Two movies of angst and discovery

Two movies from the early 1990s tell contrasting stories of men who have reached the end of their respective ropes. One of them, “Falling Down,” stars Michael Douglas as William Foster; the other, “Joe Vs. the Volcano,” stars Tom Hanks as Joe Banks.

“Falling Down,” made in 1993, stars with the main character sitting in his car, trapped in traffic somewhere in Los Angeles County. After trying to swat an annoying fly with a rolled-up magazine, Foster abandons his car and sets out on foot, announcing that he is “going home.” As the movie progresses, we learn that Foster is a veteran of the Vietnam War, that he has worked until recently in the defense industry but has lost his job, that he is divorced and his ex-wife is afraid of him and has a restraining order against him, and that this day is his daughter’s birthday and he wants to give her a gift. Along the way, Foster confronts various annoyances of modern life: overpriced merchandise in a convenience store, threatening young men in a gang-run barrio, a fast-food place which refuses to serve breakfast food even one minute past 11:30 a.m., deceitful panhandlers in a city park, and the like. Foster begins the day armed only with an attitude, but in each confrontation he gains additional weapons: first a club made from a baseball bat, then a pocket-knife, then a canvas bag filled with guns including automatic rifles. Meanwhile, his adventures come to the attention of a police officer on the verge of retirement, working his last day at the precinct office. This officer begins tracking Foster, learning who he is, and sensing the danger he represents. Both men are frustrated with their lives. Both men can imagine something better, although neither has a clue about how to achieve that improvement. The movie is clearly aims for their confrontation—symbolically, on a pier where land ends and ocean begins.

“Joe Vs. the Volcano” starts with a man working in a dismal job for a medical supplies company. His discomfort with life provokes physical symptoms which have sent him to a series of doctors. One doctor diagnoses a brain cloud, an ailment which will claim the life of Joe Banks in a few months without any overt symptoms during the intervening time. After Joe quits his job, he is visited by a wealthy entrepreneur who needs a hero. He needs a chemical that is found only on one island in the Pacific Ocean, but the primitive islanders will only permit mining for that mineral if the rich man’s company can procure a man willing to jump into an active volcano to appease the angry god dwelling in said volcano. Having nothing to lose, Joe accepts the mission. He is given a credit card with no spending limit and goes out on the town to remake himself in one day. Then he flies across the country, is welcomed onto the rich man’s yacht, and with the crew of the yacht (including the rich man’s daughter), travels toward the volcano.

Both movies feature a man living in the modern world with despair. Their lives are empty; they have no hope. Both movies use travel as a metaphor for life. The men move from setting to setting, encountering various people along the way, picking up pieces of equipment that will serve them on their journey. Both men inhabit a world that makes little sense, a world in which random things happen for no purpose, a world in which their own role and purpose seems ambiguous and undefined. Foster’s ex-wife is played by the lovely Barbara Hershey; Joe’s female counterpart is portrayed by a young Meg Ryan, who appears as three characters—a darkhaired coworker in the beginning scenes, a red-headed artist (also a daughter of the rich man) in California, and finally the blonde daughter of the rich man on the yacht. In both movies, the main characters survive a near-death experience during their journeys: Bill Foster is threatened by the neo-Nazi owner of a pawn shop he visits, and Joe Banks survives the sinking of the yacht. Both men must finally deal with their mortality at the end of their respective journeys—Bill Foster on the pier, and Joe Banks at the brink of the volcano.

“Joe Vs. the Volcano” is a comedy; “Falling Down” is a tension-filled drama. Yet both movies portray the existential angst of life in the modern world. Both movies confront the viewer with a man like most of us, a man doing his best in the world, a man who seems to have the deck of life’s game stacked against him. Both portray uncommon reactions to the pressure of life, in each case a journey, but one with comic overtones and the other with grim reality. Both movies use the journey as a symbol of life, how people move from experience to experience, traveling a road that can only end with the finality of death.

King Solomon wrote that all of life is “vanity.” Even acquiring worldly wealth, political power, knowledge and understanding of the world, and access to every pleasure is not enough. Solomon suggests that to eat, drink, and find pleasure in one’s job is the best anyone can expect in this world. But even the effort to “eat, drink, and be merry” is not enough. Heavenly treasures remain the only satisfying remedy for the emptiness and vanity of all earthly accomplishments and rewards. J.

