In the last comic, lots of people were hit in the feels by Mike’s journey. I must’ve had a hundred comments from people saying the same exact thing: this was something ‘other’, way beyond anything that went before. That’s cool, and a huge compliment to my efforts with these comics, thank you.
One guy said he wished I’d gone into more detail about the specific transition moment in Mike, from phase three (brokenness) to phase four (transcendence), and I guess we all want that – we all want a roadmap, an instruction manual on how to move to a sense of peace, of home. We all want to know how to be whole, how to become free, or how to become legends, or elders, or complete. We all want that in some way; Homer (original and Simpson), and most of human history will tell you that.
Weeeell … funny thing is I think the instructions are all around us. I watched Falling Down a few days ago, and honestly it was all in there. In this 1993 dumb-cop-vs.-bad-guy action movie. All the instructions were in there. It was a genuine work of art, that film.
Every part of every bit is totally human, totally relatable. We follow the philosophical core of a guy stuck in phase two (the struggle), doubling-down on his ‘facts’ and refusing to relent, rapidly approaching phase three (the fall). Sticking to his intellect and running his power to its logical conclusion. He seeks justice, that’s all. He wants things done right. Who doesn’t? WHO DOESN’T WANT JUSTICE AAARHGGGG
This is a man reacting to the brokenness of the world. This is a man who sees that the world needs correcting. He’s right, it does need correcting. But he’s had enough, this man has become the judge. He has become the saviour. He is the sovereign, and he will correct the world. Take control. Make the world great, again.
Control. Defend. Improve.
MAKE XXXXXXX AGAIN.
Perhaps we’re really saying MAKE MYSELF GREAT AGAIN. Control. Defend. Improve. Make great.
Problem is, as Einstein said; “Rational thinking does not suffice to solve the problems of our social life. […] The intellect has a sharp eye for methods and tools, but is blind to ends and values. It cannot lead, it can only serve; and it is not fastidious in its choice of a leader.”
The intellect cannot lead, it can only serve. Falling Down is an absolute peach of a film because it shows us what happens when we seek our interpretation of ‘justice’ without first understanding real values, without first dealing with the ego. It shows us where our mighty intellects lead us if we do not allow our hearts to either speak, nor to break. Exactly as I’m trying to do in the OHB series, it shows what happens when control and consumption of ‘stuff’ is used in order to quiet the howl within.
Eventually, even human people become things to control, to improve, to use. And we begin to experience lethal levels of turmoil when we get onto that track, as you know.
Aaaanyway, without giving the film away (watch it, it’s so much more than a dumb action movie), we meet Michael Douglas’s parallel/mirror person. We meet someone who has gone through a fall of his own, and is already in phase Four. Robert Duvall plays a man relatively unafraid of death, with nothing to prove, zero ambition and no intention of joining the toxic masculine cop bullshit he’s surrounded with. The two men are in the same world, surrounded by the same toxicity, and respond in beautifully opposite ways thanks to the different stages of their journeys, their established values.
We will all have a fall, and a profound one at that. The question is will our ego lead us into the fall to death, or will something deeper than ego be revealed?
This film is not really about 1950s/1990s America, it’s not about left/right polarised politics, it’s not really about racism or prejudice; it is about us all ~ humans seeking home and falling down in the process. As one film review comments about the protagonist in Falling Down: “The home he so desired and spent his day (indeed his life) searching for didn’t exist except as a phantom product of false nostalgia.”
This holiday break, if you get some time to yourself, maybe that’s a thing to think about. I certainly will be. What really is the home we so crave? How do we define home?
And if our definition of home is so known and comfortable … why is it that the real legends of the world have really, truly broken? Why is it that great mountains cannot rise without earthquakes? Does ‘success’ look like self improvement? Is it about getting everything ‘right’?
Who do we dishonour when we talk about ‘them’? Who are we really trying to correct when we try to correct ‘them’?
Perhaps there’s something deeper going on, and if we have eyes to see, perhaps we’ll see that the answers are all around us, in every plant, in every eyeball, even in entertaining cop movies from the 1990s.
We all fall down, and we are all invited, gently, to look up.
