The Lone Hero

So the other night, I was again embroiled in combat with my abdominals, pectorals, and triceps, this time to the tune of Blade: Trinity. Yes, I am, in fact, going to write about Wesley Snipes’ latest offering on a website devoted to a Christian’s take on film. The truth is that I enjoyed this movie, I bought it, I’ve watched it several times, and now I’m going to write about it.

The film is, at its core, a stupid action caper, replete with a central badass hero, a badass woman-hero (with large… tracts of land), a wise-cracking badass hero, and a number of badass villains (again, including a badass woman-villain, albeit with less noticeable assets). The action is over-the-top, with vampires burning and ash-ing left and right while thrumming techno and hardcore rap give rhythm and attitude to the chaos. In short, it’s a Blade movie.

On the whole, I guess the movie is pretty formulaic, but it comes off as good-natured, even self-aware at times. Ryan Reynolds’ opening voice-over is brilliant writing, in my opinion, and Reynolds himself is indicative of the movie’s strongest point: its characters. Blade needs no introduction, though as the traditional badass he ends up lacking the originality of the others. Still, he gets props for being the only good guy cool enough to use a sword. Jessica Biel is cool because she’s a girl, she’s pretty hot, and she trained like crazy to be able to actually do the stuff you see her do on the screen. Rounding out the cast, Ryan Reynolds is hilarious in a stupid, sophomoric way (and MAN, is he ever cut. That’s devotion to a physique). I’m not at all above ad-libbed goofiness, though when I heard he got the part I was initially worried that the humor would end up derailing the whole operation. It doesn’t, and it works.

But at best, this is still a dumb action/martial arts flick. It’s A-quality, but it is what it is, and what it is isn’t Shakespeare.

So why write about it? I guess I’m not really interested in the particulars so much as in the general idea of the lone hero. The Blade movies have always been, in some measure, about the loneliness of the titular character. He loses Whistler in the first one, he loses his vampire love-interest in the second, and re-loses Whistler and everyone else in the third. He doesn’t say much, he just whips out the weapons and turns the bad guys into dust. And most of all, he doesn’t like company. He’s a hero out to save the world on his own; he’ll be better off if you and I stay out of his way.

When I think about these movies, I find myself oddly attracted to this model. There’s something liberating about having nothing to care about; the promised freedom of having nothing to come home to, and thus nothing to lose/worry about, is comforting in a strange way. Similar to the feeling I get from Fight Club, I wonder sometimes if my life would be better if I cut away all the unnecessary, even cancerous possessions I have surrounding me. And when I say “possessions,” I am including, to a large extent, my relationships to people around me (much of which seem to be dying of their own accord anyway). I wonder if being alone is really so horrible, or such a crime against God as we all seem to subconsciously think it is. And when I say “alone,” I mean just that; no friends nearby, no enemies, and family that lives far enough away that I don’t see it everyday.

I had something of a mentor in college who seemed to think that it was good for a person to rely on the people around him, and I’ll admit, I’ve never understood his reasoning. It went something like this: In order for man to rely on God, he first need to rely on others, and since we need to rely on God, we therefore need to rely on others. Now, it’s very possible that I just butchered that, but I can’t really think of a way to correct it. I agree that every Christian needs to rely on God for every ounce of energy and fortune that makes his life possible, but I fail to see the connection to others that this somehow implies. In certain areas, sure. My parents supported me financially for years, and still do, and thus I rely on them in that respect. More than that, my family and certain friends are often sources of comfort and intellectual support that, whether necessary or not, make my life easier and more complete, for sure.

At the same time, I’m at something of a transition period in my life, and as many of my current friends are getting married and moving away and doing grandiose things with their lives, I’m not sure how interested I am in replacing them with new blood. Don’t get me wrong, my friends have been great; I’m just not sure that I shouldn’t spend some time between myself and God. It seems to me that a certain amount of tempering stems from hardship, and so if spending even a few years alone, honing my mind, my body, and my will, ends up leaving me a smarter, harder, and more determined Christian, then I’m not sure why I shouldn’t.

I can hear it now, the chorus of voices telling me about how being “hard” means being cold, or how cutting myself off from others will invariably cut down on my “ability to love,” or some variants thereof. I’m sure there’s some truth in those statements, but at the same time I’m not sure that the alternative is any better. It seems to me that if a man were to spend a year in solitary confinement, at the end he’d be able to go anywhere and endure anything, while the man who spends a year schmoozing with other people ends up popular, but fat and weak.

I wonder if spending some time working toward being self-sufficient, as long as it is done under the recognition that self-sufficiency is actually God-sufficiency, is not categorically better or worse than surrounding one’s self with others, it’s just different. As such, I bristle sometimes at the insinuation that a guy like me, who spends a lot of time alone and does not mind, is somehow backward, weak, or deluded.

In short, I guess I like the idea of the lone hero, at least at this point in my life. I recognize that it has shortcomings, I just wish other people would recognize that the mob of Christian interdependence has its own.

Oh, and girls with muscles are hot. So long as they’re not WWF-muscles; then they’re gross.

Fight Club

The other day I was bumming around my room, doing my self-improvement routine (pushups and situps until my body tells me to stop), and I absentmindedly flipped on David Fincher’s Fight Club, which I had not seen for quite some time. It’s a puzzling movie in some respects, because I have trouble figuring out exactly what it’s pulling for. I love certain aspects of its value system, but abhor others. Since the parts I like are interesting (read: worth writing about), and the parts I don’t like are for the usual Christian “I didn’t need to see that” reasons, I’ll stick to the good parts.

What I absolutely love about this movie is its unabashed hatred for modern materialism and feel-good sentiments. Ed Norton begins his wild journey through insanity as a normal, white-collar guy who’s got all the marks of success: designer clothes, Swedish furniture, and insomnia. I like this last one because it does really seem to go with the territory; it reflects his deep-seated knowledge that he is somehow selling himself short with his lifestyle. As a member of the modern work force, Norton gets up and drives to work, where he sits at a desk and moves around pieces of information, in one form or another, eats some pre-fabricated plastic “gourmet” meals from some chain restaurant, then heads home for the night to lounge around his excruciatingly expensive apartment. It’s no wonder he can’t sleep; he never expends any real energy, so his body has no need to replenish itself. At the same time, he never really tires his mind out either, so it puts on a similar cowl of restlessness, and poor Ed Norton slowly goes nuts in the shuffle.

His first solution begins to get at the problem: his life leaves him completely numb. He never takes anything in, and he never lets anything out. Like a stagnant pool that sits and grows slime until someone shows up and breaks the festering stillness, Norton exists in a state of intellectual and physical limbo until he can find some way to get stirred up. So he goes to the testicular cancer group, and starts crying with the men who are actually in emotional pain. When he cries, he begins to feel something, and that somehow makes him less of a robot and more of a man. Sort of.

This emotional release does the trick for a while, but ultimately the insincerity gets to him (through the guise of Marla and her own insincerity) and he ends up in the same insomnia-ridden state as before. He needs some way to really feel pain, some way to really get out of the complete sterility of his life.

So he starts beating the shit out of himself. Of course, we don’t know that it’s him who’s doing the beating initially, but that’s kind of beside the point. I actually think the movie would almost as well without the whole surprise ending, or at least it would in the capacity I am here discussing. The point is that he’s getting away from the computer and the numbers and all the worthless paperwork that has consumed him for however long, and has replaced it with the utter simplicity of fists and footwork.

What I like is that this interest in fighting is so quickly embraced by all sorts of men in different walks of life. True, most of them are in the service industry and the like (i.e. not CEOs with yachts). We see snatches of the lives the other men lead, and they all seem as sterile and uninteresting as Norton’s, even though the details are variable. When they find Norton’s method succeeds in giving them a renewed sense of life and limb, the club takes on cult-like appeal. I wonder how true this really is. I know that, for myself, the prospect of letting loose some of the male aggression that sits pent-up in my veins is appealing, and I’ve often wondered what it would be like to actually get into a fight. I wonder how I’d do. Sure, I’ve sparred before, and I work out as much as the next guy, but I have no real concept of how competent I would be in an actual fight, i.e. one with consequences. I love the part of the film where Tyler is explaining his vision of the future to himself, a future where technology is a thing of the past, where people hunt and farm and wear “leather clothes that will last the rest of their lives.”