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A little more about time

Picturing our lives as a timeline, a threat or string running through time from beginning to end, makes a lifetime seem something like old-fashioned film, the way movies were created and shown before the digital age. One could hold a reel of film in one’s hands and have the entire experience in one place, but the film on the reel said nothing. The film had to be threaded into a projector and shown on a screen to have meaning. As a motor moved the film through the projector, a flashing light shone through each frame—twenty-four frames per second. Trial and error showed that aspect to be ideal for viewing. Seeing twenty-four images each second, a viewer saw action and motion that seemed normal—they could be filmed by a camera that took twenty-four photographs per second, or they could be a series of drawings or still photographs that were carefully arranged to imitate normal action and motion.

An average human life—we will say seventy-six years—would require many reels of film. One would need enough reels to contain over one million feet of film. Nearly 57 billion frames would need to be shown at twenty-four frames per second to cover those seventy-six years. We can take this metaphor to think about time and about living our lives in time. However, this metaphor has a simple yet important shortcoming. In spite of the successful illusion captured by film shown twenty-four frames per second, time does not move in tiny bursts the way film operates.

If time clicked along at twenty-four units per second, a photon or neutrino (or anything else moving at the speed of light) would jump 7,750 miles between each frame. Science shows no evidence of particles jumping from point to point in space. Particles appear to move at a consistent rate, existing in every inch or centimeter between any two locations. Time, then, must also operate consistently, not jumping from instant to instant with a tiny gap between instants, but flowing effortlessly through every conceivable instant.

Early philosophers questioned the geometry of points and lines and planes and three-dimensional space. If a moving object must pass through an infinite number of points to reach its goal, how can it ever arrive? It must first reach the half-way point, but before getting there it must reach a point half-way there, and on and on cutting the distance in half again and again but still having more intervening points to achieve. Now, it seems, time must do the same. We approach an instant… we reach that instant… we pass that instant… and somehow, that instant has traveled from the future into the past although it was scarcely present at all.

Experience tells us that objects indeed travel through space and through time. The problem of traveling through an infinite number of points in space and an infinite number of instants in time does not bother moving objects in the least. Change, it seems, is a constant reality in our world. But, in a world where everything continually changes, how can we hold to the belief that anything stays the same? If each of us is constantly changing, how can any of us remain the same person throughout a lifetime, or even in the course of one year? J.

SCIENCE AND LIFE

The good thing about science is that it is always changing. The more experts observe the world around us and try to understand it, the more they discover and share with the rest of us. From the tiniest elements of creation—the particles from which atoms are made—to the vastness that contains galaxies beyond number, the universe is filled with marvels. New living beings are frequently found in the depths of the oceans, the hearts of the rain forests, and even in our own backyards. Health and disease, gladness and depression, the quality of our environment—they all matter to us, and they all are subject to study, observation, experiment, and the other tools of science. These tools help improve our lives and our care of the world around us.

The bad thing about science is that it is always changing. Coffee and dark chocolate and red wine are bad for us, except when they are good for us. The innards of the atom and the inhabitants of this planet require further study. What seemed true yesterday might be disproved today; what seems true today might be shown to have been mistaken by tomorrow. Science itself is a useful tool for our lives, but it is only a tool. Science lacks the authority and stability to be a foundation for our lives.

When I was young, my parents invested in several series of books. They bought Funk &Wagnall’s encyclopedia set, one volume at a time. They also bought reference books on their hobbies, photography and sewing, that came out once a month for a year or two. To top it all, my parents bought the LIFE set of books about science—those colorful volumes that could be found in many living rooms and studies a number of years ago. I did a fair amount of research in those LIFE books, both for school assignments and for casual learning. As an adult, I was able to obtain a set of the same books for my family library. They look nice on the shelf, but they are heavy to move, and the science in them is old. They are useful to learn the history of science, but they cannot compete with the Internet for up-to-date descriptions of scientific theory and investigation. This reality was reinforced this month when I picked up one of those LIFE books and started reading it from page one.

This book from the LIFE Nature Library, is called “The Poles.” At describes the Arctic and Antarctic regions of the Earth, detailing climate, flora and fauna, human exploration and inhabitation, and research endeavors in the far north and the far south. I was fascinated to learn that the South Pole is colder than the North Pole because of the continent Antarctica; the ocean under the polar ice in the north moderates the temperature of the northern region. Also, because the polar ice sheet moves and shatters and reforms, it is difficult to establish the location of the North Pole at any given time—a flag planted there this summer might be several miles away from the Pole in the future. This book, which was published in 1962, has much interesting information about the polar regions, but science has learned far more information in the past sixty years. For that matter, accounts of human exploration of the north have been reviewed and found inaccurate; Robert Peary did not reach the North Pole in 1908, even though the LIFE editors were still willing to hand him the prize as recently as 1962.

Even sixty years ago, scientists studying Greenland and Antarctica had uncovered evidence that these bodies of land once supported “warm forests and plains.” This led the editors of “The Poles” to write these words in the third paragraph of their introduction to their book: “Today we are entering an era of unlimited power, when science may be able to alter the temperature balance and convert the cold regions to hospitable, productive ones. To do this would require the greatest political courage, for the rewards certainly would not be equally divided over all political borders. But if it were done, the problem of containing and feeding future generations could be solved. Unfortunately we as a nation are not yet confronted with the problem and we give it only token attention; but the world storms generated by hunger are brewing.”

Need I say more? J.

Protecting lives

God says, “You shall not murder” (Exodus 20:13).

Luther explains, “What does this mean? We should fear and love God so that we do not hurt or harm our neighbor in his body, but help and support him in every physical need.”

Salvageable adds: This commandment prompts discussions in many controversial areas: abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty, and just and unjust wars, to name a few. Christians should seek God’s will in these extreme cases, but too often Christians become absorbed with these cases and overlook the everyday ways in which we are tempted to sin against this commandment.

This is the first of four brief commandments which protect, in order, lives, marriages, property, and reputations. (They are so brief that three of them are tied for shortest verse in the Bible, if we count letters in the original languages rather than in English translations.) Luther indicates that we not only are forbidden to kill our neighbors, but we are not to hurt or harm them in any way. Jesus goes even further, indicating that rage and insults against a neighbor also trespass this commandment.

Obedience to this commandment involves attitudes as well as actions. All human life is to be respected and even treasured. We should not even want to harm a neighbor. This includes deliberate acts of violence, and also carelessness. When we carelessly risk harming a person’s life or health, we break this commandment. That applies to our own lives as well. We are to be good stewards of our bodies—neither obsessing over our health and fitness to the point of idolatry, nor engaging in unhealthy habits that can shorten our lives or reduce our ability to serve God by helping our neighbors.

Even neglect is sinful. Not only are we to avoid hurting and harming others, but we are to help and support others. Both Old and New Testaments call God’s people to care for widows and orphans and all that are poor and vulnerable. Deuteronomy 15:4-5 says, “But there will be no poor among you; for the Lord will bless you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance to possess—if only you will strictly obey the voice of the Lord your God, being careful to do all this commandment that I command you today.” But Deuteronomy 15:11 says, “There will never cease to be poor in the land.” God knew that his people would sin, failing to honor and protect the lives of their neighbors, allowing selfishness and greed and cold-heartedness to keep them from caring about the lives of their neighbors. Those sins continue today. Enough food is produced in the world each year to feed every person alive, preventing starvation and diseases caused by malnutrition. The food is not distributed evenly, though, so that those who have more than enough can share with those in need. Politics, waste, and greed all play a part in the inequities of the world. We could be doing better.

Special circumstances call for a lifting of this commandment. Soldiers on a battlefield behave in ways that would be inappropriate anywhere else. Medical and religious professionals help families make difficult decisions about care given to the terminally ill. Many Christians believe that it shows respect for human life to deprive a murderer of his or her life. Even Jesus laid down his life as a sacrifice, dying so his people can live, purchasing forgiveness for all of our sins, including sins against the lives of our neighbors. J.