The system of a bacterium, for example, does not exist to serve only its DNA, or only its lipid membrane, or only its tRNA.  But it does have to obey the physics that define what each of those parts can and cannot do, and what they need to exist and to change, or else the bacterium ceases very quickly to be a bacterium any longer.

Likewise the system of a multicellular organism, such as a dog; the dog cannot give all of its energies to the brain, no matter how eager that brain is for glucose, lest the dog’s other parts shut down and the dog lose its whole self.  But the dog must give each cell what that cell needs, in terms of temperature, materials, and protection from mechanical or chemical damage.

A society of organisms is no different.  A society of human beings is no different.  But when we get to human beings, the individual needs which the society as a whole system must answer, become more subtle and complex.  Put a spider in a foodless dark chamber for a month, and it will emerge unscathed, ready to hunt and mate anew.  Put a human being in a foodless dark chamber for a month, and it will emerge with long-term physical and psychological damage.  It’s the psychological damage that merits the most discussion here–not that humans are distinctly social animals, but that our psychosocial needs are unique.  For example, while it’s widely known and accepted that human beings need affectionate physical contact and lingual interaction, it’s not so often considered that human beings need a distinct kind of mental privacy in order for their minds to function correctly.  Viz., human beings need to have, if not complete privacy in their thoughts, then complete security in knowing that their private thoughts will not result in punishment from the society to which the mind belongs.

Evidence of this need is everywhere:  show me a country in which people face a penalty of death for seeming to think an unpopular viewpoint, and I’ll show you a country with a relatively low index of personal satisfaction, a relatively low productivity per capita, a relatively low rate of invention and innovation per capita.  These are not false correlations–the act of creative thought cannot succeed in discovering novelty if perturbed by anxieties about said process getting the thinker killed.  This problem is compounded by the fact that our most novel thoughts are those that most require our communicating them with another person.  Another compounding factor, is that all communication carries with it the risk of misunderstanding, making it very difficult for a creative thinker to know which thoughts–and which ways of communicating thoughts–he must avoid in order to avoid extreme punishment.

Societies which thus honor this human need, are said to be “free” societies, insofar as they minimize punishments against thoughts and communications.  A corollary of this need, I propose, is the need for each individual to control his or her own body.  To honor this need serves society in much the same way as the practice of honoring free thinking and free speech–a human being cannot function optimally unless guaranteed of his or her physical safety and autonomy.  Show me a place where laws against rape are not well enforced, and I will show you a society, such as South Africa c. 2010, where 28% of men admit to raping women, and 100% of women are psychologically and physically restrained by a reasonable fear of rape.  Show me a place where laws against murder are not well enforced, and I will show you a society where individuals do not aspire to longevity nor any accomplishments predicated upon longevity.   Show me a place where kidnapping is relatively common, and I will show you a society where vital forms of interaction and transaction are seriously hindered.

When seen as individual needs or rights, these rights to free thought and speech, and rights from murder, kidnapping, rape, etc., seem like an open list with no unifying principle.  But I propose that one principle does unify these rights:

A system does not have to honor its every part’s every request.  But it does have to accommodate its every part’s every true need.

In terms of human society and the human individual, the individual’s needs can be divided into two simple components:  the need for certain materials, and the need for sovereignty within the physical boundaries of the individual organism.  Nonfree societies always mistake the first component for the whole of an individual’s needs–these societies aim to ensure that they provide, quite constantly and intentionally and from a centralized source, all of the individual’s material needs–from the aforementioned affectionate touch and interaction with others, to food, water, air, health care, shelter, clothing, transportation, entertainment, education, and so on.  I call these material needs in contrast to the other component mentioned above.  Note that communism’s self-professed materialism, makes sense in this context, and communist societies are marked by a remarkable equation of all individual needs, with this component I call “material needs.”  But other societies are equally materialistic in this same sense, notably theocracies such as Saudi Arabia and North Korea.

Free societies are marked by a radically different understanding of individual needs.  For a free society, the individual’s needs still include the material, but also include the right to self-sovereignty–the need for an individual to have maximum authority over everything that happens inside her own skull and skin.   Free societies thus double the list of needs they see their constituent parts as requiring for optimal performance.  Forced to attend to double the needs, free societies’ governments must inevitably focus less energy on providing for material needs.  However, by maximizing individual sovereignty, these governments maximize the ability of individuals to provide for their own and each others’ material needs at a maximally local level (this principle of maximizing how many social processes are done at the most local, least central level, is called “subsidiarity”).  Thereby, free societies maximize the brainpower which the society as a system can devote to the provision of material needs.

But to honor the human need for individual sovereignty, the society must allow the individual the freedom to commit acts which if they happened outside the individual’s personal organism, would be crimes.  And so it must be, for sovereignty is an actual need, in the deep sense that the individual ceases to exist without it.  Just as an engine would cease to exist if it destroyed the iron atoms that compose it, so a society ceases to exist insofar as it destroys the individuals that compose it.  Now of course, in any human society, some individuals will be incapable of personal sovereignty due to the absence of a complete decision-making mechanism–some because they are too young to have developed this mechanism, some because they have lost it due to age or damage, some because of developmental problems that prevent them from ever knowing complete free will.  However, all societies make legal provisions for such cases, granting custody and guardianship for such individuals to those most capable of caring for them as they would care for themselves.  In free societies, the aim is to maximize the amount of personal sovereignty distributed, and thus to minimize the cases in which an individual cannot be granted personal sovereignty.

Another way to think of the same paradigm we’ve been describing:  while a society is a set of individuals and the interactions they give rise to, a society’s government is just a set of said interactions, and thus only exists between people, not within them, and has jurisdiction only between individuals, not within them.

Seen in this light, wherever a society’s government intrudes upon an individual’s property, it risks damaging the individual sovereignty which the society’s every part requires in order for the society to continue to function.  And when a society’s government intrudes upon an individual’s very self, upon the boundaries of his person, it most certainly damages the individual sovereignty which the society’s every part requires in order for the society to function.

This principle will as technology advances become more and more essential to the continued existence of human societies–we currently have MRI machines that give some indication of what an individual is thinking, and whether an individual is lying, in a given moment.  Surveillance devices, long the bogeyman of paranoid schizophrenia, are fast becoming so cheap and efficient as to erode all privacy right up to the border of the individual mind.  These advances will continue.  But already our technologies make a proper understanding of individual human needs essential.

For example, we debate the right to abortion and the identity of the fetus as a separate human being without considering that both stances might be correct–the fetus is a separate human being, whose location within another individual’s body places his physical protection outside the proper jurisdiction of any government.  The principle of personal sovereignty as a human need, allows us to render an otherwise inscrutable verdict, one which answers both lines of reasoning in the abortion debate–abortion is an act of murder that takes place outside any government’s rightful jurisdiction, and therefore no law should abolish it.

Note the abortion issue did not exist until humanity had developed methods that enable a mother to terminate her pregnancy.  Likewise, humanity has developed refined substances capable of permanently destroying the user’s mind, through addiction or dementia.  Because these effects amount to the destruction of an individual, most societies’ governments have attempted to forbid the individual use of at least some of these technologies.  The effectiveness of such laws is a matter for another debate.  The point here is that by defining human needs as neatly divided into personal sovereignty and material needs, and by defining a society as being functional only insofar as it answers its parts’ needs, and by defining personal sovereignty simply as the inalienable right to control what happens within the boundary of one’s own body, we can see how even extreme individual drug use could be legalized without fostering a sense that absolutely any consensual activity must ultimately be condoned.

Similarly, by redefining rights as one of two kinds of individual human need, we safeguard against the very real possibility that the inviolability of rights may come to be eroded through overextension.  For inevitably, in a free society, with the government’s first efforts devoted to the protection of individual sovereignty needs over material needs, claimants to material needs will always resort to claiming their material need as a human right.  The problem that arises is the same that arises in a materialist (nonfree) society’s government–material needs cannot be ensured as universally as personal sovereignty needs, because human societies cannot ensure the limitless availability of any material, be it a certain kind of commodity, a certain kind of good, or a certain service.  In point of fact, a government’s ability to protect one’s personal sovereignty is in some sense just as limited as its ability to provide for material needs–hence the better law enforcement services in richer communities–but in another, very real sense, government can always provide some guarantee of personal sovereignty, in that it itself is one of the principle threats to an individual’s personal sovereignty and can in every case provide the individual an infinite supply of freedom from at least governmental intrusion into the person’s thoughts and other bodily activities.

If a society seeks to honor only the letter of the principle described herein, and not its spirit, such can easily be accomplished–but to dishonor the principle’s spirit will deprive the society of its own full potential.  Similarly, if a society seeks to honor an individual’s need for personal sovereignty alongside her material needs, but does not understand the principle that undergirds this effort, then it will not long be able to sustain the effort, and will revert into a nonfree society, where only material needs are acknowledged, and government’s jurisdiction extends into and erodes the individuals which compose the society in question.

But that’s not why I generally don’t say the N-word.  I don’t say the N-word, for the same reason I don’t walk into banks waving a water pistol, i.e., the context isn’t intimate enough to prevent everyone from reasonably assuming malicious intent.

That doesn’t mean I think the N-word should be banned.  The whole idea of free speech, rarely stated, is that people are not generally as happy or creative as possible when they’re afraid they might at any moment say something that gets them fined, imprisoned, or exiled.

That doesn’t mean I think black people should use the N-word.  The most commonly cited reason black people use the N-word:  their using it will divest the word of its negative power.  Let’s grant this excuse for a moment.  At what point will the word lose its negative power?  Are we really to believe that after the word is said for the Nth time, it will have lost its negative power, have only positive connotations?  If so, then the goal of allowing black people to use the N-word now, is to create a future, near or distant, in which everyone can say the N-word without any risk of offense.  But ask anyone who uses the word to describe people of his own race, whether he hopes for a future in which everyone calls black people by that word.

And back to the question, at what point will the word lose its negative power?  Obviously this question’s phrasing is a little disingenuous; experience tells us that the process would be gradual, stochastic, happening individual by individual–there would be no exact moment when the N-word ceases to mean something mean.  If this is the case,  what the subscribers to this theory ought to expect, is a gradual appearance of nonblack uses of the word that bear no malice.  This doesn’t mean Michael Richards gets off the hook; his famous racist rant is a textbook example of how the word still centers on negative power.   Dr. Laura’s recent outburst, in which she disparages the word’s use by black celebrities, while clearly anti-N-word, also doesn’t qualify as a non-negative use of the word.  Frankly, there aren’t many good examples of the word becoming a non-negative term for nonblacks to use to describe black people.

