December 4, 2012

  • The Grey: A Movie Review and Thoughts

    Film is one of my favorite forms of art. Reading (trying to write) and Film are neck and neck for the best way that I can understand and project thoughts and beliefs. This being said, I fall into the trap, often, of viewing in a form in which I am somewhat familiar and have an emotional attachment to. A common mistake that I make is digging when I no longer have to dig or to desire the obscure and difficult for the sake of them being that way. It is these two obstacles that I had to get over when I viewed this film, The Grey by Joe Carnahan. Once I did get over them I was able to enjoy and thought the film was well done.

    In brief it is a survival story about an ostracized man, ostracized by himself, it seems to allude to, and also because of the powerful moments of this life. His wife is dead, and it seems to indicate that she died of an illness. He has no children, works out into the deeps of Alaska on the pipelines protecting the workers from the roving bands of wild Wolf. Just before going back to civilization he has a moment of clarity and wishes to die. This moment, passes, and the wish, although strong, could not overcome his biological wish to survive. An accident ensues and leaves him and six other men alive in a winter storm. They are at the border between the tundra and the treeline. The entire rest of the movie is, on the surface, about their march toward civilization again.

    The barrier most specifically that I had to overcome while watching this film was to over-symbolize everything-each branch was a phallus, each growl representing a vesper.  This was not this type of film. Despite my predisposition to do this I do not like watching films that are only driven by their symbolism and don’t pay much, if any, attention to the conceptual story line. This movie had symbolism in it but it also was a story about a desperate and sad man. This sad man being stalked by pissed off and aggressive wolves. This sad man was ‘just’ a sad man struggling with the deeper issues of life that are almost universal to all men-or will be at one time or other. This I can attest too.  As I turned off this aspect of my mind I was able to engage this movie on an emotional level-the sorrow, the witness to brutality, the fear of death.

    What is it that keeps us going? For most, I believe, it is the biological drive couched in a human argument. We are often called the rational animal but I like to describe us, if I can use US to mean the vast majority, as the rationalizing animal. This beast finds reasoning for its animal instinct. In this movie the human tragic sorrow at losing what we desperately love, the love that only a human can feel, is trumped by the biological drive to survive. In the cold and winter it is blood, fire, and something to measure ourselves against that burns this man to life. He was not able to get over this desire even in the darkest of moments, even with a barrel of a gun in his mouth, he could not transcend his animal instinct.

    Reading this over it seems that I am giving the “humane” argument to the side that would kill itself. And, perhaps shockingly, I am saying this. The Humane, in this definition, is only to mean that unique ability of the human to transcend its biological drive. The Human is forever outside of nature despite coming from nature, despite having the drives of nature, the drives, in themselves, are always unsatisfactory because of our Humane nature of understanding our seperateness-our consciousness or Self-Consciousness. This Self-Consciousness often, most often, becomes an irritation are perpetual dissatisfaction with our unique, subjective, experience. It cannot be shared, the life of the Wolf is, despite the similarities on an animal level, natural level, is not ours. We can never be the Wolf, we must seek our emergence into a Unity through transcendence, through a Self-Conscious journey to this where the Self is transcended. We see this illustrated in the Mythology/Symbology of the Buddha reaching Para-nirvana or the ascension of The Christ on the Mount of Olives. The Self has been fulfilled.

    What The Grey shows is this oscillation between the drive for and the submersion into the natural, the descention of Man, and the Ascention of Man, to an aware engagement and fulfillment of the Self. We see the descention in the animal confrontation with the wolves-the fight, so to say, the hacking off of a wolf head and tossing it as a challenge. We see the ascention, which typically in my mythologies for the masculine is represented by the merging with the feminine, the imagined daughter playing her hair across her father’s face, the imagined wife who has been deceased for some time, whispering, “don’t be afraid”. These moments, in the movie, are coupled with intense moments of great fear, specifically transition from life to death.

    This tension is shown also in the emergence of the quest for the characters to find a god in which they do and do not believe in. The life of the modern man is alluded to in the scene where a character tries to enact a ceremony of mourning for the dead. He says, “I don’t know what to say, what to say in this situation” and is left with a concise and literal, “please help us, help these dead, thank you for helping us survive to this moment, and please help us in the future”. They symbolic gestures, the ceremonies of their culture have been forgotten. In their modern mundane drive (in this case oil pipeline workers) they have, perhaps because of necessity, destroyed their incantations to the divine. They seem sorrowful and pitiful in this world that has scraped them clean of the protection, no, not protection in actuality, but the veneer of protection that modernity gives us. The planes aluminum walls, the safety of the gun, etc. The wolves are ever there, the immense force of nature always there, perhaps subdued at the lower ranges of effect, but always there, and, finally, always the victor as death wins.

    In this inevitability there is the confrontation with God and god. The upper case being the God that must be served, the God that requires nothing and therefore is distant but superior. The confrontation with the god that can be appeased, the one that our material, modern hearts desire, is illuminated here in numerous instances. The discussion with the characters that don’t believe in a god because of the suffering of their lives-this god has not lived up to his end of the bargain and therefore they refuse him their faith. The main character, Ottway, is untrue in his disbelief. He could not be honest in his belief in a God, but tried to dismiss his belief by refuting god. He points to suffering, points to his breath, his heartbeat, the biological animal drive and says, “this is all there is” in an argument to descention-but it is tragic because Man cannot ever be fully natural. Not anymore. We have come from this but we cannot ever return, as the Myth of Adam and Eve brilliantly illustrates. Toward the ending of the movie we are able to witness that there is faith in Ottway, that his belief is in the God, one that brooks no deals, that offers no solace, that just ‘IS’. As he lay on the frozen bank extoling God to be god in helping him, bargaining with him and offering his faith as a coin, but the cold forest, the bone white sun hidden behind the outlying storm clouds. God is silent as he must be. Ottway then says, “forget it. I’ll do it myself,” in his recognition that God cannot be bought not that he doesn’t exist.

    Where I understand this belief is in how Ottway is never fully honest. His wife is a mystery, in moments, tender moments in the brutal land, where the other characters bare their inner most, he is dishonest in his quiet, in his less than ultimate answers. One character talks about the love of his life, his daughter, and her hair, and Ottway talks about his Dad, “an Irish cliche” which is a hurt but one that is much less than his suicidal hurt. By holding back he is being untrue to the moment. He is holding back is reason, his understanding of God, the taker of things, a God that is much more like Khali in the Hindu tradition who is depicted as eating her children. She is time. That which creates and destroys.

    The Grey was a good movie, a movie, like many good movies though, that must be watched when one is in the mood. In the mood to be confronted and to confront. I was in this sort of mood as I continued to struggle with my ongoing battle in this life. This battle for meaning, for honoring the meaning in which I know, and to struggle with the questions of this life-in the face of death, of the death the surrounds, both in my own march toward this end and that which I believe I can see in the society in which I live. I struggle to make this inevitability tragic and not nihilistic. I struggle to not de-evolve into the “wolfman” despite being bit. I struggle but I can hear it call me like a siren. To fight this call, to drive my being toward that which does not call at such an octave, which calls me only when I am the most careful and brave, is very difficult but I must try. One foot at a time. To go into this fray, my last one (I hope). It was a good mood to watch The Grey.

    Be well

    G