Pippin: The Meaning of Life

 

A young man's search for the meaning of life --- an evergreen theme in storytelling. Is it to slay the dragon and rescue the princess? That is a whole genre onto itself. All other popular tropes are presented in the musical Pippin: 

1. To be a revolutionary and commit patricide. 
2. To become his father and possess his power and glory. 
3. To have sex as much as possible. 
4. To amass fame and fortune (basically the same as #2). 
5. To find creative outlet in art or enlightenment in religion (mentioned but glossed over). 
6. To live an ordinary life with a wife and a kid and do humble and repetitive work. 
7. To light youth on fire and go out with a bang.

Whether it was Stephen Schwartz, or Roger O. Hirson, or Bob Fosse who came up with this list I don't know, although I suspect #3 was probably Fosse's contribution. What I find amusing is how all-encompassing the list is in the human culture, at least in the modern, industrial and post-industrial society. Before the modern era, religion and spiritual enlightenment might have featured a more prominent place, along with the forever father-son succession drama. Isn't it funny that people's (men's?) imagination is so limited? How many stories have been told to repeat the same quest over and over and over again?

Perhaps Joseph Campbell's followers would say that such convergence is inevitable, because humans are fundamentally the same. Men collectively pursue the same few paths that give their lives meaning. It may or may not be true, but I simply lament the shortness of the list --- can't we even come up with at least 10 options? 

The same question is never debated by women, because for most of human history there were no options. Women are precious resources for making babies and making babies survive to adulthood, including young men who fret about the meaning of life. With the advent of birth control, however, women can no longer escape the same question. Whether our culture coalesces the meaning of a woman's life into a short list of options also, I don't know. I do hope, however, that our imagination is not limited to men's short list. 

It is almost hilarious that, even in this day and age, we are still inundated with the same story: A person cannot find happiness unless his life has meaning and/or purpose. What might this meaning or purpose be? All the self-help gurus, who have moved their butts from books and TV to social media, are giving out the same short list, including #3. I mean, really, is this the best we can do? 

Can I do better than mainstream society though? Can I come up with something outside of the list? 

Well, I don't know. All I can do is observe life. What interests me is how #6 is dismissed as boring and repetitive and intolerable. Maybe an ordinary working life with one wife and one child is intolerable to Bob Fosse. I look around, however, and do not see that much repetition. Take, for example, the daily work of a health care professional, such as a nurse or a physical therapist or a primary care physician or a psychotherapist. The nature of the work remains constant, but each patient is slightly different. Even if multiple patients have the same disease, they have different symptoms, different ways of expressing their discomfort and pain, different trajectory of recovery (or not), different comorbidities, different personalities, different abilities to cope, different communication styles, different motivation to comply with or reject treatment ... The variations go on. Moreover, new treatments and new research come out all the time. Yesterday metformin was the best option for type 2 diabetes, but now everyone is shooting themselves up with Ozempic or Zepbound. What does one tell the next patient? Can we find some meaning of life in the people whose infections resolve after a week or two, whose wound you suture, whose pain that got better or worse, or whose blood pressure that went up and down? 

That is just the work part. What about relationships? 

Can you find meaning of life is in the argument you have with your brother, even if you have both forgotten it a few months later? Or the love you make with your spouse, and the talk about both of your 401(K) accounts afterward? Or your kid's PTA meeting in Grade 3, which is not the same as the PTA meeting in Grade 4 or 5? 

In the past 6 months, I have been experimenting with recipes involving a kind of tofu skin product, a Taiwanese specialty that I first discovered on YouTube videos. It has the marvelous ability to soak up the sauce quickly in a wok. So far I have cooked it in different mushroom sauces, but I have plans for tomato sauce, braised meat sauce, and maybe seafood sauce. Could tofu skin recipes be one of my many meanings of life? 

Ah, but none of these trivialities are fulfilling, says Pippin. 

Let's look at the word fulfill. Full and fill. The primitive meaning is the feeling of being full, having food in the stomach, the relief of hunger. 

Maybe this is the universal meaning of human life at the bottom of it all. No feeling in the world is more real than the transition from hunger to satiety. I wonder if this is one of the sources of our confusion --- the constant satiation and lack of hunger. 

All the more reason to find the meaning of life --- at least some of it --- in tofu skin recipes. Once I get tired of it, I can move on to egg custard recipes and bean soup recipes. 

