Movies

2012

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In this end of the world story, we follow John Cusack trying to save his estranged family along with a few others all over the world, before the earth’s crust shifts and destroys all life with tsunamis after the planets all align (Anybody remember the predictions of the Jupiter Effect back in 1982? — 2.0). Interesting how there has been a spate of end of the world movies in the last few years, such as The Day After Tomorrow, Knowing, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Road, and The Happening. Although I would say that these kind of disaster stories are in our DNA, because they continue to come up through all of history. One is reminded of all the parallel Flood stories in Mesopotamia, Sumer and Babylon as well as the Hebrew version of Noah’s Ark. Whether one believes they are legends or history, they all reflect our inherent need to face our mortality and values in life. There’s something about facing imminent and unavoidable mass destruction that makes you reevaluate what you are wasting of your life, and the need for change, repentance.

The obvious literal parallel of Noah’s ark is in 2012, as they build 7 huge arks to save important rich people who can pay their way with Euros (since dollars are not as trustworthy), along with a bunch of animals and important art works. The Ark concept was used in Knowing and The Day the Earth Stood Still. But interestingly, whereas the two “Day” movies and The Happening impute some environmentalist blame on mankind for causing it, 2012 does not because it is a huge influx of neutrinos from the sun that boils the earth’s core and causes the shift in poles and “earth crust displacement,” not unlike continental drift only really really quick. Regardless of this lack of moral blame, the movie still exalts a kind of nature worship that displaces supernatural religion with a humanistic naturalistic “we are all children of the earth” substitute. Here is how it does this:

There are all kinds of religious references in the film, from people praying to the cliché kook holding a “The End is Near” sign. A kooky but correct “Art Bell” character explains, “It’s the apocalypse, the end of days, like the Hopi Indians saw, the I Ching, even the Bible – kinda.” Kinda? There is a reference to the supposed Mayan calendar prediction to the year. But like all good humanistic subversions, the point is to undermine those religious images with a new humanistic definition. Thus, we see massive symbols of religion all over the world being destroyed, from a Tibetan monastery in the mountains, to the Rio de Janeiro Jesus statue to a long sequence of the Vatican being crumbled into dust and flames along with St. Peter’s and the Sistine Chapel. The extended detail and lingering on this particular Vatican destruction seems to illustrate an extra hatred and intolerance for this Christian religion by the filmmaker. The cracking of the Sistine ceiling goes right through the hands of God and Adam in the Creation of Adam, “splitting man from God,” a symbolic statement of this event. Interestingly, the director was too fearful of a fatwa being put on his head, so he avoided showing the destruction of any Islamic holy places, probably the only reason why he didn’t show the destruction of Jerusalem, since the Islamic Mosque resides in the heart of the Jerusalem Temple area. Evidently, Emmerich saved his hatred and violence for the peaceful religions that would not murder him for attacking them. When the US president gets on TV and tells the world, “We are one family stepping into the darkness together,” he begins to pray the 23rd Psalm, but is cut off before he can get past the first sentence. Another expression of the powerlessness of his Christian faith.

The central struggle in the film is the contrast of values of survival and self-sacrifice, as we see various versions of each worldview battling with each other through the different characters. The prominent one being a scientist and a Whitehouse politician from America. The politician exposes the cold reality why the government didn’t tell the people to prepare, because “Our mission is to assure the continuity of our species,” and of course if they told everyone, there would be mass pandemonium and anarchy, which would result in no one getting saved (and pandemonium does in fact, happen). As he says, “What did you think, the world’s going to sit around and join hands and sing Kumbaya?” The scientist thinks everyone should know the truth so they have time to face their demise together to comfort one another and ask for forgiveness. This is a good ethical conflict because both sides contain an equal amount of truth that causes us to think through values in conflict.

