The Dark Knight

*WARNING* This Post Contains Spoilers!! *WARNING*.

Un-Politics and the Evil Genius
by Jonathan Heaps

The opening scene of Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight" is a meditation on the balance between the intelligent conceptions of the individual-as-genius and the instrumental effectiveness of social cooperation. Robbing a bank, while not the most amiable of cooperative endeavors, does require collaboration to succeed. However, the implicit or explicit agreements that provide the dynamism and cohesion of such an enterprise need not be honored for that enterprise to be efficacious. In other words, a sufficiently intelligent (and in this case, nigh genius) betrayal of the communal-yet-criminal understanding allows the master-mind to reap the benefits of social collaboration without having to remain beholden to the internal expectations thereof. This is unsettling enough when an individual agent turns his back on the shared understanding of the group, but The Dark Knight's mysterious villain, The Joker orchestrates a more chilling dismantling of human accords.

Grumpy: I'm bettin' The Joker told you to kill me soon as we loaded the cash.
The Joker: No, no. I kill the bus driver.
Grumpy: Bus driver? What bus driver?
[a school bus drives through the wall and kills Grumpy]

In convincing his fellow robbers to betray each other, the structure of their collaborative activity crumbles. Instead of a single, grand act of betrayal in which the one acts against the many, he allows his collaborators' greed and malice to do his work for him. He does not so much manipulate the fracturing as provide the setting for its inevitability. However, the manic conceptions of his own mind are still in play. That each particular betrayal within the group of robbers only occurs after some necessary task has been completed demonstrates this. The alarm is shut off; BANG, you're dead. The vault is open; BANG, you're dead. The victory is clearly with The Joker's machinations of disorder, which are a product of a powerful individual mind. The interplay of the individual mind and will with the potent instrument of human collaboration is the thematic engine of The Dark Knight. In fact, the opening scenes of the film are a case study in what The Joker will reveal to be his intelligent-and-insane philosophy of un-politics.

In the following scene, a drugs-and-weapons deal between mobsters and (recurring villain) The Scarecrow is interrupted by both Batman-wannabes and Batman himself. In an inversion of the scene before, we find a more pedestrian form of collaboration (in this case, a vigilante gang) undermined by it's more radical and radically individual inspiration. Batman helps police capture both the criminals and the vigilantes. Motivated by a desire to participate in the idea of Batman as a force to overcome evil without the constraints of official justice, these faux Batmen risk their lives in a fashion that would be courageous if it weren't so bumbling. They clearly lack the genius of the true Batman, but they might have some success through the strength of their collaboration. None the less, the power of Batman's genius (intellectual, as well as financial and physical) can become abstracted from Batman-as-individual and become Batman-as-ideal, the dynamism for the instrument of social cooperation. The meaning of Batman can be as efficacious as the individual, Batman.

The Joker: Are you the real Batman?
Brian: No.
The Joker: No? Then why do you dress like him?
Brian: He's a symbol... that we don't have to be afraid of scum like you.
The Joker: Yeah, you do, Brian. You *really* do!

To recur to The Joker, one can imagine how The Joker-as-ideal might be a dynamic factor for Gotham's criminal element. Now, by The Joker-as-ideal, we don't mean exactly The Joker himself in his singular particularity, but rather the principle of absolute rebellion incarnated by The Joker. In order to oppose the accepted order of law and society, a criminal must identify with some kind of devil-may-care destructive impulse. This ideal can provide the strength needed for his or her combative way of life. A Joker "type" can provide the dynamic idea to breathe new life into a criminal enterprise. In a further unfolding of the theme presented in the opening scenes the The Dark Knight, we see The Joker present himself to the criminal element of Gotham as a savior from their woes under the reign of Batman, both as ideal and reality. If legal order has a hero who's reality is effective and idea is powerful, then the illegal order ought to have one too.

However, the opposition of criminal enterprise to the accepted order of law is not exactly an abandonment of the principle of order, per se. The primary reward for crime is currency, the value of which is guaranteed by social convention. Interestingly enough, the direct opposition presented by organized crime in the world of Gotham is also a kind of affirmation of the value inherent in official forms of organization, like an economy. So, though a community of nefarious intent might appeal to a principle or ideal of disregard for social order, it's presence as organized and participating in the economic order (broadly construed) betrays the shallowness of their commitment to destruction. However, if taken to its full fruition, the The Joker-as-ideal, incarnated in The Joker-as-concrete-individual will ultimately become the enemy of both structures of order, official and criminal. The good of order, found in both communities, can't bear the destructive force of his genius and strength. That power comes from an absolute commitment to the dismantling of society. The Joker's commitment comes with sufficient foresight to use the latent power of society as an instrument against itself, much like in a bank robbery gone "wrong."

