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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.

Surrogates

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This is a story of cop Tom Greer (Bruce Willis) in a world where people live their lives through robotic surrogates that they control remotely through virtual computers. The moral of the story is spoken right up front in the narration by the human activist that “We weren’t made to live life through machines, “ and that “what it means to be human is to sacrifice yourself for a higher cause and purpose.” There are people living in surrogate free zones because they want to be more human. It turns out there is a weapon that will kill people through killing their surrogates, never possible before. But the big crime turns out to be the repentant creator of the surrogates attempting to download a virus that will breakdown every surrogate in the world so that people will be forced to life real life again. The movie is really just an amplification of the avatar “social networking” that already goes on online. People live through false identities, they choose to all be younger and prettier avatars than to accept themselves as they really are. They become shadows of themselves, projections of their fantasies rather than reality. They don’t want to face reality. They seek to experience the pleasures of life without having the consequences. But as a main character says, “we must sacrifice certain pleasures to be truly connected.” So the cop and his wife suffer from the loss of their son, and she seeks to stay in the false world, while the cop seeks to redeem their marriage and make the human connection in their real bodies and souls. By the end, when the virus works and all surrogates drop, we see a lot of fat people walking around outside in their pajamas dazed as what they have been missing in the real world, but certainly better for it – because “We were not meant to live life through machines.”

Pandorum

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The world overpopulates and sends a ship of thousands of people to a distant planet to start over. But in the midst of the hyperspace sleep, some of them come to and realize that there are creatures hunting and killing survivors around the huge space ship. Turns out these creatures are some of the original passengers, who were accidentally mutated by being fed strange nuclear chemicals and turned them into predator monsters. Pandorum refers to the psychological state of coming out of hypersleep and becoming so disoriented that you go crazy and do things like killing everyone on board by jettisoning their pods into space. Of course, this is what happens to the captain who argues with the hero at the end about destroying lives on board. The captain who becomes a villain in his pandorum state says, “It’s easy when you free yourself from the chains of morality.” The theme of survival versus sacrifice and these mutated creatures are pure predators and the humans must save the rest of the hypersleep passengers on the ship by resetting the nuclear reactor on the ship. The story seems to be comparing pure survival and predatory nature with a moral approach to being human.

Zombieland: Love in the Post-Apocalypse

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We got to talking about this on the Hollywood Worldviews Group, and I watched it again. So here is the post I wrote on it a while back, with a couple additions.

A standard zombie storyline about a few living humans trying to survive after most of America is overrun with a zombie apolcalypse after a virus outbreak.

Particularly, it is the story of Columbus, a kid who is trying to get to his home town in Ohio to see if any of his family has survived. Along the way, he picks up loner, Woody Harrelson and a couple of girls, one with which he falls in love.

The story follows Columbus as a young nerd who has managed to survive by following “rules,” of survival such as good cardio (to outrun the zombies), always check back seats of cars, always wear seatbelts and “double tap” (always make sure to shoot a zombie in the head to finish him off for sure), and never be a hero, it gets you killed. The point being that these are all rules of self protection because Columbus is living fearfully in life and unwilling to take a risk. Zombies are the metaphor for what we become when we become loners in this world to protect ourselves. Everyone avoids personal names because they don’t want to get too involved in case they have to kill them as zombies later. So everyone goes by the name of the town they come from.

When he meets Witchita, the girl he falls for, she draws him out to take risks like not wearing a seatbelt. Turns out she likes bad boys, so Columbus tries to rise to the occasion. Of course, he comes to realize his family is not alive so he makes this new group his family as he says in voiceover. This seems to be a metaphor for leaving behind traditional notions of family in a corrupted world.

But in the finale, the boys and girls split up, but Columbus realizes that he has to “go after the girl,” to seek her out by putting aside his fears and self protection and ultimately says, “Some rules you gotta break such as ‘don’t be a hero,'” and he becomes a hero by saving the girls and ultimately his ability to love. And of course, the girl whispers her real name in his ear at the end, signifying that they make the human connection needed to love another person.

Columbus becomes a man by putting aside his desire to survive and self protection and by risking himself sacrificially for another. Sacrifice over survival, but no real sense of danger in the entire movie.

Julie & Julia

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A story of food, love and the meaning of life. I believe this movie is a tale of romantic existentialist redemption that proposes we find our significance in life through a quasi-religious notion of transcendence that we create for ourselves out of the stuff of this world.

