Issue
9, June 15, 2009 —
Wiber
Screenings, Stating Play: The Law of Attraction in Contemporary
American Film
In this issue:FEATURE: Louise L. Hay, What We Give Out, We Get BackGuy Finley, Principles of Invisible Justice Dr Jane Bolton, How to Double Your Creativity Law of Attraction and Millionaire Mind Sharon Elaine, Affirmations Margaret Morzkowski, The Eight Secrets: How to Achieve Anything You Want in Life Wallace Wattles, The Science of Getting Rich Wider ScreeningsEventsReviewsEarlier issues
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The
Law of Attraction has galvanized recent Hollywood cinema with a
ferocity that can only be termed radical. The re-definition
of
individuality, the re-orientation of “success” towards
self-actualization and the emancipation of women from a male-dominated
spirituality all made theoretically possible by the Law of Attraction
are being assessed in some of the most provocative of recent
films. At its simplest The Law of Attraction suggests that
the
world is what the individual makes of it: if you think the world is an
evil, dark mess that is what you create; if you think it an unlimited
opportunity for personal growth, happiness and success (whether
qualified materially, emotionally or, for some, spiritually) that is
also what you will create. Currently, the Law of Attraction
is
endorsed, practiced and espoused by many in what bookstore racks label
collectively as “self-help” or “New Age”, a literary movement
spearheaded by pioneering works of self-empowerment such as The Master Key System,
banned by the Catholic Church in 1933 for its unorthodox humanity but
now embraced by many as a key text in humanity’s search for “the truth”.
In Charles F. Haanel’s Inkstone Press edition of The Master Key System
one of the founding principles of what turned out to be a literary
journey to individual self-actualization now being mirrored in cinema
is expressed succinctly as “create ideals only, give no thought to
external conditions, make the world within beautiful and opulent and
the world without will express and manifest the condition which you
have within. You will come to a realization of your power to
create ideals and these ideals will be projected into the world of
effect.” The banning of The
Master Key System
coincided with two seminal developments in American Cinema: 1) the
popularity of sound film, “the talkies” and 2) strict censorship by the
Catholic League of Decency imposed upon Hollywood – a rigid list of
moral guidelines known as “the Hays Code”. Studios were bound
by
the Hays Code to the point where condemnation by the Church determined
box-office. The Hays Code stayed in effect until the late
1950s
when producer-director Otto Preminger defied Hollywood Studio dominance
to form an independent production house. Ensuring his
creative
control, Preminger began systematically tackling Hays Code moral
restrictions, announcing his defiance in 1957 by simply acknowledging
the human rather than holy state of virginity in the popular David
Niven comedy The Moon
is Blue, in dialogue references only.
The
self-assertion of independent film artists since Preminger was
systematically geared towards increasing creative control.
The
demise of the Hays Code in America coincided with the cinematic
revolution known as the French New Wave. A generation of
young,
smart Frenchmen writing for the screen journal Cahiers Du Cinema –
Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard (whose treatise on virginity in Hail Mary
would also be condemned by the Church) – developed the “auteur theory”,
“auteur” being French for “author”. Simply put, it theorized
that
the director was the author of the film. Thus, a number of
films
by a director evidenced a clear thematic and stylistic authoritative
“signature”, a directorial stamp of individuality. In simple
Law
of Attraction terms, the director’s ideals drove both individual films
and collective bodies of work: the creation of a film was an expressed
of an individual’s idealized world – their film was the world they put
into effect.
Although cinema was unique amongst revolutionary
C20th arts for its collective collaboration, the director had creative
control to the point where many films subsequent to the popularization
of the auteur theory changed the screen credit “directed by” to “a film
by” – the director took possessory credit. With possessory
credit
came responsibility for the success or failure of the film at the
box-office and artistic accountability for the film’s
content.
Today, the contractual right of “final cut” gives the director absolute
control over the released version of their film: contractually it is
rarely given by a major studio and those who earn it have enormous
ideological power.
Contemporary Hollywood has finally begun to
show an understanding of what the self-help movement has embraced as an
ideology: self-actualization, self-expression and the advancement of an
ideology not based on Absolutist moral principle but on the confluence
of two revolutionary ideologies: 1) humanism – the belief in human
potential as supreme: success and self-actualization depending on
self-reliance and self-expression integral to humanity as an evolved
species – and 2) atheism – the logical extension of humanism in so far
as it asserts humanity over theist spirituality: the human individual
is supreme in a world unanswerable to any God wherein the proper study
of humans is humankind, not divinity – what is now termed “secular
humanism”. The films that examine this revolutionary conflux
of
ideologies are, however, all united in their defiance of a theist
absolutist morality to the point where those who have embraced the
ideological principles behind the self-help movement as birthing the
Law of Attraction (among other principles, many of which look to
Jungian psychology and archetypal symbolism) are being challenged as to
the ethical and philosophical ramifications of “self-help” as an
ideology and “New Age” spiritualism as a new pseudo-religion.
