Resting.

Check back with me from time to time.  Old Son resting.

Love & Blessings in the New Year.

Film: Bella

Bella is a beautiful film, a film that works for the tender hearted. When I came out of graduate school I thought it my academic duty to teach students the heady difference between “real” literature/film and sentimentality, that snake in the lush garden always ready to tempt the softhearted away from the darker, brain-stressing mind nutrients.

Shortly into my stay at Ricks College, a sojourn that lasted 37 years, I read a C.S. Lewis’ essay on the problem of sentimentality in literature [and film]. He cautioned young professors like myself who were spending a lot of time “professing” the dangers of too much heart.  While reading I found these lines, which changed my approach in a mere 5 minutes. “We teachers are not in the business of clearing a forest, but in the business of planting trees.”

I looked at my students that next hour. Lewis was right. I wasn’t looking at a rain forest. I found myself in the Gobi desert.

My colleagues and friends know that I have always loved the life of the mind and the life in the mind. Yes, let me admit, however, the painful truth: The best literature is cerebral.  I love Bedford Falls, but I know that is not the world of The Brothers Karamazov, a world accessible only by way of that enigmatic genius, Dostoyevsky. And often, as Liz Lemon [Tina Fey; “30 Rock”] says, “I want to go to there.”

Bella is not the turbulent world of the Karamazovs, but it is about some of the same human emotions:  Love, hope, and, most of all, forgiveness. Add Bella to your Christmas film list; join a wonderful Hispanic-American family and take them to London, to Bob Cratchet’s or to Bedford Falls. We’ll break tradition and have a goose or turkey tacos. We’ll ask Jimmy Stewart to do an imitation of Jimmy Stewart. And our hearts will leap with joy.

Jose, played by Mexico’s answer to George Clooney, Eduardo Verastegual, leads us on a journey from a promising soccer career--through a fatal accident--to his brother’s kitchen as a gourmet cook--and finally to Nina [Tammy Blanchard], to love and forgiveness.

Meet Jose’s family: Warm, full of laughter and joy. Who else but our Hispanic brothers and sisters would interrupt a meal to start dancing? Well, our black brothers and sisters would, wouldn’t they? Don’t we need that pepper in our bland daily broth? Does anyone play classical music while eating these days? Or is everyone texting and taking calls from the office?

Because Jose, always in his chef’s whites, his flowing black beard, sitting in the sand, his eyes resting not on the Sea of Galilee but the Pacific Ocean, clearly fills the soul of Savior, we look for Saving.

And we find it. Who is Mary? Who is the oblique reference to the Christ child? And what of family, especially the parents?  Jose’s mother, the Earth Mother, her warm lap where a broken and confused Joseph weeps.

Cap your Christmas with Bella. You may even feel like calling your sister or brother. You know, the girl you grew up with, who washed your face and probably changed your diapers.

Wish her a Merry Christmas. Tell her she’s the “Bella” in your life. 

Film: The Return

Many of you know of the famous French tale, based on an earlier case in France in the mid-16^th century. In the famous 1983 French film, Martin Guerre returns after many years away but has trouble convincing the villagers that he is truly Guerre.

The Return, a later version, in Russian, reworked, appeared in 2003 and is available on Netflix in the foreign film section. Easily accessible, you can stream by pushing a button.

The film could have been shot in black and white. If there is a musical score, it passes in and out of your ears without memory. The sounds you remember are the natural sounds of nature: a hatchet chopping wood, water splashing against a shore, and the pull of the oars through water.  Nature sounds.

When the “father” returns after 12 years, he meets near total silence. The wife says fewer than 50 words in the film, the husband less than 200. The two sons, Andrei and Ivan, do all the talking and all the speculating.

So what can such a film be about that makes it worth 90 minutes of our time? The focus centers on the boys—on their relationship and on their coming to grips with the “lost” father. We watch them and listen to them respond to him while on a failed fishing trip. They visit an island instead. Apparently, he has bigger fish to fry, but he says off-handedly that he “doesn’t like fish.” What gives?

The hints about who he was and where he went come through the sons.  But don’t look for anything overt. Their world is covered in clouds and mist, appropriate symbols, the shroud that covers the father’s identity.

What, then, is the larger meaning here? One theme explores anxiety separation. What happens to children when the father leaves? He may not be Russian Special Ops or a criminal [there are hints]. Social scientists tell us the single most traumatic event in a child’s life is loss of the father—for any reasons.

Both Ivan and Andrei are losing their moorings when the film opens. They are living dangerously. Secondly, where is the communication in this family, and what does the film teach us about talking to each other? The aunt does not speak at all. At their first breakfast, the father merely says “hello.”

A third, deeper possibility, is the Freudian notion of “the search for the father.” For Freud, an atheist, who did not go deeply enough and religiously enough, missed the point. On the emotional-psychological level, there is that ongoing search for a/The Father. Lose him and you have a vacuum to fill, which creates Freud’s laundry list of childhood traumas, some of them sexual in nature.