Harvey Dent is to the official order of Gotham what The Joker is to the criminal order and Batman is to the disenchanted, unofficial order. Dent believes in the absolute universality of the official order. As a result, the decay of the official order is unbearable for him and he makes it is singular vision to redeem that societal structure. He will operate to the letter and full extent of the law and he will risk himself as an individual. However, though he might not be able to tolerate Batman under ideal circumstances, Dent recognizes the complexity of Gotham as a community attempting to emerge from the depths of a precipitous decline. The profound "success" of Gotham's criminal enterprises has factionalized what was a unified order of benevolence. The wealthy geniuses (Wayne Enterprises) supported the development of the community in collaboration with those in public office. Corruption inverted that social understanding and left the official order's status as benevolent ambiguous amongst the community. The unofficial work of Batman might provide sufficient stability to Gotham's structures of benevolent order that the official can regain its status as the universal source of social collaboration.

Harvey Dent is willing to bear with Batman-as-individual until the good he offers is realized. Eventually, Batman must hang up his utility belt and allow the official institutions to regain their place. Bruce Wayne might return to less harrowing acts of benevolence, primarily involving his check book and prestige. Batman-as-ideal provides a trickier problem. On the one hand, Batman as a source of dynamic meaning for the community stokes the belief that evil can be overcome. On the other, his presence reminds the community that the official institutions of order cannot be counted on, are fragile and susceptible to corruption, etc. In fact, because the community has already bought into the Batman ideal, the official institutions will need Batman to relinquish his mantle and pass it to a new individual capable of being as inspiring but who represents the recovered universality of the official structures of order. Lucky for Dent, Batman needs to be relieved of that mantle just as much as he desires to pick it up. The concrete Batman can't live up to the Batman ideal. Trying to will eventually end his life, because after all, Batman isn't a superhero. He's a crime fighter.

Being the Dark Knight of Gotham has some advantages over being the White Knight of Gotham, as Dent might aspire to be in the role of District Attorney. Batman is in opposition to nefarious structures of order (and disorder), but he does so in a way that lacks the hypocrisy inherent in a Government's self image. Government must view itself as absolute over that which it governs. It is the universal representation of the dynamic order of that place or people. However, the presence of crime or rebellion demands that the Government behave as a faction engaging in opposition of some kind, which an absolute universal would never have to do. Government is thus forced into a doubleness. It's self-consciousness is as universal, but its concrete reality is factional or schismatic, depending on the problem it faces. Batman's self-consciousness is more honest. He is a faction among confused and warring communities of collaboration. He defies the law to protect the law. The doubleness need not be hidden for Batman. The Dark Knight can be particular and fallible, because he is caught in between. The White Knight of Gotham is doomed because no person can attain the absolute universal perfection demanded of the official order. Like Dent says of those who pursue uncompromising justice, "(we) either die a hero or live long enough to see (ourselves) become the villain." In martyrdom, the White Knight as individual and as ideal can be united in the community's perception.

There's a problem though.

(to be continued...)

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There Will Be Blood

Kingdoms, Christendoms and The Market
by Jonathan Heaps

Daniel Plainview is alone in the desert. That simple fact alludes to the grandest of Christian and Biblical tales. The punishment of Cain. Israel's exodus from Egypt. David tending his flocks and hiding from Saul. Jesus' fasting and temptation. Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus. St. Anthony and the commencement of monasticism. The opening scenes of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (loosely based on Upton Sinclair's book Oil!) call to mind most fervently the story of Jacob wrestling with the Angel of God. Having severed himself from his society, a man (whether Daniel or Jacob) struggles with a mighty force he has found in the desert. Both leave the encounter with a blessing. Both leave with a limp.

