Loneliness, Learnedness, and the Ultimate Acquired Taste

Yes, I have used this picture before, but seriously, can you see it too many times?

I recently watched Citizen Kane for the first time in six years. It was a mind-blowing experience. In between the last time I watched Citizen Kane and this viewing, I have watched something approaching 400 new movies, read numerous books on movies, hundreds—nay, thousands—of reviews, essays and articles, and in general attempted to actually learn how to watch movies. Whereas the first time I saw Citizen Kane I merely sat there, and the second time I stared at the screen attempting—and mostly failing—to discern what was so great about it, this time I was enraptured. It was a feverish joy, watching this most famous of films. Every shot was stunning, every cut was new, every line was fresh, every shadow was crisp, every angle sharp, every tone pitch perfect—I don’t know if I have ever been so blown away by a movie, much less one I had seen a half a dozen times before.

Well, duh.

Citizen Kane is a fantastic movie, you are saying to yourself. What is so new about that? Nothing, of course. It was fantastic when he made it and now, when critics didn’t like it, when critics did like it, when audiences didn’t like it and when they did, when I didn’t really care about it and now that I do. But watching it again—and then, even more joyously, watching Roger Ebert’s commentary—made me think of a few things, the most important of which was obviously God. To explain this, I will have to explain my movie-watching story. I apologize for the personal anecdote; I don’t like it either.

When I first began my movie-trek, I liked movies that mostly everyone likes. No, I wouldn’t have enjoyed Transformers (Written By No One!) even then, but my tastes were relatively undiscerning and if they threw a few spaceships up on the screen I would probably be fine with it. Also, I didn’t particularly like old movies. There is a stink of outmoded narratives, affected acting and cheesy dialogue attached to old movies which it was hard to overcome. I might pretend to appreciate one here and then, but let’s face it, I didn’t. Part of this is due to the fact that most old movies—like most movies in general—do stink, and that I hadn’t gotten around to watching the good ones yet (why, why was I watching countless carbon-copy John Wayne movies when I could have been watching Red River or Rio Bravo?!). But much of it sprung from the fact that I didn’t have a clue how to watch movies. Of course, I was totally oblivious as to this fact. “Not know how to watch movies?” How can someone not know how to watch movies? You just sit there and stare at the screen, for crying out loud.

Then a few little things happened, in no particular order. I saw Batman Begins, and I didn’t like it at all. This was weird. It was a superhero movie—which I usually enjoy—and it wasn’t terribly cheesy. Why didn’t I like it? Why did I sit through it but not enjoy it? Was something wrong with me or the movie? I couldn’t answer that question.

Then, in my freshmen detective fiction class, we watched the eminently watchable John Huston masterpiece The Maltese Falcon. What’s this? An old movie with snappy dialogue, sordid plot and decent acting? Where did that come from?!

Then, in my freshmen film class: for an exam we had to watch a shot of a film and describe it using the terminology we had learned in class. The terminology itself was helpful if not overly important (it makes things easier to articulate, not easier to understand) but the notion of having to watch a shot and really figure out what made it what it is helped me think about watching a movie in a whole new way. The fact that the shot was the opening long take to Welles' Touch of Evil was even better. Now, when watching Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, I was able to express to myself why a certain shot was so amazing. (The first shot of them racing away in the mini-van, for those wondering). I had always loved that shot, but now I could express why I did.

Then, the kicker had to be Barry Lyndon. Over Spring Break of my freshmen year, Left Thumb and I (yes, he does exist) watched Barry Lyndon. I had never seen a film anything like it. Even my newfound vocabulary was at a loss to describe the assault of pulchritude that this film made on the eyes. I had no idea how to explain what I just saw, but I knew it was amazing.

So I decided I was going to watch movies. I didn’t do it overnight, per se, but I decided over time that this would be a hobby of mine. And so it became. It was helped along by the fact that, being lonely and socially inept at college, movies were something I could do on my own, in those many depressing lengths of time during which I had nothing else to do. Even when I did finally meet some friends, the movie-watching habit stuck.

But I still didn’t know how to watch movies! I would watch certain movies—like, say, the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple—and like them but not know why. Or I would watch others, such as William Wyler’s Sunset Boulevard, and know that I should think I was watching something important… but was I watching something important? I had no idea! If I hadn’t been told I never would have gotten past the twenty minute mark. I was watching movies out of a vague sense of duty to finally master them, but when someone told me that they didn’t like Sunset Boulevard (or countless other films) because it was boring, I didn’t really know what to say. They were kind of boring.

Well, suffice it to say that watching Citizen Kane last night was like coming full circle. After years of movie-watching and reading and writing and discussing, Sunset Boulevard is not boring to me in the least. Stagecoach is not just another black-and-white western, it is an exciting work of art. Citizen Kane isn’t just a myth, a legend, a movie you claim is great because you’re supposed to—it is actually, legitimately, one of my favorite movies.

