Rethink.

for Christine Harmon

The opening of Lawrence of Arabia tells much of the story, if not the whole. There’s that sense of adventure, a sense of exploring the world anew, underlying our highest desires and some not so high ones. It can lead one to ride a motorbike too fast, seeing more while daring anyone or anything to stop you. And it can lead to wanting to conquer your fears, know as much as possible, and take control. The link between such a spirited individual and the highest political objects is the want of freedom, but is the freedom that screams from within oneself the same thing as freedom for a people? No wonder the bureaucrats at Lawrence’s funeral refuse to explain his legacy. They can’t. The tension can only be felt by someone aware of freedom in the first place.

To be sure, this is somewhat of a boyish enterprise, and that is not meant as a compliment. It stems from another tension, one central to anything we call education in the West. British schoolboys were bred to be noble. Discipline, respect for authority, strength from order. But British schoolboys were also Christian, believing in miracles and a Providence benefiting one personally. Discipline and order do not simply create boy scouts or automatons. Self-discipline and an intellect that recognizes where things are properly put accompany the most daring curiosities and the most creative personalities. Add the idea that God becomes man and the most explosive hubris can unearth itself. The noble sees itself confirmed in the world, as it thinks it sees its own narrative unfold. One might see Lawrence as a kind of holy warrior, fighting for the cult of himself. One might accuse him of immaturity.

But Faisal’s comment that war is a young man’s game and peace an old man’s game does not begin to do the situation justice. It’s a cheap characterization which directly substitutes manipulation as control for the freedom which comes from the feeling of control. It already assumes that the only thing worth being is the manipulator who can always manipulate. What makes Lawrence so compelling to those around him is his boldness which has a certain honesty about it. That he can be broken, that he can be “half-mad,” is his being an extraordinary man. This is not a simple case of a man who is only a warrior failing to recognize the realities of politics. If anything, he sees the political situation too well and plays a complicated, deadly game that of necessity will find his weakness. We’re all naive about politics to a degree.

We witness the slide from man to divinity primarily through his learning. We see him restless in Cairo, wanting to be useful. But he does not simply exercise patience; he builds an inhuman tolerance of pain, putting out fires with his fingers as a parlor trick. He says the pain does not matter if one pays it no mind. This sort of continence, while in this case obviously exaggerated, is discussed as useful to leaders in Xenophon. It is the key to understanding both Socrates and the Spartans. Lawrence makes sure to know the region he operates in and act on that knowledge. He wins over Faisal and Ali by letting Faisal’s men do what they are best at, guerrilla fighting based on mastery of the terrain. This allows him to build a serious basis for Arab identity through the Bedouin spirit. His propensity for stupid risks endears him to his men. Prone to excessive compassion and violence, he shows a daring they wish they could have. This may be the deeper truth underlying why the best generals do whatever they order their men to do, whether Xenophon, Caesar, Napoleon. It isn’t as simple as challenging another’s manhood; it’s showing another what they can be, truly. That they never need to feel constrained by the world.

That Lawrence is successful becomes the problem. If you perform miracles, who are you? And what is the price of performing one miracle? What makes the movie so powerful is that it is the performance of a miracle which breaks Lawrence. He saves a man in the desert who by all rights should have died. He kills him later and preserves a peace which lasts even in Damascus. To perform a miracle once – to have a pillar of dust be one of fire – is to never look at a pillar of dust the same way again. That Lawrence performed a miracle at least once makes the problem more acute. For nobility, as pagan authors like Plutarch and Tacitus noted, is not meant to result in victory. Nobility actually exists as a substitute for the good. When we don’t get what we want, we content ourselves with the honor and respect due us. To be honored and respected while obtaining the good is to be no less than a god.

