Called to a Destiny

Brave is Pixar's much-awaited new venture, featuring the first heroine in their seventeen-year run as an animation studio. The film is set in medieval times, in scraggy Scotland, with spectacular waterfalls, glowing sunsets and forbidding forests, giving Pixar plenty of scope for some stunning animation.
Merida (voiced by Kelly Macdonald), the feisty young princess with a head of unruly red locks and a talent for archery, is learning to be a lady. So far it's proving to be a lesson that stretches the limits of her patience when she'd rather be out riding 'through the glen firing arrows into the sunset'. There to ensure that she does not do precisely that is her firm and sensible mother, Queen Elinor (voiced by Emma Thompson). In charge of Merida's training, Queen Elinor is forever instructing her impulsive daughter on table manners, court etiquette, dress and deportment, while her triplet sons run amok through the castle, leaving destruction in their wake. Their father, King Fergus (voiced by Billy Connolly), is the indulgent type and takes a more lackadaisical attitude toward their upbringing. He majors on dinner-time stories and rough play, leaving the disciplining to his wife.


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Culturewatch - Exploring the message behind the media

Seeing through the tears

Film title: Welcome to the Rileys
Director: Jake Scott
Screenplay: Ken Hixon
Starring: Kristen Stewart, James Gandolfini, Melissa Leo, Tiffany Coty
Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn Films (USA); High Fliers Films (UK)
Cinema Release Date: 29 October 2010 (USA); 18 November 2011 (UK)
Certificate: R (USA); 15 (UK) Contains strong language and sex references

 



‘You can't see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears.’
C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

On the surface Doug Riley (James Gandolfini) seems to be doing OK. He has the wife, the house and the Cadillac, and is still liked by everyone. But the veneer hides a lonely man, floundering in the agony of his daughter’s death. Doug has mastered the part he must play to keep the veneer intact though – the genial work buddy, the concerned husband – and is managing to fool everyone, including, to a large extent, himself.

He is shaken out of his sham existence when he finds his name on a tombstone on the plot adjoining his daughter’s grave – his wife’s approach to planning for the future. ‘I’m not dead yet’, he protests angrily, his first expression of real emotion cracking the long-held veneer. Both Doug and his wife of thirty years, Lois (Melissa Leo), are unable to communicate anything beyond the mundane since the tragic accident that took their daughter’s life. Both just exist instead of engaging with life. Whereas Doug goes through the motions, pretending all is well, Lois has withdrawn from the world, rarely leaving the house even to retrieve the mail from the end of the driveway.

The next day, Doug leaves for New Orleans on a business trip. While there, he ends up in a strip club and meets a young prostitute, Mallory (Kristen Stewart), who reminds him of his daughter. At first he has to fend off her sexual advances, but once she gets the fact that he isn’t interested in soliciting her services, they develop a camaraderie. Doug is drawn to Mallory and her vulnerable position as an underage stripper; her likeness to his daughter stirs him from his apathy and he decides to help. He calls his wife and tells her that he isn’t coming home – he doesn’t quite know what he is doing, but ‘I’m not dead yet’ is all the explanation he can offer her. He then moves in with Mallory, intending to help her turn her life round.

Doug believes that his roles as a father and a husband define who he is. His sense of purpose and his source of happiness are both linked to his identity of being a provider for his family. But his daughter’s death and his wife’s withdrawal shatter his sense of identity, and the experience of finding his own tombstone hits him with the reality of his apparently meaningless life. Desperate to make sense of his existence, Doug attempts to become the father figure in Mallory’s life. He needs to feel needed; it’s vital to his very identity. And he turns to Mallory to satisfy that need.

His ‘truth’ is that his identity is bound up in his role as a provider. And when the basis for this ‘truth’ (namely his wife and daughter) is taken away, he feels lost and set adrift. He has invested so much in his relationships with his family that he has raised them to the position of idols in his life. Nothing in this world can bear the weight of being the centre of our identity, or the sole source of our happiness. So where does that leave us? And what about Doug and Lois? Should they live the rest of their lives under the weight of this unbearable sorrow? Or can the loss of their daughter bring them to the realisation that they will never be fulfilled by the things of this world?

C.S. Lewis observed that God, who has made us, knows what we are and also knows that our happiness can only lie in him:

Yet we will not seek it in Him as long as he leaves us any other resort where it can even plausibly be looked for. While what we call ‘our own life’ remains agreeable we will not surrender it to Him. What then can God do in our interests but make 'our own life' less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible source of false happiness?[1]

This quote might make God seem like an insensitive tyrant and a ruthless, worship-hungry entity. But he isn’t. The Bible says that God is love itself. And out of his love for us, he keeps bringing us back to him – the unchangeable and true source of happiness. He isn’t a ruthless brute; he understands the pain of losing a child only too well: his own son was murdered. He empathises with the loss couples like the Rileys face, but he knows that nothing in this world will last forever, and when we set our hearts on any thing here we set ourselves up for disappointment. He also knows that if our hearts, our identity, our focus in life were set on the one, true, unchangeable God, we’d have a peace that would go beyond our circumstances, in the knowledge that he loves us regardless. Teary eyed, the world may seem blurry, but if we let it, our grief can help us focus on what is of the utmost importance in this life – knowing and loving God.

