Beauty and the Beast, Existentialism, and Love

I was woken by my cat at 6:15 this morning and couldn't go back to sleep. So I brought my bedding into the loft and watched Beauty and the Beast which my brother's wife had left at our house. No not the new remastered edition, the old VHS. I hadn't watched the film since I was a kid when it was released in 1991, and as usual my memory served me quite accurately, though of course some parts were surprises again (I forgot what a douchebag the beast is).



Anyway, the movie while arousing my interest, didn't satisfy my desire to find some deep message. I thought for a while about the admixture of modern pagan and romanticized post-christian humanist values and thought this could only be disney's doing. So I read the original (dubious as any claim to originality a fairy story can have), by Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont (http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/beauty.html) it was short, but much better than the film. I liked the Thomistic 'moral' of the story

"come and receive the reward of your judicious choice; you have preferred virtue before either wit or beauty, and deserve to find a person in whom all these qualifications are united." -spoken to Beauty after her choice of the Beast and his transformation

It reminded me of the biblical story of Samuel/God choosing David based on the virtue rather than appearance.

"And it came to pass, when they were come, that he looked on Eliab, and said, Surely the LORD's anointed is before him. But the LORD said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart." - 1 Samuel 16:6-7 (KJV)

Of course to me, there could be two much more interesting tales which I'll outline here:

1. The Handsomest and the Hag - a story about a handsome man who falls in love with an ugly woman. To be fair to the ladies, the story is usually reversed, and women are still seen as having to be attractive. (For a cartoon Belle was pretty hot). Imagine a reversal of what I like to call the King-of-Queens-syndrome, where we always have the fat ugly guy, and the beautiful girl. I don't know how people (myself included) would react to a story like that.

2. A Tale of Two Uglies - a story about two ugly people who remain ugly and learn to love each other even if they aren't attracted to each other. At the end, when they both realize that they still love each other even if they're both ugly, no transformation takes place, and they live average lives.

Although to the credit of the film, the fairy story, and my other ideas, the one transcendent truth coming through each, is the idea that loving something makes it lovable.

For example, there is a girl in one of my classes at Brock, whom upon first glance was rather ugly. Her ears were big and uneven, her voice squeaky, and she had no chest to speak of. But as I got to know her and listen to her ideas and life, suddenly I found myself attracted to her. Admittedly, not overwhelmingly, and certainly not in a true love type way.

In taking an Existentialism class, this is one thing I am appreciating the most. We put meaning on objects we conceive. When I look at a piece of bread, I conceive it as food. When I look at a consecrated Eucharistic host, I conceive it as the Body and Blood of God. Very divergent meanings for empirically the same accidents/appearances.

This is what love I think is most like - no wonder they talk about love potions and spells - it is deceptive, it doesn't follow appearances. And in this post-Christian culture, it is perhaps the only gift of grace that people have certain faith in. This is a beautiful revelation/reminder to the Christian as the apostle tells us that Love is the greatest (1 Corinthians 13).

and now that I think of it, you could make a great WoW version of the movie with a Tauren male and a Human/Blood Elf female.

Anarchy, Life a Joke?, and Thora Birch

I talked with my dad about politics tonight after dinner. It was the first conversation we've had where we didn't fight since January. I didn't say it, but I finally realized that I'm basically an anarchist or at the most a socialist when it comes to State authority. I think the institution of the State is a joke. What pretended authority could it have? I actually think Monarchies have a better claim to sovereignty than Democracies. If I could find a Catholic Monarchy I'd be set.

...

At work today my co-worker who is an Atheist said that his girlfriend always gets angry at him because he laughs about serious things. He said 'I laugh because life is a joke. You're born, you do what society tells you to do, and you die.' While I disagree with the philosophy I found it very honest. It reminds me of American Beauty, and the Comedian from Watchmen.

...

Tonight I watched a bit of American Beauty. What a fantastic film. I have many favourite parts, but one of them is the conversation between Jane (Thora Birch) and Angela (Mena Suvari):

Angela Hayes: Jane, he's a freak!
Jane Burnham: Then so am I! And we'll always be freaks and we'll never be like other people and you'll never be a freak because you're just too... perfect!



...

Out of interest I went to see what Thora Birch is up to these days, the news part of her website was last updated in 2005...4 years ago.

She has a discussion board to talk about herself. The most recent comments are viagra ads someone has spammed, followed by 2 people talking about the last time they had a new picture of her. It's pretty creepy.

But I successfully found people more lonely and pathetic than I am. I wonder if Thora Birch ever checks her website and finds these few pathetic fans hanging on, I wonder what she'd think of them.

She's an interesting character too, from a German Jewish family, named after Thor, the Norse god. And her parents were 'adult film stars'.

I bet she'd be an interesting person to have a heart-to-heart with.

I found out that 'heart-to-heart' comes from the Confessions of St. Augustine. The Latin is "cor ad (cor) loquotor"... I think?

The Fall and Decline of Andrew's Christmas by Edward Gibbon

The other day I was complaining about how bad Christmas was last year because I was in the States and I only got 1 terrible present that my brother bought for himself. It appears my ingratitude has tipped my karmic imbalance toward samsara even further and the gods seek vengence on me. I'm working every day now till Christmas (minus sunday) and all day on Christmas Eve. ... I was so enraged. Last night at work I also had a terrible set of jobs to do that sucked so much a fellow worker looked at me and said 'man you got screwed over more than anyone'.

I'm so angry with work, I think my Ukrainian and Manchester genes and lineage must be riddled with people as abject, lazy, depraved, and self-centred as I am because I hate work in any form.

Today I threw on one of my all time favourite movies "The Last Samurai" with Tom Cruise, and of course since it is one of my favourite movies, that means that everyone in the world universally recognizes it as one of the worst movies ever.

Everytime I watch the movie I feel so inspired, like my life has this intrinsic value and that I could be everything I always dream of. That I could be some kind of Tom Cruise look-alike who can beat up people and master Buddhist concentration and control myself so greatly that they would write "Discipline" on my tombstone. But then I realize I'm just an obese Canadian reprobate who has to go to his degrading minimum wage job in less than a half an hour.

But I love the movie because it has so much in it about how life should be structured and deals with the fact that man has had such different pursuits all around the world but the central tenants of life are the same. Virtue, honor, reason, and decapitation. These are the ways humanity has excelled.

As I awoke this morning I looked at the clock and wondered what I should do with my fleeting hours of Freedom. I felt like reading, but I was tired of theology and I was feeling deistic as God had blighted me with all this work, so I picked up "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" by Edward Gibbon a fellow convert to the Church of Rome (for a while at least) and cynical deist enlightenment historian. I read these words with which he described Rome as it began to decline:

"The minds of the Romans were ... Oppressed beneath the weight of their own corruption"

I underlined the quote in pencil. Gibbon is trying to describe how the Romans fall behind in their virtue they desperately try to preserve their cherished ideals of justice, wisdom, temperance, and fortitude. But eventually they can't keep going, and it becomes painfully obvious that unlike the idyllic Roman Republic this Empire built for the liberty and justice of the world was actually now based on slave labour and oppression. Rome tried to work for good intention but ended up distracted and became exactly that which they sought to destroy.

No modern/post-modern/current historian would describe the Fall of Rome in Gibbon's terminology. His theory was the immorality led to it's destruction. Modern academics don't agree about immorality and if it even exists. That's why I like Gibbon, he just tells it in this beautiful way. I haven't read enough about Rome to know if it's true, but I know that most of the hardship in my life has come from my own immorality. God is just as the phrase goes, and he punishes me most justly of all. Now I'm off to work. Hoping to live to complain another day.