Beause Carl Weathers has left the building. And look, I know, he was just an actor. No matter how often he appeared in the cinema that defined a generation’s cultural milieu, no matter how he was Apollo Creed, no matter how he appeared in a canonical episode of Kung Fu, no matter how, after a wild bumper car trip of a second career, he found a place, perhaps a perfect place, as Greef Karga in The Mandalorian, and no matter how some people (I’m looking at YOU Pie Hole Willy) thought he was Billy Dee Williams because there’s a banjo firmly attached to your kneecap. No matter.
Now he’s gone. Hail the Goer and pour one out and all that manly shit because even though he was just an actor and I never met him and didn’t think of him even once in the last thirty years, now that he’s laid down his script, there’s still a little cavity in my movie goer heart shaped like Action Jackson and it makes me the littlest, the teensiest, the most grain of sandedly sad.
In a thousand years, our archeological great-great-etc-etc-grand spawn will unearth our celluloid records. They’ll uncover a functioning Betamax or a VCR or a Blueray, and plow through a BlockBuster Video’s worth of our favorite movies and instead of recognizing it was just us trying our best to stave off the crushing loneliness of being all alone in the universe, they’ll get busy categorizing our flickering gods, laying down a lasting taxonomy of belief and they’re going to get it all wrong.
In The Zero Theorem, Terry Gilliam drops a background joke when we get a glimpse of an advertisement for “The Church of Batman the Redeemer” which, I don’t know about you, but had me howling with laughter. Tears running down my cheeks. It’s similar to the even darker, deeper joke at the heart of A Canticle For Leibowitz, one of the forgotten books of the growing sci-fi bible of perfect stories. Theorem and Canticle are both post-apocalyptic dystopian future narratives about the absurdity of history and how it’s easy to make mistakes (look, this is part of what they’re about, not a neat encapsulation. Do your own work). Canticle has the discovery of ancient religious relics like the blueprint for a lightbulb, which is a mundane and silly thing to venerate–if you know what a lightbulb is. But Canticle occurs thousands of years after some kind of apocalypse and people have descended into a primitive candle-lit existence so the discovery of such advanced knowledge from an ancient people is kind of a big deal and they completely misunderstand it. Which brings us to the Bhagavad Gita.
It is a splendidly lurid story introducing the B.V. Universe and yes, I just referenced Marvel because that’s the point I’m making. We have given these myths credence for being a distant culture’s religious canon but what if they were just the Marvel Universe of their day? It makes you understand The Church of Batman the Redeemer joke better as something that is likely to happen. The comic nerds lost in an endless discussion of the origins of the Silver Surfer are not entirely different from Rabbinical scholars and if you zoom out a little and squint, it’s impossible to distinguish them in the broad category of nerds nerding over sacred texts.
I mean, he was just an actor. The empty Carl Weathers cavity in my cultural heart is already filling up with the brilliant performances and shenanigans of present-day actors, and by the time you read this, it’ll be shaped more like Oliver Quick than Colonel Albert Dillon. I’m trying to grow. The point is that we must strive to find for ourselves the thing that staves off the grievous and burdensome weight of cosmic alienation, of being forlorn in a cold and empty universe as we learn to live with the startling and ruinous truth that no-one is coming to save us with future tech. This world will expand and contract like a ping pong ball on a frying pan until it dissolves like a long flavorless jawbreaker in the mouth of a dumbass summering teen.
And so, like Carl Weathers, each of us will flare according to the spackle of spirit levied upon us, barely discernable from our brethren, a spark in a campfire, a dim star fading in a dawn sky, then leave the stage with all the ceremony afforded a nameless superluminary. We weren’t here for nearly all of eternity, then the universe blinked, then we were gone again, for all eternity henceforth which brings us to the final question, the cosmological imperative that dogs us to our dirt nap—which whiskey should we drink to keep us warm while we’re so thoroughly ignored by the universe?
Well, it ain’t Jack Fucking Daniels, Eugene. Feed your ghost what it deserves. Go on a quest. And before you hike the high hills over a holler until you haul aside the limbs of a Come-to-Jesus tree and Honeysuckle vines and discover, shining brilliantly in the Kentucky summer sun, a copper still pumping out the moonlight, go instead to a good liquor store and pick up a good bourbon, like maybe Cedar Ridge which I think pairs perfectly with the heat death of the universe.
So, pour one out, my brethren; pour one out for Carl Weathers; pour one out for yourself; pour one out for me.