And that implies that the strategy isn’t working–having the word used repeatedly by black people, is not stripping it of its negative power, making it a harmless toy for anyone to play with.  So while the word should like all words remain legal, I don’t think anyone should use it outside of quotation marks, i.e., use it as opposed to mentioning it.

If one wants a word that means “black person,” there’s no lack of synonyms free of negative connotation.  Even if it were possible to divest the N-word of negative connotation, it would merely rob the language of a unique word–not rob the world of anti-black sentiments.  The N-word is useful precisely because it’s not just another synonym.  Its use signals something more than the presence of a black person–it signals the presence or memory of racism against black people.  What makes a word irreplaceable is what makes it a valuable part of the language.  And just because a word’s connotation is negative, doesn’t make its value negative.  After all, there is no movement afoot to strip the word “hate”of its negative connotation–we know that word has value, has an important and unique function.  (There is a movement afoot to make hatred a crime, but that deserves another post…)

Perhaps the problem is, when we do speak the N-word in quotes, nobody can hear us do so.  Perhaps, at the end of the day, that’s what we mean when we use the phrase, “N-word”–we mean “nigger” with quotation marks, much the same way that some devout Jews write “G-d” as a way to mention God without directly addressing God.  To do so may come across as a little childish, but then, so does using the N-word, aesthetically, regardless of one’s race or intention.

Fair warning: Nolan peformed his inception job on me (I saw the movie) yesterday, and this morning on the way to work the ideas starting hatching and multiplying fairly feverishly. There’s no tidy way to proceed with sharing these ideas here, so I’m just going to dive in and skip around–kind of apropos, given the subject matter:

Note Inception isn’t about dreaming first and moviemaking second.  Wherever it could have been truer to depicting how we really dream, as in dream while asleep, it instead chooses to make itself truer to depicting how moviemaking works.  In actual dreaming, we don’t communicate with anyone outside ourselves, for one thing.  For another: actual dreams have blurry edges, not infinitely detailed backgrounds and horizons (unless I just dream differently than most people).  For a third thing, in actual dreaming, when we experience a dream inside a dream, the outer dream doesn’t continue to happen while we’re in the inner dream.  (Related note: Inception isn’t really about storytelling in general, or else it would depict Dom as working alone in the Viewer’s mind.)  No, those who see Inception as first and foremost a moviemaking metaphor have clearly nailed it.  According to Inception, movies aren’t dreams per se, they’re artificial dreams made by a team of artists collaborating with the viewer.  Put that way, it hardly sounds like a novel metaphor at all, because it’s not–we’ve always spoken of movies as being artificial dreams created and piped in by a team of people outside the viewer’s head.  Nolan’s film just takes this metaphor literally.

…

Dom claims it’s always a bad professional move to build up a dreamworld out of one’s own memories–that one should only use tiny pieces of memory in constructing the dream world.  And yet he himself can’t follow that rule, and more of his private life makes it into his constructions than he wishes to admit.  While I’ve never directed a fictional movie, and the documentary one I directed in high school hardly counts, Dom’s advice–and his inability to follow it–sounds a lot like what I’ve read about a great many storytellers, and experienced in my own narratives–as much as you try to make things up whole cloth as an artist, your own memories peek through and interfere, making your story less fictional than you might like.

Other things that can interfere with a movie’s effectiveness, according to Inception:  the viewer’s memories, the viewer’s awareness of the world outside the movie, the viewer’s awareness of the moviemakers, and the inability of the moviemaking team to communicate effectively.  Any of these elements can cause the entire artificial world to shudder, as the viewer begins to think.  I really dug how Inception depicted a lot of this viewer distraction as actual shuddering.

…

Each dream is a job–the whole team gets paid for it, but they get subsequent assignments only if they succeed in affecting the Viewer as the employer–the Producer–desires.  Meanwhile, though it’s a job, it’s also an incomparably fun job, one that e.g. Ariadne can’t stay away from once she’s had a taste–it’s “pure creation.”  Sounds like the business of moviemaking to me.  Also, it’s kind of funny in this context how Dom’s first employer tries to kill him after his latest effort fails.  “You’ll never work in this town again!”

…

“Dominic Cobb” is an odd name for a character, as is “Eames,” as is “Ariadne”–that’s our first clue these names mean something.  “Dominic” suggests domination, a need to control.  “Cobb” suggests cobbling stuff together?  “Ariadne” clearly refers to a mythical princess who helped heroes navigate mazes.  “Eames” sounds an awful lot like “Seems”–appropriate for a guy whose job title is “forger” and whose metaphorical correlative is “Actor.”

…

The “projections” guarding the Viewer’s mind from invasion, acting like mental “white blood cells” fighting off outsiders–this is a pretty novel notion, and might prove valuable as part of memetics theory on how minds accept and reject the transmission of memes.

Related note: A lot of criticism leveled at cinema claims that the art form kills off brain cells, benumbs the viewer, destroys his ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, etc.–in that light, it’s interesting how Dom defends his efforts to kill off the Viewer’s army of projections as they try to kick him out of the Viewer’s mind–Ariadne asks, isn’t Dom killing off parts of the Viewer’s mind?  Dom says no, they’re “just projections”–inessential and temporary parts of the Viewer’s mind that only pop up during the Movie.  But Nolan throws this assertion into doubt later, when we realize that Dom’s gal Mal is just such a projection, and we see just how important a part of Dom’s mind she is, and just how significant it is when he finally escapes her.

…

Nolan makes a witty acknowledgement of his movie’s metafictional nature in a meta-meta-moment where Dom tries the “Mr. Charles” gambit, again breaking one of his artistic rules by explicitly reminding the Viewer that he’s in a Movie.  The “Mr. Charles” gambit is nothing other than metafiction, self-reference, self-awareness–just one of a storyteller’s bag of tricks,  no more clever than any other, though potentially very powerful, and it’s nice to see Nolan’s script treat it as such.

…

The moviemaking-as-inception-job metaphor crumbles a little at the edges when you realize that in a typical fictional movie, none of the characters are drawn exactly from the viewer’s own coterie of friends and family.  As I view a movie, my godfather’s not going to show up on screen exactly–maybe a person who reminds me of my godfather, but not the spitting image.  Inception shows exactly this happening to Robert Fischer–Dom’s crew disguises one of their own (Eames the Actor) as a doppelganger of Robert’s godfather, Browning.

Browning, played by Tom Berenger, poses a real problem for Inception‘s metaphor in this way.  Still, it’s cute how the Actor’s version of Browning exists parallel to the Viewer’s actual memory/projection of Browning, just as a movie character who really reminds me of my godfather might rouse an actual memory of my godfather as I watch and distract me from what I’m watching by the thought of how the two godfathers are related or different.  The same thing happens in Inception when Saito mistakes the Viewer’s Browning for the Actor’s version. Another Nolan joke about the failure of producers to really understand how movies work?  Inception even calls producers “tourists” on the movie set–their presence only likely to ruin the work.

Speaking of the director-producer relationship, what to make of the climactic scene where the Director has a sit-down meeting with the Producer deep down in the Movie’s subconscious?  The Director and Producer have at this point in the moviemaking process gotten completely lost and bogged down, and both feel they’ve spent decades stuck inside the Movie–now, the Director makes a final appeal to the Producer to honor the contract and pay the Director, even though the Producer doesn’t yet know whether the Movie will achieve the his goals.  Clearly a deeply metafictional scene, but here’s the fun part: once you realize it’s about a late-stage negotiation between two moviemakers, the scene makes us feel privy to a rare, high-stakes, real-world transaction.

…

Cute how Ariadne’s job as Set Designer is defined as being more about creating mood than creating visuals–a little insider perspective on her job there.  Also cute how she’s supposed to use visual illusions to keep the Viewer from realizing how small the Movie’s world is.  Touche, Mr. Nolan.

…

Illuminating to see that Inception thinks of much of a movie’s work as involving timing–especially in how the music (Yusuf’s work) must sync up with the editing (Arthur) and the acting (Eames) to make the key moments arrive perfectly.  Is it intentional that the Music Director does his work in level one of the Movie, the Editor in level two, the Actor in level three?  Do the Movie’s levels represent difficulty of execution?  And isn’t it interesting that Eames, the Actor, doesn’t play Maurice Fischer (Robert’s dad) in level three of the Movie’s climactic scene?  Eames is outside the central vault in level three, fighting off projections.  The Viewer, Robert Fischer, is inside that vault by himself, having a dialogue with his own projection of his dad.  Meanwhile, deep down in the Director’s subconscious, Dom’s having a similarly crucial dialogue with his own most important projection, Mal.  Maybe Nolan’s suggesting that really good movies take us somewhere so deep inside ourselves, we really are alone at the heart of the revelation given–and that the Movie takes the Director to a similar place inside himself as he creates the Movie.

…

Arthur’s work in level two, trying to time the “kick” “without gravity”–a reference to the challenges of editing a movie when it’s playing a lot with layers and time dilation?

…

If Inception depicts, in its third act, the process of making a movie that plants an idea in a viewer’s mind, then what do Inception‘s other, extraction jobs represent?  In these jobs, the goal isn’t to plant an idea in a viewer’s mind; it’s to steal one of the viewer’s secrets, take one of his ideas.  Is this a reference to movies that don’t really inspire new feeling and thought in the viewer?  Movies that are derivative, lowly, that only aspire to rouse an idea already present in the viewer–movies that merely confirm and reaffirm the viewer’s prejudices and old habits?

…

Interesting how Dom’s enormous guilt, his haunted past, comes from his failure to keep work and family distinct, trying to act directorial around and use inception on his wife as a fix for the flaw in their relationship–they were both too caught up in dreams, in subconscious wandering, in art, and needed to get back to their kids.  To get his wife to wake up, Dom had to convince her to devalue their shared imagined world by killing herself in it.  But this just taught her that death is an escape.  Is this a critique of art as escapism?  When Dom finally gets back to his kids after the job, he wants to test whether his return is just another dream, and Inception leaves us hanging on whether it is or not.  By the very act of testing his return’s reality, we see that the Director’s been infected with the same idea he tried so hard to plant in his wife.  The process of inception affects the Director as much as the Viewer, regardless of his ambitions to control the process.

…

Now, here’s where Inception‘s less than the most amazingly perfect metaphor ever:  In real life we don’t usually wake from dreams or movies by dying in them in the way Inception depicts.  We wake when the dream or movie’s over.   The waking happens on its own, without our control.  Same with death–we don’t have to make it happen, it’ll happen sooner or later if we just sit tight.  Maybe there really is something to the recent observation–I forget the source–that Nolan’s stories are all about control, from Memento to Insomnia to The Prestige to Batman Begins to Dark Knight to this one.  A person who’s all about control would make this mistake, and misrepresent escaping from a dream/movie as largely an act of personal will, of wresting control.

