“The nuns taught us there are two ways through life. The way of Nature and the way of Grace.”

Whatever else Terrence Malick‘s film The Tree of Life (Malick, 2011) is about, it is clearly about the struggle between Nature and Grace.  The relationship between Nature and Grace is a standard theme discussed by all great Catholic theologians from Augustine to Aquinas to Rahner.  Malick’s version is lifted almost verbatim from The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis (see Book 3, Chapter 54):

“Grace doesn’t try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. … Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it over them. To have its own way.”

On this broadly Augustinian view, “Nature” primarily refers to human nature, the way human beings are apart from Christ, and “Grace” is the way we can only live with supernatural help. In The Tree of Life, the mother is clearly associated with the way of Grace, and the father with the way of Nature, and here we see another aspect of the dualism: Law vs. Gospel.  The father’s strict discipline based on seemingly arbitrary rules and an impulse toward an eye-for-an-eye suggests an Old Testament, pre-Christian vision of God, while the mother’s emphasis on love and forgiveness suggests a New Testament vision of God.

But there is something odd about the way the viewer experiences this distinction in The Tree of Life.  The movie – or at least the children through whose eyes we see the story – clearly preference the mother and the way of Grace.  Yet it is far too simplistic to say that the mother is good and the father is bad.  It is obvious that the father loves the children just as much as the mother does.  And his disciplinarianism is motivated by his love: he is simply trying to prepare them to succeed in a world he sees as harsh and cruel.  What’s more, the film recognizes that there is something good about the father’s strictness.  When the father goes away for a business trip, the children run wild without any discipline.

Likewise, the film doesn’t present the mother as always correct.  It is hard to take seriously her suggestion that the sky is “where God lives”.  She herself doesn’t entirely believe that God is this remote: when the priest comforts her for the death of her son by saying “He’s in God’s hands now”, she replies “He was in God’s hands the whole time”. In context, this is an accusation – how could God allow this – but it also shows an inconsistency in the mother’s thinking.  She, like the mainstream Judeo-Christian tradition, tends both to think of God as transcendent – far away in heaven looking down – and also to think of God as immanent – present here with us at every moment where “all the world is shining” and “love is smiling through all things”.

The odd thing is that the mother, following Thomas à Kempis, uses the word “Nature” for human fallenness.  Yet for most of us “Nature” most readily suggests the non-human world, the world of trees and waterfalls and stars, the world The Tree of Life presents as so beautiful and full of wonder.  Nature is where we most easily see God’s love smiling through, “Every leaf. Every ray of light”, as the mother says.  So Nature would seem to be something good, something that points us toward the way of Grace.  Yet the mother opposes Nature and Grace.

It seems to me that one of Malick’s aims in The Tree of Life is to overcome these dualisms – not just Nature and Grace, but also Law vs. Gospel and Transcendence vs. Immanence:  “Father. Mother. Always you wrestle inside me. Always you will.”  The goal is to see God as both Father and Mother.  The key scene for this interpretation is the sermon at the center of the film, the priest (referencing Job 1:21) says we must learn to see the Lord who gives as the same as the Lord who takes away.

I don’t think it is possible for interpreters to make too much of the quote from the Biblical book of Job that opens to movie:

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation … while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job 38:4, 7)

This line is from God’s speech to Job from the whirlwind, a mystical encounter with God that Job has after Job has, in essence, asked God why He allows (causes?) innocent people to suffer.  God doesn’t directly answer Job’s question.  Instead God gives a speech about the vastness, complexity, and terrifying beauty of the universe.  God takes Job on the same journey the movie takes us on with its journey though the story of creation and the evolution of the dinosaurs.

Part of the point of the God’s speech is that God is the creator of both the beautiful things and the horrible things in nature, the monsters like Behemoth (Job 40:15) and Leviathan (Job 41:1), represented by dinosaurs in The Tree of Life.  The movie begins with the death of the main character’s brother.  This is the event that Jack (played by Sean Penn as an adult) is trying to make sense of with his reflections on his childhood experiences.  Jack and his mother can’t understand why God would take away their brother/son.  But that is because they think of God as simply a God of love who smiles through the leaves.  They can’t understand that the natural world is as violent as it is beautiful – the creation sequence ends when a meteor strikes the earth, killing the dinosaurs that were the high point of the evolutionary narrative.  If God is willing to kill the dinosaurs which took billions of years of evolution to create, then why are we surprised that he is willing to kill a 19 year-old human child?

The difficulty is learning to see the short life of the human being, the brief flowering of a sunflower that is born, spends its life turning toward the light, and soon withers and fades.  Some of the flowers are destroyed by weather or animals or other natural mechanisms.  But even the short life of these flowers is beautiful.  And in fact the mechanisms that kill the flowers are themselves beautiful in a terrible way, like dinosaurs and meteors.

There’s a line from the trailer, that I don’t remember seeing in the movie:  “Someday we’ll fall down and weep, and we’ll understand it all. All things.”  That’s what’s happening at the end of the film.  The main character is coming to understand, to be reconciled to both his mother and his father, to see God shining through all things.  The mother is right to insist on the way of Grace: “the only way to be happy is to love”.  But she’s wrong to think that Grace is a matter of escaping Nature.  Nature can be terrible in its indifference to human concerns, but nature is not selfish, and even in Nature’s awe-inspiring terribleness we can see God smiling through. “Nature” is not the right term for human fallenness.

I’m not sure if Jack is supposed to be literally dead at the end and in heaven – I need to see the movie again – but he is certainly having a beatific vision, a mystical experience of the love and beauty of God.  We see him embracing both his mother and his father, the beauty of Nature’s grace and the terror of Nature’s law.  He’s having the same sort of experience that Job has when God speaks to him out of the whirlwind.  This mystical experience could be just a symbolic near-death experience.  Did you notice how the sound of the elevator beeping between floors sounds like an EKG?  And if I recall correctly, Jack comes back down the elevator after having the vision, symbolically returning to life.

Either way, the mystical experience Jack has had is occasioned by his childhood memories and reflections on the origin of the universe – the movie we have just watched.  Jack has glimpsed the big picture, the universe from God’s point of view.  He has seen the terrible beauty of Nature.  The goal is that we the viewers, having been inside Jack’s mind and therefore having experienced the same meditation as Jack will have the same mystical insight he gains at the end.  We will be able to walk away from the movie believing that the God who gives is the same God who takes away.  Nature, too, is supernatural Grace.

“When Jesus himself wanted to explain to his disciples what his forthcoming death was all about, he didn’t give them a theory, he gave them a meal.”

When Jesus was anointed at Bethany (Mark 14:3-9), the disciples complained that the act was wasteful, the expensive perfume could have been sold and the money given to the poor.  But Jesus affirms the importance of the action as a preparation for his burial.  It was a symbolic act, a performance.  Jesus even goes as far as to say “she has done a beautiful thing” (vs. 6).  Many translations fudge this line, saying it is a “good” thing.  But the Greek word is kalon, beautiful.  Jesus is affirming the anointment as a symbolic act worth contemplating, an artwork.

Performance art is an artwork where the “object” to be aesthetically contemplated is an action or event experienced by a live audience rather than a painting or some other physical object that can be hung on a museum wall.  Originally meant to free art from consumeristic mentality of the gallery system, performances are not objects that can be bought or sold.  They are ephemeral; they happen and then they’re gone.  They are usually interactive and often site or audience specific and therefore unrepeatable.  Eventually museums did begin to “buy” performances, but all that is in the museum is a card explaining what happened.

This year Marina Abramovic got a lot of publicity for her performance work at MOMA, “The Artist is Present”, in which thousands of people lined up around the block for a chance to sit silently across from her for a few minutes each.  Other important performance artists include Yoko Ono who famously invited the media to observe her as she spent her honeymoon in bed with John Lennon.  John and Yoko turned the TV coverage of their wedding into a “Bed-In for Peace”, an artwork protesting the Vietnam War.

But one of my favorite performance artists is Josef Beuys.  Consider two of his artworks.  In “I Like America and America Likes Me” (1974), he wrapped himself in a blanket and locked himself in a room with a coyote for 8 hours.  And in “How to Explain Pictures to Dead Hare” (1965) he hung artworks on a gallery wall, covered himself in honey and gold leaf, and then whispered in the ear of a dead rabbit, apparently explaining the art to it.  These are weird actions, to say the least.  But they do seem to have some mysterious symbolism about them.  They remind me a lot of things the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel did.

In Ezekiel 4:1-8, God tells the prophet to build a model of Jerusalem, then lay in front of it on his left side for 390 days and on his right side for 40 more days.  In Ezekiel 4:9-17, God tells him to make bread out of all kinds of unusual ingredients and then to cook it over a fire of burning human excrement.  (Ezekiel chickens out over the excrement, and God allows him to use cow dung instead.)  These actions – especially the excrement part – sound exactly like the kind of thing contemporary artists do that drive conservative commentators crazy.

What is especially interesting about Ezekiel’s actions is that, while the scripture explains some of the symbolism to us the readers, nowhere does it say Ezekiel explained the actions to the original audience.  God simply told Ezekiel to perform these actions and left it up to the Israelites to interpret them on their own.  Apparently Ezekiel was so provocative that the elders of the city would hang out around his house just to watch him and see what he might do next (Ezekiel 8:1).

The other Old Testament prophets did similar things.  Isaiah walked around the city naked (Isaiah 20:1-6); Jeremiah filled wine jars and then smashed them together (Jeremiah 13:12-14); Hosea married a prostitute and gave their children some crazy names.

N.T. Wright argues that Jesus saw himself in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets, licensing us to interpret many of his actions in this symbolic way.  When he feeds the multitude or goes out of his way to heal on the Sabbath or casts a legion of demons into a herd of pigs, he is not just helping the oppressed, he is also telling us something about God.  There are other ways he could have accomplished the same goals, and thinking about this as a symbolic action helps us explain the particular details. Some of his actions can be understood in no other way: he cursed a fig tree for not bearing fruit even though it was out of season!

Take the legion example (Mark 5:1-20).  It is no accident that the demons are called “legion”, the name for a unit in the Roman army.  And it is no accident that Jesus casts them into a herd of unclean animals and drives them into the sea just as the occupied Palestinians wished they could drive their Roman oppressors into the sea.  Here Jesus is symbolically defeating the Romans while simultaneously showing that the real enemy is spiritual/demonic, not racial.  (See Ched Myers’s brilliant discussion of this passage in his book Binding the Strong Man.)

In John’s Gospel, the anointing at Bethany takes place the evening before the Palm Sunday triumphal entry into Jerusalem (see John 12), and as such it marks the beginning of a series of symbolic actions.  The Collect for Palm Sunday says:

Assist us mercifully with your help, O Lord God of our salvation, that we may enter with joy upon the contemplation of those mighty acts, whereby you have given us life and immortality; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

We contemplate the meaning and beauty of Jesus’s actions the way people contemplate art.

The two most obvious symbolic actions of Jesus’s last week are the cleansing of the Temple and the Last Supper.   In these two actions Jesus is symbolically destroying the Temple, enacting God’s judgment on the corrupt Jewish sacrificial system, and replacing that system with himself as the new focal point for worship of God.  (N.T. Wright has a great discussion of these events in Jesus and the Victory of God, chapter 9.  For a nice summary of the argument, see also p. 42-52 of Wright’s debate with Marcus Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions.)

What are the lessons of this approach to understanding Jesus’s life?  As with Jesus’s use of parables (symbolic stories), we can learn something about human embodiment.  Why does Jesus teach in stories and not just lectures?  He himself says it is to conceal the truth (Matthew 13:10-17), presumably to allow him to teach his disciples openly but to prevent the religious leaders from understanding the truly radical nature of his teaching and killing him before he was ready.  (Compare Matthew 7:6 on not casting your pearls of wisdom before swine, lest they turn on you.)

But that can’t be the whole purpose of the parables.  If it were, then why pass down the parables to the next generation?  Why not just pass down the literal explanation if the original purpose for the parables (protecting Jesus’s ability to teach) had become moot?

Jesus knows that we are not simply intellectual beings.  We are physical, emotional, embodied beings.  And symbols speak to us in our embodiment.  They draw connections with our everyday lives, they move our emotions, they stick in our memories, they reform our imaginations.

But perhaps more importantly, symbols are multivalent – they have more than one meaning.  Initially it might sound controversial to say that Jesus’s parables and actions have multiple interpretations.  Evangelicals are usually taught to look for “the one right interpretation” of any passage.  But even the most conservative Christian would agree that there is always another sermon to be preached about every passage.  We’re never “finished” understanding the Bible.  There is always more meaning to be found in the Scriptures.  The Scripture itself is more fundamental than any explanation.  We can never so perfectly “extract the meaning” out of the Bible such that we would no longer need to read the original text.  This is true of any artwork.  No explanation or description of a painting or poem or performance could ever replace the object or event itself.  There is always more than one meaning to be given to any symbol.

In a way I am arguing for an allegorical reading of Scripture.  But rather than looking for a meaning behind the literal text like medieval theologians did, in pointing to Jesus’s actions as performance art I am suggesting that the literal events themselves should be taken symbolically.  Hence taking the actions symbolically doesn’t mean thinking they didn’t really happen.  Jesus literally died on a Roman cross, but if the whole point of the crucifixion is simply substitutionary atonement, then he could have died in any way: stoning, fed to lions, hanging, beheading, electric chair.

But what if we take a stronger view of Providence?  God came to earth in the time and place he did, because there is something symbolically important about crucifixion.  This particular death was an enacted allegory, a performance artwork. John 3:14 connects the crucifixion to the serpent that was lifted up on a pole in Numbers 21.  Likewise Galatians 3:13 suggests that it is important that Jesus hangs on a tree.  Moreover, the whole idea of substitutionary atonement itself depends on the symbolism of sacrifice, killing one thing in place of something else.  Maybe we can extend the idea of performance art back into the Old Testament sacrificial system.  God doesn’t need the blood of animals (Psalm 50:8-13), so why does his Law require shedding blood for forgiveness (Hebrews 9:22)?  Perhaps there is important symbolism here.  The important point, however, is to remember that any explanation we give is only ever partial.

