Knowing

This week had been tough. After the Fed announced the trillion-dollar heist, I mean quantitative easing, on Wednesday night, it was like a sledgehammer had come down on every one in the econo-blogosphere.

All of a sudden, it felt like we were all staring right into the jaws of the demon abyss. No one has words enough to describe the feeling. I've awoken every morning since then with a feeling of massive dread hanging over me, shrouded in a passive uncertainty about what to think, what to do, when it seems like there is nothing to be done.

At various times in my life, I've used movies as an escape from the pain of personal troubles. To disappear into a darkened theater for a few hours and lose oneself in a compelling narrative is, as almost every one knows, a nice way to stave off a lot of emotions.

But now it was different. Now I was heading to the theaters as a way to block out pain that was not personal but a massive global dread hanging over all are heads, and the horrifying inability to do anything about it but watch.

I spent a couple hours up in Nashua at the Barnes and Noble reading new release non-fiction books in the coffee shop before heading back across the state line into Tyngsboro for the late friday afternoon showing of Knowing.

As I watched the story unfold, I found it strangely compelling in an uncanny way:

A widowed Ph.D. astrophysicist (Nicholas Cage) living in rural Massachusetts outside Boston winds up in possession of a document unearthed from a time capsule containing a string of mysterious numbers. The document had been interred in September 1959 at an elementary school in Lexington, and the particular paper had been put there by a very disturbed little girl.

By decoding the numbers on the sheet, the astrophysicist learns that they have miraculously predicted a series of deadly disasters over the last fifty years, even including the number of people killed, and the geographical latitude and longitude.

One of the things I liked about this movie is that it didn't waste time having Dr. Koestler (Cage) ranting to his friends and family while not being believed by them. Instead, after a flush of initial skepticism, we move on with the story, leaving behind the "ranting lunatic" phase.

The horror of the story is not located in his inability to convince others of the remaining disasters predicted by the time capsule sheet, but rather by his seeming inability to change the outcome at all. This horror is magnified to extreme levels when Koestler learns the true nature and scope of the last disaster predicted---it's basically as bad as it possibly gets.

Along those lines, the story posits the philosophical question of whether or not there is a deterministic plan to the universe, or whether things are just random. Koestler poses this question to his astrophysics class at MIT at the beginning of the movie while passing around a model of the Sun (rather nice foreshadowing).

Unfortunately the screenwriter made me wince here. The question posed by Koestler to his students is about randomness versus determinism in a spiritual sense, rather than a scientific sense. That is, what Koestler is actually discussing is the issue of intelligent design in the Cosmos, rather than anything having to do with, say, chaos physics.

But I let that one go. I was really rooting for the movie. Halfway through I was already deciding that American horror wasn't dead after all, it had just gone really, really big in scale, as it should, as this is where our fears collectively reside right now.

But then, as happens so many times when I pre-judge a movie as being good, things started to come unglued in the Third Act and by the end I was just revolted by what I was seeing.

Plotwise it seemed OK, but then the movie piles on its seeming supernatural premise by pulling out all the stops, with aliens and/or angels appearing all over the place. It could have worked---in some sense the movie is a bookend to 1977's Close Encounters of the Third Kind---but the story never really answered the questions it had raised, except in the vaguest of terms.

Is there order in the universe according to some great cosmic mind, or is it random? I guess the movie comes down on the side of the former, but I kept wondering if that's so, what was the point of the prediction in the time capsule anyway?. Why was Koestler pulled into this scheme of the alien guardians if there was nothing he could do about it? Was it all about getting his son and the little girl to the safe place with all the smooth black rocks? Was that the whole point of the prediction-numbers? Couldn't he have gotten simpler instructions? Given how it ended, most of what happened in the movie with the string of disaster-predictions turned out to be absolutely pointless to the story.

And then there's the ending itself, "Close Encounters of the Last Kind," you might call it. Everyone knows Spielberg made a huge mistake by revising his movie to show what happens after Richard Dreyfuss goes on board the spaceship at Devil's Tower. Knowing follows exactly that error, and does it grandly, in stomach-churning fashion. If the movie wasn't ruined by that point, it was completely trashed by the last couple minutes.

I've read a few comments on blogs calling the ending a super-Christian Rapture fantasy. It could be seen as that, to be sure, but when I saw it, I read it more along the lines of a New World Order fantasy about cleansing the Earth of its surplus population.

As anyone knows who has studied the history of eugenics, the elite financiers of this death cult have long lusted for the ability to drastically reduce the population of the world, and to rebuild mankind in a perfect new order in which the citizens are completely swaddled by the control of a globalized world-state under the elite's control. They no longer call it "race hygiene" or "eugenics," as they once did, but now call it "population control" and "bioethics." It all sounds so perfectly rational, but it is basically the same death cult as the Nazis. They really don't even bother to hide it much. As you can see here, it is advocated by many of the same people now bringing about the Fedpocalypse of '09.

The ending of Knowing seemed almost a perfect eugenics fantasy. The Earth is cleansed. Two perfect white children scamper off in innocence to be raised by a race of superbeings who will mold their mind and souls to conform to the new ideal. Mankind is perfected. The bloodlines of the Calvinistic elite are saved. Everyone else dies. The end.

Too bad. The movie had so much promise while it stuck to the mysterious numbers thing. It felt so damn eerie too, since most of the action of the movie takes place in the very corner of Massachusetts where I now am (although it was shot in Australia). The solar observatory in Westford where the protagonist works is right along the route I drove to get to the theater on Friday.

And at one point, the characters decide to take shelter in an underground cave, located exactly in the town where my sister lives, and where I am writing this right now. They even mentioned the road through the middle of town, that I had just been driving on.

When I got back home, I had fun telling my sister about this. "Yeah, and at the very end, Cage goes to his sister's house so together they can watch Boston burn up to a crisp."

We both laughed. What a knee-slapper. My mood had surely cleared up a little. Good thing it was all just a wild fantasy.