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 going on tour, doing a bunch of screenings. We’ll have DVDs to sell. And we’ll do circles and Q&As and private meetings and workshops. We’re going to meet up with many people who want desperately to find some way to fix our current problems so we can keep going without having to face some extremely hard times. What do I say to them? Do I tell them that they can’t have that? Do I tell them that I see no hope in a mass consciousness change that will yield a painless transition? Do I tell them that, even if by some miracle a worldwide mass consciousness change were to happen overnight, that as far as I can see there would be nothing to do at that point but to consciously dismantle the entire system as quickly as is possible, that even if that most unlikely of events were to happen, it would still entail vast and traumatic change? Do I just smile and nod my head and say nothing?”

you worried its going to cut into dvd sales

“Well, yeah, in a way. I mean, we’ve spent most of four years on this. I’m not going to be shy at all about saying that it’s time we got some energy returned for the energy we’ve invested. But it’s more than that. What we have to say is not what many people will expect. We’ve come to terms with the idea that we’re not going to create some huge shift in consciousness in order to avert collapse. We’ve become convinced that that is simply so unlikely as to reside in the realm of the impossible.”

“What we’re doing is inviting people to wake up to that, because if they do wake up to that, there is much that CAN be done in the face of collapse, and because we can see that there is a great opportunity here, for those who wish to live consciously in this time: an opportunity to be sane, and whole, and to live a life of meaning and intention, to grow up, as Richard Heinberg says, to become agents of healing and comfort, even as Empire collapses.”

thats way harder to sell than mass consciousness change dude

“Tell me about it, Todd. Way harder to sell. Hard enough to make me wonder whether I should just nod my head and smile and wish people good luck. But how can I do that? The best thing I have to offer the world, I think, is my commitment to total transparency, to showing up and telling the truth as I see it, in every moment. I can’t give that up.”

dont you dare dude why do you think Im still hanging with you this isnt the only laptop in town you know I could be in lounging in a macbook pro those intel cores are sweet dude like getting a massage but no Im here in your little beat up g4 powerpc because you tell me the absolute truth over and over and you dont water it down you dont treat me like a kid

Once again, Todd manages to bring a tear to my eye. “Thanks, my friend. That’s good to hear. It can be really hard to do.”

thats why they sent me here the chicken the pig the cow they knew what they were doing you want some more questions

“I think that’s enough for now, Todd. We can do this again soon. Right now, I gotta get my laundry.”

okay Im going to go mess around with the amazondotcome site make it so the books on your reading list show up as recommended titles more often

Todd’s off. Doing his own version of guerilla marketing. And so am I.

I wonder what other sites he could “mess around with”?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 11:45 am and is filed under Tim's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.