"The feeling contains no obligation." A few thoughts on Disclosure Day
There are books, movies and music that you would be missing something if you didn't experience. We may never know what we are missing but no doubt we are. And then there are those that wash over you, you snap out of it and you are not changed in any meaningful way.
Disclosure Day uses tropes and dramatic camera zoom ins to Emily Blunts eyes as she stares at a cardinal - but after watching this movie you are no different for having seen it. No part of you is better or more aware. I want to say that is like eating a single chip but a chip leaves behind calories you can turn into heartbeat and thought muscle twitch. If you mediate on it you may consider the hands that brought that food out of the earth and transformed it and delivered it to your grocery store. I want to say it is like wind but that too can move you. Cotton candy doesn't work as a metaphor because that might remind you of something when you were a child. This movie was an actual negation. An absence. The world is no better or worse now that it is in it. It is a two and half hour youtube short. I struggle to imagine that a viewer could possibly feel threatened by this movie, or connected in a lasting way (beyond the period of time that the images are being streamed into them,) to something greater or other than themselves.
I am mindful of the fact that it is easy to punch up but if there is any justice this movie will be listed along with some Nabisco commercial Spielberg directed in 1979 but never aired. To be clear, I do not begrudge mindless entertainment. I spend vastly more time on it that I would like but I would like to call things what they are. This movie is that.
“Once I watched a few episodes of Game of Thrones, it had been highly recommended to me, this was a time when people generally spoke very enthusiastically about HBO TV series, supposedly they were almost like novels. And the episodes I watched were good, the scenarios were believable, the actors highly skilled, the action grabbed your attention—as soon as one episode ended, I moved on to the next, I wanted to find out what happened, it was almost as if the plot hypnotized me, or like I was dreaming, for time passed imperceptibly and suddenly it was one o’clock in the morning. The whole time I watched I was full of emotion in response to what was happening on the screen. Joy, sorrow, excitement, fear—it all flowed through me. When I finally went to bed, however, I felt empty, in an unpleasant way, similar to how I felt after playing video games for hours on end in earlier years.
Why?
“I think the reason is simple. What we seek in art is meaning. The meaningful carries an obligation. With obligation come consequences. If a child falls from a high tower, as happens in Game of Thrones, you might feel shock and a pang of something that resembles sorrow, which dissolves in the next instant, for the plot moves on and that the story is captivating is in fact the whole point. The child is forgotten. The feeling carries no obligation.”
link to karl ove here for a slightly longer version of the above