drmstream

Yes­ter­day I flew from the east coast to Los Ange­les and watched two movies that were uncanny in the sim­i­lar­ity of their view of the human condition.

The moral syn­chronic­ity was more star­tling for the cul­tural chasm between the two films: the uber-Wasp cor­po­rate real­ity of the Reit­man broth­ers’ Up in the Air and the tsuris of the Coen brother’s A Seri­ous Man.

You can find life’s truth, but you aren’t promised redemp­tion, the film­mak­ers say.

The hero of Up in The Air lives a life of metic­u­lous order, espous­ing a phi­los­o­phy of unen­cum­bered motion that would be Bud­dhist if it promised advance­ment. As exter­nal forces dis­rupts the delib­er­ate order of his life, his essen­tial human­ity sur­faces, and, in the emo­tional cli­max of the movie, he under­stands his desire for con­nec­tion. He races to the Chicago home of the woman he yearns for, only to dis­cover on her doorstep that he is part of a fan­tas­ti­cal life she keeps wholly sep­a­rate from her chil­dren and husband.

“You’re an escape, a fan­tasy,” she explains to him later. She prof­fers the con­tin­u­a­tion of their place­less con­nec­tion, deaf to the opened quest of his heart.

The story ends with our hero back up in the air. He is dif­fer­ent, we’re asked to under­stand, even in the same­ness of his life.

But he isn’t saved. He has work to do, and his ethe­real under­stand­ing of the impor­tance of con­nec­tion in his life can too eas­ily be buried by the habits of his every day.

The Coen Broth­ers present a moral ques­tion: Can you find the mean­ing of life, and, if you do, does it matter?

At one point in the unrav­el­ing of his life from rea­son to un-reason, the main char­ac­ter Larry asks a Rabbi, “Why does [God] make us feel the ques­tions if he doesn’t let us find the answers?”

To this physi­cist who rev­els in the ele­gance of Heisenberg’s uncer­tainty prin­ci­ple (deaf to the irony that his actions in life defy the exis­tence of uncer­tainty) the real­iza­tion that every­one around him is oper­at­ing accord­ing to the prin­ci­ple that their needs should exert order on the uni­verse is a dis­ori­ent­ing and con­found­ing reality.

The film closes with the cat­a­pult­ing ele­ments orga­nized into a sta­ble order, the hero’s life regain­ing bal­ance. But for the Coens, God is not a kind and for­giv­ing God. When you think, like Job, that you’ve sur­mounted the big prob­lems, an new, epic prob­lem surfaces.

The final moments of A Seri­ous Man carry us along with Jef­fer­son Airplane’s soar­ing melody, look­ing for some­one to love, as Larry con­tem­plates the urgent request of his doc­tor to come in to talk about an x-ray and Larry’s son looks past the bully who had been the biggest fear of his young life at the omi­nous black spi­ral tor­nado clos­ing the gap across the Omaha plain.

These two films present a new zeit­geist. You can win under­stand­ing even as you suf­fer through hard­ship, but with under­stand­ing doesn’t come redemp­tion. There is just the piece work of putting a life together. For those of us who’ve found truth absent expe­ri­ence, there’s the poten­tial for suf­fer­ing, but within that suf­fer­ing there’s no greater pur­pose. It’s just life. It’s the shit that happens.

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