Well, I’ve been at my new job for more than a week now, and I’ve got to say I’m tremendously happy to be at Trader. I’m doing work which I excel at, but which is also challenging and stimulating. I’m surrounded by great people.
Yet … I’m the “new kid in school.” I haven’t been in this situation for nine years. I find it hard to get to know people. My previous workplace was a call center, filled with noisy extroverts, and here, everyone’s as introverted as I am. I sometimes feel lonely, like I’m in a library with “cones of silence” around everyone. (Hmm . . . there’s a reason why I was never interested in becoming a Trappist!)
It takes time to make friends and get to know people.
Tonight, I watched the movie Joshua (closely based on the book by Fr. Girzone). Yes, it’s really heavy-handed and somewhat cheesy, as the book was, but surprisingly effective, too, thanks to the great performance by Tony Goldwyn as the title character.
But it made me think. What if I really cared only about loving, and not about being loved? What if I just saw my new workplace as 300 more people to love?
In Hampton Roads, Virginia, out of 44 films showing in area theaters, only 10 are not documentaries, prequels, sequels, remakes, cartoons or foreign films.
Is this the end of original stories in live-action American films?
Okay. I’m beginning to write the first of several extended spiritual reflections on the Star Wars saga. In those, I’m just going to concentrate on symbolism and meaning, not criticism . . .
So I better get this off my chest now. As I look at the arc of the six stories as a whole, my feeling about the prequel trilogy has changed from disappointment to dismay. I’m going to take back some of the nice things I wrote about Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Sith just isn’t good enough to do its subject justice. The problem is that the three prequel movies are utterly different in character from the original trilogy. Considering the series as a whole, these three feel like an effects maniac trying to imitate the guy who brought us the stories of A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. Although Lucas states that he originally wanted the screen crawl of Stars Wars in 1977 to say Episode IV (implying that he already had something of three prequel stories already in mind), 28 years later, the finished product feels like a rushed job.
Although technically ROTS (think about that acronym for a second) is better than the other two prequels, I must confess that I actually enjoyed he Phantom Menace better, Jar-Jar Binks and all (yes, I’m crazy, I know). Menace at least had a planet with some variety in its habitats and sentient races, a sense of adventure, beauty, and discovery, and a rich color palette. Its problem was that it contributed little to the story of Anakin’s fall. What do we learn to help us understand his fall? Why, that he was an amazingly well-adjusted and gifted kid growing up in oppressive circumstances! And it learning that Amidala and her decoy can change costumes and wigs faster than a pit crew can change tires wasn’t that exciting, either. (The whole “decoy” gimmick was not impressive. Worse still, its reprise in Clones)!
Attack of the Clones was far worse. Its CGI-mania went off the chart, with overly-long and ugly battle sequences. Obi-Wan was so condescending that I wanted to smack him, and Anakin sounded like a petulant brat much younger than his 19 years, instead of a precocious genius of the Jedi arts. And it was very disappointing to learn that Jedi education in political science appears to consist of the one line “don’t trust politicians” (though that’s not bad advice, actually). I don’t need to say anything about the flatness of Anakin’s and Padmé’s romance, so I won’t.
Sith has better dialogue, and its fast pace helps, but it continues and magnifies the problems of the preceding movies. Shocking, the blindness of the Jedi Council is. (Drab, too, their furniture is!) In their regular meetings with Senator/Chancellor Palpatine over the years, none of them can sense the galaxy-shaking darkness on the other side of the desk. Even in the depths of their meditation and communion with the Force, none of them get direction on what is going wrong, apart from a vague sense that vagueness is being vaguely disturbed. In short, they seem less like spiritual warriors than dupes who are gifted fighters. Certainy this is not what Lucas intended, but it is the result.
Even worse, the entire purpose of the prequel trilogy—the fall of Anakin Skywalker, just doesn’t wash. The pivotal scene of the trilogy, wherein Anakin and Palpatine kill Windu, shows him going from “What have I done?!” to “I will do whatever you command, Master,” in less than 30 seconds!
