The Mist

As it turns out, the movie "The Mist" isnt your average nonsensical gore fest. Sure, there are enough dead bodies to elicit approval from the guffawing male variety but all that aside, it gave me a much needed epiphany.


So in the movie, everything’s cool until this unworldly mist suddenly invades a town and the people are forced to take refuge inside a grocery store. The turning point in the movie occurs when the people realize that this is no ordinary mist; it’s a completely alien entity. All meaning is thrown into disarray as the people literally run rampant because the mist is something that they had never imagined to exist before. This fear and confusion is depicted in the way one woman screams, “I saw creatures tonight which shouldn’t exist”. This alone distills the essence of the movie. It shows what happens to people when they’re confronted with something so frighteningly foreign.

When we wake up in the morning, things make sense because they’re exactly the way we left them the night before; We go to school, we go to work, we smile at familiar faces, we walk under a sky that’s still blue with people we still like but what will happen when one day the sun rises from the west instead of the east? When everything structured and familiar in our life turns upside down? In the movie, people start yearning for absolutely any form of leadership which will help them make sense of their chaos; they are drawn to a man who deems the mist as nothing more than a farce and they look up to a woman who parallels the mist with some divine intervention sent down to punish them all.


“(We are civil) as long as the machines are working and you can dial 911. But you take those things away, you throw people in the dark, you scare the shit out of them - no more rules”


Without leadership, without common sense, we become little more than beasts skulking around in an anarchical society. Watching this concept in the movie, I was strongly reminded of King Lear. One of the centre pieces of King Lear is a grim metaphysical contention that at his most basic level, man is unadapted to the world he lives in and is, in fact, almost an alien entity in nature. The ultimate thesis of the play is that human beings are some kind of evolutionary error who, when bare of civilized coverings, can be regarded as repulsive misfits.


“Is man no more than this? Thou art the thing itself; unaccomadated man is no more than the poor bare forked animal that thou art”


We see illustrations of this splattered all over the daily news. What did the flood bring with it? Amid convulsing waves of water, it brought the element of self-preservation which now flows through people’s veins instead of blood. While donating, we wonder how much will actually reach the victims and how much will be used to ‘polish the fat man’s silver’.


Because the worst of times brings out the worst in us.