Friday, January 1, 2016

Happy New Year (Star Wars Redux)!

Hello World! That's me, algorhythmically speaking, pushing some button to simulate life.

I did make it into 2016, though I had some difficulty crossing boundaries, and have nearly not made it more times than I care to remember across my so-called life. I do seem to like the word "redux." I decided to drive home across the first and probably only snowfall of this season. Horrowshow.

I didn't go in with great expectations, already knowing from having heard it said over and over again, that the latest Star Wars would be a masterwork of marketing, which it surely is.

But how disappointing that there could be no further inspiration which made the first one (and then the second and third which was about the end of it) such a thrill. Our world felt changed, and we were looking forward to a better more composed world, where there was some actual reconnection to a life-force, call it what you will. Joseph Campbell wrote about it, or do I have that backwards too.

I suppose it must be beneath mention that the marketing machine which the film now embodies is rather more like the death-star - I guess it's now a death-planet - than even the Man in the High Castle which I binge-watched to greater satisfaction than the Force Returns could ever provide.

Same story of fathers and sons, and the evil Wizard of onetime Oz being the goad for all the efforts of any Resistance. A better story though, except that it too can only imagine the world that we have in the place of any dream of a better one. A misty past where people seemed to give a damn.

The only innovation of the new stars wars, to my jaded eyes, was the 3D which made it seem as though my screen was almost a portal to a compacted reality. I watched the High Castle series on a series of very little screens to better special effect.

We have crossed some boundary to where we have no further dreams than to live as sated consumers, pandered to and promised release from fatty sugared overcharging. What more could we possibly want then?

The dream would be of post-scarcity where grinchy acquisitive hearts could grow a few sizes bigger, but I don't suppose we can picture that, really. Our adrenaline pumps when we are ourselves the first-person-shooter, and make the shot in some sick parody of Zen in the Art of Archery. May the force be with you too, evermore.

In the new Serial, Bowe Bergdahl confesses to wanting to live out Jason Bourne, and for that we must kill him, now musn't we, or at least hate him very very much. He is not allowed to be our uber self, that self reserved for screen alone, though if he did live the calculated cost to rescue him across the episodes would be still more than was expended on the very idea of Bergdahl left in the field to rot. They are doling it to me, and so I can't binge unless I wait, which pretty much wrecks the whole concept of high now doesn't it.

Questioning our chain of command is the only sin, and the church was already exposed as a patriarchal franchise grab of a meek and mild though worldly Jesus. The chain of command goes all the way up to Hitler or Rumsfeld or Darth Vader's son's adopted son, distantly related on the distaff side, who killed his actual Father, Harrison Ford, as reality mixes well in 3D with fiction to our sugared pleasure. Nice touch, that, I mean he's probably about to die anyhow, and might deserve it for misleading our loyalties, of which he has, famously, none. How much script should you really give an old man?

Our trouble is to imagine a better world that we would like to inhabit even supposing we are the Lucky Man who gets to live in the Castle on High. What is good enough to pry our cold homing wishing grip from that promise?

Could it not be to release a bit, to suckle, even to lose the promise of ubiquity, perpetual agency, design thinking unto death do us our part? Our drones will now catalog their obstacles and bring us back 3D images of a reality too far and high for us to visit personally says Qualcomm. We can 3D print whatever thing we can design. We can stop reading altogether and revert to form as beasts, perhaps, motivated only to consume or be consumed. Emoticons in place of faces shrouded in virtual reality goggles.

Well, Happy New Year in reality. I still hope for a world where the losers are the winners, since at least they didn't have to kill to get ahead. But we must work to imprison them all first before they spill our beans. Put guns in their hands if necessary, to cover your complicity!

I have grown so old and lazy that I won't even link my thinking for you, well you can look it up easily enough except that you won't care to any more than I care to do it for you. New episode on offer. I will grab my little screen and turn off the vision and turn inward to imagine. Or shall I drive? Decisions decisions and not a bit of design to any of it.

No comments: