I was enthralled by The Man from Earth. I usually enjoy the wife’s wisecracks while watching a movie, but this time it took a lot of self control to not tell her to shove it. I was hanging on every word and line of dialogue and did not want to miss a moment. The Ten Commandments lists a bunch of things to not covet, mind-melting dialogue noticeably absent. I coveted and then coveted some more.
A brief synopsis, The Man from Earth is the farewell party for a college professor who is secretly an immortal Cro-Magnon man that has lived for fourteen thousand years. That description does so little justice, I feel as if I am cheapening and insulting the film. It is a small miracle that we even watched it. The synopses found online make it sound like a movie that would not interest me. My tastes lean more towards Airplane! and Indiana Jones. Luckily, it was the wife’s turn to choose the movie.
The idea of history is fundamental to the movie. Without spoiling the climax, the protagonist tells his story of randomly meeting and interacting with historical figures through his long life. He was afforded the opportunity to see how history becomes history. A teaching or person is famous in their time. Commentators begin to write about it. Based on the existence of these commentaries, later generations begin to give out-sized importance to the subject. Why would anyone write about unimportant things? This cycle continues. Commentators hundreds of years removed continue to study and ready about the subject, further reinforcing the significance. Eventually the history becomes myth based not on the original subject, but the populace’s reactions to the history of the subject.
From a future perspective, history seems inevitable. But that is obviously not true at all. Tomorrow is history for our descendants, but nobody can say with complete certainty what will happen tomorrow. From the perspective of 3022, 2022 looked inevitable. All the signs for 2022 currently exist now in 2021. However, 3022 has the value of hindsight to identify which signs actually matter and which are historical static.
Is it so inconceivable to imagine a religion developing around a modern day celebrity? Cargo cults exist. There is an entire section of TV Tropes dedicated to cargo cults or after the end religions and cultures. As much as magazines write fawning hagiographies about various CEOs and interview contemporary pop idols, it is not a large stretch to imagine those writings as the base texts for a new myth six thousand years from now.
History is happening right now, this very moment. The next prophet may be walking to the grocery story as I type. Every religion, every myth began as a tiny cult or offshoot of something more established. Are we arrogant enough to claim that will never happen again?
The Keasy Depot 