Extreme Deprssion? Suicidal Ideation? Mental Stress? Or Something Else? -- June 14, 2023

Locator: 44934PGA.   

I saw a clip of Jay Monahan being interviewed during the PGA tournament this past weekend trying to explain the merger. Truly pathetic on so many levels. 

Did the stress of that interview lead to his need for medical leave?

Link here.

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The Book Page

From Chuck Klosterman's The Nineties, page 241, Penguin edition:

Meet Joe Black was released in theaters in November of 1998. Starring Brad Pitt as Death and lasting more than three hours, it was a lackluster romance with elements of supernatuural realism. The only memorable scene involves Pitt being struck by both a minivan and a taxicab within the span of twenty-four frames. 

It cost $90 million to make and earned $44 million domestically, which would normally define it as a forgettable flop. 

But Meeet Joe Black holds a strange cinematic distinction: it is almost certainly the all-time highest-grossing move among ticket buyers who did not watch one minute of the film.

Before screenings of Meet Joe Black, movie houses across the country debuted the 131-second trailer for The Phantom Menace, the first prequel to the original Star Wars trilogy, slated for the summer of 1999. 

The result was a phenomenon that had never happend before and hadn't even been imagined as a prospect: there were numerous reports of people buying full-priced tickets for Meet Joe Black, watching the Phantom Menace trailer, and then immediately exiting the theater.

That short essay precedes chapter ten: "A Two-Dimensional Fourth Dimension," a "critical" review of another movie of the nineties, The Matrix.

The Matrix was a sci-fi action film about a computer-simulated world constructed during a war between humans and self-aware computers.

The movie is a series of interlocking contradictions that should not equate to the blockbuster it became.

It was written and directed by Lilly and Lana Wachowski, who were still living iin 1999 as men. Their eventual gender transition is now the most glaring subtext to The Matrix, directly illustrated when the story's main character has to choose between swallowing a blue pill ... or a red pill ...  the metaphoric meaning of this decision has been projected back upon the Wachowski siblings.... the original thematic intention ...

The movie starred Keanu Reeves ...  his version of cool was not the nineties version of cool: Keanu was a masculine airhead. All the things that were once seen as vapid or devoid of affect became charming. A blankness that previously suggested naiveté now suggested wisdom. ... The Matrix was absorbed into Reeves.

The desire to classify Reeeves as brilliant peaked in late 2020, when The New York Times published a list of the twenty-five greatest actors of the twenty-first century and somehow placed Keanu at number 4 overall ... Meryl Streep was ignred entirely.

So what, exactl, made this film smart enough to turn a hipster doofus into a hipster Copernicus? 

The Matrix seemed like it was about computers. It was actually about TV.