Romantic Anticlimaxes

Just watched 27 Dresses last night. It was a nice little story about a woman (Jane) who can’t say “no,” even when her boss (with whom she’s secretly been in love for years) gets engaged to her sister—who has been lying about herself to secure him. Lots of painfully funny situations Jane gets herself into. And then there’s the other guy (Kevin), who drives her crazy by calling her on all her self-deceptions.

For all you cynics who say romantic comedies are predictable because you always know they’ll get together—a little education: the rom-com genre is never about who the protagonist will end up with, or if they’ll get together. In a rom-com, the audience must know that and want that. The suspense and entertainment value is based on how they will overcome all the obstacles in their way to finally get together.

So, Jane and Kevin must get together. I’m watching along as they argue and flirt, wondering when and how Jane will finally realize that Kevin—not her oblivious boss—is really the one for her. And then they get stranded at a bar in a small town. Oh dear. Here we go, I think. They’ll get drunk and then they’ll sleep together and everything will be ruined. I start begging them, “Don’t have sex. Please don’t have sex,” all the while, knowing that they’ll ignore me because, well, it’s a movie and they can’t hear me. And many filmmakers these days are dolts.

I realize many will disagree with me, in a culture raised on Friends and Sex in the City, but I think when a romantic comedy has the main couple sleep together partway through, they destroy any hope for the story to be romantic.

Yes, when they finally get together at the end of the movie, there may still be a mild sense of satisfaction that all has ended as it should. But where’s the romantic thrill? Isn’t that why we watch these movies in the first place? When you jump to the climax (literally) halfway through, all that can be left is anticlimax.

Some will argue with me on this point, telling me to get off my high horse—sex isn’t a big deal. Okay, if sex is so insignificant, why would I care if these two kiss? Why would I watch this movie, if what their bodies do together has the same significance as going out for coffee?

Sex is a big deal. If this were an action movie, you wouldn’t put the scene where the protagonist comes closest to death right in the middle of the movie. No, you save that scene for the end. Here’s to romantic comedies that make us wait for the good stuff.

What do you think?

Sympathetic Vampires and Abused Aliens: a generation with a guilty conscience?

Of the ten films nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars this year, two involved little green men…or big blue women, as the case may be…

But what struck me as interesting was that in both cases, the aliens were portrayed sympathetically, and the humans were the bad guys. On the one hand, we have (as my brother pointed out) DANCES WITH WOLVES in space; on the other hand, we have X-FILES meets THE POWER OF ONE. In Avatar, humans are greedy, imperial tree destroyers; in District 9, humans are racist, arms-dealing vivisectionists.

In either case, we come out looking pretty despicable. I might even go so far as to describe our legacy as “inhumane.”

So here’s my question: why do we see ourselves this way?

And might the answer to that question be related to the proliferation of vampires-as-sympathetic-characters stories with which our generation seems obsessed?

I’m no fan of the undead—thus far, I have avoided Blade (half-vampire fights to protect innocent humans from vampire monsters) and Angel (former vampire struggles for redemption) and Twilight (guilt-burdened vampire loved by human girl). But I think I see a pattern emerging. We identify with the bad guys—whether seeking redemption for, or announcing condemnation on ourselves.

Those of us who are about 30 and under have grown up with an increasing awareness of our complicity in the rape of the environment and the exploitation of countless neighbors so we can have cheap shoes and electronics and well-traveled food in any season. We cannot drive a car or buy clothes or eat a banana without withdrawing from a global account that is rapidly disappearing.

Could this burden of guilt—persistently repudiated by our parents, but assumed true by us—be the source of our identification with fiction’s traditional villains?

What do you think?

My Son is a Spider-man: Confessions of an Ex-Arachnophobe

Spring is in the air and I want to get into the garden! Time to hear about the other kind of plot I ponder. This is a piece I wrote for our community garden's newsletter last spring. Enjoy!

My almost-two-year-old son loves bugs. When he is playing in the backyard, he’ll let out a squeal of delight, announcing, “Pider!” Which means he has found a spider, is pointing at it, and wants me to come and look.

My son makes no distinction in his excitement about bugs—be they ladybugs, earthworms, or centipedes. Butterfly or venomous arachnid, my son is fascinated.

