Exceptional Men, and Varying Realisms

 

Both the recently released Jobs, about Apple's co-founder and domineering personality, and Tim Burton's Big Fish look at the life of exceptional men. While the biopic purports to be a straight-forward recounting of the rise, and the fall, and subsequent resurrection, of one of the 'visionaries' of our time, Burton's tall-tell interweaves fact and fiction, pushing us to unravel the difference between the two and what our feelings about the proper place of each tells us about ourselves and the world around us. Perhaps because Jobs has a higher bar of reality to surmount before we can deem it satisfactory, the direct approach actually imbues us with less a sense of the world than Burton's novel adaptation. While Big Fish asks us to think about ourselves, Jobs requests that we praise the another's ability.

How can a fictive account strike us as more truly resonant? Surely this is largely an assignment of the observer. Nevertheless, there seems to be more good and true in Burton's work - this is not to suggest that it is a triumph. Surprisingly, Kutcher excels in the role of Jobs, but he is left little to excel towards. The film felt like an Apple vanity project through-and-through. Big Fish nestles into a world where both myth and reality are interwoven. In doing so it creates a world that we can feel, that lives and breathes. Rather than demand our fealty, it excites our wonder. Such is an accomplishment too often overlooked.

The Geopolitical Implications of Armageddon-Inducing Reptiles

The existence of a fire-breathing, ill-tempered dragon suggests the creation of one geopolitical pole. Perhaps the inhabitants of Middle-Earth are simply inured to the existence of fantastical, and violent, creatures.  Yet, it seems that the existence of a super-predator would demand a new political calculus, both within and between societies. The cultural evolution of any group negotiating common space with a dragon suggests the transformation of a society. Surely we can imagine powers within the world so imposing that all aspects of a people would be touched.

This may resemble a certain type of defeatism, yet it is difficult to imagine a social sphere which would willingly antagonize a sleeping dragon. When Thorin and his band arrive in Lake-town, and subsequently announce their intentions to both awaken and slay Smaug the Terrible, surely a debate is in order about rousing this beast. Shut-up in a mountain, quietly sleeping, seems the perfect place for a dragon. The well-worn argument, this evil must be dealt with, while a certainly heroic trope, doesn't address the implications for others. If people are living under a repressive regime it is one thing to loosen their shackles. However, awakening the threat of annihilation while it peacefully sleeps, is another thing entirely. One type of politics can address living life in the shadow of a terrible, but contained, nearby power. Yet awakening that power would forcibly transform all social frameworks. I imagine that the presence of dragons would be cause for a re-calculation of economic and political focuses and power structures. The inclusion of such super-predators always seems to ignore their novel and transformative impacts manifest in how people interact with the world. Rather than a vast opposition, perhaps it would be better to say that the existence of such terrible power would haunt the very words and deeds of men and women in everything they did - at least in comparison to a non-dragon world. If evolution is the co-production of things with their environment, then people co-existing with dragons must become so culturally dissimilar that, over time, we would not recognize their kinship with us. Can we imagine powers so awesome that everything is significantly different in relationship to them? How would this foster novel creations?