“Tree of Life” and “Melancholia:” Can Films be Philosophical?

Janelle and I saw Melancholia last Saturday at Notre Dame’s Browning Cinema. Fittingly, the last time we had been there was in September for a showing of Tree of Life–it was fitting because these two films are perfect companion pieces, in the way that they ask many of the same questions but ultimately arrive at completely different conclusions. Both are centered on the problem of meaning: where is it, how do we find it, or does it even exist? Tree of Life takes its prompt the Book of Job, posing questions like: why do we suffer? Is there such a thing as divine justice? If everyone’s life ultimately converges on death (even the whole planet’s), then how can we make sense of our fragile existence? The movie, in a mosaic of short scenes and poetic camerawork with very little plot, captures the childhood of a young boy, his brothers, his loving mother and his stern father in a 1950s, Norman-Rockwell America. The boy bristles under his father and yet cannot respect his mother, and in voice-overs, he poses questions to God like “Why am I here? Why won’t you speak to me?” The movie ultimately concludes with salvation, a resurrection, of some sort that offers hope that the tenuous ties of family and friends on Earth can be renewed and restored.

Melancholia? Not so quite. Here, the movie, and the question of meaning, is dominated by a threat to all Earthly existence, a rogue planet named “Melancholia” that is hurtling through space and headed directly towards Earth’s axis. Meanwhile, Justine (played brilliantly by Kirstin Dunst) is battling severe depression during and after her wedding day, a lavish disaster that is subtly hilarious for how bad everything goes. These first-world problems are ultimately drowned out by Melancholia’s approach, and as the characters began to embrace (or refuse to embrace) their inevitable demise, the movie’s answer to the question of meaning becomes clearer and clearer as the planet  moves closer and closer: there is none. We are one big cosmic accident, and another accident could wipe us out. Melancholic nihilism is the only rational approach, so deal with it.

“Emo Capitalists,” the Humanities, and Job Training

Matthew Yglesias made a good point about “emo-capitalists” who want universities to do a better job of preparing workers. There was a similar story in the NY Times a while back about Steve Jobs and Apple mourning the same problem. Yglesias, rightfully, has little sympathy for this argument:

On a firm level obviously one solution here is to just pay higher wages and hire away someone else’s machinist. But there are still only so many machinists to go around. At some point the reasonable thing to do is to find a less-skilled worker who has less bargaining power and lower wages, hire him, and teach him to do the damn job.

I want to piggy-back off this point to make a broader one about the humanities and a university education. There has been a growing concern that universities aren’t preparing students for today’s marketplace. This rhetoric is coupled with the reality that the number of business majors are growing while those enrolled in the sciences or humanities are shrinking–and with tuition continuing to rise, you can understand why students flee for a “money major.” The implication usually is that students should be majoring in the hard sciences, and if they’re not, then business makes sense, because frankly, what good is a degree in the humanities?

The Tragic Book of Mormon: Back to the Beginning

Not quite, but close enough

This continues a short series of posts on the Book of Mormon as tragedy. See here for the first post.

While tragedies are most famous for their endings, their beginnings are just as significant for defining their scope and pathos. Because tragedies bear on the struggle, and even the impossibility, of progress and victory, the beginning of a tragedy usually marks the heights from which a tragic figure will fall (think Othello) or it will circumscribe the future of its hero by prophesying his ultimate downfall (think Oedipus) or both (think Macbeth). Thus tragedies, in their conclusions, often take us back to the beginnings and expose the tragic irony of what might have been. Whereas other literary forms, especially traditional novels, mark the progress and development of a character, tragedies expose the hubris of progress by revolving upon itself. Tragedies are the chutes to the Bildungsroman’s ladder.