I wish I could’ve said the same for myself. For most of my life I have been terrified of bugs. I was afraid of bees, petrified by spiders, immobilized by centipedes. Bugs were the stuff of nightmares. Merely knowing that a Daddy-long-legs was somewhere in the house was enough to make me run out shrieking until I had conclusive proof that it was dead.

I'm not exaggerating.

While I’m sure my bug-phobia was the source of amusement for some family members, I found it debilitating. So I prayed for help. And God provided: the first house I lived in after I got married had spiders the size of softballs. Huge and hairy. (Again, I'm not exaggerating.) I thought I would die. Or have a seizure.

We eventually learned how to trap these giant wolf spiders, which never actually bit us. But in their place, new, smaller spiders moved in—aggressive spiders that bit us repeatedly. In comparison, the wolf spiders were downright friendly—and we belatedly realized they had been keeping the nasty spiders away.

So I didn’t die, or have a seizure. Now anything less than a tarantula could hardly be called “big” in my books.

God answered my prayer another way when I started to garden. Within a few weeks of breaking ground, I realized that I no longer worried about what creepy crawlies were awaiting me as I dug. I had gloves now. But more than that, I had learned to coexist with the companions of my little garden ecosystem.

Because I realized that I need bees to pollinate my berry bushes. And spiders reduce the amount of predatory bugs that compete with me for my produce. Even centipedes have a place—in fact, my paranoia evaporated in a second when I learned that centipedes eat slug eggs!

So, even if I still wouldn’t want one crawling up my arm, as I teach my son about the world around him, I have introduced many of these bugs—my former enemies—as friends. And I am gratified to see that, so far, he is free and unafraid. I just pray that when he brings home something antennaed and many-legged, I never shriek--so that he never learns to fear these amazing creatures that do us all the service for which they were designed.

All You Need Is Love?

In my previous post, I promised to write more about love and how it can be the motivation for, rather than the antithesis of, doing what’s right. Rather than having to choose between love and duty, love should be what makes us want to do our duty.

I guess it all comes down to our definition of love. Is love a feeling of well-being? Is love an irrational drive that must eventually be satisfied? Is love a rational appreciation of the good? Is “love” synonymous with “value?” Can love have an evil object?

I’m not going to attempt to answer all these questions here, but I will fulfill my promise to report on what Dante and some other old guys thought of love. We can talk about other definitions and how they all pertain to the love vs. duty question later.

(Disclaimer: this post is more academic than I hope future posts will be, so if you get lost, skip it and tune in next time…and if you’re already a versed philosopher, forgive me if I take time to explain things you already know.)

Love in the Middle Ages
Medieval thinkers, who assumed the truth of the Christian scriptures, thought of love as the desire for the loved one to fulfill his/her/its nature. Within this definition, even Hell can be the product of Divine love. Like this:

God loves human beings. Therefore He desires them to fulfill their nature. He created each human with the nature to want to be with Him. But He also gave them free will—so they can, and do, choose to reject Him. Over their earthly lifetimes, God arranges such things as pain and pleasure to remind human beings that the consummation of all their desires can be found only in His presence.

But if, at the end of their life, a human still persists in embracing a nature that rejects God, God permits that to become their true nature. Still loving that human, God wants him/her to fulfill his/her nature. He will not force Himself on us. Accordingly, He allows him/her to reject Him for eternity…and Hell is the place from which God withdraws His presence so they can do just that.

I think it was C.S. Lewis who suggested that Hell’s door is locked from the inside.

(For more on this, see “Dante’s Hell, Aquinas’s Moral Theory, and the Love of God” by Eleonore Stump, published in Canadian Journal of Philosophy Vol. 16, No.2, June 1986, pp. 181-198.)

Platonic Love
Long before the middle ages, Plato had some ideas about love.

Crash course on Plato: everything True and Good and Beautiful is disembodied. Somewhere “out there” is the essence of Beauty which “beautiful” things here in the physical world can only imperfectly attempt to emulate. Somewhere “out there” is the essence of Goodness which “good” things here in the physical world can only imperfectly attempt to emulate…. You get the point. These “essences” he called Forms. Basically people who follow Plato (called “Platonists”) believe the physical world to be irredeemably flawed because it’s physical. By definition, only non-physical concepts (Forms) can be perfect.

Got it?