Note this mistake has two consequences–it leads to suicidality, as when Mal decides she’s the author of her every experience, and her fiat of suicide an eject button she can push whenever she decides she doesn’t like the experience anymore.  And it leads to an inability to distinguish dreams from reality.  Those two consequences, I think, are deeply related, as in Hamlet’s soliloquy.  In dreams, we’re the only person who’s really real.  If the dream is actually artificial–a movie–then there are indeed other minds in there with us, trying to intrude, but it’s our mind they’re in, and we can end their intrusion or the whole dream at any time.  Movies and dreams allow for solipsism, and often encourage it outright–insofar as they do this, they encourage suicidality, because they encourage us to think of our experience as escapable and the escape as affecting only one real person.  Reality is different–try to escape it, and it’s still there.  And: in reality, we’re not the only real person, not the center of the world, not that world’s little god in total control.  In that sense, the difference between dreaming and reality is sort of a spiritual one, with movies existing as a middle ground, a space where we can live solipsistically or communicate with other minds and relinquish our ambitions to control everything.  If so, then perhaps movies are most dangerous to those who most desire to control them–i.e., writers, directors, producers.  Note which characters in Inception get most deeply lost in the Movie, come closest to losing themselves in it.  And it doesn’t end there:  for if Dom the Director can’t bring himself to believe his kids are real, upon returning to them after a long job… if he hadn’t managed to walk away from his totemic spinning top… well, one shudders to think.

What ensues in the absence of such a relationship between giver and recipient seems subtle at first, but its harm cannot be overestimated.  In the absence of any attempted relationship between giver and recipient of charity, the following dynamic will always tend to develop:

First, the recipient of charity, realizing the charity is not motivated by love, nor given in the context of a relationship, will rightly come to distrust the giver of charity as not purely concerned with the recipient’s wellbeing as a unique person with unique needs, merits, potentials, destinies.

Second, the recipient of charity, rightly distrusting the giver of charity, will reciprocate what he perceives as the giver’s lack of love.  The recipient, to justify accepting the gift of an unloving giver, will tend more and more to see the giver as undeserving in the first place of whatever he has given, be it time, talent, energy, money, or other resources.  He will cease to see the giver as capable of suffering and thus the gifts as significant losses to the giver.  He will begin to think of the giver’s resources as rightfully his, the recipient’s, and his receiving of these resources a rectification of some generic injustice, fully deserved and correct regardless of the giver’s willingness or the recipient’s degree of true need or merit.  If he has been seen as merely part of a group, he will think of the giver as merely part of a group.  If he has been seen as an inferior, he will think of the giver as an inferior.  And so on.

Third, the giver of charity, seeing that the charity given has only increased the recipient’s demand, will come to infer that the recipient views him, the giver, as a parasite views his host.

Fourth, the giver of charity, seeing the recipient’s lack of love, will reciprocate, tending more and more to view the recipient as undeserving of whatever he has been given.  He will cease to see the recipient as capable of suffering, and the gifts as truly needed by the recipient.  He will begin to think of more and more of his resources as being deserved only by him, the giver, and his hoarding of these resources a rectification of some generic injustice, fully deserved and correct, regardless of any true need or merit on the part of the recipient.

Thus does charity without relationship always result in the mutual distrust, hostility, and dehumanization of class alienation.  Whereas the light of reason and unimpeded relationships would reveal that some poor people are honest, some not, and likewise some rich people honest, some not, and all equals in having fallen short of moral perfection; whereas reason would dictate that therefore I must judge the need and merit of each person individually, through intimate knowledge, and assume none my moral inferior; rather, once the state of class alienation has begun, charity ceases to derive from relationships and reason.

In this alienated state, if I am a recipient of charity, I literally cannot see the benefactors who support me as individuals, and thus cannot judge them fairly, as to whether they give out of love, and as to whether they come by their resources honestly.  But I shall somehow judge them, for they have made themselves a significant presence in my reality, and the human animal always evaluates those whose lives touch upon his own.  And so I must judge my benefactors as a group.  Now, two judgments are then possible–I can judge the givers en masse as mostly deserving of their resources and loving in their reasons for giving.  Or, I can judge them as mostly undeserving of their resources and corrupt in their reasons for giving.  The former conclusion places an impossibly infinite sense of indebtedness and inferiority upon me as the recipient of their charity, for I can never repay a countless number of benefactors deserving of repayment–I can’t even countenance my own self worth in relation to such a group.  And so I will always tend to choose the other judgment–that my benefactors are, on the whole, undeserving of their resources, and corrupt in their reasons for giving.

And this process of othering, of group-judging and group condemnation, inherent in this state of alienated charity, works both ways.  For if I’m one of the givers, and cannot judge the recipients of my charity individually, I will nevertheless, as a human animal, judge them.  And I can hardly bear to contemplate that a mass of poor humanity without name or number, could all be deserving of my resources–just as the poor person does not want to feel infinitely indebted, nor his sense of self worth effaced, so I as a giver cannot countenance an infinite legitimate demand on my resources, threatening to lay claim to everything I have.  And so I will always tend to choose the other judgment–that my recipients are, on the whole, undeserving of my resources, and corrupt in their reasons for taking my charity.

This is the dynamic that tends to develop where charity takes place outside of love, and the alienated state that ensues in a society where this form of charity becomes the norm. But the obvious alternative does exist:  charity through relationship.  The only way to illustrate this form of charity may be with an exemplum.  My great-great-uncle Jay Smith owned much of a rural Kansas county in the 1950s, including several housing units.  Each of his tenants he knew personally, intimately, as friends.  When any of said tenants fell upon hard times, they would ask Jay personally for a reprieve from their rent payment, only so long as needed, after which the tenant would try to make up for missed payments.  Jay would always oblige, taking the tenant at his word, knowing the tenant saw Jay as a fellow human being, who suffered the lack of rental income just as surely, if not nearly as sharply, as the tenant himself suffered from being short on money; furthermore, the tenant knew Jay truly felt for the tenant’s plight, and Jay knew the tenant knew this.  In short, their relationship had enough compenetration to ensure that each could not think of his own self and wellbeing except by including, in his moral calculus, the other as a key factor.  The tenant and Jay both suffered a loss of income together, because they were mutually honest about their resources and how they spent those resources–the tenant truly needed a break; he was not overstating his need in the slightest.  And Jay truly needed the rent money, because he charged not a dollar more than he needed to cover his expenses, fund other honest projects upon which other community members depended for their own pay, and have enough left over to put food on his own table.  Their high degree of mutual knowledge and interaction served to ensure mutual empathy, mutual accountability, and shared goals.  And all of this–the tenant’s lack of greed, Jay’s lack of greed, their mutual honesty, their mutual desire to see the tenant thrive and Jay thrive, their mutual respect for each other’s resources–all of this had as its necessary and sufficient condition, a real relationship between the tenant and Jay.  The tenant was Jay’s neighbor.  Jay worked to know the neighbor as he knew himself.  He thereby could love the neighbor as he loved himself.  This is the essence of the platinum and golden rules, and the essence of the principle,

Charity requires relationship.

It should go without saying that I must never use this principle to excuse myself from charity.  Where I have but little time, energy, talent, money, or other resources for an act of charity, the act of charity in that instance is just as necessary, but the degree to which a relationship can be inculcated may be greatly curtailed.   Wherever possible, always insofar as possible, I must accompany my gift with whatever attempts at relationship I can.  Some solon has said that the greatest act of charity takes place between two people who never discover each other’s identity.  Whoever said this did not remember humanity’s infinite capacity for ingratitude.  How many times do I fail to feel thankful for the ten thousand blessings large and small, concrete and abstract, that attend my every day alive?  If one more anonymous blessing were to befall me upon that ten thousand, would I be even one ten-thousandth more likely to erupt into gratitute, into an awareness of God or Providence or the power of love?  No, I wouldn’t.  We are all animals as much as spirits, and thus we are hardwired for, and always at risk of, devolving into ingratitude, mutual distrust, an exploitative attitude, a warfare mentality, wherever we detect that a gift is not given out of agape love.  Agape love is the one thing we will buy into at the price of our own self-bias.  And we are never so sold on this love as when it advertises with a face, and never so sold on a face as when we’re sure it belongs to a fellow suffering human being.

If your god judges by appearances, or by what people say they did and mean and are, or even by what they think they are, it is not the true god.

If your god cannot listen, it is not the true god.

If your god cannot speak, it is not the true god.

If your god can die and be kept dead, it is not the true god.

If your god gives you less and less the more you give to it, it is not the true god.

If your god does not care a whit whether you choose it or it takes you by force, it is not the true god.

If your god destroys everything it creates, it is not the true god.

If your god is only smart enough to value big things but not complex things, planets but not people, stars but not souls, atoms but not Adams, raw matter but not what we think matters, nature’s spaces but not our inner spaces, impersonal forces but not personal emotions… it is not the true god.

If your god can only receive a letter if it has been addressed correctly, or at all, it is not the true god.

If your god encourages your hypocrisy, it is not the true god.

If your god does not lead you away from yourself, it is not the true god.

If your god cannot communicate anything about itself to a mere human mind, if your god cannot master even the slightest simplification of its thoughts, if your god can’t accomplish a basic Fourier transform, or understand Cesaro summability or transfinite math, or compress its rich data into your lossy format… it is not the true god.

If your god can speak so you can hear but not appear so you can see, it is not the true god.

If your god is too proud to beg, it is not the true god.

If your god is too brittle to bend to serve, it is not the true god.

If the best gift your god can offer you, is anything less than itself, it is not the true god.

If you doubt me, consider four cases:

In the first case, a man runs up to you screaming that his daughter is hanging off a ledge partway down a nearby cliff, and he cannot quite reach her to pull her up.  He asks if you might be able to help.  You happen to be a trapeze artist, and you know that you might be strong enough to lower the man down the cliffside so he can reach his daughter, and then pull them both back up.  You know as a professional acrobat that this will be difficult, and that doing this might injure you so that you can’t perform as a trapeze artist again.  Do you help the man?

The second case: same man, same daughter, same predicament.  But this time it’s not your body you can risk to save the girl; it’s merely a fine, expensive gold-filament stereo cable you just bought for your home entertainment system’s surround sound speakers, thirty feet long and just possibly what’s needed to rescue this girl.  You know that using this cable as a rescue rope might very well destroy its ability to function as a stereo cable.  Do you help the man?

