"One life ends, another begins."

In celebration of my new job at Houston Baptist University (and my new MacBook Pro), I have moved my blog over to Wordpress. Same deal, new location. See you there...

http://filmphilosopher.wordpress.com/

The quote is from Avatar (Cameron, 2009), by the way. Not one of my favorite movies, but my vote for James Cameron's second best movie after the first Terminator. (Yes, better than Aliens or Titanic. But, for me, that's not saying much.)

"The medium is the message."

Here is an interesting audio interview with Todd Bouldin, founder of Pepperdine University's MFA in Screenwriting. I disagree with Bouldin's theory of the Church's relationship to the secular culture, but the interview did make me realize something. Bouldin started out wanting to make an "impact" for Christ in law and politics and then decided that the media is a more important influence on American culture. This connection between politics and the media helped me see what has been bothering me about the typical theory of how Christians should relate to Hollywood.

In the interview, Bouldin expresses a viewpoint similar to H. Richard Niebuhr. Niebuhr rejected what he called the “Christ-against-culture” position in favor of “Christ-transforming-culture” position. (The fun pictures to the left come from this blog post.) This move has become the party line for Evangelicals in Hollywood. The claim is that Christians in the middle part of the 20th Century rejected involvement with secular culture as sinful. But, having been abandoned by Christians and left to their own secular devices, the centers of culture like Hollywood, Washington DC, and Harvard, only got worse and worse and eventually dragged down all of America with them. According to this narrative, the only hope for redeeming American culture is for Evangelical Christians to move from cultural non-engagement to engagement – from Christ-against-culture to Christ-transforming-culture.

But while Evangelicals in Hollywood are still following this party line, many Evangelicals in Washington have changed their view. (I’m not sure about the Harvard folk.) The difference seems to be that Evangelicals haven’t yet tasted any real power in secular media, but they have in politics. The United States had an Evangelical president. There’s nowhere else to go from there. But despite having achieved genuine power (not just the presidency, but many other influential governmental positions), Evangelicals have failed to transform culture. America is just as godless as ever – maybe more so. Some of the founders of the Religious Right have now admitted that they were “blinded by might” and corrupted by the power they achieved. (Here is a nice summary of this theory.) Instead of the Church transforming culture, culture transformed the Church. Baby boomer Evangelicals still seem intent on the old model (witness Sarah Palin), but younger evangelicals seem to understand the failure of their parents’ ideas (they voted for Obama). Many young people are leaving politics behind for direct engagement with the world. They’re less interested in top down transformation of culture than bottom up revolution. Why bother with ineffective politicians when we can, for example, make a real economic difference by living and working in the inner city?

What we are seeing is that Niebuhr’s categories are misleading. Everyone – even those like Tertullian, Tolstoy, and the Quakers who Niebuhr cites as paradigmatic defenders of the Christ-against-culture position – want to transform culture. The question is not should we transform culture, but how can we transform it. The Christ-against-culture position rejects the idea – held by the Christ-tranforming-culture position – that Christians can use the tools of cultural power (e.g., politics, the arts, higher education, etc.) to transform culture. Rather the Christ-against-culture position holds that the Church has its own tools and its own very different understanding of power. On this view, whenever the Church attempts to use the world’s tools, the Church only succeeds in transforming itself into the world. For example, when the Church uses advertising techniques to market itself, it positions itself as just another product to be consumed and ceases to be an alternative to consumer culture. This is what Marshall McLuhan was talking about about when he said “The medium is the message.”

Unfortunately Evangelicals in Hollywood haven’t learned the lessons of Evangelical engagement in politics. Evangelicals still dream of “impacting” Hollywood by lifestyle evangelism (as Bouldin says, “simply being there”). The assumption of this strategy is that if individual filmmakers “get saved”, then culture will change. The problem is that it won’t work. If getting the President of the United States saved couldn’t transform American culture, then why think getting the president of Disney saved would work better? It is mystifying to me that Bouldin could understand that politics can’t transform culture but think the media can.

What if we give up pursuit of Hollywood power for the kind of direct engagement in the world that young people are discovering in the political realm? This would look like making independent films by, for, and about Christians. I’m not recommending cheesy evangelistic movies of the past, but serious (both dramatic and comic) artistic engagement with the issues that matter to us but which secular filmmakers simply can’t understand. What we need is a Christian version of Spike Lee who makes excellent art by, for, and about, African-Americans. This is a Christ-against-culture position. But it is not a call to hide in some self-imposed Christian ghetto. We shouldn’t create a parallel Christian movie studio. That would be like rejecting both the Democrats and the Republicans to create a third party for Christians. Instead we should -- if we want to transform American culture – reject politics/Hollywood altogether and do something entirely new.

There’s nothing wrong with working in Hollywood or Washington, DC as long as we don’t fool ourselves into thinking that we’re secret missionaries who will have some sort of “impact”. True transformation will have to come from a more radical strategy, the strategy of the Cross. Politics is all about power, but the Cross repudiates power in favor of weakness. That’s why Jesus says thinks like “My Kingdom is not of this world” and “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s”. You might be able to be a Christian who is involved in politics, but you can’t be a Christian politician who uses the tools of Washington to further the cause of Christ. Similarly, the media is all about money, but the Cross reveals money to be an idol. That’s why Jesus says things like “You can’t serve God and money” and “Sell all you own, give to the poor, and follow me.” Again, you might be able to be a Christian who works in Hollywood, but you can’t be a Christian filmmaker who uses the tools of Hollywood to further the cause of Christ.

Am I wrong? Please let me know by posting a comment. I welcome any friendly criticism you can offer.

"When somebody asks me a question, I tell them the answer."

This weekend I finally got around to seeing last year’s Best Picture winner Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle, 2008). I liked it a lot, but I couldn’t help wondering, “Was this really the best movie of 2008?” My first thought as the film was ending was “That was good, but not as good as Wall-E or The Dark Knight.”

Now, the Academy certainly shouldn’t be ashamed of honoring Slumdog. It may be a mistake, but its not nearly as embarrassing as giving the award to Forest Gump instead of Pulp Fiction in 1994 or giving the award to movies that are actually bad like Crash in 2006 or Titanic in 1997. This line of thinking got me wondering about how often the Academy has be wrong in recent years. Here’s my list of best pictures in retrospect, all the way back to the biggest recent goof in 1994. In my opinion, the only year the Academy got it right was 2007. (Note that these aren’t necessarily my favorite movies; they’re my vote for the best movies of that year. The only years my favorite movies were also the best movies were 2001 and 2002)

The Best Movies of the Past 15 Years
1994: TIE: Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994) and Three Colors: Red (Kieslowski, 1994)
1995: Toy Story (Lasseter, 1995)
1996: Fargo (Coen, 1996)
1997: Boogie Nights (Anderson, 1997)
1998: The Truman Show (Weir, 1998)
1999: Being John Malkovich (Jonze, 1999)
2000: Memento (Nolan, 2000)
2001: Moulin Rouge! (Luhrmann, 2001)
2002: Adaptation (Jonze, 2002)
2003: Dogville (von Trier, 2003)
2004: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondy, 2004)
2005: The New World (Malick, 2005)
2006: Children of Men (Cuarón, 2006)
2007: No Country For Old Men (Coen, 2007)
2008: The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008)

Just for fun, here are my favorite movies of the year. For the most part, they are runners-up for the best movies of the year, though some are more like guilty pleasures. (In particular, I’m not sure I can defend the artistic value of Bottle Rocket, Shaun of the Dead, The Prestige, Hot Fuzz, and Speed Racer. I just think they’re a lot of fun to watch.)

