I have always held in this race that while of course we shouldn’t vote for a presidential candidate based on something as skin deep as skin color, that nonetheless all things being equal in terms of character, temperament, policy proposals, principles, and priorities, that there is a crucial psychological bonus to having a black president. It is simply of too inestimable a value to send the message to the youth of America and around the world about what kind of a country we live in.
This great article is about an early fruit of this impact:
As I’ve considered Sen. Obama’s accomplishment, I’ve determined the most profound impact he’s had — not considering the possibility of him becoming president and proving to be one of our better ones — is on our future more than our present or our history.
I didn’t grasp that until I took my 2-year-old to the doctor last week and he took a vision exam. It was through young Alexander’s eyes that I saw how important this moment in time could be.
The nurse administering the exam pointed to different shapes and images on a chart, asking Alexander to identify each. One of the recurring images was that of a flag. It wasn’t an American flag, but a flag just the same.
To a 2-year-old, a flag is a flag, right? Alexander is most familiar with the U.S. flag. When the nurse pointed to the flag, he answered confidently.
“Barack Obama,” he said, pronouncing it as best as a 2-year-old could.
“What did you say?” she asked.
“Barack Obama.”
As she went through the chart, she once again came to the flag.
“Barack Obama.”
“Do you know what he’s saying?” I asked her.
“No.”
“He’s saying Barack Obama.” Why? Because he was making an association. Most times when he’s seen Sen. Obama on TV, the Democratic nominee has been standing in front of the U.S. flag.
Whether Sen. Obama wins the presidency or not, he has had an untold effect on the future and psyche of America.
My son will live a lifetime in which he knows an African-American can ascend to the highest levels in this country. He won’t think it odd for a black man to seek to lead a nation. He as well as many white, Asian, Hispanic and other children, whether they like the candidate or not, won’t think it odd or a novelty to see a black man standing in front of the American flag — the ultimate display of patriotism, despite misguided and mean-spirited efforts to paint Sen. Obama as being otherwise — articulating his concerns and love for his country.
Because of Barack Obama, many of our children won’t grow up with as many of the psychological bruises those before them might have endured.
I grew up being told that I could one day be president. But much of what I saw and heard suggested otherwise. I saw and experienced the discrimination. Blacks only secured the right to vote in my lifetime. I saw many black kids in school being steered away from advanced courses and training that would have prepared them to shoot for higher goals.
Not only does Sen. Obama’s feat help shape a 2-year-old’s thoughts about himself and the world around him, but it affects so many others, from high-schoolers to college students to older folks.
As something of a Rawlsian about public discourse, I have no problem with religious people arguing in government for application of ideals that they personally discovered through their religion or their sacred texts, their religious institutions, etc. as long as they respect the need to give reasons that are publicly accessible, reasons that do not cite religious authority as though it were binding upon all rational people to take into account. As long as your religiously derived view is also defensible in terms of reason, you should feel free to argue for it.
This principle is what prevents us from having laws rooted in religious intuitions that are purely arbitrary and incapable of rational justification. If anyone can just “feel” God’s voice telling them that God wants x or God wants y and if they are able to persuade others that they had this insight straight from God, then there are no limits on theological claims made by the fiat of “Scriptural” authors or contemporaries who claim prophetic abilities that can be made into laws. There is no limit to stop those who think God indicates to them that slavery is okay or that God demands a genocide (as the Bible claims he has repeatedly before for example) from making such insistences in arguments about public policy and law. We could wind up with arguments that all Americans must be baptized for the good of their souls, that there should be no separation from church and state, etc. Any argument must be considered when it needs no further justification when it is rooted in premises chosen to be believed purely by groundless “faith.”
And that’s why Obama is extremely right in his manner of trying to explain to his fellow Christians how they should conceive of their incorporation of their religious beliefs (if they must) into their public policy suggestions. And it’s why Dobson is extremely upsetting:
He said Obama, who supports abortion rights, is trying to govern by the “lowest common denominator of morality,” labeling it “a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution.”
“Am I required in a democracy to conform my efforts in the political arena to his bloody notion of what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies?” Dobson said. “What he’s trying to say here is unless everybody agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe.”
Dobson’s either obtuse or a liar to interpret Obama as saying that “unless everybody agrees” he has no right to fight for his beliefs. What Obama is saying is that your arguments must be of the type that could persuade those that disagree with you on the common terms of rational debate that we all share: appeals to logic, history, repeatable or universally had types of experiences, science, anecdotal evidence, etc. Obama’s not saying the ridiculous thing that unless everyone already agrees with you you cannot make an argument. He’s saying you cannot make an argument from premises that are simply idiosyncratic to you and your dogmatic faith tradition with its bald assertions that subject themselves to no thorough rational questioning but instead insist on “faith” to make up a key role in their assenting.
Unless Dobson really (and rather stupefyingly) thinks that he has no reasons to argue against abortion that do not come from the claims of “special revelation” from God, what in the world is wrong with demanding he use arguments that do not appeal to leaps of faith but actually are persuasive to “reason alone?” And if he thinks abortion is only refutable for religious reasons, because of his self-conscious, rationally uncompelled choice to believe (which is what faith is, a choice to believe) , then how dare he insist others who do not make a similarly rationally uncompelled choice to believe as a matter of law? How dare he derive laws from those beliefs he knows he chose even though they weren’t nearly conclusively proven to him? How does he not see the arbitrariness, unfairness, and theocracy in that? Is he just that unwilling to view things from the perspective of others who disagree with him? Does he have that little respect for them?
The irony of Dobson’s anger and contempt for Obama is that he goes right ahead and in defense of his right to argue on religious terms makes an explicit appeal that is accessible to all people after all—-he appeals to “what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies.” One does not have to be religious to have an interest in the well being of “tiny babies.” That he thinks you must is just religious arrogance. That’s not to say of course that all irreligious people accept his views on what is or is not a “tiny baby” or what is right or wrong with regard to them. But neither do all religious people agree with him. The issue can be debated among reasonable people on rational and reasonable terms without appeals to religious authority and without the assumption that only religious people can have the most robust senses of goodness possible.
It is Dobson’s pure arrogance that his religion makes his moral intuitions and moral insights superior and that arrogance translates in an unflinching willingness to theocratically impose his moral intuitions on people by appeal to reasons they could not even theoretically assent to as long as they are not adherents to his theology.
That’s obnoxious, that’s authoritarian, that’s anti-rational, and that’s flat-out regressive.
How much can you tell about a candidate’s fitness to lead a country based on a single clause? The substance/style debate has been around for centuries—and, like all the other venerable binaries, is probably best considered as a symbiosis. Too often, style is dismissed as merely a sauce on the nutritious bread of substance, when in fact it’s inevitably a form of substance itself. This goes double for the presidency, where brilliant policy requires brilliant public discourse. If you can think your way through a sentence, through the algorithms involved in condensing information verbally and pitching it to an audience, through the complexities of animating historical details into narrative, then you can think your way through a policy paper, or a diplomatic discussion, or a 3 A.M. phone call. Bush’s difficulty with basic units of syntax has not been trivial: It signals a wider habit of mind that has extended to every corner of governance. Hillary’s tendency to express herself in distant clichés very likely lost her the nomination—and, one might argue, rightfully so. Style tells us, in a second, what substance couldn’t tell us in a year. It’s silly to downplay the importance of verbal intelligence to a job that makes you the mouthpiece of arguably the most influential nation in the world.
Thaler and Sunstein correctly assume that people are busy, their lives are increasingly complicated and they have neither time nor inclination nor, often, the ability to think through even all important choices, from health care plans to retirement options. Therefore the framing of choices matters, particularly using the enormous power of the default option—the option that goes into effect if the chooser chooses not to make a choice.
For example, Obama advocates that where defined contribution savings plans such as 401(k)s are offered, there should be automatic—note well: not mandatory—enrollment by employers of new workers. Contributions to such plans are tax deductible, taxes are deferred on the accumulating money and often employers match part of the employees’ contributions. What is at stake is, essentially, free money. Yet when an employee must affirmatively opt in, participation falls far below 100 percent. Obama’s proposal would simply change the default option: Employees are in unless they choose to opt out, which they would be free to do.
Abundant evidence indicates that most would not, which would serve the national interest because Americans’ savings rate is a disgrace. In fact, in 2005 it turned negative, and if insufficient saving persists, that inevitably will mean bigger government to provide for people who have not provided for themselves.
By a “nudge” Thaler and Sunstein mean a policy intervention into choice architecture that is easy and inexpensive to avoid and that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing an individual’s economic incentives. “Putting the fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.”
Thaler and Sunstein say the premise of libertarian policy is that people should be generally free to do what they please. Paternalistic policy “tries to influence choices in a way that will make choosers better off, as judged by themselves.” So “libertarian paternalism is a relatively weak, soft, and nonintrusive type of paternalism because choices are not blocked, fenced off, or significantly burdened.”
“Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified,” he conceded, after I reminded him that he had called NAFTA “devastating” and “a big mistake,” despite nonpartisan studies concluding that the trade zone has had a mild, positive effect on the U.S. economy.
What that means in English is “Politicians pander and lie to get elected and I’m a politician, so I’m no exception.”
I give Obama the credit of having enough honesty that he here and elsewhere not only admits he lied but also accurately attributes it to his being a politician. Problem is with the lies and with the attempt to excuse his behavior on those grounds.
I understand the felt need to pander. I actually also prefer his true position on NAFTA to his rhetorical one for the primaries.
What I don’t appreciate is his consistent unwillingness to take an unpopular stance on principle. On gay marriage, he has given tacit approval of the California Supreme Court’s position, so there is reason to hope he won’t sell out the gays like Clinton did with DOMA. But his official position says he will indeed oppose marriage for gays. He claims he will reverse Bush’s assaults on the constitution, but thus far is silent on the Congress’s contempt for the constitution expressed in its passing of the FISA legislation. I put up with pragmatically, but less and less appreciate, his pandering to evangelicals on both the left and the right to insist on increasing rhetoric that insists religion should play a large role in governmental thinking. It would be nice if maybe he could take leadership and combine the Democrats’ just call for universal health care with the Republicans’ just call for tort reform that would eliminate the enormous amount of money wasted on unnecessary medicine aimed at protecting doctors’ from irrational malpractice suits. It would be nice if Obama didn’t pander to ethanol producers in Iowa. It would be nice if he could take a principled, controversial stand on anything, actually.
I agree with most of Obama’s platform and McCain is an extremely dangerous, militaristic Neo-Con and scary deficit spender who wants to stack the Supreme Court with people with no concern for civil rights. Plus McCain is as big a flip-flopper, if not bigger,than Obama is. So, there’s no doubt the only remaining hope in this campaign for any kind of reversal of the disastrous Bush policies and mindset in government is a President Obama. But it’s increasingly clear that while Obama will not have Bush’s vices, he can be expected to have most of Bill Clinton’s, excluding only the sexual ones.
It is definitely a lesser of two evils election as usual though, I’m finally coming to see and accept that. For a short period there I actually thought it might be something else.
I like Obama a lot for a lot of reasons, but I’ve never bought into the myth that he’s not a scheming politician at his core. So, this article doesn’t surprise me but it’s still disappointing.
The scene unfolding in front of me is a semiotician’s fantasia. For months, Clinton and Obama have battled (and battered) each other more or less as equals. But now there is no longer even a faint pretense of parity. When they first spy each other in the corridor, Clinton hugs the wall deferentially to let Obama pass; their brief tête-à-tête only ensues at the latter’s instigation. When the chat is over and the nominee strides toward the freight elevator to make his exit, his Secret Service agents brusquely shoo away Clinton’s aides: “Stand aside for Senator Obama! Make way for Senator Obama!”
I’m really not sure that this is a very accurate inference about the nature of Nietzsche’s shift in writing style from his early works into his middle phase, but it’s interesting to ponder nonetheless:
Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
“I love when I’m shaking hands on a rope line and”— he mimes the motion, hand over hand — “I see little old white ladies and big burly black guys and Latino girls and all their hands are entwining. They’re feeding on each other as much as on me.”
He shrugs; it’s that distancing eye of the author.
“It’s like I’m just the excuse.”
regardless of whether it’s put-on humility—there’s something in there to meditate on a bit, I think.
Fascinatingly thorough and multiple treatments of the hard numbers about Obama and Clinton’s respective prospects against McCain. That and more important analysis that should go into superdelegate thinking about whom to support.
From Bob Dylan’s 30th Anniversary concert. I love the song and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers just completely rock out on one of my two favorite renditions of it ever. My other is Bob Dylan’s own from April 16, 1996. That one ends with some unbelievable merging of harmonica with jamming guitars. But anyway, there’s likely not a video for that one so this will have to do
This video is amazing. I’ve long loved the performance of this classic George Harrison song. It’s a symptom of my Pettycentric view of music that this is the version I actually am most familiar with. Anyway, I’d never seen the video and although I knew Prince was a part of the recording, I never quite figured out where he was in the song. Little did I know it was he who was shredding the guitar and who could have guessed he was doing so with such virtuoso flair!
Compassionate conservatism’s starting point had merit. The essential argument that Republicans should orient policy around how our ideas will affect the poor, the widow, the orphan, the forgotten and the “other” is indisputable – particularly for those who claim, as I do, to submit to an authority higher than government. Yet conservatives are conservatives because our policies promote deliverance from poverty rather than dependence on government.
Compassionate conservatism’s next step – its implicit claim that charity or compassion translates into a particular style of activist government involving massive spending increases and entitlement expansion – was its undoing. Common sense and the Scriptures show that true giving and compassion require sacrifice by the giver. This is why Jesus told the rich young ruler to sell his possessions, not his neighbor’s possessions. Spending other people’s money is not compassionate.
That’s right folks, all that disgust with the George W. Bush and the Republican party these days is based on their being too compassionate. Shame on Mark Foley and his “compassion” towards his interns. Shame on the compassion of Jack Abramoff. Shame on the president for killing tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, thousands of American soldiers, and trillions of dollars out of his blind compassion.
And according to Coburn, politicians need to be governed by the principles given from “a higher authority,” a “Scriptural” Christian higher authority that should determine our legislation. And what is the message of this Christian Gospel? Apparently the sole Gospel truth that should be guiding our government is “Thou shalt not force thy rich neighbor to sacrifice for his fellow man.”
Now that’s what I call creative hermeneutics!
That this man gets to be one of the most powerful legislators in all the world, a freaking United States Senator, is shudder-inducing.
I used to consider myself a conservative. I have a whole lot of sympathies with libertarians like Ron Paul. On social matters I’m almost extremely libertarian. On fiscal matters, I’d be one if it weren’t that I thought markets are too capricious to be just or stable when unfettered and totally deregulated; if I didn’t believe that some government regulation is needed as a check and balance that prevents de facto oligarchies of undemocratically controlled multinational corporations that threaten liberty and safety in comparable ways to government’s threats to these things; and if I didn’t think that since health insurance arrangements are already by their nature socialistic arrangements, they’d might as well be run as a not-for-profit by a just government and include everyone. So, those caveats restrain my libertarianism. But at the core of classic libertarian conservative principles of small government, promotion of competition, and personal independence appeal to me.
But simply nothing about the present day Republican party appeals to me. Its combination of theocratic longings, pandering to ignorance, antipathy to science, homophobia, racism, contempt for civil and privacy rights, self-righteous hypocritical religiosity, materialism, arrogant jingoistic chest-thumping imperialism, and obscene corporate corruption make the party as repulsive as toxic waste.
And none of this has to do with the party’s “compassion!”
In response to a former student, frustrated with the labels of agnostic and atheist, I wrote the following. I thought it might be of interest to others, so figured I’d post it here in case it is.
Well, I’m not sure you have a good grasp on what agnosticism is. Thomas Huxley coined the word as a play on words. He was a philosopher who was irritated about the metaphysical presumptuousness of the philosophers around him who all seemed to know the secrets of the universe as though they had some special knowledge about things no one can really know about. He compared them, derisively, to the gnostics of the early Christian church. The gnostics were a sect of Christians who believed they were in on secrets that Jesus gave to a handful of his disciples but not the others. Gnostic in Greek is one of the words for “to know” and so the “gnostics” were those who thought they had “special knowledge.” It’s basically like “those in the know.”
SO, Huxley compared overly presumptuous metaphysical speculation and confidence to the gnostics, a sect believing it had secret knowledge. He contrasted himself to them by calling himself an “agnostic” (a “not gnostic”) who had no special knowledge about the secret metaphysical/theological truths of the universe.
So, the word agnostic has grown to mean a position of confessed not-knowing in almost any area of disputable beliefs. But primarily it applies to the theological position of declaring yourself as not knowing whether or not there is a God. Some Christians like to distinguish two types of agnostics: those who say THEY just don’t know if there’s a God and those who claim NO ONE can ever know whether there is a God. Clearly Huxley meant the latter. He meant to claim such matters were inaccessible to human knowledge and to have knowledge would require a preposterous “secret knowlege” that no one should feel entitled to claim themselves a right to.
Yet, there is still humility to agnosticism. It’s not audacious enough as to declare knowing that there’s not a God but it is saying that such questions are unanswerable and left alone. It’s not an opening for others to say they believe anyway. It’s not an outright claim there is no God. It’s a position that says we should ALL admit we know nothing about such things.
Atheism is just the firmer claim there is no God. I wish it wasn’t so closely linked to the attitude you described being wary of whereby someone claims that all knowledge is scientific knowledge. That’s scientism. That’s the (naive) belief that science can answer every question. I (and Nietzsche incidentally) completely reject that way of thinking. I think science is our most powerful and compelling mode of knowing and I think that it is a model for its insistence on method and experience and verifiability and falsifiability as tests for knowledge.
But, ultimately, science cannot answer many metaphysical questions that I think we can formulate relatively defensible beliefs about. Neither can science say very much at all about values and ethics. And again, I think there is much to say. Essentially, there are many topics for philosophy and for the social sciences that require modes of inquiry that are messier than science for being less quantifiable, but nonetheless are valuable forms of inquiry.
Just theology is not one of them.
So, you can be an atheist like me and Nietzsche without adopting scientism.
I’m technically an agnostic. I believe we cannot know the source of eternity in the universe. All we know is that in some way something must just exist. Whether that’s an eternal character to the stuff of our universe or whether it’s a seperate being is an unsettlable question. I’d rather not answer it therefore. But, if pressed to give an answer, I would say it’s a simpler and therefore less presumptuous answer, to simply say there’s something eternal about the world we do know rather than make the huge unwarranted leap to posit an entire other being that we can not know.
Ultimately, I call myself an atheist because due to my agnosticism, I de facto live like an atheist and I have enoough antipathy towards religion and monotheism that I like to express it in the least compromising title available. It is also a matter of importance to me that we deliberately accept a godless universe and pursue reframing our values in light of that apparent situation. The term atheism is more consistent with such an insistence on such an attitude.
C-Span has been wonderful tonight. They broadcast the Libertarian Party’s Convention and now they’re showing interesting commencement speeches from around the country.
They just finished showing Margaret Edson’s and I think it’s simply a must for teachers and students alike. It meant a whole lot to me. One of the two best commencement speeches I’ve ever heard or read. Please, if you have 20 minutes, give it a watch or a read.
when the Mets score over and over again….There are few more satisfying sounds in life than that! Tonight was a good night. The Mets seem to always get crushed on the Yankee Stadium Sunday night game every year, so I was not expecting such a happy game. It just stinks that my man Carlos Delgado got jipped of a three run homerun he really could have used that wound up getting wrongly called foul. Still pleased to see him follow it up with a run scoring single after continuing the at bat. He should get 4 RBI in the books
Whenever I cover the topic of abortion in my ethics classes, I go to great pains to stress to my students the value of a dispassionate inquiry on the subject. I discourage use of values charged, question begging language of “pro-choice” and “pro-life” and encourage more descriptive language of “pro-abortion rights” or “anti-abortion rights” as a way to stress that even though the issue of abortion is in many way a question of competing priorities of the values of choice and life in this one area, nonetheless in the larger scheme of things people on both sides of the issue do believe in rights to life and rights to choice in general. The issue of abortion is morally about abortion and politically about abortion rights, not life itself or choice itself. That said, resolving the political and legal issue of abortion for many who are morally opposed to abortion but legally supportive of rights to abortion, the conflict really does come down to a decision about what priorities must dominate in a free society—-life in all cases or life in most cases but sometimes choice in the hard cases. And so while it is less divisive and less partisan to gut our language of discussion of value loaded words wherever possible, this is just one of the ways in which the attempt to be objective by trying to find a values neutral or non-partisan language in which to speak proves limited and possibly even distortive of the complexity of the issue at hand. It is deceptive to whitewash the fact that values are conflicting.
Nonetheless, my effort in my class discussions is to try to discipline my students to clarify their understanding of the facts and of the actual value choices at hand systematically, one aspect of the issue at a time, in order to clarify where the rightness or the wrongness, the permissibility or the impermissibility, or the advisibility or the inadvisibility of abortion lie exactly. I want them to figure out as specifically as they can where they think the lines need to be drawn and to work that out both morally and, separately, politically. I also stress so much objectivity because I want my students to practice fairness towards the multiple sides of morally contestable matters and I want them to be able to hear and understand each other and the differing philosophers we read in studying the issue. And I’m extremely proud of nearly all of my students I have had these class discussions with for displaying incredible openmindedness and even temperedness with such volatile matters. I know my own thoughts on the issue have deepened from those thoughtful and probing discussions we’ve had together.
Lake of Fire is quite an admirable film for going a further step towards effective illumination of the issue of abortion by not banning the heat and volatile passions that most of us feel when confronted with various aspects of the issues related to abortion. Nietzsche stresses repeatedly and profoundly the importance of finding the truth best not through greater and greater extents of dispassionate thinking but through the ability to feel through more and more affects. Correlately, he stresses that the truth is not to be understood from the right perspective but from through the ability to multiple perspectives, from seeing through a thousand eyes and gaining a fuller picture that way. On these terms, I think Tony Kaye’s film about abortion is an enriching experience worth having. Kaye represents a number of ways of seeing, a number of ways of feeling and through uncensored documentary imagery offers the viewer the chance to see a thousand striking images and feel struck by a thousand emotions. What I appreciate is that for all the vitriol and passion of many of the participants in the film, that feeling of fairness and perspective undergirds the film under Kaye’s direction and editing and I think manages the sort of enrichening of dialogue I would aim at through detachment.
A key virtue of the film too is that among the viewpoints represented are some of the “detached,” philosophical ones usually given short schrift (if any schrift at all) in the public debate. That said, the film does have some limitations that could have easily been remedied within the seemingly endless 154 minute runtime. For one thing, the informedly philosophical discussions could be more frequent and more involved than some of the multiplications of extremist voices and I think some of the issues of broader political nature that distract from the strict ethics of the practice might not be allowed to dominate so much of the screentime. A lot of valuable, helpful, possibly crucial philosophical and legal distinctions are conspicuously absent. Most egregiously absent are non-religiously based (or unexclusively religiously based) arguments against abortion, more thorough treatments of pro-abortion rights positions that concede the humanity of the unborn such as Judith Jarvis Thomson’s very famous “unconscious violinist” argument, the constitutional controversies involved in appealing to “penumbras,” etc., etc.
That said, while ultimately incomplete, the film does an eye opening and laudable job in general of bringing home the urgency of the political context to the evaluation of the morality of abortion but to the morality of those involved in the debate. There is a strong temptation for me, as a fetishizer of detachment, to want to only address the morality of abortion in a vacuum separated from the contingent political practices associated with the debate since those are theoretically periphery to the relative rightness or wrongness of the practice in abstraction. This film brought home to me some of the arbitrariness of drawing neat lines between abortion in abstraction and abortion in concrete political contexts. As much as being able to abstract the practice or aspects of the practice from surrounding context helps to simplify the issue in theory, it also obscures the interrelated consequences of one’s ethical and political decisions given actual conditions.
I felt like everyone was treated rather fairly. I don’t know how the hardline partisans would feel, whether they would all feel like they were treated fairly or whether they would feel like their side was caricatured worse than the other. I think the visual documentation of actual abortions made a strong visual, visceral case against the practice while the detailed documentation of the extent of theocratic and vigilante tendencies of members of the anti-abortion movement made a strong case against casting one’s lot with such authoritarian scoundrels. I think also the extensive discussion of the consequences of abortions performed illegally brought to life viscerally the real dangers of “coathanger” abortions and most of the philosophers included served to make a powerful case about the moral ambiguity and open door for tolerance of choice in the law with respect to abortion.
In sum, I think both sides make visceral visual cases. It may be unique to my temperment but I found the visceral case against abortion stronger but the abstract case in favor of abortion rights far stronger. The degree to which that is a function of the relative humanity and largeness of perspective of the advocates for abortion rights compared to the authoritarian, theocratic zeal of the proponents of restriction of abortion rights is hard to gauge.
Overall, there is much to learn and many, many important things to see and feel in this film even for those of us who have already learned, seen, and felt a great deal about the topic already. Abortion is an issue that I feel epitomizes Nietzsche’s intuition about the necessity of multiplying the eyes, the angles, and affects with which one looks at something if one is to truly understand it. This film is a far cry from a final word on the issue. But it is an effective and valuable aid in multiplying one’s perspectives and one’s feelings.
Sometimes people disagree about what makes for a horror film. As far as I’m concerned, the definitive feature of the genre is that it deals with frightening transgressions of nature and of morality. Mitchell Lichtenstein’s Teeth is horror that situates itself purely in terms of this defining characteristic. The horror is not in the surprises, as the film offers few ultimately, and it’s not in traditional scares. The horror is all in the transgression promised in the premise. The trailer below will cue you in to the premise sufficiently enough that I need not waste words or risk spoilers by going into it myself.
Teeth is pitch black horror comedy. The tone of the film borders on cartoonish at times and its funny moments are almost always its absolutely grotesque ones. The gore is not frequent or gratuitous but it is as transgressively scandalous and perverse as promised. I am not at all one to watch horror films to see gore for gore’s sake. Yet the horror genre at its best provides incredible opportunities for shrewd commentaries and visceral meditations on all sorts of themes and in service of such themes, I am probably as interested in gore as the most gratuitous gorehound. And Teeth delivers thematically with a fascinating synthesis of narratives and myths related to sexuality—ancient myths, Freudian myths, contemporary evangelical Christian purity myths, female empowerment myths, evolutionary stories, and familiar rape narratives are all interwoven with each other in a remarkably coherent and, to me, intellectually stimulating way. I had a good time sifting through the ways that these disparate and sometimes competing narratives found so many elemental features in eerily common with each other and how they also fundamentally diverged and created fundamental contrasts by the end.
Fundamentally, what becomes so interesting with this particular horror film is the way it throws into question what is nature and what is transgression? Is puberty’s sexual awakening the end of the age of purity or is it the return to nature lost to trauma and repression until that point? Are these teeth a transgression of nature or are they an evolutionary gift for adaptation? Is female empowerment itself an overturning of nature or an adaptation for advancement of women (and the species itself)? Do our traditional myths put us at odds with nature and is the point of the film to affirm the more modern stories of physical, personal, and social evolution as vehicles towards a strengthened nature that overturns the patriarchy, dogmatism, and religious fundamentalism that traditionally have claimed to be true to nature but have only functioned through a fundamentally anti-natural tyranny, as Nietzsche would argue?
So, all in all, Teeth is a horror film in the most elemental way, manifoldly transgressively playing off primal fears, gallows humor, and vengeance fantasies in order to give life to and put in tension some of the most enduring and some of the newest myths and narratives that our culture uses to cope with, understand, and control the primal forces of sexual desire.
As to form, the acting is uneven and the pacing is a little overly drawn out frequently. And the music stands out very well. Robert Miller’s score is excitingly evocative of Danny Elfman, in particular the Beetlejuice score in places. In other words, the score knows how to do dark, wry horror comedy. And fitting the primal themes, the score also heavily relies on more tribal elements to a fitting effect.
B+
Your Friends and Neighbors
Neil LaBute’s film Your Friends and Neighbors is pretty much what I expected and desired from the director of In the Company of Men, The Shape of Things, The Wicker Man, and Nurse Betty: It’s a film in which irredeemably cruel, selfish, and sexually despairing narcissists rip themselves and each other apart. Unlike Teeth, which plays on mythic horrors and familiar narratives in exploring humanity’s uneasy relationship with sex, Your Friends and Neighbors is one of a seemingly endless line of films that drags sex down from the realm of ideals and myths and through the vulgar bedrooms of your idiosyncratically twisted friends and neighbors. The more serious films I watch, the more it becomes clear that cinema from all over the world has been for decades now chronicling sexual dysfunction and shades of particularity of experience in a nearly encyclopedic fashion.
And Your Friends and Neighbors is a fascinating watch if you’re of the temperament to enjoy unvarnished exposure of human weakness, narcissism, aggressiveness, and passive aggressiveness, and if you’d like to add to your mental catalogue of nuances of idiosyncratic sexual despair. I enjoy a great deal such films that plumb unpleasant truths and dissect in detail human cruelty, despair, and power dialectics with some dark humor. So I loved this film.
The performances were also uniformly superb. Ben Stiller vanishes into his serious role astonishingly well, Jason Patric’s portrayal of possibly the most repulsively thoroughly sketched mysoginist I’ve ever seen on screen is perfectly sickening. And Catherine Keener has a scene towards the end of the film that just blew me away. I never understood all the hubbub around her performance in Capote, but she deserved an Oscar either for 1998’s Your Friends and Neighbors or 1999’s Being John Malkovich, both for vivid portrayals of icy narcissists , callously indifferent to the attention of her admirers.
I have a weakness for women who know how to sing with some personality, even if they’re singing really poppy stuff. I don’t know if there is a word for the way she sings the words “heart” and “fall” in this song but it makes my heart flutter it’s so beautiful and cool.
Something you didn’t touch on that really stood out to me in the film is Tom Petty’s shrewd sense of what it took to become the long-running established band they are today. It only makes sense that anyone in Tom’s position has to have a special ability for spotting great musicians. But then to acquire them by any means necessary was almost shocking to me. This was especially true in the story of how they got Howie in the band. The way Tom laughed it off was a little eerie.
I loved the way Bogdonvich highlighted the crazed drive Tom had from the very earliest days of his musical career. That angry, perfectionistic drive explains so many of the choices in his life. Tom is portrayed as strong, opinionated, almost manipulative. But he stops short of making him look like a despot. Just short, in my opinion.
I don’t think Bogdonovich could have made him look any more human.
I agree completely. Recently in one of my lectures I was referring to the oppressively controlling streak that great artists have and I cited some aspects of Tom’s attitudes there. Even to this day, as far as I understand, the band has no input in what goes in the setlist. Tom is an extremely controlling guy.
I think there’s a sort of justification to it in that, as long as he doesn’t stifle the rest of the band, what his method does is to establish firmly a clarity of artistic vision. The goal with Tom’s kind of approach is to get the most out of his band for making his music. These world class musicians become themselves the instruments for making [B]his[/B] music. Individually, Benmont is a talented songwriter and a virtuoso on the piano and Mike is as good a jam guitarist as any one could hope for. But none of that gets showcased on TPATH albums because these extremely talented musicians are willing to subordinate their musical goals to Tom’s and to channel them to serve his music. They go off and do other projects to stretch their wings but in Tom’s band, they are restrained.
In concerts, Tom lets the jamming take place and after 26 years in the band, Mike finally got some serious jamming tracks on the Last DJ album, and finally, after decades of loyal support, Benmont finally got to write and sing a song on the new Mudcrutch album. But for the most part, it’s Tom’s band and Mike and Benmont let themselves fall in line because they trust him as a worthy leader.
Interestingly this image of the band with a strong leader who can get the most out of talented band members who flourish through their subordination serves as a powerful illustration of how Nietzsche views the healthy soul to function. For Nietzsche we do not have unified selves but essentially are the sum of a multiplicity of competing drives. He says that the “great man” is “great owing to the free play and scope of his desires and to the yet greater power that knows how to press these magnificent monsters into service.” He writes,
In contrast with the animals, man has cultivated an abundance of contrary drives and impulses within himself, thanks to this synthesis he is master of the earth.—Moralities are the expression of locally limited orders of rank in his multifarious world of drives, so man should not perish through their contradictions. Thus a drive as master, its opposite weakened, refined, as the impulse that provides the stimulus for the activity of the chief drive. The highest man would have the greatest multiplicity of drives, in the relatively greatest strength that can be endured. Indeed, where the plant “man” shows himself strongest one finds instincts that conflict powerfully (e.g., in Shakespeare), but are controlled. (WP 966)
The ideal here is an ever stronger dominating will over the self that makes possible more desires and each more intense as the stronger the dominating will that can harness more variegated and intense passions, the more use can be made of their being present. Another element of this is that the tension between the opposites within great men, the conflict between their great virtues and their “opposites” is actually the generative tension that develops the great man as such. He is a “bow with the great tension.” (WP 967) Nietzsche characterizes moralities as essentially the hierarchy forming disciplines that create internal cohesion by which a dominant drive (transformed into a dominant virtue) controls and channels the other energies within. Moralities are localized in that they represent the particular ordering of powers a specific individual (or group, through an analogous macro-level hierarchy forming process) finds most conducive to its needs.
So, a morality is like Tom’s principles and rules for his band. The songs remain short (like Mike says in the documentary, “don’t bore us, get to the chorus”), the guitar solos make their point quickly and end, etc. Because Tom is a strong leader, his band can flourish and produce their best work without it spinning off into becoming a mess.
This is how Nietzsche sees the value of a morality. He is famously suspicious of morality for its possibility for complete stifling of desires (and at worst, even its desire to extirpate desires completely.) Nietzsche’s ideal is a strong will that through its strength can orchestrate great music out of competing strengths of talent and keeping their competition from creating mere cacophony.
To further elaborate for those for whom the above has been too densely written:
The point is that a stronger dominant will within the self makes it possible that one can have stronger and more intense desires without being ruined by them. So, a weak willed person cannot handle strong desires because they would overwhelm him or her. But if you have a strong will, you can experience intensity of desire because you can control it. You can experience contrary emotions and passions and perspectives without letting them dominate you and make you lose control of yourself.
Nietzsche is arguing that the ability to see things from multiple perspectives that even conflict with each other, to feel things with intense passions and desires that conflict with each other—-you need a strong dominating drive that doesn’t let all this conflict within you derail you or pull you apart at the seams. But if you can feel and think from with such tension and conflict within yourself, without letting it destroy you but by harnessing all that tension and conflict into a more intense and deeper way of seeing the world and feeling it—-then you can both experience life and live it more powerfully.
The idea about moralities being “localized” is that in individuals it can be different dominating drives that give cohesion to someone, based on his or her needs. Tom is a strong willed nature who is dominated by different drives that keep himself and his band together than, say, Nietzsche’s example of Shakespeare. Nietzsche doesn’t recommend an ethics that is universal for everyone. Rather he encourages those strong enough to develop their own rule by which they can master themselves in this way that embraces and maximizes the utility of conflicts within.
And on a “macro-level” moral communities represent the domination of a particular principle or two over the people in that community. This is how moralities dominate communities. All the resources of the community are marshalled in service of these overriding values. So, in an individual soul, the dominant will marshalls all the resources of competing passions, emotions, and perspectives to generate a more profound depth of personality. In a band, this becomes the strong leader allowing increased creativity of his band without that spinning off into incoherent chaos. In a culture, this becomes a dominant virtue being the one that overrides all the others and marshalls all their value in its service.
All of this represents the streak of Nietzsche that sees value in the power of moral discipline to harness conflicting energies to put them to unified purpose. Of course, the danger of these themes is that if they are not counterbalanced with Nietzschean suspicion of values stagnation and the stifling of individual expression—they risk being read as justifications of authoritarianism.
Overall, I think the important way to read these remarks about a soul or a community dominated by a strong will is Nietzsche’s highlighting the valuable role of disciplines in a way that needs always to be balanced by his suspicion of the drive to treat our disciplines as absolute, inflexible, and a justification for completely stifling others.
I see you have a blog. Sweet! If I can find the time, I will try to make vintage blog-style drive-by comments; complete with the requisite cynicism, pettiness, ad hominem smears, and (most necessary of all) appalling grammar befitting the beneficiary of a bona fide public school education. Vive la difference!
You read it here first. This blog will have everything you want from a blog soon.
