Author Archives: disinterested spectator

The Man I Married (1940) and Not Without My Daughter (1991)

Just the other night, I happened to watch The Man I Married, which was made in 1940 but set in 1938, prior to the outbreak of World War II.  In that movie, Carol Hoffman (Joan Bennett) is married to a German immigrant, Eric (Francis Lederer), who wants her and their son Ricky to go on a vacation back to Germany with him to visit his father.  She is enthusiastic about being able to see all the sights.

Carol’s obstetrician is a Jew.  He asks Carol and Eric for help in getting his brother released from Dachau by bribing the guards.  Eric says he will be glad to do so.  Carol refers to Eric as being “sweet and gentle.”

Shortly after they arrive in Berlin, Eric begins to fall under the sway of German culture, and it is not long before he joins the Nazi party, deciding to stay in Germany permanently.  He even falls in love with Frieda, who is also a Nazi, whom he wants to marry, and for which reason he wants a divorce from Carol. Carol is disgusted with him and the whole Third Reich, and so she agrees.  But then she finds out that Eric will not allow her to take their son Ricky back with her to America, because he wants Ricky to become a Nazi too.

With the help of an American reporter, Kenneth Delane (Lloyd Nolan), she tries to sneak Ricky out of the country, but Eric stops her.  Eric’s father (Otto Kruger) is on Carol’s side, and he tells Eric that unless he lets her take Ricky back to America, he will reveal to the Nazis that his mother was a “Jewess.”  Frieda is there when this is revealed, and she is repelled by the thought that she has been having sex with a man who has Jewish blood.  Eric is crushed.  Carol takes Ricky and leaves without any resistance.

Most people have not seen this little-known movie, so I suppose it’s not surprising that Betty Mahmoody was unlikely to have seen it either, or else she might have refused to go to Iran with her husband and daughter to visit his family in 1984, just five years after the Iranian Revolution.  Her story was made into the movie Not Without My Daughter (1991).

As Sky Masterson (Marlon Brando) says in Guys and Dolls (1955), “No matter who you get married to, you wake up married to somebody else.”  There have been a lot of movies exemplifying that principle, but these two movies have an additional feature setting them apart from the rest, showing the extent to which society shapes the individual, culture determines the personality.  In particular, in both movies an American woman marries an immigrant.  While in America, the man’s self has been substantially influenced by American culture.  But when he and his wife and child return to his native land, ostensibly just for a short visit, he quickly falls under its influence.

One might suppose that no culture could be any more threatening than that of Nazi Germany. And yet, even under the Third Reich, Germany was still part of Western civilization.  Moreover, as much as it may pain some people to admit it, the Nazis were Christians.  Carol has it relatively easy moving about, with no one trying to force her to change the way she dresses or behaves.  Moreover, Eric never beats her.  As she is played by Joan Bennett, Carol has that skeptical look on her face that is part of Bennett’s screen persona. Delane cautions her not to show her disdain for Nazis while they are mistreating some Jews, but he is unsuccessful in that regard.  We cannot imagine Carol in Iran, a country in the Middle East, where Islam rules.  She wouldn’t last a week.

Not Without My Daughter begins in Alpena, Michigan, where Betty (Sally Field), her husband “Moody” Mahmoody (Alfred Molina), and their daughter Mahtob, who is four years old, are enjoying their home in the country, where we see lots of trees and a wide, gently flowing river.  It’s all so peaceful and serene, America the beautiful.  How could they not be one big happy family in a setting like that?

Betty’s parents are visiting them, and her father asks Mahtob what she wants to be when she grows up. She says, “A nurse.”  Moody points out that she can be a doctor, implying that she need not settle for the traditional role for women in the medical field.  He has clearly embraced the American ideal of equality, extending even to the sexes.

In the next scene, we see that Moody himself is a doctor, working in a hospital. While sitting in the recreation room, reading an Iranian newspaper, he overhears other doctors talking while shooting a game of pool.  They make snide remarks about Iran, not even caring that Moody can hear what they are saying. One doctor says, “The Iranians have prayed themselves back to the Stone Age.”  We know that doesn’t apply to Moody, however, because in the very next scene we see him sitting outside his house listening to a recording of Puccini’s opera Tosca.  Betty notices he seems to be depressed, and he tells her about what the doctors were saying.  She gets upset, but he is magnanimous, telling her to forget it, saying, “There are dumb people everywhere.”  Later, when he reads Mahtob a bedtime story about Aladdin, he mentions that the story is from Persia, now called Iran.  Mahtob says a friend of hers said that she, Mahtob, must hate Americans because her father is from Iran.  Moody tells her that he has lived in America for twenty years and is as American as apple pie.  We believe him when he says this.  More importantly, he believes it too.

