what's real can't die

I've been watching a ridiculous amount of movies recently. More than I have in the last three years. But not in a fun, quirky "I'm a cinephile" way. It's more like staring at disaster footage while pretending you're just curious. One film after another: grief, loneliness, doomed romance, emotionally constipated men smoking in silence. Even the comedies feel like they were written by someone losing it in a McDonald's parking lot. Most of it doesn't even feel exaggerated anymore.

Maybe that's because the world already feels like a badly written Michael Bay film. Every day there's another headline about floods, genocide, corruption, economies collapsing, senators stumbling on staircases, or people discovering exciting new ways to be awful to each other online for sport. Humanity genuinely feels like it's standing in a burning house arguing about whose turn it was to water your mom's indoor plants. 

And yet, somehow, people are still making art.

Which is beautiful, and also completely unhinged.

I keep thinking about how strange it is that while the entire world seems to be unraveling, someone is awake at 2am writing poetry nobody will read correctly. Someone is sketching strangers on trains. Someone is learning three guitar chords and immediately deciding they understand suffering. Directors are still arguing over lighting. Painters are still carefully mixing shades of pink like beauty itself hasn't become an endangered species. Art is irrational. Thank God for that, because reason lately has mostly only given us surveillance capitalism and 300-peso matcha lattes.

I don't really watch movies for entertainment anymore. Lately, they feel more like reminders that people are still paying attention. Still trying to make sense of being alive. A good film lets you experience fear without panicking and shows suffering without turning it into spectacle. Sometimes I finish a movie and sit through the credits feeling weirdly comforted, not because the story fixed anything, but because somewhere in the world another person felt the same dread and managed to turn it into something meaningful.

That itself feels miraculous.

Especially now, when the world moves so fast that everything becomes content before it's even fully real. Tragedies trend for twelve hours before being replaced by skincare tutorials and celebrity gossip memes. People scroll past destroyed cities between thirst trap videos and Ozempic ads. The algorithm has the emotional depth of a potato. 

The problem isn't just what we consume. It's how quickly we expect everything to be produced.  Creation itself has been reduced to something made and discarded almost as quickly as it exists. And the rise of AI only accelerates that impulse, promising immediate output with nothing to sit with. Art, at least at its best, pushes back against that. A painting asks for attention. A novel demands patience. A song can preserve a feeling long enough for someone else to recognize themselves in it years later. In a culture obsessed with instant gratification, art stubbornly insists on depth, which is probably why so many people find it inconvenient.

Maybe that's where art belongs in a world that feels like it's overheating in every sense: not above the disaster, not pretending the fire isn't real, but sitting beside us in the smoke. Acknowledging that we're in hell, but still making us see something honest.

Art doesn't stop wars. It doesn't reverse climate change. It doesn't rebuild homes or fix governments or magically make billionaires develop consciences. Sometimes making art can even feel absurdly self-indulgent when everything is on fire. Like, congratulations on your short film on homoerotic yearning, Petersen, but the planet is melting. But people have always made art during catastrophe. People wrote poetry during revolutions, painted during plagues, and kept diaries while everything else collapsed around them. Apparently one of our oldest survival instincts is looking directly at devastation and thinking it would make a sick metaphor.

Maybe survival isn't just keeping the body alive, but also keeping feeling alive. 

What scares me most isn't even destruction. Destruction is obvious. It's numbness. The possibility that people get so overwhelmed they stop feeling anything deeply at all. Everything gets flattened into irony, distraction, cynicism. Every tragedy becomes another headline. Every outrage becomes background noise. Art interrupts that process. It forces us to sit with grief instead of scrolling past it, to remember that tenderness still exists alongside despair, and that joy can remain meaningful, however temporary and embarrassingly sincere.

The other night, after finishing a film, I went out for a walk and everything was strangely quiet. The air was warm. The neighbor's dog was barking. A motorcycle passing for half a second before disappearing again into silence like some indie film trying too hard for symbolism. I remember thinking how fragile everything felt—entire lives unfolding quietly while the world keeps threatening to burst at the seams.

Songs, films, paintings, novels: they're little emotional fingerprints people leave behind while the world keeps moving on. Maybe art isn't meant to save the world. Maybe it exists for something smaller, more human. Maybe it exists to comfort us and give credence to what we feel. Because what matters isn't prestige or galleries or whether something gets called "important cinema" by a man named Luca wearing a scarf indoors. What matters is whether something can make a person feel human after being emotionally worn down for years. Whether a story can make someone feel less alone for a couple of hours. Whether beauty can exist without lying about suffering.

The movies I've been watching lately reminded me that art isn't an escape from reality. At its best, it's a way of surviving reality without letting it hollow you out completely. It gives shape to emotions that would otherwise stay formless and preserves memory in a world determined to replace everything immediately with louder nonsense.

So where does art stand in a world burning up in flames? Probably right beside us. Tired. Broke. Overstimulated. Mourning everything. Still trying anyway. Still insisting there are things worth noticing, worth remembering, worth feeling. 

Which, considering the circumstances, is pretty brave.