Desperate Search: (dis)Concertingly Staid

Desperate Search: 

Disconcertingly Staid

Part Two

i  want to be well. 

I want to tell you about my thoughts.

i want my thoughts to have resonance.

i want to see the world around me. 

i want to remember the world I've seen.

i want to analyze exactly what I  remember.

i want to add my individuality to the analysis.

i want to be both a part and wholly other.

i want to engage and be engaged.

i want to tell you more about The Revengers.

i want to prove to you its merit.

i want to show how the machinations of story require grace.

i want to inform you on how the grace card is like the force of gravity.

i want to explain how this relates to the ragtag band of Revengers.

i want to say that "Vengeance is mine," says the Lord. 

i want to rattle on about actors.

i want to dissect what makes a truly good actor.

i want to distill the person of Richard McGraw.

i want to contemplate his albums in succeeding chronological order.

i want to order my perspective on his individuality.

i want to see his uniqueness clearly.

i want to share this with you.

i want you to join Me. 

i want to mention Exodus, chapter 4, verses 22 through 26.

i want to portray the story as strange.

i want the answers to come without ease.

i want the answers to be hidden.

i want the answers to be worth the fight. 

i want to make a Questioner's Bible.

i want it to have verse by verse questions correlating to the text.

i want to start with the book of Mark. 

i want you to love Mark's eye as I do.

i want you to taste the enigma.

i want you to know that the word for enigma in Slovene is uganka, which sounds like an onomatopoeia to me. 

i want to share my reading of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian with you.

i want you to see it as I see it.

i want you to know that the story is spiritually vast.

i want you to see the limitlessness of the world created, the world imagined.

i want you to know that it is everything.

i want you to see the end of everything.

i want you to know that everything and nothing are mostly the same. 

i want you to still have hope. 

i want you to help me to understand Eyes Wide Shut. 

i want you to tell me if it's a reflection of 2 Thessalonians 2:7

i want you to tell me what 2 Thessalonians 2:7 is really referring to. 

i want you to know that Sufjan Stevens is a modern prophet.

i want you to feel how the baton was passed to Sufjan from C.S. Lewis.

i want you to see history's river.

i want you to paddle with me.

i want you to believe that The Crusades were really important.

i want you to agree with me that the past isn't as fixed as we like to see it as.

i want us to say that the past is not something to be tamed.

i want you to precisely know what I meant by that last sentence.

i want us to be fulfilling our purpose together.

i want us to be you and me. 

i and you and us: comrades.

i and you and us as comrades discovering the trillion pieces of the puzzle.

you and i knowing that the puzzle is the face of God.

In the last post, Dave Eggers and his 90's magazine Might was a topic of inquiry and approach. The idea was exciting and innovative, but in my perception I saw its fatal flaw from the first act. Perhaps Mr. Eggers knew this too. I learned this morning that Eggers has created another magazine since then, known as The Believer. Might, although it had great aspirations, buried itself in critique. It wallowed there. Perhaps additionally, and I believe this is the flaw (and our great pride) of the hipster aged intellectual, no destination. Things are looked at, adulated, adored even, and through this a great lens is put on the grocery carts of the world -- but what is missing is the collective -- the great sense of inclusion that can bind us together knowing that the grocery cart is everything because in it we can see and therefore chance to distill, dirty reflections of the God of the cosmos.  Might primarily seems like a failed concept because they labored hard in destroying the works of others. 

The Believer has this written about themselves on their website 

The Believer is a monthly magazine where length is no object.
There are book reviews that are not necessarily timely,
and that are very often very long.
There are interviews that are also very long.
We will focus on writers and books we like.
We will give people and books the benefit of the doubt.
The working title of this magazine was The Optimist.

There's much there to get excited about. Again I repeat, much. It is reminiscent of the speech Conan O'Brien made during his exit from The Tonight Show, in which he invoked the virtue of hope of cynicism, glee over sarcasm. The mag's wikipedia page opines that the creators of the magazine went forth in creation with the philosophical backbone of "the concept of the inherent Good." That's intriguing, no? 

I hereby propose that whoever would deem themselves as willing and able to participate, join me in the creation of our own magazine. Huzzah. 

Here's how I see it:

-We create a universe (the space of the magazine), in which we look at all the knowledge in the world. We have the freedom to look at everything that is or has been. We say that imagination too exists, in that ideas do indeed have a physical presence (neurons and brain signals and the like, you see). 

