Made in 2008 and starring Paul Dano post Little Miss Sunshine and There Will Be Blood and Zooey Deschanel pre Yes Man and 500 Days of Summer, I’d hoped for more but this turned out to be a very average version of all those films about two quirky (slightly crazy) people bored with their lives and trying to find their place in the city who collide in a messy relationship while their dysfunctional families exist only to offer a dash of extra quirkiness for them to play off and to keep us interested.

Given that this is a film that has been made and remade over and over (mostly) by young, American and male film-makers, this version doesn’t really bring anything new or interesting in the way that some others do.

The two main characters, particularly “Happy”, don’t feel developed enough and so I ended up feeling they were quite inaccessible to me and therefore didn’t really engage with their fates. This, the jumpy plot that takes us from one quirky indie set-piece to the next with scarce continuity and the random guy who, for completely unexplained reasons, appears throughout the film to try to kill Paul Dano left me, by the end, with my own sense of queasiness and ennui to match those of the film’s main characters!

One of the things I’ve been thinking about since watching Inception is the power of ideas. Here are two quotes I’ve been thinking on…

What’s the most resilient parasite? An idea. A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules.

The seed that we planted in this man’s mind may change everything.

There are thoughts that we might wish we could un-think – lines of enquiry that we reach the end of only to find conclusions that make us wish we’d never started. Perhaps sometimes it’s true that ignorance is bliss or at least more comfortable. Perhaps it’s be better to strive to be happy than to be right. We all live inconsistently anyway so why not choose inconsistencies that allow us to live fulfilled rather than desperate?

But is that even a choice we can make for ourselves? Often ideas come like an infection. Small, nagging doubts that what we thought might be true may not be (as in Inception’s “what if everything you know isn’t real?”) that start as almost unnoticed seeds but can grow into consuming thoughts that transform our entire internal model of the external world and either enhance or impair our ability to live and thrive in it.

However, we don’t seem capable of choosing only the ideas that enhance – partly because we struggle at the time to identify which ones they will turn out to be – but the whole process of cognitive behavioural therapy is based on the idea of choosing what weight to put on the things we believe about ourselves and our individual and social place in the world.

We all believe both true things and false things about ourselves and we believe each of them to a greater or lesser extent depending on our current circumstances. Large factors in how I see myself are my aspirations for who I want to be in the future and the way I think other people see me in the present. We are all more or less insecure as we go through life, with imperfect knowledge of how people see us or how external factors may change our situation.

The success of CBT seems to be in allowing us to choose to put more faith in the good things we think about ourselves and dismiss the bad things as not true. Whether or not the good or bad things are actually true takes a back seat to finding a position that allows for happiness. Maybe this apparent internal dishonesty is ok though, not least because the person we seem least able to be objective about is ourselves.

P.S. Everyone should go see Inception while it’s on the big screen (at least once)

Another twofer “Jon watches”…

The Hangover was (apparently) the blockbuster comedy of 2009. 4 guys go on a crazy stag-do in Las Vegas, things get out of hand and hilarity ensues as the following day they try to piece together the night before the morning after. There were two highlights in the film for me – a tribute to the casino scene from Rain Man and the strange pause in otherwise fast-paced action where Ed Helms (who’s great in the US version of The Office) sings a song about tigers’ dreams. Otherwise standard buddy/road movie and quite American humour.

The Wave (or “Die Welle” because it’s a German remake of an American TV movie) however is a bit more thought-provoking. Inspired by the (disputed) true story of a sociology experiment in dictatorships getting out of hand on a school campus, the setting of this remake in Germany gives it an extra resonance. A class of kids, cynical that anything like the fascist regime of the Nazis could ever happen again in their country, are convinced by their teacher to start a movement. Over the course of the week, they elect the teacher as “fuhrer”, choose a logo, a name (The Wave”), a uniform and the movement begins to take on a life of its own as people begin to be identified as “in” or “out”.

Although the progression of the movement in the film seems a bit unlikely and the conclusion of the film is much more dramatic than the conclusion of the real events it was based on, it’s still an interesting parable about the dangers of assumed superiority and how easily we can fall into excluding tribe behaviours.

The position of “I’m right, you’re wrong – you should do/believe what I tell you to” is, in my opinion, the thought process that has most often led people down a path of war or oppression. Not just religious faith but racism, communism, etc.

The faith/atheist debate (like many debates) just becomes more and more polarised with both sides often so entrenched that people on both sides don’t even listen to each other any more.

At the moment I feel that all I (or anyone) can say is “it’s been my experience that…” and to go further than that to claims of absolute truth is to overstep our ability to perceive. I think this fits quite well with the below from 1 Peter 3…

“Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect”

Living in this uncertain, analogue world where things don’t fit nicely into little boxes is much less comfortable than the happy certainty of believing I’m right about everything though!