The politician says, “Nature will choose from itself by itself who will survive,” as they are about to push on without letting a crowd of people into the arks because there is not enough time or room to do so. And the scientist makes the thematic statement of the film, “To be human means to care for each other. Can we stand and watch each other die? The moment we stop fighting to save each other is the moment we lose our humanity. Everyone out there has died in vain if we start a new future with an act of cruelty” (namely leaving the extra crowds of people behind). This statement, coming as it does from a scientist as the symbol of nobility, embodies the storyteller’s view of the moral conscience residing in science rather than religion. This reflects the common modern worldview that believes religion is powerless, and then promotes morality without religion through a scientific viewpoint, which is all rather problematic, since science provides no foundation for morality. Only the religions that have been deconstructed or destroyed by the storyteller provide that transcendent basis for such a value system.

The Road

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A dark bleak view of humanity with a sliver of hope. This faithful adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel has an unnamed man and his unnamed son (thus suggesting a mythic narrative) in a very different kind of road trip movie. They are traveling south to the Eastern coast in a post-apocalyptic America, trying to find “the good guys” in a world of human gangs turned cannibals through survival of the fittest. No food left, not even animals to eat, due to some unnamed global catastrophe that reflects more of global cooling than global warming. They are surrounded by earthquakes, erupted volcanoes, burned up forests, and increasing coldness. There is no real plot to this story of father and son moving from one nihilistic situation to another, from one gang of cannibals to another, interrupted by stretches of travelling, again, very faithful to the book, and actually captivating in it’s touch on primal drives and primal relations.

It’s really a character study of father and son, as son learns the values of survival while maintaining that shred of human value in the midst of a world without values. As the father answers his son’s question about whether or not they would eat humans, “we wouldn’t eat anyone, cause we’re the good guys and we’re carrying the fire within.” That reflects the very simple black and white morality of the story, as some critics might suggest is a “Manichean view of good and evil.” Good guys who love and help others, and bad guys who eat others.

There is a thread of religious thought through the film which also is faithful to the book, sometimes to the exact words. At the beginning we see them pass a billboard with the graffiti of a bible verse from Jeremiah: “Behold the valley of slaughter.” Stories just tend to feel more “deep” when they reference Bible verses, especially in King James language. Anyway, the religion seems to be one of a replacement of God with humanity as the object of true worship. The father says some esoteric things like, “the child is my warrant” [to carry on]. “If the child is not the word of God, then God never spoke.” And another time about the child to an old man travelling companion: “To me, he’s a god.” To which the old man says, “To be on the road with the last god is a dangerous situation.” When the son asks his father. “How would the last man alive know he was the last man?” The father responds, “God would know.” The old man then says, “There is no God up there,” in this godforsaken world. But the father responds to his son quietly, “If I were God, I would have made the world just so, and not any different. And so I have you.” This would seem to suggest that the father has a view of a providential God who somehow mysteriously, and without giving us the answers, works through suffering. In a way one could read this as an affirmation of God in the midst of such suffering.

But I am not sure that is the point for the filmmakers. After all, God is replaced by the son for this man. The father puts all his hope in his son surviving to find the good guys and live with them. The son becomes the father’s hope, and God appears to be a metaphor for that hope. So when they stumble upon a survival shelter filled with foodstuffs, they pray (including the gesture of folded hands) not to God, but to the people. “Thank you, people,” they mumble, which certainly doesn’t reflect the Judeo-Christian attribution of all blessings to God, whether received through men or not. I suspect God and religion in this story is a picture of an optimistic mythic construct to help keep a person going — a metaphor for “human goodness,” which is all rather ironic, considering the bulk of humanity is out to eat them like packs of animals following an evolutionary ethic of survival. But it appears that the story contains that humanistic optimism in the goodness of man, that no matter how bad the world can get, there will always be some good people seeking to do right. The only question is: Whose right? By what standard is their right any more right than the cannibal’s right? Is their sense of right rooted in subjective humanity with its equal and opposite extremes of cruelty and mercy, or an external objective deity to whom man is accountable? Is that God hiding in the suffering or is he a metaphor for humanity creating its own values in a world without meaning? I am not sure what the story is really suggesting, but I suspect it is the latter.

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.