The Counselor: Nietzsche at the Movies, or Shakespeare without Redemption

Posted on by admin

Crime thriller. After watching The Counselor, you get the feeling that you need to take a shower. And not because it was a guilty pleasure, but simply because you’ve wallowed in a nihilistic worldview for an hour and half that ends in despair and offers no way out of evil.

It tells the story – and not a very clear story – of a greedy lawyer, the Counselor, played by Michael Fassbender, who gets in way over his head when he gets involved with drug traffickers and his deal goes awry. He is portrayed as a man who has finally found true love with the beautiful Laura, played by Penelope Cruz and buys her a diamond he cannot afford, which is the symbolic impetus for him stepping over the line into big illegal money.

A couple of his criminal “friends” tell him not to do it because he is too naïve to handle it. (This is not the same as a moral injunction to do the right thing.) Of course the deal goes wrong when someone steals the shipment from Fassbender’s connections, and all those connected with him are hunted down to pay.

The thing about it is, I went to this movie because of the A-list director, Ridley Scott, and the A-list cast of Fassbender, Cruz, Brad Pitt, Javier Bardem and Cameron Diaz. I was disappointed. Sure, because of Cormac McCarthy, it had some of the most lyrical existential dialogue ever in a thriller or crime movie (albeit, some of it out of place and self-important). But in the service of a nihilistic worldview, such lyricism becomes verbose mockery. McCarthy’s cynicism here amounts to self-righteous platitudes.

There is a scene where the ruthless Cameron Diaz visits a priest for confession only to mock him. But the scene was out of place and confusing and didn’t make much sense other than to show her mockery of religion. And that same religious commitment in the innocent Laura made her ignorant and a victim to the strong.

On the surface, I should like this movie because it is kind of a two hour movie version of Breaking Bad. That is, there is heavy lyrical poetry spoken throughout about how our decisions make us who we are and our actions have consequences. (I forgot my note pad, so I didn’t get any of them down. But I probably wouldn’t have been able to anyway, because there was so much of it and quite complex at times). But what I picked up from it was the added notion that we cannot undo the bad choices we’ve done. There’s no going back. No second chances. Our choices set in motion an inevitable ending of despair and death.

Now, on the one hand, for those without God, I would quite agree that there is no hope, just death in this life (I would add: Judgment after that). And yes, the world of crime and evil never ends well, and even ends in destroying innocent people, which is a moral truth in the right context. But a story that ONLY shows the dark and the evil and shows no good in contrast, no hope for redemption spurned, no possibility to change, is a story that communicates there is no hope or redemption.

That is nihilism.

That is not worth an audience.

Captain Phillips: American Exceptionalism Kicks Evil Butt

Posted on by admin

A true story about the hijacking of an American cargo ship, The Maersk Alabama, by a small group of Somali pirates off the coast of Somalia, and the daring Captain Phillips who sought to protect his crew and talk down the pirates.

The director, Paul Greengrass also directed United 93, which was a virtual training film for Americans on how to stand up and fight back against terrorists, rather than cower to their demands like many would have us do. In this film, he takes a different course as he tells the story of how Captain Phillips, an ordinary American with a job to do, is confronted with, not terrorists, but simple hoodlums.

The Somalians are cast with powerful accuracy. No American stars pretending to be underfed third world victims of Al Shabab here. Greengrass must have cast actual Somalians who were so scrawny and pathetic carrying their big AK-47s, that you get a real taste of the reality of the situation. These five to eight little guys with big guns approaching a huge cargo ship without security and are able to circumvent the pathetic protective measures and commandeer it for ransom negotiations in the millions of dollars.

This really incarnated a powerful truth that Dennis Prager has often said. It shows how easy it is for NOTHINGS to achieve great destruction in this world. He always talks about it in terms of historically great people being cut down by Zeros like John Wilkes Booth, Sirhan Sirhan, Lee Harvey Oswald, Kahlid Sheikh Mohammad, and others. No matter how big or how important someone or something is, it is so much easier to destroy than to build. And when we can’t cope with that reality of such horrible loss, that such greatness could be stopped by such nothingness that we often create conspiracy theories to make it much more important so the loss is not so tragically simple. Conspiracy theories are god substitutes because we can’t stand to live in a truly random world of chance. Kennedy couldn’t have been shot by a psychotic left wing Communist, no, it had to be a vast right wing conspiracy of the military industrial complex. The twin towers couldn’t have been taken down by a handful of Arab Muslim terrorists for their crazy religion, it had to be orchestrated by the vast right wing conspiracy of the Bush administration. The fact is it is so much easier to destroy than to build that Nothings can completely change history or do great damage with just their evil drive.

And that is what I thought watching this movie. Because of the immoral international laws that forbid security and self-protection on international or national waters – in other words, because of GUN CONTROL LAWS on the open sea – innocent shippers are made into cherry victims ready to pluck for all criminals. Yes, a huge American freighter with millions of dollars of cargo and corporate power can be easily taken hostage or destroyed or ruined, because they are not allowed to protect themselves. This is the inherent evil of gun control laws and disarmament philosophy. Whether it is in personal, national, or international contexts, it results in arming bad guys and disarming good guys and hands over innocents to be kidnapped and murdered. (Evil will never disarm, folks. Never.) If ships were allowed to have a simple armed security team, the entire Somali Pirate problem, a multibillion dollar a year criminal enterprise would virtually die overnight. But criminal lovers and their hatred for justice prefer that good people die by taking away their right to protect themselves. That is despicable.

But alas, Captain Phillips has no such protection at first. The pirates take over. But the crew fights back. It’s all quite suspenseful and exciting. But when the crew captures the captain of the pirates they make an exchange for the ability to take the ship’s lifeboat to getaway from their failed robbery. Instead, the pirates take Captain Phillips as ransom into the lifeboat, believing they will get millions from the bottomless coffers of the big corporation that hired him. So the second half of the picture takes place in this little modern lifeboat with Phillips and four of his captors. You wouldn’t think such a confined space would become such an edge of your seat ride, but it really is.

And then comes the American Navy. Three huge ships of the American Navy. Clearly massive overkill of power.

The big showdown is that we know the pirates can’t win, but can Phillips get away with his life?

What I like about Greengrass’s movie is that it is economically sparse on agenda. Of course, he gives the pirates their time to speak, as all good stories should, but it does not become a political charade of typical Hollywood idiocy. We hear of the Somalians becoming pirates because of how other country’s ships came and took all their fish out, so then they started to strike back by taking money forcefully to pay for their exploitation. As the lead pirate tells Phillips, the ransom that they get like this is just taxes for using their waters. Phillips says, “There must be something other than fishing and kidnapping you can do.” The pirate says, “Maybe in America.” Okay, fair enough. That’s his side. Life is so eaaaaaaaasy in America. These pirates are not terrorists, they are Marxist criminals. Poverty causes crime. Tell that to the hundreds of millions of poor who don’t engage in crime.

But later on as the violence increases, Phillips yells at the pirate, “You’re not just a fisherman! You’re not just a fisherman!” A little too subtle, but behind that point is that they ARE responsible for what they are doing. They are not mere victims. What they don’t tell you is what the pirates themselves have sometimes admitted, that once they realized they could make a lot of money by kidnapping and ransom, they became very good at it and made it into their business. It’s not about protecting their shores or “their sea” after all. They became a Mafia, an organized crime syndicate that justifies their evil by classic Marxist finger pointing of moral equivalencies and economic inequalities. But at the end of the day, they’re just criminals who justify their evil by appeals to victimhood: This victim politics is the biggest cause of evil and violence in our world today. People paint themselves as victims which justifies them lashing out in violence at innocent people in the name of “justice,” which is actually just evil. Whether it’s the Occupy movement or the race baiting in the Media and in left wing hate politics, it’s always about justifying evil by appealing to victimhood.

Okay, I’ll stop my tangent. On to American Exceptionalism.

Now, at the end of the movie one is overwhelmed by the massive show of force of three huge war ships surrounding this little lifeboat for one American captain of a boat. Talk about overkill. This is where I can see liberals interpreting their own feeling about how America is just too big and powerful and a bully.

