Hello again,
This is the follow up to “the monster could have been more prehistoric” which I wrote a few weeks back.
I had COVID then, and I was semi delirious, and my boyfriend was like: Why are you writing about quantum physics? And I was like: Does it make sense? And he was like: I have no idea, I don’t know anything about quantum physics. But I read it again there and it does make sense now I feel normal again.
I was thinking about why the atomic bomb is popping up as a theme in films. I think it relates to the marketing around the bomb when it was first developed, that it would put an end to wars in general because countries with nuclear weapons wouldn’t attack each other.
I don’t know if anyone in power really believed this to be true. Obviously it didn’t happen. The US and the UK are basically constantly either directly at war or funding wars, which they (we) do from a position of safety because no country would declare war on the US, and by extension, the UK. (I might think of myself as Irish, I may have never had a British passport, but I pay taxes to the UK government, so that is irrelevant in this case.)
Modern warfare is strangely impersonal from the perspective of people who live in the West, with drones and bombs funded by our taxes deployed in far flung places most of us will never visit. But it is also hyper visible because of social media. Gaza is one example of this. It is very strange to experience. War is not dangerous to us at all, but we are aware of its omnipresence, and our role in that, and this is distressing.
I watched The Zone of Interest recently, which is about a Nazi officer who lives with his family in a large house with an idyllic garden just on the border of Auschwitz. He works designing extinction machines to be used in Auschwitz.
It is a thoroughly sickening film, I felt genuinely disgusted by it. I did think it was brilliant, and very well done and important (as strange as it is to use those words about something which made me feel so revolted). I’m not sure I will ever watch it again but I am glad I saw it.
Gun shots, barking dogs and screams can be heard constantly over the fence and the family have grown accustomed enough to this to ignore the noise. I did see a parallel there, in the way we interact with war at present, with photos of mangled bodies in one Instagram story, and a meme or a selfie in the next.
In general I found I was most disgusted by the family’s behaviour when it felt most recognisable. The officer's wife, for example, sifts through clothes stolen from Jewish women who have been imprisoned in the camp to find treats for herself. In one scene she finds a used lipstick in the pocket of a fur coat, tries it on, and decides to keep it. There was something so horrifyingly familiar about the sheer greed of this.
It actually made me think of fast fashion, with clothes made in sweatshops by people who are treated as if their lives have no value, to serve as disposable items for people who have a huge surplus of clothes already. It’s not exactly the same, of course, but a parallel did come to my mind.
Likewise, when the husband goes to bed at night he carefully and meticulously locks every door in the house, despite the fact that his neighbours are imprisoned, guarded by armed soldiers and dogs and separated from him by high walls topped with barbed wire. Despite the fact he is working to design machines to murder them as efficiently as possible, he still perceives himself to be the one under threat.
I noticed as soon as the film was over I scrambled to turn my phone on. I have started to notice that our phones can be a good way for us to distract ourselves from uncomfortable feelings because they are full of so many dopamine triggers. I realised I was trying to distract myself from that feeling of disgust I had watching The Zone of Interest so I held off turning it on for a little while and tried to sit with that feeling.
This too, I realised, is a strange feature of watching wars on social media. The discomfort certain photos or video footage provokes is basically instantly dampened by the next video or image being one which is happy or silly or funny, or because a message from our friend arrives. Thirty seconds of disgust is much easier to shake off than a two hour film.
Recently I was talking to a friend of mine who is quite a bit older than me and he was annoyed about people tweeting about (or posting on instagram about) going to protests for Palestine. He said something like: Oh millennials all think they’re going to save the world by tweeting. It doesn’t do anything.
I do not think a single person on earth thinks they will save the world by posting on social media. Or maybe there are one or two desperately unserious and tiresome influencers out there who do, but frankly such figures should be beneath our consideration.
I think most people my age are painfully aware of how little our views or opinions seem to count for anything in political terms. But that doesn’t mean we all just stop thinking or feeling the way we do, or wanting to express our thoughts and feelings.
Till next time xxxxx
You can buy my novel, Lazy City here.