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.

The Mysteries of "The Final Problem" (and Attempted Explanations)

To this day, the public generally believes that the reason for the death of Sherlock Holmes in "The Final Problem" was that Arthur Conan Doyle was tired of writing these stories and wanted to stop, and the reason for its reversal in "The Empty House" was the unending pressure from fans on the author.

However, David Pirie (who wrote "Murder Rooms" starring our Dr. Doyle and his mentor Professor Bell) questioned this oft-repeated theory and pointed out that Doyle went on a Holmes hiatus for a long 8 years. If public pressure was the reason for his reversal, he would have done so in the first year or two, when the outcry was the loudest. It is hard to imagine that the public was still pressing him to revive Holmes 8 years after the death, so much so that he caved under the pressure to write one of the best entries in the collection, "The Hound of the Baskerville." Pirie also pointed out that Doyle wrote the story in 1893, about the same time his father died, which might have been a dark and painful event. 

I recently re-read "The Final Problem" and "The Empty House." There are many peculiar elements surrounding the death and resurrection of Sherlock Holmes, which convince me that the conventional wisdom is, if not entirely wrong, at least missing the point. I tend to agree with Pirie that the story is associated with some emotional clouds on Doyle's mind. If he wanted to stop writing Holmes stories, he can just stop writing them without killing Holmes. The death is about death, not merely a callous middle finger at his fans. 

Where Is the Body?

The first question is, if the Sherlock Holmes fanbase flooded the publisher's mailbox demanding that Doyle bring him back to life, whose fault is that? Can you blame them for thinking that Holmes was still alive, because there is no body? Naturally, one has to wonder, Why isn't there a body? Surely ("Don't call me Shirley!" to quote Leslie Nielsen), if Doyle really wanted to kill off Sherlock Holmes, he could have at least produced a body in the river, somewhere downstream from the Reichenbach Fall, and give Holmes a proper burial.

So, the only explanation is the simplest. Doyle did not truly intend to kill off Holmes. I doubt he consciously planned out the details of how to bring him back later, but a part of his mind must have left open a backdoor for the possibility of revival. 

In other words, the ending of The Final Problem is meant to be ambiguous. Even if he did not know whether he would write another Holmes story ever again, he did not want to give us, or himself, Holmes' corpse. I also suspect that he at least had a vague idea about the escape route, ie, scaling the cliff, just in case he wanted to bring Holmes back to life. Perhaps he didn't even expect to wait as long as 8 years. 

Why Do They Leave Britain? 

The general theory is that Doyle was impressed by the natural beauty of Meiringen during a vacation, also in 1893, and decided to place the climax to the story there. However, the way the story takes Holmes and Watson there is decidedly bizarre and uncharacteristically nonsensical. 

In the first half of the story, Dr. Watson (and hence the reader) was dragged by Holmes on a fast and furious trip from London to France, and from France to Belgium, and then onward to Switzerland, in order to escape the assassination attempts by Moriarty's criminal organization (as Holmes claimed). However, Holmes also told Watson that he needed only 3 days to stay alive and wait for the police to arrest everyone in the organization. Three days was all. 

"In three days--that is to say, on Monday next--matters will be ripe, and the Professor, with all the principal members of his gang, will be in the hands of the police."

When Holmes said the above lines to Watson, it was obviously Friday. They went to Victoria station the next morning, which must have been Saturday. So, he needed only to pass the weekend without being killed. 

To buy 2 days of safety, he had to run all the way to the continent? That makes no sense. I can think of a dozen solutions to Holmes' dilemma. For example, he could call in a favor with the Scotland Yard to assign a few policemen to him in a hotel across the street from the headquarters. Or he could use the incredible makeup and acting skills and hide out in an opium den, like "The Man with the Twisted Lip." Or he could hang out for 3 days inside the Diogenes Club, which was, supposedly, next door to Whitehall. He could even hide out in the Whitehall for 2 days, since it was the weekend anyway. Even if he had to play cat and mouse with Moriarty on the road, he could have gone anywhere on the British Isle, from Wales to Scotland. Why did he have to cross the Strait? Was Doyle too lazy to make up an excuse for the long journey? 

Despite the meticulous instructions for Watson to shake any tail, they were still followed at the train station toward ... presumably Dover, then boat, then Calais, then Paris. The destination is confirmed a couple of pages later:

"Moriarty will again do what I should do. He will get on to Paris, mark down our luggage, and wait for two days at the depot (emphasis mine)."