It tells two tales in different time periods as sort of parallel universes. The first is the story of how Julia Child “became Julia Child,” the famous American cook. It shows her married to an American government diplomat in France starting in 1949, and charts her journey of emptiness at not being able to have children, with her subsequent search for a fulfilling meaningful productive life. She discovers her purpose through the one thing she loves to do more than anything: eat! She eventually learns how to cook French food and the rest is history, especially the story of how she got her first cook book of 524 recipes published with two French women.

The other story is about Julie, a modern day woman, played by Amy Adams, in search of significance in her life. She feels as if she has no meaning working in a cubicle for an insurance company dealing with human losses of 911. She is restless and can never seem to finish anything she starts, including a novel she only got halfway through writing. But she loves Julia Child, so her husband encourages her to cook her way through the 524 recipes of that very cook book of Julia Child’s, in 365 days, and to blog about it online. She takes the challenge and discovers that she begins to have significance in the world as eventually people read her blog and she shares her life lessons through food and Julia.

The language throughout is very religious. Julie explains to her friends how she is always wondering what Julia would do, or how she can please Julia, as if she were right there with her. She explains that she now has a sense of meaning and purpose to her life, that “Julia saved her”. It’s very much the salvific language of deity shifted to an imminent or “this worldly” creation. And that real world human proves to be as fickle as the anthropomorphic greek deities of old. When the 90-year old Julia Child discovers Julie’s blog, that has become very famous, she rejects her for being disrespectful and Julie never gets to meet her real world idol. But her husband encourages her that it’s better that way, because the “Julia in your mind is more important.” In other words, the real world cannot provide significance to our lives because it will fail us, only the transcendent deities we create in our minds to give us meaning are what matter. We create our own meaning and significance through our imagination.

A final touch at the end underscores the religious element of this worldview as Julie and her husband visit a museum that has a replica of Julia’s French kitchen. Julie walks up to a picture of Julia Child and places a pound of butter on the altar-like table beneath the picture, a very clear reference to the thank offerings of food given in many religions to pictures of ancestors or tribal deities.

The movie does have an unusually positive depiction of marriage in showing both Julie’s and Julia’s husbands as being entirely supportive of their personal quests for meaning, and showing marriage as a very positive element of their happiness, regardless of it being unable to provide ultimate significance, with which most religious people would agree.

The film also projects an anti-Republican political agenda in depicting the essence of Julia’s curmudgeonly unaccepting father as being connected with the political pariah of Communist “witch hunter” Joseph McCarthy. And it also reinforces this with a joke from Julie’s boss who says he won’t be like a Republican and fire her from her job for taking off a sick day when she wasn’t sick.

Be that as it may, Julie and Julia is a movie about finding transcendent significance in the imminence of our own imagination rooted in the “food” of this world.

Inglorious Basterds

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An “alternate history” story of a group of commando Jewish-Americans led by Brad Pitt as Lt. Aldo Raine, who set out to kill as many Nazis as possible behind enemy lines in occupied France, and end up stumbling upon an opportunity to take out the major leadership of Germany, including Hitler, Goering, Goebels and Bormann. While this film has its share of exaggerated Tarantino violence, it’s rather restrained compared to his previous films, focusing more on long dialogue tension build-ups intended to mimic the spaghetti westerns he is trying to imitate, along with the melodramatic spaghetti western soundtrack film techniques. He remains a pastiche postmodern as well with his corny side-comment flashbacks and comic book title cards.

Brad Pitt’s cutesy uneducated hick accent turns every expression of violence he says into a joke, which adds to the dehumanizing aspect of the film. Interestingly, the film does not merely capture the dehumanization of the Jews by Nazis, but it apparently accuses all sides of such dehumanizing. The strongest sequence suggesting this is a very long sequence of an SS Officer describing how Jews are seen by the Germans as rats (but allegedly without malice), immediately followed by Pitt lecturing his squad about how much fun they are going to have killing and scalping “Gnatzis” because they are not human anyway. His cute hick accent turning his joy of violence into entertainment. Pitt’s lecture dehumanizing Nazis is no less dehumanizing than the Nazis, thus hinting at a suggestion by Tarantino that all races, even Jews, can be driven by racist hatred and violence. Perhaps to Tarantino, the grotesque violence against the Nazis by the Jewish commandos is justified because of how evil they are, climaxing in a shot of Hitler’s body and face being blown away by Eli Roth’s machine gun in a Bonnie and Clyde ending.

