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Would You Live in a Simulated Life Or a Real One?
Maybe living in your head isn’t so terrible?
I watched the beautiful mess that was Don’t Worry, Darling, and you have to wonder about a film with a grammatically incorrect title. In Los Angeles, I was tempted to take a Sharpie to the movie posters plastered up and down Santa Monica Boulevard. But I remembered the condescending fuckwits who live to autocorrect my essays, so I chucked my pen because we’re not going to die over a neglected comma.
Home with the flu, I watched the film and it went where I expected it to go. It had the hope of a Twilight Zone episode complete with the Rod Serling voiceover but with the execution of John Cheever’s Bullet Park. Which is to say the film amounted to a group of lovely people living lovely lives — all in their head.
But as the credits rolled and I sat up in my bed in the not quite dark, and asked myself if I’d prefer a simulated life over a real one. Given the choice, would I accept the trappings of a fantasy instead of the mess and wreck of our waking, breathing life? While we’d all be noble and say, of course not, this one life is worth living for real even though our days amount to fire and brimstone and we watch the thieves that are grief and regret robber baron us until we are stripped bare. Until we are barely skin and bone. We’d hold…
