The Coming Apocalypse

Added on 27 September 2010

Walking up to school the other day with Two of Two, the wee man mentioned that his mate had told him about the YouTube video on the bursting of the biggest zit in the world. "There's blood and puss and you shouldn't watch it before dinner..." was the general thrust of his discussion. He hadn't watched it himself, but spoke about it with some enthusiasm. I, like a dull and grumpy old man, voiced the opinion that perhaps one shouldn't watch it at all, never mind just before dinner.

However, having decided to mention it in passing just now, I wrestled with whether or not I should take a look at the bursting of the biggest zit in the world. On the one hand watching it would be gross, and I'm mostly evolved and an adult; on the other, if you write about stuff that you've neither watched nor read, then you're more or less on a par with some dreadful Daily Express columnist who rants about porn or drugs or Frankie Boyle without ever having experienced any of them. [On another sidebar, unusual to see the Daily Express feature Diana on the front cover today. Apparently she's still dead. As is her dress designer. Next week the death of the man who manufactured her toilet paper or the woman who fluffed her hair or the man who spread I Can't Believe It's Not Royal Jelly on her toast.]

So I just looked for it. The bursting of the biggest zit in the world. Sadly, but not at all surprisingly, there are hundreds of YouTube clips of zits getting burst. The most popular has over six million hits, and I would have watched it, but it lasts more than four minutes. Four minutes to burst a zit. Now, I switched it off after five seconds, and therefore missed out on the full story arc of the zit bursting, so to write about it would be a bit like being a Daily Express columnist, but really.... four minutes? There are wars that are shorter than that. You could, after a fashion, perform the complete Shakespeare in less time than that.

Anyway, couldn't watch it. But here's what I did watch, thanks to One of Two. Furry Vengeance with Brendan Fraser, which took $16m at the US Box Office. One should aspire to more eloquence in situations such as this, but for fuck's sake. There really is no excuse for a film to be as bad as that. There's no excuse for a man like Brendan Fraser - who has been in proper films - to be making films like that. Perhaps he needs the money, as he's spent the cash from the Mummy films on eating all the pies.

One accepts that there's a market for cute furry animal movies, with slapstick and schmaltz; they just don't have to be this apocalyptically bad, that's all. They just don't. Just because they're aimed at kids doesn't mean that it's all right for them to be shittier than a shitty field of cow shit that's so shitty there are videos on YouTube about it entitled The Shittiest Cow Field Ever. Why is it that when you're starting out in the movies it is absolutely drummed into you that the script is everything and that you'll never get anywhere without a decent script... and yet, there are a prodigious amount of shit films made, all of which have been produced from a shit script?

What's the connection between Furry Vengeance and YouTube videos on Titanic zit-bursting? Nothing, other than that they're both representative of the accumulation of thousands of years of human civilisation, illustrating just how corpulent and self-indulgent and obese this society has become, and why it's quickly self-destruciting in a morbid, flabby sewer of electronic crapulence.

We're doomed. We're all fucking doomed.