Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Evan Almighty - from slave of images to slave of... well, concepts...

I had put this film on the "non-interesting" category, but today I wanted something light and futile so I went ahead and saw the frightful thing. I had love Bruce Almighty and I was sorry to see something so shallow in its stead. But, well, after all it showed to be a very interesting movie and it made me think a lot.

The movie starts by depicting a way of life in which one is a slave to pleasing others, image is all that matters. The "metroman" the congressman, the vip. To have success you must seem successful, and powerful, handsome and happy. The perfect life that leads you to... being a slave.

It then goes on to another side of life in which you try to do things not because you are a slave to what you think others might think of you, but because...

Well, here is where the confusion starts, whereas in the "Bruce Almighty" everything followed plausibly once you accepted you had absolute power, here we are at a loss. First of all the premise is quite obscure. An all powerful, omniscient and loving God asks for someone to do an ark without giving any explanation. Why does God do that? Is psychology remains a mystery. In the film it is said by God himself that the story of the ark is a love story, of believing, of trust. Well, ok, so instead of being a slave to the image that other's might have of me, I'm slave to God.

What's the difference, well, in the movie, the difference is that you gain others' amazement at your abilities. You ty to do something that is almost impossible, completely illogical, and you achieve it! Animals obey to you, you predict the weather with incredible precision and so forth. You became a star all over the nation.

This shows the shallowness of the message, people are not released of their desire to be accepted by others. In fact it is the same desire for fame, only the strategy to get it changes.

Of course, there are differences, the dramatic change in outllok is accompanied by a change in eye gaze, posture, way of speaking and interacting. What changed was the master, because he is no longer a slave to physical persons but to an abstract entity, he can now be more detached. When his family finally reapers to be "side by side" he looks a sea of tranquility in which a few drops have touched. Why? Because his stewardship remains elsewhere. He seems free but he did not become free. He traded one slavery for another, just to get more profits.

This is our hero, completely at loss, but God seems equally at loss here. What exactly is he trying to do? Well, supposedly He is giving an opportunity, for us to achieve whatever we want to achieve. If we want to be courageous God give us a chance to show our courage, if we want to change the world God gives us a chance to change the world. Well what if I want to play baseball on the moon? I mean, is this the way we imagine the world to be like? I always thought things were much more complex, an interrelation of stories into which we are mysteriously attracted.

The sequence of events is of course completely implausible, unless you think the Bible is a plausible book! And even if we take them as metaphors for something much more subtle it is difficult to imagine something different from a paranoid life in which everything seems to revolve around us!

The word "ark", in the end of the film is associated with "act of random kindness", which is in fact something quite beautiful. But seeing signs of things that must be done, the difficulty in recognizing, in front of everyone that "I" speak with God and he replies etc, all these things seem to inhabit the life of some obsession.

For instance, when we say that we are inspired by beauty, by ideals of freedom, by music, by nature, etc, this inspiration is not something that puts us into chains. It is something that release us. Inspiration is not a prison, a collar, a chain, it is a trampoline, and when you take it, there is a large part of you that has to decide where to take that energy, what to make of the jump, where to land, etc. Things are given to us and obviously we should appreciate them well, but the idea that we have a mission is the root of identity and identification, of all suffering, of having a way and a cross and something to bear. All suffering springs from that desire to be special, different, unique, worthy... But when we look at the stars, at flowers and rivers, we see something quite different. The beauty of Beethoven's music has no bonds, it is limited in the sense that it expresses only a small part of reality, but the beauty of it cannot be tamed, cannot be understood, specified, limited in an explanation, a place, a time. If we were able to see that we are not special in any way, that we are like the Beauty of Beethoven's music, a prairie, a river, etc., we would see at the same time that we have a beauty far beyond what we usually imagine or even that which we attribute to God.

In the movie dogs and elephants were just animals. They were not among the "children of God". In fact got only had the billions of men and women on this planet. All other extraplanetary civilizations simply have no place in God's lap. Animals obey God, people are free. This divide in which man is supperior and has to take care of animals, has to be kind, is somewhat beautiful but it is a pale beauty when our eyes are unclouded and we see that there is no need to "change the world", the world is well beyond whatever we could imagine in our wildest dreams.

However one can easily see where the magic of this movie is: when we follow what we feel is important, what is "commanded from God", what comes from above, even if we can't quite explain why it is important to ourselves. In that "obedience" or listening, there comes a pleasure, a quite different kind of "success", not external but internal. You might loose your job, reputation, even your family, but you will gain the most important thing, you did what was right, you were successful in the only way that is truly meaning and satisfying.

In showing this "happiness" the movie works quite well, it seems to me very appropriated that the movie's end credits are accompanied with "dancing", the expression of this well being that results from a person doing what he /she as to do.

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