I was pleasantly surprised by the deep philosophy of the Academy Award winning film “Hugo,” which directly applied to life!  It’s a kid’s story after all.  The story addresses the question of how does one deal with the harsh reality of loss and suffering, particularly for a young orphan.  What is a young boy living secretly in a clock tower of a train station with no family or loved ones supposed to do?  When a loved one dies at a premature age, what are you to do?

Hugo’s background as the son of a watchmaker (a trade of his father who apprenticed him) formed his worldview.  His worldview helped him to make sense of a tragic world.  Hugo’s father taught him that the world was like a large machine, perhaps like a watch, where all its parts had a purpose and no parts were extra or useless.  Hugo’s understanding of the world and life reflected the Watchmaker Theory of the 18^th century philosopher William Paley.  The Watchmaker Theory explained the world was like a watch or an organism with various purposeful parts, interlocked and inter-worked together as a system to make up the greater whole – all the parts contributed to a greater function.  This conglomeration of purposeful parts reflects design.  The presence of design in the universe means there is a Designer.  That is, according to Paley, if you saw a watch and how all its parts were intelligently arranged to serve an overall function, you assume there was a watchmaker who made the watch.  You would not assume the watch happened by chance.  If the world is as Hugo viewed it, a world of design with purposeful parts, then there must be a Grand Designer.

Tragedy and pain can make life feel random.  It’s these troubling times that often cause us to ask “WHY?”  Because we are by nature purposeful beings, we look for purpose.  Why?  Because purpose communicates order.  We strive for order in our daily lives from how we dress ourselves to how we structure our day’s activities to how we plan our lives.  We are people who are wired for design.  But when sudden tragedy hits and deep, unexpected pain strikes, we feel as though life is not in order because pain feels destructive.  We feel chaos.  So we search for purpose in order to find order.  Hugo’s view reinforces the perspective that God does exist if we do assume the world is made by design.  And we may not be able to answer the question of why certain tragedies happen to us.  But like Hugo, we can find a measure of healing through discovering our purpose as a meaningful part in the grand design of this world.  Hugo found his purpose in being a redemptive agent to an elderly man who lived in a state of tragedy from lost dreams.

There is a difference between merely accepting tragedy, which would be the only thing you could do if you believed the world exists in randomness (and in an absurd reality), and seeking redemption in the midst of tragedy because you believe the world and its parts purposefully exist (and a Designer exists).  Hugo’s robust worldview of intelligent design not only formed the basis of his beliefs about the world but also was the framework for him to find healing and redemption as a part in a purposeful world.

“What’s your story?”  That was the only question a boy who lost his father in the 911 attack could ask in order to make sense of his father’s tragic death.

What is the sense of flying an airplane into a building to kill thousands of innocent lives?  What is the sense of such brutal hatred?  How would a young boy deal with the death of his beloved father who did nothing wrong to anyone?  Difficult times of loss force us to ask the sometimes dreaded question of why, because if we knew why it would offer us some measure of healing.  People are good at doing life, living out the Monday through Friday, making the money, buying the toys, and drudging through the mundane until something far from mundane happens that shocks our world.  Sudden, tragic losses always shake the orderliness and sensibility of our worlds.  In those times, we stop just doing and ask the crucial question of why.  And honestly, the direct, expository answer that explains reasonably why we went through something isn’t available to us (at least not now).  But we can find meaning to experiences, events and even regrettable choices within our overall story.

I think we look for stories in our lives and in the lives of others not just because they are nice sentiments, but because we find purpose through them.  Stories have a beginning, middle and end.  Stories go somewhere.  They string together the pieces of events in our lives and make sense of what may otherwise strike us as randomness.  The stories provide the overall arch to the happenings we experience.  The sense that there is a story helps us to understand that our successes and tragedies are not meaningless.  A story even gives us a sense that perhaps maybe someone is in control, that in the back of our minds and in the recesses of our souls, whether we subscribe to certain doctrines or not, we want to believe there is an Author.  Something inside of us tells us there must be one.

