I went to see No Country for Old Men, the latest Oscar winner.
I did not like it. It was the model of a Postmodern story about a Postmodern world. A world with moral relativism, a world where disturbing evil has the the same validity as noble service. A world where the light is dying and departing for distant shores and all that rules our world is a semi psychotic darkness over lain by a veneer of complacency.
Much has been said about the postmodern shift. The case being made that, whether we like it or not, it is happening and here to stay. The idea that we are in a Post Christian period of thought (depending on what that means) I have accepted for a while. There are profound changes taking place in the world which are undeniable.
The pomo critiques of Spong and Crossan seek to tear down the elements of 'simple' faith in favor of facts over meaning. I think they are irresponsible scholars, as I think many in the postmodern world are. The tearing down of these scholars and those of the post modern thinkers Derrida, Foucault and the lot are irresponsible because anyone can tear down with logic, anyone can deconstruct, anyone can tear apart. The unwillingness to apply the same effort and faculty to offer the world a construct, a belief system, an understanding of what then their postulate or theorem is...
is like demolishing an old power plant that may seem rickety but is still supplying power and then simply leaving an empty lot without committing resources or care to building a new source of energy.
I believe the worlds changes are not as a result of the dismantling of structuralism and moralism, many of our deontological goods stand just find in the face of a post modern critique. But they are a dismantling of the facades of structure to reveal the true bones behind the mask.
Every thing I find in the postmodern conversation speaks to one true and real experience, it is that of authenticity. It is my belief as God is working in the world that the world is being led into greater freedom and that freedom is allowing for the very best of us to be better than ever and the very worst of us to be as bad as we could imagine and all of that is happening more and more in the full light of day. The structural gloves are off, no one will make us stay in marriage, no one will make us help our neighbor, or go to church. The structural pressures for such things the facades of them are gone.
The mistake though, like that in No Country for Old Men, is because we are able to express who we really are more than we have ever been able to, that each experience and moral decision of each person is sometimes mistaken as equal in value and validity. And it is not. We can be angels in this world, or we can be demons. There is a difference in the world we create in the very invitation we extend or do not extend to bring down heaven or hell itself.
Desiring and doing harm to others is not as valid a moral stance as desiring and doing kindness. Deconstructing arguments, words, and facts about the nature of God and existence is not as valid as offering a construct of how to understand the Universe and makes sense of our living in it.
They are not the same things, and no amount of saying it will make it so.
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3 comments:
This movie, No Country for Old Men, was hard for me to watch. I'd be very interested in hearing feedback from anyone who enjoyed the film and what you took away.
For me it seemed like the fairy tale about The Emperor Who Had No Clothes. That like the townspeople who refuse to tell the emperor he was naked for fear of looking stupid, that we're all left to ignore this film's gaping holes in plot and lack of purpose and meaning for fear of looking stupid in a culture who seems to deify the Coen brother's and their "stylistic" film making.
I guess I'm the little kid in the crowd and the emperor is just plain naked. To me this film was empty, boring, pointless and it didn't make sense. This is what we call Hollywood's Best Picture? Why? What does this say about what we consider great in our culture right now? What are people hearing?
I haven't seen the movie because I choose not to subject myself to gratuitous violence. I don't mind the occasional action film, but a colleague told me that he walked out of the movie because it was so disturbing and he saw no point to the violence. I agree with you, Sage - I don't understand why it was so celebrated. I mean, come on, the hairdo on Javier Bardem alone should've disqualified it!
I haven't seen the movie. I wanted to, but I get to see movies about as often as I get to see lunar eclipses. I have read the book, though, and it's a keeper.
Cormac McCarthy certainly isn't a "happy ending" writer. His stories tend to follow the track of the setting and the characters. In this story we have a basically good main character, who makes a lot of bad decisions, and he happens to live in a place threatened by criminal activities. This is not so unusual. We have a lot of this kind of place.
All the Pretty Horses, another great McCarthy book, follows a similar type of path. In this case, take a broken home, a detached and dejected boy, a couple of other boys on the fringe of society -- all of them lacking direction, stability or consistent and stable role models -- and send them off across the countryside, and things aren't bound to go smoothly.
But while I see where Andy is going in his criticism of the tired old ground of bleak, postmodern moral relativist stories, I don't think this is what McCarthy is doing. Not at all.
First, McCarthy writes about settings. His books are riveting in the descriptions of place, whether it's boys riding horses across the Mexican border or a pure-evil, soulless killer hunting for sport (and fancying himself a mere instrument of powers beyond his own control). The juxtaposition of settings and events, the events frequently threatening and tense if not outright violent, magnifies the sense of living in an actual, natural world, the world that we actually live in.
I will grant you that McCarthy isn't trying to write moral tales, at least not in a direct way. He's showing us a slice of life, in unfiltered detail. You can relate to the feel of the soil under the characters' feet, and see the choices they make not as calculated, intellectual decisions, but as a function of their role as living-being in this particular context. It's all connected: the characters, the setting, and the decisions. These characters can't just step out of their context and live some other life.
Neither can you. Chances are, you're a lot luckier than they are. Maybe you have good role models, and maybe someone has taught you about other ways to look at the world. One can hope that you're not starving, or a slave, or living with no healthcare or means. I suppose in a blunt way, there is an element of relativism, in that those who are lucky enough to be healthy and safe have more of an opportunity to engage with questions about belief systems and the basis of a moral system.
But at risk of being accused of over-simplifying things, I'll assert that the western philosophers who developed our Christian ontology by and large weren't disillusioned and starving, and weren't living hand-to-mouth somewhere, waiting to have what little property they owned taken from them, or being subjugated by others of power and means. Moral relativism -- or at least not spending a great deal of time trying to understand decisions and events as being related to some abstract moral standard -- starts to look a bit more useful and interesting in less sanguine environments. McCarthy is showing us people who aren't so lucky, and face more immediate challenges than trying to dope out an internally consistent and useful system of ethics.
But it's a mistake to see this story as supporting the notion that one "authentic" life is the moral equivalent of any other. No, McCarthy is showing us that there really are "authentic" lives, both good and evil -- whether we like it or not -- and here's what happens when they clash. He is not espousing moral relativism, though. In fact I think he's doing the opposite, but not beating you over the head with it.
In the case of No Country, the evil-killer character is clearly evil. You're not supposed to admire him. You're supposed to fear him. By seeing his story, watching him act out his philosophy of vacant-lot moral relativism and seeing the swath of evil, suffering and death he leaves across the countryside, you're supposed to see that it doesn't work. Not that it works. But you're also supposed to see that he is not an imaginary person. The sheriff would like never to see him again. But he's not sure that he never will.
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