The Free Thinker

Avatar

I don't get to theater movies often, but "Avatar" is worth it.  It is not the best movie I've ever seen but it may be the most spectacular.  The action takes place on another planet, Pandora, and the scenery on Pandora does something which C.S. Lewis often manages to do in print but which I had thought impossible on a screen: to convey some of what we find beautiful, awe-inspiring, in wild nature, and to take it to a higher level.  "Avatar" mingles the virtues of science fiction and fantasy: it has the comparative realism of science fiction, the sense that this is possible in our world, the appeal to the gadgeteer in each of us as we puzzle over how the futuristic machines work, and the convenient assumption that the ordinary laws of physics and chemistry etc. may be assumed to apply (no magic); yet at the same time it attains the mythic freedom of a work that projects the works of pure imagination.  The story is respectable too.  There is "character development": the protagonists learn, change, and discover through their experiences and moral crises.  There is suspense, action, thrills, but also tenderness and affection and love, loyalty, friendship, sorrow.  It meets the test, so seemingly simple yet so often failed, of making sense.  Characters' actions are well motivated and consistent, without being tediously predictable, at least, not always.  Highly recommended.

For this blog, though, the most interesting part of the film is its... what to call it?  Let's say "cause," but we could say "ideology," "agenda," "creed," whatever.  In short, what makes the good guys good and the bad guys bad.  A movie needs a cause.  You have to care who wins, you have to get a signal whose side to be on, and I think American moviegoers are sophisticated enough-- I certainly am-- to practice a sort of ideological suspension of disbelief.  The elements of the cause are familiar: environmentalism, anti-imperialism, antagonism to resource-hungry corporations, idealization of the primitive.  I heard the movie compared to "Dances with Wolves."  Maybe.  Another analogy is "The Last Samurai."  In each of these films a disillusioned American warrior "goes native" amidst a foreign people whose primitive yet noble culture he recognizes as superior to his own.  Though there is one difference here: the protagonist of "Avatar" (a) doesn't seem particularly disillusioned at the beginning of the film, and (b) makes an important observation early on, that the military types in the Pandora base camp are different from the Marines he knew at home because they're only there for the money.  The operation on Pandora doesn't seem to be a government initiative, and its more trigger-happy agents seem to be more like mercenaries than normal patriotic soldiers.  That's only one of the ways in which "Avatar" makes its cause much less controversial than those of "The Last Samurai" and "Dances with Wolves."  Far more importantly, the whole story is set on another world, where the rights and wrongs of things might be quite different from here.  North American Indians are not worse off for having the land they lived in settled by Europeans: they live longer, are better nourished, can read and write, enjoy indoor plumbing, etc.  We know for a fact that murder rates are much higher among primitive peoples of Papua New Guinea and Amazonia than in modern industrialized nations.  To idealize the lifestyles of primitive tribes on Earth is balderdash.  Man is better off with civilization.  But on other worlds, there might, for all we know, be peoples for whom this is not the case, who live amidst wild nature in harmony and happiness and could ask nothing more.  A well-informed and conscientious moviegoer ought to reject the ideologies of "The Last Samurai" and "Dances with Wolves," but not necessarily that of "Avatar."

So I'm inclined to make another comparison: C.S. Lewis's Perelandra. In Perelandra, as in "Avatar," man arrives on an unfallen world in its edenic splendor; and he comes as a potential corrupter.  On Perelandra, as to some extent on Pandora, the beasts have a natural love and obedience for man: they are there for his benefit and pleasure, though they are also ennobled in serving him.  In Perelandra and Pandora, too, a gloriously beautiful nature is part of the story; the splendor of a different Nature, compared to which earthly nature, darkened by the fall, seems like a dim second-rate affair, is ever-present, and is not merely a background to the plot, but the brilliance with the author has imagined it is one of the chief pleasures of the story, as well as its theme and the key to its meaning.  The people of the foreign planet are in their innocence, and it is the task of the protagonist to use sinister knowledge which he has from his tainted earthly background in order to foil an assault on paradise which the natives, in their innocence, can't understand and don't know how to resist.  The protagonist's reward is to be taken up into that better world (albeit, in Perelandra, after a delay and another adventure).

