Jimmy Akin – Page 478

The 4400

I basically don’t watch TV any more. Most TV shows–even ones that I like and intend to watch–don’t motivate me to tune in each week. So what I’ve done with such shows is to just watch them on DVD when they come out.

That way I don’t have the hassles of commercials or having to tune in each week or being frustrated by cliffhangers (except for the season finale).

That’s the up side. The down side is that I also have to wait a really long time between getting to see seasons of the show, but it works for me.

I’ve just started watching the second season of The 4400, which just arrived in the mail, and so far I’m pleased. The opening episode is two hours (well, 90 minutes) long, and it serves as an effective reintroduction to the premise and cast of the show–though the first few minutes of it were a little rough given how long it’d been since I saw season one.

You may not have heard of The 4400 since it’s not getting that much publicity, but here are the basics: It’s a show that airs on the USA Network and–like other USA Network shows (such as Monk)–it has really short seasons (12 episodes in the second, and even less in the first). But they’re trying to do quality rather than quantity, which is what is important to me.

The show was co-created by Rene Echevarria, who was one of the best writers on Next Gen and DS9. It also has Ira Stephen Behr as a regular writer. He also was one of the best Next Gen/DS9 writers. It was their names which got me to watch the first season, and I wasn’t disappointed.

The premise is that, beginning in 1941, a bunch of people–4400 of them (big surprise)–were abducted, apparently by aliens (though we’re later told that isn’t the case) and then returned–all at the same moment–in the present day.

When they were returned, the government did the only sensible thing: It locked them up.

But eventually it was determined that they didn’t seem to be a threat to themselves or others, and so they were released. The government’s still watching them, still trying to figure out what’s up with the whole getting abducted and then being returned all at once thing. It’s a good thing that the government’s watching, because a few of the 4400 start manifesting unusual abilities that even they don’t understand or know why they have.

The writing on the show is quite good, and Echevarria and his team have avoided some of the obvious traps that a series like this could fall into. The government is not persecuting the 4400. It’s acting reasonably. We don’t have an evil government versus righteous 4400 plot. This isn’t a standard good versus evil show. Both members of the 4400 and the normal population are shown being good and bad, helpful and creepy.

That ambiguity is the stuff that human drama is made of.

Let me give you an example of a really nice bit of writing from the series pilot episode, which shows insight into the human condition:

One of the guys we see get abducted is an American serviceman in the Korean War. When we meet him, he’s not aware that he’s about to be abducted, and with an especially good reason since he has other things to worry about at the moment: He’s getting the snot beat out of him by fellow American servicemen.

Why are they doing that?

A clue is found in the fact that he’s black and they’re white and it’s 1951, just after the integration of the armed forces.

Now the standard, easy thing to do in the writing here would be to chalk the snot kicking incident up to simple, straightforward racism: They’re bigots who view him as sub-human. But that’s not what happens.

Instead, as his fellow servicemen are leaving, one of them turns to the gentleman and says: "We treated you like an equal. . . . But that wasn’t good enough for you."

All of a sudden we’re not in familiar territory anymore. They’re not the kind of simple, unadulterated bigots we were expecting. They were willing to treat him like an equal–or at least they thought they did so.

So what was it that sparked the incident?

We find out when they leave and the serviceman looks at a photograph of himself and his white girlfriend.

Now it all makes sense!

His fellow servicemen are bigots! But they’re not the simple, stereotypical bigots we were expecting. They’re a bunch of "separate but equal" bigots. Their racism isn’t simple, unalloyed hostility towards black people. It’s tempered in a way that makes them and their motives–and the writing of the show–more complex.

And it’s a fully believable moment that shows insight into the human condition: This kind of thing could and did happen in 1951. We have an example of racist evil in this scene, but it shows more subtlety and thus deeper insight into human psychology than the simple, comic book racism we’re used to seeing on screen.

There’s also a nice bit when the serviceman is returned–along with the other 4400–in the present day: As he’s sitting in the detention center with the other returnees, he’s reading a magazine and he exclaims: "What? The Secretary of State is colored!"–at which point another character, abducted years later, walks by and corrects him and says, "Black."

(What would have been even better here is if another abductee then walked by and said, "Afro-American" and then a third walked by and said "African American." That also would have showed the evolving racial situation, but the writers didn’t go in that direction.)

Once he is released from the detention center, the serviceman has culture shock at seeing a genuinely integrated society and as being treated–for real this time–as an equal and one who can cross racial boundaries and isn’t expected to remain separate. But he gets over his culture shock and is able to fit in to 21st century society . . . at least as well as a member of the 4400 can.

