also: diane quotes scripture!
(Don't send me your answers. This is just a little way to expand your horizons. Honest.)
Yesterday was my birthday, and the funny thing was, I forgot. I clearly remembered the day before yesterday, but yesterday I just forgot.
Darin and I were driving home from the movie and dinner when I said, "Oh!" Darin wished me a happy birthday and asked if I wanted to do anything special. I said, "We just saw a movie! That counts."
I must be getting old. My birthday used to be the highlight of my year. Now I lie about my age.
The Sixth Sense is a very good psychological thriller about a child psychologist, Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), who screwed up with one patient and has an opportunity to redeem himself with a new patient, Cole Sear (the totally amazing Haley Joel Osment), who suffers from the same symptoms. While Crowe tries to help Cole, however, Crowe's marriage is falling apart, and somehow one is influencing the other. And is Cole crazy, or does he actually see the things he says he does? Or is it the case where both things are true?
Willis is good (except for the smirking, and he should be electro-shocked to break him of the habit). Darin says that Willis's acting is inversely proportional to his hair: when he's really acting, he has little hair; when he's doing Armageddon, it's toupee city. The kid is great. The supporting cast is very good as well, including Toni Collette as the boy's mother.
The story unfolds a mite slower than your typical movie (for which I was thankful). The pace is more languorous, for a reason. (Pay attention.) And the photography, I thought, was gorgeous. Almost makes me want to go see Philadelphia again, and not much makes me want to go there after seeing what my father's neighborhood had become.
If you're not planning on seeing the movie, read other reviews. If you are planning on seeing it, don't read another damn word about it and just go. You and everybody else, it would seem: at the twilight show on a Tuesday night the theater was 90%+ full. Darin and I had to sit at the front. We couldn't believe it.
I did have one cool birthday thing happen: a well-connected friend of Darin's is going to show my high school script to an agent he knows. There are a few things I want to fix in the script before I show it to anyone else, because they're weaknesses everyone has pointed out, so I sat down to work on how to fix them.
One of the problems is the end of Act I, which Len (among others) said isn't "big" enough -- something more significant has to happen to up the stakes dramatically. I took out my trusty pad of yellow paper and started doodling ideas of what could happen. I suddenly thought that the scene kind of reminded me of the story of the Temptation in the Desert (not that it would remind anyone else of that, but it struck me that way: good versus evil, a horror movie, you know). I pulled out my Bible, thinking I would find that story and maybe get an idea or two from it.
The Bible opened right to the story, in the Gospel of Luke. And you know, my Bible is not what one might call "well-thumbed."
And my eye immediately alighted on the sentence that told me how to fix the end of Act I.
It was a pretty cool feeling. Much better than thinking it up myself. (Yes, I know, I had to connect the dots and see something there I could use. I know how these fortunetelling traditions -- such as bibliomancy -- work.)
The story, for those of you who don't have a Bible handy, from Luke 4:1-13:
And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan, and was led by the Spirit for forty days in the wilderness, tempted by the devil. And he ate nothing in those days; and when they were ended, he was hungry. The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread. And Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'Man shall not live by bread alone.'" And the devil took him up, and showed him all the kingdons of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, "To you I will give all this authority and their glory; for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then will worship me, it shall all be yours." And Jesus answered him, "It is written,
'You shall worship the Lord your God,
and him only shall you serve.'"And he took him to Jerusalem, and set him on a pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here; for it is written,
'He will give his angels charge of you, to guard you,'
and
'On their hands they will bear you up,
lest you strike your foot against a stone.'"And Jesus answered him, "It is said, 'You shall not tempt the Lord your God." And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time.
Don't you just love the idea of Jesus and the devil sitting there, quoting Scripture to one another? In the Gospel of Matthew, the temptations are given in a different order -- flying, then dominion over the world. How do the Fundamentalists explain that?
(The line that inspired me was, by the way: "throw yourself down from here; for it is written, 'He will give his angels charge of you, to guard you...'")
When we were on the West Bank, in Jericho, we saw the mountain where Jesus reportedly fasted and battled the devil. Let me tell you, four hours without food on that rock would have you hallucinating the battle of the end days, let alone forty days. It's bleak, there's no water anywhere, it's like going out onto the moon to fast by yourself. Evidently going into the desert to cleanse yourself was very popular in those days -- those wacky Essenes! Yow.
Re: these idiots in Kansas who have removed evolution from the science curriculum: last night on Politically Incorrect, the incredible thinker John Schneider (he of "The Dukes of Hazzard") said, "Well, it's only a theory."
Let's get something straight: the term theory in scientific parlance is NOT equivalent to "notion," "speculation," "some idea I had," or "you know, this sounds good." It's not like we might to say to one another about a flat tire, "I've got a theory about how that happened." In that situation, you have a hypothesis.
When you have a scientific hypothesis, you test that hypothesis, and you try to falsify that hypothesis, and you throw the fucking book at that hypothesis. When you're pretty goddamn sure your hypothesis is solid, you then turn it over to other scientists, who would just love to tear your hypothesis to shreds and prove you wrong, because that makes them look good and, if the hypothesis they prove wrong is famous enough, they get tenure somewhere.
If a whole bunch of serious scientists who make write up papers and make their data available and have pretty good credentials say, This looks to be a pretty solid hypothesis, it becomes a theory.
When it gets to be a theory, the only thing that keeps it from being called "fact" is the lack of cameras documenting the event the theory explains, okay?
By the way, if there's some anomaly you can think of that a theory you don't like can't explain, it's not enough to come up with a competing hypothesis that explains that anomaly. You have to explain the vast quantities of regular stuff too.
(For example, I don't think there are any solid theories of what killed off the dinosaurs. There are many competing hypotheses, some of which gain precedence over the others for a time. However, Einstein's Theory of General Relativity is pretty well accepted, because it's been rigorously tested and explains the phenomena it's meant to explain. I really wish Creationists would try to take that one on.)
Besides which, EVOLUTION HAS BEEN OBSERVED. For every species? No. But it has been observed in the laboratory. So much "no one's ever seen it." Bzzzt. They have.
I don't understand the fear of science we have in this country, other than, "It's hard." We're the laughingstock of the world for a very good reason. I guess this hearkens back to the rant about how proud we are of being ignorant.
The answer to Monday's question: Spiro Agnew was Richard Nixon's first vice president. He resigned due to accusations of tax evasion. (I think he eventually served time.) He was famous at the time calling the media, "nattering nabobs of negativism," a phrase actually coined, I believe, by William Safire. The Vietnam War was still dragging on; I can't believe the media wasn't more positive.
Agnew was replaced by Gerald R. Ford, who I'm quite sure didn't get the post by promising to pardon Nixon. Nope, nope, nosirree. Ford paid for that little decision in 1976.
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Copyright 1999 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com