There is this movie Gossip. It is by far my favorite and one of the best, highly underrated and overlooked “irresponsible adolescents” movies of the early 2000s’ and late 90s’. None of you probably remember it, you were too busy watching She’s All That and Cruel Intentions and thinking about how weird it was that Freddie Prinze Jr. and Sarah Michelle Gellar were a couple, even though they are so irrelevant now.
You can watch the movie on youtube here. It is completely worth your time much unlike Wanted.
Well the movie is about these three college kids who spread a rumor as part of an experiment for class. The rumor is that Kate Hudson drunkenly has sex with her boyfriend played by Joshua Jackson. The rumor goes on and on and basically it ends up being that he raped her. The plot centers around whether he really did or whether she just believes the hype. I am not ruining anything, besides you have had 9 years to watch this gem.
The movie is about the nature of gossip, obviously. It plays up the fact that because this rumor is circulated so much it starts to become the truth or at least considered as a possible truth not because it necessarily is the truth, but because people believe it as such.
It makes references to the Bible and the media very cavalierly. But it does ask important questions. In the sense that just because something is widely accepted does that make it truth? Is there a such thing as a matter of fact?
Like, science for example. When you think about it… it really is a system that we created of categories and classifications and mathematical equations that we decided work via our own observations. The same way time is man made, science is man made, they’re useful tools that allow us to better relate to the world.
Science is just a better way of relating to things than religion. It’s a step above a religion, in the sense that, religion allowed us to establish some sense of where we came from, whereas science allows us to surpass that by creating more.
What I mean is, everything is only made up of matter because we call it that. If we decided to call it penis-juice then everything would be made up of penis-juice instead.
For example: Our eyes are receptive to like a million colors let’s say, but color really is the only way an object reflects light, so there could be a trillion colors, but because of the way our eyes perceive light we just may not have the capacity to see them, so is the sky being blue a matter of fact anymore?
Yes teen movies make me think about things like this sometimes.
When William Blake talks about “opening the doors of perception,” in some sense I think he means this. I think he means that truth is very much about perspective and in order to live a more fulfilled or enlightened life we have to live it via as many perspectives as possible.
Now of course anyone and everyone is taught that everything is relative. But I don’t know how much anyone actually deeply thinks about these things. Everything really IS relative–at least the way we reason things is– even things that seem like they are objectively fact.