Connecting these two themes (embodiment and multivalence), we can say that symbols point us toward practices as primary and doctrines as secondary.  What God wants is us to tell the story of Christ, not necessarily to understand the story.  He wants us to do something, not just to believe something: faith without works is dead.  The Great Commission (Matthew 28:16-20) is to go and make disciples, people who can obey Christ’s commandment to love one another, not just intellectually affirm that Jesus died for our sins (1 John 2:3-4, 3:23).

Finally the weekly Eucharistic liturgy is a performance artwork, one in which we are simultaneously the artists and the artworks.  We perform the symbolic actions of eating the bread and wine, but God performs the action of transforming us into the body of Christ.  And since this is an artwork, we shouldn’t feel like there must be a final literal explanation of what’s happening and how.  Is the bread transubstantiated into Christ’s literal body or is it a symbolic occasion for our remembrance or something in between?  We don’t need to decide once and for all.  There are many ways of interpreting the Eucharist-artwork.  As N.T. Wright has said, at the Last Supper Jesus didn’t give us a theory, he gave us a meal.  Our faithful performance is primary, not our intellectual understanding and explanation of it.

“Why must women bear so much?”

Medea (von Trier, 1988) is an interesting film in Lars von Trier‘s body of work for at least two reasons.  First, and most strikingly, it was made before von Trier’s turn to his charactaristic style expressed in the Dogme 95 manifesto.  Whereas von Trier’s post-Dogme films are in a sort realistic style which eschews film school camera tricks, Medea has an expressivistic style which no one could mistake for a documentary.  But, second, the female main character of Medea diverges significantly from the women in von Trier’s more recent films such as Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, and Dogville. All of von Trier’s women suffer at the hands of a patriarchal society.  But whereas the recent heroines submissively and silently suffer in a self-sacrifical way, Medea takes revenge on her husband for the suffering he causes her.

So von Trier’s work has shifted away from an expressivistic aesthetic toward a more restrained aesthetic, and he has shifted from a story about revenge toward stories about self-sacrifice.  I would like to suggest that there is a link between these two shifts.  And that link is von Trier’s conversion to Roman Catholicism.

It is hard to know how seriously to take von Trier’s Catholicism.  Sometimes it seems to be merely an aesthetic pose.  But since it is von Trier’s aesthetic that is at issue here, perhaps it doesn’t matter whether his religion is sincere.  In any case, von Trier fairly explicitly sets up his recent heroines as Christ-figures who suffer self-sacrificially for the salvation of others.

What does this have to do with forsaking expressivism in favor of the rules of “dogma”?  Von Trier has learned that it is not all about himself.  When life is about the expression of self, then you can only respond to an attack on yourself with a counter attack.  But when you acknowledges that there is a good order to the world which you did not create but which you must work within, then you can trust your principles and not feel the need to force others to fit into your own will.  You can accept the suffering caused by others and sacrifice your own self in the hope that others may be redeemed.

“To speak to questions of suffering and injustice Christian thought must uncover its suppressed elements and acknowledge that its symbols, like the divine, cannot be mastered.”

Thoughts for Good Friday 2011:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.  And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:5-8)

Christ’s death was not just any death, but a crucifixion.  The cross was a symbol of “shame” (Hebrews 12:2) and a “curse” (Galatians 3:13).  That’s why it was considered “foolishness” and “weakness” (1 Corinthians 1:23) to worship a crucified God, the ultimate oxymoron.

The shamefulness of the Cross has important theological implications.  As theologian Damien Casey explains in an essay available online,

the cross was a sign of ignominy. It was not a symbol commonly used by the early Christians, because for them its associations were all too clear. Theologically, the death of Jesus is God’s highest self-divestment or kenosis. It is here that the definite Christian revelation of God is to be found; in life and death of Jesus, his renunciation of mastery and identification with servitude, the poor and the oppressed and all those we treat like shit.

Its clear implication is that the concept of divine sovereignty as divine mastery over the world must be abandoned. God’s place is with the abject every bit as much as it is on the high altar of the cathedral. Yes, the crucifix as a triumphant symbol is a delicious irony in keeping with the spirit of the gospels. But that irony is lost when we forget its strong association with both ignominy and abjection. Then it merely becomes a sign of domination. In denying negation in God, classical Christian thought obscured one of its most profound insights into suffering. To speak to questions of suffering and injustice Christian thought must uncover its suppressed elements and acknowledge that its symbols, like the divine, cannot be mastered.

