Well, he’s at it again. Damien of Corvallis — video store clerk, dinner theater actor, admitted plagiarist — has added another post to his blog, Windmills of My Mind. As you will recall, earlier this year Damien dedicated his blog to “31 Days of Spielberg,” but the project, highly praised at other websites, was curtailed after 19 days (and Hook) by charges that Damien had used passages from at least one academic book on Spielberg to bolster his prose. Now, after a series of brief entries scattered over two or three months, including a paean to Roger Moore and a mea culpa of staggering cluelessness, Damien is back. He’s added a November 8 entry to his blog as part of a Faith and Film Blog-a-thon (blog-a-thons being the latest gimmick on the web to increase traffic democratically, but which really results in a bunch of cozily friendly blog buddies saluting each other). The film he chooses to praise is Shadowlands, because he identifies with the suffering of C. S. Lewis, played by Anthony Hopkins. The entry comes across as another thinly disguised mea culpa — one in which, yet again, he manages to cast himself as the victim, rather than his readers, his publicists at other websites, and Professor Warren Buckland, author of Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Hollywood Blockbuster.

In prose of appalling illiteracy even for the Web, Damien counsels us from the start that “Suffering is a part of life. At some point in our time spent on this Earth we are all confronted with this truth.” For support of this truism, Damien turns to the bookshelf and draws upon … Jesus? Tolstoy? Kirkegaard? No. Charles Grodin. Chuck, as Damien is soon familiarly calling him, began his autobiography with a description of a childhood moment of crisis, one which Damien finds “eerily reflects one of my own experiences.” Damien, it seems, when once crying as a lad, found himself “disliking it to the point that I wasn’t so crazy about continuing on with this life if it was going to involve [sic]. It’s not that I was contemplating suicide or anything like that. I was just desperately searching for a way to ‘bargain’ with life such that I wouldn’t have to endure any more pain.” The informed reader might wonder if there weren’t a more recent occasion for a replay of this crying jag.

The funny thing about Damien’s plagiarism was that the passages he lifted were the only competently written parts of his blog. The rest is dross, as shown in the latest entry, one that, though citing conscious-wrestling moments, again admits no real culpability on his part for violating one of the main prohibitions of both the fourth estate and the academy. Instead he “wrestles” with the concept of suffering, like his hero, Lewis. Wading farther into the tides of prose clunkiness, Damien writes that, “For some individuals this is where the dealing with the reality of pain begins and ends. My college professor [he only had one?] once said that there are two kinds of people in this world: philosophers and drug addicts. The drug addict merely goes through life looking for the next distraction to keep himself occupied. The philosopher actually faces into the tough issues that life has to offer.” When the youthful Damien was “facing into” his torment, he was really “launching my tenure as a lifelong philosopher because in the midst of my tears I was asking a simple but vital question: ‘Why?’” Thank God the adult Damien is here to praise the youthful Damien for his foresight!

Claiming that Martin Luther, Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, and Oskar Schindler are his “real life heroes,” Philosopher Damien broods philosophically over the question, “Why?” It turns out that this is “a very important question. In fact, ‘Why?’ may be the most important question a person can ever ask in his lifetime. The question of ‘Why?’ particularly seems to surface in the face of extreme hardship.” Personally I think it’s “Who’s on First?”, but that’s just me. Another question might also be, “Why did I plagiarize yet keep writing as if my thoughts merit publication?”

After a lot of self-praise for his philosophical meditations, Damien finally “faces into” Shadowlands (” it was this one or The Mission“). He summarizes Lewis’s life (no doubt with the aid of Wikipedia) and then re-tells the story of Lewis’s final, great love affair, as recounted in Richard Attenborough’s screen version of William Nicholson’s play (since Damien is an actor and director as well as a philosopher, video store clerk, and plagiarist, he would naturally be drawn to a stagy, overbearing theatrical adaptation for celebration in his forum), and spends a lot of time defending the film from charges of being Hollywoodized.

But the newly budding philosopher keeps blossoming through the critic’s pose: “Sometimes it seems to me that faith is perceived nowadays as a kind of unflinching optimism; a delusionary reassurance in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that ‘all will be well;’ it amounts to little more than closing one’s eyes, covering one’s eyes and singing ‘LA! LA! LA’ in the face of any and all adversity.” I can think of another reason to close one’s eyes as a shield from delusions. But the philosopher is finally rounding on his uplifting theme, which is that “pain and suffering can serve a purpose. A faith that has actually learned to confront the harsh reality of pain seems to me to be a deeper and stronger faith,” a lesson Damien perhaps learned during those sleepless, tearful nights when all those great big meanies were inexplicably attacking him (for something, it apparently needs repeating, he admits doing). Damien has suffered. But by suffering he has, like Charles Coulson, grown. He’s a survivor, and to the joy of tens of people (i.e., the close friends who populate his blog’s talk backs), he is now ready to proceed, to “face into” the completion of his Spielberg series. What Damien still refuses to “face into,” however, are facts. There seem to be two kinds of people in the world, those who admit their folly and find another line of work, and those who stumble on oblivious to their folly, turning their blog into a [sic] joke.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 17th, 2007 at 10:53 am and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.