1994: The Shawshank Redemption (Darabont, 1994)
1995: 12 Monkeys (Gilliam, 1995)
1996: Bottle Rocket (Anderson, 1996)
1997: Princess Mononoke (Miyazaki, 1997)
1998: The Big Lebowski (Coen, 1998)
1999: TIE: Fight Club (Fincher, 1999) and The Matrix (Wachowski Brothers, 1999)
2000: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Lee, 2000)
2001: Moulin Rouge! (Luhrmann, 2001)
2002: Adaptation (Jonze, 2002)
2003: Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (Tarantino, 2003)
2004: Shaun of the Dead (Wright, 2004)
2005: The Constant Gardner (Meirelles, 2005)
2006: The Prestige (Nolan, 2006)
2007: Hot Fuzz (Wright, 2007)
2008: Speed Racer (Wachowski Brothers, 2008)

And, while I’m making lists, here is my current Top 10 Favorite Movies of All Time. I try to make one of these lists every couple of years, and they inevitably change. (For example, 1 and 2 new on the list this time, having become favorites since I last made a list in 2004,)

1. Babette’s Feast (Axel, 1987)
2. F for Fake (Welles, 1974)
3. Princess Mononoke (Miyazaki, 1997)
4. Adaptation (Jonze, 2002)
5. Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994)
6. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Stoppard, 1990)
7. The Big Lebowski (Coen, 1998)
8. 12 Monkeys (Gilliam, 1995)
9. The Nightmare Before Christmas (Selick, 1993)
10. The Lord of the Rings (Jackson, 2001-3)

9

What's with the number 9? I just spent some time looking at movie trailers on the Apple website, and I noticed that this year (2009) we will have movies titled Nine, 9, $9.99, and District 9. What's more they're in my favorite genres: Nine is a musical, 9 and $9.99 are animated, and District 9 is sci-fi. Also Nine is a remake of an art film (Fellini's 8 1/2). And, judging from the trailers, at least two of the movies (9 and District 9) have political themes and the other two are about the meaning of life (Nine and $9.99). It looks like 2009 will be a great year for lovers of film as well as lovers of the number 9.

"Goodbye, Mary Poppins, don't stay away too long."

Here's a clever analysis by Matthew Moretz of one of my favorite movies, Mary Poppins (Stevenson, 1964). Father Matthew (an Episcopal priest) argues that the title character can be seen as a Christ-figure.

"Eeny, meeny, miny, moe..."

Here's a parable of nihilism. There is a group of blind men trying to describe something they've been told is an "elephant". One says it is like a snake, another says it is like a spear, another a wall, a tree, a fan, and so on. But each of them, unbeknownst to the others, is actually empty-handed and is completely bluffing. None of them are holding anything, but all of them are pretending to describe something anyway so as not to look ignorant. The "elephant in the room" is that there is nothing there. There is no "elephant".

This is, essentially, the point of Gus Van Sant's film Elephant (Van Sant, 2003). Inspired by the Columbine massacre and other high school shootings, Elephant considers the question of why a teenager would one day murder a dozen of his classmates. The violence comes "out of the blue" (the opening and closing images are a blue sky) without warning or provocation. And Van Sant's suggestion is that the "elephant in the room" is that there is no explanation for the violence. This is just the kind of thing that happens in our world. Things are random and meaningless, hence the film's final lines: "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe..." The killers have no reason for what they do any more than anyone else does.

After the Columbine shooting, there was much speculation in the media about the causes of the killers' rampage. Was it the music they listened to or the video games they played? Was it their parents' fault? Were they bullied by their classmates? Elephant rejects those explanations. Each of the main characters has more reason to shoot up the school than the actual killers do. The other students have alcoholic parents, get punished unjustly by the principal, are made fun of by other students, are accidentally pregnant, etc. But only two of the students turn out to be homicidal. The fact that these students do murder their classmates is just as (and no more) inexplicable than the fact that the other students do not murder their classmates.

This inexplicability is mirrored in the film's camera work. Almost all of the film is shot in long tracking shots which follow students as they walk through the hallways of the school. This gives the film a restless, searching tone. But when the camera stops moving, something interesting happens. The camera stands still and lets the action happen around it without focusing on anything in particular. The best example is a scene on the football field early in the film.

The shot starts with the shy and nerdy girl Michelle staring unexplicably into the sky. She then walks off screen, but the camera doesn't follow her. The shot continues to show the field. In the background some students are playing football. They move on and off the screen, but the camera doesn't follow them. This continues for several minutes, an excruciating amount of time for nothing to happen in a movie. Since there is nothing to look at except the football game, we watch that, but the players keep disappearing. We feel that there must be something happening just off screen, but we can't see it. There must be more going on here that we don't know about. Finally a student in a lifeguard shirt walks by and we follow him into the school.

This feeling that there is more going on continues throughout the film. On screen, there is no plot, no story, nothing really happens. But we feel like there must be more going on than we can see, maybe off camera. The elephant in the room, however, is that there is nothing else. This is life as it is. This is life in its meaningless randomness. This is the nihilism of Elephant.

“You’re working for me now.”

I currently live in Berkeley but Los Angeles is my home. So I never miss a chance to watch L.A.-themed movies. This week I watched for the first time To Live and Die in L.A. (Friedkin, 1985). It was a strange experience. For most of the movie I had the growing suspicion that the film was a piece of crap. It seemed like an utterly cliché cop buddy movie. All the characters speak in fake movie dialogue -- but dialogue that sounds silly, not cool like the fake movie dialogue in a Tarantino film. The alledged "hero" of the movie is an idiot who does all sorts of stupid and dangerous things that only movie cops do and would get real life police officers killed. More than that, the hero is a psychopath. He's beyond Dirty Harry. He's more like a Bad Lieutenant. But the film treats him in a typical heroic mode.... at least until the end.

The end of the movie caught me completely off guard. The hero just dies all of a sudden. And not in a big climactic shoot out or anything. The movie is going along like normal, and BANG, the guy dies. Then the movie goes along without him. It shouldn't be surprising that he dies since he's an idiot and a scumbag. If anything it should be suprising he lived as long as he did.

