End of the Line in the Social Imagination... Machine ~ Part 2

It was necessary to provide the full movie description; given in part one of this blog series. And, it was necessary to give the description of Machine ... the end of the line. Over the years, many viewers and or critics have had their go at the meaning of this Jarmusch film. Many of those go (s) were quite interesting. This time, its my turn and just to let you know it may be my last post ever. Because, I realize that its the end of the line in terms of discussing the social imagination.

Let's think back to the film's climate (black/white), genre (western), characters (a white European by descent poet/Native American) and wordage (Machine, the end of the line and the warning given while on the train speeding toward that destination) in order to better understand why 'machine' could be the end of the line for human social imagination.

And, let's think back to my last February post about 5G virtual reality. For me, 5G means the end of the line for the kind of social imagination we have experienced in the recent and farther past and could expect to experience if it were not for 5G... what appears as the coming end of the line for that recent and farther past.

Thinking back to the film's description (Part 1) and the 5G blog post, a picture should already be coming together in your 'social imagination'. Black and white represents the past, western represents a new frontier, the characters outline conflicting groups between two different races/ethnicity, and the choice of wordage ushers in a new world order while kicking out the old way. Isn't that what is going on now.

Will some of us be caught at the end of the line? Yes, and some will be begging to get in and live a new way. Which is actually suggested at the end of the film when we see Blake in the canoe drifting out to sea; along with Nobody on shore getting shot down. Blake looks on immovable and in that same tragic moment something new seems to be dawning in Blake's final gaze at the sky.

We have to wonder if we can actually imagine something new in the last moments of this social imagination... as the end of the line is approaching. Can we in fact imagine something as new as a 'machine' taking over our human consciousness and I mean 5G integration man with machine... a social imagination in a computer driven virtual reality? Some say, if we can dream it, we can live it.

Really? Could our given social imagination conceive of such an existence; think outside of its current bounded social reality? Some will say, of course; after all, we imagined it. Well, we can imagine a lot of utopias but that does not mean everything we imagine can or should come to fruition. Some things are better left in the imagination for the social well being of the social imagination; for it to actually function without getting lost or totally screwed up...truly ending up at the end of the line in an inescapable dystopia!