We’re supposed to believe the answer lies in the mind-blowing power of Darth Sidious/Palpatine. But not one scene shows him having irresistable power to corrupt or blind; we see no one bent to his will after resisting with all their strength, and it must take more than some psychokenetic tossing of objects to bring willful Anakin under his spell, and further, deceive the entire Jedi order.
So why does Anakin go bad? There’s some effort to show his emotional attachments as the cause of his downfall, but there’s nothing unusual about either his love for his mother or Padmé. When something finally does seem off (his insistence that he be strong enough to stop people from dying), nothing explains how he developed a severe emotional dependency on them. Furthermore, nothing in the movies explains the difference between the subtle trap of attachment and freedom of love.
There’s babbling about about him being parthenogenetically conceived by Sidious’ manipulation of midichlorians, but how is that a factor? We know that it enhances his mastery of the Force, but if it warped his character, wouldn’t we have seen something amiss in Menace? Why does Anakin almost instantaneous metamorphose into a child-slicing monster? All Sith gives us is that he spent a couple of days oubting the Jedi Order’s integrity. Sorry. It’s not enough. The trilogy must be about the causes for Anakin’s fall, but there’s almost no reason to be seen. The inexplicable 30-second switch still remains.
Ultimately, the prequel trilogy’s attempts for nuanced, subtle plot fails. It emphasizes details, both on the visual level of digitized special effects as well as in monotonous dialogue about complex layers of deceit and manipulation. The prequel trilogy loses the big brush and broad strokes of characters, plot and action which made the original series so archetypal. Instead of being the story of Anakin’s tragic downfall, it’s more the story of Palpatine’s tragic rise, and it raises more questions than it answers. Huge plot holes remain:
Why does Padmé die in childbirth when Leia says she remembered her real mother dying when she was very young?
Why isn’t Yoda Obi-Wan’s teacher?
Why is General Grievous flammable?
Why can’t Padmé do anything but sit around the condo in ROTS?
Why doesn’t Obi-Wan try to put Anakin out of his misery?
Why doesn’t lava radiate heat?
Viewed without preconceptions, these aren’t bad movies. They’re entertaining melodramas and cutting-edge displays of effects. But they come to us after decades of anticipation, promising to bring even more to the most influential sci-fi story of all time. They needed to please adults as well as kids, and they were supposed to help us understand Darth Vader, not to be more confused by his improbable blundering into evil.
Hold fast to the center. —Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
It’s important to keep the big picture—that’s Jedi life in the real world!
Tonight, at 12:01 am, an era ends: the last Star Warsmovie will be released. I’m looking forward to seeing Revenge of the Sith. I haven’t re-posted any of my earlier pages on Star Wars movies because I’ve been waiting for the final installment of the saga. I suspect it will cast many things into a different light.
The Star Wars era isn’t the only one ending, however. Last Friday, the final episode of what looks to be the last Star Trek series was broadcast. I’m sorry to see it go?Enterprise was a darn good show, and I felt that the most recent episodes were the best. Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula) wasn’t the most gung-ho and adventurous captain, but I would rather have served under him than the histrionic Kirk or perennially uptight Picard any day. Trip (Cmdr. Charles Tucker) and T’pol were superb characters. Connor Trineer brought Trip to life in such a way you felt that he was someone you actually knew. T’pol (Jolene Blalock) introduced us to a fascinating and turbulent era in Vulcan history, before Vulcans became so “Vulcan.” And Hoshi was a reluctant crew member who didn’t like being in space very much at all.
The writing was usually excellent, except for the third season, which was wasted on the Xindi war. Enterprise had an earthiness (no pun intended!) to it which hadn’t been seen on television sci-fi before. It gave us scenes of throwing footballs in a low-gravity cargo bay, of cornfields in the Midwest, of metal catwalks in Engineering that you could almost feel rattling underneath you.
Its humans were very human, and made more than their share of mistakes. In the first season especially, it seemed almost every decision Archer made was wrong (What do you mean ‘cultural contamination?’ We’re going to help them!) Hate to break it to you, but when we become newbies exploring other solar systems, we’re going to do what newbies do best?screw up. I only hope that when we do, we do it with as much genuine goodwill as the crew of the Enterprise NX-01.