So the ending was like a Sixth Sense or Usual Suspects moment which sent me back to re-evaluate what I had seen earlier. A little Googling turned up a rather brillian essay that sheds light on the experience I had. It's a pretty long piece, so here are some quotes:

After nearly two decades of regarding To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) with a spectrum of emotions ranging from disdain-at-first-sight to qualified enthusiasm, it occurs to me that of all his works, this is the film I have watched and pondered most frequently. No longer do I see it as a shimmering piece of costume jewelry, but a forceful, semi-serious diagnosis of a prevalent human malady: the discrepancy between what we desire, or what we are pleased by, and what we claim to value, not only in life but in cinema. ...

[Director William] Friedkin redirects the modern cop thriller through the chartreuse time machine of noir, adorned with the MTV confections of Miami Vice, but his film emerges assomething far more nasty and authentic. ... To Live and Die in L.A. is also quite amusing, presumably intentionally, but possibly not. The humor is a conscious or unconscious byproduct of Friedkin’s love-hate relationship with the genre he plunders...

But once the superficialities are shunted aside, it becomes clearer that Friedkin’s film strives to deviate from the norm. Its hero is a corrupt man emblematized by a refusal to change, and his partner willingly swaps his morality for depravity. The villain, who murders only those who have betrayed orendangered his interests directly, is never as unlikable as the hero becomes. The protagonist, whose conduct leads to the death of innocent bystanders, is dispatched in the climax without a tear being shed. The hero’s obligatory “romantic interest” is at the very least a reluctant victim of coercion, and, conceivably, might qualify as a sex slave. And the voracious slickness that taunts Miami Vice (1984-1989) has, by film’s end, become the source of as much discomfort as pleasure. So this is not your ordinary cop thriller. ...

One of To Live and Die in L.A.’s persistent motifs is the creation and pursuit of phony things. As spectators grow to distrust the contradiction between what the film introduces itself to be and what it in fact is, they begin as well to question their own moral gullibility and aptitude in judging what is set before them. ...

I believe Friedkin is intrigued that we are so quick to take sides in a movie, and so easily manipulated to accept complexity as simplicity. This is likely why he adheres to the conventions of the buddy thriller—at times pressing them beyond credulity—before escalating what becomes a point-by-point repudiation of the devices used in such films to make spectators comfortable with dynamics that should not evoke comfort.

In the end, the essay's point is about self-deception, one of my favorite themes in cinema:

once we have agreed to stipulate that Chance is our hero, [Friedkin] wants, like a Judo master, to use the momentum of our own self-deception to flip us on our backs.

You can read the whole essay here at the website 24 Lies A Second.

"I just try and refresh folks memory by way of illustration."

One of my favorite movies about filmmaking is The Five Obstructions (von Trier and Leth, 2003). It is a non-fiction film in which director Lars von Trier challenges his friend, fellow Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth, to remake his 1967 short film "The Perfect Human" five times, each time under different constraints. For example, once Leth must remake the film with no shot longer than 12 frames (half a second), another time he must make the film as an animated cartoon. Each time Leth remakes the film, he approaches the same material from a slightly different angle thereby revealing a different aspect of the infinitely complex truth of the human condition.

Today I was watching von Trier's own film from the same time period Dogville (von Trier, 2003), and it struck me that von Trier's entire English language career (his Danish language films are another story) has been a Five Obstructions-style series of remakes. Von Trier keeps remaking the same movie a female Christ-figure -- a pure-hearted woman who suffers unjust torments in order to save someone she selflessly loves. In Breaking the Waves, von Trier challenged himself to shoot the film in a hyper-realistic hand-held camera style; in Dancer in the Dark he remade the story as a musical; and in Dogville he remade the film on a single sound stage without any sets in the manner of Thornton Wilder's Our Town or a Bertolt Brecht play.

The strange thing is that Dogville ends quite differently than the previous films it is remaking. In the earlier films, the suffering woman is eventually killed but brings a kind of redemption through her death. These are clearly New Testament sort of stories. At first Dogville seems to be following the same narrative, but in its last ten minutes the story suddenly turns Old Testament: a God-like gangster shows up and convinces the film's Christ-figure to choose judgment over forgiveness. I'm not sure what to make of this. Is von Trier repudiating the earlier films? Or is he merely showing us another aspect of the infinitely complex truth?

At one point, the philosopher-novelist character says he is writing a story based on the events of the film. When he adds that he hasn't come up with a good name for the town yet, the heroine asks him why he doesn't just call it Dogville. He replies: "It wouldn't work. It's got to be universal." Well, if the movie we're watching is called Dogville, does that mean it isn't (and isn't intended to be) universal? So perhaps the point of the film is not to reject forgiveness and mercy entirely but to remind us that grace is not the whole story: there is judgment and justice, too. Rather than read Dogville as a critique of the Gospel narratives, perhaps we should read it as a retelling of the Sodom and Gomorah narrative: God sends an angel to the town but the people rape her and so God destroys the town. This isn't the prettiest story in the Bible, but it is still in there and must be reckoned with.

Starting from this reading it is tempting to see the film as von Trier's reaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. (This was von Trier's first film made after 9/11.) Perhaps, like Jeremiah Wright and Jerry Fallwell, von Trier is interpreting the terrorist attacks as God's judgment on the United States. Especially in light of the closing credits which plays David Bowie's "Young Americans" over images of American crime and poverty, combined with the film's Prologue about the philosopher's attempt to teach the town a lesson about their inability to receive good gifts, von Trier seems to be saying that God has given the U.S. grace upon grace but we have not provided God's gifts with a hospitable place in which to live and bear fruit. And if we persist in our inhospitality we will face God's wrath.

Fortunately this is only one aspect of the infinitely complex truth. Instead of following the townspeople of Dogville, we might instead follow the selfless heroines of Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark. We might choose to take the world's suffering on ourselves and to transform it into an opportunity for love.

"Hand of God, that bible stopped a bullet."

This week I watched a couple of heist genre movies: Mission Impossible III (Abrams, 2006), and Heist (Mamet, 2001). It occured to me that heist movies suggest various positions on divine Providence.

In many recent heist movies, there is an elaborate, twist-filled plot which makes it seem that the robbers are facing various set-backs until in the final scene the criminals seeming complications are revealed to have been part of their plan all along. Perhaps the best classic example of this plot is The Sting (Hill, 1973). Recent examples include the Ocean's Eleven (Soderbergh, 2001) and Inside Man (Lee, 2006).

What is interesting about the two movies I saw this week is the way they deviate from the conventional plot. In The Sting et al, seemingly unforseen events occur throught the film, but the heroes turn out to have been in control of these events all along. These movies could be read as a symbol of Providence -- God is in control even if we can't initially see how. But in Mission Impossible III (actually in all three of the Mission Impossible movies), it turns out in the end that the villain -- not the hero -- was actually in control of the seemingly random events all along. This a pessimistic vision of a kind of dark Providence. More interestingly, in Heist there are real set-backs, though the heroes manage to be successful in spite of them. Here we have a world of real contingency where there seems to be no providence at all: genuinely random things happen of which no one is in control.