But I didn’t see it that way.

What I saw was how evil is so able to do so much destruction with so little effort that Big Evil will only do far more destruction. Therefore overkill is the only thing that works. Evil only respects forceful power. Evil will not respect a president who apologizes and does nothing to stop their growth of atomic weapons. Evil will not respect the Neville Chamberlains who want to negotiate peace. They will negotiate disarmament and when the good is disarmed, they will plunge in the knife. Evil will not be as willing to shoot up a bunch of children if they know others can be armed for protection. (All the mass shootings have occurred in gun free zones. Evil is not stupid, the Left is). Therefore, the only way to overcome evil is with overwhelming force. When evil sees that they have no chance whatsoever, and they better give up or be demolished, only then will evil respond with unconditional surrender. That is just how the world works. America is not the bully, America is the security guard protecting the little guy from all the bullies. If we didn’t overwhelm with force, there would be ten times as many Islamic terrorist incidents and criminal incidents than there already are.

I won’t give it away, but I’ll just say the Navy Seals kick ass in this story. Yeah.

Lastly, I found it quite humorous that the only pirate who lives is the “captain” pirate who we see on the screen in a super that he is serving 33 years in a Terra Haute prison. But they should have added, “Where he is being better taken care of than in his own country. He receives three square meals a day, cable, conjugal visits, free health care, porn and can get a college degree if he wants.” America is so good that even its criminals are treated more humanely than the normal citizens of other countries. Not only that, but I laughed when the Navy read the captain pirate his Miranda rights when they got him. Unlike any other country on earth, America, who is supposed to be a bully, is giving rights to an international criminal that are reserved for its citizens? Let’s see that in any other country. That ain’t no bully, that’s exceptionalism.

(I am not saying America is perfect. I know we have plenty of evils as well, like we allow women to kill their offspring by the millions, we have unjust government that oppresses its political enemies through government institutions like the IRS and the NSA, welfare slavery, and criminally corrupt politicians and media who spread lies and incite hatred and violence. Okay. I’m not blind. We aren’t the Kingdom of God, and I never said we were. But we’re still better than all the rest. And without us, the whole bloody world is in trouble from Islamic fanatics.)

Gravity: In Space No One Can Hear God Scream

Posted on by admin

Space Action. A Russian satellite is blown up and its field of debris, moving at thousands of miles an hour, now threatens the lives of three astronauts working on an American space station.

It’s an amazingly simple premise, almost too simple. One would think “How can three slow moving space suits in a vacuum be an interesting action story? For 90 minutes? One could not be more wrong. Within minutes of its opening, this action movie delivers a rollercoaster ride of thrills and excitement that does not stop until the very end frames.

Sandra Bullock plays Ryan Stone, a troubled engineer who is in space for her technical know-how to help fix the computer systems on the American space station. George Clooney is Matt Kowalski, the care-free experienced astronaut who brings a light hearted teasing and probing of Ryan’s unease for a perfect balance of opposites.

Within minutes we discover that the Russian space station has been blown up and its debris field is on its way toward the protagonists. Matt and Ryan barely survive their first encounter with the debris that has turned into miniature missiles devastating everything they hit and incapacitating their return flight space shuttle. But survival isn’t enough because Ryan is now cast adrift into space, and the debris field is orbiting the earth, which means it is set to arrive again in ninety more minutes. Based on their first encounter, you just know there’s no way they can endure another one. Talk about a ticking clock.

So the rest of the movie is just one complication after another that blocks Ryan and Matt from their goal of getting out of there and over to a Chinese space station to find a way home. Raw yet simple good old fashioned action that keeps you on the edge of your seat with some stunning visuals of earth and space that will change your mind about the emotional potential of such a story. (No large spaceships and lasers and explosions and aliens needed to keep you on the edge of your seat. But it still cost 100 million dollars to make, so go figure)

But it is not without an emotional subplot. We soon discover that Ryan is a troubled soul who has resigned her life to misery and found her way to space because it’s one place to be alone and “not be hurt by anyone” down on earth. Evidently, she lost her young daughter to a “stupid” chance accident so simple as hitting her head on the ground and now she doesn’t care about her life. No mention whatsoever is made of a father to the daughter, as if a man does not matter or ever mattered, a glaring deficiency of the human soul of this story. Look even if the guy was a jerk, that would have affected Ryan through pain. But to completely ignore a man is feminist clap trap. Matt, on the contrary, has learned to take his own betrayal by his woman on earth as one of his many silly stories he tells to keep his spirits high and his soul from facing his own loneliness.

SPOILER ALERT: So when forced with the need to survive in the face of impossible odds, Ryan is brought to the point of giving up and wanting to just go to sleep in the coldness of space. To give up her meaningless life. With one last idea of hope, she finds the drive to keep going and make something of her life on earth if she can only get back. Of course, the odds continue to pile up against her all the way to the very end for a truly exciting adventure.

The personal story of Ryan is a helpful metaphor for her to return to a productive life on earth. The vacuum of space becomes the isolated “space” to which we withdraw to protect ourselves from the pain of human hurt or betrayal or loss. Okay, not bad. I like it.

Okay, now I want to admit that after interacting with some others on the next issue, I have changed my mind and have rewritten this post. I had argued that there was no transcendence in this story, but I was wrong. There was, I just missed it. It was very subtle. But it was there. Thanks to those who corrected me!

Ryan’s quest becomes one of mere brute survival that rings with the angst of today’s typical postmodern. So she survives to go back to work with a new appreciation of being alive? So what? As she says herself in the movie, she’s still going to die eventually. She doesn’t really have a higher purpose for her existence in the face of death. What is the significance or meaning to an earthbound existence? The drive for survival wakes us up to how we have squandered our time, wasted our humanity. But that can only have meaning in the face of a higher truth, transcendence, like Oh… maybe God?

There are a couple references to God in this story. One is a moment where Ryan does not pray because she says no one ever taught her how to pray. So she doesn’t. The other is a visual comparison of two images in two different space stations, a Russian icon postcard of the Trinity in the Russian space station and a Buddha (or Confucious?) statue in the Chinese station. But Ryan has no personal interaction with these visuals. They are alien to her and amount to a postmodern relativistic comparison of empty god images.

Come on, REALLY? A woman in despair over her daughter’s death and facing her own meaningless demise and she doesn’t have a single thought about her Maker and the afterlife? She doesn’t utter a single prayer to a god she may have doubts about? She admits that she doesn’t know how to pray because no one taught her how. Instead she utters a prayer to her departed Matt for inspiration. It’s the humanist’s god substitute. They need transcendence so they create their own imaginative substitute to fulfill that inner vacuum because they don’t want to face God.

At the end when she is finally safe on terra firma, she grabs some sand from a beach and looks up and says, “Thank you.” But to whom does she say this? The film is ambiguous. Now, she had been “praying” to Matt the entire previous situation that she got out of up in space, so consistency would dictate that she was saying that to Matt as well. But I do think the filmmaker was ambiguous enough for those who wanted to believe she had found a simple faith to import their desires into the ambiguity. I admit I like ambiguity sometimes. That’s what art does. It doesn’t always answer all questions and leaves room for interpretation on the weightier or more mysterious issues.

I felt that the spiritual gravity of the situation required we know who she was saying thank you to. But I have to admit that the story structure does subtley point to that prayer being to God. Here is why: Ryan’s character arc would dictate that if she began “not praying” to God in the beginning of the story, then it would make more story sense that she ends praying to him because she is changed and is a new person, as are all protagonists in good stories. Maybe she was “praying” to Matt as her human savior in space, but ultimately learns that it is God who saved her after all, and her “thank you” is now to God.

It’s a tough one. Ah, the ravages of ambiguity! And thanks to those who opened my eyes to what I had missed. The movie is better than I first thought it was.

Rush: A Sports Movie About Winning Without Meaning

Posted on by admin

Based on a true story of the 1970s rivalry between Formula One drivers Niki Lauda and James Hunt. This is a good sports movie in that you don’t need to be a sports fan to appreciate it. It’s about much bigger issues that we all can relate to: The desire for success and accomplishment, the search for meaning and purpose and love.