Now, not all people are called to love movies. When someone tells me they just don’t “get” Blade Runner or that Kill Bill is the greatest movie ever made, I just assume they don’t know how to watch movies. And that is fine, not everyone can learn everything. I don’t know the first thing about wines and probably never will; it is up to others to detect the hint of vanilla and persimmon. Movies, like almost anything, are an acquired taste, and everyone can’t acquire every taste.

But there is one thing we are all called to acquire a taste for, the Ultimate Acquired Taste, if you will: God.

Due to our fallen nature, we don’t exactly have a “taste” for God. There is a deep seated longing somewhere in us, but most of us can go for quite some time ignoring God, pretending He doesn’t exist, or perhaps worst of all, pretending we are doing all the right things (much like I might have pretended to love Citizen Kane in the past) while doing nothing to actually bring that love about. I fall victim to this more than anyone I know (which makes sense because we do tend to be most aware of our own sinfulness). For quite a long period of time (i.e. my entire life) I would say things like: “Well, I just don’t feel anything. I go to Mass, but I don’t feel anything. I pray, but I don’t feel anything. I sin, and unfortunately I don’t feel that bad about it. I can’t do anything about the way that I feel, though. So it isn’t my fault.”

Isn’t my fault. We love saying that. That is only true in the same sense that not understanding movies or wine wasn’t my fault. I didn’t enjoy good movies because I hadn’t trained myself to love them. I don’t enjoy good wines because I haven’t taught myself anything about them. But while movie-watching is not a pre-requisite for Heavenly bliss, and wine-tasting is not something Saint Peter will probably be asking me about, loving God, loving what is good, and coming to hate sin are probably going to come up in the conversation at some point.

And it is learning to love God and hate sin which seems so obviously paralleled to me in movie watching. You can put forth anything you want here: music, movies, dance, food, economics, sports (baseball, in particular!)—you name it. To really learn to love something, you can’t just pick it up and say “how does this feel?” Picking it up repeatedly without ever going further than that is no better, and as Cardinal Henry Newman would say, it might even be worse, as you have convinced yourself you are doing what it takes to improve yourself when in fact you are stuck in a rut.

It starts with grace, obviously. In my own personal movie-story, the analogue for grace would be those first few encounters. Batman Begins, The Maltese Falcon, the exam where I had to analyze a shot, Barry Lyndon. Moments of movie-grace, if you will, that I did nothing to earn. They just happened. It is similar in our life of faith, except perhaps that God is pouring grace on us at a much higher rate.

Also, suffering and/or self denial is another important aspect. Without those constant lonely nights in Tower C, do I ever start watching Pulp Fiction, Seven Samurai, Paths of Glory or Miller’s Crossing? Probably not. Even though it seemed like a pointless piece of crapitude at the time, that loneliness meant something in the end.

Then, of course, after the journey is started, you have to do the right thing even though you don’t feel like it and sinning doesn’t seem so bad. You hve to make an actual, radical change to your life. And the amazing, stunning thing, is this: without you even realizing it, after a while, the path of righteousness begins to excite you and the sin does begin to seem hateful and opprobrious (because it is). The excuse that we don’t have control over our feelings doesn’t work any better with God than it does with movies. If I was willing to spend years of reading, watching and thought to become fluent in movies, shouldn’t I be willing to spend all the time in the world to become fluent in Holiness?

The particularly crazy part is this: I understand movies better now than I ever have, and yet only now do I realize how little I understand them, and how much there is which I don’t know. The same thing happens in our faith. The closer we get to God, the more we realize how much closer we need to become!

It often seems downright impossible to do what God is asking us to do. But then again, it seemed unthinkable that I would ever understand Sunset Boulevard in such a way that I actually enjoyed watching a movie like that. The discipline it takes to learn movies is unsurprising. What is surprising is that we don’t expect to have to do the same thing on a much larger scale with the Most Important Thing in Life. If we want to love God and hate sin it takes an enormous amount of work. The surprising thing is that by the end, the work itself becomes joyous, and we no longer understand what took us so long. We can empathize with those who do not understand Citizen Kane, and we can empathize with those who find God so hard (as we all do, at times; God is much harder than movies) but with each little thing we learn, the road becomes clearer and the burden lighter. Hopefully, by the end, we will all be watching Citizen Kane with God, wondering what on Earth took us so long.

~Right Thumb~

The Coolest of the Cool

Pictured: The coolest ship in the world. Does this post really need this picture? Of course not. But I will take any excuse to picture an aircraft carrier.


The coolest human beings of all time. I am not talking about Indiana Jones or Han Solo. They are fake. They might be incredibly cool, but they are artificial constructions, much like the Most Interesting Man in the World. If they were to be considered, surely they would be the coolest of the cool. But on this list, I refer to actual human beings. Human beings who are so cool that Indiana Jones and Han Solo and the Most Interesting Man in the World would be impressed. Human beings who are so cool that our honorable mention—that’s right, he doesn’t even make the list—is:

Michael Freaking Jordan. He is the honorable mention. The winningest, best, most famous, most “I don’t give a flying hoot what you think” athlete of all time doesn’t even make the list. He is merely honorably mentioned. Because while Mike was the incredibly cool, he is not as cool as…

Harrison Ford. The guy didn’t just play Indiana Jones, Han Solo, Richard Kimble. He also saves people in his personal helicopter. It’s one thing to play the coolest characters ever. But as I mentioned, that is just a fantasy. It turns out, Harrison’s key to pulling these characters off is that he practically is Indiana Jones. As this cracked article relates:

“Twice Ford has used his helicopter to come to the rescue of real-world hikers in distress, once by saving a woman on top of an Idaho mountain and once by joining a search and rescue mission for a 13-year-old Boy Scout lost in the woods. And out of all the people on the mission, Ford was the one who found the kid. In both cases, he volunteered his helicopter and piloting services free of charge, and also made himself available to the sheriff for future emergencies, undoubtedly prompting lonely middle-aged women all over the American Northwest to suddenly take up the sport of ill-planned hiking trips.”

He also led a relief operation to Haiti and personally flies special Olympics athletes to competitions. Yeah. He’s pretty cool.

Next up is:

William the Conqueror. You know he invaded England and basically began the march of the British Empire (granted, they only really got going 600 hundred years later, but the same could be said for Romulus and Rome).

You know the date 1066, when really, nothing happened in 1066 except for his being crowned in Westminster Abbey after a successful invasion of England.

You know that he was basically a bad bad man with a penchant for conquering things. But plenty of people have conquered stuff, you say; why was William different?

Napoleon conquered because of his Napoleon complex, Hitler conquered because he was a madman, Joan of Arc did it because of the voices in her head—but William did because someone called him a bad name. According to Wikipedia, William was originally known as “William the Bastard” due to his illegitimate birth.

So he needed to get people to stop calling him that ridiculous name, and in the process take out some righteous anger on the world. So he went and conquered a country and a half, just to change his name to “William the Conqueror” which is the coolest name you can have without living in the Star Wars universe.

William changed history just to get a cool name. Imagine what would have happened if someone from the Middle East had made fun of his hair? The Middle East wouldn’t even exist anymore, that’s what would have happened.

Up next:

Every. Astronaut. Ever. I mean… come on. This doesn’t need any explanation. But let’s put it this way: fighter pilots are as cool as they come, and astronauts are the best fighter pilots, AAAAAAAAAAAND as if that weren't enough, they go into space. Cool is to astronaut like rotund is to John Adams, fast is to Usain Bolt, or explosions are to Michael Bay. They define the word. The word defines them.

Up next:

Hannibal the Conqueror and Scipio. Hannibal is well known (and he seems to strengthen the theory that having a name which ends with “the Conqueror” is probably a good way to get on this list). He basically slapped around the Roman Empire for a decade, while being outmanned, outflanked, outsupplied and outpoliticked the entire time. He crossed the Alps with 200,000 men and war elephants. War elephants. It is tricky to FLY over the Alps, and Hannibal got elephants to walk over the Alps. Not just any elephants, either—war elephants were specifically trained to go beserk and run through columns of men at high speed. Somehow, Hannibal got these ten-ton ticking time bombs across the Alps.

Then, he beat a gigantic Roman army in an epic battle. Then, he did it again. Then, he did it again, and again, and again. All this despite that fact that Carthage, his home country, was refusing to send supplies and basically doing everything in their power to take the legs out from under him. Hannibal just won, won, won. And he did it against Rome. This is the Rome that, until it crumbled from within and succumbed to the barbarian hordes, never lost to anybody. Their Empire stretched from Spain and Britain to Mesopotamia and Egypt. They. Did. Not. Lose.

Except to Hannibal, who whooped their collective arse for 15 years.

That makes him cool.

Who was Scipio? Well, we all know Rome survivied the tornado of destruction that was Hannibal. How?

Scipio beat him.

But as cool as astronauts, Harrison Ford, and guys with names ending in “the Conqueror” are, there is one undisputed coolest guy ever. There is no one is his league, and no one particularly close to his league either, his name is:

Chuck Yeager. The simplest way of explaining why Chuck Yeager is as cool as they come is this. Astronauts are the coolest people on Earth, and their hero is Chuck Yeager. If William, Hannibal and Scipio were around today, they would all give up their conquering ways, morbidly depressed by the fact that, nay, they would never achieve the epic coolness of Chuck Yeager.

