Up

Disney/Pixar's "Up" must be one of the saddest, creepiest and most morbidly depressing films I have ever seen.

I've read some far-out conspiracy theories about the Columbine massacre and one of them was that the shooters were indoctrinated into a worship of death. Columbine High School actually offered "Death Classes" as an elective. "Up" almost seems like similar creepy propaganda aimed at teaching children to worship grief and death - or to become accustomed to it.

Grief and death are part of life, of course, but should such themes be treated in a children's cartoon?

I understand the stoicism of so many others about as well as I understand grunge music, especially Nirvana. I agree with Vince Neil, the lead singer of Motley Crue: Why would anyone want to listen to music about guilt, grief, death, depression and despair? There is ENOUGH OF THAT in LIFE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Shouldn't art be an escape? To drop Nietzsche's name again, I am not covering any new ground here. Life was pretty damn precarious for the Classical Greeks and they dealt with it by affirming life through tragedy.

The treatment of tragedy determines what is depressing or not. When Sonny was murdered at the end of "A Bronx Tale" it was not sad or depressing - it was operatic, a street opera - "Live by the sword, die by the sword." Therefore "A Bronx Tale" remains uplifting and not the least bit depressing. Is it as simple as following - whether intentionally or not (I don't know how erudite Chazz Palminteri is) - certain rules of drama?

"Up" on the other hand was like being bludgeoned by a wooden board with a protruding rusty nail. The most poignant scene for me was when he was putting on a different tie every day, the ties signifying the routines of the everyday eventually leading to years gone by. We can only hold out in our cozy and cheerful microcosms for so long before old age, loss, grief and death hit us. There was something almost brilliantly existential about this scene - I think Heidegger would have gotten something out of it had he been around to watch it. Time! Time! Time - a quality of Being that sometimes feels like the worst enemy of all when one really - at heart - loves life, enjoys life. And even when I hate life I still love myself and the people I care about. I want to learn, perhaps, yogic tricks to slow down the ticking of a second to the time of a minute. It can be done with increased and/or altered perception.

Everyone considers these existential and ontological issues, of course, but my OCD makes it difficult for me to cast them off, to forget about them, to get so caught up in the everydayness that I am only interested in tying my tie for work each morning. I don't even have a job that would require a tie (any job at all!) I'm so far from the everyday sometimes that I can't escape so many of my own thoughts. (At the same time I cannot FUNCTION in the everyday at all.)

I'm an alien (yes, an extraterrestrial) and this is what gives me comfort. How many other people are up until 5 in the morning reading about hallucinogens and their relationship to quantum physics?

I'm not just interested in psychonautics because I have a curious mind. I'm also looking for an escape hatch. I'm looking for bigger and better realities in this life and the next. Because normal life can be very far from pretty and this is such a terror to me that it really is like a constant and painful thorn in my side. Don't forget that Buddha became an uber-pessimist after witnessing old age and death firsthand.

"Up" revels in treating themes that terrorize me every minute of my waking existence.

I am sure quite a few people made huge piles and piles of money on that film. But, despite all their money, power, fame, fortune and everything else that causes normal people to envy and admire them they, presumably, are also subject to the tyranny of time. Do they get off - like me at a porn store - on treating such themes so lightly?

Like true villains, how the hell do they sleep at night?