On "Knocked Up"

I don't mean to turn Not Noteworthy into a movie review repository, but some friends and I watched this one last night and I would like to comment (when do I not?).

The Good:

• Implicit anti-abortion message (at least that's what I saw).
• Demonstrates that an unexpected pregnancy is not only not the end of the world, but has potential for countless blessings.
• Importance of sacrifice for the good of family.
• Insightful criticisms of various things--superficiality of show biz, some common problems in marriages, (overly controlling, overly lax) etc.
• Funny, funny, funny, funny

The Bad:

• Another movie proclaiming the normalcy of premarital and casual sex...
• ...and irreligion.
• Seems sympathetic to adultery in some cases.
• Trots out the double-standard of chastity adults have for themselves vs. their children, while suggesting that they should be more lax toward the children than disciplined with themselves.
• Sooo much pot. Cripes, when are people going to stop believing the fantasy that this is a harmless drug?

"Crank" and Prayer

Another far-reaching movie analysis here; I recently rented "Crank" with Jason Statham and Amy Smart (I've had a huge crush on Amy Smart since seeing Rat Race).

The movie itself doesn't have anything in the way of culturally redeeming qualities. Sorry.

But it does furnish the stuff of good analogies, so I would like to make a comparison here that a priest giving a homily could probably never get away with.

The hit-man star of the movie, Chev Chelios (which, for me, conjures up images of boxes of cereal), has been poisoned in a such a way that his heart is continually slowing down until the point it will simply stop. In order for him to stay alive just long enough to get revenge, he needs anything at all that will keep it pumping, especially adrenaline; but substitutes will do for the short term (caffeine, epinephrine, etc).

Excuse me, but do we not have here a perfect image of the human condition after the Fall?

Crank depicts a man confronted with death and who is thus placed on a desperate quest for stimulation that he knows will only postpone the inevitable. Hence, all the destructive behaviors that he engages in within 24 hours represent a whole human life of soft-despair, crammed into a day.

But now I would like to turn the tables on this analogy and suggest that Chev's struggle to stay alive also can represent our own struggle to stay alive, spiritually. Our souls, our life in God, is poisoned, and each moment we find ourselves drifting oh-so-easily away into secular despair; the time between each heartbeat is just a little longer.

If we care, if we in fact seek life eternal, if we seek to rage against the dying of the light, then we must fight against our own dying to the One Light. And that means prayer. And lots of it.

An important similarity between Chev's need for adrenaline and our own souls' need for prayer is that Chev was not experiencing a desire for adrenaline; he did not hunger for the stuff; it was simply necessary. It was medicine. And thus all of his desperation - for crack, for Red Bull, for vehicular speed, for violence - grew not so much out of base passions but out of a choice--to live (even if that choice can be deconstructed into the base passion for revenge). Consider the scene where Chev is faced with a wholly sober choice: I either press my hand in the waffle iron, or I die. Would that we could share that clarity of vision with respect to prayer!

Our souls crave prayer like our lungs crave air, but our souls are immaterial; their desire is made known only through the intellect, not the base passions. Thus, spiritually dead profligation is possible (though it leads to one's life participating a bit in Chev Chelios' more literal reality). Thus the choice to live, spiritually, is a sober choice, even more sober than Chev's option with the waffle iron. Sometimes the struggle to pray is a kind of spiritual waffle iron into which we must thrust our accedia, and scream as it burns and sizzles, yet only then be rewarded with the knowledge that - yes - I will live, spiritually, another day.

The morality of pretend.

I'm still playing Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and for the first time since I bought it a year ago I'm playing it in earnest. I "power-leveled" a character right at the beginning, which means that I took several days before starting the first quest doing nothing but building up the character's stats representing how good he is at various tasks.

In most games, doing this makes the game very easy; you walk around with a Zeus that can just glide through the game, make monkeys out of all those evil-looking bosses, and sit back and casually watch all the pretty cut-scenes. I like to play this way. But Oblivion is different because when your character levels, the world levels with you. While some quests are easier than they would be, others are ridiculously tough.

Anyway, that's not what I'm writing about. My question is, what is the point at which pretend evil becomes real evil? I ask this because certain video games, including Oblivion, at times encourage the player's character to do profoundly evil deeds. Certainly, any game featuring violence shows a certain callousness towards the finer points of moral theology. But some games, for example the original Legacy of Kain, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Grand Theft Auto, and Oblivion, provide opportunities for your character not only to use disproportionate force to defend himself from evil creatures, but also to unambiguously lie, steal, abuse, and commit virtual murder.

Right now in Oblivion, my character has joined an assassination cult called the "Dark Brotherhood." The Brotherhood's "theology" is interesting in itself because it is monotheistic amid a fantasy world governed by polytheistic religions, only "God" is evil and delights in death; I suppose one might consider it gnostic in this sense. But it is curious because some of the dialogue seems to echo issues that then-Ratzinger brought up in his Introduction to Christianity about the advent of monotheistic faith.

For the most part, my character's contracts have been against people who aren't particularly likable, which I'm sure is by design--the game eases you into the idea of murder by making your victims out to be villains, just like the slasher movies of the 1980's made sure that none of the doomed teenage cattle would be missed. However, from reading online guides, I know that one quest my character will soon be given involves the murder of an entire family which is absolutely blameless--again by design. The game wants to take you on a trip to nihilism.

The Pope has recently condemned all manner of violent and culture-less forms of media and entertainment. "Any trend to produce programs and products – including animated films and video games – which in the name of entertainment exalt violence and portray anti-social behavior or the trivialization of human sexuality is a perversion, all the more repulsive when these programs are directed at children and adolescents.” (Link). His primary concern seems to be the formation of the consciences of children (and most of the games I mentioned above have at least "M" ratings, forcing many game stores to check IDs before they are sold).

I think perhaps a more helpful reference point would be any other form of play or pretend. Consider adults who reenact Civil War battles, "cosplay" at comic conventions, etc; or even professional acting. Mature people are able to participate in a fiction which sometimes calls on individuals to play-act at doing profoundly evil deeds. In the case of professionals, the seriousness of their skill demands immersion and thus a participation in evil thinking which must be less than comfortable. And I am referring as much to Shakespeare as I am to less culturally redeeming modern films.

Hm. I have more to write, but it's off to my little brother's graduation! What are your thoughts?

Some thoughts on "28 Weeks Later"

Brother Thomas and I saw "28 Days Later" when it came out in Belgium a good year earlier than it was released in the United States. At that time it wasn't clear that we were watching a zombie movie until, well, the zombies showed up. I still remember then Gregory's reaction--"it was a freakin' zombie movie!"--since what had attracted us both to the film were the post-apocalyptic images of London, not the blood and guts of the second half of the film.

(Some time later, I got a kick out of making gutteral zombie throat noises in the dark hallway outside of our rooms, right in the ear of an unsuspecting Gregory. Ecgh! Ecchhhcg! Not the only time I played cruel jokes on him.)

I was excited to see 28 Weeks Later, upon seeing that the reviews were favorable. I have some thoughts (CAUTION: SPOILERS):

• The sequel is more predictable and Hollywood-ish than the first film. I knew, as soon as the story focused on a small group of survivors, that everybody was doomed except for the children and, perhaps, the attractive woman. I also knew that the upstanding, handsome American soldier would die in an act of heroic self-sacrifice.
• I focussed on the black chopper pilate to see whether this movie would kill him off. Mainstream movies still don't know what to do with black characters, so they either kill them off, make them into black stereotypes, or turn them into mysterious "gatekeeper" figures that, as such, do not require a personality). In truth, this movie did a little bit of all three.
• SPOILER: Twist ending was neat; a little tacked on, but actually makes me salivate for the third movie. It also dragged this movie out of sheer cliche-ness. Makes it a tragedy in the true Shakespearean sense, if you catch my drift.
• The most ubelievable part of the film was that they would even think about resettling the country less than a year after the disaster.
• SPOILER: Plot hole. The Rage virus is a blood pathogen. The infected wife kissing her husband (with no notable open wounds in either) shouldn't have turned him into a zombie.
• There's some screwy logic going into both movies about the nature of the zombies. The lore seems confused about their motivation. They're not actually hungry, since they don't actually eat their victims--they just bite, and bite somebody else, and bite somebody else. Hence how the infecteds died from starvation after the first film. If they were true cannibals, it would have taken the original infestation longer to die out than it did. It's as if the infected's "purpose" is neither mindless rage nor carnivorous hunger but simply spreading the disease. Some have commented on the strangeness that the infecteds do not attack each other; this may have less to do with intelligence or society (Ala Romero's recent zombie movie) than perhaps a kind of built-in repulsion between infecteds. They run in groups because they have common targets, no other reason. The hole in this theory is that (SPOILER) the infected husband attacked his infected wife. But that was different, perhaps, because his infected wife was just a carrier and thus may not have been emitting whatever repulsion is effective between infecteds.
• On a more relevant note, I do believe in angels and their fallen counterparts, and I have explored a notion that devils are in a sense just like spiritual "infecteds". Perfect Love, and Perfect Freedom, are IMO synonyms for God and they are synonyms for salvation. In the films, to be infected is to have your entire being possessed by a single purpose, destruction. There are important differences between devils and infecteds, but the key similarity is that their wills are entirely collapsed into hatred; they cannot not destroy. The key difference is that devils have freely forfeited their wills; and also that they hunger as much for self-destruction as for the destruction of others. The infecteds fail to be a stronger analogy just because of plot points in place to make the films scarier. But the fact that infecteds are still technically alive make them a curious analogue to the devils we see possess people in other movies and that we read about in books. To be evil is to be reduced to the barest thread of existence, and to hate even that thread. Despair turns to rage, and rage to murder. Murder and suicide are kin.