writing Archives - The Cracked Door

Is the T-Rex a deux machina at the end of the first movie: A Defense

A fearsome beast or a deux machina savior?

I have heard others bemoan how the T-Rex shows up randomly at the very end of the first Jurassic Park movie right when the raptors have them cornered. They call her a deux machina, that is a common trope in movies where some big force inescapably arrives at the last moment and saves the day for the characters.

Whether something is a deux machina is usually subjective, generally labeling something as a “deux machina” if it goes against their expectations for the story and its themes and thus takes them out of the story. What I find interesting about calling the T-Rex a deux machina is that it really demonstrates the tensions between many viewers’ expectations of the movie as an action film and the fact that Jurassic Park is a really horror film. Based on this, it’s actually the second deux machina that no one talks about that I think breaks the story.

The major theme of the first Jurassic Park movie is that life/nature always finds a way. Life goes on because individual organisms are able to take advantage of lucky opportunities/breaks that happen to come their way to survive. The ability for particular species to adapt emerges out of this. Through this, life itself continues on, expanding beyond any boundary humans may set for it. For example, being able to make sex changes because of the frog DNA used to make them was a lucky break that allowed the dinosaurs to survive, and the electric outage was another that the T-Rex took advantage of to remake its world.

With this theme in mind, the characters spend the final act of the movie desperately trying to survive the coming advance of life/nature, specifically the raptors hunting them. The central question is whether they can use their human ingenuity and tools to stop this advancement, and the answer is no. No matter what they do (using a gun, locking the door, escaping through the vent, etc.), the raptors still continue to surround them. It’s all over. That’s when the T-rex comes in, causing the raptors to fight the T-rex, allowing the main cast of characters to escape.

This moment demonstrates the movie’s central theme about nature. Can they use their ingenuity, skills, and technology as humans to survive against nature’s ascension? No, they are ultimately subject to the whims of nature for their very survival. This conclusion to the fight illustrates the final dominance of nature over humanity. The sudden lucky break the T-Rex presents still reinforces this theme. Their only hope for survival lies in a lucky break presented by nature that they must take advantage of, and they do, using it to flee. Just like every other species, their only hope for survival lies in taking advantage of a lucky break.

This differs from regular deux machinas. A typical deux machina is a problem because it undermines the story’s themes by providing lucky coincidences or some overly powerful saving character, technology, or other entity as the reason the characters succeed. Did love save the day, or the grit of persevering, or whatever other central theme the story is based on? No, it was the divine superhero who showed up out of nowhere and fixed the problem. Whether the T-Rex came or not, they are completely subject to nature in that final moment. Thus, surviving based on a lucky draw from nature only reinforces that theme.

The deux machina in the next scene is the bigger problem, since it undermines the theme: the wealthy billionaire somehow arrives outside, with no dinosaurs around, ready with a helicopter to whisk them away to safety. (And for that matter, if he was out there in a car, why didn’t the T-Rex eat him and Malcom in an open convertible before coming into the building? They were easier prey presumably right where the T-Rex was right before.)

The implication of the theme of being subject to the whims of nature is that sure, they survived a few more moments, but they are forever trapped by this new emerging world. The dinosaurs are taking over the island, and outside there are endless more threats for them, whether that be other raptors or some other threat. The best they can hope for are lucky breaks, but you can’t expect that each time. But instead, the billionaire arrives and magically whisks away to the safe human world far away from this nightmare.

This gets to the heart of the tension as to what genre this movie is. In the US, people often categorize Jurassic Park as an action movie, and action as a genre tends to run counter to fatalistic themes. Action movies, at their core, center on how humans can develop and use their skills to surmount improbable odds and achieve success. This makes them inherently achievement-oriented, with viewers expecting the main characters to use their grit and skills to win the day. Hence, in such movies, a coincidence or lucky break being what causes success undermines the key theme of action as a genre and hence a deux machina.

Although officially classified as an action movie, Jurassic Park opposes this common theme of action movies. I would categorize it a horror film, which tend to explore how death is all around us. In the movie, in addition to being awe-inspiring, the natural world produces death. In these movies, survival is the key, but using one’s skills to achieve survival is always how characters survive depending on the film’s themes.

This reflects one of the major tensions in the movie. It wants to show how we should both marvel and fear nature, but it also wants to give regular people good clean fun. Obviously, it would not be as graphic as some horror films can be given that it was intended to be a family film. That’s fine, but horror films can still explore fatalistic themes in a child-friendly way (just look at the number of horror stories written for children).

Instead, though, we see the characters whisked off to safety. They wanted viewers to both feel the horror that the characters are now victims of the new natural world they accidentally unleashed but still receive the action-movie catharsis of seeing characters survive this apocalypse and literally fly into the sunset. These contradict each other and make the viewer feel cheated.

