There is a German film by Wim Wenders called "Wings of Desire". The
title is a bit of a salacious interpretation of the German "Der Himmel Uber
Berlin", which is more like "Heaven Over Berlin", of course. It's about two
angels who observe people going about their humble little lives. The
two angels, Damiel and Cassiel, can "hear" people's thoughts.
One of them, Damiel, decides that he wants to become human.
Cassiel warns him that he will have to give up his immortality. Damiel
doesn't care. He wants to know what it is like to be constrained by
time, to have to relish every moment as if it might be your last, because it
could be your last.
There was, of course, a terrible, terrible American
remake called "City of Angels" set in Los Angeles and starring Meg Ryan as--
ready for it?-- a brain surgeon. Nicolas Cage is the angel who wants
to love her.
For mass American audiences, most of the poetry has been removed in favor
of cheap, mawkish emoting, contrivance, and antiseptic middle-class
moral ambiguity: we wishe to be titillated with suggestive possibilities
without ever being mortally offended by the idea that someone might actually
act on those feelings. The kind of stunted emotional state that
produces beauty pageants for tykes, mischievous nuns, professional
wrestling, by the kind of people who get hysterical when it is
revealed that Michael Phelps smoked pot.
February 12, 2009
Why is anyone even concerned, in the slightest, about the fact that Michael
Phelps was photographed smoking marijuana? Marijuana is no more or less harmful or
truly immoral than most alcoholic beverages or fast foods or high performance
automobiles or skate-boarding. What if someone had posted a picture of him
eating a Big Mac instead? What if Meg Ryan had taken a sublimely
beautiful German film and turned it into a trite, shallow, grasping little
Hollywood contrivance? What if there was a photograph of Meg Ryan doing
just that? Shouldn't she be banned from all Hollywood movies for fifty
years for that crime?
If you are convinced that you
have enemies in the world and that they hate you and that they are coming
after you, you will eventually convince the world to hate you and come after
you. And indeed, you will have enemies in the world. They will
hate you for your paranoia and your defensiveness and the way you always
lock your doors and the way you constantly plan revenge for some outrage
that has yet to happen. Christ said, turn the other cheek. No
wonder they crucified him. He didn't even do them the comfort of
striking back at them. He offered them the quintessential liberality
of: they don't know what they're doing. I say kiss the other
cheek, because that covers just about everyone: they don't know what they
are doing.
We claim that our virtue is offended by some action
by some inadequate human being out there, somewhere, but the real offense is
that we thought anyone should take our virtues seriously or that anyone
would think that we actually believe in them for their own sake.
Nothing is more external to the soul than virtue, for it is precisely the
only thing protecting your soul from the uncomfortable insinuation of
others' mortalities. We would rather die than have them kill us.
We would rather kill than have anybody think we were killers.
If it is a conceit to pretend to be smarter than anyone
else, it is an even bigger conceit to believe that intelligence is something
to be ashamed of. Who do we prefer to kill: those who refuse to bow to
our insights, or those who confront us with undeniable evidence of our
inadequacies?
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© Bill Van Dyk
2009 All Rights Reserved
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