After a millenia and a half of Kingdom and Christendom, a new beast stirs in the halls of the industrial revolution. Whether the Kindgom had been empire, feudalism or democracy and teh Christendom had been Catholic, Protestant or Evangelical, now the Market towers over the world. When the Marxist distrusts it or the Capitalist applauds it, they both confirm its preeminence. When a new social order emerges, a kind of person who exemplifies the virtues of that order follows not far behind. The Citizen, Lord or Statesman is the essence of his Kingdom incarnate. Likewise, The Saint, Priest or Monk represents for us those who fully become the person for whom Christendom has prepared the world. Daniel Plainview is emblematic of the priest and citizen of a world shaped by the Market.

The secular state is largely ignored by this tale. In so far as Blood is a thematic meditation on the frontier (which is both socio-economic and geographic), the film is an exploration of human life with little or no law. Democracy perhaps creates the very conditions of possibility for kind of world that spans Plainview by its emphasis on freedom. The lack of social structure provided by democracy, especially a democracy pressing westward, opens a social space for a competitive profiteering way of life. If we don't socially express a "greater good" beyond the naive belief in a providential "invisible hand," then Machiavellian self-service just is the summum bonum.

Christendom of the period, on the other hand, receives its due attention. The force for social order in Boston, California is Eli Sunday's "Church of the Third Revelation." From pulling away from a post-sale prayer to undermining Eli's attempt to bless the new oil derrick, Plainview cannot bear the imposition of religion upon his operations. The Market will, however, do business with Christianity. Christianity's pre-determined goals create demand within its own structures. We want buildings, hymnals, vestments, etc. Eli wants a new building and Daniel provides, with a promise of $5000 more dollars to come. This promise is never kept. The Market must dominate religion. It cannot be beholden to religion, not just because they have incommensurable ends, but because there is no virtue internal to the Market that demands it treat the stranger with honor.

This would all be true enough and tale enough for our times. There Will Be Blood does not just posit that the Market has followed the state and the church or simply emerged in their recession. It suggests that Plainview is a newer, more powerful version of Eli. Blood puts forward the businessman as the charlatan and huckster of a new age. It is a role the Preacher used to be sufficient to fill, but these are more sophisticated times. The simple folks need a leader and that leader lies to them to keep the order and fatten his billfold. If we add that they (and we) really don't need a leader, we've got dialectical materialism and Marx.

There Will Be Blood's story left the insulting impression that it did not take the Church very seriously. Eli is conniving but never truly as cunning as Daniel. The congregants are portrayed with a kind of shuffling, misty-eyed disdain. They are sincere in the way only suckers and sheep can be. Plainview's workers have the benefit of perspective. They know that they are risking life, limb and health in the search for a paycheck. Their suffering holds no mystical meaning. It is instrumental. "Superstition," as Daniel calls it, dupes the religious follower. The worker knows the game and chooses it without the comfort of duplicitous promise.

In one scene, though, the tenacious capacity of Christianity to unmask the market is remembered. Plainview's baptism, that he had meant to be purely perfunctory, becomes a moment of sincere confession. He has abandoned his son, deafened by Plainview's own industry. He does repent of the one sin he cannot ignore. H.W. Plainview comes to the desert to join his father again. The baptism scene will be paralleled when a financially desperate Eli Sunday admits his own hypocrisy before his is unceremoniously baptized in blood by a bowling pin. The "New Atheists," such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, ought to remember that unmasking the other's motives by suspicion can cut both ways. After all, they cannot seem to account for why, if religion is so obviously false, so many still flock to it. So many still defend it with ferocity and intelligence.

In terms of pure oppositional interaction, P.T. Anderson's film may be right that religion will, in the end, be killed by commerce. In so far as they are factions trying to "win" society, the Market lacks the self-deception and limitations of Christendom. The Market will denude religion of its pretense and then snuff it out once it has no resources left to offer. However, in so far as Christianity is a body of believers in unity with each other and the person of Christ, There Will Be Blood leaves space for religion to survive the isolating effects of the culture wars. Even the formal elements of Blood as a film speak to how their ways of life isolate Plainview and Sunday. Other characters just lurk around the edge of the frame. Even when they speak, the camera hangs on Day-Lewis and Dano in reverence of the characters' narcissism.

The world of opposition and social combat elevates men to pinnacles of wealth, honor and pleasure. It is, of course, lonely at the top. Plainview "want(s) no one else to succeed," and so tastes victory alone. He has no friends. He drives away his only son, both by mishandling H.W.'s new deafness and by being unable to see his son's genuine passion for the craft of oil-work. The one man he welcomes into his life turns out to be another (but inferior) opportunist, merely pretending to be Plainview's half-brother. Daniel's limp, in a brilliant bit of physicality on the part of Day-Lewis, worsens as his success grows and his loneliness intensifies. By the end of the film, he is nearly crippled. Plainview's bum leg is the biological manifestation of his bum soul.

Anderson does hint at the small decency at work in Plainview's nature. His love for H.W. is sincere, if not often full of wisdom. Lest we think this is some kind of fluke, he also subtly advocates for Eli's sister, who is being beaten by her religiously zealous father. Plainview is a man who genuinely cares for children and family. Yes, he is lonely and these people present little or no threat to him. This could be just one more exploitation, but of an emotional sort. Still, Day-Lewis portrays this characteristic as a compulsion. He can't help but be this way, despite his pathological need to "win." We don't easily forget our moral frameworks, even when vice commands us thoroughly.

This film is a tragedy not just because someone dies at the end. It is tragic because we see two men who value victory and success over unity and community with others. Or, put another way, these men define victory and success as something other than unity and community with others. Churches seem lured into the competition and collusion that Eli and Daniel perpetrate all the time. Evangelicals have become a much-seduced demographic in secular elections. The "christian" music industry defined itself as opposition to the secular market and yet colluded with it to meet its goals. Now, a major secular label owns every major "christian" record label. It's a demographic play and advertising ploy. The successful "christian" university often cannot maintain that identity, if it ever had such a thing to begin with. We will lose when we compromise because for the Market, there is no compromise. We ought not be at odds with a consumer culture. We ought to defy the Market by our studied indifference to it. We don't need its opportunity, because we have a promise. We don't need luck, because we have hope. Read more!

No Country for Old Men

We considered Oscar season the prime time to begin publishing to this site. It provided two practical benefits. One is that there is a general interest in films at this time. And rightly so, just as there is a general interest in basketball in March. The other is that the announcement of Oscar nominations would provide us with a focused set of films from this year's exciting batch of releases. Otherwise, we might have been lost in a sea of excellent movies to choose from. To kick us off, Jonathan Heaps has written this piece about the Coen Brother's most recent endeavor, "No Country for Old Men," which has garnered 8 nominations, including Best Director and Best Film.

No Man Above The Law

By Jonathan Heaps

Rousseau gives an example of how collaboration leads to conflict in the formation of society. Four primitive men come together in the woods to hunt a stag, which will provide more than enough food for all of them. One of the four, however, spots a hare. He dives after the hare, grasping it and breaking its neck. He has enough food for himself, but the stag was startled by his attack and now has escaped. The other three men are left in a lurch. One can assume what fate befell the renegade hunter. But this is a tale of the origins of order. What of the man who abandons collaboration and order into which he has been thrust without a choice? On his view, participation in the common good is purely accidental. His membership in the human order is as capricious as the flip of a coin. His name, in the Coen Brother’s film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel No Country for Old Men, is Anton Chigurh.

The opening sequence of No Country expresses the precipice on which it seems humanity rests these days. The land is timeless, unchanging in its constant flux and erosion. The earth is as it always has been, only scarcely marked by the presence of human artifacts. The voice over of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, as portrayed with a captivating amalgam of fortitude, dismay and humor by Tommy Lee Jones, portrays a man who finds his identity and worth in his connection to a tradition of men working law enforcement. The tradition, though, has broken. Men seem to have not just violated, but also abandoned altogether the rules of ordered society. How can a man, who represents that order do his work in that world? How can he even be himself? If the world has left the story-that-gives-us-meaning behind, how can we be anything except a spectator, watching ourselves antiquate in a place more despicable than we can bear?

Enter Chigurh, a man who toys with human trust because he has chosen to disregard its value. When we first meet him, he murders a policemen who believes Chigurh is restrained and under control. Chigurh drives off in the policemen’s cruiser and uses its significance as an authoritative symbol to take the life of another trusting person. Chigurh’s second victim follows instructions to the bitter end, the victim deceived by the meaning he perceives in a police cruiser. It is a meaning we grant through our cooperation as a society. This is the great terror of Anton Chigurh. Not only can he not be trusted to join into the grand cooperation of culture and life together, but he also willingly manipulates our naïve submission to social norms against our best interest.

Llewelyn Moss too is an independent man, but he exerts his independence within the space provided by society. As a result, he is still responsive to the call of something like “the greater good.” Against what he knows is his own best interest, he heads out in the early hours of the morning to give water to a man dying from gunshot wounds acquired in a drug deal gone bad. We get the impression that Moss has lead an unconventional life, but his care for his wife is sincere and bordering on parental. In fact, it seems that Moss has taken the drug money primarily to provide for Carla Jean. One gets the impression he could have carried on hunting away the days in the hills and snuggling his remaining nights away in his trailer with his young bride. On the other hand, if she can profit from the ill fate of men driven to disaster by their avarice, what shame is there in that?

Chigurh is the hulking terror of the Ubermensch and Moss is the deluded notion of self-sufficient individuality our taciturn heroes of the “Western” film have embodied for nearly 100 years of cinema. I have heard not a few people criticize No Country for presenting one more irrational killer amongst a stale pile of genre films, such as 1991's Silence of the Lambs, including its prequels and sequel. But, unlike Hannibal Lector, Chigurh is not just an aesthete for whom killing is but one more luxury. Instead, for him killing is not imbued with any value, because his values are only self-given, indeed only self-willed. He wants the briefcase and no one will thwart his plan to get it. Indeed, promises made in pursuit of the money are kept even after its acquisition, as in the demise of Carla Jean Moss. He is the full fruition and incarnation of Sheriff Bell’s anxiety that the Texas lawman is a vestige of a world that no longer lives. That he himself is no longer meaningful against a kind of evil that is absolute, because its rejection of value is absolute.

So, in some ways, the trajectory of the story is already present to us if we are thoughtful about its themes from the beginning. Moss has to die, because the kind of man he is rages all too insufficiently, too cooperatively. Carla Jean’s innocence is defined precisely against an inherited moral framework; so she is not immune to Chigurh’s wrath-less violence. Sheriff Bell can only watch and it is no coincidence that he is always a step behind the action. What could he even do? Sheriff Bell has seen enough and he plans to retire. He visits his uncle, who, we are to understand, was paralyzed while working as a sheriff. Bell shares his grief at the emergence of a world he doesn’t understand and a God who seems so absent. He feels ashamed at quitting and indeed thinks God is ashamed of him. His uncle reminds him of the reality of things; you can’t know what God thinks of you and the world is as evil as it ever was. Bell’s grandfather was gunned down in a cold and mindless murder, back when these parts were a geographic, as well as spiritual, frontier. “It's no different,” Ellis reminds his nephew.

Perhaps though, Chigurh is not the bold and terrific pioneer of human strength that we suppose him to be from the beginning. While I appreciate that the horror of the Nietzschean hero is shown unflinchingly in this film, I delight even more in the idea that the great and evil man has misunderstood both morality and chance. Every man finds himself in the sublime chasm between both, even the supposed “Over-Man.” Despite the appearance of being an unstoppable force, Chigurh has been thwarted with greater and greater frequency as the film goes on. After all, it is the Mexican drug dealers who take Moss’s life, not Chigurh. His merciless and ostensibly amoral and instrumental control of human lives is profoundly imperfect. Increasingly, people fall victim to the tyranny of his failures.

Carla Jean, though, conquers him most completely. When he offers her the chance of survival, her fate hanging in the result of a coin toss, she refuses. She demands he take responsibility for the reality of his moral agency. He replies that his moral agency is itself a product of chance. It is the petulant response of a child; “I never asked to be born!” Chigurh’s resentiment is showing. She trumps his objection performatively. By refusing to acquiesce her will to chance, she demonstrates the will’s power in the face of it. However, she still has to die, as Hegel predicts, because her willingness unto death is her victory.

Ultimately, chance takes its fickle revenge upon Chigurh, nearly killing him in a car accident. The final scenes of Chigurh’s tale remind us that no man, no matter how forceful his will, is above morality or chance. That dialectic perhaps most defines our nature. The Nietzschean hero is the dream of those who resent their nature. It is the manifestation of their aspiration to godhood; to the pride of Lucifer’s sin. So where does that leave us? Chigurh is not above the law or the fray, which we find comforting, but the world still seems to hold us “overmatched.” Bell’s dream at the end is as much an Aesop-ian moral as a Coen Brother’s film will offer. We live in a world of grand, simultaneous moral demand and turpitude, but we are likewise subject to those careening turn-of-events we call “fortune.” Both 1996’s Fargo and No Country end with a picture of domestic, familial peace. The message of the visual is that though the world contains great evil, for which few answers seem available, we face it not alone.

In No Country's final scene, we also get the dream imagery of a father going on ahead into the darkness, carrying the fire. This imagery is two-fold. Firstly, for the novel’s author, Cormac McCarthy, "carrying the fire" is language used in his book The Road for a kind of human dignity and goodness. It is safe to assume a similar meaning here, as Bell’s recounting of his dream is taken directly from the novel’s text. Beyond that, however, is the idea that our community extends over not just lateral geography or vertical spirituality, but it is temporally transcenden as well. Our position within a tradition of men and women who have gone before and faced the sublimity of human living is what defends our courage from accusations of naïve optimism or foolhardy brashness. This is why we venerate the Saints, because they have carried the fire into the dark.

The genealogist will dismiss Christian morality for being the product of a particular tradition. The fundamentalist will dismiss tradition for obscuring the universal, cosmological Christian moral realities. The genealogist never escapes his or her own particularity, because perspectivalism is itself a perspective. The fundamentalist excuses him or her self from the authentic moral life, because they are all too willing to choose some perspective to statically suppose as universal. The fundamentalist is destroyed by the genealogist, but the genealogist is destroyed by himself. The Tradition of the Church is not obscuring us from the moral realities. Neither is the Tradition of the Church capriciously asserting its will. Instead, we are creatively participating in God’s orchestration of history. The essence of morality and “fortune” are felt only in the particular, so we ought not fear being “this people of God.” The juggernauts of our age might take our lives, but they will not have victory over us, because we have chosen God and God is good.

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In the beginning...

Welcome to Praxis-oscope! This is a web-log (or "blog" in popular parlance) dedicated to examining popular contemporary cinema from a Christian intellectual angle. These are not exactly reviews. You would probably not want to read our essays before you see a movie. We aren't going to try to convince you to see or not see a movie. Rather, our hope is that once you've seen a film, whether at home or in the theater, you'll have the desire to discuss its themes, execution and elements in depth. Some of what you find here will be critique and theory. Other times, it may border on ruminations and mystical witticisms. Whatever the case may be, we hope you'll engage the narrative art of Film with us as a meaning-full medium of cultural, intellectual and spiritual expression and self-examination.

Our name comes from an early piece of cinema technology called the praxinoscope, a Greek word which translates to something like "action viewer." Our creative spelling of the word is meant to emphasize the way in which film, as a visual medium, allows us to take a look at how we live our lives. Film gives us a chance to examine our ways of being. Film is, in this way, an existential medium. As Christians, the narrative nature of cinema is in continuity with not only the story-based form much of Holy Scripture takes, but also Jesus' proclivity for utilizing the rich (though sometimes frustratingly indeterminate) rhetoric of parables. In a human microcosm of how the Church ought to be a living contemplation of the Truth shared in Christ's parables, so we feel passionate about contemplating, in the written word, the truths we share in our celluloid parables.

A (perhaps wise) caveat: Praxis-oscope will feature films that some Christians might find objectionable. Indeed, part of our motivation in launching this endeavor was a hope that we could engage in a Christian discussion of films while using a vocabulary of critique that is more substantive than the common Christian objection to secular culture: "Its just so dirty!" It is worth remembering that the Bible itself is a violent and sexual text if we define it based on atomized instances of content. However, we don't find that text objectionable for a myriad of reasons, not least of which is that the meaning of its narrative is one congruent with the heart of God.

If, however, you are looking for a laundry list of the swears, bare body parts and violent actions in a film, so as to avoid what one might find too "worldly," there are ample resources for that on the internet. You just won't find them here. That being said, we are unafraid to condemn the message, themes or execution of a film on moral, artistic or philosophical grounds. Vacuous inclusiveness is beneficial to no one. Films are entertaining and sometimes light-hearted, but the narratives we share are no small matter for shaping our lives, our societies and our selves.

Thank you for visiting our 'blog! We hope you enjoy our words and we look forward to your comments!

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