The Revenant: An exploration of human savagery

It'd be a mistake to talk about the grim violence inherent in modern movies and television without discussing "The Revenant" which was nominated for best picture at the Academy Awards and won for "best actor" (Leo DiCaprio), "best director" (Alejandro G. Inarritu), and "best cinematography" (Emmanuel Lubezki).

This was one of the most effective films I've ever seen at totally immersing you in a foreign setting (the savage wilderness of the Dakotas in the 1820s) and forcing you to deeply consider what it must have been like to experience the extreme settings the people of that place and time would have endured.

Naturally, this wasn't a movie about the lighter or easier aspects of exploring the frontier and trapping fur but the most brutal extremes even of that occupation. I'd go so far as to say that this was the 2nd most intense film I've ever sat through and a very close 2nd at that behind Mel Gibson's "The passion of the Christ."

If you haven't seen the movie I'm going to be dropping spoilers here and there so be warned*

The movie opens with a serene scene in which Leo and his son are hunting moose in a creek bed while the fur trappers he's working for are cleaning pelts back at their camp. The scenery and shooting for this film is beautiful and combined with the sound editing it helps with the immersion this film is aiming for.

You are taken inside the trappers' camp where Tom Hardy's character is voicing normal business concerns and directing traffic when suddenly you see a naked, scalped man stumbling into the fur trappers camp before he's suddenly cut down by arrow fire...and the brutality unfolds.

As it turns out, the trappers have found themselves caught between a band of Arikara natives and their target, which is whomever has taken the Chief's daughter (it turns out to be French explorers who are the true culprits of this crime).

What unfolds is a series of unfortunate events in which you find the various characters of the film getting caught between parents and their children. Virtually everyone is caught between the Arikara Chief and his daughter, Leo is caught between a mother grizzly and her cubs, and Tom Hardy is caught between Leo and his son. In every instance the result is the parent enacting graphically-depicted brutality on whomever finds themselves in their crosshairs.

The result is that you are repeatedly exposed to grim situations and truly brutal violence as different species and people groups are thrown together in a primitive environment in which familial bonds take over and guide everyone's decisions and motives.

Captain Andrew Henry, played by Domhnall Gleeson, is basically the stand-in for the modern viewer. He's doing all he can to impose civilized ethics in a primitive environment but is ultimately unable to prevent all of the savagery from taking over and is eventually killed himself when caught in the middle of Leo's quest for vengeance against Hardy for killing his son.

While a shockingly brutal depiction of human interaction like "Game of thrones" is aiming to underscore the meaninglessness of life and lack of an ultimate higher purpose (or at least a good one), the Revenant's violence has a different feel and purpose to it.

One of Inarritu's main aims seems to be exploring the extremes of human experience and forcing us to weigh and feel the difficulty of looking to impose modern human standards on a primitive, untamed world. He's not looking to shock us and there isn't entertainment here in the sense where viewers are eager to see what kind of horrifying event will unfold next. Each violent scene is painful to watch and set up as something to be endured and felt rather than something to anticipate and be shocked by in an entertaining sense.

There is a sort of deconstructive unveiling here though in the revelation that if there isn't a guiding force to impose civilization then people will resort to animalistic instincts, looking to survive and ensure the survival of their offspring. Because even watching the film is such an intense experience you are pushed to be more realistic when considering how you might handle the different ethical dilemmas and situations of the story.

There's some value to that aspect of the grimly violent storytelling here in that the viewer has to interact with violence as a reality in the world to be navigated rather than simply an abstract deconstruction. Whereas "Game of thrones" can push you to throw away ethics as a convention of simpler minds or the burden of those who don't hold power, "the Revenant" will push you to examine how to preserve ethics for the sake of preserving ourselves from savagery.

You also can't help but consider the fact that Inarritu is a Mexican (or at least I can't) and there is a clash today between Mexican and American cultures along the border with familial instincts often taking precedent over the rule of law or modern civilizational standards. However if you consider that struggle in light of the movie you won't find any answers, just concerns.

There's also an attempt by Inarritu's to reference higher purpose and meaning with Leo's decision to forego vengeance and find another purpose to drive him to survive. Perhaps he sees this as the ultimate solution to the problem of how to sort out the inevitable conflicts between different people who are trying to survive and raise children.

Whether this is successfully conveyed in the movie I'm not as sure. One problem here is that Leo doesn't really forego his vengeance. He stabs Hardy and has already nearly killed him when he decides to "pass up" the ultimate act of snuffing out his life in order to hand him over to the Arikara chief who happens to be passing by for this scene. After doing so, the chief immediately completes the deed himself and scalps Hardy, who is a man already embittered from having been scalped in the past.

There's a sense here in which it's depicted as though God were ultimately responsible for judgment and he reliably hands it down to Hardy's character but what other outcome would Leo even have expected? He does pass up the chance to savagely kill Hardy himself (fortunately for the viewer, at this point it'd make for a horrifying conclusion to sit through a drawn out murder) but what he does is almost equally cruel and highly likely to bring the same result.

A modern way of telling this story would be to have Leo bring Hardy in and hand him over to the law, in a Christian telling (or in the real life event the movie is based on) perhaps Leo would forgive Hardy and send him on his way to Texas. Inarritu's post-modern conclusion is to give in to extremes and hand over Hardy to the savage Arikara and then rationalize this decision as giving up vengeance to a higher power before pressing on for new purpose and meaning in life in order to stay motivated to keep drawing breath.

What's ironically lost in this existentialism is any kind of uniting social ethic that could save us from savagery but instead simply a "whatever it takes to make things work for you" conclusion. There's no real sacrifice, no real ethic, just coping mechanisms for the individual. The only guy who tried to live for something greater than himself was killed.

You are left to wonder what it is that actually saved us from the brutality of the frontier and what could save us if we ever slipped back.

What is with our modern fascination with grim, violent stories?

I often bristle when I hear George R.R. Martin compared favorably up against my own favorite author, J.R.R. Tolkien.

The latter created Middle-Earth and wrote "The Hobbit," "The Lord of the Rings," and "The Silmarillion" which have been the underpinning of modern fantasy and myth. The former created Westeros and wrote "A Song of Ice and Fire," the series that includes volume one "A game of thrones," and spawned the ultra-popular HBO series based on the series.

George R.R. Martin cites Tolkien as an influence and is typically credited with moving forward the genre. If you're at all familiar with the series you can basically track Western society's development from being Christian to post-Christian by noting the differences in the series.

In Tolkien's stories you know the good guys are going to win, although it's not clear how and there is always suffering and sacrifice involved in seeing a good purpose overcome an evil one. In Martin's stories (as best I can tell) he repeatedly sets up the possibility of likable characters seeing positive ends only to bring it all crashing down in ruin in the most brutal and horrifying fashion imaginable.

The HBO series, of which I've only seen chunks, really takes this to another level with exceptionally graphic depictions of sex and violence that regularly leave viewers shocked. It's customary for people to even make "reaction videos" that track how they respond to whatever appalling ending has come upon the characters of the show in series finales.

This grimness all lauded as being "more realistic and true to human experience" than Tolkien's "escapist fantasy" in which the good guys win. The characters are largely flawed and mixed with varying degrees of nobility to their motivations. The most noble characters usually meet horrifying ends.

I find this assumption supremely arrogant and frustrating. Allow me to explain...

George R.R. Martin was born in 1948, just after WWII had been completed, and the major war that his generation experienced was the conflict in Vietnam. You can probably guess where this is going, no? He went off to Vietnam, saw horrible, horrible things, and has used his writing to express a worldview that looks to capture and depict the cruel nature of modern struggle for power. Right?

Wrong. He avoided the war by applying for conscientious-objector status.

Meanwhile J.R.R. Tolkien was born in 1892 and his generation experienced THE major war, World War I.

World War I essentially destroyed the modern era of the west and launched the post-modern movement that is an often cynical, hurt, and confused deconstruction of the modern era. Everyone's faith in modern institutions and thought was completely shaken by the fact that none of them prevented a war that took 17 million lives without any real positive objective

Tolkien endured public scorn as he finished his degree before enlisting as it was popular in England at this time to use public shaming to drive the young men to enlist. He stuck it out and finished his degree though before heading off to France to experience the unimaginable hells of trench warfare. There he participated in the nightmare of the Battle of the Somme and lost most of his friends.

Somme or Mordor?

So what happened next? He captured the hellish conditions of the Somme in an imaginary place called Mordor and he wrote a work in which human struggle against the all-too real nature of hell results in ultimate victory and good.

So while George R.R. Martin avoided the cruelest realities of human experience and then wrote about them in cynical and unfettered fashion. J.R.R. Tolkien experienced them and looked to help others make sense of them and see the potential for goodness coming as a result.

In our modern experience the vast majority of us Americans are not confronted with a terribly difficult life. We don't have to shiver in the mud while explosions go off around us, we don't have to make sense of a world in which our friends are blown to pieces and both suffering and difficult moral choices are a daily reality.

Thus, it's really easy for us to venture off into a world like "Game of thrones" or any other grim, violent entertainment series. When it's over and we're done thinking through difficult challenges in an abstract fashion we can adjust the temperature in our homes and rest comfortably in our beds.

If you ask me, the idea that this approach to story-telling, this depiction of mankind's struggles, is more advanced and superior to what Tolkien wrought after he wrestled with true grimness and violence is puffed up nonsense.

We'd love to believe that today we are more enlightened than in the past. We like to pretend that we know better, that we know that the world is a grim place and that true happiness or goodness is a mirage.

In reality, we're just comfortable to the point that we can play make-believe like the world is a difficult place without actually having to taste the reality of it like Tolkien did in the trenches at Somme.

Tolkien may have been guilty of helping people to escape brutal nightmares and find peace and meaning with his fantasies, but today we are guilty of trying to escape the fact that we don't live amidst brutal nightmares and yet haven't found that peace and meaning that comforted Tolkien.

Why Donald Trump hasn't been and won't be stopped

On this blog I've spent a lot of time detailing and explaining the plans of the Republican establishment and Ted Cruz to stop Donald Trump from winning the GOP nomination. Their plans were easy enough to understand and essentially boiled down to trying to unite the majority chunk of middle-class Republican voters who felt that voting Trump was unseemly and unsafe.

It didn't work, it won't work, and it failed for the same reasons that the conservative movement as a whole has largely failed over the last several decades. Because it was fighting against a message and against a vision rather than supplying their own.

At its core conservatism is reactionary and about preserving the old ways. In a democracy with a powerful economy and a central state with tons of money and resources you're generally not going to win elections by arguing for prudence, you're going to win by selling the best vision for how to leverage all of those resources.

Democrats and progressivism have argued for using those resources to improve the lot of average citizens. On the home front and socially, Republicans and conservatism has been about preserving the traditions and institutions that made those resources possible. The latter is a prudent vision, but it's just not going to sell.

Where Republicans have developed and sold an aggressive vision for how to make the most of America's resources is with foreign interventionism. Neo-conservatives within the party sold the electorate on policing the world and establishing peace and prosperity across the globe. But today with America's economy slipping combined with repeated military defeats and foreign adventures that seemed to make foreigners and Americans both worse off? That's not so attractive a vision. That's how Trump is able to sound almost like a 9/11 truther before the South Carolina primary (home of neo-Con senator Lindsey Graham) and then still absolutely thrash George W. Bush's brother.

When many conservatives look at Donald Trump they see a disreputable scum bag who's out for himself, they don't see someone who should be winning the GOP primary nor someone who can win in November. The whole thing is totally baffling.

However, when you see past all of that to a guy who's completely alone in selling a new vision for how the government's massive pool of resources can be put to work to improve the lot of the average American over and against the lot of the foreigner, you begin to understand why he's having success.

Combine that message with the fact that Trump is by and far the strongest personality and leader (in the purest sense of getting people to follow him) it's easy to see why Cruz and the establishment have been totally unable to stop him.

Beating Trump will require another strong leader who can sell the people on a positive vision. Instead, Trump is likely to run against Hillary Clinton, who will almost certainly fall into the trap of running as the non-Trump, safe answer for who should run the country. That's not going to work for several reasons.

One is that people don't like the status quo and they make like it even less if there are more terrorist attacks, market failures, or rumors of even higher insurance premiums between now and November.

Another is that Hillary is profoundly unlikable. Trump's weakness as an unfavorable windbag is completely minimized if America's other option is a shrill phony that can easily be painted as being on the side of the established powers that Americans don't really trust anymore to hold their best interests at heart. Neither the status quo nor Hillary herself have done anything to paint themselves as a likable, safe alternative to Trump.

Here's the current delegate count in the GOP primary:

Now that Cruz and Kasich are both mathematically eliminated from winning the needed 1,237 delegates their ability to sell themselves as a strong, alternative leader is further blunted. Instead they are pitching themselves to Americans as a means to stop Trump and allow the party to choose the next president on our behalf. It would seem that the GOP's plan is for that to be Paul Ryan.

Voters are not going to go for that. What reason do they have at this point to trust the establishment to make decisions on their behalf without accountability?

You can expect to see Trump snatch up enough of the 733 remaining delegates to reach Cleveland, OH as the nominee thanks in part to massive victories in Pennsylvania and California. If he's even close he'll leverage the threat of the utter destruction that would occur if the party looked to overturn the will of their voters to secure enough delegates to wrap it up.

From there all the talk will be about how Clinton is a shoo-in to beat Trump and the "educated people don't vote for demagogues like Trump!" rhetoric will really be ratcheted up. But it won't work.

In this space I think I'll do some writing on some movies and TV shows I've seen recently that I think are an interesting reflection on current American culture. We'll still check in on the election but that's about the size of it for the foreseeable future.