New Year – Isn’t life beautiful?

It is said that the “most beautiful time of the year” are the days at the end. Many have time off work and no urgent obligations and can therefore devote themselves entirely to the family: the constantly nagging partner, the senile parents, the whining offspring. And if you don’t take precautions in time (pretending to be sick or traveling around the world, barricading the door to your house or apartment), in the worst case scenario you’ll have other relatives on your hands who you’ll be at the mercy of and have to support.

The pent-up resentment and hatred that you have felt towards your fellow human beings and the environment throughout the year, as well as the tormenting self-pity, are successfully suppressed for a while and have to give way to fake contemplation and feigned happiness. Unsatisfied, you shovel in pieces of roast goose and listlessly wash them down with a few bottles of Brunello di Montalcino, only to then shovel in Advent chocolate almost until you feel like vomiting. Glittering tinsel, crackling fires on the television screen and the artificial scent of pine trees are intended to hide the misery of the world from one day to the next, to erase our knowledge of age, decrepitude and death from our consciousness and to make us forget that we have to exist in a godless, dark universe are condemned.

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Thomas Blum fundamentally disagrees with the prevailing so-called reality. He won’t be able to change her for the time being, but he can reprimand her, admonish her or, if necessary, give her a beating. So that the bad begins to retreat. We stand in solidarity with his fight against reality. Therefore, from now on, “The Good Column” will appear here on Mondays. Only the best quality for the best readers! The collected texts can be found at: dasnd.de/diegute

In order to intensify this form of self-deception, many people want to enjoy the evening hours on the sofa at home with a good classic film. The so-called Christmas film has become a tradition and always conveys a life-affirming message. For example, in Frank Capra’s “Isn’t Life Beautiful?” starring James Stewart, the message is: “You too are loved. Every person is needed.«

The “Sissi” films, on the other hand, overwhelm the viewer with their tons of larger-than-life kitsch and paint the picture of an ideal world in which there is neither disease, poverty nor war, but only rich, white, heterosexual, carefree, perfectly healthy people Noble idiots who recite dime novel dialogues: cheerful women in magnificent ball gowns and strapping, radiant men in freshly ironed uniforms.

Or think of the kind of bogus “romantic comedies” that all stick together according to the same predictable pattern: heartwarming sentimentality, sweet-cheesy humor, a little laughter, a little crying, a bit of implied cuddly sex, and a happy ending in which everyone Falling into each other’s arms out of sheer incredible happiness. Everything presented in nice bite-sized portions. And of course, not to be forgotten: repeated close-ups of hands tentatively approaching each other and finally finding each other. On the soundtrack, the standard mix of Richard Clayderman strumming and string orchestra overkill. The stale bourgeois morality behind it: every potty has its lid. At the end, the docile princess with the sweet deer eyes can look up gratefully to her noble knight while she lies well protected in his strong arms. »Adapt! Do not give up! Never lose hope!” is what these films successfully instill in us.

I’m not sure that in a better future, completely different films should be watched during the end-of-year days. One thing is certain: conventional Christmas and other cheesy films lie to us and give us a fundamentally wrong attitude to life.

Horror films, on the other hand, especially those in the zombie genre, have an educational effect. They paint a realistic picture of our present: love is a bourgeois construct, and people are only needed as raw materials and a source of food. The zombie film predicts the future of our social system: the apocalypse is coming; the constant destruction of our natural resources will have devastating consequences; man is man’s wolf.

The very locations of the events that one is confronted with correspond much more closely to our everyday reality than the same old, luxuriously renovated condominiums, sparklingly clean artist lofts and rom-com ballrooms: slum ghettos in which homeless people warm their hands over fire barrels; hopelessly overpopulated urban districts; dead forests; contaminated industrial areas.

One day in the not-too-distant future, these films tell us, you too will probably find yourself, surrounded by burning piles of rubbish, your skin covered in weeping eczema and sores, and wearing tattered clothes, in a completely demolished and four-fifths-looted pharmacy in the middle of nowhere stand and no longer find any antibiotics, but only a cough drop forgotten on the scorched laminate floor, which you take with you including its blood and greedily devour the dirt-encrusted cellophane wrapping.

In short: The zombie genre doesn’t leave us in the dark about the future of our existence and prepares us for the upcoming new year much better than works like “Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella.” Keep this in mind when choosing your end-of-year film in the future.