Musings on Les Misérables

Not that there’s anything to be said that hasn’t been said before.  And better.  And no, I haven’t seen the movie yet.  (One day more!)  Just to philosophize:

1. Never, ever, ever cut Eponine.  (Ahem.)  The point of life is to love, not necessarily to be loved.

2. Javert is right: Justice is absolute, so absolute that God Himself cannot set it aside.

3. Javert is wrong: Mercy is not opposed to justice.  Justice gives mercy its meaning.

4. Life is pain: “At the end of the day you’re another day older.”  See also: title of musical.

5. Life is joy: “Your world may be changed in just one burst of light.”

6. Ah, but Love Himself did die:

7. And therefore, Tomorrow Comes.

Incarnational Horror

As I’ve been re-watching Joss Whedon’s short-lived Dollhouse, a very important thought has occurred to me:

I must have Adelle DeWitt’s wardrobe.

I mean, I know that, employed by the insidious Rossum Corporation, she runs the Los Angeles Dollhouse, where she persuades desperate people to sign their bodies over to her for five years so they can have their memories and personalities wiped and, as tabula rasa “Actives”, be imprinted with any identity that a client is willing to pay for.  I didn’t say I wanted her job.  Just her pencil skirts.

Joss Whedon is no friend to religion, but he is a writer, and a master of character, and that means he has an abiding interest in the soul.  He is also a master of philosophical horror: while he’s certainly not afraid of blood, it’s always the idea that really scares you.  And beneath the comedy - “We said we wouldn’t dwell on that.  He’s dwelling,” complains genius-geek Topher Brink when his experimental technology accidentally imprints an Active as a serial killer - Dollhouse is very definitely horror.

The show was created as a vehicle for Eliza Dushku, who plays the Active Echo.  Before she was Echo, she was Caroline, a crusading idealist determined to expose the Rossum Corporation.  (They whys and hows of her transformation are revealed - alas, very disappointingly - toward the end of the second season.)  And while Echo may not remember any of that, someone else has taken up the cause.  FBI agent Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett) has been chasing rumors about the Dollhouse, and when an anonymous source points him to Caroline, his investigation starts to worry Rossum.  Meanwhile, Adelle is seeing something develop in Echo that goes beyond her imprints.  Something that comes to look more and more like self-awareness.

(Spoiler alert: That’s the premise.  From here on out, I make no promises.  Everything is fair game.)

Dollhouse neatly turns Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum on its head and asks, “But who do I think I am?”  Its very structure questions our perceptions of reality: a supporting character introduced in episode one is revealed soon after to be an Active.  Then the show goes along nicely until episode six, in which a major character is revealed to be an Active.  And then in episode twelve, yup, you guessed it, a supporting character is revealed to be an Active.  This last case is particularly poignant, as the reveal is made not just to the audience, but to the character, who, despite having worked for the Dollhouse, had never once questioned whether she herself was “real.”

Which begs the question: What is real?  The imprints are complete to the last detail, and if a human being is just a mind and a collection of memories walking around in a body, then it should follow that an imprinted Active - say, Echo as brilliant hostage negotiator Eleanor Penn - is just as real as Caroline ever was before she signed up to become Echo.  The point is hammered home in a late first season episode, “Haunted,” in which a dear friend of Adelle’s uses Echo’s body to return from the grave and solve her own murder.  This is not a composite identity whipped up in Topher’s computer.  This person actually lived, and to all intents and purposes she is living now.  So why, in an exquisitely unsettling ending, does Adelle have to watch her friend “die” again as she leaves Echo?

With its constant focus on the search for Caroline, the show argues from the start that a particular personality belongs in a particular body.  And indeed, one of the turning points for Adelle is her discovery that Rossum intends to offer certain favored clients “upgrades”: permanent transfers to a “better” body.  She is adamant that they can’t do this to her Actives, who only signed up for five years and who are entitled to get their bodies back at the end of those years.  (Lest one doubt her sincerity, a second-season episode, “Stop-Loss”, deals with the end of a contract.)  Thus the show is, in a way, profoundly incarnational.

