Judgement Day, Part 1

The first dream I remember had something to do with the Disney dark sci-fi epic 'The Black Hole' and the seven dwarves from their earlier fantasy arriving in my bedroom to amuse a lonely four year old; five years after that, I watched an episode of 'TJ Hooker' in which a serial killer claimed his victims with a hammer - that night granted me a terrifying nightmare involving Leonard Nimoy, my beloved grandmother's house, and a set of kitchen knives.  (Yes, I know Leonard Nimoy wasn't in 'TJ Hooker', the show that William Shatner presumably hoped would put some distance between him and Captain Kirk, but I suppose the fact that my subconscious was able to link Nimoy and Shatner even at the age of nine telegraphs the reasons why the cinematic image means so much to me even now.) After the Leonard Nimoy-tries-to-kill-me-at-my-grandmother's-house-and-shes-worried-that-I'll-get-blood-on-the-carpet nightmare, my dreams went quiet for a few years.  Now I know they (and when I say 'they', I guess I mean Freud and friends) say you dream every night; and this may well be the case.  But for the longest time, I couldn't remember my dreams; so I don't know if they were happening or not.  I do recall that, at eighteen and twenty, on the deaths of a friend and my grandmother respectively, I had dreams in which they appeared and said goodbye to me, and I was comforted.  Plenty of people have told me of similar experiences when loved ones cross the threshold; I'm guessing that there's some kind of integration that occurs in the deep levels of the psyche, enfolding the shock of death into something more manageable.

I've had more vivid dreams lately; two in particular have been about my own death.  One of these is still too complex and strange for me to share just yet; but the other seems necessary. I'll write it down here, without comment for now; maybe someone reading can tell me if it provokes any thoughts; and I'll try to write something more interpretive about it later in the week.  Please note that this does not come naturally to me; this really is a kind of transcript of something that happened to me when I was asleep, so it may be entirely indulgent and a waste of time; but I'm risking sharing it because I think it might mean something to some of you reading.  I make no comment about the content of the dream.  Not yet.  But your comments are welcome today.

The setting was the typical Judgement Day scenario, beloved of conservative evangelical and Catholic Christians alike (there may be a similar notion in other faiths too, I'm not sure).  The entire human race was lined up, Nuremberg rally-style, and naked, awaiting their fifteen minutes of shame.  God was on his throne, white-bearded and cliched, but visible to all, and not as frightening as he had appeared in the fears of my younger days (in this dream, God was definitely male).  The person at the head of the line would gingerly step forward, and stand gently shaking before a small TV dinner table on which sat an old top-loading VCR - of the kind that you probably watched 'BMX Bandits' on in 1983.  One of God's assistants would bring a cassette with the name of the person at the front of the line on it, hand it to God, and God would put it in the top-loading VCR.  He'd press play, and then, on a white screen to the left of the throne, the details of your life would be played back for the rest of us to see.  Only the bad stuff.  When, as a kid, you stole from a corner shop; when you mistreated a girlfriend; when you lied to your parents; when you lived in apathy, giving your devotion to consumerism and stress.  It wasn't clear in the dream what happened after the film of your mistakes was shown, but soon enough, I found myself at the top of the line.

God looked at me, but I wasn't sure what the look meant, and some events from my life flashed through my mind.  When God didn't intervene to save the life of someone very close to me, who had a good ten years of life left, and deserved it after five decades of serving her husband; when God didn't stop people who were threatening me, and causing untold psychological impact; when God couldn't figure out a way to allow me to have a sense of innocence in childhood without interference from guilt and persistent fear; when God didn't save me from the trauma that all of us who grew up in the same place were touched by at some point.  And then, images not from my life per se, but those horrifying events that I observed through the TV twenty years ago and more; the obvious ones, like the Ethiopian famine of 1984, the Armenian earthquake, the wars in Afghanistan and the Balkans and everywhere, a slide show of horrors I remembered seeing at an age when brain plasticity was pliable enough for the Nine O'Clock news to embed itself.