Michel Gondry’s masterpiece The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, following Charlie Kaufman’s masterpiece script, is one of the most top to bottom brilliant achievements in film I have ever seen.
Taken as a science fiction film, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ranks as a model for the genre. The film takes a fascinating concept—the ability to erase one’s painful memories—and rather than using it only as a pretext for exploring its other thematic concerns, the film explores the fascinating what if incredibly thoroughly, exploring the technological ins and outs of the procedure and, much more importantly, exploring in depth the direct psychological implications for those who would undergo the procedure. We see the effects of such a procedure both through the perspectives of one character as the procedure is unfolding and another character who is dealing with the effects several days after having received the procedure. The film also roots itself in, incorporates, and brings to life a wide range of scientific insights into dream psychology, keeping a wildly surreal and fantastic dream storyline feeling simultaneously realistic.
The film also explores a huge host of insights into memory and perspective. As we learn about Joel’s life through his dreams and watch as he actively shapes his memories and watch them change and emphasize various things right before our eyes. We hear the Clementine of his dream world inauspiciously say things that echo what we know to be his own thoughts about her or those of other characters rather than exactly her own words or perspectives—-the subtlest of reminders that the Clementine we’re seeing in his dream is not actually the real Clementine. There is a fascinating interplay of memory and dream creation as the Clementine we experience in the dream world is a mixture of idealization, villainization, authentic memory and new dream actor.
Looked at in terms of narrative structure, the film is a masterpiece of coherent, non-linear chronology. Like a great Tarantino film, we see various sequences not in the order off their occurence but rather in the order best for their experiential and narrative value. The film jumps back and forth in time and then, tells a relationship in reverse, capturing the feelings and frustrations of an end of a relationship in which everything looks just terrible and there’s little conscious awareness of how things fell apart as only the end is fresh in the mind.
The journey backwards through Joel and Clem’s relationship in his mind gives a great journey through a relationship with the romantic beginnings being the climax of a long relationship instead of simply the ignorant infatuated starting point that is lost as time goes on. By the time we reach the beginning of their relationship in his dream, we see characters who have traversed a whole relationship of ups and downs and who have traversed the trip back through it in the dream world and have all this connection. And we see them reenacting in dream form their initial meeting in such a way that retains its freshness and romance and wonder of two people meeting for the first time while commenting on what’s ahead. It’s an amazing combination of perspectives loaded into one scene before yet another time jump forward in time outside of the dream world.
(Don’t watch if you’ve not seen the film)
What makes the narrative structure so staggering and amazing is that it manages to play tricks on you, not letting you know exactly what’s going on for a solid half an hour into the film—-not even making clear when you have entered the dream world until Joel himself becomes aware of it despite confusing and bizarre scene transitions that precede the awareness—-but then sorts itself out and becomes completely intelligible. The film, without resorting to talky explanations, manages to utterly confuse and disorient for experiential effect and then to explain itself in such a way that having had the disorienting experience you can follow things out the rest of the way and not stay lost for the sake of the writer’s ego. The structure is disorienting when that’s best for the experience and then clear and masterfully ordered and balanced so that the surreality does not lose the audience or dwarf the emotional narrative that is of the primary importance.
And let’s not forget the narrative structure of the story running outside of Joel’s head that keeps returning the film to reality and giving a parallel commentary on the same themes running in the dream world. It also gives information insightful for interpreting the meanings and inspirations of Joel’s dreams. Even the subplot, involving the wonderfully underrated performances of Kirsten Dunst, Tom Wilkinson, and Mark Ruffalo, wonderfully leads to a narratively perfect and poignant heartbreaking twist. Dunst is perfect as the young woman with a crush on her boss, while screwing around with Ruffalo. Wilkinson perfectly plays an ostensibly caring and level headed doctor with questionable ethics and disappointingly passive justification for them. Elijah Wood also gives one of his best performances as a clueless, unscrupulous loser exploiting illicitly gained information to get a woman way out of his league. It’s hysterical to listen to his pathetic cliches as he refers to his brand new “girlfriend” as “the old lady” and tells her on her answering machine that he “loves her so much.” He’s written as a scathingly comic and pathetic satirical character.
He’s one of many great comedic elements not to be lost in the film, including a great comic variation on the classic existentialist anxiety of seeing God as an “absentee landlord” as Joel cries out to the heavens in his dream, “Is there anybody out there? Can anybody hear me?!” and we cut to those responsible for him dancing stoned in their underwear on his bed to goofy music. It’s God as absentee partiers. While not an overall comedy, the script is sprinkled with great one liners, great irony, black comedy, sight gags, romantic silliness, and scenes that are simultaneously eerie and funny.
Of course, though, as good as these performances and characters are, it’s not their movie—-Kate Winslet was nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of Clementine Kruczynski with her mixture of impetuous free-spiritedness, anxious vulnerability, hot temper, alcoholism, and earnest openness. She is written and performed to be so authentically, realistically charming and so authentically, realistically flawed that the romance around which this high concept science fiction film actually revolves works. Winslet is amazing, exuding magnetism, energy, geeky hipsterness, and yearning insecurity.
Jim Carrey as Joel Barish completely loses himself in the role. I’m a huge Jim Carrey fan and I don’t even think of him when I think of this, my favorite movie. I just think of Joel Barish, a man subdued, introspectively thoughtful, and pessimistic, desperately fighting his dreams to keep his memories. His dramatic prowess betters even that which he showed in his superb performances in The Truman Show and Man on the Moon.
As a romance the film is one of my favorites. Carrey and Winslet have a special chemistry as a genuine pair of opposites attracting. Normally films with opposites attracting play off of less particularly and skillfully drawn characters. This film is like a romance within a character study within a sci fi movie. The romance is incredibly real. The dialogue doesn’t sound written by some geniusly witty playwright—-the flirting is not witty and snappy but awkward and earnest, the acrimonious arguments are raw, the lovers’ affirmations of each other are sweet in their banal sincerity. They capture perfectly the powerful chemistry that leads to explosions rather than peace. They’re people who can’t let go of each other even as much as they drive each other crazy to be together. Not since Sam and Diane have I seen authentic portrayal of lovers who are together out of a visceral need for each other, completely in defiance of their thorough personality clash.
