Flicked Off: “The Hangover” | The Awl
Watching all these young people in line reminded me of something in Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. In that enormous scifi book, the young narrator, who has lived cloistered for much of his life, finally ventures into the outside world, which looks in many ways like our real world here. He finds that with the social structure of the capitalist working world, where people are divorced from the fruits of their endeavors and labor, it’s not so much that they suffer economically, or suffer intellectually, though these of course can happen, but that they suffer due to lack of “story.”
How much story do you get to have in your tamed life, when you are doing the opposite of hunting buffalo on the plains, say, when you are sitting in an office for eight hours a day, with no interest or input in the corporate super-structures whose machinations control your working life?
And so movies like The Hangover, which is about four men having an outlandish adventure, just seem so obviously constructed to give people with little narrative in their lives some huge outsize narrative. Nothing this exciting will ever happen to the audience.
Source: The Awl
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