But then it takes things a step further.  One of the taglines was “You can wipe away a memory, but can you wipe away a soul?”  Is there something in us beyond memory, beyond character, that cannot be taken out of the body (except by death, of which more in a moment)?

The answer is slowly teased out in Echo’s growing self-awareness, and in the beautiful Victor-Sierra romance, but then receives a definitive confirmation at the end of the first season, when the rogue Active Alpha is revealed.  We have known from the start that Alpha escaped the Dollhouse after slicing up its resident doctor and several Actives.  The assumption was that he had simply gone insane when 40-odd (in some cases very odd) personalities were simultaneously dumped into his head in an equipment glitch.  But when he is brought onto the case, Paul Ballard doesn’t want to profile any of those personalities.  He wants to know who Alpha was before he was Alpha.  Despite all of Topher’s protests that it doesn’t matter, Adelle gives Paul the file: “Alpha” was a convicted criminal, in prison for attempted murder, and when Paul tracks down his victim, the scars on her face are an exact match to the scars inflicted on the Dollhouse’s physician.

As if all that weren’t enough, two further complications present themselves.  First, as Echo becomes self-aware, and as she joins forces with Paul to bring down the Dollhouse from within, she wonders what will happen if and when Caroline comes back.  Will “Echo” die?  And from what she learns about Caroline, does she want to go back to being that person?  Paul, who has fallen in love with this maddening but indomitable woman, asks how she knows that she hasn’t been Caroline all along, but Echo is unsure, and her inner turmoil puts a distance between them that Paul cannot bridge.

Second, Echo discovers that she has a very rare ability: like Alpha, she can hold multiple imprints at once, but unlike Alpha, she can control and summon them at will.  This makes her an enormous asset, but it further complicates the question of who, in fact, she is.

It’s a lot to play with, and Whedon’s questions are far more satisfying than his answers.  In fairness, he reportedly had a five-year story arc planned, only to be informed in the middle of production that he would only get two.  But while I can look past the fact that season two is rushed, I can’t look past how much of it is wrong.

I will now skip over the reveal of Rossum’s mysterious founder/evil genius, as it is so clumsy, so unnecessary, and so damaging to what has gone before that I am pretending it didn’t happen.

But take the Attic.  It’s a fantastic concept: the place where “broken” dolls are sent.  Topher compares it at one point to the feeling you get when a word is just on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t quite articulate it - but always, with every single thought.  As a threat hanging over Echo’s head, and as a philosophical vision of hell, it’s tremendously effective, but sooner or later, logic begins to intrude.  It does seem needlessly complex and expensive to store all of these Actives, maintaining life support and the minimal level of consciousness to create the horror.  Ah, but then Echo is sent there, and she discovers that the Attic is actually Rossum’s mainframe computer.  All of those brains, trapped in infinite loops as they struggle to escape their worst nightmares, are the processing units.  I rejoiced, because that fit the tone of the show, set a new problem, and even gave a nice little grace note to a supporting character who had been sent to the Attic in season one.

And then, two episodes later, Echo blows up Rossum’s mainframe without, apparently, a second thought.  I’m all for saving the world, but at a bare minimum, collateral damage should be acknowledged, even if there is no time to address all of the philosophical issues involved.

Finally, let us take Paul’s death.  The second one, that is.  (I did mention that there would be spoilers, right?)  I long one day to write a character death as sudden and as piercing as this one.  Quite simply, he is there and then he is gone, and Echo, with a hundred personalities in her head, finds herself utterly alone.  Magnificent.

Or it would be, if that was where they had left it.  Earlier in the season, Paul has been “mapped” for an imprint, which winds up saving his life when Alpha destroys his mind the first time.  But there can be no reconstruction from a bullet in the head, so all Echo can do is take the imprint herself, finally uniting their minds.  “You did say,” she reminds him, “that you wanted me to let you in.”

