#swarmy

cmat voice: the titanic was built in chicago! i believed that for ten seconds…

her song about being the titanic in love with the iceberg is incredible. jsyk i’ve never seen titanic.

my explanation & a different version under the cut!

LOL THANK YOU!!? this movie means the world to me, i’ve never seen such an evocative portrayal of having to truly relearn every single thing when you realize the life you’re living is killing you.

swiss army man is like: you realize you’re deeply unhappy and decide it’s the fault of your situation, so you go out on a boat to an island to get away from it all. you are completely unprepared to operate a boat, or navigate to an island, or even be alone with your thoughts, and this gets you in trouble. now you’re stranded, decidedly worse off than you were before, but you don’t really care. sometimes being stranded is genuinely better than being home

but eventually being stranded also starts to kill you. there is no permanent solution, there is no way out except for, yknow, the way out.

and then miraculously: corpse on the beach. something that for better or worse ties you to living, just a little.

the thing about being tied to living is that you have a responsibility to everything else living, including now, somehow, this corpse.

and the corpse doesn’t know A THING (died sexy yesterday), but a really strange thing happens when you try to explain the world to the corpse. you realize you ALSO don’t know a thing. you know about some twisted fucked version of the world that you hate, and you know about the romantic vision of the world you desire, but the real world has actually been lost on you for awhile now.

so now you and the corpse are learning about everything from scratch. the very basics, everyone poops. what is a girl, what is a bus, what does it mean to love.

time passes in this way and you realize you really really rock with the version of the world you’re creating with the corpse, and you wish the world was like this all the time, and you start to say, what if it was?

just as you’re starting to warm up to the idea of creating a world you like, and wonder why you were ever so sad in the first place because everything and everyone is so beautiful, you’ll be reminded. just because you made a new world doesn’t mean the old one went away. it’s still on the other side of the treeline. the old you is waiting there.

i hate watching the end of swiss army man. my heart breaks watching hank’s dad and the news crew discover hank and manny’s private world. it hits wayyyy too close to home. but i never skip it. there’s something about hank’s speech that makes me remember that the world you built doesn’t matter as much as the fact that you were able to build it.

the world that you built is proof that you know how to build another one now. you’re not going to strand yourself on another island, you’ll make more weird stuff. you’ll remember everything you said to manny and try to live by it because you owe him at least that much for saving your life: and this is how you’ll save your own life, over and over and over.

not to hijack your ask for my personal swarmy essay…if you ever wanted a better view of how i understand that movie, here it is!