Transcendence and Compassion in Cinema

Mick Innes as ‘John’ in ‘The Insatiable Moon’, filming now in New Zealand

I’m in Ponsonby’s red light district on the set of ‘The Insatiable Moon’ – the portable gazebos we’re using for shade and comfortable eating are the colour of healthy scarlet; appropriate enough, given that today we turn to one of the most troubling scenes in the movie – a scene in which the hidden shame felt by a character leads to disaster. Everyone’s focused on the task in hand: to portray an awful event as truthfully as possible, without exploiting the audience’s emotions, nor denying the fact that human sorrow is real, and touches to us all. If we’re lucky, we might have an Arthur in our lives, someone who sees through the superficial mores of our culture, resists its car rally speed, and offers a human connection in the midst of the awful things that come to us, hopefully only a few times in a full life.

Anger

I moved a table at a sidewalk cafe in Cambridge, NZ, the other day.  A man growled at me.  It was his table.  I didn’t know this.  He growled at me again.  I got angry.  He was already angry*.  We parted, and I remembered the Bertrand Russell quotation that I had seen a week earlier, taken from ‘The Free Man’s Worship’, and quoted in Frank Schaeffer’s wonderful book ‘Patience with God‘.  Maybe this is patronising (I don’t intend it as such); maybe it’s too melodramatic (unless you see all of life as sacred, in which case all of life can be dramatic too); maybe it’s just an excuse for a blog post.  But here it is:

“United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need, of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves.”

* I have just been asked by a resident of Cambridge to state unequivocally that ‘we’re not all like that’ and ‘it was probably someone from Auckland visiting for the day’.  Happy to oblige.

81 Films of the Decade

In the year 2000 I was 25 and single, finishing up a Ph.D., stressed out of my tree, working with a small NGO on peace and non-violence issues, trying figure out what it was that I wanted to be when I grew up.

Now as 2010 approaches, I’m a month away from being 35 and married, I haven’t published the Ph.D., but am less stressed, working as a writer and doing some other things, and trying to figure out what it is that I want to be when I grow up.  The consolations of life this past decade have been the same all along – the richness of friendships old and new, the life-force that is sparked when I look at natural beauty – of mountains or oceanscapes or my lover’s face, the enlightenment or delight that is present when I read a well-calibrated sentence or hear astonishing music, turning over to go to sleep, and the feeling of potential that I still hope for every time the lights go down when I’m at the movies.

This has been a tough decade for many of the people that I presume read this blog – we’ve been confronted by the unintended side-effects of globalization, and taught to see life as a way to be daily afraid; we’ve experienced an economic tightening that came as a shock; we’ve all been angered by this politician or that; some of us have even lost a great deal in the wars that are still being fought.  At the same time, of course, some of us have seen peace come to places no one ever believed were ripe for such change.

Antichrist, John Cusack, the End of the World and the Re-birth of Art

Over at The Film Talk we’ve just posted our next podcast episode in which we discuss three films that I think are hugely important – ‘Antichrist’, ‘Gaia’, and ‘2012′.  If you’re interested in the end of the world and how to stop it; the politics of nation-building; the difference between provocation and mental illness; and in hearing about a film so good it’s close to miraculous, check it out here.

Violence and Sentimentality in the Movies: Which is More Dangerous?

Richard Brody at The Front Row has this interesting reflection on violence and the movies/media in general:

“There does seem to be a great deal of research on the question of violence and of quantity of viewing; but very little, if any, on the subject of treacle. I do worry about the effect of violent films on children, but I worry just as much about the emotional debility, the sentimentalization of kids who watch only child-friendly works. In general, children watch much too much television and see far too many movies in which everyone smiles too much and talks as if they’re on sugar highs—or, simply, where there isn’t enough ambiguity or mystery. The oversimplification of life into tangy bite-sized morsels is as much of a danger, for individuals and generations, as stoked aggression.”