Now, let me be clear: this plays.  Chokes me up every time.  But if the soul is something that cannot be wiped away, then neither can it be imprinted.  Echo has, in essence, become the Dollhouse’s last client.  She has chosen her fantasy.

It is a fantasy that strikes a deep chord.  Love, after all, desires more than proximity.  It desires union.  In the world of Dollhouse, where death is the end, such union can only ever be an illusion.  Hence, we are asked to rejoice with Echo because she has found and settled for the most she can get.

But I do not rejoice, because she shouldn’t settle.  I believe that the deepest longings of our hearts can be satisfied, were created to be satisfied.  And this ending is wrong precisely because it comes so close to being right.  It is a distorted echo of the Beatific Vision.

Random Beauty

End of Liturgical Year Edition:


A Prayer in Old Age

Bring no expectance of a heaven unearned
No hunger for beatitude to be
Until the lesson of my life is learned
Through what Thou didst for me.

Bring no assurance of redeemed rest
No intimation of awarded grace
Only contrition, cleavingly confessed
To Thy forgiving face.

I ask one world of everlasting loss
In all I am, that other world to win.
My nothingness must kneel below The Cross.
There let new life begin.

- Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)

Still Digging

I had the opportunity on Wednesday night to see The Great Escape on the big screen.  And, as has happened many times before, Steve McQueen and his baseball glove proved to be exactly the reminder I needed.

Because you can get out of the prison camp (in spite of the fact that the tunnel is thirty feet short of the trees), and you can steal a motorcycle, and you can get so close to freedom that you're arrested tangled in the barbed wire at the Swiss border, and you can be brought back to the camp only to learn that fifty of your friends - men with whom you have worked, and suffered, and drunk moonshine - have been murdered by the Gestapo, and you're facing a looong time in the cooler, but darn it...

You still have your baseball:

And the tunneling will start anew.

When Faith is Not the Answer

Or: We Keep Asking the Wrong Questions

Before I begin, let me be clear: I am not truly suggesting that faith is not the answer.  Faith is always the answer - or, more precisely, God is the answer.  But this is a case where precise theological truth and common usage are not only different, but often opposed.  Case in point: the film adaptation of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

A couple of years ago, I sat in a theater, trying to beat down my Inner Critic, who is nearly always convinced that she could have adapted this thing better herself.  I give her free rein after the movie, but I generally figure that the writer who actually did the work gets a chance to make his case first.  So when the Dawn Treader writers felt it necessary to add a mysterious and sinister green mist that swallows people up, I tried to play along.  The novel is episodic, and while it has a unifying quest, there's really no sense of urgency, and urgency is something you want on screen.  The intent was not wrong, so I accepted the mist as a placeholder, confident that Inner Critic could find something better later.

And then we got the scene where the cute little girl, whose father has been taken by the mist and who has stowed away on the Dawn Treader to look for him, confides her fears to Lucy.  And Lucy sympathizes, and then assures her that her father will be all right: she just has to "have faith."

At that moment, Inner Critic gave the movie an ultimatum: Her father had better be dead.  (Inner Critic speaks in italics so as not to disturb her fellow audience members.)

He wasn't, of course, and there was a sentimental, mist-defeating denoument.  But why was Inner Critic so keen to orphan a harmless movie character?

Because I desperately wanted, for once, to see a faith-themed movie that was truly brave.  To see a movie that had the courage to say no, faith does not "fix things."  Faith does not guarantee a happy ending.  We sometimes have this idea that if we just believe in God, all will be sunshine and roses, when in truth, we're more likely to wind up with a crown of thorns.

The sunshine-and-roses approach is, first of all, simply not true.  I am confident that I have no need to give examples.

Second, it is - or quickly becomes - selfish.  I know someone who is convinced that God's will for her is whatever will give her pleasure in that moment, and for whom "God will take care of me" means that He will rescue her from the consequences of bad decisions and poor planning.