Hitler himself is depicted as a stereotypical raving madman rather than a deliberate calculating man of evil, thus trivializing evil and reducing it to insanity, which no doubt will be felt as an insult by those who know all too well the banality of evil. But the alternate history of actually assassinating Hitler seems to be a catharsis for all the 17 historical attempts we know of that ended in failures. Rather than playing to history and creating a tragic heroic failure, as in true stories like Valkyre, Tarantino surprises us and opts to satisfy our movie fantasy for once, just once, to dream the “what if” of one of those attempts actually succeeding. No doubt, it will be considered catharsis by moviegoers without concern for historical truth, but as the trivialization of evil by actual victims of history.

The Proposal

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This romantic comedy starring Sandra Bullock as Margaret, a ruthless ladder climbing editor and Ryan Reynolds as Andrew, her abuse-puppy assistant seems to be a tale of traditional love over and against the feminist or egalitarian worldview. Margaret is an abusive witch to everyone in the office, who fears her and makes fun of her behind her back. She is arrogant, dominating and fully intent on making it to the top of corporate culture, crushing anyone who gets in her way. In short, she is trying to be like the ambitious men she sees in the corporate world. Unfortunately, a green card snafu regarding her Canadian citizenship threatens to deport her and ruin her ambition until she creates the scam that she is marrying her assistant Andrew. The only problem is, he is a very subservient and patient assistant – one may even say “ass-kisser.” But this deception puts his future in jeopardy, not the least because it is a felony to fake marriages like that for citizenship. She has pushed him too far, but he gives in, by forcing her to give him the long-promised never-given promotion to editor that he’s longed for in exchange for him marrying her.

When they visit Andrew’s family in Alaska for a weekend in order to announce the marriage, Margaret is surprised to discover Andrew is from a very rich, very successful business family. So he is not a snively little weak toad, but has chosen to try to make his own way, and a non-financial way as an artist, which ticks off his father. We see through this that Andrew is in fact a very strong person with his own vision in life, willing to defy family tradition. Also, Andrew turns around and deliberately does not treat Margaret as Queen, but as an equal. He lets her carry her own luggage, remarking that she’s a feminist and likes to do that kind of thing for herself. She is suddenly not a pampered coddled selfish little queen anymore, and she lashes back. While trying to tell the family “how they met” they have to make up a story on the spot, and Margaret tries to paint a picture of Andrew as a weak man, while he fights to spin it back to a more equal relationship, thus showing Margaret’s weakness: She can never be loved until she learns to submit herself to a man to be loved. This of course, she cannot do because of her own past hurts, but it makes her invulnerable and unable to love. She must be in control and “over” a man, which is why she will never find one. Andrew clearly seeks to be the leader she needs in a relationship, but she just can’t do it.

Of course, they fall for each other during this scam, but they lose it all, including their jobs, when the INS catches their little ploy. They avoid jail, though, but she is softened, and loses her job and humbles herself before her whole office in packing up and in apologies. The irony was that the proposal for marriage at the beginning of the film that was a scam was forced on Andrew and Margaret made it, thus establishing her as leader which led to disaster. But at the end of the film, Andrew seeks her out and makes the proposal for real marriage this time, promising to be a leader she can give to and receive in return.

Knowing

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This is a story of a widowed astronomy professor played by Nicolas Cage, who has a young son that receives upon a cryptic pattern of numbers from a grade school “time capsule” written by a young school girl fifty years earlier. Cage stumbles upon the key to the numbers as a prophecy of important disasters around the world and their death tolls for the next fifty years up until this very year, when it indicates everyone will die in the last catasrophe. He soon realizes that it is a prophecy of the end of the world that will occur from a freak solar super flare that will burn up all life on earth.

The story is Cage’s spiritual journey from one of unbelief to belief in a purposeful meaning to life. I am careful not to add “God” in the equation, because even though the movie uses Christian concepts and imagery, I believe a convincing argument can be made that the movie is ultimately a humanistic demythologizing of the Faith similar to what Stargate and Planet of the Apes did.

