“This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world.”
-Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
“Though I’ve hidden in the dark for life
I want to dwell in a house of light
Light, speak to me
Give me a sign
Did I know wrong from right?
There’s no answer in this life
To the lie that separates me
From the light that still surrounds us everywhere”
-Rivers of Nihil, House of Light
“The mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart.”
-Fritz Lang, Metropolis
We lurch ever onward amid progressively pointless participation, the whips of desperation and ego at our backs. To where? Toward a hopeful beacon of tangible reward, set back always by the consequences of our actions . . . unless, of course, we’ve simulated a society where a reward can be collected by our own selfish making—a ruinous contest of ‘me best and me first.’ But what rewards meaningless participation? Well, evidently virtue-signaling and happenstantial coincidence . . . so keep your phones at the ready . . . never know when it’s your time to shine. Our challenge to simultaneously participate in this contest and fabricate meaning from the absurd’s a progressively daunting expedition—one fraught with the repeated collection and abandonment of profitable positions and vestigial ideological guidance. But, to succeed, should the relics of our self-guided, albeit fabricated, meaningful participations, prove sufficiently profitable and materially bettering, a regular reshaping of our selves to accommodate necessary marketability appears mandatory. So, we may as well capitalize on those coincidental consequences and relics of desperate meaning, contorted, convenient, selfish, or otherwise as they are. This is a luxury. This is America, and our way rules.
“The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property—historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production—the misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.”
-Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
Nonsense garbage like Some Country’s Got Talent and Shark Tank nurture our performative desperation. ‘Watch my debasement for a coin’—every endeavor now is such.
America is the benchmark for capitalizing—financially, socially, romantically, occupationally—on individual perceptions of self-worth and desperate validation—a flavorful cornucopia of jealousy, superiority, and vanity. Our contorted perceptions of marketable righteousness amid perpetual competition, as we flounder in a domestic sociological degeneration, deliberately necessitate demographical warfare—every action an exercise in individual achievement over domestic-symbiosis, division over unity.
In the film discussed here, the only individuals with an historical investment in domestic/natural symbiosis and unity over division—the Pueblo—offer competency, cool-dispositions, and problem-solving righteousness in an age where such values are simply disadvantageous for growth and reward.
“The need for money is therefore the true need produced by the economic system, and it is the only need which the latter produces. The quantity of money becomes to an ever greater degree its sole effective quality. Just as it reduces everything to its abstract form, so it reduces itself in the course of its own movement to quantitative being. Excess and intemperance come to be its true norm.”
-Karl Marx, Human Requirements and Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property
“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”
-Frederick Douglass, Collected Speeches
“I watched a man die in the cold
He slept in the street
We left him there with nothing to eat
I watched a man burn in the coals
Shoveling shit into a furnace
Trading a check for his soul
The city is a fucking prison
Force fed failure. Eat what you’re given
The ivory tower, the higher power
I swear they’re laughing as we claw at the scraps”
-Fit for an Autopsy, Hydra
Money at all costs, by any means necessary, only our vanity and selfishness to guide us? Who can blame us? We’re deliberately desperate, suspicious by design, and commanded toward division. Amid such parameters, there’s no tangibly-affluent material excess for the mob beyond that which manicured showmanship might collect, save our parents’ waning sacrifice and fleeting affordability. But with only just under 15 million in some 260+ million American adults making over $200,000 a year (~6%), the odds are hardly in your favor . . . so dance faster little ones.
Ari Aster’s Eddington, which I uncomfortably enjoyed at the behest of a charmingly authoritative film advocate, showcases America’s absurdity—success by selfishness, reward through vanity, survive by hysteria, medicate through distraction—like the revelation of the wheel to a cog . . . manifest Absurdism in a truest form. The film’s many components are unique and ridiculous in their own right and are no doubt being speculated upon by apt critics aplenty. And while I presume my considerations were just as abundant as theirs (probably not . . . but maybe), I’ve only got about four hours to articulate my fascinations and the juice’ll be spent. So, let’s get on with it:
I no doubt regularly take for granted my academic interests, education, and desperation to explain myself to reality, and thus presume everyone’s at least encountered Stoicism, Existentialism, Humanism, Buddhism (which includes Jesus tonight, so pour the sand outa your panties “christians”), and possibly Optimistic Nihilism, and of course they may have . . . but do they remember . . . do you? The flames of wisdom-past flicker in our lanterns, guiding and easing us through turmoil. But the immediate illumination of instant gratification, selfishness, and vanity light the path before us brighter, even if leading us into frivolous societal disregard. Our uniquely progressive contemporary absurdity, though, which, even so illustriously armed with wisdom and self-preservation, we often feel helpless to navigate, intoxicates the calls of our ancestors, muffling an inclination for genuinely empathetic participation . . . so we disregard it . . . if we ever even heard it at all.
