Movie Review: The Sacrifice

Written and Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. 1986.

In some way the power of a great work of the cinema becomes part of you. Amadeus introduces you to an unforgettable character, 2001 immerses you in the vastitude of time and space, and Lawrence of Arabia sweeps you up in the sprawl of history. A simple movie like Mr. Hulot's Holiday can etch a tiny beach into your memory and a silly romp like Raiders of the Lost Ark can kindle your inner child. A satire or documentary can change the way you think, and a drama how you feel. I've never known, until The Sacrifice, a movie to change what you see. I don't mean see, though, as a metonymy for think (cogitate) or prehend (grasp) or discern (separate) but I mean literally to observe, to watch and keep. Tarkovsky's final movie, dedicated from the dying director to his son, is not about the world of calculation, but of the perfect, total sacrifice of love, and such love is not predicated on any recognition but the observation (seeing and keeping) that God is love, and the fullest love is the fullest sacrifice.

Yet modern man is closed to this sacrifice, and thus God and love, because he limits himself to the empirical, the perceptible, and the material. In faith, though, hope remains. The opening shot sets the stage of man's disillusion and promise: Alexander walks home from the shore with his son and friend. With his son he has planted a tree, and told his "Little Man" the story of a monk who on faith climbed a summit each day to water a tree which did one day blossom. To his friend Alexander confesses his feeling that he has waited his whole life for a reality which has not arrived. It's a rhapsodic unfurling of the story with Alexander walking along, Little Man loosely in tow playing with his lasso, and Otto his part-time postman friend cycling to and fro around them. When Otto dismounts, the men reflect in some frank philosophical speculation about demiurges, Nietzsche's dwarf, and the eternal return. This unbroken scene, over nine minutes, is also a microcosm of Alexander's life–ambling, interested, pale–and as such the cute prank which Little Man plays on Otto is fraught with portent: while the men talk the boy lassos the bicycle to a nearby tree, and after Otto starts to cycle away the bike halts and Otto goes flying off. A not so subtle suggestion: have we overlooked something in our search for happiness?

Alexander of course loves his Little Man and speaks volumes to the boy, himself mute after a recent surgery, about life and meaning. The father carries the son on his shoulders, walks with him, and holds him with tender arms. In the second scene, pictured on the poster above, Little Man sits on his father's lap and as a breeze blows through their shady grove Alexander tells his son how they came to find the nearby house in which Little Man was born: he saw it and fell in love. No calculation or benefit-analysis, just a sense of rightness. His son wanders off a bit, crawling around the roots of trees as Alexander wanders onto less happy topics, like the technical progress which has brought both comfort and standardization, but not satisfaction or spiritual health. Science, Alexander says, is in the service of evil, since sin that which is unnecessary. This would seem but ennui and speculation were it not for the beautiful sight of father and son under the breezy trees which persuades us that anything else is indeed unnecessary. He goes on and on until at last in disgust he says like Hamlet to Polonius, "Words, words, words." Mere words are no substitute for doing something significant.

In his preoccupation Alexander has lost track of his son, who sneaks up on him. Crashing into his father, the boy bloodies his nose and when Alexander sees what has happened, he collapses, just barely wheezing out, "Dear God what's wrong with me?" After he falls the camera cuts to a dream, black and white, of a destroyed urban square. No people, just gurgling water, and as the shot fades out we see the edge of what looks to be a spatter of blood. Whose?

The camera cuts back to Alexander thumbing through his birthday present, a book of prints depicting Christ. As we take in together with Alexander how the colorful paintings and images of Christ contrast the dream, or the reality, Alexander says, "Fantastic. What refinement." These are such choice words that we wonder, even of Tarkovsky and even in this masterpiece, whether they're wholly deliberate. A fantasia is not simply something which you see, but from Greek's φανταζω is something which appears to you as if presented to your consciousness, less cognitively than directly. Likewise in refined we find per-ficio, that is, finished, perfected.

Alexander goes on to say that the images are childlike yet meaningful and knowing yet virginal. How do these pictures seem to know and yet remain uncorrupted by the world? Alexander concludes that it's all been lost: we can no longer pray. Shortly later, he examines a map from the 14th century, reflecting how wonderful it must have been to have seen Europe like this. To him this old Europe looks like Mars, a lie if it's supposed to be Earth. Alexander longs to see with different eyes, to see the truth, but Otto cautions him with the image of a cockroach running around the plate, who runs that ritual, perhaps in vain, in the faith that "He could," but not seeking something so protean and chimerical as some "truth" which he can understand and master.

Tarkovsky would go on to write in Sculpting in Time (228), that,

Contemporary man is unable to hope for the unexpected, for anomalous events that don't correspond with 'normal' logic; still less is he prepared to allow even the thought of unprogrammed phenomena, let along believe in their supernatural significance. The spiritual emptiness that results should be enough to give him pause for thought."

The only alternative to faith and hope is the tortured pursuit of the truth without the ability to see it. All the while the two men carry the painting through the house, as if... as if what? As if they determine the truth, the choice, the path? As if they think they do?

After the roars of bombers interrupt the birthday celebration we learn that they were the attacks of a nuclear war. Slowly the family members lose their sanity and as they do Alexander sees the inevitable descent. Finishing the Lord's Prayer, Alexander asks for the deliverance not only of his family but also those who do not believe because they have not suffered, and those who have lost hope and the opportunity to surrender to God's will. Kneeling to God on the floor in his home, he promises to renounce and even destroy his earthly attachments for the sake of this petition. He will become silent, so that his son may speak. When Alexander stumbles back to the couch after his prayer, a coin falls from his pocket and rattles noisily along the floor. A symbol of his sacrifice, of its singularity or its smallness? Is it a gesture of banality after the heightened tone of the prayer?

In his subsequent dream, a pile of coins shaped like an arrow points the way to Little Man, but as the camera pans up (the opposite of the downward motion of the previous dream) we glimpse but his feet before he runs off. Then we hear the onrush of the jets whose breeze then blows open a pair of doors, revealing a path still sealed by bricks. The imagery here is vague but fruitfully so. It is vague not for the sake of speculation or nihilism–that is, endless legitimate interpretations–but for the sake of making the film an invitation to the audience to look and wonder where the sacred, where the significant, lies. Perhaps the coins are the sacrifice, Little Man the end, and the blocked door the alternative. Perhaps the coins are Alexander's life and Little Man is a path away from the inevitable blocked door of death. Perhaps coins represent calculation and point toward the door which technology reveals to be blocked anyway.

In cryptic, elliptical words Otto tells Alexander how to save his family: he must lay with the witch, who happens to be Alexander's unusual maid, Maria. We can accept this command as magical realism or we can understand the curious characters of Otto and Maria as possessing the sight which eludes Alexander and modern man. As Tarkovsky writes, "They move in a world of imagination," (Sculpting in Time, 227) not of empiricism, a world to which we see hints in Maria's eyes, deep with sensitivity, and Otto's fainting spells and secret knowledge of spiritual matters.

Trusting in Otto, Alexander sneaks out of the house to find Maria. When he finds her, though, he finds the need for more words, this time a story from his youth. The house in which he lived with his mother had a garden which was overrun with weeds. His mother would sit beside the window and look out into the garden, until she became ill and bedridden. At that time Alexander sought to cultivate the garden to his own taste and with his own hands and then show it to his mother to please her. When he was done, though, he looked upon his work and was disgusted by the ugliness he had wrought. He had done violence to the land and destroyed its natural beauty.

When he lays with Maria they rise above the bed, draped in sheets, liberated from pragmatism by the gift from God that was Maria's love.

When he awakes, the sun is for the first time bright and warming. Colors are rich and vibrant. Alexander picks up the receiver of the telephone, which had been ringing unanswered throughout the movie, and calls his editor. The boss is busy, the secretary says, but they're glad to have Alexander back. Is the boss more than just Alexander's editor?

Finding the world seemingly returned to normal, Alexander makes good on his promise to forsake his worldly belongings and attachments. In another long unbroken shot he burns down his beloved house and seems to go mad, but it is not the madness of frenzy but of elation, of the Holy Fool who has forsaken the world in sacrifice, for love, for God. As the house burns in the background Alexander runs back and forth, eluding the ambulance and paramedics who try to take him away. As he is finally driven off in the ambulance, Maria cycles away as well, pausing to see Little Man faithfully watering the tree as the monk did. The Little Man has inherited the ritual, the faith, and he may save himself and others as his father's sacrifice saved him.

The film ends with its beginning, with Bach's Erbarme dich from the Matthew Passion uniting the cycle of sacrifice and redemption. There is but one sacrifice, gift, and love–the full gift of oneself–and it is the fullness of this gift which transforms our sense of that harmony which is "born only of sacrifice" and which transforms the world around it (Sculpting in Time, 217.)  In so sculpting moments and meaning into this "poetic parable," this film itself becomes the glass through which we see not so darkly, but with a hint of the special sight which sees the beauty of the sacrifice.

Trigger Warnings

It's not an idea immediately attractive to anyone with antennae for liberty, putting warning labels on academic content, so it's no surprise that a proposal to mandate professors at the University of Santa Barbara place such advisories–popularly called "trigger warnings" in the online feminist community–has earned ire. The plan is unpalatable to me for a few reasons.

The now infamous proposition by UCSB junior Bailey Loverin suggests that the liberty to present, discuss, and debate in an academic manner and context should be subject to fears of inducing fear, of all concerns, is inimical to a serious pursuit of knowledge. It's hard to reconcile a tradition which in so many ways sees itself descended from Socrates, Western Civilization's great gadfly swatted down by popular opinion, with tiptoeing around sensitivities and preferring safety to hard truths. At least, though, Socrates was charged with crimes of impiety and corrupting the youth, not simply terrifying onlookers. While in public it is decorous to avoid even giving offense, and while offense is not inherently desirable in environments of debate and inquiry, there giving offense is considered worth the risk.

Moreover, the suggestions not only that students–learners and investigators of the world–would prefer not to confront challenging ideas but also that so many of them would so decline the challenge that a school requires a mandatory alert system, is one chilling to the spirit of inquiry and academia.

Nonetheless, a degree of common sense would easily ameliorate the situation. Sensitive students should investigate classes ahead of time and professors should, in private consultation with the student, advise them whether a given course or class would be appropriate for them. The situation in the classroom is not so different from that of dining, in which before the meal someone with allergies might ask whether a dish contains a particular ingredient. In both environments the individual's concern is not simply fickle but serious: panic and anaphylaxis. In both instances, though, we ought to expect that the individual with abnormal condition make the necessary inquiries. Unfortunately the presence of mandated food labeling laws suggests in which direction the debate turned. The result of oversight is always the same: conservative uniformity.

It's prudent and liberal to accommodate personal, private requests when possible and it's not unreasonable that a university should expect from professors a standard of concern for students, but the enforcement of such a law as Ms. Loverin's not only privileges sensitivity over inquiry but requires a criteria which seems destined to expand to compendious size. Each instance stifles the curriculum.

It should not be thought, though, that such a preference for inquiry means that discussions of sensitive topics should be frank or designed to desensitize, for to the contrary discussions should impress upon students the seriousness of the topic. Likewise I don't suggest that institutions of higher learning have no interest or responsibility toward accommodating student needs, but only that such a law as proposed is an illiberal and counterproductive means, injurious to the university's other goals, toward reasonable ends.

Ad summam, students should be responsible for their behavior and thus should inquire about curricula before hand, and professors should accommodate those inquiries. If laws need to exist to ensure such common sense and courtesy, then the higher education die is already cast.

Therapy vs Consolation

More of man's activity–more than any would care to admit–is centered around the Sisyphean task, not the grandeur of finding meaning, but of avoiding disruption. We are weak and construct easily punctured bubbles of tales, half-truths, and useful lies which allow us to float through unperturbed. Yet life is disruptive and threatens to break our bubble, and us. The problem is not, contra Camus, that the world is unreasonable, but that the world is not entirely reasonable. With more providence and poetry Boethius asked:

Omnia certo fine gubernans
hominum solos respuis actus
merito rector cohibere modo.
Nam cur tantas lubrica uersat
Fortuna uices?
(De consolatione, Book I Metrum 5, 25-29)

So much is ordered, yet man's life is so volatile. How to reconcile? 

The first path is that of transgression, avoiding the conundrum, called absurd, by confronting instead the norms which others have established in pursuit of order. For all its sway among intellectuals, this path seems little followed. You don't have to think that the Commendatore in Don Giovanni is sent from God in order to find passion a more cruel master than Fortune. On the milder side of transgression we have vandalism against mores. Whether it's Duchamp's urinal or tattooing, vandalism finds pleasure in the barbarity of degradation and leveling.

By far the most common path is that of therapy, by which man embraces what he hopes will cure his ailing incompletion. Some embrace political and social causes which they expect to usher in new eras of peace, prosperity, liberty, and so on, or they rail against causes so they may preserve the status quo. Some lavish on themselves material comfort as distraction, whether with food or expensive accoutrements. Some devote themselves to work, a productive if only diverting task. Some few people devote themselves to others, as charity or obligation.

This therapeutic mindset of our age is easy to summarize: the pleasurable is good and everything else is work. Hence, pleasure is therapy. People of course find different things pleasurable, see above, but it's no small coincidence that in the twilight of the gods we can see a surge in activities which people refer to as their religion: art, music, truth, love. Speaking of love, we mock the arranged marriages of the past, those set to preserve family fame and fortune, but still today relationships, romantic and otherwise, seem rooted the utilitarian balancing of strengths and weaknesses. How noble or romantic is this? Expedit esse amorem.

Yet the slightest admixture of effort and adversity results in that evil object, work. To avoid such an invidious burden, relationships become transitory and skills supplanted by technology. Character languishes amidst ease. While we didn't look up to their heroes, there is something of Nietzsche's Last Man and the antithesis of Camus' Absurd Man in this sketch. A tedious life.

The third path is that of consolation, which seeks neither remedy nor transgression but rather comfort. Today comfort has a softish connotation, conjuring images of ease and safety, but it in fact hails from Latin's con-fortis, with strength. Consolation consists neither in denying meaning nor in chasing perfection, but in forbearing  difficulty through virtue. It meets the world not with passions or faculties but virtuous character. To live so, with consolation but not cure, requires more courage and prudence than to live for nothing or chasing perfection.

Alma Mater?

So I'm teaching Petronius again and of course in teaching satire one always must broach the question of whether a character is self-aware. Is Trimalchio aware of just how silly he looks when he wants his favorite gladiator painted on his mausoleum? Naturally not, since the fool lacks the self-awareness for necessary dissimulation. It's no small coincidence to this observation that I received the quarterly alumni newsletter from my alma mater, the reading of which spurred thoughts many and terrible.

 +1 Photoshop

First off, this is one polished turn of the press. It has the gloss of a European fashion magazine and such heft that I retain the Spring issue for summer mosquito-bashing, making it perhaps the most costly bug swatter in history. But is it effective! Yet the publication isn't just a defense against desanguination but a feast for the eyes too, and let me tell you I couldn't have cropped out the cover's background and rendered any finer clouds than the Photoshop master who crafted this masterpiece. The back cover is an ingenious display of diversity and it's doubtful any finer piece of fodder could be confectioned a more tasteless sample of politically correctness. The cover is only marred by the presence of the school seal, whose curling crest seems to me an invidious, serpentine presence. Yet I shouldn't complain about the seal which manages to cram several Latin words into a magazine which is otherwise content to cultivate the haute banal style of the moderately educated middle class.

Yet it's the language of Cicero and Vergil which titles the university's age-defining achievement: a massive fundraiser. One wonders why they settled on  Latin but I suspect it's because they thought it might lend an aura of dignity and authority to what is otherwise shameless whooping for money. The more significant gesture than the title Excelsior, though, is that the official slogan includes a translation of the Latin. It's not without humor and irony that they chose the more poetical and aspirational translation of ever higher, but which is the more depressing possibility: that they thought the poetical reading of the comparative adjective a meaningful twist, or that they didn't even realize what they were writing? At any rate, Latinizing their slogan lent more credulity to their cash grab than their English apologies, which ran from describing the fundraiser as "not gratuitous"  and "not unpremeditated," which explains about as much as the old woman dropping the necklace at the end of Titanic.

Speaking of an expensive exercise in a cosmetic facade which hides grotesque and negligent structural flaws that ultimately culminate in tragic immiseration, let's talk about the school's curriculum. Actually, let's not because 56 pages isn't enough space, it seems, in which to mention what one might learn. It certainly can't be the case that you would raise hundreds of millions of dollars and have a curriculum–aka the course of learning–whose only possible analogy is to running naked through an endless thicket of flaming thorns while chased by the Hound of the Baskervilles.

Then we shall mulch in the shade!

Let then the On Campus section clue you to university happenings. The environment is the theme of the hour, and not only did a nun speak about the need for the church to focus on ecological problems, apparently excluding the fauna of their school's flagellating curriculum, alas, but also a team of students planted trees by means of shovels which were made from recycled guns in violence-plagued neighborhoods. Because that's what terrorized people need: plants. Melt your swords into plowshares by all means, but don't plan on fighting off the drug cartel with a fern and your green thumb.

If that hasn't sent you to the enrollment office, do you want to be a part of Nelson Mandela's legacy of change? Do you want to find out whether empathy can help foster racial justice? Come on! Higher education "can lift people out of poverty," "education is the great leveler," and "the Jesuits really are the best." With all of this stifling political correctness–the president's letter even alternates the order in the phrase "men and women" each time it's used–I'm surprised they declined alumni in the masculine. It certainly can't be they don't know Latin, right? Right? Bueller?

Hold on to that gun before someone
makes a shovel out of it.

Alright, you're a hard sell. Time to trot out the superstars. Denzel Washington went there. Washington, known for such movies as Man on Fire, Inside Man, and Training Day, has been hailed as "the greatest role model"by the first recipient of the Denzel Washington Endowed Scholarship, who went on to proclaim her love for Barney the Dinosaur and Frosted Flakes. Next on the celebrity parade is Mary Higgins Clark, author of 42 best-selling suspense novels, the first of which dates from her famous pre-natal years and tells the story of a zygote which realizes it's carrying the child of a murderer. Alright fine, don't attend, but you'll regret it if you ever stumble upon a murder in a runaway freight train. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Now I'm not saying that I can't take seriously a school who boasts "190% growth" in world-class faculty, cloaks itself in the cheap slogans of the day, softly peddles cheap liberalism, and demonstrates no serious, concrete academic program. Likewise I ignore its foolhardy abstract "devotion to humanity" and the hubris of wanting to leave students "able to shape the world." Instead I merely suggest that such doesn't recommend one as a nourishing mother.

She does have, though, the fool's penchant for self-revelation, if not awareness. Describing the results of a recent renovation, the magazine writes that, "the walls are the only thing remaining of the original structure." Most assuredly.

Contempt and Love

Moral philosophers are eager to suggest every which way we might become good people, but they seldom seem to get around to telling you what to do once you are a good person. Don't they expect anyone to try, let alone succeed? Perhaps they don't think that there is anything to worry about once you succeed at virtue, by which I of course mean act generally with approbation, since no one is perfect all of the time. Yet there seems a unique struggle attendant the adherence to virtue, and perhaps even to the attempt at virtue, and that is the development of disdain for those unsuccessful at becoming good people.

I haven't called them wicked because most often they are not. I'm not talking about disdaining dictators, murderers, and the like, which is very easy, but disdaining normal people who don't try or fail to practice virtues. Neither am I talking about intellectual virtue, for we can all comprehend that some people can't comprehend some things. How though should we feel about and react to people who harbor chronic character flaws and make no attempt to correct them, or fail at the attempt?

Let me give you an example and drop the pretense that I'm not speaking about myself. I work rigorously against a nature which is critical, finicky, easily-perturbed, controlling, conservative, proud, opinionated, stubborn, reclusive, anxious, indolent, petty, and derisive, among other faults. For eight years–yes, precisely eight, it's been a deliberate endeavor– I've tried to prune this thorny personality into a gentleman. I very much hope that I've at least made an improvement, but I'm at a point where I remember my old self and I'm not very sympathetic to him.

Moreover, though, I find myself unsympathetic toward those who haven't made the change. Freud wrote that we dislike people who remind us of ourselves, but for my part I find myself disliking people who remind me of my former self. Perhaps this is illogical, for it's certainly possible that such people have wrestled with other demons while I've tamed my less feral passions. Sometimes though you just can't shake the feeling that someone is congenitally–I was going to say congenitally bad, but I think the better word is weak. They lack the fortitude to improve.

There seem two ways to react to such people. The first is that to which I'm  immediately inclined: contempt. This is a word too strongly associated with hate, and it more correctly means to value little, from Latin's contemno. This is no power trip, though, because as much as the sight of such people inflicting their untutored personalities on the world fills me with disdain, that same low estimation is attended by feelings of great pity. We pity them because they don't deserve their burden–who can be said to deserve his character?–and because we feel that we've but narrowly avoided similar fate.

Yet pity is ultimately a feeling of pain, and it's no small coincidence that contemno can mean to avoid. Ultimately we wish to avoid such people. Aristotle's great-souled man is quite indifferent to inferiors. In contrast we take delight in seeing the good and it is the good which spurs us to imitation.

Of course ruling out erotic love, is there no affection these people may receive, no principle which may bind men to each other? How can we share φιλία or have an amicus without equality? Both Latin's caritas and diligo interweave the idea of esteem into the valuation. It seems there is no pure love, to use the overused word, for such people, but is there pure love for anyone? It seems always mitigated or predicated on estimation, eros, utility, similarity, equality, or some premise.

The only two remaining postures are humanism, a pure love for man qua man, and Christian agape. Yet humanism is still predicated on esteeming someone valuable as a human, to which one might rightly ask: so? What exactly might it be about the human which means we should love him? Consciousness? Our genetic similitude? Such are pretty cheap commodities and neither suggests, let alone demands, love.

Alone is agape lacking in estimation, for to love God does not imply that one finds Him in conformity with anything, but that one loves the beginning and end of everything. To love anyone in this regard then, is not strictly utilitarian or merely moral, but teleological, love as ultimate reconciliation. As such it is also love for being qua being, and thus the proper antithesis to hatred, the preference that something not exist, i.e. nihilism.

