Movies March 2010

30 Rock, season 3, disc 2
"Did Cranston give you my messages?"

Super Size Me

The third in the trifecta of fast food horror documentaries.

Transformers
Didn't care for this movie much, but we all knew that would happen, so let's move on to the interesting part: The way I watched it. Normally, I like to remove all distraction, sit down, and watch a movie in one sitting. I didn't do that here, and I blame 30 Rock. Watching 22-minute TV episodes is delightful. Watch one, you're done, a nice bedtime story or a responsible half-hour filler. Watch two, it's an hour with an intermission. I've gotten used to it. I like it.

So I watched this movie that way too, without pressure. When I wanted to stop, I got up and did something else. I expect most films to have an emotional arc best experienced in one sitting, but I didn't feel robbed, because it was just a lousy Michael Bay Transformers movie. Go team Jeff!

The Invention of Lying
I love alternate reality, and I love high concept. Even if it turned out to be antithetical to some of my own beliefs, I was ready to be amused and challenged on a long plane flight to Rome by The Invention of Lying. However, this movie had a big, stupid flaw, namely, an inherent unreality that drives a truck over suspension of disbelief. Killed this movie dead for me.

Here's the thing: religion is a part of human existence. Let's start secular and empirical: Religion has shaped culture, history, art, government, and language in every part of the world for every human, everywhere. This is not wispy poetry-and-flowers talk, this is way shit is. Even if you think religion is bogus, it has MADE you in ways you can't control.

So it will be understandably difficult to envision a world without it. You have to rethink everything, including, literally, how you think. What is justice? What is evil? Why wear clothes?

I don't expect Ricky Gervais to have a philosophically defensible rubric here, but some sense that he'd spent some time on the implications would help me like the movie. Genetic advancement? That's your highest imperative? How does anything get done then? Why isn't everyone living in huts? (Because a whole lot of architecture got done because of religion. Architects and engineers are not, historically, renowned for genetic excellence.)

That's the big one. That's the problem I can't get past, intellectually. But then there's another horrible flaw this movie purports: that honesty is cruel. That kindness is only "invented" when someone has the genius idea to lie.

The only reason honesty is ever harsh is because people cherish lies. If you did not, for instance, silently and invisibly nurture the lie that you are OK with losing your hair, then no one could hurt you by calling you "baldy." And in a world where no one lies, there would be no reason to try hurting you. Your deficiencies are fact, not barb. The cruelty that Gervais's character, Mark, endures at his work is dishonest.

Yes, it was played for larfs, but the emotional premise of the movie, one of the reasons we're supposed to empathize with Mark, is that in this world of no lies, people are hurtful to each other with honesty. That kind of internal illogic punches you in the face over and over.

Furthermore, this movie does truthfulness a disservice by suggesting that lies make the world a kinder, richer place. The colors, the lighting, the set design, all suggest a bland, homogeneous, simplistic place. But if you think about the consequences of the absence of deception for even a few minutes, when everything and everyone can only be itself and nothing else -- that would have to be the most varied, colorful, wiggy world you can imagine. Telling lies forces us into being boring, safe, and predictable, not the other way around.

Then of course, there is the poetry-and-flowers kind of stuff that you can't reason around. Love. Art. Feelings. Those things are real and powerful, and impervious to justification. A society that could not lie would understand this implicitly. I suspect a concept as dodgy as "genetic imperative" would be inconsequential as well.

And so, see, I'm putting more thought into this than Gervais seems to have, and the thought I put into it tells me that the movie itself is fundamentally a lie. The setting and premise are so divorced from reality, so bedrock fictional, that it doesn't possess the capacity to enlighten us about the reality we do live in.

I know it's a silly, cheap movie. But I want more. In fiction, we tell wonderful lies to get at wonderful truths. The Invention of Lying doesn't have the capacity to do or be either one.

The Michael Bay of the Gospels

We've been reading the Gospel of Mark in cell meeting lately. Mark is like the Michael Bay* of the Gospel writers, all action, quick cuts, and immediacy.

Verse 13 through 20 are where Jesus explains his parable of the sower:

¹³Then Jesus said to them, "Don't you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable? ¹⁴The farmer sows the word. ¹⁵Some people are like seed along the path, where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them. ¹⁶Others, like seed sown on rocky places, hear the word and at once receive it with joy. ¹⁷But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away. ¹⁸Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; ¹⁹but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful. ²⁰Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop—thirty, sixty or even a hundred times what was sown."

Lots of my brothers and sisters in Christ like to blame Satan for the things that go wrong in he world. I prefer to avoid such talk. I'm not too "modern" to buy into the idea that evil spirits exist and want to fuck me up. But I don't like giving credit to the Devil for two reasons:

1. God is infinitely more powerful than any evil spirit. So while spirits may have some power over my life, they are ultimately non-issues. I prefer to treat them that way.
2. I don't have a reliable way to differentiate among acts of the Adversary, self-inflicted problems, and unaccountable crap in life. So I don't try.

Tonight I found some Biblical reinforcement for reason #2.

Sometimes Satan eats the word. Sometimes things outside your control do you in. Sometimes you're weak and shallow and you kill yourself. And sometimes your soil is ready to take the seed in.




*Also like a Michael Bay joint, sometimes it's a little disjointed.

Trust your intuition: Bogus advice

That's not quite right; I think trusting your intuition is a great idea, after say, age 35 or so.

More and more as I live it, I like the idea of "logging the miles." We used to be able to use the word "experience" and that would be meaningful enough, but when the word gets applied to theme park rides and expensive dinners, we've lost some of the punch. Logging the miles is accruing enough time in the pilot chair to get a feel for how things go. You don't have to be flying loop-de-loops. You just have to show up and log the miles.

Back to my original point: Intuition is a subtle collection of observations. You don't have to be old or experienced to be intuitive, but you do have to be observant in inobvious ways. The way a person talks and twitches, what doesn't get said as much as what does get said. It's not conscious, but neither is it magic.

Regardless of your naturally-gleaned subtle observation skills, the one thing that ups your intuitive ability for sure is more opportunities to make those subtle observations and have them confirmed or denied, i.e., learning.

When old people offer advice to young people and tell them to "listen to your heart" or "trust your intuition" that is dangerous advice. It's decent advice for those who've been listening to their hearts for 40 years. But someone who's only had a heart for 20 years barely knows what that sounds like.

Don't trust your intuition if you're young. Test your intuition. It's a great tool, but you don't have a magical voice inside of you that knows truth when you don't. An untrained intuition is as helpful as a coin flip. You have to break it in with a few upsets and victories, and learn what to listen for. Then it starts clicking for you.

Open-heart surgery

Discovering how abnormal you are is both a relief and and a frustration. For years, I assumed I was normal enough, and by some definitions I guess I was and am. I seem to be able to put on clothes and walk around and groom myself and participate in meaningful conversations with other humans. I had quirks, but everyone has quirks.

Eventually, and this is a realization I'm not done having, I realized that I'm actually pretty messed up, it's just that I'm an operative messed up. Like a secret alcoholic, I suspect everyone around me knew something was off. But I was good enough at concealment, and the off-ness was subtle enough, and people were polite enough to avoid embarrassing me. So it didn't come up much.

A signal that I'm messed up is the still-dawning realization that I don't like my family. My family is the same operative crazy that I am. I resisted this notion at first, assuming that I was the problem, or that other people were the problem. 

Then I dedicated myself to changing relationships by visiting my family more, trying to communicate, trying to become an active problem-solver. In the last couple of years, I've given up. Because no one else seemed to want to work on the problem, and this is not the sort of thing you can fix solo.

My basic assumption, which I think is solid, is that fundamentally well people like being around their families... or at least have no problem with it. Your relationships don't need to be perfect, but you want to basically like your family. Family behavior sets your assumptions for life, and these relationships are templates for all your other relationships. If you don't have ok family, you start life in a deep hole. While people around you are ascending heights, you 're clawing your way to sea level.

My templates oscillated awfully between needy and aloof. Angry and disinterested. They were not aware of this, but those are primary readings on the dashboard of my childhood. That is a horrible, toxic way to teach new humans what is important and how to behave. The fact that my brother and I are operative nonetheless is a testament to civilizing principles and divine grace.

I haven't spoken to my parents in over two years, and I think I'm supposed to feel bad about that, but mostly I feel relieved. A week ago my mother broke radio silence to tell me she's going to have open-heart surgery soon, and I didn't know what to do about that. I hear that she's pulled through ok, but mainly I'd rather not have to deal with it.

I think that might make me monstrous. But if I can find some peace and rest, I'll need to ask if monstrosity is an acceptable price.

Closing my eyes

I'm done using the words "see" and "listen" to describe attempts to interact with God. I get mad that God won't participate in the literal, empirical senses of those words, and that Christendom bent them for me through careless overuse.

