media, criticism, rfd
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTV7gNpECW0
So... the above is a Sundance-winning animated short about a man asked to chronicle human existence before the world is destroyed by hostile aliens. It came recommended on Boing Boing, and now that I think of it... that might answer the question I'm about to ask all by itself.
I didn't like it. It should hypothetically have pushed all my warm humanitarian buttons. It should not have triggered all my "yes but what about X?!" literalism about a premise. That's not a tendency I usually indulge; I usually am very willing to suspect disbelief and go with the flow.
But I'm very tired after a day of cat stress, tech support at work, and (unrelated) severe headaches. And our dealer hasn't gotten back to me yet. :P So I don't really have the mental energy left to dig into why it didn't work for me. Or why it left me muttering "Yup, that's definitely from the New Yorker" and shaking my head.
Would anyone else care to watch it and speculate on why it bombed so badly for me? I already have some REAL good guesses, but some of y'all know me better than I do...
media, criticism, rfd
Well... right off the bat... it's pretentious as fuck.
It's a rather bland 5 and a half minutes of repetitive piano solo underlying a very monotone monologue that slowly and lazily spirals around the beauty of accepting nihlism moments before the void, while prattling on about names and ranking twitter-post blurbs of history, boiling everything down into meaninglessness.
And it is nearly 6 minutes of my life that I'd like back, honestly.
I gained nothing from this film. No insight, no amusement, no sorrow... just... a very boring recital of things I easily could have (and likely have in the past) drunkenly spiral-talked myself into understanding when I was just out of high school.
So... yeah... very NewYorker.
re: media, criticism, rfd
@JulieSqveakaroo YES. Thank you. It felt like a short about history that had no real depth to its concept of what history actually IS.
It had that stereotype Faintly Liberal White Literary Guy sense of "Gosh, Earth is just so good, it's all good stuff, let's not get into the messy parts." His version of history was so squeaky clean, with all the emotional intensity or skepticism of a guy collecting stamps or matchsticks or dead butterflies something.
And I couldn't get past thinking, "Why the FUCK would anybody do it this way to start with?" Why hire ONE guy? For that matter, what was wrong with all the OTHER histories written on earth? Are we suddenly no longer going to have access to electronic storage? Why was he not an academic? Is this really an engineering or clerical sort of job that needs someone who's just really diligent -- and not someone who will ask the HARD questions? And WHY IS IT A MIDDLE-CLASS WHITE GUY AND NOBODY CARES AT ALL?
The whole thing just felt like it didn't ask any questions, it just kinda came along and asked us to bask in the same warm centrist humanist "Gosh we sure did a magical thing together, didn't we folks!" fuzzies.
And in the process there was one glaring question: "Why do you pick NOW to mourn some of this stuff, just because aliens are gonna wipe us ALL out -- yes, gosh, even the white middle class, how dare they!" Humans have been GLEEFULLY wiping out other humans' history from the first recorded day. Are we seriously supposed to get all sad just because it's happening to the rest of us now?
I just spend the whole time kinda shrugging and going, "Yup. We all end up in the Void, buddy, and some of us get pushed. Did... did it really take you this much of your life to figure this out?"
And there you go. If I had to rewrite this myself... that's what it would be about. Instead of just going over his pretty little collection of disjointed historical moments, he'd stop and REBEL. The process of looking over human history would leave him really unimpressed with human history. Maybe he'd even decide to trash the whole record at the end.
