At a young age I developed a very specific concern regarding stories: it always seemed that it was more difficult for characters to be honestly happy than to be afraid of something. Evil lurked everywhere, it could pop out of a cereal box or telephone or monkey’s paw (ok, well that one, c’mon, you had it coming), but Good always had to arrive at the last minute.
And no one seemed to have an answer for it. Good always played defense to Evil’s offense. This really bothered me when I was eleven, because I was exactly the kind of eleven year old that it would bother.
Saturday Night Fever, Smokey and the Bandit, Annie Hall, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Star Wars (the original one) all opened in the same year, 1977. This cinematic cornucopia (combined with the invention of “Twi-Lite Time” prices at the local multiplex) spawned my introduction to “grown-up” films (the previous year I’d only seen “The Bad News Bears”). That summer we went to the movies just about every weekend.
Some of those titles weren’t age appropriate, but I did get to visit a galaxy far, far away (13 times), race across the country in a fancy car, and play superstar DJ to a spaceship full of folks from out of town. But those weren’t the only films I saw that summer.
Larry Gelbart, the genius writer behind M*A*S*H, offered “Oh God!”, starring John Denver (“Rocky Mountain High”) as a grocery store manager from Tarzana, whom God (George Burns) chooses to spread the news that we have everything we need to make the world a better place. (I’m sorry, did I mention John Denver? The singer! Was acting in this movie. And he was very good. Oh! and Teri Garr is his wife! And it’s directed by Carl Reiner! What’s not to like?)
“Oh God!” addressed my narrative concern about good and evil; God wasn’t a distant mysterious force or a (literal) Deus Ex Machina (“suddenly her hand came upon the necklace and she brandished the cross at the oncoming vampire!”). Burns played omniscience as cool confidence, a no-nonsense omnipotent granddad with all the power his character was heir to, but with kindness and patience.
No jump scares required, no special effects, just quiet wit. I really connected to this rendering of Good; the most powerful entity in the universe shows up as a nonagenarian instead of The Rock. Ok, it probably would have been Muhammad Ali back then.
That being said, it was brought to my attention that the versatile online platform I’m currently using for this column also had a few… extremists calling it home.
I often look up words when I’m writing this column, most often in the Oxford English Dictionary because it’s the largest in my home and by mere heft seems the most authoritative resource.
There wasn’t really a grey area here; I looked up the word “extremism” and there’s no positive side. It is the antonym to the phrase “fresh baked cookies”.
Many people on this platform wanted the owners to kick off the extremists, but the right to free speech is ubiquitous, so they were initially allowed to remain. Then, the platform owners had a little look-see at the questionable content, and after a Further Think decided that the platform did need a social standard, and a couple of folks were asked to leave.
I believe in free speech, and the world doesn’t have to stop talking so I can be heard. If I’m sharing a platform with people who hate me, well - heck, I’m sharing a planet with them already. I suppose if Good was as aggressive as Evil I would seek out that which is negative and destroy it, but the very ideas of aggression and destruction seem part of that negativity.
“Oh God!” set a new standard for stories about powerful good not having to be so overt, a message that, for me, has only been bested by Craig Ferguson’s brilliant description of my favorite hero, Doctor Who: “It's all about the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism”.
We can believe not only in something beyond ourselves but in ourselves, our capacities for problem solving and compassion, our ability to love as strong as anybody else could hate. The bad guys should be afraid of us, but we don’t need to be threatening to make that happen.
We keep going, we build harmony, we stand against despair, even in the grocery store line when it’s busy and the lines kind of curve around into one another and that family right ahead of us doesn’t want to sack even one bag of their own stuff as if they all had fresh manicures and baby soft hands. We can make the world a better place by just trying not to make it any worse.
As the sage has taught us, “The power of love…is a curious thing.” For every angry scream into the endless void, there is a laugh at the other end, filling it.
Chaos ex Machina.