Nebraska’s director, Alexander Payne, is remarkable for, among other things, the consistent cinematic concern he has shown for the elderly and incapacitated. About Schmidt (2003), another road-trip movie, also centered on a newly retired and recently widowed man (played by a wonderfully subdued Jack Nicholson) from Nebraska who sets out on a journey to find a sense of purpose and meaning in his life. The Savages (2007), for which Payne was executive producer, featured Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as emotionally distant, artistically inclined siblings who must come together to care for their father in his final days.
In presenting his cinematic answers to the question of who man is, Payne affirms who man is not. In marked contrast to those like James Barrat who raise the specter of artificial intelligence as the beginning of the “end of the human era,” Payne affirms that we are not machines. And although we are biological creatures, neither are we only biological animals, as those like Michael Gazzaniga would claim. Unlike animals, we not only behave, but we reflect upon how we behave. As Harold Bloom has observed, we are beings who not only think, but who overhear ourselves thinking and can change after overhearing ourselves.[2] We are human beings, which means that we are significant, that we have inner identities, that our lives our meaningful, and that our existence is needed.
At times, cinema succeeds where our philosophy fails us. Films like Nebraska show us, not through casuistic arguments but through facial expressions, camera work, and dialogue, that we are not sub-personal animals, and we are not glorified machines: we are sui generis creatures known as human beings—dependent rational animals, as Alasdair MacIntyre put it.
Woody Grant is not an interchangeable part in the assembly line of the global market economy—and neither are we. We are not Brave New World’s hatchery humans who are bred and programmed as identical, non-unique beings who are prepped to be plugged in to the assembly line of a mechanized world. No, we are b’tselem Elokim: creatures made not in the likeness of machines, but in the likeness of God. We are unique and irreplaceable, even when we are elderly and are losing our faculties . . . and even when we are bumbling, broken-down auto mechanics who want nothing more than a trip to Nebraska.
Notes
1.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, Who Is Man? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965), 24.
2.
Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (New York: Touchstone, 2000), 79–89, 147, 194.
Chapter 5
Boyhood
A Profoundly Human Story
Richard Linklater’s film is powerful because it reminds us that the dull, plotless events of our fleeting lives matter in the way in which all quotidian things matter: as Joycean “epiphanies of the ordinary.”
Boyhood is one of the most special movies of this decade, but it is not one of the best movies of this decade. It deservedly received a bevy of Oscar nominations—six in all, including nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay, but winning only for Best Supporting Actress (Patricia Arquette).
Why has Boyhood, a modest film with a paltry budget of only $4 million (by contrast, Guardians of the Galaxy had a budget of $170 million), received so much attention? The first two reasons for the garlands that this good movie has garnered are obvious; the third reason is much less obvious, but much more important.
First, this film has received so much attention not because of the story it tells but because of the story of how the movie was made. It is the only dramatic (non-documentary) movie in cinematic history to have been filmed over a twelve-year span, with the same cast, shot by the same director. Boyhood’s story could not be simpler: it charts the growth of a family—and the growth of one young boy in particular—over twelve years. We follow Mason (Ellar Coltrane) from the time he is five years old until he is ready to go off to college at the age of eighteen. In other words, we witness his growth from a child to an adolescent on the verge of adulthood.
Second, this is one of the more “relatable” films of recently memory. There are no superheroes, no special effects, and no strange twists of fortune and fate. Instead, there is a brother, a sister (Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter), and a mother (Patricia Arquette) and father (Ethan Hawke) who are divorced. There is no real “plot”; rather, there are a series of episodes from the family’s life. Everyone who watches this movie will see something strikingly similar to an event, relationship, or emotion one has experienced in one’s own life, because this is a movie that could be made about any life. It is a film about one particular family, but it is a film that could be made about any family.
Epiphanies of the Ordinary
Though Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke have never been better, the boy is, well—how should we put this?—”meh.” Let’s remember that at five years old, he was not an “actor” who “chose” this project in the way that Ethan Hawke did; his parents volunteered him for the role when he was a child. Fortunately, the quality of the boy’s acting is, in a certain sense, inconsequential to the meaning of this movie. In fact, one could argue that the boy’s blandness in fact bolsters the film’s brilliance; the boy is an archetype, a blank slate upon which we all project the memories of our own childhoods and relive those long-forgotten moments of our earliest years.
There is no “story” per se in Boyhood, but the movie houses a profoundly human story at its heart. Boyhood illustrates Jewish political philosopher Leo Strauss’s astute observation that we must begin with the particular in order to reach the universal, for the universal grows out of the particular. Even though we may reach the universal, we never completely disassociate ourselves from the particular—and it is through particular love (love for our self, for our family, for our tribe, for our country) that we reach universal love for all humankind. Thus, it is precisely because Boyhood is a particular story, set in a particular town, and taking place in a particular state, that it becomes a universal story in its appeal and in its import.
But the universalism, as Saul Bellow reminds us in his great novel Herzog, must cohere into something larger, more significant, more meaningful:
All children have cheeks and all mothers spittle to wipe them tenderly. These things either matter or they do not matter. It depends upon the universe, what it is.[1]
Boyhood resonates because these things do matter. And these things matter because we do choose to see ourselves as living in a universe where these things matter. And so, it does matter that Mason’s mom fights through a series of poor marital choices and a difficult career path in order to secure a somewhat stable upbringing for her children. And it does matter that she does their laundry and cooks for them and cleans for them and organizes graduation parties for them. It does matter that Mason’s dad tries his best to stay close to his children, and it does matter that he takes Mason to Houston Astros games and camping trips. It matters that Mason’s mom tries to coolly distance herself from her children when she sends them off to college, but it matters more that she cannot fight off her irrepressible motherly emotions and ends up crying when Mason departs for the University of Texas.
All of these things matter in the way all quotidian things matter: as Joycean “epiphanies of the ordinary.” And these things matter to every family for the same reason this movie matters to everyone who sees it: because the movie functions within us in a profound, deep, and religious manner.
The Compression of Time
The third reason this movie is so powerful is the most subtle, but most important reason of them all. Whether or not viewers realize it, the film taps into the most primal, primordial, perennial concerns we all have: the unstoppable march of time and the meaning of life.
Boyhood