|
2002 The Year in Review
By Kip
Amore
Well it's about that time
again. Did you ever notice that you almost always see the "Year in Review"
articles at the EXACT moment you give less than a shit about the old year?
Who gives a crap about 2002 right now. That was last month, fer chrissake.
But who am I to argue.
Let's face it, nothing
happened in 2002. Not a goddamn thing. The sniper. Big whoop. Winona Ryder
on trial for shoplifting. And you'd think we would have won that war in
Afghanistan by now, but if we did nobody told me. But other than that,
nothing really happened. NOTHING. Why should this be? Well, the answer is
that after 911 I watched so much news that I have never bothered to watch it
again. I asked around amongst my friends, and they concur. We all camped out
for a week watching the same news over and over again and nobody bothers
with it anymore. I still buy the paper, but I go right to the crossword
puzzle. The exact same thing happened back in 1994 with the OJ thing. You
remember that dontcha? There was so much fucking OJ in the news that nothing
else happened.
What can we learn from
this? I've been digging into it and I found out something. News is like a
soap opera. You have to stick with it for it to have any meaning. You know,
unless it's right in your back yard and affects you directly. Upon deeper
reflection, I found out that many of the things we consume intellectually are
basically soap operas. Sports: a soap opera. People who like sports (who are
Neanderthal nutscratching dipshits in my book) enjoy it because the story
unfolds week by week. And since there's always a next season cliffhanger,
you never know how it's going to end. Sports, like a soap opera, never ends.
News, like a soap opera, never ends.
This summer, I got into
The Sopranos. And I'm going along all eager to see what happens next week.
And then it hits me! It's a friggin' soap opera. And that really bothered me
and wrecked my enjoyment of the show. It hit me that no matter how exciting
the plot seemed, some writer was going to introduce yet another nutty plot
twist just to keep me hooked. A movie, in general, has a story arc that
comes to a conclusion, because the writer wants to show you something. He
wants to make a point, and he does it through the conflict and resolution of
the movie. A soap opera just wants to keep you hooked. There's no "big
picture", it's just a bunch of stuff that happens with no real point. Like
sports, and like news; it's open ended.
Some say that life itself
is just a soap opera. Well, it isn't. We die, and boy are we lucky for that.
Life is like a movie and thankfully there's no shitty sequel staring Roy
Schieder. I've said it before and I'll say it again - death is what makes
life worth living. Think of your headstone as just a place to put the
credits. Life SEEMS like a soap opera, because you literally have to tune
in next week to find out what happened. But life is really a movie, it's
just incredibly long and poorly written. And there aren't enough car
chases, and it's way lacking in sex scenes.
 |
