Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Daniel Ross Goodman

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 depicts the difficulty of this task, but demonstrates that it is indeed possible.

      Nebraska’s director, Alexander Payne, is remarkable for, among other things, the consistent cinematic concern he has shown for the elderly and incapacitated. About Schmidt (2003), another road-trip movie, also centered on a newly retired and recently widowed man (played by a wonderfully subdued Jack Nicholson) from Nebraska who sets out on a journey to find a sense of purpose and meaning in his life. The Savages (2007), for which Payne was executive producer, featured Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as emotionally distant, artistically inclined siblings who must come together to care for their father in his final days.

      In presenting his cinematic answers to the question of who man is, Payne affirms who man is not. In marked contrast to those like James Barrat who raise the specter of artificial intelligence as the beginning of the “end of the human era,” Payne affirms that we are not machines. And although we are biological creatures, neither are we only biological animals, as those like Michael Gazzaniga would claim. Unlike animals, we not only behave, but we reflect upon how we behave. As Harold Bloom has observed, we are beings who not only think, but who overhear ourselves thinking and can change after overhearing ourselves.^[2] We are human beings, which means that we are significant, that we have inner identities, that our lives our meaningful, and that our existence is needed.

      At times, cinema succeeds where our philosophy fails us. Films like Nebraska show us, not through casuistic arguments but through facial expressions, camera work, and dialogue, that we are not sub-personal animals, and we are not glorified machines: we are sui generis creatures known as human beings—dependent rational animals, as Alasdair MacIntyre put it.

      Woody Grant is not an interchangeable part in the assembly line of the global market economy—and neither are we. We are not Brave New World’s hatchery humans who are bred and programmed as identical, non-unique beings who are prepped to be plugged in to the assembly line of a mechanized world. No, we are b’tselem Elokim: creatures made not in the likeness of machines, but in the likeness of God. We are unique and irreplaceable, even when we are elderly and are losing our faculties . . . and even when we are bumbling, broken-down auto mechanics who want nothing more than a trip to Nebraska.

      Notes

      1.

      Abraham Joshua Heschel, Who Is Man? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965), 24.

      2.

      Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (New York: Touchstone, 2000), 79–89, 147, 194.

      Chapter 5

       Boyhood

      A Profoundly Human Story

      Richard Linklater’s film is powerful because it reminds us that the dull, plotless events of our fleeting lives matter in the way in which all quotidian things matter: as Joycean “epiphanies of the ordinary.”

      Boyhood is one of the most special movies of this decade, but it is not one of the best movies of this decade. It deservedly received a bevy of Oscar nominations—six in all, including nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay, but winning only for Best Supporting Actress (Patricia Arquette).

      Why has Boyhood, a modest film with a paltry budget of only $4 million (by contrast, Guardians of the Galaxy had a budget of $170 million), received so much attention? The first two reasons for the garlands that this good movie has garnered are obvious; the third reason is much less obvious, but much more important.

      First, this film has received so much attention not because of the story it tells but because of the story of how the movie was made. It is the only dramatic (non-documentary) movie in cinematic history to have been filmed over a twelve-year span, with the same cast, shot by the same director. Boyhood’s story could not be simpler: it charts the growth of a family—and the growth of one young boy in particular—over twelve years. We follow Mason (Ellar Coltrane) from the time he is five years old until he is ready to go off to college at the age of eighteen. In other words, we witness his growth from a child to an adolescent on the verge of adulthood.

      Second, this is one of the more “relatable” films of recently memory. There are no superheroes, no special effects, and no strange twists of fortune and fate. Instead, there is a brother, a sister (Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter), and a mother (Patricia Arquette) and father (Ethan Hawke) who are divorced. There is no real “plot”; rather, there are a series of episodes from the family’s life. Everyone who watches this movie will see something strikingly similar to an event, relationship, or emotion one has experienced in one’s own life, because this is a movie that could be made about any life. It is a film about one particular family, but it is a film that could be made about any family.

      Epiphanies of the Ordinary

      Though Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke have never been better, the boy is, well—how should we СКАЧАТЬ