LIFE + SOCIETY
Lirio De Los Valles
A week of nothingness calls for entertainment when the world is on fire
I recently took a step back from writing. It wasn’t due to writer’s block. It was to detach myself from the world. It wasn’t long. About a week. A week you can never reclaim. A week that sunk into the rows and columns of a diary. I spent that week watching Netflix’s limited series called “The Innocent” starring Mario Casas and Apple TV’s “Loot” acted and produced by Maya Rudolph. A multiple Goya award recipient, Casas is splendid, intense and never disappoints as Mateo. The Innocent takes place in Barcelona and deals with the criminal justice system, human trafficking, and past secrets that always find their way to your present. There are twists, subplots and by the eighth episode, the audience achieves denouement. In Loot, Saturday Night Live’s queen of comedy Rudolph echoes the extravagant divorce of billionaires Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott, and pokes fun at capitalism. Her character Molly Novak shows us the endless possibilities money can do in a world that only speaks money tongue. The show just debuted its first season. Both series are brilliant, well-structured with impressive character study, and that’s the problem — they were better than real life.
I took a step back from writing to appreciate the visual world of fiction because I had had enough of the real world buffet. I needed to check out from the hells of Hotel California. Of late, the service is paltry, maintenance is poor, and the elevator music has stopped playing.
It’s June 2022, Zelenskyy and Putin are far from civil negotiations. The children at the Gaza strip have endured six turmoil against their will. The United Nations and World Bank estimate crisis-affected children in conflict zones have risen from 75 million to 222 million. We are nose diving into recession. Inflation, inflation everywhere with no kindness to spare. Corporate organizations are cutting frills and fats. Incoming employee Russian roulette. World Health Organization states that depression and suicide rates have increased with 3.8% of the population afflicted. All over the world, low- and middle-income countries are struggling with rising cost of national debt, and increase in three Fs: food, fertilizer and fuel prices. Wheat rings a different tune as Ukraine and Russia continue to lock antlers. Sri Lanka is the canary in the coal mine being the first to buckle under economic pressure. Climate change is escalating. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports we are lying to ourselves about climate solutions. There aren’t any that can be trusted. Fossil fuel giants are still championing carbon emissions despite the greenwash. Paris summit discussions remain as utopian conjectures inching further from actualization. The broad strokes of chaos and confusion paints a dada piece. This is theatre of the absurd.
On this side of the screen, there is no sight of denouement, and this isn’t a limited series. For some of these crises, the season’s been ongoing far longer than Law and Order Special Victims Unit — fall 2022 brings season 24. There is no Mario Casas to impress and no Maya Rudolph to tell you this is just comic relief.
Thus, you reach that tipping point where you ask yourself, where can you go for comfort when the world is on fire?
Netflix and thrill, baby.
For 500 years, scientists wondered what wiped out five to eight million Aztecs shortly after the Spanish arrived in Mexico in 1519. Something catastrophic killed a population that they had no defense toward. The locals had a word for it — “huey cocolitzi” or the great pestilence, but nothing beyond that. Incredibly, it took us 500 years to make sense of this mystery: Salmonella enterica. We‘ve read it was smallpox. That, it turns out, was the second wave which wiped out the remaining Aztec survivors in 1576.
The painstaking study reached its conclusion after exhaustive DNA analyses on teeth extracted from 24 remains found in Oaxaca, Mexico. Teeth from ten of the bodies had salmonella. What’s left is a legacy of assumptions, short chapters in history books, and no survivors to validate. Regardless, an entire community was killed. No trigger pulled, no failed democracy, no human enemy came with physical weapons of mass destruction. It was nature in its most subtle form of modus operandi through days that turned into weeks, months and years — quiet evolution.
Today it’s different. We have plausible reasons and solid evidence to why people are dying. Pulled triggers, weapons of mass destruction and easy access to military-grade guns. There’s also weak leadership, an absence of meritocracy. We have capitalism as a system that breeds nepotism and feeds on corruption. It is nature in its blatant form of moral decay and spiraled hedonism, which we allow and bring upon ourselves, because life outside of an outbreak, it seems, can and is dispensable.
There is also an exorbitant amount of stupidity permeating our atmosphere so thick at times we can slice it with a knife. I was out at lunch with a friend when we overheard a middle-aged woman bleating about wearing masks with her companions. I turned to my friend with an incredulous gasp, “Incredible how ‘to-wear-or-not-to-wear-a-mask’ is still the cavil argument in these people’s lives.”
“Can you believe it?” My friend asked me.
“I don’t want to. This obduracy has become a mental illness in itself.”
In the week of my nothingness, I came across a sterling quote by Ciara Smyth in “The Falling in Love Montage”: “I’d never been broken up with before but the scene was so familiar that I knew my lines. Do scenes like this happen so often in real life that they end up in the movies, or are the movies giving us a convenient script for inconvenient conversations?
Mon dieu what a flip!
I knew then what were to be my lines crawling out of this inconvenient, sickly skin emerging from the depths of social malaise after someone asked me recently, “Natasha, why do you care?”
I replied, “Because the world would have little to no value if we don’t.”
In love and in war, we are presented with two choices: to be a Mateo or a Molly. We can seek to solve life’s mysteries despite hauntings of our past and the unexpected villains, or you can laugh at the adversities when life outstretches logic.
I recall a powerful piece of advice by Belgian psychotherapist and crisis expert Esther Perel: “People change, circumstances change. Disputes and disagreements are healthy as part of processing meaning around us through those changes. Life isn’t stagnant and when things become uncomfortable it means it’s time for us to level up. For as long as there is something worth fighting for, there is love, there is meaning, there is solution, there is hope. We can grow from crisis because crisis is opportunity.”
The news then sounded differently. A paradigm shift of semantics.
Recession is a cycle for purging excess. Crisis is part of conflict-resolution. For every economic downturn comes an upturn. When everything goes down, the next will always be up.
In Netflix’s “Queen of the South”, drug mule Teresa Mendoza acted by Alice Braga, rises from the gambles of death when she sees and hears an allusion to her Higher Self, “There’s a flower that grows in the darkness, Teresa. It’s called Lirio de los valles.” And with that, Mendoza transitions into a new reality: to survive she needs to instrument the darkness. “The only way out is either up or death.” Mendoza eventually escapes and succeeds as a drug cartel padrona.
After a week of playing truant I returned to real life with renewed hope, vigor and powered optimism.
The only way is up, and we can strive and survive like the lirio de los valles.
