Year One

My day in Dublin was so fun that I decided to extend my stay at the Travelodge in Swords for a third night, giving me another free day to explore the area. I decided to use it for a day trip out to the see the 5,000-year-old megalithic ruins at Newgrange, near the town of Drogheda.

I just love ancient megalithic structures, so this was almost a pilgrimmage for me.

Using another round of paid Internet at the Travelodge, I figured out the necessary changes of buses to reach Newgrange on a Sunday afternoon. It required first going back into Dublin before catching a bus out to Drogheda. While I was in the city, I walked back over to the Savoy and noted the show times. There was a showing of Year One in the late afternoon which, if my bus schedules were correct, would be perfect timing for when I got back to Dublin.

Of course I knew it was a low-brow comedy, which made me dubious about seeing it after experiencing the majesty of ancient megalithic ruins. I figured I would play it by ear, depending how I felt when I returned.

The ruins turned out to live up to my expectations. The highlight was definitely getting to go into the center chamber at Newgrange, where the tour guide turned the lights off , leaving us a pitch blackness and then duplicating the effect of having the sun rise on the winter solstice and illuminating the inner chamber. You have to enter a lottery to be able to experience the real thing, because there is so much demand and the chamber is tiny. I was satisfied with the facsimile.

Much to my surprise, I was actually in the mood to see Year One when I returned to Dublin. The experience was so powerful at Newgrange, that there was nothing that could spoil the day, I decided, even if the movie was unwatchable, which I suspected it might be.

The movie was showing in one of the upstairs auditoriums at the grand old Savoy, one with only about a hundred and fifty seats. No restrooms inside this auditorium. They were out in the upstairs lobby.

At first my suspicions about the movie seemed to be on the mark. I spent the first half hour of the movie being totally repulsed. It seemed to have been designed to be a direct assault on all possible sensibilities involving traditional Biblical religion. It seemed design to insult as much as possible, almost as a parody of the degenerate nature of Hollywood.

But then something happened near the midpoint of the movie. Harold Ramis, the director, is quite old school and it turns out he was just setting us up for a switcheroo.

The characters seemed to develop consciences, and sensibilities in reaction to the degenerate culture in which they were living. It was particularly nice from a narrative standpoint, since the characters followed a progression of civilization from complete barbarism to ancient urbanism (at Sodom, of course).

I began to see the movie not as a paean to barbarism and pornography, but rather as a description of the psychic journey of the modern individual trying to cope with life in our modern day version of Sodom. It was not just a dive into the trench of filth, but about coming out the other end and cleaning yourself off.

The best example of this in the movie was the scene in which the two main characters (played by Jack Black and Michael Cera) find themselves inside the Holy of Holies in Sodom.

Having come to Sodom, they have been transformed into the two degraded options available to men in our contemporary Postmodern culture. Zed (Black) has become a corrupt police state thug, whereas Oh (Cera) has become a feminized slave. Knowing that they probably face death when they leave, they have little hope of actually performing the rescue of their respective true loves, which is the quest that brought them to wicked Sodom in the first place.

In this hopeless situation, they do something very classical: they get down on their knees and importune the Creator for assistance. At this point, I'm thinking if this were a classical movie, this is exactly what they would need to do, and it would result in their ultimate victory.

And this is exactly what happens. After humbling themselves before God, they win, defeating their evil forces of Sodom and becoming heroes by rescuing their true loves. Zed renounces his role as a thug, and Oh becomes a true man, breaking his chains as a slave.

By the end of the movie, I was completely won over. What I thought was going to be a disgusting celebration of base culture turned out to be a fable of trying to live a classical life in the Postmodern world. Year One goes down as one of my favorite comedies of the year (so long as you can stand to watch the first part).