I went to see _The Forgiven_ a second time during a
week which saw the devastating defeat of the U.S.
"build back better" bill for clean energy and global
warming mitigation. The barely habitable Sahara
desert may be our destiny now. (A heat wave is
sweeping through Europe as I type.) Desert is the
ultimate nihilist.

Which begs the question: where is "climate change"
at the movies? Why has American cinema "cancelled,"
"erased" climate change? Here I mean climate
change as the bash-you-over-the-head theme, a call
to arms, not as background color. Zombie-as-climate
change metaphor, i.e., zombie-washing, zombie-face,
doesn't count. Neither does "snow job."

A search of wikipedia is frustrating. _A.I._
remains the most relevant (NYC submerged in the
ocean) and that was made 20+ years ago. The more
recent explicit examples: _The Day After Tomorrow_
(freezing instead of global warming, i.e., snow
job), _Geostorm_ (scientists try to control
climate leading to sabotage and disaster), and
_Snowpiercer_ (about the same, with snow job).
_Dune_ and _Interstellar_ are cop-outs; these
commercial films elide the issue for the sake
of selling tickets. A film which highlights the
importance of energy technology to fight climate
change is Christopher Munch's _The 11th Green_!
It may be the best film not called _A.I._ on that
list. Frank Herbert understood the central role
of energy; so did Chris Marker. Why don't the
current crop of directors? Jessica Chastain's
Murph should have mastered nuclear fusion in
_Interstellar_, not the same old quantum gravity
hocus pocus.

If you read a lot of amazon user reviews you will
be struck by the hypersensitivity towards "woke"
elements (LGBTQ, woman and minorities "replacing"
white males ...) among the MAGA set. If Hollywood
is content to offend the lunatic far-right anyway,
why not feature climate change as well?

Maybe it is just not a high priority then? Guess
what, many Republicans feel exactly the same.

This is decadence.

Democrats are rightly stunned and confounded
that the Republican Party was taken over by
Trump. Yet the Democrat's Party have also been
completely taken over by its skin-color and
LGBTQ fundamentalists, to the extent that they
no longer have the vocabulary to address the
most pressing issues. The day after the US
Supreme Court struck down Roe vs. Wade, a NYT
columnist's headline read "Abortion is a race
issue" (or something like that) -- instead of
women's issue, human issue. I didn't have
the heart to read that drivel. Another op-ed
piece was about flying the LGBTQ flag on 7/4.

How have we come to this? Millennia of human
achievements, war crimes, slavery -- MAGA and
skin-color/LGBTQ fundamentalism are the end-
points of human evolution? Didn't we have
higher aspirations? Arthur C. Clarke (and
Kubrick) postulated that the human race would
become so advanced it would shed its corporeal
form, live as light energy. Frank Herbert,
always more pessimistic, settled for simple
survival of the species, and that was a
Herculean effort already. Now we focus on
fringe politics while the planet literally
burns.

(One might argue that the idea of a progression
is Western and therefore corrupt. Indeed,
French Existentialism might have been the last
universal philosophical framework. The "theories"
that followed -- structuralism, Foucault, Walter
Benjamin -- were eclectic (chaotic, anecdotal).
The cherry-picking of history of the far left
is all of one piece with this "Western" thought
process. If you what to see what non-Western
ideologies look like, look at modern Russian
and Chinese ones -- all based on ethnic supremacy,
little room for minorities.)

Perhaps the best thing about Claire Denis' _Both
Sides of the Blade_ was Vincent Lindon's speech
against skin-color determinism! And the newly
minted NYT columnist Pamela Paul has it exactly
right.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/03/opinion/the-far-right-and-far-left-agree-on-one-thing-women-dont-count.html
---------------------------------------------------

_The Forgiven is really a thought-provoking film.
The non-stop conflicts, explicit or hinted at,
between people belonging to different cultures
and social classes make the subtext grind at you,
like stones in your boots. It presents a mirror
to Western societies, questioning our decadence,
our relation to the world. But first, Jessica
Chastain.

Chastain's character Jo may be the literate and
refined in the film, but she smugly condescends
to the servants. She is an American who moved to
Britain at unspecified times; I suspect Jo might
even be British in Lawrence Osborne's novel, which
I haven't read. Her power over the Moroccan staff
-- Hamid the head servant in particularly -- is
not just social and economical, but also sexual.
Spotting him spying on her sleeping with the other
American guest, she moves his head out of the way
so that her eyes are free to stare back at Hamid
-- while having an orgasm. She know he desires
this gorgeous white woman but will never have her.
This is the most compromised character Chastain has
played since _Crimson Peak_. Still, Jo is quite a
few IQ points below the actress' own intelligence.
In fact most of the characters have dumb dialogue,
especially Caleb Landry James' gay lover Dally, who
is your basic British equivalent of a frat boy, and
Abbey Lee's party girl gone wild.

The dignified, acerbic Hamid watches the guests'
debauchery with disdain (he has an Arabic proverb)
for every occasion), but is not above keeping the
dead Driss's father at bay, warning his boss of a
possible blackmail. The complex Hamid, negotiating
Western and Arabic cultures, is a central figure.
His hostility towards the drunk David early on gives
way to approval at the end -- welcoming him back
with a long cool drink while everyone else has
forgotten him. He knows, as John Michael McDonagh's
characters tend to know, that it matter less what
insensitive things you say, than what you are
morally capable of when the chips are down. I myself
will not be caught dead voicing the things David
(or the protagonist of _The Guard_) says to taunt
non-white races. But I'm not sure I would have
taken that trip with the father of someone I just
killed, either.

A nice visual contrast is drawn between Hamid who
throws away a tray of gourmet croissant, and David
sharing a one somehow available deep in the desert
with Said Taghmaoui's Anouar.

I think John Michael McDonagh should make a film
about climate change.