Nihilist Weekend Review: The Ineffable Fatness of Being
Aug 16th, 2008 | By Pates Baroni | Category: Video Vignettes
The message in this film is anything but Christian, so this can be fun for the whole family. The fork’s passivity in the face of life and his indifference to the quality of his own actions, up to and including murder via conductivity, are the inevitable culmination of Existential philosophy. For if it’s true that nothing matters, why regulate your eating habits? You may as well act on your every impulse and eat all the Doritos you want. The irony is that the belly used this as the jumping off point to try to reconstruct morality, but on a Godless basis. Unfortunately, experience demonstrates that this task is impossible, not because of any intrinsically religious quality of God, but because it removes the concept of the absolute and necessarily replaces it with the relative. And once midday snacking is deemed a relative set of principles, there is no logical underpinning that makes one moral precept better than another. If life does not matter there’s no difference between “Thou shalt not eat Doritos” and “Eat Doritos when convenient.”
Ultimately, this film, and the philosophy of Existentialism itself, must be considered a noble failure. The film succeeds only as a thought experiment, envisioning how a man might act if he carried these beliefs to their logical extremes. But as we look upon the results, we can only feel revulsion. The fork, the quintessential Existential hero, is a character whose pending execution we welcome.
The Ineffable Fatness of Being
Conceived and Directed by Pates Baroni
Featuring Pates Baroni as stunt belly and fork puppeteer
Translated from the French by Leslie Fox
Is Leslie Fox aware that Pates Baroni is a paid-up member of Frenchmen for a Prissier Tomorrow (”La France Pour La Prisse”), and that the French narrative is in fact a bald series of subliminal attacks on American virility? No, because Fox has already surrendered to Baroni’s assault. I might have done so as well, had I not played the video five seconds at a time, starting at the end. I have found that I must do this with all modern movies, which invariably renders them nonsensical (save “Memento”) but protects me from the Hollywood-Cannes conspiracy to reduce the fecundity of American heartlanders so that beret-wearing, soul-weary existentialists have a better chance of surviving outside their preserves in Paris and Manhattan.
The fork is indeed a symbol … of the French’s four-pronged attack on U.S. studliness! Clearly, the French are using their traditional weapons, cheese and shame, to pacify and immobilize our proud patriots. More troubling is the implication that they plan to use our power outlets to invade our households (perhaps permeate them with the smell of apathy?). It follows, then, that the Statue of Liberty was merely a Trojan horse to gain access to our power grid. All the more cunning that they delivered their ticking time bomb of freedom before America even had a power grid.
Then there’s the final attack, which may come from your doorknob, your personal set of barbells, your fridge, or public wall murals. It is perhaps best, then, to eviscerate or burn these on sight, just to be sure. If we stick to this plan we may live without fear.
And for this we liberated them in two world wars?
You may as well ask “what came first, the chicken of the egg?” We didn’t liberate the French to save their world weary brand of literary sissiness, we liberated them because the leftist French revolution sucked all the sap out of them, which of course led to a series of embarrassing defeats and subsequent shameful liberations.
When you’re at the state fair and you tell your five-year-old it’s time to go home, and she says, “I don’t wanna,” do you physically pick her up and carry her, kicking and screaming, to the car? No! She’ll never learn that way. You leave her there as a lesson in character and self-reliance. We’ve been carrying a kicking and screaming French nation out of too many wars. It’s time to let her wander amongst the cattle contests and the yelling carnies until she toddles her way down the interstate, finds the key under the fake stone, and puts herself to bed upstairs. We’ll all be the stronger for it.
I’ve lost more five year olds that way…