Film – TeacherLore

Can we fight evil without imitating it?

Posted onNovember 26, 2014November 28, 2014Authorumphrey

A review of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay–Part 1

Katniss discovers a white rose, which, unlike the other flowers, has not wilted. It’s a message from President Snow, who cultivates the flower to mask the smell of blood. Flowers are ephemeral, symbolizing the hope of beauty. Now they have become ominous, unnaturally enduring.

Several critics have noted that although Mockingjay–Part 1 was largely exposition, lacking the action of the first two Hunger Games movies, they liked it anyway. It may be a satisfying art form for an age that often understands itself as poised in a pre-apocalyptic moment, dangling between the trouble we have known and a greater trouble that has to be coming. A film about the calm before a storm feels right.

But there’s more, I think. The real struggle we are engaged in will not be settled, this time, by missiles and bombs. Our disagreements are ontological and epistemological, so language is the arena in which this generation’s epic battle is being engaged. The Hunger Games gives that struggle accessible form by casting it as a war between Katniss’s impulse to love and Snow’s compulsion to control. The battle goes beyond physics–bullets and bombs–into the realm of spirit, and all outcomes at lower levels will fail to be decisive.

So some in the audience may want a story that moves beyond fighter jets and lasers. This third film centers on that contest between the President and the Mockingjay, and this penultimate chapter of their epic contest is waged in words and images. We stranded in a propaganda war for the hearts and minds of the Capitol’s subjects. To be sure, we see that we are fated to move quite beyond words into a bloodier realm of earthquake and thunder–there are constant skirmishes that leave fields strewn with corpses–but compared to earlier episodes the war is now waged in rhetoric. For the moment, antagonists struggle to give form, words and images, to our understanding of what is at stake, the meaning of good and evil.

The moral tone of the story has grown darker. Snow is clearly evil. Snow’s hypocrisy is vivid. The Capitol’s rhetoric about the common good and human flourishing is mere stratagem to perpetuate an oligarchy of masters who control a vast system of subjugation and poverty, where the suffering of individuals means nothing. Snow’s nihilism is total. Just before switching off the telescreen and pivoting to air strikes, he tells Katniss that “it is the things we love most that destroy us.” Love makes us vulnerable.

Yet hope abides, and Katniss bears hope’s burden. Her beauty inspires hope even after great disillusionment. Abernathy claims we need to see her without makeup, we need to go past appearance and manipulation. Her unfeigned moments of emotional candor keep the rebellion going. Her trainer, Haymitch Abernathy, makes explicit that contrived images lack the force of Katniss’s raw responses to horrors perpetrated by Snow’s military. He gets her out of the studio and to the front, where her image can be projected by capturing unstaged moments where her hatred of the Capitol is caught on camera in unscripted emotional outbursts. Authentic passion, not contrived images, are the keys to better propaganda. But, of course, it remains contrived propaganda.

How can we fight evil without imitating it? This story has been wildly popular with today’s youth, who sense that they are entangled in orchestrated contests with each other for advancement in a dark and hollow world void of ultimate meanings. The consequences of the games they must play are real enough, but winning is only a temporary reprieve in a larger game which no one wins.

The Hunger Games story takes place in the godless world of modern imagination–our world–a place in which human power is constrained mainly by the opposition of other human power. The Capitol’s tyranny is enforced by technology and propaganda, and the revolution can imagine no opposition but its own technology and its own propaganda. The film approaches transcendence only in moments when Katniss inspires hope that she represents another way. She resists the flat-souled utilitarianism of the advisers who would turn away from the plight of individuals to focus on the big battles. She demands that Peeta be pardoned and that a cat be tolerated, and she ignores attempts to discuss propaganda strategy in those moments when she is filled with sorrow for what has happened to the particular people she loves. She suggests a larger game, a different world. Eddy asks, “Are you here to fight with us?” “I am,” says Katniss. “I will.” And so we have hope.

