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A Story in a Single Word
Though every great story juggles multiple themes at once, there’s usually one that dominates and with which the others all interact and highlight. As @BrianWatt reminds us in his wonderful post, that theme in Robert Bolt’s A Man for all Seasons is integrity. You could tell other stories about the same events and characters, they’d be different stories than the one Bolt told.
It’s fun and often illuminating to try this on other works. Below, I’ve four attempts, but I’d very much like to hear yours.
The Godfather: Family
Vito Corleone had some justifiable pride as a family man. So far as we can tell, his marriage was loving and loyal and his children, though imperfect, were loved and cared for. And despite his criminality and violence he retained a certain kind of honor, and his greatest pride seemed to be in his son Michael who — importantly — planned to live a clean life outside of the mafia. If I were St. Peter, I’d given him a lot of time in purgatory, but likely spare him the eternity of Hell.
Michael, however, sacrifices his soul to help his family in their greatest moment of need and becomes, ultimately, the monster his father avoided. Worst of all, he loses the very things he sought to protect. Just ask Fredo or the unborn child Kay aborts.
Lust, Caution: Loyalty
It’s not often that I recommend an NC-17-rated film, but this is one of the exceptions. Set in China during the Second World War, this film follows student Wong Chia Chi as she is recruited into an resistance cell and tasked with seducing a Japanese collaborator. As likely comes as no surprise from the description, she subsequently falls in love with him.
This is a heartbreaker, but not in the romantic sense: the conflict is more about her own identity, priorities, and ethics than about love. The acting and direction are both superb — I doubt a single line of dialogue has ever been delivered (or received) as well as the one that marks the climax — and the setting is fascinating historically. The MPAA rating is mostly for sex: while it’s explicit, it’s not pornographic, though this is a very subjective matter.
Star Wars: Acceptance
Credit Alistair Stephens for this interpretation, but I think it’s correct. At the beginning of A New Hope, Luke’s only interests are himself and his amoral ambitions. Note, for instance, that the academy he whines to Uncle Owen about joining is almost certainly an Imperial institution and that doesn’t seem to trouble him in the least. But through Obi-Wan and his introduction to the Force, Luke ultimately learns to submit his own ambitious to something greater than himself. When he fires that proton torpedo into the Death Star, it’s not his skill that leads it to its target — as he had boasted about only a few scenes earlier — but the Force to which he submits his own will. He doesn’t actually say it with words, but the subtext is clearly Not my will, but Thine be done. And when he celebrates at the end, it’s not with the strutting one would have expected of him at the beginning, but with a far more mature and humble joy.
A Game of Thrones: Power
I did not like the last season of the current show but re-reading the first book in the series through Audible has been re-affirming: it really is an excellent novel. Strip away the magic, the world-building, the (much-forgotten-but central) mystery of who killed Jon Arryn and why, and you have a sophisticated and sober exploration of the ways in which people fail to wield power over others. The Starks are (famously now) punished for their uprightness but they’re hardly alone. The Targaryens were overthrown because of their desire to keep their bloodlines pure; King Robert, in turn, is proof that military leadership and prowess do not translate to political success; and the Lannisters are ultimately undone by their own Machiavellianism. Politics is a deadly, messy business and it’s going to be interesting to see how the series apparent heroes ultimate fare at it.
Published in Entertainment
the theme of A Man for All Seasons is martrydrom.
♫ L’amour est enfant de bohème, / Il n’a jamais, jamais connu de loi ♫
Shawshank Redemption,
Full Metal Jacket,
Fifty Shades of Grey: Discipline
Job endures because he is willing to stand up for himself – to God and to the other pious folk telling him over and over again how wrong he is for not perceiving his plight as they perceive it.
Don’t get me wrong, Job does have faith. But it is how he exercises that faith – so different from what is typically expected – that makes his story (or unstory) what it is.
A great many pious, faithful people do seem to get their theology from Hallmarkcardia. They do seem to have a hard time not speaking of God in facile pieties. This does not make them unfaithful people, either. It is very possible to be a devout, virtuous Christian, and to be incapable of communicating with great depth – and thank God it is, for if it weren’t, think of how many would be doomed to perdition! Nor need a sense of facile piety rob a person of endurance – to the contrary, those with this sense often seem to endure quite well: facile piety really does seem to be a coping mechanism.