Why did he expect Moriarty to wait for 2 days in Paris? Two days later, ie, on Monday, if he were still in Paris, he would not be arrested "with all the principal members of his gang," would he? And, indeed, that was exactly what happened. On Monday, in Strasburg, Holmes telegraphed to the London police and received a response, to which he made a most unconvincing reaction: 

"They have secured the whole gang with the exception of him. He has given them the slip. Of course, when I had left the country there was no one to cope with him."

Right. So why did you leave the country in the first place? Besides, did Moriarty escape the police or was he still in Paris, waiting for the arrival of Holmes and Watson?

Again, the only explanation is the simplest. Holmes was not trying to escape Moriarty but rather lure him to the continent. The reason he left Britain was to make sure that Moriarty is not arrested on Monday with the rest of his gang.

Why Not Go Home? 

At this point, I'm sure you are wondering, why would he do that? Why go on this journey abroad just to cause Moriarty to unknowingly escape the British police?

But let's first look at another baffling choice here. Now that the arrests had happened and the gang was behind bars, Holmes decided to go on to Switzerland. Was he still trying to outrun Moriarty? (Even though he, obviously, never did try to outrun Moriarty in the first place.) No.  

"This man's occupation is gone. He is lost if he returns to London."

So, if Holmes wanted personal safety, he only needed to go home, since Moriarty could never return to Britain legally. He even suggested that Watson go home. Then why not go home together but rather head toward Meiringen? 

The narrative from Strasburg to Meiringen is even more transparent that Holmes was baiting Moriarty, leading him to a particular location. On the dead-end path by Reichenbach Fall, Holmes went as far as admitting that he knew the message to Watson was fake and devised by Moriarty to attack him. 

The simple explanation is that Holmes orchestrated the entire journey in order to get Moriarty to this place, alone, for a violent confrontation. In other words, Holmes had always planned to kill Moriarty here, far away from the British authority.

In many other stories, we have seen Holmes circumvent the law to let a criminal, even a murderer, go. He has shown at least a moderate degree of cynicism or distrust for the official legal system. I have no doubt the stories would have been much darker and more cynical, if Doyle had not tried to protect the public's sense of morality and belief in authority. Here, however, I am sure he knew that personal vigilantism was one step too far for his Victorian readers.

On the trip Holmes made a number of oblique remarks to Watson that sound like suicide notes, almost as if he had foreseen his own death together with Moriarty. However, if we read this part again, we can also interpret these as not biological but rather career suicide, and it sounds like protestation for his professional reputation:

"If my record were closed tonight I could still survey it with equanimity. ... In over a thousand cases I am not aware that I have ever used my powers upon the wrong side. ... Your memoirs will draw to an end, Watson, upon the day that I crown my career by the capture or extinction of the most dangerous and capable criminal in Europe (emphasis mine)."

Why Send Watson Away? 

This is never explicitly stated in the story, but the tone suggests (very vaguely, if I may say so) that Watson believed that Holmes knowingly sent him down the mountain in order to protect him from any risk of injury or harm by Moriarty. Or perhaps the Victorian readers assumed that Holmes adhered to the medieval battle code of duels, mano-a-mano. If Holmes were merely waiting for Moriarty to come at him so that he could arrest him alive, wouldn't it make sense to keep Watson around with his army revolver?  Holmes never let any medieval machismo prevent him from recruiting Watson's help on apprehending criminals on other cases before. 

When I presented this question to a generative AI, it replied that, besides protecting Watson, Holmes wanted the world to believe he was dead, implying that somehow Watson could not keep a secret. We saw him play a similarly cruel trick on his old friend. However, that story was written in 1913! In 1893, when Doyle wrote this story, Holmes was not supposed to pretend to be dead ... or was he? 

If Holmes really wanted to merely capture Moriarty, surely ("Don't call me Shirley!") a two-on-one confrontation is a much better bet. The only possible explanation for knowingly sending Watson away is to remove any witness of his illegal action next, which is ... more on that later. 

And, of course, removing Watson also serves the purpose of keeping Holmes' fate open-ended. Otherwise, Doyle could have written a scene in which Watson came back just a smidge too late, watching both Holmes and Moriarty plunge into the abyss ... but he did not.  

What Actually Happened? 

There is no way of knowing what Doyle actually intended to do with the duel between Holmes and Moriarty. However, as I argued above, he did not want to definitively kill Holmes. The situation is in fact very similar to the final problem of Hecule Poirot, where the detective did play the vigilanti and kill the bad guy. In that case, however, Poirot was driven to definitive suicide by his own conscience. This is certainly one possibility for Holmes ... maybe? The question is whether Doyle respects the standards of justice as much as Agatha Christie. I don't know the answer.

However, in 1903, Doyle gently soothed readers' sense of justice by portraying Holmes' survival and the killing of Moriarty as a fair fight in self-defense. This trick continues to be used in today's movies and thrillers. The good guy does not mean to kill the bad guy, but, oops, he killed the bad guy accidentally or unintentionally. All of our conscience is safe. 

Alternatively, since Doyle left the door open for himself, I can also imagine the final fight scene, in which the well-prepared Holmes pulled out a knife, maybe from his walking stick that got mentioned so many times, and stabbed Moriarty as soon as the latter got close enough, or perhaps pulled out his own revolver and shot the professor on sight. Then he calmly threw the body into the abyss. 

That would probably have lost him a bunch of fans, but I kind of like it. 

Salvation for birth and death (Mahabharata Notes #21)

It is not an original insight that all religions, to some extent, offer salvation for death. A religion that does nothing to alleviate human angst over death cannot go very far. However, the only religion that is able to perceive birth and death as both sides of the same coin, as far as I know, originates from ancient India. No other religion has such philosophical depth and insight. 

Isn't it funny? We all tend to take birth for granted and want to wish death away so that life has a beginning but not an end? It is the most natural, most instinctive presumption shared by all mankind. I get a mental image of a cannon shooting out person after person after person for a few million years, piling up in the eternal afterlife. Hmm. It must be an expanding universe.

Thus, it is extraordinary that Hindu priests at some point realized that birth and death are tightly bound together as cause and effect -- few things in nature are so pure and direct -- and dreamed up a scheme in which death is also the cause of birth. They must have loved the aesthetics of circles. 

Death may not cause birth, but birth absolutely causes death. 

Isn't it funny that nobody else in the world talks about this universal truth? Those priests some thousands of years ago not only thought about it but also put it in their scripture. If you want to avoid death, you gotta avoid birth in the first place. This is the kind of airtight logic you can't get from even the most sophisticated theologians in any other religion. 

Therefore, it is only natural and logical that the ultimate salvation offered by the Bhagavan is a total liberation from birth and from death. The all-encompassing god of the universe, through the avatar of Krishna, says kindly that everyone is free to believe in any god they want and make sacrifice to any god they want to obtain favors from. They stay in the cycles of birth and death doing their thing, even if the Atman permeates all of them anyway. However, once you become aware of and devote yourself to the Bhagavan, that's it, that's the end of your deaths ... and your births. The ultimate solution is the absolute salvation.

The 3 Gunas (Mahabharata notes #20)

After reading snatches of the Bhagavad Gita over the years, I finally decided to read the whole thing through via Barbara Stoler Miller's translation. Most of the process was a slog, but slog cannot be avoided or skipped, and finally it proves absolutely necessary. When I got to the final chapter last night, at least one understanding broke through my stubborn presumption. 

One can never pin down the meaning of old Sanskrit words, but it is generally accepted that the 3 gunas are sattva, rajas, and tamas and that each word more or less means harmony/light, passion/energy, darkness/intertia, respectively. There are a lot of explanations about how each guna manifests in a person's behaviors or life, and I encountered some of the explanations in Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, suggesting that this theoretical framwork is a persistent element in Hinduism. In the Gita, sattva is most often associated with action with attachment to duty and detachment from outcome; rajas is associated with desire and greed, ie, action with attachment to outcome; and tamas is associated with inaction, laziness, avoidance. 

Born into and living in a judgmental world, I was hardly even aware of the morality-based color that imposes value onto the foreign concept. Tamas is bad, rajas is better, and sattva is the best, and humans should attempt to climb from the lowest rung (tamas) to the highest (sattva), from ignorance to enlightenment. 

There is nothing in the Gita that explicitly dispels this understanding, but when I got to the end it suddenly dawned on me how wrong my presumption was. The 3 gunas are not 3 rungs on a ladder toward heaven. They are 3 coexising elements. All 3 gunas coexist in ... me, a person, all the time. I can no more eliminate tamas than be 100% filled with sattva. That's not how it works. All 3 gunas make up a person (or the world, but for now I'm just focusing on psychology), and we are all composed of dark inertia, desire, and the ability to be illuminated. 

(I was going to question the last part but, hey, why then am I writing this?)

As we steadily march toward winter solstice, tamas swells inside the body, weighing heavily on our eyelids. It is not bad or good. It is merely nature.