In its most basic form the story is a competition of two worldviews about life embodied in the main characters. Niki Lauda is a by the numbers techie nerd who gets into race car driving to pursue the winning of discipline and perfection of craft. James Hunt is a womanizing adrenaline junkie who wants to have fun, live fast and die hard. I think that’s what makes this movie so fascinating in one sense. To see these polar opposites in contrast, and both of them equal rivals with strengths and weaknesses.

Along with his proper rules following, Niki also marries one woman and stays with her to the end, while James tries marriage after a string of “lays” only to fail at it because he is so selfish in his obsession and ambition that he cannot give to another. But Niki’s neurotic obsession with details and his emotional detachment because of his intellectualism causes its own trouble in his marriage. When James is asked why all the girls are drawn to race car drivers, is it because of the cars and daringness? He responds, “No. It’s because the closer you are to death, the more alive you are, and the more alive you are, the more desirable you are.” He concludes that man’s nobility is to stare death in the face and risk it all. There is another statement he makes about how there is a something stronger than the will to survive and that is the will to win. In fact, he is even prepared to die by driving in a dangerously rainy race because of his wildness. While Niki is so concerned with safety, says, “To me, that’s losing.” It is all about getting the details right, making the car the best specimen of mechanical perfection and playing safely by the rules to win.

Ironically however, everyone votes to keep the race against Niki’s advice and Niki is the guy who gets in an accident on that rainy day. He gets third degree burns over his body and has a grueling path to physical recovery, only to jump back in the race to try to defeat James. There is even a point where Niki has fallen in love with his wife, but he laments that “Happiness is the enemy. It’s weakness. Because you have something to lose.” His wife says that if he feels that way, then they have already lost. But it is a profound truth that the love of another will bring that kind of value and meaning to life that is absent from those who seek experience and thrills. Why? Because love is sacrifice and sacrifice opposes the self.

And this kind of wraps up for me what was the sad tragedy of this movie about winning.

Here’s why: It is a movie about winning, and about the price you pay to win. It’s got some honest moments and challenges to the obsession of such ambition. But it ultimately does not offer any transcendence. By the end of the movie, both guys have the winning moments and losing moments against each other, both end champions, but it is a very empty achievement to me. There is no transcendence about what really matters in life. Because at the end, a bunch of trophies and historic achievements in sports really contain no lasting meaning. And the two men have ended lonely at the top, without intimacy of true friendship, without what really matters, what really lasts. I am not even asking that they deal with God, although facing death and never thinking about God is truly inauthentic and dishonest storytelling. I am just saying that, you know Jackie Robinson, fought for the respect of black human beings in baseball. (42 was a boring movie, but at least it had transcendence). Rudy was about a young kid touching people’s lives with his determination. Chariots of Fire is about doing sports for a higher purpose, We Are Marshall is about the team spirit and our need for community. Secretariat was about the American spirit of determination and women’s liberation. I could go on with other sports movies that have transcendence that make them rise above mere victories or achievements. But in Rush, Hunt and Lauda just end up alone and James even dies young of a heart attack. For what? For fun? For records that will be overrun and forgotten in the mists of history anyway? There is not even a hint of the transcendence that they lack.

I am not so sure that this emptiness is what Ron Howard was attempting to prove either. I just don’t know for sure. But I do know that the movie left a bad taste in my soul about the obsessive ambition of winning without transcendence in your life. It made winning look empty. Maybe that’s what the intent was, to tell a story where winning is losing. But without pointing to a higher purpose or transcendence, Howard leaves us with a bleak cynical view of life in the midst of shallow victory. In Rush, there is no transcendence offered, and therefore an interesting movie with an unsatisfying ending.

Breaking Bad: Yes, Virginia, there is Original Sin

Posted on by admin

One of the most offensive truths to modern man is Original Sin. How dare those judgmental Christians say we are all guilty sinners in the hands of an angry God! How dare you call my wonderful mother, who spent her whole life helping people, damned because she doesn’t believe in Jesus! People are basically good, aren’t they? I mean I never killed anyone. We’re not in the Matrix. I’m just an average American chemistry teacher with a family and a special needs kid. I’m not evil. People are basically good.

Yeah, right.

Anyone who’s ever had children knows for a fact that people start as selfish little sinners who have to be corrected and taught over and over again to be good. Why? Because, well, we’re all basically born bad. But of course, humankind is perpetually cunning in suppressing the truth in unrighteousness, so the obvious truth notwithstanding, many people still believe that people are basically good.

Enter, Breaking Bad.

I remember first watching the series years ago. It was a brilliant moral dilemma of a high school chemistry teacher who discovers he has lung cancer and realizes his wife and special needs kid will not be taken care of when he dies. He turns away from joining a high risk small business startup that goes successful and comes to the dread conclusion that the only way he can provide for his family’s future is to do what he does best in a different kind of entrepreneurship, an illegal operation of a meth lab. Since chemistry was his strong suit, he could provide the purest meth ever and build a name for his product — and barrel loads of money for his family, so they will not suffer when he is gone.

This is quality storytelling to set up a scenario where a good guy turns into a villain, and he becomes one through a morally complex dilemma. But it ain’t original. Read Shakespeare. It’s called a tragedy. A lot of gangster movies are this. And that is what BB is, a gangster rise and fall story on the greatness level that exceeds The Godfather.

But the point is to explore what is the flaw in us that, if fed, creates the monster we despise? We can all understand the essentially good motive of wanting to provide for one’s family. Nothing more primal or moral than that. And even if we think the criminality is wrong, we certainly can understand the temptation of being backed into a corner without much of an apparent choice. It forces us to think about our own lives. What would we do? Would we do evil that good may come? Would we love our family so much that we would sell our own soul to the devil in order to save them? These are not inconsequential or superfluous questions. They force us to examine our own morality and ethics. Our own badness.

And the fact that BB has the opportunity to take the time to walk through the step by step process of the decline of a man’s moral sanity only makes it that much more truthful and believable. For me the point of it all is this: Breaking Bad proves that the same evil in murderers, drug dealers and soulless narcissist users is in all of us — all of us. It just needs to be fed to come to fruition. But it’s there inside of us all waiting to break out. Watching BB makes you believe that, yes, any normal good family guy has the ability to make moral compromises that lead him down the path of destruction. After all, murderers aren’t born murderers, and every villain constructs some kind of moral justification to assuage his guilt. Evil does exist, despite the postmodern evil deniers. One man’s terrorist is not another mans’ freedom fighter, he is a terrorist.

And that is Original Sin.

Traditionally, Original Sin is the theological doctrine that Adam, as the “first man,” and therefore federal representative of the human race disobeyed God which broke his spiritual relationship with God and bent his nature to bad. Since all humanity comes from that first Scriptural pair, we all inherit Adam’s badness and the death and consequences of his rebellion.

I am fully aware of all the arguments against this truth. It isn’t fair to blame us for what Adam did, Scientifically, we cannot have come from one pair of human progenitors, how do we inherit a sinful nature, yada yada. It’s all irrelevant. It doesn’t matter where you think it came from, it doesn’t matter what “logical” problems you may have with an existential proposition. Because you see, Original Sin is the one theological truth that is an undeniable empirically observable fact: We are all basically bad. It only takes the right choices to bring that bad out.

Humankind is not basically good. We are basically bad. And all it takes to break that bad out is the right circumstances and the accumulation of certain moral choices. Little decisions lead to bigger ones. Our justification for a little white lie can build to a justification for murder. It’s how our bad nature works. BB incarnates that disturbing and often denied truth about ourselves. And it’s why modern people are completely blinded by their self-righteousness. The denial of our essential badness is the first moral decision that leads us to the destiny of Walter White.

The only difference is that Walt has let it come to fruition. He has broken bad.

Of course, one of the dangers of such studies of the making of a villain is the potential of building a story where we root for the bad guy. That is, we start out sympathetic, and like Walter, we keep watching his story and keep rooting for him by making the same choices in our rooting for him that he made in his actions. But there comes a point where we may watch with moral lesson, but we must turn in our affections or become condemned by our own morbid curiosity.

