Philosophy Study, March 2022, Vol. 12, No. 3, 144-146
doi: 10.17265/2159-5313/2022.03.004 Happiness and Are You Lost in the World Like Me? A Brief
Philosophical Analysis of Steve Cutts ‟ Animated Films
Paulo Alexandre e Castro
Universidade de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal
Steve Cutts is a young English illustrator/producer who, despite being 25 or 26 years old, has already worked for
large multinationals such as Sony, Toyota or Coca-Cola. His genius is evident not only becau of his natural talent
for drawing, but also becau he us simple programs like Adobe Flash or After Effects to create his a
nimations,
and the result surpris us. And it surpris us with the satirical, daring, carefree and ironic tone with which it
prents the human univer, with its ambitions, desires, sadness, miries. This paper examines two of his
animated films, and explores a philosophical vision about the hypermodern society and the myth of happiness.
Keywords: Steve Cuts, happiness myth, hypermodern society, capitalism, animated films
Brief Introduction to a Major Theme
Steve Cutts in his animated films, namely Happiness and Are You Lost in the World Like Me , prents the human animal that created an unequal world, succumbing to the values dictated by a global economy. The beginning of Happiness prents this unbridled race lived in any metropolis, in which the shapeless mass of workers could nd us back to Fritz Lang ‟s metropolis univer or to a platonic underground of which we will only have shadows. Steve Cutts gives us the dimension of ha
最是书香能致远ppiness in this other Black Friday race, where the deepest meaning of the word humanity is forgotten. It can be said that the topic is not new; remember Georges Perec ‟s classic novel, Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965), in which the young couple is torn between intellectual aspirations and the pleasures dictated by consumer society, and it is certainly not by chance that two years later, the emblematic work of Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle , appears. A society where nothing ems to fill the void dictated by purcha. That is showed in a scene where a man drags himlf around carrying the 4K TV and easily jumps to buy a sports car that instead of providing him with the adventure of free driving and carefree attitude, puts him in a traffic jam in the city. It is the ulessness of (the sold as) uful Ordine (2016).
The (Hypermodern) Happiness Myth or the Obligation to Be Happy
The duction of the idea of happiness, or rather, what is prented as a categorical imperative —no longer Kantian although obeying the same logic and laws —read as “you have the obligation to be happy”. In Happiness we e the illusion that happiness provides: it requires living in the prent, not expecting the future. Hedonism gains place in ecological and political militancy, in the exerci of citizenship, since hedonism is the new religion of modern society. This exaltation of happiness is clearly evident in this animation by Steve Cutts in which almost all products begin with the word hap
py. Drunk to exhaustion, we don ‟t stop and demand a
网络营销策略
Paulo Alexandre e Castro, Ph.D., Rearcher, Instituto de Estudos Filosó
ficos, Universidade de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal.
HAPPINESS AND ARE YOU LOST IN THE WORLD LIKE ME? 145
“happimed”—a drug that gives us back a rosy world, with rainbows and unicorns, that leaves us hovering in a promid horizon of well-being, in another nsoriality as if opening the doors of perception as Aldous Huxley would say. Gilles Lipovetsky (2007) tells us that we are in the prence of a turbo-consumer, fast, voracious, energetic, vertiginous, which Paul Virilio had already noticed—the vertigo of the moment. The instant is by definition fleeting, ephemeral, and does not stop at itlf. The spirit that animates the turbo-consumer has infiltrated to the core and has also disturbed our personal, family and professional relationships, and maybe that‟s why we need psychic comfort, or to u the terminology in vogue, inner harmony. The philosopher tells us:
微信黑名单怎么解除The hyperconsumer is no longer just avid for material well-being (…) but wants subjective growth, as witnesd by the flourishing of techniques derived from personal development, as well as the succes
s of oriental knowledge, new spiritualities, manuals that promi happiness and wisdom. [and continues the French philosopher] The materialism of the first consumer society has gone out of fashion: we are now witnessing the expansion of the market for the soul and its transformation, balance and lf-esteem, although the pharmacies of happiness proliferate. (Lipovetsky, 2007, p. 10)
Are we, then, lost? The cond animation by Steve Cutts gives us the dimension of the abyss where we are heading towards, from the very beginning with the phra “the systems are failing” but also with the final image. Happiness has a modern face, it‟s called technology, it‟s called screens. We live immerd in technology, with our eyes glued to the screens, like a crowd of zombies. We prefer violence to the inertia of the void that runs through us, we accept the gratuitousness of violent images, and therefore we do not provide any help to anybody but we do prefer filming, we aim the technological weapon as someone who wants to record the instantaneity of the unrepeatable moment that will be eventually repeated on social networks until exhaustion. According to Olivier Mongin, we have entered a “natural state” of accepting violence. The very experience of violence has metamorphod into a kind of occupational therapy, a catharsis for modern times; we watch violence whenever we want without violating ourlves (physically or psychically), as George Steiner says:
Open and democratic societies are therapeutic. They ek to alleviate pain and lesn hatred, striving in particular to provide relatively innocuous substitutes and channels for the latter. Authorized aggression in the free market and in sport is
a glaring example. Fictional violence is within everyone‟s reach. Television addicts, particularly in North America and
Western Europe, will have watched from early childhood thousands of hours of murders, assaults, rapes and humiliations.