That writer-director David Mamet knows his film is dealing with (the lack of) Providence is seen in these lines, thrown away in a quiet moment in the middle of the film: "We knew this firefighter, this trooper, who always caried a bible next to his heart. We used to mock him, but that bible stopped a bullet. ... Hand of God, that bible stopped a bullet, would of ruined that fucker's heart. And had he had another bible in front of his face, that man would be alive today." In Mamet's world, shit just happens, and even miracles are random and meaningless.

"What's Christmas but a time for finding yourself a year older and not a day richer?"

I'm with my in-laws for Christmas, and last night I got raked over the yule log for suggesting that children should be taught not to care about getting presents for Christmas. I was arguing that Christians especially should be brought up to reject consumeristic celebration of the secular holiday (call it Festivus, if you wish, though I'm not referring to the Seinfeld holiday) on which American children worship the false god named Santa Claus. Though not in so many words, I was more or less accused of being a Scrooge.

Tonight we're watching Scrooge (Neame, 1970), the best musical version of A Christmas Carol, and it struck me that it's the American consumer culture that is Scrooge, not me. Modern Christmas is the triumph of the Scrooges over the Dickensian sentiment.

I don't know how I missed it before, but A Christmas Carol is obviously an anti-corporate screed. It is a critique of Scrooge, a capitalist who refuses to give his employees fair working conditions: no living wage, no eight hour working day, no five day work week, no vacation days, no day off for Christmas, etc. Scrooge hates Christmas, not because he hates people in general (as the musical version would have it), but because Christmas is bad for business. He is being asked to give Bob Cratchit a day off with pay and to give money to various charities. He thinks the whole holiday is a scam by lazy poor people to get money out of hard working rich people. But in the 20th Century, Scrooge got his revenge. He managed to turn Christmas into a money-making business. Even if he has to give people a day off from work, he still makes a profit because he has made their celebration of the holiday all about getting and spending.

I don't have it in for celebration of what Dickens calls the spirit of Christmas. In fact, Dickens's point seems to be that the spirit of Christmas is to be generous to those less fortunate than yourself. (The ghost of dead businessman Jacob Marley tells Scrooge that "'Tis mankind should be our business, though we [capitalists] rarely attend to it.") And I don't even have it in for making merry -- decorating trees, dancing, driking, exchanging gifts. I've written on this blog about my theory of Christian art as redemption of secular culture, and that's what most of our Christmas traditions are about: baptizing pagan rites for Christian purposes. But there are some things that can't be redeemed. Violence is one of them. Consumerism is another. When you try to sell Christmas, the pagan (in this case, American capitalist) element wins, and the Christian attempt at redemption is overwhelmed.

So I say a hearty "Humbug!" on Scroogified gift-centered capitalist Christmas. And wish you instead a truly Dickensian semi-socialist merry Christ-Mass.

"Only in theory do we begin to suspect the power of aesthetics to shape our lives."

I was in the doctor's office waiting room this week, and I happened to pick up an old issue of The New Yorker from back in June. I was pleasantly surprised to find an essay by Tobias Wolff about a time when he saw Bergman's Winter Light at a church screening in Oxford. I really liked Wolff's optimistic reading of the film:

Bergman takes care to show that Tomas and the fisherman are not alone in their suffering, and that others, equally afflicted—the fisherman’s wife, the pastor’s steadfast lover, his hunchbacked assistant—are able to bear their pain into a still deeper faith and capacity for love.

This is how I want to read Winter Light. It is an unexpected affirmation of faith, not a rejection of faith as it is normally read.

But the point of the essay is not really about Winter Light. It is about the importance of art and beauty. After seeing the film, Wolff says he "felt harrowed, crust broken, buried things churning to the surface." At that point in his life Wolff was an atheist, but he was open to hearing what the minister might say about the film. Until the minister put up a slide of William Holman Hunt's painting "The Light of the World" which Wolff found "garish, melodramatic, cloying in its technique and sentimentality". Wolff ended up continuing in his life as a disbeliever until, years later, he discovered the poetry of George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T.S. Eliot.

Wolff concludes:

We like to think of our beliefs, and disbeliefs, as founded on reason and close, thoughtful observation. Only in theory do we begin to suspect the power of aesthetics to shape our lives.

But he notes that not everyone experiences beauty in the same way. A friend of his who was with him at the Winter Light screening was converted by the Holman Hunt painting that put Wolff off. His encounter with the painting put him on a path that eventually led him to being a missionary in Africa. Peggy Rosenthal over at the Image Journal interprets this as a lesson about the power even bad art can have to point us toward truth:

We must admit that in our popular culture plenty of bad art stirs people to genuinely good religious faith, a faith that issues in loving actions and a Christ-like spirit.

I'm not sure that's quite right. This is a lesson about the importance of context. Wolff writes that "the contrast between Bergman’s severe, honest art and this painting, on the same screen, chilled me" (my emphasis). I actually don't hate the Holman Hunt painting. I think it does have a (perhaps simplistic) kind of beauty. But I can see how in juxtaposition to Bergman's film it would come off banal. So why didn't Wolff's friend notice this jarring juxtaposition? The context of film appreciation is not entirely external. It is internal and subjective, too. We bring our own context to the work.

If all we look at is the objective context of the chapel in Oxford on a night in the winter of 1970, then all we see is the contrast between Winter Light and Holman Hunt. But if we could see into the heart of Wolff's friend, we could see why he was able to experience the beauty of the painting while for Wolff that small beauty was outshone by the brilliance of Bergman's film. Every object has some beauty in it, and every beauty has some truth. And the power of beauty's truth is so strong that it can work even through less than brilliant artworks. I guess I'm ultimately saying the same thing as Rosenthal: even lesser art can shape our lives for the better.

"It all depends on other people."

I’m not usually a big fan of British historical romance stories, but Atonement (Wright, 2007) actually worked for me. It wasn’t the tragic romance that captured my attention, but the unexpected philosophy. The movie turns out to be a sort of postmodern Masterpiece Theater remake of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 masterpiece Blow Up.

The opening image is a typewriter. The sound of the typewriter is a recurring motif in the film, even being incorporated into the music. We don’t realize it until the end of the film, but the sound of typing functions as a subtle reminder that what we are watching is not the “absolute truth” as the main character Briony Tallis will later call it. It is Briony’s imaginative reconstruction.

After a friend of hers is raped by an older man, thirteen year old Briony fingers her older sister Cecilia’s lover Robbie Turner. She tells the police inspector, “I know it was him.” The inspector presses her: “You know it was him? Or you saw him?” Briony: “Yes. I saw him. I saw him with my own eyes.” This is a deliciously ambiguous statement. She did see the rapist with her own eyes. But it wasn’t Robbie she saw.