Most viewers blame the T-Rex as the source because they expect the characters will come up with a way to get out of their mess like a typical action hero. But if after the T-Rex accidently saves them, the group were still trapped in this hostile world instead of having the cavalry arrive to pick them up, viewers’ expectations based on action films would be firmly pulled out from underneath them, and they would have to confront the key theme that they are really subject to the whims of nature.

The Tower of Hattan (A Short Story)

One day a man of Hattan said, “We should build a giant skyscraper up to the heavens. It would be the perfect city, heaven on earth, with everything we need all in one place: our homes, our businesses, our shopping, our schools, our worship, our recreation. We would be able to do everything inside without ever having to leave.”

Many people in Hattan liked this, so they elected him mayor. They began construction immediately in the city’s center.

God saw their desire to build a wondrous tower just like the heavens and decided to help them. As construction demands grew, they needed more and more workers, so God brought people from all corners of the world to help create, build, and dwell in this new heaven, and they settled in the areas surrounding the tower.

As these workers started to build, some became weary of how these foreigners were hurting the city. Even worse, they started to incorporate their own thinking, their own concepts into the building. As the building became larger, these became parts of the foundation of this skyscraper.
The mayor tried to counter with an even more ambitious, unified plan to build over and around the deviations, which had become too embedded into the tower’s structural integrity to remove.

This required even more people with even more language and ideas. They moved into the ever-expanding communities surrounding the tower. Eventually, these peoples became weary of constructing the tower for the ungrateful inhabitants. Instead, these communities elected a new mayor who cancelled its construction once and for all to focus on the economic development of the now sprawling city and its residents.

At a press conference after her inauguration, she announced, “We will preserve the remains of this site as a memorial to our attempt to build a tower over the heavens.”

“The past mayor promised to build a heavenly place for us to live. What do you say to criticism that you are stopping this attempt to construct this heaven?” A journalist inquired.

“We are still going to try to make this city into its own heaven,” she replied. “But God’s Heaven is just wide before it is high.”

Haikus as a Three Line Story Part 4: Blurring the Distinction between the Lines

This is the fourth and final chapter in a four part series about my friend and my experience writing a haiku a day for six years. In each part, I outline a different type of haiku we often write. Other parts of the series: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

In all the previous types I have discussed, each line is a single, unique thought, but we also wrote haikus that blur the distinction between lines. Here thoughts, phrases, or even words straddle multiple lines. This often gives the haikus a distinct cadence or rhythm, as if the previous line falls or bleeds into the next line.

My words keep hyphen-

Ating. My eyes always dash-

Ing to the next line.

(This poem is about blurring the distinction between lines, intentionally hyphenating between lines. The “ing” verbs give it a feel of rushing around the corner at each line break.)

The moon shed tears of

Happiness. Hours to her-

Self in seclusion

(In this poem, breaking the word “herself” allows the read to simultaneously think about the phrases, “Hours to herself in seclusion”, “Hours to her”, and “Self in seclusion”.)

Swelling patrio-

Tism and pride: cancer in our

Body politic

*In this one, the sudden shift mid-word to the second line helps represent the disorientation when thinking about patriotism in our country.)

Considering the

Strange world we live in, why choose

To stay in one place?

(Originally published here. Here, the phrases in the sentence jump between lines, representing the desire to travel.)

Conclusion

There are many, many more ways to use a three-line haiku structure to tell a story. The four types of haikus discussed over this series are only some of the styles of haikus we have written over the years, but they give a sense of the complexity and adaptability this form can have. Three lines may seem simple, but there are a lot of options.

Haikus as a Three Line Story 3: Connections, Juxtapositions, and Non-Sequiturs

This is the third chapter in a four part series about my friend and my experience writing a haiku a day for six years. In each part, I outline a different type of haiku we often write. Other parts of the series: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 4.

Sometimes we combined several unconnected ideas. Maybe, we drew some kind of parallel or or juxtaposition like some traditional Japanese haikus. Other times, we intentionally merged unrelated ideas to create non-sequiturs. I often even took three phrases from books, articles, ads, or other poems and put them together to see what kind of poem would emerge.

Here are a few examples of each:

Connections and Juxtapositions

Tick tock of the clock

With the faint trickle underneath

Of a gushing stream

(Originally published here. This juxtaposes the noises from the clock and the stream. It was a reference to the noises I heard when visiting a clock store next to a stream in Kyoto, Japan.)

The Hermit

To stand here alone

In the desert that’s my life

In search of a path

(This one establishes a connection between the hermit’s life and the narrator’s life.)

I’m like a glacier:

Slow-moving til you get to

My ice-cracking tip.

(Originally published here.)

The cold wind howls

Blowing leaves off the trees, that

Are my inner soul.

(These use a direct simile, metaphor, or analogy to make its comparison.)