The romance is explored then from an innovative number of angles—-we see a sequence of their meeting and flirting awkwardly SPOILERSPOILERSPOILER
though, we do not know at the time that this is not really their first meeting END OF SPOILEREND OF SPOILEREND OF SPOILER
, we see the major events of their relationship in reverse, and we see them take the journey together of fighting the erasure process, following them as a team that we root for, establishing them as people who get along, work together, care about the relationship, and, so, a couple we want to see “make it.”
HEAVY SPOILER SECTION
HEAVY SPOILER SECTION
In the end, the film gives a completely unique paradox, [spoiler]people who, in their immediate experience feel like they have just met and yet, subconsciously feel completely bound to one another, and they are given tapes in which, in their own words they hear exactly how they miserably they will feel towards each other. Two characters, in the throes of both infatuation and the bonds that take years to create, are given information about how much they would hate each other and need to choose whether or not to go forward or to get out and not risk ruining everything again. This creates a fascinating and unique variation on the whole romance genre. It infuses knowledge from the end of a relationship into the euphoria of the beginning and asks whether the characters will respond prudently or romantically. It also serves as a beautiful metaphor of the romantic challenge of monogamy with the need to make decisions ever anew to start it all over with ever increased knowledge of what’s ahead.
In the end, the question is whether or not Joel and Clementine will make it, whether they can learn from mistakes having erased them. They embody a paradox of human nature in which moving on from mistakes means being able to forget them and not be trapped in the past (Nietzsche’s real meaning in the quote misused in the movie) while at the same time, we need our memories as warnings to keep us from rehearsing the same mistakes all over again. Can Clementine and Joel benefit from the immediate forgetfulness of their mistakes that repairs their feelings towards one another? Or will forgetting their mistakes only doom them to repeat them again? The metaphor for, and commentary on, our own struggles to both put the past behind us with optimism and to learn how not to repeat it, is simply perfect. And all is left ambiguous, with no easy answers on silver platters, just a great conversation starter.
END OF HEAVY SPOILER SECTION
END OF HEAVY SPOILER SECTION
The romance is also beautifully evolved in numerous nonverbal ways as these characters connect not through words but through play and through sharing intimate memories. In the dream, their journey to Joel’s childhood is one of the most romantic sequences I’ve ever seen. One sequence oscillates between ugliness and comedy, and romantic poignancy as we see Clementine and Joel as little kids together sharing an ugly, traumatizing moment from his childhood. The vision of a romantic couple who met as adults sharing the intimacy of being able to be kids together, to be able to know each other in ages that they didn’t get to have together in actuality, is as romantic a picture as I’ve ever seen. The way she supports him in that scene, the way the music tracks the scene, the way she cheers him up through playfulness and the scene transitions back to their adult playfulness—-one of the ways they actually played out their child selves with each other as adults—-it’s all so brilliant and heartbreakingly beautiful. And the fun, playful moments of their playing as adults that end with Clementine vanishing—-sucking you into the romance of their enjoyment and then pulling it away hauntingly and suddenly, a reminder of the ominous threat to their relationship.
And on the subject of the scene transitions—-this film is the best edited film I’ve ever seen. The transitions through the dream world are so fluid. Constantly scenes transition with several props or people staying the same and the settings transforming around them, objects vanish from rooms, a car falls out of the sky, hallways connect radically different rooms, the background objects of the world blur and vanish as memory loses them. Changes in lighting, changes in foci, changes in the way the sound connects to the image, film reels played backwards, film reels sped up—-the number of inventive “in-camera” tricks used to create a dream world out of real world elements instead of animation are amazing and endlessly exciting. It is believable but surreal as a result. The lo-fi special effects are simply as good as they get. The dream world is made to feel like the real world, as it feels when you’re dreaming, while exploring all the incoherency and surreality of what dreams are like. Unlike Gondry’s Science of Sleep that for portions makes the dream world patently false with claymation, here he makes it both as real and surreal as it really is.
Like a dream, the film follows an emotional thread around Joel’s mind, switching between times and places and events with a perfect emulation of the dream world’s logic. The visual flourishes are too many to enumerate or list with any justice but they are spectacular. This is the only film outside of a Star Wars or Spider-Man film that I went to the theater six times to see and each time I got more out of it and found new things to marvel at visually. It was simply that mesmerizing. It captures the feel of so many things—-that feeling as a kid of riding in the back seat of a car at night, tired from a long day at a family gathering and watching the street lights and store lights fly by with the memories of the day and the week, etc. zooming by—even that life experience is captured.
And the climax of his dream, a house crumbling around him, the seashore running up under his feet, the wind howling—-the fantastic of a dream, the thematic and emotional resonance of depicting what he’s feeling (the collapse of a relationship, the overwhelming of the tide of circumstance) in symbolic form, the dialogue expressing regret and longing, despair and nostalgia. It’s the end of the relationship through a revisit of the first meeting.
And the musical scoring by Jon Brion is brilliantly resonant. The emotions are underscored perfectly, the zaniness is matched with zany music that’s not obnoxious but perfectly pitched to the scenes. The main themes are haunting and beautiful. Even the erasures of memories are signaled through great musical cues. The movie is unimaginable without its thoroughly unique and perfectly attuned musical signatures. And it’s all not much more than maybe 30 minutes of musical writing, a lot of which repeats but it feels just right rather than like a cop out. The repetition of musical cues signals parallel times, emotions, themes being explored. It serves as a thematic aid more than just an underscore for scenes.
And finally the cinematography is wonderful. Grainy and dark (at Gondry’s insistence over that of the cinematographer herself) when it needs to be, the bright room with Clementine going crazy at the end, there’s just so much thought into the look of so many scenes.
And the credits don’t happen until 17 minutes into the film and Beck’s melancholy cover for the closing credits ends the film with a perfect musical finish, seamlessly fitting with the musical and narrative themes of the entire film. On a personal note, as a native Long Islander, I love the comfortable familiarity of the unmistakable interiors of the Long Island Railroad train cars and seeing them immortalized in an all-time masterpiece like this.
Bah, I can write all these paragraphs and still leave so much out. Oh well, that should suffice to at least give an idea as to why this is my favorite movie of all time. Just watch the this video of the film to a Bob Dylan song I love:
