10,000 BC, the movie

9:40 AM 3/4/11

I'm recovering from a stomach virus this morning and I called off work. I don't call off work very often, but I'm not one of the people who NEVER calls off, either. I couldn't eat or drink anything last night and almost got sick after trying to eat just a couple tiny bites of food. I am only now starting to drink sips of plain water again.

Yesterday afternoon when I got out of my car after work, one of my neighbors was standing outside with a fishing pole. I have talked to this guy several times before. The first time I talked to him was funny, but it would have been scary if we lived in a city with lots of violent crime. That first time, I was getting out of my car when it was dark outside, and I looked up and almost yelped with surprise because a guy was standing only a couple feet away from me and I hadn't seen him.

'Do you have any quarters I can borrow?' he asks. This was anticlimactic, as it was dark and scary and creepy and there's this scary guy sneaking up on me, only to ask if he can borrow some quarters. He was doing laundry at the apartment's laundromat and ran out of quarters. So I went digging through my big plastic cup which was full of tons of change, and I gave him a bunch of quarters.

We talked several times since then. He has extremely thick glasses, which are one of the Weston Price birth defects.

I just mentioned Weston Price to a co-worker yesterday, because he was complaining that he would have to have a wisdom tooth removed because it was growing in sideways, and I told him that this was actually caused by a jaw deformity which was a birth defect caused by malnutrition and exposure to chemicals during pregnancy, and there was a dentist named Weston Price who researched primitive tribes and observed that they didn't have these deformities, so it was the result of something in the modern lifestyle. He was interested in hearing this, and after I was done, he said, 'Well, I bet not many people would make the lifestyle changes necessary to prevent that, I mean, not for something as small as this' (meaning a deformed jaw, since it's not as bad as, for instance, having no arms and legs because of Thalidomide).

I was grateful that he took me seriously. He wasn't arguing, he was actually agreeing with me, I could feel that. His response was a sort of bitterness, like 'I wish people would know about this and do something about it.' He believed it. After that, we made more eye contact than usual and felt more bonded. 'They' reminded me about something Curtis had once said when he met me at Weis: 'I don't know who to trust... except you.' 'They' meant that this guy didn't know who to trust either.

So this neighbor told me that he had a disease that made it hard for him to walk, and I told him I had a college friend who had a disease that messed up her balance and we always had to walk her around by letting her hold onto our arms, so I understood.

Well yesterday when I came home from work, that neighbor was holding a fishing pole, and then his roommate came out and said, 'You're going to hit her over the head with that!' because the guy was holding it up and moving it around and examining it while standing next to me. We talked about fishing and I said that I had never gone except long ago with a neighbor, and I said I don't like catch and release - I would want to keep the fish. I actually feel that catch and release is cruel and that they might die of infection from the injury, although I realize they don't always. I had never talked to the guy's roommate before. He pointed out that their names happened to be Jacob and Isaac, both from the bible, and then he was trying to think of the story that they came from, but I don't know the bible anywhere near well enough to think of it.

Well, Isaac (the new one I hadn't met before) commented on my dreadlocks. He saw them as having either a religious or tribal meaning. However, I myself view dreadlocks both ways; they might possibly be meaningful, but also, they are the inevitable default way that the hair goes if you don't have shampoo.

Dreadlocks were just a normal, inevitable thing when shampoo and soap didn't exist. They had no particular meaning. That's why I don't like to read websites that try to portray dreadlocks as being 'nothing but' a social or religious statement which is superior to the hairstyle of mainstream culture, or websites that strongly emphasize the long tradition and the profound meaningfulness and significance of dreadlocks, emphasizing that they were worn by religious groups and that kind of thing - without remembering to mention that dreadlocks happen all by themselves and are merely the result of not having shampoo. Dreadlocks, in that respect, could be viewed as a sign of extreme poverty, or a sign of a culture that hasn't invented, or doesn't use, soapy substances that dissolve grease. Dreadlocks viewed that way could be a sign of an inferior culture. (I am not saying they are inferior. I am saying that there is more than one way to view their cultural meaning, and I'm saying that they are a physical consequence of not having shampoo.)

Whenever people emphasize too strongly that dreadlocks have a deep, profound, superior religious or cultural meaning, it makes it inaccurately sound as though dreadlocks must always be something done consciously and deliberately, by choice, and probably with long hours of painstaking effort (the way some people do them, people who want to have dreadlocks instantly tomorrow instead of waiting a few months for them to form), and constant maintenance. That is the mental image I get from the idea of 'consciously chosen religious ritual' instead of 'the inevitable consequence that happens if you sit there and do nothing at all.'