The
positive implications of the Law of Attraction have understandably been
seized upon – self-actualization and success are achievable ideals
available to any individual as a result of their humanity.
However, the moral implications of the Law of Attraction when
considering that inverse view that the world will be a dark place for
those who seek such are proving quite an ideological stumbling block in
cinema’s willingness to embrace the positivism which has swept the
self-help market. Book after book offers to train the mind to
block negative thoughts and to focus on success; yet film after film
dramatizes the ideological struggle to do so – its moral, political,
social and religious implications. With bestsellers like The Secret,
“self-help” has become an institution. Although Hollywood has
embraced the “self-help” movement in He’s Just Not That Into You (a
tepid relationship romantic-comedy which rather blandly re-packages
Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner’s epochal When Harry Met Sally,
as ironically does a film released in competition to He’s Just Not That Into You:
Kevin Smith’s Zack and
Miri Make a Porno),
the ideological implications of the moral relativism inherent in the
Law of Attraction’s humanist impetus are being examined in films
usually not associated with “self-help” ideology yet ironically
expressing a world-view in reaction to the very same philosophical
principles offered by these self-help ideologies.
For instance:
at the cinema this week are two films which relate to the “self-help”
ideology and its socio-political / ideological implications in vastly
different ways: Terminator:
Salvation and State
of Play. Beginning with the most popular, Terminator: Salvation.
The fourth film in a series begun by director James Cameron and actor
Arnold Schwarzenegger, its narrative is organized upon one simple
conceit. In his war against the machines, John Connor
(Christian
Bale, so good as Batman)
is a
resistance warrior who has been “prophesized” to deliver the surviving
humans from the wrath of the machines. Essentially it’s a
simplistic good vs. evil fable in which the “saviour” is a Messianic
figure whose coming was prophesised – a blatant Christ
allegory.
Humanity as represented by John Connor in Terminator: Salvation has a
moral reckoning, which the film desperately tries to assert is a
spiritual destiny (the fulfilment of prophecy). Yet, when
confronted with the technology that can slay the machines, he remarks
to a colleague to “pray that it works”. This alliance of
humanity
to a higher power and the concurrent reactionary fear of technology
(traditionally representative of science and reason but here allied to
mercenarial inhumanity) uses this one reference to “prayer” to qualify
“faith” as a distinguishing factor between the human and the
machine. Granted, it’s a throwaway reference, but the
ideology
behind it cannot be overlooked, especially when watched by millions of
people around the world.
Terminator:
Salvation
is reassuringly spiritualist in its ideology. However, it is
not
humanist in the way that the “self help” ethos culminating in the Law
of Attraction encourages one to contemplate. As thrilling as Terminator: Salvation
is, nicely distinguished by a surprise cameo by Arnold Schwarzenegger,
the faith-based morally absolutist opposition between humanity (to be
saved) and technology (absolutely immoral) is a simplistic binary
dichotomy: this is not what an individual makes of the world, but the
obligation an individual accountable to absolutist moral laws of good
and evil has to a “higher” ideal. The world here is not what
one
makes of it (which is, ironically enough, the machines’ intent) but
what is given and prophesized for humanity. Yet, there is
note of
complexity in Terminator:
Salvation
– a hybrid human-robot presents an ethical dilemma in that his residual
“humanity” challenges this absolutism in an oblique aside to the
stunning assessment of humanity’s capability to invent it’s own world
in Blade Runner.
But,
this potentially humanist dilemma is negated from the outset – the
human-robot figure is introduced first as being given the last rites,
of being redeemed, or “saved” as the film’s very title implies for his
sins – he/it has been appropriated into the same religiously-ordained
Messianicism as John Connor. In making what he wants of the
world, John Connor’s self-actualization as symbolic Messiah merely
endorses a conventional and blandly re-assuring populist “myth” of
salvation from Judgment Day, themes also behind the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still,
Knowing
and Angels &
Demons.
Terminator:
Salvation
leaves no room for moral relativism nor does it accommodate the Law of
Attraction. Good and evil exist as absolutes here, the
individual
subject to them. It is not a humanist film: it is Messianic
fantasy. Its alliance of human self-actualization with
traditional religious mythology neglects the implications of the Law of
Attraction’s focus on the potential for self-actualization as purely of
an individual human making: it allies self-actualization with
spiritualist ideals of fulfilling one’s destiny. A radically
different ideology to that in Terminator:
Salvation is found in State
of Play.
Yet, as different as the ideology is, it is truer to the self-help
movement’s embrace of the Law of Attraction and resoundingly more
complex in its assessment of the ethical implications of morally
relativist humanism. Directed by Kevin MacDonald (who
directed
Forest Whittaker to an Academy Award as Ugandan General Idi Amin Dada in The Last King of Scotland),
State of Play
stars Australian Russell Crowe as a journalist reporting on a possible
conspiracy involving the death of a woman involved in a secret affair
with a married US congressman (Ben Affleck).
State of Play
alludes to a rich tradition in American cinema – the political
thriller. The political thriller resonated within US film
first
in the early 1970s as a result of political disillusionment in American
democracy in the wake of the Watergate scandal. In a shadowy
world where political expediency and morality were of no relevance to
ethical humanist “truth”, directors such as Alan J. Pakula first
essayed a morally relativistic America, the creation of ideological
façades which Pakula sliced through with razor-sharp cynicism in
association with Warren Beatty in The
Parallax View.
In essence, Constitutional democracy itself – in practice and in
principle – was a manipulated “construct” relative to political
whim. For Pakula, political “whim” was epitomized in the
Watergate scandal, referenced rather cleverly in State of Play
though now with Clintonian references to sexual morality in
politics. The absolute ideal behind the American Constitution
–
“democracy” – is, in the political thriller through to State of Play,
exposed as a ideal certainly, but of essential human manufacture and
subject to a concept of humanity in which any appearance of absolutist
morality was exposed as, at best a façade and at worst, dangerous media
propaganda – morality was “spin”. In the morally relativist
political thriller, humanity had a new agenda: without absolutes,
anything was possible as all was within human potential and anything,
no matter how abhorrent or hypocritical in the simplistic dualism of
Absolutist good and evil mythology, was justifiable (moral too, though
not necessarily ethical). Self-actualization in the morally
relativist political thriller genre became thus completely divorced
from the comforts of spiritual homily. Yet, the ideal was the
same – “truth”.
Truth in State of Play
epitomizes the morally relativist view (shared at principle level by
the Law of Attraction) of equally valid, competing strategies of
self-actualization by disavowing spiritualism altogether, primarily
because of spiritualism’s continued over-reliance on simplistic moral
dualism. Indeed, the only character whose self-actualization
is
oriented towards Theism (in a key scene he, representing the American
Political System, tells Crowe never to take the Lord’s name in vain) is
a moral charlatan and hypocritical betrayer of American Constitutional
principles. Indeed, the sole heroic figure that the political
thriller as a morally relativist genre could find is also the one
character whose sole agenda is the pursuit of “truth” – the
journalist. While “truth” in Terminator: Salvation
is the human fulfilment of prophecy, State of Play
re-asserts “truth” as journalistic “fact”, devoid of moral allegiance,
ontological faith or politically partisan bias. Russell Crowe
asserts his ideal – the pursuit of fact as ideology. Kevin
MacDonald in State of
Play
systematically creates and exposes two moral and political “fronts” as
represented by two US Congressmen, one a good Christian and one an
adulterer – Ben Affleck (in the role in which he finally emerges out of
Matt Damon’s shadow). Though members of the same party, their
world view is radically different and the vision of America’s future
each seeks as an integral expression of their respective ideological
orientations is also fundamentally opposed.
Between these two
men, making of the world what they wish one in deference to God and the
other to ethical standards of right and wrong just as he stands accused
of immoral conduct as an adulterer (a predicament not dissimilar to
that facing the rationalist Congressman hero played by Tom Hanks in Charlie Wilson’s War)
stands Russell Crowe. Affleck’s friend, Crowe respects his
ideology but finds that, in his pursuit of “truth” this apparently
inviolable ideology is merely a front and neither the underlying
traditional absolutist morality of the Christian Senator nor the sexual
(a-)moral relativism of Affleck prove to have any relation to the
“truth” after all. Affleck’s affair and the moral hoopla a
hypocritical American public impose upon marriage and monogamy as
evidence of worthy statesmanship (clear allusions to the Clintonian sex
scandal) are mere smokescreens – indeed anything an absolutist
tradition insists humanity base itself upon as evidence of moral value
is exposed by MacDonald (a true auteur) as a hypocritical
façade.
In this morally relativist world, the journalist has all the flaws of
the human condition just as his drive for the truth allegorizes the
humanist quest for self-actualization in the detective story
narrative. But Crowe considers himself beyond accountability
to
moral-ethical value “construct” in his pursuit of the objective truth
of journalistic fact: for the journalist, self-assertion is the
reportage of this truth. The journalist figure in such
morally
relativistic cinema embodies the humanist pursuit of a truth beyond any
and all political-moral-ethical facades.
