"Bury My Hear with Candy Starr" | Allusions to Christ and the Gospels in "Ceremony" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"

(originally posted 30 April 2013)

Prominent among the motifs of canonical Western literature is the allusive retelling of the Christ narrative, an explicit thematic reference to Biblical interpretations of the life and works of Jesus of Nazareth.  The original tale, sourced from the sacred texts of the Gospels in the New Testament of the Christian religious tradition, traces Christ’s significant teachings and “miracles” as observed and recorded by four of his twelve Apostles: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. As these constitute the only Gospels recognized by the reformed Christian church, they are, consequently, the textual source to which nearly all contemporary literature makes reference.

Two novelists writing in the middle of the American 20th century make such allusions to the story of Christ in their particular works, with each using the idea in a comparable, though notably different application. Ken Kesey, in his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Cuckoo), utilizes multiple references to the aforementioned Gospels to portray the book’s tragic hero Randle McMurphy as a blatant, almost ironic Christ-figure. Similarly, in Ceremony, Leslie Marmon  Silko creates parallels to Christ with the secondary character Harley, but includes significant components of this theme manifested in other characters, including the protagonist, Tayo. These novels, though vastly different in setting, scope, tone, time, and more, each use concrete elements of their respective plots to make strong allusions to the works and teachings of the Christ of the Gospels.

Perhaps the single most striking similarity between the modern literature and the Gospel accounts of the New Testament is the mortal fate of the implied Christ-figure and, infinitely more crucially, the sacrificial reason for which the character meets his end. As Jesus sits with his disciples at the Last Supper, he  foretells of his impending betrayal; as they cry out and protest that none of them could so heinously deny their Savior, he picks up a cup of wine and instructs them to “drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 27-28). It is with this invocation, just one of four accounts of the same message found throughout the Gospels, that Jesus explains to his Apostles that, in his death, he assumes the burden of the sins of all; upon being betrayed, arrested, tortured, and crucified in the day to come, then enduring hell and returning (Luke 24:46-47), he has proverbially saved humanity from universal damnation. Such a tale, of the human sacrifice for another, is also present in the fates of both McMurphy in Cuckoo and Harley in Ceremony.

Following a frenetic sequence of events in the penultimate scenes of Cuckoo, the novel’s narrator, Chief Bromden, suffocates a vegetative McMurphy with his pillow, effectively ending the man’s life and resoundingly completing his messianic arc. His literal death, however, is simply a mercy at the hands of of the patient whom he led from the holistic throes of the mental institution to what, in the very last sentences of the novel, is a potentially liberated life and livelihood. But it is prior to his death that he is truly cemented as a martyr -- like Christ -- in the eyes of the band of patients; McMurphy himself is banished to the electroshock table as refuses to admit guilt and/or wrongdoing in the events that lead to Bibbit’s suicide. This is notably similar to Christ’s refusal, as he stood in ridicule in front of Pilate, to deny that he was indeed the Son of God (Devit). After being sent to another building for the procedure, a place which could conceivably be symbolic of Calvary, McMurphy is permanently rendered a mindless body, victimized by his own sacrifice for the other patients.

Silko forges a similar story in Ceremony, in which the protagonist, Tayo, is forced to flee from his home by Emo and his malevolent band of veterans; toward the very end of the novel, Tayo’s liberation is created only through the death-by-torture of his former companion, Harley, for the latter’s failure to bring Tayo to Emo. As Tayo observes Harley being slowly mutilated from a hidden vantage, he realizes epiphanically that “all that had been intended for Tayo had now turned on Harley” (Silko 251). With Harley’s ultimate death, and Emo’s seeming metaphysical need for blood met, Tayo sees that Emo has “a victim and a corpse” in Harley (Silko 251) and he watches as Emo loads the body in the trunk and drives away, mirroring the fates of the Apostles as they watched the slow, agonizing torture of Christ and his subsequent crucifixion (Matthew 15).

