The popular television series Westworld has everyone asking:

Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?

Now, obviously, the only two possible answers to this question are:

1. Of course
2. Whoa

Westworld expects you to go with

But, shockingly, this re-imagining of a 1970s movie didn’t invent the concept of questioning our very nature.

I mean, what is reality? What do we even mean by is, reality, or what? What did I have for breakfast? Luckily, Everclear sets out to answer some or all of these questions in their video for Santa Monica.

Like most people, Everclear (Everclear is a person’s name, right? Pretty sure he’s Everlast‘s dad) doesn’t just start to question his own reality for no reason. No, it starts with a fight.

I have to commend the video’s narrative brevity here. The whole setup of the “plot” takes place in the brief guitar intro of the song. We don’t need all the details. You can see there is a man and a woman and they are yelling at each other. We can infer that they aren’t strangers.

Plus, just looking at where they seem to live tells you a lot.

That’s some grade-A terrible apartment squalor.

Incidentally, I had the pleasure of meeting Everclear himself once during the ’90s. We talked for about 5 minutes, mostly about guitar solos. What I’ll always remember, though, was that during the conversation he used the following euphemisms for his genitals:

• Umbrella and beach balls
• The gentleman’s calling card
• Inspector Gadget
• His Holiness Pope Pius XII
• King Shit of Fuck Mountain

And last, but definitely not least:

• Boner factory

The squalor is quickly escaped, however. We move to a beautiful seaside location. But is it real?

The bass player’s folded arms hint that it is not.

Everclear rips through a picture of his ex to reveal the band, playing live without an audience.

Now, I don’t know what your reality is like, but that kind of thing does not happen regularly in my reality. Quite the opposite, in fact.

I don’t think reality is meant, though. The next scene is ripe with symbolism. A man in a suit swims inside some sort of mechanical contraption.

No matter how hard he swims, he goes nowhere. The suit represents the patriarchy and the contraption represents the Dewey Decimal System. Think about it.

Then, Everclear, in a suit, walks into the ocean.

If this isn’t symbolism, I don’t know what is. He conforms to the system and becomes The Man. He is subsumed by society. And the ocean.

At this point, reality completely falls apart.

Now, there is a fantasy within the fantasy as the band starts playing in front of a green screen with the ocean displayed on it. If this image doesn’t make it clear, the following one definitely does.

That’s not just a fake ocean, that’s a fake ocean that isn’t even trying any more. Either the special effects people got tired of doing a good job halfway through the video or the fake-ness is on purpose. As an aspiring [New Critic] (/posts/rap-music-my-droogs-universal-by-blur/), I choose to assume the latter.

Note that this is still interlaced with shots that appear to contain the real ocean not on a green screen.

So, what does this mean? Are our fantasies fake even inside the fantasy? Is our reality a facsimile of a fleeting daydream of a small child? What does that mean for us, our future, our past, and our credit score? Did I have Special K with banana?

Seems like Everclear ain’t gonna help us with that.

-PTD