True Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lincoln

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Oscar winning performance in a dreadfully B-O-R-I-N-G Movie. Daniel-Day is superb. Warm, human, weak, but a great and noble “man of the ages”. He brings Lincoln to life. The writing for his character and Tommy Lee Jones’s Stevens was brilliant. The rest of it was BORING political procedural. Did I say Boring already?

OMG, I wanted to leave after the first 15 minutes. But I stayed, so you don’t have to. Don’t worry, you’re not a racist if you don’t see this movie. You’re just a moviegoer that wants a good story.

The entire dramatic question of the story is “Will Lincoln get the votes he needs to secure the 13th Amendment?” The moral dilemma was that Lincoln was told he could have peace or the Amendment, but he could not have both. But he sought for both on moral conviction. And the movie is taken up with the completely uninteresting storyline — attempting to be interesting by adding the brilliant cynicism of James Spader and cohorts as the first lobbyists — of trying to convince each and every man to vote for the Amendment.

Look, of course, this is a truly important and truly noble part of history that we all need to know about. And I’m sure it works well in the original historical political book. BUT A MOVIE IS NOT THE PLACE TO TRY TO EDUCATE US LIKE THIS. We want humanity, emotion, human drama, and this movie only delivers snatches of that humanity buried under boring political procedures. Let me say, that I actually LOVE political intrigue in movies. Braveheart, Gladiator, Rob Roy, and others only work as epics because of the court intrique and machinations. Game of Thrones and The Borgias are entirely about such things, and they all work just fine. But only because they are engorged with the human drama of the main players. The political intrigue embodies the personal conflicts AND is NOT focused on the details of the political procedures. In contrast, this movie is an endless litany of unknown men and their unknown faces being “persuaded” to vote, interspersed with Lincoln and his men talking about those unknown men and all their unknown details, interspersed with some very cool movie moments of Lincoln telling stories, ending with a complete roll call of E-V-E-R-Y S-I-N-G-L-E V-O-T-E in the House. Look, I know Spielberg thinks it is historically important to “call out” those who voted for and against, but that means he has capitulated to using movies as a political tool for indoctrination (regardless of how worthy the cause is). It’s a movie, for goodness’ sake, not an original forensic document. We don’t want to hear and see each and every vote, we want to know “what happens next.” Oh, look at me, trying to lecture the great Steven Spielberg. I’ll stop now.

But my point is that Spielberg tried to make this very much like an updated Frank Capra movie. Of course, he’s done so in its beautiful look and feel, but not in soul. It is not enough to have a couple brilliant characters, you must have a brilliant storyline, and sadly, Lincoln does not. He should learn how to do it right from his own Amistad. That movie brought it. This movies blows it.

To be fair there were several VERY human and powerful moments that moved me to a tear, and that much I’ll gladly admit. A very unique scene where Lincoln’s son forgoes the cliché scene of visiting the war wounded to see their hacked up bodies, but instead follows a cart to find the pile of severed limbs being buried. Whoah. Lincoln taking time to talk to black soldiers and to common men to get their advice. Awesome. One scene of Lincoln struggling with his wife Mary over her manic troubles was truly sympathetic yet honest, and captured that suffering in both their lives. And an amazing last scene of the movie when Tommy Lee Jones as Stevens brings home the actual bill passed by the House. It was a beautiful surprise revelation that made the movie. But of course, Jones owned the movie, even more than Lewis, but that is because he had the strongest character arc that embodied the theme and meaning of the movie: You must subjugate your personal convictions to negotiation if you are to achieve the public good in a democracy. And this is NOT moral compromise or lack of character, but rather our responsibility as humans in a divided world of imperfection. Lincoln had already accepted this before the movie began (which is why he is not as interesting a protagonist), but Tommy Lee, as the chief “extremist Pro-Lifer” – whoops, I mean Abolitionist, — was the one whose journey to finally give up his “radical” absolutist stance in order to actually bring about good in the world of the abolition of slavery. The “all or nothing” mentality is actually irresponsible and of low moral character in a democracy.

This is why the movie really should have been titled, “The 13th Amendment” and a story about the journey of Jones’s Thaddeus Stevens’ goal to abolish slavery, only to realize his own human weaknesses and his need to bend to his fellow humans in order to bring change and peace.

I have to say I was impressed by the fact that Spielberg, a well-known leftist in Hollywood, actually told a story where he openly revealed the Democrats as the bad guys. And he didn’t do the usual of turning it around and making the Republicans the bad guys. He showed that the Democratic Party was the party of slavery and racism, and the Republican Party was the party created to stop slavery. Of course, there were nuances that he dealt with as well which also made it more even handed (Not all Republicans were radical abolitionists, and some Democrats did vote for the Amendment, they were needed to win after all).

But regardless, I think this movie has enough in it for both sides to see their own biases affirmed, which actually makes it pretty fairly done. No doubt, the Republicans will see in it the affirmation of their pro-life struggle, and the Democrats as the party of slavery and racism. They will point to this dark underbelly as reflective of what has been ignored in education and the media, along with the Democratic Party’s history as the origin and membership of the KKK, and the main force behind Jim Crow laws and against the early Civil Rights movement (See here). And also no doubt, the Democrats will see it as an affirmation of their gay marriage laws struggle as well as a justification for Obama’s Executive Decisions to avoid accountability to the legislative branch (because of perceived righteousness of cause), as well as his antipathy to State’s rights.

But I think all this simply means that the movie Lincoln pretty accurately captured the universal political struggles that never change through history and keep repeating themselves in the endless struggle of a divided population.

But did it have to be so BORING?

Darren Aronofsky’s Noah: Environmentalist Wacko

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Okay, here is the full article I wrote analyzing the Noah script. More here than where it was published online.

By Brian Godawa

As a screenwriter of films like To End All Wars and Alleged which deal with faith, and as the author of a novel called Noah Primeval about what led up to the Great Flood, I am especially conscious of issues relating to the intersection of Hollywood and the Bible and I’ve been keeping tabs on a film that lives at that intersection, a film called Noah, written by Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel. I’ve also watched with great anticipation as a post-Passion of The Christ Hollywood tries to come to grips with how to reach the massive faith-friendly audience and I’m concerned about the phenomenon that I see, which is films being developed for that audience by people who don’t understand it and are thus destined to fail. Then when they do fail, as expected, smug Hollywood executives declare “See, that audience doesn’t really exist.” I don’t want that to keep happening. I want films to be properly developed so that they can succeed. It is in that spirit that I offer my analysis of Aronofsky and Handel’s Noah script. I believe that it’s never too late to right a ship that is heading in the wrong direction.