God had put the cassette in the top-loader.  He was about to push down the flap, and show my mistakes to the world.  But then, with the definitive power of a reflex, my right hand found its way to his, pushing it away from the machine.  God looked at me, smaller now than he had been just a few seconds before, his eyes conveying what I can only call perturbation - confusion mingled with disappointment, as if he was a child who had just had her ice cream taken away.  Then I spoke.  The words that came were simple:

'I tell you what, God.  I won't judge you if you don't judge me.'

Charles Darwin Can't Get No Respect (with a Jay Leno Minority Report)

And so we turn to the news on a Monday morning: Things are going just fine in the world of dumbed down culture – I just heard a story on NPR suggesting that the writers of Jay Leno’s new TV show might struggle to deal with the fact that they’re on just before the news.  Not because of ratings, but because it is assumed that the audience won’t be able to cope with the shift in tone.  Which leads me inexorably to evolutionary biology, one of the most interesting British film producers working over the past thirty years, and why I rarely go to the movies for pleasure anymore.  Three thoughts follow.

Read the rest of this post at The Film Talk....

'Unforgiven' and the Roots of Violence

I took another look at 'Unforgiven' the other day - one of those films whose original impact was muted by the fact that I saw it amidst hype, and, precisely half a lifetime ago, when I didn't know that I had no idea what I was talking about. The difference today, I suppose is twofold; I still have no idea what I'm talking about, but at least I think I know this; and I've seen a few more films and thought a lot about violence and masculine archetypes.

'Unforgiven' has the reputation of being the revisionist Western to end all revisionist Westerns; but this misses the point, and isn't quite accurate - 'Dances with Wolves', whatever you think of its aesthetic and philosophical merits, wasn't exactly a cowboys-beat-Indians actioner, the genuine masterpiece 'Heaven's Gate' shatters the myth of the glorious frontier, Clint had done revenge-as-a-living-hell before in 1973's 'High Plains Drifter', even the otherwise ridiculous and xenophobic 'Cattle Queen of Montana' had Barbara Stanwyck going off into the sunset with the unlikeliest pardners this side of the cast of 'Twins': Native American hero on one arm, Ronald Reagan on the other.  (See below for an analogy of how grating, if appealing, that particular contrast appears.)

So to see 'Unforgiven's strengths as merely relating to how 'different' it may be from other Westerns about men-who-might-as-well-have-no-name is to reduce its value to nothing more than an innovation. It's far more important than that: it reveals the gaping wound in the typical Western vision of the male psyche, exposes the roots of violence, and seeks to provide a serious answer to the question of why people kill, and why portrayals of killing constitute so much of our entertainment complex.  This answer, if taken seriously enough, could change everything.

The short version: people kill, and we like to watch portrayals of killing because we're afraid of death.

There are some fascinating thoughts about this at the International Psycoanalysis blog here.  If the author (Herbert Stein, M.D., in his “Double Features: Discovering our Unconscious Fantasies in Film” (EREADS, 2003)) has a point, and it seems pretty compelling to me, then the causes of violence can be traced to an attempt at asserting power over death; which opens a fairly large can of worms when it comes to considerations of what happens when fear is, itself, the dominant lens through which some of us have been wounded into viewing life.  This may all sound a bit flowery for the Film Talk or for a Friday, but I just wonder...if we accept the premise that politicised fear can lead to real death, can't cinematic fear give some grounding to that same fear, and that same death?  In that regard, would 'Unforgiven' be better seen as part of the pantheon of, or a kind of retrospective prequel to, films like 'A Matter of Life and Death', 'Wings of Desire', and 'Magnolia' where the notion of something transcendent gathering up the mystery of being human into a space that may not make sense as we understand it now, but constitutes an interruption of grace that cuts the poisonous flow that oxygenates the myth that violence fixes things?   Just a thought.

