The reasons why nihilist memes are so popular

I'm sure many thoughtful people have already told you that we're surrounded by pictures; there are probably too many pictures. Pictures of any kind and source claim their dominion on information. Words are probably too many as well, too "flickering", and perhaps we don't focus on them enough - also because of the fact they don't focus on us themselves. But pictures are immediate, often staggeringly immediate; most of the times, probably, people improvise as photographers because an overwhelming information culture leads them to share their visual impressions at any cost, in a narcissist (a little onanist) struggle to feel special. 

As a lover of literature, I am frequently bored by words myself, especially by novels, because narration does nothing but repeating the standard, predictable structure of everyday life and language - at least, most of the novels whose covers are in the windows of the bookshops. No, I don't think I'm picky; I just think putting words on a page with a correct syntax does not mean being a writer. The way we surround ourselves with words shows so clearly the unsuitableness of our language; we repeat the same language structures all the time, even in a creative context, because we need to make reality, to some extent, still recognizable.

Guy Debord (1931-1994), in his famous work The Society of the Spectacle (1967), talked about mass society's need of being fed with pictures in order to be kept awake for the "spectacle", a non-life created by capitalism to be in charge of workers' desires and needs. Spectacle, which means the industry of advertisements, entertainment, information etc, somehow took over the ancient role of the Church in giving people a vision of an inconceivable world of possibilities (what you can buy, the place you can go on holiday, the new technological devices, the virtues and enterprises of leaders and so on). Among the many spectacular features, he also talks about the central role of picture: "Where the real world turns into simple pictures, simple pictures become real beings, and effective motivations to a hypnotic behaviour" (18; translation is mine). 

But this post is not meant to be whiny and nostalgic, not at all. Fluid, ever changing, less and less definable, society is not very likely to be described by words, that's all. This is not to be necessarily considered a drawback of our frantic life, but a matter of fact; an interesting matter indeed, because our life goes much faster than our verbs and adjectives, for the first time in human history. The social media empire (even if it still has way too many emperors fighting for the throne) replaced, for the most part, not just our judgment, but our expressiveness. 

That's why, I think, memes (I am talking about Internet memes), among the most recent forms of communication, are the most likely to become viral: the social channel, the combination of picture and word, creates an immediate ironical message, mostly funny, which can be shared straight away. The phenomenon of meme should be analysed in light of the fact that most of the times we need something to be "viral" before deeming it worthy of our attention; and yes, I think this is partly a pity, because we focus more and more on stupid things, which are, that's another matter of fact, the most popular.

I guess you've already seen this painting in some articles or books about mass society; so, I don't have much to write. The fact is that Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888) by James Ensor (1860-1949) always looked like one of the best sociopathic pictures ever to me; is it just me, or there's something monstrous in this crowd? All those soldiers in rows, all those grotesque masks not very interested by the arrival of the Messiah, all those people trying to have a good time in such a suffocating place made me think that the painter was unbearably tired of masses; given the script on the top, I'd say this work may be called Social Network.

Many memes are about a specific category of things or people (Game of Thrones, Donald Trump, football), and sometimes they cannot be understood by every person; Facebook pages, of course, are often created just to share memes, and Facebook memes pages are probably the most popular at all. In particular, there's a type of memes I am, I confess, really into, which lately became very fashionable; its appeal is probably the main thing convincing me not to leave the social media world. I'm talking about nihilist memes.

From the Nihilist Memes II Facebook page. This is an example of the cynism I and many other normal working people probably cannot live without. This popular page often talks about children's destiny, since children's happiness and possibilities in a brand new world is exactly what helps most of people not to think about the nothingness of the universe. We make children for ourselves, and nihilism comes more from acceptance than resistance; life itself, having goals, procreating etc. are an act of resistance. 

I am sure nobody expected memes to become so popular as a reaction to the bitterness of life; starting more than ten years ago, cynical, sarcastic, often exaggerated memes about the emptiness of the universe, the urban life paranoia and various inner wrestlings spread through the Internet via every social media, probably starting from 9GAG and 4chan, and the birth of a Facebook page called just Nihilist Memes in 2014 made them even more various and sophisticated. I really enjoy the irony these memes express, especially about the way nihilists (but they often use this word as a synonym of depressed people) have to deal with the rest of the world. An exorcizing wit considers death to be the main reason of strong human passions, including, of course, the instinct to reproduce. 

Death is often seen as a liberation, and the tragic irony about the very few probabilities we have to pursue "real" goals (nothing is real, because we cannot but delay temporarily our appointment with death) is often, and willingly, excessive. The end of philosophy as a systematic study of reality is shown through the means of sarcasm about past philosophers' failing definitions and studies, or through pictures of Nietzsche, the great destroyer of illusions.