Beyond this most significant allusion to the self-sacrifice of Christ present in Cuckoo and Ceremony exists a notable series of parallels to the Gospel accounts of Jesus. Within Cuckoo, the climactic events leading to the protagonist’s doom are various, more subtle hints exist that suggest Kesey is indeed imposing a Christ-figure narrative onto McMurphy. The table on which McMurphy must undergo the electroshock therapy is “shaped, ironically, like a cross, with a crown of electric sparks in place of thorns” (Kesey 980). Within the pages of Ceremony, Silko makes further implication that Harley portrays a sort of Christ-figure; in the earliest section of the novel, as Tayo is sitting under an elm tree, “Harley came riding up on the black burro” (Silko 19), a veiled reference to the Biblical story of when “Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, as it is written” (John 12:14) as he entered Jerusalem.

The primary characters in both books are also defined by the company they keep, a truth that reflects the interpersonal signature of Christ’s character as illustrated throughout the New Testament. Of particular note is Jesus’s insistence on keeping company and breaking bread with the lowest of society, even telling a crowd that “the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you” (Matthew 21:31). Kesey uses this sentiment in a crass sort of way, as McMurphy tells the group of patients they’d be sailing with “a twitch I know from Portland named Candy Starr” (Kesey 2813) and he continues on to make a closer acquaintance with her. Silko involves a working woman much more cryptically, choosing to give Tayo a mother who makes pleasure her business.

Beyond the significant events in either novel noted above, each further explores the idea with such events as Bibbit’s suicide in Cuckoo, which alludes to an identical fate met by Judas Iscariot after deceiving Christ; Harley’s interaction with the sheep in Ceremony, which alludes to the Gospel tale of “when Jesus landed and saw a large crowd...they were like sheep without a shepherd. So he began teaching them many things” (Mark 6:34); and the strong themes of persecution and resistance in both works -- McMurphy and the patients versus Big Nurse Ratched, the Natives versus the whites -- that make strong parallels to Christ’s own repeated denials of the Pharisees (Matthew 23).

In both Ceremony and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Leslie Marmon Silko and Ken Kesey, respectively, have indeed crafted tales that overtly feature characters with strong Christ-like attributes. Such allusions in the crafting of characters can be used in several capacities within the work, and neither author hesitates to capitalize on this reality. Like many writers who’ve related their prose to the recountings of Christ in the New Testament, these two use such allusive characters as a literary mechanism to foreshadow events that would seem contextually probable given a comprehension of any of the Gospels. More ambitiously, each writer succeeds in using the literary parallels to the Biblical Christ to explore further themes of the cyclical nature of life as well as of Good versus Evil, both of which are common to all of art and all of life. Such a robust theme that relates to a story as ubiquitous as that of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, easily the most prominent and influential figure in the history of mankind, for better or for worse,  is easily identified and easily related to, and, more significantly in the context of the present novels, acts as a fulcrum about which readers can more likely contemplate and enjoy the work.

"The Chapstick Manifesto" | The Case for Increasing Annual Federal Budgetary Allocation to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration

(originally posted 12 March 2013)