Atonement turns out to be a movie about imagination: seeing things you think you understand but don’t understand. Throughout the film (as with Kurosawa’s Rashomon) we see the same scenes replayed from different (sometimes even fictional) points of view. At various points it is unclear (though, as with Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects, we don’t realize it is unclear until the end of the film) whether what we are seeing is reality, merely one person’s interpretation of reality, a dream sequence, or an utter fiction.

The first line of the film is Briony’s: “I finished my play.” She is excited, but can’t get others to cooperate in the performance and production of the play. So she decides to stick with novels: “If you write a story, you only have to say the word ‘castle’ and you can see the towers and the woods and the village below. But in a play it’s… it all depends on other people.”

After the close of the movie’s narrative, we flash forward to an elderly Briony in present day giving an interview about the story we have just seen. She explains that the story of Atonement must be her last novel. because she has a disease called vascular dementia in which “your brain closes down, gradually you lose words, you lose your memory, which for a writer is pretty much the point.”

Now, Briony’s “novel” is so “entirely” “autobiographical” that she says “I haven’t changed any names, including my own.” She claims it is “the absolute truth” with “no rhymes, no embellishments”. But if Briony is losing her memory, then how can she be trusted to tell the historical truth? And if the story is pure history, then how is it a novel? Shouldn’t we call it a memoir? Not so fast. Briony continues:

“I got first-hand accounts of all the events I didn’t personally witness[…]. But the effect of all this honesty was rather pitiless. You see, I couldn’t any longer imagine what purpose would be served by it. […] By honesty. Or reality.” She was “too much of a coward” to make amends for her false accusations and so she “imagined” the scene, “invented” it. “But what sense of hope or satisfaction could a reader derive from an ending” that told the ugly truth? She admits to changing the facts and giving her character the strength to do what she ought to have done, but says she’d “like to think this isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness. I gave them their happiness.”

This is Briony’s atonement, her attempt to make right the happiness she prevented her sister from having. But notice that the effectiveness of this atonement rests on a paradox. The novel must narrate a happy ending for Cecilia and Robbie while simultaneously confessing Briony’s sin of preventing that happy ending. Briony has to tell the story both as it did happen and as it ought to have happened but did not.

John Mullan gives a nice analysis of this final scene in the London newspaper The Guardian. (He’s writing about Ian McEwan’s novel upon which the movie was based, but his comments apply to the film, too.)

Unlike writers of metafiction, McEwan wants you to identify with characters, to succumb to narrative illusion. For Briony to undertake her “atonement”, her work of fiction must make up for, and confess, the wrong that she has done. In a novel, she can make the world better than it truly is. She can make Cecilia and Robbie survive and meet again. And we must be allowed to believe it.

In other words, the reason Briony’s atonement works (if it does) is that she has made us believe in the love story and feel the aesthetic appropriateness of its narrative conclusion. (Note the ironic symmetry here: like the play from the opening scene, the closing scene reveals that the effectiveness of Briony’s novel “all depends on other people.”) But Frank Kermode seems to give the opposite analysis in The London Review of Books, arguing that we are not supposed to believe the story:

It is, in perhaps the only possible way, a philosophical novel, pitting the imagination against what it has to imagine if we are to be given the false assurance that there is a match between our fictions and the specifications of reality. The pleasure it gives depends as much on our suspending belief as on our suspending disbelief.

But Kermode is using “believe” in a somewhat different sense than Mullan. Mullan argues only that we must be emotionally committed to the story -- that we “identify with the characters” -- not that we accept them as nonfictional representations of reality. So what is Mullan’s point? He is reading Atonement the way postliberal theologians read the Bible.

For modern theologians (both liberals and fundamentalists), the point of Scripture is its representation of reality. Believers must either accept all the Biblical stories at fact value (as do fundamentalists) or they must try to find the philosophical truth behind the mythical stories (as do liberals). But postliberals (and postevangelicals) realize that there is no way to get behind the text. There is no way to know exactly what happened historically and thus there is no way to know to what degree the stories are fact or myth – just as there is no way to know to which bits of Atonement are facts, which are Briony’s false interpretations of facts, and which are pure fictions.

And even if we could know “the absolute truth” about what “really” happened, this would be beside the point. The (historical) truth would, as the elderly Briony says, no longer serve any purpose. (Kierkegaard says much the same thing about the historical Jesus.) But as Mullan points out, this need not imply that we can’t believe the story. For postliberals belief is more a commitment to a form of life structured around the Biblical narratives. We can enter into the story without knowing what really happened. We can, as Mullan says, “identify” ourselves with Christ -- we can let him enact our “atonement” with God -- despite the fact that there are four (incompatible) versions of his life in the four Gospels. Scripture does not mirror the (uninterpreted) reality of history -- it structures our reality and teaches us to interpret history, giving us a “sense of hope or satisfaction”. But it is precisely in this way that Scripture turns out to be true.

"You can't mend the heart in a heartless world by observing that the world is in fact heartless."

Here are some nice reflections on the problem of evil by Andrew Brown, columnist for the British newspaper The Guardian:

"In the end, I suppose, my objections to God are, as they must be, theological: the workings of divine providence are just a little too inaccessible to human reasoning. The problem of suffering remains insoluble. There is no possible theodicy. But I can't, either, take the Dawkinsian view that the problem of suffering is an illusion generated by the illusion of God. You can't mend the heart in a heartless world by observing that the world is in fact heartless. That's not the point. I suppose I end up saying that I accept the Christian account of the problem; I just can't accept Christianity's account of the solution, and so I remain, by the grace of God perhaps, an atheist."

You can read the whole essay here. (Thanks to Episcopal Cafe's "The Lead" for pointing me to it.)

I really like his criticism of Richard Dawkins. And I am sympathetic to his view that there is no solution to the problem of evil -- sometimes I'm tempted to agree. But I wonder what exactly Brown takes to be "Christianity's account of the solution".

I'm a Christian theologian (more or less), and I'm still trying to figure out what sort of theodicy Christianity actually teaches. There have been many different theodicies offered by Christians throughout history. And even the Bible suggests different responses to evil. I don't find it at all obvious which theodicy (if any) coheres best with the majority of other fundamental Christian theological committments.

If there's one thing I am fairly sure of (given my reading of the relevant Biblical texts such as Job, the Psalms, Revelation, etc.) is that the best response to evil is going to have something to do with worship of God generally and in particular the liturgy of the Eucharist. (Then again, I tend to think that everything has something to do with the Eucharist!)

