"I am not the person I was. Everybody fades Martha."-- Tcheky Karyo
Just
before the nearly non-advent of the winter holidays, as I violently convulse
myself into the new year of 22, one of my followers liked a younger woman’s
request, raven-haired if my scant view of her thumbnail was accurate, for
depressing movies, and the usual pop culture cohesion thread began on video
Twitter verse. Lars
von Trier's Melancholia made the rounds, and although I am not going to scroll
back through weeks worth of tweets to indicate a correction on my part in the
stagnate world of my social media interactions, I do indeed stand corrected. Von
Trier conceived the idea for the end of the world as metaphor in a therapy
session. I streamed it on Prime once, and X-ray cued me in on important
allusions made to painters active when German Romanticism was at its height,
and I know a majestic homage to Stanislaw Lem is involved in Trier’s dense
compression of emotional fatalism, but haven’t we digressed enough already?
Melancholia has at best a tangential relationship to cloning as a way of life
in the Western Hemisphere, and another one of my followers whom I’ve mentioned
before on this account, (gee, don’t you want to know who he is?) brought up his distaste for the very British Never
Let Me Go, a film faithfully based
on the very British Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro’s
novel. The film’s stark reality about knowing how the end of your life is going
to go, just as I know how the end of mine is coming along, is very comforting,
and rather neo-imperialist, which is comprehensible. Britain was one of the
last modern empires civilization could recognize in the 20th century, and so was
Japan. Hence Ishiguro’s rather dynamic, brilliant, at times, immersion into
Western sympathies. It is also interesting to note The Island came
out as a box office disappointment around 2005, on or about the year Ishiguro
went to press, and this latter film takes the Rip Van Winkle approach: knowledge
is power, and by dint of sheer luck, the American clones destroy the
institutional harvesting built around them, deceiving them with notions of paradise,
when in reality, they were no more than livestock for their wealthy hosts.
Ishiguro’s plot takes a more egalitarian approach, with only hints about why
the students brought up in these schools didn’t rebel, like the V-chips inserted
in their wrists. It amazes me that Romanek creates the culture shock of an
alternate universe far superior to that of Michael Bay, simply by placing the
doomed in a recognizable landscape long imprinted on our visual cortex as
familiar, like Masterpiece theater,