Now, dark humour is not a new thing, that's for sure, but I think there's something a little disturbing in the way we, as inhabitants of the globalized boredom, repeat to ourselves that everyone and everything dies; disturbing, mostly because very often, instead of living, we just attend life (as you are expected to do in a society of spectacle), and wait for things to pass on the screen in order to get some laugh or distraction out of our ridiculous human tragedy. 

Our common conception about death being usually impersonal and scary, we have to be ironic at any cost, especially through popular video games, films or cartoon pictures, that is, recognizable and somehow appeasing pop culture fragments. Even Super Mario can remind us we are nothing and will always be nothing; Spongebob's large smile is often used by these memes as a maniacal laughing about horrible contradictions of life; Rick and Morty's famous character Mister Meeseeks became a paradigm of an urging will to die, in order to end the incessant existential suffering. As I've heard once in a 2008 film by Paolo Sorrentino, irony is a medicine you get not to die, and "all medicines you get not to die are atrocious". 

As I said, many times I enjoy nihilist memes, and I really appreciate the fact that the art of memes managed to make us laugh about topics people are usually scared of. But I also think that the astonishing popularity of bitter existentialist problems depicted by funny pictures can lead people, as usual for most of Internet features, to overlook life itself. By striving to find a distraction, something to focus our sight on while we drag ourselves to work and back home, somehow we overlook life, we miss its depth and its complicated beauty, we get to pessimistic conclusions without really staring into it; short story short, being a nihilist became far too easy, and everyone can be ironic about depression without even imagining what depression is. 

Memes can be misleading, and I often notice that people feed on memes in a worrying escapism. Irony does represent a way not to  succumb to sadness, of course, but maybe we have learned this art so well that we forgot how to appreciate the real life (I mean, outside the spectacle) in the serene awareness that it is just a transitory state of matter. I have the feeling we spend more time complaining about the void than living according to it, which means we shouldn't embrace the emptiness of life without seeing the powerful, contradictory mystery of life itself - we never see dead people but in fiction or in the news, for example, and we're aghast, mystified every time someone tells us they're unsettled by this economy-based existence; we don't know how to deal with real problems, but we always talk about anxiety, fear and suffering. Anxiety is definitely one of the most common keywords in memes. Everyone needs to talk about anxiety, mostly due to trivial problems. Nobody can afford to be considered normal; everyone wants to show off as a troubled person.

Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the most frequent "victims" of nihilist memes, given his considerations about life's meaninglessness. His famous phrase "Hell is other people" is relentlessly quoted, I'd say pathetically, not just by memes but also in social accounts of people who are eager to look clever. Sartre's Nausea (1938), a canonical existentialist work, is all built around the pain triggered by the awareness of being alive - life as a thinking about life, generating indecision, lack of goals, open questions. The absolute scepticism and disgust of the protagonist Roquentin, feelings he has towards roughly everyone and everything, accompany him constantly through his aimless wandering in the town. This is probably the main work inspiring memes authors, whose work, I think, is often due to frustration.

I am not the one who talks about hunger in the Third World in order to minimize depression and psychic diseases, but maybe memes are too often a way to wallow and not to think about how big problems-free our little First World place is, at least for now. We can realize the void, and this gives us the power to overcome any poisonous illusion, religion, blindness; even existentialist pain can be a nice reason to visit more places, finish reading War and Peace, maybe help people who cannot afford to think about deep things.

The fact is, depression is not nihilism. Given the fact that suicidal tendencies became so popular, maybe we should reconsider the nature of our feelings; are we truly sad, or are we just looking for attention? Are we really pessimistic, or do we just want to look interesting? The fact that nihilism became something so easy to share maybe made nihilism itself an impersonal attitude, a fake approach to life. A depressed person, on the other hand, wouldn't need irony, and maybe there are no proper reasons to make so many jokes about suicide. 

As explained in Guy Debord's masterpiece, The society of spectacle (1967), the more unsatisfying life grows, the more powerful spectacle becomes; so, what I find eerie about the rise of nihilist jokes in the past decade is the fact that we keep staring at a screen which tells us life is bad because we are put in front of a screen (Black Mirror is a perfect example in this sense). Basically, since we cannot get satisfaction out of an economic system which puts us at the edge of existence, we cannot but laugh at ourselves bitterly through the means given us by that system itself. 

We struggle for new expressions for our unsatisfaction, because this unsatisfaction is the only thing making us feel alive. We are so accustomed to the fact life is competition and harshness and money-based ideas that we mostly give up looking for a balance outside the home walls; it's exactly the same paradox making Netflix and videogames almost pathologically necessary for so many people (Debord [217-219] talks about this obsessive need of fiction as a schizophrenic reaction to the fear of being absolutely unnecessary].