For this young boy in the film, he craved to hear other people’s stories because he was searching for his own.  What I appreciated about this film was the value it brought to sharing and hearing one another’s stories to be enriched by them and to help us learn our own story.  I think we do need to take more time to hear each other’s stories, to learn from the distinctions and fellowship in the commonalities.  We need more moments of sitting with each other over a cup of hot English tea to listen to the recent chapters we lived.  We need to call up the old friend to catch up on the last few years.  And sometimes we need to have parties where we can go over our table of contents and revisit our entire stories again from childhood because it’s likely we see something now we hadn’t seen before.  And what I loved most from the film was how there is often times a special person who intimately helps us realize our story but we may not notice that person having been there.  We all need that person.

As we celebrate and cry through others’ stories, it helps us to realize our own and to appreciate that every life is a unique story lived.  So don’t just do.  Live out your story.

“What would you do if you knew this was going to be your last birthday?”  That was the profound question Tony Stark asked, which was the riddle that explained his self-destructive behavior in Iron Man 2.

Yes, this movie was criticized for being slower than the first installment, having less action and feeling slightly more boring with an anti-climactic final fight scene.  But as I recently watched this again for the second time and focused more on the character with less expectations for the action, I appreciated the question the story posed: what would you do if you knew you were dying?  For a millionaire playboy with a military grade super suit, he had a lot of options.  But the oxymoronic irony for Stark was that knowing he was dying led to self-destructive behaviors – drunkenness, lack of control, loss of judgment, brawls… and he was potentially harming others around him in the process.  The baffling contradiction is when people desperately attempt to feel more alive when faced with inevitable death through self-destructive activities.  It logically doesn’t make sense.  But when one is trying to grasp for life to escape the inevitability of death, logic is not usually at the forefront of a one’s mind.  It was like what Jack Bauer illustrated in 24, a dying man is a desperate man.

Being here in Hollywood at night-time, I see people lining up the clubs, coming out of limos, and screaming down the streets as they cheer and party.  Then, I also see young men in blazers urinating in open parking lots, young adults puking on the sidewalks, grown men fighting in the streets, and young girls in tight dresses urinating in our church driveway.  And that’s just what I see from the outside.

Stark reminded me of a young man who walked into our church service one morning after partying all night, was fully intoxicated and was ditched by his supposed-friends.  After the service, I spoke with him and he said with bloodshot eyes, “It had been years since I walked into a church.  I told myself I never would.”  I asked him, “What brought you in here today.”  He said, “Brokenness.”  There was a silence between us.  Then he said, “Brokenness brought me in today.  All this stuff that I do – clubbing, partying, drinking – it’s just stuff, you know, to cover up the brokenness.”

I believe the character of Tony Stark in Iron Man 2 posed a profound philosophical question of humanity that is relevant to so many today: How do you live when you are dying?  It is an age-old question.  I think there are thousands of people in the world trying desperately to live it up – wanting to feel alive – because they sense the inevitable death within them everyday and they honestly don’t know what to do about it.  Unless we can resolve death, we are desperate people grasping for ways to feel alive but the measures we undertake are self-destructive ones.  These measures are self-destructive because they are not solutions to dying but are exaggerations of living, that is, extreme lifestyles to help us not feel like we’re dying.  When in reality, we know that with each passing birthday, we get one birthday closer to the last one.  The solution?  Stop trying to live it up and discover what it really means to have life.  Find the solution to death so that you never have a last birthday.

Every religion offers an answer for death but not all of the answers are the same, which is one of the reasons why it is superficial and folly to say all religions are the same. Assuming that there is an answer out there, it is crucial to do due diligence in investigating the religions for what they are.  Feeling alive won’t stop death.  Actually finding life stops death.  John 14:6.

This film was expectantly enjoyable and surprisingly moving.  It’s a film that has gotten mixed reviews.  I found it had a good story and a real substance to the film that echoes what we all cry for.  Here’s my experience and take away from it, and I’ll warn you before I get to talking about any spoilers.  The story was built in the context of a robot-fighting world.  It reflected the current day MMA fighting, reaffirmed the age-old desire of people to see two combatants duke it out as a sport and carried a Rocky sort of feel.  It echoes human society’s plight to fight, to press on and to overcome.  But in the end, it wasn’t so much about robot-fighting.  It was something deeper.  There was a humanity we can identify with imbedded in the robot-fighting.  Here’s a bit of the spoiler.

The key line in the film, I found, was when the son said to his father, “Fight for me.  That’s all I ever wanted.”  At the heart of the story was about a father and son relationship that was estranged, antagonistic and fractured.  It was about how a father and son can be father-and-son when so much had fallen apart and so much animosity had set in.  The answer was if they wanted this relationship to work, they would have to fight for it.  Like most of our significant relationships, we want to know that the other is willing to fight for us as much as we would want to know deep down in ourselves that we would equally and sincerely fight for the other person as well.  I think the human cry is this: we are all in some shape, some form, like that little boy wanting someone to fight for us.  That’s all we ever wanted.  When we begin to tell ourselves that no one will fight for us and that we have to look out for number one, we dehumanize ourselves by becoming a person who has to develop an arrogant self-centeredness living in a dog-eat-dog only world.  But at our core, we want to know that someone will fight for us – whether it’s our mothers or fathers when we were children, the boyfriend or girlfriend that didn’t work out, the bestfriend whose loyalty you hoped you could count on when everyone else deserts you, or the husband or wife whom you’d like to believe will do whatever it takes to make the marriage work and will win your love over and over again for the rest of your days.  You know why we want to be fought for?  It’s because we want to know that we are loved.  It is the most basic and yet foundational need of our souls – to know that someone out there in the world loves us deeply that much to fight for us.  It’s about having that someone in the world who makes us believe that we are worth fighting for, especially in times when we feel like we aren’t.  We only fight for what we value most.  We want to know that we matter that much to someone.

I always bring things back to God because that’s my worldview – God’s love is at the center of my reality.  After I heard the son say that line, the truth of us wanting to be fought for struck me.  And then I immediately thought, God has fought for me.  When he sent his Son Jesus to die for us, it was no Sunday picnic in the park.  It was the Son of the Most High relinquishing all the rights of heaven and being born in a cruel world to fight for us who couldn’t save ourselves from ourselves by dying a brutal death upon the cross in order to nullify the consequences of sin, conquer death, defeat Satan and overpower the gates of hell.  He came as a liberator to set captives free and I was one of them.  It makes me proud to say that my God fought for me, and he said this was the definition of love (1 Jn 4:10).

I know many of us, perhaps most of us, are looking for someone to fight for us.  We want to know that we are loved and not just loved as in someone will remember my birthday on FB but loved as in someone would be willing to go through sweat and pain to fight for me – someone who would be willing to take a bullet for me.  I know many of us fear that we can’t think of someone being willing to fight for us – it’s a frightfully, lonely thought.  Some of us are the single mothers doing all the fighting for their children.  Some are the hardworking employees in a cut-throat business.  Others are husbands and wives in a non-fairytale marriage.  And still many who are simply lonely in a sea of people simply wanting one good friend who’d say,  “Don’t worry.  I’ll stand by you and fight for you.”  I think REAL STEEL tells us our cries are heard, and me writing this is also saying, your cry is heard.  Perhaps by understanding this cry, we can begin to look for new friendships and nurture current relationships that include people who will be fighters for us even as we would commit to fight for them.  Perhaps sometimes our mistake is we make the wrong friends.  We have fun friends but not fighters.  Perhaps in our current relationships that keep hitting dead ends, we haven’t yet communicated to the other person out of tears and desperation, “Fight for me.  That’s all I ever wanted.”  But most importantly, recognizing our own cries for this may allow us to hear God say to us on a daily basis, “I fought for you, child, and am still fighting for you everyday whether you see it or not.”  Wherever we are in our relationships, we are loved beyond measure because we’ve been fought for at any measure.

In the popular hype of MMA fighting, crowds cheering and roaring over the cage fights in an octagon echo the days of the gladiatorial fights in the sand arenas. The craze of seeing two people battle it out has not waned over the centuries. But what are the combatants fighting for? Beyond the brutality and violence, what is the ultimate triumph the fighters are aiming for? The trophy? The money? Fame? Personal accomplishment? I think what men fight for in the octagon is a metaphor of what we fight for in society. Why we fight says a lot about who we are. What do we fight for?

One of the films I enjoyed most last year was “Warrior,” a film that didn’t get a whole lot of attention but had a deep, moving story with incredible acting. It depicts a crucial dynamic of relationships in our society that stems from the condition of our souls. Why do we fight? If we can uncover the answer to this question, it illuminates much of why relationships are the way they are and what our souls are really searching for. I think the film illustrated the important factor that what people are fighting for is not always apparent. Sometimes the fighters don’t even realize what they’re really fighting for. But they fight. And we fight.

Here comes the slight bit of spoiler, just to warn you in case you want to stop reading here. The story showed that what we are often fighting for is forgiveness. In all our hard bouts with people, self and society, forgiveness is the unseen prize that we’re trying to get to and often times don’t realize that is what we’re actually fighting for.  In the surprising and revealing twist of the film, we find that the end of the fight is about achieving reconciliation that can only come by forgiveness and letting go of the anger.  But forgiveness rarely ever comes easy for anyone.  And that’s why we have to fight to forgive.  The deeper the hurt and anger, the tougher the fight.  The external fights we face in life represents the internal fights in our souls. We’re fighting to be free from our anger, hate and grudges. We’re fighting our way to forgiveness that manifests in reconciliation. The true and genuine Warrior then is the one who gets to a place where he or she no longer needs to keep fighting. When forgiveness is achieved, the fight is done. The Warrior has won.

I just watched the film “Frozen” which looked similar to Castaway or 127 Hours in that it had to do with being marooned and surviving the elements and its psychological effects. This is not one of my usual posts that purely discusses the theological ideas drawn from the film. Instead, what I feel compelled to comment on is the story itself and how it had the potential for greatness but fell sadly short of brilliance because it took the easy way out.

The film really should be called “Eaten” rather than Frozen. The characters are trapped on a ski-lift and what at first is threatening their lives is the cold. But instead of having the characters deal with the complexities of cold and beating those challenges, the writer throws in these wild wolves that in the end actually become the real antagonist for the characters. It becomes a movie about them escaping wolves. Mainly, if they can get away from the wolves, they will survive. The antagonist should’ve been the weather, storm and cold but the wild wolves became an easy way out. Had the writer stuck with the characters struggling with the cold, it would’ve forced the writers to become more creative, more complex in exploring the interaction and psyche of the characters and more brilliant in coming up with its resolution. The wolves seemed to come out of nowhere and had nothing to do with the main idea of the story. It was an easy way out to send a pack of wild animals, like Jaws, instead. The concept of being trapped on a ski-lift was intriguing, but the story fell clear away from brilliance. The easy way out with the wolves did not afford the writer the opportunity for brilliance.

It made me think of how often life is the same way. We want to tidy it up nice and neat, sometimes by avoiding the real problems and deflecting onto another. That’s the easy way out. To be brilliant means forcing ourselves to face the real problem and avail ourselves to the complexities of our human responses as well as making room for where we may creatively forge solutions. When we face the real problems – the real antagonists presented to us, we allow our character quality to be explored and to be developed in measures that match the intricacies of the problems we face. Then, we may discover genuine triumph.