If the Cross is a symbol of God’s grace and love, it is so because it shows depth of humiliation which God was willing to endure for us.  If the Cross is a symbol of the victory of God over sin and death, it is the paradoxical Christian victory that comes through defeat, the kind of victory in which persecution is a blessing (Matthew 5:10) and even a cause for joy (James 1:2).

The Cross is the victory of a holy love that cannot be overcome by evil but which “overcomes evil with good” (Romans 12:21).  This overcoming does not happen by a show of strength and power.  It happens by the weakness of turning the other cheek (Matt. 5:39).  No evil we humans do to God can make God stop loving us, no suffering we inflict on God can make God stop doing good to us.  In fact the more we sin, the greater God’s grace is shown to be (Romans 5:20), the stronger we resist God, the more God’s weakness absorbs our resistance in love.  God’s love for us is invincible (Romans 8:38-39) that the more we hate God, the more God’s love is revealed (Romans 5:8).

If all this is true, then doesn’t this mean that it is impossible to desecrate a cross?  You can trample a cross in the mud, throw it in the garbage, or flush it down the toilet, but if the cross is already a symbol of shame, humiliation, and weakness – if the holiness of the Cross lies precisely in the self-empyting love of God for God’s enemies (Romans 5:10) – then all attacking the Cross can succeed in doing is to make the holy weakness of the Cross more powerfully present.

As a symbol, the Cross is so powerful that it cannot be denied or destroyed by its enemies.  Attacking a cross has roughly the same symbolic effect as shooting a gun-control activist.

Not all religious symbols work this way, of course.  The enemies of Islam can desecrate a Qur’an by throwing it in a toilet or burning it. But the enemies of Christianity can’t desecrate a cross.  All they can do is show that the Cross was right all along: this is the way humans treat God.

Perhaps the Cross can, however, be desecrated by its alleged friends – betrayed by a kiss, as it were (Luke 22:48).  If the Cross can be abused at all, then surely the only way to abuse the Cross is for a Christian to distort the crucifixion into a symbol of hatred.  When someone who should know better turns his or her back on God, refusing to love others the way we have been loved (1 John 4:19), this might – if anything can – bring shame to the Cross so as to “crucify again the son of God” (Hebrews 6:6).

For example, if an artist immersed a plastic crucifix souvenir in a jar of his own urine, this couldn’t possibly desecrate the Cross. (Not even if he also had ants crawl over it.)   Assuming a piece of junk-plastic could be relevantly sacred in the first place, and assuming that immersing something in urine has the same rhetorical effect as pissing on it, and assuming that the artist’s resulting photograph of the crucifix weren’t beautiful thereby problematizing the claim that he intended to mock the Cross – indeed even assuming for the sake of argument that the artist did intend to mock the Cross – it does not follow that the artist succeeded in mocking the Cross.  On the contrary, if the Cross is a symbol of shame and humiliation, then pissing on a cross can only enhance its symbolism, regardless of the artist’s intention.

In our culture, one cannot write the letters S-T-O-P on a red octagon and have mean “Don’t stop here”.  The symbol has an objective meaning, and no single subjective intention can change that.  If you want your sign to mean “Don’t stop here”, then you need use another set of symbols.  Likewise, the Cross has an objective meaning that a jar of urine can’t change.  If you intend to mock the Cross, that’s the last way you should do it.

A better way to mock the Cross would be to call yourself a Christian and then use violence against art gallery guards and to destroy someone’s private property in the name of Christ.  You might think you were standing up for Christ’s honor – already a confusion since the Cross is a symbol of shame not honor – but all you would really succeed in doing is to turn the artwork into a symbol of the artist’s suffering and persecution.  Where it had once been a beautiful image that led viewers into a meditation on the Incarnation, you would have transformed the artwork into a symbol of hatred and persecution of the arts in the name of Christ. (Especially if you also, inexplicably, destroy a non-offensive photo of a nun praying.)

But in all this, perhaps even still Christ would be victorious in his weakness.  If the Cross is a symbol of shame and humiliation, if it shows us Christ’s identification with human brokenness and suffering, then perhaps we should see the Cross wherever we see suffering in the world (Matthew 25:45).  If this is right, then not even Christian use of the Cross as a symbol of hatred can desecrate the Cross.  Christ died for all those who suffer the results of sin, even those who suffer at the hands of Christians.

Even turning an allegedly blasphemous artwork into a symbol of persecution does not destroy the power of the Cross.  It simply allows us to see Christ in the suffering of the persecuted artist.  You can’t desecrate a cross even if you try.  And Lord knows we try.  Christ have mercy.