So this guy asked if I had ever seen the movie '10,000 BC,' because the people in that movie had locks. I hadn't seen it, but I had thought about renting it several times, but had always passed it up, and then I complained that Blockbuster video had just closed and I had just seen it closed today or yesterday, and I complained that I wasn't using Netflix yet (and I probably won't, because I don't rent movies very often - I might rent one movie every few months, on impulse). So now, I have absolutely nowhere at all to go, except Lykens gas station, where they still have a wall full of DVDs. I don't like to buy movies and have them taking up space in my house, especially if they are mediocre movies that I don't want to watch a hundred times and memorize. I like to buy movies if they are so great that I want to watch them a hundred times and memorize them.

He offered to lend me his copy. I had the feeling it was 'maybe, possibly, one of these days in the distant future, whenever you feel like it.' There was a non-pushiness there. I said, 'Can I borrow it RIGHT NOW?' That was a leap and it felt exciting. Something was a theoretical offer, something that I would turn down and say 'oh, maybe someday in the theoretical future,' but instead I said RIGHT NOW. I like doing that - I like it when something could be 'just possibly someday' and I respond with 'right now.' In fact, that's how Rachael and I stopped shaving - she was complaining in an abstract way about the difficulty of shaving, and passively wishing she could stop, and asking why women have to shave, and she had been repeatedly complaining about this several times over a period of time, so I said, 'let's do it, let's stop shaving,' and so we did. I don't find this neighbor guy sexually attractive, by the way, but I enjoyed talking with him. So I went upstairs with him and he got the movie for me.

Well, I watched this movie. I was in the process of coming down with a stomach virus at the same time, too, so I didn't really feel good while I was watching it.

At first, I had a scoffing reaction, and was thinking 'dumbest movie ever.' But part of me liked the movie and I kept on watching it. It sort of did things that were cool, and it also did things that were ridiculous and laughable, but failed to give enough of the 'fairy tale signal,' so you expect this movie to be realistic and believable, and instead it does something impossible, which can happen and it can be okay if you do the 'once upon a time' signal somewhere. For instance, these people went hiking to follow some people who had kidnapped some of their tribe. They came from a winter climate, but within a very short time, they were walking through a tropical climate, and then a desert climate. And since I've been reading about socionics, and went wandering around Rick's web pages, I've been reading about what happens when you go hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail, and it's not something where you can be in a winter climate one day and then a day later you're in a jungle and then a desert. The movie didn't make me feel as though a large amount of time was going by. If they had said that they traveled for weeks and weeks, or months, or something, then I would get the idea that it wasn't just two days or three days worth of walking to go from the snowy north, to the jungle, then down to the desert full of dark-skinned people. So I had to make some mental adjustments to accept that idea, but I managed to accept it, but I had a little bit of the 'scoffing' feeling while watching it.

Then, my hair obsession can never be satisfied. Sure, everyone had dreadlocks. That's wonderful. But they still had shaved faces with a day or two of stubble. This annoys me very much. What's wrong with beards? Why are beards so terrible, so unacceptable, that we can't grow them (or even put on fake ones) for a movie about what life was like in 10,000 BC? They all had to look like a socially acceptable, still-mainstream 'image' that is popular in our culture today - the long-haired man with a mostly-shaved face and a couple days of stubble. Never a long full beard - that's just not popular, we can't get away with that, we wouldn't want our viewers to have to make *TOO* much of a cultural leap.

Not only that, but on the rare occasions when I could get a glimpse of a female armpit, they were shaved, of course - and it wasn't a 'day or two of stubble' like the men - THAT WOULD BE *UNTHINKABLE*! No, it was perfectly smooth as though they were prepubescent children who had never grown an armpit hair in their lives.

AND, the blue-eyed woman that they were all chasing after, the one who the whole story was about, she had painted-on darkened eyebrows, artifically made to appear thicker and darker - an attempt to imitate what female eyebrows might have been like in the past - but they were still clearly 'arched' and had... this is hard to explain. They had clearly lined edges which were so obviously painted on. When you see a real eyebrow, the edges of it are seen as individual hairs. But this woman had thick dark brown lines clearly painted on her brow. You couldn't see individual hairs in the edges of the eyebrow. It wasn't anything like unplucked eyebrows. It was very heavy makeup pretending to be semi-thick eyebrows (but HEAVEN FORBID she should ever have a unibrow - that's unthinkable), but with the 'socially acceptable' feminine 'arched' eyebrow which is totally artificial.

