Many people consider philosophy to be irrelevant to our everyday lives: it is something practiced by academic eggheads in remote ivory towers, but certainly not something that results in practical living or âreal life.â
Contrary to this negative perception, the late Francis Schaeffer often pointed out that philosophy, though considered irrelevant by many people, was often a pertinent driving force of culture. The ideas generated by academic thinkers filter down through the high arts into the popular arts and are thus consumed by the masses, often without self-conscious recognition of their philosophical nature.1
People may not call their philosophical beliefs by their academic names of metaphysics (reality), epistemology (knowledge) and ethics (morality), but they operate upon them nevertheless. When a person says that someone ought not to butt in line at a movie theater (ethics) because everyone knows (epistemology) that âfirst come, first servedâ is the way the world works and that âwhat goes around, comes aroundâ (metaphysics), then knowingly or unknowingly she is expressing a philosophy. When a kid watches the animated movie Shrek, he probably doesnât know about Carl Jungâs theories of psychological types and the collective unconscious, but he is ingesting them nonetheless through those characters and that story adapted after the Jungian model.2
Everybody operates upon a philosophy in life, a worldview that defines for them the way the world works and how they know things and how they ought to behave. So philosophy is ultimately a practical reality for all of us. In this sense, everyone is a philosopher; some are just more aware of it than others.
One of the dominant influences on movies today is the philosophy of existentialism. In order to understand this influence, it is helpful to see the philosophy in its historical origins and context. In Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture, Gene Edward Veith Jr. gives a brief outline to historical stages of thought in our Western civilization in order to show us how we got where we are now. He explains that the âpremodernâ phase, which included the Greek, Roman and early Christian empires, was marked by a recognition that reality was created and sustained by a supernatural realm beyond the senses. People believed in the supernatural and considered themselves subservient to it.3
By the 1700s, with the rise of the Renaissance culminating in the Enlightenment, society became âmodern.â That is, it began to see religion as ignorant, magical interpretations of a universe that is actually generated and sustained by naturalistic, machinelike laws, understood without any relation to deity. Enlightenment was the self-designation by this generation of humanists, who perceived the previous medieval era to be the âDark Agesâ precisely because religion was the dominant worldview, the âqueen of the sciences.â So their prejudices produced the oppressive term âDark Ages,â which served to demonize their enemies. The socalled Age of Reason was marked by naturalistic science and autonomous reason as absolute tools for truth. Man was the measure of all things, and reason was his god.4
Voices of dissent against the juggernaut of Enlightenment tradition were raised in the Romanticism of the early nineteenth century. And Romantic ideas became the seeds of our current postmodern condition. As Veith explains,
Whereas the Enlightenment assumed that reason is the most important human faculty, romanticism assumed that emotion is at the essence of our humanness. The romantics exalted the individual over impersonal, abstract systems. Self-fulfillment, not practicality was the basis for morality. . . . Romantics criticized âcivilizationâ as reflecting the artificial abstractions of the human intellect. Children are born free, innocent, and one with nature. âSocietyâ then corrupts them with the bonds of civilization. . . . Romanticism cultivated subjectivity, personal experience, irrationalism, and intense emotion. . . . The romantics drew on Kant, who argued that the external world owes its very shape and structure to the organizing power of the human mind, which imposes order on the chaotic data of the senses. Some romantics took this to imply that the self, in effect, is the creator of the universe.5
Within this romantic milieu, existentialism was born.
A NECESSARILY OVERSIMPLIFIED BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO EXISTENTIALISM
Existentialism is a worldview that has many heads. So many varieties exist that it would take a book to define them all. There are even religious forms of existentialism to which some Christians lay claim. Famous translator and historian of existentialist philosophy Walter Kaufmann sums it up:
Existentialism is not a school of thought nor reducible to any set of tenets . . . . The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from lifeâthat is the heart of existentialism.6
Though some of the best-known modern thinkers who have espoused existentialism are Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Karl Jaspers,7 its roots can largely be traced back to two men: Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), a Christian, and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), an atheist. We will address some of the specific beliefs of these men later in relation to particular films. For now I would like to focus on three emphases of the existential worldview in films today: (1) chance over destiny, (2) freedom over rules and (3) action over contemplation.
CHANCE OVER DESTINY
Existentialism accepts the Enlightenment notion of an eternally existing materialistic universe with no underlying meaning or purpose. While it does not deny the laws of nature, it sees these laws as order without purpose or meaning. This is what âthe death of Godâ concept meansâGod does not âdieâ in the traditional sense, rather he ceases to be relevant because, without meaning behind the universe, the concept of God is unnecessary.8
The universe may be uniform, but its uniformity appears to our human perspective as a product of chance. And chance ultimately defies any notion of destiny or a fixed purpose toward which things are headed. Within our human perspective, anything, in this sense, is ultimately possible.
With the advent of quantum physics, the notion of chance as the underlying reality of our mechanistic universe has become even more fashionable. The uniformity of nature then becomes something that the mind imposes on a chaotic universe. Since this universe has no inherent meaning, we lead ourselves to despair (angst) if we try to find any meaning within it. The mechanical cause-and-effect universe does not fit our human desires and thus appears to us as absurd.
Forrest Gump and its predecessor Being There are both popular movies that communicate the idea of a chance world in which events occur without purpose. The use of mentally challenged men in both films is a metaphor for chance itself. They have no âintelligent designâ to their lives, and yet both of them become important figures in history without even realizing it.
In Being There Chance the gardener (a name chosen without coincidence) influences the president of the United States because Chanceâs simple-minded regurgitations of television platitudes are misinterpreted by accident as profound mysteries of genius. Forrest Gump has basically the same effect, with a simple-minded Forrest changing American history without even knowing it in a virtual exploration of the dual opposites of chance and destiny.
The title for the movie Being There is an English translation of the German word dasein, used by German existentialist Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) to define a human being as a field of probability, as opposed to the rationalist view of us as clear and distinct entities. At the last shot of Being There, just when we think there is some rational explanation for why this simple man has attained such status and impact on the world, he walks away from us on the surface of a lakeâan allusion to the concept that mindless chance does in fact mysteriously guide the universe, like a god.
Lawrence Kasdanâs Grand Canyon is another strong picture of a chance-ruled universe. In the very first scene Steve Martinâs character, a Hollywood director of mindless, violent action movies, tells Kevin Klineâs character, Mack, âNothing can be controlled. We live in chaos, the central issue in everyoneâs life.â This sets the stage for the rest of the movie, which is filled with the random evils of life. Police search helicopters and siren-screaming ambulances (symbols of the chaos) are ubiquitously in the background. The film concludes with one characterâs personal vision of standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, where âwe realize what a big joke we all are, our big heads thinking what we do is going to matter all that much.â His conclusion is that we are all like gnats that land on the rump of a cow chewing its cud next to a road you ride by at seventy miles an hour. A pretty concise summary of the existential dilemma of meaninglessness (absurdity).
As in Heideggerâs âbeing unto death,â Sartreâs ânauseaâ and Kierkegaardâs âcrisis of dread,â these characters, through their near-death experiences, face the anxiety of their meaningless existence. And this is what the existentialist term âdreadâ (angst) means. It is not merely fear itself or a specific fear, even of death, but rather the general, overwhelming revelation of the meaninglessness of our existence. A specific encounter with death merely triggers this self-revelation.
The characters at moments wonder if all the chance happenings are miracles or messages from somewhere, maybe even sent by angels. But no answer is forthcoming from the supernatural. God is silent, because he is dead. They struggle with trying to make sense out of the pain and suffering in their lives but can ultimately find no rational answer. Fate and luck are ultimately what they believe in, condemning them to freedom in a random universe. Only by making individual choices to love other human beings do the characters find personal redemption in the midst of chaos. It is through their choices that they free themselves.
The existentialist writer Albert Camus wrote of the Greek myth of Sisyphus, condemned to endlessly rolling a stone up a hill, only to have it roll back down again. He says of this quest that âhis passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted in accomplishing nothing.â9 That realization of insignificance becomes an important impetus for the existentialist storyteller.
Written by Zach Helm, Stranger Than Fiction embodies the eternal struggle of the existentialist to find meaning in an absurd universe of natural law and freedom from controlling destiny. Harold Crick (played by Will Ferrell) is an IRS auditor whose life has become a monotonous repetition of the same thing over and over (Sisyphus, anyone?). One day he hears a voice narrating his life with extraordinary accuracy, as if it were a novel. And only he can hear the voice. He visits a professor of literature (Dustin Hoffman), who tries to figure out if Haroldâs story is a comedy or a tragedy. When Harold discovers that the voice is that of a famous tragedist, Karen Eiffel (played by Emma Thompson), he realizes that the new novel she is writing is somehow the life he is living. But when the narrator reveals that he is going to die in a freak accident (chance), he has an existential crisis of dread. He watches nature documentary programs on TV that reinforce his dilemma. The documentary speaks of a seagull being attacked by fiddler crabs, âThe wounded bird knows its fate. Its desperate attempts to escape only underscores the hopelessness of its plightââillustrating Haroldâs own dread to a T.
The lit professor tells Harold to accept his death because it result...