The last few days I’ve enjoyed some nice vicarious violence. On Thursday, I watched parts of Ong-Bak, Thai Warrior. On Friday and Saturday (and Sunday for that matter), Fight Club, and last night, Kung Fu Hustle.
All I can say about the last movie is it’s a riot. It doesn’t matter if you love martial arts films or hate them, you’ll like this one. Think Roadrunner cartoon meets Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
I just watched Fight Club for the first time. I’ve got to say, it was not at all what I expected, and I’ve got to write about it. I’m also going to post another review this weekend (Peter Pan), which has been a long time coming.
I missed Fight Club when it came out nearly six years ago. But it looks like the timing was about right. If I had seen it then, I wouldn’t have been able to understand it as well as I do now, and I would’ve dismissed its spiritual themes out-of-hand. And yes, it DOES have spiritual themes. Sure, Fight Club is primarily a punch in the teeth, but it’s much more; It’s a black comedy, a rage-against-the machine manifesto, an apologetic of nihilism, an indictment of consumerism, and an alternative take on enlightenment, with some ringing and frightening questions to ask ourselves and the world. There are some spoilers ahead. If you haven’t seen it yet, you might want to do that first.
The protagonist of Fight Club, (played by Edward Norton in an amazing performance) is unnamed, but for convenience, I’ll call him Jack, which he very obliquely calls himself in the film. Jack is not only lost, but all the tranquilizers of modern life are wearing off, and he’s beginning to feel the cosmic suckiness deeply. He’s tortured by his cruel job that weighs the value of human life against the company’s bottom line. Desperate to wrench a purpose from the offerings of McCulture, he tries to find happiness in possessions. “I flipped through the catalog and wondered: what kind of dining set defines me as a person?” (The next shot pans his apartment with IKEA catalog prices and descriptions showing beside every piece of furniture in the room.)
Jack longs to be someone else, someone who is free. On one of his many business trips, he muses “If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?”
His torment is beginning to affect his health. He can’t sleep, and in the great American tradition, asks his doctor for a pill to fix everything. Instead, he’s given a different prescription: tuning into pain instead of avoiding it. When he goes to a support group for testicular cancer (which he doesn’t have), Jack is amazed at the release that comes from hugging and crying instead of repressing pain. Having found the cure for his insomnia, he starts going to a different support group for every day of the week, and finds that in being able to freely weep, he’s able to freely sleep.
Trouble enters Paradise, however, when Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), another healthy support group “tourist,” starts attending all the same groups he does (including testicular cancer!). Her presence cramps his newfound emotional freedom. They agree to split the groups between them, and fight over who gets what: “Bowel cancer? You can’t have bowel cancer, I want bowel cancer!”
Soon Jack finds himself without a home, his apartment and all his possessions having been destroyed in an explosion. He turns to Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a soap salesman he met on his last flight. Tyler seems to be everything Jack feels he isn’t: confident, contemptuous, and above all, free. Jack was in search of a meaning for his life, but Tyler wants nothing except hard-edged reality itself.
Jack: I had it all. I had a stereo that was very decent, a wardrobe that was getting very respectable. I was close to being complete. . . . Tyler: We’re consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don’t concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy’s name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra. Jack: Martha Stewart. Tyler: Fuck Martha Stewart! Martha’s polishing the brass on the Titanic. It’s all going down, man!
Tyler goes on to inform Jack that “the things you own end up owning you,” which I believe St. Francis of Assisi said as well. Tyler’s style, though, is hardly Franciscan. Tyler introduces Jack to another way of working with pain: creating it and embracing it. He asks Jack to hit him as hard as he can. Tyler returns the favor, and voilá, instant male bonding sans hugging. Jack moves into Tyler’s house, a condemned squalid mansion which is more painful to behold than any of the ensuing fights. (Think of the toilet in Trainspotting getting an hour of screen time.) They become the best of friends, regularly beating the crap out of each other behind their favorite watering hole.
