Oscar Ramblings

Academy Award Nominations are out! And they look even lamer than last year’s.

Not that I expected any better, of course. Hollywood these days seems, by and large, to resent the fact that it has to cater to us unwashed, small-minded Neanderthals in Middle America. Which, oddly enough, are the exact words we like to use to describe them. Funny how that works out.

Here are the Best Picture Nominees:

"American Sniper"

"Birdman"

"Boyhood"

"The Grand Budapest Hotel"

"The Imitation Game"

"Selma"

"The Theory of Everything"

"Whiplash"

Hands up: who has seen any one of those?

I admit, most of the nominees are films I’ve either never heard of or only have vague notions of. For instance, I seem to remember hearing positive things about Birdman, but I have no idea why it seems to have captured the hearts of the Academy, though that makes me suspicious. And thus I realize that we’ve reached the point where an Academy Award nomination actually makes me doubt a film’s quality. That’s a new low.

The rule seems to be that any film that deals with racial issues or homosexuality (in completely standard, approved, and unquestioning ways, of course) are automatic nominees. Then there has to be at least one strange, off-beat picture (two this time: Birdman and The Grand Budapest Hotel, if I understand them correctly), and preferably a piece about the War on Terror. Feminist tales and anti-Christian pieces are also popular.

Note that these films and the runners-up can also be used to provide the acting and directing categories. If there’s a really notable performance that year, you can throw it in, preferably under ‘Supporting Actor,’ but you should try not to.

If it is at all possible, be sure to keep any movie that was in any way popular with audiences off the list. The peons need to know their place and can’t be allowed to get the idea that the entertainment industry exists to serve them. No, no; your purpose is to instruct, and so the Awards should go to whatever film has the best lesson for the little swine.

Back in the day, the Film Industry knew that it was entertainment; minstrels, basically, or jesters or, at best, the court artisan serving the public. It hadn’t yet learned to resent the fact that it was expected to make movies that audiences enjoyed. Before any of you snobs or wannabes jump in, that doesn’t mean ‘light and frothy popcorn pictures.’ It means what it means: movies are entertainment first, art if they’re very good entertainment. Back then, a romantic comedy filled with witty, yet slightly rambling dialogue like It Happened One Night could sweep all four top categories. Or you could have a zany comedy like You Can’t Take It With You walk away with Best Picture, or a gigantic spectacular production like Ben Hur, or an intimate religious drama like A Man for All Seasons. The Academy rewarded films that were good as films, not because they were the ‘right kind’ of ilms

There’s still some of that left; the Academy can only give the one-fingered salute to its audience so many years in a row before people stop watching. So, occasionally, a worthy film like The Lord of the Rings or The King’s Speech will walk away with Best Picture. Or a truly mesmerizing performance will force their hand, and Heath Ledger will earn a posthumous nod, even though he was in a retched comic-book movie which audiences actually liked (honestly, and this may sound kind of mean, but I think that if it hadn’t been for his sudden death he probably wouldn’t have won. It would have been another Sigourney Weaver in Aliens situation: “Well, we can’t ignore him, but…” To be clear, that’s an indictment of the Academy, not Ledger’s performance). 

Anyway, moving down this year's list, I was disappointed that Godzilla didn’t get any nominations: I would have pegged it for  special effects, cinematography, and, especially, sound (as far as I’m concerned, there is no way that it shouldn’t have been nominated for Sound Design, just for the updated roar alone. Honestly, I think the technical awards are just distributed by Academy members quickly scanning a list of big-budget films that came out the past year and drawing their names out of a hat).

                More importantly, the fact that The Lego Movie wasn’t nominated for Best Animated Film is nothing short of a crime. Especially since they had to then fill in the gaps with Song of the Sea (huh?) and The Tale of Princess Kaguya (…you made that one up!), not to mention the from-what-I-can-tell mediocre How to Train Your Dragon 2 and the lame The Boxtrolls. My only guess is that the live-action sections disqualified it, in which case…oh, screw you, Academy! Anyway, Big Hero Six had better win or else…well, since you have no credibility left, you’ll sink even further into Minus Land and sooner or later the Gnoolies will get you. So there.

               

Update: “Fury over the fact that all Oscar nominees are white.” Some people are apparently getting upset over the fact that all the acting nominees this year are white.  

My response: That’s your takeaway!? Not “who even saw these movies, and does anyone give a damn about any of them?”

Okay, first of all, grow the hell up, people! Most of us got over throwing tantrums when we weren’t always included in everything by the time we graduated from kindergarten.

Second, the Oscars are, ostensibly at least, awards for ‘outstanding achievement in different categories of filmmaking.’ Personally (and leaving aside the question of the merits of this year’s nominees), I think giving any award or even a nomination for any consideration other than what you judge to be someone’s actual merit is dishonest, despicable, and grounds for your immediate dismissal from position of judge. Please note that when you throw a fit because the Academy apparently didn’t take anyone’s ethnicity into account in forming their list of nominees, you are in fact getting upset because they did the right thing.

Third, considering that the first Black nominee to win was Hattie McDaniel in 1939, I think we can safely say the period of racial discrimination in the Academy is past.

Fourth, if having an all-white slate of nominees is so rare that you’re making an issue of it (apparently, the last time it happened was two decades ago), it’s probably a sign you shouldn’t be making an issue of it.

And fifth, this is perhaps the lamest line up the Academy has had in years, which is saying a lot. Do you really want to be part of that?

Real Update: The above rant has been diminished by the fact that, since writing it, American Sniper received a wide release, became a big hit, and received a lot of posivitive acclaim from honestly-reasonable sounding sources (the fact that the premier opened with a prayer is also a good sign). So, it looks like we might actually have a decent and popular film up for Best Picture this year. Woo hoo.

TCM Remembers

I always love TCM's in memoriam films, and this year's especially good.

Lots of great performers passed this year.

The Mandarin or ‘Davy Jones Syndrome’

                  It’s a little late, but it’s time to get this off my chest: the handling of the Mandarin in Iron Man 3.

                  (FAIR WARNING: I'm writing this piece assuming that you've seen the movie, or at least don't care enough about it to bother about major spoilers).

                  Some people think the twist a brilliant piece of satire. Others think it unutterably stupid.

                  Me? I think it was the single worst decision in any superhero film since someone decided Arnold Schwarzenegger would be the ideal Mr. Freeze (and no, I am not forgetting the death of Cyclops or evil Tobey Maguire thrusting his pelvis at the camera).

