I think this is an excellent essay Ed - I honestly love all the points you made and feel very much the same about the film - Nolan's failure to handle this important story with any depth, his misrepresentation of O's life and character and the choice to spend the last third of the film on Strauss's vendetta which was so weirdly irrelevant! Emperors new clothes definitely but then I never understood or shared the adulation of Nolan (Tenet??!) Well done for another great fragment! x
Brilliant brilliant expose of yet another tragic missed opportunity by Hollywood writers and exec producers. Yet like them, ironically, you fail to end with an answer to the most important question, "So what can I as a lone individual do to address this pathology?" You could at least give the urls of people working to stop the current US proxy war against Russia, courtesy of the pathologically wealth and power-addicted heads of the military industrial complex which control both parties, or emails of organizer/fundraisers like myself looking for collaborators to learn from past most important successful and unsuccessful social change battles in US history to mount a powerful movement staffed by 2000-3000 organizers and the best talents in organizing, social and mainstream media and marketing and fundraising etc to stop this slow motion suicide of most of nature, all of civilization, and most of humanity.
And for mother earth's sake, please don't reply with "I'm only a writer, not an organizer." If you can write brilliant analyses and prose, you can write a list of urls of organizations and emails or twitter handles for people like me who need co-organizers,
Thanks Gary for your kind words and for your contribution to the conversation. I could not agree more that people need to connect with those who are actually trying to do something to actively engage with the danger.
However, when you write "trying to stop the current US proxy war against Russia", you sound dangerously close to parroting the apologists for the Putin regime who try to portray the barbaric invasion of Ukraine as America's responsibility. Which is not to say that the West did not contribute to it with its humiliation of Russia the 1990s, much as the Treaty of Versailles contributed to the rise of Hitler. But as with Nazi Germany, while that might help explain Russia's actions, it does not in any way excuse them. The Russians have chosen to torture and murder innocent women and children all on their own.
And in a sense, you've answered your own question: it's hard to find anyone to recommend because most people are corrupted by a good guys/bad guys narrative of some kind, rather than trying to rise above it and put the interests of humanity as a whole first. If I do find someone, I'll definitely direct people to them.
All that said, I do highly recommend your documentary about how a nuclear stand-off could spiral to anyone reading this Substack who think I am overstating the precariousness of our situation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uazLpKho34M. It's 34 years old but all of its dire warnings are if anything even more relevant today.
I think this is an excellent essay Ed - I honestly love all the points you made and feel very much the same about the film - Nolan's failure to handle this important story with any depth, his misrepresentation of O's life and character and the choice to spend the last third of the film on Strauss's vendetta which was so weirdly irrelevant! Emperors new clothes definitely but then I never understood or shared the adulation of Nolan (Tenet??!) Well done for another great fragment! x
Thank you Clio, glad to hear you felt the same way - and thanks so much for your stalwart support for this project x
Brilliant brilliant expose of yet another tragic missed opportunity by Hollywood writers and exec producers. Yet like them, ironically, you fail to end with an answer to the most important question, "So what can I as a lone individual do to address this pathology?" You could at least give the urls of people working to stop the current US proxy war against Russia, courtesy of the pathologically wealth and power-addicted heads of the military industrial complex which control both parties, or emails of organizer/fundraisers like myself looking for collaborators to learn from past most important successful and unsuccessful social change battles in US history to mount a powerful movement staffed by 2000-3000 organizers and the best talents in organizing, social and mainstream media and marketing and fundraising etc to stop this slow motion suicide of most of nature, all of civilization, and most of humanity.
And for mother earth's sake, please don't reply with "I'm only a writer, not an organizer." If you can write brilliant analyses and prose, you can write a list of urls of organizations and emails or twitter handles for people like me who need co-organizers,
Respectfully, --gary krane PhD, Gary@GetCourageNow.org and on LinkedIn and on signal
Thanks Gary for your kind words and for your contribution to the conversation. I could not agree more that people need to connect with those who are actually trying to do something to actively engage with the danger.
However, when you write "trying to stop the current US proxy war against Russia", you sound dangerously close to parroting the apologists for the Putin regime who try to portray the barbaric invasion of Ukraine as America's responsibility. Which is not to say that the West did not contribute to it with its humiliation of Russia the 1990s, much as the Treaty of Versailles contributed to the rise of Hitler. But as with Nazi Germany, while that might help explain Russia's actions, it does not in any way excuse them. The Russians have chosen to torture and murder innocent women and children all on their own.
And in a sense, you've answered your own question: it's hard to find anyone to recommend because most people are corrupted by a good guys/bad guys narrative of some kind, rather than trying to rise above it and put the interests of humanity as a whole first. If I do find someone, I'll definitely direct people to them.
All that said, I do highly recommend your documentary about how a nuclear stand-off could spiral to anyone reading this Substack who think I am overstating the precariousness of our situation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uazLpKho34M. It's 34 years old but all of its dire warnings are if anything even more relevant today.
Best
Ed