Lawrence grapples with this problem and it drives him mad. The central moment in the movie is recognizing how low he has fallen at the peak of his reputation. He has crossed the desert and won the unwinnable. Yet he is profoundly troubled by two deaths. First, the death of one he was directly a protector of, the outcast youth servant. The other death is Gasim, who he says he enjoyed killing. It isn’t clear how much he liked shooting Gasim from our vantage. It does look like he is disgusted with himself during and after the killing. But maybe Lawrence’s “enjoyment” is coming from being a miracle-worker, a founder of peoples, a giver of independence. As a truly free man, bound to no order, he must take pride in the actions that mark his effectiveness. His is not a role one gives up easily, evidenced by the times he tries to walk away.  He ultimately knows the importance of oneself as a symbol and a cause. Yet it is impossible to take any pride in the actions constituting that, as they force one to see one’s inhumanity.

The back-and-forth instability of one’s own self, weirdly enough, can be the fuel for success on the battlefield. Lawrence dares to create an Arab revolt with his personality. It fails, as even his captors do not recognize him. He returns after a crisis of confidence in himself, and his strategy is to indulge the cult of personality even more, bribing as many as possible and openly embracing savagery. It is easy to dismiss this as the actions of a potential tyrant. In truth, a broken man struggling with himself is still aiming at the higher objects. And he does this very well, giving his army a number of reasons to fight: those who love honor and freedom need no other motivation than Lawrence’s brilliance; those who love money have it; those who love to kill have that too. Small wonder he can move his army far faster than the British.

Neither the noble nor the miraculous alone make us human. But they are not just extremes with no value for our lives. Ali goes from murderous thug to a real believer in order, a commander who cares for his men, and a potential leader in a Arab nation which stands together. Lawrence serves as educator to him. And the political disarray proximately caused by the too hasty occupation of Damascus is not political naivete. It is a real chance at an independent Arab nation. The project fails for a number of reasons, not least of which the attempt to steal Arabia from the people living in it, but that Lawrence gives them a chance at success is a small miracle unto itself. The boy scout colonel looks absolutely disgusted when he leaves the room, after Faisal and Allenby acknowledge how much of a pest Lawrence was to them. I wonder if he’s angry at nobility being manipulated so basely. People really do fight for causes, and the highest causes tear us apart from the inside.

Spoilers galore ahead

The greatest Bond movie ever made – I think that, and I don’t particularly like Daniel Craig – and a necessary anti-Bourne corrective. Its themes pick up directly from Goldeneye: Is there a need for spies in the post-Cold War world? What is patriotism if the nation-state makes trained killers from orphans?

The extreme skepticism of the Bourne movies leads to thinking that all the government does is kill people and erase memories in the name of an abstract security and liberty. Quite frankly, it’s hard to see what we stand for when we increasingly fire missiles from drones and consider that and only that counter-terrorism policy. I’m not saying we should ram our values down other people’s throats. Just that it takes something more to see why evil is evil, to see why we need to pay tremendous, ironic costs for safety, justice, our way.

It’s a very thin line and Skyfall addresses it directly. M, for all practical purposes, has Bond shot in the opening as Bond is fighting for her and country. There is no reason for Bond to go back or care for MI-6. Yet he does when he sees MI-6 attacked.

It’s an open question whether this is just Bond’s instinct kicking in, whether he can be tempted by what a former agent turned villain promises. That former agent doesn’t just want revenge. If he outs all the NATO agents in the world, he can literally stop the system that spawned him. He will show it useless at even defending itself, not to mention others. If he goes further and kills M during a hearing, he can show intelligence useful for only nurturing grudges.

Bond doesn’t get tempted by the villain, despite the fact it isn’t clear M should be saved by anyone. The villain was basically a child-soldier, as are all the agents. Why shouldn’t he be angry? Why shouldn’t this system be dismantled? Bond needs to convince us that he stands for something worth standing for. He needs to justify himself. M argues before the MP questioning all of espionage that there are forces in the shadows which cannot be denied. She’s right, but it isn’t the whole truth.

