The Brilliance of 'Dumb and Dumber'

Friday night, we had a guys-night with some Church friends at my buddy Matt's house. We saw the movie 'Dumb and Dumber' (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/dumb_and_dumber/). I was the only one who hadn't then seen the movie. Everyone promised me that it would be one of the funniest movie I would ever have seen... When I saw Jim Carey's face, I could agree my friends were right. When the movie was over, I totally agreed that it was indeed one of the funniest movies I had ever seen. Matt challenged me to write blog on it and he wanted me to tie it back to the Gospel... The Gospel is so brilliantly all encompassing that in theory I should be able to tie it to anything... If the Gospel doesn't quite fit into the context of this post, it has no bearing on the Gospel Truth, it only reflects my mediocrity as a writer. So here it goes...

For anything to be dumb and funny, it actually has to be pretty intelligent. The brilliant journalist G.K.Chesterton said that in the Newspaper the easiest page to write for is the center-page editorial. The most difficult piece is the two line jokes on the last page. It takes a special brilliance to be able to write two-line jokes. The reason why it takes considerable intelligence to write a good joke is because the joke has to be based on an element of Truth and the joke has to render the Truth in a caricature that well contextualized for people to identify with. A good joke writer has to have more than just an understanding of Truth, it requires a firm grasp of the quirkiness of human nature within the context of a given culture.

'Dumb  and Dumber' is no different... it is based on a Truth which is that human beings, will do anything for love - even if odds in favor is just 1 in a million, 'there is still a chance' :P. 'Dumb and Dumber' renders this Truth as a caricature by twisting the context a bit... This twisting of context is what makes the movie so much fun. Here is an example of that twisting of context... Jim Carey thinks the guy banging the door is the 'gas-man' wanting money. The guy banging the door, when addressed as the gas-man, wonders how Jim Carey could have known about his 'gas-troubles' if he hadn't been following him already. So he thinks that Jim Carey is a professional killer who knows his business, which is an absolute lie. In the movie, you see how Truths, when rendered in a twisted context ends-up being absolutely funny, instead of just being a lie.

Now, let us focus a bit on the cultural contextualization part of the joke. If someone from the middle-ages would watch 'Dumb and Dumber', they may not find the premise of the movie funny at all. That is because they do not quite have our culture's idea of "I'll do anything 'crazy' for love" as in travelling to Aspern penniless and hoping to meet the beautiful girl and impressing her enough to make her fall in love. The reason being, back in the middle ages, love was sort of like food, taken for granted. They lived in joint-family setups where familial love held life together. They did not have to do anything 'crazy' to earn the right to be worthy of love. Love just was... But we, living in a fragmented society, unless we do something for love, will not be loved. The idea of "I'll do anything for love" is deeply ingrained in our society. The script writers of 'Dumb and Dumber' skilfully exploited this deep need for works-based-love our culture.

Even kids movies exploit this works-based-love. In the Disney movie, "How to Train a Dragon", the hero, a nerdy little guy is treated like a worm by the girl he desires. Siding with her hot-handsome boyfriend, she ridicules him. Then this nerdy kid has to go train a sick Dragon and do some incredible stuff with his friendly Dragon to impress this girl. He finally impresses her enough to make her fall in love him. He had to work for love. As romantic as this sounds, this works-based-love has quite paradoxically, wrecked our society - the suitor works hard to get the woman he wants, once he gets her, in and of himself, he does not see a need to work for love anymore. He stops working on his love. Soon he loses love and wonders what the heck happened to his first-love. The SpaceX Founder and CEO Elon Musk is classic example... a year after marrying his super-model girl friend, to justify divorce he said "I still love her, but I am not IN love with her anymore... everyday marriage is just too much hard work."

The Gospel gives the solution to this problem of works-based-love. The gospel is ALL about love, but one does not have to work for this love. Gospel love is the opposite of works-based-love. It is the unconditional love of an ever-loving Father. You can't do anything to earn His love. But this does not absolve the Christian's need to work, rather the gospel-love becomes the fuel for him/her to work harder to love others unconditionally as Christ loved him/her. A Christian who knows the Love of God will work hard, not because he is wants to earn something new, but because He wants to be true to His calling of being his loving Lord's Servant, Scholar and Soldier. In fact, whether it be providing clean water in Africa or rescuing trafficked-women from Malaysia, this 'love of God fueled work' done by Christians is the saving Grace of our increasingly apathetic world.