But I reject Freud here and seek a deeper religious answer. Yes, we seek The Father, the Father of us all. That core archetype is where our meaning and fulfillment lie. Our spiritual journey is an effort to return to The Father---a road of trials, a yoke both heavy and light to bear. The paradox depends on what kind of day you’re having. As my granddaughter, Ashley says, “it’s all in the journey.”

Finally, perhaps the film helps us examine in a displaced way the trauma children feel when parents who separate come back together. Perhaps, it dramatizes the return of the father from Iraq or prison or desertion from the family itself.

In any case, the father’s inscrutability, the vague, even fragile replacement by the aunt and the mother, and the growing Cain and Abel animosity between the brothers leaves us with a breach that does not close in the film.

Can we bridge such emotional gaps in our own lives? A returning college student for Christmas experiences the readjustment to what he was and what he has become in 15 short weeks.

Or what of the LDS missionary who attempts to transition from Mexico City to Simi Valley, California? Things have changed. Perhaps the “girl” is gone and the wounds are deep. And perhaps as so-called adults, we take that very pain too lightly.  Finally, there is the returning serviceman.

Can you set up an outpost, say, Restrepo [a famous documentary now on Netflix] and be the same? A Dutch documentary [also on Netflix] follows a squad of 12 men to Afghanistan, to what they collectively call, “The Hellhole of the world.”

They arrive home: one dead, three wounded. Within a year, 8 of the original 12 returned to Afghanistan.  One fair-haired Dutchman asks, "How can Holland now make use of a man who can only fire an M-60 machine gun?"

Yes, departures are hard.  Are returns any easier?

Film: After the Wedding

Those of us who are married know that the wedding is the easy part of marriage. After the lovely mess has been cleaned up, we face the “after,” which is, to be sure, where the real marriage begins. Here is where our film focuses: After the Wedding.

There’s a message even in that insight: once the ceremony celebrating, any ritual event is over, we return to the real world.  The Eagle Scout wakes up a pinch different; the departing missionary sports a new suit and tie, etc., and puts on the battle badge.  The Green Beret paints his face and jumps into the “work of death.”

What happens, then, when the woman you love but have in your endless drifting, lost track of her, only to find her married, blessed with two young bouncing Danish tow-heads and a daughter, much older, say 18, about to marry.

And you’re invited. Then her father offers your orphanage enough money to keep going, to survive, maintaining that oasis in the middle of New Delhi, teeming with hungry children.

Watch this chess game for real stakes played out by Jergen, the father of the children. You’ll find yourself studying Jacob’s [the great Danish giant, Mad Mikkelsen] every move and always his eyes. The musical score evades you 5 minutes after the film but the camera work is excellent, carried out, of course, in that Bergmanesque manner. Apparently Scandinavians like to look you in the eye. Perhaps they don’t. That’s why Bergman would not take the camera off the eyes. The windows of the soul.

In fact, film buffs become detectives. We like to look for hints. You accomplished chess players, in keeping with our chess motif, will enjoy following the moves.

Jergen is the power piece, and he controls the center of the board. Jacob sees himself unfairly as a pawn. The object in this chess game, however, is not to hunt the King and kill him. The idea is to orchestrate the board into a balanced, aesthetically pleasing arrangement.

What would you do if you had great resources, but “time’s winged chariot” was at your heels, relentless in her pursuit, soon to scoop you away after running over you, into the heavens, into peace?

The full impact of that moment brings the best out of Rolf Lassgard. And it is as fine an acting moment you will see, even in George Clooney’s breakdown in Descendants.

Imagine yourself empowered to do this good thing.  My skeptic friends would say, “look at history, look at human nature, look at your own sacred texts’: “We have learned by sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, . . . they will exercise unrighteous dominion” [italics added].

It doesn’t say all men [and women]; it says “almost all men.” Jergen is not one of those men, whatever his faults.

Book: The Sea

Somewhere in your mind rings a line, “Let us go down to the sea again. . . ” John Banville, an Irish writer, born at the end of WWII, wrote his novel, The Sea in  2005. That’s 6 years ago, but I choose him, not because he’s “hot off the press,” in the days when the presses were really rolling. He’s written a half a dozen additional books. This one works for me. The other five sit on the shelf. Let’s see what happens. I know The Shroud will not, so skip it.

Banville’s prose is exuberant, flowing, yet penetrating. You could read a line like this aloud in the middle of the night when Mr. Sleep doesn’t arrive and you’re eating chips and looking at a crack in the ceiling. Here, for example, is Banville's heady but plangent prose. Adolescent Max allows his imagination to float over Connie Grace, his friend Chloe’s mother.  Such stirrings are not uncommon. Sometimes a boy sees a woman before he sees a girl.