Soon other patrons beg to have their turns in the bare-knuckle matches, and Fight Club becomes a weekly event in the bar’s basement. (Eventually, the meetings become daily). A silent communion grows between members even though no words are spoken. (The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club.) Jack begins wearing his bloodied shirts and bruises to work as though they’re the cutting edge of fashion. “I got in everyone’s hostile little face. Yes, these are bruises from fighting. Yes, I’m comfortable with that. I am enlightened.”
When Marla calls Jack after she’s taken an overdose, Jack walks away, but Tyler saves her. Soon they’re involved in an intense sexual relationship, much to Jack’s annoyance, although she only talks to Jack (the reason for which becomes clear later on).
Tyler has a disdain for almost everything except awakening Jack from fear and malaise; he’s a rogue guru with the perfect disciple. By losing all his material possessions and moving into Tyler’s pigsty, Jack has renounced worldly comforts as much as an ash-covered sadhu in a cave. And he does make progress. Jack increases in confidence and awareness: “the cries of the men were the tongues at a Pentecostal Church, and every Saturday night we were born again; we were redeemed.” The scene where he finally decides to leave his job is as funny as it is shocking, and will resonate with anyone who’s ever felt trapped in a soulless environment.
You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.
—Tyler Durden
Lessons progress from slugfests to horrible ordeals (a chemical burn, a self-inflicted car wreck, and more), which Tyler forces on Jack to make him “hit bottom,” because Tyler insists that “only when we lose everything can we do anything.” However unpleasant this may be, enlightenment teachers have been saying it for millennia. Jesus said: “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains but a grain of wheat.”
If the first act is a black comedy about consumerism, and the second, the drama of a brutal education, the third act is a surreal revolution. Tyler begins giving destructive (and often funny) homework assignments to other Fight Club members. One group sabotages an environmental poster to say “Did You Know You Can Use Old Motor Oil to Fertilize Your Lawn?” Another group commits precision-arson on a skyscraper to turn it into an enormous happy face.
Jack determines to stop Tyler when he discovers that the former Fight Club (now Project Mayhem) has spread to cities across the country, morphing into an all-American terror network. Like bin Laden, Tyler has some dramatic financial targets in mind, although Project Mayhem goes to pains to make sure no one dies unless it’s one of them.
The Tyler Durden School of Enlightenment
Jack’s final transformation is in realizing that he is not a separate person from Tyler at all. Although this twist is familiar by now (I can think of four other titles with the same surprise), its spiritual meaning really comes through here: there is no separate person; there is just One only, although there are different bodies and different wills. Jack had the enlightened teacher within him all the time, and as he progressively released his perceived needs—possessions, job, nice enviroment, fear of pain, fear of causing pain—he began to uncover his true nature—unbounded, free, powerful, and finally capable of love.
There’s a reason why no religion teaches awakening until first creating an underpinning of morality, namely that awakening is not dependent on morality. Without morality and compassion, Brad Warner cautions in Hardcore Zen, enlightenment can make people even worse creeps than they already are. Goodness is about the needs of beings in Creation, but awakening is simply realizing the truth that all things are one, all distinctions are false, and you are free. An awakened person can either be a savior like Jesus, a saint like Francis, a sage like Lao Tzu, or a nihilistic rogue like Tyler Durden. Even the Bible teaches this: Jesus said, “you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free”, and St. Paul said that “all things are permissible, though not all are beneficial.”
To an outsider, it appears that Tyler cares only about the permissible part, but he sees himself as guided by an internal vision of what is truly beneficial for the world. He will do whatever is necessary for Jack get past the lies of the world and experience the freedom of his spirit, and he extends his “guidance” to others. In one scene, he successfully motivates a convenience store clerk to continue his education and realize his dream. (Tyler does this by pointing a gun to his head!) Tyler explains that having been giving a new lease on life, the clerk is going to live more fully than he ever had before.
Hollywood Jesus has an excellent review of Fight Club by Simon Remark, who also sees Tyler as a spiritual teacher. On the discussions page, another reviewer considers Tyler a Christ figure. Glenn Jordan points out:
The men gather not to inflict violence on others, but to have violence inflicted on them. This to me is the key to the film. FC was established for those men who have been numbed and brutalised by the culture they live in. Everything that Durden does is designed to subvert the intentions of the thuggish and to awaken the senses and the spirit of those who have been numbed to reality.
