[Commentary] 21 grams

One movie character that absolutely fascinates me is the role played by Benicio del Toro in 21 grams (2003). (a link to the movie's information on IMDB here).

Before I go into his story, allow me to pay hommage to the Director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Writer, Guillermo Arriaga, of this incredible movie (and a wonderful cast including personal faves Sean Penn, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Eddie Marsan (who plays the reverend)).

My personal take on just some of the many themes of this movie are destiny, crime and punishment, death, repentance, love, making good, doing the right thing, revenge, self-loathing, starting over, closure, the coincidences (serendipity?) necessary for two people to meet in this life, and the impenetrable nature of God...

The character's name is Jack Jordan, an ex-con who becomes a Born-again Christian and more than anything a deeply religious man. And although the themes mentioned above touch all of the characters in the film in one way or another as their destinies are intertwined, the role that crystalizes these 'issues' is Benicio's.

Here is the 'official' synopsis of the role:

Jack Jordan (Benicio Del Toro) is an ex-con that has spent more time in jail than out, but has reformed and is working in a church, spreading the gospel, and helping kids that are heading toward the same kind of trouble he's been in. He and his wife have two young children.

The movie does an incredible job at showing the incredible complexity of Jack Jordan as he struggles to come to terms with his life and the tragic events that happen to him despite his attempts to be a good man. Without attempting to recount the whole film, he unwittingly kills two young girls and their father in a car accident. Thereafter he cannot come to terms with the guilt, nor understand why he is being punished. He tries to commit suicide in jail and the pipe on which he tries to hang himself collapses. He is then released from jail on a technicality. Later Sean Penn intends to kill him to venge the deaths of the others and cannot go through with it. Not long after, Benicio goes to find Sean Penn and the mother of the children (played by Naomi Watts) and asks to be killed by those whose lives he hurt and it doesn't work out as expected. He even tries to take responsibility for Sean Penn's self-inflicted gunshot, admitting 'I shot him' to a sheriff, but again, he is released as the facts don't align with his story.

Having spent his years out of prison trying to atone for past behavior, through no fault of his own, he is now stuck in a bottomless well of guilt and no ability to atone. Deep conviction in God's wisdom crashes (more or less literally) into incomprehension of God's ways.

A tragic story and a tragic character, written, portrayed and directed with brio. And the brilliance was in part due to how much we come to care about and understand this character. Definitely not one of us, but at the same time one of us in the sense that the conditions of our lives are as fragile as Jack Jordan's and our (shared) incomprehension of why bad things happen to good people.

I guess more than anything the role is about the flip side of Serendipity, the negative coincidence, which I will now term derensipity.

And on that creative note, I will end this post. Be well.

Synchronicity

According to Wikipedia:

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which are causally unrelated occurring together in a supposedly meaningful manner. In order to count as synchronicity, the events should be unlikely to occur together by chance.

It really is a great word/concept! One of my favorites. There have been a few synchronistic events in my life, which I guess is the norm for most of us - often attributed to that infamous lucky star.

Anyway, the origin of the word, according to lore, which I hope is correct because it is a good story, the word was coined by Carl Jung after working with a patient who was telling him about a repetitive dream she had had about a golden scarab. Just then Jung heard some tapping on the window behind him and when he opened the window to see what it was a bug flew in and he caught it in his hand. To his dismay, it was a rose-colored scarab!

Jung apparently also described the term, in the 1920s, in the following terms at different times: an "acausal connecting principle", a "meaningful coincidence" and as an "acausal parallelism." I personally like the meaningful coincidence best of the lot...

What is interesting is that this concept apparently baffled Jung to the point that about 30 years separated his coining of the term and his actual publishing of a complete treatise on it. Another quote by Jung, written apparently around 1950 shows the evolution of his thinking on the subject and the importance he accorded it:

Synchronicity is no more baffling or mysterious than the discontinuities of physics. It is only the ingrained belief in the sovereign power of causality that creates intellectual difficulties and makes it appear unthinkable that causeless events exist or could ever exist. But if they do, then we must regard them as creative acts, as the continuous creation of a pattern that exists from all eternity, repeats itself sporadically, and is not derivable from any known antecedents.

I love this notion of "creative acts" which sounds like creative acts of the universe, and his reference to "a pattern that exists from all eternity" sounds a lot like a reference to God or a God-like intentionality of the universe. Hmm...

Otherwise, the same notion has sometimes been explained (even by Jung) as some form of collective consciousness (like two people making the same invention at the same time on two sides of the world), while others place it in the realm of divine intervention, of destiny or some form of determinism, predetermination, or that heavily-charged and hard to accept notion (for me at least) called fate.

Synchronicity has also been popularized recently by books like The Secret, in which magical thinking is assimilated to the law of attraction, which says your thoughts create your reality. I believe that is true to a certain extent, but more in the sense that you are free to interpret what happens to you any way you like. I don't know how much control we have over what actually happens, even though I would like to think we have some influence, but we can all control how we live and experience everything that happens to and around us. There is the classic example of seeing potential obstacles as stepping blocks, and of there are others, like simply feeling gratitude for whatever happens... For many, the good and the less good are both good, i.e. it's all good.

I read a fun story today in a French novel on art in which a couple is in a museum and the woman is in ecstasy in front of the painting. The husband can't take it any more as his wife is always positive, always sees things in a positive light. He tells her something like "I can't stand your positiveness any more - when the alarm rings in the morning you are thankful, when it's time to go to work you are thankful for having a job, you see art and it makes you joyful, I can't take it." What does she say? "I am so happy that you feel comfortable enough with me and all of these strangers to express such deep sentiments in public." Personally I understand and feel sorry for him, but somehow I am jealous of her...

So when does being positive look naive, ingenu or silly? Like Voltaire's Candida, who in the face of every possible disaster repeats what his tutor, Professor Pangloss taught him, that "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds." And when is it spiritual and enlightened? And how did I get so far adrift of the subject of today's post? I don't know...

To get back to the subject and to close this post, let me just say that several books have referred to synchronicity or made it part of their plots. Those I seem to recall that made direct or indirect references to it were Lewis Carroll , Douglas Adams, Philip Dick and one Russian author I discovered thanks to a Russian friend (imagine the coincidence : )) Alexander Green (aka Alexandre Grine in French). He wrote one particularly beautiful book called the Scarlet Sails, which was given to me the aforementioned friend several years ago. According to Amazon it is only available used. Beautiful story. If you can find it. Maybe with a little help from synchronicity...

Prophetability

This is a very very short post to share that my wonderful friends K and Y had a baby girl this morning at around 5am.

Funnily enough, I predicted about 6 months ago (thus the title of the blog) that she would be born on my birthday, and despite K's resistance - she has had contractions for the last week and never hoped for it to take that long - all worked out as (I) planned : )

It turns out though that I was not alone. K's mother had also hoped for a birth on the 22nd since her mother was born on the 22nd and it seems that she was a very special person.

Which leads to me to the only spiritual thought of this blog post, something that some spiritual thinkers have mentioned, that when you are born on the same day as someone in your family or share the same name as a relative, maybe somehow the destinies get intertwined...

I don't know the answer to that one, but I do know that I am extremely happy for K and Y and hope our destinies remain intertwined!