In the next scene, Moody is on the phone with his sister, who is putting pressure on him to come to Iran. When he suggests that to Betty, she says that it’s too dangerous, recalling the hostage crisis and all that has been going on over there since.  They argue about it.  Finally, he takes the ultimate step. He picks up the Koran and makes this vow:  “I swear to you, on the sacred Koran, that you won’t be in any danger, that we’ll be back after two weeks, and that I wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize yours or Mahtob’s safety.”

With that assurance, she reluctantly agrees, and the next we see, they are arriving at the airport in Tehran. I don’t know about Betty, but I’m terrified already, just seeing them being greeted by Moody’s family, a whole mob of them, the ululating women dressed in chadors, covered in black cloth from head to toe, concealing everything except their hands and faces.  Everyone in Moody’s family is emotional, excessively so, to the point that it feels possessive.

Betty is already wearing a headscarf, but that does not suffice.  Moody’s sister presents Betty with what Moody is pleased to call a present but is an outfit for covering her head and body, and he insists that she put it on immediately.  He had told her that, as a foreigner, she wouldn’t have to dress like that, but admits he was mistaken.  She asks what would happen if she didn’t wear it, and he relays the question to his sister in Farsi.  His sister becomes furious, her face filled with anger while gesturing violently.  Moody translates, saying she must wear it or be arrested.

As they drive through Tehran, things are quite different from the serenity of their home back in Michigan. In addition to the hustle and bustle one would expect in any big city, we see the looming face of the Ayatollah Khomeini on huge posters while the call to prayer is blasting over the loudspeakers.

Then we see Moody’s brother Mammal talking to Moody about something in Farsi, his face filled with anger and gesturing emphatically.  This argument is interrupted when a woman wearing a chador gets out of an automobile with an assault rifle and starts running right at Betty.  The driver of the car, also with an assault rifle, does the same.  They are the police.  Moody tells Betty to cover her hair completely.  After they leave, Mammal, with that same angry face, angry voice, and angry gestures, tells her, “Every hair that is not covered is like a dagger aimed at the heart of our martyrs.”

That earlier remark by one of the doctors about Iran going back to the Stone Age comes back to haunt Moody.  He admits that his family are “basically country people.”  Later, when Moody is awakened as he is every morning for prayer, Betty asks him not to go.  Now he is the one to become angry, saying his family are the direct descendants of Mohammed.  Then with bitter sarcasm, he says to her, “Of course, to a sophisticated American that must seem primitive.”

After another scene in which three men in Moody’s family are yelling at him and gesturing, Moody tells Betty that he didn’t want to tell her this before, but he was fired from his job at the hospital. Betty says, “I can’t believe it,” meaning only that she never thought something like that could happen. But we literally don’t believe it.  She talks about going back to find out what happened, saying they can appeal. “It’s America,” she says, “We’ve got laws.” He says nothing.

Later, he tells her for certain that they are not going back to America.  Now it’s Betty’s turn to become angry, saying he was planning this all along. “You lied to me,” she says.  “You held the Koran and swore nothing was going to happen.”

Was he lying to her when he swore on the Koran?  Later, when she tells his family what he did, he says that he swore on the Koran because she wouldn’t have come otherwise. And yet, as this movie is presented to us, I think he was sincere at the time.  He was as American as he thought he was, but now he is too ashamed to admit in front of his family that he honestly meant what he said when he made her that promise, for that would be a sign of weakness on his part.  Better to say that he lied to her when he swore on the Koran and affirm his dominance over her.

Betty asks, “How can you consider raising Mahtob here with how they treat women?”  As if to show her just how they do treat women in Iran, Moody hits her in the face, knocking her down.  Then holding a fist in her face, he says, “You’re in my country now.  You’re my wife.  You do as I say.”

Except for her daughter, who sweetly says she’ll help her, Betty is on her own. Every night they say a prayer together, asking the Lord to keep them together and help them return to America.  Hopefully, the real God is not Allah, or they’re going to be in trouble.  Anyway, one day, against the rules, Betty answers the phone, and it’s her mother, who tells her to go to the American Interests section of the Swiss Embassy.  She and Mahtob make it to the Swiss Embassy, but she is told there is not much they can do. After all, it was the American CIA, not the Swiss government, that put the Shah of Iran on the Peacock Throne in the early 1950s in exchange for cheaper oil prices, so why should the Swiss get involved and risk their own hostage crisis?

When she and Mahtob get back home, Moody starts viciously beating Betty, telling her the next time she disobeys him he will kill her.  At this point, Betty realizes it’s time for the long con.  She uses her womanly wiles to talk Moody into moving out of his sister’s house and in with his brother Mammal and his wife Nasserine, the only member of his family that ever shows her a friendly face.

One day Moody tells Betty that she must wear a chador because his uncle, who is a mullah, is coming to dinner.  While they are eating, the uncle turns to Betty and asks, “Why you wear chador?” Betty replies that she thought she had too.  Moody says nothing.  The uncle continues, saying, “It is not necessary to wear it inside.  It is exaggerated with some people now.”

The poor thing.  On her first day in Iran, the police pointed assault rifles at her, with Mammal telling her that every hair on her head was like a knife stab in the heart of the martyrs, and this evening she is belittled for overdoing it, almost as if the mullah is saying, “What are you, some kind of religious nut?”

One problem Betty has that Carol never had in The Man I Married is recognizing cultural cues.  Carol never had any trouble knowing whom she could trust and whom she could not.  But in Iran, Betty often misreads the intentions of others, so that someone she thinks will help her betrays her, while someone she thinks will betray her turns out to be on her side.

Eventually, she is befriended by sympathetic Iranians, who don’t like the way things are. They start making plans for her escape.  In the meantime, Moody keeps beating Betty mercilessly, locking her up, suspicious of her every move. It appears the long con will take a little longer.  But not too much longer.  The Iranian that is arranging for her escape tells her that people like those in Moody’s family believe a girl is ready for marriage at the age of nine.  “Child brides,” he tells her, “are not unknown.” Mahtob was four years old when the movie began, and we have seen Moody’s family having a birthday party for her, having reached the age of six.

Betty finally gets a chance and makes a break for it.  She and Mahtob will have to go across the Zagros Mountains, guided by some Kurdish tribesmen, who, she is told, are mostly friendly.  One tribesman, an old man, tries to get really friendly, making a move on Betty while she is asleep, but Mahtob wakes her up.  Previously, a young tribesman grabbed Betty’s bag and emptied it out, taking her passport, small purse, watch, and wedding ring as Betty pleaded with him not to.  We worry he is going to sell them and abandon her. He is the one who runs the old tribesman off for molesting her. But then suspecting betrayal, he knows he must get Betty and Mahtob out of there immediately.

At one point along the way, he gets a horse for Betty and Mahtob to ride on as he leads them across the mountains.  On the other side, there is a car waiting for them.  He hands Betty a package containing the valuables he took from her for safekeeping.  He mounts the horse and waves to her, then turns and rides away, cutting a figure every bit as noble and heroic as any Scheherazade might have told of in One Thousand and One Nights.

Eventually, they get to Turkey.  A bus lets them off on a street that looks run down and deserted. But then she sees the Stars and Stripes waving in front of the American Embassy.  She says to Mahtob, “We’re home, baby.”

That is as happy an ending as we could have wanted.  But I couldn’t help imagining an epilogue, where the screen says, “One year later,” followed by another scene in the recreation room of the hospital where the two doctors are shooting another game of pool.  One of them says, “Remember that guy Mahmoody who used to work here?  I ran into his mother-in-law at the grocery store yesterday, and she was telling me about all the horrible things he did to his wife and daughter.”

“Yeah,” the other one replies.  “I heard about that.  Nine ball in the side pocket.”

God’s Not Dead (2014)

Once I have decided to watch a movie, for whatever reason, there is only one piece of information I want to know in advance, which is when the movie was made, because that provides the context that might be needed to appreciate the movie and understand it.  Of course, I already have other pieces of information in advance, such as the title, but basically, I like to watch the movie without having any more foreknowledge than necessary.  And thus it is that when I decided to watch God’s Not Dead, I did so with little appreciation for what I was letting myself in for, other than that afforded by the title and the date of production.

Regarding the title God’s Not Dead, it is obviously an allusion to Friedrich Nietzsche’s declaration that God is dead in The Joyful Wisdom and again in Thus Spake Zarathustra.  This can be interpreted in various ways, but I think we can eliminate two possibilities:  first, Nietzsche did not mean this literally, that God used to exist, but then he died; second, he did not mean that no one believes in God anymore.  One reasonable interpretation is that Nietzsche was talking about the intelligentsia, scientists and scholars, especially those that populate the universities.  Sure, the masses are just as gullible and superstitious as always, but the intellectual elite have dispensed with the concept of God long ago.  If we accept this interpretation, then God’s Not Dead is an appropriate title, for the anti-intellectual thrust of this movie is that the enemies of Christianity are primarily college professors, who sneer contemptuously at the devout.

Normally, when I review a movie, it is neither necessary nor desirable to talk about myself.  But this calls for an exception.  I majored in philosophy in the late 1960s, and my favorite philosopher was Nietzsche.  Needless to say, I was an atheist and have been ever since, although now my favorite philosopher is Arthur Schopenhauer.  It was just one university that I had experience with, and it was a long time ago, but I never experienced anything like what was depicted in this film.

The movie is set on a college campus.  Josh Wheaton is a freshman.  He signs up for an introductory course in philosophy.  He is warned by another student not to take the course from Professor Radisson, but he is undeterred.  During the first class, Radisson says he doesn’t want to waste time debating the existence of God, so he demands that every student in the class write “God is dead” on a piece of paper and sign it.  Josh refuses to sign it.  I must admit, Nietzschean atheist though I was, I wouldn’t have signed it either.

Radisson tells Josh that for twenty minutes in the next three classes, he will have to defend the proposition that God exists, with the implication that if he fails in this endeavor, he will flunk the course.  On the first day that he has to defend his belief that God is not dead, Josh essentially advances the cosmological argument for the existence of God, which is that an eternally existing God is needed to explain how a contingent world arose out of nothingness in a Big Bang.  On the second day, he advances the teleological argument for the existence of God, also known as the argument from design. The thrust of this argument is that God is needed to explain life.  Evolution alone will not suffice. On the third day, he addresses the problem of evil, in which the all the sin and suffering of this world seems to be inconsistent with the existence of an all-powerful, loving God.  His answer is that evil is the price we pay for having free will, which includes the freedom to accept Jesus as our savior, which will allow us to dwell in Heaven for eternity.  He also presents the moral argument for the existence of God, which is that God is needed as a foundation for morality.

Naïve me.  I thought that Radisson’s presentation on the first day was just a pose. I thought what would happen was that in the end, Radisson would give Josh an A for having the courage of his convictions, for being able to defend his views in front of the classroom, knowing that he was being judged by a militant atheist. Boy, was I wrong! That became clear after the first presentation, when Radisson becomes physical and threatening, presumably because he feels threatened by Josh. (Maybe I should have suspected something when I saw Radisson’s goatee, which is often seen in popular images of the Devil.)  After the third day, Josh gets the better of Radisson when he asks him why he hates God, and we find out that he hates God because God let his mother die when he was young. Then Josh asks him how he can hate someone who doesn’t exist. Golly! Radisson never thought of that.

The rest of the movie shows how sweet and wonderful Christians are, and how mean and selfish atheists are, including Chinese communists.  Of course, not everyone who believes in God is sweet and wonderful, only those who believe in the real God, because a Muslim kicks his daughter out of the house when he discovers she is an apostate who secretly listens to sermons on Christianity.

Radisson is hit by a car, receiving fatal injuries.  But that’s all right, because God kept Reverend Dave in town by not allowing any car he got into to start until he was needed at that intersection where Radisson was hit.  And so it is that in the long tradition of atheists in movies, Radisson repents and lets Jesus into his life just before he dies.

I learned something from watching this movie.  I learned that it was made by Pure Flix Productions, a company that specializes in the genre of Christian-friendly films.  At the beginning of this essay, I said that I try to keep my knowledge about a movie to a minimum before I watch it, except for such things as the title and the date in which the movie was made.  I now add one more item to that list.  From now on, before I watch a religious movie, I want to know if it was produced by Pure Flix, because I doubt that I will ever want to see another like this one.  It is one thing to watch religious movies, of which I have seen many, but it is quite another to sit through something like this.

Scott Foundas, writing for Variety, argues that the idea that Christianity is under siege is a bit paranoid:

Though you wouldn’t exactly guess it from the surveys that repeatedly show upwards of 80% of Americans identifying themselves as Christians, “God’s Not Dead” wants us to know that Christianity is under attack in the old U.S. of A. — attack from the liberal, “Duck Dynasty”-hating media, from titans of industry leading lives of wanton decadence, from observers of non-Christian faiths, and worst of all from the world of academia, with its self-important evolutionary scientists and atheistic philosophes.

But the statistic he cites is misleading.  Of the 80% that identify as Christians, many of them do not go to church, and of those that do, many of them give little thought to religious matters the rest of the week.  They are casual Christians, the default attitude of most characters in a typical movie.  It is those that believe too much or too little that Hollywood has been at pains to put in a bad light.

If Hollywood has been hard on atheists, it has been downright brutal when it comes to the religious, unless the movie is set in biblical times.  While atheists typically have to repent (or be miserable if they do not), devout and pious Christians rarely exist as major characters, unless they are mentally weak. Priests are treated well, as long as they are pragmatic and somewhat worldly, but when religious characters start taking things too seriously, they are portrayed as hypocrites, as in Rain (1932), as evil, The Night of the Hunter (1955), or as fools, The War of the Worlds (1953).  A good example of how both atheists and the godly are typically treated in a Hollywood movie is Inherit the Wind(1960).  While the atheist (Gene Kelly) in that movie is put down as being lonely and miserable by the agnostic (Spencer Tracy), no less, he still manages to have some dignity by the end of the movie, and thus he gets off light compared to the two religious characters. One of them is a reverend (Claude Akins), whose fanaticism has made his so heartless that he condemns most people to Hell, including his own daughter.  The other (Fredric March) is utterly humiliated, reduced to whimpering like a little child, while his wife, whom he calls “Mother,” rocks him in her arms, calling him “Baby.”

In the face of such cinematic history, it is easy to understand why there might be an audience for films in which a man can be genuinely religious in the modern world without suffering the ordinary indignities.  It is important that it be a man, by the way. Women have always been allowed to be religious in the movies, where it is implied that their purity of heart is the result of a foolish and impractical nature.  Their piety is tolerated by the men who understand the way the world really is.  That is why the hero of God’s Not Dead is Josh, a male college student, rather than a coed.  Having a woman be the defender of Christianity would not have stood the movie in stark contrast to the usual Hollywood depictions of religious characters the way having it be a man does.

And so, while I didn’t care for this movie, I understand why there might be a felt need for films of this sort.  I do not begrudge those who want to see movies like God’s Not Dead from having their Pure Flix, any more than I would begrudge them their places of worship.  We don’t have to watch these movies if we don’t want to, and if we do, we know it will be like sitting in Sunday School and not like attending a seminar in the philosophy of religion.

Blacula (1972)

Obviously, Blacula is a blaxploitation film.  It is about a vampire of African descent. The movie is all right at first, but then it goes stupid. The detective knows he is after a vampire, and he knows all the rules about killing vampires with sun exposure or a wooden stake through the heart, and he knows that a cross will make a vampire cringe. But when he goes to the place where he suspects that Blacula keeps his coffin, he goes with cops who are armed with nothing but pistols, which are ineffective. So cops get killed left and right. But the detective has a cross for himself, of course. Oh well, it could have been worse. Blacula could have been played by Christopher Lee in blackface.

Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976)

If you’ve seen one revisionist western, you’ve seen them all. It’s always the same old thing. The heroes are actually unheroic. That’s it. That’s the whole point, and we already knew that. To make matters worse, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson is directed by Robert Altman, who keeps running his MASH style of movie making into the ground: people talking over one another, lots of silliness, quirky characters. It worked great in MASH, but it won’t make silk out of a cow’s ear. This movie ranges from boring to irritating.

Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

In Only Angels Have Wings, a bunch of real men risk their lives on a nightly basis flying the mail over the Andes. The mail? I mean, it wouldn’t be so bad if they were risking their lives to save the world from evil Nazis or something like that. But is it worth putting your life on the line for a paycheck? It is if you’re in a Howard Hawks movie, where the men are men and the women are glad of it. Whenever one of the pilots dies, if someone mentions his name, they ask, “Who?”  Real men aren’t sentimental.

In the midst of all that, a new pilot shows up who is known to be a coward, and so naturally he has to prove himself by being a hero. Jean Arthur falls in love with Cary Grant five minutes after she meets him, but it takes him a whole week to fall in love with her, right after she shoots him.  For a real man, that’s what is known as foreplay.

Duel at Diablo (1966)

Duel at Diablo is one of the last movies in which Indians still scalp men, rape women, and subject their prisoners to cruel tortures, although some of the white men are portrayed in a pretty bad light too. One raped woman, Ellen Grange (Bibi Andersson), who ends up with a papoose, is married to Willard Grange (Dennis Weaver), who regards her as defiled. That’s fine with her, because she’d rather live with the Indian that raped her anyway.  She might as well, because now that she is regarded as an outcast, some white men try to rape her as well.

James Garner’s character, Jess Remsberg, is a squaw man whose wife was scalped by a white man, and he is out for revenge.  That man turns out to be Willard, who wanted to get even for what had happened to his wife.

Sydney Poitier is also in this movie.  Since race plays such a large role in this movie, we expect his race to also be a factor, but no one mentions it or reacts to it. Other than that, it’s the cavalry versus the Apaches, and what a slaughter! Not only do men die left and right, but many are wounded and crippled. Even the horses get killed.

Perhaps as a step toward the apologist Westerns of the seventies, there is reference to the way the Apaches are mistreated on the reservation at San Carlos. As the Apache prisoners are led away by the cavalry at the end of the movie, Jess makes a remark to the effect that the Apaches will probably go off the reservation again, because they have no reason not to.

Juliet of the Spirits (1965)

The title character in Juliet of the Spirits begins to suspect her husband is cheating on her, so she hires a private detective, who confirms that he is having an affair. However, she is trapped in the marriage because she loves her husband so much that she is afraid he will leave her. But her real problem is that she is trapped in a Federico Fellini movie for over two hours, which was produced under the assumption that if you have a lot of strange people in a movie saying weird things, and then fill the movie with all kinds of symbolic stuff, people will think it is profound and deep. She thinks that it is better to have a husband who does not love her and who cheats on her than to have no husband at all. And I guess she believes it is better to be in a Fellini movie than no movie at all. Wrong on both counts.

Diary of a Country Priest (1951)

The title character in Diary of a Country Priest is in ill health. He cuts out all meat and vegetables from his diet, which consists of wine with sugar in it and stale bread. So we wonder, Is he unable to eat because he is sick, or is he sick because he does not eat? Another priest tries to get him to eat more, but to no avail. At one point in the movie, he sees God. It made me think of Bertrand Russell’s remark to the effect that one man will get drunk and see pink elephants, while another will fast for a week and see God: both are abnormal perceptions arising from an abnormal physiology. We wonder why he does not go to a doctor, and finally he does. It is stomach cancer. He dies.

Sands of the Kalahari (1965)

When I first saw Sands of the Kalahari, I figured it was inspired by Robert Audrey’s African Genesis:  A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man.  Audrey made the case that man had evolved from Australopithecus africanus, a violent, murderous primate.  His book soon became all the rage.  However, African Genesis was published in 1961, whereas the novel, The Sands of the Kalahari by William Patrick Mulvihill, was published in 1960.  On the other hand, the theory that man had evolved from killer apes had originally been proposed by Raymond Dart.  Audrey interviewed Dart and wrote an article about Dart’s theories in The Reporter in 1955, so perhaps that was Mulvihill’s inspiration after all.

In the movie, a group of passengers are on a small airplane that crashes in the middle of the desert in southern Africa.  They manage to find shelter, water, and food in a mountainous area, which also is inhabited by a troop of baboons.  One of the characters, O’Brian (Stuart Whitman), who has a hunting rifle, decides that his chances of survival will improve if he wipes out the competition, which includes not only the baboons, but also the other survivors, except for Grace (Susannah York), who also functions as something worth competing for.

One of the men he runs off manages to cross the desert and make it to civilization.  He returns in a helicopter to rescue those who have survived, but O’Brian refuses to go with them, presumably because he would be tried for murder.  He eventually runs out of bullets.  As the baboons become more menacing, he decides to fight their leader with only his bare hands, eventually killing the baboon with a rock he managed to grab.  Earlier in the movie, the point had been made that the leader of the troop was the one that got first access to all the females.  After he kills his foe, other baboons begin to approach in a manner suggesting that they recognize him as their new leader.  In fact, we suspect the approaching baboons are females.  Will O’Brian indulge?  The second time I saw this movie was on the Late Show.  As the female baboons closed in around O’Brian, some joker in the television studio played the Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan yell.  For that matter, before Tarzan met Jane, did he indulge?

The movie is a little dated now. When it first came out, the idea that man was a killer ape was new.  As a result, the author of the screenplay probably felt it necessary to have several characters drive home the point that man is in many ways like the baboons. Today, when the expression “alpha male” has become commonplace, if not trite, such repetitive, explicit comparisons to the baboons now seem overdone. Also, since the group has plenty of water, food, and shelter, the idea that several of them, and not just O’Brian, would start thinking and acting like baboons after only two days is a stretch.

Contact (1997)

Long before I saw the movie Contact, I had known people who made some sort of connection between intelligent life on other planets and the existence of God.  It’s hard to say what that connection was exactly, because no one ever presented it as a valid argument, consisting of premises about extraterrestrial beings and ending with the conclusion that God exists.  No such argument was ever forthcoming, because it would have been palpably absurd on its face, even to those who were advancing it.  Instead, they just seemed to feel that the existence of aliens had religious significance, but they could never quite to bring themselves to spell it out.

Apparently, it was people just like that who made Contact.  The movie is mainly about making contact with extraterrestrials through the transmission of signals through space, but religious stuff keeps showing up, not because there is any logical connection between the two, but simply because people in the movie seem to feel that connection, even though that feeling never seems to rise to the level of coherent thought.  Mostly what we get is the association of ideas.

For example, Jodie Foster plays Dr. Ellie Arroway, an astronomer.  When Ellie was a young girl, she had a ham radio.  At one point, she asks her father if she can contact her deceased mother through her radio.  And after her father dies, she tries to contact him through her radio.  So an association is made between radio transmissions and life after death.  We regard this as merely a child’s desperate hope of finding her parents again, which would be just fine as a stand-alone scene.  But further such childlike associations recur throughout the movie.

While listening for signals from outer space in Puerto Rico, she meets Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey), who is an almost-priest whose spirituality expresses itself as a concern for human values that he believes are being jeopardized by technology.  Ellie and Palmer have sex, and in the afterglow, during a little pillow talk, he says:  “So I was lying there, just looking at the sky. And then I felt something. I don’t know. All I know is that I wasn’t alone. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t scared of nothing, not even dying. It was God.”

There it is in a nutshell:  He looks up at the sky; he has a feeling of the sublime; so there must be a God.

By this time in her life, Ellie has become an atheist, one of a long list of movie atheists destined to find God in the final reel.  She says, “And there’s no chance that you had this experience because some part of you needed to have it?”

Her remark is to the point, of course.  Most people have a religious need.  That need is satisfied by whatever their parents told them when they were children, and that suffices for life.  If they lose their faith in the teachings of childhood, their religious need will manifest itself in something else, sooner or later.  But some people have no religious need at all.  They simply quit believing whatever they were raised to believe, and nothing ever takes its place.  They look up at the sky, and all they see are stars.  If they think about life on other planets, it inspires no religious awe.

As a way of forestalling objections, Palmer says, “I’m a reasonably intelligent guy, but this…. My intellect couldn’t even touch this.”  And that’s the end of that.  His epiphany transcended such things as reason and common sense, so it cannot be subjected to critical thought.

Later in the movie, when the world finds out that signals from the vicinity of the relatively close star Vega show signs of intelligent life, we are informed that attendance at religious services has risen.  And we see Robert Novak on Crossfire saying, “Even a scientist must admit there are some pretty serious religious overtones to all this.”

It would be tedious for me to object to every piece of poppycock in this movie, but I cannot let this one pass.  A lot of religious people believe that intelligent life on this planet can be explained only if there is a God.  Let us assume they are right.  In that case, there being another planet with intelligent life on it is no big deal.  What God did once, he could easily do again.  On the other hand, atheists believe that evolution can completely explain intelligent life on this planet.  Let us assume they are right.  In that case, evolution could produce intelligent life on another planet just as it did on this one.  In either event, one more planet is just one more planet.

Ellie and Palmer get into a debate about the existence of God.  She appeals to the principle of Occam’s razor:  “Occam’s Razor is a basic scientific principle which says: Things being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be right. So what’s more likely? An all-powerful God created the universe, then decided not to give any proof of his existence? Or that he doesn’t exist at all, and that we created him so we wouldn’t feel so small and alone.”

Palmer says he would not want to live in a world where God does not exist.  Ellie, in turn, says she would need proof.  Palmer asks her if she can prove that her father loved her.  She is stumped.  I don’t know why, because all she has to do is apply Occam’s razor one more time.  Her father acted as though he loved her, and the simplest explanation for that is that he really did.  God, on the other hand, acts as though he doesn’t care.

Anyway, it turns out that the aliens have sent us schematics for building a transportation machine that will allow someone from Earth to visit that planet orbiting Vega.  After a lot of paranoid politics and neo-luddite terrorism, Ellie gets to go.  She zips through a wormhole and ends up in a world based on what is in her mind, memories of a beach in Pensacola and of her father.  The alien who has taken on the image of her father explains everything to her, how lots of civilizations from different planets have interacted this way.  Ellie wants to know why more people from Earth can’t see what she’s seen.  The alien answers, “This is the way it’s been done for billions of years.”

In other words, this advanced civilization does not ask why things have to be this way, and so Ellie shouldn’t ask why either.  We are not supposed to question the ways of the aliens just as we are not supposed to question the ways of God.

When Ellie gets back, it turns out that while she has been gone for eighteen hours by her time, only a split second has passed here on Earth.  This is the reverse of the usual twin paradox, in which more time passes for the people on Earth than it does for the astronaut traveling at speeds near that of light, but the reason for this anomaly soon becomes clear.  It is so that her story can be doubted.  Because she ostensibly was only gone for a split second, a lot people don’t believe her story about what happened.  In particular, Michael Kitz (James Woods), who is sort of the villain of the piece, calls her story into question.  He says she just hallucinated it, that the whole thing is a hoax.  He demands that Ellie produce proof, and she cannot.  He appeals to Occam’s razor, no less, and indignantly asks if we are supposed to accept her story on faith.

Now we know why this movie has the aliens demanding that just one person go on that trip to Vega instead of having the Vegans come to Earth.  It puts Ellie in the same position as someone who believes in God but cannot prove it.  Had the Vegans come to Earth, everyone would have seen them on television.  There would have been no doubt as to their existence.  But this way, the aliens leave no proof of their existence just as God has left no proof of his.  So all the objections earlier enunciated by Ellie about God are turned against her with respect to the aliens.  Ellie’s response to these objections harks back to the mystical experience Palmer had while stargazing, almost a beatific vision.

Since this is the way things have been done for billions of years, then here is the way it must have all begun.  There was this first ancient civilization, call it Civilization 1.  They discovered there was another civilization on another planet more primitive than their own, call it Civilization 2.  So, they decided to let exactly one person from Civilization 1 make physical contact with exactly one person from Civilization 2.  They knew that the one person so contacted would not be believed by most people from Civilization 2, except for those willing to take things on faith.  Why the people of Civilization 1 thought faith was important, we don’t know and never shall.  When Civilization 2 discovered a Civilization 3, exactly one person from among the faithful of Civilization 2 made physical contact with exactly one person from Civilization 3, and he was not believed by those of Civilization 3, except by those who have faith.  And they did it this way because that was the way Civilization 1 did it, and people of faith know they are not supposed to question why things are the way they are.  Then Civilization 3 did the same with Civilization 4, and so on and so on, until we get to our present civilization here on Earth.  And it all makes about as much sense as a religion in which God leaves no proof of his existence and then requires faith in him for salvation, without which one is condemned to the eternal fires of Hell.  Why God thinks faith is important, we don’t know and never shall.

For those who are inclined to infuse the existence of aliens from other planets with religious significance, this movie is for them.  For those who have no need of religion, this movie will make them feel like an alien from another planet.