From "Steel Magnolias" 


           M'Lynn (Sally Field) agonizing over the loss of her daughter, as friends try to console 



From "The Godfather" 


      Michael Coreleone (Al Pacino) seeing the headline saying his dad has been shot 






From "Thirteen" 


         Mel (Holly Hunter) trying desperately to hold onto her daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) 




From "Fearless" 


   Huo Yuanjia sharing the love of a blind girl who nursed his body and spirit back to health





From "Fearless" 


           Huo Yuanjia (Jet Li) finally learning to see the beauty of the natural world around him 





From "Flags of Our Fathers" 


         Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) begging to go to see his mom before he has to go back to war 





From "Crash" 


Christine (Thandie Newton) realizing a cop (Matt Dillon) who humilated her the day before has just saved her life 





From "Boyz in the Hood" 


           father (Laurence Fishburne) telling son (Cuba Gooding Jr.) how much he loves him 




From "Brokeback Mountain" 


          Ennis (Heath Ledger) grieving the death of the love of his life, Jack (Jake Gillenhal) 





What is the point of the set of movie stills above? 

They show people portrayed in moments so emotionally overwhelming that millions - regardless of their race, gender, politics, philosophy, or worldview - cannot help but feel the raw human power of the scene. 

My graphic response to postmodernists. Their whole project, their whole worldview, is doomed to fail to define and/or control what it is trying to define and control. 

There is a deeper level of experience, awareness, and meaning in life that any critical theory - postmodernist, socialist, feminist, or what have you - can only take rough stabs at, and sometimes get partly right. If there were not, we would be unable to communicate at all because there would be nothing for us to communicate - person to person or culture to culture - about.

But the deeper levels of life can be analyzed until we all drop from exhaustion without our ever finally pinning life down - with any set of terms and concepts. Real human experience in this life - because it is far more affective than cognitive - defies any encompassing definitions or systems. Our thinking systems are composed of elements selected from our experiences of life; our experiences are not composed of elements selected from our thinking systems.  

Thus, it is art that tells us of the things that transcend languages, far more deeply than any criticism that tries to define art. This it does by evoking what we have in common. Uniting us, not dividing us from each other. When it resonates with the fundamentally human, then it works. Not before.   

If art did not do this, all art would be a hopeless project. 

All systems are explained in symbols - almost always language symbols. And we can show mathematically that no system for communicating ideas can be made exhaustive/complete. That is what Kurt Godel's proof is about. 

So postmodernism has had its uses. It has shown us an array of perspectives and motivated us to see more kinds of people in sympathetic ways. But any form of postmodernism that poses as the only answer to every query in the human heart has gone astray and gone sterile.  

In the meantime, art keeps portraying life, or - to be more accurate - the artist's subtly selected aspects of life, since no work of art could ever tell all there is to tell about anything. 

Reality is protean and elusive -  more complex than any set of terms and concepts in any language can ever exhaustively define. 

But so are we. Humans. Complex. Subtle. Resilient. Nimble. Speaking many languages and quite able to translate their deeper levels of meaning from one language to another. After all, we grew up here. Evolved here. 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a nice day. And never forget: there is ...there really is ...always hope.