The third case:  same man, same daughter, only now she’s not on a cliff; now the man approaches you just outside a doctor’s office, extremely distraught, crying that his daughter needs an operation for her brain tumor or she’ll die.  He has no medical insurance, and the surgery costs $50,000 more than he has.  He’s not in his right mind and has somehow decided on impulse to ask the first person he sees for help.  And that person is you.  You just so happen to have recently inherited $50,000.  The money sits in your bank account; the checkbook sits in your pocket as you stare at the man and consider his request.  Do you help the man?

The fourth case:  same man, same daughter, same predicament.  Only this time, a little light bulb pops up over your head–or is it a little red man on your left shoulder?  You realize that you could give the man a portion of what he needs to help his daughter.  Maybe $25,000–half of what you have, demonstrating that you love your neighbor as yourself and therefore are willing, as few others would be, to share half your fortune with him in his time of need.  Or perhaps, you decide, you’ll give him $10,000–enough to give him hope, and enough to inspire others to come forward to complete the fee.  Or perhaps, remembering that your spouse just got fired, and you just resolved to tighten your household’s financial belt, you decide to shave your charity a bit from what it otherwise would have been.  After all, God knows if times weren’t tight you would have been perfectly willing to give $10,000… and so you give $9,000.  You smile at the man, write out your check, hand it to him.  He sees the amount, his eyes light up with joy.  You are a hero!   You drive home immensely satisfied, if a little unsure how to tell your spouse you just gave away so much money.

Six months later, you find out the man’s daughter is dead.  Starting with your generous contribution, the father had rallied the community to his daughter’s aid.  By the day the doctors announced that his daughter’s tumor had grown inoperable, he had raised $49,000 for her surgery.  Just think–if he had only gotten $1,000 more, his daughter might be alive.  So:  Did you help the man?  Or did you just help his daughter die?  What mattered more, what had greater impact, what was more REAL:  The $9,000 you gave?  Or the $1,000 you didn’t?

Now imagine that in the fourth case it wasn’t $1,000 you held back.  It was ten dollars.  One dollar.  Fifty cents.  A penny.  Now imagine it wasn’t that you held back money, but that you hesitated to give the money for six months.  Three months.  A month.  A moment.  At what point do you cease to be partly responsible for that girl’s death?

An acrobat refuses to risk injury to help save a girl from falling.  We call him guilty.  An audiophile refuses to risk losing his expensive cable to save a girl.  We call him guilty.  So the question is a real one:  At what point do you cease to be partly responsible for that girl’s death?*

I used to think that Jesus equated lust with adultery, and rage with murder, just to point up that every distinction between what we will in our minds, and what we actually act out, is utterly circumstantial–that if we plot a sin, we have only the fortune of our circumstances to thank for our not having actually committed that sin.  And I still believe this.  But the idea of society as a quantum killing machine drives Jesus’ point further home:  by our own human standards, there is no clear line between a small act that contributes to another’s misfortune and ultimate demise, and a large contribution to another’s demise worthy of the term “manslaughter.”  If twenty men can be participants in a wrongful death, then so can twenty thousand.  Though we often wish otherwise, guilt is not a pie the size of the victim’s loss, to be divided among those who caused the victim’s loss.  By this logic we continually “seek justice” in the form of a single or a handful of scapegoats to blame for great wrongs, and when we’ve seen those scapegoats to their fate, we feel the work of justice is done.  But I propose that a fair share of what we feel, when we feel that justice has been done, is simply the pleasant sensation of being let off the hook.  For even if we’re not guilty in the matter at hand, some part of us knows, that real and accurate justice in the case of a single victim, would be the work of a million million years and a million million million human minds.  Our justice is always flawed, and there is a word for flawed justice:  injustice.  Our justice has the same relationship to real justice as a child’s mud pie has to a master chef’s pie.  Our justice is injustice.

Real guilt is not a pie the size of the victim’s loss.  It can rarely be eaten in one sitting, by one or a few people.  Real guilt is a pie the size of a million tiny cuts, fruit of all the private lusts and rages we didn’t quite contain.  And thus five loaves feed five thousand, and the last supper lasts until we’ve all had a chance to eat.

*The answer to this boondoggle of a question–at what point do we cease to be guilty of shortchanging or failing our fellow human being–is actually so simple a five-year-old can grasp it:  it’s the golden rule.  If I have loved my neighbor as myself, in a given moment, to the best of my ability, my imagination, my empathy, my energy, my resources, then I am freed of any vestige of guilt for his sufferings.

Pt. 2: HOW TO SELL A HOUSE:

Son, few pleasures in life afford one as much pleasure as the pleasure of selling a home.  And by “one,” I of course refer to your banker.  How can I obtain for my banker this incredible pleasure of which you speak, you ask?  I thought you’d never ask–that’s why I’m pretending you just asked.  Here are the steps of selling a home, in chronological order and, coincidentally enough, order of increasing difficulty:

Step one:  Decide, on purpose, by choice, of your own free will, intentionally, that you want to not have your house–your perfectly good, livable, lovable, lived-in, beloved house–be yours, anymore (this, son, is the part where you join me in a hearty laugh.  Hahahahahaha. Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.  Heartier, son.  Heartier.  The idea is to laugh so heartily your diaphragm cramps up for a solid six minutes so that you can warp right to the fun part of selling a house (the sky party)).

Step two:  Realize, three months later, through the power of phone calls, that if you just leave your house the way a bird leaves its nest, the other birds won’t ever again let you “have” another “nest,” in the sense of getting to “own” one without “buying one outright with cash” (an impossibility for most birds in the present birdconomy and for the birdseeable future).

Step three:  Advertise!  Some say a good way to advertise your house is to work with a realtor, to get bodies in the door, but other ‘tors can accomplish the same thing for far less money–tractors, for example, have a proven track record moving bodies (hence the name).  You can also get good results with doctors (they call him House for a reason), actors (some say House is actually an actor), even Surrealtor or the evil Shamtor.

Also helpful are ads, so named for the way they add expense to the process of not finding a buyer for your home.  A good ad should list, succinctly, your home’s every positive trait while downplaying the negatives.  Subtle allusions to fanciful creatures can also create a charming mood.  This, for example, is an example of a real estate ad that ran recently on a local (very local) (this) website:

“For immediate sale, purchase, or ownership transfer, via dollars or gold bullion:  One genuine, board-certified house.  Just the right size for inhabitants up to four meters in length.  Interconnected rooms.  Working chimney with fireplace attachment.  Garage ideal for car, sleigh, or wingless light aircraft.  100% organic pure all-paint wall paint.  Multiple closets good for underground railroading or easy troll storage.  Massive open-air barbeque chamber in back of property.

“Complete set of exterior house paint, pre-molded, with supporting house structure for convenient display.  Wall to wall floors.  Shag lawn rolls back to reveal original hardwood dirt.  No ghost or monster corpses.  Ground-insulated basement.  Living room sports chandelier-style air-circulation propeller.  See-through windows with transparent glass.  All doors thoroughly knobbed and hinged.  Living room stores up to twenty individual adults comfortably, or one dyspeptic libertine uncomfortably.  Guatemalan housekeeper sold separately.  Easy night access to neighbors’ pools.  Lifetime supply of internal air–very breathable.  Sump pump/foot bath on lower level.

“Non-chimerical human neighbors make for headache-free property disputes.  Free chakra removal with purchase. No known ancient blood curses or liens held by extradimensional third parties.  Top-mounted ceilings.  Working water-pipes and washbasins with drains in both kitchen and bathroom.  Occasional yeti.  Textured walls in basement useful for hours of mesmerized staring and/or hand-scraping.  House has official black belt from Jojo’s Feng Shui Dojo of Las Vegas.  Every room equipped with negative space–handy for standing, sitting, or luge.  Most rooms pre-christened.  Owners willing to de-christen rooms at buyers’ expense.  Advanced plumbing system provides clean water and removes waste water at several points.  Ground-anchored.

“Porcelain throne sculpture and curtained steam-chamber in bathroom.  Current owners willing to relocate.  Entire structure covered with adorable oversize roof-style hat.  Molemen are forever.  Bedrooms perfect for men, women, children, merfolk, and other.  Towelracks.  Property almost constantly radiation- and genocide-free.  Eco-friendly; clowns welcome.  Located near lovely school, city park, sky, planetary core and cemetery.  No refunds or exchanges.  No sleep till Brooklyn.  Batteries not included; batteries hardly necessary; batteries strictly prohibited; please stop with the batteries.  Do not feed after midnight.”

Step 4:  Wait!

Step 5:  Wait!

Step 6:  Check to see you’ve done the previous steps correctly.  If you are now on step 6, and are still waiting for your home to be sold, you’ve probably made a mistake somewhere in step 4.  Return to step 4 and be sure to follow the directions precisely.

Step 7:  Show the house.  A very important part of step 7 is not murdering the prospective buyers when they explain that your bedrooms are indeed as small as described in the newspaper ad, the MLS listing, the realtor’s printout of same, the realtor’s verbal description of the house prior to showing it to the prospective buyers, Hubble telescope photos, the small print on the tractor’s tread, x-rays of the bedrooms taken by House, the teleplay script used by House for the “Selling Your House” episode of House, and the ominous dreams sent to the prospective buyers the night before by Surrealtor (to be fair to the prospective buyers, Shamtor made no mention of the bedrooms being small).

Step 8:  If step 8 hasn’t been eaten away by bitter tears, i.e., if you can still read this, go to step 4.

Step n:  Suddenly remember that you found a really good buyer for your house down inside this shotgun barrel.  Listen, if you put your ear to the barrel you can hear him!  Hear that?  He said he’s ready to buy, and he sounds really eager!  All he needs is for you to say you agree to his terms.  Just put your mouth right on the barrel there and tell him you’re ready to wrap this up.  What’s that?  He says he can’t hear you?  That’s OK, easy fix–just pull on that little lever there.  Now he’ll be sure to hear y–

Step n+1:   Sky party!   Why yes, son, there IS cake at the sky party.  So glad you asked!  Whole mansions made of cake.  And you get to live there and never have to move again!

Pt 1:  HOW TO MAKE A BABY:

Son, making babies is hard.  As hard as organic chemistry times diamonds times Battletoads times R. Lee Ermey–think of the hardest thing you’ve ever done, and then imagine a baby eating that thing.  Only one original document remains on the subject of baby making.  It’s written on 4,000-year-old papyrus rolling papers and, near the end, a Long John Silver’s napkin.  The document’s been savaged by time to a truly Lohanian degree, rendered mostly unintelligible and completely nonexistent.  However, a close reading of the remaining fragments shows that baby-making is not only possible, but potentially rewarding.  Also, according to the coupon page, successful completion of the process entitles you to a free round of a drink the Egyptians called “putt-putt.”

