Escapism Has Doomed Us All

The more the world sinks into a quagmire that'll engulf us, the more I despise people who say our situation is otherwise.

My daily routine is not a regimented as many of my type, however something I like to do every day is to eat my lunch precisely at 1 o'clock whilst watching the news. Obviously I'm not always able to do this. I keep trying to break my daily routine in an attempt to re-condition myself to stop being such a repetitive failure. All this does though is make me a spontaneous failure, whilst deciding if a reliable sequence of fuck-ups is preferable to variable fuck-ups of mixed severity. But I digress.

The other day, the television I usually watch the news on broke. I'm still not sure how that can happen in 2017 considering TV's are digital and no longer used as a football by me when angry. So I was forced to imagine what the newsreel would look like. My guess was thus:

1. Donald Trump did something fucking stupid.
2. Something about Brexit. It might be a Conservative telling us not to worry about the eruption of that volcano we all live on, or it might be a non-government figure saying WHAT ARE YOU ALL STANDING THERE FOR?! THE VOLCANO IS ERUPTING!! RUN!! This report will conclude with no-one knowing what the fuck Brexit is.
3. Something about either the NHS, social care, schools, or prisons being in crisis.
4. Onto local news now. For some reason I get stuff about Hampshire when I live in Sussex. I guess we're too dull to have our own segment.
5. Something about the local council being in crisis.
6. The trains are still shit.
7. Some horrific crime that involves a trial taking place in Winchester Court, because apparently there are no other courts in the south. The grisly details of the crime are a welcome escape from the grisly details of the previous reports.
8. A lighthearted story that involves a middle-class heritage site, a middle-class tourist attraction, an invention that only the middle-class can enjoy, or middle-class children.
9. A random guess at the weather.

To recap: EVERYTHING is shit. Almost every sector of British society is completely fucked. Finance, Healthcare, Education, Welfare, Justice, Transport, International Relations, I've probably missed something out, but if I have then just assume it's fucked.

Do you understand how difficult it is for a fiction writer right now? The volcano is erupting! I want to run, but I'm right on top of it. How can I craft another world when the one I live in is exploding. The song 'Beds Are Burning' keeps repeating itself to me. "How can we sleep when the beds are burning?"

Generally, when the state of the world declines then the need for escapism rises. The mid to late 70's were grim for many. Vietnam was a disaster. The Cold War was ongoing. The western economy was faltering. President Nixon was embroiled in scandal. The space-race was over. Women's rights took a huge step backward (Anchorman is an excellent satire of the time). Mid-70's cinema is fascinating because of how cynical it is. Taxi Driver, the quintessential 70's masterpiece, was a macabre love-letter to a broken New York. Even high concept science fiction such as Silent Running and Logan's Run were dystopian visions of mankind destroying itself. There was no such thing as superhero movies. The two biggest hits were a film about a killer shark and a girl being possessed by The Devil.

Then, in 1977; Star Wars happened.

When studying film, as much as I enjoyed learning about the dark and seedy films of the 70's, it was a relief when we got to Star Wars. It's difficult to elaborate the cultural whiplash that occurred. George Lucas's two previous films were a dystopian thriller about a totalitarian state controlling the populace in an underground facility (which flopped because even for the 70's it was too grim) and a bittersweet 50's nostalgia-bait teen romp (which was a modest success amongst depressed 30/40 year old's). Star Wars, meanwhile, is a science-fantasy that is part-50's B-Movie and part-samurai epic with the visual wonder of 2001: A Space Odyssey combined with the action and pace of a James Bond film. Star Wars was everything and nothing like any film before it.

Well, there's one thing is wasn't: political. Yes, the Empire is an allegory for both Nazism and The British Empire; two dead ideologies that at the time weren't present in popular conciseness. They are now, of course, which leads me nicely to our next point.

Obviously, fiction was still political. I'd argue it's impossible to not be imparting a political message of some kind in a piece of art, even if the message is: "there's no political message." There was an underground movement of anti-Thatcher art in the UK, not to mention the anti-Regan punk in the US. But notice that, after Star Wars, politics became the exception rather than the norm.

Instead, fiction became obsessed with a binary good vs evil narrative. It's no coincidence that the first major superhero film, Superman, followed from Star Wars. Stephen Spielberg begun making films about the purity of the human spirit. Spielberg would collaborate with the same team who did Star Wars to create the Indiana Jones franchise; which was about good vs Nazis.

This went all the way up to politics. Ronald Regan was previously an actor. When he became President, he remained an actor. He pushed a simplified narrative of good vs evil that US politics maintains to this very day. He ensured that his face would always be in the news, always delivering a bland speech about 'the American way' and the purity of the human spirit. All whilst he did nothing. The politics was sold out to mega-corporations and bankers. The role of the politician changed from actual politics to upholding the masquerade that everything was fine because we're the good guys. There's nothing to see here. Nothing to worry about.

I want you to name me any post-Star Wars blockbuster that isn't about good vs evil. Name one blockbuster where the evil isn't evil for the sake of being evil, and the good isn't good because it's the binary opposite of evil. I suppose The Hunger Games is a hesitant exception since in Mockingjay it becomes apparent that 'good' commits several atrocities and Katniss herself toes the line between protagonist and antagonist. But even then, there's a clearly evil antagonistic force in play. It would've been better if President Snow wasn't the driving force behind The Capitol and instead was an inheritor of an old and tyrannical ideology he admires and upholds, but couldn't fully overturn even if he wanted to (like Theresa May).