It is the father who makes men brothers, and it is the universality of this declaration which gives such profound weight to the finale to Beethoven's 9th, a work which has been rechristened in the 20th century as essentially humanist or at best deistic. Yet it is joy, man's pure loving reaction to love and an affirmation of life, that is the divine spark which makes brothers of men. In other words, Deus Caritas est. (Of course refining our understanding of caritas in the process.) In the encyclical of the same name, Benedict XVI wrote of that statement's, "Christian image of God and the resulting image of mankind and its destiny," saying that, "Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter [congressio] with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction [progressionem]." [Latin English]

1 John 4.16: Ὁ θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν, καὶ ὁ μένων ἐν τῇ ἀγάπῃ ἐν τῷ θεῷ μένει καὶ ὁ θεὸς ἐν αὐτῷ μένει. / Deus caritas est et qui manet in caritate in Deo manet et Deus in eo. 

Love and joy, then, are not moral or principled acts, but the proper progression, or climax of life. Again fittingly, hatred and nihilism are the rejections and regressions toward nothing, from God and being.

This is a polarity we find again in the 9th Symphony from its chaotic keyless opening, itself suggesting a polarity with the hovering perfect fifth, to its ecstatic choral finale. The poem calls to song, though, not only those who partake in love by friendship or marriage, but all men who have all been given by nature a passion [Wollust] for life.

In the finale to the 9th, then, Beethoven summons all to fall in love under the lieber Vater, and combines the theme to joy with a gesture as simple as it is profound, a kiss to the world, in a fugue. The inexorable motion, rollicking rhythm, and overlapping of millionem and ganzen Welt and kuß seem to create that very joy of which it speaks. It's the fullness of this path from nothing to everything and the rightness, the properness of direction which we feel in joy which makes the 9th seem to transcend its Earthly parameters, calling us to partake in the divine spark which exclaims, Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!

Movie Review: The Legend of Hercules

Directed by Renny Harlin. 2014.

Let me say first that The Legend of Hercules is not a great, or good, movie. It is indeed a bad movie. It is not, however, worth only its 3% score on Rotten Tomatoes. A few factors explain the exceptionally negative reaction.

The first is that The Legend of Hercules really is a bad movie, and it's all too easy to pile onto a popular reaction. Second, LoH is a simple movie, and therefore invites the scorn of purported intellectuals. It's fun to feel superior, and a bad and simple movie is more of a lightning rod for self-righteous criticism than movies which are bad and complex, or perhaps are bad but polished. Finally, The Legend of Hercules falls into a form out of vogue in our culture, the pastiche. We today don't seem to like medleys, at least in film, rather we prefer clear and easy categories like the epic, serious drama, buddy-cop, and so on. This is not a preposterous preference, for all art needs some fundamental idea around which to turn, but a foolish consistency is not preferable to a clever fusion, or even an unsuccessful one. Michael Bay and Zack Snyder have consistent styles, not at all superior to Renny Harlin's hodgepodge of Gladiator, Spartacus, Troy, and 300. So how should we approach The Legend of Hercules?

As a simple, cheesy, crowd-pleaser, I humbly suggest. You want a love story? Check. Revenge? Check. Betrayal? Check. Gladiator fights? Check. Mythological miscellany? Check. Slo-motion stylization? Check. The only boxes not checked are the gratuitous gore and sex because the producers undoubtedly thought they'd make more money tricking teenagers into thinking that they'll see on the big screen what they watch on HBO. Psyche!

Yes, of course there's a lot wrong with The Legend of Hercules, but this movie is innocuously bad, not objectionably so. There's no offense in LoC's borrowing the 2000s-era style, 90s-era cheesiness, 80s-era camp, and the scale of the old sword-and-sandals epics. So we get a movie, and hero, that's part Gladiator, part Conan, part Samson. Sure, the writing, acting, sets, wardrobe, CGI, compositing, and sound design are all bad, but what do you want for a mere $70 million bucks?

What bothers me most about this movie is how little it uses the endless ancient sources for inspiration, especially given that film's hodgepodge style would have supported all manner of references. For example, Amphitryon walking in on his wife Alcmene and Zeus could have been quite comic, as could have been Iphicles, always one step behind, and indeed any of Hercules' canonical Twelve Labors. This movie in fact only draws on one, depicting the hero's battle with the Nemean lion as a random encounter encounter with an unlucky lion. They might not have had the budget to make many of the famous monsters, but they could have exercised some creativity and tried to bring some of the other stories to life.

The chief pleasure of the movie was noting the endless anachronisms, especially the Roman republican-era gladiatorial schools, amphitheaters, and battle tactics in in Bronze Age Greece and Sicily. There's also a puzzling statement when Hebe, Hercules' love interest, says that her mother is "now with the gods." Of course her mother is Hera, so that makes sense, but the movie portrays Hebe as mortal, so what's going on? There is also a reference to Satan, a character not only outside the Greek mythology but an anachronistic use of the Hebrew word which didn't mean "The Devil" as we mean today. But whatever.

There is some to like in The Legend of Hercules too, and a number of the fights are serviceable. In one shot he wields a sword charged up with lightning. The wide shots are cheaply rendered, but they're not done incompetently or without attention to style. There's a little bit of camp and what can only be a running joke in which the two adversaries, Hercules and Amphitryon, scream all the time. Nothing ambitious, but nothing awful.

