Incpetion *****

There is a long-standing relationship between dreams and change for mankind. Dreaming is portentous in Judeo-Christian culture, Native American culture, ancient Greek and Egyptian cultures, the Aboriginals…the list goes on. Our relationship with dreaming and the search for meaning within our dreams is older than civilization itself.

What if technology could enable us to manipulate dreams? Would even the future then be within our control? This is the question that “Inception” dares to ask. But like all good questions, this question leads to an explosion of other questions not the least of which is - As we can control reality through technology does technology itself have us more and more under its control?

We learned from McCluhan that with every new medium of communication there is change in the possibility of the messages sent; what would happen to dreaming itself if we could control it? Is there a point in which a dream could have no more personal significance then a text message?

Because "Inception" is a movie about dreaming it poses questions tacitly. By being a medium for the depiction of both reality and dreams, the movie itself begs comparison to a shared dream. Because its depiction places dreams and reality on different levels it can depict levels of dreaming, the way we can wake from a dream only to find ourselves still dreaming. But if we can share the dream with other people, how is it not a reality and further perhaps a more preferable one (see Accidental Critic Classic The Purple Rose of Cairo)?

But in reality we are asleep when we dream. And in reality technology makes dreams come true. “Inception” asks as we live the dreams of technology might we be asleep on our feet?

At one point in the movie, our hero (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) draws a diagram to show that what makes dreaming so alluring to a creator is that you can make a reality as fast as its enjoyment. There is no gap between idea, design and production.

For the creator the temptation is to never stop dreaming. It begs the question - In what sense is reality ever preferable? Indeed the end of the movie leaves you wondering (in more ways than one).

But ask yourself - Should you watch a movie where the hero’s job is to manipulate someone’s dreams and thereby their thoughts and perhaps their destiny?

Yes, you should. Moral ambiguity always seems to come with developments in technology. Wake up.

Unthinkable, Legion, and The Book of Eli

In June these three religious movies became available to rent. We watched them separately, but found that it was interesting to think about the three of them together. We should preface this with the fact that (being Christians) we thought about these movies from a Christian perspective.

All of them keep Jesus out of it, even though two of them think biblically. In Unthinkable the government confronts radical Islam but thanks to its secular mindset, it is unable to successfully understand its opponent. Both Legion and The Book of Eli are capable of imagining angels and prophets as the proper subject of movies, provided these holy beings operate as if the son of God did not and will not be present on the earth. The movies are entertaining and worth thinking about, although The Book of Eli is decidedly better.

Legion proposes the preposterous notion that God has changed his mind: In lieu of sending Christ down to bring an end to the age and usher in a far better one, he is sending his angels to destroy mankind. The field general of angels, Michael, thinks God has erred and rebels. He does his darnedest to keep a specific, single, expectant mother alive because her child can supposedly lead mankind back into God's good graces.

We are reminded of Moses' efforts to bargain with God to keep him from destroying all of the Hebrews wandering the desert. Moses argues that keeping the woebegone Hebrews alive and getting them to the promised land is far better public relations than choosing yet another people to be His. God 'relents'. Of course, it is not clear whether God is only zooming Moses when he threatens the eradication of the Hebrews. If that were the case, than the threat of extermination would have been a test to see whether Moses truly loved his thoroughly lost people.

If God is testing Michael in Legion, it is rather a more expensive test in lives than the test of Job. And it would seem that after such a long time God would already know what he had in Michael... But it is a good tale, so long as you forget about Jesus - which does seem to be the basic agenda of this century.

In the Book of Eli the apocalyptic scenario does not seem to be anything out of Revelations either. A man who has no business finding the last remaining copy of the Bible protects it against all odds in a decades long trek across the country teaching people to pray and look out for one another while dispensing God's judgment on evildoers. Take Elijah and set him in a samurai movie and you will have the idea. It is spellbinding and captures the spirit of the old Testament well (particularly with its twist at the end).

Both Legion and The Book of Eli work out the implications of the New Testament. Both Michael and Eli, each in their own way, emulate Christ, which is the task of all Christians. But acting like a Christ in an apocalyptic future is one thing, how about emulating Christ now?

Nobody in Unthinkable is capable of such emulation. The radical Islamist is capable of sacrificing himself for his holy cause (to bring US troops out of the Middle East), but he is also content with the destruction of millions of his former citizens, i.e., Americans. As one would guess, agents of the government are willing to do the 'unthinkable' in order to thwart his plans (but he outwits them in the end).

When the most humane of his captors reminds him of freedom, our terrorist, a former special forces man, tells her that freedom is a false god. No one has a response for this. And it is an assertion that should give us pause. It is Islamist to find the advocacy of freedom to be a form of idolatry, a violation of the first commandment. This is not the case for Christians. Jesus, is often asking people who they think he is, and makes it clear that their deciding that he is the son of God is pivotal to their salvation. They have to be free to make such a decision. Indeed, in Christian doctrine our being cast from the Garden insures us of the freedom we demonstrated when we ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

But in the face of radical Islam how should Christians be emulating Christ? By doing the unthinkable or by being willing to ask the pivotal question Christ asked..."And who do you think I am?"