and thoughts for myself to see the many worlds that men are always inventing for me to occupy. I could meet the me with two cats. How about the one whose name is spelled differently? The one who asked for money and got it. I wonder if there is a version of me that still believes in the death penalty. She would have a ball with how things are going these days. I could be both a writer and not-a-writer at the same time. I could be happy and never sad, starring in a new movie with Brad Pitt even though we all know why Angelina Jolie left that marriage. George Clooney can be both a good guy married to a human rights lawyer and friends with an abuser. They can stand together on a red carpet sponsored by Apple TV as if they are just two guys who love each other.

But I cannot, because the truth keeps visiting me in flashes. In the flush of shame that comes from snapping at a friend in a fit of self-pity, being reminded gently that there is cruelty within me, same as everyone else. Just because you refuse to process it doesn’t mean it’s gone. Fearfully watching Benjamin and Donald smile at each other on my computer screen, two men ready to eat us all alive. As I drive home, the sky is the colour of my jealous heart - bright white and burning - beating ferociously at everyone who has everything that they have ever asked for. I suppose it’s notable. Anxiety eats a hole in my stomach as I think of the way I am perceived, feeling sick from how lonely I am, my brain with all its empty rooms. I suppose it is important. I sit and write and feel happy and am surprised at my own happiness, feeling it struggle inside me like a little bird that forgot it knew how to fly. I suppose it matters.

After Ocean’s, George makes the decision to depict a sequence of middle-aged men engaged in psychosexual struggles as agents of capitalism. Up in the Air has him travelling the world, hired by downsizing companies to help them lay off their employees when they don’t want to deal with it themselves. He finds out that the woman who he’s been seeing, the one he’s in love with for two years, has been married the whole time. As the protagonist in The Descendants, he is the product of colonialism and marriage, finds out that his comatose wife has been cheating on him, and has to tell the doctor to take her off life support. In Gravity, he dies and comes back to flirt with Sandra Bullock as a ghost, telling her to stay alive as she tries to commit to the act of dying. 

These versions of him are vivid and tender and earnest and it is so difficult for me to love any of them because in all of them I see myself. All of them are broken in a way that Danny Ocean could never be, because to be broken you need to be whole to begin with. To be whole you need to be real.

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A personal essay by Milaine Thia, resident writer at 3shotcine.

Milaine Thia is a writer who spends most of her time thinking about writing instead of actually writing. When she does write, she uses pop culture, film, and art to explore the generational trauma of being Malaysian Chinese, or the nebulous feeling of being adrift as a person living under late-stage capitalism. In other parts of her life, she teaches writing to children as a mode of self-expression, is trying to regain literacy by reading 100 books a year, and wonders if her writing ever helps other people feel less alone. Read her work at thinklagi.substack.com.

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