That moment for me came at the end of the second season, where Walt lets Jesse’s junkie girlfriend die in her own vomit while overdosing because she was going to let the cat out of the bag. At that point he is no longer sympathetic. And in fact, I stopped watching the series because I didn’t want to root for a hero who made such choices.

I came back a year or so later to finish watching because I had made the mistake of not appreciating the power of the tragedy: A moral lesson of what NOT to be, of how NOT to behave, because of where it leads.

This would have been a picture glorifying evil had it not been for the existence of Jesse, his drug addict, slacker helper, who has risen to become the counterpoint to Walt. Jesse becomes the villain, whose conscience is awakened to his own depravity by seeing the evil consequences of Walt’s choices and realizing he is just as guilty. By the end of the series, Jesse has become despairing of life itself and throws away the proceeds of their dirty deeds because it has become blood money to him. He even helps the feds to try to nail Walt.

As Walt descends, Jesse ascends, and struggles with true moral guilt. One particularly poignant aspect of the series that shows the modern humanistic denial of evil is in Jesse’s Narcotics Anonymous group. We see them going through the standard humanistic memes of “no judging” and making everyone feeling accepted and denying their guilt and claiming victim status. At one point Jesse finally gets sick of it all and condemns the leader of the group by saying that if we shouldn’t judge, then we’re saying nothing is wrong, but they should judge things that are wrong, or we are deceiving ourselves and perpetuating our own badness. It’s really quite a brilliant exposition of the essential delusion of humanistic psychiatric notions of relative morality and our culture of denial. We are not victims of our moral behavior, we are responsible, and judgment provides the dignity and value to our humanity because it affirms that we have the ability to choose other. It is precisely our moral culpability that gives us true value. Otherwise we are of no more value than rocks.

Vince Gilligan, the creator of the series has revealed this very questioning in his own life when he says. “I’m pretty much agnostic at this point in my life. But I find atheism just as hard to get my head around as I find fundamental Christianity. Because if there is no such thing as cosmic justice, what is the point of being good? That’s the one thing that no one has ever explained to me. Why shouldn’t I go rob a bank, especially if I’m smart enough to get away with it? What’s stopping me?” (NYT)

And this is another moral repercussion of the tragic decline of a hero into a villain. We as viewers are certainly fascinated by the moral complications and ramifications of bad choices that are made for good reasons. After all, this “ends justifies the means” thinking dominates our culture from public education indoctrination to the attack on businesses in the name of “income disparity” to the persecution of political enemies through the use of the IRS and mainstream news media political lies. No villain sees himself as a villain. They always have a rationalization for why they do evil. “To help my family,” “to level the playing field,” “to right past wrongs,” “social justice,” “because the ‘other’ is racist, sexist, bigot homophobes, Islamaphobes.” The irony is that if we the viewer continue to secretly harbor a rooting for the “villain-as-hero” because, after all, the others around them are worse villains, then we viewers are indicted by our own badness.

This is why the consequences of behavior in a story is critically important to its moral worldview.

Which brings us to another aspect of the denial of our badness, another theme of the series: Actions have consequences. But not in some kind of philosophical blathering. Rather, our moral choices in life are not secluded to our own freedom, as if morality is relative and we can construct our own morals for our own purposes as many will say. Morality is not relative. All our moral choices ultimately have effects and ramifications that effect other people. We do not exist as authorities of our own moral decisions in a free universe. We are accountable for everything we say and do.

This is born out in a dozen little ways of how it affects and destroys Walt’s wife as she becomes complicit and how it ends in deaths of Walt’s loved ones. But more powerfully we see early in the series of how Walt’s allowance of that girlfriend to die in her own vomit, leads to the despair of her father, who is an air traffic controller, who then does poorly at his job because of his suffering, which leads to a plane crash and hundreds of innocent people dead. Unfortunately God is not a part of this storyline, but the notion of our interconnectedness still rings true in this and many other ways, of lives destroyed because of Walt’s choices.

Moral relativity is a lie. We do not “choose” our morality in vacuums of our own freedom and autonomy. All our choices are part of an interconnectedness with humanity that does end up hurting others. We are accountable to moral absolutes.

For all you humanists, that means THERE ARE NO VICTIMLESS CRIMES. Or for that matter, THERE ARE NO VICTIMLESS MORAL CHOICES. This could be one of the most powerful moral themes in all of television. We are guilty for what we do. And our sins will find us out.

Let’s just hope that the finale proves this moral truth that it has reinforced throughout the series.

END OF THE SERIES: SPOILER ALERT

Okay, so I saw the series finale and I have to say it was not very impressive. On the one hand, it was somewhat morally appropriate in that Walt does die. That tragic anti-hero must pay the price for his sins that ruined so many lives. Walt ultimately dies by his own hand, when he takes a bullet from the rifle he set up to automatically shoot up the bad guys at the end. Okay, this is poetic justice because one of the ongoing moral themes of the series was that Walt’s choices were moral choices that did not merely affect him but also hurt the lives of others. So it is appropriate that he falls victim to his own actions as well. And he does end up getting his revenge against the gang of very evil men and one woman who betrayed him and killed Walt’s brother in law Hank. With that there is some emotional satisfaction in the most evil not getting away with their dirty deeds. And Jesse, the junkie turned partner who awakened to his moral conscience and even turned to help the DEA did get away from the bad guys at the end, which satisfies those who want moral conscience rewarded.

On the other hand, Walt’s death was quite calm and morally unsatisfying for the evil he had become. Let me explain. Movie snobs and other cynics will not like what I am about to say, but it’s the truth when it comes to storytelling.

There is a reason why it is a cliché in so many movies of having the villain often fall to his death from a very great height, or be obliterated in a very extreme fashion (like blown to bits or crushed or burnt on fire or the like). That reason is that those gruesome endings are what give us emotional satisfaction of the punishment fitting the crime. I am not saying legal reality here, I am saying emotional and moral reality for the viewer. Falling from a great height is the perfect universal metaphor for the essence of sin and the fall of humanity into evil. And that satisfies us on a primal spiritual level like nothing else can. I am not saying Walt should have fallen off a cliff, but I am simply explaining that his moral evil was so deep that even though we struggled with our conflicted feelings of rooting for him against the bad guys, but then admitting that he deserves to die for the evil he had wrought, we should in the end be slapped in the face by the moral spiritual truth of the depth of Walt’s guilt.

This, Breaking Bad’s finale did not do, and was thus an unsatisfying cynical compromise. Walt’s soft slipping into unconsciousness without drama is an anticlimactic unsatisfying way to express the moral guilt he had or the spiritual punishment he required. It needed to be extreme, jarring, something that would wake us all up from the delusion of any sympathy we may have had for this man turned into monster. It needed to reinforce the moral drive of the entire series that actions have consequences. To misquote a famous saying, with much evil comes much responsibility and therefore much stronger consequences.

And don’t give me the nihilistic claims of “realism” as if Breaking Bad is about reality (You know, bad people get away in the real world, justice isn’t always achieved etc.). BB is not reality, it was a moral fable, and as a moral fable it should have ended with the same moral wisdom that the series was built on. Instead, it whimpered out with a half-assed humanistic compromise by making Walt die, but peacefully after getting his revenge.

And that is the biggest moral problem of all. Yes, Walt loses what is most dear to him, his family, because of his criminal obsession with providing for family. And yes, there is a kind of acceptance of his just dessert when he allows Jesse the opportunity to kill him. He saves Jesse from the final shootout. But Walt still kind of wins as well. After ruining his family’s lives, getting many innocent people killed, including his brother in law, Walt’s overarching goal was to provide for his family with his blood money. And even though his son rejects it, he sets it up through criminal intimidation to have a trust fund made for his son. So he does get his money to his family in the end. He outsmarts everyone, is able to achieve his goal of revenge, and getting his money to his son before he died, and he was going to die from the cancer anyway, so Walt dies a peaceful death having basically achieved his goal of providing for his family and cheated death. Something we should not be rooting for. A less than satisfying ending for me.

