Question; There is a science fiction film from 2015 in which an astronaut becomes abandoned on Mars after a monster dust storm. However, he manages to locate the left behind base of operations and use enough ingenuity to survive - by hydroponics - and staving off one mini-disaster after another. The movie ('The Martian') starring Matt Damon, was gripping as the astronaut faced each new crisis until eventually rescued.
Was this a comedy?
Not at all, not in a million years! It was a high profile drama of one astronaut's fight for survival on a hostile planet. Taking all it had to give and persevering by his own ingenuity. The film, based on a book by the same name, was a stirring testament to human survival in the face of insurmountable odds - and for that reason doesn't merit being downgraded and debased as "comedic".
So, how in the hell could it receive two Golden Globes as a comedy? Do the people awarding the prize even know the difference between a comedy and a drama? Did they even see the movie? Or, do they have their brains in their asses and simply confused the film with the 1960s comedy, 'My Favorite Martian'? Inquiring minds really want to know.
My theory is the Golden Globe awarders treated the film not as what it literally presented on screen (life or death drama) but as a "Poe". For those who are blissfully unaware of the meaning of Poe, we have this, according to the word gurus at Wikipedia :
"Poe's Law was originally formulated by Nathan Poe in August 2005.[2] The law emerged at the Creation & Evolution forum on the website Christianforums.com.[3] Like most such places, it had seen a large number of creationist parody postings and these parody posts were usually followed by at least one user starting a flame war (a series of angry and offensive personal attacks) thinking it was a real post. Nathan Poe summarized this pattern in his original formulation of the law:
Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake it for the genuine article. "
And subsequently (ibid.):
"However, the usage of the law has grown, and now the term "Poe" is almost synonymous with any parody on the internet. "
So, in other words, the Golden Globe folks came to perceive 'The Martian' not as the story of an astronaut stranded on Mars and fighting for survival, but as a parody of that -hence a "Poe" And if it was a Poe, hell, it could as well be a comedy! But their thinking is misplaced, irrational as well as ignorant and I trace it to the gradual absorption and undermining of thought processes by the nation's preoccupation with the net and especially social media.
Hence, that the movie was not a "Poe" (or comedy) ought to be patently obvious to anyone with a grain of common sense and intellect. I trace this back to the "Facebook" effect, and the counterfactual nature of web reality itself which is now infecting millions of brains, mainly those of the young -say between 17- 29- putting them through multiple hysteresis loops toward an ultimate dumb down.
Much of this brain degeneration has already been dealt with by author Mark Bauerlein in his The Dumbest Generation. In his book he depressingly documents how the under-30 crowd are foregoing knowledge-based maturity to wallow in a self-confected, solipsistic, social mirror world of their own egos and selves. The fallout includes their not even meeting basic standards of knowledge for employment, far less earning a degree that actually means anything.
One dire consequence as regards higher level analysis and thinking (of which the "Poe" syndrome is an imitator): A delimited reality is confected via over-exposure which deliberately excludes the harsh outside world, and confines the personalized reality to chirpy “how r ya’s”, or gossip, mainly in deformed English which Bauerlein ranks just above the reading level of pre-school children’s books (determined by the median frequency of rare or difficult words per 1000 – with print newspapers at the top with 68.3 and pre-school books at 16.3)
The entire mental superstructure was revealed in the words of one 16 year old girl quoted (p. 137-38) when asked by a journalist if she wasn’t worried that she was denied a broader picture. Her illuminating retort: “I’m not trying to get a broader picture, I’m trying to get what I want”.
Out of the mouths of “babes”! But are we really helping to engender a generation of über-dumpkopfs? Maybe, maybe not. At the very least the Twitter-Facebook obsession (compulsion?) may be contributing to the emergence of a generation of pseudo-intellectual Babbits governed by their own opinions, supported by very little factual basis.
In this context, the awards presented to 'The Martian' as a comedy probably make perfect sense, in a twisted logic way.
At least one tweet in the wake of the show was from a woman (Sady Doyle):
"It is a bold and exciting move to deem "The Martian" a comedy but I think all our efforts to avoid dying alone are essentially comic, so"
Actually, Sady, it is a hopelessly dumb move to do so. And if this is the case I can see the time soon coming when most of our brain-debased young "netizens" will soon find comedy in homeless children dropping dead from hunger or diseases. Which is sure to make all the Repukes happy!
And btw, the efforts of humans to "avoid dying alone" are emphatically not "comedic", but again this likely shows how brains have been gutted by PR, propaganda and false Poe perceptions.
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