THE CONSCIOUS APE

Public Service Abstract:

This is a meandering essay, I make long leaps, outrages connections and outright jumps to conclusions, this review/essay is a culmination of some recent and long standing hyper-fixations of mine around how vanity and lack of sincerity in the face of ever spreading irony online and offline is reshaping our world.

I take the Žižek route of how I go about it, where he in his eponymous "The Sublime Object of Ideology" is essentially re-reading Hegel through Lacan, and then uses this Lacanian-Hegelian synthesis to re-energize Marxist critique of ideology, I take a look at two movies; Chef by Jon Favreau and Porco Rosso from Studio Ghibli and juxtapose them against the book Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, and add a few tidbits by Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow in an effort to re-energize sincerity.

I will not make a snarky remark about how pretentious all this is, because my stance in this review is for sincerity, but I will admit fully to being overbearingly complex in how I am going about all this.

Vanity Be Thy Name:

One shave, one haircut, one outfit and a couple of compliments or criticisms later - and we get bent out of shape how we go around our day. The quality of our day depends on the factors programmed into us 2 million years ago. This programming molds the kind of clothes we wear the next day, how we posture, the level of how much our jaw is protruding, the pick of our "cool" sunglasses and so on. Our strongest insecurities that we try to bury with the dead corpse of our past resurface as a vengeful zombie, and he feeds on our vanity and in the same vein of brain eating zombies makes us a dull, shallow creature.

It is a tragically comical act worthy of the classical theaters of old Greece.

It is fascinating, truly, how simple we actually are - all of our problems stem from cavemen reactions to modern life - We are like Java in Martin Mystery comics - a wild caveman confused by his shiny surroundings.

Here I will pivot to Jon Favreau as Carl Casper in his 2014 movie Chef. He is somewhat aloof, separated from the modern world, good at what he does and raw - he is fucking raw and true to himself. He cares about his cooking, his craft and his ability not about the mechanical parts of him. The looks, the posture or the presentation of him, but the presentation of his work.

The film is a tremendous exhibit into raw film-making of real people devoid of irony, it hits us in the face like a sledgehammer and goes to the pith of what is important in life. Our craft, our personal sense of worth and our tribe made of family and friends. I think it is a beautiful film in its sincerity and how it shows what is truly important, beyond the surface of the fast moving world of today, for example we have a scene where Casper takes his time to make a restaurant level dinner for his partner at home, or the time and effort he puts into making a simple grilled cheese sandwich for his son. The lack of vanity and a sign of true sincerity is show to us in the faces of the observers of the acts and not in Casper himself, how Molly and Percy look at him while he is cooking.

I am not saying Chef Casper is void of vanity, nobody is - but he is a representation of a character that knows what is important to him and what is yet to become important, he is on a course of change, a deep true change into a more mature man. And how he goes about is sincere, he makes mistakes yes, and he stomps on his family in the process somewhat selfishly, yet he recognizes his mistakes and tries to make a change, and ultimately succeeds.

To all this I would conjoin one more film that I saw recently, Porco Rosso - another exhibit into how our surface part of reality clashes with the deeper parts of humanity's struggles and how we grow and mature into full personas when we are forced by the sheer horrors of our world. The main character literately turns into a pig in his shunning of humanity, he forsakes his vanity and humanity and goes into seclusion away from others and the woman who loves him - he renounces humanity and all it stand for - yet does not turn nihilistic - he closes up and stands still.

The first part of Porco's transformation from the showy and handsome pilot to a Pig starts with the outbreak of World War 1 and his enlisting into the aviation branch of the military forces of Italy, and finalizes when his comrades all get killed and he survives, alone and traumatized. The brutality of war shorns him of the superficial, and he stagnates for 20 years, until he meets Fio. Through the sheer life force and sincerity of belief in her craft and ability and friendship Fio brings Porco back, for a moment he breaks out of his piggish shell and we see the man he could have been, and the pig that he has become. The transformation ends with him (maybe) sacrificing himself to help his friends make escape from the fascist goons.