Are love and authenticity enough? Or are they too vulnerable? When we learn that Peeta has been conditioned to hate Katniss, it seems that personal love has roots too shallow to survive the manipulations of evil. How can goodness win against a sadistic ruler who seeks ever more cruel modes of action, capable of feeling only the harshest and most primitive passions, a being nearly dead to all that makes life wonderful, committed to destroying whatever does not wither before his numb gaze, breeding deathless roses to mask the stench.

Does Katniss’s love draw on a power sufficient to restore a good order? Is the people’s faith in Katniss enough? Is there more?

A lot is at stake.

Badlands: life sans religion, sans philosophy

Posted onJune 22, 2014June 22, 2014Authorumphrey

Kit and Holly enact a fairy tale made entirely of cliches and self-approval. They are anti-heroes of the American type.

Terrence Malick’s Badlands works as a period piece for that post-Vietnam time of self-absorption and loss of moral clarity that also gave us Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Bonnie and Clyde. But it’s not just a period piece—Kit Carruthers and Holly Sargis are somewhat timeless in their possession by unfocused, impulsive desires that attach to people and events in the kaleidoscope moments of a journey from unclear beginning to unknown terminus, and they “think” about what is happening and what they are doing entirely by repeating slogans and catch phrases they’ve picked up from the cultural milieu around them. In other words, they are quite like many people you know.

Most of what they say has a self-forgiving quality; their parallel monologues form a series of incoherent verbal gestures that help them feel good about themselves. As they bounce from murder to murder, they continue believing they are “good” people, though they are not. They are very bad people. They are bundles of appetites, no better (or much different) than snakes swallowing live mice. People are endowed with a moral sense. They should develop it.

Simple people may be saved by a good heart, as with Forrest Gump. But desire is not wise or good, for most of us, without some education and discipline. More and more of us get our moral education from our folkways, and our folkways are becoming increasingly toxic for inarticulate people with inarticulate desires. Holly and Kit never have thoughts, properly speaking.

“It sent a chill down my spine,” said Holly. “Where would I be this very moment if Kit had never met me? Or killed anybody? This very moment?” Her thinking never becomes more precise or more clear. “Kit never let on why he’d shot Cato. He said that just talking about it could bring us bad luck and that right now, we needed all the luck we could get.” That’s her “reflection” after one murder. About the next one, she observes: “He claimed that as long as you’re playing for keeps and the law is coming at ya, it’s considered OK to shoot all witnesses. You had to take the consequences, though, and not whine about it later. He never seemed like a violent person before, except for once, when he said he’d like to rub out a couple of guys whose names he didn’t care to mention. It all goes to show how you can know a person and not really know him at the same time.”

As for Kit, he segues from event to event, narrating his own story entirely in cliches and banalities. “Of course, uh, too bad about your dad. . .I can’t deny we’ve had fun though. . .it takes all kinds.” Nothing important can ever happen to him. He’s incapable of it.

Their moral sense has shrunk to effortless recitals of rationalizations—instead, they view life in aesthetic terms. Holly rejects the outlaw life because the wilderness is void of bright lights and pleasant food. Kit beams with a self-satisfied feeling of success when the officers escorting him to prison observe that he looks like James Dean.

The film endures because Malick is right about important things. He’s right about the woeful state of people whose minds are not enlivened by religion or enlightened by philosophy–in his stories, stupidity and evil are often kindred conditions. Malick’s films are frequently hideous, in precisely the way life among the folk is sometimes hideous.

Noah: a tawdry bit of pretention

Posted onApril 15, 2014April 15, 2014Authorumphrey

The film is an unimportant and uninteresting little story–a sort of anti-Jehovah propaganda piece blown up to pretentious scale by its grandiose budget.

One needn’t be particularly sensitive to notice that Aronofsky’s Noah is a dark story involving unlovely people in a desolate world. Russell Crowe plays Noah as a somewhat dull action hero, ready to brawl and knock heads–and for quite a while intent on murdering his own grandchildren. It’s not much of a story–neither interesting or ennobling.

No benevolent deity intent on bringing to pass an orderly world founded on love presides over this mess. Instead, the only deity in the story is a vengeful and sulking “Creator”–somewhat in the image of the hateful and lusty humans–who performs no miracles but offers instead magic tricks–such as encasing fallen angels in grotesque bodies of misshapen volcanic stone.