“That weren’t no man!”

I just watched the pilot episode of Frank Darabont‘s zombie TV series The Walking Dead.  I loved the scene where the main character, after learning about the nature of zombies, goes back to the first zombie he met, a woman with no legs who has been crawling through a field for who knows how many months, and basically “euthanizes” her.  ”I’m sorry this happened to you,” he says just before shooting her in the brain and returning her dead body to an inanimate state.  The series (or at least the main character) takes seriously the fact that a zombie’s dead body is still a human body which is, in some sense, a person who deserves moral consideration.  This idea reminded me of an earlier post I wrote on the ethics of zombies. I’m looking forward to watching the rest of the series!

***

UPDATED: There are scenes like this in many of the episodes.  The best are the scene in the department store where they give thanks to the dead zombie before using his “guts” to help them escape and the scene when the woman kills her sister just as she is turning into a zombie.

In all these scenes there is a strong sense that the zombie, though an (un)dead body, is still the same person he/she was when alive. This doesn’t necessarily imply a rejection of the soul. The person isn’t simply identical to his/her body.   The zombie is a body whose mind/soul has left, but at the same time the person is not identical to the soul.  The zombie is a dead version of the same person.  Thus the person, according to The Walking Dead, is a whole of body and soul that cannot be reduced to either component but can be (at least partially) located in either component.  Contrary to what the CDC doctor suggests, “you” do not completely cease to exist when your brain dies.  You are your soul (or mind or brain), but you are also your body.  (The doctor doesn’t quite believe what he says either, since he continues to have a personal relationship with his dead wife’s brain tissue, not simply because it is scientifically significant but because it is his wife’s body.)

I may be saying the same thing as John Morehead in his comments on “zombie theology” where he reads The Waking Dead as offering a sort of nonreductive physicalism in which you are your brain but you are more than just the sum of your brain parts.  But I’d like instead to read the film as offering a paradoxical “holistic dualism”.  You have two components, but neither one alone is “you”.  You are your brain, but not just your brain.  (Though, like I said, this may be just another way of stating nonreducive physicalism.)

“You can have Plato, and I’ll stick with Pluto (and Mickey, and Goofy).”

True story: My two-year old daughter thinks Mickey Mouse’s dog‘s name is Plato.

The quote in the post’s title comes from The Muppet Show episode where Sylvester Stallone sings a parody of the Gershwin song “Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off“.  You can watch the video here.  (Skip ahead to about 6:45 for the song.)

“Well, they treated me pretty badly at first, but then they found out I tried to kill a film critic. You know, in Texas, it’s not even a crime.”

This week I’m moving from film industry hub Los Angeles to Houston where I will be a college philosophy professor.  In honor of my move, I’m posting my entry for “5ive Things“, a blog sponsored by L.A.’s wonderful public radio station KCRW.  Here is my list of five Texas movies directed by philosophy majors. These are five of my favorite movies of any kind, but they all also happen to take place in Texas and to have been directed by someone who majored in philosophy.

1. Days of Heaven (Malick, 1978) – Besides being one of the greatest living directors, Terrence Malick is the best philosopher to have given up academia for Hollywood.  After getting an undergrad degree in philosophy from Harvard (where he studied with seminal film-philosopher Stanley Cavell), Malick began graduate studies in philosophy at Oxford.  He didn’t finish his PhD, but Malick did go on to be perhaps the greatest filmmaking philosopher.  And he’s a Texan.  His film Days of Heaven is a masterpiece of cinematic spirituality.  It’s not only heartbreakingly beautiful, but it gives you a good idea what the Old Testament would have looked like if it had taken place in Texas.

2. Bottle Rocket (Anderson, 1996) – After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin with a philosophy degree, Houston native Wes Anderson went on to make Bottle Rocket with Luke and Owen Wilson, a movie Martin Scorsese called “transcendent”.  I don’t know about “transcendent”, but it sure is funny, and I would agree with Scorsese that it is one of the best films of the 1990s.

3. Blood Simple (Coen, 1984) – The Coen Brothers‘ first film gets as close to the joys of pure cinema as a Hollywood movie can.  The Coens are often remembered for their quirky dialogue, but they are just as much masters of nonverbal cinematic storytelling.  Here, in the unbridled enthusiasm of a first film, their cinematic virtuosity is on display via long wordless scenes of Hitchockian suspense.  The younger brother Ethan studied Wittgenstein as a philosophy major at Princeton, and he has learned well how to translate the great philosopher’s ideas to film: “What can be shown, cannot be said” and “what can be said at all can be said clearly” and “what cannot be said must be passed over in silence” (my paraphrase).  Blood Simple is only the first of three Coen movies that takes in Texas.  See also No Country for Old Men and the upcoming True Grit.

