for Heath, or "requiem for a smiling face"

12 years ago, there were no such things as "blogs".

In fact, back in 1996, there was barely even an internet.

Even in my day job, where we were ostensibly on the leading edge of software & technology at the time, we were still using things like VI, the MS WordPad of text editors, to write complex computer programs, line-by-line-by-line. Lotus Notes was the latest thing for intra-company communications, and only senior management had actual accounts on the system. A laptop? You may as well have asked the company to buy you a Rolls Royce while you were at it. And, if you were one of the blessed few to have a company e-mail account, chances are, you were keeping a manila folder in your file cabinet, where you kept hard copy print outs of every single e-mail you ever sent or received.

At home, things weren't much better. I bought a Compaq Presario that year and subscribed to a local Mom & Pop internet service provider to get dial up access to the nascent web. After being spoiled by free e-mail back in college, I couldn't wait to rip open my shrink-wrapped copy of Netscape Navigator and jump back onto the so-dubbed "Information Superhighway".

One night during that same year, as I was listening to Hot 97 on the train ride back to my humble abode in Montclair, New Jersey, Angie Martinez & company came on the air in tears.

Tupac Shakur had just died.

I didn't know this man. And yet, his passing had meaning - real personal meaning - to me.

And, even though I was a relatively content, well-compensated (albeit grotesquely overworked) little corporate drone, I had to say... SOMETHING.... about this to someone.

I was driven..... compelled to write.

So, I sat down at my Presario and composed a little essay called "2Pacalypse", where I related the suddenness of 2Pac's passing to Thornton Wilder's "The Bridge on San Luis Rey", questioning this notion that death is God's way of saying "mission accomplished". Was his soul actually supposed to learn something by getting gunned down on the Las Vegas strip? Were the rest of us supposed to take something away from it? Or was the search for terrestrial meaning at all a fruitless gesture?

Of course, what took me a page or two to say back in the mid 90's I can now do in one paragraph. Practice makes perfect. :-)

Point being, even back then, when I couldn't even imagine living the life that I lead right now, was the DNA for Macroscope.

Even more to the point, I'm still struck by my personal need to respond in a personal way to the passing of a person who had no direct contact with my life.

Then again, as I stated in "2Pacalypse", Tupac been touching my life in some way since 1991. As a popular artist, his music had provided a kind of Greek chorus to my life. I remember cruising the summer streets of Baltimore with my friends to the tune of "I Get Around", or planning to scare the white people in the dining hall at Princeton with a song that starts "...They claim that I'm violent, just cause I refuse to be silent", or feeling warm and fuzzy and agreeable listening to "Dear Mama".

If I can paraphrase Jeffrey Wigand, we artists are in the Emotion Delivery Business.

And anyone who can make you FEEL something will always have a place in your heart, regardless of how that feeling is given to you. They become your friends, you family even. They can make you laugh or cry. They can inspire you, and even disappoint you, even if you've never ever met.

Thus is the odd conundrum that is mass media and celebrity.

Even though he was a stranger, 2Pac's art made him feel like he was my friend.

Which is why I'm suddenly reminded of him and his passing today.

Not that long ago, I hated Heath Ledger.

He didn't really register with me the first time I saw him, opposite Mel Gibson in "The Patriot". I mean, his character irritated me, but there were so many other things in that movie that pissed me off even more (Black slaves who were just tickled pink to pick Mel's cotton? A church full of people burned alive, but everything is cool because Mel killed Jason Isaacs? Shall I go on?), that I just sort of ignored the young Aussie.

"A Knight's Tale" was when he really started to irk me, because I could feel the studio machine tuning up the band to proclaim him "The Next Big Thing(tm)". I'd recently read William Goldman's "Adventures in The Screen Trade", and tended to agree with his thesis that new stars were only created when an established star passes on a juicy role and the producers are forced to cast a talented unknown in the part. Sadly, I think I was unfairly heaping Heath in with my feelings on Ben Affleck in Pearl Harbor ("The Next Harrison Ford"? come ON!) and just this overwhelming sense of Jonestown-style Kool-Aid that was floating around movie marketing that year. In fact, by the end of the summer of 2001, I was so irritated with the kind of films I'd been seeing, that I teamed with a like-minded classmate from film school to write a film that directly addressed many of the failings that we saw while still telling a good yarn.

And after a year of working on said film, we got word that Heath Ledger was going to star in a new movie with the EXACT SAME TITLE AS OURS.

Yes, I HATED Heath Ledger.