But it is not a coping mechanism that works for everyone. It did not work for Job. True, Job’s story does say something about faith – that it is possible to be an exceptionally faithful person without being a “happy shiny” person, without importing one’s theology from Hallmarkcardia. But Job stands out because he’s not willing to sweep the absurdity of life under the rug, he stands up to God Himself and says, “This makes no sense! I want this to make sense, but I also know it doesn’t!”
Die Hard 1- all: Ingratitude.
John McClain saves his wife and many others from harrowing circumstances and terrorists TWICE. There is no positive life outcomes for him, only more and more terrible situations, a broken home, a family that hates him, a mediocre pension, and a cadre of motivated and brutal enemies.
No amount of self-sacrifice, no amount of heroism, nothing! will ever be appreciated by your wife, your family, or society in general beyond the most immediate and superficial. Virtue doesn’t pay, and never will.
Men have no value beyond their byproducts.
I want you to imagine that in Die Hard with a Vengeance that when they go dig John out of his drunken stupor to appease the terrorists, Holly is meeting with the church ladies. When they arrive to get john she calls for him, and his drunk butt stumbles down and trips and falls over a table as a drunken mess having just woken up from shrieking nightmares from the airport and tower adventures. The ladies all look at holly in a mix of pity and judgementalism, and holly looks them squarely in the face and says “my husband saved me and thousands of others at great cost to his body, health and sanity? what has your husband ever done for you or anybody? Thats what I thought.” Then she flips them all the bird and helps john up to go out and put another Gruber in the ground.
John McClain is the postmodern Candide
It’s a Wonderful Life- Community. George Bailey again and again makes the choice to sacrifice for family and friends, constantly sacrificing his own dreams. He becomes embittered about this but is ultimately shown through Clarence’s vision that the community he sacrificed to maintain was something beautiful and worth sacrificing for. And, in the end, the community pulls together to rescue him.
Ender’s Game– Necessity.
Chariots of Fire– Drive.
Harry Potter Series- Friendship.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid– Mortality.
Avengers 1 & 2- Teamwork.
Ben Hur– Grace.
The Princess Bride– Wuv, twue wuv (okay, it’s more than one word, but I couldn’t resist).
Midget Faded Rattlesnake:
Doctor Robert:Job endures only by Faith.
Perhaps “Endurance” would be better.
Job endures because he is willing to stand up for himself – to God and to the other pious folk telling him over and over again how wrong he is for not perceiving his plight as they perceive it.
…
“Unstory” was a good insight, but I think this misses the point. It’s not really about Job.
It tells Satan is not an independent power. He can only torment Job as much as God allows.
It tells us karea is bad doctrine. God may bless people, but it doesn’t mean they deserve it. Calamity is not necessarily the result of specific sins. This is the unstory part of it. His friends are looking for a reason that Job is punished, but Job’s troubles are not discipline for sin.
At the end, we learn that even though Job has done nothing wrong, he has no right to question why God allows all these terrible things to be done to him.
No, Job did have a right to question. God did not punish Job for questioning, just informed Job that he wasn’t going to get an answer. And then Job accepted that he wasn’t going to get an answer and “repented in dust and ashes”, but God still told Job’s friends they had not spoken rightly of him, as Job had.
Surely, if Job had no right to question, it would have been odd of God to phrase it as Job spoke rightly of God while his friends hadn’t, since his friends were speaking of God at the same time Job was questioning Him. More learned biblical scholars than I have picked up on this same point – that “rightly” applies not only to Job’s relenting, but to what Job said before in the arguments with his friends.
Man can question God – Abraham did (“What if there are ten righteous?”), Jacob did (Will you bless me, will you tell me your name?”, Habakkuk did, Job did. The Caananite woman challenged God incarnate.
God gives us the right to question, even when God won’t provide an answer. What we don’t have a right to expect is the answer, the story that would explain it all to us. We must accept the unstories, the non-answers, the apparent absurdity of it all.