So to get a better handle on the tragic ending of the Book of Mormon, it’s important–much like I did in the last post–to take us back to the beginning. And I mean all the way back to the beginning, to 1 Nephi 1, where Lehi has his initial theophany. In it, he sees God being praised by angels, the descent of one whose glory exceeds the sun (presumably Christ), and 12 followers that are usually connected with the 12 apostles. Lehi is given a book by Christ, which he reads and which spurs him to prohesy of Jerusalem’s destruction (see 1 Nephi 1:8-15).

Lehi’s vision and Nephi’s account of it here is mystifying. For one, no interpretation is ever offered; it doesn’t fit into the narrative of Lehi’s exodus (he will receive a different vision about that); and there is no comparable vision in all the BofM (the closest in scripture would be John the Revelator’s). Joe Spencer, in a great series of posts on the Book of Mormon, has helped put the vision in context of Nephi’s retrieval of the brass plates, interpreting the book Lehi receives as that set of scripture. Very plausible–but I want to suggest another meaning, that this vision prefigures the spiritual climax of the Book of Mormon: Christ’s visit to the Nephites. In 3 Nephi 11-28, we have all the same features of Lehi’s vision: the descent of Christ, 12 disciples that are called as special witnesses, angels that come praising God. Christ even brings additional scripture to the Nephites, like the Sermon on the Mount, and chapters from Malachi and Isaiah. Christ’s visit is also closely tied to the Jerusalem that Lehi prophesies about, as they both condemn Jerusalem for its wickedness. Lehi’s vision serves as a marker of the the heights that the people in the Book of Mormon aspire to: a visit from Christ, the establishment of his church, and the reception of his word. From the very first pages, we see the trajectory the narrative will take us, the hope for the type of reconciliation with God that Lehi experiences in his vision.

The Tragic Book of Mormon: A Tree and a Gate

I’ve been thinking lately about the Book of Mormon as tragedy. I’ll try to string together a few posts on that topic to make you uber-depressed. Here’s Uber-Depressed Part #1.

The ending of the Book of Mormon, with the violent destruction of the Nephites, certainly strikes us as the most tragic moment of the Book of Mormon, but it’s important to remember that the reader foresees these events early on in the book, when Nephi receives a vision of this ending in 1 Ne. 12. Grant Hardy, in Understanding the Book of Mormon, astutely points out how troubling this vision is for Nephi, who emerges from his tent depressed, especially when he finds us brothers quarreling. His despair is two-fold: not only are his descendants headed for destruction, but his own actions take on a whole new meaning–or rather, they lose a whole new meaning. Nephi, who imagines his family’s flight from Jerusalem as akin to Moses’s exodus from Egypt (like Moses, he even killed a man for his people), has clung tightly to Lord’s assurance of a promised land. Now, this promised land appears inevitably bleak, its ruin a foregone conclusion.

Nephi is trapped in a paradox of prophecy, fate, and agency that is often at the heart of tragic literature. Like Macbeth, for example, Nephi’s future is clouded with foreboding prophecy, but he cannot ignore the fact that he is–or at least feels he is–free to choose. Prophecy would appear to negate any chance of his altering future events, but he strives and preaches anyways. Yet unlike tragic drama, Nephi’s paradox is not revealed in a single dramatic moment–instead, the Book of Mormon plays more like a tragic novel, whose dour ending is often predictable but we–the characters and reader–march onward nonetheless of our own choosing. In tragic novels and the Book of Mormon, the tragic irony hovers over the narrative like storm clouds for long periods rather than striking and disappearing in an instant like lightening. Nephi is not allowed a moment of dramatic climax, but must bear the prophecy as his burden for many years, his preaching and exhorting always overshadowed by this moment.

Google Images has a severe shortage of good gate pictures, but this is nice

This paradox is not debilitating, however–in fact, I believe that it inspires Nephi’s doctrinal thinking and helps him expound on the key archetype of 1 Nephi and the Book of Mormon: the Tree of Life. Our account of Lehi’s vision in 1 Nephi 8 leaves much unexplained (as 1 Ne. 11-14 show us) but perhaps most importantly it does not explain, and even Nephi’s interpretation cannot answer, a few key questions. For instance, if the fruit is so delicious, so sweet above all else, why would anyone fall away after eating it? How can the mocking of others be that persuasive? This type of apostasy is certainly represented by the future Nephite people, as Nephi sees in 1 Ne. 12, but many Book of Mormon readers are often puzzled that a Zion society organized by Christ would ultimately fall away. The tree seemingly represents the end of a journey, the final destination for those searching in mists of darkness, but in 1 Ne. 12, Nephi sees that life never seems to reach a final resting point, even after tasting the sweetness of the gospel’s fruits.

In this light, 2 Ne. 31 is an important contribution by Nephi to clarify and supplement the Tree of Life symbolism by transposing onto the symbol of the tree that of the gate: “For the gate by which ye should enter is repentance and baptism by water; and then cometh a remission of your sins by fire and by the Holy Ghost.” Nephi’s teaching here is delicately balanced. On the one hand, he wants to affirm that baptism by water and fire brings salvation, but he doesn’t want you to assume it’s the climatic moment of one’s life (as reaching the Tree of Life would suggest). Nephi retains much of the imagery of the Tree of Life vision in his writings here but offers the symbol of the gate and the teaching to “endure to the end” as a way to explain that baptism is a climax in the process of conversion, but it is also the beginning of the rest of your spiritual life. We must “press forward” like those searching for the tree of life, but now we are “feasting on the word of Christ”–in a sense, we are taking the fruit with us onto the new path of discipleship (see 2 Ne. 31:20; compare with 1 Ne. 8:24, 30). This dual-path helps Nephi reconcile the trajectory his people are headed on as well as his own paradoxical agency: life is not determined by climatic moments, but continues inexorably onward, with the same rewards and perils still possible during the journey.

By bringing together these two archetypes, the tree and the gate, Nephi suggests that the religious life is a series of journeys, that climatic moments are often leveled over time while on the strait and narrow, and that discipleship often requires steady dedication rather than bursts of zeal. We can sense that by the end of his record, Nephi is reflecting on the youthful fervor of his youth that led to a series bold actions (retrieving the brass plates, building a ship) which never managed to keep the family together. Instead, he has found that his discipleship has become defined by his willingness to endure, to remain faithful to God and his people even with the burden of foreknowledge. The promised land was never the Tree of Life he was expecting, but only another gate onto a long, brutal journey.

 

Some books I read recently

Refuge (Terry Tempest Williams):

I read this book thinking I might use it in a class I was proposing on religion, literature, and the environment. But I didn’t love the book, and it stayed off the syllabus. I like the contrast Williams makes between the intractable wildness of the Great Salt Lake and her mother’s breast cancer, but the memoir played the same key over and over with little variation. You could start from page 50, 100, or 150, read a hundred pages, and your experience of the book would not be much different. Williams is a very poetic writer, which works fabulous in some places but comes across a bit too strong in others.

 

 

 

Housekeeping (Marilynne Robinson):

Another book auditioning for a spot on the syllabus, and this one made the cut. This is Robinson’s first novel, before she wrote Gilead and Home (Gilead‘s excellent), and it is a powerful meditation on a young girl’s connection to her family, her lost mother, and a home that she never quite belongs to. Robinson’s prose is breath-taking in places; I found myself pausing repeatedly to reflect before moving on, something I don’t do often when I read novels. Readers mostly interested in the plot won’t be satisfied much, but I highly recommend it.

