Will Ferrell: L’Etranger
I have an unfortunate tendency to obsess on a short list of unproductive questions, so I’d like to give a big thank-you to Matt, Peter, Ross and Steven Pinker for kicking off my latest bout of “are human beings just machines incapable of transcendence?” angst.
Here is a great hammer-and-nails example of the human tendency to see everything through a somewhat self-centered prism: has anyone else noticed that the entire corpus of Will Ferrell’s work seems to center on exactly this dilemma?
In fact many modern “thoughtful” comedies share this perspective. Groundhog Day is the story of a self-centered pig’s journey to escape the prison created by his appetites. Interestingly, the one obvious small-town institution missing from his journey is a church, and it seems plain to me that the movie is a metaphor for Buddhist enlightenment. Knocked Up is an analogous transformation of a slacker to other-centeredness. (This is why, incidentally, I don’t think the movie is tanked by poor writing and worse acting on the part of the female lead. She is for us – though absolutely not for the character of the male lead – an object in his transformation.)
What’s interesting about both of these examples is that, like Jane Austen’s novels, the movie ends on the wedding day (of course, being modern Hollywood, there is usually no wedding day, but I think you get my drift). What’s left ambiguous is whether each of these characters has transcended a machine-like human nature and become spiritual and moral in a truly non-self-serving sense, or whether they have merely proceeded to a higher-level understanding of their machine nature wherein they achieve better alignment between their behavior and the behavior which maximizes their biochemical well-being. That is, have they simply moved from unenlightened to enlightened self-interest? What’s left unexplored is the subject of the nineteenth century novel: what happens after the wedding? Because what each of these characters would discover is that real relationships, especially those with kids, will make demands that are, in practice if not in theory, very difficult to sustain in the face of corrosive nihilism.
It seems to me that this specific version of the dilemma – how can I maintain a stable domestic order if there is no higher purpose to my life than satisfying appetites? – is the core of Will Ferrell’s comedy.
Consider his latest magnum opus: Talladega Nights. The whole point of the movie is that Ricky Bobby follows the example of his father in walking away from any responsibility. The scene in Applebee’s is the crux of the movie. His father, seeing the family coming together, picks a fight with the waitress in order to get thrown out. On the street, the son confronts his father, and in the most significant exchange of the movie asks him what he should do, and the father responds: “Well, that’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?” Eventually, Ferrell’s character reconstructs a domestic life (after defeating a French existentialist driver who reads L’Etranger).
What is Wedding Crashers but a description of the defiling the tradition of the wedding to pick up girls? The Will Ferrell character is shown as the epitome of this attitude, as he screams at his mother for meatloaf and moves to picking up girls at funerals. Eventually one character escapes. His character in Blades of Glory makes the same journey. Ditto Old School. My take is that Stranger Than Fiction has a very similar theme, but I never go to movies that are anything more sophisticated than cop buddy films. I have no idea if Elf fits this mold, but there are some things I won’t do even for a blog post.
My take is that Stranger Than Fiction has a very similar theme, but I never go to movies that are anything more sophisticated than cop buddy films.
Your loss. Stranger Than Fiction, if not good, is better than it ought to be. I’d watch the movie again just La Gyllenhaal.
— SomeCallMeTim · Jan 17, 12:09 AM · #
Slow down, Hoss. Groundhog Day may be missing a physical church (unless you dismiss the bell tower/steeple used during the suicide sequence), but it’s not missing religion. Recall that Bill Murray, while scarfing down the mother of all diner breakfasts proclaims himself to be “a god” … not the God, but definitely “a god” … This, in turn, inspires Andie McDowell to reveal her years of hard time in Catholic school. If anything, the Puxatony, Pennsylvania of the movie is an allegory for the Purgatory that Phil Conners must escape.
— JB · Jan 17, 06:38 AM · #
JB:
You know, I thought about mentioning the belly flop from the steeple, but I couldn’t decide if this was some deep comment by the director, or just the most obvious tall building in town.
I agree that religion and spirituality permeate the movie, but it is striking (to me at least) that as Conner proceeds through stages of personal evolution he never goes through even a phase of church attendance. I assume that this was because it would put the writer and director in a position of making this either a pro- or anti-sectarian movie, which they probably neither wanted to do nor felt would be commercial.
— Jim Manzi · Jan 17, 03:11 PM · #
I have to confess to wondering about the convenience of the steeple myself.
Looking at it another way, I have to wonder if Phil Conners is the type of guy who would go to church. When he proclaims himself to be a god, it seems almost natural for the character. Conners is self-centered and egotistical, so when he discovers himself trapped in a feedback loop in the space-time continuum of course he’s going to make the leap of logic form ‘I’m just a mere mortal weatherman’ to ‘I’m a god.’ He’s just been looking for a good enough excuse.
Then again, if someone was convinced of his own divinity he would probably want some confirmation from a knowledgeable source. In many ways, Bill Murray could have given the “I am a god” talk to a local priest, say in a confessional booth. I can see this working well dramatically and opening all kinds of wonderful comedic doors (but doing so perhaps at the cost of the love story aspect of the movie). The closest Phil Connors comes to seeking this level of professional advice is when he visits the psychologist (or was it the neurologist, off the top of my head I can’t remember) — and as you’ve noted, that’s about as secular as it gets.
— JB · Jan 17, 04:31 PM · #
I disagree about the end of Old School:
Luke Wilson is probably settling down and that’s good. His original girlfriend, the swinger Juliette Lewis (who broke his heart at the beginning by cheating on him) is not settling down, and that’s good too. Vince Vaughn is staying in his marriage and that’s probably good, or at least necessary (remember, he gets kicked out of the kid’s soccer game he’s coaching, and his wife steps in for him), but his deep unhappiness with marriage and family is never resolved. Will Ferrell reveals his Olive Garden waitress underpants fantasy to his therapist and wife, and that turns out to have been good (at the end, he’s happy to be a DJ, he’s king of the hill at the fraternity, and he’s about to hook up with sex-focused Juliette Lewis).
In fact, the only sin that is punished in Old School is lying—with the joint deaths of Jeremy Piven and Craig Kilborn, each of whom deceived others repeatedly, as the m.o. Honest self-centeredness is not punished; it’s celebrated.
You’re right about Wedding Crashers (which is the greatest comedy of all time). Of course, it’s a little odd that the punishment for Will Ferrell’s unrepentant self-centeredness is that he’s going to be stalked by the crazy gay brother. (I don’t really think the movie is anti-gay despite the ‘nude gay artshow’ scene, but it’s strange. I would have preferred Will Ferrell hitting on Jane Seymour at the end and she having a look like she was about to eat him up. That would have been a better ‘hunter becomes the hunted’ story’.)
Stranger Than Fiction was atrocious and should not be discussed with the classics.
— tom · Jan 17, 06:45 PM · #
Are human beings just machines incapable of transcendence?
A self-answering question, no? Though rather than “transcendence”, which is historically burdened, it’s probably better to refer to “it” as enfranchisement: the ability to create models of the world and our place in it, to then have thoughts about those models, and then have thoughts about those thoughts about those models, and so on — this gives us an asymptotically-free will, a plurality vote, in how we choose to behave.
Thus, I can say that Camus illuminates a truth when he writes, “The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious”; — but that Sartre speaks gibberish when he says, “Man is all the time outside of himself: it is in projecting and losing himself beyond himself that he makes man to exist; and, on the other hand, it is by pursuing transcendent aims that he himself is able to exist.” Pace the existentialists, there is no radical freedom from human nature, there is only asymptotic freedom by way of human nature.
So yes, to exercise the vote we must figure out a way to “self-surpass” the machine. However, the only way to do that is to use the tools that come with it.
— JA · Jan 17, 08:26 PM · #
“Because what each of these characters would discover is that real relationships, especially those with kids, will make demands that are, in practice if not in theory, very difficult to sustain in the face of corrosive nihilism.”
I disagree with this. It seems to presume a false dichotomoy of transcendence vs nihilism.
My wife and I are atheists and we have three kids. We are raising them alone. Are friends and family are out of state and we haven’t found any trustworthy sitters yet. So we work round the clock, one is at work, the other is always at home. Period. It’s been that way for five years now. Very tough, grueling. We haven’t been out on the weekends together since then. Worse, there have been some family tragedies that have occurred to my own first family and also to my current family. How to say it without melodrama? I simply didn’t know it was possible to suffer so much for so long. Now I know better.
We do not pray or seek guidance from any deity. We just work hard and love our kids to pieces. It’s getting better these days, thank goodness.
When I got married, the hardest part for me was not being able to nurture my wife better – because the kids’ needs were overpowering. Three under three, it was such a crushing weight. Both parents focused on the kids, and neither on the other – so we were starving emotionally, even physically, from lack of rest, pleasure, and reflection. I was aware enough to recognize it was happening, but that was all.
This indeed was a shift from self to other; a painful, exhausting move. Of course, there were so many moments of delight. The best thing about parenting was discovering the bright, sweet, burning ocean of love inside me that I had suspected was there for my kids, but actually felt humming, glowing inside me once I held them in my arms. And it was effortless. I would weep in despair I was so drained; they were ghastly, miserable times – yet picking them up, how I loved my little bundles. Is this transcendence? I don’t know if this counts in your estimation.
To me, it is certainly not nihilism. And it is certainly not self-centeredness either. And the fullness of those moments, and others, renders ‘transcendence’ a fairly academic issue to me at this point in my life.
I take issue with your cardboard characterization of modern life. I am immersed in this ‘corrosive nihilism.’ I do not seek to escape it. My wife and I do not look to live outside the box, just to live more fully inside it, through time. You seem to frame life as just transcendence vs nihilism, but that’s a cartooniverse, a fake Manicheanism. There are more philosophies of life than these two. I suppose we might articulate it as: we seek a dynamic and fuller immanence. But I’ll hold off on that kind of unnecessary pretentious lingo. Suffice to say that it’s not reducible to an egocentric, every-man-for-himself nihilism.
Your post was interesting but seems to presume a simple theocentric frame with a one-variable graph of society that attempts to be serious cultural critique.
Life is more complex than “Religion is transcendent and other-directed (and therefore good), modernity is nihilistic and self-centered (and therefore bad).”
— Chum · Jan 20, 06:52 AM · #
Chum:
Thanks so much for your comment. I’m sure that wasn’t the easisest thing in the world to write.
I did not mean to imply that atheism = nihilism; I know way too many counter-examples. (Though it’s easy to see how a reasonable person could draw that conclusion from what I wrote, so I take the miscommunication to be a failure of exposition rather than one of interpretation).
What I was trying to communicate is my view that in practice nihilism = bad (or no) parenting, and unhappy family life in general.
Peace,
— Jim Manzi · Jan 20, 06:52 PM · #