"The Road"

On November 25, the film "The Road" is going to be in theaters. (Though the drive-in here in Kane only shows films like "Monsters vs. Aliens," and it closes in October anyway.) "The Road" is based on the post-apocalyptic novel by Cormac McCarthy, and set in a world where all living things are reduced to ash. Nothing grows. The few survivors have to scrounge for canned goods or else cannibalize each other. It's a world where meaning is lost in the featureless, fearful fight for daily survival. Against this bleak backdrop, a father and son make their silent way south along some unnamed and treacherous road in hopes of finding warmer weather. Incidentally, much of this movie was filmed along a derelict 13-mile stretch of the Pennsylvania Turnpike that was bypassed in 1968.

Here's a long quote from the novel "The Road." I'm using this quote in my doctoral dissertation to talk about the erosion of meaning in postmodern language:

"He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down to a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever."

I think that too often we're made to live anonymous lives: on the computer, in our cars, on the phone, staring blankly at the fictitious lives of others on TV. In all these things, we're unknown. And human beings were never meant to be unknown. We're meant instead to live in close proximity with each other and in direct relationship with the earth that gives us life. I think the thing we most need today is a stronger sense of place, and communal identity, and the greater good. What we need is to find our own unique identities within the context of "our place," rather than moving to North Carolina because it stays so warm in the winter.

I even think that "The Road" uses the symbol of "the road" to refer to geographic rootlessness of modern life, and the way our lives lose meaning when we're always on the move, never able to commit them to a single place, always trying to carry our identities with us, as if 'who we are' could be unrelated to 'where we're from'. Anyhow, I'm looking forward to seeing the movie "The Road," even though the book is oppressively dark. Dark books and movies express a real truth, all the while reminding us not to take hope for granted...