                  Imagine if, midway through The Dark Knight, Batman had tracked down the Joker only to learn that he was an innocent clown hired by for a birthday gig that got out of hand and that Eric Roberts’ Mafioso character was the real villain. Or if the original Star Wars had killed off Darth Vader and kept Grand Moff Tarkin as the main bad guy. I call this the “Davy Jones Syndrome:” wherein a work introduces an awe-inspiring or iconic villain, only to sideline him in favor of a more generic bad guy who gores whatever ox the writer happens to be obsessed with (usually capitalism or patriotism or some other institution liberals don’t like). It’s named, of course, after the disastrous Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, which – in addition to their many other sins – inexplicably decided that an utterly generic evil capitalist would make a better chief bad-guy than a super-powered demonic cross between Captain Nemo and Cthulhu as played by one of the best character actors in modern Hollywood.

                  Iron Man 3 makes almost the exact same mistake: a diabolically evil villain played by a master bad-guy is unceremoniously tossed aside to make room for a nondescript corrupt corporate executive. The only saving grace of this debacle is that Guy Pearce is an excellent actor in his own right and can make a perfectly serviceable villain, unlike…whatever the hell his name was in Pirates. The trouble, though, is that Pearce is best at playing rather ordinary or at least human bad-guys (see his deliciously heartless turn in The Count of Monte Cristo). As a comic-book super-villain, ‘Guy Pearce as evil businessman’ is no match for ‘Ben Kingsley as all-knowing terrorist mastermind.’

                  This is so stupid, so anticlimactic, and so indescribably lame that I find it single-handedly derails the film (in my review, written shortly after I had seen it, I thought that it didn’t quite, but upon reflection I realized that the film’s contrary virtues are all ones that only really come on the first viewing, and the black hole of badness created by the Mandarin and the many other flaws grows ever larger the more you think about it).

                  I’ll try to explain why and how this was such a terrible, terrible idea (because I think it's instructive). To do that, I’ll have to recount the basic set up of the first half or so of the film and read it as though they were not going to pull their disastrous twist.

                  The Mandarin (played with chilling coldness by the great Ben Kingsley) is established as a master terrorist; Osama Bin Laden by way of Fu Manchu. He has a deep, abiding hatred for America and all it represents, a hatred he expresses through precise and symbolic bombings across the globe, accompanied by stylistic propaganda videos explaining his reasoning. He often announces his targets ahead of time, but the authorities prove helpless to do anything to stop him. At one point he openly challenges the President of the United States by threatening to execute a hostage if the President doesn’t call him in time. Then when the President does, he kills the man anyway. He’s made his point: he is in charge.

                  The Mandarin gives off an air of chilling omnipotence; he is so cunning and subtle that he can make a phone number appear in the President’s personal cell-phone while effortlessly eluding all attempts to bring him to justice. Combined with his theatrical manners and trappings, he seems almost more than a man.

                  Then, one day, Tony Stark’s friend is injured in one of the Mandarin’s attacks. Tony, enraged, offers a public challenge to the terrorist. The Mandarin accepts by bombing Stark’s house into rubble.

                  The impression is that, for once, Tony has really bitten off more than he can chew. The Mandarin is the kind of bad-guy, like Bane or the Joker in the Dark Knight films, who cuts right to the point with a speed and ferocity that the hero is unprepared for; an intricately planned blitzkrieg that overwhelms and crushes him right where he thought he was most powerful.

                  In the midst of this is Guy Pearce as a character named Aldrich Killian; a business rival with a serious grudge against Tony Stark for snubbing him years earlier. Killian possesses an unstable performance-enhancing technology called ‘Extremis’ which is tied up in the Mandarin’s schemes, and appears to be working with – or for – the terrorist, who headquarters in Killian’s Florida mansion.

                  Now, what happens in the film is that it turns out Killian is the one in charge and the Mandarin is actually a funny little British actor who has no idea of the crimes he’s involved in. Killian is in league with the Vice President and has a deal in which he’ll kill the President in exchange for the Vice President supporting his war profiteering (in a desperate attempt to save face, the writers have Killian inexplicably screaming “I was the real Mandarin!” right before he dies).

                  First of all, lame, lame, lame, Lame, LAME! Political corruption, a personal vendetta, and war profiteering? Boring! Seen it a thousand times. Hell, the last two Iron Man movies did all that, and did it better! Killian is basically just a mix of Iron Monger (the war profiteer), Vanko (the personal grudge against Stark), and Justin Hammer (the corrupt business rival), all of whom were a heck of a lot more interesting and fun.

                  Even if we hadn’t seen it all before, a corrupt corporate executive with an old grudge is a petty, rather pathetic figure. There’s no power or grandeur to him. He’s a perfectly serviceable villain, but he’s a mid-level bad-guy, not the ultimate threat of the climactic film of a trilogy. On one side we have the Master Terrorist who hates the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave and all it stands for, and on the other we have a shallow, soulless man who can’t forget a personal slight. All the laws of drama scream in protest when you take the latter over the former.

                  What should have happened is that Killian, out of his hatred of Stark, would join forces with the Mandarin, thinking, in his arrogance, that he could control the terrorist. This would lead to the crucial moment where he realizes that he has been toying with a force far more powerful and dangerous than he bargained for and would presumably pay the price. The dynamic would be rather like Dagget and Bane in The Dark Knight Rises: the greedy businessman who, looking for an edge over his rival, turns to someone who really believes in something greater than mere Mammon and finds, to his horror, that the ideologue is something far beyond the control of a petty creature like himself. Killian, like Dagget, is a small man; a man of spite and greed and envy, whose overwhelming arrogance is the only thing that prevents him from realizing how dangerous someone like Bane or the Mandarin really is (or ought to be).

                  Which brings me to one of the crucial points: the Mandarin, as established in the first half of the film, hits Tony at a point he’s never been hit before. He strikes right at the roots of who he is and what he does. He forces Stark to face the question “what, exactly, are you fighting for?” Stark has always supported and ‘fought for’ America: both when he made weapons for the military and when he took the fight directly to the Afghan terrorists. But really, Tony has always had his own interests at the forefront. Even after he became a hero, it’s always about either cleaning up his own mess or protecting his own friends and loved ones.

The Mandarin forces him to question all that. He forces Tony to look for the ideal beyond any personal interest; it’s not about him, his past, or even his friends, it’s about the bigger issues of Freedom, Justice, and so on that Tony is supposedly fighting for. Do those matter to him at all? If so, is he really certain he’s on the right side? When push comes to shove, can Tony fight for something higher and nobler than himself?

                  See, the Mandarin, had they but allowed him, would have forced Tony to do some serious self-examination and answer some hard and interesting questions. He wouldn’t have just been a physical or intellectual challenge, but a spiritual one.

                  But perhaps I’m asking too much. Modern Hollywood seems almost incapable of imagining a man fighting for a higher cause like Justice or Honor; even Captain America wasn’t allowed to have any more profound a motivation than “I don’t like bullies.” Hollywood morality is, as a rule, entirely self-centered: personal exploration, personal empowerment, supporting one’s friends and families (if we’re lucky), and so on. The idea of fighting for a flag or an idea, for the “ashes of your fathers and the temples of your gods,” seems entirely alien to them. If so, then I can only say that if they can’t comprehend the ideas that make stories worth telling, they should stop telling them.

                  Still, even if they were never going to make the most of the Mandarin, what they actually decided to do simply hideous. On the most basic dramatic level, setting up an omnipotent, deadly mastermind able to run circles around the most powerful nation on Earth only to throw aside the curtain and show him to be nothing but smoke and mirrors is a stunning misstep, on the level of having the characters wake up and realize that it was all a dream. Having it done as a cheap joke (complete with toilet humor) only adds to the insult.

                  There is a time to be subversive and a time to be conventional. In both cases, that time ceases the moment it begins to hurt the story. In this case, it doesn’t just hurt the story; it maims and kills it. “We know you came for an elemental confrontation between Iron Man and his greatest foe, but that’d be too obvious, so we thought you’d enjoy more of the exact same kind of stuff you got in the first two movies, only stupider.” Or, alternatively “yes, I did just spend an hour setting up an utterly terrifying villain only to turn him into a cheap gag at the last minute. Ain’t I a stinker?” For goodness sakes, that’s the kind of joke you get on a Simpsons episode; it doesn’t work in an actual movie!

                  I’ve heard some people say they support the twist on the grounds that the Mandarin is a ‘racist’ character. Personally, I don’t know what racist stereotype is forwarded by a man who can outsmart the whole United States Military and go toe-to-toe with Iron Man. I’m not sure what negative statement this makes about Orientals or Anglo-Indians. Moreover, if we’re going to play the ‘racism game,’ isn’t the twist a lot more racist than the alternative would have been? Isn’t the implication (if you insist on drawing one) “oh, of course an Oriental couldn’t be the real bad guy: they’re just a funny little people. For a real mastermind, you need a white man”?

                  Besides that, what about the Mandarin is at all racist? A ‘mandarin’ is just an aristocratic class of civil servants from Imperial China who served as advisors, barristers, treasurers, and that sort of thing. An equivalent Western bad guy would call himself something like “the Bureaucrat” or, less amusingly, “the Judge.” This, of course, makes perfect sense for the Mandarin as presented in the first half of the film; a master strategist who appoints himself to stand in ‘judgment’ over the United States, and does so from the heritage of his own (ostensible) culture.

                  The only other grounds for calling the Mandarin a ‘racist’ character is the mere fact that he isn’t European, in which case good God! Do you realize how idiotic that position is? In the first place, it actually is racist to assume that people of one race do not suffer the same temptations and passions that any other race does and hence cannot be villains. In the second, pick up a newspaper sometime and see how much relation that notion has to the real world.

                  I can think of two, maybe three reasons for the decision the filmmakers made. The first is a simple desire to do something different, in which case they ought to be reminded that their job is to tell a story, not to win a Calvinball tournament. Originality is a tool, not an end, and the moment you start worrying about being original rather than simply telling a good story, you have lost your way and should put down your pen until you find it again.

                  The second reason is a fear of overseas markets. I suppose I can’t really fault them for that; filmmaking is a business, after all, but we’ve reached a very low point of culture indeed if we’re so desperate for the wealth of the tyrannies and dictatorships of the world that we dare not say a word against them. That’s even assuming that the Mandarin was explicitly connected to the Chinese government in any way, which would be an easy thing to avoid. Indeed, if they were really so worried about that, it seems to me the obvious solution would be to introduce a sympathetic Chinese character or a flattering depiction of the Chinese government to balance the portrayal (though the latter would be morally questionable in its own right).

                  The third and most troubling reason is that they really believe this is closer to how the world works: that the director or screenwriters subscribe to a kind of ‘9/11 Truther’ view of politics in which nations like America really fabricate terrorist threats to gun up the military-industrial complex that pumps wealth into the pockets of the right people. If so, then they’re despicably ignorant and callous people who need to learn to face the real world and their film is not only bad, but actively offensive (the fact that it came out mere weeks after the Boston Marathon Bombings only emphasizes this).

                  Unfortunately, I suspect the last is the true, or at least primary, motivation. Something I read quoted from an interview with the director indicates that he subscribes to this kind of insanity (I can’t find the interview at the moment).

                  So, in summary, the treatment of the Mandarin in Iron Man 3 squanders great dramatic potential, is hideously anticlimactic and stupid in itself, and seems to stem from motives that range from silly to despicable. It’s a real winner. Storytellers, we’re going to file this under the ‘don’t’ category.

Vivat Christus Rex! 

On Heroes

Steven Greydanus’s Decent Films review of The Lone Ranger is a depressing read. Of course, I had small hopes for that movie ever since the first reports came out of its running millions of dollars over budget (it’s a frickin’ Long Ranger movie! How much CGI do you need!?). Then my hopes grew even smaller with the awful trailers featuring trains blowing up right and left, bullets flying ceaselessly, and a patently-miscast Johnny Depp stumbling about as a painted, be-feathered Tonto (you know, Hollywood, your constant blathering about race and equality would be a lot more believable if you did things like casting actual Native Americans in Native American roles!). The news that it’s just as bad as it looks merely cements my misgivings and the film will remain unseen by me.

                  So why do I bring it up? Because Greydanus points out something especially troubling that I would like to discuss; the fact that we don’t seem to have any real heroes anymore. At least, we don’t have any shining images of iconic goodness. It’s as though we just don’t want to accept truly good, heroic characters; we need them to have deep flaws, or be swallowed up with angst or self-doubt. A confident, morally-centered, idealistic hero is something we haven’t seen in a long time.

                  Now, when I say ‘image of iconic goodness,’ I don’t mean a character that never does anything wrong or is hard-pressed or has no flaws. What I mean is, succinctly, a character you could use in one of those ‘what would X do?’ bracelets to help clarify a moral decision. I love the Iron Man movies (well, at least the first two), but no one in their right mind would ask “what would Tony Stark do?”

                  Take Man of Steel, for instance. There we have a grim, morally-compromised Superman, weighed down with his sense of alienation, willing to let innocent people (including his own foster father) die rather than risk revealing himself to the world. In my review of that movie, I commented that it felt as though the filmmakers didn’t even have an idea of what a figure of exemplary goodness would actually look like. 

                  “Well,” you say. “That’s more realistic than the outgoing, friendly, morally-upright Superman of other works…”

                  Two things:

                  One: No, it’s not!

                  I wish I could find some way of getting it through people’s heads that making a character more morally ambiguous or darker or whatever you like to call it does not, ipso-facto, make him more ‘realistic;’ it just makes him less enjoyable. Moreover, the fact is that Superman is never going to be realistic. You can make him as gritty as you like, but he’s still an alien from a world light-years removed from Earth who is nevertheless completely human, to the point that he can produce children with his human wife, and whose only biological difference is that, for some reason, sunlight makes him invulnerable, able to defy all known laws of gravity and physics, and gives him the power to shoot lasers from his eyes. Realism is kind of a moot point by now!

