Sandalstraps Cinema

As the semester winds down (and the workload winds up) I've been day dreaming about what I'm going to do with all my soon-to-be-rediscovered free time. And, since doing something worthwhile has long been ruled out, I think I might spend more of my time blogging. At least until something more pressing (like J-term classes followed by the Spring semester) pops up.

But, if I do resume more regular blogging, what, o what should I blog about?

This morning I blew the time I should have been working on the two papers I have due this week finally watching a movie that I simply loved, but don't have time to comment in depth on yet: V for Vendetta, the Wachowwski brothers' worthy follow-up to the Matrix trilogy (first take: better than the second and third Matrix films, not quite as good as the first). Strangely enough, that film explores many of the same issues as my emerging idea for my Masters thesis (or am I just seeing a thesis topic in everything?), but more on that when I take the time to blog for real.

In the meantime, I've decided that until I change my mind (which could well be before any actual posts) I'm going to do more in depth looks at the theological, philosophical, and ethical content in movies, much like I did in these posts, two of my all-time favorites to write:

Contact

RENT

Or, for less depth, consider these:

Ever Since the World Ended (juxtaposing the film Donnie Darko with a Mose Alison song)

An Unnatural Evil (a look at Augustine's theodicy of natural evil after watching An Inconvenient Truth, but I swear, its not that heavy)

Bobby (paging Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards)

An Unnatural Evil

"Natural evil" as a part of the broader problem of evil has posed a problem for theists for almost as long as there have been theists. It can be seen as suffering that is embedded in nature, not the product of any volitional action. That suffering seems to be built into the fabric of our universe poses a real problem for those who claim that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent - perhaps a greater problem than any other aspect of the broader problem of evil.

Theodicy - as we've seen before - is the attempt to logically reconcile the apparent contradiction between an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving good and perfect God, and the fact of suffering, the fact of evil. The most persuasive theodicies, in my opinion, all involve some appeal to human freedom. They argue that suffering is a necessary product of human freedom, and that such freedom is a greater good than the experience of suffering and evil is a bad. As such, the freedom that produces suffering, the freedom that produces evil, offsets the evil, the suffering, that it produces.

While I am not persuaded by such an account, I can see how many people would believe it. Those of us who believe that the freedom of action and the freedom of will that we experience is more than illusory cling to that freedom as one of our most cherished possessions. We resent any intrusion on our freedom, any manipulation, any coercion. We fight off and rebel against those who would subvert our wills. This shows that at least some of us - those of us who do not so readily exchange our freedom for the illusion of security - do in fact see freedom as a kind of supreme good.

This implicit understanding of the value of freedom is at the heart of the most persuasive theodicies. These theodicies tell us that, if, in fact, we must have either freedom or a life without suffering and evil, we would choose to live freely. My only problem with them is that they, in supposing that we must have either one or the other but not both, in fact place limitations of a supposedly unlimited God. In doing so they implicitly contradict what they overtly propose - that suffering is not incompatible with an unlimited and perfectly good God.

"Natural evil," though, is not so easily attributable to human freedom. After all, what role does our activity have in producing hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, cancer and the like? These forms of suffering, these natural instances of apparent evil, have throughout human history seemed to exist outside the realm of volitional action. This fact, however, has not stopped some from attempting to connect natural evil to human activity.

Augustine of Hippo gave the first theodicy against natural evil that I am aware of. In it he connects natural evil both to the Fall of Adam and Eve, and the justice of God. He argues that no form of natural evil - no naturally occurring instances of suffering - existed in the Garden of Eden. In Eden there could have been no hurricanes, no tornadoes, no earthquakes, no disease, no death. However, the Fall of humanity through the actions of Adam and Eve in the Garden, somehow disrupted the very fabric of the universe. When humanity fell, the whole Earth fell with us.

As such, at least indirectly, natural evil is no natural phenomenon. It is the product of the subversion of the human will, the end result of the corruption of our nature, a corruption which in turn corrupted the whole world.

