2 posts tagged “match point”

The next book and movie that we'll be reading/watching over at The Analogical Imagination is...(drum-roll)... Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and Match Point by Woody Allen!

As always, you'll have a couple weeks to acquire the book before we start reading it.  This is a relatively short book (especially compared to Brothers Karamazov), so we shouldn't need more than a month to read it.  Two weeks to get it, a month to read it.  If things go faster or slower though, we'll gladly adjust.

Also, special thanks to Charmedbuttercup, who pointed us over to The Vonnegut Library, where you can read any of his books for free online.  So now you don't even have to spend money!  Unless you're me and you bought the book a month ago. ;)

In the meantime, see if you can get a hold of the movie.  Remember, as soon as you've seen it, you're welcome to comment on it.  No need to wait for me, feel free to make your own post and add it to the group!  Even if you just want to let us know if you liked it or not, post away!

Here's a little more about the choices:

Review from Amazon.com
To the best of my knowledge, there really is no other writer quite like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Mother Night appears to be a rather straightforward, albeit quirky, novel at first glance, but as one delves down into the heart of Vonnegut's prose one finds grounds for contemplation of some of life's most serious issues. This novel is the first-hand account of Howard Campbell, Jr., a most remarkable character. Campbell is an American-born citizen who moved to Germany as a child and became the English-speaking radio mouthpiece for Nazi Germany during World War II. In the fifteen years since the end of the war, he has been living an almost invisible life in a New York City attic apartment. He misses his German wife Helga who died in the war, sometimes thinks about his pre-war life as a successful writer of plays and poems, and perhaps just waits for history to find him once again. As we begin the novel, he has been found and is writing this account from a jail cell in Israel, awaiting trial for his crimes against humanity. While he is reviled by almost everyone on earth as an American Nazi traitor, the truth is that he was actually an agent working for the American government during the war; this is a truth he cannot prove, though.

Thus, in this 1961 novel, the hero is ostensibly a Nazi war criminal. The primary moral of Mother Night, Vonnegut tells us in his introduction, is that "we are what we pretend to be" and should thus be pretty darned careful about what we are pretending to be (a secondary moral being the less enlightening statement "when you're dead, you're dead"). In the eyes of the entire world, Campbell is exactly what he pretended to be during the war, a traitorous Nazi purveyor of propaganda who mocked and demoralized allied troops as well as regular citizens. Internally, Campbell hardly knows what he is anymore; he claims no country, no political values, wanting only to live in a "nation of two" with his beloved wife Helga once again. A series of significant events forces Campbell out of the cocoon of his past fifteen years, and his thoughts and actions along the way provide big juicy morsels of food for thought: taking personal responsibility for one's actions, the harsh truths of war and peace, the sometimes vast differences between truth and fact, individual redemption before self and society, finding direction and a purpose in a world gone mad, etc. Vonnegut's scythe-like dark humor cuts deeper than mere satire, aiming directly at some of the darker sections of the human heart, areas which most individuals too often ignore or refuse to acknowledge. The gallows humor can be quite funny on the surface, but it is in actuality a scalpel which Vonnegut wields to open up the heart and soul of the reader for self-examination. Mother's Night, the title of which is taken from Goethe's Faust, is a relatively short but very powerful novel.

 

Here's my review of Match Point when I first saw it in the theater:

Went and saw Match Point tonight. Very good movie. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Of course, it's only good if you really understand it. I heard a lot of people coming out of the theater saying how it was pointless and depressing.

It was good because of how very complex it was.

Let's start at the beginning of the movie with Chris' quote on luck. How we don't like to admit how much of our lives are out of our control, how so many events don't seem to have a purpose. Luck is as random as it is meaningless. Chris is a man who is losing faith. Not faith as in some greater power, but faith as in the basic belief that our lives have some sort of meaning. That there is a point to it all.

At one point someone (Tom?) quotes that "Despair is the path of least resistance," but Chris replies back that it is not despair, but faith. In a way he is right. People like to fool themselves into thinking everything is okay, and that they have power over the meaning in their lives. It's easier for us to deal with the tragedies of life by simply paving them over with happy thoughts. But if you do that you ignore a whole side to life. Life isn't all pretty flowers and sun and light. There is darkness there. Ignoring it does not make it go away.

Chris sees this more clearly than anything else. He seems to have a small obsession with the tragic. He also is desperately searching for some sign of meaning. Justice. Freedom.

Freedom is a real trouble for Chris. He is constantly trying to free himself of obligations. He quits tennis for free time, marries a rich girl for financial freedom, and shacks up with a hot girl for sexual freedom. The funny thing is that all of these attempts at freedom lead him to become more and more attached to obligations. His escapes always turn into limitations, each being stronger that the one before.

But even more important to him than freedom is justice. In a world that is completely random, how can there be any justice at all? Chris doesn't think there can be, but he desperately wants to be proven wrong. He is hanging onto faith by a thread. Because of this, Chris is constantly pushing limits. He is finding out how much he can get away with. In a just world, he would be found out and punished.

So he cheats on his wife and lies to his mistress. When he kills Nola, that is the final straw. He wants to be caught. This is his last desperate attempt at proving justice.

If you pay attention, there's something there that at first glance does not seem to fit. When he throws the ring, it bounces on the fence and lands on his side, which should signify his defeat. But when he goes to the police for questioning, he gets off scott-free, right? So he didn't really lose, right?

Wrong.

What happened with the murder investigation was the absolute worst thing that could have happened to Chris. He will have to live the rest of his life with that guilt, but that's the easy part. The hard part is that he was proven right. Justice doesn't exist. Meaning doesn't exist. There is no point to our lives. If there was, he'd be in jail. How can a man live if he has no faith?

The ironic part is that Chris was looking to be punished, and he ended up receiving the worst punishment of all. If he was really paying attention to the signs in his life, the fact that he was proven right proves him wrong.

Chris was punished. There is justice; it just never comes in the form you expect. There is meaning. Sometimes, in the depths of despair you can find hope.