The Sunset Limited

HBO has made the most interesting tv of the last decade, though Showtime holds its own. The recent film version of Cormac McCarthy's The Sunset Limited is indicative of the consistently high production value of HBO's movies. Samuel L. Jackson and Tommye Lee Jones are both up to the onerous task of bringing a two man stage play to the screen, albeit the small screen (if you can call it that anymore), and, on the whole, Sunset is compelling. I confess that I didn't intend to watch it when I did, but I got caught, from the first few moments, in what is clearly a staged version of an inner debate that McCarthy has played out in his head for the last 40 years. But I think the film also represents my last trip to the alter of post-apocalypse that McCarthy has nailed himself to a cross above. Truth is, I can't take it anymore.

2000 years ago, some guy who has come to be known as St. John the Apostle wrote the last book of the New Testament or his Revelation. In it, he imagined the end times, the second-coming of Christ, and a whole bunch of other crazy shit that has been the fodder for so many Hollywood, end times movies. In the bible, it's the hard sell to the Book of Psalms' softer one. Psalms promises that God will walk with you through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, while Revelations threatens you with being left behind the rapture to watch your friends and family die in agony, only to be rewarded with continual torture in a fiery hell. As a child, Revelations worked on me. The devil scared the shit out of me, still does, still can't watch The Exorcist, still get a chill every now and then when I walk down stairs at night, still a little afraid to say, out loud, that I don't believe in no devil. But I digress. My point was that since Revelations, and no doubt many times before, someone has stood up every hundred years or so and declared that the shit has hit the fan, the jig is up. From the dark ages, to the fall of Rome, from the Black Plague to the French Revolution, smart people the world over declared that things were coming to an end, and here we are.

I know what you're thinking, "yeah, but those guys didn't know what we know." The planet is falling apart, the oceans are dying, we have the capacity to blow our planet out of the solar system and scientists in Switzerland are trying to create a black hole (great fucking idea). These things are true. Meanwhile, there's a class war brewing in our country that I'm pretty sure is gonna get bloody before it's over. The "conservative, Christian, right-wing, Republican, sraight, white, Amercian male" that Todd Snider sings about is more pissed and irrational than ever before in my life, and the Mid-East is about to spin out of control.

Amidst all this, I can't bring myself to throw my body in front of the Sunset Limited, and I don't need Samuel Jackson to help me fill the Jesus shaped void in my soul (why is the Black guy always the spirtitual one anyway?). What I do need, I got. I'm a teacher, a father and a husband. There are a whole bunch of people in my life that I have some influence on, obligation to. For whatever it's worth, and it may not be much, I feel like we who have fucked this world up so much, can also fix it. I teach smart kids, surely we can find a way to fix what has gone wrong. While we do it, we will undoubtedly be screwing something else up, but we can let the next generation deal with that. What we can't do is load our belongings into shopping carts and hit the road. No more McCarthy for me, thanks. I don't want to bury my head in the sand, but I don't want to rub my face in the shit anymore either. I do want to keep fighting.

I'll keep recycling, buying goats for kids in Africa, eating less meat 'cause it unsustainable and telling my kids that they can change the world. It may not be true; we may be fucked. As the great Bob Knight once said, "I think that if rape is inevitable, you might as well sit back and enjoy it." Fuckin' A, Bobby, Fuckin' A.