I suspect that he arrives at this position through a reading of the creation myths of Ancient Israel found in Genesis - and yes, there are two distinct myths. The first myth is found in Genesis 1:1 - 2:4a, and the second myth comes immediately after. While the first myth is primarily about

a.) an ongoing creation process that constantly moves from chaos to order, and

b.) the establishment of Shabbot, the Sabbath, a sacred day of rest,

it also asserts a natural connection between humanity and the natural environment. The activity of creation ends on the sixth day, when God transfers dominion of all the Earth and everything in it to humanity. While that transfer has often been seen as almost a transfer of power - we now have dominion over nature and are justified in dominating it and using it for our purposes - it can also be seen as a transfer of responsibility. However it is seen, it connects the well-being of the world with human activity.

The second creation myth is the story of Adam and Eve, a story that also speaks to the relationship between humans and the natural environment. Genesis 2:5 reads

...when no shrub of the field was yet on earth and no grasses of the field had yet sprouted, because the LORD God had not sent rain upon the earth and there was no man to till the soil...

This verse - and its surrounding context - connects all vegetative life to the existence of humans, who are charged with stewarding natural resources and tending to the well being of the ecosystem. This charge - found in both creation myths - is at the heart of Stewardship Theology, a kind of ecologically conscious approach to the Judeo-Christian tradition. This connection may also be the sort of thing that Augustine had in mind when he attempted to connect natural evil to the Fall of Adam and Eve. When the caretakers of the Earth were corrupted, the Earth they were charged to care for was also corrupted.

Augustine also had in mind the justice of God - a reflection of his androcentrism. Natural evil is, for him, only a problem because it causes humans to suffer. Yet such suffering, seen after the Fall, is for Augustine the prerogative of God. We - cosmically speaking - earned it. Perhaps it is used to drive us toward repentance, or perhaps it is used merely to balance the scales of justice. In any event, when a hurricane, a tornado, an earthquake, or cancer or some other horrible disease strikes, we cannot ask God why. We know why. Like all other forms of suffer, the why is answered with the Fall.

I have never had much use for this kind of thinking. By now my philosophic and religious objections to theodicy should be clear. In my view, they don't work, and they don't help. They are neither philosophically or emotionally satisfying. Additionally, in this particular case it has always seemed to me to be the height of arrogance to somehow connect human activity to natural disasters. How, after all, could Adam and Eve - who I don't believe were ever intended to be understood as historical figures - eating an apple cause tornadoes and the like? On a literal level it didn't make sense to me, and on a metaphorical level it didn't speak to me.

But, last night I finally watched (I can't believe I get to use this phrase) Al Gore's Academy Award nominated film An Inconvenient Truth. As I watched it, I remembered Augustine's theodicy concerning natural evil. And while I don't think Augustine was right - he was, after all, writing long before human activity could dramatically impact the natural environment - I do think that he was inadvertently on to something. That is, his notion that human activity plays a role in what we call natural evil turns out to be correct, even if not in the way that he understood it.

Natural evil is - in the way that we experience it today - not exactly natural at all, if by natural we mean something like "the opposite of contrived"; or something like "beyond the influence of volitional action." This is because human activity is drastically altering the natural environment in ways that reap a great deal of suffering.

This was not news to me when I watched the movie - in college I did an independent study comparing and contrasting Buddhist and Christian approaches to environmental ethics because I was already convinced that the ecological crisis was the most pressing moral issue facing us today. However, watching the movie brought the point home to me in a concrete way. This is not a matter of abstract thought, of moral theory. This is a concrete issue, a pressing issue, a live issue, a pertinent issue, an urgent issue. An issue that demands immediate action.

The good news is that we already have concrete proof that humans cannot only negatively impact the natural environment, but can also undo our own damage. Of all the various ecological crises noted by the environmental movement that began in the 1960s, global warming is the only one that is still trending negative. So many "unsolvable" problems have already either been solved, or are at least trending toward a solution.