Having got a chance to read an undated version of the script for Noah I want to warn you. If you were expecting a Biblically faithful retelling of the story of the greatest mariner in history and a tale of redemption and obedience to God you’ll be sorely disappointed. Noah paints the primeval world of Genesis 6 as scorched arid desert, dry cracked earth, and a gray gloomy sky that gives no rain – and all this, caused by man’s “disrespect” for the environment. In short, an anachronistic doomsday scenario of ancient global warming. How Neolithic man was able to cause such anthropogenic catastrophic climate change without the “evil” carbon emissions of modern industrial revolution is not explained. Nevertheless, humanity wanders the land in nomadic warrior tribes killing animals for food or wasteful trophies.

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In this oppressive world, Noah and his family seek to avoid the crowds and live off the land. Noah is a kind of rural shaman, and vegan hippy-like gatherer of herbs. Noah explains that his family “studies the world,” “healing it as best we can,” like a kind of environmentalist scientist. But he also mysteriously has the fighting skills of an ancient Near Eastern Ninja (Hey, it’s a movie, give it a break).

Noah maintains an animal hospital to take care of wounded animals or those who survive the evil “poachers,” of the land. Just whose animal rights laws they are violating, I am not sure, since there are only fiefdoms of warlords and tribes. Be that as it may, Noah is the Mother Teresa of animals.

Though God has not spoken to men or angels for a long time, Noah is haunted by recurring dreams of a rainstorm and flood that he surmises is God’s judgment on man because as Noah says, “At our hand, all he created is dying.” The trees, the animals, and the environment. “If we change, if we work to save it, perhaps he will too [save us].” Or as grandfather Methuselah reiterates, “We have destroyed this world, so we ourselves will be destroyed. Justice.” Oh, and I almost forgot, they kill people too, but it’s not really as important. In another place, “We have murdered each other. We raped the world. The Creator has judged us.” The notion of human evil is more of an afterthought or symptom of the bigger environmental concern of the great tree hugger in the sky.

Noah seeks advice from his grandfather, Methuselah, the oldest man alive, who lives in a cave. Unfortunately for fighting pacifist Noah, he has to go through the Watcher’s Land to get there. The Watchers are angels who came down from heaven to help fallen humanity by granting them wonders of knowledge from magic to science to stars, metal, and fire. But when mankind turned that knowledge into weapons of war and tools of environmental devastation, God banished the Watchers to earth and turned his back on them. Now, they reside as 18-feet tall, six-armed grumpy angelic complainers who resent mankind.

Through tricky movie dialogue, Noah convinces the Watchers to help him and he receives a magic seed from Methuselah that blooms a magical forest in the desert. It’s really a quite imaginative and powerful scene that shows God’s miraculous provision. Noah uses this timber to build his boat (Wait a second. Wouldn’t that make him an evil clear cutting lumberjack?). So the Watchers help him build the craft. Followed by another beautiful sequence of a magical thread of water that spreads out from the forest into all the world that calls the animals two by two to come to the ark.

Like a magical Mesopotamian Dr. Doolittle, Noah has the ability to “lead” the animals peacefully into the ark as they come from every corner of the earth. And yes, even the insects. Well, they finish building the ark, the rains start, the evil mobs try to get on the ark, but the Watchers fight them off, blah, blah, blah, movie action and we are at the midpoint of the movie, with Noah and his family on the ark, weathering out the flood.

What Noah doesn’t know is that evil warlord Akkad snuck his way into the boat and plans to kill all the men and rape all the wives to start civilization as his own brood of evil minions.

Meanwhile, Noah has himself become a bit psychotic, like an environmentalist or animal rights activist who concludes that people do not deserve to survive because of what they’ve done to the environment and to animals. Noah deduces that God’s only reason for his family on the boat is to shepherd the animals to safety, “and then mankind disappears. It would be a better world.” He concludes that there will be no more births in this family so that when they start over in the new world, they will eventually die out, leaving the animals in a humanless paradise of ecoharmony and peace. As Noah says, “The creatures of the earth, the world itself, shall be safe.” (Except for slamming intergalactic meteors, non-anthropocentric global warming, ice ages, sun spots, volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and that “survival of the fittest,” eat-or-be-eaten thing. But other than that… “safe.”)

His ethical reasoning? The same as all environmentalist activists: The ends justify the means. “We must weigh those [human] lives against all creation.” Shades of Malthus and Al Gore.

There’s only one problem. One of the women on the ark is pregnant, and Noah decides that if it is a boy, it can live, but if it is a girl, he must kill it. We can’t have more of those nasty little virus-like humans swarming the earth. So most of the last half of the script is a family killer thriller like Sleeping With the Enemy, that asks the dark dramatic movie question “will Noah kill the child if it is a girl or not?” Ancient sex-selection infanticide.

The woman gives birth to twin girls, and Noah gets all the way up to killing not one but two female infants, after killing evil meat-eating Akkad. But in the end, he fails. He says “to himself, to the Creator,” “I can’t. I can’t do it. I am sorry. I am so sorry.” He is just too compassionate to carry out God’s cruel plan. Noah is more loving than God.

The denouement shows a miserable drunken Noah with his growing family of future earth-killing grandchildren being told by his daughter-in-law to teach them “about the world around them and how to live in it.” Because, “Maybe if you give them your wisdom they will do better with their world than we did with ours.”

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CREATIVE LICENSE

It is no secret that Aronofsky set out to make a political propaganda piece for environmentalism. He said so himself to entertainment reporters:

“It’s about environmental apocalypse which is the biggest theme, for me, right now for what’s going on on this planet. So I think it’s got these big, big themes that connect with us. Noah was the first environmentalist.” (see here: SlashFilm.com)

Before analyzing the message of this story, we need to get a few things straight. First off, there is nothing wrong with retelling stories of the past to highlight an issue in the present. In fact, pretty much all period pieces do this. The King’s Speech was about more than courage to do public speaking, it was about standing up to global terrorism. The Crucible was about more than the Salem Witch Trials, it was a metaphor for McCarthyism. Heck, even the Bible does it. It’s the way we writers write. We interpret the present through the past and the past through the present. But is our analogy or metaphor legitimate and germane to the original meaning? Or is it a distortion akin to making someone say the opposite of what they actually said?

Secondly, there is nothing wrong with engaging in creative license, whether it is magical seeds or six-armed Watchers, or even Noah as a warrior. I don’t even think there is a problem in using non-biblical sources like the Book of Enoch or the Sumerian version of the Flood story, where unlike in the Bible, Noah receives dreams about the coming Deluge. The question is, does it support the spirit or meaning of the original story, or the original author’s intent. Bible believing Christians do not necessarily own this category of Biblical interpretation. The Bible doesn’t say what vocation Noah had before the Flood, only what he was afterward (a tiller of the soil). So if a Christian attacks the notion of Noah as a warrior shaman, he may really be illustrating his own cultural prejudice of the notion of a white bearded old farmer which is not in the Bible either. Saying “That didn’t happen on the ark,” is sheer ignorance because nobody knows what happened on the ark, because it wasn’t written down! Hyper-literalists are too often ignorant of their own unbiblical notions.

