Once a year over at my 366 Weird Movies reviewing gig, I turn in one philosophical rant about the nature of weirdness in art. The new one is a little bit of Zen navel-picking speculation I call “Questions Are Beautiful.” It was provoked by a comment somebody made on my review of Cube (1997), saying an analysis of the ontological mystery would make good meat for an essay, so I green-lighted myself to accept the challenge.
Former shoegaze essays at 366Weird include:
- NORTH (1994): THE WEIRDNESS OF A COLOSSAL FLOP – A CASE STUDY
- Harlan’s Ellisons’s R.I.P.
- WHAT MAKES A WEIRD MOVIE WEIRD?
But this time around, my point is a simple one that nevertheless seems to send some people into fits. We like strange, unexplained movies, say I, because the universe is a strange, unexplained place and we humans are in constant turmoil to try to understand it anyway.
I then raise the question: Is this humans’ fault? Is our compulsion to sort everything into categories actually a flaw? Humans sure seem to be in the minority in nature. We fight nature’s chaos with a calendar that tries to manage our irregular planet rotation. The universe gives us quantum physics and dark matter, and we shake our fists angrily and insist we’re going to solve that too with our blunt chalkboard equations. Nature spews animals and plants and even life forms that don’t fit into either of those categories, but we’re determined to catalog every one of them into a system. We love systems. We’re sick that way.
What if our frustration in sorting the universe into orderly spreadsheets is an indicator that there’s something wrong with us? Something wrong which other intelligent species elsewhere in the universe do not have? If you think that’s a radical idea, well, it is, but it’s shared by none other than Neil deGrasse Tyson in my favorite one of his rants:
See, that’s a beautiful question right there! Are we just idiots on the universal scale of intelligence? Can we improve? Should we even bother? These are scary, disturbing things to ask, things that could drive you to extreme nihilistic points of view. But still, objectively, beautiful.