We now have to - simply have to - use our collective political wills to enact changes that will bring the production and release of greenhouse gasses under control. For more information, visit www.climatecrisis.net and stopglobalwarming.org

Ever Since The World Ended

My younger brother decided, after looking through my movie collection and noticing one gaping hole, to get me Donnie Darko for Christmas. I've now seen it twice - the second time I even got Sami to watch it with me, a mini-coup - and have been meaning to write about it. It is the perfect embodiment of my favorite kind of movie, not exactly a technical masterpiece, but a delightful combination of philosophy, physics, metaphysics, theology, and, of course, extraordinary weirdness. The sort of movie that makes you say, as soon as you overcome the shock, Who the hell comes up with this stuff?!?

But, despite having seen it twice now, I still can't come up with anything meaningful to say about, except this: If you haven't seen it, see it NOW! Rent it this weekend. Hell, come over to my house and borrow mine. (Sorry, turns out I just loaned it out to Tom, who called me just as I sat down to type this.)

It was one of the most spectacular flops in the domestic box office (grossing only about $500,000, which seems like a lot of money to me, but a.) isn't to Hollywood, and b.) represents less than a quarter of what it cost to make) because, it part, we, only weeks removed from 9-11, just weren't ready for a movie whose plot revolves around a jet engine mysteriously crashing into a house. But now it is a cult classic. It has everything a geek could want.

Anyway, the title character, Donnie Darko (real dialogue from the movie: Girl: "Donnie Darko... What kind of a name is that? It sounds like a superhero name or something." Donnie: "What makes you think I'm not?") is a paranoid schizophrenic who starts to have strange daylight hallucinations. He is frequently visited by a giant bunny named Frank, who tells him that the world is about to end. As he chases the clues that Frank gives him, trying to figure out the "master plan," he explores the nature of space-time, gets into discussions about human nature and even free will and determinism, argues about literary criticism, censorship, and even the anatomy and sexuality of Smurfs, and studies the possibility of time travel, per Steven Hawking's speculation about the nature of worm holes.

But the big question throughout the movie is this: Will the world end, or won't it? And, what do we mean about the world ending, anyway?

I can't even come close to answering those questions, because to do so would give away the movie. And that is at the heart of my inability to say anything meaningful about the film. Like every film that I love, it creates its own world, even its own universe. And, while there is some correspondence between that universe and ours, to discuss the details, the architecture of that universe, you must first step inside it. You have to see that universe for yourself before you hear or read what anyone has to say about it, because otherwise you will bring to many expectations to that universe to be able to see it for what it is.

So, instead of telling you whether or not the world ends, instead of telling you whether Frank the giant bunny is real or a product of Donnie's mental illness, before telling you whether or not, and how, time travel is possible, I'm instead going to tell you about one of my favorite songs.

Huh? What? Did I just type that?

Sure seems like it, anyway.

Every time I think of Donnie Darko, and of the ambiguity about the end of the world, I get a song by jazz legend Mose Allison stuck in my head. Like the creators of Donnie Darko, Mose Allison is a cerebral poet and a dark wit, prone to play with the meanings and usage of words. He has a kind of macabre sense of humor, and it infects his music. Light, playful rhythms, melodies, and harmonies mask often biting language. See, for example, his playful Your Mind is on Vacation But Your Mouth is Working Overtime.

But he doesn't just use his gift with words to insult. He also uses it to explore the mysteries of life and death, and the inexorable passing of time. In Was he writes:

When I become was and we become were
Will there be any sign or a trace of th' lovely contour of your face
And will there be someone around
With essentially my kind of sound

When am turns to was and now is back when
Will someone have moments like this
Moments of unspoken bliss
And will there be heroes and saints
Or just a dark new age of complaints

When I become was and we become were
Will there be any Susans or Ralphs
Lookin' at old photographs
And wondering aloud to a friend
What it was like to be then

Other songs that grapple with mortality include If You Live (with its constant refrain, "If you live your day will come") and No Trouble Livin' ("I don't have no trouble livin'/ It's jus' dyin' that bothers me").

But the song that sticks in my head when I think of Donnie Darko is his classic Ever Since the World Ended:

Ever since the world ended
I don't go out as much
People that I once befriended
Just don't bother to stay in touch
Things that used to seem so splendid
Don't really matter today
It's just as well the world ended
It wasn't working anyway

Ever since the world ended
There's no more Bible Belt
Remember how we all pretended
Goin' round lyin' 'bout the way we felt
Every rule has been amended
There's no one keepin' score
It's just as well the world ended
We couldn't have taken much more

Ever since the world ended
There's no more black or white
Ever since we all got blended
There's no more reason to fuss and fight
Dogmas that we once defended
No longer seem worthwhile
Ever since the world ended
I face the future with a smile

Or, as Donnie says, "When the end comes, I want to breath a deep sigh, because there's so much to look forward to."

Bobby

I love the magic of the cinema, but I don't get out too much anymore. Being a parent has that effect. To go see a movie in the theater at this point requires the kind of logistical planning that should be reserved solely for flights to the moon. But, since my parents took Adam off our hands for the weekend, last night Sami and I finally saw a movie we'd been dying to see since we first heard that it was going to be made: Emilo Estevez's Bobby.

As much as I'd love to, I'm not writing a movie review here. If you're inclined to read such things, you've probably already read 50 or so reviews of this film, and all of them were by people who know movies better than I do. And, if they're anything like the reviews I read, they all told the truth. This is a good film, sure, but technically speaking, not a great one. It aims for the best of Robert Altman, and misses ever so slightly. It is complicated, weaving unrelated stories together with some deft craftsmanship, but not quite seamless artistry. Some story lines are not well developed enough, others demand more time and attention than they reward.

It is an ambitious film, and ambition should be rewarded. But, anytime a filmmaker whose highest grossing films are the Mighty Ducks series suddenly gets artistic ambition, that ambition can too often get smacked down by reviewers who seem only to notice pretension when it comes from known commodities, directors whose work has already been devoured by the public and found a little less than filling.

I'm not qualified to say that Emilio Estevez has created an artistic masterpiece here. I simply don't know enough about the craft of film making to say how well he executed his vision. I don't have a discerning enough eye, I suppose, to see all of the mistakes that were undoubtedly there. Or, for that matter, to see all of the subtle moments of brilliance that never get noticed by people like me, who go to the movies to have an experience, to encounter the mythic, life changing power of a story.

But I can say this: When the movie was over, no one left the theater. As the credits rolled, we all stood up, reverently, and milled about it awed silence, tears welling in our eyes. The young women behind me wept openly. The group of "older" couples sitting just to the right of my wife sighed with their whole bodies, realizing that their rare trip to the movies was rewarded. (Sami has a movie-going principle: if you find yourself surrounded in the theater by people older than you, you're in for a good film. Older people don't waste their rare ventures into the theater on duds.)

Were we in awe of the film, or of the life memorialized by the film? I can't say. While Estevez's picture spent most of its time circling around the story of Bobby Kennedy's last days, telling the stories of those who would witness his final speech; the strength of the film is that the filmmaker's love of Kennedy shone through it. It stole its strength from its subject. The most powerful moments, in fact, were the video and audio clips of Kennedy spliced into the film.

Whether it succeeds as a work of art in the eyes of the guardians of artistic integrity, Bobby was and is the perfect historical-mythic vehicle for our times. So immersed in the turbulent sixties, it speaks perfectly to the turmoil we experience today. And it leaves us searching for the next Bobby, the next transcendent political figure to offer us hope.

Let us hope that someone like John Edwards or Barack Obama can rise to the challenge, offering us that ineffable mixture of vision and charisma that unites our fragmented nation.