Reconciling religion and evolution: The Tree of life

From an unpretentious and persuasive visual essay on the most debated movie of the year, The Tree of Life, by Matt Zoller Seitz: 

There is this central notion in all of Malick’s films that every individual person is just one tiny part of nature. Not too much more important in the larger scheme of things than an insect, or a blade of grass. It’s really not all that radical to state, but it’s one American audiences seem to have trouble accepting, because it’s anathema to the way we are told we should live our lives. And in this [evolution] sequence Terence Malick has done something quite remarkable, which is that he has reconciled religion and evolution. He has reconciled religion and science. 

That’s from the first part of the essay, which Seitz put together with a film editor collaborator. In the second part, which is much more beautiful, because it features the mother in the film, the most beautiful of its characters by about a country mile, he gets specific:

When we hear the mother speaking in voice-over, I think we’re hearing Jack’s projection of her internal voice, her overwhellming goodness, her unselfishness, her sunbeam warmth. Look at how she dotes on her infant child in this moment near the opening of the movie. She’s Mother Earth, much as “The Tree of Life” itself is Mother Earth. 

 

http://www.movingimagesource.us/flash/mediaplayer.swf?id=170/985

“The Tree of Life” is the most debated movie of the year, because critics love it, by a 40-2 margin, and ordinary people often detest it.

What makes Americans unhappy?

It's not just the recession, as this fascinating graphic — based on a Gallup poll of "subjective well-being" taken daily — shows, based on a statistical resampling of results by Princeton economist Angus Deaton. 

Happiness1
Here's the logic, from Ezra Klein's great WonkBlog: 

There are some big changes that seem to make sense: a big drop following the collapse of Lehman and the financial crisis. But the bigger trend seems to be perplexing. Overall happiness seems to have risen substantially since the beginning of 2009 — at levels even higher than before the current crisis — even though the recession and economic slump would have presumably taken a big toll on the American psyche.

Deaton puzzled over this shift himself and concluded the rise in happiness actually had to do with the very questions that Gallup was asking. In the lead-up to the 2008 election, Gallup posed the questions about political preferences first, asking whether the poll participants planned to vote, whether they approved of the sitting president, whether the country was headed in the right direction, and so forth. When those questions were dropped in early 2009, reported happiness immediately spiked. According to Deaton’s analysis, the very act of thinking about politics makes Americans feel less happy and satisfied with their lives — an effect that’s almost as big as being unemployed. 

Deaton concludes: 

“People appear to dislike politics and politicians so much that prompting them to think about them has a very large downward effect on their assessment of their own lives,” he writes. “The effect of asking the political questions on well-being is only a little less than the effect of someone becoming unemployed, so that to get the same effect on average well-being, three-quarters of the population would have to lose their jobs.”

I feel I've never understood the fabled "independent voter" so well. They keep their distance from politics not because they don't care, arguably, but because they don't want to be depressed. 

But what I don't understand: If this is true, why the popularity of political commentators such as Jon Steward, Stephen Colbert, and Rush Limbaugh? With those guys, it's pretty much all politics all the time. 

The not-in-denial drinker: Dwight Macdonald

Asked once why he drank so much, critic and editor Dwight Macdonald replied:

"I'm an alcoholic, Goddammit it!" 

From a really terrific NYTimes Book Review piece on a new collection of Macdonald's acerbic criticism, Dwight Macdonald's War on Mediocrity, last Sunday. Few reviews are so entertaining, but then, few critics (or writers, for that matter) threw off as many mental sparks as Macdonald. 

Dwight Macdonald

From Jack Shafer, formerly of Slate. 

How to talk to a man planning suicide: Tennessee Williams

In l940, while living on $50 a month, Tennessee Williams had a long talk with his suicidal friend Clark Mills. I think in the self-reporting of this conversation you can see why 20 years of lack of success at writing could not kill Tennessee Williams' belief in his work, nor his desire to live…

[Clark Mills] came over last night and told me quite seriously that he had decided to kill himself within the next year. He is tied to academic job at Cornell which smothers his creative life and he sees no possible escape as his poetry, very fine but completely non-commercial, could never support him. I reasoned with him for a long time about the infinite value of life, of the miracle of simply being alive, and through this I think I convinced myself of it…

I wrote this line yesterday at the beginning of a long poem – 

I want to infect you with the tremendous excitement of living, because I believe that you have the strength to bear it! 

Mills went on to become a professor at the Sorbonne, a highly respected translator of French poetry, and, according to the definitive edition of Williams' Notebooks, an intelligence agent. 

[from Selected Letters, 8/23/40]

The problem with America: Too much cake

Vanity Fair puts the entire California chapter of Michael Lewis's new book, Boomerang, on the Web, and boy is it good. Lewis really is all that. Long but highly recommended. Here's the thinky part:

The road out of Vallejo passes directly through the office of Dr. Peter Whybrow, a British neuroscientist at U.C.L.A. with a theory about American life. He thinks the dysfunction in America’s society is a by-product of America’s success. In academic papers and a popular book, American Mania, Whybrow argues, in effect, that human beings are neurologically ill-designed to be modern Americans. The human brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in an environment defined by scarcity. It was not designed, at least originally, for an environment of extreme abundance. “Human beings are wandering around with brains that are fabulously limited,” he says cheerfully. “We’ve got the core of the average lizard.” Wrapped around this reptilian core, he explains, is a mammalian layer (associated with maternal concern and social interaction), and around that is wrapped a third layer, which enables feats of memory and the capacity for abstract thought. “The only problem,” he says, “is our passions are still driven by the lizard core. We are set up to acquire as much as we can of things we perceive as scarce, particularly sex, safety, and food.”