But I want to end on a positive note. One qualification to my nit picking here is that at the end, Walt finally does admit that his obsessive motive for the entire series of engaging in crime to provide “for my family” was in fact not for his family but for himself. And that is the human pride of original sin. The underlying darkness to the façade of criminals’ and gangsters’ devotion to family is that it is ultimately pride that drives the human heart into the rationalization for each little moral compromise that ends in the evil we are so offended at being accused of but are in fact guilty of having in our own hearts.

We are Breaking Bad.

The Walking Dead: Zombies, God, and What Makes us Human

Posted on by admin

I recently finished the third season of the Walking Dead. I have always been a big movie guy, not much of a television watcher. I like the punch of a two hour story that has it all, including rich characters, human drama, with climax and resolution. It has a very satisfying sense to it, like eating a good steak dinner. However, I have grown to appreciate television series as the best writing that is out there these days in storytelling. The advantages of this medium is more about the characters. Its purpose is to get you to love the characters so much that you want to see them go through their extended journeys. So the focus on movies is more on the story and the focus of television is more on characters. Of course there is much story going on in a series but it is more drawn out and takes much longer to achieve its character arcs and resolution. A series is more like engaging in a new diet. It takes more patience but you see the effects down the road and they can be more lasting. But this is why I think it has a more powerful influence on our cultural values. Because the longer you saturate within the worldview of a narrative, the more affected you are by its values. This is why television is also more dangerous in its ability to saturate viewers in the worldviews of its storytellers for a longer period and change their values and worldview so widespread through the emotional immersion.

So I try to be careful what I immerse myself in regarding these television narratives. I have found though that The Walking Dead has been quite a positive extension of the positive values of zombie movies, along with a few cautionary dangers to be aware of.

First off, many people already have a hard time with zombie stories. They think they are just a glorification of blood and gore and should be rejected as dehumanizing. Not true. Some are. But not all. In fact, the very essence of the zombie story is as a cultural critique of social values that dehumanize us. They explore the moral question of what makes us human? What gives us dignity? How are we any different from animals? What keeps civilization from falling apart into anarchy? These are all VERY relevant and important issues in our morally relative culture of naturalism and atheistic evolution. I have written about this elsewhere in an article on the value of the horror genre as morality tales that address the reality of evil, our sinful nature, and social injustices, and in a blog post of World War Z.

The Walking Dead is very simply the story of a band of refugees in a post-apocalyptic scenario of America overrun by zombies. The lead character, Rick Grimes, is a cop who leads the multicultural group that contains a proper diversity of men, women, black, Asian and sometimes “other” people on a quest to find a safe habitation, first in the American South and then in the Midwest.

They are in fact looking for a home, a place of safety and order in a world of chaos. A primal urge in all of us. As they scavenge for survival, they encounter various groups of other survivors whose values come into conflict with their own, as they themselves struggle to maintain order and authority within their ranks. Otherwise they will end up killing each other, just like the zombies around them.

The power of a zombie story is that it strips down our outward mask of values that we wear in society. When we are faced with survival our true natures come out and for too many of us, that is an ugly nature indeed. This is not imagination. This is reality. Many people’s true selfishness comes out when they are forced to choose between saving themselves and helping others. The Walking Dead (TWD) shows that when we no longer have law and order keeping society in line, some of us will struggle to create a new structure and others will lay aside their moral veneer and seek to exploit and use others for their own survival. This is an incarnation of the moral challenge that who we are is determined by how we behave when no one is watching us, or when we think we won’t have consequences for our behavior.

But it is more than that. It also is about the question, “What makes us human or civilized?” In season two, Rick’s group finds their way to a farmhouse that has been happily untouched by zombie attacks. But it’s owned by an old geezer. Now, in the outer world, its pretty much a free for all scavenge fest. Nothing is owned by anyone anymore, except those who can protect it with violence. Now at this safe haven, do they respect the old man’s authority because it is his own property, or do they just take him over? Is there such a thing as private property in such a lawless state? TWD proves that you must respect private property as a foundation of civilization, and you must respect authority, or you end in chaos. In season three, they commandeer a prison that provides the first real rest and security in a long time (with all its fences and locked bars). The irony being that it was a place that was used to keep monsters in, now it is used to keep them out.

Early on, Rick says, “This is not a democracy,” as in we must have a leader who has strong authority over the group or they will fall apart. And for most of the show, this proves true. Until Rick himself starts to break from the strain, and is challenged by his best friend, another cop, Shane. Rick is a mental leader, and a man of strong ethical emphasis. He even continues to wear his uniform and hat for quite a while. But Shane is more the “muscle” and earthy pragmatic man who seeks to lead by doing the dirty work that no one else wants to do, but must be done. He is not a survivalist, but he is more of a survivor mentality. He is willing to give up on those who are weak in order to survive. Rick however, tries to balance the needs of the individual with the needs of the community. To be a man of justice, but also compassion. He tries to keep a high value on the dignity of others. But survival bears heavily on his ethics and he becomes a harder man as the series goes on. He also almost breaks down mentally at the death of some significant characters in his life. He eventually softens and includes the group more in the decisions when he learns his lesson that he needs his followers as much as they need a leader.

Through many episodes the people are faced with difficult life situations that place the two ethics of survival and sacrifice in conflict. Should they go back to save one person if it jeopardizes everyone else? Should they keep searching for a little lost girl when doing so also endangers the rest of them? Can they kill their beloved if they “turned” into a zombie? By and large, those who would stress survival over sacrificial helping of others tend to be the least humanized and we see that we must maintain an elevation of human life if we are to maintain our own dignity, society and sanity. Those who maintain the ethic of sacrifice for others are sometimes killed, but always the ones upon whom “civilization” continues to grow. This is of course assuming that the zombies are truly no longer “human” so the killing of them is NOT the same thing as killing a human. They are undead. They are more like rabid animals to be put down because they destroy living humans. This is more self-defense than anything. But we will talk about that in a minute.

Suffice it to say that this elevation of civilization being founded on us maintaining the Christian ethic of self sacrifice for others rather than the evolutionary ethic of survival of the fittest is something that makes this show so important. Because humanity is still so thoroughly evil we still have a strong contingent who believe that there is no absolute morality, we only “socially construct” morality to control others. Might makes right. Sure, these relativists may not all be Kim Jong Ils or serial killers, but they are university professors and “scientists” and sociologists teaching kids these values in a world of constant evolutionary change. Our modern universities are breeding zombie nihilist kids, because teachers and professors deny all moral absolutes (with the exception of their Leftism of course) and with it all religion as patriarchal fascist control, but they themselves are behaving as if there are moral values of civility and such. But the next generation becomes more consistent and starts to live consistently with those relativist values. They start to behave as if there are no moral absolutes. It’s that simple really. And thus we have the growing zombie apocalypse thanks to public education and the universities.

In season three, they run into another walled community, Woodbury, that is led by a benevolent dictator, affectionately called The Governor. On the outside, he is a nice Southern gentleman who also rules as a benevolent dictator, but in reality, he is a dark violent soul. Their “Bedford Falls” of happy suburban life contained within a walled perimeter turns out to be a police state underneath of human experimentation and gladiatorial games with zombies for cathartic violence. But the Governor also seeks to kill Rick and his band.

But here is where I would like to encourage all Christians to support this series by watching it. This setup of the Governor and his little town is the classic Hollywood scenario of an outwardly happy traditional suburban world with a dark underbelly that almost always includes a Christian religious element to it. The usual revelations would be that they pray as they kill people, or the Governor uses “right wing” religious rhetoric because he wants to set up a theocracy.

BUT THIS NEVER HAPPENS IN THE SERIES!

There is not an ounce of religious rhetoric from the survivalists or the Governor! I could not believe it. I applaud the writers of the show for not exercising the typical bigotry and hatred of Christians that network and cable writers so often display.

It is pathetic to me that the bigotry and discrimination against Christians and their faith has become so ubiquitous in Hollywood storytelling that I get excited about a series just because it doesn’t attack Christians!

But there is more to it than that.

