Men, Women, and Sagan

I watched a movie last year called Men, Women and Children.

It was probably the most depressing movie I've seen in my entire life. I'm still not really sure why I watched it. Probably I saw that it was directed by Jason Reitman and thought it said Jason Bateman and was all, "Oh! I love Arrested Development, this movie will be GREAT!"

Fail.

This movie was not at all a love story involving the boy from Fault in Our Stars, as the promotional poster above would have you believe. Instead, it is the story of how technology has completely destroyed our ability to connect with each other. The poster was only created after the movie tanked so badly that it had to be re-branded. Here's the original poster:

Now, listen. I know what you are thinking. Who cares? It's just a poster. It's just a movie. But this movie messed with my head 12 months ago and I am still mired in cynicism because of it. It was based on this book and here are the main story lines:

Don and Helen -- Married but bored. The internet allows him unlimited access to porn and her involvement with a man she met on a hook-up website for cheating spouses. They decide to stay together anyway because why the hell not?

Chris -- Their son. So addicted to seriously deviant online porn that he now has a complete inability to connect with girls

Hannah -- The would-be model Chris can't connect to because of his addiction. But don't worry. She's just as effed up. Hannah is "building her modeling brand" by posing in increasingly risque poses and garments for her website

Donna -- Her mom. Accepts payment from anonymous men through the website she "manages" for her daughter in exchange for putting Hannah in poses and lingerie they request

Allison -- A cheerleader at Chris and Hannah's school. She has an eating disorder, which she gets the "strength" and encouragement to maintain from pro-ana websites like this.

These are only about half of the characters. It just gets worse and worse. But the whole movie is narrated by Emma Thompson, whose voice is mesmerizing, and it's interspersed with images from the Voyager spacecraft and writings by Carl Sagan... so you are very confused: drawn into it and repelled at the same time!

What does the Voyager have to do with anything? you might be asking. That's there because Tim -- a high school quarterback -- reads A Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan and decides that the earth and all its inhabitants are completely meaningless. They needed some shots of the earth from space to really drive this point home, hence Voyager:

All right. Here's the opening, which is composed of Sagan's writing read by Emma Thompson as the space probe floats by:

That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization... every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner...Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. 

In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves...

That's a pretty depressing way to start a Jason Bateman (Reitman) film, that's for damn sure. After 12 months of reflection, I think the point of the movie is that the technology that has allowed us to travel 4 billion miles into space to take a picture of Earth is the same technology that is destroying us and our ability to interact with each other.

But what I really got out of the movie was the same takeaway that Tim had when he quit the football team: none of it matters. Who cares if you are so freaking talented that you are a starting quarterback at 15? You are just one of many quarterbacks who is one of many people living on one of many planets in one of many galaxies in what they are now hypothesizing is one of NINE universes!

This movie made me search out Sagan's writing. Consider this quote:  “Look back again at the pale blue dot of the preceding chapter. Take a good long look at it. Stare at the dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself that God created the whole Universe for one of the 10 million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of dust... If this doesn’t strike you as unlikely, pick another dot. Imagine it to be inhabited by a different form of intelligent life. They, too, cherish the notion of a God who has created everything for their benefit. How seriously do you take their claim?”

The obvious point here is that we should not take the claim seriously.

Carl Sagan was a brilliant astrophysicist. When I look at his words and I look at pictures from the Voyager expedition, I cannot help but be swayed. It does seem extremely unlikely that "help will come from elsewhere to save us." I envy people who believe in God despite the vastness of our universe(s) and the obscurity of our mote of dust. But have they just not seen the space probe images? Have they just not read Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking? Is it merely easier to go along with what they've "always" believed and ignore new evidence?

I don't know. I wish I had faith. I miss having it. But for the last year I have not been able to shake the echo of Sagan's words:    We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable.