Order and Chaos

Reading movie reviews cracks me up. I mean honestly. Have you ever noticed that reviewers will tear a movie to shreds for being "incoherent," "meandering," "lost," "without meaning," "inconsistent," "too many loose ends," "scattered," and "unstructured?"

These are just some of the terms I've read over the years. At the core of the reviewer's displeasure seems to always be one thing: He believes that the filmmaker did not know what he was doing. In other words, the reviewer thinks the filmmaker did not have a structured story to tell. A story with a defined plot, some type of consistent structure, and a meaning that pervades the entire movie. Things seem to be random, and without thought in the reviewer's mind, and this is unacceptable. It is poor, lazy storytelling.

Now a great movie! That is something different. The filmmaker is praised for his delicate touch. His precise strokes of brilliance peppered throughout the movie that make thematic, meaningful points hit home in the most poignant ways. The reviewer praises that one look that conveyed that specific emotion, which hit home the ironic, touching point of the whole story. Detail and the care with details the filmmaker took proves his expertise. That director knew in every frame of the movie what his vision was, and he executed that vision with a powerful certainty. His master stroke, his knowledge of all the characters, his grasp of every second of the film culminated in sheer brilliance. This, now this is a work of art by a master storyteller. Give the man an Oscar already!

So why, why I ask you, do so many of these same people believe their lives--their personal stories, their hurts, their fears, their hopes, their dreams--their land, their world, their entire universe all happened, all were created by incoherent, lost, scattered, random, unstructured chance? When everything they praise in a simple story screams the exact opposite about what they believe in their entire existence, what do they have? It seems like they have something that doesn't make sense.

Why do they want the filmmaker to know what he's doing, and the world to just happen randomly, without meaning? What in the core of their being screams at them for such structure, to the point they base their well being and career over analyzing the validity of stories based on a storyteller's vision?

There seems to be a contradiction. A contradiction between Order and Chaos. Or, if one looks at it deeper, maybe there isn't a contradiction. Maybe there is just order. A beautiful, symmetrical, visionary, brilliant, graceful order. An order to you, to me, to our land, to our world, and to our universe. A visionary story with a visionary storyteller.