The centrality of worship (prayer, liturgy, communion, etc.) for our response to evil is something the best cinematic theologians have realized. I have already discussed Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (see my earlier post) on this topic. Here let me just mention the work of Ingmar Bergman, perhaps the filmmaker most obsessed with the problem of evil. There are hints of Eucharistic themes in The Seventh Seal (Bergman, 1957) and The Virgin Spring (Bergman, 1960). But the theme becomes most prominent in Winter Light (Bergman, 1962) whose story takes place in and between two celebrations of the Eucharist.

One could argue that Bergman intended these films as a critique of the idea that worship can provide an adequate response to evil. (For a really good analysis of The Seventh Seal along these lines, see Steven Greydanus's essay at Decent Films.) But even if it is true that Bergman intended to reject a Eucharistic theodicy, he was unable to keep the truth from shining through his work. In any event, I think Bergman's intentions were more complex than simply rejecting Christianity. He also struggled with the ability of art to respond adequately to evil -- most significantly in Persona (Bergman, 1966), but I don't think he ever quite gave up hope that art could help us go on living.

Unfortunately I don't have time now to give a detailed analysis of Winter Light (I hope to do so in a future post -- this post was supposed to be a simple link to the essay by Andrew Brown!), but I encourage you to watch it for yourself and try to figure out what is going on in the final scene. Has the priest lost his faith? Why does he go through with the liturgy? Is this an optimistic or pessimistic ending? How does the ending relate to the endings of The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring? And, most importantly, what can we learn from this film (regardless of what Bergman was trying to teach us) about responding to evil?

Let me know what you think.

"Abortion confronts the Christian with the most perplexing questions of all."

This election season many Roman Catholic and Evangelical voters have found themselves attracted to Democratic candidate Barack Obama. At the same time, many of these religious voters feel conflicted because of Obama's pro-choice stand on abortion. That Evangelicals could support a Democrat at all is surprising, of course, because Evangelicalism has, for the past 30 or so years, wed itself tightly to the Republican party. But, for some Evangelicals and Roman Catholics, it is simply too much to ask to forsake the pro-life commitment that the Replublican party has used to gain the loyalty of the "Religious Right" for so long.

In light of this controversy, religious supporters of Obama have given some interesting arguments for Obama. For example, my wife posted about this issue on her blog and received some nice responses. Some pro-life advocates have explicitly argued in favor of Obama, too. But one of the most interesting arguments has come from Obama's running mate Joe Biden who has recently pointed out that Roman Catholic dogma on abortion has shifted throughout the centuries.

Catholic historian Frank Flinn has a nice article on the Church's changing attitudes toward abortion. He explains that it wasn't until 1869 that the pope declared abortion to be absolutely forbidden during all stages of pregancy. Before that, the fetus was not considered a person until the moment of "quickening" (i.e., the moment the mother first feels the baby move in her womb) which usually happens in the middle of the second trimester. Flinn even quotes Anselm as saying: "No human intellect accepts the view that an infant has the rational soul from the moment of conception"!

I suppose the argument here is that if even the supposedly infallible Roman Catholic Church has changed its mind over the centuries about when a fetus becomes a human person, then this is a question too hard for the American government and should be left up to individual people. It's the same point Obama was making when he told Evangelical leader Rick Warren that this question was above his "pay grade". One could reply (as did Biden's own Bishop) that when the Church changes its teaching, the later teaching is always better than the earlier teaching. But this reply would seem to undermine the whole point of conservatism which teaches that "traditional" (i.e., older) teachings are always better. This was the point I was making in my earlier post about same sex marriage. Conservatives can't argue that we should accept the "traditional" view of marriage, because on the traditional view wives are property of their husbands and the possibility of polygamy was assumed: men can own as many wives as they can afford. Here again the conservative argument from tradition doesn't support Evangelical and Catholic positions.

Now, I knew this stuff about the Catholic Church's evolving position, but when I read it again it got me wondering about Evangelicals. Has there been any shift in Evangelical understandings of abortion? A few minutes with Google reveals that there has been.

In 1968 Christianity Today sponsored a symposium on issues of birth control and abortion. And what happened? Evangelical leaders of the day got together and decided ... to be pro-choice. Follow this link for the published summary of the symposium along with some responses. Below are some of the most interesting passages, along with my comments in italics:

• "Abortion confronts the Christian with the most perplexing questions of all: Is induced abortion permissible and if so, under what conditions? If it is permissible in some instances is the act of intervention still sinful? Can abortion then be justified by the principle of tragic moral choice in which a lesser evil is chosen to avoid a greater one? As to whether or not the performance of an induced abortion is always sinful we are not agreed, but about the necessity and permissibility for it under certain circumstances we are in accord." -- i.e., abortion is always tragic, but sometimes it is the best choice in a bad situation. Note also the assumption that we should approach the question of abortion with humility -- i.e., we should remember that the answer is above our pay grade.
  
• "The Christian physician will advise induced abortion only to safeguard greater values sanctioned by Scripture. These values should include individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility." -- i.e., it is permissible to have an abortion if you think you won't be able to care for the child.
  
• "The Christian maintains that in avoiding legalism on the one hand and license on the other, the prescriptions of legal codes should not be permitted to usurp the authority of the Christian conscience informed by Scripture." -- i.e., the choice of whether to have an abortion should be left to the individual, not mandated by the government.
• "Physicians are called upon to maintain and restore the health of the whole [human being]." -- i.e., abortion may be necessary for the mental (not just the physical) health of the mother.
• "We live in a world pervaded by evil. Human relationships become distorted; unwanted children are born into the world; genetic defects are not uncommon and harmful social conditions abound. Therefore, it is the duty of Christians to be compassionate to individuals and to seek responsibility to mitigate the effects of evil when possible, in accordance with the above principles. When principles conflict, the preservation of fetal life or the integrity of the human body may have to be abandoned in order to maintain full and secure family life." -- i.e., there are many kinds of cases in which abortion may be necessary: cases of "distorted" relationships such as rape or incest, cases of "genetic defects", cases of "harmful social conditions" such as poverty, cases in which the mother's bodily "integrity" is threatened such as when her life or health is in jeapardy, and even in cases of "unwanted" pregnancy. Note that many of these cases are spelled out in more explicit detail elsewhere in the report.
  

So this is a fairly standard pro-choice document. It is also a clearly pro-life document -- what? you can be pro-life and pro-choice at the same time? -- but while affirming the value and sanctity of all human life from the moment of conception, the document's drafters understand that in this fallen world hard choices must sometimes be made. And those choices can't be made for us by government officials who don't know the specifics of our case and try to create blanket rules that apply to everyone. Its a document I think Obama could agree with.

The document actually reminds me a lot of one of my favorite movies on the topic of abortion: Citizen Ruth (Payne, 1996). The movie satirizes both sides of the culture war, indicting both pro-life and pro-choice activists for their mutual failure to treat the women involved as actual human beings rather than pawns in a political battle. (There's a key scene toward the end where the two sides are so involved in screaming at each other about what is in Ruth's best interests that they don't notice her walking away from the whole mess.) In 1968 Evangelicals were the compassionate people writer-director Alexander Payne would one day challenge us to be with his film. But by the time he actually made his film in 1996, Evangelicals were just the butt of his jokes.

