A Culture of Despair

Movie Meltdown - Episode 445 (For our Patreon supporters.)

This week we sit down for a simple movie discussion and suddenly we are knee deep in an examination as to whether or not we are in fact - a culture of despair? But after hammering out the finer points of Thanos' plan for the universe vs. Roddenberry's vision of the future... we quickly fix all the world's problems.

And while we try to figure out just what it takes to assemble the lair of a podcasting super-villain, we also mention… Guillermo del Toro, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Hateful Eight, dragons can, in fact, be defeated, a genuinely weird movie, more concentrated death... in a more productive way, the creative and constructive power of the imagination, escapism for poor people, when your real world has crossed over into what you thought was dystopia, non-likable characters, a zero sum game, a loss of faith in ourselves and each other, escapist literature, co-creators for the new world we live in, hanging out at one of Dali’s parties, French new wave, not really a clear narrative of who’s supposed to be heroic, a slave to his own reductivity, AP Bio, it’s because we’ve accepted, in a very internal way, a kind of preexisting low expectation for human beings, justifying literary endeavor, I don’t have guests over to sit and take tea, you really shouldn’t compare arts, a productive calculus, the poetic capacity of persons, HAL 9000, living in a fantasy world, a mis-step from a talented writer, a quote from Chesterton, we’re always reflexing the universe back at itself, we’re getting more fractured, misery can be beaten, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, rose-tinting history, your natural desire for something that is inherent to you, moral un-culpability, The Shape of Water, take a stand on an abstract philosophical issue and try to defend it, the human being as artist, moral injunction and the heat-death of the universe.

Spoiler Alert: Spoilers for the epic death and destruction of Avengers: Infinity War. You have been warned!

“There must be more that your nature is reflecting about the kind of cosmos that you're supposed to be living in then the sheer misery and despair of the world.”

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