Synopsis

Endgame of the Mind Industry

Hommage à Mark Fisher

Once upon a time, because there was a time when a person experienced themselves as a pulsating star, struggling to flicker with the many in the darkness. And once upon a time, because there was a time when a person killed themselves without even noticing. All that happened was that they no longer wanted to flicker with the many, so they took the sky, dipped its bottom in black, and, as a single shining star, directed the gaze from the depths upon themselves. But the other stars, painted dark, also wanted to be one, so they thoroughly washed with thinner, painted their sky black, and directed the naive gaze upon themselves. Thus it happened that all those stars drew closer to the earth. From then on, the glowing dots shone orphaned, while the naive ones dazzled continuously upwards, even when the sky nearly fell on them, held only by a cobweb above the trees. The birds became dizzy, the fish trapped bubbles inside, and infinity, like asphalt, petrified in a sepulchral silence.

Our story’s pixels revolve around the legendary star pedagogue Helga Káldi’s downfall and the mysterious death of her nine-year-old student, Pál Berci. The mosaics are sometimes moved by peculiar, sometimes by mediocre public figures at their whim, while the TikTok seconds of time mercilessly tick away, creating a dizzying sense of the eternal present. The secret of Sodrás Street Elementary School is smeared by our characters’ net narcissism and excrement. Reality, like a centipede, escapes from the burning light of the ego, hiding in cracks, only emerging at night to cross the sleeping visage. In their dreams, traces of the past appear—a Nirvana song or a Rembrandt painting—easily erased by a morning update. They awaken in collective mental exhaustion, volunteering for the Finale of forgetting, to perform the show of fallen angels.

The Finale performance, as its title indicates, depicts a terminal state, with the characters reaching a “mental endpoint” through a symbolically interpretable narrative. Whether the apocalypse follows or something good begins is still unknown. The drama was nearly finished when I read an interview with Márton Gulyás, who named the phenomenon the play addresses: the “mind industry,” created to normalize social injustices and inequalities stemming from our production system, intensively influencing our society. Among others, he referenced Mark Fisher, the British cultural theorist, whose writings provided inspiring theoretical background and whose ideas and conceptual inventions were incorporated into the play. The performance was originally scheduled for December 2020; nearly a year has passed since the limited preview, and we hope the virus spares us so that we can finally reach the premiere. (Pa