We hardly experience death as a collective feeling, but we strive to see death in memes and fictions; we hardly find the will or the time to read philosophy books, but we have to put Kierkegaard and Sartre in a funny picture. The utterly ahistorical social context we struggle for money in persuades us to look at history as something ridiculous; only this context could generate this type of dark humour, and an ahistorical nihilism we can use to justify our fear of life. Augmented reality is probably the best way to make nihilism unauthentic: our impressions and feelings are so artificial that somehow even our fear is. 

Stalker (1979), the famous work by A. Tarkovsky, is about nihilism, but not exactly from an existentialist (ahistorical) point of view; the dialogues between the three protagonists, often cryptic and symbolic, often refer to the lack of goals and clear desires of modern humanity. The journey to the Room, an enigmatic place where one is supposed to obtain what they desire the most, turns out useless, because apparently nobody is able to desire something clear anymore, and history itself, as the "Professor" explains in a beautiful monologue, has no direction anymore, no past nor future, but a chaotic blend of the two, so that nobody knows what is worthy of struggling. I mentioned this film because somehow it explains the "nihilist" boredom generating so many memes throughout the Internet; if you didn't watch it yet, you need to know it can be soporificly slow. Seriously.

Memes are not a bad thing, neither a good one. They're an interesting cultural phenomenon, and I like talking about it as such. As you maybe already know, this word, derived from a 1976 Richard Dawknig's famous book, means "something which can be imitated, replicated" (Greek "mimema"); there couldn't be a better definition for our disquieting misconceptions about culture. Being entertainment a mean of survival in an urban life which makes us feel meaningless, knackered and inadequate (the struggle to survive never stopped, just changed its selection methods), I totally understand why we need pictures to be countless, immediate, simple and possibly funny; I just hope that this never-ending hunger of shallow information will not persuade us to overlook words and pictures that maybe are still worth something more than a joke. 

We are turning into memes; our life is a meme, where we repeat and do and joke about a standard stock of situations. A countless horde of "When you..." memes makes people laugh at and share utterly banal feelings and situations anyone could feel mirrored in. We need to clap our hands to ourselves, continuously. We don't separate our judgment from the media surrounding us, and we feel we should live somehow, but we don't remember how.

That's why, all my aforementioned fears notwithstanding, I decided that nihilist memes are probably the most interesting, or better, the least shallow memes you can find. At the end of the day, without pretending we are in charge of our lives, we managed to create something funny about our tiredness: there are no more illusions to fiddle with, and our mortality is nothing staggering anymore. The "system", that is, the production process, has already won and always will, so we find no reasons not to make light of our parcellized life, whose goals cannot be but money-oriented. 

The main drawback of all of this, as I said, is that everyone can play depressed, philosopher, deep, and every time you would like to say something more than "life sucks", you have the feeling someone is already making a meme about you; you are old, you are boring. By "memezing" the emptiness of life, we make it less and less philosophical, in the sense that we struggle less and less to enjoy it.

The reasons why sci-fi films are going to be the only interesting films left

Blade Runner (1982) shows you perfectly how deeply, and how quickly, our views about future changed. If they're really going to release a second episode, I guess we'll see a totally different ensemble of futuristic elements, including, hopefully, monitors with a better resolution.

I already know you'll disagree. Many of you are just thinking that several genres still have a lot of things to show in terms of style and innovation, that you were so moved or so amused by that comedy or that tragic story, that it depends on one's taste and perspective, that that movie with Leonardo DiCaprio made you cry, that you felt your bowels twisting with rage during all the bloody tortures in 12 years a slave etc. etc.
 

So, first of all: what does "interesting" mean in this post? It means realistic. And what do I mean when I say realistic? I mean weighty, rich and problematic in terms of study of reality, of scientific analysis; this doesn't have anything to do with amusement, special effects, emotion, actors' skills, Michael Fassbender's coolness and so on. Depicting reality is the very essence of art, and an artist is not necessarily an entertainer, and vice-versa. Moreover, art is not just emotion. In the aristotelian sense, art is imitation of life, and the fact our view of life is always limited and keeps changing through the history doesn’t mean art can afford to stop analyzing it.

Eva Green played in Womb (2010), and this is the main reason why you must watch it, regardless of anything else. Apart from this, I really loved this "sci-fi" film (more precisely: a dramatic film with one single important futuristic element) because of its minimalist frames, its essential soundtrack, its wonderful script. No exaggeration, no pathos, no standard Hollywood stuff (this film is German/French/Hungarian: phew): a ravishing dramatic picture where photography and dialogues are perfectly balanced. It is one of the best movies I know about genetics. I think you should watch it because it faces a matter which is growing more and more present in human life: clonation; namely, the possibility to live again after life. As claimed by the director himself, Benedek Fliegauf, this work tries also to explain that "free will", in our time, is a great deal overrated in comparison with the inheritance of genes. Why do people always feel free?... Anyway, Eva Green.

Example: I LOVE Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), really; I mean, I could say it was epic, majestic, awe-inspiring etc., BUT it was not problematic: it didn't tell me anything about my reality, my world, the modern human's philosophical point of view etc. Reality keeps changing, and works of art show us the flowing of changing. 