That shows you the kind of writing you can expect in the series. It’s more complex than the run-of-the-mill, hackneyed stuff you’d get on most shows of the type, just as Echevarria’s and Behr’s scripts were better and more complex than typical Star Trek stuff. Now that they’re freed from the (amazingly tight) shackles that Star Trek writers were under, they have a chance to spread their wings, and I’m enjoying watching the results.

It’s the same kind of situation as with Battlestar Galactica–where DS9 veteran Ron Moore got the chance to spread his wings.

The second season opener–the only ep I’ve watched so far–has some nice touches as well.

There is, unfortunately, a violent, Fundamentalist zealot in it, but I can accept that since some Fundamentalists would react negatively to the 4400 in real life (and the one in the show is able to cite a verse from Revelation that does sound like the events of the series).

(Also like Battlestar Galactica, there are interesting religious themes in the series, that I’m curious to see how and if the writers will pay off.)

Summer Glau (River from Firefly/Serenity) makes an appearance as a mental patient and does her usual excellent job playing a mentally disturbed young woman.

Jeffrey Coombs (Weyoun from DS9) also has a cameo, which may turn into a regular part. It’s nice to see him without prosthetic makeup.

And an H. P. Lovecraft book plays a significant role at a crucial moment in the plot.

CHECK OUT THE FIRST SEASON.

OR THE SECOND.

STICKS HICKS NIX DIX CHIX

Since I was talking about music earlier today, I may as well touch on this story as well.

To the left is the cover of the Dixie Chicks’ new album, Taking the Long Way, which is their first new album since they shot off their mouths in a spectacularly rude way at a specutacularly bad time that was sure to alienate their country music audience.

GET THAT STORY IF YOU DON’T KNOW IT.

They could have recovered from that, but instead they issued a string of smouldering non-apologies and eventually appeared–bizarrely!–on the cover of Entertainment Weekly stark nekkid with inflammatory words and phrases painted on their bodies.

That ain’t really the country thing to do, and their fans turned their backs on them.

Now, personally, I don’t care if they hold the opinions of President Bush that they expressed in England. I’m not happy with President Bush, myself. But to say what they did (that they’re ashamed that the president is from Texas) when they did (in wartime) where they did (on foreign soil) to whom they did (Euro liberals) was sure to hack off the people who bought their records, and following it up with a bunch of non-apologies and bizarro stunts LIKE THIS (skin warning!) was utterly contemptuous of their core audience.

In other words, they were alienating their base.

So, three years later out comes their first new album and their label starts pitching it to country music stations and with news stories being written with headlines like "Dixie Chicks Return To Country Radio."

So have three years changed things? Is all forgiven? Will their country fans start listening to them again?

A precondition for forgiveness is repentance, and with defiant, in-your-face songs on the album like "Not Ready To Make Nice"–a contemptuous stab at those who were offended by their actions three years ago–it’s clear that the Chicks have some repenting to do if they want to be forgiven by their country fans.

AND SO THE ALBUM IS GOING NOWHERE, MANY STATIONS AREN’T PLAYING ITS SONGS, AND THOSE THAT ARE ARE GETTING COMPLAINTS.

Good.

I used to listen to their songs–I particularly liked "Goodbye Earl"–but the Chicks showed themselves to be a bunch of spoiled girls who have never grown up. I have no interest in listening to their songs because I will have no ability to enjoy them until they can adopt an attitude other than contempt for those who gave them their success by buying their albums and supporting them and their careers.

A basic rule of getting along in life for public figures is "Don’t show contempt for your base."

That’s a principle Mr. Bush ought to learn if he’d like his reputation to fare well in the long term, too.

Quote Of The Day

Digging into the Great Quotes File, we find a quote that I first found attributed to that apostle of common sense, G. K. Chesterton, and was pleasantly surprised to later find attributed to an unexpected source:

"Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace." –Oscar Wilde

Who was Oscar Wilde?

CLICK HERE.

As you may know, Oscar Wilde lived an actively homosexual life for some years. What you may not know is that he was received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed. For more on that story, check out Joseph Pearce’s biography The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde.

GET THE BOOK.

The Many Faces Of James Darren

See the guy in this picture?

That’s Moondoggie from the Gidget movies, and it’s Gidget he’s standing next to.

Moondoggie was played by a teen idol of the day known as Jimmy Darren (who was popular enough that he later appeared in animated form on The Flintsones as Jimmy Darrenrock.)

As part of his teen heartthrob career, Jimmy recorded a number of albums.

But he moved out of this phase of his career (as teen idols tend to do). He tried to move on to more "serious" roles, like this one . . .

Here he is as Dr. Tony Newman, one of two time-travelling scientists on the Irwin Allen thriller TV show, The Time Tunnel.

I recently blogged about the release of the DVDs of that series, which I was a fan of as a boy.

