It will come to be seen as the persecution of a culture. This makes football akin to the Confederate flag, or Christmas decorations in public spaces, or taxpayer-supported art depicting Jesus in a tank of urine – something that becomes intractable precisely because so many people want to see it eliminated. The game’s violence would save it, and it would never go away.
I don’t think we have any idea who we are. I think we’re engaged in a constant battle to figure out who we are.
Batman never questions the logic of letting a childhood experience dictate his entire life.
The past has happened, and it can only happen the way it happened.
When Arthur Schlesinger Sr. pioneered the ‘presidential greatness poll’ in 1948, the top five were Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jefferson. Only Wilson appears to be seriously fading, probably because his support for the World War I-era Sedition Act now seems outrageous; in this analogy, Woodrow is like the Doors and the Sedition Act is Oliver Stone.
But when you’re naturally better than everyone else, and when that talent is so utterly obvious, being quiet doesn’t translate as humble. It translates as boredom.
Woody Allen made it acceptable for beautiful women to sleep with nerdy, bespectacled goofballs; all we need to do is fabricate the illusion of intellectual humor, and we somehow have a chance.
According to population expert Dr. Paul Ehrlich, we should currently be experiencing a dystopian dreamscape where “survivors envy the dead,” which seems true only when I look at Twitter.
The reason something becomes retrospectively significant in a far-flung future is detached from the reason it was significant at the time of its creation – and that’s almost always due to a recalibration of social ideologies that future generations will accept as normative.
It is impossible to examine questions we refuse to ask.
I’ve obliterated three days trying to come up with an elegant way to write what I’m about to write, but I think the least elegant way is probably best: I like Kanye West.
TV takes away our freedom to have whatever thoughts we want. So do photographs, movies, and the Internet. They provide us with more intellectual stimuli, but they construct a lower, harder ceiling.
Not all crazy people are brilliant, but almost all brilliant people are crazy.
Now, obviously, all old people seem cool whenever we see black-and-white images of their younger selves. It’s human nature to inject every old picture with positive abstractions. We can’t help ourselves. We all do it. We want those things to be true, because we all hope future generations will have the same thoughts when they come across forgotten photographs of us.
Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.
The only modern narrative that handles the conundrum semi-successfully is Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, where schizophrenic heartthrob Jake Gyllenhaal uses a portal to move back in time twelve days, thereby allowing himself to die in an accident he had previously avoided. By removing himself from the equation, he never meets his new girlfriend, which keeps her from dying in a car accident that was his fault.
But regardless of the direction you move, the central problem is still there: Why do it? What’s the best reason for exploding the parameters of reality? With the possible exception of eating a dinosaur, I don’t think there is one.
It starts from the premise that black connotes evil and death in all cultures and hopes to figure out if “these associations influence people’s behavior in important ways. For example, does wearing black clothing lead both the wearer and others to perceive him or her as more evil and aggressive? More importantly, does it lead the wearer to actually act more aggressive?
According to the director, Primer is a movie about the relationship between risk and trust. This is true. But it also makes a concrete point about the potential purpose of time travel – it’s too important to use only for money, but too dangerous to use for anything else.
The defining line from Frank Herbert’s Dune argues that the mystery of life “is not a question to be answered but a reality to be experienced.” My fantasy offers the opposite. Nothing would be experienced. Nothing would feel new or unknown or jarring. It’s a fantasy for people who want to solve life’s mysteries without having to do the work.