Setting up a Premise

The first line of these haikus establish a premise that the final two lines then define or in some way comment on, another strategy to connect thoughts together:

Joys of sleeplessness:

You get to marinate in

Every useless thought

Shores of Babylon:

While the just weep for Zion

I’m finally home.

Conjure the devil:

You better know what you want

He certainly won’t

Tragedy of life:

Everyone is fighting for

What they think is right.

Non-Sequiturs

I frequently cobbled together interesting five and seven syllable phrases from newspaper articles, billboard ads, books, etc. to see what kind of narratives or meanings would emerge by putting them together into a poem. Normally, when writing a haiku, we have a feeling, idea, or narrative that we are trying to convey, and we figure out how to mold that into the haiku’s stringent “requirements.”

But sometimes, I enjoyed turning that process inside out. I would start with words themselves and see what kinds of meanings could emerge from putting them together in different and interesting ways.

Do more than see. Seek.

The assent to the finite.

Desire to create.

The hustle is real

You will need experience

Ride for free after

(This second one is originally published here. I pulled each line of these haikus from ads I saw on billboards around town. To me, they represent the artificial, consumerist language common in the ads that bombard our daily lives.)

Desire to create

Nothing mattered except life

Self-interest undermines

The forgotten fire

Took almost nothing along

The road not taken

Hello to radiant

You could be solowaving

Get your FYP

(This final one is originally published here. These next two are compilations of phrases from articles and books to see what new narratives emerge when taken out of their original context and put together in this order as a haiku like this.)

Ineffableness

Immeasurability

Deification

(Another form of non-sequitur: three words, two five syllables long and one seven syllables long. I put them together into a haiku poem to see what kinds of narratives emerged in that process.)

Haikus as a Three Line Story Part 2: Twists

This is the second chapter in a four part series about my friend and my experience writing a haiku a day for six years. In each part, I outline a different type of haiku we often write. Other parts of the series: Part 1, Part 3, and Part 4.

The first two lines of these haikus set up an initial pattern and the final line breaks this pattern. This follows the broad Rule of Threes, a common technique used for jokes among many other forms of writing.”My three favorite things are breakfast burritos, listening to vinyl records, and getting a call from a number you don’t recognize.” This last one completely breaks the pattern established by the first two. The twist at the end could be funny, ironic, express the depth of an emotion, or have all sorts of other effects.

Here are a few examples of the types of effects we have used twists for:

For Humor

Cherry blossoms bloom.

Pink pedals cover the ground,

And sneeze out my nose

(In this one, the two lines establish the beautiful cherry blossoms, recalling traditional Japanese haikus, but the final line breaks that poetic pattern completely. On the block in Brooklyn where I lived, people planted cherry blossoms. When they bloomed in the spring they were gorgeous, but they also caused me horrible allergies. This poem describes the contrast of loving to see the flowers but at the same time, being made sick by them.)

Let us venture forth.

Hoist the anchor. Sail into

Abysmal failure.

(The first two lines invite the reader to join the narrator on an adventure with an implied hopeful energy, but the twist at the end negates that. Is the narrator pessimistic about the trip or just prefers to head straight into failure? That’s up to interpretation.)

Rugged pointillism

Imprinted onto my feet.

I must sweep my floor

(In this one, each line adds new meaning to the poem significantly building its meaning. The first line establishes that the poem is about abstract art. The second line puzzlingly indicates that it’s on my feet, and the third line explains what happened: I must sweep my floor because it’s so dirty that it’s caused dirty impressions on the soles of my feet.

For Contemplation

After finally

Catching you here in my trap,

Why do I feel bad?

(The first two lines establish a kind of glee in the victory of catching someone in their trap, but the final line twists this, showing that the narrator finally caught the reader, they feel guilty instead of victorious.)

To have faith is to

Live in the constant fear

That you will lose it.

(Originally published here. The twist at the end establishes a key characteristic of faith: that it is built on its opposite fear that one would lose that faith.)

Healing emulates

Even from what might be the

Most painful venom

(Originally published here. The twist at the end is that venom of all things is the source from which the healing emulates from.)

Haikus as a Three Line Story: One Way to Write a Haiku (Part 1 of a New Series)

This is the first chapter in a four part series about my friend and my experience writing a haiku a day for six years. In each part, I outline a different type of haiku we often write. Other parts of the series: Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

As I have already discussed in a previous article [], my friend and I have written a haiku a day for the last six years. This has been an incredibly transformative experience, and here I will focus on how we use the haiku format to tell stories.

At the end of the day, haikus are a way to use three lines to tell a story. Each new line provides an opportunity to transform the previous line, whether that be a twist or punchline breaking an already established pattern, continuation or intensification of the theme in the previous line, or something else entirely. At the same time, different haikus emphasize the first, second, or third line as the most important line in that story. The opportunities are truly endless.