It’s a tawdry tale made of money and angst, but lacking in spiritual insight–or even much in the way of worldly wisdom. Brian Mattson gives a likely explanation for this unlikely disaster.

This is an age drawn toward apocalyptic stories, but for my money Walking Dead has a more interesting plot, deeper exploration of the human condition, more spiritual longing, and nicer people.

What does “The Butler” teach about America’s racial experience?

Posted onAugust 28, 2013August 28, 2013Authorumphrey

If there’s nothing higher than the White House, there’s little hope.

The Butler doesn’t extend beyond the “progressive narrative” of American history. In this narrative, racism is pervasive−the major theme of our national experience.

In our actual past, racism has always had to contend with the better angels of our nature. Martin Luther King, Jr.was pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and the power of his rhetoric is inseparable from the depth of his faith that racism is contrary to God’s will and thus doomed. When he said “Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children,” he was not merely fashioning a trope. He was speaking truth, and he knew it was the white majority that he had to persuade and that most of them favored neither cruelty nor oppression.

Martin Luther King is present in The Butler, but the Christian tenor of his rhetoric is faint. He does defend the butler’s role to his son, who believes that angry political activism is the way to make progress. The King character points out that the domestic servant’s exemplification of service, effort, and restraint powerfully undermines racial stereotypes. He does not look down on the butler, as his son is wont to do.

It was Martin Luther King’s modeling of nonviolent and peaceful reconciliation that prepared the way for the passage of the Civil Rights Act. “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred,” he said. Such teaching was of a piece with his faith and hope: “When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last! Free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'”

This was not Malcolm X’s message. which had more to do with anger and with victory than with love or transcendence: “Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor.” This derives from Marx. It’s the language of revolutionary ideology, dividing humanity into the classes of oppressor and oppressed. It’s the song of hatred and bitterness that King warned against.

In the actual past, it was King’s message of peace and brotherhood that prepared America to pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, both of which were motivated by a vision of national unity. The political activism of Malcolm X was more useful for building a revolutionary army than for bringing a nation together. People had to choose between the two paths then just as they must now. The film, unfortunately, does not make the choice clear.

In Genesis, Joseph serves as a type of Christ. Sold into slavery, he served Pharaoh meticulously, in spite of his status as a despised minority. His patience and obedience in spite of brutal treatment positioned him to save the tribes of Israel and to ameliorate the harsh realities of this world. He foreshadowed what the Savior had to teach about oppression and brotherhood. He modeled the Christian way, which King profoundly understood.

The film generally leans a different way. In the end, the butler leaves his job at the White House and joins an angry protest movement−against Reagan, of all things. Reagan is presented, absurdly, as opposed to racial equality. This is done through cursory references to Apartheid in South Africa. The film uses the strained expedient of twisting Reagan’s opposition to communism into antagonism towards racial justice, ignoring the actual past, in which South Africa was infected with the same revolutionary ideology that moved Malcolm X.

In the film, enlightenment leads to street politics, serving up a vision of political activism as much of the meaning of goodness. The election of Barack Obama is presented as the apotheosis of our yearning for justice. Such is the progressive vision.

True stories in an age of fictions

Posted onJune 23, 2013June 25, 2013Authorumphrey

“No society can be just or good that is built on falsehood.” Stanley Hauerwas

I spent some of the day outside reading Stanley Hauerwas. He deals with some of the same concepts as Alasdair MacIntyre–the connection between narrative and social ethics, for instance–but his style is simpler and less technical. I think high schoolers in an AP class could follow much of his thinking. His essay “A Story-Formed Community” lays out quite vividly some basic ideas about communities and politics that would be useful for young people to discuss, but the essay is organized as a reading of Watership Down, so some familiarity with that novel would help. I’ll watch the film version, which I’ve never seen. Maybe that would provide enough background, given that Hauerwas uses extensive re-telling of the story to make his points.

