I’m embedding this month-old YouTube video here because it’s better that you don’t see its title. That would spoil the clever pay-off.
20Aug07 — 5
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- 04.02.23 Coming soon
- 11.02.19 Live comedy review: Geoff Norcott at the Southport Comedy Festival
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- 12.27.18 The Wykehamist Fallacy
- 12.08.18 The Moral Degradation of The Labour Party
- 10.14.18 FILM REVIEW: Downsizing
- 09.09.18 Film Review: Fright Night
..Well, that certainly doesn’t make me any fonder of mimes than I was before. Vile creatures.
Hunh?
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The title is “The Wind”. The man in the hat is The Wind. The start of the film shows him going around doing the kind of things The Wind does: blowing up skirts, rattling shutters, turning umbrellas inside-out. He doesn’t understand why his activities make him unpopular. Then he is approached by a kindly engineer from Epuron who wants to use his powers for good: driving wind turbines.
Clearly, Tim, you don’t understand because you are an evil, capitalist, global-warming-denying, neocon Gaia killer, with a carbon-belching Transit van full of scandium parked outside your underground bunker.
The idea that a mime might actually do something to _benefit_ the environment is, for me, so counterintuitive, that it was _there_ that I found _the bulk_ of the humor. (..Albeit of the “sometimes-you-have-to-laugh-so-as-not-to-cry-a-BUCKET-of-tears variety.)
Don’t infer anything about my own past with mimes from what I say, I beg you. It’s not that they ever did anything to me personally. It’s what they are doing to ALL OF US, ALL OF THE TIME.
Well, the clip may be clever, but it is ideologically biased. It’s easy to imagine a similar film done the opposite way: people have always loved me, because I bring the smell of spring to the nostril, because I’m a gentle breeze that colours the land, a soft ruffle over a field of barley, a quiet stir over a lake’s surface, etc.
And now they hate me because I’ve been trapped by ugly monstrosities disfiguring the finest hills in the country, etc.
You get the drift.
So, I think it’s just a piece of propaganda. And the pay-off is clever as in ‘they pay me to be clever’.
I used to love the wind myself, actually, no matter how stormy. I now hate it with a vengeance *because* of wind turbines…