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Intellectual House o' Pancakes Webdiary

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2003-11-01 - 10:43 p.m.

Just finished watching 13 Conversations about One Thing, a fine movie. It's essentially about the stories we invent to give our lives order, and it features the kind of script that demands that you stay alert and open to its internal logic and poetry.

What I love about the film is that it validates faith, chaos, materialism, karma, randomness, accountability, luck, and spirituality--it says "maybe" to all of the above without being wishy-washy, just open.

(Minor spoiler ahead)

E.g. the "smiley" insurance investigator is regarded as a joke around his office, and is sacrificed at the altar of his boss's bitterness (a bitterness cultivated in part by the breakup of a marriage that might, the film ambiguously suggests, have been saved by a small, unmade gesture). Meanwhile, the insurance investigator's random smile at the housecleaner causes her to rethink her own bitterness, setting her back on track. His smile wasn't meaningful, but it fit into a story she wanted to tell herself about the world. and his smile was meaningful, because he is a generous guy who beams his positivity out to others, and this time it worked.

And the housecleaner's car accident--was this luck, was she being spared from death for the second time in her life, or was it a case of the scumbags of the world getting over on the good people?

The film asks who is to blame for the bad things that happen in the world? We have a thief blaming the rain for his crime, a fired housekeeper blaming the greed of the rich, a physics professor blaming the immutable laws of the universe. Everyone's right and everyone's wrong, and, as a recurring visual image indicates, there is blood on everyone's hands--even if sometimes it's only red ink.

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