From “The Scratching Post”: A perfect prelude

By Ken Marks

[Opening from the original on The Scratching Post, March 26, 2022, published here by permission of the author.]

I’ve never read On the Beach and only got around to watching the movie on TV years after its theater release. Maybe I avoided it because of the emotionally draining story, the kind my 11th-grade lit teacher called “cathartic.” I ended up liking it very much. My sole criticism was the ceaseless playing of “Waltzing Matilda” until my head was ready to explode.
    I recall a stirring scene between Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck. In a fury of incomprehension, she asks what could have caused the world’s leaders to order an all-out nuclear exchange. After all, it’s the ultimate geopolitical fuck-up, a step so breathlessly stupid that lunacy seems the only possible explanation. But the movie doesn’t deal in explanations, just consequences. Its focus is on the psychic torment of those remote from the bombing as they await the arrival of radiation poisoning.
    Glutton for punishment that I am, I crave an apocalyptic movie in the same vein, but one that shows how the buildup to catastrophe can be plausible and insane at the same time. We badly need such a movie. Without it, we miss an invaluable chance to behold the macabre duality of human nature, our capacity for simultaneous sanity and madness.
    It happens that the world stage is at this moment supplying a story line for such a movie. It’s a perfect prelude to On the Beach. I refer to the horrific war in Ukraine. Putin is the ideal villain. He’s 69. The clock is ticking. His dream of restoring the Soviet empire on his watch is fading. Snatching a tiny Baltic state will no longer qualify as progress. He needs a big win — Ukraine. The hero? There are two, Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, and NATO, the grand Western alliance that Trump sought to castrate.
    As the drama unfolds, Putin and his generals….
[Read the whole thing on The Scratching Post.]

Copyright © 2022 by Ken Marks Ken Marks was a contributing editor with Paul Clark & Tom Lowe when “Moristotle” became “Moristotle & Co.” A brilliant photographer, witty conversationalist, and elegant writer, Ken contributed photographs, essays, and commentaries from mid-2008 through 2012. Late in 2013, Ken birthed the blog The Scratching Post. He also posts albums of his photos on Flickr.