3 Films

We have recently struck it rather lucky with three most excellent films. I recommend you immediately place them in your Netflix queue, or run right out to your local video store and rent them up. Each is quite different, but all three are smartly directed, sharply written, delightfully acted, and just generally good, in the good sense of the word good.

In Miss Pettigrew, I especially loved the direction that reminded me of stage direction (or the best screwball comedies of the thirties), and the occassional perfect line that had meaning on three layers at one time. Beautiful.

Bottle Schock is a story of passion, hope and hard work. It has a smart and funny edge to it, a very American sensibility that looks on europe with suspicion of a very different kind from the suspicion felt by Europeans toward America. Again, tight story telling of a story that is fun, with lovely cinematography. Some of the love triangle action rang a bit false to me, but I could overlook it.

The Big Night. Oh....just a delight. A sacramental experience. The final scene with the fritatta is one of the finest scenes I have ever witnessed on the screen.

Diamonds are Bunk

The event of my engagement to be married did not fall along conventional lines. I was a student, saving as much money as I could to make it stretch far enough to complete my tuition payments for my bachelor’s degree. I was paying for it myself with some inheritance, and money I earned. By the time my future bride and I decided that we should indeed marry, my bank account was running mighty thin. I moved into a cheaper apartment (a dungeon actually), deferred maintenance on my car, scammed free meals where I could, and watched my account dwindle in spite of working hard and living cheap.

That was no great problem for me really. I am somewhat abstemious by nature, and I was young and had no great expectation of wealth. I love fine things, but many of the things I consider fine are either not the same as what other people hold dear, or simply cost comparatively little. The problem was the diamond.

I will not explain here how much trouble it caused that I could not afford to by a “proper” diamond engagement ring. Certainly the so-called standard of a ring costing several months salary was out of reach. Even then I suspected that the whole diamond engagement ring thing was a scam. Yet it was hard for my fiancée to deal with people’s reactions when she told them she was engaged, and yet had no hardware to show for it. I eventually did purchase a ring (a sapphire flanked by two small diamonds), at some hardship. Suffice it to say that it was approaching the level of being a dealbreaker. I remember feeling put upon and trapped by some kind of worldwide conspiracy that had hoodwinked the world into thinking that a clear stone (undistinguishable from a piece of broken glass by most people) had been declared, arbitrarily, the sole indicator of honorable intent. The work, and sweat and struggle, I was putting in to earn the money so that we could actually be married counted for little or nothing. The abandonment of long held goals and the joyful and purposeful reordering of my life to align with the goal of marriage was not counted particularly important. The stone was the thing. It seemed that rather than marriage itself being the sacrament, the bauble had become the sacrament. It just seemed wrong.

Now 22 years later, I read an article in Atlantic that vindicates me. Read it here.   The article was originally published in 1982. I dearly wish I had read it then. I might not have gotten into less trouble, but I would have had more to stand on than a sneaking suspicion that I was being flim-flammed.

Turns out it’s a scam. It’s all a big swindle. Diamonds are just rocks after all. My marriage has lasted longer than our diamond, and is worth infinitely more than any rock I could buy. I knew it would turn out that way in the end, but it sure caused me a lot of trouble at the time. I have no love for DeBeers. The bastards.

Tangled and Twisted

I was recently reminded of this quote from C.S. Lewis’ book The Four Loves.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

As I become older I can see more and more what a dangerous and difficult thing love is. I wonder at how love can even be moral and righteous and some circumstances, and immoral and wrong in other situations. It’s not so much that I am seeing the world in more shades of gray. It’s that I’m coming more and more to see the world as incredibly tangled, impossibly snarled, knotted and jumbled. Few things are truly simple. Almost nothing cleaves a straight line.
This is as true for the adulterer as it is for the homosexual. The fornicator struggles with this as much as the sodomite. And guess what? That’s all of us. Jesus made it pretty clear that the real standard of rightness is higher than we can reach. So don’t think that you aren’t bound up in the knot.
As I was saying, it is easy to think that love, in and of itself, redeems any act, any person, any event. Deep affection, total devotion is perfectly acceptable, no matter who the people are, no matter what their situation. This may be the most pernicious lie to permeate our culture. If it’s love, then it must be OK. Love, however, is not that simple, and like everything else in the world, it is twisted and bent and needs itself to be redeemed and made right.
How can it be wrong if it FEELS SO RIGHT?
But I LOVE HER! Becomes not simply a declaration but the argument for justification.
The problem is defining what love actually is. Lewis’ book does a powerful job of exploring the complexities and layers involved in love.

Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God; Appreciative love says: "We give thanks to thee for thy great glory." Need-love says of a woman "I cannot live without her"; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection — if possible, wealth; Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.

We have made love an idol. We worship it and justify our worship by chanting “God is love…God is love.” In fact, we really have no idea what we are talking about. Our study of love only grazes the most thin surface layer. It has not served us well.
I have no idea how to do this, but if we can go deeper and peel back the layers of what love is, we will find that love is much harder, more violent, more demanding than we like to think – and more glorious and magnificent and splendid than we could have conceived. If we were to find a way to truly reveal to ourselves the absolute heart of love, we will turn the world inside out.