Most American movies have happy endings. Since life frequently does NOT have happy endings–and since in the long run we are all dead, to quote Keynes, albeit to another purpose–this makes most movies “escapist”, as we say. A pleasant alternative to reality. Most American media exists to help people working jobs they don’t like, in places they don’t like, often with people they don’t like, to narcotize themselves enough that they stay on the conveyor belt of Life.
Here is my question: what if most of our movies had tragic, sad, “depressing” endings?
On the one hand, with happy endings, we wind up wishing we were those people. On the other, with tragic endings, we are glad we are NOT those people. One fills you with longing and regret–within which self pity and resentment can find ready homes–and the other with gratitude.
It has been many, many moons–a year perhaps of full moons?–since I read Nietzsche’s “Birth of Tragedy” (in German of course, because I am so special I would not even be my own friend), but in addition to the famous Apollonian/Dionysian opposition he drew, I recall one where he commented that the decline of the Greeks began when they started to prefer comedies to tragedies.
A comedy is a way of forgetting your cares. A tragedy is a sort of tonic that after an initial wave of fear and pain and sadness, braces you to your life, with new energy. As one cop I knew liked to say, what doesn’t kill you can still ruin your day, but I am sure Nietzsche’s famous similar dictum had its origin in something like the intended cathartic effect of tragedy.
Orwell was calling us decadent in the 30’s, I guess it was. Jacques Barzun’s book “From Dawn to Decadence” was published twenty years ago.
Decadence is clearly a mutable, subjective idea, but that most Americans–and indeed most of the developed world–has lost its way, is pretty obvious. For me, it was the election of Barack Obama, someone about whom we knew nothing, who had accomplished nothing, and whose main talent was and remains the ability to read a prewritten script with the gravitas of an acceptable soap opera actor.
So much can happen. The show is not over. The Greeks decayed, but the Romans replaced them. Life is change. Certainly, life could change for the worse the planet over for a very long time, but that has not happened. It could also continue to change for the better, as indeed it has been for the past few centuries. Either way, I will keep doing my thing until I can’t. I see no other good option.