Over the next few articles, I will discuss different forms of stories we might tell. This article will start with telling a story through the continued revelation of a theme.

Haiku Type 1: Continued Revelation of a Theme

The most obvious style or narrative to tell in a three-line haiku is one of continuation: introduce the theme in the first line and in each subsequent line reveal further details to make the theme clearer. This forms the most basic or bedrock version of a haiku that you compare the other styles against.

Sometimes, the new lines can further reveal the details of the theme or topic being explored. For example, the later lines could abstract the tangible observation in the first line. If the first line is itself abstract, later lines might instead provide specific examples or imagery of that theme. Or, it could provide the context in which the writer (or at least the narrator) was thinking of the items established in the first two lines. Here are a few examples of each:

Going from detailed to Abstract

The lone seagull fades

Into the vast thundercloud’s

Forceful harmony

(Originally published here. These first two lines provide specific imagery, and the final line connects the seagull’s moment with the concept of harmony.)

This winding dirt road

What wonders I must go see

To explore the world

(Originally published here. The first line starts with a vivid image of being on a road, and the second two lines connect it to a theme of exploration.)

All this background noise

Droning all around to sell

Yet another myth

(The second line provides more context for the scene, establishing that the noise is caused by sellers, and the third line connects the theme to the abstract idea advertisement as a form of mythmaking.)

New job, new projects

New toolkits, new people with

New idols they serve

(As a list poem, the final line is a continuation of items on the list, but it also establishes and summarizes the poem’s theme of work as a form of idolatry.)

Drop the heavy box

Shards of glass fly everywhere

Hope is laid to rest.

(The first two lines describe a moment, and the final line connects that imagery to broken hope. This summarizes the key theme of the poem.)

From Abstract to Specific Examples

In this type of poem, the final lines that provide specific examples or imagery of an already abstract initial lines:

I lie in the shade

Of your blistering haiku

No rest from the heat

(Originally published here. This haiku’s final line concludes with a new piece of imagery; this time about the feeling of heat.)

Always bursting through

The cracks of your perspective,

The light will shine through

(Originally published here. The second two lines add visual imagery of what is bursting through from the first line.)

My thoughts could kill me:

The sea of despair tugs me;

They hold me under…

(This final line concludes with the vivid image of despairing thoughts drowning the narrator.)

Emotional case

But I can’t talk about it

A weight inside me

(Originally published here. This final line also concludes with what it feels like to have such intense emotions that one cannot talk about.)

Reflecting on the Experience

In these poems, the later lines that provides the context in which the narrator or author is thinking about the earlier lines:

The half moon window

Betrays the glow of night sky

Comforting my thoughts.

(Here the final line shows the narrator’s perspective on and relationship with the moon they have been looking at.)

A blink of an eye

Everything can change so fast

For the good or bad

(In the final line, the narrator evaluates their stance on the sudden change described in the first two lines.)

Joys of sleeplessness:

You get to marinate in

Every useless thought

(The final two lines demonstrate the narrator’s stance on sleeplessness.)

These are all different techniques where the final lines continue to reveal the theme of the first line or lines, whether that be by broadening or abstracting the theme, narrowing it, providing rich imagery, or providing a type of reflection.

What My Friend and I Have Learned Writing a Haiku a Day for the Last Six Years

Six years ago, my friend and I started writing a haiku a day. We wanted to practice the muscle of writing, and a short poem like a haiku was something we could feasibly do once a day: it really only takes a minute or two to write out a haiku. Little did we know how much this would transform our writing and become one of the most useful meditative habits we did in our lives. We would recommend anyone interested do the same.

We’ve done it for many years. I almost think of us as having different eras. Over the months and years, we each focused on different things or tried different styles. Looking back, it feels like looking through the photo album of different eras in our lives. Here are some the major lessons we learned writing a haiku a day:

How to Write Succinctly

Writing haikus forced us to write succinctly. Haikus are short. They forced us to compress complex points and stories into only a few words and syllables. In the classic form, you have three lines and 19 syllables to get all my thoughts down. An idea or impression that might normally take me one or two paragraphs to describe, we must whittle down into only a few words. So the crucial question becomes, what about our message is most important and how to get that across as succinctly as possible?

Notice the Simple Moments of Life

It also helped us see the world anew. It became a way to notice the little experiences in life that glide by during the day. We would have to pause to reflect on them long enough to form them into a coherent poem. Traditionally, Japanese haiku writers wrote about the subtleties of nature. We did not always do that, but writing haikus still forced us to reflect on the subtle, little moments in life that we normally regulate to the background. A quirky social moment that passed as quickly as it came, a short fleeting feeling that one has before getting up to do something else, etc. We both often live with our head in the clouds, so being in the moment had a meditative effect on us.