For the greater part of the Atomic Age, the United States has been the global leader in space travel and interplanetary exploration. It was the US that developed jet-rocket technology in the 1940s and 1950s, that famously led mankind to the moon in the 1969, that landed the first probes on the Martian surface in the 1970s, that orchestrated the seminal Space Shuttle program from the 1972 to 2011, that cooperatively deployed the International Space Station in 1998, and that, along with many other accomplishments, is now leading the world into the new age of commercial space flight. As this nation has reaped the consequent and obvious technological benefits of these endeavors to both further its own interests and improve the quality of life abroad, the world may direct its collective gratitude largely to the organization that wholly conceived, developed, and executed these milestones for humanity, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Despite NASA’s profound contributions to global progress in all conceivable forms of medicine, materials science, lifesaving technology, engineering, biological disciplines, national morale, international national economies and more, legislators of both parties have, in recent decades, repeatedly sought to drastically reduce the agency’s annual operating budget. With a current allocation of $17.77 billion of the federal fiscal year budget, NASA comprises about 0.48% of the government’s total annual expenditure; that is, for about every $207 dollars spent on national defense, social security, various income securities and more, just one dollar supports the Agency’s stated mission to “pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.” President Obama’s approved FY2013 budget will further slash this to under $17.71 billion, the lowest operating budget that the agency has had in four years, and, by proportion, the smallest in its nearly 55-year history (Brastaad). This action, which is gravely consistent with the aforementioned annual reduction of allocation to NASA, neglects the scientific and economic benefits that a prosperous space agency offers, and, equally importantly, fails to meet lawmakers’ obligation to American citizens. To meet the technological needs of a rapidly-growing international population, US lawmakers must, as the men and women charged with tending the world’s preeminent expeditionary space power, reverse this trend and strongly consider a dramatic increase in NASA’s annual funding.

Of the multiplicity of reasons to consider raising the agency’s funding for future exploration and experimentation, perhaps the most important requires a brief look to the past. Since 1976, NASA has maintained an online database of the scientific innovations which have directly resulted in improving the quality of life around the world. As of this writing, the current list includes fully 1,760 uniquely identifiable advancements in every existing field of practical science (Spinoff). President Obama himself, in a speech to the National Academy of Sciences in 2009, reminded Americans that the Apollo program, “produced technologies that have improved kidney dialysis and water purification systems; sensors to test for hazardous gases; energy-saving building materials; and fire-resistant fabrics used by firefighters and soldiers” (qtd. in Tyson 27). The president could have easily expanded such a list of revolutionary “spinoffs” by mentioning NASA’s direct role in developing the technologies behind digital imaging in modern medicine, collision-avoidance systems in fixed-wing aircraft, LASIK surgery to restore vision, global positioning system infrastructure, the military’s essential Meals-Ready-to-Eat, radiation detectors, and, seemingly, nearly every achievement in applied science in the last 40 years (Tyson 28).

In considering the president’s list above, it should be emphasized that it includes only a small selection of NASA’s achievements made during the Apollo era, a twelve-year period that ended in 1972. If the plan that the president ambitiously laid out in an April 2010 speech at the Kennedy Space Center, in which he calls for the nation to land on Mars by the mid-2030s, produces any tangible results, each of the world’s more than seven billion inhabitants should be optimistic aboutobt the potential technological benefits to be reaped; lives can be saved, mouths can be fed, and diseases can be cured -- all directly through NASA’s endeavor to touch down on its celestial neighbor (Kennedy).

Lest there be any doubt about just how direct and how critical the type of help that the agency can provide may be, critics should look at the Hubble Space Telescope and the optical problems with which it was plagued for the first three years after its launch in 1990. Though it was eventually fixed manually by a NASA crew, the issue, that the images it produced were deeply out of focus, was solved in the interim with a software algorithm developed by astrophysicists at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore (Tyson 31). At the same time, researchers at the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at Georgetown University, with help from the Hubble scientists, realized this algorithm could be applied just as well to mammography; because of the efforts to repair a design flaw in Hubble, the medical scientists at Georgetown were able to improve the accuracy in tests for the early detection of breast cancer (Tyson 32). It is to NASA, as much as to researchers at Georgetown, that countless women owe their lives. It is easily conceivable what further discoveries could be made -- and what further lives could be saved -- if American legislators restore the agency to its prior budgetary allocation (on average, about twice as much by proportion since 1976).

