What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire

Monday morning. It’s warm and stuffy. The forecast for the week puts the temperature here in North Carolina in the high nineties, approaching 100 degrees F. One hundred F degrees. F for… well, you know what F is for. I miss the North.

I sit down with my laptop to check in and see if peace, love and, understanding has magically blossomed across the world overnight. It hasn’t. Damn. I really had my hopes up.

But Todd’s there to talk, sticky at the ready.

howd you sleep dude

“Better, Todd. Thanks.”

so what are we doing today

“Not sure. Everything for the DVD has been sent off, so now we just wait. We’ve got stuff to figure out for the website. The house is a wreck. I’ve got laundry to do. You got any ideas?”

what are you most worried about

I stop for a moment, close my eyes, and check in with my body. My brain often has little clue about how I’m feeling, but my body always seems to know. I see at once what is there.

“We had a screening last night. The first theater screening for us. Big screen. Big sound. Local crowd. And we have another coming up in Asheville this weekend. And we leave in just over two weeks for our Northeast tour. I have to show up, in person, and show our doc. And I have some fear about that.”

whatre you afraid of

“Oh I don’t know. Lots of things. What a Way to Go is an intense experience. It whacks people’s denial right upside the head. They may not like that. They may not like me. They may come after me. I see them, lined up at a microphone, asking me to justify what I’ve just shown them.”

so then what do you do

I sigh. One of those heavy morning sighs that says, “I wish I was still asleep!” What do I do? Sure. We’ve had great reviews. So many have written to thank us for what we’ve done. But we don’t kid ourselves that the doc is for everybody. Some people are not going to thank us for calling their entire world into question. At the screenings we’ll likely run into some of those people. Who will I be in those moments?

“Maybe I need some practice, Todd.”

ok so what do you need from me

“Let’s do a bit of role playing. You pretend to be an audience member that has just seen What a Way to Go. Or maybe it’s like a press conference. Or an interview. The lights come up. You’re stunned. You’re feeling things you don’t want to feel. And Sally and I are there. Come at me with some questions and I’ll try out some responses. It’ll help me. And maybe it’ll help others when they show the doc to friends and family.”

ok I can do that so heres my first question dude lets see so good evening mr bennett todd buttsore from the comfort times Im wondering whyd you make the movie so long

I laugh. “Yep. That would be the first one.” I think for a moment. “There’s so many ways to come at this.” It’s not like we didn’t wrestle with this throughout the editing phase. Which way do I take this one? Oh, I know.

“One of the fundamental mechanisms that keep our culture going is the denial of feeling. The wounding, the loss, the grief, the rage, these things run so deeply in us that if we begin to feel them, we fear that we won’t be able to contain it all, and that the release of all of this denied feeling will undo us. So in the presence of something, in this case a documentary, that creates a huge feeling experience for a person, often the first line of defense is to get back into denial as quickly as is possible.”

ok

“One way to do that is to go into film criticism mode, which is primarily a head activity, rather than a body activity. If you can steer the conversation toward editing techniques or plot points or camera movements or sound design, you take yourself away from the feeling experience. So one thing we try to do is limit attempts to critique the film as a film, and insist that people deal with the contents. It’s the content that we must face into, not the question of whether the doc is perfect or not.”

“This is not to say that there aren’t critiques to be made, just that people will have to do that on their own time, not with us. The film’s done. We’re not much interested in how somebody else would have made it differently. There is no piece of art that will work for everyone. There’s no one-right-way to make this film. Why pretend that there is? It’s just a distraction.”

excuse me tim todd baffled from simple thinking magazine I want to follow up on the last question I understand what youre saying but still its too long its too dense theres so much in it I cant wrap my head around it

“As we worked through this material over the years, it became clear that something happens when we look at everything at once. For four years now we’ve been exploring that phenomenon, with our minds, and with our bodies, reading widely and deeply in as many aspects of the present predicament as we can. And what we’ve found is this: when you look at the big picture as a whole, it burns away denial like nobody’s business. You might be able to look at climate change and dream of clean coal. But when you looked at climate change and energy depletion and mass extinction and population and dying oceans and forests and political insanity and the culture that created all of this, you see that clean coal is not going to do the trick.”

“So we made a doc that looks at as much of the whole at one time as it can. And that can create an intense feeling experience of overwhelm, fear, grief, anger, all sorts of things. It feels like a necessary step for people to go through. The situation IS overwhelming. It IS difficult to wrap your head around. It IS deeply confronting to our expectations and plans. So it makes sense that we should feel those things. Feeling what is so, feeling what you are feeling… I would call than sanity.”

“The problem is, when you’re caught up in that overwhelming experience, pretty much ANY duration will feel too long. People will attempt to tamp down their strong feelings by staying in their heads, by trying to grasp it all. But that, too, will be thwarted, unless they are already intimately acquainted with the material. The situation is simply too complex, the problems too interwoven, to be quickly and easily understood. So the doc will feel too long, too dense, too hard. That’s OK. What we’re finding is that people are watching it over and over. We love that. And so do they, apparently.”

todd sanguine from the cheermongers channel so if its so dense that people cant understand it all if it just pisses people off if it just makes them so upset that they have to block it out isnt it still too long too dense too much too something

“Thanks for continuing to chew on this one question, Todd. It’s really rich. And you’ve gotten to the heart of it. People are going to tell us it’s too long, too dense, too intense… because they know that it will be too difficult for many people to tolerate and understand, and they are afraid that if that’s the case, it won’t work.”

work how

“Well, that’s what I’ll have to ask them, isn’t it? Why does it matter that it’s long and dense? Because most people won’t get it? Why does that matter? Ah… because then there won’t be a mass consciousness change in time. In time for what? In time to avert widespread suffering from climate change and oil depletion and economic meltdown and political insanity. If there’s no mass consciousness change, and soon, we will not be able to make a more gentle transition. And if we let go of that possibility, we have to face into the fact that we are moving into some extremely challenging times. Life as we know it will not continue.”

but thats what you say in your movie theres no way to do that no way to keep this train going like it is it cant be done

“Yeah. It gets really hard at this point. I begin to wonder what I can say out loud, where I might want or need to hold back. We’re go