The Journeymen

How do you define a good movie?  Does it have to be great through and through?   If it starts of bad, but regains its footing, to finish off on a high, you would consider it good.  If you found it slacking or losing steam in the middle but good otherwise, it would be good.  

But here’s the thing.  The entire movie drives towards one thing.  The conclusion.  So what if a movie is great right until the final minutes, where it completely puts you off with a thoroughly underwhelming end?  Would you consider it a good movie still?  How would you feel about the entire experience?  How would you describe it to someone else who asks your opinion of it?

That, I feel is the philosophical difference between those who focus only on the conclusion and those who can hold good memories of the journey.  For the rest, the journey is like the gas station fast food you probably had on your journey.  Either all gone soon, or gone to a bad place.

There are some of us, then, who will evaluate our lives based solely on the goals and achievements we managed, letting everything else fade into significance, especially in instances of goals not achieved.  We let our entire memories of all that transpired get colored by the filter of what we ultimately achieved.  Much like auteur directors using their favorite filters to suit the mood of the movie.  The rest can look back and sort out and bank on the happy memories of their mixed journey and can chose to relieve the happy moments.  Lucky them.

Epic Fail

Every TV show around you makes references to other TV shows and movies.  They are full of jokes referring to current flash in the pan celebrities some of whom may wash out before you are done reading this.  Within the generational context, these are tantamount to Inside Jokes.

This stems partly from a sense of being unanchored.  Chaos exists in our current world in a multitude different ways.  But considered individually they all appear unworthy of defining an entire epoch.  We are too easily distracted and at a loss to prioritize.  So we are an age defined by several things but nothing really stands out.  

To Quote Tyler Durden “We're the middle children of the history man, no purpose or place, we have no Great war, no Great depression…”  We have become these feckless and cynical creatures, drifting rudderless, allowing ourselves to be fed on a steady junk diet of pop culture.  Ironically, reading and watching about purposeful heroes and antiheroes who do anything but drift; pitting our one lives against those with double lives.

And so we anchor and chain to each other, blind leading the blind.  But there will always be the risk that everything we claim to stand for, everything that we identify ourselves with will fade away, in one big domino chain reaction, each cultural anchor losing significance and therefore, dragging everything around it with itself.