Tuesday, February 9th, 2010
I watched “The Invention of Lying” a few months ago and didn’t really know what to make of it at the time. Of course it goes without saying that I’m a huge fan of Ricky Gervais’ comic genius so it was inevitable that I would find the film fairly amusing and clever at times (although not as good as “Ghost Town”)… but the film also clearly had a strong agenda; what to make of its final message?
Now that I’ve had a bit of time to reflect, it seems that the only conclusion I can come to is that the premise of the film is not actually very inventive. Ironic.
So what is the premise? Gervais makes no attempt to hide the fact that the film is based on one main idea: that the stories behind religion in general and the Christian faith in particular are little more than ‘invented’ fairytales. The conclusion is that even though the reality of this world amounts to nothing more than the bare facts of science, people actually need made up stories (aka. ‘lies’) to give them hope, meaning, excitement, purpose and expectation. (Another subtext was that fat guys need this kind of world, that goes beyond the bare facts of science, or else they would have no hope of getting beautiful women – but I guess that was just part of Gervais’ brilliantly self-deprecating humour!).
In the context of the film, the ‘fairytale’ that Gervais’ character makes up which signals the advent of lying is basically a religious system concerning a place in the sky ruled by a man in the sky who can provide a hope beyond death. This is what the people buy into with the result that it creates excitement, gives him power and initially leads to a more pleasant atmosphere, although this eventually breaks down (the implication being that belief in God is not actually beneficial for society or human flourishing).
Ultimately the thing that disturbed me most about the premise of the film was not so much the thinly veiled dig at Christianity; that is not really a novelty anymore. Neither was it the fact that Gervais has typically misrepresented most of the essential facts of Christianity; ideas such as God creating the world already full of evil and suffering and Christianity as a system of works-based salvation are completely alien to the Bible yet this too was to be expected from an atheist lobby that knows only how to caricature and misrepresent Christianity…
The message that disturbed me most was rather the one which emerged out of Gervais’ own secular framework. It was the message that promoted a ‘correct’ picture of reality where there are no (ultimate) happy endings and neither is there any real and ultimate justice, as in these ‘fairy stories’. In order to comfort his dying mother, Gervais’ character invents heaven, giving her the hope of a future, a purpose for her existence and a happy ending. Even though he ‘knows’ that there is no such thing as heaven and that her death will swallow up any meaning her life ever had, he retreats to the use of made up fairytales to help her in her final hour.
There are three problems here for the secularist:
- First of all, the surgical removal of future hope and ultimate purpose leaves the secularist with only one philosophical system to provide meaning: existentialism (whether this be hedonistic or nihilistic). Such a self-limiting worldview, while not necessarily wrong, is problematic
- Secondly, this scenario, rather than undermining Christianity, only ends up lending credence to the plausibility of the Christian narrative. For whether they like it or not, secularism is a historical novelty and flies in the face of human experience. This world is a world of fairytale and myth… human culture has always been built on myth-based narratives. And, just so this word, ‘myth’ is not misunderstood here, anyone who has studied literature will tell you that fairytale and myth do not necessarily mean ‘unfactual stories’ but rather they are the depiction of certain realities that transcend what we see before our eyes, but that we can nonetheless sense. In other words, just as science has revealed to us that our eyes often deceive us as to the reality of the physical world (optical illusion, etc), so literature speaks of a similar dimension that is accessible to us on some level, yet not visible. Out of this dimension, every culture and society in human history has produced beautiful and fantastical myths and fairytales and all speak of ultimate happiness and ultimate justice – things which require an ultimate benefactor and an ultimate judge, basically a relationship with an ultimate being. Gervais may have written off this dimension completely, but he finds himself in the position of a numerical minority and a historical novelty. While we are not agreed as to who or what this ultimate being exactly is, humanity in general has always agreed that his hand at work in our world – and indeed in our very minds and hearts – is evident. Now one option is to shrug off this historical witness and just claim that all people before the Enlightenment were needy and ignorant. Despite the historical arrogance of such a position, it is an increasingly difficult one to hold as more people are realising that the only people denying any kind of reality beyond the bare facts of science are essentially fundamentalists and have thrown out decent scholarship in favour of diatribe and ‘religious’ rhetoric. Just note how many reviews of “The God Delusion” by secularists themselves have been dismissive and/or disparaging…
- Thirdly, while the secularist may claim to have heard this many times before, it by no means lessens the force of this point: such a narrative as portrayal as the ‘correct version of reality’ in the film is simply not existentially satisfying. The biggest criticism (and a fair one at that) that is levelled against Christianity is that of hypocrisy – why do people who speak of love so often fail to be unloving… Behind this question is a fundamental existential concern – why should I follow something that doesn’t work, that doesn’t provide eternal love and unconditional value and ultimate meaning in my life? So why should a similar charge not be levelled at the ‘atheist paradise’? If a world needs to be built on lies in order for it to work, then why should I take it seriously? The fact of the matter is that Gervais’ atheist paradise is based on the idea that people need to be trained to see beyond the bare facts of science – this entails lying. Isn’t this exactly what Christianity teaches? Except that in the case of the Christian message, the solution is not a lie but the truth…
The fundamentalist secular gospel – that there are no ultimate happy endings – might be coherent with the facts of science. But Gervais, in pointing us to a reality beyond the bare facts of science only ends up reinforcing the plausibility of the Christian narrative.
So how does the plausibility of the Christian narrative lead to faith in the Christian God?? And I will close with this.
C.S.Lewis put it best when he wrote that in the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, “myth became fact”… All the myths and fairytales of human history could only ever have been seen as dim shadows and uncertain estimations of the nature and workings of the ultimate being who must be both benevolent and just. Yet in the person and work of Jesus Christ, the expectations of these myths were finally realised. The cross sees the ultimate dispensation of justice as well as the ultimate bestowal of love. Each person who trusts in this God is guaranteed by the resurrection of Christ that their relationship with the ‘man in the sky’ is assured. How? Because the ‘man in the sky’ became a man of flesh and died to redeem us and the world.
The film ends up being not very inventive at all, since the dreary, unimaginative world of bare facts is put forward as the real one and the world of myth, meaning and purpose as the false one.
Tags: Atheism, Cultural Temperature, Fairytales & Mythology, Films, Hollywood, Provocative Thoughts, Ricky Gervais
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Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
The combination of watching the fairytale movie “Stardust” and being introduced to this song have led me to put finger to keyboard this evening…
Just in case you are not clued up with the plot of Stardust, it concerns a young man – a nobody – who ends up not only defeating the witch, getting the girl and becoming king but he also lives forever in a perfect relationship with her because she happens to be a star and has given her heart to him in love, so when he grows old they ascend to the sky to shine together forever.
The ultimate ‘feel-good’ movie…
I have one question though.
Why are films like this viewed so cynically by most people today? You can just imagine in Blockbuster (or whatever your preferred dvd rental establishment may be), your eye passing it by as an appealing choice (“for the wife/girlfriend/kids maybe”) but certainly not to be preferred above Die Hard, Michael Clayton or The Libertine. Why? Because they are a little bit more ‘rooted in the real world’, more for grown-ups. Soppy girls and children can go with these droll, fairy-tales but sensible men and women are just not convinced.
Yet if this is the sentiment associated with it (and this is certainly the feeling I automatically had when looking at the selection on offer at one of Kozani’s local dvd rental shops this evening), then why do we call it a feel-good movie in the first place?
Isn’t it because we view the situation it describes not so much as fantastical but as ideal?
It is how both our mind and our heart would prefer for things to be but we see that life is not like this so the whole scenario is rejected – often scornfully (but perhaps more often than we’d like to admit, wistfully) – as unrealistic. If you just think about it, we don’t think of X-Men or even Shrek as feel good movies. They are certainly fantastical but they are not an ‘ideal’ that deep down we actually want. Obviously Shrek does an excellent job of getting to the heart of both the genuine struggles of life and some of the deepest common values like unconditional love, but – almost cruelly – it is still remarkably earthbound. However much we agree with the ‘greater’ ideal of true love’s form being found not in external appearance but in the personal love between two souls, no one’s aim is to end up as an ugly, smelly ogre living on a swamp with all of life’s problems still present; this is what the heaven of humanism looks like. ‘Happily Ever After’ is a cruel joke in Shrek.
With a film like Stardust, however, you don’t have to be sentimental to see that it has everything that deep down we all long for. The story of someone being raised up from less than nothing in the eyes of others to an inheritance that is imperishable and glorious forever and this happening not for the purpose of personal glory and pride but for the purpose of a relationship of deep, interpersonal love and eternal intimacy… well, I don’t think I need to say any more. It is incomparably more desirable than any earthbound fantasy scenario. And yet this was a story written by a human and it is one that echoes throughout human history. It is a dream within all of us. Where does it come from? Michael Vaughn, the director of the film, comments that it is not a film that will affect anyone’s life or change the world but I beg to differ. The scorn expressed by someone for such a story always hides behind it a bitter, half-forgotten longing for this story to be true, for someone else, if not them. It’s almost as if they have been trying to forget a parallel dream of their own and you have reminded them and made them hope once more.
Well, somewhere, there is a cruel joke going on. Either the universe is playing a cruel joke on us by vesting us with these desires that neither have any rational origin nor hope of fulfilment (if materialism is the ultimate reality)… or the cruel joke is on those of us who choose to listen to the barking of Polly Toynbee and Richard Dawkins over and above the whole of human history which bears witness to these dreams of men as a consistent (and persistent) feature of the human condition.
