A teacher named Rolfe narrates his older brother’s story in the Russell Banks novel, Affliction (1989), and even if he is not likely to be a wholly reliable narrator, he can surely be trusted in pointing out his brother’s deepening affliction.  Wade Whitehouse, the 41-year-old sibling, is divorced from Lillian, the only woman he has ever genuinely loved, and painfully misses having his young daughter in his care.  He struggles against the wrath of his half-mad father and harbors unreasonable suspicions about the men around him, at the risk, it turns out, of losing his job.

Wade’s life starts going down the toilet.  For him to be is not really to live, for he is living with a “dumb helplessness.”  Or he begins to live with it.  Being is all that Wade has.  A helpless man is not free.  A Christian couple, Wade’s sister Lena and her husband Clyde bring to the family a set of traditional religious beliefs that their relatives don’t know what to do with.  Lena and Clyde can be fatuous, but that they live lives distinctly separate from those of Wade and his father is understandable.  The men’s behavior creates a maelstrom increasingly difficult to control.

Affliction is cohesive, thrilling and mature.  It is better than much of Faulkner, and although it is not as profound as the best of Faulkner, to me it is just as powerful as it.

Girlfriends (1978 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Its nebulous ending is not much of a flaw.  Claudia Weill‘s Girlfriends (1978) is still a pretty good film about a young Jewish woman (Melanie Mayron) who loses her live-in friendship with BFF Anne (Anita Skinner) when the latter moves out to get married.  The arrangement worked, but for Susan, the Jewish girl, very little after that works very well, including a foolish dalliance with a married rabbi.  On her own, Susan painstakingly searches:  for herself no less than for an actual job that will relieve her poverty.

Weill directed and Vicki Polon wrote this trenchant, fundamentally comic (and low-budget) picture.  At 88 minutes long it is soundly interesting with a mild edginess.  Memorably does Mayron play the charming and errant Susan.  Girlfriends is enjoyable, despite some visually ugly nudity.  “Sarna at the Well” (an artistic 1939 photograph by Gotthard Schuh) it ain’t.*

*Susan, by the way, is a budding photographer.

*I have yet to see “Sarna at the Well” on the Internet.  It is displayed in the book, Nude Photography by Peter-Cornell Richter.

English: fragment of the Gospel of Matthew (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“And if anyone gives a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is my disciple, I tell you the truth, he will certainly not lose his reward.”

This is from Matthew’s Gospel (NIV), and I do not believe that by “little ones” Jesus meant believing children (merely).  He meant believers period.

A person who provides a follower of Christ with a cup of water will not lose his Heaven-sent reward, whatever it may be.  But if he’s unsaved, what does it matter that he will get a reward if after he dies he just goes to Hell?  How much value can the reward have?

Natalie Portman, actress. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Five women (Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, et al.) investigate a dangerous swampland captured by something known as “the Shimmer,” previously investigated by military operatives who lost their lives.  This is the premise of the recent movie Annihilation (2018), a sci-fi tale largely nonsensical and thus inferior—but intriguing too.  It is also deeply disturbing, in a way that has the ring of truth about life.

What seems to be the case about the Shimmer area is that it is representative of pathology.  It is a place of metastasizing, of mutation, of refracted DNA.  The dialogue contains references to cancer, dementia, etc.  The women are in a sphere of deadly catastrophe essentially no different from their own.  What has to be done to annihilate the annihilator?

Sophisticated acting by Portman and Leigh and others enrich the film, and director Alex Garland “has crafted sequences of strange splendor” (Alan Scherstuhl).  Annihilation, in truth, is neither a success nor a failure (I don’t know about the novel from which it is adapted).  It is simply disappointing as sci-fi and compelling as representational art.

Did you ever see the late Dr. Richard Eby, a Christian physician, on Christian TV?  Like Bill Wiese, he claimed to have visited Hell (in the guise of an unbeliever) and to have witnessed Revelation’s lake of fire.  In his telling, the lake of fire is not merely the “second death,” as the Book of Revelation teaches.  But Christian universalist Gary Amirault maintains that Eby eventually told him he believes God will save all mankind, and that he read a letter from Eby to his cousin with statements to that effect.  Curious.  Was Eby not sent to Hell, after all?  Did he never see the damning lake of fire?  He used to assert that these were loci of everlasting punishment.

Another thing that should be pointed out is that Eby declared on TV that at some point Jesus told him Eby would still be alive when Christ made His second coming.  But the man died in 2002.  And this is to say nothing about whether in his stories about Hell there are the same kinds of contradictions that exist in Bill Wiese’s stories.