revolutionary road

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0959337/
Revolutionary Road
directed by Sam Mendes
2008

There's a lot to be said about this very depressing movie. I'll stick to two: first, it is very much like a Greek tragedy in some ways. There is a chorus, acted by pretty much all the minor characters. There are our tragic heroes, undone (in at least one case) by the will of the gods. And there is even a mad prophet! He is quite literally mad, but has a better grip on the truth than anyone around - not that anyone is listening (and when they are, they ain't happy to hear it).

That said, the movie also says a bit about the notion of "horizons of possibility." One way to put this is: when I get up in the morning, I choose between eggs and cereal (for example). I don't choose between eggs, cereal, and running into the lake, or breaking into my next door neighbor's house, or pacing back and forth on the sidewalk, etc etc etc. It would be very difficult to make those kinds of choices on a regular basis.

Anyways, early in the movie, April (the wife) conceives of a plan to save their marriage: move to Paris. At first, Frank tells her it's ridiculous - at which point she asks him to point out what's stopping them. And he can't. As they tell the rest of the people they know, the plan is variously derided as immature, impractical, a fantasy, etc. These are all ways of essentially excluding the very idea from consideration. The movie tries to make the point that these people are doing this because if they ever took the idea seriously, they'd see just how awful their lives are - how empty and hopeless.

In other words, the movie argues that we work ourselves into routines designed to keep us ignorant of how little of true value there is to those routines. We have a sense of a normal world, but this sense is constructed, in a way artificial. If we'd just open our eyes, we'd realize that there's far more out there than we ever dreamed - that the world is a crazy place, a fantastical and curious place - and perhaps also a dangerous place.

(This is perhaps the reason that I am more sympathetic to Singer et al than Diamond is in "Eating Meat and Eating People." They seem to have the will to look at the world, to consider every possibility, and decide what is to be done. I worry that her kind of ethics is too close to putting blinders on oneself. But this is just to neither Diamond nor Singer; it's neither of their positions I am discussing here, but versions of them.)