If there’s one trend I hate in modern art, it’s what might be called “Sadism for the whole family”. There is something particularly disgusting about corporate washed callousness. It’s gold-leaf-coated maggot cheese for the soul. The latest expression of which is Fallout.
Perhaps the grossest part of fallout and the culture which birthed it, is that it won every award. The fedora crowd saw its decadence inhumanity and resentment, and in deep resonance cried, “yes! yes! yes!”.
The best thing which can be said of it is that, even with a corporate wash, it still captures something. This is particularly gripping when you’ve just come out of an era of utterly hollow “stories” based on progressive blank slate-ism. The evil part of human nature is at least a genuine part.
If the daydream of progressivism is that you can be anything, the nightmare is the quiet voice reminding you; this is only possible when everything is equally meaningless.
Fallout is a justification of cruelty, a revelation of the godless emptiness of determinism.
It is low and base and crass like the mind of a man very simple, yet without his truthfulness, warmth, or good humor.
Instead it amalgamates the baseness of the simple minded with the rotting, satanic boredom of the self-appointed intellectual. Its message is that goodness is only the result of economic prosperity, evil only economic poverty. For man is nothing but animal. He has no divine spirit, no autonomous will, and no true ideals.
There is no God to worship, no God to judge. There is only a swallowing, omnipotent boredom and an occasional cattle prodding of innocence to stir a momentary diversion.
This is depicted as inevitable. Not because it is, but because some part of each of us wishes it were.
It’s a desire to return to the womb of chaos. To an earth in eternal darkness where man raped and maimed and there never rose a light to reveal what he had done. A return to the preconscious, pre-moral. To have no god but instinct, not judge but might.
It’s born of the chant of the crowd; it’s rolling and growing hunger to sacrifice beauty to wash ourselves of the pain of seeing our reflection in it’s eyes. To become animal again, to snuff out the divine spark and the place from which it came; for the mere pleasure of seeing our spit drip down its face. It’s profoundly resentful, profoundly anti-divine.
It seeks to bring everything that is upright, true, or noble down into the murk of nihilism. The ultimate motive of it’s creators is revenge. Revenge for their heartbreak, their boredom, their dissatisfaction with existence. Until butchery, blasphemy, and innocence; until rot, rape, and kindness, all churn and sludgify into meaningless interchangeability.
It eggs on the part of man who would kill Christ again should he show up today. For we want our darkness, and even more; to tell ourselves there was never an option to it. We’re nothing but helpless victims in a meaningless machine. Streaming now on Amazon.
“The determinist must not say to the sinner, ‘Go and sin no more,’ because the sinner cannot help it. But he can put him in boiling oil.” -Chesterton
Powerful analysis