There are many ways to delude oneself, typically with no good reason to actually believe it. You can focus on your work in order to convince yourself you\u2019re not lonely; you can hide in a movie theatre to avoid existence; you can stare into your phone until fiction becomes fact. None of these things ever work out exactly how you hoped though, because nothing ever does. You miss out on everything else: time, money, hope, all of which compounds into negatively affecting your own future. You could accept this loss early on and get on with it all, or you could let it quietly fester within you\u2026 Or you can just go to space instead. Your call.<\/span><\/p>\n Ad Astra is the latest film from James Gray and \u2013 as per all of his previous films \u2013 it is very good. After an introductory action sequence on a truly gigantic antenna, featuring our hero Roy McBride escaping a mysterious technological surge, Roy is informed that those surges exist all across the world. They appear to be caused by the remnants of the Lima Project, an exploration mission lead by Roy\u2019s father Clifford who was assumed to be dead, leading a mission that was assumed to have failed. Roy soon launches into space to find his (until now) presumed dead father – a father who left him and his mother behind years ago – in order to continue his celestial search for extra-terrestrial life forms. <\/span><\/p>\n A lot of things happen in the interim, as the journey passes space pirates and recording booths and Natasha Lyonne, but the viewer can always safely surmise Roy is going to make it to Neptune to see pops. (The viewer has already seen early in the film that Roy\u2019s father is played by Tommy Lee Jones, and that cantankerous curmudgeon doesn\u2019t sign onto a movie merely to pose for a photo in a spacesuit.) This isn\u2019t a movie about whether or not the hero gets from Point A to Point B, it\u2019s moreso about the zigs and zags along that path. So, of course, Roy gets to Neptune and, of course, his father Clifford is still alive hacking away at his own interplanetary quest.<\/span><\/p>\n Upon entering his father\u2019s ship, Roy talks to Cliff and \u2013 in an inspired writing choice \u2013 Cliff immediately tells his son that he didn\u2019t miss him while he was gone. Despite leaving his son when Roy was 16, living a wholly solitary existence on Neptune for years, Cliff never thought about his son once. The look on Roy\u2019s face as this information is relayed to him conveys to the audience that he knew this the whole time. Roy simply had to hear it from the wrinkly-eyed oracle himself before he could admit it out loud.<\/span><\/p>\n Brad Pitt\u2019s performance as Roy has been appropriately ballyhooed, with most of its power contained in static frames of Roy\u2019s face, merely processing information. Perhaps Pitt\u2019s strongest moment in the film comes right as his father Clifford is telling him that, \u201cHey, I never thought of you once while I was gone. Kick rocks, kid.\u201d When we watch Roy experience this, Pitt chooses to barely move. He sheds a tear, but other than that he is essentially motionless. And yet you can see him registering the most powerful emotion of the movie on his face: \u201cI fucking knew it.\u201d You watch a man break not because of what his father says to him, but because of what he already knew and refused to believe. Then, and only then, can he vocalize what he knew to be the truth all along: \u201cI know, dad.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n You can get where you\u2019re going, you can experience what you wanted to experience, but the only thing you\u2019ll learn is that which you were afraid of the whole time.<\/span><\/p>\n Earlier today, I was bored. When I say bored, though, I mean what all of us mean when we say we\u2019re bored in 2020: I had nothing immediately pressing to do, so I aimlessly looked at my phone while standing and waiting for my rice to cook. I did not stare off into space, as I would have ten years previous, and I did not get out my book to read due to the relatively short time I had to kill. So I scrolled. I found nothing, as I always do. And yet, I will do this again, presumably before I finish this writing session, despite the fact that I know it will break my focus in a way detrimental to the finished piece. But a Vanity Fair cover story on Joaquin Phoenix is peaking out at me from the browser tucked behind my word processor, and those meaningless photos aren\u2019t going to scroll through themselves. He looks like he\u2019s laughing on a couch! Must-see content! <\/span><\/p>\n We live a life of quietly agreeing to believe one technological snake charmer or another, about one snake oil or another. If something doesn\u2019t fit what we\u2019re looking for, we can rest easy knowing that we can keep looking, scrolling on by until the next thing fits our exceedingly temporary needs. The technology in our pocket has instructed us that we control everything, so if we find something we can\u2019t control we can wall ourselves off to it until we find the next desirable thing that we can control; contrary thought need not apply, for it shall be swiftly ignored. And if we don\u2019t find what we want, we continue our unending scroll, our search for what will satiate us in the precise way we wish to be satiated.<\/span><\/p>\n Do I think this world is broken? Yes. Do I believe it is unfixable? Honestly, kind of. I believe that, at some point in my lifetime, we got to a stage where everything was good enough. If we called off the search for all non-medical technological advances in 2007, we probably would have been okay. I would have been cool with stopping the day before the announcement of the first iPhone; the internet is an immensely powerful and wonderful tool, but maybe we don\u2019t need it in our pocket at all times. (Admittedly, this point comes from a place of privilege: as somebody who has lead a comfortable, North American existence, I felt and feel we were far enough by 2007. I recognize technology has given voice to many members of the previously voiceless who actually need to be heard. In this piece, I suppose, the views on technology apply to me and people living existences similar to mine.)<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n People have been bitching about technological advances made in their lifetime since the dawn of time. Everybody misses how things used to be, even though \u201cthe way things used to be\u201d is a relative experience. Cave painters would have probably complained about society\u2019s introduction of the paintbrush had they lived long enough to see the day. In 1845, Henry David Thoreau famously eschewed society entirely, making his own world on Walden pond so he could focus on his writing. Over a century later, Ted Kaczinsky took a more aggressive, exploding-mail sort of approach towards eschewing society from a cabin in the woods. I am not going to retreat from society; I am too deeply entrenched (and I also kind of think Thoreau was a defeatist, let alone my thoughts on Kaczinsky\u2019s repulsive actions). I\u2019m going to stay here, and I\u2019m going to worry that I made the wrong decisions on how to spend my time today, yesterday, and tomorrow, and I justify continuing to do this by saying everybody else around me is doing the same thing. As you can see, because you are reading this.<\/span><\/p>\n Now, my stance on modernity is (obviously) hypocritical. This website exists as the stepchild of a blog that was founded in 2009, after I had read enough opinions online to think mine were thoughtful enough to publish. Our podcast, where we recently discussed Ad Astra, exists because of the continued growth of what is now called content. I heard enough voices talking about movies, and I thought James and I could do better, in an at least semi-unique way. Did we succeed? I don\u2019t know. But we tried, which means I have contributed to the surge (albeit a surge that strikes back quietly, and at a smaller scale, but constantly). Now I suppose I\u2019m trying to figure out how to shield myself from its repercussions.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"ad2A\"](\"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/ad2A.jpg\")
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