Oh man, it’s for real been a while since we got a little shreddy, know what I mean? Pretty understandable though, Mr. Pujol is a pretttty busy guy. But, in light of some recent events going down in Murfreesboro, he’s decided to grace us yet again with another edition of THE SHREDITORIAL. It’s a good read and has us stoked about this new movie called Myopia. Catch it at MTSU real soooooon…

SHREDITORIAL 17
MYOPIA

Life is like a video game right? I mean, I’m an individual, I’m a unique snowflake, and I’m completely alienated from all other human beings as the solipsistic protagonist of my own credit-less movie, complete with the Western story arch and all. Ya know how it is?

Looks like there is this sweet two-part student film running at MTSU this week called MYOPIA (a play on the words Distopia and Utopia). I’ve been reading rave reviews about it on my Spacebook and Critters. I’m pretty sure the plot is about the aftermath of this sort of consumer culture-y, Brave New World meets A Clockwork Orange the movie; not the book. We at the Shred can really appreciate a narrative that emphasizes the feverish alienation of being held in a Weberian God’s amoralized spotlight while riding the wave of a ten-year trend within an overarching Culture of Death, which of course, is the prequel to MYOPIA.

Now, I could sit here and try to ironically, or humorously, muse upon the film’s surreal double-debut at a distance of abstraction, but hey, it’s only 45-minutes away now, I mean, my little sister can throw an email that far. So since it’s The Shred, I want to cat-fist its rabbit-hole with my Kruger-glove: this flick made me think about how once consumerism and secularization of society made a harlequin baby on one end, and radicalized fundamental spirituality dominated all vocabulary relating to the non-touchables on the other; the qualitative understanding of human interaction in America has been marked down to a polarized zilch that is expressed as a long, empty silence, occupied by the sound of fluorescent bulbery.

There seems to be no tangible argument for or against the value of human relationships within the film, which seemed to be the overall thematic specter throughout the work. There was a disproportionate focus on the artificial barrier between individuals, and the crux of proving oneself in order to justify oneself through the eyes of others as a vessel upon the self and have your picture taken in the biggest place: to be the Bat Signal within the Star of Bethlehem. The film also touched on culture not affording the individual with the freedom of empathy, in the Chapter “An I for an I”. I thought that was a pretty cool point, but I didn’t know how to feel about it, and I don’t have the time to think about it due to my busy schedule.

The film exhibits the newest market: the psychic frontier being pioneered by sociopolitics and the private sector in the 21st Century: the space between individuals. Littered with billboards and pop-ups shops of associative meaning upon its Elysian Fields, its souls know of nowhere to go aside from away from one another, into unique-snowflake obscurity. The noble savages of this frontier, devoid of all proto-post human experience, writhe in meticulously regulated pain as guinea pigs of the birth pangs of the death of the social animal known as the human-bean.

*SPOILER ALERT. The climax of the movie escalates until the protagonist, initially shot out of a cannon at the beginning of the film, spirals into a final impact with his/her emotional wall as a bolus of over-stimulated nerves, and explodes into one final moment of Thelma and Louise-esque glory, diving Thunderbird-first into the axis of the YOUniverse, and spends the remainder of his/her life waiting for the credits to roll, wondering who will come to their funeral.

MYOPIA is now playing, projected upon a giant mirror, in the KUC Theatre 24/7,

The Puj