Martin Heidegger talks about our relationship with technology, if we are to have a free relationship with it, we must understand the essence of technology. The danger of technology is that we might misunderstand or misconstrue the essence of technology. That works for anything, and in particular pop culture, which can tell us the most about ourselves. If we miss the essence of the movie or TV show, then that is the most dangerous thing about a film. The content is not dangerous, but the misrepresented essence of the myth.
Take for instance a classic like Fight Club. I think Fight Club is probably one of the most important movies of my generation, because it is not only a critique of our lifestyles, it is one of the greatest (if not the greatest) works of art that tell us who we are as a culture.
Most of us like Fight Club because of witty lines that we like to repeat amongst our friends. "You're not your fucking khakis." "You are not a unique and beautiful snowflake." "This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time." "I wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every panda that wouldn't screw to save its species." You know all the commonly quoted lines. We like to see the fighting and sex scenes. But this is the danger of Fight Club, not because of cursing, violence, and sex, but that is all we usually think of the movie as and as little more than that.
One of the most important lines from Fight Club, I think, is, "Goddammit, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; working shit jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We were all told that one day we'd be millionaires, movies gods, and rock-stars, but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact, and we are very pissed off." Because that is what our generic lifestyles have turned into. Not culture, not spiritual way of life, but a mediocre lifestyle mass marketed and sold to us in stylish packaging of individuality of choice. Pick a job, pick a family, then pick all the pointless crap you have options of buying. The only way these men could have a spiritual experience was to say "fuck it," take their shirts off, forget their image, forget who they are ("Fuck what you know, forget what you think you know about life, friendship, and especially about you and me."), and then proceed to engage in mental state of primal fear as they beat the shit out each other. It is raw, primitive, animalistic, but it was the only way for them to have a real experience. Not to experience something that was prepackaged as brand and mass marketed to them. They had to forget everything and beat each other senseless in order to escape generica and have a true, real, spiritual experience. And in actuality, that might be the only way for any of us to have a real spiritual experience anymore. Even something as sacred as church, yoga, mass prayer, meditation, et cetera is a mass marketed, generic experience of salvation and "awakening."
Take another movie, A Day Without A Mexican. It's generally popular because it's funny to get a glimpse of what our world would be like without Mexicans. Of course, there's the danger; the director had a vision, and a good one I might add, and we missed the point because the movie was funny. The point of A Day Without A Mexican is about being Mexican, and being Mexican is not ethnic, it's cultural. "You belong to the people who taught you the world... My heart is Mexican." BAM! Right there is the whole movie! But it gets misconstrued or lost entirely.
A final example that is very dear to me is the TV show Lost. Many people didn't like it, just because of the ending. Because apparently how something ends is the most important thing, like, ever! If I may modify a Mitch Hedberg joke: I hated that apple because it turned out to be a core! But we confuse the story for the point of the story. The show Lost had a very vital message that, ironically, gets lost. The point was everyone's relationships to each other; how they met, how they got along, or how they fought; how their lives were entangled, how they lived together. At the very end of the show Christian Sheppard says, "The most important thing in your life was the time you spent with these people." That's because that is the most important thing for us. Like Fight Club, our lives are shallow and empty because the things we own end up owning us. It doesn't matter that your life turned out this way or that way, nor does it matter how much we try to change it. It doesn't matter if we lose this stuff or are left with nothing. The most important thing is the people we share our brief time with in life.
That message gets lost in the show because we're too shallow when it comes to storytelling. We want storytelling to be as generic as The Little Mermaid, or My Big Fat Greek Wedding. And isn't that the point of Fight Club? If you can't grasp the experience by forgetting all the other distractions in the story, then you aren't meant to have the experience. You can't have the experience of something greater than yourself if you aren't willing to take some punches to the face.
The ultimate danger is that in missing the essence of film, our modern day form of storytelling, is that we will never understand ourselves. If pop culture can tells us more about who we are than any other medium, then misunderstanding that means we will be lost in generica, forever mass marketed how we should live, feel, and consume as human beings in an illusory democracy of pointless choices.
Pick your poison, because consumption of brands is the only religious experience we have left.
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