Second example: The Revenant (2015), the revelation, greatest film of that year, DiCaprio's best etc: personally, I couldn't stand that film, since, well, watching an almost three hours long picture with a man suffering, starving, stumbling, falling from mortal heights and miraculously rising up again, surviving just with his mind steadiness instead of (logically) dying for septicaemia and persuading a virtual bear not to kill him even after shooting it is not a very fulfilling experience (no, I'm sorry: the fact it was semi-autobiographical does NOT make it more special, and stop with the “woow, a true story” effect); BUT: this doesn't mean I cannot admire the actor's skill, the special effects, the soundtrack, the make up and all the technical elements which made this film a "nice thing to watch spending few hours of your life", but NOT what I call a work of art.

Mad Max: Fury Road: probably the coolest film of 2015. But coolness is not everything, right?

So. Why sci-fi? Of course this genre changed a lot since its origins, and as you know genres grow more and more difficult to define: sometimes sci-fi means metal, hard silvery surfaces, laserguns, white aseptic rooms, but sometimes it just means a dramatic plot developing around one single futuristic element (The Astronaut's Wife [1999], Womb [2010]). Aliens are not that scaring anymore, and abductions are, at most, a cheesy horror happening (have you ever seen Extraterrestrial [2014]?) or a curious linguistic exchange (Arrival [2016]). 

We cannot imagine things, obviously, by using the same fantasy as once: maybe you forgot, but Blade Runner (1982) was set in 2019; 2019, got it? Basically, according to Scott's cult masterwork, we are already using both perfect humanoid robots and monitors with a very bad resolution. Nowadays, instead, we (well, most of us) cannot even imagine what's going to be invented in the next two years, and our predictions about future society cannot be but murky (and often worrying).

And all of this notwithstanding, the chief philosophical and social problems of our time (starting from 2000, more or less) are faced and depicted especially by sci-fi; I very rarely found the same “weight” in other cases (and of course I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy any other films at all): sci-fi is pretty much the only genre which still “dares”, from time to time. I think this also happens because we said basically everything about all the rest, and cinema (as already happened to literature long time ago) is growing old.   

“Late capitalism”, as someone defined this era, should be portrayed by expressing its decayment, but it’s quite easy to notice that most of the recently released films are just… pathos-oriented. Everything is pathos, and people comment like this: "Oh nice... but a little sad!" So, when I say sci-fi, I mean, in general, films with at least one sci-fi element: the film itself can be either a romantic story, or a post-apocalypse story, or a space journey, etc. It's impossible to be more precise.

Cosmopolis (2012) is one of the rare not-exactly-sci-fi films dealing with decay of capitalism. Cronenberg's last film, Maps to the stars (2014), is another beautiful portrait of the "tiredness" of the rich class, stuck in its contradictions, and the relationship between the entertainment industry and the Western society. Cronenberg, where are you? We need your disturbing talent!

The fact is that sci-fi still shows us aspects of reality which are worthy of a deep discussion - namely, which are problematic. They lead us to some kind of reflection about the development of human society, our main fears, our uncertain and scared perspective about the weakness of global economy, and they do so way more effectively than other genres. I believe that these films (beware: I'm not talking about ALL the films with this tag) may be the only films left which make us think, not just feel. There are very few exceptions lately.

In particular, our relationship with technology, space exploration and artificial intelligence still generates works which I wouldn't define just entertainment, regardless of their actors' popularity, their budget etc. Our way to imagine the future, of course, keeps changing, but since the human race seems to be particularly tired in this period, I'd say that sci-fi tries to imagine all the possibilities (and the complications) that humans could pass through this decay by becoming something more than human.

British The Machine is an interesting sci-fi work about the possibility of recreating someone's appearance by means of engineering reconstruction, but also, and most of all, about the superiority of a robot mind which can absorb and quickly assimilate, once come to life, any kind of information, exactly like a child. The ending lets you understand this curious, innocent female android will be the first individual of the new (hopefully) peaceful race ruling the Earth.

Probably, we're still not ready to transcend our physical form; we still have too many problems to fix: first of all, I guess, the death of our planet. But everything in our habits shows us that we cannot just be happy to focus on a career and keep saving money until death; not anymore. We can be many things, many people, in many places. Our synapses expand in all directions. We strive for a virtual life, because ours looks more and more narrow. We grew up in a technology-based society, and we must deal with it; art must deal with it. 

I’m a little tired of hearing art being defined as “feelings”, honestly. Genetic augmentations, artificial intelligence, supercomputers are for sure more "interesting" (I won't use inverted commas anymore) than tear-jerking musicals set in a modern Los Angeles or battles against orcs for the reign of Azeroth (although battles against orcs are one of the thing I'm eager to watch after a standard working day).

I won't talk about Gattaca (1997), a sci-fi masterpiece about future of eugenetics in a competition-based society, for two reasons only: first, I'm trying to focus on more recent works; second, it would be too difficult to me to stop writing, and I'd probably need an entire new post. But please watch it. You must.

I want to make some examples of recent films that impressed me in terms of realism - according to the meaning I explained above. Let's begin from the best one: Ex Machina (2015). Finally, a beautiful dialectic fresco about the deep contrast between free will and predestination, humanity and machines, reasons and feelings. Apart from its brilliant visual effects, personally I don't know any better film about problems and doubts raised by modern conceptions about androids. Basically, you cannot guess, until the end, whether that beautiful female android has got human feelings or not; the spectator is led to think, not just to feel, and this is the main reason, of course, why this film is on the list. 

I think this film definitely deserves a place in the list of the best pictures about robots ever made; you must wait until the end in order to get what is the difference between human and artificial intelligence; which is dialectically explained. Art itself, painting in particular, is mentioned in the film, connecting spontaneity and artificial program in an exquisite dialogue.

Ex machina speculates through and through, as well, about the idea of spontaneity, which is the root of human unpredictability and of human art too. Just because we think about a painting to create by means of a mathematical construction, we’ll never be able to create an original painting; machines cannot create, just calculate, but their calculus may disguise itself terribly well as spontaneity (Chappie [2015] is a similar philosophical attempt, but it hideously degenerates into banal gunfire battles and cheesy humour). The astonishing ending is an eerie, unsettling outlook on the countless possibilities of future robots’ will, both in terms of appearance and attitudes.

Another recent nice (and tasting nostalgically “old-fashioned”, also in the soundtrack) film about robots is The Machine (2013). Well, it is not as deep as the one above, because there are way too many bullets, but I think it is worth a look, because the love story is gradually (fortunately) blended by the birth of the unequalled superiority of the mechanical “race”.

Her (2013) is about (romantic) relationships with machines, too. It is dreamy, sometimes unreal, suspended on many questions about our blurred-by-routine identity and desires, and it makes you feel like you just resurfaced from a long apnoea. I know, it is kind of a love story, but deals with a not yet existing technology, so… sci-fi, somehow. Actually, having sex with androids will be much easier than discussing about anything with an AI, I guess, because programming such a complex robot mind is still a dream. 

Ok, I confess: Her moved me to tears. This doesn't mean I wasn't intellectually stimulated... However, an other important element of this film is the solitude and affective isolation caused by a working-based lifestyle. Well, the Western one. Isn't this the reason why we always feel like messaging someone?...

But this film shows you how deeply human feelings are affected by the temptation of an “abstract” relationship - namely, the ones we pass through without touching nor seeing anyone. Technology already created long-distance love stories, and they will grow probably more and more important in our life, since the mind of modern human beings cannot really remain in the same place for long time. We can love many people or virtual people, in many ways, from many places, and I think this film shows you exactly how difficult is going to be for us to feel just humans with bodily limits - and the worst of these limits, probably, is the need of being considered unique. Watch it; don’t worry,  it’s not just romance.

Of course I must not omit Transcendence (2014), and I guess it pretty much explains why by itself. I should add that yes, maybe some aspects of the technology shown in the film are a little exaggerate, but the idea (the art) focuses on the fact that the essence of humanity, at the end of the day, is establishing strong ties with other people. The protagonist achieved the (maybe) last stage of intelligence, that is a spiritual/digital flux of data influencing reality without any bodily restrictions, and, by doing so, nothing was left to him but the interaction with the woman who knew him the best. 

Transcendence, of course, is much more than a man vs. machine film. The protagonist, by transfering his personality to a digital system, becomes not just immortal, but almighty, managing to control, heal, improve every living being he's interested in with advanced nanomachines. Basically, he can enhance other people's humanity... and still love, wow!

The very core of the film is showing us, of course, what are the perspectives of science about death. Again, the personality backup which allows the protagonist’s life not to end (well, to end just physically) is still a dream; I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to reconstruct someone’s personality by using megabytes, but this film, for sure, depicts majestically our yearning for a more and more abstract existence - because our future is abstraction, deal with it.

Something similar had been shown by, among many others, eXistenZ (1999), Cronenberg’s famous masterwork which focused more, anyway,  on the sublimation of humanity by games and virtual achievements, and about which I could write for hours. So, I’d better stop now.

I must absolutely add The Congress (2013), an Israeli animation/sci-fi story with a hint of delicious retro design style. This film is an amazing journey in a dystopian world (well, just a large area of a world) where people use a special drug in order to evade reality, suppress sorrow and create their own personal crazed perception. Yes, I know: Huxley - although in this moment I’m also recollecting, while talking about recent stuff, We happy few (2016), a fascinating, dystopian video game; but the difference is that The Congress people can do and become anything by affecting their brain like that, from riding a raging bull to turn into Jessica Rabbit.