It must be said that the dreams do not prove anything on their own, but their very presence obliges us to do something about them and simply barking at them is not going to make them go away. Neil Gaimon, the writer of the story behind Stardust, found an outlet in pen and ink. But this is hardly a satisfactory outlet or conclusion.
Indeed, the Toynbees and Dawkins of this world would remind us of the fact that they are simply being realistic – no one has ever ‘imagined themselves’ into a different state, place or condition; nature simply does not work this way. There is no point in losing oneself in unrealistic visions as if we could ‘make’ them reality just by believing in them and living as if they were true. They would claim that this is actually dangerous…
Yet just watch their ‘friendly bark’ turn into snarls, gnashing of teeth and shaking of fists (literally) when they are confronted with the historically-attested event of the death and resurrection of Jesus. They know that this is something from which they cannot escape because it is part of their own recent, human history. We do not know what the first humans looked like but we have numerous eyewitnesses to Jesus’ death and resurrection with their accounts transcribed and cross-referenced; in a court of law there is only one winner here – the eyewitness evidence – and yet we are supposed to accept ape-man theories and reject the events of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection? They know this and so they do not waste their breath attacking the historicity of Jesus and the events surrounding his death and resurrection so they resort to emotional arguments in an attempt to undermine the interpretation of these events. Yet this is an even more foolish endeavour as the interpretation of these events is laid out over 1500 years of the Bible writers all writing about things they did not fully understand at the time but which are now crystal clear to us in the light of the person of Jesus. The story was already told and complete – it just needed the hero to appear.
“Saccharine” (sweet) and – ironically – “earthbound” are the words used respectively by Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins when confronted with these events.
We are back in the dvd rental shop here! I’m not trying to undermine the latent hostility in their retorts but, essentially, they are looking at this scenario and not struggling so much with the events but with the interpretation of them – the interpretation which would allude to reality having any kind of relationship with ‘fairytale endings’, with true and everlasting love and with brilliance and glory shining forever with pride completely banished. Hitchens attempts to demolish the resurrection simply by calling it ‘sweet’ and Dawkins tries to reinterpret it, calling it ‘earthbound’ when any idiot can see that it is the complete opposite of this; if someone has truly been raised from the dead then it is the one true hope that answers the call of our hearts – to be free of the chains of the curse of death. And not only does it sound the klaxon call of freedom but it also speaks of the deepest love that no Shrek could ever even contemplate – an eternal, interpersonal relationship where you shine as do the stars in the brilliance of true glory (ie. not ‘vain-glory’) forever…. saccharine I think not.
At one point of the film, Yvaine – the star – asks the young hero if he is not tempted to kill her and eat her heart so he can live forever. He responds by asking her why would he want to live forever without this existence being in the context of a loving relationship. Conversely, the witch, Lamia, at the end, embodies the secular response to this sentiment by attempting to do exactly that – live forever without any loving relationships after her sisters have been killed. This is not even Shrek’s skewed version of heaven, it is the fundamentalist atheist’s version and it is a horrific thought; even if they could ‘live’ forever, they would still want to cut themselves off from the source of life, love and laughter; this is actually a pretty good description of hell, defined for us over and over by every article they write and every retort to God they snort out (I must add here that they are not all ‘snorters’ – at the best of times, Christopher Hitchens is a paragon of propriety and congeniality and in a kind of paradoxical way I am a great admirer of him).
Their constant refrain is that even if a perfect God was there, they would still reject him.
Which leaves us with the longings of our own heart. Obviously I am not lumping everyone who is not a Christian believer in together with Richard and Polly but sometimes seeing the extremes helps us find where we fit in. I hope you have noted, whether through your own observations or what I have been saying here that, at the end of the day, the ‘logical’ reasons to trust in Jesus’ death and resurrection are almost by-the-by. They can be checked out by anyone. What stops many – and here please take note – is their attitude to the scenario being presented to them (think of the dvd rental shop). They are indignant that anyone, even God himself, would ‘seriously’ seek to spoil the ‘grown-up’ (just another word for bitter) world they have built. They know it is not ideal; it is not even pleasant; in fact it is rather ugly and lonely, but it is theirs and no ‘sweet longings’ and fairytale endings placed in front of them should disrupt this. Their cry for freedom has long been stifled by patterns of thought and behaviour designed for survival and carving out a little corner for themselves in this cruel, unforgiving world and any tender thoughts (yes, I do believe even Polly has tenderness of this kind in her heart somewhere) harboured for any kind of ‘shining forever’ style ending has been covered over by a hardened and, ultimately, a proud heart.
My question for you is how much of this kind of person are you today or are you in the process of turning into….?
Please read the words of this song – it is the perfect companion to the fantastical scenario of Stardust because it speaks of a parallel scenario, but a true one.
Tags: Films, Movies, Provocative Thoughts, Values
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