In the end, The Legend of Hercules doesn't commit any new or heinous crimes and its references aren't to sources so excellent that you would rather watch the originals. As usual I'm always disappointed when a classically-themed movie doesn't live up to the richness of the ancient sources, but few, if any, ever do. Sure this movie is bad, but its 3% scores seems less a result of being an epic failure than being the wrong movie at the wrong time than.

Movie Review: Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo. 2014.

spoilers noted below

How does the director of You, Me, and Dupree end up directing Captain America 2? At least the writing team, who penned Michael Bay's Pain and Gain, had written other Marvel movies, but when the producers, editors, composer, cinematographers, and casting directors have all been kept in the Marvel house, who thought to hire the Russos? Whoever did, give them a hand because Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a leap forward for the franchise and a novel, mature story in the Marvel universe.

Dispensing with the mythological setting of the Thor series, the supernatural dimensions of The Avengers, the outlandish sight of The Hulk, and Robert Downey's rakish charm that holds Iron Man together, Captain America was always poised to be the most grounded and sober Marvel hero, a potential Captain 2 realizes. The script steers clear of the conservative plot of the first installment, a plain old goodies-versus-baddies romp, in favor of a complex plot of intrigue, political maneuvering, and betrayal. We appreciate this twist for several reasons, the first of which is as variety. It's refreshing to see a sequel which doesn't simply ape the success of its predecessor. Second, the complexity feels like an escalation from the simple world of World War II's clear-cut good guys and bad guys into a world of operatives, secrets, secret sub-organizations, and moral ambiguity. Third, the complexity allows Captain America, essentially the sole survivor of the previous movie, to take center stage as a hero, who is a point of moral stability and historical continuity, and as a protagonist with whom we empathize as a man-out-of-time.

Direction and production support the shift as well. The tone of Captain 2 is essentially that of a Bourne movie, that is to say, it's predominately serious, poised on weary. Yes, there's lighthearted humor in the banter between Captain Rogers and Black Widow, and in the subplot about Captain America catching up on pop culture he's missed, but for the most part the Captain is taking pretty seriously the fact that people are out to kill him and take over the world.

Visually the movie is dark and gray, with the only splash of color coming from the star-spangled outfit of Captain America himself, a pleasing symmetry between the story and style. Also like the Bourne movies, Captain 2 eschews extended fight sequences for shorter ones which punctuate the movie more often. This size and pacing give the movie a satisfying ebb and flow instead of an avalanche of action, and after the traditional heist opening the action scenes shrink down before they escalate up to the finale. The most noticeable stylistic shift from both the previous installment and its Marvel siblings is the realism of the violence. No, it's not gory at all, but we sense Captain America's power and the brutality of his blows. We're leagues away from zapping Nazis and romping around whacking aliens when in shaky close-ups and realistic sound we see Captain America breaking bones and pounding people into bulkheads. Without the cliche line, we sense that his power is a responsibility, a fact which silently reinforces the moral dilemmas of the plot.

spoilers

That plot is worth talking about, too, much to my surprise and delight.  Captain 2 centers around the mystery of who infiltrated the global defense force S.H.I.E.L.D and killed Director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson.) The reveal is traditional but handled with competence as we and the Captain discover whom to trust, which becomes the film's first theme: the necessity of trust in society. Can Captain Rogers trust Black Widow, with her checkered past and loyalty to S.H.I.E.L.D? Can he trust Fury, with all of his secrets and machinations? Can he trust S.H.I.E.L.D members and operatives? Should he trust the members of the Security Council, both as individuals and as officials who oversee Fury? Does he trust council-member Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford) as an individual, as an official, and as Fury's old buddy who wants to avenge his fallen ally? The bottom question here is whether all the checks and balances, hierarchy, and bureaucracy can be so effective as to legitimize so much secrecy, dissimulation, and manipulation which make trust impossible. Do you trust individuals, the system, or the plan?

We hold all of these rhetorical questions in mind even before S.H.I.E.L.D is compromised. At that point, Captain America is off on an adventure to unravel the plot which fiends S.H.I.E.L.D's nemesis, Hydra, not only resurgent, but slithering its tentacles throughout S.H.I.E.L.D. The outing of the conspiracy though, done with a cliche writing trope which we overlook because it's done with a novel visual, puts a different spin on our question of trust. We learn that Hydra's first attempt to take over from within the Nazi party failed because the world pushed back against tyranny. Learning from that mistake, they've infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D so they can destabilize the world and make is so chaotic that citizens will run to a protector. "We learned that people need to give up their freedom willingly," says a member of Hydra. What a troubling thought: how and to what degree are S.H.I.E.L.D and the Nazis similar that Hydra could act through them both?

These two themes–personal trust and institutional trust–are developed in two contrasting pairs of characters. The first pair is Nick Fury and Alexander Pierce. Fury believes in the tools of the spy and military trade as prudential compromises. He has no fanatical belief in control and secrets, but uses them because he thinks the end justifies the means. On the other side, Pierce wants to use S.H.I.E.L.D's vast resources not to react to threats as Fury does, but to prevent them by murdering whomever they deem a probable threat. Both men want the same power, in this case a trio of flying aircraft carriers with essentially unlimited surveillance and assassination ability, but have different purposes. Whom do we trust? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

On the ground we have the soldiers, Captain Rogers and The Winter Soldier, who respectively answer to Fury and Pierce. Rogers flat out disagrees even with Fury, to whom he reports, and perhaps only serves him as the lesser of evils. I was taken aback at the frankness of Rogers' dissent when early in the film upon seeing Fury's new fleet, Rogers says, "You want to put a gun to the world's head and call it freedom. This isn't freedom, it's fear." When Fury replies that he's preventing problems, Rogers snaps back, "Doesn't the punishment come after the crime?" This sudden interjection of and deference to the rule of law has teeth because it's in such contrast to the far-off reaches of spying to which they (and we?) have come.

