“I don’t remember the moment, I tried to forget,
I lost myself, is it better unsaid?
Now I’m closer to the edge.”
It is always a great moment when Pandora puts on a song with the perfect lyrics for the moment, especially right after my conflicting feelings and thoughts due to watching Koyaanisqatsi. Even now, after thinking about it for quite some time and feeling as if I’ve understood the message behind it, I still get uneasy thinking about the way the movie expressed it. Long (very long) minutes of beautiful, natural scenery to fast paced seconds of the technological, gray city life. I’ll be honest and say that during both the fast and the slow moments, I had my moments of boredom. I feel this is because the movie transitioned really well into the fast moments. It didn’t happen immediately, but instead took its time. For example, instead of going straight from the many long shots of the desert environment to the really sped up people going on the escalators, the movie instead had us have a transition moment that included the interaction of nature and technology. It showed power lines amongst the nature scenery and atomic bomb denotations in the desert. But I feel the most important nature/technology interaction was the first one shown: suddenly on the screen, a shot of a big, green truck appears and it covers everything around it in black smoke.
I honestly thought I understood the entire movie just from this one scene. The black smoke engulfing everything was what I thought was an obvious indication of how many people (and they are right in believing so) believe that we are killing ourselves with the constant use of technology without care for the consequences. I thought it was brilliant of the producers/director/whoever thought of this to have the area surrounding the truck to be bright and pure and the smoke to be so thick and black that once it covers a certain area you can’t see through it anymore. Though this was a beautifully crafted scene, it occurred way too early into the movie. After watching the entire film, I can say that I wasn’t entirely foolish to think I understood the message behind it from that scene. I’d say I was pretty close, and I like how the film acknowledged what most people were probably thinking: technology has impacted us greatly. From a calm, slow life to a now fast paced, selfish one. Pretty much everyone agrees now that technology has changed us, but I feel there was more to the movie than just this. I felt like that was a very easy message to get out of it, and this film just seemed too complicated to simply take the easy route.
I wouldn’t say there was another scene that made me have a brain blast like the green truck one did. I don’t know exactly when I realized this, but I realized that this film wasn’t really about how we are affected by technology, exactly. For example, the film showed the manufacturing industry, from workers sewing pants to others organizing hot dogs. They went through this pretty fast, which is expected because in reality it does happen quickly. But it was interesting that right after that went by, people were shown eating food and shopping, and this was done at the same pace as the items being created. Everything was happening fast, even people just relaxing and having a good time was done at the same speed as people working. I felt like this was just one of many examples from the movie that really emphasized a switch we humans have made in our lives: from living in the Earth, amongst water and air and all sorts of organisms, to now living in a giant computer chip, filled with metals and electricity and “advancements.” This is our life now, whether or not we like it or acknowledge it. We move just as fast as machines do, which is a huge change from how much slower things were going in the past. Things were much calmer too, which is why I understand why people consistently discuss the past and how much it has affected us, but I think it’s a waste of time discussing this if we don’t do anything about it to fix it. Then again, I feel like this is not an easy situation to fix. For the most part, I feel this situation is quite irreversible. I’m not talking about the environmental issues here; I’m talking about the technological ones. We live and breathe iPhone 5s and iPad Minis. Our bodies have adjusted to it, how do we make our bodies go back to being satisfied with everything going back to a slow pace? I don’t see that happening at all.
But the thing is, I don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing either. We can of course learn to do everything we’re doing now in a more environmentally friendly way, but either way we’re still going to do what we’ve been doing. People can’t imagine living without their Plasma Screen TVs and lightweight laptops. Everyone is constantly with a cell phone, always using transportation, having Google as his or her best friend. I really don’t see that changing, and to be honest I don’t see anything Koyaanisqatsi about that either (if I used the word correctly here). So our lives have changed, and pretty quickly at that. But why does that mean we are living a chaotic life? Of course, this depends on a person’s definition of chaotic. If they mean spontaneous, then yes, we really should think before our actions (the environmental crisis is a very clear example of that). But if by chaotic they mean out of control in a negative sense, then I don’t really agree. I feel like this new way of living, through technology, is very different, and we humans don’t have a past time period similar to this that we can look back to. So this is a huge change, and many people usually assume that change is bad and it’s best to stick with what we already know. But we can have control in this life, I am confident about that. As mentioned loads of times, it is possible, scientifically and even economically, to live the life we are all living now in a more environmentally friendly manner so that we don’t put the entire Earth at risk. I feel many people may get out of this movie that we have officially transitioned to not caring about the environment at all, and being all about the newest, latest gadgets, so there is no hope. But it’s just so wrong to think that way.
What I got from the movie was that we are living a different life than what we used to live. Especially now, during 2012, since I assume the film was made in the 1970s. Not only have our connection with technology strengthened and our relationship with nature weakened, but also amongst fellow human beings have we changed. The scenes in the film that zoom in on people’s faces, showing immense sadness in some, just broke my heart. Especially that first man shown, the one with the hat that said something about ferry rides. It showed again how technology driven we now are. If something doesn’t work, we just throw it out and get a new one. If something just doesn’t belong or you don’t have time for it, you just set it aside. We do this amongst each other now, in big cities the most. We care about ourselves first, our closest friends and family the next, and after that, you’re on your own. If we do this with each other, how can people not imagine us doing that to the Earth? Technology is our life, and I think our only option now is to figure out a way to live with it without putting an end to ourselves and the world around us.