“She is in my memory her own avatar.” Then Banville wrestles with the book’s theme: What is the role of the past in our lives and how real and regenerative is it? “Which is more real, he asks us, the woman reclining on the grassy bank of my recollections. Or the strew of dust and dried marrow that is all the earth any longer retains of her?” Banville begs us to give place sometimes to our past. The Past is Light; the Present is Darkness.

And so Max battles with past and present. Anna, his wife, dies of cancer. He returns to the little coastal village away from Dublin. Can he solve the  problems that plague him?

In The Sea I had hoped for a solid father-daughter relationship such as my own with my three daughters. I didn’t get it in the film, The Descendants, and it’s a fragile work in progress in The Sea. Ironically, and most commonly with women, The Woman saves. Claire, Matt’s daughter, a female St. Sebastian, riddled with arrows of failed love, outlasts her drinking father’s immaturity and emerges, now stronger and centered by the end of the novel, than Anna, her mother. She takes Max, near dead from alcohol poisoning to her home, cleans out the liquor, refuses to sell her childhood home and marries. This blossoming into womanhood is more convincing than Alex’s so-called coming of age moments in the film, The Descendants, a film the press wants for the Academy Awards.

Anna and Max, our flawed couple and parents of Claire, are two floating creatures in the sea of life. More like jellyfish. Anna drifts, content to be a vague Mischung of all the other people she knows. Max tells us she—all of us—is “defined and have our being through others.”

Try working that statement through while you walk the dog or are helping your wife clean the kitchen. Allow your mind to plow the “sea-scenes” of your life—yes, the deep, abiding relationships that have “made” you what you are. I speak of the people in your past who impact even to this very day.

How much of your wife is in you? Your grandfather in you? Her aunt in her? Beyond this little mind game, however, Banville questions—and fails—to challenge my own notion of a core self. Sociobiologists love this problem. Gallons of coffee and hours of much-needed sleep have been spent in student eateries over this one. And when your own children come into your life, you continue to wrestle, as Jacob’s struggles with his angel. “Honey, who is the child? Where did she come from?”  Your wife calmly answers, “she is your daughter but she is more like your grandmother.” Complicated!

We can’t solve Max’s question quickly for ourselves, but for Max, there is never a complete answer. "Be  somebody," Anna yells, "Be anybody you want!" Then continues, "I am what I want to be, and what I don’t want to be." Max has no moorings; he drifts with the tide. As William Yeats, the Irish poet says, “The center will not hold.” Max is a spiritual drifter, pulled by the life-tides and occasionally bitten by deep ocean monsters.

And that same restless tides of time and water, wash both the twins, his friends, Myles and Chloe [second “love”] beyond help and down into the dark depths of a sea-death. Like Siamese twins, they are locked together in life and in death.

Banville, then, lays out some interesting questions about the past and the present for us to digest.  The novel spoke to me because I’m an incurable, untreatable Romantic. My own acute memory, one of my few gifts, has kept the Past alive in me.

That force field of memory feeds my deep affection for others. I bring the past, which is always with me, into the present. And because I believe in an endless Future, I will never suffer Max's trauma. The trifecta of these three time zones fuse and make people fascinating for me and worth knowing and loving. When I say, “thanks for being in my life,” I really mean it.

When I return to my own imaginary cottage by the Irish Sea, I’ll take all three worlds with me.

And ask you to come along.

Film: Electric Shadows, Part II

I finalize Part II with a suggestion. Thoreau spoke of active listening as well as active talking. What about interactive reading and watching of films?

Call me mad, but the early monks of the Franciscan order directed the sacred text to themselves. They read aloud, alone, engaging in a dialogue with the words. “Let not the sun go down on your wrath.” Lord, I went to bed last night, angry with Abba Tomas; we don’t agree about how loud the liturgy should be sung. What happens inside my heart if I defer and sing louder, as he wishes?

“Please, let the sun not set on my now uneasy heart.” Peaceful, relevant application. And so what of film? What does Ling Ling find in film that life cannot provide? How does film finally bring her and her Maoist-frenzied childhood friend together [in a park, near water, of course]? Born a child of disgrace, she becomes jealous of  her baby brother, born to her mother and new father, “Uncle Pan,” the projectionist for the popular outdoor films he shows each night. When she does more to attract her parent’s attention, she receives a beating, which leaves her deaf.

Because films order the world in two hours, they are an order principle in our own lives. Of course we suspend time and logic. If we can’t, go ahead and read a book on physics and forget the film. She becomes a runaway, living, ironically, down the street from her parents. She writes in her journal, “if my life were a movie, I’d be the only one watching it.” Loneliness? I think of those lines when I write one of these blogs. This insight, easily topped by the famous Groucho Marx lament: “I wouldn’t want to be a member of any club that would have me for a member.” Electric Shadows captures loneliness, deafness, alienation, but it also captures love and reconciliation.  Let the camera do its work as it helps you pick up the hints.

Jiang also helps us with symbols:  Cameras, film, binoculars—all capturing the theme of perception and misperception. Here comes the old Scot, Robert Burns: “O would power gie us, the gift to see ourselves as eithers see us.” That honing of the senses begins with film when they are very young.

While my mother and I walked home from My Foolish Heart, I kept thinking about something children can’t get their minds around:  Love. How could the beautiful Susan Hayworth weep so much over a man, now gone? I was 8 at the time.

Ok, I admit it. In my privacy while watching Electric Shadows, I put myself in the film. How would I have treated the outcast and beautiful Jiang Yihong, disgraced by a pregnancy, deserted by her lover, a Red Guard enthusiast, more obsessed with a fat man who killed hundreds of thousands of people as Chairman and wrote 20 pages of political and economic nonsense that sent an entire nation into madness, than the woman he loves, the child, the new little human who is his responsibility?

Could I escape the rabid world of the Red Revolution? Would I have ceased being human had I lived then?

How precious are the shadows that invade my mind, as I lie abed, drifting into sleep. How could that angel wife of mine and I join forces and help such “fallen” souls? How would we help mend broken hearts and deep wounds of those hearts and souls? Well, first, we would want a landscape as background—a brook, trees, and a little bridge, a place to sit. We’ll need the mothers and fathers of such lost runaways. Carolyn, critical in these tender moments, would hold the crying woman without a mother. She would lay her head on her lap and stroke her forehead.  I would sit near, and in perfect Cantonese I would begin the words of comfort.

“You are not really responsible for all of this.  Let me tell you the rest of your story--the part you don’t know. .  . .”

Film: Electric Shadows, Part I

How is the weather where you are?  My Idaho friends are watching the red line head for zero. Here in Austin, we’ve had rain but pray and dance for more. We need a drought-buster! Cold, overcast and windy.  A perfect day for a film.

Let me suggest the Chinese version of Woody Allen’s, The Purple Rose of Cairo. The Mia Farrow character, who has nothing in her life but her imagination at the local theater, literally loses herself in the film.  Finally, the Jeff Daniels character joyfully steps off the screen, walks down the aisle, takes her by the hand, and they walk out of the theater and into life.  The question Xiao Jiang raises in his first directed film, Electric Shadows, is what is the role of the imagination in our lives?

You think that is a non-question, or one you’re too busy to answer during the Christmas rush.  Really? Your children, well the children in my time, “dreamed with visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads.” Actually, I’ve never seen a sugarplum and have never bought a single plum that I could eat. Too sour. Beware of such promising fruit as apricots and plums, unless someone is lucky enough to live south enough to grow them.

Ask yourself while you’re unloading all those electronic machines just what your children are dreaming about. Forget the sugarplums. Your children want more screens, more ways to escape into a world of imagination ready-made for them. They don’t have to slip into those “free and easy, apple orchard days” Dylan Thomas, the poet writes about.

A new Apple will soon replace those “apple orchard” dreams. Your children are entering a world Aldous Huxley already built for you in 1936:  A Brave New World. The new virtual reality isn’t even your own God-endowed mind moving you to other worlds of thought. The “Feelies,” he wrote of, will take you into a tactile experience more real than their minds could ever mold.

Sad—and true.  Does the human imagination have a function beyond escape? A friend of mine said that she didn’t think I would have “survived my life as I have without my lively imagination.”

Let’s settle for her definition: Imagination enables us to survive. Of course, a twisted, corrupted imagination sends us to crime, prison and death. Or if we high center on that screen filled with impossibly half-clad women [also seen on airport paperbacks], we are simply paralyzed. Those gals are not real, anyway:  They are pixels, dots that shape an image. You’ve fallen in lust with an idol.

I plea for a richly textured religious imagination. Such a shaping force builds a possible world for me:  One that is lively, inspiring. That shaping force William Coleridge, companion to William Wordsworth and poet, said the imagination is “esemplastic”—it shapes and informs our experiences.

Faith without an imagination is a kind of vague hope—a desperate trust. Our religious life without imagination is an exercise in patience, a plodding, trekking towards something about as real as a mirage.

Last night Elder Eyring added pictures to his Christmas devotional message. What happened?  We see Mary now. Beautiful, pure, dark hair [of course, she lives in Palestine], her skin clear [but not as brown as it really was]. We see the authentic looking blue dress. We see Gabriel enveloped in light, speaking. We watch Mary journey to Elizabeth, managing her own miracle. Mary lays her head in her cousin’s lap. Two women bound together for cosmic comfort—a moment in a sand-swept village, flies buzzing, the simple bread lunch and a small glass of wine.

Wombs of destiny.