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Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Daniel Ross Goodman
Читать онлайн.Название Somewhere Over the Rainbow
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isbn 9780761872245
Автор произведения Daniel Ross Goodman
Жанр Религия: прочее
Издательство Ingram
Wallace’s belief in the futility of human beings’ attempts to escape themselves and transcend their natures, and his view that personality is determinative of destiny, suffuses Infinite Jest with a tragic sensibility that is closer to the Greek view of human nature than the Judeo-Christian perspective that “every human being has the capacity to be as righteous as Moses or as wicked as Jereboam,” as Maimonides wrote in the Mishneh Torah. In a key passage of his magisterial Infinite Jest, Wallace writes:
The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. . . . You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win. . . . You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.[1]
Perhaps the true tragedy of Wallace’s life was that he was never given the tools to access a religious tradition that would have given him the means to treat the spiritual crisis from which he so acutely suffered. He was never given the spiritual keys that would have unlocked for him the treasure house of a wisdom tradition. Thus, he was always trapped inside his own animating limits, killed by his own hand and mourned by us all.
Note
1.
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York, Little, Brown and Company, 1996), 84. (emphasis added)
Chapter 4
Driving to Nebraska
Cinema, Human Dignity, and the Elderly
At times, cinema succeeds where philosophy fails. Films like Nebraska show us the importance of honoring our elderly parents and remind us of the unique dignity of every human person.
Is it possible for a film that was nominated for six Oscars, was directed by one of Hollywood’s most highly regarded filmmakers, and features a career-best performance by one of the best actors of his generation to be overlooked? In the case of Nebraska (2013), the answer is yes.
Directed by Alexander Payne and featuring stalwart character actor Bruce Dern in a performance that garnered him his first-ever Academy Award nomination for Best Performance by a Leading Actor, Nebraska was one of the surprise standouts of last year’s crop of Oscar-season films. The movie is shot in crisp black-and-white, simultaneously conveying the grimness of the forlorn Midwest landscape and also lending the film, in the words of its director, an “iconic, archetypal look.” A quiet and subdued film, Nebraska imparts an important reminder of every person’s intrinsic human dignity, honestly portraying one man’s struggle to care for his aging parents in a way that reflects that dignity.
An American Road Trip
In Nebraska, Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) is a retired Montana mechanic and a cantankerous Korean War veteran. As if his congenital crabbiness were not enough, Woody is also an alcoholic, and he’s evidently verging on dementia. When he receives a promotional sweepstakes letter in the mail stating that he has won a million-dollar prize, he believes it. Everyone understands that this sweepstakes letter is clearly a hoax—everyone, that is, but Woody. He prevails upon his son David, played by a surprisingly effective and restrained Will Forte (formerly of Saturday Night Live), to drive him to Lincoln, Nebraska—where the sweepstake’s headquarters are located—in order to collect the chimerical prize. They are accompanied by Woody’s wife, Kate, played by a wonderful, laceratingly witty, acidly funny, scene-stealing June Squibb who, at the age of eighty-four, received an eminently deserved first-ever Oscar nomination for her supporting actress performance.
As the story unfolds, Nebraska seems to follow the structure of the venerable American “road-trip movie.” Characters embark on a physical journey across the broad, expansive landscape of our beautiful country, experience interesting adventures, encounter strange and exciting people, and narrowly escape from a few hairy situations, only to experience a more profound inner journey of the soul. Of course, such narrative structures have an impressive pedigree that precedes American culture: think of Homer’s Odyssey, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, or even Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Yet Nebraska is much more substantial than the average American road-trip movie. While our expectations of witnessing the typical tropes of the road-trip genre are fulfilled, the Grants’ journey through the lonely land at the center of our country serves as an unconventional exploration of the challenges of honoring our parents. Throughout the film, the message is clear: the elderly—even when they reach the stage of senility—must be cared for with sensitivity and respect.
In choosing to drive him from Billings to Lincoln, David succeeds in pulling off the tricky task of managing a mentally ailing parent. David addresses the dilemma of how he should honor his father by deciding to play along with his father’s delusions, in order to avoid causing him needless emotional anguish. David intuitively realizes that more harm would be done by refusing to take his father to Nebraska than by actually making the trip from Montana. Often, when a loved one suffers from early onset dementia, all that their caregivers can do for them is play along. Refusing to do so only makes things worse. Although David’s choice compromises on truth, it brings his father emotional peace and preserves his dignity.
Woody, a retired mechanic, intimates that he’s merely a beat-up car. But David doesn’t buy into his father’s mechanic-mentality—he doesn’t treat his father as an old machine that is breaking down. Rather, he treats his father as a human being: a unique creature that, regardless of his physical or mental condition, always possesses infinite value and therefore always deserves to be treated with utmost dignity.
Man Is Not a Machine
The insidious “man as machine” metaphor—as Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote in Who Is Man?—may have its source in La Mettrie’s L’Homme machine, and goes back at least as far as Descartes’s Treatise of Man. It continues to be promulgated by behavioral scientists and evolutionary biologists as well as ethical humanists and philosophers. Yale Professor of Philosophy Shelley Kagan, for instance, argues that we are machines—incredible, beautiful, thinking machines, but nevertheless machines.
We should be very wary of this definition. As Heschel warned,
We must not take lightly man’s pronouncements about himself. They surely reveal as well as affect his basic attitudes. Is it not right to say that we often treat man as if he were made in the likeness of a machine rather than in the likeness of God?[1]
In an industrialized, utilitarian, youth-obsessed, mechanistic, capitalistic society in which human beings are often viewed as important only insofar as they are capable contributors and producers in the market economy, we run a great risk of unconsciously (and at times consciously) devaluing others once they reach old age and infirmity. If a person can no longer contribute to society in a manner that can be quantitatively recognized—in other words, can no longer buy or sell things—what value does this person possess?
It is precisely in its unequivocal answer to this question—its statement that human beings continue to possess infinite value even when they become elderly and infirm—that Nebraska’s power lies. The movie gives a subtle yet clear-eyed depiction of what it means to honor the elderly (Leviticus 19:32) and to honor one’s parents (Exodus 20:12, Deuteronomy 5:16). It unapologetically