Stone (2010)

This is a movie about a parole officer whose life is drastically changed, for the worse, because of the manipulations of a convict he's working with, and the convict's wife.

The parole officer's name is Jack, and the film opens with a scene of he and his wife. His wife is obviously feeling distraught and trapped, and threatens to leave him. He runs upstairs after hearing this, picks up their sleeping daughter, and threatens to throw her out of the window is she leaves him. She doesn't obviously, and we fast forward to their golden years, where nothing much seems to have changed. And this is where the story begins.

Jack is a parole officer about to retire, and his last account is a young punk who calls himself Stone. Stone was convicted for accessory to murder and arson, the victims were his grandparents. Stone is a big talker, and eventually gets his very attractive wife involved to... convince him to let her husband go free. This sounds just like any other con movie, but (and of course anything with Edward Norton in it..) it goes deep than that. Throughout this process, Stone becomes increasingly entranced with this religion supporting the idea that we gain spirituality through our senses, through sounds and the like. There are various buzzing and droning noises throughout the sound scape of the film, and Stone interacts with noise and sound continuously throughout the film. Concepts of noise and silence in the physical world and the relation to the noise and silence within your own self.

Religion and the idea of spiritual connectedness play a large part in this film. Jack attends church every week with his wife (still long-suffering), and yet feels no connection to the faith. He confides to the priest on one occasion that he envies his wife's and daughter's ability to feel connected, but it just seems to get harder and harder for him. He seems to be most bothered by Stone's rising connectivity, which coincides with his further spiritual decline. Jack has never seemed particularly happy with his life, but in his dealings with Stone, it comes to light that not only is he not happy, he is connected to nothing, nothing is important to him. He doesn't care about anything or anyone. Maybe this is why he so easily falls into the 'con' planned by Stone and his wife.

Something else the film deals with is the idea that we're really harsh on people who get convicted for something they've done wrong, and it's not wrong for us to keep the peace, but there are people who do 'bad' things every day, and just aren't caught, or aren't even told that what they're doing is wrong, but they also destroy people's lives.

The movie end with Jack's wife reading some reincarnation theory saying that we all start out as stones, and work our way up the chin of beings until we become human, and we do that to pay for our sins in previous lives. Which ties into the spiritual growth, and maybe even to the ability to process sound on some level.

This was a worthwhile film. It was thought-provoking and gritty. It's not a movie to watch when you're in one of those 'feel good' moods, but it's definitely worth your time.

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

This is an amazing book. If you've seen the movie there won't be any surprises, but the book goes more in depth into the concepts and such so the reader can get a firmer grasp on the ideas the author is trying to convey.

The story starts off with this guy who's going to these anonymous groups for people with terminal diseases, but he doesn't have a terminal disease. So right at the beginning of the book we have the main character searching out destruction as a way to solve his discontent. The cause of his discontent of course would be that he feels he doesn't belong within his own society, that his individual self has no presence when interacting with society as a whole. So the individual revolts against society, reasserting its authority over itself. And this would be the reason for fight club. what makes fight club so wonderfully appropriate as a beacon for the individual to rise up against society is that society finds the concept of fight club so abhorrent, it doesn't understand the logic. Society's morality dictates that we are all special individuals that are to cherished. We are all special individuals... something of an paradox, but as we all sway to society's rhythm we can see the logic. But if we take this statement apart and apply it to our own lives, because the western world believes this to be true, generation me as an example, and yet we are all alienated and desire/ are forced to be the same. One of the mantra's in this book was 'i am not a special snow flake' or something to that effect. By denying society's morality, the individual recognizes their discontent and counters it (of course in real life the contrasting extreme is no better than what caused the trouble in the first place, but one very much deserves the other... and its great for symbolic purposes:P). The members of fight club act in a way that society does not comprehend so that the individual can gain autonomy over itself, wresting itself out of the numbing grasp of society. This would manifest itself as destructive behaviour, both towards the self and towards the other, desiring the loss of the individual in a crowd, looking beneath the superficiality we create around ourselves to present as an image, and presenting something unacceptable in its place.

Besides the extreme need for society and the extreme need for the individual there is also the need for balance, hence there being three components to the novel. the aggravator, the aggravatee, and something detached from both. The aggravator would be society, whose desire is to quell individuality and can be found in characters that are 'normal' like the guy's boss, or the very motivation in each of our heads and within the scope of each character's awareness to conform to the bigger picture. The individual would contrast this in it's desire to rise up out of society establishing its autonomy over itself, and this can be found in the idea of fight club and those who believe in it's teachings. The third party would be able to see the benefits and flaws in both extremes, and that would be our narrator, or even the reader, and this person sees a need for both.. or a need for neither.

It was very symbolic, which I enjoyed, but if you're not the type that goes for symbolism... well it'll tap into your rebellion or something.. and it has the fighting (which is you reveling in the symbolism but denying it!). Great book though. I recommend.