-We take the world entire as a vessel for coming to know God. Deeper and deeper. 


-We observe scientific phenomena, literary genius, exceptional sporting feats, and we search within those things for that which uniquely reflects a vision of God. 


-Because Man has been made in God's image, foremost among the efforts we make, would be to look at the individual, and to love them for how they have been made. 


-We create pieces of art along the way ourselves. These should not be free forming pieces of art --- we are not a journal of unattached artistic renderings --- but rather, pieces that enhance the experience of the magazine. For instance, one issue may have a soundtrack, an audible companion to the words on the page. This area of course, should be left vague, so as to leave room for later formation and evolution.


-We will charge a substantial fee to be a member of the magazine. It should not be cheap. Our pretentious magazine will not ever have an extensive fan base, but we'll force the play of the consumers passion by making them invest in order to partake. 


-This is a big one (and already foreshadowed): there will be no room for negative reviews and hollow criticism. We have not the time for such things. If we are interested acutely on the worship of God by the compartmentalization of pieces of matter and mind, then the best way to deal with dirt and crap is to ignore it. There are, inevitably, certain nuances and distinctions that can be made and will be, but as a general principle, the destruction of concept is not what we'll be in the business of doing. Let the others toil away in such self-deducting ventures. We will avoid the pitfalls of jealousy, envy, and strife by loving the lovely, not concerning ourselves with burying the already dead. 

-So, anyone got a title?

-Now, if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, -- each one's work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If anyone's work is burned up, he will suffer loss though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire. 1 corinthians 3:12-15

Shall we not build, so as to see our work endure, not because of our greatness, but because we fixed our eyes on the character and form of God? Shall we not do that in this way? With our hearts? With our minds? With our work?

that's it.

that's all i want. 

Goodbye.

Desperate Search: (dis)Concertingly Fickle

Desperate Search: 

Disconcertingly Fickle

Part One

Below the surface lies the grocery cart. Always.
Sometimes it's a pond, a lake, a river, a neighborhood litter corner, a forgotten hill, or, in my most recent sighting, the Adriatic. Bedraggled and alone, the grocery cart is an ever present reality. It asks many questions. Who are these people that steal grocery carts, anyway? Why do they then, after going to the hassle of stealing them, leave them to be devoured by rust and algae in the nearest local waterhole? Who does these things?

Who murdered those people in cabin 28 in Keddie, California?


The grocery cart is everything. It's nothing at all. It's the world entire.

Often I skate from one philosophical obsession to the next. I've been a self-labeled Objectivist, Post-Neitzcheian, Christian Spiritualist, Modern Pelagian, Hopeless Romantic, Fiscal Conservative, Social Libertarian, Wannabe Franciscan (minus the monk part), Post-Tribulationist, Artist, International Man of Mystery, Zealot, Vague Wanderer, Desperate Believer, Doubter, Doubter with Faith, Believer with Doubt, Believer in Fear, Late-Night Radio Listener, Non-Conformist, Peer-Pressured Non-Conformist, Redactor, Bohemian, Naturalist, Carnivore, Anti-Abortionist, Anti-Death Penaltyer.... of Paul, of Apollos.

What does it matter? -The grocery cart is everything. It's nothing in and of itself, but it can be everything. It can be infinite in dimension.

I move from one topic to the next, concerned immensely with the present thought, secretly believing and caressing the hope that this one, newly seen perspective/topic/theme/reality will be the key to unlocking God.

This, my friends, is the everything.

I've been outspoken in my contempt for The Avengers, I saw in it the great nothingness of pulp without unleashed imagination's eye. I saw no grocery cart to steal.

Currently I am reading A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a super self-aware semi-autobiography by Dave Eggers, friend of David Foster Wallace (the one I wish deeply to extract genius in tangible form from) and screenwriter of the film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, a film I adore. In the book, Dave is a founding member of a magazine entitled Might. You know it's real because it has a wikipedia page> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Might_magazine

From what I gathered from the memoir was that the magazine's aspiration was to be the magazine that stood for everything -- was the fulfillment of everything the age is meant to be. From what I discerned, Might was everything the world had, was the embodiment of nineties' truth.