Frailty (2001) - Spoilers - a Family Interpretation

I just discovered that I have never written a review for this movie. How strange. I could have sworn that I did, some years ago, when I first watched this odd little horror movie that left a strong impression. 

In the late 1990s, after the massive successes of twist endings (perhaps more precisely called "flip" endings) in "The Usual Suspects" and "The Sixsense," this type of endings that mess with the audience's heads was quite common. "Frailty" came a little too late to the party to capitalize on the trend. It took me a while to work out the meaning of the ending upon my first viewing, and the horror of it did not hit me until that evening. The horror lies not in a seemingly normal and loving single father (Bill Paxton) who suddenly starts to ax people, but rather in this world in which God orders people to ax other people by handing them a list of names. The killer is a hero because he regards his targets as demons and therefore inhuman, although they appear to be humans who have murdered someone or bad in some other way ... maybe? It is never quite clear, because one of the sons, Fenton, is labeled as a demon many years before he supposedly has committed murders ... but that part is not clear, either. The list of victims in his house might well have been a list of demons handed to his brother Adam. The definition of demons is not well established in the movie, which actually adds to the terror. Indeed, the delayed horror I felt that evening, some years ago, was from the vivid immersion into a world where a wrathful, Old-Testament God's ax falls on humans who are judged as demons whenever and wherever, with no room for any mercy or mitigation or bargaining or defense in court. Nope. Who needs hell when God is handing down direct punishment every day on earth? 

This movie sat in my VOD queue for a few years before I finally rented and watched it again yesterday. The terror has faded, but I am no less disturbed than the first time, just from a different angle. 

The second viewing leaves no doubt that the screenwriter, Brent Hanley, meant no ambiguity. The God is the literal wrathful Old-Testament God. The father (Paxton) is a literal superhero who carries out God's mission to ax demons in the world. The people he axed are literal demons who have murdered their spouses, parents, or children. And the mission is literally passed onto Adam, who axes his brother Fenton (can't be named Abel I guess), among others, because he too is a demon. Everything should be taken literally, and the flip is a plot device but not a source of doubt. The writer's intention is spelled out in his DVD commentary, which I have not heard but is partially transcribed by a kind blogger here. 

Although I already had a gut feeling about the writer's family of origin while I was re-watching the movie, this comment confirmed my suspicion: "When people asked Hanley where the idea for the script came from, he likes to say that it's 100% autobiographical." In some sense, this is also indirectly confirmed by the fact that Hanley has not been able to get another screenplay made ever since. "Frailty" remains his only produced script. Usually everyone has at least one story to tell -- their own life story. Going beyond that requires something else: skills, imagination, insight into other people's psyche, etc. I have no doubt this story is 100% autobiographic for Hanley, particularly the conflicts between Fenton and the father and the most disturbing scene in the movie --- no, not the ax murders --- where the father locks the pre-teen boy Fenton in the underground bunker (which Fenton had dug) which no food and no toilet and one glass of water per day, poured through a hole by Adam. This feels real, and it is precisely where the horror lies on the second viewing. 

The wrathful, vindictive, punitive God portrayed in the movie is not a religious figure in the Bible but rather the boy's human father. He is flesh and blood; he is not an allegory, not a vision, not a concept, and nothing imaginary or symbolic. He is 100% real and can hack your head off any minute. 

I said "the boy" above, because I believe the writer is both Fenton and Adam, torn by both hatred and worship for his father. 

There are a few other interesting reflections on this family drama. For example, Hanley mentioned in the commentary that the bunker scene was originally even worse, as Fenton was supposed to be afraid of the dark and he pissed and shat during the imprisonment. Paxton took these details out because even he found it unbearable. Even without these details, some female audience members walked out of the screening during this scene, which highlights the lack of any femininity in this family. Revealing, isn't it? This is an all-male family and all the relationships reek the Old Testament-style masculinity. Even more interesting is that the original script defined Agent Wesley's sin as murdering his daughter, which is changed to his mother by Paxton, which slightly weakens Hanley's theme about patriarchy but still hints at the absence of a mother figure in this universe, I mean, family. 

Thus, all pieces of the puzzle fall perfectly into place. This is a story about a family in which the father is God. Definitely not the New Testament of God or Jesus, but the Old Testament God. He is the judge, jury, and executioner all in one. To the son he is almighty and death-giving to not only demons but also humans (ie, the Sheriff). 

With zero experience with a wrathful or violent father when I was going up, it is only recently that I realized that many people love punishment, either doling out punishment themselves or, perhaps better, watching a father figure punish other people. Apparently the massively popular reality TV show "Cops" has many imitators on YouTube nowadays, garnering millions of views. Reading the comments section can be quite illuminating. I see the same thrill between their watching mentally unstable miscreants being cuffed and dragged into police cars and Adam's for his father's heroic mission of killing demons, including his brother Fenton. That is what terrifies me the second time.

Hence, the most chilling part about the ending is Adam's day job as the sheriff in small town Texas, judging who is a good man and who is a demon through a handshake. Like his father, he inherits the position as God in his motherless world, which I cannot be sure does not overlap with my world. As much as Hanley lays out the vivid details of his father's relationship with him, in his heart, father remains a hero. This reminds me of the ending of 1984, the sincerity of which I can no longer doubt:

"He loved Big Brother."

Out of the Past (1947)

 

If I were 30 years younger, I might become obsessed with this movie. Now, though, my thought was more like, "Where have you been all my life?" An astounding movie that pushes the film noir genre to its logical extreme. I could not believe my eyes when I saw it for the first time last night. Never even heard of it -- can you believe it?! 

How extreme, you ask? When it comes to the femme fatale, this femme is most unapologetically and unrepentantly fatal. Jane Greer's character, Kathie, is not fundamentally different from other female villains of this type, but her depth of badness is almost unrivaled in all of English-language cinema, except perhaps Sharon Stone in "Basic Instinct." Her power comes as much from her beauty as from the purity of her evil. It's so delicious as to be revolutionary. (One of these days I have to write something about the importance of bad women.) 

And then the complex plot. The highly stylized dialog is faithful to the hard-boild pulp tradition but a tad more dense than average, perhaps even more so than "The Maltese Falcon" or "Double Indemnity." Plotwise it is more elegant and, although complex, more logical and believable than the aforementioned two classics. I felt a happy tingle down my spine when Robert Mitchum's Bailey muttered to himself in the taxi, "It's a frame." The merciless pacing nearly broke my neck. Plotting is a lost art in modern American cinema. I have not seen anything on par with this plot since "LA Confidential." (Sorry Rian Johnson. Your mysteries are but child's play in comparison.) 

Finally, there's the cinematography. I expected the typical shadows and lights, but I did not expect them to be toyed to this extent. The night scenes and the day scenes; the indoor scenes and the outdoor scenes. Every scene is ever so slightly more stylish and more intense than the best noir I have seen. I had to pause the streaming to check that it was indeed made in the 1940s, because it is so full of expressionist images that I thought surely it had to be a decade or two later. The images feel meta; they feel like a distillation of the very best techniques in all film noir, years after the entire treasure trove has been savored, digested, and transformed. 

I grew up on Raymond Chandler, who, despite his glorious prose, is too sentimental. This I have to admit at my crusty old age. "Out of the Past" is nearly entirely unsentimental about human lust and greed, but it does not work too hard to be performatively cynical, either. Nobody is a patsy, not really, which distinguishes itself from Dashiell Hammett's tendencies. Every time the plot appears to drift dangerously into a genre convention, the scene cuts away on the cusp of cliche. The only discordant note was Bailey's non-femme-fatale girlfriend Ann, who threatens to ruin the movie's realism with small-town American wholesomeness ... or so I thought. The ending, however, completely subverted my expectation and wrapped up the movie's ultimate perfection.

Fantasying versus Dreaming

DW Winnicott's paper, Dreaming, Fantasying, and Living  is collected in his seminal book Playing and Reality. I have zero confidence that I understand any of it. Nevertheless it seems to illuminate something in my own experience. Perhaps Winnicott was describing something entirely different, and yet somehow his words, which I have read closely, slowly, and with difficulty, ignite recognition. So I will just assume that he was talking about me as much as he was talking about his patient. 

I have a very simple example of fantasying. For 3 months DH has been telling me, gently and convincingly, that I should do pull downs and bench presses at least once a week, preferably twice. I wholeheartedly agree that it is the right thing to do and have thought about doing them several times a week. Vivid images of me doing pull downs and bench presses float around in my head. Nevertheless, I have actually done them no more than 5 times in 3 months. I can't even remember the actual number of times, because all the imagined workouts have blended into the memory of real action. This is fantasying. 

This is a real but low-stake example, but who doesn't know someone who has put their life on hold indefinitely because they are waiting for something to happen? They will get their act together and begin their life, for real, as soon as they meet their soulmate, or find their true passion, or land their dream job, or figure out what they really want. Before the monumental event happens, however, they can always fill the void with constant visualization of their dream life. 

Winnicott pointed out that fantasying not only does not nourish one's emotion life but stifles it. He did not describe, theorize, or explain how it does so. Perhaps it is not the point anyway. 

Ironically, popular self-help theories have made billions of dollars by promoting fantasying, ie, by encouraging people to imagine, in vivid details, their wish-fulfillment. It is usually packaged as the American Dream or The Secret. In fact, the word "dream" in today's culture means daydreaming much more often than night-dreaming. 

According to Winnicott, only night-dreaming is real dreaming and truly nourishes one's emotional health. Real dreams are full of symbols, which lead people into their deepest truths, including what they want. Subsequently, this path lead away from idle fantasying and true living. 

No Other Choice (2025) - Not a review

When I entered the workforce in 1999, Microsoft Word had already dominated the word-processing market and pushed Word Perfect into oblivion. At the time, I heard many colleagues in writing/publishing lament how much better Word Perfect is than Word and wondered how a superior product could not win the game of competition in the supposed free market. Nearly three decades later, a few days ago I heard the same sentiment from someone in the business of pharmaceutical regulatory publishing. Even now someone still remembers the superiority of the long-dead Word Perfect. It reminded me of Park Chan-wook's new movie, No Other Choice, because the answer is that this is a free market in which the surviving product or company wins not by being better but by murdering its competition.

Not having read Das Kapital, I have no idea whether any economists in history predicted the elegant ways of monopoly: First you kill all your competitors through bottom-barrel, negative-balance-sheet pricing. Once they are all dead, you raise the prices on consumers, who now have "no other choice" but buy from you. And the initial self-sabotaging strategy is funded by Wall Street and private equities, who can afford to wait until they reap obscene amounts of profit from captive consumers. Superior products are necessarily more expensive and therefore always lose out in this scheme. Whose fault is it? We consumers have no one to blame but ourselves, because the vast majority of people cannot help ourselves but to always reach toward the lowest price stickers like moths fly toward the flame. 

The idea of shirking responsibilities has been circling in the back of my mind since, at least consciously, I watched "The Sopranos," which was made in my formative years when I did not quite understand the culture around me --- a culture of absolutely no responsibilities. The title "No Other Choice" is in large part about the same theme, an ironic phrase behind which everyone hides while committing murder. Once again my mind is drawn back to the bright sunny morning in March 2003, when my friend and I sat outside of MCI Center and heard about the new of the invasion of Iraq. Nowadays every American involved in making that war happen would say they had no other choice, including those men and women who joined the military explicitly to take revenge on "those people over there" and, 20 years later, whine about wasting their time and youth in the military and Biden's decision to pull the last troops out of Afghanistan. Of course, nobody had any choice, it's all just a big weather system that came and killed millions of people and destroyed American wealth (but not the wealthy) for generations.

Before I watched the movie but after reading its synopsis, I thought it was going to be another sob story about how cruel and dehumanizing corporations are, how capitalistic greed sucks the soul out of hardworking average workers, blah blah blah. I thought it would be another "elegy" in line with Case and Deaton's Death of Despair theory, trailing behind droves of intellectuals who have cashed in on the plight of the virtuous American workers who lost their jobs to evil Chinese and Mexican workers. I was surprised, however, that the central character, Man-su, despairs in losing his middle-class social status, his elaborate hilltop house, two dogs fed on gourmet food, and a stay-at-home wife. His extreme measures to land the next job are not driven by poverty or starvation, but rather by the absolute refusal to change ... himself. The movie makes no demand for my sympathy. What a relief. Thank you.

Isn't it great? We're all leaves tossed in the wind, victims of evil whoevers, never having to take any responsibilities for any of our own decisions. Some years later, when aliens land on earth and wonder how the planet became uninhabitable, the electronic documentation of our images and chatters will explain to them that we annihilated our own home because we had "no other choice." After all, we can't do without cars because we already built the highways, we can't give up beef because it is the only food men should eat, we can't stop building data centers because it is our patriotic duty.

The ending of "No Other Choice" is beautiful. After chuckling ironically for 2 hours, I did not expect to be hit with such poignancy that tears came to my eyes.