Yet Rogers doesn't just follow orders. He thinks for himself and evaluates based on his own principles, in contrast to the Winter Soldier, who's being programmed by Hydra. The Winter Soldier is made an automaton to follow Hydra's commands without question, and the scene of his torturous reprogramming is a terrible visualization of what's taking place whenever we choose not to think for ourselves.

Alas, the plot has two endings, one to Captain America 2 and Rogers' story, and another to Captain America 2 as a Marvel movie. The first is superior and twofold, the second an unnecessary coda.

The first of the two proper conclusions to Captain America 2 sees the assent to Rogers' philosophy when the regrouped team of trusted S.H.I.E.L.D agents concludes that all the carries have to go. We still wonder, though, did the policy invite the men, or did the men invent the policy? Yet one scene belies an anarchic interpretation of the choice to scrap the whole program. When Rogers broadcasts across the S.H.I.E.L.D headquarters what Pierce has done and who has been compromised, one of Pierce's lackeys puts a gun to the head of the engineer who can go ahead with the launch. The little pipsqueak, though, stands up to the thug and refuses to proceed with the launch. There is in S.H.I.E.L.D as in any body politic, good and bad, and S.H.I.E.L.D like any group is no better than the virtue of those who inhabit it.

This scene, along with an earlier one in which the agents reassigned to take out Rogers demand to know whey they're hunting a hero, are a vindication of the Captain's own individualist freethinking. They're also a prelude to the self-sacrifice and trust of Rogers' final confrontation with his nemesis.

With the mission completed and realizing The Winter Soldier is really his old friend Bucky Barnes, Rogers throws up his hands and refuses to kill Bucky. Rogers doesn't risk the mission or anyone else, but only himself by choosing to trust that his former friend, ally, and brother would come to his senses and not harm him. When Bucky pulls him from the wreckage of the carrier, this is Rogers' truest victory, the victory of trust over fear, and choice over force, the victory of Captain America.

That Delightful Rest

The philosophy of Aristotle lacks little, but a gaping omission is a human face. There is no smart aleck Socrates with whom we may laugh and grow irate, nor can we spy a troubled soul, like Marcus Aurelius, behind the words. If there was a character, real or imagined, in the lost works of the Aristotelian corpus, the "rivers of gold" according to Cicero, then we are all the more at a loss, for Aristotle's work is decidedly not that of the mechanical, technocratic mind. His philosophy is not cold and calculating, and we'll find it warm and lived in if we peer behind the notational style. This is nowhere more evident than in the chapter of the Ethics on friendship where he defines a friend, in part, as someone before whom you might do something foolish and still not blush. Yet if this man from antiquity is largely lost to us, there as another face for the philosophy.

Cicero's own philosophical works make no boast of originality, the non plus ultra to the modern mind, but who wouldn't be content, christened "Rome's greatest Aristotelian" by Dante, of all? Unlike their Aristotelian origins, many of Cicero's works are structured not as treatises but dialogues, which give human faces to the dense and often obscure discourses which they summarize or critique. Still there are moments of genuine and unique revelation in Cicero's philosophy when he sheds a new light, filtered by years of study, personal suffering, and the struggles with nation he strove to save, on philosophy.

For me the most poignant of these moments comes toward the end of de Amicitia, written in the summer of 44 BC just before Cicero returned to Rome to launch his famous Philippics against Marc Antony. Here the statesman-philosopher re-imagines Platonism and Aristotelianism, especially the Lysis and penultimate books of Aristotle's Ethics, as a dialogue centered around Gaius Laelius the Wise, the preeminent author and orator of the generation preceding Cicero's. Laelius remembers his friend Scipio Aemilianus, i.e. Africanus the Younger:

Numquam illum ne minima quidem re offendi, quod quidem senserim, nihil audivi ex eo ipse quod nollem. [de Amicitia, 103. The Latin Library]

It seems innocuous enough, obvious even, but there's so much insight in these few words, insight only gained by personal experience. There's so much substance under that polished parallel style.

On the surface, sure, Laelius is saying the obvious that his good friend never said anything which offended him in the least, which he would have noticed, nor vice versa, but this is something we overlook today, I think. With our legal system which functions on the premise that the contest of contrary opinions will reveal truth, a pluralistic polity, and the economic necessity of competition, we perhaps let variety and rivalry get the better of us.

Of rivalry we often consider speaking our mind more than a right but a duty. How quickly do we feel that we'll be implicated if we don't speak up for, or against, something. How quickly do we offer unsolicited opinions simply because they're relevant, even if they're unnecessary. Who doesn't feel the urge to pile on when someone is being dragged through the mud? Laelius' point is of course that he and Scipio didn't offend one another, but surely some of that accord resulted from the prudential application of silence, or at least deferred judgment.

Of variety, how often do we hear platitudes about having rights to opinions, and rights to be heard, and so on. We forget, and Cicero reminds us, that the soul finds rest in the harmony of friendship.

The dialogue contains also in that euphonious and compact relative clause, quod quidem senserim, a subtle nod to the empathy implicit in friendship. Simply, we have to pay attention to how the other person feels, what hurts and delights our loved ones. We need to know that look in their eyes, they way they shuffle in their seats, the way they grow quiet, that tells us we've hurt them, and we have to care enough not to do it again. The very thought of that look, of that quiet, has to pain us so much that we need to avoid it. The dialogue of course is idealized, and it's unlikely anyone has not hurt his friend at some point, but we see the tempered wisdom of Cicero behind the ideal.