As the analogy to Perelandra might suggest, "Avatar" has a theology.  What's interesting, though, is the explicit paganism of that theology: there is a sort of Gaia figure, a nature-goddess, whom the protagonist initially regards with skepticism but who turns out to be real.  This Gaia figure, called Eywa, is evidently not omnipotent like the Christian deity: her sway is apparently limited to the planet Pandora and does not extend to earth; it seems that there is a real risk of defeating her if a certain "tree of souls" is destroyed by Earthling artillery; and it seems that she resides somehow in the "network" that is Perelandra's ecology.  This is really exceedingly interesting.  Who comes up with this stuff?  Where do they get their ideas?  Paganism has been dead for 1,500 years and yet, somehow, Hollywood screenwriters feel called upon to reinvent it, only for fictional purposes no doubt, yet one wonders: do they believe it?  A little bit at least?  I've noticed this before.  In computer games like "Baldur's Gate" there are various gods for whom one sometimes undertakes quests: again, paganism, not seriously believed, yet somehow necessary to introduce for entertainment purposes.  I'm not sure that the paganism of late antiquity was so very different.  One gets the sense that it was a powerful cultural force yet, at the same time, was not taken too seriously.  The Greeks were irreverent and impious about their gods from the beginning, from Homer's day, but the human love of stories, of imagination, the human need to contemplate and half-believe in the transcendent in order to enjoy life, even if they didn't regard it as a lawgiver to be obeyed, was enough to keep the Greeks building temples to Jupiter and Apollo for a thousand years.  It was against this paganism that the martyrs waged their grim but glorious struggle, paying the price of death for the joy of denouncing these corrupting pseudo-divinities with their last breath.  Hollywood today is a similar kind of rival to Christianity, a source of narratives and role models and values, in the aggregate absurd, impractical, elitist, cruel, conducive to misery, yet exerting a powerful sway over the imagination, a fount of corruption.  (The convention of spontaneous sex, without consequences or complications or even, seemingly, contraceptives, is just one example.)  But Hollywood's paganism is rarely as overt as in "Avatar."

No End In Sight

I was surprised to find No End In Sight to be as good as it was.  It didn't get into conspiracy theories or confuse the issues by shouting about lies and stealing oil.  It just looked straight at Iraq, what people tried to do and what did happen.  Wrapped at the beginning of 2007, it had a very dismal view of Iraq's prospects (though no more dismal than mine were at the time), but neither did it really try to ask for a pullout.  In fact, the last quote in the movie was of a Marine saying, with suppressed fury, 'this is not the best we can do.'

From a personal perspective it was hard to watch, both because if I ever have to watch another soldier getting blown up it will be too soon, and because it was all so enraging.  It brought together almost every last thing that, when it happened, I said to myself, "that doesn't seem right" or "how could they make such a huge mistake?" and compressed it into a very short chronology.  There was almost nothing that was new to me, and there were certainly a few wrinkles I feel were more important than the ones they had in there, but I was astonished at its incisiveness and, insofar as a documentary would allow, erudition.  Though the director certainly had an angle and the framing of the story certainly injected somewhat tendentious drama, it did not in any sense strike me as a facile hatchet job.  Indeed, it merely brought together a bunch of things I knew already but usually didn't contemplate in such rapid succession.  That was quite sufficient to bring ears to my eyes for all the opportunities we lost.

At the end of the day, of course, it offers no solutions, just the sense that we've made very great blunders and caused a massive amount of unnecessary suffering, and now we are deep in the hole.  The surge seemed to turn this back for a while, but the recent struggles between Maliki and Sadr underline the tenuous and uncontrollale nature of improvements so far.  Iraq (excepting Kurdish areas, which have been largely independent since the mid-90s) has gone from one strong man to many strong men, orbiting an exhausted and demoralized center.  Is there a solution any more?  I don't know the answer to that, but this movie reminds me: what we are doing right now isn't a solution, it's a gamble.  Worse, it's a gamble the between bad (a detente of strong men with Iran the main external power broker) and worse (extended chaos, breeding the generations of terrorists).  Good outcomes are possible, but only, really, by chance.

I can only presume that this is Gen Petraeus' hope: if we hold the line long enough, some unforeseen configuration of currents will emerge that we can forge into a lasting peace.  This is actually somewhat plausible, but only if the blacksmiths understand Iraq clearly as it is, not as their conscience would prefer it to be, or as they find it politically expedient for it to be.  This holds no less true for Democrats than Republicans: it does Iraq no good (and some ill) to blame everything unpleasant about Iraq on Bush et al.  Something dramatic must be done.  If our next Commander in Chief chooses withdrawal, then s/he (and we) will own the consequences.  Pretending it would be easier than it will be is just repeating the same mistake over again.

