No B.S Friday: People loved it. I found it perverse.
The Martian starring Matt Damon is a hit. Mid-90s on Rotten Tomatoes on both critic and popular scores.
I just found it bizarre.
And I hope I’m not dropping any spoilers here (but if you think there’s any chance that Matt Damon does not get rescued after being stranded alone on Mars, then you don’t know Hollywood), I just found none of it stacked up.
Like it didn’t make a lot of sense. NASA, teaming up with China, devotes a huge amount of the world’s resources to helping get one dude off a distant planet? Not likely.
His crew, after almost getting home, turn around to go get him, on a dangerous long-shot mission, despite having kids and family waiting for them at home. Really? I dig Matt Damon, but I wouldn’t abandon my kids for him.
A guy sacrifices his career at NASA to secretly send the crew back to Matt? A forced redundancy? In this economy?
I just found myself asking myself over and over, why do we all care so much whether this one individual survives? People literally pack Times Square to watch it happen live.
To me, it was just so obviously not realistic.
Which meant it was a fantasy.
So that got me wondering. What is the fantasy the movie wants to sell you then? If Matt Damon is the everyman, and a proxy for your own self, what’s the fantasy that you’re enjoying when you watch it?
It’s this:
The world sees that you’re alone and it wants to rescue you.
It feels desperately bad that you have been forgotten and abandoned. It will go to great lengths to rescue you. It will literally stop the gears of capitalism to make sure you’re ok.
Your friends will abandon their concerns for their own family and friends and make your safety the number one priority.
The world sees you are alone. It sees how hard you’ve been working. And it wants you to be safe. And it wants you to have rest.
What a sweet, sweet dream.
It is a fantasy for our age… which kinda tells you how messed up things are for our lived experience right now.
But there’s something else here.
If that’s the fantasy, how do you sell a fantasy of being rescued and cared for to people (and men in particular) raised in a culture of rugged individualism and self-reliance?
You make the rescue the PRIZE for heroic self-reliance.
Matt Damon faces incredible odds, all on his own. He survives on minimal food. He grows a potato crop in human poo and Mars dust. He builds an interplanetary communications device from spare parts. He stiches his own wounds.
He stitches his own wounds.
And then, and only then, after a superhuman display of self-reliance and totally not needy, then Matt Damon gets the rest the that he, and we all, deserve.
Sleep well, little Matt Matt.
But this is why it’s perverse.
We have all been sold the lie that rest in the collective will come if we can just persevere on our own just a little bit longer, be a little bit more self-reliant, stand on our own two feet just a little bit more.
We will pick you up… if you can just hold out on your own just one more day.
While the whole reason why we feel completely burnt out and have started fantasising about overly contrived rescue movies is precisely because we have been trying to do it all on our own.
We were never supposed to. Life was always meant to be a collective effort. We’re a tribe species. We cooperate. That’s what made us top of the food chain.
But somewhere along the way we fell off the path. We made a virtue of isolated independence.
And now we burn ourselves out in lives of isolated independence.
While deep down, we are crying out to be rescued.
s.o.s stop.the.earth. come.save.me
i.am.all.alone
JG.
Capitalism leads to selfishness and we are all actually deep down unhappy or at least unsatisfied. My parents said back in the poor days when everyone had little but relied on each other, there was a community of helping each other out. They were still very happy because they all helped each other out all the time and judged others little. Now it’s all about keeping up with the jones and outdoing the other person.