Finally, Laelius draws attention to the littlest things, minima, which always need our attention. How our friends cater to our little pet peeves, and how easily we take their considerations for granted. Maybe they let us tell the same story over and over, or they avoid a certain topic to which we are sensitive, maybe they curb their playful teasing, or perhaps they simply stopped slurping their soda for us, but the absence of these irksome bits gradually becomes an environment in which we can find ease, and ourselves, in each other. It's a rest so consoling, so powerful, that we feel it, moreover we can exist in it, even when the activity of friendship is broken off by distance, whether by travel or, as Laelius says about his lifelong friend, by death.

So in but a small sentence Cicero through the voice of Laelius reminds us what restraint, consideration, and appreciation are necessary to make, find, and keep that delightful rest we call friendship.

Classroom Nightmares

A new season of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares is under way and this season I'm struck by how many problems these chefs and owners share with people in other professions, namely academics. Therefore a list, not meant to embarrass or admonish teachers, but to jolt them out of their complacency by outing the most common foibles in the profession.

1. Welcome to the Junkyard

Classrooms become warehouses for all of the junk teachers don't want to throw away: old furniture, microwaves, bookends, sets of old books, posters, globes, you name it–and always in dilapidated condition. Never mind old tests, piles of papers, and answer keys all jammed into folders and plastic organizers. Finally don't forget antiquated text books jamming the shelves. It all has to go. You don't want to eat surrounded by someone's junk, so don't presume your students want to learn surrounded by yours.

2. Purge and Clean

Yes, the custodians clean the building, but keeping the classroom clean and orderly is the equivalent of managing front of house at a restaurant. The room has to look kept and academic. The walls shouldn't be festooned with tape and decrepit posters, cork boards shouldn't be covered in staples, and your own desk shouldn't be covered with a decade of academic detritus. Some teachers like to post student work on the walls, a practice which suits only visual arts. Otherwise please realize the absurd fact that you're stapling tests to the wall, and desist. 

3. Nova et Mira

When was the last time you made something new? I don't mean slapping the test from the publisher onto the copy machine, I mean composing a new test. How about new lecture notes, worksheets, or quizzes? You're definitely not photocopying the same old originals again and again, right? 

It's not possible to remake everything all the time, but judiciously reuse, retype, and re-imagine old work. You're not the same teacher who made that material and the students it helped are long gone. Try something new, or at least update something. The more organized you are, the easier the task of revision.

4. Study Your Peers

Teachers abhor being observed and are perhaps the least competitive of professionals, whereas in every other field everyone clamors to observe and improve upon their betters. Chefs learn others' recipes, lawyers study each others' briefs, and everyone in technology viciously dogs each other.

There's always a bigger fish, someone from whom you can learn even if he teaches in a different discipline, and there's always something you personally can improve upon. If you think you've perfected something, you're stagnating. 

5. Poll for Feedback

Students are your pupils and parents are your patrons, so it might be a good idea if you ask whether they're getting what they want. Teachers feel accused and insulted when questioned, and no doubt many students and parents will try to game your system for points and prestige, but you have to address to their expectations to some degree. On the one hand the student has to meet the demands of the curriculum, of which the faculty is custodian and expert, and on the other hand the students and parents only chose your class or school because they thought it was worthwhile, so why would you want to disappoint them? You can have standards without refusing to accommodate students with different goals, expectations, and interests.

Sanctus

Holy is one of my least favorite words in our beloved English tongue. To start, the word has an undignified ring, for both wholly and holy are merely 'oly without that oft-unheard puff of air. It sounds like it should be a suffix, not a word of great philosophical and spiritual import, and listen to those sounds next to one another: oh-lee. Say it nice and quickly and it sounds like a siren! Holy is also considerably debased by its position in a variety of common curses and epithets, and for my money there's something unpleasant about a word so frequently appended to the likes of cow and mackerel.

Yet, sanctus, is word which looms large in my mind. Aside from its aesthetic superiority what a panoply of perfect meanings swirl about it: sacred, venerable, pious, ordained. How sanctus seems to contain all the other virtues. It is what we call sanctus that defines not just ourselves, but everything.

One musical setting of the liturgy's trifold sanctus bring out all of these meanings.

–

The Sanctus from Beethoven's Missa Solemnis emphasizes the mystical power of the word from Isaiah 6:3, its centrality and the reverence it summons from us. Beethoven achieves this in a few ways. First, his indication is mit andacht, rapt and with devotion. Second, he's returned to D, the home key for the whole mass. Third, he's eschewed bright strings for the more austere basses. Fourth, in m. 9-12 Beethoven creates a novel, solemn color palette of horns, trumpets, and trombones. Finally, the theme itself is intimate, with its own internal motion, that step and leap, that generates the whole piece.

We begin then not with confidence, but with the reverence which precedes confidence. Only gradually does that germinal theme, working its way up, graced by a trifold repetition in the brass, finally say in the four soloists, Sanctus. Beethoven repeats not just sanctus three times but the whole phrase, Sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth.

In the first repetition, the polyphony emphasizes the unexpected spreading of the word. From one to the other the delicate word spreads from voice to voice. Also, by the musician's power, the melisma, he's made san-ctus, of two syllables, now of three and thus equal to the tri-syllabic do-mi-nus, to which it naturally now seems cognate.

In the second repetition with their crescendo on the first dominus and sforzato on the second, the voices seem to realize the possibility of this momentous development, but back off with the somber, darker piano repetition of Sabaoth. Can our Lord be the Lord of Hosts?

In the third an final repetition, the syllabic pronunciation is timid declaration, as quavering ninths in the violas and cellos fade away over a drumroll. The ensuing movement comes an emphatic yes in the form of an ecstatic fugue on pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua.