Winter                                                   Winter Moon

Kate and I both read a zine called the Tablet.  It’s a hip Jew commentary on whatever.  It contained this today:  “The Hebrew year is 5774 and the Chinese year is 4710. That must mean, the joke goes, that against all odds the Jews went without Chinese food for 1,064 years.”  We follow, as I wrote before, Jewish tradition by going to movies and eating Chinese on Christmas.

Today we stayed close to home, eating lunch at the Mandarin Buffet, greeted by r challenged waiters and waitresses who greeted with holiday cheer anyhow.  After that we saw the Desolation of Smaug, the second of the Hobbit trilogy.  It’s a non-stop action flik with Evangeline Lilly as an action elfess, as beautiful here as she was all those seasons on Lost.  The time went fast as the dwarves escaped the Wood Elves in barrels, road coal and metal carriers to escape Smaug and Gandalf seemed to be defeated by Sauron.  If you haven’t seen it, it’s a lot of fun.

This was at the Andover Cinema and our second choice, Hunger Games II, had just ended its run and we didn’t know that.  So, we had to decide on a second movie on the spur of the moment.  We chose Wolf of Wall Street. This is a more difficult movie to parse.  First, it’s too long.  Could have stood 45 minutes worth of cutting.  It’s a Martin Scorsese movie so he apparently got the cut he wanted.  Second, I hope, as Kate imagines, it’s broadly drawn.  I’ll explain that in a bit.

Wolf’s great strength is its unflinching look at what happens to people who cannot answer the question, what is enough?  If you make money and power the focus of your life, they will become your center of value, what H. Richard Niebuhr called your God.   With them in the center of your ethical system your value choices will not be about people or beauty or justice or the natural world, but how about how you can get more.  More money.  More power.

You will not be able to answer the question, how much is enough, because the amount of money and power you need will always be just a bit more than you have.  This is ambition. This is greed.  This is eagerness to have positional authority.  This ultimate honey trap gets strokes by the culture.  We lionize billionaires and barely recognize the teachers, doctors, mechanics, nurses, clerks, postal workers who do the important work in our culture.

I’m not, this time, trying to make a political point, but a theological one.  What you place at your center, your center of value, shapes all the decisions that you make.  It’s a critical decision and it is just that, a decision.  You can choose to have other people, the natural world, beauty, health or justice as your center; you can also choose money and power.

In Wolf we see the terrible personal and social cost of choosing money and power.  Other people are tools.  Stocks are, as Matthew McConaughey’s character, Mark Hanna says, “Fairy dust…they exist for one reason.  To take money out of the clients pocket and put it our pocket.”  The only yardstick for success is money and the conspicuous consumption of luxury goods:  Armani suits, Ferrari’s, yachts, estates, drugs, whores, planes.

Kate saw it as drawn broadly.  That may be, but the motive force, the need for more and the sense that life has no moral limits characterize so many striving folks.  Not just Americans.  Chinese, too.  Singapore.  Mumbai.  This movie is, at bottom, about seduction and shows what few people ever realize.  We don’t need the devil.  We seduce ourselves.