Final Cut Pro

It's usually pretty easy to find the Apple trailers for my film links, coming up one or two in a Google search... but of course this is also the name of their popular editing software. My Apple fanatic son loves it, I struggle with it. Ironically, I am about to become a Final Cut Pro myself. My film, Valley Fog, is almost through filming and it's time for me to face the music.

The term is important in the film industry and one that is carefully fought over between directors and producers. Only stellar directors with proven track records get final cut, otherwise, the studio decides on the final look, length, story-line and particularly the ending, usually after dozens of focus groups have had their way with it. This goes a long way in explaining the high-cost drek we so often find in theatres.

In the movie Final Cut, Robin Williams play a cutter... the ultimate editor. The premise of the film is that the technology exists to have a chip implanted before birth, by loving(?)/psychotic parents, which will record every moment viewed by the lucky implantee. What the poor recipient gains is a mystery to me because the "organic chip" can only be dislodged once you're dead.. except of course, by the unknowingly implanted Robin himself, who wants a living extraction in order to clarify a haunting childhood memory. Finding it, as usual, a waste of time to go too far along the typical whacked out Hollywood story-line, I prefer to focus on the premise, as it's quite illustrative.

So, again, Hollywood asks "what if". And as with so many of the films I've already reviewed on this blog; the question is, what if life were more like a movie. Film/life is a common metaphor for a reason. What if you had the type of control over your life that you can now have over your indie film, or home movie? It also goes along the lines of many of the other films in this genre in another way. Imagine Big Brother even more intrusively in your life than it already is... now that the internet and technology exists to record everything we do. Do you know many of your activities are already recorded? Walk in any shopping area, especially an upscale one, go near a bank, a parking lot etc. You are being filmed, without your knowledge or consent, every day. This is reality now.

My son sent me this link yesterday from the ACLU, he found it pretty scary and so do I. But it is nearing reality. Big business concerns that can afford it, can get tons of info on us. Everything you type on that computer of yours is logged, every porn screen you see, every search you make.. it's all recorded permanently on your hard drive. Remember how they knew Scott Peterson looked at tide maps the day his wife disappeared? Hard drive... you need to destroy those with a sledgehammer and sometimes even that doesn't work. As I've mentioned before, the internet is not the open road, it's a two-way street.

So, perhaps it's not such a stretch to imagine you have an implant that records everything you see, say and do. If you did, would you live your life any differently? I imagine that would depend somewhat on who you thought would view the footage. If we had final cut and full control over our own footage, that would be one thing. Like Robin, we could use it constructively, to clarify our lives. Painful childhood memory haunting you? Let's take a look/see, maybe it wasn't so bad. What the fuck happened at that business meeting or date... go for the instant rewind.

Even more likely though, is that we completely forgot the childhood experiences that shaped us. When I went through my diaries, I found my truer childhood, the one I repressed because it was painful to remember. But, it affected me deeply, until I was able to take it out and look at it with the objectivity and perspective of an adult & parent. Slept through an important business meeting? Didn't hear wifey's complaints cause you were thinking about your girlfriend? Handy record-chip to the rescue! Objective reality is there for us to re-distort.

In the film, Robin is troubled by the moral dictates of his profession, which require him to delete stuff the loving survivors would not want to see. Without that, we would have to be even more scrupulous, more hygienic about our every move. What if all the Catholic doctrine, wifely warnings and Big Brother scares fail to curtail? What if people lived their lives like they were free? Well, then we pull out the ultimate tech threat... you will be recorded, and when you die, it will all be there, in post-living color, for all to see. Would you live your life differently? I guess it depends what we want at the end, and some people do want that perfect attendance award.

Now, in the film, the only person that knows the truth is the cutter. And it drives Robin crazy as he sees (and helps) the wife-beaters portrayed as heroes by the things he cuts out of their "rememories", the little two hour films he makes out of the archived footage. Only he knows the secrets. After all, who has the time, not to mention interest, to go through all the footage of someone's life? Too much noise, too much information, not enough filters, not enough search curtailment.

We have something similar, something that ignores the too much info problem... God. We are told, and most of us believe, someone does see and remember everything we do. God sees, God judges. God knows what's important. Moreover, we see our own lives. We judge ourselves. We apply that exterior judgment to our own actions all the time. It's called conscience.

Does this mean we should live our lives as though it were a movie that would/could be shown to all? Well, this certainly would explain why most people lead such safe, boring lives, or at least appear to. But, that's because most people anthropomorphize God into their nosy neighbor or controlling mom. And that's because we've been taught to see things that way by the controlling mom, supported by the Priest, and teachers and boss etc.

God loves us far more than they do though, and the final arena that we face is far more omniscient and compassionate than those entities, or even our own conscience. Those entities want to see us perform, God wants to see us learn and grow. If we live our lives to justify them before some judge, we cut ourselves off from learning and risk to conform to strictures that are too small for God. God isn't some narrow-minded judge that gives us points for following rules. God sees our challenges and choices and intent and the love and desires we face as humans. God wants us to see the true purpose of our lives, which is to learn and love and grow.

Pick Two

The comfortable predictability of a long-term marriage
An exciting, satisfying sex-life
Personal integrity

... because almost no one gets all three

Finding Foreverland

What is Neverland? If it's the one in Santa Barbara, it's a place where innocent boys go to have their lives ruined by some misguided manchild in his own self-created Promised Land, whose imagination has been replaced by stunted sexuality. That bastardization of Neverland is a completely controlled environment designed to foster the illusion of freedom for children but which is, in fact, a playground for the whims of an all too powerful man whose idea of love is nothing but grossly distorted fantasy.

Going back, for a moment, to my MJ vs. the Pope post (3/12/05), there is a similar theme. They both exploit powerful truths and concepts for a less obvious, more insidious goal. MJ takes the imagery of J. M. Barrie, who was motivated by true love for children, to make a hunting ground in which to play out his messed up mind. The church uses the powerful truths expressed by Christ to keep women barefoot and pregnant all over the world for two thousand years in order to, as Jack Welch so aptly put it, "grow the business".

What is saddest about these entities, other than that they exploit the powerless, is that they distort the original truths so much that they turn off the more thoughtful, and, even worse, damaged, humans, who then lose out on the good that was contained therein. I can't begin to tell you how many Catholics I know who not only have lost all faith in the Catholic Church, but who don't even believe in God at all. It's not just Catholicism that turns off the astute and exploited, it's misguided parents, and others with power, of all religions who use the religion to control others. Once they see through the ploy, they often blame it on religion itself and never look back.

This is why Catholicism is on the decline in the developed world and can only increase its ranks in the third world where they come with, as Major Barbara would say, food in one hand and a Bible in the other. So, enough debunking the charlatans for now. Where is the real Neverland? And don't tell me that's an oxymoron.

There is a Neverland; a Promised Land, it's just that I can't take you there. Maybe I can point the way, maybe I could even give you directions, but, you have to find it on your own. How? You need to unlearn everything you've studied. You need to take apart everything you've built. You need to figure out every assumption you've ever made and then question whether it's valid. There are some pharmacological aids, but the powers that be want to make very sure you never want them or have access to them. The powers that be want you working hard and focusing on the "real world", because, that is where their power lies.

So, if by some chance you can deconstruct without them... what have you got? Nothing? Everything? I used to meditate a lot. Meditation is not contemplation, it's not about thought. It's about emptying thoughts so you can see what lies beneath, the truth, the essence of our existence. We think money makes us happy, or friends or power or stuff. It's not that those things are meaningless or valueless, it's just that they are apart from peace and happiness which lies within.

Neverland, Foreverland... they're both timeless, seemless... whole. They are a realm where you are whole in your soul... when you "come together". Beyond, beneath and in between these fake Disneylands and empty promise lands and incredibly complex societies lie simple truths and feelings in each of our hearts that we can access and draw on for joy and inspiration and creativity and imagination. In that, it's very much related to childhood, it's a state we all had once.

It's a shame that children are not respected as the guides they truly are. Both Jesus and Barrie truly loved and respected children. Barrie changed the landscape of theatre in the Victorian age by bringing children into its world and elevating them, joining them, becoming one with them (and not in the MJ way)... showing the power of childhood, and making Peter Pan a permanent symbol of a man in touch with his inner child. After him, Freud "discovered" the id and changed Western ideas about how the mind worked.

What's interesting about this highly successful film is that it does illustrate the true story, one which, itself, has been cynically twisted in our society, not only by MJ, but by a best-selling book, "The Peter Pan Syndrome" which used the name to refer to men who never matured to the point of being able to develop successful relationships with women. What should have been a compelling, inspiring story has been variously misunderstood as the story of an immature or sexually stunted man, the man who could never grow up, instead of a man like Johnny Depp or Jerry Garcia who was actualized and creative.

Just like women have been under-served by a society which puts up barriers to career & cash, men have been similarly cheated by putting up barriers between them and kids. Even the word pedophile, which should, by it's Latin root and suffix refer to a true lover of children, has come to refer to the sickest of our society who see them as a venue for sexual exploitation. That alone, should inform us, alert us, to how unbalanced we've become. For all I lost in my career, I gained tenfold through the loving relationships and respect I developed with my children. They have taught me more than anyone, loved me more than anyone. By sharing their lives with them, by loving them... I have found Neverland... and it will never, never leave me.