Does An Inconvenient Truth Promote Peace?

By Charles Schwenk

By winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Al Gore joins the ranks of a very diverse group of past winners that includes Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat, and the Dalai Lama. He also becomes only the second person to win both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar. I will tell you who the first person was at the end of this piece because I want to quote him in my summary.

As a Buddhist, I was pleased that the Dalai Lama received a Nobel Prize. I read a lot of Buddhist web sites so I know that many Buddhists are also very pleased that Al Gore received one. One site contained a review that said An Inconvenient Truth is the best movie ever made.

I believe Al Gore has done us all a service by helping people understand that the Earth is warming and that the CO2 we produce is the major cause. He is a sincere person but I think he has fallen into a trap that ensnares many sincere people. He has decided that winning the debate on global warming is essential, even if it means disrespecting opponents, telling half-truths, and focusing on frightening scenarios. In contrast, the Dalai Lama refuses to do these things, which means he refuses to promote polarizing conflict.

Early in his film, Al Gore makes a joke about a schoolmate who asked their geography teacher whether the coasts of South America and Africa ever fit together, to which the teacher replied, “That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.” The student went on to become a dropout and drug addict. The teacher went on to become Science Advisor to the Bush administration. I laughed.

I am sure the Dalai Lama could make equally funny jokes at the expense of the Chinese who occupy Tibet but he doesn’t. Instead, he attempts to promote dialogue with them by treating them with respect.

CO2 causes global warming but the causal relationship is complex. Al Gore attempts to make it seem simpler than it is. He presents graphs of temperature and CO2 for the last 700,000 years and points out the strong correlation between the two, indicating that his former schoolmate would say, “I think these two fit together.” But he does not lay one graph on top of the other to show how well they fit together. Why not? Because when you see the two graphs on top of each other you begin to suspect what climatologists have confirmed; CO2 changes most often follow temperature changes by 600 to 1000 years. This does not mean that CO2 does not play any role in temperature change. It does mean, however, that CO2 changes are not what triggers temperature change. Yet Al Gore summarizes the relationship by saying, “When CO2 goes up, temperature goes up.” This statement is not false but it is misleading because many people interpret it to mean that CO2 concentrations go up and then they cause temperatures to go up. Maybe Al Gore simply made an honest mistake but I don’t think so. He says in the film that he has given his talk about 1,000 times. It seems likely that he has refined and polished each statement and that when he gives the presentation now he is saying exactly what he means to say. In other words, he probably means to give the impression that changes in CO2 always precede and always cause changes in temperature. I guess I am saying that he wants to mislead people, though I believe he does this out of his sincere belief that he has to in order to get people to really take global warming seriously.

The Dalai Lama, on the other hand, does not believe he should distort or selectively present information. Though he laments the horrors done to the Tibetans by their Chinese oppressors, he admits that some things have improved under the Chinese occupation. For instance, infant mortality has declined. The reality of the Chinese occupation is complex and he refuses to over-simplify it. He does not even insist on Tibetan independence but argues that Tibet should become an autonomous region within China.

Al Gore uses urgent, and sometimes apocalyptic language when discussing global warming. When he repeatedly calls it a “planetary crisis” I believe he goes too far. It is a serious problem partly because the experts are not certain how extreme climate change will be or how soon we must begin to reduce atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Global warming might be a crisis but it is misleading to say it certainly is. It may be true that we must reduce atmospheric concentrations of CO2 within the next ten or twenty years. Unfortunately, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (they shared the Nobel Prize with Al Gore) has concluded that even if we cut human-produced CO2 emissions by half tomorrow CO2 concentrations will still continue to rise for the next century.

The Dalai Lama could use overblown language when discussing the Chinese occupation of Tibet but he refrains. He does not say China is destroying Tibet or killing its soul. He does not make apocalyptic predictions about what will happen if the Chinese remain. He knows that such hyperbole would only make dialogue with the Chinese harder.

Though most people consider the Dalai Lama a wise man, some feel that Al Gore’s approach to global warming is wiser than the Dalai Lama’s approach to the Chinese oppression of Tibet. They argue that Gore has been successful in his crusade against global warming while the Dalai Lama has been unsuccessful in his attempts to end the Chinese occupation.

I don’t know which man’s efforts will appear more successful in the coming decades. Though Al Gore has created a great deal of concern about global warming, I am not sure this concern will translate into good policies for reducing CO2 output. The polarizing conflict he has helped foster makes cooperative effort and rational solutions to the problem less likely. On the other hand, the Dalai Lama’s efforts to understand and empathize with the Chinese and his unwillingness to over-simplify and polarize the situation may yield surprising results. He may not only help his own people, but he may also help the Chinese toward policies that are respectful and compassionate. As a Buddhist, I see reason to hope that a simple monk, as the Dalai Lama describes himself, might help world leaders to behave in a more enlightened way. After all, it happened at least once before, about 2500 years ago.

Now let me do what I promised at the beginning of this piece and name the only other person to win both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize. It was George Bernard Shaw, who, in his play, “Major Barbara,” wrote, “He knows nothing; and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.” Politicians often feel they must make people believe they know more than they do and that their opponents know nothing. There are very few individuals involved in politics who refrain from doing this for philosophical or religious reasons. I am grateful that a Nobel Peace Prize was once awarded to one of them.

Here are some links of modest interest. First is my article at MSN’s TV page about a new trend in TV show characters focusing on unpunished killers. In addition here is an article I wrote there on the best medical comedy shows. For a more varied diet, here is a link to Kim Morgan’s blog entry at the Huffington Post, a brilliant defense of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, in connection with the recent new Kubrick DVD box set.

Coincidentally, at the same time that American Gangster appears (see this month’s film review), Magnolia Films releases Mister Untouchable, a documentary about one of Frank Lucas’s competitors, the more famous and visible Nicky Barnes. Barnes, however, got his drugs from the Italian Mafia, and had a large but fragile network…many of whose dumber members were just waiting to dethrone him.

Lucas figures only briefly in Mister Untouchable, about 45 minutes in, where his role in Harlem drug pushing is minimized and his dress sense is ridiculed. The club they both attended, Smalls, makes another cameo, though. Like Lucas, however, when the law finally closed in, Barnes turned snitch and betrayed all those with whom he had risen to the top. Barnes, who has been in the witness protection program and appears in the movie shielded, remains arrogant and egotistical to the end, his apparently flexible loyalty now flipped to his government protectors.

Mister Untouchable offers a cursory, whirlwind tour of Barnes’s life and works and takes what you could call the Law and Order position on Barnes’s sins, i.e., that it’s okay to revel in the misdeeds for an hour, but ultimately only a prosecutor’s office is the real hero, with its wiretaps and undercover agents and entrapment schemes. As the late Murray Kempton (who as a New York columnist followed Nicky Barnes’s career closely and with a sneaking sympathy) once wrote, Barnes “bestrode Central Harlem like a Colossus,” but Mister Untouchable prefers to take the modern view and present him as an OG, a player, not a cunning and callous business man up against the most vicious gang imaginable, the U. S. Attorneys Office.

Still, Mister Untouchable has its horrible momentary pleasures, such as a sighting of The Claw, a drug addled denizen of Harlem impervious to low doses of H and who thus served as a quality control drug tester for Barnes’s lieges. The Claw’s left arm was infected to thrice its size but he lived happily off its poisons (according to a lieutenant whom Barnes later betrayed) until one night in the emergency room surgeons cut it off and The Claw promptly died.

There’s something rather fascinating about a director crashing and burning. One views it with mixed emotions, both pity and glee. There’s gratitude that it’s not you; there is a bit of schadenfreude at the pillorying of another pretentious Hollywood egoist. The most recent, prominent director to flirt with disaster is Richard Kelly. He is known for one film, the cult movie Donnie Darko which viewers appear to either love or loathe. Such visceral responses could be put to good use by a polemical director like Oliver Stone, but when Kelly finally came to make his sophomore film, his cult status appears to have given him license to pursue the worse aspects of the earlier film at the expense of what made it at least reasonably accessible to viewers.

Southland Tales is an epical fantasia set in the near future, 2008, during a national election which is taking place in the midst of an international nuclear war. The film follows various factions — candidates, rebels, movie stars, scientists — with hidden agendum, with the primary focus a search for the movie star Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson, aka, The Rock), a Bruce Willis style action film star who, by virtue of his marriage to a presidential candidate’s daughter, is an asset on the campaign trailer, but who, in his amnesiac state, offers something to a radical underground group. The roughly 140-minute film is easy to follow through its first 90 minutes, as long as you don’t stop to try and explain it to anyone, but a series of reversals and betrayals in its last hour start to leave the viewer behind.

As a storyteller, Kelly is attracted to apocalyptic tales threatening the comfortable upper middle class existence from which he emerged, and he prefers ambiguity over clarity. As shown by Southland Tales, he has a rather crude and obvious sense of humor. Word of this film was leaking out even before it hit the festival circuit, and apparently Kelly tinkered with its American release edition. It is still over-long and overdone. Not only are there three “graphic novels” (i.e., comic books) that give the film’s back story, but there is an impenetrable website (http://www.southlandtales.com/) that is just as complicated and opaque as the movie. But now that this train wreck is here, the disaster that is Southland Tales raises some interesting issues.

The End of the Auteur Theory When this policy guiding the editorial vision of the magazine Cahiers du cinema was first enunciated back in the 1950s it posited simply that the most interesting thing about a film was its director’s personality and vision. But now, 50 years later, directors may well be out of control. Not every director has something to say or a personal style. In fact, these days, signatures from film to film may well be found most often from the producing end of of a film. It is difficult to imagine this quirky film being quite this bad had a Jerry Bruckheimer or a Scott Rudin produced it. We may be living in time when a Producer’s Theory is more operative as an approach to understanding cinema. If the directors want to reclaim their post at the pinnacle of the creative pyramid, they’d better start reigning in their excesses and finding ways to reconnect with audiences.

Novelty Casting Oddball casting is a signature of so-called independent cinema and it’s taken to a bizarre extreme here. Among the cast members besides the Rock are Seann William Scot, who appeared with The Rock in The Rundown, Buffy star Sarah Michelle Gellar, pop singer Mandy Moore, British actress Miranda Richardson, American cult favorite Kevin Smith, TV sitcom star John Larroquette, Christopher Lambert, Wallace Shawn, Bai Ling, and Justin Timberlake. I even thought I saw Bob Barker in a crowd scene. My only response is I’m tired of it, because too often the novel actor is not suitable for the part, a problem throughout Southland Tales, from Shawn as a mad scientist to Gellar as a porn queen.

Homage Frenzy Related to this is unyielding inclination of a certain kind of filmmaker to homages. Again, this is rooted in the French new wave crew, which liked to cite their favorite movies and inspirations. Modern indie style filmmakers are out of control magpies, however, and rarely do the citations point to meaning, the way Scorsese did with his quotes from Godard in Taxi Driver. Usually they are just shout offs to insiderish favorites. At least if one is bored, one can catalog identifiable references. Kelly cites from the films that influenced his youth, films by Lucas and Spielberg. Like the revised Star Wars, this film opens as Episode IV; novelty casting includes Rebekah Del Rio, from David Lynch movies, and Zelda Rubinstein, who was in Spielberg’s Poltergeist. I leave it to others to mount a website collating all of Kelly’s references.

Bad Influences It’s not enough to be influenced by previous generations of artists. They have to be good artists. So for Kelly to seemingly evoke Altman’s Brewster McCloud is not heartening. Other films that Southland Tales brings to mind, unintentionally or not, include Privilege, Myra Breckenridge, Lost Highway, and Fellini’s Intervista, more, though, for their good-directors-gone-bad excesses. Another influence appears to be The Magic Christian, which also concludes in a vast flying machine (here it is a dirigible). The film that Kelly seems to have taken most to heart is Gus Van Sant’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. For example, Wallace Shawn villain/hero is derived, even down to his plastered coif, from John Hurt’s performance as The Countess in that nightmare of a film.

The SNL Curse If we can agree for a moment that the worst influence on the culture during the last 30 years is Saturday Night Live, than Southland Tales is the ne plus ultra of that influence. The SNL alums are responsible for more bad films that any one single entity, be it a major studio or a deranged producer. Southland Tales has no less than five SNL alumni in its cast, including Cheri Oteri as Zora Carmichaels, Jon Lovitz as crazy cop Bart Bookman, the dreadful Nora Dunn as the foul mouthed Cyndi Pinziki, Amy Poehler as Dream, and even Janeane Garofalo, passing though in a part that must have been severely edited down. Dunn is especially horrible, and Kelly is at a loss to control or guide her. The laziness and the sloppiness of the acting in her scenes with her various colleagues is an outrage and an insult. If Kelly wanted to hex his film into oblivion, he could have done nothing better than to pack his cast with the execrable refuse from SNL.

The Sin of Pretentiousness Finally, Southland Tales suffers worst from the sin of pretentiousness. This happens most usually when a vacuous director yearningly wishes to make a statement but has nothing to say. From its kitsch poetry quotations to its terrible jokes (which, as a colleague pointed out, are followed by a hold for laughs that will never, ever come), Southland Tales is the product of a man in love with his own inarticulate vision, with no person in his entourage, and no inherent artistic talent, there to put the brakes on his pretentiousness.