总经理办公室
The spiral of graphic brutality in the media and on the Internet is perhaps currently going out of whack. (Steiner, 2001, p.
145)
As we have mentioned earlier, social relations, which include labor, community and family relations, are subject to the mercantilist technologization dictated by this hyper-modernity and, in this n, they become valid under the scrutiny of the appearance mediated by images. As Goffman mentioned, once the reality with which the individual finds himlf committed is momentarily ungrasp
able in its totality, the individual will have to make u of the available appearances. Paradoxically, the more the individual finds himlf engaged in reality (to which perception does not give him access), the more his attention will focus on appearances (Goffman, 1991, p. 291).
Technology has invaded the territory of our mind and taken our time. We make lfies—not without photoshopping them first—to post them, as if this validates the greatness of the spirit or brings us clor to the aesthetic sublime, and hopping to achieve countless likes that legitimize our existence. And we forget, literally, we forget what made us move forward, language. We forget the contents, the grammatical forms, the terms, becau we dare to redefine, as if we were gods on Olympus, entertained playing with puppets, we dare to
HAPPINESS AND ARE YOU LOST IN THE WORLD LIKE ME?
146
redefine language, as in the origins. Communication has been transmuted (at least since Marshal McLuhan), but not even he would have foreen the dangerous replacement of a univer of words by Lol‟s and smiles. Symbolic reprentation impos itlf as an affection—a dangerous path that leads to nowhere, which forces us to smile. Happiness requires indications, suggestions, notes. Let‟
s borrow for this purpo the movie Shrek. Despite the classic story of the hero accompanied by a plump, bacoco companion (a kind of re-invention of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza), who saves the princess by destroying a dragon, there is a subversive humor in the background, with humorous deviations typical of Brecht. It is the current society that we find there portrayed when, during the wedding ceremony, signs are raid saying, “laugh!”, or “respectful silence!”. The are references to modern customs and rhythms, to pop culture, including here some sarcasm full of irony about vanity, when, for example, the sleeping beauty waits for the kiss and hurries to fix her hair. As Zizec says: “no wonder the final quence of the film consists of an ironic version of the song …I‟m a Believer‟, the old hit by the Monkeys from the 1960s—it‟s the way we are believers today: we enjoy our beliefs, but at the same time we continue to practice the faith, ie, we continue to give ourlves to it to support, without saying so, our daily actions” (Zizec, 2003, p. 197). Imprisoned in a system that has not only dehumanized us but wants to remove all legitimacy from life, whether from the environment or from animals. We play like bored gods. The fluorescent rabbit that appears in a gray and inhumane scenery of men, approximately at minute 1:39, constitutes the perfect metaphor and takes us to Eduard Kac‟s Alba rabbit—genetic manipulation as an art form, bioart. And then still, technology in the arch for love. That image of me that is no longer reflected in the calm waters of our esnce but is deflected into a social network, to appear on a screen, where someone, somewh
ere is willing to scroll through the display of faces and bodies, waiting for a match that reinvents technological love. And we have one last touch of make-up, perhaps botox, to board the medusa raft that Géricault portrayed in his most famous painting in the 19th century.
舞蹈教育学In Sort of Conclusion
Lipovetsky knows that happiness is paradoxical: we have never had so much to feel so little: “the market offers more and more means of communication and distractions, but anxiety, loneliness, inner incurity are also more and more common, we produce and consume more and more, but that does not make us happier” (Lipovetsky, 2007, p. 287). Steve Cutts helps eing that. But one should remember Aristotle: in order to be happy, man has to enjoy different external goods without difficulty, but becau man is in his esnce politikon, he wants the goods in which feel pleasure in sharing the common good, knowledge, wisdom. Happiness for the ancient Greek is Eudaimonia, that is, the state in which man feels inhabited by a Daemon, as a good genius. So, happiness is the balance between virtue (Areté) and Wisdom (Phronesis). Modernity needs to recover the historical and sapiential length of civilization, not in order to create a new imperative but in order to not waste humanity in us.
References
Goffman, E. (1993). A Aprentação do Eu na Vida de Todos os Dias. Lisboa: Relógio d‟Água.
Lipovetsky, G. (2010). A Felicidade Paradoxal. Ensaio sobre a Sociedade do Hiperconsumo. Lisboa: Edições.
Mongin, O. (1998). A violência das imagens ou como eliminá-la? Lisboa: Editorial Bizâncio.
Ordine, N. (2016). A utilidade do inútil. Manifesto. Matosinhos: Faktoria K de Livros.
Steiner, G. (2001). Errata: Revisões de uma vida. Lisboa: Relógio D‟Água.
炒排骨Virilio, P. (2000). A Velocidade de Libertação. Lisboa: Relógio D‟Água.
椿萱并茂是什么意思Zizek, S. (2006). A Subjetividade por Vir—Ensaios Críticos sobre a Voz Obscena. Lisboa: Relógio D‟Água.
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