On the other hand, postmodernists fancy playing God and changing the meaning of texts to suit their agenda because they believe language creates reality. Therefore, it’s okay to “make the Bible say what we want it to say.” This is manipulative narcissistic nonsense, but that doesn’t change the fact that understanding the original intent is not always easy. All authors unavoidably bring some of their own meaning to the text. The real question is: Does the creative license or embellishment serve the meaning or theme intended in the original story or does it twist it into an alien meaning against the original story, a favorite propaganda tactic of postmoderns, leftists, and radicals.

Was Noah the first environmentalist and animal rights activist? Was the moral failure of man in Genesis, disrespect for the environment? Was that why God completely destroyed the environment and killed all of the animals of the land except those on the ark?

Of course not.

THE THEME

First, let me say that no Christian that I am aware of believes that we should carelessly pollute the environment and kill animals without concern for the consequences of our actions. Those kind of accusations are straw man caricatures from ignorant anti-Christian bigotry. The Bible itself is where we get the notion of being responsible stewards of the earth. Genesis 2:15 says that God put man in the Garden “to work it and keep it.” The basic meaning of the Hebrew text is to exercise great care while cultivating it. If anything, Adam was the first conservationist, not environmentalist, because he was to work the land, use human planning to overcome the thorns and thistles of nature. Which brings us to the next command that God also gives to mankind relating to the environment.

And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:28)

The Hebrew words for subduing the earth and having dominion are military terms of conquest. So, we see that man is to use his technological insights to forcefully harness the wild and chaotic forces of animals and the environment to bring them into good use. This is not a command to pollute or pillage the earth, but neither is it a subordination of man as a servant of the earth. The earth was made for man, not man for the earth, unlike pagan earth religion or environmental extremism, which claims that man is made for the earth, not the earth for man.

Because the Bible was the first in history to divest nature from deity, it argued that nature is NOT a personal being or filled with animistic spirits or a part of deity. This was the foundation of technological progress that brought about a better world of extended life spans, modern science and medicine, travel, better food production, and much more. If nature is impersonal, then we are justified in harnessing it for human good. But that is not a call to exploitation as previous verses explained. The Law of God even had rules for treating beasts of burden humanely (Ex 20:10; Deut 25:4; Prov 12:10) But they were still beasts of burden for human use. Because humanity is in the image of God, animals are not.

Having defended responsible conservation of the environment, nevertheless, I have to say that the movie script for Noah is deeply anti-Biblical in it’s moral vision. While the Bible commands mankind to “work and keep” the garden of earth as its stewards, the sin that brought about the judgment of the Flood was NOT violence against the environment as depicted in the script, it was violence against God and his image in man. That’s no minor difference.

The thread of evil that leads from the Garden to the Waters began with Cain’s murder of Abel, which was considered the ultimate violence against the image of God that mankind was created in (Gen 1:27). This was because God accepted Abel’s sacrifice but not Cain’s. So the violence was based on sacred relationship with God himself. It wasn’t the ground that cried out to God, it was Abel’s blood that cried out to God for justice. Lamech then follows this pattern in killing a young man and boasting about it (Gen 4:23-24). The lineage of Cain eventually dies out and God replaces Abel’s lineage with a new Seth, son of Adam, “in his likeness, after his image” (Gen 5:3).

In Genesis 6 we read about mankind multiplying on the face of the earth. The Sons of God, angelic beings from God’s heavenly host, mate with the daughters of men to give birth to giants. Okay, this is very weird and wild to contemplate, and I don’t have time to explain it in detail here. You’ll have to read my book Noah Primeval to find out more. But suffice it to say that the main meaning here is that the heavenly beings violated a holy separation of mankind from divinity (Jude 6-7; 2Pet 2:4-10). This mixing of “images” reflects man’s perennial pursuit of trying to attain godlike status. Remember the Original Sin in the Garden? “You will be like God!” said the Serpent (who was strangely absent from the Garden of Eden in the Noah script). Man is seeking to become like God by his power over life and by his constant pursuit of divine prerogative or power. This will continue through to the Tower of Babel incident as well, when mankind tries to build a temple tower that connects heaven and earth.

The Bible then says that Noah, however was righteous, and he was “pure in his generation” (Gen 6:9). The implication here is that Noah is not merely walking with God as an obedient follower, but that he is not part of that corrupted miscegenation of angelic and human cohabitation and hybridization. Again, the image of God undefiled.

By the time God says that the wickedness of man is so great on the earth (6:5), and that the “earth was corrupt in God’s sight and the earth was filled with violence” (6:11) there is absolutely nothing that has been said about man treating the environment with violence. It is completely about violence against the image of God and rebellion against God himself, not the environment. As Near Eastern scholar Tikva Frymer-Kensky explains, the concept of the earth being “corrupted” or “polluted” was a theological expression of how man’s sin against God’s image makes man’s very physical inhabitation religiously “unclean.” The earth had a physical impurity akin to the profane abominations that defiled the land of Canaan:

In the biblical worldview, the murders before the flood contaminated the land and created a state of physical pollution which had to be eradicated by physical means (the flood). Although this concept may seem strange to us, it is not surprising to find it here in the cosmology of Israel, for Israel clearly believed that moral wrongdoings defile physically. This is explicitly stated with three sins — murder, idolatry, and sexual abominations. (Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “The Atrahasis Epic And Its Significance For Our Understanding Of Genesis 1-9,” Biblical Archaeologist, December 1977, 147-155.)

And after the flood, the image of God is again offered as God’s basis for establishing capital punishment as his primary concern in justice, not the environment (Gen 9:6). Shedding man’s blood in murder would now require just recompense of capital punishment. In the primeval history of Genesis what God cares about keeping sacred and invaluable is his image in man. And the murder and violation of that image of God is what pollutes the earth, not the other way around. As Frymer-Kensky concludes, The author(s) of Genesis wrote about the Flood “to illuminate fundamental Israelite ideas, i.e., the biblical ideals that law and the ‘sanctity of human life’ are the prerequisites of human existence upon the earth.”

In the script Noah, what God cares about is the environment, not so much man. As Noah reveals, “The world squirms beneath our foot, a poisoned husk. The Creator sees this, He mourns it, and will tolerate it no longer. He would annihilate all in an instant than watch this creeping rot… We must treat the world with mercy so that the Creator will show us mercy.”

Turning the tale of Noah into an environmentalist screed and animal rights diatribe does violence to the Biblical meaning and turns it into something entirely alien to the original meaning of the text. Admittedly, the script does include murder and violence against man as an additional “evil,” but this is secondary in the story. The primary sin of the script Noah is man’s violence against the environment. Which is kind of contradictory, don’t you think? Claiming that God destroys the entire environment because man was — well, destroying the environment?

