The Angst Komic-Szene

The First Sea Lord demonstrates the existential power of comedy, the most expressive and accurate of all art forms.  Sophoclean tragedy - the ennobling fantasy of a doomed warrior culture -  dishonestly tries to transmute the murderous excesses of war into redemptive life lessons.  But the whole enterprise fails from the start.  Without a forgiving God it is hopeless, and with a forgiving God it is unnecessary.

But comedy is truth.  Comedy forces us to face the worst about ourselves and our world.  Mel Brooks:

Tragedy is when I cut my finger.  Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.

May I propose the Angst Komic-Szene, in which the protagonist experiences a soul shattering existential crisis over something no other person cares about.  By way of illustration, may I quote the following excerpt from the television show Wings, in which Thomas Haden Church collapses in grief over the inadvertent destruction of his handmade model of the Graf Zeppelin (2:51 to 5:37):




I think this scene has great existential power:   In default mode - without some corrective effort on our part - not only will we die alone and without dignity, hardly anyone will care. They will be too busy with their zeppelins.  And, of course, we can't be bothered too much with the problems of others now - after all, we have zeppelins of our own.

Woody Allen perfectly captured this pathological solipsism - the disease of our species - in Bananas.




As far as I'm concerned, that's the true original position, the world we are born into. How we proceed from there is up to us.

Why must we begin and end our lives in this absurd and arbitrary dreamscape?  As the Supreme Being said in Time Bandits: "Ah...I think it's something to do with Free Will."