I’m sorry, I just had to vent. The following is not very well stated but at least I got it off my chest before it festered.
In searching the interwebs for information about some movies featuring Diane Keeton, I stumbled upon the preview reels of an upcoming Netflix mini-series that I will not watch.
Don’t fail to miss the first-season three episode showing of Nightm***s of Nature. (I will not complete the name or provide a link to provide a tiny boost to the series but you can find it if you must.)
The name alone was sufficient to create a hair-on-end response. I was both intrigued and horrified, so I dug deeper to find some of the stills and short word descriptions of the content. And I had an immediate visceral reaction.
I got full in the face of my computer screen and declared to the empty room: “Not only will I not watch this, but I will protest loudly to all my (teeny) band of readers to warn them of this affront to nature nurturers on every continent.”
Then I realized that my readers are mostly “the choir” and would get my objections immediately. But I persisted in my ruminations.
It is the “average American” that needs to be warned off this crap.
If I may paint with a very broad brush, it is the typical city dwelling indoor-oriented eco-apathetic consumer who will be drawn to and, I think, diminished by taking in this kind of “entertainment.”
It tickles our lust to be afraid. There are things aplenty in the man-made world to fear. The world made without hands (as John Muir called the natural cathedral and its residents) should not be among our top 100 fears (except maybe for the microbes that want us for dinner.)
But this aberration will sell easily just now. How very well timed, just before Halloween.
Now we can dress our children up as any animal with teeth and they will be terrifyingly menacing and malevolent as the mouse that murders the cricket it mercilessly devours, starting with the head of the terrified insect. Crunch crunch. (Queue Psycho sound track stabbing sounds!) Trick or Treat!
A Purer Form of Evil
What’s not to love here!? What we have here is a superior form of EVIL.
The concept combines the “natural (stuff happens) evil” of life forces (storms, accidents, disease) taking down the innocent, with the added ingredient of “moral evil” that attributes human fear, malice, deceit and hatred to animals great and small, pitted against one another. This is pure badass nature.
We are already as a culture largely out of touch with the world beyond the asphalt. Maybe at times we go so far as to sample it for an afternoon in a tame park or briefly stop at a scenic overlook where we stay safe in our car.
But from this Netflix vantage point, there is US. And there is ALL THAT. And now, after these nightmares, we really want no part of living things that aren’t US.
Nature (from mosquitos to spiders, snakes and those ordinary out-there green, furry or feathered THINGS that we have no names for) consists of threats to be vanquished, overcome, tamed and made to do our will. Nature is a resource to be turned to profit or otherwise avoided.
The living world from which we come and on which we are totally dependent is now the stuff of our most terrifying dreams.
Extinction? All the better. Who needs those ikky things the viewer will see in Nightm***s of Nature? Be gone with them.
Stewardship? I don’t think so.
It is unlikely but I might watch an episode and issue a retraction of my gut response here if that is warranted.
If you do take the bait, let me know what you think; what you feel; and how this viewing benefitted your children who watched with you.
And let us know what kind of terrifying insect, mammal, reptile or bird-monster costume they wore for Halloween to keep the message going.
Just be sure they stay on the sidewalks and don’t step into the grass.
You never know when the disgusting slimy earthworms will pull them and their plastic pumpkins of candy into the soil and feed the writhing mass of them to the horrible hideous moles and voles in the dark below.
– Fred First is an author, naturalist, photographer watching Nature under siege since the first Earth Day. Cautiously hopeful. Writing to think it through. Thanks for joining me. Subscribe to My Substack HERE.