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The Box

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Norma (Cameron Diaz) and Arthur (James Marsden) are a married couple with child in the 1970s during the transmission of the Mars probe. They have a troubled life losing her job and his promotion and receive a strange gift from a man (Frank Langella), Arlington Steward, who looks like a scary shadow of death with his deformed face (soon to be revealed as from a lightning accident.). The gift is a little box with a button in it. If they press the button within 24 hours, two things will happen. First, someone they do not know will die, and two, they will receive one million dollars. So this is a movie that sets up a moral dilemma to stretch our minds about conscience, values, and human freedom.

Of course, they are pressured to push the button and their lives start to unravel because of it, until the end when THEY become the victim of another person’s choice (who does not know them) to push the button. What they don’t realize is that the second moral choice for those who push the button is this: Either suffer their child to be blind and deaf for the rest of their life, or kill their spouse. The movie ends up with a lot of weird Twilight Zone type scenarios of strange cult like behavior from people who are all in on it, and some strange connection to the Mars landing. But what looks like an occultic movie is actually naturalism and everything has a natural explanation, including Arlington Steward with the strange face and box. He’s actually inhabited by a Mars intelligence through being struck by lightning — oh, it’s all too confusing. But they make the point a couple times in the movie with a famous Isaac Asimov quote: “Any advanced technology is sufficiently indistinguishable from magic.” And they show this quote up against a picture of Jesus from the New Testament times. So the suggestion is clear: Naturalism. Religion is simply an attempt to explain technology that is sufficiently beyond our grasp (such as Mars alien life forms and their technology to control us).

Another thematic element in this complex film is Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialism. The filmmakers go out of their way to emphasize a reference to Sartre’s famous play, “No Exit” about a group of people who are in a hotel who are dead, and discover that hell is not eternal damnation by God, but rather, self deception, “bad faith” in letting others define us rather than we defining ourselves through our own choices. Sartre believed, and promoted in No Exit, that “existence precedes essence.” That is, we are not created by a God which would make essence precede existence. Rather, we first exist in a meaningless universe that we must not seek to find meaning outside ourselves. In this sense, we are “condemned to be free” that is, we are absolutely free, and without external definition by other values or choices or standards. In short, there is no God, we create ourselves through our choices. So to Sartre, if we seek our meaning (essence) outside of ourselves, we are letting others define us and therefore are exerting “bad faith.” In his scheme, we must embrace our meaninglessness and accept our own responsibility for creating ourselves, our reality. This worldview is essentially one of idolatry and self-deification clothed as an assertion of freedom and responsibility. In the movie The Box, Norma is a teacher teaching the play “No Exit” to students who quote the infamous line, “hell is other people.” This would mean that if we let others choose for us, we are placing ourselves in a hell of our own making, letting others define us, etc. The school is putting on a play of “No Exit,” and in one scene, “No Exit” is written on the windshield of a car. Another statement is made, “Unfulfilled wishes is hell.”

So in this context, when Arlington Steward in the story says to Norma, regarding whether she should press the button or not, “listen to your conscience,” it probably doesn’t mean quite the same thing as a Judeo-Christian appeal to conscience. This appeal is to listen to yourself, not others. At one peculiar moment, Arthur is absconded by the cultic members helping the Martian and is given an option to choose between three water portals (strange doorways of water created by “magical” technology). “Three paths. One is salvation. The other two, eternal damnation.” He picks number two and is brought back to his beloved wife safely. But then later, when Arthur and Norma are given another choice of letting their son be deaf and blind for the rest of his life or shooting Norma dead, Norma sacrifices herself and has Arthur shoot her to save their son. Interestingly, Arthur was shown the afterlife when he has his journey through the water portals (a symbol of baptism?), which is what gives him the courage to shoot his wife because he believes they will be together again. There is a lot of religious imagery here, but I think it is subverted by the notion of secular existential freedom. When Norma asks Arlington, “Can I be forgiven?” He responds, “There are two ways to enter the final chamber, free or not free. The choice is yours.” So, the only forgiveness is in being free, NOT in following an external code or “other’s choices.” It’s almost as if the “vision of the afterlife” is a deception (technologically created) that breeds bad choices in this life of the willingness to kill another because of deferred hope.