                  Besides which, what kind of sick, cynical mindset says that unless a character has great, obvious flaws he isn’t realistic? Or that, to make sure people understand that he has flaws, they have to be placed front and center and made the most important thing about the character? Is that even our experience in real life? Granted, none of us have ever known a perfect human being on Earth, but surely all of us have encountered people who strike us as particularly good, upright, and noble. If we are unlucky enough to not have run into such people, nothing is easier than to find them in history. Take any saint you like, for instance. Or in the political field, take George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or Theodore Roosevelt. In the military field, take, say, Joshua Chamberlain, Robert E. Lee, Alvin York, or George C. Marshall. None of them perfect, but all exemplary figures of courage, honor, decency, and so forth. Heroes are as much a part of the human experience as anything else, and always trying to sabotage or hamstring them in fiction is every bit as unrealistic as a flying alien raised in Kansas.

                  Two: It doesn’t matter!

                  Superman is not supposed to be realistic, and trying too hard to make him so only cheapens him. The whole point of the character is that he’s as morally upright and decent as he is physically powerful; he’s the champion of the little guy, of truth, justice, and the American Way. He’s wish-fulfillment of the most uplifting kind: someone who actually can do what the rest of us, in our best moments, would wish we could do. Compromise that, and you lose most of what makes him worth watching and are left with only empty spectacle.

                  For instance, the other day I watched an episode of Lois and Clark: the New Adventures of Superman from the 90’s. In it there was a funny scene where Clark is playing poker with Perry and Lois. He’s losing badly, so he’s sorely tempted to use his x-ray vision to cheat and look at Perry’s cards. But he resists because he knows that “Superman should be above that sort of thing.”

                  Now, for my money that one scene is more true to life, more applicable, and more interesting than all the angst and alienation stuff in Man of Steel. That’s the sort of thing Superman should be about: a man with the powers of a god who is determined to use them only for good, even in such a minor issue as a card-game. It’s realistic in a way that Man of Steel isn’t; because it asks important questions and offers decent answers. What questions does Man of Steel ask? “How might humanity react to a god-like alien?” Wow, that’s deep, man. And no one has ever asked the ‘how do we respond to the different and/or superhuman’ question before, unless you count nearly every sci-fi or fantasy film of the last decade.

                  The point of iconic heroes like Superman or the Lone Ranger is that they’re ‘realistic,’ not in the sense of ‘deeply flawed,’ but in the sense that they address real questions about right and wrong. The difference is that heroes react as they ought to react. If you have a hero who just goes along with the shady deal because you think that’s more realistic, then what the Hell was the point of having him in the first place? If you’re going to make Superman an angst-ridden, morally compromised character, then why bother writing a Superman story at all? There are dozens of angsty, morally-grey characters out there; write a story about one of them if that’s what you’re interested in. 

                  Now, the excuse we usually hear is that this kind of iconic goodness is ‘boring.’ Oh, that must be why characters like Superman, Captain America, the Lone Ranger, Zorro, and so on have been so popular for so long: because they’re boring.

The fact is, goodness is not in the least boring, even in fiction. A story is boring if there’s a lack of conflict and a character is boring if he isn’t challenged or if he has no defining features, but a character is no less interesting because he is good and honorable. Actually, I don’t think I’m alone in finding characters like the ones I listed above to be far more interesting than yet-another sort-of hero incessantly plagued with doubts and regrets.

                  We need characters to look up to and admire at least as much as we need characters to identify with or characters to hate and despise. These days, with so few on the market, we need them even more. We need shining examples of goodness that are not torn down, but elevated and vindicated. Superman was supposed to be that. So was the Lone Ranger. Our children deserve heroes, and it is our job to give them that.

Vive Christus Rex!

Four Life Lessons from "The Hobbit"

        As some of you may have heard, the first movie of The Hobbit came out last week (see my review here). In recognition of this momentous occasion, we’re going to look a little closer at the story. Tolkien (as you may remember) was a devout Catholic and always infused his stories with his faith. As you can imagine, you can learn a lot from one of the most brilliant Catholic minds of the twentieth century. For now, however, we shall limit ourselves to the ones that can be found in the first third or so of the book (corresponding roughly with what’s in the movie).

1.     Leave Your Comfort Zone

When we first meet him, Bilbo Baggins is a solidly ‘respectable’ Hobbit. You could know exactly what he was going to say on any subject without bothering to ask him. His concerns were primarily eating, reading his mail, and keeping his lovely hobbit hole nice and clean.

Then, one day, he meets Gandalf the Wizard who is looking for someone to share in an adventure he is putting together with 13 dwarves intent on reclaiming their kingdom of Erebor from the dragon Smaug. Bilbo, at first wants nothing to do with it…until one of the dwarves voices the opinion that he is “more like a grocer than a burglar.” That, coupled with the dwarves song of gold and adventure, makes him determined to go and prove himself.

These days we’re often told that we’re “okay, just the way we are.” Bilbo and I are here to tell you that’s nonsense. Of course you’re not okay just the way you are; if you were, you wouldn’t be telling yourself that! It’s like what Tolkien’s friend Lewis said about the phrase “I’m just as good as you:” it’s one of those things that no one would say if they actually believed it. Do you think any saint, or any great man: Peter, Francis of Assisi, Francis de Sales, Theodore Roosevelt, or John Paul II ever once in their lives said “I like being me; I am comfortable with who I am”? Of course not! They were great precisely because they were always uncomfortable: because they were never satisfied with themselves, they were always seeking to improve.

The fact is, there is always something you need to improve, always boundaries you need to cross. If you’re comfortable with your life, it probably means you’re doing something wrong. God doesn’t want us to be comfortable; He wants us to be Saints. An insular, respectable life is generally not a sign of great sanctity.

I hardly even know where to begin with the awful word ‘respectable.’ Christians should never be respectable! To be respectable means to be in line with the times, to be a thoroughly normal child of the Xth-Century, and God forbid we be that! We ought to be a sign of contradiction to the world; we ought to be obnoxious, non-conformist, and improper. In other words, we should never be a perfectly ordinary person of our times. If we are, it means one of two things: Jesus has come and again and the world has ended, or we’re not living as we should. Trust me, you’d know if it were the former.

At the beginning, Bilbo really is more like a grocer than a burglar. He’s (let’s face it) a pampered, upper-class wimp: much like many of us. But he has the desire to be something more, and it is that desire that sends him running out the door without his pocket handkerchief.

What’s your hobbit hole? What comfortable, easy refuge is keeping you respectable, and what’s the desire that will drive you out of it?

2.     Honor Your Responsibilities

 Bilbo and the dwarves are, at first, not what we might call ‘friends.’ They don’t like each other very much. The dwarves are apt to dismiss Bilbo as useless, and Bilbo is, well, apt to be useless. Yet they are friends, because ‘friends’ is what they have committed to be. They’re comrades; mess-mates. And however they feel about each other, they have responsibilities towards one another.

