It was a black comedy set in a slightly futuristic time period, where Zach plays George Washington Winsterhammerman, an employee at "Jeffers Corporation"--the friendliest and most profitable organization in the country. It has taken over society, more or less, and anyone that wants any kind of productive future should probably just work there. There was a dry, black humor that set the tone within the first five minutes. Though this tone would never be lost, it would evolve.
I laughed, don't get me wrong. Even during the parts that struck home at long last, there were bits of absurdity you couldn't but help laugh at. The storyline itself is absurd, focusing on a "pandemic" of people literally exploding. Of course, no one can distinctly tell why this is happening to people, only that having dreams and being tired are some of the symptoms. Imagine that.
It strikes you rather suddenly, surprising you when all of a sudden the story becomes a social commentary. If you take everything metaphorically, you're suddenly blindsided, as I was, by how profound this film actually was. These people are exploding from stress, anguish, pain, or simply from being bored of their mundane lives. Naturally, this is a disease, a travesty that must be cured. Somewhere during the middle of the movie the Jeffers Corporation, and the United States
You have to notice the social commentary this film initially presents. A society focused on productivity and which has lost its ability to connect, to feel happiness. A society of isolation. Politics and society governed by these super-massive corporations. Individuals that have become drones, mere cogs in the machine, who have lost the fucking ability to dream. Don't make me get Gatsby on you--you must see the relevance here.
There's a part where Zach's character, George, goes to speak to his brother who has recently started a free-living society in his back yard after quitting the Jeffers Corporation in favor of resuming his old hobby of pole vaulting. [Like I said, absurd.] Julieen, his brother, notices that FBI has been crawling through the woods, presumably to take down the little society he has created. They fear some sort of revolution, and of course, this rebellious thought which isn't congruent with the rest of society is a threat and must be destroyed. He says to George, "They don't even know they're doing the same thing as everyone else, just using a different name. Entertaining themselves. Missing it. Lying. None of them care about pole vaulting or dreams."
This idea, beyond the immediate, personal "Oh shit..." reaction, is rather evident in the many wars and conflicts that have occurred over the difference of opinion--not because the other opinion is necessarily dangerous, but because it is different. This is the ethnocentric "us vs them" mentality that people tend to hold, especially when based on ignorant ideas about what is right and what is wrong, based on the primordial fear of the unknown.
Another psychological or social dynamic the movie covered within the theme of absurdity was the pursuit of happiness through extrinsic means. It shows people seeking happiness through working hard and being purely productive to watching self-help shows and reading self-help books, like George's wife, Michelle, does. Their marriage isn't particularly happy, and she aims to fix this lack of happiness via these absurd self-help remedies. In particular, she is a fan of Sahra, a blonde television host who resonates as being particularly shallow in emotion and intellect. This woman's methods range from deep breathing to meditation with candles, to reading a book called "10,000 Things That Make Me Happy." Of course Michelle immediately orders the book, hoping it will fix her unhappiness, even if from the viewer's perspective she initially seems unaware there's a problem at all. When the host of this show, Sahra, finishes the book, reaches number 10,000, you see her having a panic attack on live television. She's screaming, crying, at this last little platitude in this book of absolute bullshit. "'Happiness is: being happy.'... What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?" She collapses to the ground, wracked with sobs. Later, you see she has shot herself with a shotgun, laying dead in plain view of the camera.
Michelle of course, cannot handle seeing her idol of happiness crash and burn. George finds her in the bedroom sometime after this, a shotgun in her lap. "She put the shotgun in her mouth, said goodbye, and pulled the trigger. So I put my shotgun in my mouth, said goodbye, and pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. Shells weren't in the book." The woman couldn't even kill herself correctly. She then tells George that she'd been trying all afternoon to make herself explode and couldn't, finally coming to a pivotal conclusion: "They are better than us because they still feel something, they still dream something. Something that hasn't been ripped out of them by hair cuts, and lattes with what kind of milk, and an ass that won't stop growing, and a husband who can't get his dick up."
Once again, one can't help but see the social commentary. When we see someone who's sad in our society, despondent in some manner, we immediately ask "What's wrong?" and assume there's something to be fixed. That somehow, unhappiness is unnatural or something that should be erased. It's a fucking part of life, not a disease to be cured. Hell, we find these same people that are more aware of the oftentimes dark nature of humanity or the miseries of history, who tend to be more morose than jovial, are the ones who create beautiful art and literature. Take Poe for example. Would his work have been as beautiful or as relatable if he'd had some absurdly happy or nearly perfect life? No. There is beauty in misery; we cannot appreciate the goodness in life without the bad. Aside from that entirely, I find that misery in itself can be something beautiful because it's a part of the 'human condition,' if you will. It's experience.
I won't ruin the ending, or spoil too many more details, but whatever original notions I may still have maintained were finally crushed in the scene where George meets Jeffers. After a long spiel, Jeffers gave George the best piece of advice he could, explained that he could help him get rid of all his pain. That he had the answer. He wrote it down on a business card and handed it to George.
Before I finish this, I just want to say that anyone that has anything resembling a soul or understanding of the human psyche or has any part of them that doesn't try to dissociate from what it means to be human, fucking watch this movie. It's surprising, it's witty, it's funny, it's morbid, it's fucking depressing, it's eye-opening and pulls you out of any "sleepwalking" through life you may have been doing lately. Seriously, watch it.
I'm a pretty unemotional person. I tend to do exactly what I just mentioned above, disconnecting myself. However, this movie didn't give me a choice. I didn't have the chance to throw up walls because I wasn't suspecting this movie to hit any kind of nerve, and yet, it did. This in itself is incredibly impressive and something of a feat. I don't think I could ever explain it properly. Let it just be said that when I finally saw what had been written on the card, all the feeling that had been building up the entire movie finally hit home, and I could no longer argue that this movie was anything but brilliant.
How do you get rid of all the pain?
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