There’s something entirely comforting about the simplicity of such a life: when you’re hungry, you kill something and eat it; when you’re cold, you kill something and wear it; and when you’re angry, you settle your differences with knuckles and loose teeth, and not with thousands of pages of rules and laws and codes and procedures, with lawyers sucking their lives out of everybody’s wallets so they can buy a new piece of “flaming shit” that they don’t need and won’t appreciate anyway. There is something truly comforting about owning nothing. It really is freedom in a very basic form.

This brings me to the film’s concept of “hitting bottom” as being a good thing. At first, I kind of dismissed this as an overly romanticized version of freedom, but the other night it occurred to me how similar this is to the Christian worldview. As Christians, we very truly need to hit the bottom before we can get anywhere else, and as long as we fill our lives with “flaming shit” (I like that phrase), we never get to the real issues. Life doesn’t really begin for a man until he realizes what’s truly important, and that doesn’t come until all the unimportant stuff is forcibly removed. You lose a lot of stuff, be it in the form of physical possessions or intangibles, but you end up with a freedom you never had before.

The fighting stuff also fits with Christianity, I think. It seems to me that men are naturally aggressive, and deep down, most of us wish we had some legitimate outlet for that aggression (or if I shouldn’t speak for other men, then I certainly speak for at least myself here). I think it helps, or at least it has helped me, to see life as a war between good and evil that is waged on every level. In some instances it’s fought with fists or guns, in others it’s fought with words on a page and the ideas conveyed therein. We can’t get away from this, though I suppose the uninitiated can kind of ignore it with liberal ideas that allow them to accept everything as long as they don’t think about it with more than ten percent of their brains. We are soldiers in God’s army, and that position has many ramifications in our daily lives.

So Fight Club gets a lot of it right, in my opinion. A good Christian does hit bottom, and then he does have to fight. The difference is that when he fights, he fights with a purpose.

Books!

I guess this one's not actually about a movie. Sue me.

I just read The Screwtape Letters (for the first time), and The Great Divorce (not for the first time), over the past two weeks or so. Both were exceptionally well-written, but both are strangely different.

The Great Divorce is an amazing account of heaven and hell that, while I do not believe it literally, makes an inordinate amount of sense. The idea that people are in hell because they choose to be is fascinating, and I buy it completely. I remember having many a conversation about the almighty predestination issue, with one of my more conversationally-oriented friends of yore, and I think Lewis's solution is probably the correct one. To say that a person has no choice in what he believes is to deny everyone's common experience. To say that a person has control of himself is to deny God's sovereignty. And to say that it's both at the same time is contradiction to a feebly human mind.

But it is both. People go to heaven because they can't imagine living in the emptiness of hell, and people go to hell because they don't like what heaven "stands for." We end up where we want to be, and God knew it all along, and allowed us to make the choices that would take us there. Maybe it's not quite that simple, but maybe it is.

Screwtape Letters, on the other hand, is depressing as hell. It seems like the poor guy they're tempting has a very narrow path to walk, and a million ways to screw it up at every turn. If you're strong, you get aggressive, if you're weak, you cave in, and if you're in the middle, you get proud of your wonderful balance (even as you plummet serenely into error). It seems so hard sometimes to walk the line without deviating in any of the myriad ways that bombard me.

But it's not about chance, and the ultimate choice is simple: believe and follow (even if it seems like you fail more than you succeed), or go your own way and do whatever the hell you want (and I do mean "whatever the hell," since you might as well be there already). We make this choice a thousand times a day, and Christians will always end up on top if they're truly Christians.

I guess that's why I don't really worry too much about losing salvation anymore, though I once did. If I get to the end of my life and I don't "make the cut," then I guess I probably would never have appreciated heaven anyway.

I guess some people just aren't happy, never will be, and don't want to be, strange as that may sound.

Band of Brothers, Part 2

Ok, so it's been quite some time since my last blog. I can chalk that up to general laziness, but also a good bit of busy-ness regarding school reading and, of course, my precept paper. "Justice in the Oresteia;" I imagine it's not a gripping read.

Anyway, I decided to get back into it this weekend, seeing as I'm at home and have a nice, convenient way to write and upload. I really should be reading my Tocqueville, but I'm a bit too rowdy for that.