This was the role in which I first became aware of Jimmy Darren, though I had no clue who he was in real life any more than I did any actors I saw on TV at the time.

During this period of is career he also went for "serious-er" roles than that of a time-travelling scientist, such as Pvt. Spyros Pappadimos in The Guns of Navarrone.

I like The Guns of Navarrone, but I was oblivious to Darren’s role in it, too. It wouldn’t be until he started performing another role that I really became aware of who he was.

That role–which is the one for which I’ll always best remember him–is this one:

Here he’s appearing as the holographic 1962 lounge singer Vic Fontaine on Star Trek: Deep Space 9.

This was a great role for him! It drew on his musical and sci-fi background and he did an absolutely outstanding job as a suave, wise, strong, and (once in a while) vulnerable lounge singer who could really sing.

There was also some irony to the role since in the imaginary 1962 world that Vic inhabited, he sang at a Vegas nightclub and hung with members of the Rat Pack like Frank and Dino and Sammy–and in real life the actor Jimmy Darren was a close friend of Frank Sinatra.

The Vic Fontaine role came along at an important point for Darren and allowed him to re-enter the kind of musical world that he had worked in at the beginning of career. His role on DS9 proved so popular that not only did he become a virtual regular on the show (in more than one sense of the term), it also re-launched his career as a singer.

After the show he started recording albums again, and a number of his older ones have been re-released.

In fact, there’s ten of ’em on iTunes for download right now (search on the term "James Darren").

I haven’t heard all ten, but if you enjoyed his singing on DS9–or if you just like really well-sung American standards in the Frank Sinatra/Mel Torme tradition–then I’d like to recommend one album in particular: This One’s From The Heart.

This is the first album he did after DS9, and as a thank you to the fans of the show who would form a key part of its purchasers, it includes virtually all the songs he sang as Vic Fontaine–only this time without them being interrupted for story or covered over by dialogue or cut short for time.

Here’s the playlist of standards it includes:

"The Best Is Yet To Come," "Come Fly With Me," "That Old Black Magic," "All the Way," "It’s Only A Paper Moon," "I’ve Got the World on a String," "You’d Better Love Me," "Sophisticated Lady," "Just In Time," "I’ve Got You Under My Skin," "The Way You Look Tonight," "Here’s to the Losers," "You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You," "Dancing in the Dark," "Night and Day," "I’ll Be Seeing You," and "Satin Doll."

That’s quite a lineup! And Darren’s rendition of these songs is excellent.

I have a bunch of the same songs done by Frank Sinatra, but despite Sinatra’s undeniable mastery of this form of singing, I find that I enjoy Darren’s versions better. Darren’s voice has a more velvety quality, like Mel Torme’s, compared to Sinatra, and this makes it warmer. This kind of Rat Pack singing requires the singer to project a kind of strengh through his voice, but there are different kinds of strengths, and if you listen to Sinatra’s voice he at times projects a cruel streak.

Darren, by contrast, projects a friendliness and warmth, even when the song would lend itself to a cruel treatment. For example, a personal favorite are the songs "You’d Better Love Me" and "Here’s to the Losers," both of which have to be handled just right or the singer comes off sounding aloof and arrogant. That’s how Sinatra might do them. But in Darren’s hands, "You’d Better Love Me" sounds friendly and playful and "Here’s to the Losers" sounds compassionate and optimistic.

Not every song on the album is a winner to my mind. I don’t really like "Sophisticated Lady," for example. (It’s a slow song, and I have a constitutional aversion to slow songs.)

Growing up when I did, I didn’t discover this type of music until I was an adult. Back in high school, singers like Frank Sinatra were considered square, but when I grew up enough to appreciate types of music that weren’t popular with my high school buddies, I came to appreciate this genre.

Unfortunately, it’s a little hard to refer to because there isn’t a standard name for it. Some are calling it "classic pop" (i.e., the type of music that was popular before rock & roll). Others are calling it "pop standards." Or "lounge music." Whatever you want to call it, there’s just something comforting and classy about this type of music.

Overall, Darren’s This One’s From The Heart is an outstanding introduction to and example of the genre, and I’d heartily recommend it if you were a DS9 fan, if you’re a lover of this style of music, or even if you’ve never really gotten into this style of singing and would like to see what the fuss was about.

Enjoy!

McPlannedParenthood

Coming soon to a strip mall near you: A "quick-service" Planned Parenthood clinic. Next thing you know there’ll be one on every corner. Right next door to the local Starbucks, no doubt.

"Planned Parenthood wants to expand its services to more areas, and the organization’s leaders hope a plush fast-service clinic coming to this well-heeled St. Paul suburb [Woodbury, MN] next month will attract a new group of women who value convenience and can afford to pay full price.

