Break the Heart

“You notice that popular literature, the kind of stories that are read for relaxation, is always very highly conventionalized. If you pick up a detective story, you may not know until the last page who done it, but you always know before you start reading exactly the kind of thing that’s going to happen. If you read the fiction in women’s magazines, you read the story of Cinderella over and over again.”

“The Educated Imagination” by Northrop Frye

“Prominent ideas cannot die until the problems that arise within them have been resolved. They are not just a kind of external parasite. They are not alien organisms, viruses: ‘memes’ that happen to have infested us and can be cleared away with the right insecticide. They are organic parts of our lives, cognitive and emotional habits, structures that shape our thinking. So they follow conservation laws within it. Instead of dying, they transform themselves gradually into something different, something that is often hard to recognise and to understand.”

“The Myths We Live By” by Mary Midgley

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Dear Alex,

I am writing my first critical review of a movie I have just watched this past Sunday afternoon with my daughter. I have not read commentaries on it, and I have no pre-planned mental notes to press into sentences here. I simply feel the need to perhaps talk about a new blockbuster release from the narrower view of an alien trespasser.

“Break the Silence: the Movie” is a 90-minute documentary of the 2019 BTS World Tour LOVE YOURSELF:SPEAK YOURSELF that exploded with fireworks and promise for their millions of fans, the ARMY, in revolving stadiums and hysteria from France and the U.K. to the U.S., Brazil, Saudi Arabia and finally, Seoul. The 7-membered boy band needs no reason nor science to justify their brand loyalty. My daughter surrenders at will her minimum wage and maximal faith to the box office online in the first hour of sales.

At the centerpiece of BTS is their embryonic bond with ARMY. What distinguishes their music and shows from others, they tell me on cinematic screen, is the exclusivity of fun for the audience. Their alchemy defining “fun” is best understood by the convulsive ravings of mostly teen girls enjoined to “fight” in voluntary legions the “battle” of aggrandizing BTS kingdom, words in quotations striking beyond genre and culture to speak of “love yourself”.

In my dizzying mind that throbs in the pyrotechnical splendor of BTS sold-out concerts, I try to thread their 2 or 3-word themes, each roaring first with a potent verb, in a few arrangements for fun:

Love yourself.
Speak yourself.
Break the silence.

Break. Speak. Love.

Each action word pledges prominence and expectation for BTS lovers. If you say it and mean it, you and self and yourself, all of you in the universe of one, shall find whatever, whoever and all or any other you hope to find. The ambiguity of stock language in this gospel invites you to mold and manufacture cookie-cutter hope on a silver platter.

But in all the silence broken and love spoken at the BTS movie, there is one thing most extravagantly missing from human expression at the altar of gathering for performers and pilgrims. No one cried. Not a half tear fell on camera in the perpetual loving and speaking of self or breaking silence. BTS skin stays supple with sweat and success but in their whirling of the world, there is no space, no story, no history spoken of in tears, not even when their eyes tilt to sun or stars.

So how do you love, speak of love and break any silence without tears?

Yours, Kate