To Love the Nothing

I recently watched a movie called Closer, which details the rotten moral world inhabited by four characters - two male, and two female. The film can best be described as utterly heartless, even cheerfully so. The characters are blunt in their statements about their infidelities and feelings, and 'humanity' or morality is a currency that has no value.

Several years ago, I read Lord of the Flies as part of the required reading for the literature bagrut. That work, although it ultimately described the victory of animalistic and immoral tendencies over humanity, was meant more as a warning about the dangers of this happening to us if we are not careful. Closer, by contrast, is a celebration of its own moral vaccousness. It is but a symptom of a broader tendency in the Western world to celebrate the nothing, to praise the id. What was once called "criticism" is often not meant to help change things for the better but rather to bask in the putrid state it claims society is currently in. It makes me sick to my stomach that we've come to this. This is the civilization that brought democracy, human rights and mutual tolerance?

The same reasons that made me resist the message of Lord of the Flies make me feel disgusted by this movie. Humankind has shown itself capable not only of horrible things, but also great ones. Contrary to the director's narcissistic view, many of the people I've "bumped into" over the years have been quite decent folk. Not saints, to be sure, but certainly not the bastards described in this movie. We are taught in Judaism that we have a good inclination alongside the evil one. To look only at bad deeds and people, but to ignore the good ones, is no less of a deception than to do the opposite.

Some of you may very well want to walk down that road of self-negation. To those of you who decide to do so, I bid you farewell - I will have no part in it. AIWAC