The truth is that M isn’t a leader as much as a symbol. She’s incompetent to stop her former agent, who knows all MI-6’s tricks. Javier Bardem’s character has his best moments in the final battle at Skyfall. He uses a first wave of mercenaries to make Bond and company use up all their tricks in defending the manor. Then he calmly starts setting the house on fire after machine gunning it. The only way people get out is through a tunnel underneath the house, once meant for practitioners of a secret faith. The only way Bond turns the tables is that explosive substances were left in the house to keep it warm.

The metaphor is actually pretty subtle. Bond cries when M dies. It’s hard to see why duty for duty’s sake matters, especially when it seems an infinite regress. Bond loses his childhood home and the person he was supposed to protect. In material terms, all he does is kill the bad guy. Is that really a good? Or even anything just? The bad guy was simply part of a cycle of revenge, no?

Tradition – “our way” – is the infinite regress of duty. You can look at it as a cost you’re always paying or a source of near infinite strength. It sounds ridiculous to say the latter, especially since our greatest heroes stand up to bad ideas, bad traditions. But that’s just it: they start somewhere, they establish something. Now to look at literal costs gives one tremendous power. Like Javier Bardem’s villain, you can use computers to get others to cause explosions in the strangest places or rig elections. You just need to find the price for what you want and pay it. Tradition as a perpetual cost is priceless, for better or worse. It does create child-soldiers and horrific casualties.

But tradition has a power which matters in a positive sense. Bond’s patriotism is real. He does remember his childhood home; Scotland and England and the people in it matter to him. To a degree, he can sacrifice them because he knows they too stand for something. That’s the real power of tradition: trust. You can establish trust another way – Socrates certainly does – but it is unclear that can reach all men. Weirdly enough, there’s something univocally universal about patriotism. In declaring one’s own limits, one sets the stage for seeing others who are different.

There’s more. Smarts aren’t enough to deal with others, especially socially. Tradition makes one a leader more than a planner. Bond demonstrates this best with Moneypenny. He’s not telling her to stop being a field agent because she shot him. He tells her this because there are good people who can contribute best without being in the line of fire. You want to fight for as many as possible. The alternative is only fighting for oneself, all the time.

Again, this is a very thin line. Bond sure as hell looks like he’s fighting for himself, that he’s a rat who eats other rats just as much as the bad guy. And the bad guy’s revenge might even create a better world. The issues of establishing trust and fighting for others are matters of degree. It is difficult to know right from wrong. What’s funny about M talking about the shadows where evils need to be fought is her moral relativity stemming from a moral absolutism. Not that there are absolutely right answers, but that we need to start somewhere. Bond sees that exactly in Skyfall and draws his strength of will from it. Evil is real not because the bad guys don’t have a point, but precisely because they do.

Blah blah blah Hansel and Gretel is misogynistic & “witch hunt” is offensive & the whole thing is just one joke & blah blah blah I don’t know how to go to the movies and have some damn fun (h/t Ricky McAllister)

I’ll give Moviebob, whose video review is linked above, credit for one of his complaints: the movie is a bit paint-by-numbers. I don’t feel it drags like he says, where the first 10 minutes are the only good part and then a gag runs too long.

I do feel the movie is ridiculous fun and recommend it heartily. The rapid-fire crossbows and other medieval Batman gadgets make for cute gags; the witches trying to escape on brooms are a neat parody of chase scenes. The movie looks good – it is colorful, like a storybook, and that contrasts nicely with the hardened, overly macho action star dialogue of the leads.

Moviebob’s complaints are just awful. The “witch hunt” one is just ludicrous. Almost the very first thing that happens in the movie is that a witch is saved. She’s later recognized to be a good witch but is consistently one of the movie’s heroes. To say the movie is some kind of attack on practicing pagans or Wiccans is insane. “Misogyny” has a bit more bite, but not much. Hansel and Gretel beat up witches in scenes that recall The Dark Knight’s “enhanced interrogations.” However, the evil witches are established as super strong with some kind of regeneration early on. The whole plot of the movie is that they only need immunity to fire for immortality.

