Why dark is not (really) the opposite of light.

In our world there are basically two ways of looking at reality: the Persian way and the Hebrew way. That’s sounds fantastically archaic, but they’re really quite hip.

The Persian perspective is by far the most prevalent way of looking at the world. Made popular by Zarathustra, the Persian model insists that everything comes in pairs, which are opposites, and which together either create a cosmic conflict or some harmonious whole: good versus evil, light versus dark, up versus down, yin versus yang, and so on.

The Hebrew way of looking at things supposes that there are no two sides, just one side, or rather no side at all. It’s just us in a big world, and we evolve from a chaotic past to a harmonious future. Another important factor in the Hebrew way of seeing things is that evolution is towards some kind of attractor; some kind of central entity towards all things move, evolve or simply revolve.

All story telling focuses on conflicts, but the big difference between Persian story telling and Hebrew story telling is that in Persian story telling the antagonist always comes from the camp opposite the camp of the protagonist. The conflict ensues and a happy ending revolves around the camp of the antagonist being defeated but not annihilated. The enemy retreats, regroups and will surely be heard from again.

Hebrew story telling focuses almost entirely on conflicts that arise inside the favored camp, or even inside our hero’s head. If there is an antagonist camp, it usually receives very little screen time, and a good look at the story reveals that the actual conflict of the story is that of our heroes. If there is an enemy camp, that enemy will either be completely wiped out, or they will reconcile with our heroes and become one with them.

A typical modern example of Persian story telling is found in the Star Wars cycle. The “dark side” is an equal counterpart of the side we’re rooting for. It’s peopled by darklings and captained by some arch-darkling. The Hebrew answer to Star Wars (although they came first) is Star Trek, in which a federation of heroes goes out to encounter strange new worlds and become one with a greater realm. Star Wars is always about the battle against the others. Star Trek is most often about our own attitude towards antagonism, and our personal or collective growth. An insurrection in Star Wars tells of the good guys finally rising up against the utterly other bad guys. An insurrection in Star Trek most often has to do with a person or group that breaks away from the larger fold and turns on it.

Similarly comparative are the movies It’s A Bug’s Life (Persian, by Walt Disney) and AntZ (Hebrew, by Steven Spielberg & co), which were published pretty much at the same time and were obvious reactions to each other.

We’re free to admire and utilize either perspective and it would be folly to state that either Persian or Hebrew is the right one or the true one. But it’s also wise to realize that the Persian way of looking at things is as poetic or experiential as the word sunrise. Of course the sun rises, in our experience, although in fact the sun stays were it is and the earth turns. What to an observer seems like an act of the sun is in fact an act of the earth. Take away the earth-bound observer and the sun never rises again.

In that same way, up and down aren’t opposites; they’re merely directions from an observer’s perspective. Take away the observer and neither direction is either up or down. The same goes for warm and cold, or any other duo. Even darkness and light aren’t opposites. Light consists of substance (photons) but darkness is not the presence of some other substance. When we turn the light on in a dark room, the room fills with light, but nothing actually leaves. Darkness does not get replaced with light; it doesn’t go away. It just seizes to exist.

Because the Persian way of seeing things is so natural to any observer, even the Bible often gets interpreted in a Persian way. Many people believe that God and the devil are equal opposites, each with their realms and empires, and that darkness belongs to the devil while light belongs to God. But no, we can safely conclude that the Bible works the Hebrew way.

In the Bible God is the legal owner of everything. Light belongs to God but darkness as well. In fact, some of the core scenes of Scriptures occur in darkness (like the creation, the covenant with Abraham, the death of Jesus Christ). God, or at least communion with God, is that attractor that all evolution naturally aims for, and the devil ‘rules’ separation. A consequence of this is that only God’s realm is organized and based on understanding, forgiveness and communication. The devil ‘masters’ chaos, which is a paradox because chaos can only exists when there is no rule. The devil is the emperor of an empire in which the subjects aren’t subjects.

The same difference between the realm of God and the realm of the devil - a.k.a. Beelzebub, which means Lord Of the Flies - is the difference between a colony of bees and a swarm of flies. Bees are organized; flies are not. Bees adhere to central rule; flies do not. Bees have a home; flies don’t. Bees focus on flowers and help them reproduce; flies focus on corpses and dung and aid only decay, and if they help reproduction, it‘s the reproduction of diseases. Bees produce honey and care for their offspring; flies produce nothing and don’t care for their offspring. Bees are armed; flies are not. Any bee can venture into a swarm of flies unscathed. Any fly foolish enough to come close to a beehive, won’t even make it past the first line of defense, let alone come near the entrance.

Next time you watch Luke Skywalker battle Lord Vader with a light saber (an obvious metaphor for an intellectual debate; for any physical fight both have access to grenades and laser guns and the likes), or Captain Picard zip through the Briar Patch (Moses in Exodus 3) and engage the Son’a in favor of the Ba’ku, and so doing create a conflict within the Federation that threatens its very existence, maybe you should take off your shoes…

Maybe not.

