?The Trip? and the Challenges of Friendship
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on July 5th, 2011 4:35 am by HL
?The Trip? and the Challenges of Friendship
I saw The Trip this weekend, which for reasons very particular to me, may be the movie I’ve enjoyed most so far this year. I liked Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop just fine, but The Trip is an even better movie about the craft of comedy. Much of the movie is Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon […]
I saw The Trip this weekend, which for reasons very particular to me, may be the movie I’ve enjoyed most so far this year. I liked Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop just fine, but The Trip is an even better movie about the craft of comedy. Much of the movie is Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon doing things like this:
The combination of the appeal of American popular culture filtered through the refinement and intelligence of English humor is sort of irresistible to me. But the movie also hit the sweet spot of something I’ve been thinking about a lot: the treatment of friendships as secondary to romances in most movies and television shows. It’s so rare that the relationship between friends is the most important thing in a movie. Friends are usually a facilitator to the traditional end of a comedy, a marriage (or at least permanent-seeming partnership) rather than the main event. I think that’s one of the reasons Bridesmaids has been so successful: it’s the friendship that matters, and the romantic and sexual relationships that are at the periphery. The groom in the titular wedding doesn’t even have a line.
In The Trip, there’s a pair of interesting imbalances between Coogan and Brydon. Coogan is more successful professionally, but he’s dissatisfied with his failure to make the leap into the first tier of actors alongside people like Michael Sheen, and he’s divorced and in the process of being left by his current girlfriend. Brydon, by contrast, is less famous, but he’s reconciled to it, making money off an iPhone app based on one of his characters, and incredibly happy with his wife and new baby. So even though Coogan has more material resources, he needs Brydon more than Brydon needs him, and he’s obviously deeply uncomfortable with that, and expresses that discomfort by being something of a jerk. But the malleability of friendship means that they can deal with it, that they can work through Coogan’s behavior to get to the root of his sadness, even if that means dealing with it obliquely by singing ABBA and testing their octave ranges. Anyway, it’s a warm, terrific movie, the cure for the common action movie.
The Declaration of Interdependence
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the […]
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Okay, the Declaration of Interdependence sounds a lot like the Declaration of Independence.
By saying that it is a self-evident truth that all humans are created equal and that our inalienable rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, our Founding Fathers were telling us that we are all in this together, that we are interdependent, that we have a moral duty to protect these inalienable rights for all humans. President Lincoln, perhaps above all others, was instrumental in making clear that the second sentence of the Declaration was “a moral standard for which the United States should strive,” as Wikipedia puts it.
The double appeal to “Nature” — including the explicit appeal to “the laws of Nature” in the first sentence — is particularly salient. For masters of rhetoric like the authors of the Declaration, a repeated word, especially in an opening sentence, is repeated for the singular purpose of drawing attention to it (see “Why scientists aren’t more persuasive, Part 1“).
Yes, the phrase “laws of nature” meant something different to Jefferson than it does to us (see here). But as a living document, and as a modern Declaration of Interdependence, the words have grown in meaning.
It is the laws of Nature, studied and enumerated by scientists, that make clear we are poised to render those unalienable rights all but unattainable for billions of humans on our current path of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions. It is the laws of Nature that make clear Americans can’t achieve sustainable prosperity if the rest of the world doesn’t, and vice versa.
Ironically — or perhaps intentionally — the toughest inalienable right to maintain is “the pursuit of happiness.” Certainly, the catastrophic global warming we know we face (thanks to our understanding of the laws of nature) threatens life and liberty (see “Memorial Day, 2030“).
But if we keep listening to the deniers and delayers, if we fail to sharply reverse our current emissions path nationally and globally, then we are headed toward 5°C (9°F) planetary warming by century’s end and 850+ ppm — with sea level rise of 4 to 6 feet or higher, rising perhaps a foot a decade or more for centuries, the U.S. Southwest and one third of the Earth’s habited land a permanent Dust Bowl, half or more species extinct, and much of the ocean a hot, acidic dead zone (see “Intro to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water“).
Not bloody many people will be pursuing “happiness” under those conditions. They will be desperately trying to avoid misery, when they aren’t cursing our names for betraying our moral values.
If we don’t aggressively embrace the clean energy transition starting immediately — and help lead the entire world to a similar transition — then the Ponzi scheme we call the global economy will probably be in some stage of obvious collapse by our 250th anniversary, July 4, 2026.
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
And so “happiness” is repeated also, underscoring its importance to the Founders. “Life” and “Liberty” are really the very minimum we owe our fellow humans. We have a moral obligation to work toward freedom from want and care for all.
The party of Lincoln has, tragically, abandoned the values embraced and articulated by its greatest thinker and rhetorician — and those embraced and articulated by our Founders in the Declaration see (WashPost: “The GOPs climate-change denial may be its most harmful delusion”).
When is the last time a major conservative politician ever talked about “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” except to mock the entire notion (see Gingrich sums up GOP ethos: “I am not a citizen of the world! I think the entire concept is intellectual nonsense and stunningly dangerous”).
We live in unique times. We must all hang together or we will surely all hang separately.
Happy Interdependence Day Century!