The artwork of The Congress, directed by Ari Folman (don't miss his previous animated war film Waltz With Bashir [2008]), is breathtaking. Many of the fancy buildings decorating the landscapes of the animated zone are inspired by H. Bosch's paintings; its inhabitants decided to appear like famous actors, comic characters, mythological heroes etc., so that in their enhanced reality nothing can really make the difference. Oh, Enhanced Reality is also the name of one of Fear Factory's songs.

The protagonist, Robin Wright, playing as herself, not able to keep working since cinema industry can use digitally, and at will, the actors’ appearance, chooses to try this drug in order to find her lost son, who suffers for a syndrome destroying his senses; this lets the animation part begin, putting an end to the “real” Wright's performance. Thanks to the special substance provided by a huge corporation, nobody in the animated zone remembers about the “normal” perceivable reality, which is slowly decaying. Tastes, colors, bodies, smells, everything is an artificial stimulus, with no limits to variations.

This film is delicate and unsettling, extremely creative, aesthetically crazy, with long silent moments, and focuses on the uniqueness and rarity of strong feelings saving human life from boredom and nothingness. Where everyone looks like someone else, only people loving you remember who you are. More than that (and here is the core), The Congress tells us our reality is more and more made of cerebral stimulus and less and less of material objects. Appearance and personal experience will be just a matter of fantasy. We are our brain, and science keeps trying influencing its electric activity in order to gain an enhanced reality. We will be able to live, basically, without moving. Of course you may think about Brazil (1985), Matrix (1999), Wall-E (2008), Surrogates (2009), and many other deep works, all of them converging to the same fear/attraction towards cerebral life. In general, The Congress is one of the best animation movies I’ve ever seen.

Zero Theorem (2013) is disturbing, grotesque, melancholic: of course, because it is directed by Terry Gilliam (Brazil [1985], 12 Monkeys [1995], The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus [2009]). I have to confess I'm not crazy about Gilliam's morbidity, but I found this film tremendously "interesting", since the protagonist, stuck on a chair, working relentlessly with his computer and recollecting some sweet memories from time to time, struggles desperately against the impending Nothing. Doesn't this depict our actual condition? Doesn't this concern all of us?... Yes, that's art.

Obviously I could make some more (not many) examples. There are, and there will always be, many ways to talk about the human condition by means of cinema; but, as already said, I think nowadays sci-fi is the best instrument to achieve this goal - and that’s nobody’s fault, it's just a fact. Apart from the reasons I mentioned above, I think this is also due to the fact that society changes faster and faster, and that technological/scientific settings are the only ones which can keep pace with this frantic development. 

Many of these settings, obviously, are quite banal or not very detailed (In time [2011], Elysium [2013], Divergent [2014]... way too many others), and of course I didn’t say sci-fi proved to be immune to degeneration, commonplaces etc. But I think (I hope) that the films I mentioned have good possibilities to become classics - at least, to live for long in our memories as good examples to cite while we'll be talking about art in the early 2000s'.

The reasons why Graham Sutherland is awesome

Graham Sutherland (1903-1980)

Death, development and rebirth are the cores of this visionary painter's artistic research. Whereas Francis Bacon innovated English art by disfiguring living (often human) shapes in the cage of the I, Sutherland's main result, through the horror of war he strove to depict, was probably the germinating of a portrait of an everlasting life which, even under a bombing sky, manages to keep his power of changing.

Nothing stops growing up, even in destruction, and the great quantity of vertical figures in Sutherland's pictures is the very evidence of his yearning for life and ascension to organic fulfillment. From this Londoner artist's point of view, life is an obscure, often monstrous energy animating the things/creatures, indifferently; however, in my opinion, considering his artworks as an inhuman, alien self-developing creature whose man is not but an asymmetric organ would be a great mistake.

Horned forms (1944)

Actually, in Sutherland's artworks man is always present. The eerie, sometimes horrific fusion of animal and vegetal elements (thorns, in particular, start growing up in his pictures of the 40s) is not but the symbol, I may say an icon, of human fear. Something "iconic" or even religious fidgets, relentlessly, in his shapeless, non human mixtures, since, by borrowing an expressionist struggle against matter, he uses nature to depict, indirectly, universal human feelings. His solemn, majestic figures may remind us De Chirico's metaphysics, but these two artists get to opposite sides: De Chirico never puts life in his silent landscapes, Sutherland always does. 

Thorn tree (1954)

War, which Sutherland studied by a very close distance during his work as a "war artist", reduces life to some kind of "blob", to a chaotic mass of unpredictable evolution. His Heads series testifies his tendence to omit the human figure in order to speak about human life itself; as in his later religious subjects he painted for several churches (the figure of Jesus is both a quivering portrait of secular uncertainty and a powerful warning about universal sorrow), the tall, huge twisted columns of Three standing forms in a Garden, or, even more, of the majestic The origins of the land show us a world where human presence is an accidental, destructive as well, element of the vital evolution: differently from Bacon, who's obsessed with closed, narrow spaces, Sutherland prefers using large, open, empty landscapes, like settings of an imaginary prehistory, a churning universal birth where life is still a shapeless womb or, maybe, of an apocalyptic post-war planet where man trascended his fragile and dangerous form.

The origins of the land (1951)

Three standing forms in the garden (1952)

Sutherland is a fascinating scenario of regeneration and, in the meantime, a scaring suggestion of unpredictability of organic matter, and, consequently, of history. He wrote the poem of rebirth from the ashes, bestowing upon life, as well, an awe-inspiring dignity, regardless of the type of creature containing it. In his eyes, life is a whirlwind, an overwhelming tempest of colour which man cannot withstand: in his late works, you can notice colours turning deeper, shades more numerous, tones more soul-destroying; starting from the 50s, you can see his attention for psyche in his portraits and his unsettling animal-shaped figures, less plant-like, more tragic.

Head III (1954)

Crucifixion painted for the Church of Saint Aiden, Acton (1961)

At the end of his reasearch, maybe, we must see matter going back into the inside, in the tormented mind universe Bacon found in a cage: in the astonishing Sitting Animal we see, once again, mankind, the human loneliness, the monster-like condition of a self-devouring society, and this crouching posture, as a return into the Self, maybe meant, from Sutherland's point of view, the end of any compromise between reason and psyche.

Portrait of Edward Sackville-West (1953-54)

Sitting animal (1964)

Pictures are contained in: Sutherland, from the series I Maestri del colore, Fratelli Fabbri Editori, Milan, 1966.

The reasons why we should stop repeating that books can save the world

Everything dies, all of us know that; but, to be more precise, since nothing alive is the same in two different moments and the whole universe relentlessly evolves and goes (mostly unexpectedly) through mutations and changes of directions, focusing either on death or birth of individual things is not particularly clever. From an organic matter organic shapes and phenomena are generated, namely, everything that lives won't be the same forever, but is already doomed to turn into something else, no matter how alien to its original seed. We say modern or even (quite funnily) post-modern because we think many technical achievements around us show we're the "ripest" age at all; actually, they're not but consequences of our lack of meanings.

Oswald Spengler, in his monumental essay The decline of the West (1918 vol. 1, 1922 vol. 2) depicts the history of a Culture (he says there have been several cultures on earth, and he calls his own "Faustian", begun about Xth century with the birth of an "aerial" religious architecture and declined with the tragic notes of Goethe's Faust) as a slow passage form a fertile period, where the spirit of peoples and art are totally and organically in tune with each other in order to create spontaneous and various forms (the majestic symbol of the beginning of the Faustian culture is the cathedral), to a civilization, the type of society he, and we as well, lives in, characterized by the supremacy of huge multiethnic cities, the end of the country settlements and costumes and the repetition and mixture of past esthetical expressions. Of course we're not the first civilization, nor the first one which will fall.

Oswald Spengler (1880 - 1936)

Spengler, of course, already knew he lived in the exhausted shell of an old Culture, NOT in a Culture, and his majestic knowledge was absolutely aware of the impossibility to reach the heights of his main teachers, Nietzsche and Goethe: the age of the most meaningful spiritual discoveries of the Faustian Culture (each of them coloured with the essence of this Culture in particular) was already ended, and civilization couldn't but collapse on itself in a struggle to survive to the meaninglessness of its existence. Spengler died just three years before the beginning of the Second World War.

That's why I'm a little tired of all this complaining about the "death" of art, of culture, of books, of things we deem important just according to commonplaces; but I also understand what it's due to. There's no "death". Everyone talks about culture because there's no culture to talk about, just re-elaboration of past things. Apparently, we turned totally unable to understand that knowledge can be built privately, between wise people, with good threads about various aspects of life; in this sense, and in this sense only, culture cannot die. We are totally free to gain any information, and, if we focus just on what we like, there's not danger for "culture" at all.

The fact we name "culture" something belonging exclusively to the past, coming from an hypothetical good age, or rather, something we never really struggled to build, is the clearest evidence that our world is turning less and less organic; and this started several decades ago, more or less when we started realizing art was depleting its abstract repertoire of forms. Everywhere is the same generic metropolis, the same global (globalized) hive. Although we have nothing but fragments of past forms we try to call beauty, we pretend to believe museums and theatres can save humanity from collapse. Spengler had exactly the same feelings about the "men of culture" of his age.

We use categories, definitions, comfortable but sterile borders to keep the living matter in a dead monotonous land, and we claim culture is fundamental, art is everything, history is necessary, ignorance is dangerous, without really knowing the meaning of these words, and we say many other things we learned from the intellectuals monitors teem with. Suggestions about a good mantainance of mankind are everywhere: basically, we step on them without even noticing, during the few minutes our hectic routine allows us.

The Librarian (1566), by the Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldi (1526/27 - 1593). Books have been the main source of information for centuries. Of course there's plenty of alternative instruments now, but the number of words known by young people grows smaller and smaller, several studies warn.

The more we talk about a topic, the less we know about it: this is universally true. Sometimes this happens because we're deeply attracted by very little known things (how many people wrote about God or Greek tragedy?); sometimes, instead, because we grow opinionated thanks to the fact someone keeps repeating us an unorganic definition of something wich is supposed to be organic in and of itself. 

Everyone claims books are important because nobody really knows what culture is for, and wants to feel "in safe" thanks to novels and good feelings. Everyone thinks that books can defeat ignorance, instead of understanding ignorance can be built in universities as well, with the illusion of a world change, and that ignorance sometimes means not knowing what is to be known. Without a Culture, books are useless, and Culture cannot be built again, nor imagined. Books are useless without wise readers.

Culture is predestined, including its unorganic parts, its sad old ages, when fantasy turns into the monotonous establishment of repeated forms; as inhabitants of an old civilization, we cannot but claim "culture" is important, since we prefer living in the past, in the nostalgic wave of a determined shape, in the pages of famous works which inspired the cinema, instead of accepting a difficult, modern (someone said "post-modern") standpoint that simply understands the fertile age of the Western civilization has come to an end, and that culture cannot save anyone nor anything. We're nothing. 

Babel (2001), by Cildo Meireles. This artwork, in my opinion one of the most astonishing of London TATE Gallery, is a tower of radios of many types and age piled on each other; the radios are all on, and the resulting noise, buzzing and continuous, is somehow disturbing. It is a beautiful momument to the various and nonuniform culture of modern age, made of a patchwork of voices which doesn't help you to have a cultural over all view about reality.

The most coherent (namely, scientific) artists of the 20th century created artworks which don't look for coherence, don't celebrate the importance of abstract ideals; just few examples, very different from each other, but all related to a sense of decline: Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) is a deep glance into the metropolitan paranoic frenzy;  Musil's The man without qualities (1930-1943) puts an end to the tradition of big systematic novels, showing the deepest skepticism towards any type of "cultural" association; Fellini's Orchestra Rehearsal (1978) shows the impossibility of facing a balanced thread (and a democracy) when everyone wants to shout their own opinion; Fight Club (1996)  highlights the consequences of a job-based alienating society where a generation grew up with no purpose but collecting money for the future, waiting for the crisis. In any civilization, money is the ultimate fuel of every spiritual activity.

All these disenchanted masterpieces notwithstanding, we grow less and less scientific; we keep pretending there's a proper value, a proper art or form. Polite progressist TV talk shows try to tell us we still can live in a ravishing Renaissance, if only we have enough money for bookshops and the thousandth art exhibition about Impressionism. Everything is about pretending, because people need to believe culture is about something specific and easily recognizable, like recycling, like cooking. 

Integration (2013) by Piero Tonin. Among the many rethorical, misused, misunderstood culture-related words, multiculturality is one of the most common. Trying to conceal the prevalent role of consumerism in Western society, we act as various cultures cohabited in our metropolises, although we perfectly know the presence of many different languages, clothes and ethnicities does not change the fact we don't share but one only culture, the culture of money.This word, actually, like a huge sponge absorbing whatever it leans on, taught to children and waved by politicians, defines an effective strategy used by "integrators" in order to turn everyone in a standard Western consumer. Reversally, racism, which is a much worse reaction for sure, mostly represents an anachronistic struggle to "protect" a culture racists themselves have a vague idea of.

Books are everywhere; writers are everywhere. Everyone wants to write about everything, but nobody feels up to an overview, a total judgment; nobody looks the whole picture from far. Everyone repeats reading is a defence against ignorance, but nobody explains us what type of books we're supposed to read: the important is they're made of words. Reading is usually deemed a generic remedy to a disease (ignorance) which is supposed to threaten our freedom to think, but nobody seems noticing that the quantity of things people read and remember doesn't mean they can actually speculate about reality (and this includes the ability of understanding reality grew too difficult to be defined).

Books, once they turn into an abstract symbol of salvation, are a cunning expedient to keep people at bay; books are the symbol through which capitalism can expand a market (culture is a market) by convincing people they are actually free. In the aftermath of the modern "chaotic" development of the Faustian Culture, Western population should have already stopped - I'm not saying reading - but at least giving to books such an absolute, romantic importance. We're not able to stop idealizing culture because we're not coherent, we're not scientific towards the features of our civilization. 

The only possible culture of our age is a culture of no culture; namely, the awareness that culture isn't made but for the pleasure of the few people who authentically can get some pleasure out of it. There's no reality but pleasure. All the rest is just words.