Haley Joel Osment, enemy of orthodoxy

It is certainly true that many of the major faiths share ethical tenets – notably, some form of the Golden Rule, urging people to treat others well.

The nature and extent of ethics, of course, is a complex subject, far beyond the scope of this post. It’s clear that a certain level of ethical behavior coincides with self-interest. If I expect other people to drive on the correct side of the road, I must also be willing to do so. If I expect other people to stop at red lights, I must also be willing to do so.

Some of this type of ethics may even be hard-wired into us, although it’s an instinct that’s all too easy to short-circuit.

But there are some ethical issues which do not reduce to self-interest. Imagine stopping at a red light at 3 a.m., with no obstructions to your view and the clear visual evidence that there’s nobody but you on either of the intersecting roads for a half-mile in any direction. Do you wait for the green light?

Christ calls for us to love our enemies. (We usually ignore him, but that’s another post.) Christ calls for us to give of ourselves in a manner that goes beyond the ethics of self-interest. Christianity, like other religions, makes some claims on its participants that seem arbitrary and beyond explanation. We accede to these demands because we believe a particular religion to be the truth, because we put stake in a deity or in a religion’s central teacher or prophet.

“I don’t understand all the mysteries of the master plan,” wrote one of my favorite singer/songwriters, Randy Stonehill. “But I know the Master does, so that’s OK.”

The universalist stream in modern popular culture, which aches for some form of belief and assurance but which does not want to appear intolerant and which rejects what it sees as the puritanism of organized religion as it has been practiced in the past, tries to have it both ways. Some elements of popular culture seem to have a belief in belief itself.

I reference the movie “Secondhand Lions” in the “about” page for this blog. Please excuse any spoilers, but this movie is such a terrific example of what I’m talking about that I have to mention it. (It will sound like I’m being critical of this movie, but I actually find it terrifically entertaining, as long as you watch it with open eyes.)

The plot of the movie is that an adolescent boy (Haley Joel Osment) is sent to spend the summer with two mysterious uncles (Michael Caine and Robert Duvall) who have recently turned up after a long absence. Over the course of the movie, Osment is presented with two different explanations of who the uncles are and where they’ve been. Caine’s character tells the boy all sorts of fanciful tales – which are acted out by younger actors in flashback sequences – about the adventures he and Duvall’s character had in the French Foreign Legion, culminating in Duvall’s character hoodwinking an Arab sheik and falling in love with the sheik’s daughter.

But other family members believe that Caine and Duvall were notorious bank robbers and that their wealth is dirty money.

At one point, having been presented with a piece of evidence that seems to prove the bank-robber theory, Osment is torn. He has come to love the uncles over the course of his stay, and now he’s not sure what to believe about them. In a strange middle-of-the-night encounter which is in some ways the climax of the movie, Duvall’s character tells the boy, in effect, that the most important thing is to make up his mind and believe in something, one way or the other.

This was promoted as an uplifting family film, so I will leave it to you to figure out Osment’s decision, and whether or not it is confirmed to be the truth. (I have not seen the alternate ending contained on the DVD, so I don’t know how much it differs. I have read that the ending was re-shot as a result of test screenings, so it’s possible that the original ending may have been troubling because it was less upbeat.)

I do not mean to read too much into this movie – after all, it’s a fine movie which manages to entertain a wide variety of ages with great performances from three talented actors. But I was troubled at the time by Duvall’s advice to his young nephew. After all, isn’t the truth more important than the act of belief? It seemed like it was meant to be a religious parable. But does that mean that Osment should stop trying to find out whether or not his uncles were wanted criminals, possibly even murderers? We are shown the scene in which Osment’s character gets objective evidence of the truth about his uncles, and the scene takes place many years later, with an adult actor playing the character. In the meantime, of course, the boy could have been spending two decades aiding and abetting fugitives from justice.

Another movie, contemporary with “Secondhand Lions,” approaches a very similar premise, although with a much more adult treatment. In the movie “Big Fish,” directed by the great Tim Burton, Billy Crudup’s character is at the bedside of his dying father, played by Albert Finney. Finney has always told tall tales about himself and his life, and when Crudup now wants to have a serious conversation and some closure, he is annoyed at his father’s need for attention and keeps trying to set aside the tall tales. Just as in “Secondhand Lions,” the tall tales are dramtized by the filmmakers in fanciful, over-the-top fashion, with a younger actor (Ewan McGregor) playing Finney as a young man.

Although Crudup’s eventual reconciliation involves a moving scene which ties in with one of the tall tales, we aren’t meant to think that Crudup suddenly believes every last word his father has told him. Instead, the issue of whether or not the stories are objectively true has been tabled so that father and son can understand that they love each other very deeply. We may even believe that the stories are the father’s way of escaping from his own shortcomings, and that the son’s acceptance of the stories represents his own forgiveness of those shortcomings. But then, in an epilogue, we find out that at least some of the stories may not have been as fanciful as first thought.

Think about the comic strip “Peanuts.” As much as we can sympathize with, even admire, Linus for believing in the “Great Pumpkin,” creator Charles Schulz clearly believes that Linus – who in other situations is the strip’s voice of reason – is misguided. The Great Pumpkin never shows up, and Linus is always distraught and disappointed in that fact. And what is the criteria for the Great Pumpkin’s appearance? He appears to the supplicant who is the most “sincere.”

I will have to side with Schulz here, not the scriptwriters of “Secondhand Lions.” I never want to be smug about my own beliefs or intolerant of those with different beliefs, but I believe that the truth is what’s important, not believing simply for the sake of belief itself.

It is, of course, true that I cannot provide objective evidence of the truth of Christianity. Unlike Haley Joel Osment, who could conceivably have continued to research his uncles’ fantastic stories, we must take our religious beliefs on faith.

That is the foundation of another type of universalism, the “we can never really know what’s true, so it doesn’t really matter what we believe” type. And that will have to wait for another post.