Ishmael and Isaac, Illustrated

We watched a movie last weekend called Stranger Than Fiction (2007), about an IRS agent living a very ordinary, competent but boring and unfulfilling life, when he begins to hear to voice-over narrator we in the audience are hearing, describing and assessing his life. When the voice announces he is about to die, he decides to do something about it. A psychiatrist he consults tells him he is schizophrenic, but he insists on a second opinion and she recommends he see someone who knows literature. He finds a professional eccentric (Dustin Hoffman) who teaches literary theory, who reluctantly agrees to help him find out who is writing his life. Meanwhile we see who is writing his life, a reclusive novelist (Cate Blanchett) who kills off the protagonists in all her books but is having trouble finding a way (or the will) to kill off the IRS agent in her story. Eventually the principals all meet. The novelist meets her character and is shocked, decides to change the ending so he doesn't die, but it is a near thing. The professor and the novelist talk and he tells her if she doesn't kill him her book will go from being a masterpiece to merely ordinary.

Some SACs (Second Advent Christians) believe the correspondences in the Word are meant to apply only to the Word and emphatically not to the world around us. I'm not one of those. I think there is a spiritual order to all things, not just to the Word, and the purpose of the latter is to help us see the former (see AC 3632). The IRS agent in the movie is living an Ishmael-rational life, and the novelist writes Ishmael-rational books but is having trouble completing this one because she cannot make it go where she wants it to go. There is another order already there in the life of her character, an Isaac-rational (spiritual) order she sees but has no way to understand. Eventually, at considerable cost, she decides to honor the new order (new to her) in her character's life and accept the different ending that comes to her by influx she has no concept of and cannot recognize but goes with anyway.

(If you like this, you might visit my other blog at http://gegenschein.squarespace.com )

-Don