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How I Met the Most Terrible Woman

The famous sit-com, How I Met Your Mother, reached its end finally. It's been greatly anticipated by many and is currently being hated and scorned by even more. I've heard countless negative comments on it but as most people aren't philosophers, nor particularly good at deeply analyzing films, this popular negative attitude toward the finale of the show rests on feeble limbs.

Two main groups of degrading opinions come to my mind that I've heard:

#1: It's a letdown because we've been driven to believe that Ted would finally arrive at a point when all his misery ends and his life magically becomes complete. This state could be transient but in the final episode it lasted for only a couple minutes and it served the sole purpose of building drama, which is truly not an elegant act.

#2: We've been lied to because Robin and Barney were meant to stay together. They would have been the true success-story of the show and now it's gone to smoke.

These arguments wouldn't stand the ground against strong reasoning because they aren't based on reason but on emotions and taste; and we all know the Latin proverb: "Taste is undebatable." They aren't satisfying arguments to the opposition because they are not smart ones. On the contrary, nobody can argue against them rationally because they are built upon expectations and what we expect is our own--there are no right or wrong expectations, only fulfilled and failed ones.

Shortly after watching it I was hesitant as to what it was meant to be: an ever-hopeful romantic or a disillusioned realist piece. A friend of mine said quite cleverly that it was a disillusioned romantic one. At first I thought it was a brilliant phrase but then I remembered Fitzgerald's Amory Blaine:

<"I'm a cynical idealist." He paused and wondered if that meant anything.>

There are terms that just don't make sense, even though the young egotist feels as though he's said something utterly sharp. This friend of mine is actually a lot smarter than me but in regards of this he made a mistake. A romantic, by definition, has his/her illusions.

Of course I'm not Immanuel Kant and I'm not trying to build an argument on semantics. My point with this is actually that I understand how this ending seems like something smarter than what the great contemporary romantics could dream up and yet with a stronger emotional core than what any realist could invent. It truly creates the illusion that it's a smart ending. But I find it at best average.

Smart people, who've mostly responded positively to HIMYM's finale, often argue that:

#1: It touches on the perfect imperfection of life, how nothing good lasts and yet how Good is omnipresent.

#2: It's the only way that the whole franchise makes sense, since the conclusion explains why this story had to be told in the first place.

#3: It gives us hope that something waits for everybody to make life worthwhile, even in the most surprising forms and even multiple times.

These seem pretty logical arguments to me, however, they are marred by a certain intellectual leniency--that what's smart and realistic, always promotes valuable concepts. But that's not true.

The fatal flaw of HIMYM is that it limits life to a race, where no one actually wins.

Think of Robin and Barney. They had a successful marriage that only lasted three years, what cannot be a successful marriage by definition. Success in marriage isn't depleting a cup of joys and experiences: people vow to keep together to the end of their lives, not to the end of their happiness. Of course, I understand divorces and I don't deny anyone the right to get a divorce, but they exist because sometimes the married couple fails at their promises and that means the failure of their entire marriage and failure is the antonym of success. It's impossible to say that it's a successful marriage but also a failed one. It may have had some success but not a fullness of success.

Think of Ted and Tracey. They were soulmates, destined to be together, and they had their time and they were happy. Then the story contradicts itself and Tracey dies and the concept of the one dies with her. Why does Ted go back to Robin after his marriage? It's not that I'd reject a story where two, who are not perfectly fitting, but loving and caring and willing get together and struggle to live out their love, which naturally has a number of difficulties. That's actually a good love story. But how did a perfect marriage not change Ted essentially? How come does he go back to a failed relationship?

In summary, in the finale there are 2 important points that I find problematic:

#1: Ted arrived at the point where everything started. Maybe things would work out now--maybe not. What is for sure though is that a relatively lasting romantic relationship (a marriage) and parenthood did not alter his concept of where to turn for love. He goes to the same person with the same gift as in the very beginning of the series. What it means is that Ted takes an escapist standpoint and views lived-out love as the primary value in life. Actually not the primary value but much rather he finds everything else pointless because nothing added to or took away from his life: tragedy and great happiness. Ted did not gather true wisdom--he gained nothing but a big number of memories, which hardly correlate, as they eventually take no effect.

#2: Barney's been emotionally crippled by Robin. All the characters point out that he should move on and move forward because even though divorce is a tough issue, one must be able to not become the Barnicle afterwards. What isn't recognized is that divorce is beyond human capacity. It's very nice that Barney becomes emotionally capable through finally becoming a father but the weight of him being emotionally crippled can't be put on the shoulders of a baby girl. It's not that a young girl can't be very strong and do wonders but that it's not normal and natural--it's tragic. There's not a normal way of getting past a marriage but marriages are to be saved. The story runs into a wrong moral that looks very pretty but is actually misleading.

I write this post at about two in the morning so some of my points and arguments are missing and the remaining few is also mixed up and confusing but I felt it important to write this post. Life can't be a cruel balance of happiness and grief. Life isn't a pointless circle. I say these not only because I am a christian but also because philosophically they are great and painful simplifications.

a wonderful event in the life of a truly wonderful YouTuber :)

I’ve been a Christian my entire life, but wasn’t baptized as a child. That changed last night, and I feel incredibly blessed and humbled.

Let your love be strong

"Falling down like broken satellites..." This is what Jon Foreman felt at some point in his life. I bet this wasn't just a one-time-experience, for I know it befalls on me over and over again.

I know where I'm headed, I know what I should do right now but I'm constantly wasting time from my life. It's when I don't shoot for the goal. Then it doesn't matter if I'm just sitting around, doing nothing or I'm purposefully transgressing morals, rules, anything... The effect is always the same: emptiness, being burn-out...

As I've said, I know where I'm headed. I know what I should do. It's so easy to picture myself as being an acknowledged novelist, director or such. I just sit here and imagine... And I also have great plans of finishing my first novel AT LAST. It's so clear what road leads there, what action is required now. But I'm just not on the right path. Momentarily...

However, as I said above, this is a temporary state, ergo, there is a way out. My momentary "crisis" can be settled, I can be revived very easily. There's this solution, which Jon Foreman sings about, he asks the Great I Am: Let your love be strong!

My world has to be resting on His love, and then I'm immediately out of the pit. Simple as that. Why? Because no matter what you're telling me, I feel His indescribable love, so I'm being moved externally. My miserable minutes are over, and maybe I can sing tomorrow's song earlier than expected :)

I read Bram Stoker's Dracula right after changing the course of my studies. From a fine university I went to another brilliant one. Everything around me seemed to take new shape and I had to learn new customs. In this phase, when my brain was forced to let fresh things pass, I found myself absorbed in this piece of literature, which I had been meaning to read for quite some time then. And so it was, I read it and found it interesting and original. On the contrary, I felt it wasn't a perfect match for me, since it was set in and meant to be understood in another era.

Time passed and I concealed my Dracula experience in the back of my head. This period, however, came to an end, when, yesterday night, I stumbled upon Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula (1992), and I couldn't resist, so I watched it.

The cast is near perfect, Keanu Reeves being probably the only odd one out, since he looked way too young and inexperienced to take on the role of Jonathan Harker. But all in all, Gary Oldman (Dracula), Winona Ryder (Mina Harker) and Anthony Hopkins (van Helsing), acted so stupendously, that left me breathless at certain points of the film. The directing was also terrific--of course, what else could we anticipate seeing Coppola's name on the credit roll.

Before saying anything I must remark, that I'm a huge supporter of book adaptations, so I had a very positive attitude towards the movie beforehand. At the very end of the film, it sadly turned into bitter disappointment. But remember, I write this, having established, that it was almost perfectly made.

Dracula's original story operates with stereotypical characters and countless elements brought in from superstition--not strictly, just in comparison with contemporary ways. The story has its twists and mysteries but those aren't as shocking and sudden as it would be expected from a current book. It begins with a solicitor, Harker's visit at castle Dracula and an encounter with the monster, Dracula. From here the count goes to London, seeking new lands to hunt humans. Harker's fiance, Mina is staying at her friend's place, at the same time. This friend, Lucy, has a habit of sleepwalking. When Dracula arrives to England, she, conveniently, happens to be the easiest target. The count feeds on her regularly, killing her little by little, until it gets too suspicious and Lucy's noble admirers, joined by professor Abraham van Helsing, unite to discover what torments the woman. They come to a right conclusion eventually but then it's too late and Lucy's transformed into a hellish creature, so they are forced to kill her, in order to grant her eternal rest and avoidance of godly condemnation. The fellowship decides to hunt the original vampire down and through Mina they get acquinted with Harker, who just returned, having scarcely survived his stay at the count's castle but is now resolute to bring down destruction upon the demonic creature. Dracula, moving on from Lucy, also turns Mina into a vampire, or comes really close to it, and then the men (and Mina) enter into a tight chase him and kill him.

