Having great conversations with friend, filmmaker and artistic fellow traveler Joshua Oppenheimer about the need for a post-mortality aesthetic expression.
Joshua:
As we have discussed, death is embedded in how we tell stories. Can you imagine Jesus, Romeo and Juliet, or Oedipus without death? Once our culture starts telling stories that are not haunted by death and dying, physical immortality and radical life extension will start to seem second nature. In this sense, we need a cultural revolution against ageing and death. Helping to kickstart this revolution is the most important ambition for any film project about physical immortality. And I think the way to do this is to create a profound artistic experience that moves as many people as possible.
Me:
I consider it my mission in life to be a part of altering these archetypes — which inform experience, and are also informed by experience. Somewhere we have to crash that circle.
Death and limitation work hand in hand in our stories. Consider the limiting archetypes of Paradise Lost, Icarus flying to close to the sun, and Jesus on the Cross for that matter.
You become aware — you lose.
You fly too high — you lose.
You care too much — you lose.
We’ve got a huge narrative to turn around.