Thus, when Bilbo escapes the goblin mines without his friends, he makes up his mind that, if he can’t find them outside, it’s his duty to go back in and look for them (“and very miserable he felt about it”). The fact that he probably won’t be able to find them (magic ring or no magic ring), that they might be dead for all he knows, and that they don’t even like him very much anyway doesn’t matter; he committed to them, now he has to fulfill his duty to them.

But then, he stumbles across them in the woods to find that they are discussing the very same thing: going back in to look for Bilbo. And, unlike him, they adamantly don’t want to. They complain to Gandalf that Bilbo’s useless anyway, and that they won’t be able to find him, that he should have kept up, and so on and so forth.

Once again, Bilbo shows us the right thing to do, while the dwarves (who are ostensibly the more experienced and dedicated adventurers) show us what not to do. Bilbo knows his duty and sticks to it, no matter how much he’d prefer to do otherwise. The dwarves, on the other hand, plead changing circumstances to excuse themselves. Duty does not change with circumstances or with feelings; it is constant no matter what, and our only concern should be to do it to the best of our abilities.

3.     Get Creative

  

That isn’t to say, of course, that changing circumstances don’t need to be taken into account. Our duty may remain the same, but our situation does not. So, the effect is something like this; we have two points: the fixed point of our responsibility and the moving point of our situation. In between is the shifting, Cube-like maze of circumstance. So, we have to get creative.

This is my default solution.

Bilbo finds himself alone and lost. His responsibility is to find and (if necessary) rescue his friends and escape the mountain. In addition to the fact that he’s stuck in a labyrinthian cave network with goblins prowling around and no light source, he meets Gollum, who thinks he might like to eat Bilbo. So, Bilbo improvises and when Gollum suggest they have a game of riddles to decide whether he will show Bilbo the exit or having him for dinner, he agrees. The only way to the outside is through Gollum, so Bilbo accepts the situation and tries to find a way to make it work for him. Then, when it looks as though he might lose the game, Bilbo accidentally hits on the solution; to think outside the box and ask a question Gollum couldn’t possibly guess: “What have I got in my pocket?”

                  Now, the clever thing about the pocket question is that the important thing is less to make Gollum guess wrongly (since the only way he could guess correctly is by sheer luck), but to make him try to answer. Once he tries to answer, it shows he accepts the question and thus binds him to his promise. Gollum, less adept at such things than Bilbo, takes the bait and loses (it’s the same principle behind things like roulette and shell-games: the trick isn’t in making the other person lose, it’s in making them play at all). 

                  When circumstances seem overwhelming, sometimes the best thing to do is to get creative and try something completely different. To ‘cheat,’ as it were.

4.     “Vanquished Enemies Should be Spared”

G.K. Chesterton listed this as one of the things no sensible person ever has or ever will question. If you have beaten someone and have a chance to finish him for good, you should always ere on the side of mercy.

After Bilbo has won the riddle game (“pretty fairly”) and, in fleeing the enraged Gollum discovered the power of the Ring, he finds himself in a position where the only way he can escape is to somehow go through or around Gollum. Remembering Gollum’s willingness and intent to murder him, Bilbo considers simply killing him. But his basic decency wins through; it wasn’t a fair fight by any stretch, and besides Gollum was already so miserable and alone that Bilbo couldn’t find it in his heart to kill him.

Bilbo’s mercy, note, was done because he could sympathize with Gollum. He “caught of glimpse” of Gollum’s miserable, lonely life and it made him feel for the poor creature. It is easy, in these days of the internet: of faceless names comprised of odd phrases strung together with random numbers, to lose all sympathy for other people. Whenever we’re tempted to lash out, to make crass, hateful comments, or to attack people who disagree with us, we should pause and try to imagine what their life, their mind, their world is like. In short, we should show pity to those we meet.

                  Much later, at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo (seeing the tremendous damage Gollum has done in the mean time) wishes that Bilbo had killed him when he had the chance, earning him a rebuke from Gandalf:

                  “Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo’s hand! Pity and mercy: not to strike without need…I daresay he does deserve [death]! Many that live deserve death, and some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment, fearing for your own safety.”

                  All too often we find ourselves far too eager to pass judgment, to ‘strike without need,’ to take what seems to be the easiest, safest way out, regardless of how it affects others. At such times we should remember Bilbo and the pity he showed an enemy that he had every reason to despise.

Tune in next year for part two: Never Laugh at Live Dragons!

                 

Vive Christus Rex!

Famous Catholic Friday: Sir Alfred Hitchcock

Good evening.

Our famous Catholic of the week might come as something of a surprise; it’s a man who made some of the finest movies of all time, almost all of which dealt primarily with extremely deviant behavior. That man? None other than Alfred Hitchcock. 

  

Catholic Credentials: A cradle Catholic educated in parochial schools; devoted to his wife; quietly returned to his faith late in life after a long period away from it.

Nerd Credentials: One of the greatest filmmakers of all time; the undisputed master of suspense; great-grandfather of both the animal attack and slasher sub-genres.

                  After two weeks of upstanding, faithful Catholic men, I thought this week I would venture into murkier territory with someone whose name isn’t exactly a watchword for piety. Suspense, horror, wit, and brilliant storytelling, yes, but not piety. Hitchcock was what we like to call a “Bad Catholic;” that is, a rather more obvious sinner than some.

                  Alfred Hitchcock was born in 1899 in England and raised by his very strict Catholic family. As a matter of fact, his family was more Puritan than Catholic, at least in behavior. His mother would make him stand at the foot of her bed and give an account of himself every night. His father once had him locked up in a jail cell for five minutes to teach him to respect the law (this instead gave him a great fear of policemen for his entire life). He was educated by Jesuits at St. Ignatius College, studying engineering and navigation. At the age of fourteen, his father died. Rejected for military service during the First World War (he was already heavily overweight), Hitch took a job as an ad designer.

                  During this time, he started to dabble with writing short stories, sharpening his satirical and creative skills. At the same time, freed from his parent’s smothering influence, Hitch began to delve into more…risqué subjects (one of his short stories involved a young man whose search for a brothel ends in the house of his best friend’s girl). He also took up photography and, seeing a chance to combine his new passion with his advertising skills, got a job designing titles for a moving picture company.

                  Hitchcock fell in love with the new medium and studied all he could. Before long he was involved in writing, then in co-directing. Then, one day, while working on a movie called Always Tell Your Wife the director fell ill and Hitch was tapped to finish up for him. Impressed by his work, the studio gave him the helm of their next picture, Number 13. Unfortunately, his first solo directing effort was a failure; the film went over budget and wound up being cancelled mid-way through. Bad luck continued to plague his nascent directing career, and his next two films; The Pleasure Garden and The Mountain Eagle were both flops.