It turns out the whole thing is a Martian experiment at a distance through Arlington who was somehow possessed through the lightning strike. Arlington says the one factor not accounted for is “The Altruism quotient. If you humans cannot subordinate your desires to more important values, I will be compelled by my employers (Martians) to exterminate you.” Hmmm. This would be quite frankly a complete contradiction of the existentialist claim of self definition, since subordinating one’s choices to “more important values” is in fact, allowing external others to define us. So I am not sure if the filmmakers are aware of this blatant unlivable suggestion of existentialist freedom. It wouldn’t surprise me, since it is a common hypocrisy of this worldview to demand complete freedom from all moral accountability for one’s self, and then to seek to impose their own morality on others. This was embodied in Sartre’s joining the anti-nuke movement because nuclear arms were somehow “immoral” to him. So he demanded no moral standards for himself, while imposing his own moral standards on everyone else. A common behavior of those who fancy themselves gods.

The Fourth Kind

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A pseudo-docudrama that tries to document strange occurrences of alien abduction that may explain the unusually high number of deaths and disappearances of residents in Nome, Alaska. This is a postmodern movie that really takes the fiction/non-fiction blur to the next level. Whereas, Paranormal Activity plays the fake reality game of Blair Witch and Cloverfield, the “found footage” genre, that we all know is not real, but we pretend it is so it makes it seem scarier. But The Fourth Kind creates fake documentary footage and then tells us through the lead actress, Milla Jovavich AS Milla Jovavich and the director as himself that this is a movie that is recreating real documentary research by a real psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler (similar to an episode of Unsolved Mysteries). The director then juxtaposes “real documentary” footage of interviews next to the re-enactment with the actors to give the illusion that this really really happened and they are just re-enacting it. Wow, talk about taking the postmodern notion of everything being fiction to the next level. This movie lies to the audience in telling us this is a re-enactment and these are real tapes that they based their movie on. So it is a fiction of a fiction, a story of a story.

TFK uses all the formulaic elements of alien encounters that have been claimed to be true since the 1940s, assuming the classification used by Spielberg with his Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Only the Fourth Kind is not mere contact, but abduction, complete with butt probes and aliens with big owl eyes. But since they use the “found footage” documentary style, it becomes a focus on story over effects that we have come to be oversaturated with through the Spielberg phenomenon. This is another element that makes it seem more “real” is that it is not splashy or having any real effects. So this is all about what we do NOT see versus what we do see. In fact, even the videotaped abduction scenes become visually distorted (though strangely, not the audio ☺) due to the presence of the alien psychically in the body of the abuductee.

What I found most interesting was that the movie uses the cliché “Chariots of the Gods” ancient astronauts theory that the gods of prescientific cultures like the Sumerians, were simply aliens from space misinterpreted as “gods.” We are told of the hieroglyphs of the Sumerians that show rocketships and astronauts with breathing apparatuses, all the usual old crap. And during one taped sequence we discover that the beings that are taped entering Milla’s room speak in the ancient Sumerian dialect in “non-human” voices (are you following? – the Sumerians – the first writers of words, were taught language by these aliens). And the rough translations are incomplete and can only catch words like “Our creation… destroy,” and lastly and most importantly, “I am God.” Milla is shown praying to Jesus at the very beginning of the movie. Yet apart from these two ambiguous moments, NOT A SINGLE REFERENCE is made at all to the supernatural.

I am not sure if the filmmaker is aware of it or not, but everything that occurred, including the alien abduction moments of levitation and jerking around, Ancient PAGAN Sumerian voices, the alien language of claiming to be God, are all elements of demon possession. It’s almost as if he entirely missed a great twist that this is not alien abduction but demon possession. I say this because there is not a word of consideration in the entire movie that this could be supernatural, so I think he may not have realized that these are classic symptoms of demon possession. Instead he opts out for a mysterious ending of unexplained phenomenon under audio tapes of allegedly real UFO sightings. Great potential for a unique perspective on a cliché subject squandered with a dissatisfying ending of mystery.