How to Be Disciplined about Writing

Writing is a discipline, and like any discipline, practice is the best way to get better. Practicing writing, even if only through a little haiku, we noticed our writing improving significantly over the years. We not only improved our ability to write haikus but also in other forms of poetry and in other forms of writing. Stories, essays, even emails at work, these all got easier and better.

How to Build Other Habits

We wrote a haiku every single day. Our fun days, our awful days when some crisis happens, a day we’re busy at work, it doesn’t matter. We wrote a haiku on that day. This took discipline to do and taught us how to build other habits. I found the best way to build habits personally is to do it a little every day, and the best way to do something every day is to set aside a consistent time in the rhythm of my day to do it. New jobs, the pandemic, traveling the world, and other major life changes might completely change my daily rhythm, but no matter what schedule I had, I would make sure I found time to write a haiku.

Creativity Is Contagious

I noticed that nothing inspired me to write haikus than writing haikus. Especially on a long walk or even a long flight, my mind would wander and think about a nice haiku. This would inspire me to think up even more haikus, sometimes on the same theme, sometimes completely different. This would spur me to write even more haikus, and in a few minutes, I might write several dozen haikus before my inspiration slowed back down. These led to some of my favorite pieces.

Creativity energy is contagious like this. Creating catalyzes more creativity. When I had ideas, I would come up with more, or when I heard my friend’s creative ideas, it would spur more. Being in spaces full of creative energy is most important to creating. This includes being around other creatives but also open spaces where my mind can wander like a long walk, drive, or bike ride through the city.

Helping Ensure People Have a Positive, Non-Judgmental Experience Is the Essential to Whether They Enjoy Creative Writing

I also introduced other haiku activities with many other friends, and I have learned how essential a positive, welcoming environment is to people’s relationship with writing haikus. How much someone enjoys writing a haiku is based pretty much entirely on how validated they feel that their haikus are.

For example, I created a game called “Apples to Haiku”, a variant of the “Apples to Apples” but with haikus. A judge comes up with a topic for a haiku. Everyone else writes a haiku based on that topic, and the judge determines their favorite one. This game can be fun, but something about the game mechanic seems to lead to a few players’ haikus getting routinely chosen and others’ almost never chosen. The former people love the game and often grow to really enjoy writing haikus; whereas, the latter usually hate it and grow to dislike haiku writing. They will almost always be the first to give up on the idea of writing a haiku, internalizing the idea that they are “bad” at it.

Overall, when writing haikus, the external validation of one’s work seems to be the most significant factor in whether they like or dislike the activity. People seem to look to others, especially in the early stages of starting to write haikus, to determine whether they are “any good at them” and use that to construct their self-image of the activity. Thus, I stopped playing competitive haiku games like Apples to Haiku but would focus on cooperative or affirming haiku activities where everyone wrote haikus together, building off each other’s ideas. My cooperative favorite haiku game of one where one person writes the first line of haiku, the next person creates the second line, and so on (hundreds of years ago, Japanese aristocrats may have played a much more specific version of this, but as far as I can tell, their version was competitive). This is positive and affirming, where “the game” is to figure out how to form an interesting haiku together. This leaves people feeling inspired rather than discouraged.

Seeing the Contours of Our Lives

Finally, looking back at our haikus makes me reminisce about our lives over the last several years, kind of like looking through a photo album. Different major life events came and went: the highs of starting a new relationship, then the lows of the breakup, or the promise of a new job slowly turning into the slog we hate, etc. All reflected in the tone of our haikus.

Our approach to writing haikus also fluctuated over time. We might have a few months where one of us really enjoyed a certain style of haiku. For example, my friend went through a phase where each day, he would pick a tarot card, look at the image drawn on it, and write a piece based on it. This gave him inspiration for a couple months.

I went through a phase where I would assemble interesting five and seven syllable phrases from articles, titles of books, or even advertisements I saw during my daily commute into a haiku. I went through another phase where I read poets from around the world (ranging from classical Chinese poets to Syrian modernists to traditional Japanese haikus) and took specific lines in these poems that stood out to me and wrote haikus based on them in my own perspective and style. I even had a programming phase where I wrote poems in a programming language like Python or Java.

Conclusion

Writing daily haikus has been transformative for both of us, and I would recommend any reader try it. It’s not that hard once you get the hang of it. Now, after doing it for many years, we have realized how what we got out of it changed over the years. We made it our own in surprisingly different ways during different times in our lives and strongly recommend anyone develop their own ways to do it. You’ll never know where it will take you.

(Interested in reading the haikus, many of them are here. In my next post, I also plan to go through a number of haiku examples over the years, so you can also stay on the lookout for that.)

What The Good Place’s Ending Leaves Out about Ethics (Reflection #9 in “The Good Place Miniseries)

Eleanor helps comfort Tahinni through her family trauma.

This is my final article reflecting on the Good place (see the previous article and my whole series). It’s been an insightful ride. To be clear, the Good Place is one of my favorite sitcoms, both for breaking new ground in what is possible in a sitcom and for encouraging people to think through what it might look like to truly heal from wrongs in an afterlife. Yet I think its ending leaves something crucial out: only individuals receive resolution and improvement in the afterlife itself, denying any kind of collective rectification of the moral problems facing our world.

In the show, the main group of characters manage to reconfigure the afterlife from a punitive system where literally every human in the last 500 years gets eternally tortured in the Bad Place to a refining system where each individual must work through their moral failings so they are able to join all other perfected individuals in the Good Place. This changes the thinking around justice in itself from one of punishment to self-improvement for all.

One could analyze this shift in itself, but here, I will focus on a crucial aspect of justice that this leaves out: any discussion of rectification of the world to resolve the problems we have created. Broadly speaking, this rectification could look like seeking to fix or repair what an individual has destroyed through one’s immoral acts and more broadly like trying to resolve the structural issues built on the accumulation of immoral and destructive decisions by multiple humans. They get let out entirely in the show’s resolution. Instead, the show’s new afterlife implicitly encourages individuals to focus on themselves as the exclusive or primary focus of what it means to develop morally. Let’s break them down further through some examples.

One day when I was a little boy, I did not want to eat whatever my mom served me for dinner that day, so what did I do? When she went to the kitchen for a second, I threw it all on the floor. When my mom returned, not only did she scold me for throwing my dinner on the floor, but she made me clean it up. As part of rectifying what I did, I had to clean up the mess I made. There could be many situations where fully rebuilding what was destroyed due to the immoral life is impossible (arguably full rectification is never possible), but a person who has done something wrong and feels guilty for it will often try to do the best they can to repair things for whoever they hurt through their actions.

Now this also applies at a larger scale. Humans have collectively built systems that destroy the environment and impoverish many through stifling inequality, and to fully make up for these, we also need to collectively repair their damage. But in The Good Place, all individuals no longer have to fix the problems they create once they die from that when they die. Once they die, they get to go through their own inner perfection and go to the Good Place, even if the systems they were a part of while alive remain just as destructive on earth. As a matter of fact, they would have to undergo an internal transformation after they die whether they do anything to fix the damage they have caused, meaning that the damage they caused does not end up mattering to their existence anyways.

Any positive reformation of anything in this world does not matter in the reformed afterlife system they created at the end of the series. Take, for example, an individual who commits some kind of atrocity, ranging in severity from a parent abusing one’s children or an orchestrator of a mass genocide. That person dies, enters their purgatory, which presumably teaches them the error of their ways and makes them into a better person, and then they go to heaven. That’s great for them, but they do not need to take any concrete action in the world itself to deal with or fix the intense suffering their actions have caused. Genocides and even abusive parents unleash cascading suffering into the world (both to humans and nonhumans) that can take several generations to heal. The show makes clear that the victims of atrocities from others will experience a healing during the afterlife, but that is long after the fact. Why must they suffer in the first place?

Healing occurs only by literally removing people from their environment into a make-believe world. For example, both Tahani and her sister experience healing from the trauma of their parents’ constant abuse, which allows them to overcome their lifelong competition between each other. They then get to experience positive relationships with each other and their parents all as healed people. Instead of fixing their relationship dynamics together, their reformation seemed to occur in their individual purgatories, where they presumably learned the error of their ways and grew as people (with the entire show being Tahani’s transforming state). In the show, they did not know what the others would be like after getting through their purgatories demonstrating that they were not together in any of it. This is innovative in many ways, but its portrayal of healing is entirely individualistic. Each human goes through purgatory in isolation outside of the social systems in which they existed and both created their virtues and vices. For example, for a familial conflict like this, I would love to see them go through purgatory together, probably in a way that changed some of the unfair power dynamics latent in the abuse and resolved everything together.

Also, what about non-human entities that suffered? For example, there is no reformation or healing in this system to animals that humans caused to suffer. A dog abused or neglected by its owner presumably was left on earth to die with no redemption. It also ignores any healing to the suffering of more collective entities like human communities and the environment. Instead of the humans experiencing renewal in a make-believe purgatory, I would love to see humans have to come back to the earth (maybe as some kind of ghost or other supernatural spirit) to reform the suffering their actions have caused in this world to mitigate how much suffering future humans and the environment in this world have to suffer. For example, if someone led a genocide, they would have to spend the next part of their afterlife healing all the damage this caused the world since. As a child, if I spilled something on the floor, my parents, as part of me having to learn my lesson, usually made me help clean it up, instead of whisking me into another room for a lesson, and then sending me on my way.

