More thoughts on Non-Violence (1)

If you ask me 'How did Jesus raise the dead?' I will kiss you on the lips, and say 'like this'. -    13th century Persian (Iranian) poet, Rumi

Last year heralded several important anniversaries, some of which were passed over with a little more nonchalance than I had expected.   1968 was not only the best year at the movies for the whole decade – seeing the release of 2001, The Wild Bunch, and Planet of the Apes, among others, but far more seriously, it saw the deaths of three towering late twentieth century figures.  If they had lived, it cannot be stressed highly enough just how different the world might be today.  Of course I'm talking about  Rev. Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.,  Senator Robert F Kennedy, and Brother Thomas Merton.  Many of us are hoping for a recovery of their visions for the good society, in which human beings recognize their interdependence, and are more interested in being rich inside than out.

One first step toward this recovery must be toward a serious engagement with non-violence as a way of life.  I’m going to use some of my next few posts to discuss this.  Everyone knows the teaching ‘Turn the other cheek’.  It is both a universally familiar, but not always practiced belief, with which almost everyone agrees, yet it might be reasonable to wonder if in fact no one knows what to do with it.  More than that, the attitude displayed in ‘turn the other cheek’ is considered, in our world, at best unpopular, at worst treacherous. I think one of the most pressing questions of our time is how to capture the public imagination with a vision for non-violence and negotiation that appears at least as compelling as the vision for war and belligerence presented by politicians, pro-violence religious figures, and elements of the media.

War, and other aggressive conflict – put simply – looks more exciting than peace.  In some respects, it looks more real, for peace, and peace-making are so often portrayed as ‘non-events’.  War – rhetorically and of course very literally – is where the action is at.

This is our starting point for reflecting on non-violence as a way of life.

If you ask me 'How did Jesus raise the dead?' I will kiss you on the lips, and say 'like this'. -    13th century Persian (Iranian) poet, Rumi

Photo above from www.maryt.wordpress.com

The What If? Foundation

Margaret Trost founded the What If?  foundation to engage with deeply distressing need in Haiti in the aftermath of her husband's sudden death.  She has redefined her future; the story of what happened next is a moving and inspirational combination of chance and compassion.  The What If? foundation is one of the most exciting examples of concrete social action happening anywhere today.  Find out more about the foundation here; a lovely interview with Margaret Trost on Progressive Radio here.

Has Anyone Actually Seen 'Watchmen'?

Thoughts from Kevin Boyd of the University of Chicago Divinity School on the most under-criticised film of the year:

" Watchmen directly asks what no other superhero movie has ever had the courage or audacity to posit: Is society actually worth saving? In this sense Watchmen is not just about the flawed psychologies of its costumed adventurers; it is perhaps the first superhero movie to take the concept of universal sin seriously. The traditional superhero film employs a formulaic template: Evil threatens the established social order until good intervenes. The roles of good and evil are clearly and easily defined. This simple narrative structure is built on two premises that, until recently, have gone unchallenged in the genre. The first is the unambiguous coupling of the hero with the moral good and the villain with moral evil ... The second premise, though, has until now remained virtually unassailable, and it is this element that makes Watchmen so interesting and so difficult to digest. The second premise is that society is worth saving, that the social order under threat is worthy of salvation. In most previous superhero films the desire to uphold the social order is simply taken as a given – society is good and it must be saved from the threat of evil. But in Watchmen the immediate crisis of mutually assured nuclear destruction is not caused by one discreet individual; there is no named villain. Instead, the threat is posed by the morally bankrupt social order itself. Evil is not external to the social order; it is characteristic of it. As Watchmen member Rorschach states, “The world will look up and shout ‘Save us!’... And I'll whisper ‘No.’” ... In a particularly poignant moment in the film, the hero Night Owl looks out on a murderous rampage by the sadistic hero (and his co-Watchman) The Comedian and asks, “What happened to the American Dream?” The Comedian responds, “It came true. You’re looking at it.”

In our current world of political discourse and economic crises, perhaps The Comedian’s response hits a little too close to home. Situated between a “war on terror” and world-wide economic collapse we inhabit a time where sin feels omnipresent. What we lack is a robust way to speak about it. We’ve lost the Niebuhrian sense of ourselves as our own most vexing problem. And yet just as the neo-orthodox theologians resurrected the notion of human sin in response to world war, so too must we find new ways to name and speak of our experiences; in a fashion, films like this are the first steps in such a process because they show a world saturated in sin – a world that is sometimes uncomfortably too like our own. The film offers no easy answers, though. After all, the dominant narrative voice that structures most of the action is that of Rorschach, in every sense an absolutist and a fascist. We might think of Watchmen as the first segment of a traditional jeremiad, a literary text lamenting the moral failure of society and warning of its ultimate collapse without immediate and genuine repentance – but given the extreme pessimism of Watchmen’s anthropology one must wonder whether society, even when violently compelled, is capable of sustaining the momentum towards such repentance. The unsettled feeling many experience leaving the theater may come from the fact that this film, perhaps for the first time in the superhero genre, hints that it might already be too late to stop the Doomsday Clock."