"It could be to reproductive health care what companies like MinuteClinic and RediClinic are to strep tests and ear infections. Planned Parenthood is a nonprofit, but its leaders hope the new clinic will make enough money to help subsidize the rest of its operations."

GET THE STORY.

One these franchise PPs get going, I wonder what the tagline will be. Perhaps "Over 45 million killed"?

“At The Count Of Three You Will Wake Up Feeling Refreshed . . . “

Down yonder, a reader writes:

Jimmy, what is your "informed opinion" about whether it would be morally advisable for a Catholic to be hypnotized, either to help curb an unhealthy habit, or just as part of a show at a fair or on a cruise or something?

It depends in part on what your view of hypnosis is.

If you think that hypnosis is an altered state of consciousness that results in heightened suggestibility then it would be morally licit to use it for legitimate therapeutic purposes, like stopping smoking or losing weight or curbing anxiety.

It would not be morally usable for illegitimate therapeutic or investigative purposes, like trying to dig up memories of past lives, alien abductions, or fingering real or imaginary criminals since hypnosis trying to use hypnosis in this way leads to confabulated "memories."

It also could be morally licit to use it for entertainment purposes IF (and this is a BIG IF) you’re confident that the use of it in a particular case will not result in you doing or being tempted to do something immoral. For example, if you know that the stage magician is likely to give you morally neutral commands like "Cluck like a chicken" then the act would have a different moral character than if he were going to give you commands like "You’re becoming extremely aroused by your co-worker, who I also have here on stage hypnotized. You can’t keep your hands off her, etc., etc."

If, on the other hand, you’re like me and think that hypnosis is likely a socially constructed role that people know how to "play" from movies and TV (rather than a genuine altered state of consciousness) then a different moral question comes to the fore, because hypnosis in that case functions basically as a placebo.

Deceiving people into thinking that a placebo is real is immoral because it involves the offense of lying, but–in principle–it’s not immoral to use placebos as long as you don’t lie to people about the nature of what they’re doing. If you say, "This is not a change in your consciousness; it’s just a confidence-building measure that has as much or as little meaning as you choose to put into it" then I could see where therapeutic hypnosis might be morally permissible in principle.

I could see an informed Catholic saying to himself, "This may be just a placebo–or perhaps a smidge more than a placebo–but I’m going to use the fact that I was hypnotized as a confidence-building measure when I want a smoke or want to eat or when I’m feeling over-anxious."

In that case the person would not be attributing more to hypnosis than hypnosis has or is known to have. He’s aware that it’s just a tool he’s using with himself to accomplish his goals (like counting to ten in order to cool off when you’re mad or telling yourself that you can do something in preparation for actually doing it).

I’m not 100% comfortable with that, but it’s sufficiently non-problematic I wouldn’t at this point say that a properly informed Catholic couldn’t morally use it for therapeutic reasons.

Of course, the illegitimate therapeutic and investigative considerations would still apply.

And I’d be more uncomfortable about using it for entertainment since part of the game is thinking that what the stage hypnotist is doing might be real–unless the audience was made to understand that this is all just a game.

There’s also a "content-free" school of hypnosis that treats it just as a relaxed, focused state in which a person can put himself and decide for himself what he wants to do. In that case, it’s basically a form of meditation, and as long as it doesn’t get overlaid with mysticism or claims that it’s anything other than it is then it seems morally nonproblematic in principle.

This is all distinct from using hypnotism in works of fiction, where real-world rules don’t apply and hypnotism can be presented in a humorous, fantasy light–like in the otherwise forgettable Woody Allen movie Curse of the Jade Scorpion.

Madagascar! Constantinople!

Bad News, Everybody!

SONY hasn’t learned its lesson and has optioned two more of Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon books for sequels to The Da Vinci Code.

The first sequel is the book Angels & Demons (which was actually published to no special fanfare years before The Da Vinci Code), which deals with the Illuminati and their plot against the Catholic Church and . . . are you ready? . . . killing people at the Vatican with antimatter!

Also, the pope has fathered a child out of wedlock with a nun, but to avoid breaking a vow he didn’t have sex with her instead used artificial insemination.

Obviously this pope had a degree in moral theology before becoming pope.

And a degree in canon law. (The vow is to not get married, not to not have sex; the latter is an entailment of not getting married. And it isn’t even a vow in unless he’s a religious; it’s a promise.)

And a real sense of fun. (I mean, he committed a mortal sin to have a child, and he didn’t even commit the enjoyable one.)

MORE INFO HERE.

The next sequel–based on the book Brown is currently writing–is set in America and deals with Freemasons.

MORE ON THE SEQUELS FROM A HOLLYWOOD PERSPECTIVE.

Good News, Everybody!

The Vatican’s standing pat on the requirement to do accurate Mass translations!