                  His personal life, however, was rather more successful. See, in the process of finishing up Always Tell Your Wife, he had to work closely with the movie’s editor; Alma Revile. The two shared a passion for cinema, a brilliant creative mind, and a macabre sense of humor. What’s more, she had an ear for dialogue and an almost uncanny eye for continuity. They joined forces and she became his co-director and editor on his next few films.

                  Then, at last, Hitch found his voice with his first thriller film; The Lodger (1927), about the hunt for a serial killer in London. It contained many of Hitch’s favorite themes; blonde women, murder, questionable fidelity, a cameo by himself (brought about when the actor hired for a minor part didn’t show up), and, of course, the innocent man wrongly accused. At long last, Hitchcock had a hit. With his professional life a success at last, he married his co-director (who first converted to Catholicism). Alma would collaborate with her husband for the rest of their lives, though unofficially; she didn’t care for the limelight and Hitchcock’s star was on the rise. At the end of his life, when accepting an AFI Lifetime Achievement Award in 1979, Hitch credited his entire career to “the beautiful Miss Revile” (specifically, he said that without her he might have been present that night as “one of the slower waiters” rather than the guest of honor).

                  Hitchcock adapted well to the advent of sound. His movie Blackmail (his tenth) is generally considered the first British talkie and made good use of the new technology; emphasizing specific words and sounds to add suspense to his scenes. Not long after that, he had the first of his ‘famous’ films: 1934’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. With a story resulting from a blend of several detective novels (and taking its title from a book by Hitch’s fellow British Catholic, G.K. Chesterton), it told the story of a vacationing English couple who are inadvertently caught up in an assassination plot.

                  With the success of The Man Who Knew Too Much, together with his later film The LadyVanishes (1938), Hitch caught the attention of Hollywood and was brought over by legendary producer David O. Selznick to helm an adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s romantic thriller Rebecca (1940). The resulting film won Best Picture (though, as things were arranged at the time, the award went to Selznick rather than Hitchcock). He followed this success up with Saboteur (1942), Lifeboat (1944), and his own personal favorite, Shadow of a Doubt (1943).

                  During this ‘early stage,’ Hitchcock settled on his own particular directorial style. He was notoriously controlling on set, planning out the entire film in advance and expecting actors to conform to his vision or else. He had no patience for improvisation or method acting. He would only talk to the actors if he had criticisms, and he was once quoted as saying that actors were cattle. “Not so,” he later claimed. “I said actors should be treated like cattle.”

                  As he continued to gain fame, Hitch began to experiment. Rope (1948), for instance, was done in 10-minute takes with carefully disguised cuts, giving the impression that the entire film was a single, long take. Lifeboat was staged entirely, well, on a lifeboat (this made Hitch’s signature cameo difficult; he ended up as picture in a fashion magazine advertising weight loss).

Hitchcock drew on his Catholic upbringing and nominal faith for I Confess (1953), about a priest who finds himself accused of murder after hearing the real murderer’s confession. Though at this stage of his life Hitch wasn’t much of a Catholic, he demonstrated that he still maintained a connection to his childhood faith. A meditation on the seal of Confession and the lengths to which priests are expected to go to maintain it, the picture explicitly likens its wrongfully accused hero (Montgomery Clift) to the suffering Christ as he struggles to remain clear in his conscience and faithful to his ministry in spite of the hatred and condemnation he receives from all corners.

Hitch continued to experiment and improve. In 1955 he became a household name with his macabre anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which gave the world his infamous silhouette and inimitable nightly greeting: “Good evening.” He directed the stunning Grace Kelly in a trilogy of films, including the brilliant Rear Window (1954) and the spectacularly romantic To Catch aThief (1955). He remade The Man Who KnewToo Much as a much more assured Technicolor epic with James Stewart and Doris Day, created the pan-and-zoom camera technique for the twisted psychological thriller Vertigo (1958), then defined the spy film as we know it with the hilarious thriller-comedy North by Northwest (1959).

It was after the success of the latter film that Hitch had his most original idea yet. He decided to risk his entire career on a film that, if it succeeded would change the film industry forever, and if it failed would almost certainly ruin him. It was one of the most explicitly violent, shocking, and disturbing pictures ever made. Unable to find any backers, he put up the money himself, used the crew and sets of his TV show, and made it in Black and White to save money. The result was arguably his greatest work; a movie that shocked the world and, for better or worse, changed movies as we know them: the horror-masterpiece Psycho (1960).

Whether he envisioned the film’s impact or not, Hitch could have had no idea what it would unleash…and he certainly didn’t intended it. Hitchcock enjoyed pushing the envelope and giving a bawdy wink to the audience, but the wave of violence and sex that he unleashed horrified and disappointed him. He eventually grew to despise the new industry he helped create. “I made movies about people,” he lamented privately in his old age. “Not robots.” In this way his greatest masterpiece became, at the same time, his deepest failure.  

Hitch continued to make movies, but Psycho was his peak. His next movie was the strange animal-attack horror film The Birds (1963), followed by Marnie(1964), both of which starred the young blonde actress Tippi Hedren. Somehow or other (Hedren later claimed it was because she refused to have an affair with him), Hitch and Hedren grew to despise one another. Hedren called him ‘evil’ and claimed that he did everything in his power to destroy her career; an accusation that, considering he seems to have kept her on contract intending to make more films with her (and since once her contract with him expired she immediately got herself fired from her next one), is a little hard to believe. Certainly, his treatment of her was deplorable, but the idea that he actively wanted to destroy her seems a little far-fetched (other actors who worked with him at the time deny it).

Hitchcock’s relationship with Tippi Hedren showed him at his worst, but he had sins aplenty apart from that. He was rumored to have more than one extramarital affair with his glamorous leading ladies (though, as noted, he and his wife loved each other dearly and remained together their whole lives) and he certainly often treated his actresses abominably. He was famous for his oft-cruel practical jokes, which included deliberately springing people’s phobias on them (i.e. by sending them a box of live spiders). In directing he could be ruthless; Tippi Hedren endured five days straight of having live birds thrown at her, suffering severe cuts and nightmares (she came very close to losing an eye). His films are loaded with illicit, often voyeuristic sex, from the casual fornication in North by Northwest to the jarringly blatant homosexual murderers in Rope.

Yet, for all his very real sins and failings, Hitchcock never seemed to be able to completely escape his faith. His films, loaded as they are with the wretchedness of the human condition, nevertheless often featured what might be called ‘threads of grace.’ His many, many wrongfully accused characters might seem to have the world against them, but we sense that there is something else working for them, something that allows them to make their narrow escapes time and time again. Hitchcock’s films often had a sense of a large force of justice at work; something that ensured that, for instance, Mr. Thorwald or Tony Wendice couldn’t get away with their seemingly perfect murders (or even Wendice’s brilliant plan-B). His films feature much grotesquery, horror, and evil, but also, unmistakably, hope, even in their darkest moments. Moreover, while Hitch might revel in deviant behavior he seems equally determined that such behavior never be without consequences. Even the sympathetic sinners in a Hitchcock film have to endure what might be called ‘penitential suffering’ before their happy ending (witness, for instance, Grace Kelly’s adulterous would-be-murder victim in Dial M for Murder), and as far as I can recall the only Hitchcockian villains who really “get away with it” are the Birds.