The strength of the movie is in the acting. Gemma Arterton’s Gretel is strong and sexy. When she takes command of the public square early on, declaring who she is and headbutting anyone in her way, it is clear who her character is and one wants to see more of her in the movie. Jeremy Renner’s Hansel is a lot of fun. He’s always trying to be tougher than he is. This results in him getting saved a ludicrous number of times by women – either Gretel or the good witch or bad witches missing badly.

Not much else to tell you. The reason for this “review” was to prevent stupid reviews by snobby critics from stopping you from seeing it. It’s good to be able to go to the movies and enjoy yourself. I am not sure why that is becoming a crime in some circles. I suspect some don’t read enough and are expecting film to take the place of “literature” or “philosophy” or “thinking for yourself.”

Spoilers ahead. Go watch Gattaca if you haven’t already.

Earlier this week, I was wondering about the division of all human knowing into two: theoretical philosophy and political science. It’s a division Maimonides uses in his Logic, a work which seems to be about the recovery of political philosophy. I remarked to Nathaniel that maybe such a severe distinction – where almost everything is political science – brings about the concept of the noble. The bridge between these types of knowledge has to cater to our vision of the highest, but vision alone becomes the key. What is noble often concerns self-sacrifice with the hope of a greater good for others.

Enter Gattaca. At least one genetically engineered super-human, Jude Law’s character, cannot abide his place in life. He takes his death wish and creates a new ambition. Give his name to someone else who can use it, help them get what they want, then kill himself. It’s hard to call what he’s doing vengeful because of the contrast with Ethan Hawke’s Vincent and Gore Vidal’s bash-your-head-in-with-a-keyboard director. Vincent definitely wants to get the hell off this damn rock. He’s not explicitly vengeful, but he is moreso than the original Jerome Morrow.

So what are Jude Law’s motivations? I think we can identify two:

1. He has decided that the most rational thing to do in a world which is utter crap is kill himself. Before dismissing this as arrogance and saying that people lived through worse, consider how powerfully Gattaca itself makes this argument. Would you really want to live in a world where everything is genetic testing to absurd, consistently extra-legal degrees? Jude Law sees right through all this. He declares, rightly, that people are going to see who they want to see. This was never about perfection in any sense, not even about utility. This was all about the feeling that we could try to guarantee success and would be better off trying to do so. This was all about the fear of fear itself: panic, in a word.
2. The only way to truly not be second-best is win a competition no one would dare enter, not even in the future. What is left for a genetically engineered superhuman who can compete at nearly everything? You’re going to have to use all your advantages in the service of a powerful cause and be ready to give it all up at the drop of a hat. In short, you have to earn your identity for yourself by destroying your own DNA, perhaps even all connection to this world. The privacy and ultimate willingness to give up his own name are crucial to Jude Law’s character.

On that last point: it is true that we don’t know, say, who “Homer” was. We just have a name. Did Jude Law figure out that working for your name is actually a fruitless endeavor, the sort of thing that relentless genetic enhancement is supposed to aid? He certainly is defensive about his name early on in the film.

I’m not sure how to resolve any of these difficulties. A general comment on the rational and the noble is in order because what’s happening in Gattaca, unwittingly, is the science of perfect gentlemen. We’re going to create “noble and good” people, a class with higher desires and trappings who gets what they deserve. And that class, to some degree, will figure out that this is the most worthless sort of life. Who doesn’t want to earn and fight for what is good? Who doesn’t want to learn, and more importantly, learn how to learn?