4. The Thin Blue Line (Morris, 1988) – Errol Morris was a history major undergrad, but he did briefly enroll in the philosophy graduate program at U.C. Berkeley.  And many of his films, The Thin Blue Line above all, brilliantly raise philosophical questions about doubt, certainty, and self-deception. Morris’s film not only reinvents the documentary genre and engages thoughtfully with the ethics of law enforcement, it is also almost a college practicum on epistemology.

5. Primer (Carruth, 2004).  Okay, so director Shane Carruth was a math major, not a philosophy major, but if you believe Plato then philosophy and math are not very different.  Carruth’s incredibly low-budget film (shot for $7000!) blends mathematical theory, physics, philosophy of time, and computer engineering to create a surprisingly moving drama about friendship and morality.

P.S. The quote for the title of this post comes from an episode of the animated TV series The Critic.

“Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.”

Here are some further thoughts about the aparently happy ending of Inception (Nolan, 2010).  (See my previous post for my initial thoughts.)

All of Christopher Nolan’s other films are best understood as film noir, with the possible exception of The Prestige.  Films in the noir genre, are often (always? almost always?) told from the point of view of a protagonist who thinks he knows what is going on and perhaps even believes he is in control of the events of the plot, but who, in the end, realizes that he was being conned and really had no idea what was going on the whole time.  (Under this description, even The Prestige might count as a film noir.)  Hence noir films eschew Hollywood endings and end tragically, as do all of Nolan’s films prior to Inception.

Inception, however, seems to belong in a different genre.  On the surface at least, Inception is a heist movie.  (See my earlier post about heist movies.)  A heist movie is almost the exact opposite of a film noir.  A heist movie is told from the point of view of a protagonist who really does always know what is going on and is really in control of the events of the plot, even the events that seems like mistakes or random accidents that benefit his opponent.  In fact, we might even say that the only difference between a noir and a heist movie is perspective.  A noir is told from the perspective of someone being conned, while a heist movie is told from the perspective of the con artist.  Since the perspectives are different, then the ending of the story has a different valence.  The same ending would be a happy ending in a heist movie and a tragedy in a film noir.

Now if the reading I suggested in my previous post is correct, then Cobb is conning on himself.  The movie is, at bottom, a film noir like all of Nolan’s other films.  But since both the con artist and the one being conned are the same person, if the con is successful then the surface of the movie (the part from the perspective of Cobb’s conscious self) will take the form of a heist movie.  And, this might help explain the appearance of a happy ending.  It’s not that Nolan is suddently feeling more optimistic than he has in the past; rather, as a heist movie, the film must have a happy ending in order to fit the genre conventions. But there are enough clues in the film to make the viewer doubt whether the ending really is happy.

Cobb’s conscious self seems to be in control, but really there are subconcious forces conning him, subconscious forces that Cobb carefully orchestrated while awake to fool himself in the dream.  The happy ending itself is the con.

“You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.”

Like all of Christopher Nolan’s movies Inception (Nolan, 2010) is about self-deception (self-inception?, being the beginning of oneself?), particularly the self-deception involved in giving meaning to your life after a tragic and life-shattering event.  I’ve only seen the movie once, but I suspect future viewings will support the interpretation that the entire movie was an elaborate hoax that the protagonist (Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dominic Cobb) played on himself in order to make himself think the ending of the movie was real when in fact it is a dream.

Then again the movie is also about the corrosive power of skepticism, the fact that once it is suggested to you that your world may not be real, you cannot disprove the idea and the boundary between real life and dreams breaks down.  So I also suspect that the movie will be carefully crafted to be undecidable.  If Nolan succeeds, we will never be able to know whether the movie is a dream or not.  And in that case, perhaps we can, as Cobb’s wife suggests in one scene, forget about what we know and go with what we choose to believe.  We must choose our own defining idea, the idea which will change everything and shape our identity.

If Cobb is to construct a meaningful life for himself, he must put himself in an undecidable position.  He must create a false reality and then make himself doubt any clues that suggest his reality is false.  In other words, he must use the power of skepticism against himself.  He must doubt even the idea that his world may not be real.

Here skepticism is necessary for a self-deception is in the service of meaning.  One interesting question here is what we are supposed to think about all this.  All of Nolan’s previous films end tragically.  (The possible exception is Batman Begins, but the epilogue in which Batman learns that his methods have lead to copycat super villians like the Joker suggests that we should see this film as tragic as well.) In fact Memento has a remarkably similar ending to Inception.  In the earlier film, the protagonist creates “a puzzle you can’t solve” in order to give his life the only kind of meaning possible for him given his mental illness.  Yet the ending of Memento seems shocking and somewhat sad.  Inception, however, seems to have with a classic Hollywood happy ending.  Is this simply away to help preserve undecidibility, a refusal to explicitly acknowledge Cobb’s self-deception?  The final shot of the spinning top does cast some doubt on the Hollywood ending while leaving its interpretation open.