Hitchcock’s career wound down in the seventies with him producing only two films: Frenzy (1972) and Family Plot (1976). After this, and a few failed attempts to get one more movie off the ground, his declining health and growing disgust with modern Hollywood caused him to retire.
At some time during this retirement, away from the glamour and drama of the film world, Hitch once again turned to the faith he had abandoned for so long. After having become the most famous and admired director in history, the Master of Suspense quietly and secretly arranged things so that he could receive the Sacraments he now desperately craved in peace. Either by coincidence or design, the priests who attended him were Jesuits; the same order that taught him at school all those years ago.

In 1979, he was knighted and became Sir Alfred Hitchcock. Only a few months later, he died quietly in his sleep of renal failure.

No one will ever make Alfred Hitchcock a Saint. He lived a life of frequent deviance, even cruelty, and wandered far from his faith for many years. Nevertheless, he eventually saw himself for what he was – a poor sinner – and returned to the One who could bring him the healing and forgiveness that he knew he needed. He teaches us that, no matter how we have sinned or strayed, the Lord will still be waiting, waiting to welcome us when we return.

In the end, Hitch was hooked; hooked, as the man who provided the title to two of his classic films put it, with the “invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world,” but which brought him back “with a twitch upon the thread.” 

Vive Christus Rex!

12 Debating Tips from '12 Angry Men'

     

             12 Angry Men is one of those classic films that everyone, and especially every American, should see. One set, twelve actors, and more drama than all the Transformers movies put together (including the animated one with Orson Welles as Unicron).

                  The story is simple; an eighteen-year-old boy of undisclosed ethnicity is accused of murdering his father. The case against him looks devastating; there are two eyewitnesses, a lot of suspicious circumstances, and the boys only defense is a flimsy alibi about being at the movies during the killing. The film opens with the jury retiring to debate the case, and the entire movie takes place in the jury room (with one brief scene in the adjacent bathroom).

                  Since the entire movie is about an extended argument, it’s no surprise that you can pick up a lot of debating tips from watching it.

                  (Before I begin, be aware that this review assumes you’ve seen the movie and will contain **NUMBEROUS UNMARKED SPOILERS** so read at your own risk).

                                                             #1               

                  Debate:

                   The first step is to actually make the argument and not simply assume the question is settled. At the beginning of the film, eleven of the twelve all vote ‘Guilty.’ Juror #8 casts a single vote for ‘Not Guilty.’ His reason, he explains, isn’t because he necessarily thinks the boy is innocent, but because he feels they need to actually talk about it before coming to a decision. The evidence of his guilt appears to be overwhelming, but nevertheless they have a duty to dig deeper before they can send a fellow man off to die.

                  There’s an insidious technique to avoid arguments floating around in which one side simply assumes they’ve won and sneers at the other side for trying to debate at all. Why do you think the Global Warming crowd gets so much support? It isn’t because they have an air-tight, scientifically unassailable case, it’s because they seize the moral high ground and mock anyone who dares to disagree with them. The same thing with the ‘Same-Sex Marriage’ crowd, or the Abortion lobby: they don’t invite debate; they just attack anyone who tries to question them.

                  The first step to any argument is to have the argument. Don’t let people tell you the question is settled; make them fight for it.

         

                                                               #2

                  Question Premises:

                  As the first step to undoing the case against the boy, Juror #8 challenges the assumption that the knife that was used to kill the boy’s father was a unique weapon that links the boy with the killing. When the others point out that neither they nor (according to his testimony) the storekeeper who sold it to the boy had ever seen a knife like that, and therefore it would be impossible for someone else to do the killing with a duplicate, #8 wordlessly stands up and slams an identical knife into the table.

                  All debate is based on logic, and all logic is based on premises. If you can call the premise into question, you can undermine your opponent’s whole case. A logical statement consists of a premise and a deduction: A is true, so B must follow. Therefore, you can defuse an argument by either attacking the premise or the deduction; either by showing that A is faulty, or that B doesn’t necessarily have to follow. Typically, if you can attack a premise you will be on much stronger ground than if you attack a deduction, because if you attack a deduction, you will only get a probability: if B doesn’t necessarily follow, then it’s still true that B could follow. But if A is false, then B loses its power as well. If the knife isn’t unique, it doesn’t prove anything that the killing was committed with it.

                  Your first step in a debate should be to discover your opponent’s premises and test them for weaknesses.

                                                          #3

                Prepare:

                  Related to the above story, you need to get your facts straight and consider your arguments before you enter the debate. Consider what proofs you’re likely to need and take steps to get them. Juror #8 knew the knife was bound to come up and knew that he would need hard evidence to show that it wasn’t unique, so he went out and bought one, making a note of the location and the price (both of which indicated it was a fairly popular model).

                  Think ahead, gather what you need, and come in with the evidence you need to make your case.

                                                                                      
                                                                 #4

                  Compare:

                  One of the first breaks in the case is when Juror # 8 realizes that two pieces of evidence contradict each other: one witness claims to have seen the killing take place through the windows of a passing train, while another claims to have heard the killing through the open window of his apartment. But if the train was passing by, it would have been impossible for him to have heard, much less identify, anything at all.

                  Typically if someone is arguing from a weak position they’ll throw everything and the kitchen sink into an argument, blind to the fact that some of their points contradict each other. For instance, rabid anti-Catholics will often say on one hand that Catholics ‘stole’ all their holidays from pagan cultures (by the way, how do you ‘steal’ a holiday?), and that Christmas, Halloween, and Easter are actually pagan celebrations. On the other hand, they’ll say the Church brutally suppressed and destroyed all the good and noble elements of pagan culture in order to impose itself. But if the Church is so reactionary and hate-filled towards paganism, why would she base her calendar around pagan celebrations? And if the Church is just paganism with a new face, then how can you say it oppresses paganism?

                  These are the kinds of contradictory arguments that tend to expose poor logic and positions based more on emotion than reason.
                                                               #5

                  Experiment:

                  As part of the evidence against the boy, an old man claimed to have run to his front door just in time to see him fleeing the scene of the crime. Questioning whether an old man with a paralyzed left leg could have gotten to the door in time, Juror # 8 decides to try it himself to see, discovering that it would have taken over forty seconds for the old man to make the journey; far too much time for him to catch sight of the boy on his way out.

