I watched the move Venus with Peter O'Toole tonight with my parents. Not a great movie, but a very provocative one.
As I see it, the movie raises two central questions, two major themes. The first is old age and death: appropriate since there is only one major character in the film who is not just about on her deathbed. The characters talk about death constantly, and their loss of memory, their trivial old-person joys and their rage and bitterness at age and decrepitude are the real heart of the movie. The last line of dialogue is especially beautiful (no real spoiler here). Two characters are discussing their friend's death with obituary in hand. The last line is delivered with failed nonchalance which betrays its urgency. "How many collumns did he get?"
The second theme is pleasure. To what extent is people using each other for pleasure justifiable? Peter O'Toole plays an aged actor who takes a very physical, romantic interest in his friend's twenty-something niece. He buys her things, tell her things, and every time she is not looking we see him eye her. But she needs him too. A troubled girl, his attention becomes an affirmation of her being, and she has no problems being assertive when she feels things have gone far enough. Both of their wants and what they do to satisfy them feel sleazy to the hundredth power, disgusting and base. But human. And really, if they are fulfilling each other's warped desires, isn't what matters that they are both happy--not how twisted each desire is?
Which brings me to a philosophical/psychological/biological point that I can't help but throw in here. Human beings are not hardwired for happiness--if we were, we would sit around all day smiling until we starved to death. Rather, we are wired to be eternally discontented, trying to reach goals with the purpose of being happy but the knowledge that--if only because it is how we must be to survive as a species--as soon as we reach the goal and the happiness it becomes not enough, and we must set a new goal. Self-help crap always says "don't try to be happy, you can't force that, instead try to set and meet achievable goals." Do our brains provide a scientific grounding for this philosophy?
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A Californian, a Scot, and a Shanghainese walk into a bar...
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Upcoming: Romeo & Juliet, Forum Theatre, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
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Soft Night
silent graffiti
sprawling words stretched out on cream pink walls
spattered from on high by the seagulls
that freewheeled and caw-cawed through aharsh pink sky
still graffiti
a motionless oasis
in violence, silent. calm,
but eagerly longing for discovery:
notice me!
here! I am out of place
no whitewashed walls
a monument TO MAN’S INGENUITY
no pyramids of the metropolis
only the loving work of boys
somewhere between testament and confession
they who posses nothing
but are the property of adults
spray themselves out on other adult property
this is mine! until the paint
is covered by another layer
dogs piss at a fire hydrant
silent graffiti
crackling ground under Nikes
and from
far off
the whirr of sirens.
8 comments:
How, indeed, does one justify using another. Interesting post, Brian. And to think you wrote it after your teeth ordeal!
The movie showed the process of egoism - each actor was self centered and concerned primarily with themselves. It is interesting to contrast that with Letters from Iwo Jima where (most of) the Japanese soldiers were concerned with honor and country, to the exclusion of their own happiness. Being a western film, we are most sympathetic in Letters with the one private who only wants to return home to his wife (an egoistic desire). In Venus, none of the characters are particularly sympathetic, but we are offered no alternative. The actor who dies seems to be happy (or at least content) when he does, but we also get a sense of the wreckage he left in his wake through his life. The young woman, Venus, grows and becomes more confident in the end; is that supposed to leave us with some hope that she will have any better life?
Hi Brian - I have to see the movie to really comment. But, from what I've read, it seems like the only difference between Peter O'Toole's rrelationship with the girl and any body elses is that he was old and ugly. If he'd been as young as she was nobody would have looked twice. It would just be banal.
I couldn't disagree with the third paragraph more. I do not believe that we are hard wired or evolutionarily predisposed to being eternally discontented or fixated on the endless pursuit of ephemerally satisfying goals. I think that this is a particularly Western pathology that has its twisted beginnings deep in the demonic heart of Christianity. Secular or religious - we buy into it. It holds that you're NOT GOOD ENOUGH! In fact, you are corrupt and imperfect. You are BAD. This idea is buried stakelike into our hearts before we are very aware and then we spend the rest of our lives trying to goal chase and perfect our way out of it. The Buddhists call this "Hungry Ghost" syndrome -never satisfied, never full, never content. If this is the case, then the only real goal worth pursuing is learning how to pull out the stake. "Carl Jung tells in one of his books of a conversation he had with a Native American chief who pointed out to him that in his perception most white people have tense faces, staring eyes, and a cruel demeanor. He said: "They are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something. They are always uneasy and restless. We don't know what they want. We think they are mad." (Pg. 75, "The Power of Now", Eckhart Tolle.) So - this goal oriented, disatisfied sate that you are calling scientific and evolutionarily based has always seemed to me to be nothing more than a widespread cultural/psychological pathology that we can, with effort, recover from.
I both agree and disagree with artdroid. I agree that the "original sin," seeking salvation from unhappiness and Catholic guilt is a Judeo Christian philosophy that is beaten into us, and not terribly healthy. On the other hand, humans do seem to have a thrill seeking gene that is exaggerated in some ... a desire to push limits and do creative things. How else do you explain people who voluntarily jump from high distances for the thrill of free fall (know that there is a parachute on the their backs), explore uncharted and dangerous territory, and go on roller coasters! Culture can calm and suppress urges just as much as create disquiet, so maybe Buddhists are in denial???
swallace makes my point for me. They are jumping off cliffs in order to distract themselves from their inner disquiet and unhappiness!
Dad--how do you see the relationship between egoism and death? I agree that each character was following an individually motivated desire, but I think some level of depth was added by making mortality a persistant stake; all petty desires become both nothing and everything when death is at hand. I think that talking about egoism without the element of mortality in this case is impossible.
Art--Yay posting! Maybe the relationship would have just been a little unhealthy and not bizzare if the two had been of a similar age. Nevertheless, the purely physical nature of Peter O'Toole's desire and the dependant/needy victim status of the woman added to the unease in that relationship.
I understand where you're coming from spiritually with your argument (well, maybe not--lets say for simplicity that I do), and while the original sin crap is just crap, the evolutionary argument makes sense to me. In at least a semi-Darwinian world of competition, what would a Buddhist say is the drive that makes each animal struggle to survive? I see discontentment as being very evolutionarily viable--you have needs, and you persistantly want to fill them more and better, to gain an advantage. Very western, of course, but how do inner peace and acceptance of everything as it is ensure that shit gets done? If we are perfectly content, why would we ever even want to reproduce, or eat, or do anything? It seems to me that any species which is perfectly happy would be dead within a generation.
i agree with Brian, reproduction does seem to be an onerous chore (just ask your Parents.......Kidding! Just kidding!!!.) But sex is fun and is as much about intimacy and bonding as it is about reproduction. (And I would maintain that currently sex for reproduction is sending us ALL over an evolutionary cliff marked - Lemmings Leap!) Eating and work can be fulfilling if you find the right job and you are working to live (not living to work). When these things are pursued with an eye towards self-actualization and growth they can lead to contentment. Contentment does not necessarily imply lack of action. Contentment may actually require activity which leads toward a sense of fulfillment (however you concieve it). It's when you are pursuing these things out of fear or a sense of inadequacy or desperation that they become oppressive (which just about covers 95% of us),
By the way, Japanese biologists think that Darwinian competition is mostly a load of crap. They have a whole other hypothesis that says that species mostly cooperate and its only our Western bias that causes us to see killer competiton. ( I only read this recently and can't defend or comment any more about it. But, it is certainly a startling idea!)
the perversion of listening in on the subject of sex, god, and the ruinous search for fulfillment is just delightful! I must side with Art on the nature of one's essence, and would like to ask you to re-examine your fundamental belief system. While writers like Tolle and Parson can be seen as the latest reaction to the birth of reason, Foucault would have some very interesting things to say about how the language of telling stories have inverted upon itself the idiom "no more storytelling." For further exploration, visit e. tolle's site or tony parson in the U.K. (Alas, michel foucault died in 1985, but his works are alive and well.)
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