But then I saw "Monster's Ball". In particular, this scene made me a believer in Heath Ledger.

(And, if you've never seen the movie before, I beg you, PLEASE don't waste time with this YouTube clip. Just go out and rent the damn thing, because it's just a fantastic film):


I even loved "The Four Feathers". And a big part of what I loved was Heath's performance - just through his body and his face, he was able to transport me directly inside his character's emotional journey, from false pride, to cowardice, to guilt, resolve, sacrifice, despair, and, finally, triumph.

I read an interview with him where he said that, regarding acting roles, he felt like it would be a waste of his time to repeat himself. Which is why he turned down a ton of nice, frothy teen films at the start of his career and was, at one point, forced to borrow money from his agent to survive, waiting for a good, original role.

The guy wasn't just a teen idol-in-training. He was an f'n actor.

And the very best actors have always been anthronauts - literally, "sailors on the seas of humanity" - exploring the uncharted corners of the soul and bringing the breadfruits of this spiritual New World back to nourish those of us who wait on the safer, civilized shores of our own identities.

But, knowing what I know about actors who channel the spirit of their characters, like Mr. Ledger clearly does, I can't help but wonder about the toll it took on him to accomplish... THIS:

Before The Joker, he appeared to be on the path to be a reasonably peaceful & content family man. Then, after locking himself in a hotel room for six weeks to inhabit this most unhinged of all supervillains, he separated from his love and complained that he'd been unable to sleep for weeks.

His brain just couldn't stop spinning.

I believe I even heard that he'd been prescribed Ambien, and it still only helped him sleep for an hour at a time.

Am I suggesting something as crass as "The Joker killed Heath Ledger"? No. What I am suggesting is, when people describe certain actors as fearless, it's not just about doing their own stunts. There are emotional and spiritual costs to doing this sort of work at the highest level.

I remember my father wondering out loud about Ricky Williams: "with all that money, you'd think a guy would be able to keep himself off of drugs".

Sadly, Dad, sometimes, for some people, the drugs are the only things propping them up to allow them to even do what they do. Athletes. Rock stars. Movie stars.

Delivering a feeling to millions upon millions of people, night after night, day after day...

Think of it this way: consider how much energy it takes for you to have the relationships with the people you personally know and with whom you maintain a personal connection. Now, imagine if you had to do that for a living, where every single person on the street feels connected to you. Deeply. Personally. Spiritually.

Every. Single. Person.

The best of them give us all so much. Things we simply could not live without, no matter how much we want to dismiss them as inconsequential.

After I got through shouting "WHAT?!?!?" at my computer screen, hoping that if I said it long enough and loud enough, the sheer force of my voice would change the words to anything other than "Heath Ledger Dead at 28"....

After I got over the deep sadness I felt for people like Michelle Williams and his daughter, or even someone like Christopher Nolan, who now has the unenviable task of looking at his friend Heath's face every single day for the next six months while trying to finish editing his movie....

After taking the stream of phone calls from friends who were as astonished and saddened at the news as I was....

After all that mourning....

All I honestly have left to say is "Thank you."

"Thank you, Heath, for the deliveries"

"They were always right on time."

Send some light and love both to him and the people who knew him best.

Good night, friends.

Review: The Passion of the Christ

I saw Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" about a month ago. I started writing this post the day after and, well, as you can imagine, it started to get a little out of control.

So, let me take a step back.

Mel Gibson's father Hutton is a complete loon. The man has gone on record denying the existence of the Holocaust, and Mel refuses to rebuke him. Gibson himself belongs to a branch of Catholicism that rejects the reforms of the second Vatican council, one of which is the Holy See's official statement refuting the idea that Jews should be held accountable for Jesus's death. By his own account, he is not a good person.

Media accounts of the near-Fangoria level of violence in The Passion really made me reluctant to see it, let alone pay $14 at the Arclight for the privilege. I saw pictures of devote churchgoers, who probably won't see another movie from godless Hollywood all year round, walking out of theatres in tears. I worried with my friends that many of these folks aren't particularly media-saavy and will have a hard time keeping in mind that this is simply a movie, a distinctly interpreted exercise told through the prism of Mel Gibson's mind, and not a documentary about Christ's final moments.

A very large and vocal part of me did not want to see this movie. In fact, a large part of me even resented the existence of this movie. But I felt like I had to see it. I can't NOT talk about it, and I can't talk about it without seeing it.

Of course, it helped that I had a friend with free passes to the Magic Johnson Theatre at Crenshaw Plaza.

