Comfort in catharsis?

After hav­ing seen a truly scin­til­lat­ing and visu­ally orgas­mic (so much so, in fact, that I devel­oped a headache) IMAX 3D pre­sen­ta­tion of James Cameron’s Avatar, I began to put together a pat­tern emerg­ing, to me any­way, in works of pop­u­lar art and lit­er­a­ture. Avatar and another con­trib­u­tor to this pat­tern, Dis­ney-Pixar’s Wall·E, are gen­er­ally straight­for­ward in pack­ing their punch.

Humans are evil — regard­less of their inten­tions, malign or not — and more than likely will end up destroy­ing or deplet­ing them­selves and their resources.

I’m not really try­ing at ver­bose crit­i­cism, but why do we indulge in con­struct­ing mas­sive, ever-more-awesome nar­ra­tives to apol­o­gize for our­selves, our wars, our destruc­tion, our sad state of exis­tence? These and other sto­ries are chill­ingly beau­ti­ful and evoke strong emo­tions, so I under­stand the appeal. The apolo­get­ics are just stu­pe­fy­ingly idi­otic — that we might redeem our blight on the Earth through artis­tic acknowl­edg­ment. Let’s at least do some­thing about our innu­mer­able crises in addi­tion to nos­tal­gi­cally memo­ri­al­iz­ing them, please? Kthxbai.