by va
Fellow connoisseur of decadence, good mate in real life, and miglior fabbro Cyriaque offers his thoughts on Marmaduke. In case you weren't aware, Marmaduke is a feature film (yes, based on that Marmaduke) currently playing in theaters. What happens is, quoting Cyriaque here, "the guy from Pushing Daisies, Kitty from Arrested Development, and William H. Macy (who appears to be perpetually on the verge of tears) yell at Marmaduke a lot. Also, Marmaduke surfs." There is little point in going on about what Marmaduke is, though. The pertinent question to ask is: why?
Given that Marmaduke is a movie nobody asked for, nobody enjoyed, and nobody will remember, why was it made? Dear readers, I believe this film to be a cinematic time capsule, a veritable cross section of a sick society that pours $50 million and countless man-hours into a cultural artifact nobody gives a shit about, like the Phoenicians' idol to Ba'al. The film will find a shelf life on DVD and lie undisturbed in NetFlix warehouses until civilization dies. When the smoke clears, our descendants will find this film hidden in a bunker somewhere, nod their heads sagely, and murmur with their leper tongues, "This is why they fell."
It's my personal opinion that our civilization will make the leap from decline to inexorable ruin in the fairly near future, but as I imagine it, it happens when energy policy expert Empress Sarah Palin gives the go-ahead to the Ford Motor Company to proceed with its mass-manufacturing of vehicles powered by the blood of Fake Americans. But, our descendants are surely correct to intuit that the release of Marmaduke for public consumption eerily presages such events.