God doesn't "talk" to me. I suspect God communicates with me, but he's never said a word to me in the common, concrete understanding of what "words" are. So I'm taking time off from that particular metaphor.

I've long been a reader of Real Live Preacher, a pastor at a small Baptist church nearabouts San Antonio, Texas. (His blog link is also in my sidebar.) Very recently, RLP left the pastorate. He's never been an orthodox pastor, but he wrote something that I'm not sure he could say occupying the pulpit. Goes like this:

I’m 48 years old. I have been a Christian since I was 9. I’ve been to seminary. I’ve been a conservative, then a liberal, then kind of a conservative again, then even more of a liberal, and finally I don’t know if there’s a label that even fits me. I’ve been all over the map. I’ve been looking for God in the scriptures, in the heavens, in the world, in my mind, and in thousands of conversations with as many people.
And I don’t know anything about God.
I don’t mean that in the good way, like when people say that someone is wise because he admits that he doesn’t know something. No. Seriously. I just don’t know shit about God. Period.
I don’t know if God exists or not.
I don’t know what the Bible says about God. The more I read and study those books, the more confused I become.
I don’t know how much God cares about how we live our lives.
I don’t know if God answers prayers or what it would even mean for a prayer to be answered.
I don’t know how we should worship God. I don’t know if sticking to ancient traditions is good because they have survived some kind of religious natural selection process, or if we should just sit in silence like the Quakers. Maybe we should get guitars and cookies and sing prayers that 5-year-olds can understand. I don’t know.
I just don’t know.

I've been down a less rigorous road than his, and he's farther along. But I can see him from here. And I mean "see" in a metaphorical sense.

I've recently signed on for a pretty advanced leadership gig in my church, Circle of Hope. I'm on the Compassion Core Team, which is part of the higher leadership function of our whole group. I was chosen because I've been around for a while, and keep showing up, and, at just the right time, demonstrated a bias for action over slacking.

I'm also about to become a cell leader in the next few months. My leader, Brian, picked me because of what he called my "flirtations with atheism." He's done the reading and the thinking and the reasoning and the guesswork just like me. And he says that the thinking is good, but that in spiritual matters, you learn by doing. I think I believe him.

It seems propitious for my investment in my church to crank up as my skepticism waxes. I'm expectantly interested in seeing what happens. In the literal and figurative senses.

Frogmarch

For over a year, I've been trying to get hired to write for computer games professionally. This is one of the harder things I've ever tried to intentionally do. There are many people vying for a very few jobs, and I'm not ideally situated to act on it.

I'm doing it anyway.

I've dithered on whether to include my "game professional" blog link here, because these sorts of new ventures are fragile, and can be killed by premature exposure.

However, my definition of "premature" is often equivalent to someone else's "adolescent." I don't like revealing things until they're basically done. The elephantine problem with that schema is that I seldom have the resources to do something completely by myself. So the half-baked thing is either revealed as half-baked, or worse, never revealed. So I'm kicking this one out while it's still young. It's rough, but I'll try polishing in public and see how that works out.

To further my streak of mixed metaphors, let me add: My good, old friend Tom Briscoe used to say, "If you don't execute your ideas, they die." Most of my best ideas expire before they make it to the executioner's stand.

This is one more halting attempt to get one up to the guillotine.

At your leisure, peruse Dire Curious, my "breaking into the game biz -- again" blog. DC serves several purposes for me.

1. Professional development: You don't have to have a gaming blog to get hired on gaming, but I'm not knowledgeable or well-connected enough (yet) to skip it.
2. Personal marketing: I'm terrible at this, and I need the practice.
3. Experimentation with Wordpress: So far, I prefer Blogger, but everybody says it's great. I need to find out if it is or ain't first-hand.
4. Disciplined writing: I know I'm a more capable writer than I ever show anyone. I can be better. I have to do it more to make it real.
5. Another try: This attempt to "do something" may get left by the curb in a few weeks like so many other projects in my life, and I'll feel the same sort of sickly shame I always feel if that happens. But I'm pretty sure I believe the truism that you have to try a bunch of things and see which one sticks. So this is the next one of the bunch.

I'll keep a link to DC in the Ventures sidebar, but I'll probably never link back. On this blog, I give myself permission to appear neurotic and lazy and unhireable. Those traits don't belong where I'm trying to behave industriously and professionally.