Vedic Film Critic

Cloverfield: the Facebook-YouTube-generation’s blair-witch-godzilla project – a metaphoric tribute to the spirit-sapping-success of society’s surrender to spectacle.

“All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.” Guy Debord

What happens to life if the snapshots we take to record life, become life?

J.J. Abrams has produced a smart new take on the monster movie genre that is in fact, a well deserved poke in our collective eye. It is a cinematic metaphor about the monster of mediated moments that has overrun our modern urban lifestyle.

As the spectacle of daily life becomes increasingly mediated by the raging tempest of electronic media and the so called meaningful moments of life are continuously surrendered to the all consuming beast of digital imagery, we come to a frightening threshold in the society viewed as spectacle. In the words of social theorist Guy Debord, “The spectacle is not a collection of images, rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”

Those moments that are meant to be life are now simply fodder for the digitally fueled feeding frenzy. There is no longer a message; only the medium remains. Form has triumphed over content. Self-absorption and narcissism carry off the day, leaving in their path a trail of social and spiritual destruction; littered with the tattered shards of hope, virtue, humility…  But the real victory of the spectacle, and the dissolution of content, is the end of personal responsibility.

This abdication of accountability was predicted in the Sanskrit texts over 5000 years ago, “When there is a predominance of cheating, lying, sloth, sleepiness, violence, depression, lamentation, bewilderment, fear and poverty, that age is Kali, the age of the mode of ignorance. Bhagavat Purana 12.3.30

Compared to the loss of accountability the loss of innocence is a minor inconvenience. The absence of accountability means we are free to pursue all ends to gratify our senses, and no end to our sense of what we deserve. A society devoured by the soul eating monster of empty-form driven media has no hope of reclaiming its place in the pantheon of virtue.

Virtue requires accountability. People have to be able to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. But if they are sufficiently distracted by the monster of manufactured moments, by the illusion of a captured moment rather than being in the moment; then they have no hope of reclaiming the Now; which is the only thing they have… the only thing any of us have.

Sadly, the Now is lost forever in the flurry of our furious efforts to be the center of self-generated attention. The more we try to be the one to overcome the spectacle’s unsettling instability, the more we fuel its incessant growth.  And the less likely we are to stop and be present within ourselves and even less with the person next to us.

The anti-heroes of the movie are desperate to record themselves saving themselves, but they cannot.  They cannot overcome the monster. Similarly, via our digital documenting, we strive to overcome the influence of material energy, (a.k.a. Maya in Sanskrit.) As we pursue the illusory sense of control that the various auto-generated forms offer us, we grow further and further away from ourselves, our present, and our true nature.

Cloverfield was an amusement park ride and metaphor for the loss of our-selves to the monster of pure self-indulgence.  A monster that emerged fully formed at the onset of the industrial /capitalist age and became part of the American archetype in the boot strapping American mythology of Horatio Alger.  Soon after that Ayn Rands, pernicious objectivism polished it into the American dream of supreme sense gratification, the ideology of, “get yours, at all cost.”  

From there we became a nation of consumers. Our dreams reflected our surrender to the new state religion of consumerism. You were what you could purchase. This American dream/nightmare (where personal worth is slaved to getting-what-you-deserve) has reached its apex in modern society’s fascination with manufactured media moments.  You are what you digitally record.

What started out at the onset of the industrial age as a beastly promise for the few to attain new heights of material enjoyment and influence (at the expense of the many) has arrived in the My-Face-You-Flicker-me age, as an endlessly streaming mirage, seemingly able to freeze time, seemingly under our control, so that we never again have to be distracted by the tediousness of the present.

And without the present to interfere, we can surrender once and for all to the hallucination of fabricated life, we can surrender to the spectacle, we can just shop, and work hard, and look for amusing ways to live vicariously through digitized relations in between the shopping and the working.

We can even try our hand and largely empty gesture of humanitarianism as long as we preserve the effort on camera or in endlessly unreadable blogs. We can pursue environmentalism, and do cleansing fasts. We will record it all, but we won’t have time to watch it. There will be something else to record and preserve for posterity.  A posterity than never actually arrives because, like the present it seems to continually disappear.

A life of manufactured moments is a life without meaning or without narrative structure. J.J. Abrams and company made a movie without meaning or narrative structure, but it didn’t need it, because it was a movie about how a society built on the spectacle of self-absorption doesn’t have much of a story to tell; just pictures… 

The film’s desire to be understood as commentary is telegraphed from the opening shot, telling us, this is not a movie about life, but a movie about making life into movies. This theme of ‘film-as-commentary-on-spectacle’ is further maintained by the film maker’s excellent and brave decision to restrict themselves to footage garnered via the spectator’s video camera.

At the end of the movie there is no one left to care, only an unnamed government employee, dutifully archiving the digital record of reckless self-absorption.   This is the empty destiny of a society endlessly caught up with preserving the illusion and failing to perceive the present. Truly, this is a horror movie at its best, for in the words of the immortal Pogo, “we have met the enemy, and it is us.”

Spirit in Slashers?

Is there a spiritual lesson in the hauntingly beautiful, Tim Burton adaptation of Sweeney Todd? Resoundingly, yes.

Sweeney Todd, played with alarming depth by Johnny Depp, is the personification of all desires unfulfilled. He is the reservoir of what is known in Sanskrit as krodha or anger, frustration, rage… The movie is an artful metaphor for the consequences of anger. Anger is the poison that will destroy its bearer. It does not, however, contain its destructive tendencies to the source alone. Anger, after tearing out ones innards it usually brings down much that is dear to the afflicted.