As promised, I am now returning to Band of Brothers. Last time I wrote about Soble as a guy who tried but didn't really make the cut. This time I think I'll write about Nixon as a guy who makes the cut but doesn't really try.

Note: I realize that most of the character issues I'm going to bring up here actually don't happen until near the end of the series, so if you haven't seen them all, dad , you might not want to read all of this just yet.

Nixon is an interesting character because he's a rich boy in the army, and as such he demonstrates an certain facet of the personal characteristics that go hand-in-hand with being well-off.

One gets the sense that Nixon is of a different sort of man than Winters from the very beginning. Winters seems disciplined and duty-bound; the sort of man who leads from the front for the simple reason that it can't be done effectively from the rear, the first in and the last out. Nixon seems like the kind of guy who would rather shrug off actual combat and lead from a bunker behind friendly lines; he seems like the kind of officer who would rather discuss the merits of any specific strategy than actually implement it. From the first few episodes, perhaps most notably in his reaction toward Soble, Nixon seems to be much more aware of the army systems and their functionality than Winters. Nixon seems to constantly question and complain about his particular situation, with what seems to be a partial attitude of "I could do a better job than whoever's calling the shots," and he's far more likely to bend the rules to suit his own desires. He's the kind of man who follows only the parts of the rule set that he understands; those rules he does not like, or simply thinks are silly, he does not heed.

For example, he's one of the few characters who is ever seen drinking with any amount of regularity. Sure, the enlisted men would never pass up alcohol if they could manage to get some, but Nixon goes out of his way to get it, to the point where he ends up embarrassing himself more than once. He's likely to sleep in late and roll into his meetings unshaven, with a wrinkled uniform, because he's an officer and he can afford to. And later, he gets demoted for his lackluster war-performance, but he doesn't care much because his wife decided to divorce him (Sidenote: any woman who would divorce her husband while he's actually out on the battlefield, defending the lives of innocent people, is an absolute bitch).

This last illustration is the most interesting to me: in the middle of a war, in which he could conceivable be killed at any moment, he's preoccupied with the fact that his wife is leaving him and is taking his dog with her. This seems completely absurd to me, that a man who is daily thrown into numerous life-threatening situations is more worried about being alone than of staying alive.

I wonder how much this sentiment is actually held by people, and specifically by men. One could easily make the case that if Nixon is fighting for his home and his country, then if his home is destroyed by his wife's departure he no longer has any personal reason to fight. I can see how this demoralization would negatively affect his attitude. At the same time, he's fighting a war that needs to be fought and won, regardless of his current personal issues.

I wonder if we as Christians often make the same mistake; we let our desires and performance be regulated by our circumstances. We say "oh, God can't possibly expect me to witness to my friends because my girlfriend just dumped me," or something along those lines. So often, I think that my own personal suffering justifies my actions to make other people's lives worse, and that they should "understand" and not be upset because my foot hurts or my dog died or my car needs a new muffler. And as offensive as this is toward people, I think I end up doing it most often to God, who is the one person who can claim both that He fully understands my pain, and that He will never treat me the way I treat Him in return. It's pretty selfish, when you come right down to it.

The other interesting idea I get from Nixon is the issue of education. As I wrote earlier, Nixon seems to be the type of person who is more interested in the theory of warfare than in the actual practice of it. I think this is a snare of education, and it is especially dangerous to Christians who pursue the intellectual route. People get so caught up in reading and contemplating (and writing, ), that they forget that there's actually a war going on between Good and Evil. I know it is certainly a tendency for me to get caught up in theory to the degree that my practice suffers greatly. Rather than deal with envy or anger or lust, I can spend endless hours devising excellent plans to deal with them, all of which involve "starting tomorrow." There's an air of cowardice in this tendency, that I would rather create the plan than carry it out. At the end of the day, the man who works steadily gets the job done, while the theory jock gets fat and bald but some how manages to still feel superior to the other.

Christian men, like Nixon, need to be willing to get their hands dirty, even if it means getting shot at and bloodied in the process.

I have no idea when my next post will be, but hopefully after school's out my ability (and interest) in writing will pick up again.