Generally, my passions dip and fade with as much zeal as they arrive, stamping their sudden 'game-changing' truths to the inner parts of my retinas, where my brain touches the backs of my eyeballs. In writing this (I won't rewrite or reread this, so it's only my local memory that informs me and catalogs the essence and theme of this post written thus far), I've attempted to insinuate a certain negative association with my predisposition to stumbling hopelessly romantically in love with whatever new truth theme becomes in vogue for me. Now, I can say truly to you, now I can say it; that's not how I perceive my stumblings at all. Not whatsover. Rather, I think I'm right. I'm right and I'll write about it because the grocery cart is everything.

Points of Hypothesis:

1) All truth points to God.
              a) All truth is an outpouring of God's (i) design, (ii) character,  (iii) imagination, or (iv) declaration, as no truth exists apart from God Himself.
2) God is infinite. 
3) Truth is beauty. 
4) We are finite beings given insight that the infinite is real and abounds around us (within us as well?). In this being finite, we find that we can be, in every single moment of existence, fully endowed with a perpetual state of wonder at the mystery of infinitude. 
5) This mystery, while ever being present, ever presents itself in wholly new and wholly other ways, thereby making the mystery around us appearing to ever change, wherein reality we are only ever being forced to reckon with a different aspect of the same great enigma.
6) An inherent attribute within mankind is that we are led to explore. This is exemplified in a myriad of ways by man, not many of which are redeemed. Perhaps we can call the basic idea behind it as: curiosity and wonder. 
7) Our primary function on Earth is to glorify God. 
8) Worship of the almighty God is the most exacting, radical, and profitable form of glorifying God for man. 
9) Exploring the world around us can be, and should be, a form of deep, physical, mental, and spiritual worship. 

Points of Conclusion:

Therefore 10) is:
Everything is illuminated. Everything is cloaked in mystery.


The grocery cart is everything. The grocery cart is therefore illuminated. It is illuminated as a device which we can use, compartmentalize, scrutinize forever, and see the very eye of God. The grocery cart is nothing because we will never reach our destination merely observing (even with an eye towards God worship) the thing itself. The grocery cart therefore forever remains at the bottom of that riverbed/lake/stream/Adriatic as everything and nothing all at once. And everything acts/serves precisely the same purpose as the grocery cart.

All is everything. All is nothing.

In Part Two, I will try to distill 'Next Steps' out of all this. I will try to shift the focus from the merely philosophical to the outlandishly pompous naivite of physical movement. We'll see if (and how) it works.

Until then, I conclude with this quote from A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, wherein a contributor of Might Magazine focuses in on the scope life with his application to MTV's Real World. 

It reads as follows (strange grammar and syntax his):

Dear Producers,
Something is radiating deep within me and it must be transmitted or I will implode and the world will suffer a great loss, unawares. Epic are the proportions of my soul, yet without a scope who cares am I? This is why I must but must be one of the inhabitants of MTV's "Real World." Only there, burning brightly into a million dazzled eyes, will my as yet uncontoured self assume the beauteous forms that are not just its own, but an entire market niche's, due. 

I am a Kirk Cameron-Kurt Cobain figure, roguishly quirky, dandified but down to earth, kooky but comprehensible; denizen of the growing penumbra between alternative and mainstream culture; angsty prophet of the already bygone apocalypse, yet upbeat, stylish and sexy!

Oscar Wilde wrote, "Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating... [they] live the poetry [they] cannot write." As with Dorian Gray, life is my art! Oh MTV, take me, make me, wake me from my formless slumbers and place me in the dreamy Real World of target marketing.

Sincerely,

David Milton

TO BE CONTINUED.

Desperately Searched: Bobby Fischer

We are told that Bobby Fischer ("Where is he? I don't know! I don't know!" Such sentiments are all the more true now) died an insane, ravenously angry man that had traded his homeland citizenry for asylum on an island nation. We are told he was a hater of Jews, convinced that various schemes were in place putting an elite squad of international Jewry as harbingers of worldwide power and control. This delusion is made all the more head-scratching by the reality that Fischer himself was Jewish.

He died in 2008 in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Let us not concern ourselves with the darker seams of Mr. Fischer's character. The HBO documentary, Bobby Fischer Against the World focuses our attention on the screws of his clock -- the bristles of his broom. Let us concern ourselves not with the 'whys', not with question of what made this one man tick and sweep in the manner he chose, for there lies no answers this side of heaven. Men and women will always be shrouded in the tomb of history. Motive (including subconscious motive) can never be determined with assurance.

