Oh, son! We’ve all had bad days, but this guy is having such a bad day:
(Video found at Hot Air)
I don’t know if the—what would the word be?—programmer/choreographer of this performance had any specific type of battle in mind, or if it’s just an illustration of Being Embattled, in general.
Either way, this clip seems to show a fairly straighforward representation of human struggle. As an obsessive metaphor-hunter, though, I think I get more out of unintentional representations of the human condition, than I do from a well-crafted literal depiction of the same.
This scene from It’s a Wonderful Life, for instance—a fine example of a literal representation of prayer. Poor George Bailey says, “God ... oh, God. Dear Father in heaven. I’m not a praying man, but if You’re up there and You can hear me, show me the way. I’m at the end of my rope, I— show me the way, God!”
A great, moving bit of acting, and I love this movie. But which scene pops into my head more often when I’m arguing—erm, I mean, praying to God? A little something from Brendan Fraser’s The Mummy, of course:
The feckless Jonathan wanders off to inspect some interesting decorative scarabs—only to discover that they are real, live, flesh-eating scarabs that burrow under his skin! They race around, horribly, and are headed for his brain! Jonathan runs to Rick, the hero, and begs him, “Do something, do something!” But as soon as he sees how he’s going to help: “NOT THAT, NOT THAT!”
(Warning: in case you couldn’t tell from the description I just gave, this clip is scary and gross, not for kids or the easily disgusted!)
Well, we’ve all said prayers that are answered that way: God says, “Sure. Here comes the knife.” Ouch.
How about you? Do you have any favorite movie scenes with private meanings? Any seemingly trivial images ring a bell in your head? Hey hey, it’s Friday!
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For my husband and I - raising 11 kids - we have more than a few. But two good ones - the end of “Spy Kids” - “Spy adventures, that easy. Keeping a family together, that’s hard and that’s a mission worth fighting for.” While, for us as a couple we have “Family Man” where Nicolas Cage’s character is coming to grips w/ his very average life as a husband and father as opposed to his previous ‘got it all, rich bachelor life’. He is trying to convince his ‘wife’ Tia Leone to buy into the lifestyle w/ a new job and move into the city. He tells her they will have a life that other people will envy. His wife looks at him with amazement - “They already do.”
We repeat that both phrases to ourselves again and again when we can feel the loneliness that comes with striving to raise a holy, large family in world that no longer honors either venture, much less both. While we do not want to encourage ‘envy’, it is just but a reminder to us that God (and all the saints and angels) are smiling down on us when strangers in the grocery store want to discuss over-population.
“The dying is easy. It is the living that defeats us.” From “Shoes of The Fisherman” which is faithfully watched every February 22.
Royal Tenenbaums:
Royal, standing in the staircase, looking down on his estranged daughter, who is walking into her room. He says in the midst of chastising her, “What happened to you? You used to be a genius.” And with her wounded eyes trying to hide behind an inch of makeup, she looks at him with total clarity, and says, “No I didn’t.” Taken aback, he blinks and says, “Anyway, that’s what they used to say.”
I think of that every time I get the chance to bear wrongs patiently.
The Mummy is my favorite horror movies. Funny, creepy, and truly profoundly horrifying, once you take the premise as real.
I’m also very fond of Constantine, with Keanu Reeves (I think this is is best role). It shares an odd link with Mummy: Rachel Weisz plays two utterly different characters, Librarian Evelyn Carnahan in Mummy, and Detective Angela Dodson in Constantine.
But there’s a single line in Constantine that delivers deep insight.
Constantine is discussing his situation with the Angel Gabriel, beautifully played by Tilda Swinton. She mentions that God requires belief of his human creations.
“I believe,” says Constantine.
“No,” says Gabriel, “You know. There’s a difference.”
(From memory; I can’t find an accurate transcription.)
I know that this movie has been criticized, with good reason, as an attack on Catholicism and Christianity itself. I love it anyway, for its portrayal of a deeply flawed, deeply cynical human being, struggling for salvation while adrift in a deeply flawed, deeply cynical world, including a floundering Church.
And Gabriel, in that line, exposes the core of our cynicism: we know so very much, but have forgotten how to believe in that which we cannot know.
All I know is: be careful if you think you need to pray for humility. Or patience.
From a TV movie called “Purgatory.” After the protagonist has risked his own salvation by breaking the rules of Purgatory, the angel takes him to Heaven anyway, saying “The Lord is hard, but he ain’t blind.”
This isn’t exactly what you had in mind. but this interchange from “The Unforgiven” certainly rings a bell in this old head:
Half-blind would-be gunsel who’s just killed a bad guy: “He had it comin’, didn’t he?”
Clint Eastwood character: “Kid, we’ve all got it comin’”
Oh man. There’s quite a few from the TV series Firefly that I relate to.
[After completing a train heist for a dirty man, Mal learns the stolen goods are actually medicines for a desperate group of very ill people. He and his team are caught by the sheriff returning the goods they now refuse to steal.]
Sheriff: These are tough times. A man can get a job. He might not look too close at what that job is. But a man learns all the details of a situation like ours… well… then he has a choice.
Mal: I don’t believe he does.
And I imagine God says this to me a whole lot:
“Do you know what the chain of command is here? It’s the chain I go get and beat you with until you realize who’s in command.”
And finally the overt discussion between Book(priest) and the Child Genius River.
Book: What are we up to, sweetheart?
River: Fixing your Bible.
Book: I, um… What?
River: Bible’s broken. Contradictions, false logistics… doesn’t make sense.
Book: No, no. You—you can’t…
River: So we’ll integrate non-progressional evolution theory with God’s creation of Eden. Eleven inherent metaphoric parallels already there. Eleven. Important number. Prime number. One goes into the house of eleven eleven times, but always comes out one. Noah’s ark is a problem.
Book: Really?
River: We’ll have to call it “early quantum state phenomenon”. Only way to fit 5,000 species of mammals on the same boat.
. . .
Book: River, you don’t… fix the Bible.
River: It’s broken. It doesn’t make sense.
Book: It’s not about… making sense. It’s about believing in something. And letting that belief be real enough to change your life. It’s about faith. You don’t fix faith, River. It fixes you.
@Mary S—Poor River. Poor Book. No, wait, poor Mal, for having to put up with all of them! :)
Yes, faith fixes us. Thank God.
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