Where the Wild Things Are

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The story of a young boy, Max, who struggles with loneliness and anxiety that is expressed in temper tantrums of frustration. When he feels neglected by his single mother who has a boyfriend, and his older teen sister who ignores his affection (nothing abnormal or dysfunctional, just the realities of life), he runs away and withdraws into an imaginary world of his own making, where the wild things are. In this world, he becomes king over the huge monsters who have adult voices, but all act exactly like children, or indeed, exactly like Max, running wild, having dirt clod fights, building a fort (“the place where only things you want to happen there happen”), but also throwing tantrums of jealousy, anger, control and selfishness. As Max experiences the consequences of his own behavior played out in the immaturity of the Wild Things, he begins to face the responsibilities of growing up – negotiating differences, delegating authority, becoming concerned for other’s feelings and maintaining loyalty. Through this journey of imagination, Max begins to see the self-destructive effects of staying a child and garners the nerve to go back home where he belongs, to his imperfect, yet loving mother, because Max is growing up. The key moment being when Max looks at the deterioration of the wild things into selfishness and blurts out, “I wish you guys had a mom.” Obviously, kids need moms, they need adult parents to shepherd them into adulthood by helping to curb their selfish tendencies. A coming of age story that incarnates maturity, not in sexual discovery as most coming of age movies, but in relational community and adult supervision.

Paranormal Activity

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A fake “reality” documentary in the tradition of The Blair Witch Project, only this time it’s real supernatural evil. Micah and his live-in girlfriend Katie decide to videotape the strange haunting experiences that have followed Katie since she was young. So we see it through the eyes of their camera as they record it all, including their sleeping at night. It is a straightforward and simple demon story that builds from the sounds and noises, through the “open doorway” of a Ouija board, and all the way to the possession at the end. This story reinforces the reality of supernatural evil.

I had to change my original understanding of the movie’s worldview because I had missed one shot in the movie that made a big difference in the meaning. Originally, I had said that “The only two references to God occur once when they research an exorcism on the internet which remains a distant story to no effect, and once at a climactic moment where Katie clutches a crucifix in her hands till she bleeds – also to no effect.” But I was wrong because I missed a shot that occurred shortly after this. Micah says, “I’ve had enough of this” and he tosses something in the fireplace to burn. Well, I had thought he tossed the Ouji board pointer into the fire, but a friend told me it was the wooden cross. BIG BIG difference.

Because it is after this symbolic discarding of the cross of Christ that the demon has the power to invade their lives even more so. A shallow approach to God is useless and that without a real connection to the living God in Christ, we have no hope of overpowering such evil. After all, Micah is portrayed as expressing that he is not afraid of this entity and he can fight it by himself. And in the end, without the power of God, he ultimately cannot.

Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant

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Darren is a high school student with a best friend, Steve, who gets him in trouble, and who experiences existential angst in a typical suburban family that repeats the mantra of boredom to him, “a productive life. College, job family, college, job family.” His dread is compounded by the belief that “we’re all gonna end up in the same place (dead) whether we like it or not.” When he visits a circus freak show in his town, he discovers it is led by a “good” vampire who doesn’t want to kill people, just suck their blood a little. Turns out that a band of “bad” vampires who still kill people are trying to start a war with these “good” vampires in order to get some real blood spilt. Darren becomes a half vampire in order to save his best friend from dying, but unfortunately that friend gets caught up with the bad vampires. So we now have best friends on opposite sides of this building war.

But the real theme behind this story is that of determinism and free will, namely, that biology is not destiny. We create ourselves through our choices: Existentialism. Early on, we hear Steve talk about his “bad blood,” which is confirmed by the good vampire later. And as he says that, we are taken on a cinematic journey into his very blood cells to see that there are evil “elements” in his DNA. We hear the phrases, “Destiny, we all have a destiny,” “It’s all been written down in a book.” After Steve goes “bad vampire” he tells, Darren, “Too late, I have my destiny, you have yours.”

However, the tension of free will is woven in throughout as we hear the lead vampire, John C. Reilly, state, “I may write the script, but the characters seem to do what they want.” And Darren is told, “You seem to have a lot of free will” because he is able to avoid drinking blood even though it will ultimately kill him. Finally, when Darren struggles with whether or not he will become bad because he is a vampire, his monkey girl girlfriend tells him the theme tagline: “Being human is not about what you are, it’s about who you are.” Darren concludes, “Just cause I’m a vampire, doesn’t mean I’m blood thirsty.” Thus the film argues against Original Sin in that it concludes we can have control over our natures to do good or evil and there is no inherent evil to our nature, merely natures that can be used for good or evil (thus, the good and evil vampires, a similar concept to the Twilight series).

Another way of looking at it: “What you are” is an argument for identity being rooted in an essence or substance (biology), but “Who you are” is identity being rooted in personhood or free will.

There is some comfort here for those of us who consider ourselves freaks in society and don’t fit in as we are shown that everyone has their place and special purpose to perform, though of course, we must choose to do so.

Coco Before Chanel

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The story of the beginnings of Gabrielle Chanel from a destitute French orphan near the turn of the 19th century to the beginnings of what would become her empire of fashion design. It’s feminist tale of liberation as Gabrielle seeks to make her own way in a “man’s world” as the end titles say. It portrays the French aristocracy as decadent and even boring in their life of leisure — to this woman, a hard working seamstress and bar dancer. So in that sense it elevates the protestant work ethic and self-made entrepreneurship over aristocratic inheritance and old money.

When Coco becomes a mistress of French millionaire Balsan, she pursues her hobby of decorating hats and wearing simple clothes that bucked the system of lavish overwrought women’s apparel with imprisoning corsets and padding of the time period. She seeks to give women freedom in their clothes and thus their bodies, and thus, their social status. Of course, she never really loves Balsan, who eventually falls in love with her and is willing to marry her against his social status. But it is too late, because she falls in love with Balsan’s best friend, “Boy” Capel, all the while maintaining her independent spirit.

The movie attempts to disconnect true passionate and meaningful love from marriage and link it to adulteress lifestyles. In the movie, all the rich men, including Coco’s lover, marry for socio-economic status, but have mistresses for true love, where they “really” experience the intimacy of being known and loved (which in the movie is depicted as nothing much beyond “fun trips and sex”). Coco complains that her mother married for love and ended up destitute and dead, with Coco and her sister in an orphanage. So marriage does not get very high marks in Coco’s mind of romantic hope.

Coco is devastated when she realizes she cannot marry Capel because he is getting married for status, but hardens herself and decides to never marry and just live the life of Capel’s mistress while growing her own business and maintaining her own independence. And they are able to do so until Capel dies in a car accident and we see in the face of Coco, a devastating loss – in the midst of her increasing success – that it appears she never overcomes for the rest of her life, since she never married.

In an ironic deconstructive way, the movie seems to bear the internal contradiction that regardless of this liberation of Coco, she doesn’t really have the intimate love she found in that one man and ends life rather sad, despite her worldly success. It seems that career may be a fulfillment of her genius, but is not the ultimate meaning for this woman who desired to be known by love, a love she sought outside marriage, a love that evaded her to her death.

Law Abiding Citizen

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This is a gritty violent story of prosecuting DA attorney, Nick Rice, played by Jamie Foxx, who only takes cases he knows he can win, and plea bargains the weak cases so he can play the legal system in order to maintain a high record of wins to better his career. In other words, he doesn’t really care about justice, and be bargains with murderers, and then he justifies his actions by an appeal to pragmatism, you get the best deal you can with an imperfect system. Along comes an inventor Clyde, played by Gerard Butler, whose family is killed by scum, and who experiences the injustice of our legal system as one of them gets away for plea bargaining, led by Nick, and against Clyde’s wishes. Well, I don’t know if this is possible, but the point of the movie is to show that our legal system is corrupted by this kind of bargaining with murderers and results in injustice through compromise with evil.

Clyde’s response is to snap and plan retribution for 10 years through his inventive mind. He hacks into the system and makes the one killer’s lethal injection execution a torturous event, and captures the other killer and brutally tortures him before killing him. Then Clyde hands himself in and in a poignant moment at his own defense for bail, he quotes legal precedent to convince the judge to let him go without bail. Then when she is persuaded, Clyde chastises her that this is what’s wrong with the system. He clearly should not be allowed to be let free, yet, he just used the rules to manipulate her and she bought it. He heaps insults upon her for her moral idiocy and deliberately loses the appeal and lands in jail. Then, while in jail, has worked out a way to start killing everyone connected to his case, from the judge to each of the lawyers, while he is in prison. Meanwhile, each time, he makes ridiculous demands, such as receiving a steak dinner and an ipod in prison, or he will kill the next person.