Film Review | "The Tree of Life" (2011)

(originally posted 27 June 2011)

Dripping with ambition and marvelous to behold, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life is a rapturous meditation on life and on death, on creation, destruction, and on humanity’s most achingly existential questions. “There are two ways through life: the way of nature, and the way of grace,” muses Mrs. O’Brien (in an ethereal performance from Jessica Chastain) to her eldest son, Jack (portrayed impressively by first timer Hunter McCracken), shedding a modicum of insight into an altogether unprecedented film.

It is this reality with which the latter character, an older, sleek-suited Jack in the form of Sean Penn, is conflicted at the onset of, but also throughout, the film upon learning of his younger brother’s death. What follows over the next two hours of a definitively lyric, non-linear film is Jack’s reflections on this, on the course of his 1950s childhood under the reign of a demanding, perceivably unyielding father (Brad Pitt, in, yes, the thespian achievement of his career) and the care of an overtly loving, expectantly merciful mother (Chastain).

Were Malick to contain his poetry in this tale, a moving narrative of an idyllic midcentury America depicted magnificently in every splendid detail by production designer Jack Fisk, he would have succeeded in achieving conventional greatness. Alas, he does not, aspiring instead to utilize these scenes as a means to contemplate all of existence, from the eruptive birth of the universe and the dawning of life on this planet to closing scenes of the afterlife, and, perhaps, the afterworld.

In this vision, amid sweeping renderings of the infinity of deep space and scenes of a primordial Earth replete with dinosaurs and prehistoric landscapes, Malick makes those inquiries of life and existence whose answers serve to explain, and often justify, creation itself. He does so literally, with whispered narrations from several of the O’Briens, though mainly from the young Jack, that define the film foremost as a prayer. It is these prayers, which play out as an absorbingly abstract dialogue with a Creator (one that Malick actually, audaciously, depicts in several instances throughout the film), that operatically probe the piece’s central theme, the eternal struggle between grace and nature, mercy and harsh reality. Pitt and Chastain, in their opposing roles as the extremes of parenting, archetypally portray this—the demanding father, the forgiving mother.

Malick, and his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, present these ideas with a stark, moving beauty that is quite likely unmatched in cinema; to say anything less of such imagery is remiss. Scored brilliantly with enduring compositions from, among others, Brahms, Smetana and Berlioz, along with an original theme from Alexandre Desplat that stands on its own against these classical heavyweights (and shall we not forget Cassidy's haunting "Funeral March"), The Tree of Life succeeds as much as visual and sonic poetry as it does as a meditation on the ideas that these sweeping, moving pictures serve to represent. Comparisons to 2001: A Space Odyssey will be inevitable, and are mostly apt, but while Kubrick’s great work stands as equally visionary and ambitious in probing the great mysteries of existence and beyond, it lacks the humanity and vigorous emotion of the present film. Visually, one might find the film, or at least parts of it, most closely resembles particular scenes from Fantasia. In spite of any comparison though, the film stands apart, unique in its interpretation of the bounds of film.

Beautiful, captivating, eccentric, The Tree of Life is a transcendent masterpiece, a seminal work deserving of nothing less than placement among our greatest contributions to lyrical craft. With it, Terrence Malick has forged a breathtaking piece that is not simply an immaculate addition to cinema, but one that may well be a watershed moment for the medium and a veritable monument in America’s artistic consciousness.

Film Review | "Biutiful" (2011)

(originally posted 22 June 2011)

With Biutiful, director Alejandro González Iñárritu makes a steep narrative departure from his previous films; dissimilar to his well-received directorial (and production) efforts in both 21 Grams and Babel, Iñárritu withholds his typically sprawling, occasionally chaotic storytelling structure and focuses his lens solely on Uxbal (a brilliant Javier Bardem): single father to two young children, separated husband to a parentally negligent wife, career criminal, psychic communicator to the afterlife, late-stage cancer patient, and wonderfully-caricatured tragic hero.

In this role, with Iñárritu’s undying focus upon him, and under the weight of a demanding, often agonizing script, Bardem shines, gracing the viewer with a towering achievement of his craft. In navigating his world—a gritty, urban Barcelona—Bardem displays the same thespian chops that were just as evident as in No Country for Old Men (for which he took home a well-earned Oscar; Bardem was also nominated for 2000’s Before Night Falls, as well as this year for Biutiful). Also worth praising is Maricel Álvarez’s convincing portrayal of Marambra, a pitiful parent, likely narcissist, and Uxbal’s separated wife.

Yet while Biutiful succeeds triumphantly with its lead performances, it falls conceptually flat. Splitting writing credits with Armando Bo and Nicolás Giacobone, Iñárritu has written a tale appropriately rife with terse, occasionally powerful dialogue. The film and its script otherwise suffers the plight of pretension, expressing too heavily on themes of perseverance and the vain morality inherent of being criminal. Where the filmmaker wishes to dynamically convey suffering through what nearly amounts to a contemporary retelling of the narrative of the Book of Job (which has been done quite recently, and acted quite successfully by Michael Stuhlbarg, of HBO renown), Iñárritu's failure is in creating a setting where story can actually happen. Rather, the viewer is offered a Spanish ghetto (one very well-shot with cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto's gritty, charged lens) with scene upon scene of variously terrible, irksomely contrived fates affecting the protagonist and the rest of the cast.

The film moves quickly, and probably recklessly, from a bleak tale of a father's enduring will to care for his children against his impending early death, a faltering illicit enterprise and the burden of speaking for the dead (apologies to Orson Scott Card), to a movie in which the viewer realizes that not only will nothing good happen, but seemingly nothing good can happen. If anything, one may find the film comically bleak and unyielding; truly every single effort by the altruistic Uxbal to make life better for himself, for his young children, or for the illegal immigrants he is responsible for harboring, is answered, universally, with a consequence even more depressing than the one preceding it.

And the film goes on, and on...and on. At a trying 148 minutes, the present critic found himself checking his watch several times, as much as from a strong desire to more or less end such narrative masochism as from being the consequence of watching a film that wanes considerably in most of its second and third acts.

 Do not, however, mistake the film's shortcomings in mood and plotting for what is an altogether very good artistic effort. Bardem is, as always, to be savored. And while bleak, the setting is absorbing, and for much of the first act, what will eventually become depressingly difficult to stomach is heartrendingly dramatic.

| ARCHIVED | David v. Goliath v. COLONEL HANS LANDA (Oscar Picks '10)

(originally posted 07 March 2010 as SS04)

Better late than never, but we’re back for a second year. Every category. Every pick. Every award. And as always, a free case of soda to any who best this effort

Best Picture - ‘Avatar’

It’s Pocahontas-in-space versus that bomb-squad-flick-you-meant

-to-see-but never got to it. Its James Cameron versus Kathryn Bigelow (in a way…), formerly married. It’s the highest grossing-film ever versus what would be the lowest-grossing Best Picture winner in over a half-century. It’s as neck-and-neck between ‘Avatar’ and ‘The Hurt Locker’ as could be expected among the now 10 nominees. So why ‘Avatar’? Coin flip

Male Performance in a Leading Role - Jeff Bridges – ‘Crazy Heart’

The Dude abides, better late than never.

Female Performance in a Leading Role - Sandra Bullock – ‘The Blind Side’

It’s just her year. Disregard that arguably the greatest female screen performer in Hollywood’s storied history has lost out each of the past 26 years.

Male Performance in a Supporting Role - Christoph Waltz – ‘Inglourious Basterds’

For a third year in a row (after Javier Bardem in ’08 and Heath Ledger posthumously in ’09), this award is the most definitive lock of any category this year. Walt put the best job up of any actor this year, and did so in four languages. He was not the seamless evil we saw in either Anton Chigurh (Bardem) or the Joker (Ledger), but the maniacally grey supergenius we haven’t seen since Anthony Hopkins took the screen as the good doctor, Hannibal Lecter...