We have to have darkness: the movies don’t work without it. Even in our living room, we turn off the light to pretend.
But we know there is a greater Dark out there, the realm in which something wicked comes. Or the possibility of darkness persisting. Imagine, one day, it’s dawn and morning, but the light declines to come back. How long, then, before we start signing up for Panic 101 or living in Clickbait?
I want to talk about movies not just as attempts to get at our credit cards and our hearts, but as a cyclone system in which the dark and the Dark are bumping together.
We are naturally so cheery (don’t you love us?) that we have not thought enough about the prospect of our dark; we have been so set on brave efforts to have light surpass the threat of night. This is an essay on that looming metaphor. It’s grounded in movies (or movie-like attempts). But it insists on the technology and the meaning as a married unity. Not that this marriage is tranquil. The movies are more than an art and a business, a medium and a passion. They are a cave painting of our struggle with the Dark.
By 2022, we understand—we have not been competent with reality. Try ruinous. Maybe the movies were invented to indulge or hide that failure—like ads for looking on the bright side. So we cling to treating extinction as just a special-effects extravaganza. But the real Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica (diminishing but as large as the United Kingdom) is beyond CGI or being rescued by the italic of a knockout movie fanfare—Thwaites!—with a $500 million budget and the Rock, Dwayne Johnson, bringing us home just as he did in his lyrical disaster epic San Andreas!
One thing we’ve learned during COVID-19 is? Why not have a screen in the womb to let the embryo study? In our desperate need for intel, we have to begin earlier.