When Nick accuses Clyde of sick vengeance, Clyde tells him if he wanted vengeance, he could have killed everyone years ago. No, he is making a point, he is going to bring down the whole justice system to make that point. But what is the point? Well, we learn at the end, when Nick figures out how Clyde is able to do these killings and he turns Clyde’s inventions against him. Nick finally says, he won’t make any more deals with murderers like Clyde, and Clyde says now you finally get it. In other words, the whole moral of the movie is that justice doesn’t make deals with murderers, you’ll just get more mayhem because evil people will only use deals as weakness to exploit and will continue to do evil until they are forcibly stopped. Law Abiding Citizen is not merely a vengeance movie about vigilante violence, it is a moral fable that condemns our legal system. It makes the argument that making deals with murderers only results in more murder, that plea bargaining results in high recidivism rates of criminals being released into society only to rape and kill again and again.

In light of the current geopolitical events in Iran, I suspect the filmmakers may also be making an analogy to making deals with terrorists and fanatical dictators, which only result in perceived weakness by said terrorists as an opportunity to exploit for more power and violence.

A Serious Man

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Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest movie wrestles with God’s sovereignty and man’s free will in this story of a 1960s Jewish physics professor and his world falling apart like the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Larry Gopnik’s wife has fallen in love with a Jewish widower and wants to give him a ritual divorce so she can remarry within the religion, his son is approaching his bar mitzvah while exploring drugs and rock and roll, and Larry’s brother, a loser with a Rain Man-like psychological dysfunction, is living with him sucking the life out of him. In fact, everyone seems to be sucking the life out of Larry, what with all his responsibilities in life. Even a Chinese student with failing grades tries to bribe him and then blackmail him for accepting bribes.

And all throughout the movie, we hear the repeated phrase, mostly from Larry, but also others: “But I didn’t do anything.” It is used in various contexts but often as an excuse for feeling treated unfairly in life by others or God. Larry’s brother is taken in by the cops for gambling, “but I didn’t do anything”: Larry’s wife tells him she wants a divorce, “but I didn’t do anything” he replies, and so on throughout. The point seems to be that we make excuses for not being active in our lives, for not taking responsibility for what happens to us. And the biggest accusation in this story seems to be a religious one, that in our resignation to God being “in control” we become passive agents in a universe that are acted upon – we miss the opportunities of a lifetime because we are immobilized by our worldview or theology.

Larry is portrayed as believing that he is just supposed to be a good boy and bad things won’t happen – but they do – to him. He seems to keep losing everything dear to him from his wife to his reputation, to his lawn, to his job, all because he “goes along” and doesn’t take action in his life. At marriage counseling his too-young rabbi tells him he should just accept this divorce, resigning himself to the fact that God is in control and it’s just a matter of changing his perspective and he’ be able to cope. In other words, an almost Buddhist approach where you do not fight what happens in the world, you change your desires. This religious resignation is shown as being at fault for Larry not really living life. By resigning one’s self to the will of a deity, rather than choosing to act, one misses out on living life, such as the pot smoking libertine hot chick next door, who Larry notices sunbathing (reminiscent of King David on the roof seeing Bathsheba) – or rather, that Larry fantasizes as being a pot smoking libertine, but he never acts upon his fantasies.

A Serious Man brings in the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle as well as Schrodinger’s cat metaphor as a philosophical expression for Larry’s worldview that concludes after explaining a huge chalkboard of mathematics that we can’t possibly know what’s going to happen. Another excuse for “not doing anything.” I think the humanist worldview to this film is that since we can’t know what is going to happen because the future is not determined, then to resign ourselves to God’s will is to not take the responsibility we have for making our own fate and destiny by acting upon our desires. Larry is a passive hero who keeps avoiding responsibility for his life and keeps missing out on really living because he refuses to be the master of his fate and thus becomes the pawn of others.