In fact, God has an increasingly positive role in this series. In the first season, there was only one sequence where they stumble upon a church with a few zombies sitting in the pews looking at the cross of Christ up front. Okay, that’s a funny irony. But it pretty much just became a scene where Rick prays to the Christ statue for some help, while having a hard time believing he is there. Okay, That’s fair. Of course, we all question God with serious tragedies. Some cool possibilities. But unfortunately nothing ever really came of it. In fact, I remember thinking that it was not a very honest portrayal to have people in this life and death lifestyle and none of them really be dealing with the whole God and suffering and evil thing. You don’t have to be a believer to acknowledge that when you face death, you at least wrestle with God. Also, the fact that there was a crucifix in a Baptist church showed the ignorance of the writers about Evangelical faith. But that is forgivable.

Anyway, in season two, they meet Herschel, the old man with the farm, who read his Bible and kept his family members who had turned to zombies penned in his barn. He was unwilling to kill them because he thought they were still human. Okay, you could say that this is a kind of critique of Christian’s elevation of the sanctity of life to the point where they give something dignity that does not deserve it according to these story tellers. Plus he was a pacifist, an unlivable worldview in a world of pure survival. So I was thinking, uh oh, here it is, the stupid Christian stereotype coming.

BUT IT DIDN’T HAPPEN! I am very glad to admit I was wrong twice on this account.

Herschel had a traumatic experience that got him to overcome his pacifist silliness and false views of zombies and he ends up in season three as the moral conscience that keeps Rick in line when he starts to sway. Herschel even describes himself as “losing his way” by being out of line with the Bible. I was blown away. In fact, the whole series is an incarnate argument against pacifism and left wing theories about the “goodness” of human nature and the need to “understand” evil instead of condemn it and strike it down. The zombies are not the only ones who will keep coming to eat you until you destroy them. The villains like The Governor will not stop in their lawless pursuit of killing the good and controlling everyone else until you put them down — as in permanently — as in with a gun.

Take that you immoral gun control advocates who seek to arm the evil and disarm the good.

Not only that, but Herschel’s faith becomes a little more positive element when he quotes the Bible to unruly Meryl, a man who is sure to become a Judas in Rick’s group. Both Meryl and Herschel had a limb cut off, Meryl cut his own to save his life in the first season, and Meryl had his leg chopped off because a zombie bite in the leg would have turned him if Rick had not cut it off in time. Meryl quotes Matthew 25 to Meryl: “And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.” This is a powerful metaphor for the seriousness of sin, but also for the power of repentance for Meryl, and he sees this. It would be nice if season four brings some kind of redemption for a rather brutal and bad man. We shall see.

Well, there’s a ton more of course, but I will end with my one caveat of caution. While TWD does not have a whole lot of zombie violence, there is some in every show, and it is not a pretty sight for those of weak stomach, since the only way for zombies to be fully stopped is by cutting off their heads or smashing their brains in. TWD is quite responsible in not becoming gratuitous. But we should be careful of the amount of such violence in our entertainment diet, even if it is morally appropriate violence. Because too much of a good thing can be bad. It may even have the very effect the storytellers intend to avoid: A tendency to dehumanize real people in our world.

But that is a small caveat to an otherwise powerful and morally rich tale of survival and sacrifice that lands decidedly in the camp of Christian values for civilization.

So far. We shall see about season four. After all, we all know what happened to 24.

Mud: Amazing Movie of Male Liberation

Posted on by admin

Southern Coming of Age Romance. Young Ellis and his friend Neckbone are two young boys living in the impoverished Arkansas off the Mississippi river. While exploring a small island on the river one day, they stumble upon an old boat that has mysteriously found itself way up on a tree. They soon discover it is being inhabited by a fugitive named Mud, played with brilliance by Matthew McConaughey. Mud is on the run from a pack of vigilantes. It turns out he has a troubled life of pursuing his childhood sweetheart, Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), a beautiful white trash woman who cannot seem to stay committed to Mud. She is a floozy who keeps sleeping with bad boys, and then gets in trouble and runs to Mud to protect her. Well, this time, she was beaten up pretty bad, and Mud went too far. But they have agreed to meet up at a certain date in this certain town to run off together. Now Ellis and Neckbone are going to help him reunite with his beloved Juniper and ride off into the sunset.

This movie is refreshing and bold mythic storytelling. It is an extreme rarity: A tale of Male Liberation. Hollywood is flush with Feminist tales of female liberation: Thelma and Louise, The Stepford Wives, Little Black Book, Mona Lisa Smile, Erin Brockavich, The Color Purple, The Help, The Hours, Portrait of a Lady, The Piano, and on and on.

The typical scenario in feminist “romances” is that women interact with all the possible negative stereotypes and cliché’s of men (no quality men seem to exist in this delusionary agenda), only to find that she has allowed herself to be defined by men and discovers that she doesn’t need men, she just needs a vision, a career or some other thing that gives her meaning other than a man. In other words, she can be just like a man and get her meaning from what she does.

As untruthful as this worldview has proven to be in the real world, and despite all the millions of women’s lives that it has ruined by making them think they can be like men, only to discover too late that they are not and are left with crushed desires for a family and relationship, I still actually like watching feminist movies. I still think that stereotypes exist because they are based on real existing patterns, and there are too many abusive and selfish men in this world who use women and do not sacrifice themselves for love. I enjoy feminist movies because I want to be more sensitive and understanding to women and their condition and nature and even how they are unfairly treated at times.

But I still want to keep my testicles, thank you.

And the feminist narrative is not an honest narrative precisely because it is a victim myth. It shifts the blame onto men and society, as well as denying nature and biology. But the only blame women in these narratives have is – now get this – that they have accepted their “oppression.” The classic justification of victim theory: The denial of one’s own true moral failure.

Actually, like Mud, many of us men are incurable romantics who want to be the knight in shining armor that rescues a woman and provides for her safety and happiness in this world. Yes, we do exist. And men can be used just as much by women as in the reverse. And they often are. But the difference between feminist movies and a men’s liberation story is that the male liberation narrative, like Mud, is a more honest self-aware narrative. It doesn’t shift the blame onto women, it only acknowledges “bad” women, while admitting men’s own flaws. This is not only more true and honest, it makes for better storytelling and richer more complex characters – as opposed to negative clichés of feminism.

So, in Mud, you actually have the manipulative female, but you also have all the classic negative males. But here’s the twist, both the men and women all have both good and bad traits. No one is completely bad. But no man or woman is completely good either. Let me explain.

The protagonist is not actually Mud, but the young boy Ellis. This is a male coming of age story that for once isn’t about “losing your virginity.” Mud becomes the mentor hero that Ellis looks up to because Ellis is falling “in first love” with a young lady in town, and he is drawn to Mud’s romanticism and heroic desire to protect Juniper. The problem is, Ellis’ love interest is another young version of Juniper who Ellis uses his brawn to protect, only to discover she is manipulating him. So as Ellis looks around him, he gets advice from his father that “love will not last” just as love in his marriage did not last (And by the way, his wife is not depicted as the problem either). He sees the betrayal of Juniper, and you would think even Mud would learn a misogynist message that no woman is worth it. But that is not the answer in this story. Both Mud and Ellis remain romantics in realizing that they were just fools to fall for the wrong one. They still believe in love.

And why? Because a woman needs a man to believe in, but a man needs a woman who believes in him. We need each other. And to give up on that would be to become cynical and lose the hope of true romantic and chivalric love. In other words to become feminist or egalitarian.

Ellis’s dad is a struggling man of low employment whose marriage is crumbling because he feels less of a man for not being able to maintain the family riverboat and therefore his fish business. He has his bitter drinking bouts, but AMAZINGLY, he does not degenerate into the classic cliché wife beater! Not once does he become violent. It is an honest dealing with what many men struggle with. I ask you, when was the last time you ever saw a Southern out of work hick who was NOT a wifebeater in a movie? And this is not a very good example of a father in his lack of communication. But we see that he does love his son, and that he has a high value of ethics on not stealing. These characters are wonderfully fascinating and rich characters with flaws and good qualities. We are after all, fallen splendor.

Neckbone is living with his uncle, a kind of industrious slacker played with fantastic nuance by Michael Shannon. This guy hasn’t grown up. He’s in his thirties probably, still plays in a rock band like a high schooler, is not sexually sensitive to his girlfriend, and is not a great influence on Neckbone. BUT he is amazingly ingenious in creating a diving suit with lights to get clam traps in the river as well as repairing good junk he finds and makes it usable again. He provides the wisdom of the film when he says, “This river brings a lot of trash down it. Some of it is worth a lot of money. Some of it is junk. You gotta know what’s worth keeping and what to let go.” When he discovers his nephew might be getting into trouble with Ellis, he doesn’t act like a Nazi but he does keep an eye on his nephew and warns him about being responsible.

Then, Sam Shepherd plays an ex-marine sharpshooter who raised Mud and tries to stay out of everybody’s business like the classic curmudgeon. But when his shooting skills are needed to stop the bad guys, he’s there, baby! Like a MAN!

Then you have Mud. Not the best of male examples for a young boy. BUT he knows it. His story begins with a rather selfish bargaining chip of getting the boys to help him rebuild the boat to escape outta there, but ends with him endangering his own life to save Ellis from a snake bite. So the man has to grow up as much as the child. And the most telling and mature wisdom in this film comes when Ellis and Mud are saying goodbye and Mud can see Ellis’ pure heart for love and he tells him “You’re a good man, Ellis.” And Ellis responds by saying that Mud is a good man too, but Mud says, “No. No, I ain’t.” WOW. What feminist movie would admit THAT flaw in their heroine emasculators? This is the honesty of male liberation. Mud knows and admits his flaws and seeks to overcome the flaw in himself, the real moral flaw, not the blameshifting psychological flaw.

I would say that my one big complaint is that Mud never chooses the true moral choice of turning himself in for the crime he did commit and that quite frankly spoils an otherwise fabulous morality tale. But no story is perfect. And we must be able to “know what’s worth keeping and what to let go.”

I could go on. This movie was a refreshing and satisfying story so lacking in today’s blockbuster morrasse of male juvenility.

The Mortal Instruments: A Dualistic Story of the Supernatural Without God

Posted on by admin

Action horror. Hot girl realizes she’s both Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker in a Twilight World of battling werewolves and vampires. (In this movie, zombies “don’t exist,” so right off the bat you know it is an inferior horror film)

The movie starts out rather well with a very cool sequence of Clary, a young artist high schooler I think, learning that she has a secret identity she is not aware of. Her mom is hiding her true identity to her, she can see demonic and angelic things others cannot, and demons in the form of earthly creatures are after her.

As soon as the mythical background starts to be explained, everything becomes very jumbled and hard to follow. She eventually learns she is a “child of the Nephilim.” Though this is never really explained except I think it occurs when someone drank from a chalice cup that an angel Raziel offered at the Crusades. Didn’t make much sense to me.

So this is why she can see the spirit world, because she is half-human, half-angel. It’s a Nephilim story! And all the demons, vampires and other monsters want to find that magic cup that Clary’s mother has hidden, while Clary has the location embedded in her memory somewhere. Although I couldn’t remember why drinking from the cup was so wanted by the villains. I think it was because that would make them half-angel? Oh, I don’t remember, it was just kinda dumb.

So, normal humans are called “Mundanes” because they can’t see the spirit world (The American word for “Muggles” – Give her a break, you gotta call them something and it’s gotta reflect the fact that they are blind to one half of reality). Vampires and werewolves are called “downworlders” because they inhabit the world down here. And the good guys are “Shadow Hunters,” which are Nephilim who kill demons. If you know anything about the Biblical Nephilim, none of this makes any sense. But if you want to follow a cool Biblical fantasy tale about the Nephilim, check out this cool series. Meanwhile, Clary realizes she has the ability to tattoo runes on herself that bring powerful enchantments to stop demons and other stuff.

So the worldview in this story seems to downplay angels to almost non-existent. Sure, the evil arch-villain Raziel was an angel, but the heroine’s helper ally, the shadow hunter Jace, a scrawny effeminate kid who is somehow able to topple big bad bulky muscular guys, explains that “he’s never seen an angel.” So, I’m sure they are there in the series, but not in this movie. But when they retrieve weapons from a church, Clary asks about the religious reality behind their battle. Jace explains that they “know no religion,” and they could just as well hide their weapons in a mosque or a buddhist temple or Hindu temple. He then says he doesn’t believe in religion, he “believes in himself.” Then when Clary learns about the history of the evil angel Raziel, she is told by a master shadow hunter that they are engaged in a battle of good and evil, “a war that can never be won.” In other words, the world is a Dualistic eternal battle between opposing good and evil that are pretty much equal and always in conflict – hey, just like Star Wars! Just like Eastern Dualism! And then she realizes whose daughter she is and you go, “Hey, just like Star Wars!” Okay, sorry I spoiled it for you. You won’t miss anything cause it’s all rather vapid.

No reference whatsoever to God occurs in this story of supernatural demons and AWOL angels. It’s another riduculous attempt to hijack the mythos of Judeo-Christianity and to exorcise the most essential element, God, while keeping the corpse of the imagery and trying to resurrect it with occultic spells and magic. BTW, I have no problem with having occultic elements in the story per se, but the context determines their meaning and in this world, there is some abstract impersonal force that is actually quite boring because it has no personality and no metaphysical sense to it.

Okay, there is one tiny waaaaay ambiguous cool reference to God when we discover that the musical genius Bach was a shadow hunter and playing his music uncovers demons because it makes them go mad and they reveal themselves. Bach was a Christian who wrote music to God’s glory, so that could have been meaningful in its proper context.

One cool statement at the ending sums up the reality of spiritual awareness. Clary is sad and scared that “I don’t see the world the same. I see demons and angels.” To which Jace responds, “The world is the same. You’re just different.” That does sum up the reality of spiritual enlightenment, even if it comes in the context of a contradictory dualistic worldview.

Jobs: Visionary as Obsessive Narcissistic A$$h*!e Changes the World

Posted on by admin

A biopic about Apple. What? You thought it was about Steve Jobs? Well, it is – technically — but watching the movie gives one the impression that it is more about the image and concept of the innovative company than about the human Steve Jobs, which as I understand is accurate, because he was not very human to people. However, of all the options of what story to tell, I think they chose an interesting one, because the theme of Jobs’ life as expressed in the movie is about his vision of changing the way we see computers into one that the product should be a natural extension of the individual. So it would make sense that this two hour commercial for Apple follow the same paradigm as the product to capture that essence.

And that thematic approach is what brings transcendence to the movie. It’s about something bigger than Jobs, a way of seeing the world, of changing the world. It’s sad that that “something bigger” was ultimately only a business and a product which cannot give true spiritual meaning or purpose to life.

As a Mac enthusiast myself I was fascinated to see the “story” of the spirit of that venture and of Steve Jobs. That is what a biopic is supposed to do, capture the spirit, not necessarily the historically accurate details of someone’s life. And I think writer Matt Whitely and director Joshua Michael Stern do an excellent job of painting the portrait of that artistic entrepreneurial genius.

They follow him with brief episodic moments of his college days dropping out of the “system” of college, his experimentation with drugs, his original pairing with Steve “Woz” Wozniak in his father’s garage to make the first Apple computer, and on up through his firing from Apple, it’s demise, and Steve’s recapture and reconstitution of Apple into the greatness it originally was.

The bulk of the story is told through the business/entrepreneurship angle, but what little personal human narrative they bring in is rather poignant about the character of this visionary entrepreneur who changed the world.

In the very beginning, we get the faintest glimpse of the fact that his birth parents had given him out to adoption. He wonders with anger “who has a baby and throws it away like it’s nothing?” Of course, this would be prophetic for him as he proceeds to use and cut through every friend he has on the way to the top and throws them away like they are nothing.

Because of his growing obsession with doing something great, he tramples over everyone who ever helped him. When he just gets going, he gathers together neighbors and friends to help build the business and then fails to give them options when the company goes public, while later screaming at Bill Gates for stealing his operating system (they chose not to depict how Steve hypocritically stole the operating system from Xerox). He gets a girl pregnant when he was just starting out, and then proceeds to throw the baby away, as he was thrown away, by denying his paternity and telling the girl, it’s not his problem, “it’s not happening to me.” (Which as an aside, is technically the completely logical consequences of the feminist abortion movement that tries to take away the male’s choice in having the child and then hypocritically tries to force that responsibility back on him through alimony laws.) At one moment in the story, Woz, the very guy whose idea the Apple personal computer originally was, leaves the company and tells Steve, “It’s not about the people anymore for you. It’s about the product.” Again, something that Steve apparently embraced.

But all this megalomaniacal pathos is balanced by some truly memorable proverbial wisdom that Steve spouted about being an inspiration for the odd balls, the rejects, the nerds, who can change the world, and the belief in the limitless possibilities of the human imagination. Not just better, different. There are the required references in there to the 1984 Apple campaign and Job’s statement to Scully, Exec at Pepsi, about not being known for selling sugar water but for changing the world.

We humans are complex creatures of good and bad, and visionaries are too often larger than life exaggerations of that complexity, so the movie is a fair portrayal of such ambiguity and inconsistency. But in the end, it is ultimately a very sad and tragic tale of a man who “changed the world” and provided inspiration for hundreds of millions, while losing his own soul in the process.

But it all got me to thinking about what I call the Salieri Syndrome. For years, I have struggled with the apparent fact that world changers and visionaries and great artists and intellects etc. on the whole tend to be the worst sort of human beings. They tend to sacrifice other people to their “higher cause” in the name of helping people. In short, it seems greatness so often lacks goodness.

Remember Salieri from Amadeus? How he wanted to do great things for God and how God made him mediocre while blessing the infernal monkey Mozart with the highest of musical gifts? Or like Steve Wozniak, who was gifted with the idea but not the greatness to make his idea change the world, while the selfish narcissist Jobs got the job done, and all the glory. How many of us have had youthful desires to change the world, to do something great, something significant with our gifts and lives — but to also be a loving human being, and dare I say pleasing to God? – only to see that users, manipulators, and a-holes seem to be the ones who achieve the most success in their field or change the world. It’s almost as if the two are mutually exclusive. The good are rarely the great, and the great are rarely the good. (Yes, yes, yes, I know there are always exceptions, plenty of exceptions. I am talking here of majority, not absolutes).

Perhaps it is a delusion to seek the combination of greatness and goodness. Maybe that’s like saying I want to be both proud and humble. When you get to the second half of your life and like most people, you either haven’t achieved your dreams, or you realize you never will, you re-evaluate your priorities. You start to think, maybe, just maybe, loving people instead of using them for our purposes, our “dreams” or our “higher causes” changes us, and that’s the world most in need of changing.

The Host: Socialism Kills the Individual Spirit

Posted on by admin

A flaccid futuristic dystopian morality tale about Collectivism vs. Individualism. Another kind of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. If it were not for the phenomenally talented acting of Saorise Ronan, this movie would be terribly boring and tepid. As it is, it is only boring and tepid. How the heck do you say that name? “Seer-sha Ronin.”

Okay, the wonderful Saorise plays Melanie, one of the last people left on earth who have not been taken over by a parasitic alien population that gives you shining blue irises. Evidently, these aliens are called “souls” and they are ethereal but physical glowing tentacle little things that you insert into a human by making a cut in the back of their neck. The alien then embeds itself in the human host and takes over the consciousness. The human soul is still there, but it becomes dormant as the new being takes over.

But these are not the evil malicious soulless beings of the traditional Body Snatchers fame. These are actually nicer than humans. In fact, the narrator at the beginning of the film states that “the earth is at peace, no hunger, no violence, the environment is healed, and everyone is courteous to all. Our world has never been more perfect.” There’s just one problem it isn’t our world anymore. So no matter how nice they are, they are still invaders who are stealing our home. AND they are without emotion and physical passion. In other words, this is the worldview that believes that we can only find harmony by using reason and denying the passions of humanity. Maybe a metaphor for the Enlightenment.

Melanie gets caught and has a “soul” implanted in her. But she is a rascally independent spirited individual, who is not easily suppressed, and she fights in her mind with the being that has taken her over, named the Wanderer, or Wanda. The government or collective or whatever it is, has agents who seek to hunt down all the last remnant of humans in order to finalize their colonization of the planet. So they want to use Melanie to track them down by exploring her memories, not accessible to the Wanderer Wanda. Melanie fights back and is able to touch something in the heart of this “soul” being, and Wanda decides to escape the compound and find the humans to help them. Or something like that.

A small group of humans are hiding out in a secret cave in the desert led by a strong leader, Jeb, (William Hurt), who says, “This isn’t a democracy, it’s a dictatorship. A benign dictatorship.” So the obvious comparison is that human society is the opposite of the aliens, it is individualistic but led by strong leaders and has passion and emotion. It’s messier and more dangerous, but it is our humanity and we cannot deny it. Messy freedom is more desirable than safe control. Which is the same theme as the director’s other films The Truman Show and Simone. This is an important theme to him obviously.

But this is a deliberate parable about the danger of collectivist thinking (like socialism, leftism, communism). At one point, an alien says to a human, “You think the loss of your will is too great a sacrifice, but we have to think of the common good.” To which Melanie responds, “Call it what you want, this is murder!” Murder, that is of the individual soul, the freedom of the individual as it sinks into the collective.

Melanie finds the secret human group and they divide over wanting to kill her or keep her alive. Since she might be a spy or she might betray them. So the whole thing is set up to be a moral dilemma that wrestles with our identity as humans. And this is the problem with the movie: Because so much of the struggle is an interior dialogue between Wanda and her host Melanie, you have long lingering shots of Melanie’s face contorting through the inner debate as we hear it in voiceover. This kind of inner monologue does not work well with movies in such an extensive fashion, because it becomes less dramatic and more mental. HOWEVER, as I said, Saorise is such a talented actor, that she made it tolerable.

Wanda begins to prove herself by helping the group, saving someone who tried to kill her, and falling in love with one of the human guys. So the whole thing is about learning to love and accept the “Other.” From fearing them as hostile to seeing they are just like us capable of the same loves and fears and goodness as well as badness. But the moral problem comes when they realize that to release the aliens from humans, they can’t seem to keep either alive in the process. So how do they free Melanie? Are they any different from Wanda’s colonial race by slaughtering her people? It’s a good moral dilemma that carries interest despite the otherwise lame drama.

The whole thing looked pretty low budget with cheesy TV action. I’ve seen better TV action actually. And there were a lot of goofy holes that made me cringe. Like the humans putting on sunglasses at night to hide their pupils after they have been pulled over – like they’re not going to be told to take them immediately off. And then there’s the fact the Melanie does not want to tell the humans that she is inside with the alien still. You see, they believe that the old person is totally gone and taken over. But they aren’t. Then why the HECK would she not want to tell them that she is inside still? Especially if they might kill her because they believe she is not there anymore!!! Argh. Obviously to keep the plot going or there would be no moral or dramatic tension. And then there is the kissing. Obviously written by a woman because it is through the kiss that the inner Melanie is brought out. When she kisses her old boyfriend, she gets angry for him kissing the body that is in control of by someone else. Oh, it’s all a bit too silly. But kinda cute. Chicks will like it.

The silliest of all is the liberal mindset at the end when we discover that you cannot remove the alien from the human “by force. It can only be captured by kindness and love.” In other words, if they just coax the little things out, they’ll come out and everyone lives! Oh puhleeze. And then when the evil alien Seeker who has been trying to find the humans becomes violent herself, but is captured, rather than killing her, the good alien says, “There has been too much death. Not death, exile.” So they send her to another planet deep in space – WHERE SHE CAN “VIOLENTLY” TAKE OVER ANOTHER SPECIES OF CREATURE. And it is violence, even if you do it nicely and softly. Because the point is that it is violence against the individual. This is the stupidity of liberal thinking about judicial punishment. Liberals think that if we just treat evil and violent offenders with understanding and “put them away,” in exile of jail, we will fix the problem. But the reality is recidivism, repeat offenders who are simply released to commit their violent crimes on someone else. And that is exactly what this movie was unwittingly affirming is to release evil upon someone else other than “us.” THAT is barbaric cruelty. The barbarism of unintended consequences of liberal thought.

The cure in this story unfortunately is worse than the disease. It perpetuates the very violence it seeks to decry by not fighting evil with force.