The driving force within these good vs evil narratives is that there's an 'on-off' switch. There's always a simple way to reverse the evil. All you need to do is shoot a torpedo through an exhaust port to blow up the Death Star. You just need to steal the Ark/Grail before them. You just need to kill Snow. Strip General Zod of his powers. Destroy the ring. Dispose of all seven horcruxes. Shoot the bad guy. Get the girl. Live happily ever after.

As the 90's became complacent, with a boom in the economy and the end of the Soviet Union, fiction became focused on disasters. At first there were aliens and monsters in Independence Day and Godzilla, which filmed the mass-destruction of urban landscapes like cumshots. There were still 'good' characters (hideous, one-dimensional stereotypes, but 'good'), but the evil wasn't even a sentient entity because the western world stopped seeing evil as something humans were capable of. Armageddon was about an enormous rock. Titanic, the highest grossing movie of the 90's, was about a block of ice. In fact, there were not one but two major films...about volcanoes.

Star Wars returned in 1999, but it wasn't relevant. The prequels focused on good becoming evil and of evil camouflaged as good. Episode 1 was called The Phantom Menace, and it concerned a clunky political system haunted by an invisible threat. By 2005 it was portraying intergalactic coups and slides into fascism, but the world just wasn't in the mood for a return to Star Wars because the first prequel 1. Was released at the wrong time, and 2. Was shit.

It was only on September 11th 2001 when an invisible threat and corrupt politicians activating emergency powers became all too relevant again.

Coincidentally, two films came along which were perfect. Both were adaptations of a book series. Both started a major franchise. Both were escapist good vs evil stories where the evil was personified by a sentient entity equipped with a convenient on-off switch. Lord Of The Rings, and Harry Potter.

Would these both have become the defining franchises of the 2000's without 9/11? Since they were both adaptations of popular novels (though the novels weren't nearly as popular prior to adaptation) they probably would have enjoyed some success. But would we have got not one, not two, but three bloated, indulgent Hobbit films? Would we have got eight Harry Potter films that only concluded in 2011 only to get both a spin-off film and a spin-off West End play in 2016 with more incoming?

As Saddam Hussein, portrayed by George Bush and Tony Blair as the ultimate evildoer, was put on the run by an invading Western Coalition; Return Of The King blared throughout cinemas. With just the drop of a ring; Sauron exploded, Mordor collapsed, and all evil was driven out of Middle Earth forever. Saddam was defeated, Bagdad was reduced to rubble, and all of Saddam's terrorist scum faded away with it. The noble West had triumphed against the evil East. Return Of The King thus became one of the highest grossing films of the 2000's and bagged a shitload of Oscars.

As we attempted to come to terms with international terrorism, which had previously only been a low-key threat and not the subject of every other news report; we were transfixed by Harry Potter. He too grew up attempting to comprehend an entity that seemed so closely linked with his life. Voldemort hung over Harry as the threat of terrorism loom,ed over us all. Harry was raised battling an un-dead wizard-Nazi. I myself was raised on not trusting anyone who looked Middle Eastern, on always being afraid to travel, of never knowing who might be watching over you.

But, in 2011, he was caught. Osama Bin Laden was shot in a US-led raid without trial, along with several others who presumably were Al-Qaeda affiliated and thus absolutely deserved having their brains redecorate the room. As people were partying over the spilled guts, the final part of Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows was released. We watched Harry finally destroy Voldemort once and for all. As he died, all his followers and all his evil was washed away. With just one swift stroke all terrorism in the world was destroyed forever. God bless America!

Except, as we all know, this is bullshit. The War On Terror is a failure, and we know it's a failure because sixteen years after the war's declaration and six years after the death of Bin Laden, we feel even less safe. Saddam possessed no weapons of mass destruction. The only danger he posed was to his neighbours, thanks to Henry Kissinger's grand plan that making every Middle Eastern nation hate each-other would somehow create peace. The only people he destroyed were his own, and so the Coalition put an end to the Iraqi people's suffering by destroying their homes, wrecking their countries infrastructure, upending their political system, and murdering the people they claimed to be liberating.

There were no terrorists in Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion. Hussein had no link to 9/11, and Bush/Blair knew this. Iraq's punishment? After dealing with US/UK forces, the country faced a new government that was actually more ideologically regressive than Hussein's. This was followed by terrorism, a civil war, and now ISIS. We've ruined once-sovereign nations, yet when refugee's come to our doorstep we have the gall to evict them - the victims of our own atrocities. Meanwhile, George Bush and Tony Blair dare to denounce Trump and Brexit whilst skipping away unpunished. Shoot the bad guy. Get the girl. Live happily ever after.

The volcano is erupting. The beds are burning. The ship is sinking. The asteroid is about to hit us. Evil has become so all-encompassing it's reached that stage where it no longer appears sentient. But the twist fiction will never give us is that there never were any good guys. The world is ending. Global warming is being ignored. Healthcare is being eradicated. The good guys gave up and let evil become a volcano. We're all going to die, and guess which major franchise should finally make a return just as this happens, just as we need an escape from this madness?

Star Wars.