According to Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, in “Plato’s Eros and Dante’s Amore” (Traditio. 12 (1956): 315-337), Plato believed that souls existed before being placed by the Creator into a body. In this pre-existent state, the soul was in such bliss—able to contemplate the Forms without any impediment by the irksome weight of the flesh—that throughout all of its imprisonment in the body, it longs for and strives to once more return to that heavenly beauty. The love of material objects can be explained in that “the function of the various finite objects of desire is to ‘remind’ us of a beauty once seen and presently forgotten, a beauty so great that we are impelled up the ladder of beautiful forms to possess it” (Mazzeo, 333).

So, for Plato, the feeling of love is basically the soul’s déjà vu when it apprehends anything that contains a spark of Goodness or Truth or Beauty. It is sort of like saying I love my husband’s good qualities, rather than loving my husband himself.

Dante’s Conception of Love
A millennium or so later, Dante had an interesting view: that love motivates all human action—right and wrong. (For those who don’t recognize the name, Dante was the medieval Italian guy who wrote the Divine Comedy chronicling his travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven) Dante viewed love as “the source of every virtue, every vice” (Purgatory XVIII. 14-15).

Dante denied that “every love is, in itself, good love” (Purgatory XVIII. 36). He made a distinction between ordered and disordered love. Ordered love leads to virtue; disordered love leads to vice. He also believed that rational love must be educated as to how intensely it must love each thing. Loving some things too much can be immoral, just as loving something too little can be evil. So love can motivate evil “by choosing the wrong goal, [or] by insufficient or excessive zeal” (Purgatory XVII. 94-96). He argued that all the good and evil done by people can be attributed to proper or improper love.

Dante, like Plato, would say that the soul remembers the inexpressible joy of being in God’s presence before it was confined to the body and, therefore, longs to return to God’s embrace. Love expresses itself through Beauty, which is perceived by the eyes. Love’s object is an individual, which then leads the lover to the love of God. When a soul fixates its love on this earth it is a result of mistaking the model (of God) for the real thing.

He believed that rational love must be educated in its judgment of what is good, so that it seeks not what only seems good, but what actually is good. Dante outlines the three ways in which rational love can exercise mistaken judgment:

(1) when a person views another’s downfall as the key to his/her own success and therefore desires the other’s undoing,

(2) when a person views another’s rise as a threat to his/her own honour and fame and so desires the other to remain low, and

(3) when a person is overcome with anger by being wronged and so seeks only to do another harm (Purgatory XVII. 115-123).

In accord with Dante’s conception of love, one could use the word love interchangeably with “value.” In such a way, even Satan’s hatred of God can be explained in terms of love; Satan could conceivably be accused of falling into the first of rational love’s mistaken judgments, as outlined above. Satan mistakenly thought that his own glory would increase if he could defeat God; he loved his own good more than he loved God. The language used to describe Satan could then be changed so that he is not someone who loves nothing, but someone who loves nothing properly.

So what?
Now that our brains are swirling with philosophical ideas, what do we think the makers of Legend of the Seeker would say about any of this? Can Dante or Plato shed any light on the love vs. duty question? Or would Richard and Kahlan define love in a very different way?

What do you think?

Do We Really Believe Love is the Antithesis of Duty?

In watching the first season of Legend of the Seeker, I began to get a familiar feeling. I’d felt this way watching Attack of the Clones. There was one episode in particular (Revenant) in which the story was told of a former incarnation of the Seeker and “his Confessor.”

Now this was your basic “another consciousness takes over my body, making me do things I would never do myself but really wish I could” episode which finds its way into most SF tv series. As my sister aptly put it, it gives the producers a chance to get the protagonists to take off their clothes without permanent repercussions. Us viewers all indulge in a little vicarious wish fulfillment…and everyone goes home happy.

But what stuck in my craw about that episode—besides its cheapening of the protagonists’ plight by the law of diminishing returns (ie: when you tell the same joke twice, it’s not funny anymore)—what really bothered me was the obvious assumption that acting upon romantic love is a betrayal of duty.

Okay, okay, this is SF. “Duty” sounds out of place. Does “destiny” or “quest” fit better? Richard’s “destiny” is to kill Darken Rahl. He cannot fulfill that “quest” if he consummates his love with Kahlan.

(Now, theirs is a special case—if they consummate their love, Kahlan will involuntarily touch him with her power, subsuming his will forever in a “love” for her that goes beyond obsession. He would kill himself if that’s what he thought she wanted.

Now, I’m not about to argue that the obliteration of one’s free will is a thing to take lightly. It’s pretty much the last thing you’d want to do to someone you loved. But how would it prevent Richard from killing Darken Rahl and fulfilling his all-important destiny? Kahlan wants Rahl dead too. She could command Richard to kill Rahl and he would, just as surely as if they hadn’t consummated their love. Right?)

But the dilemma, to which the show (and also the book it’s based on) repeatedly calls our attention, is the choice between protecting the ones you love and destroying a threat to the greater good. The assumption is made that if Richard loves Kahlan, he will save her life, even if it means death for the world. (There’s a logical problem here: Kahlan is part of the world, therefore if the world is destroyed, so is she. But I grant that in the heat of the moment, none of us can be counted on to be logical. (Okay, maybe Data would be…))

In Revenant, we meet Richard and Kahlan’s pre-incarnations: Kieran and Viviane. (Apparently seekers fall in love with their confessors all the time.) We’re told, “One thousand years ago Kieran and Viviane did the worst thing a Seeker and Confessor can do…they consummated their love.”

We’re told, “it ruined Kieran…he thought only of protecting Viviane.”

So Kieran’s love for Viviane, and the loss of his will, prevented Kieran from fulfilling his quest.

But in the episode Bloodline, we learn that Zedd is Richard’s grandfather, a fact he had kept secret, he claims, because he never wanted Richard to have to choose between killing his grandfather and fulfilling his quest. Again, love versus duty. And this time there’s no coercion or will-breaking involved.

In Revenant, Kieran’s wizard admits, “I loved him…so I hesitated. Because I loved him, that hesitation led not only to the loss of many innocent lives, it led also to the loss of Kieran’s soul too.”

So what are we, the viewers, to conclude? That love disables goodness? That loving anyone deeply—be they lover or family—brings about the downfall of the world? (Or is that only for special people who have a “destiny?”)

Remember Attack of the Clones? Particularly the “Dominatrix by Firelight” scene? Padmé tells Anakin, in essence, “I’m a senator. You’re a Jedi. It could never work.” The storyteller implies that their union would be somehow immoral. We’re never told why. In another scene she asks him, “Are you allowed to love? I thought that was forbidden for a Jedi.” One of the trailers showed them holding each other with a voice-over pronouncing, “A Jedi must not love.”

Here’s my question: why the heck not?? What is it about our society that makes us believe that love keeps us from doing what’s right? We’re fed this message repeatedly and we just swallow it. Is it hard to think of other examples?

On the flip side, our storytellers present doing what’s right as inimical to love, to happiness. Kieran says of Richard and Kahlan, “they have a destiny that is destroying them, just as it did us. They love each other…”

As he and Viviane touch again after a thousand years, Kieran says, “This is all that matters. We’re all that matters.”

I suspect this is the key. We equate giving in to love with forsaking duty because we believe that virtue must be dour. The do-gooders out there want us to be miserable. Therefore, happiness can only be had if we say, “Screw the world; I’m doing what I want!”

Could this belief be related to the prevalence of broken relationships in our society? So many people in our lives get hurt when we “follow our hearts.” I feel that I’ve fallen “out of love” with my spouse, and I feel attracted to another person…now my only option for happiness (the only way to be “true to myself”) is to give in to those feelings, no matter that it destroys the lives of my spouse and children.

In a culture where the needs of children are routinely overruled in favor of adult lust, have we permanently linked the consummation of love with guilt?

But might I suggest (and I’m by no means claiming to be original here), that rather than being the enemy of duty, true love is the foundation for doing what’s right? Love which seeks the good of the other, even at personal cost to myself? (I could elaborate here, but I think I’ll save it for another post.)

How do we determine, in any given situation, what is the right course of action and what is the wrong? On what do we base our decisions? Our feelings? Popular opinion? Utility? These are age-old questions. But we still need to answer them.

If saving the world is in our hands, then maybe personal attachments are a danger. If the fate of the world rests with me, then my loving my son is a fatal weakness—with global consequences. My enemy simply has to threaten my son and I’ll abandon the world to oblivion in order to save him.

But if I rid myself of all personal attachments (isn’t that what the Buddhists suggest?)—if I value nothing and no one corporeal—what kind of savior could I be? What would I be fighting to save? A disembodied principle? Why fight at all?

Love must have a place in doing good. (Again, see my later post on Dante’s Conception of Love.)

What do you think?