What’s Wrong with the World

It is not obvious that true privacy in our day will endure the ministrations of its narrow partisans. There is a bizarre sort of double pressure on the idea of privacy right now: a simultaneous exaggeration and diminution. Its deterioration as a firm principle of life proceeds at once with the most horse and desperate cries in its defense; almost as if a howling mob of revolutionists, their hands bloodied from the work of expropriating and uprooting, now turn around and with all the sincerity of madmen, demand that their appointed despots reinstate Tradition, so that they may live by the simple customs and prejudices by which simple men lived before the Revolution. It is like the most ferocious Jacobin turning monarchist just as the guillotine’s blade falls on the King; and stridently claiming he was monarchist all along. It has an air about it, undoubtedly inspiring a certain human sympathy, of furtive penitence; perhaps it is the confession of faithless men. In any event, it is an intriguing phenomenon.

In an otherwise excellent review of the latest installment of the Bourne franchise, Peter Suderman, amidst discussions of character development and depth, and the mirroring of content in cinematic form, throws out this baffler concerning the politics of the flick:

Greengrass tries to supplant Bourne’s emotional blankness with some fairly obvious and simplistic liberal politics at the end. Most of these bits, though, seem thin, even desperate, groping for something the series hasn’t earned rather than letting its cool, detached brutality speak for itself. And really, is there any need to spell it all out? It’s always been plain to see that Bourne was what Nathan Lee smartly calls “action hero as blowback.”

The Kingdom is a noteworthy film for several reasons. First and foremost, its depiction of Islamic terrorism is about as clearheaded as anything I’ve seen out of Hollywood. The bad guys are Muslims acting as Muslims, and there is hardly even a gesture toward “religion of peace” or “perversion of a great religion” sophistry. To be sure, the film makes no real attempt to examine the ineradicably Islamic character of the Jihad, exhibits little curiosity about the whole sanguinary tradition of holy war: but that is just as well, as most Hollywood curiosity along these lines descends rapidly into sentimentalism, illusion, or bewilderment.

Secondly, it is noteworthy for several masterful action sequences, culminating in a rolling firefight that moves from street to cramped apartment complex, which frankly left this viewer breathless.

Finally, the film is noteworthy for the surprising preeminence achieved by an unlikely character: a Saudi police colonel (played by a newcomer named Ashraf Barhom) who begins as the babysitter for a team of FBI agents investigating a series of attacks on Westerners in Saudi Arabia, and ends their comrade-at-arms. This guy steals the show.

The film is not without flaws. It’s pacing is ineffective at times. The plot is pedestrian. The brief denouement seems exceptionally forced, as if the filmmakers just tacked it on at post-production. Stars Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner manage only mediocre portrayals of their characters. But the finely-rendered action, the firm resistance to PC nonsense on Islam, and the unexpected brilliance of Mr. Barhom, make it, in my judgment, a worthwhile movie.

A few years ago, a friend of ours married the interpreter who acted as a sometime intermediary when my future wife and I first met in Kiev. It so happened that, for whatever utterly inscrutable reasons, they enjoyed watching Sluts Sex and the City, a program I have loathed, from its inception, on account of its superficiality, nihilism, moral corruption, and tendency to promote the most insipid banalities as the very apogee of wisdom. On my personal Scale of Detestation, the program probably ranks up there with all things Quentin Tarantino, which is to say that it is a celebration of the Nothing, and that its popularity is a certain harbinger of The End.

That said, I have found that the smartest take on the new film adaptation of the series is that of Helen Rittelmeyer, who, in a brief comment on the film, manages to encapsulate virtually everything that has inspired my loathing:

Having decided that marriage is not the right lifestyle choice for her, Carrie ends the movie with a question: “Why is it that we’re willing to write our own vows but not our own rules?” That’s right, girlfriend! Marriage is just a bunch of rules that other people made up, and buying into it will only obscure the Inner You. Never mind whether those other people might have been wiser than you are, or whether the transformation might be an improvement.

Or take Samantha, whose life philosophy is summed up in the line “I love you, but I love me more.” She abandons a man who loves her and whom she loves because she can’t stand not to be the center of her own universe. Even the ladies’ four-way friendship, supposedly the show’s moral center, involves so much confessional self-reflection that one is tempted to conclude that relationships with other people are only interesting insofar as they enable self-discovery. Strange—I always thought it was the other way around.

As for the matter of friendship, well, yes - those who instrumentalize sexually intimate relationships as voyages of self-expression, self-discovery, and so forth are bound so to instrumentalize friendship as well; if one first acts as though one is not a body situated in social and relational contexts, but a gnostic Self striving to realize its own True Being in a world of indifferent or malign stuff that must be forged into instruments of the Self, then there is no reason for this to halt at the boundaries of friendship. Why would it? The idea that it might is merely an expression of the idea that sex is somehow special, unique; but the reduction of sexuality to gnostic animality strips it of its uniqueness; and if something considered so critical to personal identity is nothing more than desire objectifying the other, why should friendship be immune? It will be little more than a sounding board for the Self: a chorus of approbation for those who have 'dared' to 'write their own rules' and negate the world actualize the Self to the uttermost. The gnostic Self is a universal corrosive.

During this season of Advent I have been reflecting on the rapid changes in our culture as they seem to be moving us toward what Richard Rorty called "nihilism with a happy face."

The philosophical canyon between two 20th century films seems to exemplify this ghastly movement: It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Pleasantville (1998). If you have some free hours, watch them back to back. The first presents true human flourishing as communal and teleological. In It's a Wonderful Life, the hero, George Bailey (played by Jimmy Stewart), finds his "true self" in a rightly-ordered relationship to others: wife, family, friends, God. Pleasantville presents true human flourishing as the liberation of the self from the communal and the teleological. It is the willful self-discovering dissenter, unencumbered by family, community, or church, who is the hero of Pleasantville. When you watch both films, compare Pleasantville with George Bailey's alternative universe, Pottersville, the city that had once been the real Bailey's Bedford Falls. (For an analysis of Pleasantville's relativism, see Greg Koukl's review).

There's a new Star Trek movie. With all the attention this film has received, I was reminded of this 1986 skit from Saturday Night Live with William Shatner:

Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

I recently saw Watchmen on DVD. Like so many movies today, it is a mixture of superb special effects, solid writing and acting, and unspeakably gruesome and wholly unnecessary violence – along, of course, with an equally gratuitous sex scene or two. (In this it is like the late-1980s comic book on which it is based.) Of course, we are never supposed to criticize such things. “It is Art – causa finita est!” The Coliseum isn’t really evidence of decadence, you see, as long as the gladiators’ dialogue is well-written and artfully spoken.

Anyway, that’s not my theme here.

My Watchmen post below generated some interesting combox feedback, much of which I agree with. Thinking about the subject further, it occurs to me that there might be yet another factor at work in the phenomenon I described.

In The Aesthetics of Music, Roger Scruton (building on some ideas of Michael Tanner) puts forward a brief but illuminating account of sentimentality. A sentimental person, according to Scruton, tends to be quick to respond emotionally to a stimulus, will appear to be pained but will enjoy his pangs, will respond with equal violence to a variety of stimuli in succession, will nevertheless avoid following his emotional responses up with appropriate actions, and will respond more readily to strangers and to abstract issues than to persons known to him or to concrete circumstances requiring time, energy, or personal sacrifice. In short, a sentimental person is one whose emotional life becomes an end in itself and loses its connection both to the external circumstances that would normally shape it and to the behavior that it ought to generate. Feelings of moral outrage, romantic passion, and other emotional states become valued for their own sake to such an extent that the actual moral facts, the well-being of the beloved, etc. fade into the background. Sentimentality thus involves having one’s emotions “on the cheap” – enjoying them, as it were, without paying the costs they entail. For that reason, Scruton says, it is a vice.