Sunday Review: Two war films

That question yet again: can art rescue us from World War II?

By Jonathan Price

The Oscars have just been awarded, and I’m going to write about two films that those Oscars largely ignored, for different reasons: The Book Thief, because it got nominated in only one category and seemed a minor film in comparison with the others; and The Monuments Men, because it opened too late to be considered for this year’s Oscars. Both are films about World War II and, for me at least, raise interesting questions about that key twentieth century event, which, for most of us in 2014, some 70 years after its ending, is just history, the past: but each succeeding year is still good for a film or two.

What happens

We went to a theater last December to see The Descendants, and we liked it well enough to watch it again, even as early as this afternoon.

The Descendants (2011: Alexander Payne) With his wife Elizabeth on life support after a boating accident, Hawaiian land baron Matt King (George Clooney) takes his daughters on a trip from Oahu to Kauai to confront Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard), the man who was having an affair with Elizabeth before her misfortune.

When we saw it the first time, I don't think I particularly noticed the brief interchange when Hawaiian King confronts Speer to try to find out what happened between Speer and Elizabeth:

King: "How did it happen?"
Speer: "It just happened."
King: "Nothing just happens."
Speer: "Everything just happens."

    I'm sure I noticed it this time because of having read Free Will, by Sam Harris. (I wrote about the reading Friday.)
    The exchange between the two men isn't striking just because Speer summarizes Sam Harris's thesis. Look at the preceding line of dialogue:

Nothing just happens.

    I think that the George Clooney character says that because he's suspicious that Speer, who is a realtor, started the affair to try to gain an advantage in a huge land deal the King family are involved in.
    But out of that context "Nothing just happens" is another way of stating the theistic position:

Everything happens for a reason.

That is, God's in control (or perhaps your guardian angel or angels), and they have a plan....
    Well, if they have a plan, then apparently it calls for quite a few people to believe it...and for the rest not to, and for a good number of the former to believe so strongly that everything happens for a reason that they simply refuse to entertain the possibility that it might not be so. (At any rate, it's people who believe that sort of thing from whom I hear the statement, "You can't make me change my mind.") What a plan.

But seriously, why do people believe that nothing just happens?
    The material world of evolution and "everything just happens" can be very unsettling, as can the facts that people suffer, everyone dies, and justice is not done in this world. Beliefs that deny these realities provide solace. Suffering is for our own good, and it will be made right. We'll be resurrected and live forever (if we follow the right prescription for salvation). God will right the balance of justice at The Last Judgment.
    Solace is the Number One Reason for such beliefs (in the cases where it's not simply that people are paying lip service to the beliefs they've been taught and have never questioned).
    Actually, though, there's a sense in which it's true that nothing just happens—the sense in which happenings have material causes. Believing "nothing just happens" in that sense can inspire a person to try to find out the causes. It can lead to insight, and to science.
    And actually, believing "nothing just happens" in the theistic sense can also inspire a person to look a little deeper into his or her spiritual and moral life, to try to discover why something bad, or something good, or something problematic happened. Insights can be found that way; people can (but may not) become better people as a result. Believing that there's a god and he (usually it's he) has a plan isn't necessarily the end-all of such a believer's life. Life can still be good for such believers (besides the solace). (Hey, I think I really am becoming more accepting of others, just as I said on Friday.)
    The main thing seems to be that we keep looking and seeking and trying to find out. As long as our beliefs inspire that, we're still alive and ticking.

By the way, it would seem from the considerations above that Harris believes both that nothing just happens and that everything just happens. But it's based on an ambiguity.
    He believes that nothing just happens, because everything that happens has causes. And he believes that everything just happens, in the sense that it's an illusion that our free will is one of those causes.

Walter Kirn up in the air!

I'm concurrently reading Walter Kirn's 2001 novel, Up in the Air, and enjoying it no less than I'm enjoying Ian McEwan's Solar. Up in the Air is a romp, though a story much different from that told by the George Clooney movie (much darker, yet funnier), and a novel much different from McEwan's (its dark action concentrated into a tiny fraction of the decade taken by the tragicomic action of Solar).
    With what dismay, then, did I read this morning, in this coming Sunday's New York Times Book Review, Kirn's front-page review of Solar, which is about as total a dump-on of another writer's work as a reviewer writes. It opens:

According to the perverse aesthetics of artistic guilty pleasure, certain books and movies are so bad—so crudely conceived, despicably motivated and atrociously executed—that they’re actually rather good. Solar, the new novel by Ian McEwan, is just the opposite: a book so good—so ingeniously designed, irreproachably high-minded and skillfully brought off—that it’s actually quite bad...There’s so little wrong with it that there’s nothing particularly right about it, either.

    Fortunately for the discerning reader, the illogic of "so good it's bad" undermines Kirn's position from the get-go. But Walter Kirn's standing, both as novelist and as "a regular contributor to the Book Review," will browbeat the unwary into thinking that there might be something to his quasi-logical argument, so maybe they should just skip Solar. So much the worse for them.
    Kirn more or less writes off the boot room, which I blogged about the other day: It

devolves [emphasis mine] into a model Hobbesian jungle as the supposedly liberal junket­eers steal the best gear for themselves, placing their own survival before the group’s and putting the lie to man’s altruistic posturing.

Why does it "devolve"? It doesn't. Kirn's just miffed. His underlying complaint about Solar may be that expressed in his paragraph:

There’s little that’s lifelike about Solar, despite its relentless pretensions to relevance. The story is structured like a crossword puzzle, in rows and columns of little empty boxes that McEwan helps us fill in by providing witty riddles whose solutions flatter our intelligence. The process feels pleasantly antic and cerebral, but in time its premeditated quality becomes preposterously artificial, as do its swerves into heady slapstick humor.

As a reader of the book, I find none of this justified. To say that Solar is "structured like a crossword puzzle" is just silly. "Premediated...preposterously artificial" suggests a formula for summing up Kirn's review: Preposterous! Whatever McEwan might have published, I suspect that Kirn had premeditated to put it down, however artificial the logic of his put-down would have to be.

I think there's a clue to Kirn's pique in his statement:

What makes Solar such a noble nullity is that it answers these challenges so easily, with such a quotient of stress-free mastery that they feel less like challenges than like problems in a literary exam the author has devised as a means of proving his own prowess. This may be Beard’s story, but it’s McEwan’s vehicle, constructed to let him pull all the showy turns of the major contemporary novelist and ambitious public intellectual: personalizing the political, politicizing the personal and poeticizing everything else.

    The clues, I mean, are so easily, major contemporary novelist, and ambitious public intellectual. Kirn appears to have been suffering a serious case of jealousy!