MY BLOODY VALENTINE

My Bloody Valentine (2009)  Jensen Ackles, Jaime King and Kerr Smith

RATED R for being REALLY INCREDIBLY VIOLENT, full of MURDER AND BLOOD AND MAYHEM and having naked people.

                Okay, this was the first official gauntlet thrown, and I’m sorry it took me so long to. . . uh. . . what exactly do you do with a thrown gauntlet?  Pick it up?  Stomp on it with your foot?  Plant a little garden around it?  I don’t know.  Anyway.  I have Brandi Woods to thank for suggesting that this movie would be virtually impossible to find a spiritual message in.

                My Bloody Valentine is a slasher film of the “let’s see how utterly grotesque we can make this and still have it be 3D” variety.  The quick synopsis goes like this.  One Valentine’s Day, five miners are locked In a mine.  Only one resurfaces, having murdered the other four to preserve his air supply.  After being in a coma for a year, he wakes up and kills many of the hospital staff as well as a bunch of party-goers who are revisiting the mine for what I can only assume are masochistic reasons.    He is “shot and killed.)  Ten years later, when the mine-owner’s son (who was present at and largely responsible for the original accidental collapse) returns to town to sell the mine, the murders start again.  They are brutal, physically unlikely, and often involve either a pickaxe or a shovel and a decapitation. 

                A great deal of the cast dies and there appears to be no path of logic to their killings.  There is little to no redemption or catharsis for the ones that live.  Also, often, women are naked.

                So I understand why this seemed like a challenge to my gauntlet-thrower.  It’s a slasher movie!  What window pane cross could possibly be found in a slasher movie?    I guess I could go the Old Testament route.

                       "And he brought out the people that were in it, and cut them with saws, and with harrows of iron, and with axes..." (I Chronicles 20:3)

That’s a bible verse about something that David did.   Good old warmongering David. 

But I think I’m going to go for something a little bit darker and STRAIN my cerebral matter for some kind of lesson.   In order to do that, I’m going to have to spoil the big surprise ending.  But that’s okay! Because if you’re one of the people that reads this blog, there’s a good possibility this is the kind of movie you wouldn’t see if it was the last reel in the last movie theater in the post-apocalyptic world.  So I don’t mind spoiling it, really.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

The movie My Bloody Valentine is about internalized evil.    The ten-year anniversary killings are not being performed by the original killer himself, but by someone he is possessing, or haunting, or possibly just someone who is obsessed by him.  This man is so wracked with guilt for his part in the original accident that brought this killer into being that he actually finds himself a perfect vessel for the killer himself.  All of the mindless destruction that he wreaks in his unconscious split-personality state carries on the original mission of the crazy pickaxe wielding miner that he trapped in the mine with his negligence.

So what’s the message in that?   It’s about the line between guilt and repentance.  They are two radically different things.   Guilt is destructive.  It takes a mind and soul with great potential for good and swallows them up until they are useless at best and perfect weapons for evil at worst.  We tell tragic stories about the man who did something wrong in his life, and was so eaten by guilt that he could never forgive himself.  

 This Is Not A Good Thing.  

 We mistake it for a something we want.  We say things like “Good!  He screwed up!  He should suffer!”   Here’s a movie quote. . . “Just. . . feel guilty.  Swim in it till your fingers get all pruney.”  (drastically different movie, but still).  We feel like that would be justice.  But it isn't!   A vessel of guilt is useless.  A vessel of guilt is a vacuum.  It sucks the life out of everything around it and destroys it utterly.

So the main character (and antagonist, as it turned out) in this movie allowed his life to be so swallowed up by guilt that he lost his identity and gave it over to a destroyer.   And we should learn from his example and not do that.

Oh, what’s that?  You think you could never be in a situation where you wreak that kind of destruction?  Really?  I know I can.  When I am feeling most guilty about something is when I am the least capable of doing any real good.  I may not pin someone to the wall with a shovel until their head is cut in half or open someone’s chest cavity and extract their heart for re-packaging in a Valentine’s candy box (and by the way . . . bleahgufisdlbleah) but I guarantee I can be at least as destructive to someone else’s spirit.  I can cut someone down with casual disrespect and rip someone’s heart out with a bitter angry word.  And at the heart of it is just my own preoccupation with my own screw-ups.

So the message is this.   If you have done something wrong, intentionally or not, that is eating away at you, make amends.  Ask forgiveness.  And then – and here’s the tough one – ACCEPT forgiveness.  That way you can go back to being a nice penitent person who screwed up but is trying to make things right.  Letting yourself be wrapped up in layers of guilt is self-absorbed, egocentric, and eventually will empty you of anything good, making you a perfect weapon for the destruction of others.

DISCLAIMER:   I cannot think of a single person in my immediate family who would enjoy this movie for anything other than its unceasing gorey 3-D violence.  And there are some people in my immediate family who like that kind of thing.   (We're not talking Last of The Mohicans or Gettysburg violence here, either.)

Now then. . . Where is My Next Challenger!

Cloverfield

Cloverfield (2008) Mike Vogel and Jessica Lucas         Rated PG-13

    This movie was made in the theory that if you could make a killing at the box office by filming a supernatural hunt and other such horror movies through the lens of a small handheld camera, you could do it with a giant Monster Eats New York movie.   Of course, the film that started it all (The Blair Witch Project) was unscripted, and this one definitely has a script.  That’s the part that directors of the “make it look handheld” era have forgotten.  Cloverfield is a fun thrill ride of random violence with occasional comic relief.   I like to put it on as background noise occasionally, but watching it actually makes me a little carsick. 

    Very quick plot synopsis:   In the middle of a farewell party for Rob, who is heartsick due to how badly he screwed up his chances with Beth, (as documented by Hud who has been handed a camera and has no respect for personal space), a giant alien monster attacks New York.  The partygoers flee, hoping to evacuate the city, and find themselves right in the middle of the hot zone.   Rob (along with several of his friends, including Hud and his camera) decides that he has to rescue Beth from her high rise apartment, because according to a phone call that Rob receives, she is injured and she can’t move.   We follow Rob and his party of desperate rescuers through all of the worst parts of the alien attack, from fighting its spawn in the dark subway tunnels of New York to the middle of the military mobile headquarters where people are dying from the creature’s horrific bites.   Main characters die.  Plans get thwarted.  Hud talks a lot while he’s continuously filming the journey.  Great family fun.

    So where, in this “TNT Movies for Men Who Like Movies” fest is the spiritual message? 

    Here’s what I found.   Even though Rob and Beth exchanged harsh words at the party, from the moment of the alien attack, Rob can think of nothing else but Beth’s safety.  He puts himself at risk over and over (followed closely by his friends, even though he keeps encouraging them to take off and save themselves) in the hope that he can get to her and save her.  His single-mindedness drives him forward, into and then out of danger.  It even saves him from the panic or despair that so many other people in the film are falling victim to. 
   
    Now, obviously, there is very little likelihood that you or I will ever find ourselves in the midst of a giant alien monster attack.  (Let’s hope.)  But monsters come in all shapes and sizes.  There is the giant all-destroying Beast of Finances.  There is Heartbreak and Despair.  Other creatures that seem a lot smaller but that are nonetheless very destructive, like Bitterness and Resentment and Loneliness.  Then there are the scarier, more alien monsters.  Like Illness.   To some people, many many more than we like to think about, the monster destroying the city and tearing down its buildings while we lay there helpless is Cancer.  These beasts fall from the sky and begin attacking our city and we can either lay there helpless and injured, save ourselves and flee, or turn ourselves, heart and mind, to the rescue of someone else. 

    How often in the past few months, days, or even hours has someone asked you to pray for them or keep them in your thoughts?  How often have you agreed wholeheartedly to do it, and then just gave a quick nod to the universe and went on about your day?   The next time someone asks you to pray for them, or think of them, would you be willing to turn all of your energy and thought to that person, even to the point of temporarily ignoring your own battles with your own monsters in order to focus heart and soul on them? 

    Maybe we should give that kind of self-sacrifice a try.  Not only could it possibly save them, but it may be the saving of us, too.