1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 68: The addiction

“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

Kathleen (Lili Taylor) is a PhD candidate at a Lower Manhattan institution called the University of New York. She studies philosophy, but in this movie the discipline arguably stands for all of the humanities and social sciences. The discipline doesn’t seem very rigorous. Professors and students recite quotations to each other and solemnly contemplate photos of atrocities (the massacre at My Lai, the Nazi death camps). They talk about evil and determinism and free will. These are important topics, but I failed to detect much cogency in the discussions.

And yet this is an “ideas” movie. The main idea is downright traditional. It comes from theology, and it’s voiced by a vampire (Annabella Sciorra).

R.C. Sproul said we’re not sinners because we sin, but we sin because we are sinners. In more accessible terms, we’re not evil because of the evil we do, but we do evil because we are evil. Yeah. Now, what choices do such people have? It’s not like we have any options.

I never thought I’d hear R.C. Sproul invoked in a vampire movie, but what do you know, the director is Abel Ferrara, who is old-school and eclectic; he grew up Catholic and, despite having converted to Buddhism, appears to still trouble himself over original sin and heaven and hell. He also has used heroin and known people who were destroyed by that drug. In this movie, sinfulness is likened to bloodlust, which is likened to a craving for heroin.

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The vampire pulls Kathleen into a dark alley and gives her a choice. Tell me to go away, the vampire says. Tell me like you mean it.

Kathleen just says, Please.

The vampire bites her.

Has the vampire passed the craving on to Kathleen, or did Kathleen already have it? Arguably, what the vampire passes on is awareness of the craving, not the craving itself.

In the rest of the movie, Kathleen goes around biting people. She presents them with the same choice that she was presented with. When a person isn’t prepared to tell her to go away, she turns him or her into a vampire; she gives the person an education.

The person already has the craving, deep down.

One of her university classmates, as yet unbitten, reads philosophy while eating a hamburger. Kathleen is repulsed. The two activities shouldn’t be paired. The point of philosophizing is to enable one to resist one’s cravings. Philosophizing turns out to be a pitifully ineffective pursuit.

Kathleen becomes disenchanted with her studies.

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Kathleen apprentices herself to a guru, an older vampire played by Christopher Walken (of course) who claims to have learned to “manage” his bloodlust.

You know how long I’ve been fasting? Forty years. The last time I shot up, I had a dozen and a half in one night. They fall like flies before the hunger, don’t they? You can never get enough, can you? But you learn to control it. You learn, like the Tibetans, to survive on a little.

It’s hot air. Before long, the creep is belittling Kathleen and sucking out her blood, leaving her more despairing and famished than ever.

Of course Christopher Walken would be the movie’s closest thing to Satan.

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Everyone was guilty of what happened at My Lai, Kathleen initially argues (this is in an early scene, before she is bitten). The man who was punished for the atrocity was a scapegoat. Everyone should be forced to come to terms with the guilt.

She means that the guilt is collective – everyone contributed to some injustice that brought about the My Lai atrocity. After she is bitten, a more horrific truth is made evident to her: atrocities are committed because of an evil already in the perpetrator, an evil that lives in each person, that can only be curbed by death to the self, perhaps only by literal death. But death isn’t a choice for vampires, who are addicted, agonizingly, to sucking up life, to prolonging deathlessness.

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I checked out a library book by two local philosophers: The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning. It’s a self-help book. Here is how philosophy can help you to live well.

It’s an easy book to read, but I’ve had it for weeks and now I’m out of renewals. I’m having trouble building up sufficient enthusiasm to get through it. Something about the book feels too pat.

Not having read much of it, I don’t want to criticize it; but after I saw The Addiction, I looked up terms like original sin, sin, and salvation in the index. Nada.

Odd, because I know that at least one of the co-authors is a Christian.

Here’s what I think Ferrara would say about this book.

Go ahead. Use philosophy. Question. Make a life-plan. Cultivate good dispositions in yourself.

You’ll still be addicted to sin.

The cravings will still rack you. You’ll still give in to them.

You still won’t be able to withstand the light. You’ll still flinch away from mirrors.

C.S. Lewis writes about an addict in The Great Divorce. The addict is powerless to rid himself of his addiction, which is like a fiendish companion that perches upon his shoulder. An angel offers to help the addict. Shall I kill it? he asks. The addict needs his addiction killed, not managed, not held in check by virtues methodically cultivated. And if the addiction is inseparable from the addict’s life, the addict needs to die. But that needn’t be the end. Jesus says: “I am the resurrection and the life.”

Ascension Island

Congrats to Liga de Quito for winning the Copa Sudamericana, and especially to Alexander Domínguez for blocking three of Fortaleza’s penalty kicks. Domínguez also tended goal when Liga previously won this tournament, in 2009.

Stephen says this is Domínguez’s finest hour, but I still prefer the epic time-wasting of 2021.

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I have nothing much to relate – the weekend has been low-key (the best kind of weekend) – so here is an oldish video by Un mundo inmenso that I’d somehow never viewed until tonight. It’s about Ascension Island, an out-of-the-way, volcanic, Guernsey-sized British territory in the South Atlantic.

Plenty of weirdness here. Best thing – or worst, according to one point of view: Charles Darwin had the idea of importing non-native plants to moisten the air a bit. One of the mountains ended up turning green, but its ecosystem isn’t up to the ecological purists’ standards.

The U.S. has a military base on the island. Apparently, quite a few of the Britons are getting edged out. Which they resent. They’re only temporary residents, but some have been on Ascension for many years, and like their Northern Atlantic counterparts they feel connected to “their” land.

I looked up the island’s job board to see about moving my family there, but only one job was posted, in waste management, and it wasn’t ideal, requiring various special driver’s liscences as well as unmarriedness. Besides, the vacancy was closed.

I guess we’ll stay in South Bend.

Justin E. H. Smith’s generation

I am a Scorpio, a Rooster, INTP or INFP (depending on what day of the week I take the quiz), and who-knows-what on the Enneagram. According to current BuzzFeed wisdom, my culinary preferences reveal that the Taylor Swift lyric –

if the story is over, why am I still writing pages?

(from “Death By a Thousand Cuts” – a song I don’t know)

– will describe my love life for the next six months. (Why stop at my love life? Why stop at six months?)

More credibly, perhaps, I was born near the temporal boundary that separates the GenX-ers from the Millennials. I assume it isn’t a sharp boundary. I exhibit characteristics of both groups. Alas, I seem to have been born on the boundary’s twerpier side. I’d rather be an X-er. So it was with some keenness that I tracked down the magazine article “My Generation” by the entertaining philosopher Justin E. H. Smith.

A few paragraphs in, my heart sank. Smith was presenting an inventory of what music he used to listen to and when he used to listen to it.

(I remember when it was more or less obligatory to recite that sort of thing to people. It got tiresome.)

The tediousness of his musical examples aside, Smith’s point is that the X-ers were the last cohort to believe in “art in the fullest sense”:

What is art in the fullest sense? It is impossible to give an answer that will please everyone, but we might say that it is a distillation of the spirit of its time that somehow succeeds in breaking out above its time, speaking to us across the generations in a way that transcends the limitations of its own local idiom and its own myopic present. It is shaped by its historical period but ends up saying something quite general about human suffering, human hopes, perhaps the possibility of human redemption (or not).

(It bears emphasizing: “something quite general” is not quite something universal; I think Smith is deliberately avoiding making a claim about universality. He is interested in pitting himself against those who disavow even the more limited cases of transcendency, e.g., of art that speaks across a number of generations.)

After the X-ers, creators and audiences stopped pursuing, valuing, or even acknowledging transcendency and narrowed their focus to content shamelessly generated for like-minded people. Authenticity, as an aspiration, became a casualty. Nowadays, creators and audiences, lacking any belief in a transcendent anchor to be true to, allow themselves to be pulled along by the strongest current, and everything eventually sinks into the whirlpool of upvotes, of (Smith emphasizes) The Viral, of The Monetized.

Whether or not he’s right about the chronology, Smith does seem to have identified two strikingly opposed ways of thinking, and it does seem that the allegedly newer way (the anti-transcendence tendency) has the upper hand, Zeitgeist-wise. Or so old fogies like myself like to worry.

A day at the “farm”

Last night, Daniel outgrew his crib.

For several hours today we trudged through a corn maze. The boys walked most of the time (Daniel was attached to a leash). Advice: Don’t try to walk small children through a corn maze unless you know the way out.

After we found the exit, we encouraged the boys to bounce upon a large, inflated cushion. Then we encouraged them to roll around with other youngsters in a pit filled with uncooked kernels of corn.

We stood in a long line and eventually bought donuts. While Daniel was eating his, he plucked a wasp off the picnic table and tried to eat it; now, his lip is swollen.

I would be remiss not to mention my other precious child, Samuel, whose birthday is tomorrow. He’ll turn four. I remember my own fourth birthday. I suppose that for better or worse, a lot is now happening to Samuel that he’ll remember for the rest of his life.

Sammy, did you like the farm?

Oh, yes.

Would you like to go again next year?

No.

Ecuador 0, Colombia 0; body-text fonts, pt. 20: Wessex

Our shaky goalkeeper, Moisés Ramírez, blocked a penalty kick by Colombia’s Luis Díaz. Good for Moisés! The much-criticized Kevin Rodríguez also played well. The team, as a whole, did not.

We need a different coach.

Other teams are bad enough, we might scrape through to the World Cup. But we’re nothing like pleasing to watch. (Again, I mean the team; some of our individuals are amazing to behold.)

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This is from the introduction to the Library of America’s paperback edition of Helen Eustis’s The Horizontal Man (1946), which I haven’t read but might do (fall isn’t only a good season for reading horror and murder; it also befits the campus novel).

I did recently stare at the typeface for several hours, in Dolores Hitchens’s Sleep with Strangers.

It’s a rare one.

This book is set in 12 point Wessex, conceived by Matthew Butterick and finished at Boston’s Font Bureau in 1993. The typeface was inspired by the “surprising beauty of the wide-bodied italic complement of Caledonia … ”

The typeface reminds me of W.A. Dwiggins’s work more generally (e.g., Electra, New Caledonia, New Winchester).

Butterick, a lawyer and type designer, maintains a website that is perhaps the best free guide for amateur typesetters – that is, for virtually all of us. I say free, although Butterick (reasonably) would like people to give him money or else buy his book or one of his fonts. Wessex, however, doesn’t appear to be for sale; and I’m not sure that if it were, the proceeds would go to Butterick.

Safe return; tragedies; election; Baby Owen’s welcome

I’m back in South Bend, delighted to be with my own family and delighted by how delighted they are that I’m back.

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The big news is the tragedy in Israel. As with the Ukrainian tragedy, I have nothing useful to say, and I’m reluctant even to share others’ links, although my Internet go-tos – friends and foes – have offered up plenty of material. I’m doing my utmost not to condemn Joe Blow on the street or in the pulpit for taking this or that stance, for confidently allocating blame.

The other news is that Daniel Noboa, Alvarito’s son, is Ecuador’s President-elect. The populists hounded the last President, a businessman, out of office. Now the people have elected another businessman to replace him.

Ecuador will play soccer against Colombia tomorrow.

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This is one of the better birth announcements I’ve seen.

Owen appears to be his parents’ fourth child. (I barely know these people, but all my memories of them are favorable.)

Behold the principle of diminishing returns.

On holiday; Bolivia 1, Ecuador 2; Brazil 1, Venezuela 1

A satisfactory little vacation in Austin. I’ve done what I said I’d do, except I haven’t ridden the bus.

I’m about to finish reading my second book.

David took me to a good Colombian restaurant in East Austin, the seedy-but-gentrifying part of town. He lives in a much-nicer-but-also-gentrifying part of town. I gather there are other neighborhoods that leave his in the dust.

My legs are sore because yesterday I hiked through a stony, scrubby forest. I’m no birdwatcher, but I was delighted when a roadrunner crossed my path. It was an idyllic morning – except that the freeway traffic near the forest was very loud.

Back where Ana & David live, we did a little tour of the Halloween decorations.

Ada, my neice, is a chatterbox. She is keen to describe all the neighborhood calaveras (skulls). She tells us about Ellison, her imaginary older sister.

George, my nephew, likes to be read to and to dribble the soccer ball around the house.

We watched Ecuador play awfully against Bolivia. To our intense relief, Ecuador scored the winning goal in the last minute. Afterward, David and I listed four or five players whom we never want to see again. The commentator was a nice man from South Africa or maybe New Zealand who clearly knew little about South American soccer or soccer in general. By the end of the game, even he was remarking on how poor these players were, and David and I were warming up to him.

The other notable result was that Venezuela rescued a point in Brazil thanks to a late bicycle-kick goal. The Brazilians were very angry.

October’s poem

A dead racoon lay in the middle of our street, in front of our house. Someone put a traffic cone next to it to alert passing cars. The racoon remained there for many hours.

No city official collected the racoon.

Our next-door neighbors – jovial young men – held a memorial service for the racoon and buried it in their back yard. I applaud the sentiment but worry. Scent of racoon attracts more racoon.

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It’s chilly in the house. Our brand-new furnace provided heat for two days. Then it quit.

Not that I’ll be affected much. Repairs have been comissioned, and meanwhile I’ll fly to Texas to visit David, Ana, Ada, George, and Russell (the dog). The forecast there is for temperatures in the 70s and 80s, F.

Ana & David have jobs, and Ada and George go to day-care, so I’ll have time to myself. I intend to walk, ride the bus, eat, and read – things I used to do when I was a bachelor. I’ve pared down my cargo to these texts:

• The Bible
• Daphne Du Maurier, Don’t Look Now: Stories (I’ll probably just read one or two longish ones)
• R. M. Dworkin, ed., The Philosophy of Law (probably just one or two articles)
• Dolores Hitchens, Sleep with Strangers (unless I finish it tonight)
• Alasdair MacIntyre, The Unconscious
• Ronald Hugh Morrieson, The Scarecrow

I’ll use the Internet to continue reading Macbeth.

So, in addition to Scripture: texts of criminality, deviance, and buried desire. My usual seasonal fare.

Ecuador and Bolivia will play in La Paz on Thursday. David and I will watch that game together.

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October’s poem is “October”:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

O hushed October morning mild,

Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;

Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,

Should waste them all.

The crows above the forest call;

Tomorrow they may form and go.

O hushed October morning mild,

Begin the hours of this day slow.

Make the day seem to us less brief.

Hearts not averse to being beguiled,

Beguile us in the way you know.

Release one leaf at break of day;

At noon release another leaf;

One from our trees, one far away.

Retard the sun with gentle mist;

Enchant the land with amethyst.

Slow, slow!

For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,

Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,

Whose clustered fruit must else be lost –

For the grapes’ sake along the wall.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(Robert Frost)

Dress-up

Twenty-five days before Halloween and, already, we’re in the thick of it. Karin found a Where’s Waldo? outfit at Goodwill; Samuel wore it most of the day.

The costume got him lots of compliments on the street – drivers were queueing up to smile at him and to respect his right-of-way – and at the library. One of the librarians carried a Waldo book over to Samuel. While I was occupied at the checkout machine, Samuel sneaked into the back offices (he also performed this trick last week), but he was so cute, the branch manager scolded him just a little.

Karin bought Daniel a full-body outfit of a skunk (one of his “spirit animals”). He hasn’t tried it on yet, but he’s been dragging it around the house. My parents, zealous Goodwillers, bought Daniel a Superman disguise that would look swell on him were it not a costume for doggies.

Here’s a video of Daniel resisting bedtime.

Birthdays; mischief; the Fruit of the Spirit; a word association; a walk; a rogue motorcar

Happy birthday to Karin; to my sister-in-law, Ana; and, apparently, to quite a few of my acquaintances.

Here’s an old photo of Karin and her dad.

My parents baked Karin a cake. Daniel got it all over himself, and we had to toss him into the bath.

We asked Samuel if he wanted to bathe; he demurred. Later – too late – he apprehended that we were respecting his stated wishes, that we in fact didn’t intend to bathe him. He grabbed some fistfuls of cake and judiciously applied them. So we bathed him after all.

Daniel, whom we’d dried and partly dressed, climbed into the water again.

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This morning, I was urging Samuel to be patient, which got him onto his favorite Sunday School topic – the Fruit of the Spirit – and so we read from Galatians 5, which also mentions walking along with (beside, behind, in step with) the Spirit; which made Samuel impatient to take a physical walk; which we did take, along the perimeter of the nearby school. We observed the physical education students riding bicycles upon the running track. I never got to ride a bicycle in P.E. in my day. … Even stranger, a few yards ahead of us, a car casually drove over the grass and mounted the sidewalk and ambled behind the tennis courts and into a parking lot. I could hardly believe I’d seen this, but I checked the grass, and the tracks were there. What was so strange was the nonchalance of it, as if it were a familiar route for that car.