The Life of Pi

Ang Lee 2013

Here are a few questions.

When surviving on the sea seems to be hopeless Pi offers himself to God,  as if saying   ‘your will be done’   and does so not in despair but almost in exaltation.    What does this mean to you?

Pi wants the tiger, Richard Parker, to be his friend, and on the life-boat he treats him with deep respect.  When Richard Parker leaves him forever Pi mourns.    What does that say to you about Pi?

At the end of the film Pi tells another story, the one the Japanese officials prefer.    He asks the author – and of course us - which we prefer.    What is your preference?

Some stories are true, factually.  Some stories are truthful, they carry meanings that can be trusted even if they are not factual.   We call some of these stories myths, and some we call parables.   Could the Life of Pi be a parable?  And if so what truthfulness does it convey?

If the second story is the factual truth how do you think it relates to the first story?

Do you have an inner Richard Parker?   If so, how do you feel about him?  Or her?

The author is told that Pi’s story will ‘make him believe in God’.  

What does that mean to you, having seen the film?

And here are a few thoughts – and more questions.

Ang Lee’s film ‘The Life of Pi’,  based on Yann Martel's Booker Prize-winning novel,  is first and foremost a spiritual journey, both  for its title character, and for his witness.   The witness, Raph Spall,  is the author who has sought out the older Pi , having been told that his story ‘will make him believe in God’.  

We soon discover that no one religion can contain the young Pi’s belief, as he learns to practice not only his native Hinduism, but also Christianity and Islam.  In a passage from the book, not included in the film,  Pi and his family are promenading along the Ponticherry sea front when they are greeted by the Hindu Guru, the Catholic Priest and the Muslim Imam, each of whom want to praise Pi for his faithfulness, but they find them selves in noisy conflict over which faith has Pi’s true allegiance. His father brings this rather unholy row to an end by exclaiming that ‘Pi only wants to love God!”

To love something means to put our faith in it.  I choose the word faith rather than belief because beliefs can be intellectual, propositional and dogmatic, whereas faith is more often visceral, emotional and adaptive.  

So how could Pi’s subsequent story of shipwreck and survival make us love and  ‘put our faith in God?’

At the end of the film we are presented with an alternative story, one that may sound much more likely than the tale of the boy and the tiger,  and asked ‘which do we prefer.’  Not believe, but prefer.

Do we simply accept that life is arbitrary, violent and ultimately hopeless,  as the second story suggests, with its elements of murder and cannibalism?    Or do we look for something other?

In the film The Mission Father Gabriel says  ‘if might is right then there is no room for God in our world’.   He is speaking in the light of God as mediated by Jesus, who showed us the vulnerable and sacrificial face of God, the face of love.   But at the end of the film we are confronted by the Papal Nuncio, played by Ray MacAnally, the man who has sanctioned violence, but who seems to be saying that, sadly, tragically, violence is sometimes unavoidable, and when it is truly unavoidable we must accept responsibility for it, and move on.  Never for a moment should we pretend that it is God’s preferred way, but understand that it is a consequence of our own sinfulness.   We must not consider it as normal, and must never get addicted to it.   Faith is not about fantasy, but we must come to terms with reality, and still keep on loving.   Is this what Pi’s journey is about?

 Why does Pi want the tiger, Richard Parker, to be his friend?    Could it be because he recognizes the instinctive reactions of the tiger, admires his strength, and recognizes them as part of his own self, maybe his id?     In the second story that Pi tells of his ordeal he does  indeed imitate the actions of the tiger.    He does not condemn himself for doing so, but when the ‘inner tiger’ is no longer needed for Pi’s survival he slinks back into the jungle and does not look back.   So maybe Pi recognized the necessity for the use of power, when it is needed, and only when it is needed.    Then we have to move on, and not ‘worship’ the beast.

Earlier, when Pi seems overwhelmed by the struggle to survive he offers himself to God, as if saying   ‘your will  be done’. Is he echoing Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the Cross,  believing that God is love, and so God’s will may often be mysterious, but it is never malignant.  It is as if he is saying ‘I have done everything I can, now it is over to you God, and I will accept whatever that means.’

So do we prefer the story that sounds ‘too good to be true’,                                                                     or the story that sounds ‘too true to be good?'   

Can we accept both, while preferring, or putting our faith in, one?  

Are we condemned to believe that reality is dark, violent and hopeless, or can we put our faith in a Universe that, despite it’s shadows, is ultimately shaped by light and love, and choose to live in hope?

If God is real then nothing is more real than God, so which version of God/reality do we, like Pi, want to love?  And to put our faith in?  

By putting our faith in something could we actually help make it real?  

Apocalypse Now ! Redux.

Francis Ford Coppola, 1979 and 2001

“I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead”

 Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I never wanted another.

What was this mission?

Your mission is to proceed up the Nung River in a Navy patrol boat. Pick up Colonel Kurtz's path at Nu Mung Ba.   When you find the Colonel, infiltrate his team by whatever means available and terminate the Colonel's command.

Terminate the Colonel?

Terminate with extreme prejudice.  He's out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct. And he is still in the field commanding troops .

Although Apocalypse Now! is set in the Vietnam War it is based on Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness, set in the late 19^th century Congo.    

In Apocalypse Now! We see on Col. Kurtz’s desk two books, From Ritual to Romance  by Jessie Weston and  The Golden Bough  by Sir James  Frazer.   These books inspired T S Eliot’s The  Waste Land. The epigraph of that poem comes from The Heart of Darkness “Mistah Kurtz – he dead”.

In The Heart of Darkness (1902)  a young sea captain  is sent upriver to rescue Mr Kurtz, a brilliant and idealistic manager who is sick.  Marlow finds, however, that Kurtz is now depraved, and worshiped by the locals.  Human heads decorate his gate.  He has also taken a native ‘wife’.

The final words in The Heart of Darkness  are about the death of Mr. Kurtz, asking, 

Did he live his live again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge?  He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, - he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breathing – “The horror! The Horror!”

When Marlow returns to Europe he intends telling Kurtz’s ‘intended’ that Kurtz uttered her name as he died.  In the original script of Apocalypse Now!   Willard returns to the USA and tells Col. Kurtz’s wife and son that he lived and died a hero. 

The Wasteland (1922) reflected on the spiritual sterility of post WW1 Europe in the light of the Holy Grail legend and classic fertility rituals, alongside Shakespeare, Dante, The Christian Bible and Hindu Upanishads.    It is experimental  in form, often fragmentary and obscure, ‘a heap of broken images’.  and profoundly pessimistic – even if he uses the word Shanti as a refrain, which Eliot said could be translated as the peace of God which passes all understanding.   

Here are some quotes from Eliot’s poems.

We are those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom

Remember us - if at all - not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed men.

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception

And the creation/

Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

 Between the desire

And the spasm

Between the potency

And the existence/

Between the essence

And the descent

Falls the Shadow.

                                    For Thine is the Kingdom.

And

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

How do you think these quotes, referenced by Col.Kurtz,  might inform our understanding of the movie?

Eliot’s poem is emphatically religious, and Willard, our protagonist and narrator,  starts by telling us that  

There is no way to tell (Kurtz’s) story without telling my own. And if his story is a confessional then so is mine.   

Willard has to go on a journey into the heart of darkness, and that is an interior journey as much as exterior.    What is his confession about?

Apocalypse Now! is set in the Vietnam war, and even if it is not ultimately concerned with that war it is quite possibly the most accurate film ever made about that war.    These quotes ring true;

Shit... charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy 500.

It's a way we had over here for living with ourselves. We cut 'em in half with a machine gun and give 'em a Band-Aid. It was a lie. And the more I saw them, the more I hated lies.

 We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene!

And at the end of the film Col. Kurtz tells Willard, 

I've seen horrors... horrors that you've seen. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror... Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies! I remember when I was with Special Forces... seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn't know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it... I never want to forget. And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God... the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men... trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that.

This speech is informed by a friend of the scriptwriter John Milius,  who had served in Vietnam and experienced, first-hand, the hacking off of the arms by Viet Cong.    When the film was released in 1979 many, maybe most,  critics described Kurtz’s final words as meaningless.   

Willard says, however, 

In a war there are many moments for compassion and tender action. There are many moments for ruthless action - what is often called ruthless - what may in many circumstances be only clarity, seeing clearly what there is to be done and doing it, directly, quickly, awake, looking at it.

This shocking moral perspective, exemplified by the hacking off of the children’s arms as an act of love, as something that had to be done to save them from a worse fate – the victory of the Americans and therefore their political system, is the diamond bullet.   Critics refused to allow it to enter their brains.   How do we react?    Are there some things so terrible that nothing, nothing at all, should deter us from doing what is necessary to avoid them?  Especially for the sake of those we love?

Seeing clearly what there is to be done and doing it, directly, quickly, awake, looking at it.

Maybe the critics could  not look at that terrible moral possibility.

Note about the ‘French sequence’ in the Redux version.   Vietnam used to be called Indo-China by the French, who colonized it.      The Vietnamese rebelled after WWII, with Chinese support, and eventually drove the French out.   The last great battle was at Dien ben Phu in 1954, a victory masterminded by the brilliant Vietnamese General Giap, the teacher turned soldier who died in September 2013.  

Despite this defeat the Americans fought in much the same way – and were also defeated.  They feared that if Vietnam ‘fell to the Communists’ there would be a ‘domino effect’ that turned the whole of South-East Asia Communist.    It would have cost them much less to have made every Vietnamese man, woman and child a dollar millionaire.  

Apocalypse Now! was extraordinarily difficult films to script, shoot and edit.    There were many variations of the script and edit.   Some think that Francis Ford Coppola could not find a way to make sense of the massive themes – and footage. 

What do you think?