This Is Why I Need Art (or “Look It Up Yourself”)

 

 

In the film bio, I harp on the fact that “art compliments science” and blah blah blah. But its more than that. For me, their relationship represents two sides of the same coin.

My academic studies so far have been incredibly inspiring and I’m a better person because of them.

 

However, with a focus on sustainable development, my academic efforts were often accompanied by feelings of sheer terror and helplessness of the world I was learning about.

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” — Albert Einstein

Studying cultural anthropology was a journey for me to learn how and why the only world I’ve ever known has become what it is today: a culture of abandonment and entitlement. And I sympathize, I truly do.

I sympathize with the notion of being the exception to the rule.

The rule most creatures on this planet don’t wear pants;

They don’t print pieces of dried wood pulp and kill eachother over who has more dried wood pulp (think money); T

hey don’t design chemicals to kill plants and then design plants that can’t be killed (think ROUNDUP and the entire corn and soy industries in the US) and sue people who grow these unkillable plants on their land without a licensing agreement (think MONSANTO);

They don’t have licensing agreements;

They don’t chemically strip nutrients from food to make it look better only to “refortify” it with synthetic vitamins (think WONDERBREAD);

They don’t shave their eyebrows in order the paint them back in.

We do.

Yes, we think it’s a good idea to package bananas in plastic bags to protect them AND to serve sausages covered in chocolate-chip pancake batter on a stick. Yes, we eat things called “corn syrup solids”, and we need to be able to eat them with one hand.

Will plastic bags protect us?

We charge more for food that hasn’t been sprayed with chemicals and genetically engineered then for food that was grown, you know, regular. We get cancer from toxins and pollutants we introduce in our environment, and we then treat those cancers with other, different toxins that cause other, different cancers, and so on. Ad nauseam. Seriously.

Like I said, sheer terror and helplessness: that I have been damned to a life run by people I don’t understand, in a world where I sometimes feel I don’t belong. A world where suburban lawns of golf-course grass meant to be grown in fertile swamplands are shipped to semi-arid mountain-scapes where they would normally never survive, if it weren’t for the people who meticulously water and groom it.

This is the same world where the only source of water for some people come from small plastic baggies flown in by international aid workers, who then take pictures of these people pretending to happy so they can market their religion stateside and/or sell the pictures to istockphoto. And so on.

The explanation that “this is how it’s always been” isn’t sufficient. And this is why I need art.

 

Art is the blue pill of blissful ignorance of illusion to the red pill of painful reality. A reality that we, as a civilization, may have overstepped our bounds, and the laws of nature and its gods are intent to punish us for it. Maybe the laws of nature and the gods allow for such convoluted, seemingly unnatural ways of life to florish. Maybe these laws are somehow responsible for concepts like “The Geopolitics of Food Scarcity” and furniture like the “Fuck saw”. Look it up yourself.

I’ve heard once that religion is society looking in the mirror and not recognizing itself. When I try to look at the society, it’s not usually what I expect to see.

 

No matter, I have seen the red pill, and I cannot un-see it. But I need the blue pill to act as a counter-balance. So I take both pills and let them fight it out in my stomach. Together, they form an unsettling balance and perhaps an unrealizable symmetry.

And so thats why my artsy films are so weird.