205. moiety

I did not watch the Oscars last night. Something about watching institutionalized, self-congratulatory narcissism makes me nauseous. Ellen DeGeneres’ quip in her opening monologue about rain in Los Angeles dampening the evening seemed to sum it up. “We’re fine,” she joked. “Thank you for your prayers.”

Frankly, I haven’t seen any of the films that were nominated this year, aside from 12 Years a Slave, which made me feel guilty about having complained about anything, ever, in my entire life. For one, I don’t have the money. When faced with having to pay rent, groceries, phone bill, car insurance, and other essentials, spending what little discretionary funds I have available on what amounts to flimsy, cardboard representations of reality seems pretty ridiculous. Which brings me to the other reason I don’t go, which is that I find most films these days to be formulaic and predictable, as well as shallow and dull, and not worth my time.

Author Carlos Stevens wrote of the role of movies during the Great Depression: that they “offered a chance to escape the cold, the heat, and loneliness; they brought strangers together, rubbing elbows in the dark of movie palaces and fleapits, sharing in the one social event available to everyone.”

I don’t understand wanting to herd into darkened theaters to sit with strangers, or the desire to mingle gregariously. But I get wanting to escape from reality. It’s why I spent so much time with books as a teenager, preferring fictional universes where heroes overcame their demons. But it’s hard to relate to most of the stories presented for entertainment these days. Where movies of the 1930s were meant to give us hope in dark times, movies of the twenty-first century seem purposed only to numb us to the meandering banality of our own times.

Today I came across an article that explores the evolution of the horror genre and its use as contemporary commentary. The author writes of Wes Craven’s 1972 The Last House on the Left:

Scenes such as our female protagonist being raped and executed are meant to remind you of Mi Li or the notorious photograph of a Vietcong suspect being shot in the head outside a Buddhist Temple. Craven is telling us that the cinema is no long a safe heaven from suffering. ‘Look,’ his films seem to be saying. ‘This is what’s happening outside your door. Do something!’

Rather than attempt to hold a mirror to reality, most movies today promise shiny solutions to difficult solutions in fifteen, easy-to-follow “beats” (as per Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat). From opening image to that pivotal “dark night of the soul” at the end of Act 2, these stories promise that everything will be okay, no matter how impossible the situation.

Right now, it’s difficult to find much hope in these stories given my current circumstances. Sure, I’m not in living Russia, Uganda, or Nigeria, in real danger for my life. But I’m still looking for a job, my unemployment insurance runs out this week, and I’m not sure where money is going to come from in the next few weeks. My car is falling apart. I’m not sure how I’m going to force my unscrupulous landlord to return the security deposit without hiring a crackerjack legal team.

So you’ll forgive me if the avaricious characters in The Wolf of Wall Street or the charade of Dallas Buyer’s Club doesn’t assuage my anxieties. Hollywood loves to glorify the myth of the lone hero, the man or woman who overcomes villains and all odds to achieve his/her goal.

What’s so seductive about a story like 12 Years a Slave is that we know how the story ends. Even in its darkest moments, we know from the historical record that Solomon Northup will be freed. We know that Frodo will succeed in his quest. That Harry Potter will defeat Voldemort.

There is mythic truth in these stories. But that truth is only found in hindsight.

We are all heroes in our own narratives, which means that we are constantly in medias res – in the midst of the story. So I don’t know when life is going to calm down for me, and allow me to live a mode other than near-constant crisis management. As I said to a friend of mine today, it feels as if I’m always waiting for something awful to happen or expecting to be disappointed. One could say that this is how self-fulfilling prophesies are written, yet I’m tired of trying to play Pollyanna and paint a smiley face on a bleak situation.

What little hope I have actually comes from my atheism, and my layman’s study of cosmology and natural selection. In a recent NPR interview, astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson said:

You will never find people who truly grasp the cosmic perspective … leading nations into battle. No, that doesn’t happen. When you have a cosmic perspective there’s this little speck called Earth and you say, “You’re going to what? You’re on this side of a line in the sand and you want to kill people for what? Oh, to pull oil out of the ground, what? WHAT?” … Not enough people in this world, I think, carry a cosmic perspective with them. It could be life-changing.

It’s hard to look at the Hollywood elite gathering in Los Angeles to give themselves awards in light of knowing how utterly insignificant we are, especially when there is so much need in the world and so much progress left to make. As Piper Chapman says in Orange is the New Black, “I cannot get behind some supreme being who weighs in on the Tony Awards while a million people get whacked with machetes.”

It could always be worse. And it’s a miracle that any of us are here at all, given how it could’ve gone countless times for our planet throughout its history.