He goes on to compare Tyler using his blood to secure the basement from Lou to Christ using his blood to redeem his followers from Satan. Jordan also sees similarity between the entrance test for Project Mayhem to that of religious orders like the Benedictines, with evidence of determination and renunciation.
However, others compare it to the Hitler mystique, and caution that Tyler is dangerous, violent, and obscene. You almost certainly do not want Tyler to be your teacher, and you absolutely do not want him to be your waiter! You also have to ask if Tyler is any better than the world. Just as the meaningless consumer culture emasculates men, he uses the threat of emasculation to control the police, and even himself.
Personally, I’m glad for the moral cushioning that religion gives the world, and I’m very grateful that my teacher is a much nicer fellow than Tyler.
The First Rule of Project Mayhem: You Do Not Ask Questions
So here are some questions you shouldn’t ask:
What is the moral difference between exporting Communism, exporting jihad, or exporting democracy through invasions and revolutions?
Is our way of life really better when tens of millions of Americans find it unendurable without medication?
Is it better for thousands of people in a country like Iraq to die every year through crime and insurgencies or through totalitarian oppression?
If capitalism enslaves people, is it right or wrong to oppose it?
What is the difference between Jesus violently turning over the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple, and Tyler’s assault on the corporate temples of power?
Is Tyler/Jack simply crazy? Does he get better?
Do the members of Project Mayhem become free, or have they just enslaved themselves to Tyler instead of mainstream culture?
Is there more purpose in wars than in boxing matches? Underneath the rhetoric, justifications, and apparent causes, is the violent drama in the world ultimately an attempt to alleviate cosmic boredom?
Does Jesus want you to be a good citizen?
When you think you have the answers to these questions, look at them again, and ask yourself, Am I sure? How do I know? How do I really, really know, apart from conditioning?
Amoral characters are exceedingly rare in mainstream film. (We like our heroes good, and our villains evil. It distracts us from the difficult truth that the light and dark, yin and yang are simultaneously within us, that we are created in God’s image, the ultimate source of both what is perceived as “good” and “evil.”) Besides having an amoral character, Fight Club also surprises by not taking sides. You are free to draw your own conclusions. In fact, “You are free,” is really the only message.
Peter Pan is one of the few stories that really qualifies as a modern myth. It has endured for over a century now, and is almost universally known in the English-speaking world. Director P.J. Hogan gives the tale wonderful impetus into its next century with this beautiful and intelligent film version. This is the telling of the Peter Pan tale par excellence, not only because it’s so professionally done, but also it brings out the undercurrents in the tale that have never really been expressed before, foremost of which is that Peter Pan is really a story of first love.
Why is this the first time the love story has been presented in Peter Pan? Because this is the first film version where Peter is played by a boy and not a woman! In addition, Peter has usually been shown as a very young child, which made his terror of growing up feel considerably “off,” not to mention his confused love for Wendy. Hogan rectifies this by showing us Peter on the verge of adolescence. This makes everything—the romance, his fear of growing up, and his mastery of the sword—ring far truer.
While it definitely remains a children’s film, this Peter Pan is neither dumbed-down nor sugar-coated. The dark undertones of Barrie’s original are not glossed over. Peter is not cute and sweet, he’s a young warrior who longs to kill Hook. Mermaids are dangerous creatures. Tinkerbell is funny, crazy, and sometimes murderous.
Flying is presented smoothly and nonchalantly, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. There are no self-conscious interruptions like the “bullet time” in The Matrix. I highly recommend watching the DVD extras which detail the grueling months spent in flying practice and sword training to appreciate what an impressive accomplishment this was.
Wendy’s story
Hogan’s film brings home something else that generally escapes us—that this story isn’t about Peter Pan, but Wendy. Wendy Darling is wonderfully portrayed by Rachel Hurd-Wood, who might be the next Jodie Foster. As the story opens, her Aunt Millicent notices that Wendy is becoming a young woman, and persuades Wendy’s parents to give her her own bedroom, and begin schooling her in the arts that will help her to “marry well.” Wendy must soon stop regaling her brothers with pirate stories, and to start learning to prepare for what Mrs. Darling calls the greatest adventure, love.