Unfortunately, when the Christian message is presented to the society it often is presented in such a twisted context that the message of love becomes branded as the 'the religion of a bunch and dumber people' by the popular opinion makers of the likes of Richard Dawkins. He has said that he wonders if Christians have lesser IQ. His rabid atheism apart, there is something to what Richard Dawkins thinks about Christianity. Without the right context, even the best presentation of the Gospel wouldn't even rise to the dignity of a joke. We live in a society where everyone is familiar with the name 'Jesus Christ', but they do not have the right Gospel context to know Him for who He is.

To make Christianity not look 'dumb and dumber' in the eyes of the world, what we need is not just right words, but right words that are put into the right context. The question is, "How is this context built?" This context-building comes when our lives become Christ-like and we become the embodiment of His unconditional love. When people we interact with do not have to work to earn our love, when we would love them as God loves us, we wouldn't look dumb and dumber when we present the Gospel to them. Our lives will look brilliant that they would look at us and wonder what kind of God we worship to be so radically loving. In fact this is precisely what Jesus says...

John 13:
34)  A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. 35)  By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

If the script writers of the same caliber that made "Dumb and Dumber" were to make movies today, it wouldn't be based on the caricature of the Truth of 'i'll do anything for love'. It would I suspect it would be based on, 'i'll do anything to not be bound by love'. If you have been following social trends you'll know that for the first time in human history there are more singles than married people (across the globe). There are more and more books written about the glories of 'going solo' as against being bound in marriage which is increasingly being looked upon as an obsolete social institution. Having lived increasingly fragmented lives for a few generations now, as a society we are losing the motivation and the ability to build truly loving relationships. This makes the Gospel, the dire need of this society. If Christians do not act, like now, our society might end up in a tail-spin of some sort.

John 4:35 Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’? Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest.
Matthew 9:37
Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few;
Matthew 9:38
therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”

Just like the brilliance of 'Dumb and Dumber' is in the context in which the truths are presented, the brilliance of the Gospel too is in the context, the context being Christ-like love. Instead of being bottled within our selfishly contextualized lives, if Christians would only look-up, we would see that the fields are ripe for harvest, waiting for God's love exemplified in the Brilliant Gospel. If the Gospel does not appear Brilliant within the context of modern day living, the problem is not with the Gospel. Society's caricatured understanding of the God's love reflects only upon the mediocrity of Christian-love. Christians without an understanding of the loving context within which the Gospel Truth needs to be rendered, make it look Dumb and Dumber.

Anti-Christ & Christ

During a discussion of movies, my good friend Luke mentioned the Director Lars Von Trier's 'Anti-Christ'. Lars Von Trier works are rightly classified as very disturbing high art psycho-dramas (there are quite a few scenes in the movie where you'll want to close your eyes). The movie's title 'Anti-Christ' would almost seem a misnomer to the layman because the movie says nothing about Christ, but in that, it says much about how despairing life without His redemption would be.

The experience for watching  'Anti-Christ' was insightful to me because I saw the movie the morning of the 'Good Friday' just before before attending the traditional 3 hour 'Good Friday Meditaions' from 12:00 PM to 3:00 PM in an Episcopal Church, St. John the Divine. Seeing this Christless movie and then attending the Good Friday service helped me experience back-to-back, the sharp contrast of two antithetical worlds, the central figure being Christ - absent in one, Savior in the another.

Anti-Christ is metaphysical presentation of how the Evil in human nature destroys a husband and a wife. The wife along with her toddler writes a thesis about the innocent women slain in the middle ages, while staying in their cabin in the woods. There she experiences the 'red in tooth and claw' nature of the woods - the animals killing one another, the acorns falling to the ground and dying... etc. She sees that nature kills itself and is Evil. Then she infers that if nature is Evil, then Human Nature is Evil too. Then she concludes that the innocent women that were subject of her thesis were Evil themselves and deserved Death. Then she begins to see her own Evil nature and selfishness. Psychically disturbed, she comes back to the city with her toddler.

Then one morning, she is aware that her toddler's life is probably in danger, but continues to enjoy the throes of orgasmic pleasure she is in. Toddler dies. This makes her deeply guilty and brings back her fears of the Evil in herself. Her husband being a therapist decides that since all this started in their cabin in the woods,  they needed to go there to figure-out a solution. There, as he delves deeper and deeper into her mind, he realizes, like her, that Nature is Evil, that Human Nature is Evil too and that he is not exempt himself. He realizes there is no solution to the problem of Evil in Human Nature. The movie ends with his killing the wife. VERY Disturbing. :(

The movie deals with two problems...
1. Nature is Evil. So Human Nature is Evil too.
2. Death is the ultimate end and the ultimate Evil of all Evils. There is no solution. In fact, at one point, the wife tells her husband that one of them will have to die and tries to kill him.

