July 23rd, 2010 10:19am
RATING: Worth a Shot
Film and television writer/director/producer Roger Nygard had an experience after September 11 many of us must have shared. Faced with the violence and seemingly meaningless waste of the event, he began asking himself life’s big questions: What is the purpose of life? What is existence? Is there a God?
Rather than idly chat about the big ideas over a pint of beer with his friends, Nygard picked up his camera and started interviewing the experts – people who have dedicated their lives to figuring out just what the heck we are doing on this spinning ball of cosmic dust. These interviews include a wide variety of religious, scientific, and vaguely spiritual subjects: from Christian preachers and priests, to Buddhist monks, Indian sikhs, astrophysicists, atheists, and even a self-proclaimed Satanists and druids. The product of all these conversations, The Nature of Existence, is not so much an inquiry into the nature of religion and the eternal, but a tossed salad of all the world’s ideas about religion.
Nygard’s hope is that by talking to all these various people, some kind of existential least common denominator would emerge. What he instead discovers is something far more interesting. The Nature of Existence creates a conversation between an unlikely mix of thinkers. An interview with an Anglican priest or a minister at Dallas’ Cathedral of Hope cuts to a British scientist or atheistic philosopher. The overall impression is that the answers to our questions about the universe are as numerous as protons and neutrons. It’s an agnostic showpiece.
By the film’s end Nygard believes – or hopes? – he has discovered some commonality between all these complimentary and contradictory ideas, and he concludes with some thoughts about living in the moment, loving others, and continually searching for meaning. But he has also missed one ongoing theme that both the religious and scientific men and women keep repeating. Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, physicist, Darwinist, Jew, or Christian: all reveal their particular paths towards understanding to be an continuing process characterized by focus and diligent practice. In this way, Nygard’s pluralistic dabbling in the overarching ideas of each approach was doomed to fail. Deep rooted explanations of reality – believable or not – can only come from picking one path and sticking to it.
PETER SIMEK
D Magazine
http://frontrow.dmagazine.com/2010/07/the-nature-of-existences-diverse-spiritual-conversation-gets-lost-in-the-cosmos/
recent comments!