Wise old Uncle Harry liked to repeat: "You can't cut anything so thin there's only one side to it!" A wisdom the world's zealots need to learn. To punch home the point, consider this week's counter-point between the Cannes Film Festival's top prize and American sports' top cheaters.
American director Terrence Malick's film TREE OF LIFE stretches minds and souls with its dazzling and elliptical tale of religious themes. Meanwhile American sports heroes like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and now Lance Armstrong are accused of stretching the rules with years of doping. What's going on here!
Nothing really new. Our best and worst angels have been simultaneously whispering to us from the first day our ancestors stared into the stars and grunted their curiosity. On one hand, we sense gods and goddesses up there who call us to the good and virtuous life. On the other and darker hand, we yearn to become the gods and goddesses ourselves. Genesis is but one of the creation narratives that speaks to this struggle between honoring our creators and stealing their thunder for ourselves.
Malik's film will not bring large popcorn crowds into the multiplexes, for it take up the mystical themes about human existence which we last heard in our college philosophy classes. But come on, that stuff is over with; now it's time to live not examine life. Time for the summer blockbuster menu of fireballs and computers, violence and sex. I mean, this is what Claude van Damme and Cameron Diaz are for...!
While Malik's controversial reach for matters that matter will end up in tiny art-theatres, humanity's passion to become like the gods will continue to play out in big-time sports. Just check the drum-roll of revelations about famous athletes infamously cheating in the name of winning? A study in pride hardly limited to the locker rooms, it includes the board rooms, stock markets and government chambers as well. In the convoluted name of excellence, man's new mantra has become: Whatever it takes!
But wait -- this sounds like moralizing. And surely in a secular age of amoral technology, morality is not only an incredibly subjective thing, it is also a rather simplistic thing. Progressing as far as we have in modern living, what compelling need is there left for examining life? You live only once...you go for the gold...any way you can buy it.
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I'll take the movie over today's phony athletes any day....
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