A Roundup, A Book, A Movie, A Speech, A Dream

This week I finished the research for the new book, grateful for the opportunity, and looking forward to getting deeper into the writing; watched 'Randy and the Mob', a lovely, smart and funny new comedy, mingling traditionally 'conservative' values with a liberal sensibility under a generous serving of distinctive Southern identity, not to mention fully fleshed-out characters; watched President Obama's speech and (misgivings about it not going far enough aside) was deeply impressed by the attempt at meaningful compromise, troubled by the divisiveness of the room, delighted by the humanness of John McCain turning to his colleague and mouthing the words 'Should we stand?' when the President had just praised him, and had a familiar sense that, as Erin Parish says, 'Barack is back'; and started production on a short film that I hope will be the basis for a bigger project that will be announced later in the year - I'm really excited about this, and there'll be a chance for readers of this blog to be involved, so please watch this space. But there's something else on my mind as the week ends.  I had two extraordinarily powerful dreams recently, both of which involved my own death.  Neither of which were pessimistic, although the second was the most frightening nightmare I can remember having.   (Don't worry - I don't think they were prophetic in any sense other than the universal; I'm not planning to cross the threshold any time soon.)  I've thought a great deal about the two dreams, and I've come to the view that I should write about what these dreams have given rise to in my conscious thought.  It's taken a while to get to the point of feeling able to write about this; and I think I'm going to restrict myself for the time being to the details of the first dream only, partly because I think it's a story best shared in conversation between friends, and partly because the first seems more universal than the second.  Sorry for being cryptic - but I figure if I write this post today it will serve as a commitment to actually telling you about the dreams next week.   Hope the weekend unfolds in a way that invites what Richard Rohr suggests will make life better.

How are We Present to Reality?

A remarkable thought from Richard Rohr, which, if I read it thoughtfully enough, I think might get me through the day: "Somewhere each day we have to fall in love, with someone, something, some moment, event, phrase, animal, or person. And it must be done quite definitively! Somehow each day we must allow a softening of our heart, which usually moves toward hardness and separation without our even knowing it. We can now prove neurologically that it is easier to move toward cynicism, bitterness, fear and despair than it is toward goodness, beauty, or appreciation. All spirituality is intended to help us recognize and counter our downward spiral toward smallness.

The world often tries to conjure up life by making itself falsely excited, by creating parties, even when there is no actual reason to celebrate. I have often noted in poor countries how people create fiestas because they have survived another season or even another day. We create fiestas to create fiestas, which I guess is not all bad; but after a while the ungirding of joy and contentment is not there.

We have to create and discover the parties of the heart, the place where we know we can enjoy what is, and that we have indeed survived and even flourished another day of our one and only life. Just make sure you are somewhere, and always, definitively in love! Then you'll see rightly, because only when we are in love can we accept the mystery that almost everything is."

Now to some of us, I imagine Fr Richard's words, or words like these may sound unrealistic or sentimental; which reaction may, of course, itself be a result of the ease with which he tells us our minds move toward cynicism.  There may be other reasons, too, perhaps especially challenging for people who have been around meditation and spiritual practices for longer than they care to remember, but still find that they don't seem to work; or they don't always work; or they don't often work.  I'm a mix of both - cynicism betrays me frequently, making me fear the worst of myself and of others, taking me away from experiencing contentment, and, worst of all, detaching me from my sense of self.  At the same time, I've been around spirituality 'masters' for a long time; I've tried a fairly wide gamut of seeking - from conservative evangelicalism to charismatic exuberance to wilderness testing to something like very amateur zen and much in between.  There was something beautiful, and something troubling about each of these.  But there's also something deeply compelling about Richard's suggestion that, if love is harder than cynicism, then we should devote more time to investing in love, because cynicism has more than enough nourishment to keep it alive without us tending to it, watering it, making sure it has the right food.  It will only die through being overwhelmed by love.  The kind of love that Richard calls 'definitive' needs to be chosen.  It isn't just going to happen.