He uses the novel because “the best way to learn the significance of stories is by having our attention drawn to stories through a story.” The significance of stories, for a polity, is fundamental. Communities are founded on stories, and they sustain themselves as members tell their personal stories, finding how they fit within and extend the founding stories. Arguments and political discussions “are subordinate to the ability of a community to live and tell its stories.”

It’s a useful balance in an age awash in policy discussions and multi-step plans. The stories people tell and the stories they believe they are part of matter more than any number of contests between wonks. Who we are will shape what happens, and we are creatures formed and driven by stories.

A story is true to the extent that it can accommodate the pressures of actual events. Societies whose stories can no longer accommodate that pressure do not remain communities, though they may produce Potkemtin villages and other forms of seeming. Seeming is the first refuge of a scoundrel. Hauerwas contrasts the society of Russia under Stalin with communities formed and sustain by religion: “It is well-known that Stalin responded to Pius XII’s condemnation with the taunting question about how many divisions had the pope. Most assume that Stalin’s point is well taken, for without divisions the power of the church counts for nothing. Yet in spite of all appearances to the contrary, Stalin’s response masks the fundamental weakness of his position. A leadership that cannot stand the force of truth must always rely on armies.”

That’s quite true. Lying and deceiving are forms of weakness, and when leaders begin lying they also begin arranging stronger methods of control than persuasion. Audits, maybe. Inquisitions. “Peace is bult on truth,” said Hauerwas, “for order built on lies must resort ultimately to coercion.” I would be more optimistic about our future if Americans seemed more attentive, more outraged, at the steady stream of deceptions and misdirections flowing from the current administration.

Justice is based on truth, and freedom is based on justice. The only real defense good people usually have against bad people is the truth. Systems of justice are always systems of ascertaining the truth–of figuring out amid conflicting testimony what really happened, of unmasking liars and shedding light on deceptions. There’s no other way to work at getting the right things done. Creating fog and confusion is the stock in trade of criminals angling to get possession of other people’s property. They don’t care that if we can’t keep what we’ve made and acquired needed for the way of life we’ve chosen, if we can’t keep the place we’ve created for ourselve and our fellows, then we can’t stay free.

The president’s chronic deceptiveness is necessary because people would not tolerate his designs if they were clear–good and just people may still constitute a majority.

One thing to do, as we wait to see what happens, is to tell and discuss the stories that lie at the heart of the better world that we’ve seen, sometimes in true texts, sometimes in daily life. Ultimately, stories are more powerful than armies. Caesar and Napoleon had far less impact on the world than Buddha and Jesus. The best story wins.

Comparing V for Vendetta to 1984

Posted onJanuary 22, 2011December 23, 2011AuthorMichael Umphrey1 Comment

Several students have told me that the film V for Vendetta is “just like” 1984. Since I’m always interested in resources that might make Orwell’s important warning clear to younger people, growing up as they are in a world that is so shaped by Newspeak and Doublethink–now referred to as “political correctness”–that his message is hard for them to hear, I watched the film.

It was similar, in the sense that in both stories humanity is being oppressed by a totalitarian regime. Still, it was the differences that mattered most.

For one thing, Orwell understood the political threats that would most matter in this age. He accurately identified the main source of modern totalitarianism as socialism, characterized by an ontology of materialism and an ethical philosophy of utilitarianism. This film, I thought, could have been produced by the Party in 1984. There is no God, and humanity’s fate is determined by economics; there is no moral law–the “rational” guide to ethics is to focus on the collective–doing the most good for the most people. Inevitably, “good” will be defined by the leader. We’ve been down that road several times. What is good is what is good for the Revolution. Who opposes the party opposes humanity.

So it’s quite ironic–though very politically correct at this moment early in the twenty-first century–for director James McTeigue to cater to socialist fears that the totalitarian threat comes from Christians. His film portrays a Christian fascist party at the helm of a negative utopia. Like Orwell, he uses an authentic verse memorized by British school children to evoke a distant, ominous memory from a Christian past. Orwell used lines from “Oranges and Lemons”:

Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
And here comes a chopper to chop off your head.