--Nato

Tolkien's Presentism

I saw the fifth Harry Potter movie on Thursday (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). Quite fun. By now, the Harry Potter series has, I suppose, surpassed the fantasy classics that I read as a kid-- C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings-- in terms of both length and readership.  Having read very little of Harry Potter-- I read the first chapter and a half of Order of the Phoenix-- I suppose I can't really compare.  Certainly Rowling is a very talented writer.  But I don't sense in her the same greatness as in Tolkien or Lewis.

Lewis, whose greatness is specifically Christian, is a topic for another essay.  Tolkien seems to me the inventor of modern fantasy; the inventor because, unlike, say, The Wizard of Oz, he serves as a bridge between the ancient fantasist tradition-- paganism-- and a myth-starved modernity which hungers for a literature that inculcates the belief, proscribed in our times by scientific-materialist dogma, that there are mysterious worlds other than our own, a belief that man needs to have at some level even he is no longer permitted to openly confess it, or else, as William Blake said, "the same dull round, even of the universe, would soon become a mill with complicated wheels."  One must give special credit to a founder.  Rowling steps into a tradition of fantasy literature which is already thriving; her originality lies in the extraordinary humor and creativity with which she appropriates a huge amount of magical folklore, and at the same time in her evocation of the experience of growing up.

What impresses me about Tolkien is the strange presentism of Lord of the Rings.  I've heard that Tolkien denied that his books were representing contemporary events.  (He was writing between 1937 and 1949, and was published in 1954-5.)  And an attempt to map the characters, places, and events of his novels onto the geopolitics of the 1930s and 1940s doesn't quite work.  And yet there are nonetheless so many parallels and echoes.  The Ring evokes the atom bomb: it means destruction if the Enemy gets it; yet the good guys, who have it, must not use it or it will irrevocably corrupt them.  The rising power of Sauron evokes the rising power of Hitler: a force of perfect malevolence, of terrific strength, but capable also of subtlety, cunning, deceit.  Saruman and King Theoden, under the influence of Grima Wormtongue, evoke the appeasers, seduced by lies and fear into collaboration or non-resistance.  The opposition of East and West is also evocative: the East (read: Bolshevik Russia, Nazi Germany), a source of vast menace and darkness; the West-beyond-the-seas (read: America), a place of bliss and peace, to which the people of Middle-Earth could once sail (the open borders of the 19th century) but to which access was now debarred (the rising immigration restrictions of the 1920s, a national disgrace for which we have never felt anything like adequate shame: they make us, in effect, complicit in the genocide of the Jews).  Tolkien's Middle-Earth is a world in an immediate crisis but also in long-term decline, a world full of the echoes of old glories, full of ruined cities and depopulated countries, a world where the best things are ancient.  In this respect it makes a weird contrast with our world, where we taken for granted the superiority of the present over the past.  But it fits the 1930s and 1940s: Europe's glorious past standing in grim contrast to the darkness and menace and horror of its present.  And again, victory over Sauron brings a reprieve but not a restoration: the decline of Middle-Earth is inexorable, just as Europe could never again be restored to its 19th-century glory.

Too mechanical a presentism can be a fault: it may prevent a story from following its own logic, its telos.  Tolkien's presentism is incomplete.  The Ring is destroyed and the good side wins; the atomic parallel breaks down.  America came to Europe's rescue; Tolkien's blessed West-beyond-the-seas remains aloof from the affairs of fallen Middle-Earth.  Presentism is not Tolkien's purpose: he is not trying to describe contemporary affairs in metaphoric garb.  Yet the moods, the fears, the lessons of those times infuse The Lord of the Rings, and they can help a contemporary reader to imaginatively penetrate the consciousness of the world-saving Britons of the 1940s.  That is what myths for.  William Blake wrote that "eternity is in love with the productions of time."  Myths capture that intersection of time and eternity, weaving into stories that will reverberate forever the deepest heart of man-as-he-lives-now.  Tolkien's presentism is his strength.

Is there a similar presentism in Rowling?  Of course, whereas Tolkien created his world apparently out of whole cloth (although one never quite understands what the relationship of "Middle-Earth" to our own world is), Rowling's books are set in our own world and our own times, with the fascinatingly implausible revision that there is an entire magical world parallel to and secretly embedded in it.  A certain trivial presentism is inherent in the fact that Rowling's stories are, in fact, set in the present.  But does Rowling's mythology bear any meaningful relationship to the great issues of our times?  Is there a high presentism in it similar to that of Tolkien?  If so, I don't see it.  Rowling's fiction seems to me merely escapist.