M. Night Shyamalan’s Happening: The Apocalyptic Genre and the Bible

M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film “The Happening” is a strangely braided tale of mass obtusity and private sophistications, or so this reviewer devilishly advocates.

Although the hybrid concept is riveting, Shyamalan’s Happenings doesn’t really happen. Perhaps it came too soon after I Am Legend, is too similar to Signs, or counts too much on people being subtle. And M. Night Shyamalan should know by now that when the masses miss your subtleties, your movie gets cudgeled.

Still feeding off the success of The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan amazes movie goers once again with a script that nobody else would have been able to sell to anyone. What could have been a powerfully portent addition to the apocalyptic genre does grave injustice to the subject of the story, the stars that play it and the humanity it portrays.

Without any hint of urgency, the audience is informed that the world as we know it is coming to an end because for some unidentified reason all the bees have gone missing. That must have upset the plants, explains the plucky hot-dog eating breeder, because plants are more talkative than most humans. Apparently, we plastic MacHumans are too spiritually morose, even, to show some decent hysteria when our fellow men jump off buildings by the bushel or offer both arms for lions to devour. Blood-and-guts gush, sound effects thunder, but no tear is shed as the invisible foe prowls along in windy undulations and makes us kill ourselves in the most creative ways.

But then, there’s this curious, albeit completely over-acted, display of emotions when one single guy, who’s demonstratively not affected by the killer pollen, takes up a riffle and shoots some other not-infected person. At once Zooey Deschanel’s amazing blue eyes water up and fill the screen, and our hero – played by the usually well-composed Mark Wahlberg – bursts into feelings that weren’t there before when he and thousands of others were trying to escape mass execution by patiently waiting for a train, courteously exchanging tickets or the muffled bickerings of toothpaste-cap level arguments.

And the audience is left to pray: If the three concepts of Holocaust, some guy named Joey, and munching tiramisu can somehow find a way to go together, please God, let there at least be a very good reason!

But there is none, and God stays silent. Now why is that?

Religion is ubiquitous in the US, whether you like it or not. How can there be an apocalyptic movie without some mouth-frothing extras screaming quotes from the Book of Revelation in it?

The Book of Revelation is the most famous member of a body of apocalyptic literature that was produced two millennia ago. This genre was a typical result of the formation of empires that were as large as the known world, because to any human individual, empires are so huge that only a divine power can bring them to an end. Apocalyptic literature invariably showed God’s wrath being brought about by known natural events such as earth quakes, volcanoes or even meteorites.

In the twentieth century, the apocalyptic genre was revived by mankind’s growing global awareness but the rise of technology sired an apocalyptic sub-genre: movies and books began to identify mankind as rival God as the cause of global destruction. During the cold war we thought that nuclear weapons might do the trick, or else some martial virus that would escape from secret military labs. But in recent years our increased concern for the environment opened a market for the classical nature-strikes-back story. Hence we see Armageddon come in the wake of a mindless meteor, or The Day After Tomorrow mathematically triggered by pollution.

Shyamalan’s Happening however lets us guess at the nature of the story and leaves us indignant with the desire to know what we’re getting killed for. Is Syamalan saying that our collective behavior of the recent age translates into, or triggers, this mass self-suicide? Or has nature consciously declared war on us? Or are we all the victims of some transgressed critical-mass threshold? Why is the girl near the window with the tree saying that she sees “in calculus”? Why does neither the math teacher nor the science teacher submit some scientific substance to this ordeal, other than the glorious insight that there are some forces of nature that we don’t understand?

Are we supposed to quickly forget that to help us deal with exactly that, mankind has come up with religion, and that excursions into religious thought are deeply human? Shyamalan’s movie, however, is peopled by puppets that have not a thing to do with human beings, our true need to know, and the consolation of the belief in a God. Unless you count the sinister Mrs. Jones, who maintains her signature ignorance with signature zeal, while displaying Bible texts and Jesus statues all over her house. When she goes, and she goes grimly, she’s singing Psalm 23: The Lord is my shepherd, while the green pastures that He leads us to are known to be the very fields that kill us.

Luckily, our hero is a stud and our heroine is hot. And that kid’s cute too. Too bad the kid’s not clairvoyant, the heroine a retired missionary and our scientific hero an Indiana Jones kind of theologian. He would have revealed within the first minute of the movie that the Hades-trailing fourth horseman of the apocalypse is chlorophyll-green, that the Biblical word for bee is closely related to the word “Word” (of God), and that the Biblical word for wind is identical to the word for spirit.

Nah. That would have made that movie perhaps too scary all at once.

But where a wrathful God would have saved a city on the merits of five righteous inhabitants, so Shyamalan’s The Happening is rescued from complete failure by Mark Wahlberg’s smile in the last minute of the movie. That two-second smile alone tells more story and shows more character than the entire preceding drag. It makes the movie mesmerizing and shows that somewhere deep under the roots of the killer grass there lies an initial intention of making a truly great film.