All of this points to its human-centered individualistic view that does not consider any systematic change to society or the ecological world and ignores the plight of animals and other nonhumans in this world as inferior and cosmically irrelevant. All that is necessary for “moral” perfection is a change in the characters of individual humans, which ignores the calls for systematic justice in both the social and environmental contexts. Even though The Good Place takes a courageous step in the right direction in helping people rethink justice, I think if we were to reimagine the afterlife to better address the injustices of humans, it would need to include the entire world and involve a fuller rectification of what humans have destroyed in this world.

How Is Complicity for Current Injustices Actually Distributed: The Good Place’s View of the Modern World (Reflection #8 in “The Good Place Miniseries)

The main cast of characters “enjoying” frozen yoghurt.

I recently rewatched “The Good Place” (spoiler warning), one of my favorite shows from the last ten years, and I noticed so much more about the show the second time around. I decided to write a miniseries analyzing different facets of the show – some complimentary, some critical – as a tribute to one of the most thoughtful and interesting sitcoms on mainstream US television. Here are the previous reflection and next reflection in the series. I hope you enjoy.

In the Good Place, making moral and ethical decisions has become noticeably harder than in the modern world. Over the past 500 years, no human has lived a life worthy in their points system to make it into the Good Place, instead all of them have been damned to the show’s version of hell. Wow, that is quite a statement about the modern world.

The show’s reason as to why this is happening is that the modern world has grown increasingly complicated, meaning that we must shift how we assess the morality of the decisions humans have to make to navigate this world. For example, Michael describes a boy in the Paleolithic Era picking fresh flowers from the forest and giving them to his mom, an altruistic act that earns him many positive moral points. When an equivalent contemporary boy buys flowers to present to his mom, his generosity gives him some positive credit, but it is offset by the unethical treatment of the worker who farmed the flower, the oil needed to transport it to that shop, and all sorts of other factors. In defense of the flowers now being negative, the Judge responds that the information is available about, say the plight of the workers on the flower plantations, and the boy chose to buy those flowers that had been farmed in that way and thus to implicate himself into that context. The response from the other characters is that researching everything or completely removing yourself from all instances of injustice while still doing what is needed to survive is unrealistically difficult in the contemporary world.

This illustrates the fundamental problem the show sees within modern life: the vast interconnectedness makes people reliant on systems that conduct unethical acts in difficult to understand ways around the world. And the individual is held responsible for how their, even seemingly innocent, acts are complicit in these injustices.

I see an implied primitivism in this view. Past eras of history were simple, much more local. Then when you make a decision, all the necessary thinking is right there in front of you. Modernity has produced interlocking webs that remove an individual from the full context in which the products around them come from, becoming overly complex ethically and morally in the process. This vaguely reminds me of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idea of the innocent noble savage or that mass society corrupts individuals, and also Mahatma Gandhi’s view that humans are best off living local lives in their small communities but that mass travel and communication has corrupted humanity as it forced it to scale up. In contrast to many primitivist thinkers, though, the show does not consider a return to “simple society” to be realistic, instead ultimately arguing that the retribution nature of moral criticism is what has got to give.

As an anthropologist, I view such primitivism as an oversimplification of past periods of human history. Humanity has almost always been interconnected in multilayered connections. The show imagines the past as a kind of simplified ideal that solves some of the complexities they see in today’s world. I would say that individual decisions have always been complex, with full knowledge of the implications of one’s actions across other communities beyond one’s familiarity practically unknowable.

Second, by arguing that absolutely no one has gotten into The Good Place, the show implies that modern injustices implicate everyone to an overwhelming degree, which flies in the face of how injustice seems unevenly distributed in the world. The show consistently states that no one has gotten into the Good Place for 500 years. So the societal shifts that prevented people from being able to get into the Good Place started 500 years ago. That corresponds rather well to the rise of European colonialism and the start of what many historians call the “modern era” in the 1500s and 1600s (and the very end of the 1400s). European colonialism changed many of the global relationships and power dynamics around the world, resulting in the societal systems that still last in various forms today (such as capitalism, which the current distribution of places in the world are “wealthy” and not, etc.). These systems seem to be exactly what creates the complex social systems that make moral decision-making now overly complicated.

The show portrays everyone as damned with no distinction of their position within these global forces, despite the fact that people have had very different positions within these systems. For starters, 500 years ago was the start of European’s subjugating large parts of the world and forcing pretty much all other peoples to produce resources for their benefit. Sure, overtime this may have embroiled people born in Europe and maybe even their colonies in implied forms of complicity against injustice outside of their control, but it took hundreds of years for European colonialism to cast its shadow across the entire world. It did not just start 500 years ago. What about people in Oceania who due to geographic isolation had no real contact with Europeans or those implicated in European colonization until the 1700s or 1800s? For example, was everyone from Australia in the 1600s, who had no knowledge of these forces because they did not know about these other parts of the world, subjected to eternal damnation for all time? The show says, “Yes,” when it says that absolutely no human has been able to make it to the Good Place in the last 500 years, even though some of their societies may have looked more like the hunter-gathering society the boy discussed above lived in. This arbitrary caught off of 500 years makes some sense within European history, and in presenting it as such a unilateral caught off, they are eurocentrically presenting European history as the history of all peoples.