Even a person on a diet who sensibly avoids coming face-to-face with a piece of chocolate cake will find it hard to control himself if the chocolate cake somehow finds him. Every pastry chef in America understands this, and now neuroscience does, too. “When faced with abundance, the brain’s ancient reward pathways are difficult to suppress,” says Whybrow. “In that moment the value of eating the chocolate cake exceeds the value of the diet. We cannot think down the road when we are faced with the chocolate cake.”

The richest society the world has ever seen has grown rich by devising better and better ways to give people what they want. The effect on the brain of lots of instant gratification is something like the effect on the right hand of cutting off the left: the more the lizard core is used the more dominant it becomes. “What we’re doing is minimizing the use of the part of the brain that lizards don’t have,” says Whybrow. “We’ve created physiological dysfunction. We have lost the ability to self-regulate, at all levels of the society. The $5 million you get paid at Goldman Sachs if you do whatever they ask you to do—that is the chocolate cake upgraded.”

Years ago Sam Shepherd wrote a play — Angel City — about living and working in Hollywood, in which a producer turns green, slimy, and eventually into a lizard. The writer saw further than he knew, perhaps.

Lewis' story also includes an enthralling encounter with the fearless-unto-the-point-of-recklessness Arnold Schwarzenegger…really worth a look. 

Ahnold

The usefulness of forgetting: Tennessee Williams

 

"A bad memory is a great convenience." 

 

Tennessee Williams, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, 1950

 

The quote is from the nouvella. Here's the poster from the first movie made of this story. 

 

Roman_spring

[My god, what a cast! Lotte Lenya?!? Who was nominated for Best Supporting for the role? I have to see this picture.] 

Another bad day for climate change denial

Richard Muller, a MacArthur fellow at UC Berkeley, and a contrarian who led a group of scientists — mostly physicists — into the foul waters of climate change denial, funded in large part by the justly-infamous Koch brothers, has been forced to admit by the extensive resampling of data from 40,000 field stations that yes, the Earth's atmosphere is warming, as thousands upon thousands of studies by reputable scientists around the world have reported in thousands of different ways.

_climate_change_624gr

"Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK," said Prof Muller.

"This confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change sceptics did not seriously affect their conclusions."

Well, at least Muller apologized, more or less. Don't expect the same from the closed mind of denier Anthony Watts, who is continuing to refuse comment, claiming he couldn't possibly say anything about a paper that hasn't been peer-reviewed. Right. Even though he's published thousands of misleading posts about global warming based on, um, less substantial data, such as his recent sneer at Al Gore, for having the temerity to support the Occupy Wall Street protesters.   

Watts says Gore has "lost it." Actually Watts just lost the argument he's been flogging for years.  

The Holy Family: Tennessee Williams on Van Gogh

As mentioned in an earlier post, while at the University of Iowa's dramatic writing program, Tennessee Williams, then a complete unknown, set out to write a play about Vincent Van Gogh.

He didn't get past a few scenes, but the idea still fascinates. 

In a letter to a friend William Holland, dated 11/18/1937, he wrote:

The Van Gogh trouble is that there is too much dramatic material. it is hard to make a selection. Van Gogh was a great social thinker and artist — he had tremendous love for humanity and believed in the community of artists — he painted common people at work and tried to establish an art colony in southern France — but he was constantly misunderstood and persecuted — crowds gathered outside his window, shouting "Fou-roux" — "the red-headed madman" — that suggests a main theme — a man with a great love for humanity whom humanity rejected — he formed many disappointing relationships — his brother Theo was his only supporter — his story would be the story of an artist's relations to society — not one artist but all. 

From Selected Letters, pp116

Williams1937Pictures of Williams at this time in his life are rare: here's a yearbook picture from 1936.  

 

 

 

Alfred Hitchock on global warming

Well, not exactly. But in his "Picture of the Week" feature on his chatty blog, Peter Bogdanovich — who directed one of the great pictures of my youth, The Last Picture Show — has some interesting thoughts from Hitch on nature and revenge re: The Birds: 

When I asked Hitch what he felt the movie was really about, he answered, “Generally speaking, that people are too complacent…” With the essentially inconsequential nature of the characters and the somewhat comedic quality of the beginning, Hitchcock said, he meant “To epitomize the fripperies of people, the lightness with which they live, their lack of concern about the fact that nature can turn on them.”  To me, it has always seemed like the director’s way of saying that no matter what we may do, Mother Earth somehow would eventually have her revenge.

The recent hurricanes and earthquakes and tsunamis the world over, the generally terrible air, all the other obvious results of global warming, only prove how prescient, metaphorically speaking, Hitchcock really was nearly half a century ago. 

And here's Hitch himself in the trailer, dryly enjoying our ruthlessness, and our just deserts — "The awk, the famous passenger pigeon, and the dodo bird have all disappeared. Actually, they didn't disappear, but were simply killed off. But of course, this is nature's way. Man merely hurries the process along whenever he can be of help."