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Rating: The journey, an enchanting metaphor of knowledge, of its wandering, cathartic nature, is, in a sense, a symbol of life, suspended in the continuous search for a meaning in itself. If the journey, that is, the search for meaning, gives identity to life, then its opposite, namely death, is also a possible starting point for defining it. A negative construction, based on what life is not, and yet no less interesting and valid. Because death speaks to us, makes us speak, and paradoxically, builds things more solid and enduring than life does. For this reason, in many famous travel stories we find a cathartic and resolutive descent into the Underworld.
Lazarus is a journey in search of the dead, a descent into the Underworld to interrogate the spirits that have shaped the culture of our time, in order to understand the past and the present and the value of an exceptional life. The hegemonic place of Western culture is obviously the United States of America, a factory of legends, illusions, and mythological figures of premature death, each a symbol, conventional and countercultural together, of its own time. And so, from Seattle to Portland, from Los Angeles to New York, on the trail of Hendrix, Cobain, Marilyn, Elvis, who died too young, whose art is destined for eternal remembrance. One searches for Sid and Nancy's hotel, John Lennon's apartment, places of a pagan religion and equally sacred, to understand, and perhaps, to demystify...
Because fundamentally, the myth is a conventional construction, which in its contradiction is nonetheless the product of a homogenized cultural system, which in the myth gives vent to the 'repressed', to the suppressed, and which mythologizes dissonance only to celebrate it as the exception that confirms the rule. Exceptions that ultimately haven't changed anything. Myths, as such, have never gotten their hands dirty with history. Precisely for this reason they represent a model, an immutable paradigm, whose static nature, however, has not hindered the dynamism, the movement of the message of which they are symbols: freedom, escape, intolerance, discomfort, and hope. And it is for this reason that the myth, the dead, speaks to us: because it exposes the most basic issues of the common man, the non-myth, who finds a form of redemption in the myth.
There is no need to explain why certain myths are literally 'worshiped'. The sense of empathy emanated by them is what most contributes to the generation of a religious sentiment, in a materialistic sense, the strength of which consists precisely in removing from the divinity the prerogative of exceptionality, which, thanks to the myth, returns to man.
Finally, what to say? It is strange to find something extremely interesting on TV, especially on MTV, whose programming mainly focuses on the broadcasting of American formats, embarrassing and ridiculous. Lazarus is the TV that criticizes itself, it is the dissonance that confirms the rule.
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