While trolling around the streaming multiverse, The Marvelous María Beatriz and I landed on Bugoniay. Here’s a quick synopsis from one of its many reviews:

The world is dying, and Yorgos Lanthimos would like to hasten its end. His blunt instruments in “Bugonia,” a casually sardonic black comedy which might constitute his most approachable film to date, are a paranoid beekeeper and a craven biomedical CEO. The apiarist, a sweaty, dirty, and smutty Teddy (Jesse Plemons), teams with his impressionable cousin Donny (Aidan Delbis) to kidnap Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), believing she’s an alien from the Andromeda species intent on destroying humanity. Their theory comes from conspiracy podcasts, crackpot online sources, and Teddy’s own experimentation. The pair’s plan will require them, in the words of Teddy, to cleanse themselves of their “psychic compulsions.”

The movie is billed as a comedy, which it sort of is, though we had to keep reminding ourselves of this because the absurdity and ridicule heaped up in the movie on the main characters as well as the entire human race is by no means done with a light hand or self-deprecation. In the end, it isn’t comedy; it is a polished and posturing scorn.

Eventually, we learn that Michelle really is from Andromeda – the emperor, in fact – and that it is she who decides to terminate the Andromedans’ experiment in trying to tame out of the human species the viciousness and greed that they seemingly love to indulge and foment, even when doing so leads to its own destruction.

You can’t say that there isn’t some truth to the accusation, given recent moves by this administration to eliminate any restraints on pollution and its desire to ramp up the construction of the next generation of nuclear weapons and its demolition of the science behind climate change and its defenestration of the nation’s public health system. Not to mention capitalism itself.

Back in 2007, Alan Weisman wrote The World Without Us, a thought experiment about what would happen if we disappeared from the face of the earth. (There is, of course, a Wikipedia page about it.) It’s an old trope, but what if this were thought out from the point of view of the planet, taking as real certain assumptions about the planet’s consciousness, its constitution as a sentient organism? Might it not feel some great relief at not having to humor our lunacies anymore? There is something perversely pleasing about this kind of species self-negation, that not only will the planet not have to groan under our weight but that we, as well, won’t have to carry the burden of carrying ourselves forward any more.

There is a poignant moment when Emma Stone, as the emperor, takes what looks like a long quill and pops a gossamer bubble that had been domed over a replica of the earth. As it pops, we shift to scenes of people who literally died in their tracks. Species gone. Evolution can begin again.

The story of the movie doesn’t really hold up under close scrutiny. I mean, why would the Andromedan emperor take on the persona of the vampire CEO of a vampire pharmaceutical company? And there are many glitchy catches in the story line like that. Which means that in the end, the director really wasn’t that serious about his movie – he could generate the frisson of the alien invasion without having to do the harder and darker work about how we are alien to each other and invade each other all the time.

I don’t know – would it be better if we humans just disappeared? In my more frustrated and unmagnanimous moments, I do believe this. (Which may be due more to my own momentary dislike of my own existence than a deserved fatwah on humankind.) But then I go to a meeting of the Library Trustees of the Hubbard Public Library in Ludlow, Massachusetts, and meet four women who are committed to the life of the library and the life that a library can conjugate in the town. Linda Collette, Chairperson (March 2026), Antonia Golinski-Foisy (March 2028), Ruth Saunders (March 2027) and Melissa Rickson – Director. They kindly let me sit in on their meeting, where I heard about snow days, staff appreciation, programming, fundraising, and budgets. Then I had the pleasure of chatting with them because they were very interested in why this man just shows up at their meeting. So I told them about my connection with the library and the town, about my mother having been a library trustee, about my efforts, as a new homeowner, to participate in the town meetings and get to know people and see where I could possibly make a difference.

These were not extraordinary people, not masters of the universe, but they were solid and whole and wholesome and motivated and concerned and committed to the welfare of their local habitation. When you see the human species on this level, when the human being can’t be reduced to an algorithm or a trope or a stereotype or an other, then the species may be worth saving. We can wish the species gone only if we allow ourselves to drain its members of all specificity and see them only as sketches, cartoons (in both senses), bloodless and unbrained. Once you hear the history of a life, once you contend with the density and gravity of another body, once you get beneath the personas and roles and exoskeletons, it is well-nigh impossible to dilute our fellows in order to trash them. Their presence, their thisness, becomes sacred, and we have to treat each other that way. Well, maybe not “have to,” but we should – those moral ties will be the only things that save us from being a species worthy of demolition.

So, yeah, watch the movie. But get off the couch and go get involved because that will be the only way we will stave off the dogs of war among us. 47 and The Ilk want us divided and snarling; best thing to do is go hang out at the library and watch knowledge spread and enliven.