14 Feb Secrets of the Dead: Sinking Atlantis (2008)

Metastories

Somewhere along the line, we lost the thread. The way we approach art has been transformed into a fixation on artist as celebrity. The practice of governing has been ignored in favour of fantasies about how we should be governed. It matters less what Johnny learns than what we think about he learns, and for that matter what Johnny himself thinks.

And in this rush, our documentaries transformed; this is an example of the problem.

There is a rather amazing story here. All of western wisdom is presumed to originate with the Greeks, yet a superior society predated classical Greece by a millennium. Ironically, it seems to have pulled all its societal intelligence from what we would come to call Persia. Later, Greeks would destroy Persia and all its accessible wisdom, inventing something called history: a narrative of the world based on itself. Were it not for a single natural catastrophe, we may well have a verb-oriented, woman-influenced society that understands context instead of our male, noun, context-unaware one. The ideal is a synthesis of both of course, but for a fateful day of ash and water.

This story has no dearth of engaging elements, from magical sex to cannibal-based science; from the first linear written language to the likely architecture of Stonehenge.

But this is submerged, because the producers think that a more interesting story was the discovery of the disaster. So we have second-rate scientists posing for us, pretending to find what others found decades ago. We have them narrate not the history of Minoa, but the history of their journey of discovery. We do have some crass ‘dramatisation‘ of the Minoan disaster, as if seeing a sword crush a pot gives us essential information. But far, far, worse is the dramatisation of scientific discovery.

Elsewhere, I have been critical of TeeVee and how it harms storytelling. In this case, even the much celebrated PBS delivers this trash. I thought we support them in various ways to stay serious. Not here.

Posted in 2011

Ted’s Evaluation — 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

IMDB