Some time ago the Holy See issued an instruction called Liturgiam Authenticam, which ordered and end to the hippy-dippy-squishy translations that ICEL has been ramming down the throats of English-speaking Catholics for the last 40 years.

WOO-HOO!!!

So a new translation of the Mass has been in the works–and it’s quite good! (I’ve seen drafts, and it’s worlds better than the inaccurate, tin-eared one we hear every Sunday.)

BUT NOT EVERYONE IS HAPPY WITH THE NEW TRANSLATION.

Yet time is growing short, because the Holy See has made it clear it wants these translations done without unnecessary delays, and a vote on the new translation is scheduled for the USCCB’s meeting next month.

This apparently led some bishops to have a meeting with Cardinal Arinze in whic they apparently felt him out about the possibility of just sticking with the current translation of the Mass instead of using the new and improved one.

His response, leaked to Catholic World News (CHT to the readre who e-mailed), is found in the following letter:

2 May 2006

The Most Reverend William Skylstad
Bishop of Spokane
President, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
Prot. n. 499/06/L

Your Excellency,

With reference to the conversation between yourself, the Vice President and General Secretary of the Conference of Bishops of which you are President, together with me and other Superiors and Officials when you kindly visited our Congregation on 27 April 2006, I wish to recall the following:

The Instruction Liturgiam authenticam is the latest document of the Holy See which guides translations from the original-language liturgical texts into the various modern languages in the Latin Church. Both this Congregation and the Bishops’ Conferences are bound to follow its directives. This Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments is therefore not competent to grant the recognitio for translations that do not conform to the directives of Liturgiam authenticam. If, however, there are difficulties regarding the translation of a particular part of a text, then this Congregation is always open to dialogue in view of some mutually agreeable solution, still keeping in mind, however, that Liturgiam authenticam remains the guiding norm.

The attention of your Bishops’ Conference was also recalled to the fact that Liturgiam authenticam was issued at the directive of the Holy Father at the time, Pope John Paul II, to guide new translations as well as the revision of all translations done in the last forty years, to bring them into greater fidelity to the original-language official liturgical texts. For this reason it is not acceptable to maintain that people have become accustomed to a certain translation for the past thirty or forty years, and therefore that it is pastorally advisable to make no changes. Where there are good and strong reasons for a change, as has been determined by this Dicastery in regard to the entire translation of the Missale Romanum as well as other important texts, then the revised text should make the needed changes. The attitudes of Bishops and Priests will certainly influence the acceptance of the texts by the lay faithful as well.

Requesting Your Excellency to share these reflections with the Bishops of your Conference I assure you of the continued collaboration of this Congregation and express my religious esteem,

Devotedly yours in Christ,

+Francis Card. Arinze
Prefect,
Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments

“Who Are These People And Why Do I Care?”

That’s the question I was asking myself thirty minutes into The Da Vinci Code.

Of course, I knew intellectually who the characters were before I stepped into the theater, but the film did next to nothing to tell me who they were and it did absolutely nothing to establish them as presences on screen who I should care about. They’re just emotionally null images who show up and start running around and doing . . . stuff.

Lots of . . . stuff.

Like . . . y’know . . . driving around in cars backwards in traffic really fast and looking at secret messages written in ink that only shows up in ultraviolet light and talking a lot about symbolism and God and getting shot at repeatedly and . . . and . . . and the Mona Lisa was in it, too! (For about five seconds.) . . . And there were a couple of churches . . . I think.

Oh! And the movie was set in France! Yes! I definitely remember that! France was in the movie!

The movie was a horrible, horrible mess. I mean, you may have thought that The Big Sleep was hard to follow, but that’s nothing compared to the mess that The Da Vinci Code is. The Big Sleep also has one big advantage over this movie: The Big Sleep is actually interesting.

Not Opie’s latest opus!

Man, is it boring! B-O-R-I-N-G!

Its boringness virtually overwhelmes its offensiveness. I kept yawning audibly through the whole thing.

It fails to establish who the characters are. It fails to establish their motives. It fails to establish why we should care about them. It fails to establish what they’re thinking. It fails to establish how they know what they know. It’s just a huge, sprawling, poorly-communicated mess.

And the overdramatic soundtrack is frequently shrilling overdramatically to tell you that this is a dramatic (!) movie because nothing you’re seeing on the screen is telling you that.

And somebody apparently spiked Richie Cunningham’s drink with a tab of acid, because there’s all these flashbacks and hallucinations and visions interrupting in the middle of sentences every five minutes, like when they’re going to Isaac Newton’s tomb and all of a sudden–for no reason at all, mind you–~~Mulder and Scully~~Langdon and Neveu are suddenly surrounded by all these people from the 18th century, which only the audience (not the characters) can see.

Other film critics have talked about how there is no chemistry between Tom Hanks and the French actress who is in the Agent Scully role, but they’re not telling you the half of it! I mean, these two characters are so emotionally inert that from now on the nuclear waste management agency will be using their relationship to insulate spent uranium rods.

The only time the movie gets a little interesting is when Ian McKellan shows up as a walking anagram who hates the Church and is obsessed with the Holy Grail and injects a bit of humor into the movie.

He gets both of the movie’s intentionally funny lines.

One occurs when he is bluffing his and his manservant’s way past the police by telling them, "I’ve got a medical appointment that I can’t be late for, so if you are really that determined to stop us, you’ll just have to shoot us."

Then he jerks his head toward his manservant and says, "Start with him."

The other intentionally funny line occurs when McKellan has been unmasked as a villain (You weren’t expecting a spoiler-free review, were you?) and as he’s being bundled into a police car, he’s shouting hysterically about Tom Hanks: "That man has a map to the Holy Grail!"

Okay, you kinda have to be there for that one, but in context it was funny, and deliberately so.

That’s not the case with most of the funny lines in the movie. One of the best unintentionally funny lines is when Agent Scully is musing over the fact that Mary Magdalen’s sarcophagus has been moved and she says . . .

<overdramatic petulant French girl voice>The Church, did they finally . . . "get her"?</overdramatic petulant French girl voice>

Or when the Opus Dei cop tells another French cop who is a major character (his boss? his partner? his junior? his peer?) that he got a call from an Opus Dei bishop who told him that he’d just heard the confession of a killer named ~~Fox Mulder~~Robert Langdon and that’s why he’s so fanatically obsessed with catching Tom Hanks.

Some images in the movie are unintentionally funny, too, like when we get a flashback to the Council of Nicaea and it looks like a Renaissance-era, hypercaffeinated high school debate club complete with bleachers.

At what feels like the end of the movie we get a nice moment when Ian McKellan gets bundled off for being a homicidal nut job and you’re thinking, "Whew! Now that that’s over we can all get up and go home!" But NOOOOOOOOOOOO! There’s a whole nother sixteen hours in the movie that we have to sit through!

And in this sixteen hours we go back to the kind of boring, chaotic, poorly-explained, un-Ian-McKellanized . . . stuff . . . that dominated the first act of the film.

Like that conversation near the end of the film (only about three hours before the credits roll) between Mulder and Scully where Mulder is trying to convince her that she shouldn’t be so scientific and that what you believe is what is ultimately important and that if the audience claps its hands really hard then Tinkerbell will come back to life and maybe it’ll destroy or renew the Christian faith if she goes public with the fact that she’s the last surviving descendant of Jesus Christ (Sorry, if you didn’t want spoilers then you should have bailed when I outed Ian McKellan). Only he’s too convoluted for any of this conversation to make sense.

And then Scully ditches Mulder to go off with the secret sex cult that worships her (yeah, okay, I can buy that one) and he goes back to his hotel and starts shaving and he (dum! dum! dum!) cuts himself (hey, they’ve still got three hours before the credits; they have to fill it with something) and (I am not making this up!) he looks at the blood from his shaving nick and gets a VITAL CLUE (which makes no sense) to the location of the tomb of Mary Magdalen (who is buried in the Louvre, it turns out) and he goes out into the night running like a madman and . . . and . . . FAILS to find her tomb!

THE END!

Only it’s supposed to be a moving ending because he’s kneeling and maybe praying–or something–several hundred feet above her tomb, which he can’t see and only guesses is there.

And so the audience is left with bunches of unanswered questions like . . .

Why did Agent Scully decide to suddenly destroy her career as a French police woman for no good reason?

and

Who the heck was the bank manager working for when he decided to try and kill Mulder and Scully for no reason?

and

Did the evil albino who’s a hyper-religious Catholic know that Scully was a descendant of Jesus Christ–as seemed implied–or not–and if he did then why would a hyper-religious Catholic like him want to kill her?

and

Did that evil Opus Dei bishop know that Scully was a descendant of Jesus Christ–as seemed implied–and if so then how did he know it since her name had been changed and her identity masked to keep the Church from knowing that she was still alive? And why would he want to kill a descendant of his Savior?

and

Why did the French Opus Dei cop destroy the very piece of evidence that would have been most useful in a court of law to prove that Robert Langdon was the killer of the museum guy and then ruthlessly hunt him down for murdering the museum guy?

and

How on earth did the murdered museum guy have enough time as he was bleeding to death to strip nekkid and cover himself with ritualistic symbols in blood (and why would he do that, anyway?) and then think up a bunch of puzzles needed to write three secret messages in ultraviolet ink in different parts of the Louvre? And why was he carrying ultraviolet ink around with him to begin with?

