Things that don’t connect.
This article has full spoilers on Arrival and Florence Foster Jenkins.
We went to the movies. We had Trump in our minds. We did a weekend full of chores and decided to soothe that with the wonder of moving pictures. Twice.
Saturday, Arrival. Sunday, Florence Foster Jenkins.
And Trump. I wrote an article,
https://bullshit.ist/donald-trump-wont-do-squat-f102b4dfdfff
It was supposed to be a confidence vote granted to my near future.
But then I saw this Arrival movie.
The aliens gave us a language that once learned gave one the possibility to foresee the future. But! The big but was that what was called in the movie “non linear time” meant that events were fixed. Time is set in stone and there is only one way in which it unfolds. This had to be the most depressing thesis I’ve seen lately.
But remember Interstellar? That guy messed with the time traveler paradox inside a tesseract and sent messages back in time because future transcendent humans knew from the future this had to happen in the past. One way. Time and its events set in stone. Last year I was just sad.
This year’s “SciFi”event was downright depressing.
Like, there is a woman who decides to marry a man who will leave her because she decided to go ahead and have a baby girl with him knowing that their baby will die of an incurable disease after reaching teen age all while knowing he’ll leave her because he was one who couldn’t agree with the choice of going ahead with a doomed course of events but this fundamental difference in personality type didn’t matter any more or less than the known disorder causing the yet unborn girl to have this disease killing and first causing huge pain and misery to an unsuspecting human. This whole movie looked like a huge Pro Choice advert. And very disempowering.
I mean what if Trump had to be? What if that FBI director was the shit cause that aligned the odds so that the prescribed timeline could plough ahead?
’Cause ya know, I still believe that the donald by itself is not a super force of change. But what if:
- there is a cataclysm that suspends democracy for emergency state
- an insurrection occurs
- freaking aliens arrive
- there happens a major, and I mean major not starving tribes men in deserts with rockets type of thing, major international conflict, warring superpowers
- or maybe divergent government appears in donald’s, you know, more or less federal country?
What if things like these occur in the next two years of donald’s complete hold on power? That is a scary set in stone future to me.
And what’s with these movies? Why is this art suddenly agreeing that there is only one way? And why, may I ask, do we humans of today or yesterday always need some hot shots from other galaxies or from the future itself to solve our current problems?
Do we need as a society someone who tells us what to do, and art just reflects what we’ve already voted?
Is this nationalist racist radical dumb xenophobe political doctrine that incoming future which we can only know about and observe but never change?
Trouble.
And with that loaded into working memory we went to see Florence.
Depressed, all I needed was mixed feelings. I mean, is this about a beautiful spirit who wanted to be seen in its joyful manifestation or about how the whole world is the playground of the rich? I mean, the second option I knew before seeing the movie. Yet the way it is presented in Florence Foster Jenkins with such charisma as only Hugh Grant could ever muster, made me red faced angry. But then Meryl Streep. I mean, maybe Florence was sending the world a message, maybe we should stop trying to be the best and just do things because we like them and abort the grading of our performance.
Mixed feelings. A commoner making a fool of themselves is publicly executed. A rich person is cushioned in all possible ways. Is Florence full of ego or full of passion? Is she sane? Is it an example to follow or a story about an unusual incident?
Such potential.
But in the movie there was this line where Hugh Grant says he (ahem his character) always aimed to be an actor, but at some point realized he won’t be a great actor, and at that point ambition left. And as the tyranny of ambition left he could start to live. And:
People may say I couldn’t sing, but no one can ever say I didn’t sing,
… said a dying Florence. But, does it matter? And is lack of ambition the grease of the mediocrity engine or is ambition the hammer that thinks everything is a nail?
My article on Trump. 294 views 127 reads 14 hearts. I am starting to live.
But Florence. The story, the movie, the two scripts detailing it (there is another french version Marguerite) all appeal to the comedic factor of one wearing the emperor’s clothes and the tragic factor of the meanness of mankind targeted at a deluded human.
But I also see that this was possible because of wealth. Do you see the connection between Florence and Ryan Lochte? I do. Is the world the playground of those who win the many lotteries it provides?
Are we all the hosts in the the real life West World of the ones who succeed? Should we be because there is no progress otherwise?
I mean, Trump came back after Meryl Streep died so beautifully as only she can. And the tears of Mr. Grant, reminded me of donald’s team at the white house. Oh lord.
This brat is running the world. All those 60,350,241 votes enabling his game to work and him to play.
He gets to be president because he was born Trump and we the people just upgraded the levels reachable by the winners.
I get to go to work. You too. When is our upgrade coming?