And how in the world was Neolithic man able to destroy his environment and cause global warming anyway? Exactly where did the carbon emissions come from? Fred Flintstone SUVs? Industrial campfire smokestacks? The number of people on the planet in that distant age would have less impact on the climate than bison farts. It’s really quite ludicrous, but inadvertently hints at the historical and scientific fact that far greater global warming and cooling cycles have occurred in the past without man. It’s quite natural. Consider it the Circle of Life.

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PSYCHO NOAH

Perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of the Aronofsky/Handel script is its portrayal of God in the moral worldview of Noah. I’m not talking about the fact that Noah is sinful in the movie or that he gets drunk. That is in the Bible. That’s not the problem. The problem is that Noah is depicted as attempting to follow God’s will in the script, a will that includes the complete annihilation of the human race, as opposed to the Genesis depiction of starting over with eight humans to repopulate and ultimately provide a Messiah.

Someone could well make the argument that Noah’s journey is one of realizing that his zeal for his environmental and animal rights cause has gone too far, and that he finally realizes that killing people is too extreme. There must be a balance of interests. In one scene, Japheth accidentally kills a lizard that will now die out because it was only one of two. Noah explodes in rage upon his son for his carelessness. Then he repents and realizes that “the same wickedness is in all of us.”

But I am skeptical of this “balance of interests” interpretation of the script. Noah does not have a revelation that he has made animals more important than humans, rather he has “realized” that the evil against animals is in all of them, such as his son. Then the very next thing he concludes is that there will be no wives on the ark and they are not going to repopulate humanity after the Flood. He says, “As long as there are men, creation is not safe.” Add to this, the fact that the animals aboard the ark help Noah to pin down his family so he can kill the infant girls. That clearly supports the notion of God being behind it all.

Also, at the end, when psycho Noah realizes that he cannot kill the baby girl to stop the human race, the reason is not because he realized he was too extreme against humans, but because he was too weak to follow through with God’s commands and his “higher cause” of genocide. This Humanistic worldview certainly tugs at the heartstrings of our hubris. Man’s weakness of compassion makes him superior to God.

Killing all humans but eight in order to start over (As the Bible portrays) may seem harsh to our thoroughly Modern Millie minds, but it reaffirms that Image of God in Man that gives man value despite the evil. God always saves a remnant of the righteous in order to bring about his Messianic plan of redemption. In Noah, man has no higher value than the animals and the environment. Noah wants to get rid of us all and return the environment to its pristine condition untouched by the presence of man. What is so disturbing is that this motivation to violence is exactly the worldview of many extremist leaders of environmentalism. Here are some documented samples of their human hate speech and dog whistles to violence:

“Christianity is our foe. If animal rights is to succeed we must destroy the Judeo Christian religious tradition.”
(Australian philosopher Peter Singer, the “Father of Animal Rights.”)

“If you’ll give the idea a chance… you might agree that the extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions if not billions of other Earth-dwelling species.”
(The Voluntary Extinction Movement, quoted by Daniel Seligman in “Down With People,” in Fortune magazine, September 23, 1991)

“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable, but a good thing…”
(Editorial in The Economist, December 28, 1988)

“Man is no more important than any other species… It may well take our extinction to set things straight.”
(David Foreman, Earth First! spokesman, quoted by M. John Fayhee in Backpacker magazine, September 1988, pg. 22)

“We are not interested in the utility of a particular species, or free-flowing river, or ecosystem to mankind. They have… more value – to me – than another human body, or a billion of them… Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.”
(David M. Graber, National Park Service biologist, in a review of Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 22, 1989, pg. 9)

“I got the impression that instead of going out to shoot birds, I should go out and shoot the kids who shoot birds.”
(Paul Watson, a founder of Greenpeace, quoted in Access to Energy Vol.17 No.4, December 1989)

“We, in the Green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which the killing of a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year old children to Asian brothels.”
(Carl Amery of the Green Party, quoted in Mensch & Energie, April 1983)

This violent hatred of humanity that is displayed in the movie script of Noah also seems to emanate from significant quarters of the environmentalist movement. But ironically, it is logically inevitable that if you deny the image of God in Man, and you elevate the environment over humanity, then you will inevitably wish to eliminate humanity for a better environment.

THE WATCHERS

Another significant deviation from Biblical truth in the Noah script is the identity of the Watchers. In the script, they are portrayed as misunderstood rebels who, like Noah, also are more compassionate than God. It seems everyone in this story is more compassionate than God.

As previously indicated, the Watchers of Biblical fame are Sons of God, or angelic beings who violated God’s separation of the heavenly and the earthly, and mated with human women (Gen 6:1-4; Num 13:32-33; Dan 4:13). The New Testament quotes from and paraphrases a non-canonical Jewish text called 1 Enoch that has retained a tradition of respect within Christian history (Jude; 2Pet 2:4-10). Though it is not considered Scripture, its picture of the fallen angels cohabiting with humans affirms the Biblical notion of these being rebel sorcerers, not well intentioned educators who get blamed for mankind’s misuse of good gifts.

Aronofsky apparently uses some of his notions of the Watchers from the book of 1 Enoch, such as the names of the angel Samyaza (1Enoch 6:3) and their act of revealing secrets to mankind as well as the idea that they helped Noah build the ark (67:2). But the script’s view is the opposite of the Biblical/Enochian view of the Watchers as rebels who reveal occultic forbidden secrets that are part of the reason why God sends the Flood.

There is one line of tradition in the pseudepigraphal book of Jubilees (chapter 10) that depicts the Watchers as teaching Noah their secrets of herbs and healing to counter the corruption caused by demons, but this is not the Biblical or Enochian view.

Also, the script seems to equate the Watchers with the giants, whereas in both Enoch and the Bible, the giants are the progeny of the Watchers uniting with human women. An additional use of the name Og for one of the Watchers reflects a muddled reference to an apocryphal Book of Giants that refers to the exploits of a giant Og at the time of the Flood.

NoahBookBanner4

FADE OUT

All in all, the script for Noah is an uninteresting and unbiblical waste of a hundred and fifty million dollars that will ruin for decades the possibility of making a really great and entertaining movie of this Bible hero beloved by billions of religious believers, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim. This movie will be rejected by millions of devoted Bible readers worldwide because once again it subverts their own sacred narrative with a political agenda of pagan earth religion that is offensive to their Faith. In a very real sense it engages in the very sin of the primeval history in Genesis: A denial of the image of God in man.

If Noah is released, and as I am predicting, does horrible numbers at the box office after being rejected by traditionalist Christians and Jews (in spite of the studio undoubtedly hiring faith-based marketing companies to spin it as “faithful”) as well as mainstream viewers who will instead choose whatever feel-good movie is in theaters that week, studio executives will gather in their suites on Monday morning and cluck about the elusive faith-based audience and how they never turn out for “their movies,” when it was in fact a movie made by someone outside of their community that was insulting, degrading and contrary to their deeply held beliefs and values.

