Hitchock

Hitchcock's first movie in technicolor is an experimental film called Rope, adapted from a play called Rope's End. It is experimental in that most of the film appears to be one shot, and all of the action takes place within one room. Far from being boring or repetitive, it is a riveting thriller, even in this age of (need I say it?) explosions and car chases. The story is of two young friends, fresh out of the university who decide to act on their newfound ideas about an intellectual and moral elite. Unfortunately, acting on these beliefs means murdering their friend whom they believe that they are intellectually superior to. They hide the body in a bookcase and, in a bold move, invite his friends and family to a party in the same room that the body is hidden.

The movie replies heavily on dialogue--there is no music except for some brilliantly placed piano which is played by a main character. The plot thickens when the murderers teacher, played by the timeless Jimmy Stewart, shows up to the party and notices something is afoot. Stewart must soon face the horrible truth that his students have acted on the ideas that he taught them about the intellectual superiority of some over others and the illusion of traditional morality.

It is, perhaps, the clearest attempt at a refutation of Nietzchean ideals that I have seen in a movie, and Hitchcock makes a very decent attempt at an answer to the problem of the superman. Does his argument hold water? Watch the film.

fountain of sorrow

So I've been listening to Jackson Brown lately, and came across this stanza:

When you look through love's illusions, there lies the danger
And your perfect lover just looks like a perfect fool
And you go running off in search of a perfect stranger
And the loneliness inside you grows like a fountain from a pool...

Fountain of Sorrows
Fountain of Life
You know that hollow sound
Of your own steps in flight.

You've had to suffer
And you've has to fight
But it's good to see
Your smiling face tonight.

In Charles Williams' Descent into Hell, there are many frightening evens and themes, but none so frightening, perhaps, as the constant unseen footsteps which all the characters hear form time to time. To Pauline, they are the steps of her doppelganger, her double, whom she fear more than death itself.

How often do we run from our selves? How often do we hide from the light, fearing it might expose our fear, our pain, even our self? But if only light can pain, only light can heal. Can life, perhaps, enself us? Can the light of honesty and love see through even disillusionment? It seems that the truest stories we get today are those tales of seeing though things, through innocence to experience and pain; through utopia to chaos and anarchy, through the smooth makeup of pretense to skin itself, and it is the skin which disappoints.

But what if we could looik further, pull back both layers and see the beauty and glory beyond even the meaner stuff of pain? Surely, some have said, if you struggle with problem of evil, you must also be true to the universe and wonder at the problem of joy. Which is at the base of things, which will fulfill? For surely there is layer upon layer of pain and joy, of beauty and chaos. On come now, you know the answer. You always have. It is your deepest desire and, for some, your greatest fear--that in the deepest relm of endless day light perpetual shines, in the end, on all.

Wilder and Chesterton

Our town is a very interesting play. It was the first play my dad was in in high school. He had one line. It was "the stars are sure bright tonight". I always thought that it sounded like a dull, boring play, but I have found that Thorton Wilder, in less than a hundred pages, captures in short instaces the problem of living as immortal creatures in a physical, temporal world. I have two thoughts about this problem. The first has to do with that strange place where aesthetic theory and semiotics meet. My thought, or, more properly, question, is this: if we can take time learning and deriving meaning from art, and if art is, on the whole, the practice of making images of things in reality, then how much more may we learn from taking time with and paying attention to objects in reality?

But I feel like art is most times more intuitively meaningful than reality. Why is this?

Okay, second thought: Chesterton masterfully tackles this problem. At the end of The Man Who Was Thursday (mild spoiler ahead for those who care), Syme encounters the dance of common things, where people are dressed up as lampposts, dogs, mailboxes, etc. He says that long afterward it was the real things that reminded him of the dancing things, not the other way around. An interesting question emerges: can art remind reality what it is, or what it should be? Ahh, but this is a deep, confusing well. Let's return to Chesterton. In ManAlive, Smith suggests that perhaps God gave man a love for specific things both because heaven is a specific place and because eternity is easily the greatest idol. In Our Town, Wilder gives one a glimpse of eternity at the end, shows us the dead's view of the living. But the message is not so much that death shows us the worthlessness of specific things and moments, but that death shows us how much is in specific things and moments that the living miss.

Perhaps we are too concerned wiht the infinite, with a God who is the God of another world, another place, another time. It would be good to remember that God is the God both of heaven and of your sidewalk, that Christ is the Word upon which your hedges depend for existance, and that the Spirit moves and breaths with the sparrows in hiding in the Ficus and in the air that the ceiling fan circulates. A God who is so specific must be a great God indeed.