Why Is Boredom So Horrific? A Disappointing and Deplorable Investigation

 by Luke Dylan Ramsey

And you can chew on gum / If it makes you have fun

—Foxygen, “Oh Yeah”

Swimming up tide, I guess, flailing mine meaty arms at that enlightening oblivion tiptop the sky’s tiptop, maybe… lately for various reasons I’ve been thinking about messy, imperfect works of art.

Are Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid (2023) and Eddington (2025) as tightly wound and purely kinetic as Aster’s first two movies, Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019)?

Is Brian Evenson’s depiction of multiple consciousnesses occupying one body in his novella The Warren more nuanced and logical (if far less poetic) than Gene Wolfe’s version of said malady in his Book of the New Sun series?

(Besides the fact that neither you nor anyone you know saw it) Is Francis Ford Coppla’s Megalopolis (2024) as magnificent a piece of uncut kino as, say, the Godfather series or Apocalypse Now (1979)?

Is that last question ridiculous to you?

Whether it is or not, it shouldn’t be.

Let’s start with Aster. A small percentage of the moviegoing public (itself an even smaller percentage of the public at large) gave Beau Is Afraid a chance during its cinematic run. The movie was divisive, had poor word of mouth, and was largely seen as a failed (and bloated) experiment (this is largely true for Aster’s latest as well, although Eddington does seem to already be experiencing a revival).

What Beau Is Afraid is not, however, is boring. The movie zips along so fast that you almost forget that the only explanation for the cause and effect (or, sometimes, the lack thereof) is a conspiracy vaster even than the Trystero from Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. The movie also visually and emotionally captures the feeling of stress dreams and interlinked nightmares you cannot wake up from in a way that I don’t think had even been attempted before, at least cinematically. Beau Is Afraid is more of a horror movie than many would have you believe as well.

Yes, Beau Is Afraid is Aster’s masterpiece, his finest work, but I would never call it perfect… and yet if you called Hereditary or Midsommar perfect, I would not even think of slapping you back to sanity.

Want a work of art even more messy and imperfect than Beau Is Afraid? My man, try Eddington. That movie made me feel every emotion I can think of, including boredom, joy, anger, regret, exhilaration, and shame. It is Aster’s worst movie but possibly his most fun piece of kino to think about after watching.

I can get very

about Eddington… there’s so much left unsaid in that movie. You can extrapolate years of history behind many of the characters’ actions, words, and especially their silences, despite the fact that the movie shows only a few days worth of time. Understanding the subtext of Aster’s latest effort also requires having lived during the time period it depicts, which may be Captain Obvious to some, but I don’t think the fact that the “Antifa” vigilantes were actually corporate stooges or just how relatable the movie can be will be quite as apparent to viewers a hundred years from now.

Anyway, let’s go back to the whole feeling every emotion thing. Coppola’s Megalopolis is the epitome of that concept. The highs are incomprehensibly high, but the lows are dismal. Just like with Eddington, I felt every possible human emotion while watching Megalopolis. Like all of Aster’s work, Coppola’s piece of unadulterated kino can shock just as much as it can delight.

Megalopolis is confounding yet hypnotic. Megalopolis features some of the dumbest lines of dialogue and most pointless subplots I’ve ever come across, and I used to teach high school English. Megalopolis can sometimes be unintentionally nightmarish, yet the movie features far more memorable scenes than any recent box office success I can think of. I gave the movie a 4.5/5 on Letterboxd, and I stand by that rating.

I kinda hate baseball, but it occurs to me that the movie is a home run swing from Coppola that only partially connects with the pitch, a collision that causes the bat to explode all over the batter (Coppola) and blood to go everywhere (wine $$$) and the ball itself just zooms off to annihilate a passing city dove (the audience)… OH YEAH!

Anyway, Apocalypse Now and the Godfather movies are better pieces of art to be sure, but they aren’t nearly as ambitious… which feels ridiculous to write, given how especially Apocalypse Now was a miracle in and of itself.

This is America. Ambition is everything.

Let’s change tracks a bit. Even though Evenson’s portrayal of multiple identities in a single body is, like, much shorter than Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, in Evenson’s novella the concept is much more central to explaining the story’s many open ends and is given a far higher percentage of the page count.

Look, I have a line of Ascian Correct Thought tattooed on my arm. I absolutely love the Book of the New Sun. And Wolfe does explore the multiple consciousnesses in one body thing some, but it is more of a convenient plot device (especially in Urth of the New Sun) and an explainer for some rather tangential though beautiful lines than a depiction of the madness such an existence would create.

What do Evenson and Wolfe have to do with messy, imperfect works of art? I would not call a single one of the stories by Evenson that I’ve read messy… many are imperfect, sure, but whatever, I haven’t read a single truly bad story by the guy.

The Book of the New Sun is a mess, if a beautiful one at that, and, to me, imperfect. Before you crucify me, let me point out: the series’ imperfections make it perfect (Oh Mine Sweet Lord Jesus, carry me across these cliché and trite sands and back to the oasis of 90s suburbia!) (I can be trite and cliché if I wanna, fuck off, punk)… the books’ parts do add up to far more than their sum, somehow. And if it were not a mess, why would so many people have spent so much time trying to unravel the many secrets inherent to the series?

To me, a car engine looks like a mess in the same way that the Book of the New Sun looks like one from a bird’s eye view. The Book of the New Sun spends more time on things such as cosmic horror than it does exploring how multiple human identities occupying but one body would actually play out, and honestly that’s fine by me… not every subplot and/or plot device needs to be fully explicated upon ad nauseum. But Evenson’s portrayal is largely masterful and just as puzzling, if not as virtuosic and wide sweeping overall.

In the weeks and months ahead… well, barring any apocalyptic discord up here in our cosmic laboratemples and fiery roistering riots in the markets of humankind (goddamnit, I’ve got bills to pay!)… I may or may not be exploring such eternal questions as what does of Elric of Melniboné’s sword, Stormbringer, actually look like? was Philip K Dick a visionary saint, one of the thirty-six Tzadikim of his time, or just another drug addled madman loserbitch? how nice of a lady was Ursula K Le Guin back in that collective hallucination we still call reality? (She sure seems nice in her books.)