The Ballad of 12 Gauge Automatic

Seven years ago I had seen on Netflix Coen Brothers' The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. The story is set in the harsh, snow-dusted backroads of the Old West where a traveling showman played by Liam Neeson drags his most unusual act from one dusty town to the next: a young man born without arms or legs, who somehow lights up the stage with his voice alone. With quiet dignity, this performer recites Shakespeare, the Bible, poetry, and Lincoln’s words so beautifully that for a while, people stop and listen. But audiences are fickle. Their attention drifts. Then one day, the showman discovers something far simpler and more profitable, a clever little rooster that can count and do basic math tricks. The crowds suddenly come alive for the chicken. And just like that, the human being who had given everything becomes dead weight. What happens next is as cold as the river below the bridge they cross. Without a word, without hesitation, the showman discards the performer like yesterday’s cargo, throwing him into the icy waters to drown. No anger, no struggle, just pure, quiet opportunism. The rooster takes his place. The show goes on. It’s one of the most hauntingly matter-of-fact depictions of human cruelty I’ve seen. In the name of survival and spectacle, empathy evaporates the moment someone stops being useful. We all know that humans can be like this in the back of our minds but I ended up realising that God is like this. Once one realises that God, not the one we grew up believing in but the actual providence, the bureaucratic one that projects itself as divine, soemthing shifts inside and on a private, personal level the social contract and social pretensions collapse. When the veil lifted from my eyes, even then I just wanted to do my work quietly like I always wanted to do but soon I realised that even that was not an option. I ended up realising that the consequence of our lives and our lives as a whole are a thought in the mind of God and then God employs his bureaucracy, which is unfortunately straight from Ram Gopal Varma's underworld flicks and a lot of it even worse, even from the Kanti Shah's underworld, to make the thought in his mind true. What I have seen in my life, and totally unprovoked, is not something that I had thought I'd ever see. I often give The Matrix references and while what I saw was in fact doors turning into concrete walls as Mouse had experienced in the first movie and like him, when I realised that not only doors are turning into concrete walls but also violence is being rained on, and that too without any provocation, I had no option but to bring out the big guns. The difference here is that I'm not using big guns as a last resort, I'm just having fun with it while it might look like last resort because of the optics. I ended up realising that it's all about optics. The whole thing is nothing but optics. The difference between what a thing actually is and how it is perceived, and the whole sadistic fun of this arrangement lies in this created misunderstanding. This is the misunderstanding due to which people drink themselves to death and I studied the mind so that I can save those people finally realising that this in fact is the very design. We are just a bunch of organic androids playing out the designs enforced on us, stereotypical, preset designs. My concern was not this however, my concern was that these designs are not only being enforced by incompetent assholes, but they are also acting on their sadistic whimsy without any consequences. I know Mouse's fate in The Matrix but he went out with style unlike the young man without arms and legs thrown into the water by the travelling showman.