Brian Godawa is the screenwriter for the award-winning feature film, To End All Wars, starring Kiefer Sutherland, and Alleged, starring Brian Dennehy and Fred Thompson and the author of Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films with Wisdom and Discernment. His most recent book is Word Pictures: Knowing God Through Story and Imagination. His new novel series, the Chronicles of the Nephilim is an imaginative retelling of the primeval history of Genesis, the secret plan of the fallen Watchers, and the War of the Seed of the Serpent with the Seed of Eve: www.ChroniclesoftheNephilim.com
The first book in the series is about Noah and the Ark, Noah Primeval available at Amazon.com.

Machine Gun Preacher

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Relativity Media
Directed by Marc Forster
Written by Jason Keller

From the opening scene of a Sudanese village pillaged by LRA terrorists who force children to kill their parents to the closing credit monologue of the real life Sam Childers’ plea to rescue the kidnapped Sudanese orphans by any means necessary, Machine Gun Preacher packs a punch to the gut of our moral conscience. And it does so with a nuanced spiritual and moral reasoning that challenges our American couch potato activism that prides itself in political debates over moral action. Oh, and did I say it involves Jesus?

Machine Gun Preacher is based on the true story of Sam Childers, a drug addicted motorcycle riding criminal who gets saved by Jesus and goes to help rescue the orphans of Sudan from kidnapping, enslavement, torture and murder by rebel terrorists.

The story begins with an unrepentant Sam being released from prison, telling the Guards to go “F” themselves. What “poor” Sam learns is that his faithful wife has found Jesus and quit her stripping job to lead a respectable god fearing life raising their daughter. And now she wants him to come to church. Needless to say, that pisses Sam off big time and launches him on a self-destructive raging crime spree of drugs, robbery, and violence. But he is brought to the end of himself and believe it or not, gives his life to Jesus, being baptized and getting a respectable job in construction. This ain’t your low key Tender Mercies.

One day, Sam hears about the church mission project of building churches in Uganda and he takes off to go see how he can help. What he discovers on his trip is an evil world more wicked than he even realized. Joseph Kony’s terrorist group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), crosses from Uganda into Sudan and burns down villages, kills adults, tortures those who speak out, and forces children to become soldiers in their terrorist group. The result is myriads of orphans without much help from anyone to protect them.

Well, as you can guess, this pisses off Sam, and he gets a vision from God one day to build a church on his property for street people rejected by “proper” churchgoers, as well as an orphanage in the Sudan to help the children. Once, his new orphanage is burnt to the ground, he starts over, but this time with a new spirit – or rather, an old spirit redeemed with a new purpose. He joins the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), a counterinsurgent militia that protects the oppressed children with lethal force. Thus the title Machine Gun Preacher. Sam clings to his God and his guns. And thus the tremendous moral tale that asks the questions worthy of the Good Book itself: “How far will you go to save helpless innocent human life?”; “How does God’s redemption apply in a violent world of evil run amok?”; “Is self defense morally justifiable in rescuing women and orphans?”

A Christian Movie?

I have to be honest, this movie contains in it what I usually criticize in a typical “Christian movie.” Big bad biker dude’s wife finds God, brings him to a corny red-bricked church and he accepts Jesus into his heart, “gets saved” and baptized, turns his life around, starts his own church, and helps the poor children, yada yada. Christian clichés and memes we are all too familiar with in the Christian world.

However, this movie is not a cliché Christian movie. It is a deeply moving honest portrayal of “muscular” Christian faith alive in the complex real world we live in that draws respect even from unbelievers. So why do I say that? What makes it different if it carries some of the very same elements of Christian movies?

Well, first off, let’s be honest that the most obvious major differences are good production values, good writing, good directing, and good acting, that is so absent from “Christian movies.” Now, I am not going to go on a Christian movie bashing binge. And I am not going to make digs at specifically named Christian movies (and you know who you are :-). As a matter of fact, I think in general, they are getting better in all these categories as the years press on. I have been a part of some mediocre movies as well, so I know how hard it is to make a good movie, period. But there are several things in the storytelling itself that I think make this film work where Christian movies approaching similar themes often do not. First, in its moral and spiritual honesty and second, in its portrayal of evil and redemption.

Moral Honesty

While the movie wrestles with the moral issue of how to rescue widows and orphans oppressed by murderers, it does not promote hero worship or give pat answers and it deals honestly with the moral ambiguity of violence as a means to an end that exists in the real world.

First off, the villains in the film are fairly represented. Though the bulk of the murdering done in Southern Sudan has been by Muslims against Christians, Joseph Kony, the leader of the LRA, claims to be a Christian. Now, this would be a perfect opportunity for the typical Hollywood politically correct spin to ignore the Muslim violence and paint it as a picture of “Christian” terrorism. But the movie does not do this. It tells us about the Muslim violence and then communicates that Kony claims to be a Christian, but is clearly not a Christian, but a wolf in wolf’s clothing, using the Christian God’s name in vain. The issues are just more complicated than knee jerk moral equivalency will allow.

The movie also struggles honestly with the issue of using violence to defend the innocent against violence. Rather than creating another left/right divide of the issue or pacifism versus warmongering, this story promotes action, yet questions itself with an ambiguous thoughtfulness. When Sam sees the evil of the LRA cutting off the lips of protestors or the mine field death of a little boy, he realizes that this kind of evil cannot be stopped except by force and draws upon his past violence to overcome it. But his past nature is redeemed by channeling it to do good. Other than unborn babies, can there be any more helpless victims in need of protection than these? Can a pacifist in good conscience actually choose to allow orphan children to be murdered instead of stopping their murder with lethal force? As the Bible says, killing in self-defense is morally justifiable (Exodus 22:2-3) and rescuing widows and orphans from the wicked is commanded (Jeremiah 22:3; Psalm 82:4; Proverbs 24:11).

But neither does the movie degenerate into a bloodfest of vicarious catharsis of violent joy. It raises the issue, through a U.N. peace worker, that the use of violence even in service of a good cause can turn heroes into villains. She claims Kony too started out as Sam did, trying to do good with his violence but ended evil. But rather than capitulate to this simplistic moral reductionism, the movie goes deeper. Sam gets to the point where be becomes so filled with hate for his enemies that he gives up on God in the face of all the evil and is driven to suicidal thoughts. But he finds a way out back to God and draws a line of distinction between righteous and unrighteous violence based on the motive of hatred. One can achieve justice rather than vengeance by not allowing the hatred of the enemy to grip our own hearts. According to this movie, there is righteous violence in service of the good. In fact, Sam ends up rescuing that U.N. worker with his guns, providing delicious irony that reminds one of how American soldiers provide the freedom and protection to protestors to hate and accuse America of denying freedom.

Spiritual Honesty

And that brings me to the spiritual honesty. While Sam becomes a hero, the movie does not white wash him nor whitewash his faith. His faith and sensitive conscious create a complex moral tension in his life that is not completely solved by the end of the story. Sam becomes so focused on his cause of rescuing people on the other side of the earth that he neglects his own family given by God. Sure, he sells what he owns to save the children, but that means what he owns is taken from providing for his family. This is a common problem with “full time” charity and ministry workers. Christian salvation does not always result in a balanced life. Christians often continue on as a mixed bag of good and bad qualities that God uses in spite of our flaws. Kinda like the Bible. But all too often unlike the Christian movie genre.

When Sam cannot get donations from the selfish rich people around him and he sees that the kids are not being helped, he has a crisis of faith and gets angry with God to the point of cussing him out along with his family. Oh my goodness! A Christian who cusses when he gets angry? Heresy! The film portrays Sam repenting from his suicidal hatred and coming back to a justice orientation, but it does not show a spiritual resolution. Maybe this is just part of that uneasy ambiguity of the tensions in our own lives. The reality is that while Sam remains married, he remains a scarred and imperfect man with a bad attitude, who still screws up. It is a messy situation and no one gets away clean or undamaged. There is redemption, but it is no fairy tale happy talk prosperity salvation.

At the end of the film, we see a video of the real Sam Childers telling us he is not capable of clearly delineating the right and wrong of what he does. But he asks us the question, “If it was your child who was kidnapped, and I could bring them back to you, would it matter how I got them back?” Making it personal challenges the self-righteous who would sacrifice the lives of other’s children on the altar of convenient arm-chair philosophizing. These are real people’s children being kidnapped, raped, enslaved and murdered, not abstractions for an argument. Talk is not enough. Action is required. Evil can only be stopped with violent force. And violent force, even in service to righteousness, is not without its negative effects on us. But the evil will not listen to talk. So your only choices are: Allow innocent children to be kidnapped, raped and murdered or kill the evil perpetrators? Which will you choose?

Portrayal of Evil and Redemption

Straight up, this is a hard R-rated film. Unlike “Christian movies,” It is full of the F-word, has a crude sex scene and is very violent. In other words, many Christians will be offended by it. In my book, Hollywood Worldviews (Read the Preface free along with unused chapters of the book at the URL link) I have a chapter on sex and violence in the movies and the Bible where I explain that in a story, the power of the redemption is only equal to the power of the sin depicted. If you do not portray evil Biblically as the seductive yet destructive reality that it is, your message of redemption will not be truthful or believable.

While I do not condone all portrayals of sin in movies (some of it can be exploitative. Read my book :-), in this case, the depth of the depravity is essential to the potency of the redemption. The problem with some Christian movies is that when they portray real world evil with a filtered “protective” sugar coating like some 1970’s television bad guys, they degrade their redemption story to an unrealistic anachronism that doesn’t ring true to human nature. If the real world they portray is not real, how can the redemption be real? The reason why Sam’s Old time Religion salvation in a corny quirky Evangelical church is not off putting to unbelievers is because it is depicted as a polar opposite of Sam’s equally extreme pre-Christian lifestyle. We understand and accept that it takes extreme measures to save an extreme sinner.

Christians often have a hard time with the F-word in movies. They will sometimes accept violent shootings, stabbings, or riddling bullets (as long as they don’t show too much blood), but for some contradictory reason, they just think that the F-word is too harsh for their holy ears. Look, I’ll agree that sometimes it can become excessive, but I’m sorry, if I see a biker dude in a Christian movie saying “friggin” or “dang” or whatever other substitute cuss word for how they really talk, I do not believe the reality of the character and subsequently do not believe the storytellers understand human nature because they are afraid to face it like the Bible does. Their fear of accuracy is a reflection of a lack of faith, reminiscent of hagiographic biographies of saints. Just too good to be true. The book of Judges depicts far worse than Machine Gun Preacher ever does.

When Sam has quicky car sex with his wife in the car by the side of the road, we are saddened by the dehumanized crudity, and that is Biblical (Don’t worry, wives and girlfriends, they don’t show any skin). That is Biblical because it portrays exactly the kind of dehumanization that has destroyed Sam and destroyed his ability to find intimacy with his own loving wife. Every aspect of this man – love, sexuality, relationships, human concern — is spiritually damaged almost beyond repair. Why, that is almost as bad as the Bible’s detailed description of dehumanizing sexuality in Ezekiel 16 and 23 (Read my book for a whole lot more).

And of course, when we see a person whose lips have been cut off because they talked back to the terrorists, or when we see a child whose legs have been blown off by a mine, or a child forced to murder his own mother, we are repulsed because we cannot imagine such evil. But rather than being “sensitive” to family audiences or avoiding “excessive violence”, this movie does what is morally right: It shows the evil so our consciences will be convicted and we will act (I betya parents don’t let their children read Ezekiel 16 or 23 either). If we never saw the grotesque images of the skeletal myriads of Jewish victims of the Holocaust, we would not have the moral growth necessary to “never again” let it happen. If we do not see what is happening to the innocents in Sudan and around the world, we will remain ignorant and spiritually and morally immature, preferring political arguments in our safely removed lives to actual moral actions.

I will conclude this analysis with a translation of a famous Tony Campolo charge that struck my heart and never left me years ago:

Rebel terrorists have murdered over 400,000 Sudanese, and enslaved over 40,000 children and many Christians just don’t give a shit. And the most tragic fact of all is that many Christians who just read that statement were more offended by my use of the word “shit” than by the fact that 400,000 Sudanese have been killed and 40,000 enslaved by terrorists.

God, forgive us of this sin.
Jesus, thank you for Machine Gun Preacher.

The King’s Speech

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A British period drama about a commoner speech therapist who helped King George VI overcome a stuttering problem right around the start of WWII. In this sure Oscar movie, Lionel Logue is the commoner who is enlisted by George’s tireless wife, Queen Elizabeth after an endless list of other doctors who have failed to help the weary Duke of York with his persistent childhood curse. What starts as a simple story of royalty and plebian culture clash quickly becomes a transcendent tale of the equality of man and the victory of strength in defeating evil.

Logue’s eccentric techniques of physical exercise and psychotherapeutic exploration of the stuttering origins provide the dramatic scenario for these two men to break through their cultural barriers and make a human connection. For Logue’s approach to work, he must have complete control and authority over the patient within his domain, which violates the exclusionary protocol of aristocracy that has been the only experience of George VI. Ironically, Logue’s exclusive access to this personal world of “Bertie” as he was called by only family results in a friendship that would last the rest of his life. In a world of isolated royal loneliness, Bertie finds human connection with a person of social status that was excluded within his cultural prejudice.

When he discovers that Logue is not only a commoner, he is NOT the doctor that Bertie had assumed (sin of sins!), their relationship is almost destroyed, until a rousing speech by Logue proves the very American egalitarian notion of pragmatic results over titles and social status. All the doctors in England could not help Bertie, but Logue’s practical experience as a WWI soldier helping his fellow soldiers overcome shell shock gives this self-made man true equality with any establishment academic or privileged aristocrat. The American Revolution won all over again. Bertie’s compassion for the common man becomes real when he finds his own privilege masks a prejudice.

Of course, Logue himself learns that such equality cannot be abused to violate authority. In one particularly beautiful line of the movie, at the end, both men gain a renewed appreciation for each other when the King calls Bertie “my friend” outside the therapy room, but Logue responds with “your majesty.”

But the King’s Speech is also a bigger picture story about the need for leadership to guide a nation to rise up in strength against evil. A nation gains its fortitude and it’s inspiration from its leaders. The climax of the movie is the King’s need to give his declaration of war against Germany, the greatest of sacrifices. Yet, until then, he had not been able to get through a public speech if his life depended upon it. Walking into the recording booth, he knew that Hitler would exploit his display of weakness (much as Islamists exploit western duplicity in avoiding swift justice against terrorism). If the King of England could not speak to his own nation about sacrifice and warfare because of a stuttering weakness in the face of the Nazi evil, where would the people draw their strength from to join him in the highest of sacrifices? Completing that speech without barely a stutter marked the entry of the English into the War with a fearless strength that would make Germany shudder. Yes, Churchill was the real hero who came from behind the scenes to the limelight, but it all started with the figurehead of their culture standing strong and unwavering, or in this metaphor, unstuttering. A powerful tale of victory and the triumph of the human spirit that means more than personal victory over individual problems.

127 Hours

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Survival tale based on a true story of Aaron Ralston, a mountaineer whose arm was caught in a fallen boulder while rock climbing in a remote crevice in the desert. When he realizes that no one knows where he is, and no one will find him, he will die unless he can cut off his arm to escape. It is a riveting story that takes place virtually entirely in one simple location where Aaron deals with his dilemma. Aided by a few flashbacks and video recordings, Aaron faces the consequences of his own solitary existence. He was such a loner that he didn’t tell anyone where he was going. He didn’t answer his mother’s phone call because he was too focused on leaving to bother. So his personal journey of examining his life leads him to realize how he needs people more than he realized and this dilemma is a direct result of his own selfish solitariness. We need others.

One dishonesty of the story is that in this entire journey of facing death, Aaron is never depicted as thinking about God and his ultimate destiny. I understand that Aaron in real life is a Christian, so this is particularly manipulative of not being true to his spiritual journey. But even if he was not a Christian, it just doesn’t ring true that someone with that time on their hands, facing death, would not even spend a moment considering God and his spiritual destiny. It leaves one empty in an otherwise riveting account.

Secretariat

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This is a total feel good movie of the year, sure to be a strong Oscar contender. The story of one of the most amazing race horses in history, whose speed in winning the triple crown has never been repeated. But really, it’s the story of Penny Chenery, the owner of Secretariat, a story of American egalitarianism triumphing over class, gender, aristocracy and hatred. Penny is portrayed as a middle class housewife who, with her brother, inherits her rich parent’s horse farm. Because of the inherent oppression of inheritance taxes, she is pushed to sell the farm to pay the taxes. She says no. Then to sell Secretariat to pay the taxes. She says No. And then to get out because she is a woman in a man’s world, to go back to her kids and raise her family instead of engaging in successful business. But she keeps pushing through for her dream, a dream to make something of her life, to find her passion by raising Secretariat to be the champion he became, from his underdog beginnings as a second choice bred horse. Her husband is shown bothered by her absence from the family as she obsessively pursues her dream miles away from home, but he gets over it and the family is never shown to be adversely affected by it all. Sure, she misses some school plays, but it’s all depicted as worth it. In a way, this woman is the ultimate feminist who has it all: a good family, a successful business and a priority of her own dreams. She fights the establishment of white male power with the egalitarian American “never give up” spirit and wins.

The movie starts with a passage from the book of Job about the power and beauty of the horse in God’s scheme of things. And the movie ends with a gospel song as Secretariat wins. These spiritual elements add a deeper sense to the theme of the movie, though wind up appearing somewhat artificial due the complete lack of spirituality in Penny and her family’s story. Is redemption really only about achieving personal dreams and bucking the establishment? Is salvation really just about triumphing over cultural prejudices or over personal character flaws? I say this because there seemed to be a lack of this personal dimension to the story that would make it rise above a shallow external victory of personal dreams into a triumph of the human spirit.

The Social Network

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A drama about the invention of Facebook and its founders, written by Aaron Sorkin and shot by David Fincher. The movie starts with a long opening tete a tete between nerdish computer geek and autistic-like jerk, Mark Zuckerberg and a young college co-ed he is out on a date with, Erica. It’s a brilliant scene that sets the stage for the film’s drama and delivers the thematic message all in one: She is not going out with him and people do not like him, not because he is brilliant or wants to be on the inner ring of power, but plain and simple, because he is an a**hole. A simple but profound tale of character and integrity and what it means to be alone in the world. If you can’t make friends, it’s your own simple fault.

This will be a multiple Oscar nominated film for 2010. It basically makes the ironic argument that the young man who brought us the biggest most successful social connecting medium of the decade, was unable to maintain friendship himself. The film really touches on some relevant important issues for today: The rapidly changing “cool” culture, the seduction of power, the egalitarian force of the internet to make lives and destroy them, the corrupting process of the “inner ring” in aristocratic culture like Ivy League education and old money, but also that same inner ring mentality in the world of enterpreneurship. It’s a rich panoply of human nature, guilt and unrequited love and friendship.

This movie is so full of so many memorable lines, I can’t remember them all. A broken-hearted Eduard to Zuckerberg: “I was your only friend.” Zuckerberg to the rich Winklevoss twins who claimed Zuckerberg stole their idea: “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.” Zuckerberg about the Winklevoss twins: “They’re just angry that for once in their life, things didn’t go the way they were supposed to for them.” There is a price for the witty arrogance and condescension of Zuckerberg, and his inability to be vulnerable, summed up in the last image of the film: his constant refreshing of the screen after he requests to be a friend with the one girl who didn’t want him for his success and reached out to him, the one he lashed out by posting his juvenile rantings of revenge against her. That little element of irony of a Facebook world: People “blog” or post their innermost thoughts without discretion to the whole world, and do not consider their public consequences, YET, they cannot be truly vulnerable to another human in person. Zuckerberg, after destroying the one woman he wanted on the internet, he hoped he could just erase what he had written, but he couldn’t, it was permanent, it was “not in pencil, it was in ink.” And so he longed for the intimacy he had sought, the sense of belonging that he obsessed over in trying to be in an insider’s “cool” “final club.” And when he betrays the only true friend he had, he ends all alone in the world, the one dread of existence.