I recently attended a talk given by Alan Bean. Mr. Bean is one of only twelve men in the history of the universe to walk on the face of the Moon. Twelve. He is not only an astronaut, he is the cream of the astronaut crop. And when he mentioned Chuck Yeager, his eyes sparkled like a seven-year old, as if he couldn’t contain the admiration.

Anyone whose sheer coolness can strike an astronaut speechless is the epitome of cool. Chuck Yeager is the coolest man the world has ever known, and I defy you to suggest someone cooler. Even fake people can't approach Yeager. Indiana Jones wants to be Chuck Yeager when he grows up, but knows he never will.

~Right Thumb~

“I want much more than this provincial life.”

This line does not seem to mesh with the rest of Bell’s character. In Beauty and the Beast, Bell is selfless, charitable and wise. This particular song seems to indicate that she is ambitious, ungrateful and greedy. Seen in the proper light, however, I believe this song is the key to one of the more important themes in the film, which is often overlooked.

This is, in part, due to the fact that so many truths of human existence are present here. The importance of looking past superficial appearances, the vicious tendencies of mobs and crowds, the true nature of love as sacrifice, the wide-ranging effects of evil and many other themes are present in at least some fashion, subtle or otherwise.

But why is Bell so determined to escape “this provincial life” and why does she sing this song with a smile on her face? Is not this a mixed signal at best, or sheer greed at worst? Does she not love the books in this town, cheerfully “bonjour” the various characters and dance her way back to her father, whom she enthusiastically encourages regarding his science project?

Why yes, she does all of those things. She is very happy and yet she wants more. Some would call this greedy, I would call this saintly. Allow me to explain.

Cardinal Newman outlines the difference between the “watchful” Christian and the unwatchful Christian as being one of satisfaction. The watchful Christian is unsatisfied with this world, longs for the return of Christ, and so does not place his joy in material things; therefore, he is constantly on the lookout for the coming of the Lord. The unwatchful Christian, while attending Mass, going to confession and in general following the commandments, is satisfied with the things of this world. He likes them for what they are, and not for what they point him toward.

We are, of course, meant to appreciate the many good things God has given us, and Bell does. She likes her books and her horse and so on. But we are not supposed to be satisfied with them. The things of this world are imperfect and impermanent, and even as we thank God for them we should be begging Him to return, that we might participate in His goodness as fully as we were always supposed to do. Power, fame, money, stature—these things do not last.

Now observe what Bell does. She appreciates her life—but she is not satisfied with it. She turns down the greatest life a woman in her “world” (this provincial town) could possibly have. The stature of marriage to Gaston, the money this would avail her, the envy of all, the power of becoming a veritable village queen—all of this is unimportant to Bell. Instead, by the end of the film, she has a life much greater than this. The Beast’s castle is not simply a bigger palace over which to rule. It is, in a sense, the afterlife. And in this afterlife, because she died to self in the material world, and sacrificed herself in the most loving of ways, she has gained… everything. Much as Jesus promised us would happen if we were able to die to self.

Now hold on there, Mr. Crazy Theorist, you might be saying to yourself. What is this “afterlife”, “death to self” and other such nonsense of which you speak? She doesn’t die!

Actually… she does. Being a fan of the film, it is easy to overlook Bell’s act of love toward her father. She promises to stay with the beast forever in order that her father might go free. Forever. Knowing the end of the film, this seems, shall we say, less than horrifying. But just imagine what happens if the beast never softens, if love never enters his life, and if she is just stuck there.

Forever.

She basically died. She would never see her father, her town, her fellow human beings again. She would have lived out her days cold, alone and forlorn, subject to the vicissitudes and temperaments of a monster. She would have gone from village queen to lifelong prisoner in a matter of hours, and she would have done it all because she valued her father more than herself, and she valued the next life more than the trappings of “this provincial life.”

Then, of course, having died to herself, she goes about converting the Beast who also dies to self (but in a much more literal fashion) before they are united in the “Heaven” of the film’s finale. Note that the Beast also had to choose which was more important to him—having Bell in his castle forever, or giving Bell up because she needed to see her father. He, also, could have had his material dream—but let it go. Bell and the Beast forsook this world, and only in doing so were they able to live happily ever after in the next world.

This, to me, is the most enduring theme of Beauty and the Beast. As we view it from this angle, it becomes apparent that when we chase after money, or power, or fame in our lives, we are marrying Gaston. The most powerful man or woman in the world is still just the Gaston of a slightly bigger “provincial life.” Bell gave up all of this and even her basic freedom because she wanted more than that out of life. If only we would be so ambitious.

~Right Thumb~