Penelope Cruz was Robbed. By Penelope Cruz. (Or Love and Death with Pen and Ben)

Through the magic of Netflix Watch Instantly - which seems to be delivering much better quality image than it used to - tonight I saw one of the films I had been eager to catch last year but missed due to unhelpful film distribution patterns/other commitments/laziness.  'Elegy', a film based on a Philip Roth story, with Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz as lovers, Dennis Hopper as Kingsley's best friend, Deborah Harry as Hopper's wife, Patricia Clarkson as Kingsley's long term girlfriend, and Peter Sarsgaard as Kingsley's son proclaims itself a desirable prospect from its casting alone.  Its director, Isabel Coixet, made two of the best interior dramas of the past few years in 'The Secret Life of Words' and 'My Life Without Me'.

It's a gorgeous film, thoughtful and ruminative about life and love, ageing and death; a film in which the New York of Woody Allen's serious side is a character (even though the movie was shot mostly in Vancouver).  It's about what happens when a person prefers their career over being with other people; when one allows even a little celebrity to take over the priorities of human relationships; when a person believes their own propaganda.

It's also about cities and how they can affect people - in this movie they look at each other through windows, across courtyards, in nightclubs and taxis, and they're scared to say what they think or even to really know what they want.  But maybe not always.

Of course, Philip Roth is known for being a serious man - too serious, according to his ex-wife Claire Bloom's extremely sad memoir - and this is a film based on a novel called 'The Dying Animal', so don't expect an adrenaline-fuelled thrill ride.   Actually, maybe that's not a bad description, for 'Elegy' is an exhilirating piece of work, utterly gripping, full of life despite, being rooted in its emotional context, which is in the shade, to say the least.  And, to explain the title of this post, all the performances are excellent - these people feel real.  Ben Kingsley enunciates like he's going to die if he speaks too quickly; his posture implies a sense of such fear that he'll lose everything that you want to reach out and tickle him or send him to a hospital.  Penelope Cruz in particular re-asserts the vulnerability she showed in 'Abre los Ojos' and its remake 'Vanilla Sky'.  My genial co-host at www.thefilmtalk.com and I were mightily disappointed by 'Vicky Cristina Barcelona', for which Cruz won an Oscar.  Not that I begrudge people winning prizes, but she stole that one from herself.

Something Really Unusual Is Happening

An op-ed in today's New York Times in the form of an AIG resignation letter, and an article in this month's Vanity Fair, re-evaluating the American Dream, raise questions rather than offering overly simplistic answers.  Most interesting question: What do people think the Dream is?  If it's changing the world, then Dr King and Donald Trump could both be seen as people who achieved it, in spite of the wide qualitative chasm between the meanings of their lives.  If it's winning a popularity contest, then let's take Barack Obama and Jennifer Hudson too.  Throw in a little Lance Armstrong and any number of other folk known for triumph over adversity and you've got your American Dream right there.  Although if you look at the amazing photographs from the 1950s in the VF article you're quickly reminded that until not so long ago the Dream was nothing more than home ownership, a mid-sized family, and all the Coke you could drink.

Was the American Dream always about one man making it big for himself and his family? (Let's not pretend that it was a gender-neutral dream.) Or was there something a little more, dare we say it, 'communitarian' going on under the surface?  Think about the Old West - whose colonisation was certainly one of the earliest incarnations of the Dream...Sure, people killed each other in the race to the frontier, but they may also have met each other's needs - shelter for the night, food when it was needed; people ultimately defining their units of concern more widely than a mythical nuclear family which did not yet exist.

As for today, whatever is really going on right now, the fact that a serious conversation about the moral dimensions of economics is not only underway in public, but not considered an embarrassment in polite company, well, it's a start.  Let me add my inflation-busting two-cents with a brief hypothesis: The American Dream is dead.  The rest of the world has an American Dream: one often hidden under antagonistic sentiment toward our misunderstood fifty-state brothers and sisters.  It's a dream that America might stand for what it has done so often in literary and cinematic myths: a tune that goes something like this:

We're-All-In-This-Together

The American Dream is dead.  But that doesn't mean we can't dream a new one.