Fate Beats Man

Rating: 10/10 (25 October 2008)

When the lady who had been spewing biblical doomsday quotes and cursing anyone who dared to doubt her piousness or whose piousness she doubted, ever since things went wrong, finally went nuts, was hailed as the prophet because she did, demagogued the crowd, and made human sacrifice to the monsters unknown, I was almost certain that this film was lampooning the intolerance and the ridiculousness of the religious (and political) right and hallowing the rationality and the clear-headedness of the almighty and invincible American (upper) middle-class (especially the sea-board educated liberals).
"Damn." I thought, "I should've seen that coming the first moment I saw how that blue-collar, common, vulgar, uneducated, stupid, cowardly, no-good manual labourer even dared to question the judgement of our great hero artist." Then I continued enjoying the show, not only because Marcia was doing a dead-on satire of the 'politics of fear' but also because I, along with the more enlightened part of the American public, was quite sympathetic to what I, at that moment, thought to be the politics of the director.
Just when I was thinking what an important message that this supposedly 'horror' film was sending and savoring the words of wisdom from our heroes about how blind the 'mass', which, of course, were below our sane, sophisticated, and heroic ones, could get when they were in a panic mode, the ending came.
And bammmmmmmmmm! Everything that you thought you saw unravelled, and reincarnated into a paradox neither could we explain nor did we want to believe. All this time, we thought the ones who were supposed to be the heroes remained as sane as their reason allowed them to be, which no one can say they did not, wrestled with the calamity the most fiercely among their fellow men, which no one can say they did not, and, in every circumstances, made the best guess according to the cards they were dealt, which no one can say they did not either.
Even when the artist pulled the trigger, it was for the best, since they were without supplies or weapons, their car was out of fuel, no aide was in sight, and it was the only other way to die aside from being consumed by the bugs from another dimension. The artist did the noble thing, like a leader should have done, plunging his hands into blood, taking the guilt, and prepared to offering himself to the suffering that others would rather die to avoid. And then, the mist cleared, and the tanks of the military victoriously arrived, along with the lady, who no one thought to be rational to run into the deadly mist alone and was deemed most assuredly dead, and her children, the reason that she so foolishly left the smart.
In the end, the demagogued, the foolish, the stupid, and the insane survived, while the heroic, the reasonable, the rational, the enterprising, and the sophisticated perished.
When the self-deemed superior ones made the comment about the blindness and stupidity about the mass in panic, what they did not know is that they were indeed, as the no-good manual labourer so unknowingly presciently said, not better than the mass. Yes, they did everything they were supposed to do. But they were still in a panic. As they themselves succinctly put, when commented on the stupid mass, - "You scare people badly enough, you can get 'em to do anything. They'll turn to whoever promises a solution, or whatever.", they, the supposedly intelligent ones, were also scared enough and, thus, could not escape from their truth either. When they were saying "As a species, we're fundamentally insane.", trying to illuminate their fellowmen's ugly nature to make sense of their inferior behaviours, what they seemed to forget was that they were also part of the species. When they were scornfully watching their kins descending into lunacy, priding in their own 'saneness', what they failed to see is that, in the big picture, they were all the toys of their fear, only with different symptoms. When what you can do is not based on reason but a wild guess, fate rules. It always beats man, who perpetually lives under its whim. And it treats man mercilessly, no better than the bugs man were trying to kill.
Which leads me to think of the wise words of the Great Turtle Master in Kung Fu Panda - "One often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it.".
Which leads me to think of the current financial crisis.
Alan Greenspan, the Maestro, the master of the universe, the wisest of all the finance wise men, whose ass both parties had been so desperately trying to kiss, before he retired with glory, had been adopting an easy monetary policy for years, which increased the money supply, which placed in the hands of the banks so much more money that they were willing to lend to anyone even if they know the person cannot pay back. He aimed for a boom but America got a depression instead. Well, he is just trying to do the obvious, the right thing, predicting the future based on a wild guess, but fate beat him, which he should have known full well that he was no better than any of us when playing a game against fate.
Not to mention W's Iraq fiasco.
They were both trying to do the right thing, the logical thing, yet they both forgot that they belong to the mankind, they are fundamentally insane, and they are scared. This is a lethal combination that guarantees a show-hand with the fate that often beats man. No wonder they both met their destiny.
It simply reminds me again of the Great Turtle Master's wise saying.
And let's just hope the next president of America is, at least, not as scared as those men who would often meet their destiny.