Moral Ambiguity, Casey Anthony and Foreign Films

Is the universe moral?

I touched on this topic briefly in yesterday’s post and am going to expand on it today. In March, I wrote one of my favorite blog entries called “Oh the Humanity,” where I managed to tie together Jesus, Gandhi, Tiger Woods and Charlie Sheen. Today it’s moral ambiguity, Casey Anthony and Foreign Films. (I write these blog entries, by the way, to get these weird connections out of my head and into yours – like how when you have a song stuck in your brain and someone else hears you humming it and picks it up, somehow, magically, you are suddenly free of it.)

Earlier today I read this quote from the Florida prosecutor who put Casey Anthony on trial: “We are disappointed with the verdict today. (But) we did our job. The jury did their job. This is justice in America.” How does that strike you? Does it sound like he’s blaming the failure to convict in this case on both the jury and the justice system? What if he’d said, “Hey, we had to prove that she murdered her daughter beyond a reasonable doubt, and according to the decision of the jury we failed to do that”? My opinion is the majority of Americans believe two things about the Casey Anthony case – first, that she is guilty, and second, that the prosecution did not prove its case and the jury had no choice but to let her walk.

Actually, I think the majority of Americans believe three things about this case. The two I just listed and this – that somewhere along the line Casey Anthony will get hers. We believe that somehow God, the universe, fate, circumstance or whatever you want to call it will take care of her.

Which makes the news I heard this morning that Casey Anthony has already been approached about having her own reality show hard to stomach. That doesn’t exactly sound like divine retribution.

It’s interesting to me that we believe eventually things will sort themselves out in the face of all sorts of evidence to the contrary. We don’t want to think about this but thousands and thousands of crimes go unsolved every year. People, quite literally, get away with murder all the time. And as for our justice system that the prosecutor in Florida commented on, well, it does have its flaws. One of the more delightful conversations I once had was with an African-American judge who told me that when he was an attorney he was known as “the black Perry Mason” in Benton Harbor because he never lost a case there. On the other hand, he said, “I never won a case in Grand Rapids, either.” There is a very interesting relationship between the median income level of a community and the percentage of court cases that end in a conviction. In a nutshell, the higher the median income level, the more likely it is you are going to jail when on trial for anything in a community. I'm telling you that if Casey Anthony were tried in Grand Rapids we'd be having a different conversation today.

All of which brings me back to the challenges story-tellers like novelists and filmmakers face. They have to create their own universes and decide how moral that universe is going to be. Readers and watchers demand, however, that things make moral sense in books and movies. Suppose you were watching a Brad Pitt movie where right in the middle of it Brad was going for a walk and a piano fell from the sky and killed him. And that was the end of the story! The film just ended with Brad Pitt crushed by a piano and he didn’t resurrect and become a superhero with strange musical powers or have his death avenged by an angry group of music critics. We’d tell our friends, “Hey, I went to that new Brad Pitt - Piano Guy movie and it sucked. Don’t go see it. It’s terrible.” No, we want stories that make us feel good. We want heroes that learn something (like don’t walk under falling pianos) and become better people (starting support groups to help grieving families cope with IFPDS – Instant Falling Piano Death Syndrome.)

We were playing with our new On-Demand movie toy a few nights ago and found the German movie Das Boot. I knew this movie won a bunch of awards but had never seen it. So we watched it. I’m going to tell you what happens and I don’t care about a spoiler alert because it’s 30 years old. You’ve had your chance to see it. The movie is about a German U-Boat in World War II. It is agonizing and excruciating as they deal with the amazingly difficult life in their submarine and then are shelled mercilessly during some naval action. The climax comes as they try to slip past the British through the Straits of Gibraltar. They don’t make it. They have the stuffing pounded out of them and the submarine sinks to the bottom of the sea. Through heroic, superhuman effort the crew works together to patch up the sub and miraculously are able to get it to lift itself off the sea floor and head for home. They make it back to Germany, and are just enjoying a hero’s welcome when some enemy airplanes come out of nowhere and bomb the submarine station and the sub and the entire crew is blown up. And the movie ends! Talk about a piano falling out of the sky. They went through all this anguish to get home and when they do they get blown up. But foreign films don’t labor under the same sort of requirements that American films labor under. Foreign filmmakers don’t answer to Hollywood studios that demand a happy ending – they get to explore irony instead.

And irony is often a more accurate snapshot of reality. Stuff happens. In the Richard Rohr book I referred to in a recent post he calls this the “necessary sadness” of life. The rain falls of the just and unjust. Heroic people are blown up just while they make it back to safety, while a woman who most probably murdered her infant daughter is rewarded for the instant fame accompanying her deed with offers of money and more fame. And here’s the thing I want you to contemplate – when the inevitable books and movies about Casey Anthony do come out, we will tolerate them because they are non-fiction. Sadly, we know the world works this way. But as a work of fiction – I’m telling you an author wouldn’t be able to sell that script anywhere.