BIRTHING DEATH; 365 Impressions of a Dying World, vol.1

I used to think cinematic mysteries approximated those of the void, the world, the impenetrability of matter itself, the incorrigible secretiveness of bodies remaining subjectively secretive despite how readily accessible an online MD. I used to think cinematic mysteries could bare similar shapes to the riddles of time and birth and death and the seeming performance of the air itself only pretending to be air. You know? But actually I feel now like I've seen behind the curtain and glimpsed all there is to glimpse, taken all the pleasure there can possibly be in deconstructing constructed riddles and mysteries. That are then honeyed with attractive players and gilded with expensive production values and borne aloft digitally enhanced screens; with popcorn and soda and neutral company. Is this everyone's theatre experience? So cinematic mysteries no longer feel satisfying to me, the convention of the entertainments available which I used to religiously pursue now seem so fucking stale so laughably faded and expected, dropped like palliatives like sedatives; I'm embarrassed to have ever thought storytelling (in this medium anyway) had radical potential. But then I guess that's my personal measure of value, if something has radical potential; a fluid measure seeing as capitalism is so adept at coopting the means of it's demise aimed by dissident hopefuls. Who more often than not cash in somewhere along the way because a comfortable life is a sunnier prospect than misery, poverty, and eventual defeat. No matter how principled. Maybe cinema is only ever as exciting as a mirror, so this dysphoria I'm experiencing could be symptomatic of some other seismic shift in my personality. Navel-gazing is perhaps a suitable cinematic accompaniment. It is after all about window dressing the capitalist individual's psyche, the Hollywood productions anyway. But it's naive to think that 'indie' cinema, whose budgets are still passed through gate-kept thresholds, whose content is still calculated through a metric of manageable (even complimentary) dissidence; it is naive to think, for example the recent prestige-kerfuffle of A24, that independent or alternative cinema which then pitches itself as such is anything but a variation in flavour, as opposed to being emblematic of the weakening of parasitical commerciality's hold on despairing publics. Despairing is right. We are systematically beat down by an ideological accessory to nature's existing cruelties which include the corruption of time, the inevitable loss of being temporally bound beings. Tethering to others in the harrowing flux, for comfort, according to our programming as social animals; only to have these tethers painstakingly un-braided over life's sublimely indifferent march towards oblivion. I used to think cinema was a refuge but now, having proven itself the oppressor through the insidious omnipotence of streaming, the toad nestled in the tree-roots has eaten every last spore and grub, every last possibility of magical renewal of itself, of fresh saplings; gone. Why do I even care so much that cinema seems dead to me; not that it objectively is, just that I'm having a momentary loss of romantic feeling for it. A romantic feeling which for me has historically been very strong. I think it's a sign. From my wider self, from the version of myself that uses gut-feelings and cock-twitches to communicate to my shallower, more limited conscious self; the single-hemispheric management department, the vantage which collates objective materials only and neglects in it's rigid equation all the penumbric deities like hunches and nightmares and excessive horniness. I personally believe there are messages from the divine in excessive horniness. But as a gay man I might be biased. What I suspect is happening is that my higher self is registering that the world is winding down, and cinema being the mirror or lens through which I'd cohere my environment into a legible 'world', now seems defeated by a surplus of information, by a maelstrom of pressurised data. Cinema as an external hard-drive, as a cognitive extender, has reached maximum capacity (personally speaking). Of course, there's always the fact that cinema no longer functions as centrally as it once did in terms of dictating/manufacturing reality. Even before the hyper-connectivity of the Internet and normalcy of personal computers, and way before smart phones, the cinema screen and it's dominant diegesis shifted from ideological strong-arm to a richer discursivity, an increased number of voices producing a greater variety of images/stories/affects towards dynamism, plurality, and other words people use when they want to critically justify watching semi-pornographic 'art'. But cinema's specific diegesis no longer monopolises cultural production in the universally influential way it did for the latter part of the twentieth century. T.v. does that shit now. You'd think approaching ruin as we are on a global scale that television, long keeper of temporal flows what with classical forms being dictated on a nationally broadcast schedule (now freed in a soupy internet time-flux from which viewers can conjure and shelve entertainments at will); yeah, you would think that a medium so wedded to temporal regulation, so enamoured of the 'normalcy' of the five-day work week and it's vetting, would suddenly be exploding with apocalyptic thematics. But it's doing the opposite. I only see shows about life sans pandemic. They are unbelievable at this point. The normal lives they depict are even more fantastical now than they were a year ago; not because of their tailored bodies or effortlessly maintained inner-city apartments or polished quippy dialogue, but because the presumed backdrop of all of these whimsical players and their interactions just imploded. 'Normal life', from this side of 2020? What a fucking fairytale.