In Stoker's novel, Dracula is a very instinct-driven killer. He only seeks base things and is not a bit a human. We don't get to see his backstory’s smaller details, only that he used to be an important and  extraordinary man, then, at some point, he attended the Scholomance and has been like this ever since, only growing greater in his abilities. The only thing he engages in, apart from killing and turning people into vampires, is experimenting with ways to become more efficient at his other pursuit. Stoker wrote him as someone, who is led by evil and nothing else.

Dracula has one equal: van Helsing, who is almost identical to him, with the crucial difference of being motivated by good--by christian ideas in this story, mixed with superstition.

The movie tried to remain true to the source material in regards of the plot and interfered where intellectually a renovation seemed due. For example Coppola kept the means, by which the mourners of Lucy hunted the count but fundamentally changed the motives of Dracula. He tried to give sense to the character and so came up with the idea, that it would be of bigger service to the plot if the count was led by romantic feelings. It is supposed to give depth and seriousness to the drama. However, it works only if we fail to understand Stoker's original intents or if we are reluctant.

In the movie the count is fueled by grief and longing, after his dead wife, tragically killed hundreds of years ago. This event is where the movie’s Dracula experiences his extreme disappointment in the church and turns to other sources. The director takes it even further: Mina is somehow the reincarnation of Dracula's dead wife--this is very explicit, since she has actual memories from her past life. They both recognize each other and are gravitated to each other, even so, love each other honestly.

The movie has another important aspect: All of the good characters are humanized. The screenwriter threw away the naive figures and applied contemporary materialist tools to repaint them.

Coppola took the good characters and made them as bad as any other man and took the evil one and made him as good as any other. But what are the vampire hunters without a high ground? Dracula, in the other hand, has a morose reason behind all his evil-doings and is thus legitimized, made the victim of the story. 

Stoker painted a picture, that was clearly white and black and then came Coppola, saying 'Hey dude, life's more complicated, than that'. Of course life is more complicated, than that but Stoker had an entirely different meaning. In his story: There is a transcendent world, there are transcendent values. In Coppola's vision, what we get is very grounded: we all are the same (not equal but identical!), regardless from the appearances, and the idea that everyone faces something after they're dead is as old as Stoker's vampire, and just as much an entertaining element of folklore but nothing more.

The movie denied the concept of good and bad. It rationalized that if we were Dracula, we'd probably end up doing things that could be deemed wrong, yet we would be as valiant as humans ever were. This is not necessarily killing or whatnot but we wouldn't be perfect if our lives weren't perfect. Dracula was demonic but with a certain justification. He had to be killed, of course, but it was tragic, in contrast with Stoker's ending of the story, where it was a relief.

Originally I liked Dracula's story because everything the characters did, even when they killed the abominations created by the count, or the count himself, served other purposes, than to increase the spectacle of the story. The hunters freed souls and granted them such things, that were impossible for the victims to attain on earth any more but existed nonetheless. Stoker believed in morals that aren't based solely on practicality but on a grand concept, that there exists the metaphysical and good above the world we know--that there exists God.

Tarsem’s The Fall #2 - Immersion

In this series I’m exploring the reasons why Tarsem’s “The Fall” is my favorite movie.

Seeing a movie for the first time can be awfully important because as the viewer goes along with the story they build up their attitudes, which will hardly change later. Now this doesn’t apply in all cases, since many art films heavily rely on alienation, absurdity and obscurity, all these undermining the importance of the first time, as the case is often that the conception and solidification of attitudes and a deeper understanding of the experience come later. In fact we regularly process movies after the event, however this is usually more of an adjustment in the case of genre movies.

One feature that I find overarching The Fall is its generosity and it is present and foremost here, in the field of immersion, as well as in many other places. The Fall, being an independent film with an R rating, didn’t have very much to win by being as viewer-friendly as it ended up being. My argument is that this film is enjoyable and not at all puzzling at the first time viewing but it serves an artistic purpose and not popularity.

I found two interconnected parts of the film that helped it accomplish this feat.

#1: Placing us in Alexandria’s point of view. First off, a child seems a relatable protagonist, since everyone has been one. Her being in a hospital with a broken arm seems like nothing out of the ordinary; even if one has never had a broken bone, there’s nothing predominantly exotic about it.

#2: The narrative arc is gradual. To delay the exposure of the audience to the more powerful motifs of a film is a hard thing to do because it requires confidence in the script and performances and high payoff value expectation. As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, the story’s starting point is very familiar and seemingly simple. When we are shown the characters and their depths, the movie follows a classic formula: we start with more mundane details and progressively move toward the more dramatic. A juxtaposition: in today’s storytelling it’s more common to try to shock the viewer early on and thus induce an immediate and strong emotional response.

The Fall follows through with this approach of gradual expansion on every layer, e.g. Roy’s story starts out as an independent tale, which is very safe and light, then it becomes inseparable with their reality and concerns the darkest and hardest topics around the end. In this narrative mode the audience is granted safety from confusion, as there’s an obvious story on the top that is entertaining in itself. At the same time, however, the more profound layers of the film, through being concentrated in the later parts, can be encountered without the deception that sudden shocks and an ensuing emotional chaos would have caused. Thus I think the art in The Fall is exquisitely genuine and can be experienced as such, which is a very rare merit.

Writer's note

It's been a long day. I've been called in to 2 job interviews, for which I'm happy beyond words but, other than that, oh boy, have I had a swell time?

I'll begin with something that's very close to me: literary work. Ever since I learnt how to write I've had a grand vision of my future. It's been my dream to be a great writer and I've always lived in this illusion that I'm good at it. But today I was rejected by a medium-sized company. No, not my professional application-- I wanted to be a volunteer. It's a quarterly magazine. So they said that they had my test writings checked by professionals and they found them inadequate in regards of grammar and authenticity.

The other thing is, well, literature, too. Remember when I said I've had this dream to be a great writer? Yeah, it pretty much fills every second minute of my waking hours. So here's the other story: Yesterday I recieved an answer to a query I sent to a seemingly fitting agent. She wrote that she feels honored (of course), that I contacted her, however, my work is not really for her. She (of course) encouraged me to keep on trying because she did not reject my book because of its general lack of genuineness but because of her own lack of enthusiasm about it. Yeah, it sucks. I know what you're thinking: Well what does one (1) agent matter anyway? Keep on trying, she said that too. So yes. Thank you. I've been trying. I've been trying for over a year with a total absence of fruition in any respect. I've re-written and polished my work but what does it matter now?

I've never said I'm a writer. Never to anyone. I've always believed humility is crucial and so I've never mentioned myself as a writer or artist. I didn't keep my writing a secret but I sure as rain was modest about it. Still, what I feel right now is this: I'm a complete wreck as a writer. Yeah, I'm a wreck that's for granted but why do I think I'm a writer. I never said I was and I've been constantly forcing myself not to consider myself as that. But in despair and disappointment my thoughts betray me. I'm just a sore loser and a presumptuous fool.

I'm not going to apologize for all the dismal things I've written because they aren't dismal. They're meant to teach you something. Well, who am I trying to lie to? They're meant to teach me something. Something I know and yet pretend to never have heard of. In all honesty I have a lot to learn and I've got to let go of big-faced concepts about myself. I'll be small. I'll remain small and I'll accept being that. I'm too young to be big and it takes some time to get rid of one's youth.

Forget the People

The news having spread quickly and having reached the last poor, unemployed soul, a miserably thin crowd came up to Mr Dis App’s door. As he walked out with his humble luggage, they overwhelmed him.

He had thought he had braced himself against the jeering and scolding and ridiculing. But the judgmental people were shouting wishes of safe passage, the cynics wailed without any comment and his loving mother said her heart was breaking for him.

Nothing too predictable but still, all acceptable from people with no fate and spirit. This would be, Dis App pondered, a gesture unconserved.

He had one backpack, one messenger bag and--what he knew no one would know is a piece of luggage to his new life--a watch.

“Where is Scott?” he asked himself.

But he knew, fate is no mirage, it would not dissipate if he blinked or looked away.

And the used car was indeed parked at the end of the street.

Cottages with unmanaged surroundings. Weeds and poppies all the way to the city limits.

I decided that this blog won't have any pretensious notion, so there you have it, no fake art, just a usual pose ;)