Are we living in the 14th century?
Want to make everything epic? Listen to "Two Steps From Hell" next time you fold the laundry...
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I’m going to be blunt: We seem to be time traveling.
We haven’t literally reversed the passage of time, of course, but the global zeitgeist is becoming increasingly Medieval. For starters, we’re in the midst of a global plague. Sure, it’s more like the 1918 Spanish flu than the Black Death, but that hasn’t stopped The Times from declaring the end of New York City as we know it. (Sharp students of history will recall, though, that London rebounded after the great fire that wiped out the plague.) The signs that we’ve returned to the Dark Ages are everywhere: Misinformation is rampant, the rats are swarming, governors are grasping at power, there’s a despot ruling over the land, and toilet paper is a luxury.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Between televangelists invoking god to cast out COVID-19 and protests against science in the heartland, it’s a wonder we haven’t started burning witches yet. It used to be that your cow stopped producing milk, and the village got together and burned an old woman because maybe that would help with the milk situation and nobody really knew any better anyway (even though they probably did). Today, it’s people protesting outside ice cream parlors because they don’t really believe in the virus, even though we definitely know better now.
The Dark Ages were typified, at least in part, by a calcified belief system. You could believe the world was full of invisible forces, so long as you chose the right ones to believe in. In practice, this meant choosing the unseen forces that the Church or king approved of. Those who believed something different were devil worshippers, witches, Protestants or Catholics—depending on your persuasion—or, worst of all, atheists. We seem to be on a similar trajectory today. On one side of the mote, there are anti-science protestors who simply cannot believe that something they can’t see with the naked eye is virulent and deadly. On the other side are those who haven’t left their homes in weeks and seem to have concluded that the virus is a mustard gas-like miasma that cannot be escaped except by harshest of measures.
The reality is—as always—somewhere between the two poles. There are a mountain of facts and reams of scientific evidence pointing to the irrefutable fact that COVID-19 is a deadly disease that will continue to kill thousands upon thousands of people unless everyone cooperates in some basic and easily achievable public health activities such as washing your hands, wearing a mask when you’re within six feet of people, and closing non-essential businesses for a while. In an ideal world all of this would happen voluntarily, but people are ignorant and selfish, so that’s not possible. There is also a line at which interventions in the name of public health become authoritarian and repressive, such as ending all immigration into the country (a measure which frankly has nothing to do with public health at all) or closing beaches and parks where people exercise or catch a breath of fresh air.
At some point, the world has to remember that we are living in the 21st century, with all of the wonders of modern science and technology at our disposal. No, there’s not going to be some magical cure overnight, but we do know exactly which measures are necessary to preserve human life and blunt the impact of the pandemic. We definitely don’t need to burn witches or pretend that the unseen can’t hurt us. A little rationality, self-sacrifice for the greater good, and awareness of the past will go a long way right now.
Today’s Film: Primer (2004)
Today’s guest recommendation—the second in Highly Transmissible’s inaugural science fiction week—comes courtesy of Robert Frankel. Frankel is a writer, filmmaker, and journalist living in Brooklyn, New York. Find him at www.robertfrankel.com or shoot him a line at frankelr27@gmail.com.
A sci-fi gem devoid of aliens or space travel, Primer leans heavily into the method of science; it’s a film as much about process as it is about consequences, and it stands as the most definitive time-travel movie ever made.
When Aaron (Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) develop a small box with the potential to disrupt dozens of industries, they don’t let their aspirations get ahead of them. They know the best way to control something is to understand it—until they realize their box allows them to travel a few hours or days into the past. Abe creates rules to avoid paradoxes. Aaron follows stock indices. Together, they squeeze into separate boxes and skirt a day into the past, make the right investments, and reap the windfall. It all seems to go well. But causality is a tricky thing. When one event leads to another event leads to another, where do your actions end, and the system’s outputs begin?
To say more would give away much of the film’s endless surprises. Primer is a true sci-fi puzzler. It explains the rules but makes no effort to simplify its conceptual framework. It trusts the audience to make sense of its nine—yes, nine—timelines. (Beguiled viewers will find diagrams available online.) And yet, despite the film’s intense narrative dexterity, neither the characters nor the thrust of the story is ever lost. At its heart, Primer is a classic tale of power, friendship, and betrayal, albeit a deceptively simple one.
Carruth, who not only co-stars, but also served as writer, director, producer, and editor (in addition to production designer, sound designer, and composer), made Primer for about $7,000. This makes the movie a miracle of low-budget filmmaking that continue to impress its influence on time-travel stories to this day. And, a few technical issues aside, the film continues to hold up very well: With each repeated viewing, Primer loosens one more of its many knots, revealing new details and illuminating the incredible construction of its a-temporal narrative.
Even those boxes—those homemade portals into the past—feel immensely believable and, perhaps, twice as claustrophobic for contemporary viewers.
Primer is available to rent on Amazon, YouTube, Google Play, Apple iTunes, and Microsoft Store.
Reading List:
Today I’m recommending just one piece of outside reading, a fantastic new collection of horror and fantasy short stories by author and Highly Transmissible reader Aaron Palmer. Skeletal Prayer is a collection that takes surprising turns, is economical in its narrative structure, and plays out horror in settings that are deeply realized and utterly unusual. Skeletal Prayer is available on Amazon for $2.99.
Benjamin Reeves is an award-winning screenwriter, journalist and media consultant based in Brooklyn, New York. Follow him on Twitter @bpreeves or write to him at breeves.writer@gmail.com.