It is maybe me nearing thirty and doing a job that at best I don't like, that these two films speak so strongly to me - I do fear getting old and doing something that I hate, I would say that is a universal feeling we all share - getting lost in a large system where we are slowly ground down to a nub. A system built on vanity of the dictatorial managers, petty bosses and simple bully's high on a power trip. But it goes even deeper for me - for decades I was a fat slob, a loudmouth cunt hiding his insecurity behind a tall thick wall of bravado, bluster and irony - and in my casting away of fat I have also begun to break down those walls - and I would wager that a lot of work has been done, more is needed, but I am well into my finding a path of true sincerity. More on that later.

Chef, Porco Ross and Infinite Jest all have the same core principal - they take a good hard look at humanity, how we are vane, insincere, selfish, and how this shapes us and our reality. Infinite Jest here being the truly biggest contender into that look. It is a resolutely hard, dense book to read, but in that obfuscated style hides or maybe better said is shown the true complexity of humans. We are multi layered creatures, and a shorter more simple book could not encompass the complexity of our existence. However, this book is as indulgent as is purported. The tennis hopping between the story and footnotes alone is an exercise in patience.

The cast of flawed and wild characters here is beyond the scope of this essay, but in the general outline of their behaviors we have David Foster Wallace's outlook on how a tennis academy, a rehab center and a radical terrorist cell of paraplegics share the same problems of comportment in the world. How their lack of true sincerity and attempts at fashioning an outwards image of themselves for others to bask in shows us how crazy and lost we all are, nobody is beyond vanity and almost nobody is capable of sincerity in the modern world. We all try to uphold the image of us that we have built in the place of a true identity.

The undercurrent:

All this works have a strong undercurrent in them, an undercurrent that is shaping the behaviors of its characters. Technology. In Chef we have the pervasive effect of smartphones and social media on how we act among others and online, in Porco Rosso there are the machines of war - specifically airplanes. And in Infinite Jest we have the supercharged entertainment in the form of hypnotic TV cartridges that can be seen as today's streaming platforms that offers us infinite amounts of music, films, shows, podcasts etc.

There are good sides to all mentioned technologies, they cure boredom and they offer simple respite from the hectic insanity of the world. But the bad side is poisonous. It fundamentally reshapes us as humans into something else, into this pent-up anxious, oversexed and overstimulated monkeys. What you see shapes you, and what you see everyday for most of your waking hours shapes your entire reality.

This undercurrent of technology is why I am writing this Frankenstein of an essay, and why I mentioned Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. For if there ever was a novel that shows us the harmful and changing side of technology and how we humans are tragically and comically inept at controlling what we create it is this door stopper of a tome. It is pretentious, arcane, high and low brow, and utterly awesome in its delivery. The destructive beauty of the V rocket is the central piece of this book, and through it Pynchon shows us how crazy, smart and incapable of handling ourselves we humans are, we have the hands of gods when creating and the minds of animals. So how can we handle ourselves when we supercharge our ability to communicate, travel and entertain ourselves when the first instinct when creating a rocket is to bomb our neighbors?

Rise and fall of humanity:

All these pieces of work show us the true cost of irony, and how it gets supercharged in the environment of the online world. Irony as a humorous tool is a versatile companion piece in the Bat-Belt for all of us. It encompasses situational, dramatic and verbal irony, the most common form is sarcasm. And in our day to day, face to face dealings it is a fun and even sometimes useful way to communicate thoughts. Bur once you are behind the veil of the internet, and hidden behind the abstractions of algorithms, usernames and physical divide - that irony becomes the totality of your character, sincerity and compassion go out the window. And the more you partake in the drinking of the irony Kool-Aid the more it becomes a part of your entire persona, it affects how you act in the real world - here I mean the physical aspect of our existence. The questions of the digital reality are an essay in themselves.