and

Why would the museum guy go to all that trouble instead of just writing, "Please tell my granddaughter to go to Rosslyn Chapel and she’ll find a bunch of people who can tell her about her family. She doesn’t need to destroy her career as a cop and go on the lam from the law and put her life in danger repeatedly as she solves a bunch of superfluous puzzles. Honest!"?

and

Why would the museum guy write secret messages in ultraviolet ink on two of Leonardo Da Vinci’s masterpieces, and even if he were going to do that, why didn’t he write the important message on the first masterpiece? Why write an unimportant message on the first masterpiece simply to lead his granddaughter to the second?

and

Didn’t Ron Howard realize that stories about solving puzzles are only fun if the audience has the experience of being able to solve the puzzles with the characters on the screen and that it’s no fun at all if the puzzles are so complex that the audience can’t solve them and only gets to watch the characters on screen repeatedly pulling the answers out of thin air?

and

What’s the point of telling the audience that a particular series of numbers is the Fibonacci series if you don’t tell the audience what the Fibonacci series even is? (I mean, I used to be a math major, so I knew the answer to that one, but it’s still bad filmmaking. Ron Howard was NOT making this movie with me in mind, I can assure you.)

and

At just what point did Ron Howard and Tom Hanks realize that they were giving a huge number of people a really strong disincentive to ever see a Ron Howard or Tom Hanks movie again in the future?

and

Why is the Mona Lisa so important that it’s in all the advertising for this movie, when it shows up for about five seconds and its only significance is that it got vandalized by the museum guy with ultraviolet ink?

and

Why is Leonardo Da Vinci mentioned in like two scenes in this movie when he gets title billing?

and

What the heck is the Da Vinci code, anyway?

“You Are Getting Very Sleepy . . . “

A reader writes:

I was wondering if you have any information about hypnosis and Catholics. As a fairly recent convert, I have areas of my faith that are still informed by my protestant background, and I like to shine the light of Catholic truth upon them when possible. It has been my belief that participating in hypnosis, by opening up the subconcious mind, may allow demons access to the soul that our concious mind would otherwise suppress. What do you think?

The Church does not have an official position on this matter, so what follows represents my personal opinion. I have done quite a bit of thinking about hypnosis from a scientific and moral perspective over the years, so I hope you will find what follows to be an informed opinion.

Unfortunately, there’s no standard answer to what hypnosis even is. If you read the American Psychological Association’s "definition and description" of hypnosis, you’ll find that it’s all description and no definition because people in the field can’t even agree on basic questions like whether hypnosis represents an altered state of consciousness or not.

Let’s suppose, though, that something like what might be called the "classic" model is correct. According to this model, hypnosis is an altered state of consciousness ("a trance") in which a person is relaxed, mentally focused on certain things (either the hypnotist’s voice or what the hypnotist tells the patient to focus on), and has a heightened suggestibility (i.e., they’re more willing to follow the hypnotist’s instructions than they would be if not hypnotized).

On it’s face, there’s nothing supernatural about any of this, and that would make me wary of claims that one is opening oneself to the demonic.

I tend to take whether someone is open or closed to the demonic at face value: You’re not inviting demons to influence you unless you’re inviting demons to influence you. Since there is nothing overtly demonic about hypnosis (e.g., each hypnotic session does not begin with a prayer to a demon) there is no overt invitation to demons to influence you through it.

What about covert demonic influence? Demons do sometimes play unseen roles in influencing things around us, but when they do so it is in order to corrupt faith or morals or at least to cause suffering. Could a demon be involved in a particular case of hypnosis?

Well, if the hypnotist is trying to induce beliefs in you that are contrary to the faith, like the idea that you have lived past lives, then I suppose that the answer is yes. But then you don’t have to posit the existence of a demon to explain that. There are all kinds of evils in the world that aren’t directly produced by the activity of a demon. The hypnotist may just believe in reincarnation and use his role as a hypnotist to foist this belief on others.

And there’s nothing unique about hypnosis here. There’s nothing intrinsically occult about hypnosis in the classical model described above, and demons can have unseen involvement (or non-involvement) in all kinds of evils in the world, not just hypnosis.

There is a tendency in many Christian circles (both Protestant and Catholic) to give too much credit to demons in my opinion. While the devil was responsible for unleashing evil in the human community, this does not mean that one of his agents is involved in every particular evil that we encounter.

The classical model of hypnosis is not supernatural, it does not address supernatural forces, and it does not attribute supernatural powers to the hypnotist.

Neither do the individual components of the classical model have obvious supernatural significance: You may relax in hypnosis but you do not thereby open yourself to demons. Relaxing is a normal thing that humans do all the time.

