Dinner in America, Bottoms, Snack Shack, The Monkey, The Substance, Bugonia, The Long Walk

It’s a weird time to be a clown. Well, if there was a normal time to be a clown, you wouldn’t be a clown, you’d be a dentist. It’s a professionally frustrating time to be a clown. This is because the traditional targets of satire – greasy weirdos, dinguses, the performatively rich, the actually rich, Glenn Danzig – keep doing that extremely xenomorph-y thing they do in which they spontaneously reconstruct their physiology in response to whatever defense their prey has most recently deployed against them. Having excised from their souls all that but which might let them feast yet more rapturously still, humanity’s worst fete under the villainy of a godless sun. It’s important to have a hobby.

Everybody knows you can’t shame the shameless, but you can at least point out what colossally useless dipshits they are. From a public utility perspective, that’s usually close enough. More confounding is how to expose the internal life of a movement that prides itself on not having one. How do you isolate defect from the entity when defect is the entity? At a certain point you’re just getting into a shouting match with id. Seems counter-productive.

Movies are taking a variety of different approaches to this problem. You have the There’s No Point In Making Any Of This Subtext So I’m Just Going To Smear Your Faces With Text (The Substance), the I’ll See Your Ennui And Raise You Nihilism (Bugonia), the Shit Be Fucked But There’s Something We Can Do About It (Dinner in America, The Long Walk), the Shit Be Fucked And There’s Nothing We Can Do About It (The Monkey, somehow also The Long Walk), and many more still.

But even after taking my self-guided survey course in Cinematic Depictions of the Apocalypse, I still felt that something was missing. And I think the problem lies with me.

I’ll let The Simpsons explain:

Just don’t fucking look! Trying to make sense of a temper-tantrum is missing the entire point of a temper-tantrum. You’re projecting logic onto what is just aimless diaper-shitting; granting meaning to what deserves none. 

Obviously, this carries with it the massive caveat of in the business of storytelling. You can’t ignore the weirdo-brigade in real life. And you shouldn’t! But the movies listed up top are all various flavors of awesome because (among other strengths) they focus on the effect that catastrophic levels of anti-intellectualism are having on people caught in the vortex. No thought or empathy is spared on the vortex itself, which is exactly how much thought and empathy it deserves.

The End

You don’t owe the worst humans alive anything. They turned off their brains for a reason, and they can live with that dumb fucking choice. It’s everyone else having to live with that dumb fucking choice that makes me wish I still did disco biscuits.

No movie is going to solve the problem of weaponized stupidity – if it were that easy, The Monkey would have done it by now – but storytelling can at least make the long walk back to normal less shitty. Collective action is and always will be the answer, but narrative makes for a solid sidekick – it’s good to be reminded that you’re not crazy; that, yes, this is really happening; that We’re All in This Shit Together. Catharsis isn’t an engine in-and-of itself – that’s what this whole anti-intellectual movement is predicated on! – but it makes for pretty decent fuel when your ship has a long fucking ride home.