Morality, Rambo, and Brother Brigham's quote

There have been delays between posts for several reasons (my recent illness, visa problems for my wife and daughter, etc). But I've also realized that I've been making some increasingly outrageous assertions lately that I'm not sure I have the right or the clarity of mind to make. So I'd like to take a step back and ask some more questions.

These 'assertions' that I'm hesitant to make stem from what it means to be a 'Latter-day Saint' aesthetically on the one hand and morally on the other — what ways this is expressed in film as well as its definition, not to mention what an 'LDS' morality might be.

It is in the spirit of the second that I approach this post.

There are a few citations that are on my mind and I'd like to start with those before I start framing them:

The first is the quote often shared and mentioned but rarely (or perhaps never) discussed from Brigham Young. It reads:

Upon the stage of a theater can be represented in character, evil and its consequences, good and its happy results and rewards; the weakness and the follies of man, the magnamity of virtue and the greatness of truth. The stage can be made to aid the pulpit in impressing upon the minds of a community an enlightened sense of a virtuous life, also a proper horror of the enormity of sin and a just dread of its consequences. The path of sin with its thorns and pitfalls, its gins and snares can be revealed, and how to sun it (Discourses of Brigham Young, p.243; Bookcraft, 1998)

The next is the discussion of good and evil we find in the scriptures. There is no gray area as far as they are concerned. The end of Omni 1:25 reads: "for there is nothing which is good save it come from the Lord: and that which is evil cometh from the devil." There are many such references, this just happened to be one I had at my fingertips.

The next thought comes from the first time I read Alma 30. It was at a time in my life when I was trying to fix a lot of things, or, I guess, I had just recently fixed a lot of things and I was trying to grow out of the afterbirth, so to speak, of that change. I remember reading the story of Korihor and being moved to tears mourning his loss. I didn't hate him, and I don't believe that it is possible to hate him if you read the account in the spirit with which it was written. I identified with him (for lack of a better, less-encumbered, less-Freud-laden word). That experience did more for me as a young man, new to this blessing called repentance, than I have words to express. I can remember no such experience with melodrama.

The next is the chapter of 2 Nephi 2. While I won't cite the whole chapter, I will say that it is the greatest treatise on the most morally complex narrative that I know of, namely Adam and Eve and the garden of Eden. Despite the fact that the binary for good and evil is still stark and consistent with all scripture, ("[men] are free to choose liberty and eternal life {which is then linked to the Savior}..., or to choose captivity and death {which is then linked to the devil}"), there are other more complex binaries presented so that the whole picture can no longer be viewed in a two-dimensional table. The most shocking and perhaps the most important to our discussion (as well as our understanding of the garden narrative) is at the very end of verse 15 which I will quote in full:

"And to bring about his eternal purposes in the end of man, after he had created our first parents, and the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air, and in fine, all things which are created, it must needs be that there was an opposition; even the forbidden fruit in opposition to the tree of life; the one being sweet and the other bitter." (Italics added for emphasis.)

In the verse we read that this opposition which is so important in man's progression is brought to a head, as it were, by the two trees discussed in the garden. The forbidden fruit (which comes from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil) in opposition to the fruit of the tree of life (the same discussed by Lehi earlier in his vision, as well as by Alma in chapter 12 and at the end of chapter 32). I have assumed that the fruit of the tree of life is to be considered sweet and the forbidden fruit to be considered bitter. Though I see that the converse could be argued effectively, I'll save such a discussion for another time.

The reason this binary challenges such a two-dimensional morality as we might understand it earlier, is that both trees are equally essential to our eternal progression. And not only this, but it is this very chapter that explains this principle. As far as I know, there is no other document which explains and expounds upon this concept. Yet it simultaneously presents them as being in opposition to one another and being mutually dependent on the other. Mutually dependent, mutually oppositional, equally essential. There is no room for black and white morality here. If we are only able to think this way, the gospel will be filled with confusion and contradiction, as will this narrative from the Garden.

Finally, I think of Rambo, or First Blood I should say. I mention this movie partly because it is one that my saintly mother-in-law secretly loves and partly because my wife and I recently broke down and watched it not long ago. When my mother-in-law is confronted with the disparity of how the most loving and non-violent of women (she is truly saintly) secretly loves a favorite of TBS's 'Movies for Guys who love Movies,' she blushes and defensively says that it is because he didn't do anything to them. "He didn't deserve it." Indeed she's right. First Blood is the epitome of what Brigham Young was talking about as far as character portrayal: The law is evil personified, and Rambo is good personified. Only according to President Young's quote, the consequences for evil and good must also be included in the text, which doesn't occur specifically here (even though Rambo gets the sequels and the police don't).

But one thing is sure about the film: the law is demonized and Rambo is idealized. There is not one positive trait shown for the "bad guys" and not one negative trait shown for Rambo.

So now for my conclusions.

First, anyone who suggests that filmmakers who "just tell a story that might have happened somewhere, sometime" have no moral obligation beyond telling that story is either naive or in denial. No movie can be mistaken for reality. It is, at best, a perception of reality. Along with that understanding comes the responsibility to realize how our perception of reality affects the telling of those stories. First Blood could have been told another way. The filmmakers chose which character traits to include and which to exclude. That is a decision that directly affects the morality of the story.

Next, as far as I've experienced in my mortal probation, the good are rarely rewarded as they expect and evil is rarely punished as we'd hope. In fact, I even feel to some degree that when I am trying to do what's right, things get more difficult. It seems that this perspective has come from my knowledge of the gospel and it's eternal perspective. Yet Brigham Young, who knows far more about the gospel than I do, suggested that viewing characters who embody good or evil and who get the rewards of their evil or good would aide the pulpit. I'm resisting the temptation to discard a prophet's input, but this situation is very confusing. True, his counsel was descriptive and not prescriptive, but I still have a hard time agreeing with the description. And so I have no conclusion as of yet.

There is a thin line, however, which I'm not prepared to define yet, between the complex morality we find in films like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a film wrought with contradiction so much that I can't quite get my head around it, and moral relativism or even when the mention of the words "good" and "evil" seem out of place. I know that it is mainly fear that drives those words from our moral discourse as well as from our storytelling and our aesthetic discussions. However, it is also fear that causes us to use those words too quickly, to rush in and judge harshly.

The morally complex films of Terrance Malick and Jia Zhang-Ke, which refuse to judge their characters (precisely because every character, no matter how small the role, is morally intricate) present both a challenge and an answer to that fear. I don't believe that either filmmaker's work could be called morally relativistic (especially Jia Zhang-Ke) because even though each character is far from being clear-cut, the film is always challenging us morally.

Perhaps the best answer, however, might be the films of Anthony Mann. Mann's westerns, by nature, have a clear sense of good and evil, but each character is nuanced and their own senses of morality are constantly evolving, thus challenging my own flawed sense of morality. I consider the westerns of Anthony Mann to be some of the most morally complex of the genre and of any American film I know. Truly he is one of the greats. It is this morality which seems to go in line with the compassion that I remember Korihor being described with. There is always a clear sense of right and wrong, but the characters are so nuanced, and the text's perception of them is so unassuming, that we are challenged. The character's complexity doesn't fit easily in to the film's clear cut, uncompromising morality.

But what other conclusions can or should be drawn?