So back to movies. From Here To Eternity and Here Comes Mr. Jordan are my two favorites. They both are in black and white although I know at least one of them was colorized. Black and white is better, was better back then. Contrast. Clarity. Technique. That’s why.
We’ve come into an era where every waking moment we are bombarded by stimuli. Statistics recording stimuli are staggering, more in one day than our ancestors one hundred-fifty years ago had in a month. Don’t quote me on that. I remember reading it and it’s probably outdated by now. It might have been more in one hour now than in a month then.
The point is that to get attention nowadays you have to be bigger and badder, louder and louder, more and more outrageous. You have to bang the public on the head and say: look at me.
Then: simplicity, clarity, contrast, technique.
Now: outrage, shock-factor, bigger and badder (with little consideration to better).
The next movie I mentioned was Passenger 57. It’s not a great movie, not even a great movie in its genre. It’s just a simple one-man-saves-the-world action movie. I find it of import because it sets a new limit, a higher one in the outrageousness of where we’ve come as a race of people regarding meaningless killing and narcissism.
Passenger 57 presents changes in our established moral code. We are asked to accept as part of our reality the wanton killing of a family man as the way we’ve come, the way we are evolving as a people.
And we do. Now, some years after 9/11, some time after the making of Passenger 57, we see things like this and it’s just another killing, another terrorist act, another day, ho-hum.
Next movie: Set It Off. Four black women rob banks to get money not because they are criminals but because the system will not give them a break, won’t let them make a living even though they try and won’t even let them simply be themselves. They are discriminated against because of their color and abused because they are women.
Of course robbing banks isn’t the answer, no matter what. But that said, they get caught, because they are not criminals, and they “fight it out.” One gets away and one detective sees her getting away and decides to let her go.
This one is a good movie. It’s groundbreaking in many ways. It’s of import (to me) in that it lays bare what the system is in real-life modern terms and questions the rightness and wrongness of the system. It has more in it too, lots more.
So nowadays there’s a real question about who we are and what we are. Nowadays, there are lots of questions most of which none of us ask. We are busy. We are inundated. We are bombarded by stimuli, most of them distracting, useless and negative. A lot of them are even false or falsified. So like that once-shocking-the-senses killing in Passenger 57, we’re numbed, stressed-out, beyond the limit, and consequently we don’t ask the questions we should be asking.
Believe me, there’s lots of questions.
Why movies?
We can learn from them. The old ones including my two favorites show a clear sense of our morality and sense of justice back then, and the new ones, who knows? Morality is convoluted. Justice is often not served.
Kind of what we’re like and where we are at nowadays, huh?
Don’t get me wrong. No better place to be than here in the USA. But our system, our government, is broken and breaking more and more. If you listen to Pravda USA media– you know who they are–they’ll tell you it’s President Trump who did it and is doing it. If you’re interested in truth and reality, you will look at what the Democrats have done from before Hillary lost until now. They’re already talking of another impeachment.
Nowadays in the movies we’re the zombies. The Democrats want us to be just that.