Then again, we’ve tried to create aristocracies before. Early on in Herodotus (I.30-33), Solon discusses two examples of happiness. One is Tellus the Athenian, who has a beautiful large family, wealth, land, is in a time where his city is prosperous. He dies nobly on the battlefield, is given a great funeral. Tellus is first in happiness. Second are twin brothers who carry their mother to the temple for miles like oxen would. She asks the goddess to give them what is best. They die in their sleep. Is it better to never have been born at all? Is a natural basis for nobility our simply dealing with the ills of Fortune?

The trouble with going that route is where “nature” finally leads – not so much to nobility, but to rationality. This is true even if nature reduces to (and disappears with) physics in the sense we have it. Nature somehow ends up characteristic of a higher or necessary sort of knowledge, not just our will. Nobility ends up almost entirely artificial. Almost. The two problems of the soul Aristotle identified, how it is both a source of motion and knowing, are on display. Good luck solving them – only with that “solution” could the conventional be entirely displaced. Jude Law says there might be nothing on Titan. He knows for sure there is nothing on Earth.

Spoilers galore ahead. Yes, posting will resume the 20th. I’m making an exception because – well, you’ll see.

On “Inception:” a meditation on trust and sacrifice. Those issues are explored through faith and reason. The movie is filled with extraordinarily clever and competent people and a curious device that allows them to give someone a dream, go into that dream with themselves and the recipient of that dream as actors, “extract” information and plant ideas.

Underlying the Inception project is the mixture of dreams and reality – the mixture is destined to be a mess, as it depends on untruth in its very, um, inception. It is no surprise the one man best at navigating others’ minds drove his own wife insane by implanting the idea that they were together in a dream world when they really were in a dream world. Brought back to reality, she wondered if that too was a dream and killed herself assuming it was. That’s not Inception gone wrong: that’s the very nature of the project and how DiCaprio’s character knows Inception will work, especially for planting ideas.

But the movie is nowhere near as nihilistic as “The Prestige,” where a fatal conflict between old and new has a Hollywood ending slapped on. There, the “new” wins because of “family,” never mind that the “new” drove one of his wives to hang herself through his purposeful neglect. Underlying faith and reason here is memory, the want to believe and trust, the guilt we feel that we must reckon with, not simply recollection. His dead wife, as a subconscious projection of his, only wants him. He’s the anchor to reality; the dream world only includes one other person for her. The twistedness of trust as blind loyalty/mental projections begins to disappear when one realizes that if it weren’t for being forced together in a dream world, all the insanely clever people we’re presented would be trapped in their own little worlds. It is no surprise the idea DiCaprio and friends are supposed to implant is that of breaking up a monopoly in an heir’s mind. The father, dead for years to/in reality, had through his cunning and power near complete control of the world’s energy. One wonders how much they deceive the heir, given that the heir’s placement of his childhood as central seems a self-realization. The plan that called for creating two dreams within a dream was ultimately about seeing what would make the heir happy. Money and power were never terribly important to him even before the dreaming began.

What is surprising is how much trust invading others’ dreams takes, how only a thief – a liar – can be the surest safeguard for everyone else who needs to be involved. The thief and crew are employed by the very first person targeted; he probably set himself up to see what they could/would do. He is most likely testing their loyalty/ethics with the confrontation before the helicopter ride. We get different examples of “faith” (spoken 3 or 4 times at decisive moments) throughout the movie: a team that trusts each other despite violent disagreements (at least two members know full well how threatening DiCaprio’s subconscious is), the girl in love with the dream world who ends up believing more in the thief and his techniques than he himself; a belief by the thief that he still has a family despite a wife screaming in his head that he doesn’t really. But the trust a corporate executive puts into a fugitive who broke into his mind is the strangest of all, yet yields the greatest reward for all involved. DiCaprio’s hero understands more than his mentor that faith is faith in something, someone. The memory of the wife shows “only one” can be just as lost as being alone. Two may not be enough. What “reality” is: the everyday trust a CEO may have in his workers, his reputation, yes, his money, driving him to incredible acts of heroism. Recall how much pain he endures throughout the dream, for a chance at normalcy.