Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970)
“There's a thousand sides to everything, not just heroes and villains. So anyway... so anyway... so anyway... so anyway ought to be one word. Like a place or a river.”
I had a terrible nightmare last night.
It all began with Roland Gift reading me an article from The Guardian. It was about millennials, and although I often find it hard to grasp what people mean when they say 'millennials' I continue to listen.
Roland was shaking his head as he read this story about young people having no distinction between art and commerce, they were now the same thing. Young people find nothing embarrassing about listening to Taylor Swift, for example. I asked him what was wrong with that, and Mr Gift asked me what Pop Music I listened to when I was young.
“Well, none, because I didn’t like it.”
Roland Gift clicked his fingers and pointed at me.
“And that is what they’ve lost.”
He went on: young people have no quest for something of their very own, young people will just take what is given to them, young people do not recognise the underground. This all seems a little prejudiced against young people to me.
I take a look out of the train window as Roland Gift asks me how many cars I think are in the world, so I ask him “How many people are there in the world?”
“7 billion? 7.1? Something like that.” I think about how many cars that might mean there are and then answer.
“2 billion?” Roland shakes his head. It looks like I’ve overshot the mark, there won’t be 2 billion cars for a while. Huh. Look at me, overestimating how bad things are.
Roland tells me that I’m missing the point, and then launches into a metaphor about how much pollution is created every day by all the cars in the world. But the numbers and figures are so vast and all-encompassing that they simply don’t mean anything. As a response I ask him how many Coke cans there are in the world, but he doesn't know.
And then, because this is all a dream, things get even weirder.
I notice that everyone on our train carriage is looking at a small metal box that they’re holding in their hands. I ask Roland what they’re doing, but he’s not there anymore. So I nonchalantly shuffle closer to a fellow passenger to see what’s with the box. It turns out that he’s got a small screen on it. Huh. That’s impressive.
The man on the train is watching Spider-Man (Sam Raimi, 2002). This seems to me like an odd choice of a film to watch on a small metal box. But maybe I should not speak, because he seems happy. My plan now is to wait for this man to go to the toilet and then I’ll try out this device. But when he goes to the toilet he takes the box with him. How frustrating.
Almost as if they could read my mind, another passenger leans over and shows me their device. They can see that I’m interested so they explain what it is and how it works.
Apparently I can use this to watch anything I like. Speak to anyone I want. Hear anything I want.
I give it a trial by fire and search for Tracks (Henry Jaglom, 1977). Blow me down. There it is.
I look up to thank the person who handed me the box but they’re not on the train anymore, and neither am I. I’m in some kind of meeting. In an office building. There’s a large window and I can see the surrounding buildings and the people far, far, far below. The men around me are talking about numbers and statistics, and it dawns on me that the words they’re talking about are not life. That is life. Outside. It’s happening now, and we’re ignoring it. We can barely see the details at all from up here.
There are people who make sense of this world outside. They take it and reimagine it and repackage it and make it available on the box that everyone has. But here’s the problem. No one gives a crap.
The owners of the box only want the things that they are told they want. They don’t go looking. They seem to be living in the same world as the young people in the article that Roland Gift was reading to me earlier. They want things that they know are not good, and then they talk about them, knowing they’re not good, and then they laugh and throw their hands up in the air and say ‘Well, whatchagonnado?’
Meanwhile, there’s a line of creatives coming through the office. I seem to know all of them, but they don’t recognise me. They all file in one by one and they immediately form two camps:
- Creatives who work exclusively on advertising
- Creatives who work on what they want to work on
The group who make up the former keep showing us their work with a deep sense of pride, and everyone nods and agrees that it is wonderful. I feel like I’m in the story The Emperor’s New Clothes’. This is empty, hollow, glossy garbage. It exists to further a product, nothing more. But no one wants to say these words.
The second group show us something born of and from the heart, but they’re dismissed with little more than a glance. Their work is edgy, daring, it tells us something new about the world that we didn’t know previously. But how much money has it made? Ah… now there’s the question.
I don’t want to be in this meeting anymore, so I ask if I can use the restroom. I leave, taking the small metal box with me. People seem to carry these things when they go to the restroom.
But instead of the restroom I go straight into the elevator. There’s a canister of petrol in there, and I pour it into the metal box. I have a book of matches in my pocket with the words ‘He – She – It’ written on them and I strike a match. The flame catches quickly, and travels not only into the mechanisms of the box, but along a thread in the air that we can’t see that connects everything together. The fire passes immediately from one box to the next, it passes into people’s heads, it burns everything they own, every comfort they have, every reservation in a draught-free restaurant, every fat lazy thought that anyone ever had; it burns how they put money before friends and family, it burns how it’s only at the end, at the very end, after a lifetime of missing the point, that there comes a revelation, and everything rushes to one place that has always been on the distant horizon where it all finally makes sense and you turn to the only other person in the room and say something anything to try and tie all of this together as well as you can before the life leaves your body and your breath comes to a stop.
And then I woke up.