McTeigue reaches back to the Gunpowder Plot–one of the seventeenth century religious battles between Protestants and Catholics, immortalized in a rhyme popular among British school children:

Remember, remember the fifth of November.
Gunpowder, Treason and Plot.
I see no reason why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.

This linkage of terrorism and violence to Christianity flatters the sensibility of moderns, still believing they are achieving some sort of liberation from religion, while they continue pressing forward in a world where individual liberty erodes in a morass of political correctness, and the dominant power in Europe is a European Union intent on eroding national sovereignty through all the accouterments of a propaganda state and rationalized regulation, while churches all over Europe remain empty and quiet each Sunday.

The main danger to freedom in Europe now is the same as it was when Orwell wrote: the progressive fulfillment of socialism’s managerial fantasy, the depth and breadth of its control increasing. The main obstacle to this dream has always been the churches–think of Catholicism in Poland–which provide both a rival center of power and an incommensurable reality forever beyond the reach of the state, for those who believe. McTeigue’s vision of a state-run Christian fascism will distract many in the audience from a more credible danger.

In some ways, V for Vendetta resembles the French Revolution more than it resembles Oceania in 1984. In Enlightenment France, a utopian naivete fed the passionate belief that if the horrible French aristocracy (and the Christian clergy) could be destroyed, that then. . .then. . .then, somehow, liberty and fraternity and equality would, um, burst forth–or something.

But. It was not to be. As Edmund Burke noted at the time, when long-established institutions are suddenly destroyed, what follows is not utopia but a mad scramble after power wildly careening into the streets–a mad scramble for which the most brutal and Machiavellian are best equipped. Terrorism did destroy the aristocracy, establishing itself as a principle of power. The Reign of Terror was enacted to the tune of noble platitudes and motivated by an unscrupulous will to power, in time, of a single man: Maximilian Robespierre.

The hero in V for Vendetta is an intellectual. We never see his face, but we hear his voice and we watch the entire nation brought to attention at his single will. It is clear that this will opposes evil. It is far less clear that this will is not evil itself. Still, isn’t there a pleasure in seeing evil overpowered? One could easily mistake this pleasure for the triumph of goodness.

This film differs from 1984 in that Orwell did not offer even any appearance of a solution to the problem of fully realized socialism. Winston Smith’s defeat is total and thorough. He loves that which has destroyed him. Though Orwell supported the desires and intentions of the do-gooders who became socialists, he could never see how those intentions, after consolidating power to do good things, could keep that centralized power from the brutal and devious thugs who would always be attracted to it. Since he didn’t see a solution, he focused on making the threat clear.

McTeigue’s story, by contrast, ends on a triumphant note, as though destroying totalitarianism were as simple a matter as shooting a bank robber in some Hollywood West. The image of triumph is not without horror, of a sort, as a mass of identically masked terrorists grin their porcelain grins–a not overly appealing nod to equality–amid explosions bringing down the architectural symbolism of Western Civ–the fireworks of emancipation, or something–with rousing music.

McTeigue’s story is self-aware enough to play with the nihilism of his avenging hero’s vision, which cannot get beyond destroying evil. The masked hero falls in love, and this brings home, painfully, the essential joylessness of the quest that has consumed his life. He cannot be deterred from his fate by the attractions of love. He knows enough to blow up a bad world, but he knows far too little of how to create a good one. The story’s grace note is that he does know, at an existential level, that it is love that he has missed. But the point of the story, still, is that he does miss it.

But he continues onward in his story, knowing that it can only end as he and his enemy fulfill their destiny in mutual self-destruction. This aspect of the movie’s vision rings true. We are indeed entangled in a titanic struggle with enemies, the end of which is our mutual death.

This dark tale will be quite ironic to one who believes Christianity’s story with its powerfully articulated vision of how a world might grow to be truly ordered by love. Without knowing that story of faith and hope and love intertwined in a workable vision of human happiness, the modern world increasingly constructs meanings centered in willfulness, pessimism and violence–V fits that pattern; it’s a bloody tale in which, as Isaiah prophesied, the wicked are destroyed, again as during the French Revolution, by the wicked.

Goodness is somewhere else doing other things, unimagined by the film.