Whip It

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Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut about a young girl in a small town in Texas who desires to get out from under her mother’s stifling expectations for her so she can do what she has discovered she really wants: Roller derby! Starring Ellen Page as Bliss Cavender, this story, as with all Barrymore’s stories, is a women’s empowerment narrative about women needing to come out from under oppressive social norms for their roles.

Ellen’s mom, played by Marcia Gay Hardin, is molding her two daughters to be beauty pageant queens just like herself. This of course doesn’t fit for Bliss, but she goes along to make mom happy until she finds what she really loves to do, roller derbying, which causes the turmoil. Bliss accuses mom of shoving her small town “50s morality” (an obvious reference to the traditional gender roles and family notions) down her throat. But what makes this more than a simplistic feminist fairytale is when a fellow roller derby queen challenges Bliss that she is being selfish and that her mom may be wrong about roller derby, but she cares for Bliss and is only trying to help her, and that mom’s rules are for her own good, NOT because she wants to hurt her or control her – that there is value to what her mother thinks. The mom and dad are actually happily married and even frisky, thus showing such “traditional” marriage as mostly positive.

There are no strong men characters in this movie, illustrating a female gender bias in the viewpoint. The roller derby coach is a loony obsessed with exercise and acting like a pothead with a few screws loose. Bliss’s very first rock and roll boyfriend turns out to be a womanizer, and the announcer of the roller derby is a loser horny toad always failing to get laid. Bliss’ dad, played by Daniel Stern, is a stereotypical couch potato sports fan who follows mom’s lead instead of being a leader in the family. He is too weak to face mom about her contempt for sports so he watches the football game by lying to her that he is staying late at work. He pretty much cow tows to her until the end, when he is the first one to support Bliss and takes the lead by pulling Bliss out of the big pageant and bringing her to the roller derby. So his leadership is portrayed as good when supportive of Bliss’ desires.

So this film seems to prioritize the individual’s dreams without negating the value of family. The collective family and the individual member can get along and balance each other’s interests.

Monsters Vs. Aliens

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Susan Murphy is struck by a meteor and grows to be 50 feet tall, which, needless to say, jeopardizes her wedding plans with a television weather reporter. Also, she is captured by the military and imprisoned with other monsters they’ve captured over the years. Susan, as the “50 foot woman” meets the Missing Link, Dr. Cockroach and B.O.B., which are homages to the monster movies of the 50s and 60s: the Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Fly and the Blob. Meanwhile, a hostile alien robot has come to earth to “extract” the special substance that made Susan grow big and strong, so that he can become powerful and take over the earth, destroy it and start his own civilization of clones of himself. This bad guy alien is an expression of colonialism that imperialistically exploits other “worlds” for their natural resources and then destroys the inhabitants in order to make it his home.

This appears to be a feminist woman’s empowerment story. We follow the journey of Susan, who begins her story as a weaker woman who gets her self worth from supporting or following a man, her fiancé. The fiancé is a self-obsessed man only concerned with his own career, and not with Susan’s concerns at all. So when Susan becomes huge and even saves the city by destroying a robot, the fiancé breaks off the engagement because as he says, he can’t be in someone else’s shadow, and her shadow is particularly big. In other words, he wants a woman in HIS shadow and any “powerful” woman, or a woman who has become “big” (an obvious metaphor for a successful career woman) is too intimidating for him. He perceives that the relationship exists to serve his interests, not hers, a common accusation against “patriarchy.”

Susan realizes that her fiancé is a jerk and was only concerned with himself, so she muses to her monster friends that she doesn’t need a man to accomplish great things in life, after all, it was she who fought and destroyed an alien robot, not HIM. She stands to her full 50 foot height with clenched fists of empowerment (lacking only the Virginia Slims cigarette due to Hollywood political correctness) and says, “I’m not going to short change myself ever again.” And at the climax, when she has the chance to “become normal” by becoming small again, she chooses to become 50 feet again to save her monster friends, who have become more important to her. So at the end, when her fiancé asks for her back (for obvious selfish reasons again, to benefit his career), she stands him up and makes a fool of him and walks away, not needing a man as a fish needs not a bicycle.