A quick flash of Klieg lights from the subconscious

 

Saw a short but evocative post from Michael Smith on Facebook yesterday that struck an immediate chord with me:  

It struck chords with a lot of people in fact. We’d already been through this once with all the guiltiest talking heads in the media interviewing all the accomplices in the political class about how the fact of Joe Biden’s serious dementia could have been covered up so thoroughly. Nauseating to watch. Now we have a similar but not quite identical phenomenon of the complicit talking heads in the huge set of hoaxes designed to destroy the Trump presidency inviting some of of the prime perpetrators on to deny the truth of Tulsi Gabbard’s charges with a straight face. Nodding all around as more lies are piled on top of the mountain of old lies. Does no one realize they are, if possible, making matters worse for themselves when the investigators bring their charges?

Reading Smith’s post and the comments appended to it made me think of a movie I had seen as a kid. It was called “On the Beach,” filled with big Hollywood stars, including Fred Astaire in his first role with no dancing. Uncharacteristically dark for the big movies of the late 1950s, its release was big news in the entertainment world. My own reaction was a kid’s, I suppose. Impressed but baffled. The plotline was doomsday. The world would soon come to an end. Nuclear war had occurred. Those able to, financially and otherwise, had congregated in Australia to obtain the maximum delay before the fallout arrived to kill everyone off. All the characters were involved in subplots about coping with the End of Days. 

It wasn’t until I was old enough to discover Evelyn Waugh and his two brilliant first novels, Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, that a smart critic’s summary of their plots explained “On the Beach” to me as well: “A portrait of high society politely blowing its brains out because nothing makes sense in the world anymore.”

Why I thought of the 1959 movie when I beheld CNN, MSNBC, and other alphabet news outlets pretending that the chickens of the Russia Russia hoax weren’t coming home to roost. So I looked up the trailer for On the Beach and discovered that it was even better than the movie itself as a demonstration of the Evelyn Waugh review. Here it is:

What’s being sold here isn’t the existential reflections Hollywood appears to be inviting the public to participate in: it’s just how big a gala event this movie opening is. Star after star and international bigwig after international bigwig, all dressed to the nines and happy as hell to be seen together in such glittering company. Even the Russians were there. You couldn’t wrap it all up with a bigger bow. It’s hilarious. Probably not the intent of the trailer’s producer.

I will say, all the years later, that the movie was intermittently memorable. I recall the Fred Astaire plotline, which may have been the easiest for a kid to understand. And I also took away a lifetime reverence for the dirge-like chorale they made of Australia’s signature song, “Waltzing Matilda.”

That can’t be a fluke by the way. I have to believe that Tom Waits also drew inspiration for his own signature song, ‘Tom Traubert’s Blues’ from the score of  “On the Beach.” That’s how haunting it was. And how haunting he still is.

Interesting to ponder the possibility that all the conspirators and accomplices do know, deep down, that the jig is already up. This massive set of interconnected crimes (or dirty deeds if they’re still rationalizing) is already the only thing they will all be remembered for, regardless of what happens in the courts. Maybe they too have been, and will somehow continue to, “politely blow(ing) their brains out in public” for our entertainment and their masochistic sensation of the intensity of suicide.

Who can say? Who knows? What does anyone else think?