As part of hypnosis, you may focus your attention on the hypnotist’s voice or the fact that your legs feel limp and heavy (because you just relaxed them! duh!), but we focus our attention on our bodily states and on other people’s voices all the time (ever try listening to someone in a crowded, noisy environment?). Focusing your attention is a normal human activity that does not open us to the demonic as long as what we’re focusing on isn’t demonic in nature.

Then there’s the heightened suggestibility, and here’s where we hit a significant problem–not in regard to the demonic but in regard to hypnosis in general.

To explain, I’m afraid that I’m going to have to say what I personally believe–or at least suspect–about hypnosis.

I don’t subscribe to the classical model. I don’t think that a person is really going into "a trance" in hypnosis. I don’t think that the state of consciousness a person is in during hypnosis is substantially different from any other relaxed, focused state of consciousness we experience.

I think that hypnosis is–or is likely to be–a social construct.

In other words, I think that there is a certain social role that people are expected to play when they are "hypnotized" and that they adjust their behavior to play this role. They know from film and TV and books that a hypnotized person is supposed to relax and act sleepy and then do or imagine what the hypnotist tells them, and that’s exactly what happens: They relax, they act sleepy, and they do or imagine what the hypnotist tells them.

Or at least the "hypnotizable" people do (the ones willing to play the role and then attribute their actions to the hypnosis).

Other people either don’t play the role or, if they play it, they are aware that they’re just playing a role and that "I’m realling doing all this myself" and so they are considered poor subjects for hypnotism or even "unhypnotizable."

MORE ON THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCT THEORY OF HYPNOTISM HERE.

So there is a big question in my mind about whether there is any "heightened suggestibility" in hypnosis or whether it’s just a person’s willingness to go along with the hypnotist because he’s playing an expected social role.

The fact that you supposedly can’t get a hypnotized person to do anything fundamentally contrary to his will would suggest the latter.

However that may be, the fact is that people who are hypnotized or who are playing the social role of a hypnotized person do respond to the suggestions of their hypnotists.

The moral evaluation of their actions would depend on the moral content of the suggestion they have been given. The suggestions "Cluck like a chicken" or "Raise your left arm" would seem to be morally neutral. "Stop smoking" or "Don’t eat so much" would be positive for a person who has been smoking or eating in excess. "Tell me about your past life" or "Try to remember who it was that sexually abused you (when in fact you were sexually abused by no one)" would be evil.

In none of these cases, though, do I see any opening of oneself to demons–unless the hypnotist directly suggests that you do so.

What we are "open" to is determined by our wills. If our wills are closed to the devil then we are closed to the devil.

A person undergoing hypnosis could thus say, "When I get hypnotized, I’m opening myself up to what the hypnotist wants me to do, but opening myself up to the hypnotist is simply not the same thing as opening myself to the devil. My will still remains firmly against what the devil wants me to do. I’m just letting the hypnotist give me a sleepy pep talk to help me stop smoking or something."

Even when the hypnotist does do evil, as with encouraging people to believe in past lives, that’s still him abusing his role as a moral agent and it does not involve inviting the devil to influence you.

You’re inviting the hypnotist to influence you, but since the hypnotist is an external natural influence any evil that the hypnotist does would be ascribed to "the world" rather than "the devil."

Scripture speaks of evils being produced by "the world, the flesh, and
the devil," and the devil is only one of three sources of evil in that
reckoning. Much of the time we are dealing with evils whose immediate
cause is external natural influence ("the world") or internal natural temptation ("the flesh"). It is only on occasion that we encounter an evil whose immediate cause is supernatural ("the devil").

I therefore don’t think that we should rush to attribute evils that we
encounter to the agency of demons. Sometimes they are caused by that,
but only sometimes. If we have evidence in a particular case (as in the
case of a possession) that evils are being caused by demons then it is
reasonable to attribute that case to a demonic cause, but if we don’t
have such evidence (as in the vast majority of cases) then I think we
do better not assigning a demonic cause to it.

If we allow ourselves to go too far in labelling things "demonic" that
do not have any obvious connection to a demon then we induce a kind of
paranoia that will lead to a cultural scrupulosity and personal
paralysis that is morally and psychologically unhealthy.

We should live life positively, trusting in God and his victory in
Christ, not looking over our shoulders (or under rocks) worrying about
demons. God is stronger than the devil, and we can trust him to take
care of us without having to worry about whether every little evil we
encounter had a supernatural cause or not.

This hesitancy to ascribe things to supernaturally evil causes seems to
be reflected in the Church’s policy of only performing exorcisms in
cases where other causes (like mental illness) have been ruled out first and there is no remaining natural explanation for the events that are transpiring.

We’ll simply be healthier and happier if we keep our focus on God and
trying to please him and only attribute things to the agency of the devil when his
involvement is undeniable.