The Gospel According to Pi

A story that will make you believe in Pi.

Pi was ardently searching for God. He started of as a Hindu, went to the church and became a christian, and then he also became a Muslim. All of these faiths, all of these paradigms, all of these religious narratives were constructed by other people, and given to him. He was given his Hindu faith by his mother and the society he was born in, he sought out his Christian faith and it was given to him by a priest, and likewise with his Muslim faith.  

 And so it goes with us. We are given our faiths and beliefs in god through external sources. They come to us in the form of stories that didn't happen to us, but ostensibly happened to someone else along time ago. And we try to reconcile those stories to our own lives. They give our lives meaning. But the meaning isn't innate, it is created in our own minds. 

When Pi's dad fed the goat to Richard Parker, and Pi had to face the grisly reality of the world, the ugly brutality of it all, and the finality of death, He couldn't reconcile that with any of his faiths. So his life became aimless, unhappy and unfulfilled. 

And so it goes with us. That is the spiritual journey for many people. When confronted by the utter meaninglessness of life, that bad things happen to innocent people, that children get cancer and die, that people get slaughtered in wars, people starve, get sick and die, that life is a series of random occurrences, then our faith wavers.

So next Pi does what many of us do. He attempts to fill that void in his life with love. With another person. But his relationship ends when they are pulled apart.

And so it goes with us. How many of us end up with our first love, for our entire lives? Relationships end for whatever reason, and we feel lost again.

And then he goes through his whole ordeal. Shipwrecked, adrift, loosing everyone he loves, watches his mother get murdered, and he becomes animalistic to survive. He leaves that higher human conscience and on that boat, life is only about survival. Not about faith, not about god, higher powers or existential dilemmas. It is solely about survival. 

And it is no coincidence that he sailing over the Marianas Trench, the deepest part of the ocean. He is drifting over a literal abyss. And when he finally loses everything, when he is at his most desperate, when he is starving to death, he stares into that abyss, and has a renaissance  He finds his meaning. His own PERSONAL meaning. 

The sequence begins with the beautiful tender shot of Richard Parker staring into the abyss, and we follow the animalistic tiger in his transcendental trip, and we come out of it reborn as Pi. As a human. And he makes choices. He creates his own narrative, his own myth, his own personal religion.  

When he rejoins society, the animalistic side of him leaves, and never returns, but he is reformed.  His journey has parallels in Jesus, Moses and other religious founders going into the wilderness and finding their purpose. Pi was thrust into his own wilderness, has his epiphany and he comes out reborn. His journey and self-discovery was foretold by his girlfriend in her dance “god goes into the forest to find love.” God (Pi) goes into the forest (wilderness) and finds love, love of self. Unlike his previous search for religion where he tried in vain to find meaning external from himself, he found his meaning within himself. He became his own God. He consciously created his own meaning. 

What we witnessed was the inception of a religion. For Pi, it is a personal truth that he found within himself. The belief system isn’t fully formed, nor is it codified. It is contradictory, confusing, and esoteric. There are no rites, no traditions or holidays. Once Pi’s story is externalized and his disciples spread, interpret and embellish his gospel, it’ll perhaps take on another level of meaning.

Perhaps the followers will create their own traditions and rites such as The Eating of Pi on March 14,  and The Dance of the Lotus. Perhaps they will venerate the Orangutan Mother of Pi. Perhaps they will have pilgrimages sailing across the Marianas Trench. They will sculpt effigies of Richard Parker. Perhaps they will wear Pi symbols around their necks. Perhaps they will build cathedrals of vines that float on the oceans. Perhaps they will sing songs to the glory of Pi, create religious laws and codes of conduct, institute leaders and will tithe.

But Pi himself, the founder of the faith, had a completely different, internal relationship to his story. And so it goes with Abraham. And so it goes with Buddha. And so it goes with Jesus.

And so it goes with Pi.

Dark Knight Rises is Chris Nolan's Reckoning

After the announcement of Bane as the baddie in the new movie, I had low expectations for The Dark Knight Rises, and yet somehow I was still disappointed. I wanted to like the movie, I really did, or I wouldn't have dropped my hard earned money on a ticket, and spent nearly three hours of my Friday night watching this debacle.

The movie fails on nearly every conceivable level, starting with the perfunctory plot, and following with the characters behaving preposterously as they are tethered and drug along behind this turd of a story.

The most egregious error of the plot is the cornerstone of the entire script; Bruce Wayne's completely unconvincing romantic tryst with Talia. For what the characters lack in chemistry they make up for in stupidity. Bruce inexplicably turns the entire fate of his company, and the entire fate of gotham and his super magic clean energy producer weapon thingamacguffin into the hands of a girl he just met. Bruce starts off trusting no one, and then completely trusting some random girl the script had no interest in developing. Yep, completely gritty and realistic. If by gritty and realistic you mean cheesy and irrational.

Another out of character moment in service to the plot is seen when Alfred leaves Bruce because, well it made no sense. Make whatever excuse you want, but the real reason that Alfred leaves him is because the plot requires him to. This is the part of the cliche story where the character loses everything and everyone. He loses his wealth, his company, his toys, his health and his friends. It just reminded me of another number three movie, The Karate Kid 3. Daniel-San and Mr. Miyagi have a spat and break up because, well it's the third movie, what else are you going to do?

More gritty/realistic (cheesy/irrational) plot points. Bane allows himself to be kidnapped to make sure some dude we don't know didn't squeal. And then at the precise moment, the plane, well you know what happens. Why do I think this is so cheesy? Well take a legitimately gritty and realistic piece of pop entertainment, The Wire, and substitute the characters.

D'Angelo Barksdale gets kidnapped by Prop Joe, and in order to make sure that he didn't rat him out, Stringer Bell allows himself to get kidnapped. As soon as he finds out, his crew is there to kill everyone while he snaps his restraints and kills Prop Joe. Oh yeah, did I mention that the whole thing took place on an airplane? Pre-fucking-posterous.

Every piece of this dreck is as completely predictable as it is inconceivable. If you were surprised that Joseph Gordon Levitt was going to become Robin/Nightwing/ the Next Batman, well, all I can say is that I wish I was like you, easily amused. Alfred seeing Bruce and Selina in the Tuscan Cafe? The random chick Bruce gave the company to double crossing him and stabbing Batman in the back? The scoundrel Catwoman pulling a Han, flying in and saving the day at the last minute? Every inane plot point was telegraphed like a shotgun blast to the face. 

The only thing telegraphed harder was the punching. I haven't seen such lackluster, mimed fight choreography this side of a Steven Segal movie. Sloppy swings, missed connections galore. There was little physical or emotional weight to the fighting. The action felt very stagy. Even the extras were paired off neatly in twos doing their little boxing tangos.

The dialog is so very weak. Thankfully, most of it is garbled beyond recognition by cartoony post sound production. That which isn't over modulated is the standard expositiony stuff that makes little sense. Somehow Alfred knows stuff that Bruce doesn't know including the history of Bane. And in another piece exposition-laden dialog scene, Robin figures out that Bruce Wane is Batman, something that Gordon was inexplicably oblivious to until Batman reminded him that he once gave him a coat.

Bleh.

Overall, Nolan overreaches trying to be grandiose and instead just falls flat. All I can hope for is that Nolan can learn the lesson of why he fell.

Katniss With a Thousand Faces

Let the 74th Annual Backlash Begin!

Before a single ticket was purchased for the opening weekend of The Hunger Games, , the inevitable backlash had already been swelling, most notably criticisms that Hunger Games was a rip-off of other stories. The most obvious comparison has been made to the 2000 Japanese novel and movie Battle Royale. Certainly, the two stories share superficial similarities: Both take place in future dystopias; both pit teenage children against each other in a king-of-the-hillwinner-kill-all battle meele; and the protagonists in both are star-crossed lovers who thwart the system.

But to engage in this reactionary dismissal of calling The Hunger Games a blatant plagiarizing of Battle Royale ignores the debt that both franchises have to The Running Man and Lord of The Flies, and the debt both of those owe to The Most Dangerous Game and the debt that had to the ancient Grecian myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.

Heaping another helping of criticism, Mike Ryan of Moviefone.com has made a correlation between each of the characters in The Hunger Games with the characters in Star Wars. So is that it? Can we just dismiss the The Hunger Games as Suzanne Collins freebasing Star Wars and Battle Royale and American Idol?

It is easy to make these correlations because all of these works follow the same fundamental story structure, the monomyth.

The term monomyth, literally meaning one story, was coined by Joseph Campbell in his seminal work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and he explained it thusly:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

Campbell then dissects the structure into seventeen smaller steps, and those are lumped into three arcs: The Departure, Initiation, and the Return. These are not rigid steps mind you, but they outline a structure that all similar successful stories share. All of the rest of the elements of the story, kids killing each other in a high stakes survivor reality show in a decadent post apocalypse future, are all window dressing. Distilled to its basic form, The Hunger Games is a traditional Hero’s Journey. And Collins adept use of this structure is the reason for its mass success.

Much like Star Wars, the first movie in The Hunger Games trilogy concerns itself with the departure and the first five steps of the Hero’s Journey, which begins with the The Call to Adventure. The hero begins in a mundane situation and is summoned into the unknown. The key to having a dynamic and sympathetic character is that the hero must choose to heed the calling. Luke Skywalker chooses to go to Alderaan and safely deliver the droid. Frodo chooses to take the ring to Mordoor. Marty chooses to meet Doc Brown at Twin Pines mall. Katniss Everdeen makes the heroic sacrifice in place of her sister and chooses the quest.

The second step is the Refusal of the Call. I’m a bit stumped here, as she really never rejects the calling, or has the power to do so, but she is quite a dick to Haymitch, and he's the scoundrel character, so that's got to count for something, right?

Once she has accepted the calling, she moves onto the next level, Meeting the Mentor. In this stage, the hero’s guide and helper appears and gives the hero an Object of Great Importance. Katnis’ guide and mentor is of course Cinna, and she receives an artifact from him that helps her on her quest. Just as: Theseus receives a ball of string and a sword from Ariadne; Luke obtains a lightsaber from Obi Wan; Dorthy receives ruby slippers from Glenda; Frodo gets the ring from Gandolf; and Marty gets a Delorian from Doc Brown, Cinna gives Katniss her talisman in the form of the Mockingjay pin. Certainly the chronology is a bit wonky, but hey, this is writing, not algebra. 

The next step is The Crossing of the First Threshold. This is where the hero leaves the old world behind and ventures off into the adventures beyond. This recalls the moment when Frodo and Sam step out of the field and remark that they have never been this far out of the Shire before. For Katniss, this is obviously when she gets onto the train and is whisked away from District 12.

The rest of the movie is the largest part of this leg of the journey, The Belly of the Whale. This is the part where the hero undergoes a trial in which they metamorphose from the person that they were formerly to their new self. Katniss undergoes a physical change preparing for her entrance into the arena, undergoes the trials of the Games, wins a small victory and emerges a stronger, more self-assured hero. This sets her up for the following trials.

Now I haven’t read the two sequels to The Hunger Games, but I can predict with certainty that the following things will occur.

• She will lose her mentor Cinna just as Luke lost Obi Wan, Frodo lost Gandolf and Marty lost Doc Brown. It’s an integral part of the characters maturing and succeeding their mentors.
  
• The stakes need to be raised, so instead of the stage being a Game, she necessarily needs to fight the mega-threat, the empire and President Snow.
  
  
•  She will suffer a defeat. One of the Districts will probably be destroyed, (shades of Alderaan).
   
• She will have an Atonement with Her Father (or mother in this case) find out the true nature of her father’s death, and be forever changed by it. After that she can no longer be the innocent, naive young girl, but emerges from some temptation of the dark side to become a fully formed woman.
  
  
• One of her close allies will turn out to be a traitor.

How close am I?

So The Hunger Games isn’t as derivative as it is made out to be, but instead it is following a template that storytellers have been using since the first cavebuster was told over a campfire and a bucket of mammoth barbecue. Deriding Collins for following these archetypes in her story makes as much sense as criticizing Frank Lloyd Wright for being unoriginal because he designs buildings that have a roof supported by four walls.  It’s the way it works. It’s the basic structure of the story. This type of story follows the blueprint set out in Joseph Campbell’s writings. Or Star Wars, take your pick. The latter was so slavish to the Heroes’ Journey that the final episode was actually called The Return (of the Jedi), deliberately named after the third act in the monomyth.

So may the odds be ever in our favor, the Force be with us, and pray that the Ewoks don’t make an appearance in The Hunger Games.

They do? Shit.