I watched ‘Greenland’ the other night. It’s an ‘end-of-the-world-by-asteroid’ disaster film, starring Gerard Butler being all Gerard Butler-ish. It was a fun romp through every ‘disaster film’ trope/meme, with some above average CGI effects thrown in for good measure. I was entertained.
Some time later I was describing the movie to Mrs Widds which, even later still, triggered a bit of an epiphany.
Yes, my friends, I epiphed! … and what I epiphed about was this …
In all of these sorts of movies we see what I like to call the ‘noble sacrifice’. It’s where the, almost always, curmudgeonly elder, usually a disaffected parent of one of the estranged lead couple, dies. (who incidentally almost always have a child, who sports a vulnerability of some sort – in the case of ‘Greenland’ the kid is a diabetic)
The curmudgeonly elder who has survived for their requisite three-score-and-ten (or thereabouts) years quite well, thank you very much, must sacrifice themselves in order to save one or more of the primary characters, after one or more of the primary characters, (or their self-absorbed teenager) has put themselves in mortal danger by doing something breathtakingly stupid.
The curmudgeonly elder has to be sacrificed so the ‘young-un’s’ can live, presumably breed, (usually shown in epilogue, mid, or end-credits scenes – I’m looking at you ‘Minority Report’) and ensure the continuation of the species.
Another perfect example of the curmudgeonly elder dying in order for the brood to survive is the curmudgeonly grandma in ‘Dante’s Peak’, who literally throws herself into an acidified lake to save her precocious grandchildren (another disaster film staple) who came looking for her, along with the lead characters who came looking for precocious grandchildren. (now that I think about it, that movie had another curmudgeonly elder, the senior volcanologist, who died sacrificially too)
Side note: – just because you’ve got a healthy ‘breeding pair’ doesn’t mean that’s necessarily a good thing. Just look at the intro to the movie ‘Idiocracy’ to see a prime example of how that can turn out.
This may have been necessary in a pre-technological/industrial world, when all the ‘rebuilding of a society’, by necessity, would have to have been accomplished by hand.
Young folks = lots of strong hands, and backs (and afore mentioned ability to self-replicate at an alarming rate) … old folks = a waste of scarce resources.
However, in our wonderful and terrifying modern era, it t’ain’t necessarily so.
What we have now is KNOWLEDGE. (and the technological know-how to render those strong backs obsolete)
Unless all life on Earth is reduced to the odd random microbe, (in which case, all bets are off) the most precious resource to be preserved is knowledge. Not the kind of ‘knowledge’ curated by the archiving of every tweet ever thumbed across the digital universe, but the myriad knowledge of how to construct a living breathing society/ culture.
Knowledge is one thing, but then you’ve got to know what to do with it, and that knowledge, folks, resides within the life experience of … you guessed it … The Curmudgeonly Elder.
How apropos in this Entertainment Age, where Youth is eternally sought after, that the sacrificial lamb is actually mutton.
There are so many tangents this wee bit of an epiph could head off into. but this is after all, a wee little epiph, so I’m just going to stop here and leave the rest to your imagination.
Widdershins Worlds 
Funnily enough, I have begun to feel a little surplus to requirements myself lately, after being told in no uncertain terms that I really shouldn’t expect any better from 76-year-old kidneys!
Made me feel I should just wander off and die in a corner… just joking, of course.
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I tell myself that such ijits will be old (if they’re lucky) one day too … and have been very tempted on occasions to say it out loud too. 🙂
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But when that day dawns, will they remember all the well worn people they dismissed out of hand?
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Probably not.
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Love a good epiph Widds – don’t mind a good movie either though they are far and few between at the moment.
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I’m catching up on my re-watch list nicely though. 🙂
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Whew! Great epiph! I fear stupid is making a comeback hand in hand with hubris and entitlement.
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The three Horse-Idiots of the apocolypse.
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The Elders were venerated for a reason when experience and memory were humanity’s only ‘hard-drive’. Maybe they need to be again…
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Such a wasted resource, but then, humanity’s really good at wasting resources these days. “(
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That is sadly all too true.
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Wise, entertaining, and amusing. Very well put together
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I do like it when I epiph. 🙂
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🙂
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You should epiph more often. You might find answers to climate change, the pointlessness of perfume adverts and how they get toothpaste in that tube …
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Climate change is easy … the other two though? I have my doubts. 😀
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Oh, you are my hero! Sacrifical Mutton is precisely what we’ve been seeing in the Western world during this Covid crisis. The assumption seems to be that the Elderly are just a drain on society so if the virus gets them, no big deal.
And I loved that opening from Idiocracy. Makes me want to see the whole movie.
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It’s not spectacular, but worth a watch. 🙂
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😀
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You are so right about these movies! And I love your conclusion. The US is a gigantic example of “sacrifice the elderly.” And several politicians have even come out and SAID IT! Yeesh. Good luck to all those breath-takingly stupid characters who think they know it all. Lol. Great post.
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Thanks. 🙂 … a society that does not recognise a resource that’s right in front of its face is a society doomed to extinction.
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Have you seen Logan’s run
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film)#Plot
It is set in 2274 and In which people over 30 !!! are killed being they are too old
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Saw it as a young thing when it first came out. It blew my nascent SF writer’s mind. 😀
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Wow. Yeah, they’ve been trying to get off a remake for years now. Of course — like the Willy Wonka original vs. remake (as one example) — it will be “closer to the book.” Which means it’ll be so different from the original film, that we’ll probably end up disliking it.
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It was such a visual treat … all those beautiful people 🙂 … Jenny Agutter was one of my first crushes so it does have a warm place in my heart. 🙂
Hollywood just can’t seem to get it through it’s thick skull that you can’t recapture the zeitgeist, no matter how much CGI you throw at the wall.
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Yes, that’s what sapped my enjoyment of the Star Wars films. It was more video game than movie.
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Your read of this movie (and disaster movies, in general) is perfect: a man makes a noble sacrifice; one child is self-absorbed, the other has some type of illness, there’s curmudgeonly elderly person, etc. Too funny!
This almost sounds like a sidequel to Deep Impact, but it reads better than Geostorm.
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Hey there RD, welcome to my tastefully decorated corner of the interwebz. 😀 …
Heh, having seen both those movies, I can only agree with your assessment! 🙂
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You’re welcome. And thanks for making me aware of the flick.
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