The death (ongoing?) of organized religion is something that I think brings many positives, but it left a vacuum, and the multitude of things that have rushed into it are not much better, especially in the age of social media, which can bring both a nihilism as well as an ever-shifting tides of grifts offering you an answer to the void inside.

People are searching for answers, same as they ever were. But there is a certain type of, almost, psychosis that comes along with the super-reality of the internet (which is becoming even more apparent as AI has come into the scene and taken the place of therapist and friend, sometimes even partner, for some people). Social media, and now AI, thrive off offering you a false or deluded version of reality, feeding off your doubt and pain in order to drive interaction. Both of these platforms live on you remaining unhappy, and on feeding the delusions and ego you come up with to deal with these things.

They are bent on keeping you from touching anything real.

When I think of devils and demons, I tend to think of the sort of metaphorical sense of the word. That the concept of devils and demons is an abstraction of these real forces, and, to me, that's what AI and social media have become. Which really isn't their fault; it is the natural course of things in our capitalist environment. Profit motive will naturally lead things away from any authenticity, any connection with reality or humanity. It will drive things towards dehumanization, dissociation.

Obviously, this is nothing new. It is just the latest iteration, but it is novel in the technology it has available, the proliferation of it, the power behind it. And it is a novel time in the sense that there often seems to be little else to turn to, little else that leads you to a broader view of the world, that leads you to be more connected to the people you love, to your neighbor, to your community.

We are being isolated, and we are being fractured; at a community level and at an individual level.

The things that used to give us meaning and community have died/are dying, for right or wrong. Beyond the death of things that did not evolve with the world and were no longer serving us, like organized religion, cynicism has eaten away at so many other things. It eats away at authenticity, it eats away at earnestness and love, it eats away at our ability to be vulnerable, to be ourselves. It eats away at caring.

We live in a time where our humanity is being taken from us, and we are often unequipped to fight it. Generations are growing up without the slightest idea of how to build a community. Many people are growing up without the slightest idea of how to make a friend or build a relationship; without really knowing how to love anyone else. The world is growing darker.

I remember seeing for the first time, several years ago, the film “Meeting The Man : James Baldwin in Paris”, and the particular clip where he says that the world is held together “by the love and the passion of a very few people.” More and more I see this as true. More and more the act of truly loving others, truly having passion for life, is becoming a radical action. Perhaps it always has been. In fact, I'm sure it always has been.

I'm scared every day of what seems to be a darkening tide. But then I remember that it must have seemed so for anyone who has ever paid attention. Maybe it just seems darker because we have become more powerful, more capable of enacting evil. But opposites are an illusion of sorts, and the more capable one is of feeling pain, the more capable one is of feeling love. The more dark we can see, the more light we are capable of. The only problem is that it won't happen by accident. It takes practice, it takes concerted effort, it takes purpose and action. I think this is the thing lacking so often in this generation, in these new generations. In an age of cynicism, what do you aim yourself towards? when it seems everything has already been tainted. It is sort of cringe to believe in God, or it just lays outside the realm of rational belief that we allow ourselves, which is never really so rational as we believe it to be. But I think the fact of the matter is that our rationales and our concepts will never capture the full reality of life. There is always something ineffable in our experiences, impossible to articulate. I think we see that as something that divides and isolates us, but I think it is the opposite. It is the bridge, it is the universe that we share, that we are all a part of. It is the thing that most connects us, it is the experience we share.

And while our concepts and stories can be useful, the more we get caught up in them, the further we stray from this shared reality, the more we isolate ourselves. We spend so long behind a screen, so long in these super-realities, we become isolated and confused, we become lost, and we seek answers, and we look to these same dissociated realities to give them to us.

So let me just say that there is no perfect concept, no perfect rationale or logical understanding that will lead you to the light, that will make your entire life make sense. There are things that illuminate you, that help you see the reality that is really in front of you, and there are things that can keep you in the dark, and all manner of in between.

The important thing is not accumulating the right concepts or having the right ideas. Concepts and ideas are only sign posts pointing us to elsewhere. If they are not pointing us towards life, towards this shared reality, then they are not useful, and we ought not to hold onto them. It will often happen in your life that you will need to leave a previously useful idea behind because it no longer serves that purpose. It no longer connects you or directs you towards this spiritual thing. And that's okay. Life is constant change. We are constantly changing, and it is often just our conceptualization that is not keeping up.

So I think it pays to remember to not be caught up in this constructed world. There will be no mental image that you can construct to perfectly represent the world and to fully understand it logically. Let go. Engage with the experience before you. Your life is not happening at some future point, it is happening now, all the time, and you shouldn't miss it while looking for answers. The answers are all there, you just have to remember how to listen.

This is the light I look for nowadays. I think it is becoming brighter in my generation. I think more and more people reject the ways that keep us in a sort of subservience. I hope we continue like this. I do have a sort of belief that I cannot, perhaps, logically justify, but it is the belief that things are getting better, on a grand scale. There will always be evil, always be demons. We pretend as if it is us and them, but evil and good have always been a part of us, and we will always be manifesting both. But we also have the power of our consciousness, we have the ability to look at what we are doing, to observe ourselves, and to make our own decisions. I believe we are trending towards more awareness. Hopefully, someday, we will all be a little more wise, and a little more able to steer the ship with the good in us, more able to create conditions to bring out the good in us. I think that is our only hope, in the long run.

But a discussion of utopias and progress, and the ways systems can bring out different features of our multi-faceted nature, is probably a discussion for another time.

I just feel that we need something else in our lives, and I hope more and more that young people can steer themselves towards the present moment, towards the impermanence of things, towards truly cherishing our lives and the people around us. I hope we can steer ourselves more towards light and passion and love. I hope we can find genuine meaning and purpose, and not chase mental constructs, delusion, and success within limited and deluded frameworks of value. I hope we can lay down our masculinity, our capital-based value systems, our beauty standards. I hope we can lay down a lot, and find more than we could ever hope for in our empty hands (shout out Ursula K. Le Guin).

To me, it is a masterpiece of its own kind which has gone criminally underrated and has been spoken of far less than it deserves. Maybe this is because it received no wider theatrical release, or maybe it is simply a movie that misses the wider American audience, almost by design. That isn't to say that it was a conscious decision—I have no evidence that it was—but I think the spirit of the movie and the ideas that live in it are unfamiliar to most Americans, and the method of storytelling is so far outside the “content” and “entertainment” industry that we have become accustomed to that I saw many reviews angered that it didn't live up their idea of “storytelling”, which is a concept I find very troubling. If you find the movie boring, that is one thing, but to explain it away by saying it “has no plot” or “has no conflict” is an egoistic, pseudo-intellectual way of dismissing something you simply didn't have the patience for. It doesn't give you the dopamine rush you crave, or it requires you to try enjoying something new. This is a topic for another post, some other time, but I will conclude by saying that I think many Americans may consider this film an “art film”, not because it is abstract or difficult in any way—it is a very straightforward film—but because they do not understand its slower form of storytelling or the feelings it is dipping into. To me, this is what movies should be. Not that they can't be exciting or have action; not all films need to be slow poetry, but I think they should all be art. And the gap that appears to be growing between what we consider art and what we consider entertainment is concerning, and is backed by industries that want to sell us slop while keeping us mindlessly engaged. I don't think that should we should allow art to be co-opted by these forces, and I don't think we should resign ourselves to pieces that leave our dopamine receptors clapping while we remain hollowed. But, I digress.

(Sometime I'll have to talk more about Ursula K. Le Guin's “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, as I think this offers a different perspective on storytelling than what the typical viewer might be used to.)

I'm writing this because I think this movie deserves to have more said about it, and deserves a wider audience. I hope to at least give it the former.

I watched the movie with my father recently, and he told me that he sort of got it, but not really. He didn't understand “the message” exactly, but he seemed to pick up on a sort of intuitive understanding; something he could not put into words. And this is where I think we fail our children when it comes to art. We talk so much about “the message”, the logical understanding of a movie, a story. But any art should, I think, contain an element of poetry. And when I say poetry, I am going off a more colloquial definition, which I think we apply even to the written word; poetry is a sort of aesthetic leaning in art which I believe points to the truths that we cannot articulate. The thing you understand intuitively, the actual experience of the piece and how it moves you. The logical understanding, “the message”, comes after, and is bound to be somewhat personal.

(I would like to digress again. As I understand it, this is also how we experience life on a neurological level. We in take stimuli, and our brain processes it in different areas before our prefrontal cortex can creates a story later. It is obvious that the statement “the rain falls” is quite different from the experience of seeing rain fall. The words are how we make logical sense of life and communicate what we have experienced, and they have meaning, or maybe, more accurately, they point to the meaning in our experience. But they cannot convey the whole truth, they cannot convey the exact experience. Which I believe is fundamental to art. It is not a “theme” necessarily, or a thesis statement. It can have those things, but a piece of art with a great thesis statement still fails if does not convey feeling, if it does not convey an experience.)

It seemed foreign to my dad that the “point” of a movie might be to feel something. Yes, a plot so abstract that you can't make anything of it can be hard to get through (am I a hypocrite for falling asleep during 2001: A Space Odyssey? I was a little high). But there's nothing really abstract about the plot of After Yang. On the contrary, it is very straightforward, and I think the straightforwardness of the plot makes it an even better vehicle for the things it actually contains.

For a quick summary, the movie revolves around a husband and wife with an adopted Chinese daughter, for whom they purchased an android sibling, named Yang, specifically marketed and purposed to teach her about and connect her to her heritage. But, at the beginning of the movie, Yang “breaks”, and it soon becomes apparent there will be no fixing him. It is about what happens after Yang, after all, and remainder of the film is uncovering the life Yang lived, walking through the memories he was allowed to capture in short video clips, and dealing with the grief of losing him.

Now, I believe many “themes” can be drawn from the well that is After Yang, not all of which I am qualified to speak on. But there is something I feel is missing from a lot of the reviews I have seen, and I am hoping to lend some new perspectives on the film by sharing what I found meaningful and profound about it. I'm very passionate about this and I think I could go on at length about many of these things, so I will separate them into at least a couple different posts. How exactly I will organize those, I am not sure, but I think the first one will cover memories and their role in the movie.

Until then, if you haven't seen this movie, I would highly recommend settling down for it on a nice day and giving it a watch. It is only about 90 minutes long, best enjoyed, I think, when you're in a mood to come back down to Earth, and remember the things you truly enjoy. For days when the sun is shining through the window just right and you remember that you need to touch grass.