But it’s difficult to stay hopeful or plan for the future when storm clouds seem to be permanently camped on the horizon.

61. desideratum

Soooo… Easter.

Tweeted a bit about this on Sunday morning. It was strange, driving around and seeing everyone going to church, and knowing that a year ago I was one of those people. And frankly, it was a little lonely. There’s comfort in being a part of a group, in marking the passage of time in ritual, and in such a manifest way and explicit terms.

Jesus is alive…

Satan is defeated…

I spent the first part of the morning watching the Marx Brothers’ Night at the Opera with my friend Emily at her place. And the strange thing is that it felt just like any other day. It wasn’t until later, when I was driving back to my place to get ready for a 10am meeting with my Former Fundementalists group that I really noticed the church-goers; the couples holding hands on their way to church; the little girls in their pink and white dresses; the families piling out of mini-vans like clowns packed into a Yugo.

Last week, a blogger I follow posted an entry that consisted of a note card with the following quote from Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (trans. Samuel Shirley): “The things whose goodness derives only from authority and tradition, or from their symbolic representation of some good, cannot perfect our intellect; they are mere shadows, and cannot be counted as actions that are… the offspring and fruit of intellect and sound mind. ”

Basically, this is how I feel about religion right now. After lunch on Easter, both my mom and dad and brother-in-law ganged up on me to try to poke holes in my fledgling belief system and save my soul from damnation—which, if you know me, is about the least effective way to try to get through to me. It only resorts in me reverting to lizard behavior and digging myself further into whatever defenses.

Here’s the facts, as I know them: My gut tells me that there’s a God, and that Jesus was a real person and who he claimed to be. I feel uneasy when saying anything else, and I’ve learned to listen to that inner compass. However, I simply don’t buy Christianity as it’s wrapped and sold these days; believe in the tenability of evolution as the origin for the human species; am still not sure whether the whole resurrection thing happened; and would be far more likely to side with a more ancient and non-western sect of Christianity (e.g., Eastern Orthodox) than with Evangelicalism and its dogmatic fetishism. I still consider myself a skeptic (with secular humanist leanings), don’t believe the Bible to be the inerrant “word of God” (any more than any other book is “inspired”), and, as Augustine presumably advised (I’m still looking for a direct citation for where that idea comes from), favor science over religion where the facts seem clear:

When they [scholars] are able, from reliable evidence (erax documentum), to prove some fact of physical science, we shall show that it is not contrary to our Scripture. But when they produce from any of their books a theory contrary to Scripture, and therefore contrary to the Catholic faith, either we shall have some ability to demonstrate that is absolutely false, or at least we ourselves will hold it so without any shadow of a doubt. (Book I, Chapter 21)

Augustine wrote that in 402 AD, and it’s a much more generous stance than what we hear today from the Church, which is often Bible-thumping dogmatic dismissal of scientific evidence. We have the faculties of logic and reason: why should we turn off that critical thinking part of the mind when it comes to religion that we apply to every other field of human learning and research? When the facts seem to say that the earth is older than 10,000 years, based on both physical geological and cosmological data, who do we side with? Science? Or a book written two thousand years ago by a bronze-age people with rudimentary scientific knowledge of the universe (who, I might add, weren’t even attempting to write a scientific treatise in the first place, and were basing their creation account around contemporary Near East etiological myths)? I believe that we can glean truths from any human writing when we properly use the aforementioned logic and reason, and that the physical universe is just as much revelation as anything else.

Basically what Augustine is saying in his treatise on Genesis is that science and religion don’t necessarily have to conflict; that one informs and shapes the other; and I’ve always felt that. It’s the dissonance that comes from the conservative right saying that science is anathema that has bothered me, and it’s that that I’m distancing myself from, not necessarily God. (That said, however, I also must admit that from a scientific perspective, the earth, our solar system and the universe behave exactly as they would if there weren’t a God. It seems to largely run and correct itself.) For example, on a personal level, that’s the conclusion that I came to in wrestling over whether homosexuality was a sin or not: that this is my experience; that I’ve always been attracted to men (as supposed to being abused or something); that the mounting psychological and psychiatric data suggests that it’s a normal expression of human sexuality; that trying to alter an individual’s orientation is dangerous and unnecessary; and that the religious right’s opposition and scrambling to throw up objections to homosexuality comes from a patriarchal panic over their threatened status quo and losing what power they still have over the culture at large.

But more than anything, I believe that God would want me to get out and enjoy life, not worry about whether I’m living in “his perfect will” or whatever it is that the kids are saying nowadays. Be good to people, play fair, and leave the world better than you found it. That’s my religion.