Equilibrium and the Art of Dystopia

Recently, I had the opportunity to show my brother the dystopian Thought Police action film Equilibrium. We have just a bit more time these days. In the current climate, where a great deal of fear surrounds the way we interact in society, a movie about Thought Police, dystopias caused by cataclysmic events, and a focus on emotions, especially how fear destroys us as a society, seems particularly relevant. 

My brother and I watch movies and television series together. I have a list of must-see movies and television series I've wanted to show him, pieces of art that are my duty as his sister to pass on to the next generation (we have a significant age gap). He, in turn, has added to that list with some of his own favorites, things I might never have considered or known about otherwise. A fair exchange, in my opinion.

I realized partway through our viewing that it had been about a decade since I'd last watched this movie. This was not because it isn't good or worthy of repeat viewings. It is. No, it was more that this movie holds a special place in my heart as part of my list of consciousness-expanding movies, and, as such, I only really watch them when I'm in the right headspace, and the timing was right....

Groundhog Day: A Movie About Second Chances...and Third...and 432nd...

In older times, tribes, villages, and towns, followed the seasons using nature's cues as to when to perform certain duties. Observing when certain plants appeared, or herds of animals migrated into or out of the area were a clock different than the hands that meter out every second of our modern day. It worked rather well; those kinds of deadlines actually meant something - because knowing when to plant crops meant the difference between eating and dying - whereas today...well, a lot of times we're just counting down the seconds until...what, exactly? Until the next presentation? Or sale? Or disturbingly short vacation time? Do you ever wonder if we're doing it wrong? If we lost something in our fervor to move on from the past? After all, the rest of nature had been getting by with those same clocks for millennia.

Now, sure, these observations get a little bit iffy, and at some point in the past, perfectly logical reasoning can often become insane ritual. Through the co-opting of tradition by conquering religions and cultures (not to mention the times when the past simply got it wrong), time can whittle away any sense of the past's logic and beauty till it appears ridiculous and comical, a grotesquerie of what it once was.

...And that's how you get to the point where you use rodents to tell you when winter will end. That's right. It's Groundhog Day. But Groundhog day may be more magical than we think.