The Flash

As I finished watching this movie, I felt something in my soul crack. Unhinge. Look, folks, regardless of your belief in God or whatever, real art is sacred. Absolutely sacred. You don't get to fuck with real art. That moment when some idiot put a crucifix in a jar? Yeah, fuck that guy. It wasn't deep or edgy, it was desecration. 

If you disagree go fuck yourself. 

Yes, I mean, it. I should. Here's why.

See, the problem is that people have this idea that all things should be rationally examined. Rationality, the process of making a thing make sense, is meant to ask whether or not a thing aligns with your principles, your assumptions. Your assumptions cannot, by definition, be rationally picked apart. They are based in your experiences and what you have reflexively learned to value. And that process is not actually a rational one. If your values are actually contradicted there should be disgust, revulsion, and anger. Because, as it turns out, the need for the sacred is higher than the rational process and actually should greatly supersede it.

I am not claiming that the following scene is on the same plane as sticking a crucifix in a piss jar. That would be silly. A crucifix is art that's so sacred that it is called sacred art as a redundancy. True art is always sacred, there's just some art that is so overloaded with the numinous that the communal response is to babble at it as the rational mind is forcefully reminded it is only a tool. I am making the distinction here coz this one scene really. Really. Really. Hit me hard. And I am angry at its desecration, and I think we should all be angry that such a thing was desecrated.

 

For those of you who have not seen this movie (and I do not recommend you see it at all), the lines "I love you more, I love you most, I loved you first" are the exchange between Barry and his mother from when he was a child. This monstrosity of a movie is about Barry trying to save his mother and accidentally breaking reality. The movie is very much about Barry coming to grips with the fact that he cannot track the variables that his mother living has on the universe, and by the end of his movie he can't justify saving her. The damage is too great, too complex, too unknowable. Barry cannot kill billions of people simply because he wants his mother to live. It goes against what his own mother taught him.

So the above scene is Barry undoing his mistake and saying goodbye. His mother, who clearly thinks he's just a crazy dude (and I mean, Ezra Miller, so) still reaches out in compassion to his pain. She's just being herself, and it turns out that Barry's memories of her don't actually do her justice. She is a legitimately good person, one who should have gotten better than being a random murder victim. And Barry has to let her die. She is being more than the person that Barry remembers, so much more! And Barry is realizing that heroism is a lot more than saving babies in a microwave. 

Yes, that happens.

No, it is not funny. 

There's two stories going on in this one objectively beautiful scene: one of the mother always being what she was, and one of the son finally growing up. The scene is so well done that I actually find myself crying as I'm writing this blog post. It is two people living two completely different stories, intersecting in their own subjectivity, and making something far greater than either of them. I live for this kinda stuff in a story. This is my jam. And I got quite a bit out of it. And I should have.

And the fact that this scene of pure love is buried in two and a half hours of some of the purest corporate excrement makes me very angry. The CGI is so bad. Laughably. Obviously. Horrifically. Bad. The acting is so wildly inconsistent. The music fails in every which way as a soundtrack, and frequently broke me out of the illusion. The rest of this movie is so horrible that I couldn't stop watching and when I had to stop I started watching it the next day coz I just wanted to see where the trainwreck would wind up.

Turns out I needed to stop, coz I didn't know it was going to shit over something I find sacred. It wasn't high art, sure, I'm not claiming this scene is the best thing ever made, but I am claiming that this one scene deserved a real movie. Actually deserved it. Everyone, even Ezra Miller, did too well in this one scene to deserve everything around it. It's not the first time I've seen WB desecrate one of their DC movies, as Batman vs Superman Ultimate Cut shows. But watching this scene? Get shoved in a jar of piss?

WB deserved to lose money on this one. I'm glad they did. I hope they lose more on it. A whole fuckton more. A very vengeful part of me hopes that WB legitimately dies for this kind of desecration. And it doesn't stop there, at least for me. I am so tired of this corporate interference. I am so tired of whatever process goes on behind the scenes that makes monsters like this movie. I'm tired of good movies becoming badly-paced streaming shows, of jokes blaspheming scenes, of jaded audiences who can't even tell what the real thing is anymore. It tires me. Wears me out. Fills me with spite. 

I know art in this world requires money. I'm neck deep in developing three TTRPGs and am hitting the bottleneck of needing money for art and graphic design. I am not unsympathetic to "This isn't free to make", and if someone ran up to me and said "A big corporation is willing to drop buckets and buckets and buckets of money on you coz it likes what you're doing, just make a few small concessions for our bottom line" I'd fucking sign, and I have no moral qualms about saying it and doing it. In order to get things done you must make compromises, and I care too much about actually getting things done to pretend that my idealism would poison that. So I am not bemoaning Big Money. It has its uses.

But it is a means. Not... whatever the fuck I just saw.

And sometimes such acts of desecration should have consequences. Like the (un)fortunate passing of a gigantic corporation as it's abandoned. I very rarely actively wish for the death of a corporation as a moral necessity. But whatever desecrated this scene? It needs to die. It cannot die fast enough.