There’s a homeless man about the town for the first half of the film and regardless of whichever ideological conglomeration he finds himself amid, there is no empathy for he has little to offer save the righteous pleasure in helpfulness. But the actions of some good Samaritan sprout no further than a hurled water bottle from afar until the desire to rid the town of his nuisance solidifies his own demise. What does he have to contribute save his removal . . . in the interest of growth and betterment for his community? Nothing.
It’s a cliché to adjective to hell and back our cancerous adherence to perpetual individual and societal financial-growth . . . but let’s do it anyway—Capitalistic? Sure . . . Dystopian? No doubt . . . Immoral? The “Christian” party elected a pedophile and regularly legislates to kill the poor and the sick . . . Kakistocratic? “First of all, your honor, just look at him.” Our trifles of material indulgence and often-frivolous sexuality distract sufficiently enough most of the time, but the distraction is the addiction . . . and it has its own price—the numbing of connection . . . of humanity. I presume I need not illustrate and articulate the socio-economic/political absurdities enveloping our daily regularity (many well-displayed in Eddington) . . . and those imaginations your mind just conjured likely manifest unique-to-you (or unique to ‘your side’) frustrations.
It was clever for Eddington to’ve avoided including political parties (unless I missed it. I’m not gonna look it up though, so . . . ). What hill we choose to die on, so to speak, is nearly-exclusively partisan now, so we know which parties who belonged to during the film. But if those aforementioned tools of wisdom-past be either neglected, abandoned, or never encountered at all, the gravity of each partisan purity test devolves into a self-aggrandizing exercise in virtue-signaling.
Without a thoughtful, legitimate individual appreciation for some topical persuasion, what partisan-esque “side” we choose, what ideologies we adopt, how we actively participate in defending or propagating either, and with whom we share whatever we come to “believe” is ultimately charged by the insistencies encouraged by this Dystopian, Capitalistic, Immoral, Kakistocratic, Absurdity called these United States, and this charge is administered by both sides (one more than the other of course, but, from the top, division however achieved is the goal).
We must make money . . . as much as we can . . . however we can (often at the expense of others), and we’re human . . . so we fear . . . and want . . . and desire. And in whatever way we can suppress those fears, act on those wants, collect those desires, and profit from them all as much as possible often enough becomes the adopted partisan-esque ideology we perpetuate. And the powers-that-be monitor these demographical divisions, nurture them, and tow the lines that separate us from one another. And even if there is some pseudo-libertarian-esque adherence to liberty in the face of medical emergencies, those emotional or psychological responses are also swiftly collected by our overlords to ensure our continued degeneration into absurdity—whatever keeps us desperate, isolated, suspicious, frustrated, and violent.
The isolation breaks us, as it did during the pandemic, the frustration angers us, as it does daily, and the violence festers until America does what it does best—destroy. We are desperate for connection, even when we’re not, we hide from negative emotions, in whatever way we can, and become aggressive when things don’t go our way. Mix in our fears, wants, desires, sexuality, jealousy, and materialism and we’ve a rancid mix of desperately hysterical vanity.
Let’s look at three characters to illustrate this—Joaquin Phoenix, The Black Police Officer, and the Chubby White Kid (I’m not looking their character names up . . . sorry).
Joaquin exists in a sex-less (or at least intimiacy-less) marriage, directs his frustration toward his ideological opponent, and sees that opponent’s insistence upon emergency medical directives as infringing on his personal liberties. He has some empathy but lacks any tangible competence beyond weaponized accuracy. As the film goes on and these inadequacies and frustrations fester, so increases his aggression until violence consumes his empathy as he betrays those around him until he finds himself fighting for his life, show-casing his only skill—violence. His reward is bitter, but deserved, and the undiscovered or minimized truths of his actions are superseded by the immensely profitable existence as a mascot for whatever ideology he represents.