 

 

 

 

 

A Friend of the Earth (T. C. Boyle):

I am working as a T.A. on a course on sustainability my advisor is teaching, and the students will be reading this novel in the course. A Friend of the Earth is a remarkable satire, poking fun at both consumer culture and environmentalism while not abandoning an earnest concern for how we treat the planet. Boyle folllows the life of Tyrone O’Shaughnessy Tierwater, an “eco-terrorist” who bombed construction equipment and sabotaged lumber companies during his early years. But now it’s 2025, and with the planet falling apart due to global warming, Ty is jaded and bitterly cynical about how meaningless his life of crime was. To call him an anti-hero would be putting it too nicely: he’s impulsive, rash, irresponsible, lustful, paranoid, and angry towards everyone else (“To be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy to humanity,” he claims). When the state takes away his daughter for negligent parenting, you nod in agreement. This novel is laugh-out loud funny (another thing I don’t do much when I read novels), and Boyle captures many of the ironies, paradoxes, contradictions, and compromises that come with trying to be a “friend of the earth” without bitterly hating the world at the same time.

 

 

Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins):

I’ll be honest: I wasn’t really impressed. Collins centers the first of her trilogy on an intriguing premise: a post-apocalyptic society where children are randomly selected to play the role of gladiators in a massive biodome, fighting each other to the death in order to secure food for the rest of their lives. Katniss, a terribly-poor 16 trying to care for her mother and younger sister, is forced to outlast and ultimately kill the other 23 competitors in order to secure a basic level of comfort for her family–or die herself. Something Jack London would write after reading Ender’s Game and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” But too many problems nagged me: the importance of winning over the audience, both before and during the Hunger Games, was never fully explained until later, and the “reality-TV” aspect of the game was more distracting than interesting. The teenage romance felt contrived from beginning to end (Katniss even admits as much, and it doesn’t help). And the ending of the game itself was anti-climatic: the last third of the book began to drag, and it felt like Collins didn’t know how to wrap things up and tried to improvise on the spot.

Which is too bad, because the beginning of the game was fantastic, with much anticipation about how Katniss would survive and which other characters would meet her in a final showdown. The book also makes some subtle comments on social stratification, the politics of food, and how we can amuse ourselves to death. Katniss herself was also an absorbing main character. But she was most absorbing when she was playing the part of heroine, not girlfriend. I want to see the movie, but I’m not sure if I’ll finish the trilogy.

Your Favorite Music, by Letter

Hint: Take them as a group, not as their solo acts

I don’t have a lot of money to spend on music, and I’m always hesitant to drop $15 into an album I’m not sure I’ll like, so I tend to visit our public library’s CD collection fairly often. They have a good range of classics along with a good selection of newer material, so I can try out albums or artists before I decide I want to pony up the full amount. Like any good library, the collection is properly ordered and cataloged alphabetically, and I was browsing earlier today, I wondered: what if I were headed to jail to serve a life sentence (don’t ask why), and I was allowed to take all the music available under just one letter[1]–and only that letter–with me to prison? And what if all the songs in that collection would be played at random, so I wouldn’t be able to control what came up (this way, you can’t just pick your favorite group and ignore the rest)? Which letter would I pick?[2]

I thought about this for a good 20 minutes as I walked around, and here are some observations I made:

• The middle pack of letters–from about G or H through N or O–is in serious trouble. Each letter will have at least one good artist (L has Led Zeppelin, e.g.), but its slim pickings up and down.
• M is sneaky bad: you might first think, “Oh, M is a popular letter, I’m sure it would be great,” but then you look closer and begin to recoil in horror: Madonna, Metallica, Dave Matthews Band[3], John Mayer, Matchbox 20. Friends don’t let friends pick M.
• N is the most 90s letter of them all: you got Nirvana, No Doubt, N’Sync, Nine Inch Nails, Ninety-Eight Degrees (numbers get spelled out), NOFX, New Found Glory, and all those “NOW” Best Pop of the Year compilations. I could never pick this letter for many reasons, the most important being I would be stuck with Nickelback and would live in constant anxiety that their songs would come up and ruin my day–like a kid playing eternally with a broken jack-in-the-box.
• F wins the alliteration award: Foo Fighters, Franz Ferdinand, Fleet Foxes, and–wait for it–Five for Fighting. Seriously, no other letter came close. And I already feel like I’m missing a couple.