Village, Shutter Island and St. Augustine’s Confessions (& Lost)

I was talking to a few of my friends who had seen the movie ‘The Shutter Island’. They agreed that they were pissed off at the end of the movie. One of them said that he felt the same way that he felt when he saw the movie ‘The Village’. He said that he wanted to shout, “Give me my money back”.

The one common strand in both the movies is that the thrill and the suspense is built upon an absolute lie. When a movie goer eagerly stays riveted to the movie, expecting to see the panoramic view of a truth behind the build-up of the mystery, and then realizes to ones utter shock that there is no mystery to be unraveled but only a lie that had to be discovered, it can be very enervating. As the much-hyped TV series ‘Lost’ is nearing the end the bloggers are venting out anger as the prospect of not getting comprehensive answers for the mysteries that made the show interesting. We watch the movie/show with an anticipation that we will be ‘satisfied’ by the unraveling of the mystery at the end of the movie – a mystery that would be true and worthy of the wait and which would give meaning to the wait. When this need is not satisfied, there is an angst.

When we realize that we have been falsely led in a movie, as irritating it can be, all we would have lost would have been a couple of hours of our precious time and a few bucks. But the anguish would be incomparable when we have been falsely led in ‘real life’ and we live our life enjoying the thrills and the tide and keep on moving hoping to find ultimate satisfaction, only to realize at the anticlimactic end that all the thrill and the passion was based on a lie which was discovered to be a lie too late in the game.

I remember reading an article in the magazine ‘The Week’. It was about the psychological effect of the modern idea of living a radically individualistic life. A successful editor of a magazine is interviewed and she says (something like this… it is not a verbatim quote), “(when I grew up in the age of liberated individualism), I was told that I was free to do whatever I wanted in my life my own way. I was told free sex was harmless. But all it left me with is a string of broken relationships. I was told that accomplishment would bring happiness. But I found out that on the heels of happiness of this kind comes an inexorable emptiness. Now, I look at pictures of my classmates who have made different life choices because they believed in different truths. As I look back at my life, I realize that I had been lied to. I had been lied to by ‘liberators’ who told that it was ‘my life’ and that I could live it ‘my way’. I was expecting to find an ultimate satisfaction somewhere long, but now, sometimes, I just want to cry”.

If one were to live all of one’s life in some sate of delusion, the enervation one experiences can be as painful as hell. May be hell is a place where there is much ‘gnashing of teeth’ not because of the fire and brimstone but because of the inexorable enervation one feels from deep within at having been ultimately lied to by intellectuals and teachers whom they had so blithely trusted, and consequently, having missed many opportunities to know the truth that stared them in the face.

In the context of this, I am reminded of St. Augustine’s Confessions. St. Augustine says that the one thing in life that brings most hurt is a lie. We really get hurt when someone whom we trust has outright lied to us. We hate to be in a position where we pay a dear cost because we were deluded by a lie. The one thing in life says the Saint, that can bring most joy is, ‘truth’. The one true embodiment of absolute Truth is God. So, says Augustine, “without God, there can be no joy in life”.

If God created life, then He is the one who defined what is true in life. So this implies that He cannot be anything but the embodiment of Truth, for if He IS, He cannot be anyone but the true Creator. And this implies that if there is someone from whom we can learn truth about life, it is God. As lady Editor said, if a lie causes her to cry and if as Augustine says, the truth causes joy. The only hope for joy in life is to be inside the realm of truth on the side of the true One who WAS, IS and will forever BE.