FRAGMENT I:

Zig-Zag Papyrus à Rouler

Qualite Superieure

…

Step 1:  If you want to make a baby, you’re going to want to have handy three adolescent dolphins, three sets of jumper cables, and a car battery.  These won’t help you make the baby; just be warned you will find yourself wanting them.

…

Step 3: The heart.  Babies are heartless killing machines.  Under no circumstances give a baby a heart; it will just get sold for crack money.

FRAGMENT 2:

Step 16:  Carefully connect the brain to the spinal column.  Apply too much force and the spine’s telescoping mechanism will jam up, and you’ll be stuck with a dwarf instead of a baby.  If this happens, do not panic–the dwarf can be used to assist in your next baby-making attempt, or broken back down into parts for your next baby (except the spinal column).

Step 17:  The arms.  The arms are really small and floppy, so you’re gonna have to jam them into the shoulders pretty hard to get them to stay.

FRAGMENT 3:

Step 40:  Next comes the cry-hole.  Make the cry-hole too small, and the baby will choke to death on its own sadness.  Make the cry-hole too big, and the baby’s voice will disembowel anything that hears it.  Experiment with different sizes until you reach a volume level that you, and you alone, can tolerate.  If the baby looks like Carly Simon, you’ve gone too far.

…

Step 50:  Pants.  A lot depends on the cut here.  Just remember:  a baby’s torque is directly proportional to its inseam.  Hence Proverbs 4:59:  “The longer the britches, say goodnight, bitches!”  Now you know.

Step 51:  Choosing eye color.  A good rule of thumb is, brown eyes, all your thoughts laid bare.  Blue eyes, kill you with a stare.  Green eyes, though more difficult, can be worthwhile–if you do go with green, resist the urge to take the baby’s head out of the mirrorbox for the first fourteen weeks, to prevent the mind-thoughts from oxidizing.

FRAGMENT 4:

Step 67:  Larding.  You want to get a good layer of lard on there, enough to pad the baby against a wayward haymaker but not so much that it can’t execute a clean five-finger death punch if the situation arises.   Most people err on the side of underlarding.   It all comes down to, if you get snowed in during a blizzard, do you want to have a nice round baby to eat, or a lean mean guilt-free killing machine that quickly runs out of fat stores and decides to death-punch you into a month’s supply of meatsicle?   Answer: yes.

FRAGMENT 5:

Jean d’Argent à Long

Restaurant de Fruits de Mer

est. 1932 BC

Step BABY:  Your baby is complete.  Now you must find out if it is worthy.  A worthy baby will score at least 50 points on the following test:

Question ONE:  Seal it in a room made out of Avatar.  Give your baby half a point if it finds a way to kill itself before realizing it’s watching a remake of Fern Gully expensive enough to have saved 100 square miles of rainforest.  Give your baby a whole point if it finds a way to stab out its eyes with its own stumpy fingers.   Give your baby two points if it figures out how to roll its eyes so hard they point backward into its own skull, limiting its Avatar exposure to flashbacks from the portion of the movie it saw.   And give your baby 49 points if it escapes, then hunts down and destroys any of the Avatar cast or crew.

Be sure to remove any scar tissue from your baby’s brain before proceeding to question two.

…

Question THREE:   Drive your baby far out into the desert.  Not too far–not mafia-body-dump far, just mobile-methlab far.  Tell the baby to get out.  Give your baby a full point if it gets out with enthusiasm or a string of hearty invective.  Half a point if it hesitates or struggles getting out of its seat.  And zero points if it pretends not to understand you and you have to shove it out.  Then, remove your sweat-soaked shirt and toss it to the baby.  This will provide the baby with an ample supply of water and electrolytes, as well as enough scent to track you back to your home.  Give your baby ten points for finding its way home within 24 hours, five points for within 48 hours, and zero points if it returns after 48 hours.  If, after any amount of time, you hear of a doomsday cult forming in the desert, led by a baby, give your baby 49 points.

Question FOUR:  Have your baby watch Red Dawn.  Afterward, ask it to name the film’s protagonist and central theme.  Five points for an answer of “Wolverines!  Wolverines!”  Seven points for “Thundercats!  Ho!”  Ten for “Patrick. Swayze.”  49 points if it produces a video of Vladimir Putin being raped by a wolverine.

…

Your baby’s train departs from Cedar Rapids heading toward Dallas at 100 mph.   At the same moment, another train departs from Denver heading toward Tallahassee at 150 mph.  Question EIGHT:  Will the two trains collide, and if so, where?

a)  No.  The trains will not collide.
b)  Yes.  The trains will collide, just east of Kansas City.
c)  No.  My baby’s train is his penis, and Cedar Rapids and Dallas are the names of his girlfriends.
d)  No.  My baby’s train is his penis, and the other train is his other penis.
e)  Yes.  The two trains are my baby’s penises, and they will collide somewhere inside Virginia later that afternoon.

If your baby answers a) or b), zero points.  Otherwise, 49 points.

This concludes the baby worthiness test.  Tally up your baby’s score, and record it at the bottom of your papyrus.   If it’s 50 or over, congratulations!  You are the proud owner of a real, actual baby.   With regular upkeep, your baby will provide you with months of physical protection and spiritual insights.  Just remember to refuel your baby with a small animal whenever its screams begin to weaken, and swap out the soul every 300 kills.  And don’t forget, once your baby’s life-cycle is complete, you can send the remains to P. Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney, Egypt for a free copy of this book’s follow-up, “How to Make a Toddler.”*

*This offer has expired.

Is the only kid in his school to wear white dancing shoes, slacks, peculiar shirts, weird old hats, suspenders, and shades.

Near the beginning of the movie is seen pretending to listen to a parent figure’s advice.

Constantly harasses his best friend by phone.

Teaches his friend how to risk opprobrium in order to meet their destiny.

Has no car and has to bum rides off of his best friend.

Likes to put his hair up into a mohawk when bored and not in public.

Doesn’t take schoolwork seriously.

Monologizes when alone in a bedroom.

Works hard to gain access to an exclusive establishment.

Likes to break into song and lip-synch and dance whether in public or private, shamelessly, wowing nearby ladies.

Goes to epic, extreme measures for the girl he loves.

Digs oldies music.

Tries to smooth-talk his way through every situation.

Makes it his mission, during the movie, to change his best friend’s mind about an important matter.

Realizes at the end of the movie that his best friend has to decide their own fate about the important matter.

Looks knowingly at the camera, breaking the fourth wall.

Is easily the most interesting, coolest kid in his school, whether anyone else realizes it or not.

If you said Duckie from Pretty in Pink, you’re right!

If you said Ferris from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, you’re right!

That’s right.  Take a deep breath.  You’re a big kid, you can handle this.  Ferris, is Duckie.  Duckie, is Ferris.  (Both, are probably John Hughes alter egos.)

But, you say, Duckie is totally hapless, almost completely unloved, poor, awkward, ladyless!  Ferris is the most popular, cool, clever, lucky, dashing kid around–nay, imaginable!  There is no way they can be the same guy!

How, you ask, am I reading your mind like this?  Simple:  I too have been through the long dark valley of fear upon realizing the two characters are the same.

It’s not so hard to accept once you realize the secret equation:

Duckie = Ferris – (Infinity x Luck) + Hamster Teeth.

Or, if you like:

Duckie + (Infinity x Luck) – Hamster Teeth  = Ferris.

If you cannot accept this through the power of equations, please, I beg you, accept the testimony of your eyes.  For though hard to ponder, ’tis true, that Ferris and Duckie look almost exactly alike.  Sure, Duckie’s teeth are a little more rodentlike, his smile lines a little deeper.  But if you’d been born into a universe without upperclass dental care and with only your smile to keep you warm on lonely, luckless nights, you’d look a little more like that too.

Here’s Ferris looking his most charming, in his iconic movie-poster pose.

Here’s Fer… I mean Duckie, looking not just equally dashing, but… exactly like Matthew Broderick.

But wait, you say, that’s not fair… Duckie doesn’t usually look that snazzy.  Usually, he looks kinda awkward, with those goofy smile lines and supertall freakazoid hair and funky-looking teeth.  True:

But then again:

And then there’s the small matter of weird old hats:

In closing, I ask you to consider one Mr. Duckie Bueller:

And the actor who played him, John “Ferris” Cryer:

War is peace.  Freedom is slavery.  Ferris Bueller is  Philip F. “Duckie” Dale.

Roger Ebert’s review of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

But eventually those sparks started a fire.  My best guess is that the movie was shot roughly in sequence, because the longer the film ran, the more convincing DiCaprio and Winslet’s pain became.  By the end, I was weeping.  This movie hurts, and keeps hurting.

The older I get, the less advice I feel I can give for friends having relationship issues–real couples seem infinitely varied, with zero rules about what absolutely can and cannot work out between two people.  Our lives and loves weren’t made to be redundant.  Sometimes we’d love to write off this or that relationship–of ours, or that we’ve learned of secondhand–as doomed from the start, or intrinsically wrongheaded.  Heck, we’ll even write off entire categories of relationship as hopeless–an idealist-pragmatist pairing, or homosexual pairings, or a May-December romance, or an interfaith marriage–we pretend we can avoid pain with a few simple rules.  We pretend that if we pay close enough attention to how relationships fail, we’ll figure out the secret to eternal romantic bliss.  Doing so is easier.  Doing so helps us grieve, and avoid grief.  Revolutionary Road has no patience for such shortcuts.  A character tells another she hates him, then that of course she does not.  Both times, she’s sincere.  Repeatedly, characters choose both of contradictory options, until one option closes irreversibly.  We like to believe a different series of choices would have resulted in less grief.  Not necessarily.  Perhaps the grief isn’t meant to be fled from.  Perhaps it’s just meant to be shared and borne.  The film’s final shot is of a husband turning off his hearing aid so he doesn’t have to hear his wife write off the story’s tragic central couple as failing to meet several of her criteria for a nice family.  He would rather mourn them than write them off, even if that means pain that won’t fade.  Are we brave enough to do likewise?

For starters:  The title character’s voice-over and dialogue hit several poetic high notes: “I’ve never really cared for lakes.  Lakes are like… stepping into somebody else’s underwear.”  “I like the detail of a thing.  Especially if it’s got a purpose.”  At times these gems seem to string together into something greater, but others sound like snatches taken randomly from a journal, perhaps Walt Whitman’s, if Walt Whitman had the intellectual libido of a surfer.

