Feeling run down today but I have enough turkey to feed a family of eight in the oven right now and it only cost like … seven pounds reduced. The heating is still cranked up to bastards, despite the fact I’ve just watched Don’t Look Up. I figured it was only a matter of time before everybody told me everything about it so I got in early. I’m not sure what I’m gonna write but there’ll probably be spoilers.
It’s the new way of telling a story, I guess. It is a movie that satirises itself. Jump cuts and leaving people mid sentence when we know what they’re gonna /
/ and a load of celebrities giving charming star turns. The director here has given people rein and they’ve taken it. We all know that Leo can go for it, and he does. As do they all. Jennifer Lawrence is the assured centre holding it tight and clear so everybody else can be wild. Meryl Streep plays Trump. Rylance plays Musk. It’s all so mischievous and observant. And it’s a terrible terrible wonderful allegory for exactly what is happening right now with climate change and everything else everywhere. It’s an artistic noise that you can either quietly scream along with or you can talk about Netflix money and how “they” have an agenda or whatever fucking axe you’ve been told to grind now. There is So. Much. Noise. So much. This blog is part of it too. I’m not telling you what to think, but I’m thinking. I’m part of the noise. So much of it. Everywhere. Crushed people are clamouring to be seen. Overlooked people are grinding received axes. Tired people are seeking joy and finding fear. I think the thing I find most egregious in the current information environment is how people fool themselves into thinking that an agenda they’ve received through their noise-consumption is somehow the result of probing research on their part. There are whole languages developing in these new religions, shared and augmented in bubbles that know that the governments habitually mislead the public and lie.
“You think X,” I am often told, when I don’t. “You think X but actually it’s Y, and I can prove it by disproving X.” Aargh. THAT JUST DISPROVES X IT DOES NOTHING TO PRESENT Y AS AN ACTUAL ALTERNATIVE. But if you start saying “straw man” you’re being too clever. Or “critical thinking” or “peer review”. And if you start being emotional and using nebulous “they them” and basing worldviews on instinct then you get called an idiot and curtly dismissed by people you think are utterly cut off from themselves. We have stopped listening to each other. We just wait to talk. And this situation is pushing us further and further into our narrative bubbles. It is comforting to have something concrete to rail against – some sense of structure and order. Chaos just has to be endured.
So yeah. A funny sad angry movie. I’d like to have been in it lol.
Instead I’m gonna have my cheap turkey feeling poorly on my own and then go to sleep and hope I wake up feeling better.
AlBarclay 