Third, and most insidiously, this attitude can become self-idolatry.  "I am so special that obviously God wants me to be happy."  And if that one is easy to dismiss, try this one: "I am so special that obviously God wants me to succeed."

This last is, I think, the Catholic artist's great temptation, and there is just enough truth in it to make it really dangerous.  We see that the world sorely needs Christ's beauty - and it does.  We believe that talent is indicative of a calling - and it is.  So we abandon ourselves to Christ to be used as His instruments - and we should.  But unless we are very careful, we start to consider ourselves invincible: "GOD wants me to do something."  Yes, He does.  But maybe sometimes - not necessarily all the time, by any means, and we'll never know until we try, but sometimes - what He wants us to do is fail.

I recently read something that makes this point exceptionally well.  It's called Surfing With Mel, and it's… I'll let the subtitle explain:

A Story in Script Form by

Matthew Lickona

based upon

A Story in Epistolatory Form by

Joe Eszterhas

regarding

A Failed Film Project by

Mel Gibson

based upon

The Book of Maccabees by

God

(Please be aware: The language is what you would expect in a script about Mel Gibson and Joe Eszterhas.  If the preceding sentence didn't convey what you should expect, you may not be the target audience.)

There is no happy ending here.  There is the ugliness of sin, and a faith that brings no joy.  Faith here is not something that fixes problems, but something that cannot be escaped.

To return to theology, of course faith promises a happy ending.  In eternity.  But in a fallen world, let us not "have faith" because of what it will bring us.  Let us have faith because our faith is true.

Portrait of the Artist?

I just finished reading a basically sound book, Gigi Rosenberg's The Artist's Guide to Grant Writing.  But I'm still stuck on a sentence in the middle: "An artist statement reveals your philosophy, why you do what you do - your themes, your processes, your obsessions, and all the other details your audience needs to know."

Now, to be fair, I would not for a moment deny the importance of an artist statement to grant writing, which is the subject of her book.  And a little later on, she has a very valid point about how the process of writing such a statement can help you understand and focus your own work.  But why does "your audience" need to be told about "your themes, your processes, your obsessions"?

Is it the artist that matters?  Or is it the art?

There is a great line in 1776.  (Okay, there are, at a very rough estimate, 2,347 great lines in 1776, but for our purposes right now there's only one that matters.)  Thomas Jefferson has drafted the Declaration of Independence, and now every member of Congress has to put in his two cents about wouldn't it be better if you included this, or took that out, or changed this word, or…  Through it all, Jefferson sits there, silent, agreeing to every change.  Finally, in exasperation, John Adams demands when Jefferson is going to speak up for his own work.  And Jefferson answers:

"I had hoped that the work would speak for itself."

Art is self-expression, yes.  But that is its process, not its purpose.  It's the difference, if you will, between agent cause and final cause.

Which brings me to my favorite painting, Rembrandt's The Painter in His Studio.

Given that we don't even see the painting here, just the artist, it might seem an ironic choice for this post.  But the painting is so much bigger than he is.  And the painting is in the light (one could argue that it is creating the light) while he is in shadow.  And Rembrandt didn't provide us with an artist statement.

Looking at this, I think of St. Augustine.  In a sermon on John the Baptist, he wrote:

John is the voice that lasts for a time; from the beginning Christ is the Word who lives for ever.  Take away the word, the meaning, and what is the voice? … When the word has been conveyed to you, does not the sound seem to say: The word ought to grow, and I should diminish?  The sound of the voice has made itself heard in the service of the word, and has gone away, as though it were saying: My joy is complete.  Let us hold on to the word.

If you're in a good mood...

Don't read this post.  Seriously.  Stop now.  Go make art while the sun shines.

When I'm feeling useless, untalented, and generally waste-of-time-and-space-ish, I go and read this.  All the way through.

And then I get back to work.