On Falling
A realistic Nomadland, with Million Dollar Baby vibes, produced by Ken Loach. Not ultimately uplifting like The Old Oak, just depressing and extremely blue.
Amazon employs young people in their prime, instead of unemployed old people doing physical jobs. Prime physical performance, wasted on menial barcode reads and bullshit metrics.
Her off-hours are occupied with menial tasks around the flat she shares with many strangers, scrolling Instagram for avocado toast breakfasts, vacations to foreign lands, and cat videos. Her room is in permanent darkness.
Cracking the phone screen doesn’t affect the compulsion with content to keep the inner thoughts at bay. It does lead to an unexpected expense, meaning eating nothing, stealing food from roommates, avoiding her share of the electricity bill leading to a blackout mid-shower.
The job is so numbing, there’s plenty of suicidal people, including a dude that attempted human connection with the protagonist. The powers that be install suicide nets, and our protagonist picks so many strong ropes…
After hearing another guy venting in the lunch break, she follows her lead and replaces one of the ropes with a recipe book. Her coworker replaced a book with a dildo. All three are things our protagonist has no experience with: reading a book, cooking properly, sexual ecstasy.
The managers are all natives, with special hi-viz jackets, but they too are soul-crushed rats in a cage. Their only reprise is watching a box roll in place in a rising treadmill. A perfectly Sisyphean metaphor for their lives.
The protagonist is so depressed in her soul-crushing job, she is moved to tears by touching the skin of another human for the first time in a weeks, a saleswoman hawking makeup. She then needs to describe her life outside his work and cannot. She simply survives.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.