"Call it."

Earlier this week blogger Jason Hesiak posted his reflections comparing the philosophy of No Country For Old Men (The Coen Brothers, 2007) with The Dark Knight (The Nolan Brothers, 2008). His reflections on No Country are great, though I think he under-appreciates The Dark Knight.

In any event, it was insightful of him to juxtapose the two films. Anton Chigurh and The Joker are clearly cut from the same nihilistic cloth. They both -- I would argue, innaccurately -- think of themselves as Nietzschen Übermenschen. Like Hitler, and other evil men who utterly misunderstood Nietzsche, they're really more like Hannibal Lecter than Nietzsche. Like Nietzsche -- and, I would argue, like the Jesus who rejected the legalism of the Pharisees-- they do reject a morality based on "rules" (Chigurh: "Let me ask you a question: if the rule you followed brought you to this [i.e., to your death], of what use was the rule?" and The Joker: "The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules."), but unlike Nietzsche (and Jesus) they are left with a life-denying nihilism because they don't attempt to engage in the "transvaluation of all values" by building a new life-affirming morality based on joyfulness rather than legalism. (Beyond this nihilism, there is also a fairly obvious -- though unremarked upon by Hesiak -- link between Chigurh's coin tossing ["Call it."] and the coin tossing of The Joker's protégé Two-Face ["The world is cruel. And the only morality in a cruel world is chance. Unbiased, unprejudiced, fair."].)

Hesiak has two criticisms of The Dark Knight. His first problem with it is that it explains its philosophy too verbally instead of letting it come out through more cinematic means. He writes that in No Country "no one in the film explains to the audience, or to any other character in the film" the kind of things The Joker is always explaining to Batman. This might be a fair criticism -- but in general I think The Dark Knight is interesting insofar as its explicitly philosophical musings pull us in conflicting directions (see my earlier post on the film). These aren't explanations as much as they are questions.

His other problem is that the film is too nihilistic and doesn't offer any hope. He writes: "So I suppose I could summarize my opinion of No Country of Old Men by saying that I experienced it as a medium through which I lived out my life and my death, and that it was a refreshing experience after Batman: Dark Knight, through which I felt as though I simply experienced my death." This criticism is less fair insofar as The Dark Knight is part of an ongoing series. I expect (or rather, hope) that in the next Nolan-directed Batman film we will see Batman beginning to find his way out of the darkness into which he has descended in the first two films. If The Dark Knight is the middle film in a trilogy, it makes sense that it would be the darkest and least hopeful.

Furthermore, I disagree with Hesiak's suggestion that Chigurh is the "main character" of No Country. I think Sheriff Bell is the main character. (Clearly Llewelyn Moss is not.) On my view the movie is about the sheriff's confrontation with the inexplicability of evil. It narrates his struggle to find meaning in the kind of world where Anton Chigurh could exist. In other words, No Country For Old Men is about the problem of evil.

But the Coens' film doesn't seem to have much to say about the solution to the problem. It just wants to make sure we understand why and how the nature of evil threatens the meaning of life. The Dark Knight, on the other hand, goes further. The Nolans' movie is also about the problem of evil, but, like Batman Begins, it movie is interested in exploring -- and criticizing -- various possible solutions to the problem. True, the Nolans tend to talk about their themes as much as they dramatize them, but I don't see that as being as problematic as Hesiak does.

But regardless of whether you ultimately agree or disagree with Hesiak's essay, it is definitely worth reading. Check it out here.

"Abortion is murder!"

When I return to teaching, I plan to assign my students to watch the abortion documentary Lake of Fire (Kaye, 2006). Along with the Jewish homosexuality documentary Trembling Before G-d, it's one of the most stimulating movies I've seen about a contemporary ethical issue. And, like movies such as Waking Life and My Dinner With Andre, the film is made up almost entirely of philosophical discussion, priming the audience's intellectual pump for class discussion.

One caveat I have about the film, though, is that I don't think students will be able to digest the material without expert commentary. Much of the footage is presented without editorial comment -- there is no narrator and very few on-screen titles -- and hence lacks any sort of context and ends up being misleading.

Because of this lack of commentary, most reviews of the film claim that it is fair to both sides of the debate -- something unusual in the abortion contoversy. But I didn't find the film to be fair and openminded at all. Filmmaker Tony Kaye is not unbiased -- he's obviously pro-choice. I actually have a hard time understanding why anyone would miss this point. Why would reviewers think Kaye is anything but pro-choice? Surely professional film critics don't need the director to come right out and say he is pro-choice before they can detect his viewpoint. (Maybe they've seen too many Michael Moore movies!)

A more charitable interpretation of the critical blindspot is that since the film includes graphic footage of late-term fetuses, perhaps reviewers were led to think Kaye is sympathetic to the view that abortion is murder. After all, these fetuses look exactly like post-birth babies, and hence exactly the same sort of footage is used in many anti-abortion propaganda movies. (This, by the way, is one of the misleading scenes. The fetuses are clearly in their second-trimester of development. But without being told that almost 90% of abortions take place in the first-trimester when the fetus looks more like a sea monkey than a baby, viewers might think that all aborted fetuses look like this.)

Another reason people may mistakenly believe the film is ambivalent is that, in part because of the graphic footage but also because it presents such an array of voices from every side of the debate, the film is so unsettling that it creates a kind of ambivalence in the viewer. It's not that Kaye doesn't know what he thinks about abortion or that he keeps his own viewpoint hidden in the film -- it's that after watching the film, you no longer know exactly what you think about abortion. And that's the most significant aspect of the film. It's also one of the most pro-choice aspects of the film. The film wants to convince us that this is a hard issue that is not as black and white as it is usually presented in political debates. Therefore, the film suggests, we should leave the choice about abortions up to individuals.

Another caveat: I'm not sure the film is primarily a debate about abortion at all. It is a documentary about the people involved in the abortion debate. And it's mostly about fundamentalist Christians who believe that abortion doctors should be assassinated. In some ways, the film is presenting a philosophical challenge to pro-life advocates, asking them "if you agree that abortion is murder, then what makes you different than these extremists?" (Again, I don' t think the film is even trying to be unbiased.) It's a fascinating question: if abortion really is parallel to the holocaust, then why shouldn't pro-lifers declare open war on abortionists like the Allies declared on the Nazis?

Brett McCracken, an Evangelical reviewer, misses this challenge. He complains in his Christianity Today review that the film "purposefully avoids featuring any thoughtful, articulate, or moderate Christians". From the rest of the review, I have to assume that by "moderate", McCracken means a Christian who condemns abortion as murder but also condemns the murders of abortion doctors. While this may be true, the film nevertheless presents the positions of moderate Christians, while putting them in the mouths of extremists. And what this move does is make the extremists look like they have some good points and that they are not (entirely) crazy. So I actually take this to be a rhetorical virtue of the film.

Moreover I reject McCracken's definition of "moderate Christian". I think any view according to which abortion is obviously murder is a pretty conservative one. A truly moderate Christian is one who admits that this is a hard issue about which the Bible has little to say, and who is willing to allow diversity of opinions about abortion. A liberal Christian is one who simply accepts the pro-choice viewpoint as obviously true.

McCracken seems to think that what separates his own (supposedly "moderate" view) from other "fundamenatlist" or "expremist" views, is that he is not interested in forcibly converting nonbelievers. He complains that the film makes all pro-life advocates look like "mindless pawns in a larger and more malicious march toward theocracy". In other words, the film assimilates anyone who votes against abortion rights to the "reconstructionist" viewpoint that the laws of the United States should be revised to match the laws of the Old Testament so that, for example, anyone who uses the Lord's name in vain should be put to death. (Someone in the film actually gives this example!)

Again, McCracken's observation is true: the film does attempt to blur the line between extremist theocrats and more moderate run-of-the-mill pro-life Republicans. But again this is a virtue of the film. I think a strong case could be made (though the argument is left implicit in the film) that anyone whose position on aborion legislation comes from their Christianity and not from publically shared reasons is, indeed, a theocrat. (This point is even more clear when it comes to the issue of gay marriage.) The fact that McCracken is so defensive suggests that, on some level, he knows this critique to be on target.

It's this ability to challenge us to rethink the implications of our deeply held beliefs about abortion that I think is the film's biggest philosophical strength. Without the Socratic ability to recognize that we lack wisdom, we have no hope of escaping the unproductive torment of the "lake of fire" the abortion controversy has devolved into.

"We are white men, sir, not beasts."

If you haven't seen The Proposition (Hillcoat, 2005), I recommend it to you. I'm not sure there's a lot of new territory here that John Ford hadn't already explored in The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (see my earlier post on these films), but the old puzzle about the relationship between civilization and violence is brilliantly and beautifully retold by first-time screenwriter Nick Cave in the context of a western set in the Australian Outback. These are the same sort of perennial questions about the nature of justice raised again this year by The Dark Knight. (Come to think of it, Liberty Valance and The Dark Knight are almost the same movie!)

"Either you die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

As hoped for in a previous post, I did finally see The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008), but I haven't been able to write about it yet. I think I need to see it a few more times before I can unravel my thoughts. Here are a few of my confused musings.

First, let me point you to an op-ed by Jonathan Lethem in this week's New York Times. I really liked Lethem's comment that "a morbid incoherence was the movie’s real takeaway, chaotic form its ultimate content". That's exactly the theme I discussed in an academic paper on the philosophy of Batman Begins (Nolan, 2005). I think the movie is intentionally incoherent, pointing to a puzzle in the American soul, a deep ambivalence we have about the nature of violence, justice, and heroism.

This ambivalence is dialectically expressed in a debate between commentators: witness Andrew Klavan's article in The Wall Street Journal and the response by David Cohen in Variety. Klavan argues that The Dark Knight sets Batman up as a symbol of George W. Bush in order to show us that Bush is a misunderstood hero. Cohen agrees with the Bush bit, but sees the movie as a criticism of the president's view of heroism. Lethem seems closer to the target when he says that the movie is playing both points of view off each other.

Both of Nolan's Batman movies have two endings: an ending in which Batman's method is praised and an ending in which it is vilified. In Batman Begins Rachel Dawes visits Bruce Wayne at the site of the burned-down Wayne Manor and says that Bruce was right to have created Batman, that Gotham City needs him. This seems like the end of the movie, but it is followed by a scene in which Lt. Jim Gordon points out that Bruce's method has resulted in "escalation" by giving grandiose ideas to the Joker. In The Dark Knight this theme is elaborated upon: the Joker and Batman are shown to be "two faces" of the same coin. But here we have two endings, too. First Harvey Dent points out that both he and Bruce share the blame for Rachel's death -- only Jim Gordon comes out looking innocent -- and then Gordon goes on to repeat Rachel's idea that Gotham needs Batman. (Actually he says we "deserve" Batman, the dark knight, but that we "need" Harvey Dent, the white knight. I'm not yet clear on what's going on here.)

The philosopher in me keeps hoping for a coherent message. I dream that writer-director Christopher Nolan is working on a trilogy in which Batman finally and unambiguously realizes that his vigilantism was a mistake, thereby affirming Cohen's reading. (It seems sigificant along these lines that, before she dies, Rachel recants her speech from the first ending of Batman Begins.) But, artistically, I suppose I have to admit that the film is a better text for being open to multiple readings.

"I don't like food, I love it. If I don't love it, I don't swallow."

In honor of this weekend's Slow Food Nation event in San Francisco, here are my Top 10 Slow Food Movies (in alphabetical order):

1. Babette’s Feast (Axel, 1984)
2. Big Night (Scott and Tucci, 1996)
3. Eat Drink Man Woman (Lee, 1994)
4. Fast Food Nation (Linklater, 2006)
5. How to Cook Your Life (Dörrie, 2007)
6. Mostly Martha (Nettlebeck, 2001)
7. Ratatouille (Bird, 2007)
8. Sideways (Payne, 2004)
9. Spanglish (Brooks, 2004)
10. What’s Cooking? (Chadha, 2000)

In case you haven't heard, Slow Food is an international movement trying to combat "fast food" by emphasizing conscious eating (i.e., sustainability and fair trade as well as mindfulness), communal dining, quality food, etc. (For more on the concept of "slow food", check out the international movement's website.) What do you think? Have I missed any movies that should be on the list?

"Jimmy Carter for president!"

I'm too young to remember Jimmy Carter's presidency. Though I was alive during Carter's time in office, my earliest political memories are of the 1984 Regan vs. Mondale campaign. But after seeing Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains (Demme, 2007), I'm a big fan of Carter. I couldn't agree more with Ed Norton's reaction to seeing Carter backstage at The Tonight Show: "Jimmy Carter for president!"

The movie isn't actually a straight documentary about Carter -- it's actually about Carter's recent controversial book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid -- but I loved the historical accounts of Carter's policies. We can only wonder what would have happened if he had been reelected and allowed to continue his sustainable energy policy, his anti-nuclear weapons campaign, his Mid-east diplomacy, etc.

And Carter's supposed failure in the Iran hostage crisis, turns out to be his greatest success. Carter may be the only president ever to avoid a war, even to his own political detriment. Now that's an Christian president. Unlike the allegedly Christian George W. Bush, who invented a war out of a trumped-up act of terrorism (the alleged connection between Iraq and 9/11), Carter managed to keep our country out of war with Iran, eventually saving all the hostages from actual terrorists.