My initial reaction?

That was a great movie.



Surprised?

I am a Christian. Born and raised as a Protestant - United Methodist to be exact. I consider myself pretty faithful. I pray daily. I try to read the Bible daily. I tithe. On the other hand, I haven't regularly attended church since high school. I like to say that I haven't found a church that moves me yet. The ones that I have seen, either back at Princeton, or in my old home in Montclair, New Jersey, or, most recently, here in Los Angeles, always seem so contrived. After spending all of my formative years at Mt. Zion United Methodist Church back in Baltimore, I've probably heard just about every cliche` and overused Christian phrase on the planet. I can instantly tell when a minister is simply going through the motions and when he's actually speaking "The Word".

For those of you who may not be completely up on the Bible, one of the most interesting scriptures to me is the Gospel according to John, Chapter 1, Verse 1:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God"

What's interesting to me is that, way back in the book of Genesis, the first thing God does is speak. And God's speech, the formulation of words, is the original creative act. Everything in existence, everything that IS, spawns from that Word.

Christian theology goes on to tell us that Jesus is, in fact, The Word, made into flesh. The power of God, squeezed into the form of a prehistoric Bob Villa.

I'm a writer. I've written my entire life, in one form or another. But I think I've only recently become truly aware of the power of writing, and of words. Stephen King once said that writing is a form of telepathy - a vehicle by which the author can insert their own thoughts into the heads of others. In Mark Millar's Superman: Red Son, Lex Luthor is able to defeat a Stalinist Man of Steel with a simple phrase, written on a slip of paper, that drives him to the brink of suicide. I wrote a poem to my ex-girlfriend that, when I recite it, even brings other women to tears. The right word from the right person can take you past Heaven.

There's a scene in "The Passion", where Pontius Pilate questions Jesus to determine his guilt, and Jesus tells him "whenever you hear Truth spoken, you hear my voice".

The point is, I know the Word when I hear it. Sometimes it's from the voice in the pulpit of my family's church. Other times, it's the casual comment of a total stranger. It's a song on Hot 92.3. It's the rhyme from a poet in a dank coffee shop. It's the affections breathed into my ear with a kiss at midnight.

Of course, that's the trick with the Word. It can come from anywhere, at any given time. As I struggled over the seemingly decadent lives of so many clergy, a very good friend who happens to be an AME minister told me that being called to preach in no way means that you're a good person.

I'm saying all this to say that, yes, Mel Gibson is an extremely imperfect messenger, but this movie forced me to confront issues with my own faith that I've been dodging for years.

Case in point: I've always tried to conceptualize God and Jesus in almost mathematical terms. For instance, if sin, theologically speaking, is the state of being separated from God, it's impossible for God to understand, and, therefore, absolve sin, without God somehow separating from himself. Which is, essentially, what Jesus is. He's a sliver of God. A slice. A portion of the whole.

But, to me, that's always meant that Jesus was not an ordinary man as we think of it. After all, he can see the future, heal the sick with a touch, walk on water, feed thousands with just a loaf of bread and a pair of fish, turn water into wine, tell demons to hit the bricks, and raise the dead, including himself.

Superman has nothing on this guy.

So, when people talk about how painful and costly the crucifixion is, and they're all so impressed with the sacrifice Jesus made, I always felt like they missed the point. To me, Jesus was not an ordinary man and his entire reason for being here was to die. It wasn't some great sacrifice. It was his mission. And, since he knows the future, he knows he'll succeed. Where's the drama and sacrifice in that?

Ironically enough, my daily Bible reading took me through the Easter story in the week before I saw The Passion, so the story elements were fresh in my mind. I'd forgotten that, according to the Bible, Jesus pleaded so hard with God to find another way, ANY other way, to complete his mission that he sweat blood. I'd forgotten that, as he hung on the cross, Jesus found a moment of abject dispair where he literally screams to the Heavens why has God forsaken him.

These two things helped to highlight for me what is the essential paradox about Jesus - he is the Word Made Flesh, but he still acts like a man. Because that's what he is.

Which changes a great many things. When Jesus does all of his miracles, and then says to his disciples that they can do these things, too, if they only had faith, it makes you wonder about the nature of faith.

I have a very good friend who speaks constantly on manifestation and energy and tapping into the intelligent source of creation. She'd sooner shoot herself than ever actually use the word "God" (which, needless to say, gives me pause), but she is also completely confident in her world view. There isn't a single doubt in her mind.

