Currently, I am reading Caitlin Doughty’s Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, which is a book centered around Caitlin’s experience of working as a 21 year old cremator in San Francisco. In her novel, she discussed *obviously* death and each culture’s relationship to it. Exposing our formulation around Western calculation of death and what it means to die.

In the chapter named Bubblating, where Caitlin speaks objectively and without prejudice about the stench of death, especially in larger sized humans. She investigates our approach to the ultimate triumph of death; love, and how it came to be. Comparing Hans Christian Anderson’s original 19th century The Little Mermaid and the Disney adaption – in the original Ariel walks around with the sensation of glass slicing into her faux human feet, is made to sleep like a dog in the Prince’s room on a pillow in his doorway, and after the Prince marries a more attractive more suited Princess is forced into an ultimatum of killing her one true love one or herself. Leaving her to jump over the side of the boat in a suicidal confession of her love for her less then devote Prince. Had me thinking about the nature of story telling and its objective.

Surpassing narrative of victim vs. villain, audiences are becoming evermore interested in the power of internal affairs. Going full circle back too original Ariel’s internal conflict as we become less and less intersted in sarcastic crabs and over protective mermaid dads. Thus, arises the success of directors and writers such as Woody Allen and Noah Baumbach, where dialogue is fuelled by extra-fictional understandings and meta-theatric realisations.

It’s funny how in a world post Disney, we are seeing ourselves (ourselves being symbolised through protagonists) become more extraverted in our internal affairs. Swimming away from the dancing musical scores of disillusioned safety and back into the grim repercussions strained fundamentalist beliefs and haunting moral consequences.