On one of the last nights she’ll spend with her brothers in their shared bedroom, she wakes up with a start, to see a half-naked boy floating in the air above her bed, who quickly vanishes. In school the next day, she draws a picture of him hovering over her bed, and her teacher dashes off a note to Mr. Darling regarding his daughter’s “unseemly preoccupations.” (We’re in the Victorian era, after all.)
When Peter returns the next night, Wendy learns that he’s been listening for months to her telling stories to her brothers. Partly, he’s enchanted by the story-telling, but mostly he’s enchanted by her. “One girl is worth more than twenty boys,” he says. When he tells her that the Lost Boys are children who fell out of their prams and went to Neverland, she asks why there are no girls there, and Peter replies, “girls are far too clever to fall out of their prams.”
Wendy is just as entranced by Peter. He’s charming, cocky, slightly surly, and has an oh-so-exotic American accent. She offers to give him a kiss, and Peter holds out his hand to receive it, thinking a kiss is an object. Not wanting to embarrass him, she gives him a thimble, and he reciprocates with an acorn. When she tries to give him a real kiss, Tinkerbell’s dangerous rage comes into play, so that will have to wait. Wendy asks if her brothers can come along to Neverland with her, and Peter agrees, clearly not because he wants to, but because he doesn’t want to disappoint her. (Five minutes later, he can’t remember their names.)
“The Wendy’s” Choice
When Wendy arrives in Neverland, she finds it full of adventure, although she’s unprepared for the level of danger in this world. Tinkerbell tries to get the lost boys to kill this strange visitor she calls “the Wendy;” her plot is foiled only by the acorn “kiss” that Peter gave her, which stops an arrow from piercing her heart. (That “a kiss is a powerful thing,” is a recurring motif.) When Peter finds her, she falls into her role of being mother to the lost boys (and her brothers), with Peter acting as the group’s father.
Peter is enamored with Wendy, and eagerly shares with her all the magic of his world. In one beautiful scene, he shows her a fairy dance inside a hollow tree, and the light from the fairies illumines their faces. Peter and Wendy move away from the tree, and begin to dance themselves, their happy thoughts lifting them into the air, as the fairies circle around them showering them in a golden circle of fairy dust.
Wendy, though, is growing up; she knows that no fantasy can satisfy her forever. She’s seen Peter’s world, but not his heart. Intuitively, she knows that the environment isn’t real, but the heart is. She asks Peter if it’s all just make-believe. He answers, “Yes, if I were a real father, I’d feel so old,” and they begin to spiral down. Wendy presses him to talk about his true feelings; he can relate his feelings of anger and his knowledge of jealousy, but nothing of love. Once his inability to love is exposed, he lashes out:“Why do you have to ruin everything? We have fun, don’t we? I taught you how to fight and how to fly! Go, and take your feelings with you!”
This scene is powerful. It speaks to all the boy-men (and their female counterparts) in the real world who want the benefits of love, sex, and relationship without giving themselves. Although Peter enjoys the feeling of being in love, he can’t give himself in love, which would meaning sacrificing his eternal youth. All real love entails some sacrfice, from the everyday sacrifices of couples to each other and parents to their children, to the profound picture of God’s love in Christ’s self-surrender.
Hook witnesses the scene and senses the enormity of Peter’s mistake, realizing that he is simply an older version of Peter Pan. He acutely feels the ache of having lived a loveless life, and schemes to make Wendy his own.
Wendy is tempted. Hook seems mature, while Peter wants to be a boy forever. With Peter, Wendy can only be a mother, but Hook offers her the more exciting role of piracy as “Red-Handed Jill.” Yet Wendy is able to sense that both Pan and Hook are playing at love, something neither is really capable of. Wendy decides to stop holding on to that which isn’t real, and return to real life, with its possiblity of real love, in London.
