So I got an email criticizing my post below for not talking up ELI as representing the truth that is Christian theology. Good point, actually. Here’s my feeble memory of what the movie’s unfashionable but genuinely illuminating teachings are along those lines:
1. Each of us has free will and a personal destiny. No situation genuinely deprives us of all choice.
2. Prayer is first of all about gratitude about what we’ve been given. Maybe the main failing of the modern, high-tech world is that people had much more than enough but less gratitude than ever and so wasted much that was good. People forgot how and why to pray.
3. It’s almost easier to pray when you’ve been given just enough and so you can see more clearly what’s genuinely indispensable or precious. (Eli here reminds us of Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag.)
4. What we’ve been given that’s most precious is God, family, and friends. Life without any of those is the closest experience we have to hell. Without those, we become worse than the other animals–cannibals, for example.
5. We should do more for others than for ourselves. Eli read that in the Bible but was so mission-driven that he forgot to live it. But then he willingly surrendered the pleasure of reading the Bible to save a friend, a beautiful woman to whom he was not physically attracted. And his friend (Solara, the source of light) learned that, of course, not from the Bible, but from her love of her loving and sacrificial mother.
6. We will all be judged for what we do.
7. God is personal, cares about persons, and is incessantly active in the world. Creation wasn’t some one-time thing at some point in the past as, say, Locke or the Big Bangers teach.
So I agree with Bob, finally, that the movie was, in the most important ways, neither stupid nor ridiculous.
January 24th, 2010 | 1:19 pm
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January 24th, 2010 | 1:45 pm
I would be hard pressed to find more truth anywhere than that which is written above. Perhaps Peter Lawler is to be America’s Solzhenitsyn?
January 24th, 2010 | 4:37 pm
Well done.
January 25th, 2010 | 2:12 am
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January 25th, 2010 | 11:20 am
Though all these items are important, #’s 2 and 7 are words to live by…..Cheers to you Lawler
But as to you Cheeks: Wagh!…apororiatically speaking of course.
January 28th, 2010 | 11:18 pm
Was Eli not physically attracted to Solara because he could not see her? And isn’t Solara the name of the disaster which brought about the wasteland in the first place?
This movie was either Road Warrior meets Bradbury/Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, or some gnostic take on the Book of Mormon and the trials and tribulations of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young as they (or Mormonism) journeyed “west” on their (its) way to Salt Lake. Except a ruined San Francisco will have to do in place of Utah. Lost in the wilderness of “flyover” country for thirty years, Eli gets sidetracked by a Mussolini reading biblical fundamentalist in Carnegie. Is this some sort of commentary on the religion of those who live between the coasts?
At the end, one wonders if the New King James translation belongs side by side with the Torah (in Hebrew?) and the Quran (which translation? or in Arabic). Either way, it’s shelved with God knows what else. Luckily, the library exists on Alcatraz.
Has the Da Vinci Code made it to the library? Or can we thank the murderous Carnegie for saving future generations from such tripe. Not that I’m in favor of book burning–he also had some “Penguin Classics” on the pile with Dan Brown.
February 4th, 2010 | 7:17 am
“This movie was either Road Warrior meets Bradbury/Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, or some gnostic take on the Book of Mormon and the trials and tribulations of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young as they (or Mormonism) journeyed “west” on their (its) way to Salt Lake. ”
It basically ripped off The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi.
February 4th, 2010 | 7:28 am
And now that I think of it, it also rips off Paul Newman’s first movie, The Silver Chalice.
That was an interesting movie. Jack Palance plays a magician who thought that Jesus was also a magician, and the his powers were bound up in the Grail. Newman plays a silversmith who fashions a silver chalice for the cup, and the movie revolves around the Palance character trying to get possession of the cup because he thinks it holds the key to absolute magical power. He comes to an ignoble end, as one might guess.
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