[2] C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Culturewatch - The Guard

Culturewatch - The Guard

A Different Set of Standards

Don’t we all love a story where, in spite of the odds stacked against him, the underdog manages to beat the villain after all? Regardless of society’s postmodernist expectations of unresolved endings, and increasingly blurred moral boundaries, we find the clear-cut good-defeats-bad conclusions oddly satisfying. The ending to Captain America, the latest superhero movie produced by Marvel Studios, is satisfyingly and unapologetically old-fashioned.

The eponymous Captain America starts off as the spindly ‘90-pound asthmatic’ Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), who is so eager to fight for his country in the Second World War that, after being rejected in five different states, he goes to New York to try to enlist under a false name. This is where Dr Erskine (Stanley Tucci) recruits him for the government’s secret Super Soldier programme, which aims to increase the efficiency of the army by injecting soldiers with a newfangled cell-enhancing serum. Erskine sees something in Rogers that no one else seems to appreciate. He sees the character and courage beneath the skinny exterior; he sees the heart of the man, and that is what he bases his selection upon. There is a comically touching scene where, in boot camp, Rogers throws himself on a dummy grenade to protect his fellow soldiers, who have dived for cover. When Rogers is chosen as the first soldier to be tested with the serum, he has just one question: ‘Why me?’ Erskine replies, ‘A weak man knows the value of strength, and knows compassion.’
The world lauds and rewards achievement and ability. While encouraging self-promotion and competitiveness, it often undervalues strength of character and personality. And though in many situations in real life we are quite likely to find ourselves responding in the way the world does, in the dark of a movie theatre we let our guard down and empathise with the underdog. Maybe it’s because we all are painfully aware of our own weaknesses and know the lengths we go to to hide them from the condemning eyes of the world. We’re afraid that our weaknesses might expose us to ridicule or abuse.

While Steve Rogers’s story is fictional, its theme isn’t original. Turning back the pages of history we find David, a scrawny little shepherd boy who went from tending sheep to ruling a nation. This change in circumstances came about, not because of his appearance or his abilities, but because, according to the Bible, God evaluated him for the position by looking at his heart. God sent a man called Samuel to select one of the eight sons of Jesse to be king. Samuel’s first inclination was to choose the eldest and handsomest of the lot, but God clearly didn’t agree:

The Lord doesn’t see things the way you see them. People judge by outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart. (1 Samuel 16:7)

Following God’s instructions, Samuel sidestepped all of the seven older sons before settling on the youngest, and the most unlikely, David.

Throughout the Bible, God seems to favour what the world would consider to be the unlikely and the unlovely. Even for his own son’s genealogy God chose several people of low rank and no status. Jesus’s ancestry includes those with a rather colourful past – a prostitute and an adulterer amongst others; people who had a past they weren’t particularly proud of, who were aware of their shortcomings, but who realised their dependence on God. Apparently God is in the business of uplifting the weak, and has been in it since the beginning of time. According to the Bible,

God chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And he chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful. God chose things despised by the world; things counted as nothing at all, and used them to bring to nothing what the world considers important. (1 Corinthians 1:27–28)

Our abilities or inabilities are not a hindrance to God’s love or his purposes for us. His love is not based on what we can or cannot do; he loves us with an unchanging and unchangeable love, and his love can transform us.

Steve Rogers is transformed from lanky lad to muscle man only because of the work of the serum in him. He realised that without the serum his strength didn’t amount to much and so he chose to have it injected into him. The one thing that can transform us as radically is God’s love which he offers to us, but which we need to choose to accept.

The greatest way God showed his love for us was by sending his own son Jesus to take the punishment we deserve for rebelling against God. Grace is the undeserved love and forgiveness God offers us through Jesus Christ. We can choose to accept Jesus’s sacrifice and be forgiven, and when we do we can enter into a relationship with God, who says, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness’ (2 Corinthians 12:9, NIV).

If our weakness makes us realise our dependence on God, then it is a good thing. Then, whatever the world’s take on weakness may be, we can live in the knowledge that we are loved completely and wholly as we are, and that, despite our weaknesses, God can use our lives for great things.

Calendar Space

In India life seemed to trundle along; following the seasons, shaped by a six-day work-week and the occasional national holiday. Sometimes I’d suddenly realise that I didn’t even know what the date was, and that didn’t really bother me; but now, here in England, I find that my time is planned out for the next six months at least! Meetings, appointments, birthdays and reminders are scrawled across the Highland Cows Calendar that hangs above my desk. How did life become so busy? At times, I resent the dictates of a tight schedule; but mostly I enjoy the order and productivity it encourages. It gives me a sense of being in control, which may or may not be right. But I know what is supposed to happen and when it’s supposed to happen; and usually things go according to plan.


Until a crisis comes along; loss of a job, a death in the family, a broken relationship – and the façade of control crumbles. Everything else is put on hold while we try to grapple with fate unexpected.

Recently a friend lost two members of her family, quite suddenly and in quick succession. Needless to say, the family is still recovering from the loss of their loved ones. This Christmas must have been a bit sombre than usual.

As I thought about the situation in her life, I realised afresh how important relationships are. And yet I find, sadly, that those closest to me I treat thoughtlessly. I love them, and they know I love them, but I don't often make a point of telling them how much they mean to me.

So this year I’ve decided that along with everything else that finds its way onto my calendar, I’m going to make a special place for reminders – to do an ‘inventory’ if you like, and take stock of the relationships in my life every so often.

And hopefully one day when eternity comes knocking, and time ceases to have meaning, there will be no regrets of words unsaid, and love unshared.