After nearly dying several times from thyroid gland cancer and
resulting complications, Roger Ebert is more or less back to health and producing his usual number of movie reviews. He's also doubling back to catch up on movies he missed reviewing while he was ill, and as a result there's pretty much an abundance of content on his site. Reading his latest
Movie Answer Man segment today, I was struck by this reply, though not for reasons having anything to do with the film in question or cinema in general.
Q. In your zero-star review of "September Dawn," you stated that there must be a more thoughtful and insightful way to consider the tragedy of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. There is: A film professor of mine at the University of Utah produced a feature-length documentary about the massacre entitled "Burying the Past: Legacy of the Mountain Meadows Massacre," which has won several awards. The film speaks with descendants of the 17 children who were spared death that day in 1857 and explores in an intelligent and sensitive manner the deep emotions that continue to haunt them. The Web address is www.buryingthepast.com.
--Aaron Allen, Los Angeles
A. Several readers have told me about Brian F. Patrick's film. The film finds that Mormons did indeed commit the massacre, while drawing a line between church teachings and the actions of a fanatic group of fringe-dwellers.
Yers. "...while drawing a line between church teachings and the actions of a fanatic(al) group of fringe-dwellers." Pretty well sums up every act of religion motivated mass murder, doesn't it? Except for the religiously motivated acts of mass murder that are directly directed by mainstream church directors, of course.
This is exactly the point Dawkins and Hitchens and other prominent critics of faith make in their books and
innumerable public speeches. It's always some "fringe" element of a church doing the horrible things people do in the name of religion, and the fringe element is always condemned by the mainstream. But as long as faiths exist, there will always be fringe elements. Furthermore, in virtually every case the "fringe" element is being much truer to the faith by taking a more literal interpretation of the foundational texts, while the condemning mainstream are watering it down and infusing the bloodthirsty ancient teachings with a modern, non-religious morality.
This is essentially why Hitchens and Dawkins and others argue against faith. It's not so much about the specific teachings of any particular religion; it's about getting people not to see faith as a virtue. After all, even if every religion on earth went away tomorrow, people would just invent new ones, and continue to become enthralled to other faith-based belief systems. Faith is, by definition, "firm belief in something for which there is no proof" and as long as people are willing to believe things without evidence for them, and people want to be told how to live and what to believe, the human species will continue to be easily roused to mass murder, and other unsavory acts rational people would never engage in. Religion is the most prominent example, but there are plenty of others. Even discounting the previous 100,000 years of human murder and pointless warfare, just consider events of the last half century. Any logic-denying belief system, whether religious (9/11) or cult of personality (Jim Jones, David Koresh) or cult of the state (Stalin, Mao, Khmer Rouge), will use faith to turn people from thinking individuals into (mass) murderers/suiciders.
In lighter news, Ebert has inducted
Pan's Labyrinth into his Great Movies list, even though 1) it was released just last year, and 2) he doesn't seem to have ever actually reviewed it. I guess he saw it on his death bed and figured it was good enough to enshrine immediately. He does mention that his previous ten year waiting period to become a Great Movie has been modified by his near death experience, and that's certainly understandable.
His commentary on Pan's Labyrinth is worth reading, and it reminded me that I never got around to reviewing that one. I saw it with Malaya in January and honestly, I'm not really sure what I thought about it. It was clearly brilliant in some ways, but incredibly frustrating in others (mostly because the characters we're supposed to be rooting for do such stupid things). The thing I found most interesting about it, in immediate retrospect, was that the movie never took a stand on whether or not the fairies and fauns and magical things the girl was seeing were real. They're never seen from any perspective but hers, and during the course of the film I went back and forth on the "are they real, or just in her mind?" question. I don't think it's resolved in the film, and I'm sure that's intentional. Ebert doesn't touch on that point, and I suppose it's kind of beside the point of the cinematic and creative brilliance that he appreciated in the film, but I think it's worth debating. Not that I've got anyone to debate it with.
I suppose I should see the movie again; it's very grim and unpleasant and painful, with only the escapes into slightly less grim and unpleasant and painful fantasy world there to enliven things, but who says a movie has to be fun, or um... enjoyable... to be worth watching? (The
box office says that, but we're not motivated by such petty pursuits as money, now are we?) Pan's Labyrinth is definitely a good movie, and it might be a great movie, but by any metric it's a better movie than it is an enjoyable movie. Unless you're a film purist like Ebert, and can enjoy a movie on its technical and artistic merits, no matter how cruel and unpleasant and frustrating is the story it tells.
Labels: atheism, christopher hitchens, ebert, movies, richard dawkins