What is this obsession with the 'arched' eyebrow? All of them INSIST that it ABSOLUTELY MUST BE ARCHED. (I'm hungry now after not eating all night long, so this is a bad time for me to try writing without ranting and getting more and more worked up as the hours go by. So watch out for CAPS LOCK!) They can't stand the sight of a flat, horizontal eyebrow without an arch, but I find those natural eyebrows to be very pleasant and comfortable to look at. Oh, you can't tell the women from the men when they look that way? WHY NOT GROW BEARDS! Then you can tell the women from the men! But no, that wouldn't go over well, we don't want our viewers to struggle with an unfamiliar cultural image.

I'm comparing this movie to 'Babies,' a movie I rented a few months ago. I liked that movie's portrayal of foreign cultures much better. That's not the entire title - I forget the whole title - but basically, someone watched four babies in four cultures from around the world, and just filmed them in their normal lives. They didn't make the 'actors' in the movies 'pluck and arch their eyebrows' because Westerners would like them better that way. They showed everything, including all that would be gross and unthinkable to Westerners, like an African baby picking up sticks off the ground and chewing on them, for instance.

So the 10,000 BC movie had a 'romance novel' feeling to it. They take modern-looking, American-looking people with familiar American mainstream images, and put them in the distant past, still looking like familiar modern Americans, except just barely doing something (dreadlocks) which are seen as more primitive - except they didn't look like real neglect dreadlocks, which often stick together over time, forming several large locks instead of a large number of thin locks - so even their dreadlocks weren't very realistic. They wouldn't have showers with running water back then. Showers let your dreadlocks remain thin, individual locks of hair. But if you are bathing in an ocean, a lake, or a stream, your hair will lock differently, and although I haven't tested this, I'm guessing that it will cause much larger locks to form, the kind of 'congo' locks that are unpopular and associated with Indian ascetics. I'm not absolutely sure about that, because I've seen photos of Indian ascetics who still had narrow strings instead of large snakelike connected locks.

So, unfortunately, my hair obsession didn't quite like this movie enough. It's good for someone who has an unexplained 'fetish' for dreadlocks, without a real thorough commitment to it, and without the courage to take it a few steps further and question everything else.

Note. I have to describe the process that led me to where I am now. Some of my recent choices resulted from talking to 'them.' 'They' were the ones who suggested that I go all the way to dreadlocks. It actually wasn't my idea on my own. But they only did that because they knew I would happily accept this idea and would be eager to do it. The point is that I understand when people aren't able to make the leap themselves, when it doesn't occur to them that the women also have to have unplucked, archless eyebrows, the men must have full beards, and so on, when instead they are inconsistent and partial about everything.

I might try to eat something soon...

About the story of the movie. When I was watching this, I started thinking of 'intuitives' because of reading about personality types. Intuitives are interested in the past, and the future, because the past connects to the present and the present connects to the future, and so on. When you look at the present, you can say, 'How did we get to be where we are now?' and then look into the past to explain it. So for instance, a myth might be created to explain 'How did humans lose their tails?' and then there would be a story about how humans used to have tails like other animals, but they got into an accident, or the gods were punishing them, or something along those lines, and forever afterwards, humans had no tails.

So a 10,000 BC story might be something like that, something that asks 'How did we come to be where we are now?' It could make some connection to the present. This movie didn't do that. It was just a bunch of people who almost looked modern, who just happened to be living in the distant past, for no particular reason (probably only because the movie writers wanted an opportunity to express their 'dreadlocks fetish'), but it could just as easily have been in the distant future, or the present, except that it involved a lot of walking instead of driving or flying. But hey, it could be a story about a bunch of Amish people, if you wanted a story without cars. Or it could be about a tribe of modern-day hikers who had rejected the automobile and were living in an intentional community or who had created an intentional religion, or a large group of people who were trying to protect the environment. Or it could be a 'dystopian future' where there were no more automobiles and people went back to walking again.

In fact, that kind of story might be more interesting to me than a story about primitive tribes who actually look modern and have arched, painted eyebrows in 10,000 BC. There was no particular reason why this story had to take place in 10,000 BC except for the opportunity to make lots of cool dreadlocks and hope that the dreadlocks trend catches on and becomes popular in mainstream culture (which it didn't).

If they insisted that the 'chase scene' of the movie had to involve many days of hiking after the people who were on horseback, they could have found some other way to do that besides being in 10,000 BC. If they wanted to show really cool computer animated saber-toothed tigers, which actually weren't all that important to the plotline, except in a symbolic way, they could have done that differently too. The saber-toothed tiger actually didn't play much of a role in the movie at all, except as a kind of superstitious belief, or prophecy, that a guy who could talk to saber-toothed tigers would be somebody important who would bring down the king.

Yes, I'm ripping this apart. Maybe the movie will grow on me if I watch it again; however, I will always be irritated about the hair and grooming. I'd have to watch it when I didn't have a stomach virus.

Not only that, but when they showed arts and crafts and technology, it looked messy and primitive. Primitive technology, primitive crafts, are not at all messy, sloppy, or primitive looking. In fact, primitive craft work and primitive tools are amazingly beautiful and sleek, and often it is higher quality and more durable than modern junk. They do amazing things and we can't even imagine how they put this together, like the huge stones that weigh several tons in South America, where the stones fit together perfectly and were cut that way, and they remain standing even after earthquakes. That's my idea of primitive technology, something which is actually superior to a lot of modern technology. Primitive people were much smarter than modern people, and they had to do all of the thinking themselves, and had to often reinvent the wheel, because they didn't have printing presses or the internet to tell them how to do everything. So whenever they invented something, it was even more amazingly unique and new than it is when a modern person invents something and has all this help from all the research they've done.

It's hard to explain this, but I saw that 'messy look' when they showed the houses and things where the original tribe lived in the beginning. They just looked messy and flimsy, like a strong wind would blow them down. There were these stick things sticking up with thin little rags of fabric hanging off of them. Everything was brown - there was no color, but in reality, people invented paints and pigments and used them long ago. Everything looked that way. It looked weak instead of strong, colorless instead of colorful. It's like they didn't have faith in primitive people's ability to be really, really strong and to know what they're doing and to do it really well. They had this idea that primitive life was fragile, vulnerable, weak, and uncertain, and always on the edge of extinction. That is a common belief. After reading Weston Price, I have the belief that primitive bodies are stronger and healthier than modern bodies, that they never need to go to the doctor, that they do not have outbreaks of disease (and I'm probably going too far with that belief, because I guess there would still have been some disease). But a lot of diseases are caused by poisons and malnutrition in the modern world, and bodies are vulnerable because of growing up deformed. (I know, I need to try to eat - that's what's going on when I obsess about food.)

It's like the dinosaurs. Michael Crichton wrote 'Jurassic Park,' and they made it into a movie, and because of that movie, it finally became popular to imagine that dinosaurs are alert, energetic, and fast-moving, very quick like birds. It was his book that made it popular to see them that way, instead of huge and heavy and slow and stupid.

This is analogous. People think that primitive humans are 'huge, heavy, slow, and stupid,' or 'always prone to disease, barely scraping by, poor, with fragile tools that can barely function,' and so on. I am trying to say that primitive people are extremely strong, extremely healthy, extremely smart (smarter than we are!), extremely good at communicating, and very competent at surviving. I am saying that they can do things that we can't even imagine, things that are unthinkable - for instance, guide a ship across the ocean, even under cloudy skies where they can't see the stars, by sensing and feeling the magnetic fields of the earth. They can sense the magnetic field, that kind of thing. They can hunt animals on foot, by smelling them, by walking quietly after them instead of running, by going barefoot on their tiptoes, by intuiting the pathway they must have followed, by knowing everything about where they go at what time in what situation. When they throw a spear, it isn't this awkward throw where it doesn't even look like the spear could penetrate the skin. They might throw it with an atlatl - I'd have to read about it and I never understood how an atlatl worked, and I might not even have the right words - or they might throw something that spins, instead of a plain old long spear. I got the 'barely scraping by' feeling instead of 'strong and confident' feeling from that movie.

All of this reminds me of socionics because I was reading about the functions. It's like the movie was written by someone who wasn't very sure about their sensing function. 'I'll do you one better' is the phrase 'they' are putting in my head right now - you think those are dreadlocks? watch this! you think that's a primitive weapon? I'll show you a primitive weapon. (If I could find that website again where the guy is making obsidian blades out of rainbow obsidian... that web page never stops loading because the photos are extremely high resolution and there are like twenty photos on one page, but that's an example.)

I'm definitely a socionics devotee now. I've decided that socionics is 'better than' other theories, that it's better than the Myers-Briggs, or David Keirsey and the four temperaments, or any other theories that I saw so far. It could happen in the future that I stumble across something unimaginable, something analogous, which is 'better than' socionics. Who knows.

I'm going to very carefully try to eat solid food.