goya's ghosts

It's not too often that I watch a film, and the first descriptor that comes to mind afterwards is "completely unnecessary", and the second is, " ridiculously superfluous", and the third is, "no, just ridiculous".

Netflix billed Goya's Ghosts as "the epic true story..." of Francisco Goya, the Spanish Inquisition, and the French Revolution. So we watched it, thinking we'd get a nice glimpse of a Spanish artist whose work was previously unknown to me, as well as a couple of intriguing events in Spain's history that I could use a little more information on. I really need to research movies before I watch them from now on.

The movie centers around Francisco Goya, the famous Spanish painter, and his connection to Ines, a young woman whose portrait he has painted and who is in deep trouble with the Spanish Inquisition for failing to nosh on a piece of pork at a dinner party. She is branded a Judaizer and a heretic, tortured, and thrown in prison for 15 years. Goya's role is to forget all about her for all that time and then try to help her at the end, the old 'too-little-too-late' thing. By this time, the French Revolution has reached Spain, a power struggle ensues, Ines is let out of prison and seeks the help of Goya to find the daughter she bore while in prison, etc. etc. The end of the film finds Ines pretty much insane, her ex-priest rapist dead, and Goya following lamely along as she walks with the death-cart along the streets of Madrid with somebody else's baby in her arms. Close curtain.

Okay, so what do you do at the end of an obtuse film like that? Why, you go to Wikipedia, that's what you do! You think, "This can't be the end of it--that's not even right!" You think, "Is this for real? What a weird story!" And so you begin to dig. And you find out that this movie is in fact bastardized historical fiction and bears no resemblence to any real events at all! You find out there was no Ines, no trouble with the Inquisition, no cross-mingling with the Revolution.

What you find out is that some sad little movie executive sat in the middle of his idea vacuum one day, when suddenly someone walked in with a preposterous idea for another Hollywood fricassee of history, and he just went for it. They must have figured that if they threw Natalie Portman in with all the no-name actors with schizophrenic Spanish accents, they'd have a sure thing on their hands.

I'll always maintain that the real victim of Y2K wasn't the tech industry at all--it was the movie industry. Evidently, on December 31, 1999, at 11:59 pm, Hollywood ran out of good movie ideas.
--Teri.

the tenuous threads of faith

Ever so often (actually, much more often than I'm really comfortable with), I start a long and convoluted circle of thought about my faith. It starts out as a simple question what I actually believe. Then it gets a little deeper and into the less easily-answered questions about why I believe those things and what the rest of the world believes. Before I know it, I'm in up to my ear lobes in the mirey ponderances about the nature of faith itself in relation to my experience. And it gets very confusing, yet always draws me back ultimately to the very first question, and maybe this is why I start over and over again. It goes something like this:

"Okay, so why do I believe Christianity is all that, anyway?" (This leads to some preliminary and sometimes vague rumination on historicity, bibliographical evidence, the nature of man, et cetera. Okay, deeper we go now...)

"So what about Islam? Judaism? Hinduism? Taoism? Agnosticism? Aren't there some great Muslim apologists with air-tight cases for their faith?" (This gets more difficult to answer in my own headspace, but I can still track with some basic facts of history to provide some insight on the origins and underpinnings of these other religions. On to the murkies...)

"In my own experience, what has flavored my view of religion and of the nature of God?" (This is where I get hopelessly muddled in how my culture, my emotional wounds, my exposure to media, my geographical locale, my relationships, my education, my philosophical leanings, even the food I eat has influenced how I view faith and my relationship to God. At this point, I generally throw my intellectual hands up in dispair and figure that it's all impossible to parse out.)

And then I'm back at square one the next time, determined to someday complete (or break) that circle and get to the inside of what drives and informs this sometimes misunderstood faith of mine.

Was religion meant to be this hard-thought upon?

--Teri.