Add on top of that our vanity, and how we jockey to position ourselves in the social circles of our lives, and we start using irony to build ourselves, "we are the funny type that doesn't care", "always tells it how it is", "the just brutally honest types" and so on, this convergence between our baser instincts and tech fueled communication turns us into gremlins of fakery and fuckery.

Our vanity will never go away, and our sincerity will never be total - but we can do the hard work of trying and improving ourselves beyond the current point without fear of the end result, the only result we should fear is regression. Going back to that depressed and bitter existence is fear inducing for me.

There is work to be done, we have to go back to that large block of stone that is our potential and chip away piece by piece until we reach the core of sincere beliefs, and then we should take some clay and start making new shapes - we hold some of it inside of us and some of it has to be fabricated - the true self that is. The monotheistic way of looking at how a true self emerges is fully unappealing to me, this stance that either you have been formed fully and need to be revealed, or oppositional that you are nothing but clay and need to be fully shaped is preposterous. It is at the least the combination of the two, with a high probability of other things working under the hood of existence without us knowing it.

These works will resonate with you and hold you tight and make you think of them and of the meaning buried in them, this is what shapes us and remodels us, we are that block of stone and we hold the hammer, chisel and the add-on clay - some of us live the lives of no introspection and some of us do nothing but introspect - but what we need to partake in the third option - reflect and change. Without both, you can only stagnate and fall back onto the previous version of thyself.

Look at Casper, after much deliberation and a mental breakdown he quits his cushy but routine job at the restaurant and goes and buys the taco bus and takes his estranged son with him on the road to healing and gets his life back on track and his family in order, it is a beautiful showcase of redemption and the healing process of the soul. On the other side here is Porco, and his return to the society with his friend Fio and his fight for his community, as he said - better a pig than a fascist - and he ultimately sacrifices himself or at least tries to, so his friends and family can escape to safety - another showcase of a selfless act of somebody who went beyond simple vanity and selfishness into true sincerity.

When it comes to Infinite Jest , and how it figures into all of this on the topics of vanity and irony vs sincerity - it is a more avant-garde and bleak work in how it resolves itself - and it works fine as a contrasting agent - not all change is good or for the better - some of it is that biggest fear of mine, falling back - regressing or just plain stagnating. The characters here are driven, burned out, and crazy with dread, depression, over-stimulation and lack of any true sense or meaning. It makes you ask yourself if you have any purpose, if you can ever rise above your simple yet permeating primordial problems. It is as I said, bleak, but that is unfortunately reality of many people, some of us will forever be trapped in that tar pit of self deprecation, insincere beliefs and wants of trying to build one's identity with clothes, tattoos, hobbies etc instead of using the bricks of reflection, learning and implementing change.

Changes:

I am of the ilk that thinks that people can change and that change is inevitable. People who want to remain static do so. People who need irony as a shield against the world will use it so, and double down on it, we have built the environment for it. There is no room for sincerity where irony is the rule, when you are sincere you open yourself and your beliefs to the world, and they get ridiculed, for how could they not. One mocks what one fears the most in himself, and we all fear the mocking laughter of our tribe, or an audience in the scope of the internet. If a politician would step out tomorrow on some stage and tried to be sincere in the face of opponents armed with irony, he would be laughed of the stage I am sure of it, because in so many cases we mistake sincerity for naivete.

But that is my whole point in this essay, to live a life of true meaning, and to develop compassion and empathy, one first needs to regain his sense of sincerity. We have all at one point been extremely sincere, back when we were children, and over the years of harsh lessons and rolling with the punches life gave us we have learned the way of irony; "You cannot hurt me if I say something hurtful in a funny way about myself first.". I am not advocating abolishment of irony, as I have said - it is a great tool for humor, that is being exploited en mass nevertheless, what I am advocating is this, try to be more sincere with yourself and see what happens, you just might discover some old joyful part of yourself that got broken-off and got buried under the detritus of trauma of growing up.