A Review of Roger Ebert's Last Letter

The history books will record Roger Ebert as a great film critic. He was that, and I am certain, much more to those who loved and knew him best. His loss has been felt by many around the globe because of the millions he touched. Ebert took us to the movies for years; he guided our ticket purchases, awakened in us a poetic appreciation for films we might not otherwise have seen, and best of all, he called the public away from the mindless, lowest common denominator of entertainment. His ability to critique film and his way with words had the effect of “raising all our boats” in the areas of culture, intellect, emotion, and even an awareness of the sacred.

Ebert’s ability to awaken us is what makes his death feel so tragic; but it is also what makes his now popularized letter, “I Do Not FearDeath,” equally as tragic. Ebert’s final critique came to us not in the form of a film review, but in a staunch and unwavering gaze cast toward seeming permanence of death. It has taken the internet somewhat by storm and been praised by many.

I confess, I found little praiseworthy in it. In fact, it primarily aroused in me a deep sense of pity to see a man with such brilliance and appreciation for beauty in life, take those gifts and place them in a room with such a low ontological ceiling.

Ebert begins his letter with the assertion that there is “nothing on the other side of death to fear.” The belief in nothingness after death is what Nobel Prize poet Czeslaw Milosz called “the true opium of the people.” Ebert himself confesses in his letter that the prospect of eternity “frightens me,” lending great credence to the observation of Milosz. The opium of nothingness can produce an intoxicating bliss when we come to believe that we’ve no one to answer to on the other side of death. The liberation granted in a belief of nothingness is probably far more pleasurable than any notion of God, for it is according to Milosz, “a huge solace in thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murder we are not going to be judged.”

I am not surprised to see Ebert’s letter so readily received by so many. Who wouldn’t want nothingness after death? Nothingness allows us to follow our own bliss in the time we have, to suck what marrow we wish from the bones of life, to find our own sense of purpose and meaning – to ultimately make a go of it with the ideals that suit us and please us best. That’s opium indeed.

What this world view ultimately lacks is a cross. The cross of Christ stands in stark opposition to the blissful addiction of nothingness. The cross implies direction, purpose, and it carries a stronger resolve than the comfort of just ceasing to exist. The cross indicates that it is often our discomfort that opens us to the deeper courage. The narrowness of it funnels our lives into tight ideological spaces which ultimately wring out of us the greater nobility.

I believe I probably would have never written a response to Ebert’s letter had he not quoted Walt Whitman. I am in love with Whitman and the familiarity of his Leaves of Grass wash over me much like holy writ. To equate the line, “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,” to a belief in nothingness after death is a gross misreading of the good gray poet. In the lines preceding, Whitman says things such as:

“I know I am deathless…. The smallest sprout shows there really is no death and if there ever was it led forward to life…. There is that in me -- I know not what it is – but I know it is in me… it is not chaos or death – it is form, union, plan -- it is eternal life.”

The idea that Whitman may in fact be under our boot-sole testifies to his belief in life after death; it is neither a denial of it, nor is it some kind of awkward groping into nothingness. Ebert lowered Whitman’s ontological ceiling to fit his own and this perhaps disturbs me as much as anything.

Ebert continues his letter by making references to Richard Dawkins and meme theory which is little more than a tautological blanket tossed over an inept, naked Emperor who has spent the last 500 years trying to cage Platonic idealism. It is precisely the kind of mechanistic stain that Ebert applies to his own wife’s experience of the sacred in his letter: “Do I believe her? Absolutely. I believe her literally – not symbolically, figuratively, or spiritually…. I believe she did it in the real physical world I have described, the one I share with my wristwatch.”

I understand the sentiment – Ebert wanted to contextualize the experience without cheapening it and he made a valiant attempt to make this experience and so many like it, absolutely corporeal in its essence. Yet, at the end of the day what he aims for is hardly possible without severely cheapening the experience.

The beauty of a good film is that it takes us beyond the screen and into the wonder and imagination of the intangible. To say that such an experience shares the same space as a wristwatch is on its very best day, a gangly truth. That Ebert would never use such vernacular for his favorite film and yet chooses to apply it on the grand screen of human life is cause, not for celebration, but for unmitigated remorse.

I give his letter 2 out of 5 stars and hold out higher hopes, both for our species and for that which awaits us all in the Great Beyond.

LOST finale, I was blind but now I … ?

I read a story recently; maybe it was true story, maybe just a parable, I don’t know. It went something like this:

Once a man was walking in a park on a beautiful spring afternoon. Along the way, he was stopped by a group of blind women having a picnic. They heard him passing by and asked the man to take a photograph of them. He agreed. As the women huddled closely together and he snapped the photograph, he inwardly mused about the cryptic nature of a group of blind people wanting a photograph of themselves that they would never see. As he continued his walk, it occurred to him that as human beings we are fashioned in such a way that having shared experiences which ultimately rest beyond our human faculty to enjoy could ultimately be enjoyed through others. The photograph, that these women would never see, could be enjoyed by others who could see it -- and the enjoyment of those who saw it would be shared by those who lived and experienced the moment in a very different way.

I think LOST kind of fits that bill for me. I walk away from the show undecided if I am one of the blind women wanting to share an experience that I could never see directly, or if I am a holding a picture of something that I can see and trying to relay it to a group which has known it much differently than me.

That alone made the finale ‘worth it’ to me. I didn’t come away feeling ripped off and some have, most of my disappointments with the show emerged during the writers’ strike and all the plot problems that stemmed from it. Ultimately the ending brought a redeeming quality to the work itself and maybe that redemption, at least for the characters, was the point all along.

Interestingly enough LOST seemed to be geared toward the characters and not the fans from the start. I can appreciate that much about it; at least until the massive advertisement campaign started bleeding into my artistic appreciation of the show. So much of the cliff-hanger design was about neither the characters nor the fans – it existed to bait advertisers into spending more money to keep things rolling.

Cynicism aside, what the finale demonstrated was that all along the story of LOST existed for the characters and not the fans. We are each called into their story and emerging perhaps with little information, we’re left to our own individual imaginations as to the role we might play in it as existential beings.

It’s true that there are likely several dozen different theories about what happened. As a Christian, the old saying from John’s gospel, “No greater love has anyone than this: that they lay down their life for their friends” pretty much washed over the final scene. So did a line from T.S. Eliot – “My end is my beginning.”

Even so, Jack emerged from the tunnel of light in nearly the exact same place as the man in black. His body was contorted in a very similar fashion as the man in black. Could Jack be the island’s new smoke monster? Was Hurley’s selection as island guardian meant to guide Jack back? Is that why everyone else was waiting for him?

Or was it that Jack’s commitment to science and reason that kept him emerging into the afterlife much slower than his peers? Undoubtedly the issues of faith and redemption have been, and will now be codified, as the show’s primary themes.

It was through the theme of faith that everything else on the show will probably be forever interpreted. From the attempt of science to control religious faith (Dharma), to human self-righteousness manifested via the need to own religious faith (Ben), to the battle between good and evil to establish a foothold in religious faith (Jacob and the man in black), to the flirtation between this world and the next (Desmond), to ultimately crafting a human dialogue of purpose and meaning between two opposing ideologies (Jack and pre-monster Locke). The themes are there whether or not we choose to examine them as such.

LOST is a basic metaphor for our culture, of this I have little doubts. Volumes are going to be written about what it meant, and probably already have been, in that this is but one of thousands of blogs on the matter.

So five blind women having a picnic asked a stranger to photograph them… If you can understand the vicarious human nature of such a request, you’re close to becoming a candidate… and of course being a candidate, well, that’s a terrifying beauty all its own.

Earth is crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning


Meet you all on the other side,

DA