Knowledge of Good and Evil As Applied to Movies
Stories We Tell Ourselves, or Stories We Are Ourselves, Part Two
“The confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing its work.” —Wittgenstein
3 Kinds of Story
The following morning, the storyteller awoke with a new question running through his mind. The question was this: By what authority do I tell these stories?
He quickly realized that this second question was only a more thorough and conscientious “rewrite” of the first: if the stories the storyteller told did not come from a higher (whether inner our outer) authority, why tell them? What “right” did he have to do so?
Or more precisely, what purpose in doing so?
On New Year’s Day, I planted a lemon tree in our vineyard while my wife planted a mandarin tree. Later that day, we planted a nectarine tree in our garden.
There are three kinds of story that I am involved in telling-living in this latest series of essays. First (really last) there is the story of filmmaking; for example, as we will get to shortly, the “legendary” filmmaker Francis Coppola, and the unknown, wanna-be filmmaker Jasun Horsley (who happen to share a birthday—albeit a full Saturn cycle apart).
Then there are the stories of the Bible that I have been attempting to fathom and familiarize myself with here, as a means to enter more fully into a conscious life of service to those eternal principles represented therein, by words like “God,” “Christ,” and “Holy Spirit.”
Lastly, though really primarily, there are the stories of vine-growers, wine-makers, and farmers, stories that have purely to do with practical knowledge, passed down over the generations.
In all of this story-telling and story-analysis, I am seeking one thing: purpose-meaning (two words, but only one “thing”).
An Imponderable Void
“If one second were a billion years, and this world we know, this beautiful earth and its creatures, existed for one-billionth of a second, then how privileged we are to have lived in it. It is a thing beyond legends, that in this imponderable void there existed such a place as this, and such beings as we.” —Francis Coppola, Journals, 19 October, 1989.
As well as watching too many movies lately, I have been re-reading the Projections book series started in the early 1990s, by John Boorman and Walter Donahue, from the UK publisher Faber & Faber. Book 3 begins with the journals of Francis Coppola, between 1989 and 1993. The first passage in Francis’ diary is quoted above.
As we all tend to do, Coppola here interprets the facts (or “facts”) and turns them into a narrative, to keep at bay the unthinkable horror of an unfathomable mystery, which is that we exist within an endless expanse of time, when all logic demands that we cannot.
Why exactly is it a privilege to have lived in this time, Francis? And what exactly is the alternative to existing?
To call it a “privilege” to be here for a billionth of a second implies that we understand an incomprehensible anomaly, a rank impossibility, a screaming affront to all reason, a mystery that, if dwelt upon for long enough, neutralizes every last certainty we ever imagined we had, and reduces it to simply this:
We exist, and we cannot ever know how, why, or for how long (perhaps we are always existing somewhere).
Elsewhere in his journal, Coppola expresses the futility of his own existence and his relentless drive to continue creating, to keep that feeling of futility at bay. He admits to being angry and frustrated most of the time. “I know how good I feel when I have written in the morning,” he writes. “It’s as though I have earned the good feeling that lasts the rest of the day and night.”
I can easily relate to all of this, and to the vicious circle of fire Francis is trapped inside. Twenty years after the success of The Godfather, he is still wrestling with a lack of confidence and a need for success, still finding his days void of purpose-meaning, unless he can invent one by coming up with a new film project.
In contrast, the vine-grower, grape harvester, and winemaker never has to ask himself why he does what he does, any more than we ask why we eat, sleep, or defecate. It is just in the nature of things.
Storytelling is a harder instinct to account for.
Discerning the difference between good and bad movies was the focus of my first authorial incarnation, from age fifteen to thirty, as a film critic-writer. This is similar to, but not the same as, discerning the difference between a corrupting and a benign influence, which became the focus of my authorial output for the subsequent 25 years.
Since I am currently embarked on the task of making my own movie in 2024, these two concerns have become synthesized into a single (double-lensed) focus.
The synthesis of the two questions is a single question: the question of whether it is even possible to make a “good” movie that can also be a benign influence; and if it is, what’s an example? Is moviemaking itself such a debased and debasing art that—as in the case of a film like Natural Born Killers, The Matrix, or Fight Club—the better it is, the more potentially corrupting? (Hence a benign film tends, like the films of Bresson, to not quite work as a film, at all.)
Coppola’s Useful Idiocy
There is another question our storyteller might have asked himself, one that Francis Coppola—at some point in eternity—apparently forgot to ask himself: When do the stories we tell become self-serving and self-aggrandizing, rather than essential to our community? And/or, at what point do these stories begin to serve an illegitimate authority, with or without our knowing it?
A few months after his contemplation of the imponderable void, on 16 January, 1990, Francis wrote the following entry in his diary:
On this day [when the UN attacked Iraq), in this moment, the human race took another step towards Wells’ World State Convention. . . Now that knowledge is in the hands of everyone, all people, all Nations, television and satellites have forever made it impossible for one group to manipulate knowledge of what is happening; World television is bringing this vital knowledge to everyone without being diminished. And it was knowledge—through computers and engineering and design—that was responsible for designing the modern war machine that could allow for surgical strikes, massive war with only enemy casualties—a force for world civilization. . . . Let there be a world government, there must be. The United Nations can serve civilization well and deserves the chance to be it. THE WORLD STATE. “ALL WE ARE SAYING IS GIVE PEACE A CHANCE.” The Stealth missile is right out of H.G. Wells’ “Wings Over the World,” the air dictatorship emerged as the force which designed the new world state (Projections 3, p. 5, emphasis in original).
Oh dear. Behind very major artist is a crypto-technocrat, clawing to get out?