I’m fascinated by the critique of sentimentality – and while some may legitimately suggest that I am guilt of such over-egging the emotional pudding myself, I think it’s entirely appropriate.  At the same time, the way we tell stories in which violence plays a significant role requires sustained attention.  My starting point: Is there a qualitative difference between the violence of ‘Inglourious Basterds‘, ‘The Dirty Dozen’, ‘Lethal Weapon’, ‘Saving Private Ryan’, ‘Home Alone’ and ‘Cache‘?  Of course there is.  What’s the purpose of movie violence?  What are its effects?  Can it be cathartic?  Can it nurture more real-world violence? And I’ve come to the view that the human race can no longer afford representations of the myth of redemptive violence for entertainment’s sake alone.  If you’ll join me in the comments section, let’s talk about why.

The Beginnings of What Happens Next

My friend Dawn Purvis has made a surprising intervention in a debate about the causes of the conflict in northern Ireland.  Henry Kelly writes about it here – if you’re interested in the politics and peacemaking of my home society, I’d encourage you to read this article.  If you’re not, but you care about how we handle history, and especially how it has become almost impossible for truth to get past party interests, I’d recommend it just as much.  Are we willing to remember things that make us look bad if it helps other people to heal?

 

‘New’ Irish Cinema – The Paradox of ‘Turning Green’

You know, we like to be friendly round here, but if you’ve been in the neighbourhood for any length of time, you’ll also know that I often grieve the lack of imagination in most films.  Robots kill some people/people kill more robots; abs-ridden guy meets cute girl/conflict/unification; bloke changes, you know the deal.  So it’s a pleasant surprise to see ‘Turning Green’, your none-too-typical American boy grows up in a small West of Ireland village/competes with the local gangster by selling porn magazines (illegal in the eyes of the State and shameful in the eyes of the Church)/and makes witty comments about what’s wrong with the land of my birth while Timothy Hutton, an actor I like a great deal, snarls at him from under a pork pie hat.

Problem of the Day: Has Martin Scorsese made a Ghost Story? And if so, What am I going to do about it?

So I was up early this morning having slept restlessly after watching the end of ‘Battlestar Galactica’ last night (no spoilers – suffice it to say that fans of Richard Dawkins and Thomas Merton may find themselves both satisfied; I certainly was).  Cylons colonised my repose (for some reason the early models, one of whose bosses is depicted above, were the stuff of my childhood nightmares), but I managed to avoid the bad dream I might otherwise have had when I was younger and less apt to resist imagining the imminent doom of the planet.  I have a sensitive constitution, as they say.  Which segues neatly into the reason for this post: why I am about to let you, dear reader, down.

Mental Illness and the Movies

Just a brief post from me as I’m on my way to Nashville to, among other things, meet up with the maestro for a screening of recent cult film ‘The Room’ at the glorious Belcourt Theatre. Meantime, I’d like to recommend the gutsy article at the Huffington Post from Glenn Close on the cinematic portrayal of mental illness. It’s a significant moment when anyone is prepared to criticise their own work, especially when that work is among the most successful and iconic they’ve done, but Close all but disassociates herself from ‘Fatal Attraction’ because the way it turned a human being with a personality disorder who needed help into a monster whom the audience was supposed to consider worthy only of being spectacularly murdered.

There are, as Close writes, notable exceptions (such as ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, above) to the superficiality or demonising portrayals of mental illness; but for the most part, the contours of the mind in the movies are subject to the same kind of over-simplification or plain ignorance that shows up every time the term ’schizophrenic’ is used to describe ’split personality’ (an entirely different condition) or, more disturbing, when ‘psychotic’ is used interchangeably with the accurate term given to the extremely rare phenomenon of ‘psychopathy’. According to the Native American scholar Joe Gone, 48% of US Americans have a diagnosable mental illness, and so Close’s points about ignorance not helping any of us are just the tip of the iceberg.  I’m not an expert in any of this, although like most of us, have not been untouched by mental illness in my friends, my family, myself; I’d love to have a conversation here about the portrayal of psychological conditions in cinema – any particularly good examples of accuracy, or bad examples of egregious misunderstanding?  If mental illness is frequently rooted in conflicted desire and expectation, and if cinema is about desire, is it possible that the movies might actually have the power to make us sick?  Or to heal us?