Philadelphia and Me

A couple of nights ago I caught most of Philadelphia, from the point where Andrew excuses himself to go vomit in the bathroom and ends up in the hospital to the freeze frame of the home video from his childhood.

I was very moved. I cried. Not great sobbing gouts of tears or anything, just a quiet happy-sad little trickle from both eyes and a short little catch in the throat.

The value of a film like Philadelphia, a toned-down mainstream look at an alternative lifestyle, is that it forces us to see the adherents of that lifestyle as people like us. They have hearts that can be wounded and broken. They have families that love them and whom they love. They have friends they care about and who care about them. They have their loyalties and disloyalties, their heroisms and betrayals. From a distance, in the words of the song, they are pretty much like everybody else. They just dress differently, eat different food, have sex with a different gender.

That's one side of a very valuable coin.

The film makes a point, through the person of Andrew's lawyer, Joe, of bringing up mainstream objections to homosexuality and neatly disposing of them. Joe, like the mainstream viewer, comes to see homosexuals as people, not problems, people with hopes, dreams and needs, people with lives they deserve and have the right to keep, people with secrets they have the right to keep. We rejoice with Andrew in his victorious bid against callous, abusive prejudice. We grieve with Andrew over the loss of his life, both physical and social. We laugh and cry with his family over the antics of a curly-haired little angel as he plays on the beach with his siblings and drags a heavy picnic basket to the porch steps. The film draws out our sympathies–and rightly so.

The film also makes a point of showing us a member of a recently abused and maligned minority in a position of unchallenged power and authority. The message here is that the still feared and suppressed sexual minority deserves the same acceptance and assimilation as the mainstream now cherishes for the once despised and oppressed racial minority.

The film likewise draws a distinction between moral and legal attitudes toward homosexuals. Joe's opening address to the jury asks them, and through them the mainstream viewer, to remember that what matters in the courtroom is not morality, but law. It is a question of the legal, not moral, code whether Andrew Beckett was wrongully dismissed. It is a question of the legal, not moral, code whether homosexuals may occupy positions of influence in our communities, from the highest offices of government to the lowest offices of education.

That's where it gets tricky. It's easy for me to accept that some people desire or need to be actively homosexual. But I get uneasy when personal active homosexuality breaks down the bedroom door from the inside and becomes public homosexual activism. This is the point that Joe attempts to make when propositioned in the drugstore. It's one thing to be yourself. It's another to shove your individualism in other people's faces. Put another way, it's one thing to come out of your closet and quite another to walk into mine. Or my children's.

People like me are in something of a bind. We are educated intellectuals (that is not redundant), liberal in outlook, conservative in lifestyle, morally religious, professionally secular. We see homosexuality as a sin, not a crime; as not a crime, and yet a sin. We believe, as Joe declares, that all men (read humans) are created (or evolved) equal, whatever their sexual orientation, and that most things in life have nothing to do with sexual orientation. We wish to see everybody free, happy and fulfilled. We try to be "wise as serpents and harmless as doves". But being wise as serpents, we know that people affect each other, even without trying, and that not all effects are good (read desirable, positive, expedient).

The law reflects our tolerances, not our morals. That is, it directly reflects our tolerances and only indirectly reflects our morals. We are generally happy to tolerate diversity "out there", but we are occasionally loathe to admit it "in here"–and rightly so.

You may read the word rightly in two ways: right as in correct and right as in having a prerogative. If I do not wish to raise my children with the notion that homosexuality is a viable option, equal in physiological naturalness and social value to heterosexuality, is that not my right as a father? What I would do if one of my children chose to experiment with homosexuality or pursue a homosexual lifestyle is another matter and a very complex one that I'll address below. For the moment, I am concerned with my "natural" and "socially sanctioned" responsibility to nurture and socialize minors. If I am to socialize them, I must teach them values. What values shall I teach them and what weight shall I give to those values? How far shall I go to reinforce, or even enforce, those values?

To be continued

For discussion of a related issue, see A Clairvoyant Selfportrait of the Artist as a Published Author. See also the story A Dream of Fortune/The Fate of Meteors.

Where Ideas Come from

I was spooning out the cat food when I started thinking about an HBO feature I'd seen on Mission Impossible 3. I'm going to skip the gimmicky spelling here. Tom Cruise and JJ Abrams had shared how the city of Shanghai had really opened its doors to them. This struck me as interesting, because some bureaucrat probably had to look over the script for the flick before approval could be given and the portrayal of Chinese military intelligence in the script was probably obviously less than flattering. You'd think they'd have run into problems on that count. Perhaps they did and were just keeping the fact under wraps.

In any case, my mind turned to the question of art and what it consists of. Readers of my previous post will remember that I spoke of communities and their aesthetics. What if a human filmmaker submitted a script to an alien bureaucrat and the bureaucrat judged the script on its artistic merits? And what if the alien world's aesthetic was worlds apart from ours?

Sounded like a good premise for a story. Sci-fi, of course. A one off? Hmmm. Maybe I could fit it into a series. How about TEAL (Teaching English as an Alien Language)? Hmmm. How would I fit in an English teacher? Aha! The English teacher is recruited as consultant and translator. He or she observes and participates in the process. Now we're talking!

All this happened before I'd finished spooning out the dog food. That's where ideas come from. From spontaneous associations, not from dog food.

Hmmm. What about dog food? Alien dog food. Alien dogs. Really intelligent alien dogs. Hmmm. Attitudes toward intelligence. Measures of intelligence. Roles of intelligence. Slavery. Cultural prejudice. Hmmm. An English teacher is hired to teach an alien dog English. The dog is as intelligent as any of us. The masters refuse to learn other languages. The dogs handle interracial relations. Hmmm.

Two ideas in one day. Not a record, but not bad.

Rubber Masks and Twists and Turns

I was watching Alias last night and thinking to myself how silly many of the most recent TV series are. I guess TV series have always been silly, but I've been particularly aware of this phenomenon lately. The same applies to movies.

Last night's silliness resided in two elements: impersonation and misdirection.

I haven't been following the series closely, so I can't be sure what all has happened between the episodes I've watched, but it appears that Lauren, an apparently exposed Covenant mole, has managed to get back onto the "Rotunda" wearing a rubber mask in the likeness of Sydney, the show's heroine. Now, forgive my lack of credulity, but it seems to me that properly trained field agents and desk officers of a crack intelligence agency would see through or around a mask in less time than it takes to bat an eye. Besides the cosmetic anomalies, there would be the little matter of what carries the head around, to wit, the rest of the impersonator's body. Surely physique/figure, posture, gait, tread and a dozen other characteristics would give the impersonation away. As it happens in this episode of Alias, only a change in perfume is apparent.

Masks as paraphernalia of impersonation have been around for a while on the stage and screen. John Woo was into them for a bit (Face Off, Mission Impossible 2). They featured prominently in Darkman. Granted, the Face Off and Darkman masks were somewhat more sophisticated than the MI2 and Alias ones, but there are so many problems with the whole conceit of fooling everybody, including spouses and lovers in bed, with a simple change of face and voice that it's a wonder the idea gets used at all.  I guess it's effective, though. People watch the shows–and sometimes pay money to do so.

Incidentally, the Japanese historical drama Kagemusha explores quite effectively the complexities of impersonation. A thief is very secretly recruited to impersonate an assassinated warlord. He succeeds brilliantly, even managing, though with initial difficulty, to fool, or at least win over, the warlord's grandson, but is ultimately exposed by the warlord's horse, who is not fooled at all and throws him off like a sack of rice. The warlord's favourite concubine, who has been kept away, like all the warlord's wives and concubines, from the impersonator, rushes to her supposed lover's side only to discover that his shoulder lacks an identifying scar.

More annoying than the business with masks is this tendency to stuff a show with misdirection. It's become so common that I've grown to expect it. You'd think the characters in the stories would expect it, too, especially the ones in TV series, who encounter it weekly or daily or whatever. The problem with it as a plot device, from my perspective, is that you stop trusting the characters. For me, at any rate, this creates a hesitation to care, a tiresome uncertainty that what I'm seeing is actually happening (in the context of the story) or that it means what I think it means. It's gotten to the point that I sometimes don't bother forming conclusions about the reality or significance of events in these shows. Well, all right, that's impossible, but I've adopted a sort of limp inquisitiveness, a ginger, half-hearted, detached curiosity focused more on how silly it's going to get than on what's actually apparently happening.

Another example of the device occurred in a recently aired and re-aired episode of 24. I haven't followed that series closely, either, but I get the gist of the events and relationships. In the episode in question, Jack Bauer, exposed as a CTU mole in the Salazar organization, moves to re-infiltrate the Salazar organization. Whatever happened to once bitten, twice shy? Don't the people in these shows have any sense? Why on earth would the supposedly sagacious head of a heavy-handed family criminal organization with terrorist connections allow an exposed anti-terrorist triple agent back into the bosom of his gang, especially when by discrediting himself with the government that agent has undermined his own usefulness to the underworld? Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

The only explanation I can think of is that all this is somehow symptomatic of the currently empowered generation, the late-twenties through mid- to late thirties generation, I guess, that writes, directs and markets these productions. They must feel uncertain of the people and events in their lives, that anyone could be an imposter, that it's impossible to tell who is really behind or with you, what's really going on, or what anything really means. Perhaps it's the lack of a code, of a set of beliefs and morals they would rather die than betray. Perhaps everything has become so relative that people expect and forgive betrayal, trusting when trust has been abused, and overlook patent uselessness, anticipating benefits when no benefit can logically be expected.