Brief thoughts on a movie (not a review)

I went not long ago to a viewing of TOGETHER, a supernatural body-horror movie with, I was told, a philosophical angle.

It stars Alison Brie, best known as the voice of Diane in BoJack Horseman and as Annie in the sitcom Community.

TOGETHER does have a philosophical angle, and I admire Brie, but I cannot recommend this movie.

SPOILER ALERT. Do not read further if you want the plot twists to surprise you.

The plot plays out at two sites: one a rather generic US "big city," the other a much more bucolic environment at least an hour by car or train ride away. The screenplay offers few specifics about these locations (and the principal photography, I'm told, was done in Australia) but from what specifics we do get the story begins on the US west coast -- let us say Seattle -- and the bucolic scenes are well inland.

The central couple are Tim and Millie, played by Dave Franco and Brie. Their relationship has fallen on a bad patch -- they are not sure whether they are still in love or just settling for each other. They hope that their change of setting will bring them together as in the earlier days of their relationship.

Millie is the one with a regular job. She is an elementary school teacher. Tim still aspires to be a rock star and plays irregular gigs with his buddies. Those gigs will get even more irregular because of the move. Millie will be teaching at the new place and Tim's dependence on her will deepen.

At the new place, Millie has a colleague named Jamie, a gay man who seems nice enough (and was a member of the hiring committee that brought her to town) but who plainly has secrets.

At one point, after Millie confides in Jamie about the relationship troubles between her and Tim, Jamie responds by telling a story he attributes to Plato, about how humans used to be four-legged creatures, Also four arms, and both male and female genitalia. The gods were afraid of human power and split them apart into the creatures we are now. That is why we are condemned to seek out our other half.

This of course is the philosophical slant to the movie. Jamie doesn't say so but the story he relates is from the SYMPOSIUM, and it is a dissenting view within that dialog, attributed to the comic playwright Aristophanes. I believe the scholarly consensus is that Plato's own view is, as usual, the [very different] one he attributes to Socrates.

Anyway: the body-horror aspect of this movie arises because the Aristophanic stuff plays out very literally. Over time, Tim and Millie get stuck to one another physically in ways increasingly difficult to disentangle and, indeed, increasingly grotesque. This turns out to be related to a cultist movement in which Jamie is an active figure. Indeed, Jamie was once TWO active figures of that movement. We hear early on about an apparently deceased husband of his -- the big reveal though is that neither of the two men in that one-time coupling actually died. They fused, and Jamie is not so much the survivor of the earlier couple as its consequence.

Sometimes the fusings result in grotesque mash-ups. At other times, as with Jamie, the fusings go more smoothly.

We also witness the confounding of two dogs into one. I'm not sure what Aristophanes would have thought of that. And what we see of it seems on the grotesque side.

Final plot twist: Tim and Millie do become one. In much the same (successful) way that the two men who became Jamie managed to merge. So, behind the body horror stuff all along, there is a sappy love story with a sort-of happy ending. The two have come Together (the fitting title of the movie) -- more completely than they could have hoped, as a consequence of their change of setting.

If you are capable of taking the Aristophanic stuff seriously and literally then you are capable of taking this as a happy ending.

At any rate: Diane and I were the only two people in the theatre for this particular showing. Personally, I'd as soon have seen the latest incarnation of Superman.

A Story About Coleridge

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Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

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Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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