After watching Crash with the class a week ago, I left the theater with a funny feeling.
The monologues towards the end of the play encompassed both capitalist and communist views of the economic meltdown. As far from being on the banker's side that I am, he did speak some sense. I remember a bit where he said of society, something like...
...nothing stopped you buying up the world did it. You were more than happy to go out trying on new dresses, sitting in new cars and wearing new jewelery, not giving a fuck about anyone else. And then as soon as the good times stop, when someone's got to face the music, you all want someone to blame. And you turn to us, and expect an apology, as though we're the crash. You my friends are the crash. We're all the crash.
The most prominent ideal dissected by the production seemed to be the question: What does money mean? For example, at one point there is a discussion between the banker and his artist friend about value. The banker makes a statement that there is no true way to distinguish the value of someones work.
We can never say if someone deserves what they earn, they simply earn what they can get.
Inevitably the question of 'what it money worth?' looms closer. How is it that a homeless person, merely grateful for his health, can be happier than someone with a personal fortune of millions?
After watching the play, I got 'the urge'. You know the the urge that I'm sure everyone occurs at some point during their life: The urge to just burn all of my material possessions, start wearing skatty tye-dye t-shirts, start eating grass and feeding off love and dance.
It made me question the whole industry that I aspire to go into. If possessions are in fact meaningless, then what am I doing dedicating my life to generating ideas in order to sell everyday products that no one really needs anyway?
I started to picture a horrible existence... In years to come, I'd win a pitch for the Heinz account. I'd go out with the agency and celebrate with champagne and the leggy account girls.
But take a step back, and what kind of existence is that - the privilege of selling beans and sauce to people who quite frankly, could easily cope in a world without?
And so what if it's the best beans and sauce. The pinnacle of my career would have come down to securing the privilege of giving a voice to one of the many tins of beans in a supermarket aisle. And I wanted to be someone significant??
At this point I got the shudders, quickly realised I was getting too deep and then tried to remind myself that giving a voice to beans would actually be quite fun. Still...
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