Consider this sequence of verses from the Bhagavad Gita, “While contemplating the objects of the senses, a person develops attachment for them, and from such attachment lust develops, and from lust anger arises. From anger, complete delusion arises, and from delusion bewilderment of memory. When memory is bewildered, intelligence is lost, [bhuddhi nasat] and when intelligence is lost one falls down again into the material pool. (2:62-63)

The downward spiral ends in the loss of bhuddi nashat meaning, spiritual intelligence. So the instruction seems clear and obvious. But, how does this loss of spiritiual consequence look? What will it feel like?

Important questions that deserve to answered; and if something is worth doing it is worth doing right. If you are going to answer a question publicly it is in everybody’s interest to answer it the most beautiful and intelligent way possible. Using the “best words (and the best images) in the best order, as Mr. S. Coleridge might say about film, if he were around today.

Mr. Burton demonstrates that if a question is worth answering (or if a story is worth telling) it is worth doing beautifully,

The loss of conscience or spiritual intelligence is depicted with beauty, intelligence, depth and a delightfully perverse sensed of humor.

As for the musicality of it, while I am not personally the biggest fan of Stephen Sondheim, his work was deftly handled by the talented ensemble. The musical form, especially in film, might be the hardest of all form to pull off. I can think of very few examples of the musicals well done. The standard is, and continues to be, the Brecht-Weil, Three Penny Opera. Mr. Burton’s Sweeney Todd is not quite to that level, but it is certainly competing within that class.

 The key to understanding Frank Lucas (brilliantly play by Denzel Washington), the real-life-drug-pusher-anti-hero of Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, is his likability. His likability stems in part from the fact that he cared (in a morally skewed way) about issues like respect, reputation, and family. His likeability is part and parcel of his charisma.

Frank Lucas’s charisma comes from the mysterious place most charisma comes f rom. Although most people, even modern psychologists, do not know that charisma comes from a willingness to accept the adulation of others. Note, this is very different from being dependent on the adulation of others, which simply makes one unattractively needy and insecure. Being open or available to adulation, however, is a very attractive quality (this is because greater than the soul’s drive to be liked or loved is the soul’s drive to behold something it can like or love.) People who are open to being liked without needing to be liked have charisma. People like Frank Lucas.

The story that Mr. Scott so capably tells over a two and a half hour period (yes, this movie is worth seeing,) is the juxtaposition of respectability, family values, and charisma, with violence, murder, and criminal behavior, all of which are personified in the lead character.

From a spiritual point of view this addresses the moral ambiguity of material life. Sometimes good people do bad things and bad people do good things. The conundrum raised in the film is which one of these roles describes drug pusher Frank Lucas and which one is his opposition, law man Richie Roberts (well played by Russell Crowe?) 

Is Frank (loving son, doting-genteel husband) doing bad things? And is Richie (womanizer, negligent father) doing good things? Or is Frank evil incarnate sometimes displaying acts of civility while Ritchie is the personification of goodness sometimes exercising really bad judgment?

This brings up at least two questions:

1)      Who is the good guy doing bad things, and who is the bad guy doing good things?

2)      Is the road to hell paved with good intentions?

According to the laws of physics your karma is attributed mostly to your behavior and not the consequences of your behavior.  What is less clear is the role of intention.

For example the law man’s intent is to protect the innocents from the ravages of the drug pusher. Yet this is not the consequence of his actions. After the law man excises the drug dealer at the top of the pyramid, disorder is created, more violence than normal ensues and the market for the drugs and destruction of innocents remains unabated. From this perspective the results of his actions were hardly good. But his intentions were good (i.e. positive, healthy, moral…)

So Richie had good intentions, along with a mix of good and bad behaviors. And Frank Lucas had bad intentions with a mix of bad and good behavior.

So what’s what (and who’s going to hell?)

The yogic philosophy has a very interesting way of addressing these issues. In the yoga perspective intentions are split into two camps: spiritual and material. Spiritual intentions are absolute or non-dual. This is because anything connected to God, or Spirit, or the absolute, inherently develops similar characteristics. So any one who purely longs or intends to serve or connect to God experiences commensurate bliss (this, by the way, is a yogic way to test the depth of a person’s spiritual advancement – and also by the way, ignorance is not bliss.) Material intentions are dualistic and relative. They offer the hope of peace but cannot deliver it. If your intentions are good they will inspire good behavior and eventually good behavior brings some material reward, but not peace of mind. If your intentions are bad they will inform bad behavior and of course no peace of mind. So either way material intentions lead to stress, dissatisfaction, and unhappiness. So who is going to hell? According to Vedic philosophy material life is hell. Even if you get to a heavenly station for a time chances are you will eventually work your way back to hellish conditions. In today’s movie both guys are going to hell; Frank Lucas is just going to get there faster.

In this sense the road to hell is paved with material intentions. A point that writer Steven Zaillian and director Ridley Scott bring home with the movie’s  rich juxtaposition of moral ambiguities, as in a cop who is selfless enough to give up sharing a million dollars in cash for the sake of honor, but is not sufficiently selfless to be available to raise his son.

As to who is who (question number 1 – good guy doing bad vs. bad guy doing good.)  From the Yoga point of view, Frank and Richie are both materialistic men. They are both going to reap the consequences of their behavior; some of which was bad, and some of which is good.

Overall this is good film making, by a film maker who clearly has the depth and skill that has deservedly placed him in the pantheon of Hollywood greats.

What makes the movie even more compelling is that it is based on real people and historical events. The real Frank Lucas was a violent, evil, charismatic, likable son of a bitch. And the real Richie Roberts was an honest, super bright, law abiding son of a bitch.