An Equitable Universe

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth – Alan Watts
I have realised that the past and the future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is – Alan Watts
But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us – Alan Watts
When you’re trying to clear your head, it’s much easier to sweep things under the carpet than to actually throw them out – Me

…It all started with the Oscars.  There was no doubting that they were on the way, because the TV had cancelled all other news for the duration and across the Ukraine the reporters were being issued with bow ties (although, as a sign of respect, not the revolving kind).  Whilst I have no particular objection to a bunch of very highly paid individuals celebrating their own unrivalled contribution to the world as we know it in an onanistic orgy of botox and amphetemine, I do get pretty cheesed off with them ramming it down my throat for weeks on end thank you very much, and if I’m entirely honest, I really don’t think I need a man in a tuxedo that cost more than my house lecturing me on why I should do more to make the world a fairer place.  If the world was a fairer place, they would be wearing a Primark jacket, there would be no hiccups, I would be able to open a packet of dry-roasted peanuts without distributing them over a fifty yard radius, and everybody with a box to call home would have a valeted flat somewhere green and perfumed.

It is a well-known fact that costume-wise a lack of material coverage² = amount of salacious media coverage generated.  I have little interest in which next-big-thing actor has borrowed a spangly frock from whom, allowing her décolletage to get far more than the normal amount of air – and TV coverage –  whilst she laments the tendency of fifty percent of the species (there are, by implication, no exceptions) to objectify women.  I agree totally with a sentiment that is undeniably righteous, and I cannot deny that, as a man, I am apt to get distracted by breasts, but if each and every female nominee (and let’s be honest, proportionally they are frighteningly small in number) is ‘doing it for all women throughout the world’, does that also mean that all the middle aged white men are doing it for me?   Because, if so, I don’t want it!

Nor do I really need to be lectured on my myriad shortcomings by a Harry Flash-in-the-Pan who has spent the previous six months building up his media profile by chronicling his sordid history of drug and alcohol abuse in a series of short, amusing videos on TikTok, before landing his dream role of ‘third bystander’ in a deleted scene from a straight to the bin epic about a family of dysfunctional nematodes. 

Yet they are the heroes of the red carpet.  They are trailblazers.  Without their timely intervention it is probable that the rest of us would remain misogynistic, racist, everything-o-phobes and we must all be forever grateful that they have freely given so much of their valuable time in making us aware of the error of our ways… They say.  If I gave them an egg, do you think that they would teach me how to suck it?

What films* do offer is the opportunity to look critically at the past and to predict the future although, crucially, only as we see it today.  It is inevitable that I view the past and perceive the present differently to everybody else. I have chewed my teeth often enough to know that I am not everybody else.  A vision of tomorrow can only be based upon knowledge of yesterday and perception of today: there must be an infinite number of futures and an even more infinite number of me’s to live in them – and all I can do about it is to apologise sincerely to the infinite you’s.

I think it is undeniable that today is altered by yesterday and tomorrow will be shaped by today – even if the man with the Play-Do has lost the little thing that makes the smiley faces.  I think we have to accept that we are all part of the one big thing.  We are all equal parts of the Universe.  In an equitable Universe we would all have equal input and we would all take the same from it – except on a Monday morning when, until the first coffee has been assimilated, there is absolutely no meaning to life.  It is not a fair Universe, and even if you think there might be a film in it somewhere, there is absolutely no point in making a song and a dance about it…  No-one will thank you for it.

*Movies – Until quite recently I was blithely unaware of what a colloquialism this is – the ‘entertainment’ equivalent of ‘The Hole-in-the-Wall’**…

**ATM