                  Sometimes the best way to figure out whether something can be done is simply to do it. For instance, a lot of people these days say that the Christian ideal of chastity is impossible, but how many of them have ever tried it? Lots of things seem impossible before we try them, or when we first start out, only for us to wake up one day and realize that the thing is done and a part of our lives.

                  When someone tells you that something can’t be done, ask them whether they’ve tried it. 

                                                            #6

                  Ask Questions:

                  At one point Juror #11, who hasn’t said much up to now, stands up and begins rattling off a number of questions about the reasonableness of the prosecution’s scenario. After a number of these, Juror #3 (who’s particularly invested in the guilty verdict) says “wait, you voted guilty like the rest of us, so which side are you on?” To which #11 calmly replies “I don’t believe I have to be ‘loyal’ to one side or the other. I am simply asking questions.”

                  All too often, we become settled on the idea of ‘sides:’ that we have to support ‘us’ against ‘them.’ But debates shouldn’t be about sides or which team wins; they ought to be about getting to the truth. Hence, it’s important to be able to look at the issue from every perspective and ask tough questions. 

                                                               #7

                  Empathize:

                  #11’s questions, meanwhile, are all about trying to put himself into the boy’s place and account for his movements on the night of the murder. His central point is the question of why, having murdered his father, would the boy risk going back to the scene of the crime three hours later, especially when the other evidence indicates that he would have known that someone saw him. Unsatisfied with the argument that the boy came back to retrieve the murder weapon, he changes his vote.

                  Often ideas that seem reasonable in the abstract become much more flimsy when you try to imagine the actual nuts-and-bolts behind them. It’s easy to say, for instance “everyone will work for the good of everyone else,” but if you try to consider how an actual person, a working man breaking his back day-after-day would react to the idea that this is for “everyone,” the result is much different.

                  Empathize: put yourself in other people’s position and ask yourself whether the idea presented is really credible or not.

  

                                                               #8

                  Consult Experts:

                  At one point, having reached an impasse, Juror #2 suggests a problem with the stab-wound, noting that the boy was over half-a-foot shorter than his father, yet the wound was made at a downward angle. After #3 demonstrates how a shorter man could stab a taller one at a downward angle, Juror #5 (who grew up in a slum similar to the one the boy lived in) gets up and explains that switchblades are built to make underhand attacks, and that no one who had any experience with one (as the boy had) would ever make the kind of wound that killed the victim.

                  There are an almost infinite number of subjects in the world, all of which have their secrets and arcane bits of knowledge that most of us would never even think of. Before we make broad statements about such subjects, it often pays to find an expert to tell us whether our ideas are likely or even possible. A little research and a little humility can work wonders in debate.

                                                            #9

                  Call-Out:

                  Juror #6 is an interesting case; he talks a lot, but he’s utterly indifferent to the case. He initially votes guilty to hurry things along so he can get to a baseball game later than evening. Then, when a storm means the game will be cancelled, he switches to not-guilty because he’s “sick of all the talk.” At this point Juror #11 loses his patience. Walking right up the man, he berates him for “playing like this with a man’s life” and basically calls him a coward for not voting as he thinks.

                  #6, of course, takes offense: “Now listen! You can’t talk like that to me!”

                  “Yes,” says #11, “I can talk like that to you.”

                  The fact is, we will sometimes encounter immoral people; people who go through life with a sneer and a shrug, but who bristle with indignation if anyone dares criticize them. The way to deal with such people is to call them out; to name them for what they are. Don’t let their pride or their protests of indignant offense stop you from speaking the truth.

                                                            #10

                  Ignore:

                  As the jury swings ever more towards an acquittal, Juror #10, who has made his shameless bigotry known throughout the proceedings, leaps to his feet and goes into a minutes-long monologue about how “those people” are dangerous and violent. As he talks, every other juror gets up one by one and turns their backs on him. Wrapped up in his diatribe, he doesn’t notice this at first, but as he starts to wind down he realizes what’s happening and gets quieter and quieter. Finally, only the unflappable Juror #4 is left.

                  “Listen to me,” #10 pleads. “Listen to me!”

                  “I have,” #4 snaps. “Now sit down and don’t open your mouth again.”

                  Occasionally, we will come upon beliefs so twisted, so horrifying that there seems to be no point in arguing them. In such cases, often the best thing we can do is to simply turn our backs on them and let them rant into the air. A particularly self-possessed and strong man (like Juror #4) may be able to stare him down, and then, with the silent support of the ignoring majority, tell him to shut up.

                  In the face of truly evil ideas, the best thing is often to first let their proponent know that they are unacceptable. Then, when he’s been chastised by public opinion, he may finally be open to reason.

                                                           #11

                  Observe:

                  The last and strongest piece of evidence for the guilty party is the fact that a woman living across the street actually saw the boy killing his father. This point seems insurmountable, even prompting the limp-spined Juror#12 to switch his vote back to guilty. As the begin the discussion, however, Juror #9 notices something; #4 (who wears glasses) has a habit of rubbing the peculiar impressions that his glasses have left on the side of his nose. #9 points out that, though no one commented on it, the woman who claimed to have witnessed the murder had the same marks, meaning she ordinarily wore eyeglasses. Since she was in bed trying to fall asleep when she witnessed the murder, she wouldn’t have been wearing her glasses then either. Hence, her eyesight is in question.

                  Simple awareness often helps us to spot gaps or reasons for doubt in our opponent’s arguments. If we observe that he has a habit of not looking us in the eye, we might conclude that he’s not as certain as he lets on. If we see that he’s reluctant to let go of a certain point even after it’s been dealt with, we might question his motives. And of course, observation is the first and best way to gather evidence in support of our own position.

                  Stay alert, carefully observe the world around you, and you will be prepared when you need to debate.

                                                           #12

                  Ask Why:

                  In the end, Juror #3 stands alone; the only guilty vote left: bitterly snapping that it’s his right to dissent, and that he’s given his arguments. #8 calmly invites him to try to convince the rest of them, causing #3 to go into a furious rant, repeating all the evidence that they’ve dismissed so far. After he’s spewed his rage on them all, the rest still sit unmoved. Spotting a picture of his estranged son which has fallen out of his wallet, he shouts in anger and begins to tear it up. Coming to his senses, he breaks down in tears and votes not guilty.  

                  When the arguments have all been made, the evidence presented, and your opponent still won’t budge, it might be time to simply ask him why he’s so immovable on this issue. Let’s face it; most of us are not strictly logical. We’re not supposed to be strictly logical. For most people, the reason they have a particularly violent hatred or rejection of some idea or belief is not out of logic or because of the evidence, but because of some other, deeper, more personal reason. When your opponent sits unmoved, even after you’ve taken his arguments apart, showed him hard evidence, and demonstrated your position perfectly, then it’s time to take a step back and try to find out what in him is preventing him from agreeing with you. If you can find that; if you can lay your finger on that one point which tethers him to his false belief, then you will almost certainly win him over.

Vive Christus Rex!