The movie toys with greatness in a similar way for a stretch in the middle when the idea of Vann’s omnivorous, catch-what-comes nature finds echoes in his voice-over narrative, and in the narrative from a nature show he’s watching about (I think) toads, and in his eating habits, as he polishes off a snack and then discovers a proper meal sitting on a tray just outside his door–he sets to the meal with little show of surprise or acknowledgement of the irony that he’s just had something to eat.  The effect of this scene is indeed like that of a nature show, with Vann as the lazy toad following his bliss from moment to moment on his little lilypad of a bed.  But we don’t see enough of this wit from Minus Man, and at times the movie itself seems to be the lazy toad, not willing to hunt down significance or beauty, but willing merely to capture them as they pass, and sit inert for long stretches in between.

Similarly, the movie takes care to touch on several topics any competent serial killer movie must address–the killer’s sexuality; the killer’s ability to feign emotion; the killer’s bonds with other people; the killer’s method of choosing victims; the killer’s motivation or type of catharsis from killing.  But the movie doesn’t seem to know quite what to do with each of these topics.  Vann’s sexuality is touched on in a scene where he miscalculates exactly how roughly to wrestle back against a playful date, but barely, and what we see of both characters in that scene rings false–the date, Ferrin, who has been utterly puppyish in her crush on Vann, freaks out too immediately and loudly when he finally responds to her play, and acts afterward as though he had struck or bit her.  And from Vann, we see in his wrestling a willingness to indulge in aggression, that we otherwise get no hint of.  He says elsewhere that he’s not violent, and that he does the minimum necessary to kill his victims, and we see and believe him.

Likewise, Vann shows some signs of caring for Ferrin, as well as for his landlords (Brian Cox and Mercedes Ruehl), but these contradict other scenes, such as the one where he responds to a Christmas gift in the most socially inept and insensitive way possible.  It’s as though Minus Man remembers half the time that Vann is, as any serial killer must be, supremely ill-adapted to society, and capable of interacting with people comfortably only from a position of paranoid control… while the other half of the time forgetting this, and depicting Vann as a Zen-like master of receptivity, open to trying out friendship and a woman’s nurturing embraces with the same ease as he tries out different locales and jobs.  The movie rings truer when acting on the former impulse, as when Vann ditches his host family to wander around on Christmas morning, and when he narrates, “The most important thing to figure out about someone is whether they can hurt you.”  But the script follows Owen Wilson too often to an opposite place, where a serial killer can be a gentle poet, childlike in his openness to the flow of life, at ease among his prey.  Wilson takes so easily to this latter place, it’s hard to imagine the movie doing anything differently with his character.  Heck, the movie even lets Wilson act at one point as though he’s a fully-functional, fully-empathetic, socialized adult, who upon seeing his friend hitting himself, shouts at once for said friend to stop.  The moment is not true to Vann at all, and the result is not a believable human being–and unfortunately, this is the sort of story that lives or dies on the believability of its human beings.

I think mention is due to a couple of other notable elements.  First, to have Vann’s life intersect that of another killer, struck me at at first as an unearned coincidence–unearned not because it seemed improbable (coincidences are by definition improbable-seeming), but because it didn’t seem significant enough.  But then, isn’t what Vann learns from the other killer’s capture rather significant indeed?  He seems to learn, essentially, not to be such a toad–to be more careful, to tread more lightly, to eat more choosily, and to keep moving.  But again, why would the movie introduce his careless, lazy predation with such confident, broad strokes in the nature-show scene, and then treat the character’s evolution away from carelessness so much more lightly, with so much less emphasis on symbolism and narrative symmetry?  Which brings me to the other notable element:  the final shot.  The movie’s final shot succeeds on its own terms, and transcends the rest of the film in emotional impact, thanks in large part to a big shift to Hitchcockian music and lighting.  But that last image, of a highway construction sign flashing its two-headed arrow: how does that speak at all to the core matter of Vann’s evolution?   It seems to belong to an entirely different movie, a movie less about Vann’s nature and more about our inability to detect the killer in our midst.  But then, judging from the film’s title, we’re supposed to see Vann’s nature as intractably cryptic, as undetectable.  Vann is a cypher; we are doomed to miss the point of him, or perceive anything consistent or true in him.  How convenient a thesis for a film so unsure of itself.

I suppose I’d have preferred that the movie hew more closely to that solid conception of Vann as a sun-baked toad.  But then, would you call the movie Toad Man?  And would Owen Wilson be able to pull off a character that substantial?

2012:  I didn’t watch this, but I did watch the escape-from-L.A. clip on Youtube repeatedly–it’s a paean to and parody of every disaster movie ever.  I can’t tell if it’s tongue in cheek or pokerfaced; it transcends questions of seriousness.  If anyone ever tries to make a disaster movie after this, they’ll have missed the point, much like the Scary Movie crew who somehow failed to notice the Scream franchise.

9:  **SPOILER ALERT** Shane Acker’s 9 started off wonderfully, but got late-period-Burtonitis halfway through and forgot to write itself a decent ending.  The plot is elegantly simple: a doll comes to life to discover he’s one of nine such creatures inhabiting a post-apocalyptic wasteland.  The wasteland is the work of a monstrous sentient war machine, the movie’s Big Bad, who, it turns out, was created by the same scientist who afterward crafted the nine dolls.  My friend and I both hummed with anticipation during the second act–we both foresaw a magic and unprecedented ending in which the nine titular heroes have been devoured one by one by the Big Bad, at which point, the dolls’ creator’s plan is revealed–he created them all to store parts of his soul, and fated them to be devoured by the Big Bad to become its missing humanity, thus redeeming it from inside and saving the world through a most exotic form of self-sacrifice.  But alas, as obvious and marvelous as this ending seems from the movie’s midpoint, the plot first dodges the unique ending for a pedestrian one (killing the villain through a now-too-conventional Big Battle), and then tacks on a kitschy Return-of-the-Jedi vision of its heroes’ dead souls at the end, when the movie’s already made clear that their souls are software, not some tangible spectral hokum… 9 could have been the movie that gives life to Lincoln’s famous maxim, “If I make my enemy my friend, have I not destroyed my enemy?”  If it had gone this route, it might have been my favorite movie of 2009.

Adventureland:  Early on in this movie, I told my wife, “This movie has to end with the protagonist getting laid.”  And I was right.  I rarely call a movie’s ending (see note on 9 above), but this time, I’m extra glad I nailed it, ’cause the movie turned out to be a really pitch-perfect and reverential depiction of one kid’s buildup to the sexual and romantic big leagues.  It’s a nice antidote to the glut of movies that depict the ideal First Time of a young man as involving zero commitment, zero emotional attachment to the girl involved, or some other form of zero chance that the pairing could succeed long-term.   Hollywood asks us to believe, often enough, in the happily ever after of two jaded twentysomethings with little virtue or maturity to show for their years and the countless failed relationships under their belts–if we’re willing to swallow that several times a year, why not the bright future of a first love?  Especially where the vestals show a little maturity and depth–what’s not to like?

Avatar:   Watching a second time in 3D, I thought I’d find more to love about 3D.  But even Cameron’s relatively deft use of the format only makes for a wash–I couldn’t care less about the 3D, because I couldn’t tell it was there during the scenes that absorbed me most, when, presumably, it was being used most masterfully, and in the scenes where it was most obvious, I kept thinking about how it should be improved (frame rates will have to triple, and directors on down retrained to use much less jump-cutting when working in 3D).  The derivative plot and hacky dialogue also didn’t register with me as much on a second viewing.  I even forgave the lazy visual cues linking the natives to native Americans, instead letting the Na’vi look and lifestyle impress me on their own merits, wherever their source.  But enough about what didn’t matter.

On the second viewing, I confirmed that Giovanni Ribisi, Sam Worthington and and Zoe Saldana form the molten emotional core of this movie.  Saldana’s wracked sobs, Worthington’s childlike delight, and Ribisi’s dose of villainous realism (touched by doubt, relentlessly pragmatic, nicely counterbalancing Stephen Lang’sgloriously cartoonish military honcho) showed themselves as the real reasons to watch.  That, and the actually competent aerial scenes, and the emotionally bizarre but raw climax in which Saldana’s Neytiri first sees her beloved in his human form.   Note that of these strongest elements, only Ribisi’s performance is untouched by CGI.  Somehow, Cameron managed to anchor a movie largely in the emotion conveyed by two blue CG’d alien faces.  Studio execs?  Screw 3D, invest more in Cameron’s new performance capture technique!

I swear the following tangent is apropos of this Avatar review: Watching the dully inexpressive CG face of the title character from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button a year ago, I was reminded of the old lament, “If youth only knew; if age only could.”  Benjamin Button‘s core flaw, other than its screenwriter’s vicious self-plagiarism, is that the title character totally blows a unique opportunity to be a Youth who Knows, an Aged person who Can.  Brad Pitt, confined in large part by the script and perhaps the limitations of his character’s CG bobblehead, plays Benjamin as way too passive, timid, mute, frail, and cowardly to fulfill the promise of his unique opportunity.  I mention all this because it explains what I loved most about Avatar–somehow, Sam Worthington of all people manages to convince as a Youth who Knows, an Aged person who Can (thanks to his rebirth as an avatar in a new world).  His Jake Sully makes the most of his newborn foal-like body, facing every physical and psychological challenge with a hard-won fearlessness, an emotional surefootedness, that could only be born of experiences of frailty, war, and grief.  That surefootedness shows up when need be as grim battlefield valor, but also, frequently, as childlike joy, and his infectious smile upon confronting each new obstacle does everything for the audience that Benjamin Button’s CG performance didn’t.  Perhaps Cameron’s performance capture technique would have improved that movie’s resonance, freeing Pitt’s performance and the screenwriter’s imagination of how a backwards-aging man would act.  It certainly would have helped critics better appreciate the underrated Zemeckis movies Beowulf and Polar Express, whose relatively lifeless faces couldn’t satisfy professional cinephiles spoiled by a lifetime of live-action performances.  The most real-seeming and affecting CG in Avatar was the Na’vi’s faces at several key dramatic moments.  Just think about that.

Bruno:  Derivative.  Paula Abdul sitting on a chair made of Mexican guy while talking about charity–that should have been the whole movie.  Well, that’s not entirely fair.  There were many,many gut-busting laughs to be had.  But many of these laughs merely echoed bits of Borat, and many echoed each other.  Bruno got the most mileage, was most revelatory, when the focus was off Bruno–as with the chair Mexicans, yes, but how could I forget the stage parents willing to subject their children to any danger or indignity for a chance at fame.  Unfortunately, far too infrequently did the movie seem at once original, and revelatory, and gut-bustingly funny.  Borat accomplished this trifecta much more consistently.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs:  The CG fluids depicted in this adaptation of the eponymous children’s book are as good as any I’ve seen.  As with other animations of late, the story’s pacing seems masterful, at least when compared to live action efforts of the last few years.  (I suppose that makes sense, given how much animation production centers on precise planning and timing.)  BUT:  I’m suspicious of this story’s moral–yes, it’s bad to make a machine that runs amok, and yes it’s bad to be shortsighted in your municipal economic policies, but c’mon!  The protagonist had slaved his whole life to invent something that worked, and this was his first potential success, and it leads to armageddon.  Does post-millenial America really need to be telling our kids that a lifetime of hard work in the sciences or engineering can only result in a solid string of failed experiments or else a catastrophic, pyrrhic breakthrough?  I’m pretty sure that’s not what they’re pouring into young heads over in Germany, Korea, China, India, and Japan.   Of course, the impression my son probably took from Cloudy is that if you work really hard, you can make something that explodes in a novel and spectacular fashion.  And hey, that’s probably what’s driven most U.S. kids to become engineering students over the last hundred years anyway.

Drag Me to Hell:  Hooray!  Not sure this merits a 2nd viewing, but the first is a doozy.  Where else can you see a grade Z concept executed with grade A talent?  But that’s not why I cheer; Tarantino’s one-man sex tape Death Proof accomplished as much.  That grade-Z-done-grad-A vehicle  did almost nothing for me, except give me one more chance to revel in Kurt Russell’s steakburger screen presence.  Drag Me to Hell offers more–an almost medieval horror concept–that the best, gentlest, and cutest of us, could deserve and meet the worst imaginable fate due to one bloodless injustice we commit in a moment of venality.  Also:  Yay to old-school special effects!  And yay to a horror movie that doesn’t center on physical torture, an oversized natural predator, a deformed backwoods clan of cannibals, or goddamned zombies!

Extract:  It stars Jason Bateman, who’s like a fist-sized diamond–put a fist-sized diamond in a lump of coal, and you’ll still want that lump of coal.  Drop a fist-sized diamond in a septic tank, and you’ll dive in after it.  My point is I adore Jason Bateman, who often plays a noble, diplomatic mensch whose intrinsic honesty and fairness are compromised only by a desire for a woman’s love–he’s so good at this role, he makes it seem as though such a man is possible!  Thankfully, Extract isn’t a septic tank; it also features a crackerjack supporting cast and writer-director Mike Judge, whose Idiocracy ranks right up with Soylent Green as one of the all-time best one-note mean-spirited prophecies.  Extract feels like a lark by comparison, one of those modest films a director makes when he’s short on ambition but has money and creative energy to burn, but then, perhaps its ambitions are simply more subtle than those of the epic Idiocracy, and its view of humanity more hopeful and forgiving.  Idiocracy posited that a world full of idiots just might be smart enough to listen to its one voice of reason.  Extract posits that we each are full of idiocy, but just might be smart enough to listen to our inner voice of reason.  I think I like that better.

The Hangover: I’ve never seen so much of a movie ruined by inclusion in the preview.  When are we going to hold preview makers accountable for their crimes against film?  Against us?  I sure would have delighted in the in-theater revelation that the men’s blacked-out exploits somehow resulted in their acquiring Mike Tyson’s tiger, a hooker’s baby, and a chicken.  Sure, you have to watch the actual movie to find out the details of how these items were acquired, but if you’re gonna pull that narrative stunt of giving away the endgame first, you’d better make sure that those intermediary details are utterly astonishing–that how they got the tiger, is more amazing than that they got one.  Call this the Evel Knievel theory–it’s awesome to make a motorcycle jump of 200 feet, but more awesome if that jump is over a row of 20 flaming schoolbuses.  I’m not sure the movie pulls this off.

Harry Potter and the Buildup to the Climax:  After the jaw-dropping severity of H.P. and the Order of the Phoenix, I expected more from director David Yates.  Between the dementor attack and the unfair tribunal against H.P., the first half of Phoenix packed as much pathos as the rest of the series combined.  This time around, all I can remember is that in this one, the kids talk a lot about snogging and heartbreak, and Gandalf dies.

The Hurt Locker:  Combine several solid actors, one semi-great director, one Jeremy Renner, authentic settings, and a screenwriter who didn’t bother with realism, despite talking to firsthand participants in the Iraq war, according to said firsthand participants.  Cut with tedium, Hollywood shorthand for an informed and reverential look at war (cf. Apocalypse Now, Thin Red Line, etc.).  Result: my drunk brother bailed from the theater 30 minutes in, when I’d paid steeply for his ticket, and afterward, I couldn’t even feel mad at him.  Renner’s character is addicted to adrenaline and cortisol.  I get it.  This does not a movie make; nor is it some novel observation about one of war’s possible effects on a soldier.  If you want to see a realistic, profound, indelible, multifaceted depiction of the Iraq conflict, see HBO’s Generation Kill.  If you want to see another, see Generation Kill again.  It might cost five times as much as this movie on DVD, but then again, it’s five times as eventful, five times as accurate, five times as exciting, and five times as memorable.  Jeremy Renner deserves better, but then, I’m sure he’ll eventually manage to cry himself to sleep on the huge blanket of critical praise he’s rightly been covered in.

(P.S.–I couldn’t be happier that Bigelow’s the woman who finally broke the best-director-Oscar glass ceiling.  As with many other best director awards, hers rewards a lifetime of consistently groundbreaking work, and what she attempted with Hurt Locker would qualify as high art in my book, if the subjects she depicts didn’t so richly deserve a higher level still of rich and realistic depiction than what her screenwriter brought to the table.  If you don’t feel so charitably toward soldiers, just imagine the movie were about the plight of dolphins in Japan, but repeatedly referred to them as fish–real soldiers are far more three dimensional, if not dynamic, than what Renner and his buddies are given to work with.  Yes, the bomb work is suspenseful.  No, suspense cannot replace well-crafted characters.  Sorry!  I have three close friends who served in Iraq.  Two of them loved the work as much as Renner’s William James, and one of these two was an EOD guy, who said later he’d much prefer to be sent back than to have to work as a recruiter–but that’s another story.  None of these friends are as single-minded as Renner’s character.  They are capable of falling madly in love with the danger of death, and yet also capable of coming back and loving domestic life, poker nights, deer hunting, and backyard barbecues with the neighbors.  These are real soldiers.  These are the most fascinating ones.  If you want to see some, two words: Generation Kill.)

I Love You, Man:  If Fight Club raises the question of what modern masculinity should look like, while blasting the foundations of the answer it erects, then I Love You, Man provides a more plausible answer to the same question.  In fact, the movie gets so many things right–yes, it’s hard after college to find a good male buddy; yes, men need friendships with other men as much as they need women; yes, these friendships consist of a good deal of silliness; yes, these friendships provide more than silly horseplay, they shape mens’ philosophies and character–the movie gets so many things right, it’s important to remember what it omits–that the best friendships should have the friends both devoted to something bigger than themselves.  A common goal, a common god; call it what you will, it’s what electrifies the male bonding in Fight Club, and it’s what feels absent from most modern depictions of friendship regardless of the genders involved.  Real brotherhood is born in a shared willingness to sacrifice for the same ideal.  You see that iron bond between WWII vets and their war buddies; you feel it among the major players in accounts of 1st-century Christianity; you see it at play in Fight Club, Army of Shadows, 12 Angry Men, Seven Samurai, Saving Private Ryan, Stand By Me, and The Right Stuff.  You don’t see it in scenes of two grown men playing video games together.  If your friendships consist solely of self-indulgent activities, as most modern friendships seem to, then you and your friend will know each other to be entirely selfish creatures, and therefore not worth trusting at the deepest level.  I suppose I’m eager to see a movie combine the charms of I Love You, Man‘s realistic and wholesome bromance, and Fight Club‘s caustic contempt for relationships that merely help both parties fritter their lives away.

Inglourious Basterds:  My heart is not made of stone; I can see the exquisite color with which Tarantino repaints WWII.  But seriously, this is at least QT’s fourth movie in a row built like a cherry red Ferrari around an engine of revenge–Kill Bill Vol. 1, Kill Bill Vol. 2, Death Proof, and now this.  Remember the neat way Sam Jackson’s character in  Pulp Fiction rethinks his own schtick about vengeance, and thereby achieves redemption?  Yeah, well, QT doesn’t, and each of his films is becoming more emotionally retarded than the last.  Yes, we like vengeance stories!  We also like eating Krispy Kreme donuts six at a time!  QT, that kitchen scene in Kill Bill Vol. 1 sums you up–you are a box of spilled Fruit Loops on a linoleum floor.  And I really don’t want to keep eating junk food off the floor.  Grow up.  After blowing up Hitler, you’re not going to get another free trip to the revenge fantasy well.  Maybe go spend a few years raising a kid or serving the poor, and then come back and write something new and infused with a spirit other than wrath.

The Invention of Lying:  Ricky Gervais deserved this movie, and I mean that both ways.  I love Gervais, and I loved this movie, but it’s exhibit A in how our thinking about fiction and lying is corrupt.  Fiction isn’t a form of lying; it’s hypothesizing, imagining alternate realities while knowing they’re alternate realities.  With fiction, the audience knows that what it’s being fed isn’t purely factual.  I’ve written about this in depth, because I think it’s a vital distinction. A world without lying therefore WOULD already have fiction–fiction, but no willfully deceptive Blair Witch-style marketing campaigns, and no Santa Claus lies, and no Dianetics or Book of Mormon.  The Invention of Lying gets this totally wrong.  And another thing: a world without lying, would not be a world in which people said everything they thought.  Tact and silence are not forms of deception any more than fiction is.  Being lie-free no more demands I say every hurtful thing I’m thinking, than that it demands I say every random thing I’m thinking, or every boring or obvious thing I’m thinking.  But then, if the movie recognized these distinctions, there’d be no critique possible of its lie-free world; no change needed in it; no room for a plot.  And that ultimately reveals the big lie behind The Invention of Lying–lying isn’t really necessary; fiction is, and tact is, and knowing when to shut up entirely is.  There was no intellectually honest way to make this movie.  The premise is false.  It should not have been made.  That may not be the most tactful way to put it, but at least it’s true.

Knowing:  Check out my review here.

Michael Jackson’s This Is It:  There’s a reason I’ve never heard any rumors of Jackson being a petulant brat–he’s not.  I’ve never seen someone so powerful, being so modest, polite, apologetic, gentle, and patient with those around him.  I’ve also never seen real footage of someone so close to death so full of energy and committed to their craft.  Here’s a thought: It’s amazing how much Jackson’s relationship with his father echoes the relationship of Viktor Frankenstein with his monster… in both cases, an obsessed man beyond the moral pale, used ghastly methods to give life to a totally unique creature of fantastic abilities.  In both cases, this creature resented his creator for robbing him of a natural life.  In both cases, the creature fled from and hated his creator, without ever being able to stop being exactly as his creator made him.  In both cases, the creature’s deformities reflected the abominable acts of his creator–looking at Michael’s skin bleaching and relentless rhinoplasty, one can almost hear Joe Jackson cutting his son down for his appearance, remarks that became ugly surgeries just as much as Viktor’s stitching together of various corpses.  And in both cases, the creature never was able to fit in among normal people, thus favoring the less-judgmental company of little children, with similar results.  Michael’s estate auction revealed a skillful sketch of Frankenstein’s monster he penned while on the set of The Wiz early in his career.  Later, he depicted himself as a reanimated corpse in his Thriller video.  I used to wonder why he did that, why he invested so much creative energy in that silly monster-movie premise, and cast his beautiful self as one of the undead.  Thanks to This Is It, I wonder no more.

Monsters Vs. Aliens:  When I watched this with my son, I couldn’t believe Roger Ebert felt so harshly toward it.  But now that I’m trying to remember something about it, something worth saying, I see Ebert’s point.

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian:  When Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure depicted historical figures as grossly inaccurate cartoons, we felt free to laugh, because the movie was ABOUT its protagonists’ historical illiteracy.  Battle of the Smithsonian has no such excuse.  Worse, it spends way too much time building toward a new movie trope I call the Apocalyptic Menagerie, in which a movie climaxes with a battle scene involving way too many characters and machines and creatures of implausible variety.  You know this trope.  Star Wars eps 1 and 2 are guilty of it;  Lord of the Rings: Return of the King is tainted by it (the blame in this case goes to Tolkein, and to be fair, his version of the trope came first and was done with greater skill).  Quit trying to wow me by throwing robots, ninjas, monkeys, zombies, and laser-mounted elephants in a blender and hitting the frappe key on your ILM compositing station.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop:  I’m sure I come across sometimes as way too focused on whether a film has a moral I can agree with, or a wholesome message.  But rest assured, friends, that I am just as focused on a movie having some sort of challenge or edge to it.  PB:MC fails to offend anyone in any way–it’s as round, flabby and bland as its hero.  I can imagine the pope falling asleep during this snooze.  I found myself fleeing, with Blart behind me pleading for me to halt, powerless to make me reconsider.

The Proposal:  Ryan Reynolds can do no wrong.  He’s the jock-looking, fratty guy I can’t bring myself to hate.  Here he pulls a Clooney, meaning he downplays his charm by playing a sad sack, thus ablating the audience’s envy and winning their support.  And Sandra Bullock can do no wrong, because she’s the hottest thing on two wheels.  If they’d found a believable way to show her transformation into a respectful, humbled human being, we’d have another Ten Things I Hate About You or Overboard on our hands.  Close, Hollywood rom-com machine; keep trying.

Public Enemies:  Michael Mann could direct the rescue of a kitten from a tree with as much fascination as the Other Michael can only muster by crowding a shot with a half-naked woman, two fighter jets, a sunset, and a robot exploding.  Depp’s villain here is one of his more believable roles; Christian Bale keeps up his streak of playing Christian Bale.  Watching this, I felt like I actually learned a little something about the evolution of crime and the FBI during the Depression.  Not a bad feat for an action flick.

Star Trek:  I choked up during the first five minutes.  The rest of the movie managed to be ridiculously actiony without seeming gratuitously actiony; after two viewings, I can remember clearly almost the entire plot, and every spectacle.  Thank you, J.J. Abrams, for avoiding the Apocalyptic Menagerie.  And high five for the snarky use of time-travel (branching histories subtype) to explain a reboot in the glibbest way possible.  And way to show Spock’s childhood in depth; I could have used a little more of young Kirk’s homelife, so that I could better delight in his evolution into a bold captain, having seen exactly where he got that swagger.

Terminator Salvation:  Entire books about John Connor’s future have been written.  An underrated TV show had tried a couple of fascinating narrative gambits about Skynet’s personality and John Connor’s eventual romantic feelings for a terminator possibly designed to seduce him.  The TS writers made use of none of this.  They showed zero understanding of what appeals about the Terminator franchise.  I’m reminded of when a grandmother tries to make a nightgown for her new granddaughter-in-law to wear on her wedding night–the creative choices are all wrong, because the creative inspiration is all wrong.  John Connor should have been the ONLY hero of this movie.  I’ve seen movies pile on too many villains in a third or fourth installment of a series, but this is the first time the good guy roster felt so crowded.    Also, could the TS writers not even enamor themselves of basic common sense?  A human thrown into an iron girder by a robot, crumples; he does not dent the girder and then stumble back to his feet.  And a machine whose main military goal is to kill John Connor, would not take John Connor by the throat, and then do anything other than squeeze until the man’s head popped off.  And finally, if Skynet managed to capture and then identify Kyle Reese, it wouldn’t use Kyle as bait to get John, because it could just kill Kyle and thereby erase John from history.  I wish Skynet would come back in time and erase this movie from history.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen:  The closer Michael Bay comes to creative exhaustion and self-parody, the more I respect him.  If you’ve ever heard the bands Rage Against the Machine and Atari Teenage Riot, you’ll know that the former takes itself completely seriously, while the latter takes itself psychotically seriously, and that the latter approach is far more interesting.  This flaming pile of garbage is at the same time an amazing cathedral that defines, and facilitates the worship of, post-millenial Americana.   What an amazingly disjointed fever dream of our culture in all its glory and decay.   I’m somehow totally not sorry I watched this.

Up:  The first ten minutes of this movie could never be matched by the rest of it (we’re seeing more and more of this frontloadedness in movies lately).  Carl and his house resonated with me.  Something seemed… miscast, about his young friend, and the big bird, and Doug the Dog, and the villain, his blimp, and his canine servants.  The boy and the dog never stopped annoying me.  Finding Nemo is twice the movie Up is.  The Incredibles is ten times as good.  And why?  Because in these other movies the elements seem well-matched; the characters seem destined to know each other and relate to each other as they do.  My diagnosis?  The Pixar crew’s starting to think their brainstorming sessions can do no wrong, and that any action scene is a good action scene.  Expect one of their next movies to exhibit full-blown Apocalyptic Menagerie–you heard it here first.

Watchmen:  One man would sacrifice anything for justice, even the survival of the human species.  A second man would sacrifice anything for the survival of the species,  even justice.  And a third man could do anything he imagined, but can’t find a reason to value either justice or the survival of the species.  The three men just described–Rorschact, Ozymandias, and Dr. Manhattan–form an unholy triumvirate of lost humanity as fascinating in its symmetry as anything I’ve ever seen in film narrative.  Three friends of theirs stand as witnesses to the collision of their philosophies.  Two of these witnesses, Night Owl 2 and Silk Spectre 2, are optimists, and one, the Comedian, is a cynic, but they’re united by a humility their powerful friends lack–they don’t presume to see the big picture, and thus for all their superheroism, their philosophical humility means their lives are doomed to be shaped entirely by the choices of those three men.  And so it goes: Ozymandias, who values humanity’s survival above all, commits a profound injustice in the name of ensuring that humanity survives.  Rorschact, who values justice above all, vows to undo Ozymandias’ towering feat of injustice, even if doing so places humanity back in danger of nuclear annihilation.  And Dr. Manhattan, who could provide either man with limitless aid, chooses to side with Ozymandias, who dared to treat him as a pawn, frame him as a villain, and cast him as humanity’s new God… in so doing, Dr. Manhattan chooses to thwart Rorschact, the one who never failed to see and treat him precisely as he was.  Ah, what a clockwork of ironies!  And what a hard-edged, brainy ode to the core beauty of humanity, the romantic bloom between mere mortals Night Owl 2 and Silk Spectre 2, who in the end embody the humanity that Ozymandias seeks to preserve, and the deserving innocence that Rorschact’s rigid justice can’t condemn, and the beautiful possibility that Dr. Manhattan finally discovers as a solution to his existential crisis.

Whip It!:  Ellen Page is a woman among girls.  She’s emerging as a screen presence who manages to be sexy without stain, smart without guile, flawed without guilt, confident without vanity, bold and yet modest, and all this without a lick of effort.  Interesting that the things that make her an ideal woman, are the things that would make any mature human being ideal.  Meanwhile, Whip It! comes across as a little too derivative, but only because I happen to have seen Karate Kid first.  Maybe that’s what this film really lacked–a mentor figure as profound and well-drawn as Mr. Miyagi.

World’s Greatest Dad:  Go Bobcat Goldthwait!  Seriously, everyone go track down a copy of Sleeping Dogs Lie, while I try to shake somebody down for a copy of Shakes the Clown.  Also, this movie’s further proof that Robin Williams is following a very strict diet of about six shitty movies for every one awesome movie.  But usually, his awesome movies are the dramas, and his shitty ones are the “comedies.”  This is an impressive change of pace.

This won’t be a long post because the issue is really simple:  If there really are multiple universes, then they don’t connect in time or space.  If they don’t connect to our spacetime, we can never, nobody we know can ever, verify that they exist, nor experience them; our very universe itself cannot experience or be affected in any way by them.  If otherwise, these other universes are in fact connected to ours physically, and thus are not really other universes, but parts of the same, and the universe is simply much bigger and more honeycombed than we previously imagined.  We could even grant that our universe has an infinite number of chambers, each with some big bang or crunch or wormhole umbilicus tying it to its neighbors.  But this does not allow us to escape the mystery of particularity, the mystery of why this universe exists and others do not–for even in this infinitely honeycombed universe we now propose, the connections between chambers are utterly particular, and the whole creation still exists in a particular configuration that is not identical with every other possible configuration.  To illustrate this, simply imagine an irrational number whose infinite sequence of digits might include every possible finite sequence at some point within it.  This sequence represents a simplified, one-dimensional version of our “infinitely honeycombed universe.”  Note that this irrational number is not equal to every other possible irrational number–it is just one of an infinite number of possible irrational numbers.  Why this universe exists, while others do not, still demands an explanation other than “they all exist.”