Does God exist? Blah, blah, blah….

These fundamental questions have been repeated so often that they are now reduced to meaningless clichés.  But when these questions are posed as new profound questions that demand serious consideration one cannot help but respond with a wince.  This is the main problem with pop philosophy; it is addressed to those to whom philosophy is new, to those who rarely ever considered the “big” questions about the meaning of life, to those ignorant of the history of philosophy that has attempted to answer these questions.  My main disappointment with the movie is that it came across as rather pretentious in posing these questions because its philosophical amateurishness was so painfully obvious.  It also didn’t help that the movie was so inept at answering these questions in some interesting way.

Matrix is a movie that also posed a fundamental question in a simplistic way, but the entire series was an attempt to formulate a contemporary answer to the age-old question of reality versus perception in the context of advanced technology that can manipulate the human mind.  But unlike Matrix, Sunshine simply congratulates itself on having asked the utilitarian questions without dealing adequately with it through the movie.  In a rather clumsy way, the movie creates a situation where unless the crew were reduced by two, the mission would be impossible to fulfill.  But this is a stupid situation because the answer is obvious.  No one can do anything unless one were to suddenly turn a ruthless murderer able to kill two or three colleagues or two or three people decided simultaneously to sacrifice themselves.  This is an untenable dramatic situation.  At another time, when by dint of sheer chance enough members were lost so that all they had to do was kill a member who is suicidal, this crew member does everyone a favor and kills himself, saving a crew member from cold-blooded murder.  This is a facile solution to the problem.

Also, a rather ridiculous way of dealing with a  theological question came in the form of murderous naked lunatic who attempts to sabotage the missions because he thinks humans are interfering with God or are trying to play God by attempting to reignite the sun through human technology.  How or why he came to this conclusion we don’t know.  But the answer is that this conclusion is delusional because if humans can keep nature alive through technology for humanity’s survival, so be it.  This is utterly a simplistic way of posing the question about the limitations of human powers; it sets up a straw man to attack theology with practical common sense philosophy.

Posted by jonathankim at 5:02 PM EDT

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Another excerpt from the Economist--once an opportunity for diplomatic engagement has been lost, is it even possible to reverse course after the US and Iran have resorted to humiliating name calling, rabble-rousing denunciations, and nuclear sabre rattling by both countries?

Link to the full article: http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9466864

The case for a “grand bargain”

IF A military attack looks too dangerous and sanctions will not bring Iran to its knees, must the world accept that the Islamic Republic will soon have a bomb? Maybe. Plenty of governments in the Middle East are already working out how best to prepare for life alongside a nuclear-armed Iran. But what if sanctions and the threat of force were combined with more positive incentives for Iran, such as security guarantees and normal relations with the United States? Might not a beleaguered regime that was offered some such “grand bargain” see it as an honourable way to give up its nuclear plans?

That is the thinking of those who say the mistake of the Bush administration has been to confront Iran instead of engaging it. Four years ago Iran gave tantalising signs of wanting to end the long confrontation. The superpower's rapid disposal of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan after September 11th 2001 and its preparations to invade Iraq had made it look like a formidable enemy. In 2003 Iran is reported quietly to have offered to open broad negotiations with America on all outstanding issues, including nuclear weapons and Israel. But for various reasons—mainly, say some, the hubris of America's own neoconservatives—this opportunity was missed. And by the time America had run into serious trouble inside Iraq two years later, Iran's mood had changed.

Posted by jonathankim at 3:00 PM EDT

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Here's an interesting excerpt which refers to the fact that WWII could have been prevented had America and the rest of Europe not mistreated Germany, allowing Hitler go from the political fringes to the majority (like the current Iranian president) by capitalizing on angry and hungry Germans.  We are poised to make the same mistake with Iran and provoke a nuclear war by infuriating the Iranian citizens into further supporting the hardliners' policies.

http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9466834

For Rudy Giuliani, the Republican front-runner, a military strike would be “very dangerous”, but nuclear arms in the control of “an irrational person” like President Ahmadinejad would be more dangerous still. Would he consider using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran? “You can't rule out anything.” John McCain recently broke into song, intoning “bomb-bomb-bomb bomb-bomb Iran” to the tune of a Beach Boys song.

Alongside the work of the think-tanks and the warnings and ditties of the politicians comes a drumbeat of alarming newspaper articles. In the Wall Street Journal, Norman Podhoretz, a hero of the neoconservatives, concludes in an op-ed piece: “The plain and brutal truth is that if Iran is to be prevented from developing a nuclear arsenal, there is no alternative to the actual use of military force—any more than there was an alternative to force if Hitler was to be stopped in 1938.”

The audience in Iran
Is that really where things stand with Iran—a new Hitler and a new 1938? Look again at Tehran's Friday prayers. One thing a visitor notices at once is how little connection this stage-managed event has with the everyday life of the bustling metropolis around it. Even the audience, squatting in serried ranks beyond the dignitaries, looks untypical.

Iran is a young country (see chart): two out of three people are below the age of 30. On the streets of affluent north Tehran, young people dress in the latest fashions—even if the jeans-clad women are obliged by law to wear the Islamic headscarf (the hijab). The audience at prayers, however, is older: shabbily dressed men well into their 40s, regime stalwarts who have trekked uphill from the poor southern suburbs.

Which is the true Iran—the consumer-oriented young, bored by the slogans of a long-ago revolution and impatient to move on? Or the regime faithful chorusing the familiar slogans at Friday prayers?
It is tantalisingly hard to know. With 71m people and a multitude of languages and ethnicities, Iran is a difficult place to read. Although it has elements of democracy, including an elected president and parliament, the state is not ultimately controlled by elected institutions. And even the elected bit of the system is a backstage game of personalities and factions, not a transparent process rooted in political parties. Press freedom is limited, almost no serious independent opinion polling is allowed, and many official economic statistics appear simply to be made up. All this makes the regime's inner workings elusive. Outsiders can only follow the trend and make a guess.

Posted by jonathankim at 1:30 PM EDT

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When the main protagonist, Andre Morney, says he’s a failure you suspect that he means what he says literally, that he is acknowledging and declaring his identity, not simply saying that I failed at one particular thing, to complete a thesis required for graduation. He will fail at all things he tries.  It’s as if the movie is a study of those who fail as opposed to those who succeed in life.  Why is he a failure?  Why will he fail at everything? 

The movie does establish a pattern: he fails to complete a thesis; he fails to secure a recommendation from his professor who once admired him; he fails as a writer of fiction (his philosophical argument against writing could be seen as both a serious argument and a cover for his lack of ability and talent); he fails as a teacher at the military base; he fails in his career in the military; he fails in love and friendship.  He fails even to undermine his friends’ happiness and success.  He tires ridiculing a student into giving up writing; he advises Eloi to burn his love letter to the “librarian” and succeeds in postponing their love, but eventually she abandons him and finds love with Eloi, a successful writer and scholar.  He maliciously tries to break up Alex and his girlfriend with a lie, but that also fails.  I suppose the list could go on.

Of course there’s no reason—life and humans are not subject to the rational explanations of what we are and what life is.  But that doesn’t mean that these patterns are meaningless; that is, having no rational, certain knowledge of what we are does not prevent us from trying to infer potential answers through observing our actions.  One might come to the conclusion that he fails because, and this may seem ironic, he is a selfless devotee who cannot act as a master of the one thing he loves—literature.  He will always be a failure so long as he questions what he loves, neither worshipping it like a sycophant or mastering it like an egomaniac; he will fail to achieve anything so long as he is skeptical of the intrinsic necessity of an achievement, like a completed novel or thesis.

He may have failed as a writer because he may indeed be a bad writer.  Or one might say that he never tried because he felt inadequate to literature.  But I think the reason is that he, taking literature all too seriously, felt that literature could not justify its existence.  All of his friends who did not feel as intimate with literature as he did never thought of literature as anything more than some activity that they might try their hands at.  Language was just a tool and stories were just a convention with rules and standards for evaluation.  They found success because they were skillful enough to make things that were adequate to literary society’s conventions and tastes.  But whether Andre was equally gifted or not, and we can safely assume that he surpassed them in talent, his talent for mastering a certain art form was not the main question for him in regards to literature, which was not just an art form.  Here, I hesitate to say that it took on a godlike presence for him.  There was nothing religious or spiritual about his attitude.  It was in the end a philosophical question about literature, though simply presented in the movie, that paralyzed him.  He couldn’t find a necessary reason for ever taking up the pen.  No reason could be good enough.  If one takes seriously the central question of the movie “Why should one write?” there is no one single compelling reason that would force literature to bow down in front of it and serve its grand purpose.  There is no human reason that could compel literature to become an expressive medium to articulate it.  What Andre at such a young age intuited is that all literature is meaningless, purposeless, and arbitrary. (This does not have to be an expression of bleak pessimism.)  Most writers are not philosophers, or they suspend questions that demand justification.  Literature, like most things in life, is self-justification par excellence.  It is justified simply because it exists.  There was not preexisting reason for it—it’s not rational in that sense.  Literature survives on authors who take it for granted—it’s one of life’s givens and no one ever asks why it ought to exist, no one except those who see and understand too soon.  

Andre will never take part in the life of literature, but he cannot abandon it either.  He will never tire of asking the question “Why write?” and spouting his idea that writing must be necessary and that those who write are too weak not to, that is, too weak to justify their writing.  The more he reads, the more he comes to value a book, that question of self-justification will become more prominent and urgent.  If I’m not necessary to existence, why exist?  Eventually he might come to see this question not as a rhetorical question justifying suicide but as an earnest question that seeks a provisional answer.

Failure is intrinsic to those who settle for fleeting answers.  Some succeed in life because they never understood this; some others succeed and go on existing because they come to except these terms of existence, that all answers must fail to satisfy the question of why.

Posted by jonathankim at 3:27 PM EDT

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How does one describe this kind of moment?  The word that comes to mind at first is candid, but it’s only partially accurate.  It’s a moment that I think happens only in a story, not in life, for life is without a script that propels time and events forward.  Only in stories where movement is palpable from moment to moment can one experience a sudden and unexpected interlude when the plot skips a beat, though only for a brief pause, before it recovers the regular pulse and rhythm of its movement.  Such a moment occurred in “The Singer” with Gerard Depardieu, when he and the girl share a brief moment where he cracks a joke—he asks, “Do you know what will kill us [the lounge singers]?” and answers his own question, “Kareoke.”  That moment had little to do with the plot.  It’s as if the joke was too good to leave out of the movie, so the director found a way to insert it into the film.  But the effect was pleasantly jolting, for one experienced what it would be like when time stopped moving and we found ourselves in the freedom of the pure present.

Posted by jonathankim at 9:52 PM EDT

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One can’t help but to ruminate on the symbolic significance of the title, “Evening,” in a movie about the largest themes—life, death, and love, though love dominates the movie.  The word “evening” is interesting first of all because it’s a verbal, a verb made into a noun.  It is the part of the day after sunset that progresses into the darkness of night.  And it’s that progress that is of some symbolic interest.  That is, it is interesting to interpret the movie by comparing how one progresses in that part of life. 

Of course, since Redgrave is on her deathbed, this comparison does not seem to make sense unless by progress we mean a mental journey.  The movie centers on her remembrance of that one fateful day of her best friend’s wedding, a day that in fact marks the moment the sun disappears and life and love grow into the night’s gloomy darkness.  The movie portrays the wedding as an anxious moment when one must confront the unavoidable eventuality—one might even say “fate” that usurps control of our lives—just as in the evening, the beauty of the sunset is enveloped in the mind’s awareness of the inevitable demise of light.  The wedding night’s festivities only signify the human wish to become oblivious to gloomy reality.  But the festivities are punctuated by the drunken brother’s mishaps that constantly remind us of the death of love and life (the speed of which depends on who you are) that his beloved sister’s wedding has brought upon all those involved, like a plague.  It’s as if one wishes to say that we can stave off death as long as we are willing to be tantalized by the possibility of a love fulfilled.  But the sister's marriage destroys the possibility by banishing the light of the “midsummer night’s dream,” and introducing the gloomy darkness of the “light of common day” (Wordsworth) in which we must work as slaves to fate and create what fate has dictated to us.  Yes, eventually we feel a sense of accomplishment and we can be consoled by it, as the older women in the movie do.  But when life’s night approaches, we hanker after that moment when the light of our dreams battled mightily, if in futility, against the onslaught of dark fate, creating the fiery beauty of twilight.

Posted by jonathankim at 12:11 PM EDT

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There’s no question that the movie is a typical, feel-good movie with stock characters, but this does not detract from its high aesthetic achievement.  What makes it art?  What distinguishes it from other run-of-the-mill Hollywood feel-good movies?  One answer is its authenticity--rather unusually displayed.  Musicians play musicians, so that there needs to be no camera trick and enhanced sound effects.  Music stays relatively unengineered, and it takes precedence over the stock characters and plot.  Music remains closer to the streets, to its anonymous origin.  It is never contaminated by a typical Hollywood story that always attempts to catapult it and the musicians to the stratosphere of unreal celebrity.  So yes, the story is unoriginal, if “authentic.”  But it does not infringe upon the music with its intentions to make itself a bigger story that it is. 

The popular sense of authenticity stems from the vague meaning behind the cliché, “Keep it real.”  The assumption is that there is some genuine reality out there against which our actions and words are measured.  It protects you from the follies of presumption and pretension.  You might say that Once also does a good job of imitating the look of authentic urban life of young struggling musicians.  Indeed, that’s part of the movie’s charm.  (Evelyn Waugh is right in warning people against charm, for behind it lies vacuity; manipulative charm is vulgar and is too easy to detect.  But there is something tragic about those who know that they are shallow, so they learn to become charming in order to hide it.)  Wouldn’t we all want to look like them, fall in love like them, struggle like them, succeed like them (success coming in the form of pride and satisfaction, not in the forms of money and fame)?  This vicarious pleasure, as well as the pleasure of being seduced by charm, is one strength of the movie.  We know we are being seduced into an ideal world, and don’t mind it one bit.  Why don’t we mind it?  Because in the end the movie sympathizes with us who try in life and take comfort in knowing that we tried.

Posted by jonathankim at 8:28 PM EDT

Updated: Monday, 11 June 2007 8:31 PM EDT

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There’s an uprising in the dream world.  Aided by stolen dream recording devices called DC mini, the collective dreams are marching parade-style to invade reality and destroy the very research institute that created the device.  One researcher is already abducted (and spiritually eviscerated) by a spy in the upper echelon of the institute, and the other scientists are in danger, also.  Ironically, the uprising is instigated by none other than the “chairman” of the psychiatric institute who comes to see the danger of technology’s power that extends beyond the reality of everyday life into the dreams of individuals.  When our heroes realize that the perpetrator of the theft is the chairman himself—and before he is revealed to be a soul-devouring evil monster—they find him inside a greenhouse that preserves what is left of nature, including human nature.  In their brief conversation the chairman reveals the reason why he has decided to destroy the monstrous technology he has created: dreams are the only refuge for humanity in a world dominated by technology in every respect.  But the trouble is that he also steals everyone’s dreams with the DC minis he’s stolen and enlists them in his army.  The metaphor is obvious: our “Chairman” (Mao?) is a totalitarian dictator who has the power to destroy individuality.  So, in his attempt to rescue humanity from machines, he has ironically enslaved it and deprived all individuals of identity and spirit.  Tragically, saving the dream world is tantamount to turning it into a creepy world of lifeless ghosts.  But the movie simplifies this tragic irony by concluding with a cliché about the importance of children and their freedom to dream.  It does not deal with the consequences of this new technology that has the power not only to record dreams for analysis—to what purpose, we do not know—but to transform our perception of reality.  And who knows what other advances the later models might introduce?  The very notion of subjectivity, the very core of individual identity, is threatened by this machine, and yet, the movie simply ignores this in favor of a sentimental Hollywood ending.  The collectivity is a threat, but it only arose in response to a greater threat—human blindness or illusion has no other antidote but a total annihilation of vision.  If clear awareness and critical insight are banished by society to the point that restoration is impossible, what else can we do but remove even the only ancillary benefit of illusion, dreams?  The movie most certainly pulls its punch and corrals us into another appealing illusion which we take for truth: the innocence of dreams.

Posted by jonathankim at 11:08 AM EDT

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Away from Her is the type of movie that relies on the talents of the actors capable of playing complex characters.  This is a challenging project for a young director’s debut film, and she (Sarah Polley, who is also the writer) had the intelligence to adapt a short story by a gifted writer, Alice Munro. 

Depth and complexity in a story requires a simple but profound action that forces the audience to confront reality and come to grips with it.  When the story begins, both the husband and the wife are aware of the latter’s incipient signs of Alzheimer’s.  When the condition worsens, they make the difficult decision of putting her in a care facility which requires a complete separation between patients and families for a month supposedly to make the assimilation into a new environment easier.  The couple had never been separated from each other for that long in their 41 years of marriage.  When she’s placed in the nursing home, this is where the plot begins to thicken in two significant ways.  Let me just say an amateur, didactic writer would have focused on the emotional trauma of separation, loss of a loved one to a heinous disease, and eventual death.  But Munro is an exceptional storyteller, and the story turns into one not just about the fragility of even the deepest emotional connections but also about guilt and retribution.  In the month of separation, the wife develops a romantic connection with another patient, but more interestingly, we and the husband begin to suspect that she half pretends not to remember her husband, making him suffer the double humiliation of being treated as a stranger and of having to watch his wife be intimate with another man.  Though the movie never reveals what the husband did, we are certain that there is a painful past that the couple never dealt with in the open, and she seems to seize her fatal disease as an opportunity to punish her husband.  The touching part of the plot takes the form of the husband letting go of his pride and helping his wife regain happiness by bringing the man she loves back to the nursing home for a visit—incidentally, he sleeps with the wife (admirably played by Olympia Dukakis) of the man, perhaps signifying his past weakness for infidelity.

Sarah Polley herself seems to be a skillful and mature screenwriter.  She never falls into the didactic or sentimental trap by overwriting, putting herself too much into the story.  She also displays an understanding of suggestiveness in her emphasis on tantalizing conversations that reveal and conceal simultaneously.  For instance, the wife thanks her husband twice for not abandoning her.  At first we think that she means he stayed with her despite her illness, but when she repeats it a second time at the end of the movie when she momentarily regains her short-term memory, we realize that she had been meaning something else all along, like you could have left me for another woman but you didn’t.  The movie concludes with this scene as a moment not of brief recovery but of forgiveness and reconciliation.  The fact that the wife was both suffering from memory loss and pretending not to remember makes the story so interesting.  Both as a scriptwriter and director, Polley showed excellent judgment in allowing a great story simply to unfold and the great characters to emerge through the actors' skills.

Posted by jonathankim at 3:08 PM EDT

Updated: Saturday, 2 June 2007 3:33 PM EDT

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--from The Nation (June 11, 2007)

<>The IMF/World Bank cartel is still operating in the poorest countries, and it is through this cartel that the World Bank does its worst dammage: the privatizatin of water in countries like Ghana and Tanzania, the imposition of user fees on primary healthcare and education in Kenya and other African counties, the privatization of social security systems in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe, the destabilization and overthrow of Haiti's democratically elected government in 2004 and, most recently, the cartel's role in deciding that poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa could not spend 70 percent of the desperately needed aid money that they received from 1999 to 2005--to name just a few disasterous examples. 

"Wolfowitz and the Bank" by Mark Weisbrot, p.8.

Posted by jonathankim at 9:02 PM EDT

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