If we look across history, we find many a mother killing her child and many a husband killing his wife. In 'Anti-Christ' Lars Von Trier draws a metaphysical portrait of such extreme Evil that is often swept under the rug of the amiable society, except if the media decides to sensationalize it (as in the case of Casey Anthony). The movie ends in despair because once one comes face-to-face with Evil, one is 'lost'. One realizes that there really is no way out. There is no redemption. Once they are lost, they spiral down until they kill each other. There is none to get them out of Evil. There is no Redeemer. In other words, the movie has no Christ-figure to sacrificially love the lost sheep and bring it back into the fold of righteousness. Hence the name 'Anti-Christ'.

After this intense horror movie, I went to Church for the Good Friday meditations where there were 8 sermons in 3 hours, and some really Awesome hymns. Given the context of the movie, the topics for the 8 sermons I thought, were amazingly providential...
Jesus Christ Died for... Our Pride of Knowledge
Jesus Christ Died for... Our Envy
Jesus Christ Died for... Our Inaction
Jesus Christ Died for... Our Anger
Jesus Christ Died for... Our Lust
Jesus Christ Died for... Our Fears
Jesus Christ Died for... Our Greed
Jesus Christ Died for... Our Deceit and Pride

The sermons dealt with the same theme as the movie 'Anti-Christ' - Evil and Death. But from a very different paradigm, one in which Evil and Death are defeated by Christ's sacrificial Love. The sermons though deeply convicting of Evil, were also comforting because there was a way out, there was a solution - the Sermons pointed to the Savior Jesus Christ, who had conquered Evil and Death. To the Christian Evil is powerful, but not all powerful. It has been defeated by the Crucified Lord. The Human being no longer needs to be enslaved to Sin. Neither is Death the end of All. Christ died on the Cross and Resurrected, thus defeating Death.

The goal of Christ's Death is to justify to us and pave way for Sanctification so that we would increasingly become Christlike - sacrificial in our love. Christ says that no love is greater than that in which one is willing to lay down one's life for another. Christ commands Christians to love one another as He loved us. Christ promised that we will not be alone in this struggle against Evil/Sing. We will not have to fight a losing battle against Evil, the Holy Spirit would be our 'Helper' in our journey to become Christlike.

By the time we were in the 8th sermon, I was kind of tired and wasn't quite listening that well, but the Rector Larry Hall's last few words of the 8th sermon stuck with me, "these are the Truths we need to live for", he paused and said with a smile, "and die for". Christianity has more martyrs today than in any other time in history. As we look through History and see the throngs of the Christian martyrs who Christlike, laid down their lives to spread the message of Christian sacrificial-love. We see that Christian Love is stronger than Evil/Sin and Death. Christ is conquering the World to Himself through Christian love depicted on the Cross.

A world without the Redeemer would indeed be a world that is overwhelmed with Evil and Death. It would be the Anti-Christ - the world without Christ. If the world we live in is any better, it is because Christ is the quintessential model for a Hero Redeemer who powerfully depicts sacrificial love that overcomes Evil and Death. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ helps us emulate Him. We needn't fear the anti-Christ world around us. We'll win it over by being Christlike, for Christ died on the Cross, defeating Evil and He is risen, defeating Death! Happy Easter!

Not Ultimate, But Important

I made a case in my blog on 'Lion King' that this world is NOT ultimate and that as Christians, for us the next world is the ultimate one. This is true, but this does not mean that this world isn't important. This world is important because Jesus Christ inaugurated the Kingdom of God in this world and we are a part of the Kingdom of God. In this 'Kingdom of God', each of us human beings have an important part to play and we need to fulfill that role.

As I noted in an earlier blog about Horses and Christians, Christians need to go out into the world and start building hospitals and corporations and orphanages and make good movies, paint beautiful paintings etc... But all of this apart, the most important goal for Christian living is to be conformed to the Image of Christ. Whether you are building a hospital or a corporation or orphanages or good movies, or great paintings, the Holy Spirit is working in you to conform you to the image of Christ and that is what truly determines success in life, this is why this life though isn't ultimate, is important nevertheless.