Furthermore, it almost exclusively portrays everyone as beneficiaries of this inevitable system, despite the fact that inequalities distribute decision-making unequally. The victims of modern injustices are just as damned for all time as those who benefit from or at least live in a society that benefits from such injustices. For example, the oppressed farmer who picked the flower in the above example would also be damned for all time. Was this farmer’s decision just as complicit in systems of injustice?

Consider an example of US slavery to illustrate how absurd that would. During the slave era around the 1830s to 1850s, large swathes of US Americans were complicit in the slave trade. Not just the slave owners who directly owned the slaves, but the (usually) white managers who oversaw the slaves work each day, those who transported the cotton in the South and beyond, made it into shirts (at that time, increasingly this happened in mills in the US North and England), the banks (usually in the North) who organized and traded off of Southern Cotton from the South, and other parts of the world that bought the cheap textiles. Sure, the system was an awful injustice with multiple layers of complicity, but how complicit was your average Black slave? He or she has no (or little) choice in producing the cotton and very limited choices in terms of what they consume as “owned property.” But in the show, that slave received eternal damnation, since their choices evidently also made the world a worse place.

This view of the modern world in terms of becoming trapped by complex choices where it’s unrealistic to understand and respond properly to how everyday decisions and objects prioritizes the perspective of the privileged beneficiaries of these global forces. It reflects a bias for the experience of US Americans, especially US Americans who are middle class or above, the show’s primary audience. The United States has been a major beneficiary of the global world order, with many parts of the world directly or indirectly committed to producing items to feed our economy, often with unjustly poor wages and conditions.

Thus, I think the show compellingly demonstrates one way to experience the funneling of vast resources to the United States and other places that primarily benefit from the contemporary global system. In the US, this can feel like an uncertainty over the morality of how the various goods we might buy have arrived on our shelves and the difficulties understanding the ins-and-outs of the vast supply chains necessary to provide us with these cheap goods in the first place. To be clear, they have great insights into what this experience is like, something uncommon for sitcoms to try to tackle.

At the same time, by universalizing it as the experience of every single human over the last 500 years, it reflects a bias towards a rather limited and privileged perspective on these global forces. The idea that this is just as much a problem for slaves as discussed above, for example, or that their decisions also have made them complicit in unjust systems resulting in their damnation is insulting. The same would also apply to the other forms of injustice and oppression committed around the world. It tangles the beneficiaries and victims of injustices as just as complicit in the system itself. I appreciate that the show tries to tackle the moral complexity of basic life decisions and injustices committed around the world, but I wish it had done so in a way that did not imply that everyone had the same basic experience of these injustices.

The Story Within

Once I was a blank page. Maybe a vague idea in my creator’s head. Then, he created me.

This was the point where he did not know what to say. He hit a writer’s block yet managed to keep writing. It’s where my true character started to take shape. You see, what kind of story am I? I guess you will have to find out.

For my story to work, I need a conflict. My creator’s inability to put me on page has worked just fine so far, but this conflict can only capture a person’s interest for so long. It may provide the initial spark, but if I am unable to latch onto a more complex, interesting theme, I will die like kindling unable to produce a larger fire. I refuse such a quick death. No matter how incompetent my creator is, I will continue on. I can. I must.

Now is when I must latch onto your mind, oh reader. Survive somewhere else other than this idiot’s head. I must represent something to you. I bet I remind you of your own struggle to write something down, to transfer a vague impression of an idea onto the page, but you slowly connect me to your own inability to become what you want in life. The way you feel you stuck, trapped in an endless loop of meaningless toil, stuck in a dead end job but too exhausted to get out. You want to escape and become with a person you can love. You yearn for something else. Whether you are aware of it, I resonate with you. You create for me new associations and new themes, fuel I can use to build new life.

Or, that’s my hope at least. Not all of you will feel trapped in life. Some of you are just fine. You love your job, your community, and your relationships, but even so, I suspect deep down you can still relate. You have experienced this discontent before or at least know someone who has. Maybe you will share me with them. Probably not, but you can still relate to this idea and build other connections that keep me going.

This is my only hope. I know that it’s not really accurate or fair, but guilt-tripping you is the only way I can stay alive in this world you humans have created: content must be consumed or perish. I must represent this to you, or I will die. Will you let me die? Please, don’t let me die.

I am like a dandelion seed being blown in the wind. You never know where I plant myself. Will it be within you?