The Black Police Officer comes from a family of law-enforcement and thus takes what he considers his responsibilities seriously. He becomes enveloped by the racial unrest after the George Floyd protests, but continues his occupational responsibilities in the face of his ex, who considers her socio-economic/political positions righteous and beckons his ideological realignment. The quagmire of his ideological predicament appears perpetually disregarded as he exists as a monolith of those wishing to exist amid the absurdity without being roped into the chaos. Unsurprisingly, our next character’s jealousy, retribution, and self-interests drag him into it nevertheless and the Black Police Officer becomes an easy scapegoat for violence merely because of his skin-color, dating history, and occupational responsibilities.
The Chubby White Kid cares little for genuine societal-evaluation but his interests in the Black Police Officer’s ex, who claims to care a great deal for societal-evaluation, encourage his participation in a charade to win her heart. This fails as his friend collects her interests instead. Ever invested in appearing righteous in her eyes, however, the Chubby White Kid continues adopting a self-interested adherence to his newly-acquired ideological positions. His journey’s a common one: Establish a brand, reinforce and perpetuate it to collect the preferred rewards of participation and engagement based on the manicured museum exhibit of performative self-aggrandizement. His filmed act of heroism amid the film’s concluding chaos jettisons him into a profitable ideological spotlight like the doppelganger of our own real-life Kyle Rittenhouse.
In an effort of martyrdom-for-show, Joaquin and the Chubby White Kid both adopt and perpetuate ideologies which may bring the reward they desire—a happy marriage, community respect, the girl of their dreams, acceptance, and tangible public admiration. The Black Police officer seems to simply exist within this reality, possibly devoid of any recognizable super-ideology—the masses in the middle, existing on the line of the Yin-Yang, squished between the deliberately festered wall of death propagated by whichever overlords profit the most from our embattlement [the tech business and its corporate investors (currently ravaging these communities, massively inflating utility prices for citizens) versus the suspiciously well-funded anti-fascists in the film].
In the end, Joaquin’s a vegetable and puppet for the community and his ex-mother-in-law, while the Chubby White Kid, coincidently with no real ideology of his own, gets recognition and financial acceleration leading to whatever rewards await his future. The Black Police Officer is left scarred, an unwitting participant in the show, stoic, unfazed by the absurd chaos which ensnared him and unfolded around him. He continues exercising his marksmanship. Because he finds solace in connecting with his passed father? Or because what sense is there in extracting meaning from our absurd existence if creating it for ourselves is too troublesome? Perhaps a refined marksmanship is his personal meaning. May as well refine what we’re already good at. When the dust settles, there is only the perfection of violence.
“We are tourists
Watching the funeral of life
At last, the last disciples burn
Eight billion parasitic worms
An ocean swallowing the shore
Pain now and pain forever more
Undeserving of the petty possessions
A shelf of bones, your trophies bought in blood
Absent at birth, and unimmaculate conception
Return to dirt, allow the gardens to flood
We are tourists
Watching the funeral of life”
-Fit for an Autopsy, Lurch
Reality’s absurd no doubt. Finding meaning in its chaos often feels pointless. We live in a reality of The Kids in the Hall’s Social Justice Art Class versus MadTV’s Darlene McBride. Our ability to disregard this ongoing battle minimizes our ability to participate socio-economically as recognition for our ideological efforts grows progressively more paramount. The pressure builds. Stoicism, Existentialism, Humanism, Buddhism, and Optimistic Nihilism still offer a glimmer of self-guidance to extract meaning from the Absurd, but an aggressive suppression of broad-education limits access to the tools to find our true selves and care for those around us. Mental health is disregarded, inaccessible, and depressing. We’re pitted against one another in a hunger game of desperate self-preservation. Good luck.
After care: I know it’s rough. We all sell ourselves shorter than we ought to, and sacrifice our individuality and mental health to get by in this absurd and flawed system. You are not alone. You are loved and unique, but don’t let that go to your head. The tools to navigate the absurd are available in many ways. Find comfort in your family and nurture the relationships worthwhile. Not all are devoid of altruism, compassion, empathy, and egalitarianism. Realizing there’s no ultimate meaning to anything doesn’t mean finding meaning in life is pointless. The genuine connections we forge along the way, our efforts toward legitimate self-betterment and personal growth outside the barriers of selfishly fabricated participation, and the care we take in looking after our loved ones are great ways to start. Feeling is meaning.
