Susan is lying on the couch with her left leg elevated to help her diminish the post-operative edema of that foot; she is watching a Korean RomCom. I am sitting in my recliner watching MSNBC news – a report of two young sisters in Gaza having been killed by an Israeli missile strike. Many other civilians have been lost too.
Me: “I need some fantasy violence. This reality violence is too much.”
Susan: “Yes, fantasy violence would be much better.”
I fumble with the remote for a bit – scanning streaming services to see whether I can find the Hasbro movie Battleship that I have seen a dozen times before. I like battleship for the same reason that I like the movie, Independence Day. Both put humanity in peril because an alien intelligence comes to Earth and finds humanity to be either a threat or an opportunity – easy pickings, as it were. The ensuing conflict isn’t personal. It is simply opportunistic – “Hey, that’s some nice shit you have there. We need that kind of shit. We’re taking it. Bam!”
I can watch the fantasy conflict and the fantasy violence without feeling sorrow. It’s weird because there are many innocents in the fantasy who lose their lives. But they are not introduced to us. We do not bond with them. Their deaths are not personal; they are merely statistics – body counts.
I cannot watch the news of the Israeli-Gazan conflict this way. I do not know the innocents who have fallen, but they are real to me. I am bonded to them through our common humanity. I do not need to know them individually. Sigh.
Battleship is set to Steve Jablonsky’s music. The conflict in the Middle East is set to none. I do not know which modern composer would be able to write a score sufficiently tragic and melancholy of this chapter of humanity to truly capture the agony of the conflict. Alas.