I really, really hate people who don't have doubts. I want to attack them, to know what gives them the nerve to actually think that they've got it all figured out. But, I've forced myself to realize that my problem isn't with them for their arrogance. It's with myself, because I'm riddled with doubt. I always have another question. I can always conceive of the alternative. In many ways, I think that much of the really harsh criticism of this film from the left, from people like Christopher Higgins, starts in this same place - an utter disdain for the faithful. Mel's issues only make it easier.

But I also realize that you can't really acquire faith. Just like when Morpheus says that no one can ever actually be TOLD what the Matrix is. You have to use building blocks. Use the fact that I have faith that I'll wake up tomorrow morning in my right mind and with all my fingers and toes as a way to expand my faith to bigger things.

The Passion also made me re-examine the nature of sin. As I've said before, sin is that which separates you from the divine. So, in many ways, we define our own Hell. We all have our own interpretations of what it means to be God-like, and we all have a sense on how close we, individually, meet our own standards. I've always taken the fire images of Hell to be metaphors for the state of constant longing, when you know that you must spend all eternity outside of God's presence.

The Passion paints a different picture of sin, as illustrated through it's depiction of the final fate of Judas Iscariot. As Judas agonizes over his betrayal of Jesus, a pair of kids start to taunt him for being a crazy man. But their taunts become more violent, to the point that they actually snap and bite at him. Their faces contort into grotesque monstrous images. In the end, they form a horde, like a pack of wolves, that drive Judas from the city and into a hangman's noose of his own making. It's as if they were conjured by his own spiritual torment.

I'm reminded of a passage in Genesis, where God tries to warn Cain, as he senses his growing anger and jealousy towards Abel, that, if he does wrong, "Sin crouches at his door, seeking to consume you." Somewhere else in the Bible, Satan is likened to a lion, stalking the Earth, in search of souls to devour. Which must have been what Dante had in mind in his image of the final circle of Hell in the Divide Comedy - Judas, trapped in Satan's mouth, chewed on like Prometheus, but never dying, for all eternity.

It's an interesting contrast to what we see of Jesus in the movie, on his arduous journey to Golgotha, where the crowds and the Roman soldiers continue to whip and kick and beat him, even after he's been lashed to within an inch of his life and forced to carry a giant log up and down city streets. In the very beginning of the film, Satan warns Jesus that no one man can bear the sins of the entire world. if the demon children are a representation of the sins of one man, it gives new meaning to the enormity of the task that is set before the Messiah.

Now, for those of you who aren't Christian or interested in theology, who've managed to stick around all the way down through my missives about this film and my religious faith, my hats' off to you. I'm simply saying all these things to illustrate one point. As a Christian, particularly as a media-savvy, jaded, non-church-going, somewhat secular Christian, this movie had a tremendous amount of meaning for me, and, for that, I'm grateful to Mel for making it. And, as a filmmaker, I applaud the absolute artistry that went into its construction. Since it seems to be on track to be one of the highest grossing films of all time, I'm curious to see if it gets remembered next year at Oscar time.

But, just like I believe that this is a film made by Christians and intended largely for Christians, I don't know that I can adequately gauge how offensive it is to Jews. Personally, I don't think it's particularly anti-Semetic. Yes, some of the main villains are the Jewish high priests, but I didn't get the sense that the film was saying that they were bad because they were Jews and, therefore, all Jews are bad. After all, aren't Jesus and all of his supporters Jewish? Moreover, a point could be made that the film illustrates what the Jewish high priests may have felt was a legitimate greviance with Jesus. After all, they're living under an occupation, and some dude who seems to have his own cult appears out of nowhere, claiming to be God incarnate, and that he's mad at his own priests so he's going to destroy their temple and make himself king of the Jews. Blasphemy & insurrection, all wrapped into one package. It would almost be like what you'd expect most pastors to do if some guy showed up today and claimed to be the second coming. Conservative Christians would be calling for his head on a platter.

On the other hand, I can see how it would be uncomfortable at best for Jews to see guys wearing their religious regalia and acting like Snidley Whiplash. In fact, I have a friend who felt that the depiction of Judas' demon childen tormentors was also an anti-Semetic statement because, presumably, the children were Jews. Or the fact that Satan is seen lurking among the high priests during the scouring.