Movie Review: Pirates of the Caribbean 3

The first "Pirates of the Caribbean" was brilliant, but also fairly self-contained. The romance and magic and mystery-- interwoven with history of course, for there really were South Sea pirates; just enough to make the alchemy work-- that it evoked were brought to a satisfactory conclusion. It could have done without a sequel.

By the third film, they're starting to beat a dead horse, and yet... they still managed to have a lot of fun. If anything, the myth and magic, and the wild fight scenes, get more over-the-top with each film, leaving the viewers' imaginations dizzy. (One's suspension of disbelief gets a real workout.) The ship sails to the Land of the Dead, beyond (it seems) the farthest north, and manages to come back. We see Calypso, goddess of the sea, in a rage. A funny scene is the "Brethren's Council," a meeting of the nine pirate lords. My favorite Jack Sparrow line from this one: Calypso is "a woman scorned, the fury of which the like Hell hath no."

If the truth be told, there are enough loose ends at the end of the film that they might be able to make a "Pirates of the Caribbean 4." I hope not. Enough is enough.

Movie Review: Blood Diamond

If we're very lucky, "Blood Diamond" will be the first of a new genre of films.  On the one hand, there is the type of film is typified by "Hotel Rwanda."  Hotel Rwanda, a film about a hotel owner who keeps Tutsi refugees alive during the Rwandan genocide, is a socially conscious film, which attempts to awaken the conscience of the viewer, to increase awareness of the horrors that are going on in our world, so that people will try to do something.  On the other hand, there are action films.  "Blood Diamond" fuses the two into something better than either.

Action movies are a strange phenomenon.  One can see them as the continuation of a long tradition going all the way back to Homer's Iliad, the tradition of literature that celebrates heroism, strength, courage in battle, adventure.  Why do we enjoy heroic literature?  It is exciting; it gets the adrenalin pumping; we feel vicariously, first fear and danger, then triumph.  But it's not just that.  We need to believe in the hero's cause to enjoy it.  If the author fails to convince us to sympathize with one side (and usually, to despise the other side), he has failed, and the story is just a lot of pointless bloodshed.  Action movies teach us to admire virtue: courage, above all; strength and stamina; loyalty and selfless sacrifice; sometimes cunning and quick wits.  And the shadow of death that hangs over the hero makes life more poignant.  The embrace of a beloved woman (for example) has more meaning when it may be the last.

Now, in most societies of the past, war was a frequent occurrence, and heroic literature had plenty of real material to work with: war was a regular occurrence.  And courage in battle was a critical social resource: without it, lands would be overrun, peoples enslaved or put to the sword.  Heroic literature was needed to inspire in the young the virtues that the society couldn't do without.  Courage is still with us, our soldiers have it in plenty, and we are indebted to them for their brave service.  Probably action movies still play the social role that heroic literature has long done, inspiring young men (and women) to mimic in life the courage represented in art.  But America has enjoyed peace at home for generations now.  Wars occur far away.  They don't touch our everyday lives much.  And the creative class is ambivalent about them, anyway, unsure whether our side is in the right.  Moreover, war today is disciplined, technologized, almost industrial.  It no longer seems as heroic as it did.

Action movies fill the role of the old heroic literature but for a long time now they have been more escapist.  In a Cold War-era James Bond film, the global conflict with communism is exploited as a built-in moral compass, a grand backdrop to raise the stakes and make the action exciting, but the balance between inspiring patriotic courage and entertaining a crowd has tipped in favor of the latter.  And yet, in order to be entertaining, action movies also need an ethical point, good guys and bad guys that the viewer really believes are good and bed.  At least in the Cold War, there was a readily available cause and enemy: we might not all have agreed with it completely, but at least we understood it.  Since the end of the Cold War, this is a problem.  Who is the bad guy?  Who is the enemy?  Action movies like "The Rock" make the US government the bad guy, alleging bizarre evil conspiracies that penetrate to the heart of everything.  Action movies like "Mission Impossible" raise the stakes by putting intelligence agencies' own personnel at risk: Tom Cruise's character has to prevent the exposure of his fellow agents.  This kind of action film requires (a) more mental effort on the part of the viewers to understand a good/bad conflict with which they are not yet familiar, and (b) a more robust suspension of disbelief, since the villains are so implausible.

