The Villans of Central Casting

 Soft music was playing. The lights were dim.

“Can I open my eyes yet?”

It wasn’t a special occasion. I wasn’t waiting for a surprise.  

In my living room, things were blowing up – cars, people. There was indiscriminate gunfire taking people down. Women were screaming. The mundane suburban landscape was now a desolate hellscape.

Not only was it Movie Night, but also it was my husband’s turn to select what we would watch during the next two hours. This is why I was shielding my eyes, trying not to bear witness to another hapless victim meet a shocking demise after what I could only hope was a realistic-looking replication and NOT actual torture.

Which I learned really happened to Hannah Waddingham (who plays Rebecca Weldon in Ted Lasso) when she portrayed the Cersei-shaming Nun in Game of Thrones. 

(Imagine Googling for more information on the delightfully comic and statuesque actress, and finding out that she suffers chronic claustrophobia from being waterboarded for 10 hours during filming of that infamous scene in season 6, episode 10. … but that’s a little beside the point … )

Who knew in the Second Decade in the year of our Lord, CGI, that filmmakers would still revel in hurting women? 

I know … Look around … the news is full of real live people (some in the highest echelons of society) who have no such compunction, nor do they intend to inflict less harm. They want to scorch the earth, Mad Max-style; and they will do just that once the opportunity presents itself. 

Perhaps the orchestrators of our nation’s destruction will watch on closed-circuit TVs and congratulate themselves as society collapses because of their excesses and consolidation of power. It will happen slowly at first, as resource scarcity and the incremental erosion of our institutions leave us powerless to defend ourselves against the forces of nature. And then all at once we will descend into chaos. I can't imagine anyone will be reveling in the rapture.

I don’t usually say things like “I hate this movie.”

I usually open my computer and start doing something off the books. Something that if I did get paid would amount to making just a nickel or a dime an hour.  

And my husband doesn’t usually say anything about my “tuning out.”

How many movies has he suffered through feature characters he finds insufferable, who talk fast and use all the expensive words – sometimes requiring the convention of a freeze-frame so someone in post-production can apply a textural explainer – and still manage to say absolutely nothing?

 

He can admit my choices, even those without much of a plot, are usually better than his where the NOC lists are always getting out in the open. But I also must admit that the world I try to escape into isn’t always pain-free. Art imitating life can be depressing.

Of course, Tinseltown’s horror shows have nothing on the furor oozing out of the DC Swamp’s central casting. But I suppose that’s why we are still sitting here in the dark … trying not to think about the parts of this fallacy that now seem all too real. 

“This movie is pretty awful. How about a comedy”