But I just finished watching it. It was very prescient in important ways. He guessed, in 1990, about Google Maps, and really Google itself.
Schematically, he juxtaposes the chaos and impersonality of urban civilization on a global scale. They visit Venice, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Peking, and Tokyo. Only in Japan do things calm down finally.
Then, in what has now become a bit of cliche–but an understandable and needed one–they go to Australia, where they finally wind up with a bunch of aboriginals.
They go, I suppose, from virtually scripted chaos, to calm, to myth, to a perversion of myth, and finally back to the Logos of word, connection, and deep internal order.
Along the way, the Writer, who is cut out of the original version, or at least his narration, comments:
I’d always cherished the beginning of the Gospel of John: in the Beginning was the Word. I began to fear that the Apocalypse would read “in the end were only images.”
Two of the main characters become addicted to images, and it is hard, now, not to see the process as eerily similar to iPhone addiction.
They are cured, in at least one case, by a return to the written word.
I will need to ponder all of this a bit more, but if I might comment on the aphorism “the media is the massage” there is an experiential difference between consuming images–which is what the internet consists in, mainly–and words, and particularly stories. Complex stories. Human stories. Stories with meaning.
Connecting stories are really the glue of human culture. When we long for the simplicity of the Aboriginals, we long for myths, for stories we all know, to which we can all relate.
In America, what connected us until recently was a shared story of “America”. A shared myth of “America” which admittedly glossed over or omitted the ugly details, but which served to unify us, to give us a common reference point, a common language.
No good ever comes from destroying even an ugly past. We all need common reference points, and losing those, we become lost. To become lost, in the modern world, means to be subsumed in a mob, a mob which does not see us, which does not recognize us, which does not care about us. All a mob provides is an animating energy that enlivens living corpses.
This movie is worth the watch. This is not a review, but a riff on my perception of the filmmakers intent. He got an awful lot of things right, including his latent portrayal of the necessity of, and often random fact of, human connection.
It makes you a bit sad, but in a good way. I pray every day that I might help in some way to help all of us find a way out of this mess we have created for ourselves.