Garden State

I saw an interesting movie the other day: Garden State, starring Natalie Portman and Zach Braff (also directed).  It's a film that has many familiar themes to movie-goers, but is also a good example of post-modernity for anyone who is still wondering what that whole thing is all about. 

 

I won't give away any plot spoilers, but just to say that it's a "boy meets girl", "boy falls for girl", "will boy stay with girl" kind of movie.  Nothing too unusual there.  But the larger themes of the movie are revealing.  The story is centered on Andrew Largeman's return home to his mother's funeral.  She drown in the bathtub and may or may not have committed suicide.  Either way "Large" doesn't feel a lot of sadness for her.  In one scene, he describes how he couldn't cry at the funeral.  He tried to think of every sad memory and movie scene, but he couldn't make himself cry.  The bigger picture is that he has become so numbed to the world because of medications his psychologist-father gave him as a kid, that he basically feels nothing.

 

After deciding to go off the medications, his eyes begin to open to the world around him, the 'real world' of the here and now (which basically is a world centered on Natalie Portman).  In the process of waking up to his own reality, his newfound awareness is subtly contrasted with the false worlds all around him.  His dad relies on medications as a way to numb himself and others to pain and love.  His friends believe in get-rich-quick schemes (taking merchandise off the store shelves directly to the return desk, a pyramid scheme, and those real estate tapes that promise huge returns for little time), based on what life "could" be rather than what life really is.  God is not real, but is only a bottomless abyss (as is the search for some kind of Platonic ideal for life.  Life just is what is in front of you--how very Aristotilean.)

 

It's not a downer of a movie.  "Large" has some interesting adventures and comes to the conclusion that he must stop waiting for life to happen.  It's happening every day and he has to take it for what it is--the joy and the pain.  But it is a post-modern commentary on the foundations of modern life: religion as void (except for its hope of forgiveness), science is suspect, the economy is a game, family is broken.  The only thing you can really trust is your own experience and the world as you experience it in this very moment.  That's sort of the conclusion of both the movie and post-moderns.  In this way the title of the movie is biblically ironic.  What if Garden State were not just the slogan for a state, but a state of being biblically described.  We live in anything but a "garden (of eden)" state of being.  Life is broken.  Sometimes its hard.  But it's life and it's the only one we have.  It's worth living for.

 

The thing that Jesus showed us is that life is also worth dying for.  And that's something missing from most post-modern reflections on the world.  In the opinion of God, you are worth dying for.