The absolutist, messianic good and evil duality of Terminator: Salvation
is counter-balanced in State
of Play
by the morally relativistic reportage of objective fact and its
accountability to potentially subjective humanist standards of right
and wrong (divorcing ethics from morality). In both films,
the
world is what humanity makes of it: in one film according to religious
allegory and in the other according to humanist moral
relativism.
Both films create “ideals”, one of them in deference to traditional
spirituality and one in deference to humanist
counter-spirituality. However, only State of Play
considers the ethical implications of the Law of Attraction –
humanity’s responsibility to a truth shorn of moral absolutism and in
which the human capacity for self-actualization alone creates an
ideology, not as absolute certainty – destiny / salvation – but as an
expression of self. Truth, insofar as it is allied to
journalistic (or scientific) fact, is objective and any
moral-political-social-sexual codes based on spiritualist moral
certainties are individual constructs to be stripped away for their
underlying humanity, a humanity where the world is truly what the
individual makes of it and of limitless potential only when the
individual realizes that the potential to achieve all that one is
capable of becoming is within oneself and not bound by the absolutism
of spiritual accountability.
But, then: what of the individual humanist’s responsibility to the
collective “humanity”? ###
** ***** **
Too
Many Apostles Spoil the Last Supper
(an extract from Robert Cettl’s Film Tales, coming
soon to ebook in association with Inkstone Digital, No Limits and
Amazon Kindle)
Producer Lord Lew Grade made the ambitious hit television mini-series
of Moses
with Burt Lancaster to much acclaim. So much so, that he
received
a personal invitation to meet the Pope: it was an invitation that Grade
took lightly but which his Catholic wife was thrilled by. At
the
meeting, as his wife remembers it, the Pope remarked that he hoped that
someday Grade would produce a version of the life of Jesus.
Some
years later, Grade set about just such a project, a lavish, all-star
cast re-telling of the life of Christ, Jesus of Nazareth.
Grade in turn secured the services of esteemed Italian director Franco (Romeo & Juliet)
Zeffirelli. After some arguments about casting, the filming
process was underway. Once, in a brief discussion between
producer and director, Grade asked what Zeffirelli was shooting the
next day. Being a religious epic on the life of Christ,
Zeffirelli replied that it was the Garden of Gethsemane scene being
filmed the next day. Grade then asked who was in
it. The
director replied that it was Jesus and the twelve apostles, to which
the apparently budget-conscious producer replied “What! Twelve apostles,
can’t we make do with less?”
###
Wider
Screenings columnist Robert
Cettl
has a B.A (Hons) in Film Study from the Flinders University of South
Australia, which included an international scholarship to the
University of Southern Illinois in the USA. He has
post-graduate
qualifications in Librarianship and Information Management from
UniSA. In addition to popular DVD reviewing, his writing for
McFarland (one of the leading American publishers of film non-fiction)
has been collected by such as Yale University Library and the British
Film Institute. His forthcoming work for this market (for
release
in 2010) is Terrorism
in American Cinema: a comprehensive analysis of terrorism
as a genre from fears of PLO inspired homeland attacks in Black Sunday to the
outright denouncement of the Bush War on Terror in W. His
previous work includes the above extracted Film Tales, now on
sale and coming soon as an ebook through Inkstone Digital and Amazon
Kindle in association with No
Limits.
For analysis and commentary on individual films mentioned in this
column (and hundreds of others) and for updates on the latest Hollywood
hits and choicest DVD releases, Wider
Screenings
is now on Twitter. Any @ reply will be duly answered – there
are
no automated DMs or tweets. If tweeting, please mention film
title in tweet: requests for films/DVDs to be reviewed are welcomed and
given priority. Free print copies of Film Tales can be
won in the tweet ‘n win Film Buff Quiz. First tweet request
being incorporated into Wider
Screenings is a retrospective of actor Warren Oates
beginning with the film Cockfighter,
a seldom seen look at cockfighting in the Southern States and a film
still banned in England.
Charles F Haanel is regarded by many as the "Father of Personal Development" The
Master Key System is simply one of the finest studies in personal
power, metaphysics, and prosperity consciousness ever written.
The
Master Key System is a system that teaches the ultimate priciples,
causes, effects, and laws that underlie all attainment and success,
covering everything from how to create abundance and wealth to how to
get healthy.
This masterpiece, which originally sold over
200,000 copies, was banned by the Church in 1933 and has been hidden
away for more than 70 years.
Napoleon Hill, the author of Think & Grow Rich, was massively influenced by Haanel's most famous work.
This book has been linked with the book, television and DVD phenomenon, The Secret.
FEATURE: Louise L. Hay, What We Give Out, We Get Back 
