Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

Before I forget, yes, I did see "Casino Royale" last Sunday night, and was very positively impressed with Daniel Craig as the early James Bond.

Though I'll always be loyal to Pierce Brosnan, I have to admit that I actually find Craig's James Bond a more intriguing character. As my sister remarked (after selfishly sneaking off to see it by herself on Saturday evening!), I'm eager to see a sequel with this new Bond, but I'm doubtful that they can ever come up with a more compelling or intriguing story-line. Even that first big chase scene, which seemed to go rather longer than I found entertaining to watch, turned out to be important in setting up the kind of character this young James Bond is: not so much for finesse or smarmy one-liners, but doggedly determined to bull through and get the job done, no matter how much it hurts.

However, that's not what I meant to write about today.

No, right now I wanted to get a few thoughts off my chest -- thoughts that have been piling up there ever since I went to a matinee of "The Fountain" on Tuesday.

Admittedly, I might not have gone to see "The Fountain" if I wasn't such a big fan of Hugh Jackman, but I'll also admit that I found the film more watchable than I'd been expecting, as well as surprising in its willingness to let the viewer deal with ambiguities and uncertainties. And yes, I'd recommend it -- particularly if you like puzzles and lots of Hugh Jackman showing that he's got real acting chops.

By the way, I noticed that the reviewer of this film at the website Sci-Fi Weekly made several comparisons to the Kubrick film "2001: A Space Odyssey" (a film that never flipped any of my switches, I'll confess, but makes several of my male film buff friends drool in admiration, just thinking about it). Apparently, the comparison focuses on that tolerance of ambiguity, that willingness to leave one wondering just EXACTLY what was going on at various points. And though my chief enjoyment in puzzles is solving them, I did find it refreshing and even fun to watch a film ("The Fountain", I mean -- NOT so much "2001" because I never did care about any of the characters in that Kubrick film to the slightest degree) that was willing to make me work so hard to come up with a 'solution', and still leave open the possibility that my solution might be quite other than what the film-maker had intended.

But -- to the extent that "The Fountain" DID have a message and a point to make, and to whatever extent I may be right in thinking that the message involved accepting death as a part of life, a necessary corollary to life and love that is meaningful -- I'll admit to being a bit underwhelmed.

The words "Well, DUH!" did, in fact, come to mind at various points while watching the film.

However, ever since then, I've been wondering if it's just that I got the wrong message, or that (as a consequence of spending so many years in parish ministry and studying and reflecting on the end of life as a stage on the journey) I'm peculiarly placed to regard this as "old-hat".

Or if, maybe, it's just that I long ago read Orson Scott Card's short story "Mortal Gods" in the collection of Card stories with religious themes published under the title Cruel Miracles.

I couldn't find my copy of Cruel Miracles (of course!) before making this entry (the last time I KNOW I had it was when I used Card's introductory essay from the start of that book to kick off a panel discussion of his contention that science fiction literature is the only truly "religious" fiction being published today at a sci-fi convention in Des Moines in the late 1990's). So, this is me going on memories of having read that story about 13 or 14 years ago, but . . .

As my memory of "Mortal Gods" goes, earth finally makes contact with alien lifeforms, who do all the travelling themselves, coming to earth over the vast distances of space, in journeys that apparently take hundreds of years (no such thing as faster-than-light travel, after all), and ask only that -- in exchange for their sharing of the knowledge and technology of their many different species and cultures -- they be allowed to build meeting places in every country on earth. The aliens take the bits of land they're given in every part of the globe and build structures that are architecturally recognizable to the local populace as houses of worship (churches, mosques, temples, etc., depending on the predominating theology and architecture of the local humans). There, the visiting aliens who have invested incalculably vast amounts of time and energy to get to our earth sit, and just wait for any human who might come in and care to visit with them.

The key, as one old man discovers when he comes in to visit an alien "church" one day, is that earth is apparently unique in all the universe for having intelligent life that is NOT inherently immortal. All other alien lifeforms discovered so far, in all their infinite diversity, share the quality of being immortal, ageless, free from decay. To them, death is a nearly inconceivable notion. Yet, here on earth, we have these brief, fragile lives, in which death is absolutely certain, whether sooner or later. And so, the alien races all come here to worship these "mortal gods" -- these amazing, fantastic beings called humans who KNOW that they are mortal and who alone in all the vastness of space have invented art confined by frames, music with a definable beginning and ending point, and all other manifestations of creativity predicated on the idea that we DON'T just go on and on forever, that all life is change and suffering and mostly it's just too darn short, even so.

The old man in the story, who's feeling his mortality and the pains of his various ailments more and more each day, thinks the aliens are crazy, of course, to WORSHIP mortality. But in the end, he comes back to their church, to allow them to witness the indignity and sordidness of his death, as he struggles for each breath and gracelessly surrenders to the end of life. At which point, one of the aliens, awed by this great gift they have been given by the old man and knowing that something appropriate should be said to mark the sacredness of this moment, breathes out the English phrase, "O Lord, My God!"

Over all, I'd have to say that I'd still prefer that Orson Scott Card story to "The Fountain" -- except that the story didn't have Hugh Jackman in it! However, I see interesting parallels in the idea of the main character, Thomas Creo (my Spanish may be rusty, but even I remember that as Spanish for "I believe" -- closely related to the Latin word "credo", from which we get the word "creed") struggling mightily to "cure" death, all the while his wife Izzy is writing a fantasy/historical story about a Spanish conquistador searching for "the tree of life", rather than the fountain of youth, and insisting that her husband must "finish it" for her, after her death. Even though it might take him something like another 500 years to learn the lesson, he finally does get it, and goes back and embraces the cycle of death and new life in each of the story-lines: the conquistador who finds that being "first father" may not be quite the form of eternal life he'd had in mind; the neuro-surgeon who decides to spend every moment he can with his dying wife, rather than missing out on fleeting, precious moments with the person he loves in his obsession with conquering her illness; and the futuristic voyager who accepts his own death, at last, in the death of a star. In other words, he finally "finishes" the various stories, allows them to end and so become the works of art they were meant to be, rather than just staying stuck, with no frame, no boundaries, forever incomplete.

Finally, Izzy's favorite phrase from her Mayan tour guide, that "death is the road to awe", actually seems to be MORE meaningful in light of Card's short story, than it was in the context of the film itself. But, either way, the point is a good one to make, and the film was quite watchable (not to mention that Jackman was in top form in all his incarnations during the movie).