Creation

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The dramatic story of the origin of Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of the Species. The narrative that the filmmakers construct is that Darwin reluctantly embraced his theory because it went against the cherished Christian faith of his wife, Emma, whom he loved deeply. It depicts him as suffering physical illness because he considered the implications of this theory to be the “death of God,” and hope for the afterlife. It portrays him as eventually “giving in” to the idea of evolution through natural selection because it was the truth, and he had to follow the truth wherever it led him, even if away from his beloved Emma. So the thematic battle is between truth and love. Emma tells Charles, “We both know you are at war with God. It is a battle you cannot win.” But he does in this story. And at the end we hear him say, “If I am right, it changes everything. If all these things are lies: courage, honor, love. It would break your mother’s heart.” So evolution in this story is a totalizing methodology that transcends science and speaks to other disciplines, reducing ethics and morality and the supernatural to illusions, or worse, delusions.

It also shows Darwin’s wrestling with the notion of a loving God who allows a “wasteful process with so many deaths for so few to live.” It shows his deep love for his daughter Annie, who died young. Annie becomes Darwin’s existential dilemma of the “loving God paradox.” The pastor of the church preaches for Darwin’s ears, “Our miseries are not of a cold uncaring universe, but a wise loving parent.” “The Lord works, in mysterious ways,” to which Darwin responds with anger in telling his now infamous description of the special wasp that lays its eggs in a live caterpillar’s body, as well as the 900 species of parasites that live within our own intestines. There are a few creative sequences where the camera zooms into hyper detail of nature, such as a baby bird that falls from a tree and dies, gets eaten by maggots and other creatures and fertilizes the dirt where the grass grows, all in time lapse to show the “heartless” amoral process of nature. Another poignant moment occurs when Darwin shows his children on a nature walk a fox capturing a rabbit as prey. Although I found it an ironic contradiciton that the filmmaker does not show the actual fox catching and killing the rabbit. This moment, which would have been so powerful in expressing the brutish red in tooth and claw nature of his worldview, the filmmakers could not film, no doubt because of “animal rights” issues. As if there is morality that restrains us from shooting such natural events. “No animals were hurt in the filming of this movie” is really laughable in this context of evolutionary theory.

Notwithstanding theistic evolution, the film seems to make the assertion that evolution’s most important implication is its effect on religion. And religion is not given a good depiction here, well at least the dominant form of religion. Emma Darwin is depicted as sincere, devout and loving. It’s everyone else that is Christian that gets the big hit. To begin with, the movie starts with the title CREATION next to an outstretched fetus hand in the womb. The hand is in the symbolic referential gesture of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, only there is no God’s hand outstretched to give it life. Later in the film, Darwin tells a story about an orangutan in captivity and we see a human with outstretched hand to the ape, also reflecting the motif, but in this sense, about ancestral connection not deity. The opening title asserts that some consider Darwin’s idea to the “The single most important idea in the history of thought.” And why? Contextually it seems because “You killed God” as Thomas Huxley tells Darwin in the film. We hear Darwin refer to a tale of Beagle captain Colonel Fitzroy capturing some indigenous Fuegan natives whom he seeks to convert and civilize them with Christian culture. When Fitzroy brings the “civilized” natives back to their people to try to convert them, it fails, because as Darwin believed in the movie, nature was more powerful than culture, a common narrative in today’s post-Enlightenment world that has hatred for Western civilization founded on Christianity. The local pastor is depicted as making Annie suffer corporal punishment (kneeling on salt) for believing in dinosaurs (a newly discovered mystery at the time), which of course now that we know they were real, makes Christians look like “science deniers.” At the end, Charles takes over the fairy tale book that his wife is reading their kids and instead tells a “natural” story about a sloth in Argentina, thus metaphorically illustrating how his theory replaces narratives of imagination with narratives of “fact.”

But there is some very creative counterbalancing going on in this story as well. For, Emma is shown to be an artist, a piano player, who plays beautiful music as Charles descends into his science of details. I’m not sure the filmmakers are aware of this, but Charles actually did lose his appreciation for classical music which after a time became to him just a series of detailed notes and sounds due to his scientific atomism. His scientific reductionism ruined his ability to appreciate beauty.

Another ironic twist is that the movie does show the fallacious science of the times as well. Charles seeks remedy for his illness in various quack medicines from useless drugs to “hydrotherapy” and body wrapping. So modern medicine at least does not get a full pass and is shown to have its weaknesses. Which is true. For the history of science is itself replete with as many foolish beliefs and practices as any religion.

Yet another ironic twist of interest lies in the comparison of Charles and Emma with their beliefs. The filmmakers show Charles as acting more Christian in his love and Emma more evolutionary despite her faith. Charles loses his own faith in the process, but still loves his wife and family and misses his dear departed Annie. Now when Annie is dying, Charles brings her to a faraway doctor for hydrotherapy. Like Christ leaving the flock to save one sheep, Charles leaves his family of wife and 3 children to save the one child, an altruistic move entirely at odds with his own theory. Meanwhile, Emma turns to go with him, but when she looks upon her brood of three other children she decides to stay, a perfect picture of survival of the fittest, favoring the protection of the healthy and letting the weak go to the ravages of nature – at odds with her Christian faith, and for which she regrets later on. Then, when Charles goes with his daughter, he says his last prayer to a God he is not sure is there, “If it is in your power, to save her, I will believe in you the rest of my days. Take me in her place.” Christian Substitutionary atonement, not unlike Christ’s own vicarious act. The movie also shows through intercutting and montage that Charles vicariously goes through the therapy with his daughter, at least in a spiritual sense. So we see Charles unable to live out the implications of a theory which he believed decimated the notion of love and sacrifice and courage. But we also see his Christian wife unwittingly living out his theory of natural selection.

And now, one of the most powerful thematic twists. At the end, Charles hands her his newly completed manuscript for the Origin and tells her that “Someone needs to take God’s side in all this.” He gives her the decision of what to do with it, to burn it or publish it – all up to her, after reading it. I don’t know if this really happened, but it is the ultimate sacrifice of truth for the sake of love that I can see. Contrary to his “scientific” devotion to truth, Darwin chooses love over truth. But then Emma decides to let him publish it, apparently also out of love for him instead of what she thought was truth. She tells him, “And so you’ve finally made an accomplice of me. May God forgive us both.” So no one is entirely consistent with their beliefs. Theistic evolutionism doesn’t get a voice in this story, as the notion of evolution and God are made to appear dichotomous opposites, as if God cannot achieve his purposes through evolution.