Fear of the next step
Peter isn’t the only one afraid, though, he’s simply the most honest about it. Peter is unafraid of death, but fears life—specifically the ordinariness of adulthood. That other lost boy, Hook, is afraid of death and old age. Time is after him and will devour him, symbolized by the ticking clock inside the enormous crocodile. Wendy is afraid of life choices. She’s excited by both Peter’s wildness and Hook’s debonair manners, but knows that both are wrong for her; she must leave Neverland and return to reality.
All fear is really fear of the future in some respect, and it’s often about the next change in our life situation—to put it broadly, about the next part of our “growing up.” This film can disturb you if you watch it openly, because you will likely see some of your own fear mirrored in the those of Wendy, Peter, or Hook. At some level, we all have this hesitancy about that next step in some part of our lives, and mere physical age is no evidence of not stopping in Neverland and refusing to go forward. Neither is having a family; many people go through the motions of development, while freezing huge parts of their lives, very often their spiritual lives, at a childish level. As Jed McKenna wrote in Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment, “a seventy-year-old is often an eleven-year-old with fifty-nine years of experience.”
Although there’s a happy ending of sorts—Wendy returns home along with her brothers and the Lost Boys, who also now have a home, there’s a profound sadness at seeing Peter turn back from her window to fly back to an emptier Neverland, with no Lost Boys to guide, no Hook to fight, and no Wendy to love. His last words are:
I’ve got to say that I wasn’t terribly impressed by Narnia. That’s not to say that Disney’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is a bad movie—far from it—but it isn’t a great one, either. In all fairness, Narnia was a most risky endeavor to bring to the screen for a number of reasons: its adult fans have a nearly religious devotion to it, and its stature has grown in their imaginations through the years, turning it into a mythic story it never dreamt of being. Deviate from the book, and the wrath of those fans will rain down upon you. Don’t deviate enough, and you’ll end up with a tale that’s as unassuming as the book they think they remember. It’s a Catch-22.
Director Andrew Adamson (his name translates as “Man, Son of Adam”—got to admit that’s cool, huh?) managed to slide between those two dangerous possibilities, and instead created a film that wants to have it both ways—a heroic adventure on one hand, and a charming fairy tale on the other. It’s more successful on the fairy-tale side.
The scenes of the children in England are quite believable, and the two youngest kids, Georgie Henley (Lucy), and Skandar Keynes (Edmund) are simply brilliant in their roles. However, the screenplay never quite draws us in. We never feel they’re in danger, whether bombs are falling around them in London, or if an evil witch is pursuing them. I would’ve liked more time seeing their characters developed. James McAvoy, who gave us one of the best perfomances ever as Leto in Children of Dune, has a pitch-perfect performance as the faun Mr. Tumnus, and his scenes with Lucy are probably the best in the entire movie. William Moseley (Peter) and Anna Popplewell (Lucy) are under-used, and at 18 and 17 respectively, they may soon become too old for the following movies. The White Witch (Tilda Swinton, fresh off her role in Thumbsucker) is deliciously evil when we meet her, yet we there’s some disappointment in entering her unimposing castle.
Springtime for Aslan and Narnia
Things further slide when spring comes to Narnia. Yes, you’ll believe that beavers and wolves can talk, and Aslan is beautiful and majestic. But his camp is a collision of gaudy red-and-gold tents and costumes, without a hint of dust to be found. The land ends up looking like a garish painting, not a place where a lion might leave his tracks upon the soil. Although it is a children’s fairy tale, Lewis told Narnia with humor, passion, and depth, which are all in short supply here. The kids barely react to their fantastic surroundings in Narnia, so we don’t either. Furthermore, in spite of their call to ascend the Narnian thrones, there is no believable transformation going on. A couple of brief scenes are supposed to show the children training to become warriors, but the shots of kids awkwardly swinging around heavy swords are just embarrassing. Without human adults in Narnia, who’s going to teach these kids martial arts? The beavers?
Lewis described the battle against the White Witch in a couple of short paragraphs. Here, it’s like a diet version of a scene in The Lord of the Rings; for the children it has to be restrained and it is, but for adults, it’s awkward and long, all which raises the question of why it needs a massive battle scene at all. And it’s a zoological mess. Polar bears, leopards, minotaurs, and phoenixes fight in the same scene. It’s as though everything a kid might like is thrown into the mix, just to be sure. Pour in the menagerie and turn on the blender.
I’ll say little about the spiritual symbolism of Narnia, since entire volumes and dissertations have been written about it. Yes, the symbolism of the book is still there, Aslan still dies, resurrects, and forgives. However, I winced at the scene in which Peter gives the battle cry For “Narnia and Aslan”. Enough of that. Enough of war “for Jesus,” “for Allah,” “for [insert divine name here]”. Sure, the battle is “not of this world;” it’s about the spiritual war, the struggle within our souls to become like Christ, united with God. But now and throughout the ages, we have projected our neighbor as the enemy, instead of our own lack of love. Peter’s battle cry doesn’t help clarify things for those who confuse them.
I like Lewis as much as the next guy, yet I think it’s sad that so many Christians can’t see the spiritual reflections in any stories but these, when so many stories, intentionally or not, are packed with symbols of spiritual sacrifice, resurrection, and redemption, and often of a much subtler and higher order than this; e.g. The Matrix, Pleasantville, and Spider-Man 2, to name just a few. (If you haven’t already, I encourage you to check out Hollywood Jesus. My friend David Bruce taught me how to look at contemporary film with a spiritual eye, and chances are excellent he can do the same for you.)
From what I’ve read, although they were close friends and Lewis admired Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Tolkien disliked Lewis’ creation, finding it a jumble of beasts and magics with no rhyme or reason other than allegory. There’s little sense in it. Why does Narnia need not one, but four monarchs to govern it, when there’s no governing to do? And both Cair Paravel and the Witch’s castle are so empty they seem little more than places to display thrones. In the books, these aren’t problems at all, but simply exercises to use our imaginations even more as the charm unfolds. Yet after $150,000,000 has been spent on the film, I find myself wishing for more depth and plausibility.
Adamson could have done better, but largely the problems are with the source material. The best Narnia adaptaion might have been to leave it very much the children’s fairy tale, full of charm and rich, grandfatherly voice-overs from the narrator, but in the age of The Lord of the Rings, that would be an unlikely sell. And turning it into a convincing world where good and evil are fighting to the death would distort it beyond recognition. Still, it’s not a bad attempt—but a somewhat disappointing one.
What Is Enlightenment? » magazine has an excellent review » of What the #$*! Do We Know?, the movie which I had considered a mixed bag of entertaining, popularized science on the one hand, and grossly deficient pseudo-mysticism on the other.
WIE’s writer Tom Huston explains in great depth the missing pieces glossed over by the Ramtha students’ film, from the alternate views of the nature of quanta (e.g. probability waves is only one interpretation), to the insufficiency (and egocentric motive) of the New Age platitude “we create our reality.”
Mystical practice is traditionally aimed toward the mind-shattering revelation that there is actually only one reality and one self, and this revelation is said to liberate the individual from his or her attachment to personal desires. So if we’re pursuing the manifestation of our desires by consciously manipulating the quantum field, and thereby attempting to re-create reality itself in our own image, how spiritual can that be, really?
He concludes with a very intriguing suggestion about the cause of the film’s popularity:That we should even feel the need to overcome the doubt of the scientific materialist worldview indicates how all-pervasive it actually is, and how thoroughly steeped in it most of us are. In fact, the very need to base our belief in the transcendental Divine on the findings of science seems indicative of the strange spiritual desert in which we currently find ourselves. . . .
There’s some powerful wisdom in these words, which applies to a lot of us, from those who strain to prove prophecies with current events, and the Creation with fossil records, to those segments of the current “spiritual” subculture that lack a vision of their own.
Tonight, at 12:01 am, an era ends: the last Star Warsmovie will be released. I’m looking forward to seeing Revenge of the Sith. I haven’t re-posted any of my earlier pages on Star Wars movies because I’ve been waiting for the final installment of the saga. I suspect it will cast many things into a different light.