At the end of the day, I don't think it's anymore helpful for Christians to tell Jews that the movie isn't anti-Semetic than it is for White people to tell Blacks that a movie like "Traffic" isn't racist when it shows Erika Christiansen being used as a sex slave for a Black drug dealer. The issue isn't intent, but, rather, how much these things play into and, perhaps, legitimize existing stereotypes. Ultimately, no one can tell anyone else what they can or cannot be offended by. Whether you intended to offend is irrelevant if offense is actually taken. If Jews say they find the movie offensive, it is, by definition, offensive to Jews. The issue, therefore, creates what one of my friends in academia calls "a teaching moment".

Until this movie came out, I had no appreciation for just how Christian our culture is from the perspective of non-Christians. That, in and of itself, makes its existence worthwhile.
Moreover, now that I have some perspective on it, I can see just how much the fact that I am a Christian colors my profound reaction to that movie. Conversely, I'm now aware how much, if you were not raised in a Christian tradition, that "The Passion" probably appears gratuitously violent and exploitative. In many ways, if you don't know the basics of the Gospels, the movie may not even make any sense.

But these conversations, both with the larger community and within myself, wouldn't even exist if the film did not exist. And for that, despite all the egregious faults of the messenger, I am deeply appreciative of the message.

P.S. - but I'm still angry that, after all the trouble to make it authentic by using Latin and Arameic, they STILL couldn't get a brown-skinned Jesus. "Historically accurate", my ass. I guarantee you Jim Caviezel does NOT have hair like wool or feet of brass. Ya dig?


p.p.s. - and when is somebody going to do a Mary Magdelene movie? This book, The Gospel of Mary of Magdala REALLY has me intrigued.


Apparently there's a forgotten, non-Canonical gospel (one of the Dead Sea Scrolls? not sure) written by Mary herself, where she is actually one of Jesus' apostles and one to whom he revealed some secret knowledge. Needless to say, this didn't make Peter and the boys happy. Was there a bit of Hater-Ade served at the Last Supper?
I must admit, despite my good Christian upbringing, Gnosticism fascinates me. Like looking at the deleted scenes on a DVD.

Passion Play
The New York Post seems to have illicitly gotten their hands on a copy of the latest cut of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of Christ" and given it to a broad cross section of folks for review. In looking at this, and other responses from people to the as-yet unreleased film, it seems to me that your level of offense from the film is inversely proportional to how close you are to Gibson's own beliefs on the religious spectrum. It seems that many devote Christians don't seem to see anything in it that would offend or castigate Jews, while a number of Jews who have seen it are VERY worried about the less forward-thinking members of the Christian community taking this film as new marching orders to beat up some Semites.

Since I haven't seen the film, I can't speak on it. Although, as a firm believer in karma, I think the fact that Gibson's Jesus, actor Jim Caviezel, was the SECOND person to be struck by lightning during the course of filming is telling, to say the least. At the end of the day, I'm curious. I want to see it, so I'll probably check it out.

Having said that, the one thing that struck me about all the statements on the film in the Post (and, in other places) is that everyone seems focused on the brutality & violence of the Crucifixion. I find myself reminded of an Easter sermon where the pastor took great pains to illustrate the gory details of Christ's death, as if to say "he endured all that for you, so don't make his death in vain."

Somehow, this all seems to miss the point, to me. The point wasn't that he suffered a horrible, blood drenched, prolonged death. The point was that he died. Period. And was then resurrected. I once had a theory that the whole exercise of the Christ, of the divine becoming incarnate in the flesh, was that God had to comprehend and experience sin in order to abolish it. If sin is a state of being separate from God, God would have to shear off a piece of his or herself in order to comprehend that. Which raises a number of interesting issues for me. First of all, it suggests that, omnipotence does not mean the absence of process. Yes, God may be capable of doing anything, but everything has a procedure to be followed to accomplish it. If God's goal is to save humanity from sin, that very process may have a very specific set of inputs, procedures, outcomes, and, most importantly, timetables.

Also, if God/Jesus could have died in any manner of his or her choosing to experience death (the opposite of omnipresence, perhaps), why choose a public, brutal death? Could it be because it was an image and a story that will never leave our minds?

Anyway, whatever flaws there may be in Mad Max's movie, I think it will at least get a number of Christians to scrutinize their own faith. Like I said, I'm curious.

The Longest Walk
Here's a Time article about "The Passion", Mel Gibson's directorial follow-up to Braveheart, that details the day of the Crucifixtion. The big conceit in this film is that it's all in Aramaic & Latin, the languages of the time, with NO SUBTITLES, because he wants to be as authentic as possible and force the audience to focus on the visuals.

Just a minor suggestion: if you want to be authentic, cast an Arab as Jesus, instead of the VERY-anglo James Caviezel.