Or is the ending Nolan’s suggestion that self deception can sometimes be good (as discussed in my post on The Invention of Lying)? Nolan’s films argue that, at least for a certain kind of person (i.e., victims of tragedy), meaning is only possible via self-deception.  But why would this sort of self-deception necessarily be bad?  Isn’t it possible that all meaning is an illusion, a product of self-deception?  The meaning of words is an illusion:  the scribbles on the page and the noises in the air don’t really mean anything apart from what we choose to tell ourselves they mean.  Likewise the meaning of artworks is an illusion: the scribbles on the page aren’t really faces or whatever, unless we choose to tell ourselves that’s what they represent.

All linguistic and artistic meaning is a kind of collective dream.  But these dreams can be good.  They allow us to communicate and create beauty.  The illusion of art makes it possible to create, as Cobb says in the film, “cathedrals” of the mind, works of beauty that “could never exist in the real world”.  From this perspective, why not also think of the meaning of life could be a beautiful illusion or a good dream?  Perhaps Nolan is suggesting that whether Cobb’s world is real or not, as long as it is beautiful and meaningful to him, then it is worth living.

On the other hand, Nolan is also aware that there is something in human nature that craves non-illusory meaning.  We don’t want to think that our meaning might be self-created.  That’s why Cobb’s self-created world couldn’t be meaningful for him and his wife.  That’s why she had to hide away the spinning top which could signal her world’s falsity.

And, above all, that’s why Cobb’s self-deception has to be undetectable and the movie must be constructed so as to be perfectly undecidable.  In order for Cobb’s world to be meaningful, we must never be able to know whether the spinning top is going to fall or not.  But perhaps it shouldn’t matter one way or the other as long as the dream is beautiful.

“How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?”

I’m thinking about using the movie In Bruges (McDonagh, 2008) in my ethics class to discuss some points from MacIntyre’s After Virtue, in particular his opening parable about a world that has lost the traditions and practices that give meaning to our moral terms.

In his blog post about the film my friend Barry Taylor gave the astute assement that In Bruges is

a film about the search for redemption in a world where religion, and specifically the Christian religion, has been either pushed to the edges or simply left behind as society moves in other directions.

In this respect, In Bruges reminded me of the novel Atonement. Both are about the search for judgment and redemption in a post-Christian world. Western culture no longer believes in God, but we still instinctively believe in sin. We know that even if God is dead, not everything is permitted. But we have nowhere to turn when we do sin. There is no one to judge us and no one to forgive us.

As I discussed in my earlier post on the film adaptation of Atonement, at the end of the story the narrator, Briony Tallis, confesses to having departed from the historical facts. The tragic “truth” would have been too depressing. In the novel, Briony writes:

How could that constitute an ending? What sense of hope or satisfaction could a reader draw from such an account? Who would want to believe that they never met again, never fulfilled their love? Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism?

Briony justifies her revisionist history by appealing the sort of postliberal theory of narrative truth I discussed in my review of the film.

When I am dead, and the Marshalls are dead, and the novel is finally published, we will only exist as my inventions. Briony will be as much of a fantasy as the lovers who shared a bed in Balham and enraged their landlady. No one will care what events and which individuals were misrepresented to make a novel. I know there’s always a certain kind of reader who will be compelled to ask, But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish. As long as there is a single copy, a solitary typescript of my final draft, then my spontaneous, fortuitous sister and her medical prince survive to love.

As a narrative artist, Briony is creating truth. Of course, the difference between narrative truth in postliberal theology and in the novel Atonement is that the latter is not Scripture. The author of Atonement, Briony, is not God. But in order to generate the kind of truth she needs for forgiveness, she must act as God.

The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? there is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.

But perhaps it was not “an impossible task” after all since Briony has succeeding in making us “want to believe” her version of the story and not to “care what events and which individuals were misrepresented” in spite of our temptation toward “the bleakest realism”. Briony concludes:

I like to think that it was not weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end. I gave them happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me. Not quite, not yet. If I had the power to conjure them at my birthday celebration . . . Robbie and Cecilia, still alive, still in love, sitting side by side in the library, smiling at The Trials of Arabella? It’s not impossible.

In the end, it seems that Atonement is not entirely pessimistic about the possibility of art to offer redemption in a post-Christian world.

So what about In Bruges? What is that film’s take on the possibility of redemption?  That discussion will have to wait until a future post…