The story begins with Cage unable to get over his wife’s recent death. He masks his own unbelief when he tells his son that he never said there was no heaven, “but if you want to believe there is a heaven and mom is there, that’s fine.” Of course Cage’s statements about the size of the universe and how “we are all alone” indicates his real belief and we soon see him in class addressing the classic question of randomness versus determinism in the universe. He brings up the galaxy and the anthropic principle of how life is so finely tuned to the precision of the universe that some people say this indicates a purposeful design. When he concludes with the other view he indicates that it may all be chance, “the result of a complex yet inevitable string of complex biological mutations. There is no grand meaning, there is no purpose.” It’s clear, the death of his wife has brought him to this conclusion and when a student asks him what he thinks, he says, “I think shit just happens,” indicating his despair.

We also learn that Cage is estranged from his pastor father because of his father’s religious beliefs. Cage tells his sister not to pray for him. Meanwhile, Cage’s son, Caleb is being stalked by strange men in trenchcoats, as if they are waiting for just the right time. When Cage figures out the prophecy is about the solar super flare, he calls his religious pastor father and talks about the gift of prophecy and that the end is near. Cage brings his son to a safe place, only to discover the trenchcoat beings are angels, with what appears to be wings who shed their human disguise, and come from an object that resembles the spinning wheels of Ezekiel’s visions in the Bible (This Ezekiel passage is clearly referenced in the film). We hear the kid explain that he and others are “chosen” to be taken away to start a new world. “Only the chosen can go. Those who heard the call.” Obvious New Testament language. We then see Caleb and other children from around the earth “raptured” off the earth as the solar super flare burns up all life in an apocalyptic “judgment” scenario reminiscent of Revelation.

Cage explains that he now believes and knows that he will be in heaven with mom and Caleb someday. He drives out to his parent’s home, makes his reconciliation with them. Dad says, “This isn’t the end, son.” Cage replies, “I know,” and he is now spiritually reunited as they burn up in a ball of fire. We then see Caleb and another little girl arrive on a pristine new planet like an adolescent Adam and Eve and run over to a huge tree that is an obvious metaphor of the tree of life in the Garden of Eden spoken about in the Book of Revelation at the end of the world. At least this is what one interpretation of the Bible says it means. Anyway, the Christian imagery is blatant throughout the film, making this an outright Christian metaphor.

But is it a Christian worldview? Or is it a humanistic demythologizing of Christianity? I think that there is enough indication for one to argue that the “angels” were actually aliens in physical starships just as Stargate argued, making religion a superstitious interpretation of scientific facts. This of course is a very common cliché in movies ever since the book “Chariots of the Gods” in the 1970s that posited that the angelic manifestations in the Bible were actually “ancient astronauts” in flying saucers that were misinterpreted by ignorant religious people as spiritual beings. The fact that the “angels” in Knowing are in very physical spaceships seems to indicate this secularizing demythologizing. But of course, one may argue that it is simply the same “wheels within wheels” that Ezekiel saw in his heavenly vision (and pointed out in the movie), making it ultimately biblical. I think there is just enough ambiguity for either interpretation.

In the DVD special features a documentary about apocalypticism in history addresses it as an element of all religions and an anthropological phenomenon of coding society’s fear. An anthropologist claims that the nuclear age created the “Rapture theory” in the Bible and birthed the UFO craze out of our social fears. They try to show commonalities in all religions regarding the deity and destructive identity of the sun and then explain the scientific possibility of solar super flares. They end on the “alien mythology” of aliens bringing us out of our self destruction to give us another chance, so the documentary at least is more a demythologizing than a scientific support for religious belief.

The Director, Alex Proyas seems to deny the imagery used in the film as being exclusively Christian. He explains on the director’s commentary that to him, the Christian mythology in the film is a part of our cultural imagery, but are more symbolic shorthand for a “bigger story” of humanity coming to peace with its mortality and finding hope beyond it. Anthropologized faith. Proyas addresses the presence of physical spaceships in the film as aliens and that the Ezekiel vision would be exactly how an ancient religious person would interpret an alien. Proyas, claims he is definitely showing the religious impulse as an interpretation of scientific reality, yet was deliberately making it ambiguous so that anyone could bring their own interpretation to the imagery. When the interviewer exclaims that the religious interpretation (over the alien science one) is the central image of the story, Proyas balks and says that that is what the interviewer brought to the film, rather than the film exhibiting.

For Proyas, the meaning lies in Cage’s son surviving him as the hope of how we survive our mortality. Humanistic demythology. Proyas wanted the movie to be relative in its meaning to the viewer. He explicitly says he deliberately wanted the imagery to be ambiguous so that they could be interpreted as either angels or aliens. Angels or Aliens? You decide.