What Fischer brought us was a genius mind -- an acute rationale for conquering a simple game of wit and wisdom.

Fischer almost always started with the same first move. Even from early on in his career he complained of the limits of the beginning moves of the mind sport. In chess, there are precisely twenty first moves that can be made. Twenty. That's mere pittance for the genius, you see. Pittance. Nevertheless, out of the twenty choices, Fischer was renown for relegating himself to the same choice.

1972: Bobby Fischer faced off against the best of the Soviet regime. Boris Spassky was the reigning Grandmaster of the Universe ("of the Universe" my addition), and the lone, rising star American, Bobby Fischer was to rival his dominance. Fischer, the finicky mental titan and consummation of American uber-independence, chose to not show up for the first match of gameplay. The second game, in which he nearly walked out on, also ended in a Fischer loss. He made a rather startlingly brazen error. He would claim that the noise from the television cameras squelched his ability to concentrate. As it goes, the competition ended when one player arrived at 12 wins against the other. In this score count, Fischer still had nine games he could not show up for before admitting defeat. That would not happen. 

After the second game, Fischer would not lose another game.

Spassky himself admitted later that the turning point of the match occurred in game six. That's the game in which Fischer broke tradition. He changed his first move. The ever constant one-in-twenty was challenged. Spassky had prepared for the tournament based on the foreknowledge that Fischer always chose the same first play. Chess, being a game of possibilities contingent upon previous decision points, became suddenly unexplorable for the communist nation's hero. From that move forward, Fischer's moves were shrouded in mystery for Spassky.

Fischer won handily. He was world champion. He was the grand master.

Three years later, in 1975, another, stronger, faster, meaner Commie had been born and was a means by which Fischer was to be threatened anew for empirical grand-leadership. The threat of extinction was too grand. Fischer never showed.

Another twenty years later, in 1992, Fischer and Spassky rematched. This was the first (and last) competition since the 72 championship that Fischer took on.

And this is where my interest is peaked. The two men fought. Fischer again won without much wonder. I suspect Bobby Fischer saw the event as just the thing that would swell his name back into the limelight of the big boys of chess. It didn't have this effect. 

The general consensus was that the two former grandmasters were dueling in the manner that a present day George Foreman would face off against a latter day Mohammad Ali. The show was, in a word: pathetic.

But why? Chess is not a game of carnal strength. These were not old-timers in the sense of mental ward scrubbers. Fischer and Spassky were surely still quick witted, what was the problem? Kasparov, the grandmaster of the nineties, replied, when asked about Fischer's game play, was a polite, "He did okay."


The problem was not their minds... at least, not in the traditional sense. The problem lay in evolution. General consensus agreed that the foremost problem of the duel was that the players built their artworked gameplans off of byzantine ideas. Chess for maniacs and historians is a game wedged in history; it never stops building upon itself. As a player, you always must build upon the shoulders of your forefathers. In this way, the turns that Spassky and Fischer took in 92 worked well and good for players in 72, but all their style and class had been observed and pondered over in the twenty years since, and henceforth had become inadequate and effectively mute in regards to productive game play strategery.

There are two ways to react to this situation. The first and obvious route is to say that Fischer and Spassky, being the old dogs that they were, failed to adapt to the ever changing architecture of the sport. Fischer, however, saw a different path. It was not his lack of expertise, not his twenty years of virtual escape from the ungulating sport that was the culprit, nay, it was the sport itself. It was flawed.

Fischer's conviction was that chess was not in fact, the game of intellectual championship. He declared rather, that the game had descended into mere formulaic memorization. His standpoint was that chess had become a game of facing not an opponent, but a list of pre-memorized positions, flanks, and 6 or 7 move set-ups. Whoever could remember best was crowned king. For Fischer, this was a banal madness of conceit.

The solution was to change the game. Fischer yearned for a chess that was built off of facing individuals; that was a game of creativity and art. So, in 1996 he created a construct to the set-up of chess that would come to be called Chess960. The idea was to maximize the number of first possible moves, so that no formulas could be reasonably learned and spewed out as memorized regurgitation. Chess960 has a starting board where the back row of rooks, knights, bishops, king and queen, are assembled (to some degree) at random. The outpouring of this small change is that the number of potential first moves expands from the pre-noted 20 moves up to 960, hence the name.

I'm choosing to note Bobby Fischer here in this series because of some deep desire within him to keep imagination alive. His Chess960 tries, as best as he could fathom, to do away with route memory and expand the plane of possibility beyond human comprehension. Too many choices means that not all options can be analyzed. Fischer saw that a place that allowed for uncertainty was a place that breathed creativity.

Bobby Fischer's illustrious star is noted here for seeing beauty, art, and the essence of creativity itself being a spring whose existence is predicated by a lack of foreknowledge. 

To apply that statement to God is hazardous at best and automatically cause for blasphemous leaps of hypothesis. I shan't make such claims here. 

I only mean to marvel.

Desperately Searched: Andrew Kevin Walker

Let's take a poll: 

Who agrees with this line from the film Doubt? 

When you take a step to address wrongdoing, you are taking a step away from God, but in his service.

Well, do ya... punk?

This post is long. 

Doubt is a film much like receiving Chickenpox at a young age; it hurts, and sometimes even the memory of it stings, but you are better for having gone through it. It provides you with a sort of invincibility if you can withstand it. 

As a long-time survivor of doubt myself, drinking from that cup is, in some ways, like coming home. It is at once a feeling of warmth as well as shame. 

Warmth: because you can see that others process 

and are affected by the world in a manner similar to yourself. 

Shame: because you now see yourself as a card-carrying club member 

of society you'd rather not be numbered among the ranks of.

A conversation arose in a pub. 

One man was drinking a dark beer, the other hot tea. 

The discussion of why people do the things they came to pass. 

The beer drinker noted, 

"I wouldn't be too quick to label between good and bad people."

He took another swig, 

"I feel uncomfortable saying there is such a thing as good and bad people."

The tea drinker enthusiastically nodded, 

"Yes, because good and evil don't exist."

The beer drinker paused mid-swallow. 

This was not the conclusion he intended the conversation to reach.  

Later in the week, I pondered over such things as this. 

I pondered and pondered.  

After many-a-thought, my mind declared to me that I needed to seek something of an authority on the matter, for it is not good enough merely to show the ramifications of (what I would call) evil actions. The philosopher can decipher any one singular act as the mere consequence of environment, or the psychological progression of an innocent on a certain path by some previous incident. 

No. Showing the effects of maleficience makes no impact. 

What then could be shown? What then could be proven? How do I show that good and evil exist if actions alone are not worthy of judgment? 

I am not akin to the depths of wrongdoing. I am not knowledged in the education of the motion of the deeper of evils. I know not their shadowy ways. But then I ask in fear, if not I, who does know? Who could be my Virgil on this spiral of hell? 

 Enter Andrew Kevin Walker. 

disclaimer: the content of this post gets decidedly darker from here on out. Reader beware.

According to imdb, he has produced only two scripts that are wholly his. The rest of his writing credits are shared. 

The two films that he alone hath penned are 8MM and Seven. Whilst I considered his personal canon, a vague recollection of the drama surrounding the production of 8MM came to mind. 

As it turned out, Mr. Walker walked (ha!) off the set over changes made to his script. Apparently, as studios are apt to do, the ending was changed to bear a more hopeful, optimistic hue. This infuriated Walker to no end, and he later refused to have his name associated with the picture. I knew this story, but also recalled 8MM as a pretty damn dark film. I was curious as to how the script could have been any bleaker.

So I scavenged the internet until I came upon Walker's original script. I read and read and read. 

By tale's end, my soul was flayed open by the nuance of the difference between the script's denouement and that of the film's. It happened as follows: 

In the film: a load of horrific eye-gouging events occur. 

Our protagonist somehow makes it through it all. 

He returns to his wife and child. 

He embraces his wife and says abruptly, "Save me."

In the script: a load of horrific eye-gouging events occur.

 Our protagonist somehow makes it through it all. 

He returns to his wife and child. 

A montage is expressed, showing our protagonist returning back to normal life. 

One day he abruptly burst into tears and cries out, "Why, why, why?!" 

He goes home, embraces his wife and says, "Save me."

All the violence, the murder, the extremes of sex, the snuff -- it's all their in the film. But what the studio balked at, what they couldn't reckon themselves with, is that evil has a lasting effect. You can't just experience it and move on. 

Let's explore the plot for a bit.

Brief Referendum: 

A new film entitled The Hunter has something to do with a search for the Tasmanian Tiger.

The tasmanian tiger went extinct in the thirties. 

The slogan for the film stands as:

Some mysteries should never be solved. 

That may be true, but who can ever resist?

Back to the business at hand. 8MM.

• Nicholas Cage is a P.I.
• FYI: That's good.
• An old lady pays him to watch an 8mm film her recently deceased husband had in his vault.
• That's good, right? I mean, we all like movies.
• Turns out the film is of snuff nature. 
• Shucks. That's bad.
  
• Cage is paid to go hunt down the makers of said film.
• Cage hires a porn-store dayworker to be the Virgil to his Dante.
• Our Virgil takes us down and down the circles of porn hell.
• That's bad.
• Bad stuff happens.
• That's very bad.
• A masked-man is our main villain.
• More bad stuff happens.
• That's still very bad.
• Even more bad stuff happens.
• Make it stop!
• Masked-man is killed. We never know learn his identity.
• That's good?
• Bad stuff stops happening. 
• Good... I think??
  
• The movie is over.
• ???

Okay, how about Walker's previous movie, Seven?

• Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman are cops.
• That's good!
• A fat man is murdered. 
• That's bad.
• Turns out the murderer, John Doe, is a serial killing.
• That's worse.
• Bad stuff happens.
• More bad stuff happens.
• John Doe turns himself in.
• Hooray!
• Even more bad stuff happens.
• Wait... that's bad! But I the bad guy was already caught!
• John Doe is killed. We never really know his identity.
• That's good, I think. 
• Morgan Freeman tells us the world is not a good place.
• Don't says those words, Morgan... don't say those words!
• The movie is over.
• Sigh. 

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

Both stories deal with the concept of a master play of evil, and a slipping into the recesses of dark knowledge by the ardent protagonists. 

A couple scenes in each story contains very telling monologues which stand -- if we consider our surroundings with care -- as hidden compasses. 

Purview the internet and you'll find several different drafts of Walker's Seven. The most dramatic changes come in the final act. In one draft, while John Doe is being transported into the desert, Freeman (Somerset), Pitt (Mills) and the cold murderer have a brief back-and-forth about the purpose of all Joe's scheming.

SOMERSET
You want people to question God's existence?
You want them to...

JOHN DOE
No!! No!! I want them to question their own existence.
I want people to question their own existence.

MILLS
You really think what you're doing is 

God's good work?!

JOHN DOE
The Lord works in mysterious ways.

It should be noted that throughout the story, Detective Somerset, though wholly repulsed by the things has is brought to see, is innately curious to understand it all. Wherein Mills simply writes John Doe off as a lunatic, Somerset sees him as too calculated to be purely motivated by insanity, and so works hard to comprehend the killer's drive. 

See it yet? That police car conversation changed when it made it onto the screen -- it adds a similarly complex nuance to Joe's motive.

MILLS

Wait, I thought all you did was kill innocent people.

JOHN DOE

Innocent? Is that supposed to be funny? An obese man... a disgusting man who could barely stand up; a man who if you saw him on the street, you'd point him out to your friends so that they could join you in mocking him; a man, who if you saw him while you were eating, you wouldn't be able to finish your meal. After him, I picked the lawyer and I know you both must have been secretly thanking me for that one. This is a man who dedicated his life to making money by lying with every breath that he could muster to keeping murderers and rapists on the streets!

 

MILLS

Murderers? 

JOHN DOE
A woman...

MILLS

Murderers, John, like yourself?

JOHN DOE

[interrupts] A woman... so ugly on the inside she couldn't bear to go on living if she couldn't be beautiful on the outside. A drug dealer, a drug dealing pederast, actually! And let's not forget the disease-spreading whore! Only in a world this shitty could you even try to say these were innocent people and keep a straight face. But that's the point. We see a deadly sin on every street corner, in every home, and we tolerate it. We tolerate it because it's common, it's trivial. We tolerate it morning, noon, and night. Well, not anymore. I'm setting the example. What I've done is going to be puzzled over and studied and followed... forever. 

See it yet?

If Se7en exists as a strange testament as to one man's effort to make mankind reflect on his evil ways, then 8MM is the scalpel which focuses finely on the deeds themselves. 

Our Virgil has seen much. We trust him and know him to be true because whilst working in the porn-shop, our P.I. spots him highlighting selections out of what appears to be a porno-mag. Who does that? Answer: no one. He was reading legitimate literature, but hiding it behind the perception that he was the common dreg, getting off on some new comic fantasy. Anyway... the point is, we trust him. That's why we're inclined to believe him when he goes on this rant:

MAX
(aka Our Virgil)
Know what else? It's only gonna get worse. More and more you'll see perverse hardcore coming into the mainstream, because that's evolution. Desensitization. 'Oh my G-, Elvis Presley is wiggling his hips, how offensive!' Nowadays, MTV's showing girls dancing around in thong bikinis with their asses hanging out. Know what I mean? For the porn-addict, big tits aren't big enough after awhile. They have to be the biggest tits ever. Some porn chicks are putting in breast implants bigger than your head, literally. Soon, Playboy is gonna be Penthouse, Penthouse'll be Hustler, Hustler'll be hardcore, and hardcore films'll be medical films. People'll be jerking off to women laying around with open wounds. There's nowhere else for it to go. 

As I contemplate that slippery slope argument, I ask you, gentle and patient reader, why are vampires so popular now? What is so alluring about attractive cannibals? 

Look at the most heinous of all crimes.
What do they consist of?
Sex and blood.

It's no coincidence.

From the dawn of time, poets and philosophers alike have recognized BLOOD as the life of a being -- as the essence of a soul. And SEX. As Christians we recognize it as the symbol of God's relationship with us. We see the Church in the New Testament (and Israel in the Old) consistently spoken of as the Bride. Christ Jesus is our Bridegroom. Think of the book of Hosea. The harlotry of Hosea's wife, Gomer, as used as a direct analogy for God's people's unfaithfulness to God. They turned to idols instead of their Lord. God speaks of this as adultery; sex with another. 

It's no coincidence. 

When captured by the bad guys, our protagonist, Nicolas Cage aka Welles, has one question left nagging at him.

WELLES
Just tell me. Tell me some more of the secrets you and Christian shared. What kind of degenerate pervert was he really? What the fuck did he want with a snuff film?

LONGDALE
(aka bad guy lawyer)
You're asking me why.

WELLES
I'm asking.

LONGDALE
A man like Mr. Christian, a great man... all his money, all his power... a man who had everything there was to attain...

WELLES
Why did he buy a film of some poor, lost girl getting butchered?

LONGDALE
Isn't it incredibly obvious?

WELLES
Enlighten me.

LONGDALE
Because he could. He did it because he could.
(pause)
What other reason were you looking for.

That's the type of evil that our John Doe was evilly trying to destroy
-- killing evil by evil --

PURPOSE

 Here's why this discussion is relevant to us.

Andrew Kevin Walker's brief resume shows us something that we ourselves perhaps couldn't see. 

He spares us the action steps of becoming evil -- he shows us its mechanism. And most importantly, he shows us its futility. 

Vainly, I'll try as best as I can to summarize:

1. Evil exists.
2. It functions in a certain direction. Always forward.
3. There is a curiosity that we may have towards dark knowledge, but it will never satisfy.
4. Evil is never static in that it is insatiable.
5. Evil is perpetually inclined towards sex and blood. 
6. Participation, on any level, always ends in futility.

Remember the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? "And Evil". Let us not be so arrogant as to forget that there is such a realm of information; that rabbit hole exists, and it falls forever downward.

Through Andrew Kevin Walker we see a revelation of the reality of evil motivation. My controversial claim is simply this: that such a gift was given to Mr. Walker from the Lord. This is perhaps a part of his cross to bear. This is, in some fashion, a responsibility in that it is a gift, and we are remiss to bury our God-given gifts.

GENESIS 6:5-6, The LORD say that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.  And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. 

And so are told, and so we can see.

As for us, we are now given a new context in which to understand PHILIPPIANS 3:8 ...whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

Doubt ends with the two main nuns of the film sitting on a bench. 

SISTER JAMES
I wish I could be like you.

SISTER ALOYSIUS
Why?

SISTER JAMES
[tearing up] Because I can't sleep anymore.

Sister Aloysius, the nun who gave us the quote about stepping away from God in his service long ago, sighs and admits:

SISTER ALOYSIUS
Maybe we're not supposed to sleep so well.