Are there really no genuine bad guys left in the world then, against which fictional heroes can display their prowess and deserve our sympathies?  This is where "Blood Diamond" comes in: it identifies them.  The Sierra Leonean warlords, jeering and cheering as they lop off people's hands, turning children into monsters, lording it over teams of slaves in the diamond camps, are as despicable as any of the implausible evil geniuses who serve as the nemesis of James Bond.  But they are real.  There are far too many of them.  May the movies villainize them again and again, in a hundred different ways, may they villainize them until they are a cliche, a recognized type that the movie viewer comfortably anticipates as a cinematic formula.  Until we can read reports of atrocities in Darfur, or the Congo, and the numbers and place-names are no longer meaningless statistics because we have seen them, have seen janjaweed and warlords and child-soldiers in film after film.  Then, perhaps, we will start to remove this scourge from the earth.

There's more to be said and I don't have time to write it all...  Leonardo DiCaprio gives a great performance in "Blood Diamond," as a "Rhodesian"-- as exiled whites from the country now called Zimbabwe sometimes call themselves-- gunrunner and diamond smuggler who, later in the film, partially redeems himself.  I met Rhodesians while I was in Africa, and they are a strange and fascinating people.  A white minority ruling an apartheid state, they declared independence from Britain in order to fight a desperate last stand against majority, i.e., black rule, against international law, abandoned by the West, in the 1970s.  Some Americans went over there to help-- so I was told by a Rhodesian I met in Malawi, who had served in the Rhodesian army in his youth-- old grunts from Vietnam who wanted to keep "fighting communism."  The Americans were a lot older, some in their 30s, whereas the Rhodesians got drafted for ten years straight out of high school.  They could barely understand the Americans with their accents.  Eventually the white regime got overrun.  Now, the Rhodesian cause was pretty wicked, wasn't it?  A white elite fighting a doomed fight for an apartheid state against majority rule, in defiance of international law?  And yet it was Robert Mugabe who came to power when they lost.  Sometimes it's hard to say who's right and wrong in history.  The whites were not expelled in mass but the water got hotter and hotter for them and many of them left, scattered all over Africa, as Africa slipped into crises, deepening poverty, AIDS.  It's good to see a Rhodesian character represented on screen.  The world should know their story. 

Other characters are a journalist trying to expose the corporate buyers of blood diamonds, and Solomon Vandy, a poor fisherman caught in the fray, who is enslaved in the diamond camps, loses his son to the rebels as a child-soldier, and then, because he finds a huge pink diamond of tremendous value, gets drawn into the furious conniving adventures of Leonardo DiCaprio's character.  I could go on and on.  Spectacular film.

Movie Review: 300

I won 2nd place in Greek history at the 1995 Junior Classical League Convention in Kansas, so I was excited to hear there was a movie about the famous stand of the Spartan 300 at Hot Gates, or Thermopylai.  This is not the first time that this famous battle has made it into the movies.  In "The Last Samurai," Tom Cruise, a disillusioned US Army officer, alienated from his own people after participating in massacres of Indians, travels to Japan to train the officers of a new Meiji Restoration government against samurai holdouts.  Tom Cruise goes native and fights alongside "the last samurai," Katsumoto.  And he tells him the story of the 300 Greeks who resisted an army of tens of thousands of Persians at Thermopylai.  Right before the climactic battle, Katsumoto asks Tom Cruise's character:

"What happened to the Greeks at Thermopylai?"

"They died to the last man."

To Katusmoto, no ending could be better, and he looks forward to the same fate.

My preferences, of course, would be for a movie that dealt with the intricate politics of the Greek city-states of the early 5th century.  I would have preferred if the movie had shown the following interesting detail: Sparta had two kings, an arrangement I've never heard of anywhere else, which meant that Leonidas' death did not leave Sparta kingless.  I would have preferred that the dramatization of everything-- of the wickedness of the Spartan ephors (priests of the oracle, who predicted defeat a bit more baldly in "300" than in history), of the heaps of Persian dead, of the elephant and rhinoceros in Xerxes' army-- wasn't exaggerated to the point of grotesqueness.

Yet it's a good thing that Americans are seeing a movie about Thermopylai at all.  That battle-- and the two wars by which little, divided Greece, amazingly, fought off the vast armies of Persia and preserved its independence, with ramifications that have reverberated through history ever since-- deserves to be immortal.  Even the crudest eulogy to it is better than nothing.

While the movie renders everything so heroically implausible that it seems like a fantasy, it actually does get the basic story roughly right.  Some accurate facts from the movie: