I've begun watching the early episodes of a show called "Breaking Bad," about a high-school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque whose response to a life crisis is to start cooking meth with one of his ne'er-do-well ex-students. I thought it would be a nihilistic exploration of a disintegrating personality, but instead the script turns at every point on the central character's convincing moral choices under unbearable pressure. Not good moral choices, but believable ones, and demonstrated with economy in a fine script.The main actor spends very little time explaining himself. His sidekick, the young student, is struggling harder to put into words what one human being owes to another. In one episode they face two tasks, one even more horrifying than the other. After quarreling for a bit over who should do which, the young man suggests a coin toss, which the teacher loses. The young man takes care of his own horrible job, only to find the older man procrastinating about his, which provokes the outraged outburst that "coin toss is sacred, man." When you expose yourself in good faith to the outcome of a tool of chance, you live with the result. You hang onto that moral precept even though you seem to have left the world of virtue far behind, and the coin toss is about profound crimes that are disintegrating your identity.
In some part of us, we know there have to be moral laws even if we ostensibly think the universe is a vast, materialist, meaningless void.
Well, and especially if you are going to violate the moral laws of the universe, it would be wise to treat the Lady Fortuna with the respect due to the sacred. You are, more than the man who obeys the law, placing yourself in her hands.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of such shows, Uncle Jimbo at BLACKFIVE put me on to the show "Sons of Anarchy," which I've watched on Amazon for the last while. It's extremely violent, but also clearly Shakespearian in its structure: not just because of the periodic Hamlet references, but in terms of the plot elements it prefers.
ReplyDeleteIt has an interesting take on honor culture, taking the motorcycle club as an example of one. I think it does a good job of showing what the advantages of such a culture are especially in the modern world; but it is clear about the disadvantages as well.
No question; some part of your thoughts have to be shielded from the "meaningless void" if you are to think at all. Somewhere in that core the rules that make you you are still heard.
ReplyDeleteVery Tom Stoppard in your analysis.
ReplyDeleteMore C.S. Lewis than Tom Stoppard, but I'm amazed lately at how the central premise of "The Abolition of Man" seems to come up daily, as more and more Americans are trying to figure out how to make sense of a completely amoral or materialistic universe. They can may it make sense to themselves from some kind of distant, abstract point of view, but it's simply not possible to live that way, as we discover as soon as we hit a bump in the road.
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