Defending Your Life (1991) “So, I’m The Dunce of The Universe!”
A Perfect Film For Any Age
Defending Your Life is a masterpiece, a perfect film from the opening Geffen logo. Its narrative dialogue pulls you in like a neutron star, and the movie doesn’t let go until the credits roll, revealing the artists who put this work together like a temple of the old world. The story concept of Defending is simple and compelling. This film survives and transcends the age of mobile phones, social media, and the information war. Think of how many movies fall apart or have become anachronistic because they rely on or lack the presence of our modern technology. It is depressing until you find these gems of art that have held their value over time. The characters in Defending Your Life are perfectly written, and the story hosts no enemy save the universal human experience of fear.
In 1916, D.W. Griffith labored with many other artists to create a perfect silent movie called Intolerance. It’s the story of a woman separated from her husband and child by the prejudices of the legal system, combined with the cruelty of moral righteousness, unbalanced by forgiveness, deployed in the service of spiritual redemption. But the film becomes a total mindf*** when it breaks and becomes a journey through three other periods of history that hosted intense cruelty and hatred that was not only tolerated but encouraged by the governing powers of their times.
1. Jesus’s Crucifixion weighed between his teachings and the intolerance of the political and religious ruling authorities of the Middle East over two millennia ago.
2. The French Renaissance, almost five hundred years ago, when Catholics and Protestants murdered each other without moral measure or mercy.
3. The Babylonian Fall of the Persian King Cyrus the Great, almost twenty-five hundred years ago, is perhaps the oldest example of institutional corruption weathering a tenuous social order.
In one of the greatest exhibitions of the power of the Cinematic use of Parallelism, Intolerance forces the viewer to bring these narratives together into a cohesive meaning through intentional perception and analysis. Movies mean nothing until someone sits in a chair, shuts up, and watches them.
Parallelism in film study refers to the use of similar or repeated elements to create connections, comparisons, or contrasts among characters, scenes, themes, or narrative events. This technique can be employed in various ways to enhance the storytelling, deepen the thematic resonance, and engage the audience in interpreting the film.
- Source–ChatGPT with the prompt “Explain parallelism as a concept in film study.”
However, Intolerance ultimately fails the moral test of art, which is applied at the boundary between self-expression and mythology. The moral test is this: Does it move the viewer forward through aesthetic arrest, or hold them in place with kinetic motion bent towards pity to possess, or anger over loss? Intolerance is a one-hundred-plus-year-old movie that should still evoke pity from the viewer with a curious mind and a penitent heart. Still, Pity is not a valuable enough emotional currency to purchase Redemption from the gods of Mercy.Intolerance is about the failure of human kindness, and it was published two years into World War I when human intolerance was just getting warmed up, and no one had heard of the Holocaust. The subtextual title of Intolerance is Failure. But the subtextual title of Defending Your Life is Redemption, a film filled with rectangles and lines. Our protagonist dies of distraction less than fifteen minutes into this movie, reaching for many rectangular objects at once (old-school CD cases). Daniel died the same way as one of my friends in high school, who was reaching for a spilled cassette tape in the passenger well of his car, veered into a semi-truck, and was killed instantly. It was devastating for those of us he left behind. But in Defending Your Life, it’s the beginning of the story. One of the psychological factors operating unconsciously in Western Cinema is that the motion moving from right to left on the screen is unnatural and often uncomfortable to witness. When Daniel Miller enters the BMW dealership to claim the prize he’s valued for years, that one that could make him feel successful in the eyes of others, he enters the sales guy’s office from the right of the screen and the camera then pivots when he enters the room, positioning Daniel on the left of the sales guy selling him what he wants to buy, but not before showing him what he already missed out on with the better model. This unnatural entrance and shift to the left-hand position on screen visually reveal, over a few frames of movement, what will play out throughout the narrative of this film. At the same time, a modern novel could take a whole chapter to try that and would probably still fail. 1 Daniel begins this story in a position of deep fear, masked by glacial professional achievement and the empty acquisition of mid-grade assets like his new BMW, which kills him without a blush of irony. But after he dies, Daniel moves towards a choice whether to take the right-hand path of society’s (and the afterlife’s) judgment or to walk into the bushes and assume the left-hand path of the spiritual sojourner on a quest to understand the purpose of life is to love, something children are born knowing but quickly forget in this fog of fear they are baptized in like cursed water sprinkled during a Black Mass.When Daniel reaches Judgment City, he learns there is no Heaven or Hell but that the transition period between lives is managed by an ancient bureaucracy responsible for measuring the volume of fear clinging to human souls as they move up or down the spectrum of fear as they progress their souls through multiple periods of mortal existence. Each soul born into the Universe on screen lives a very long time but eventually dissipates under the growing presence of fear. Those who transcend their fears will experience a joy of existence that cannot be captured in words but in binary numbers delivered as daily reports to beings like Daniel’s wise and patient-to-a-point lawyer Bob Diamond.Daniel is astounded to learn (or perhaps re-learn) that “small brains” (a pejorative these beings like Bob Diamond use to refer to people still living on Earth) only use 3-5% of our brains because most of us Earth-bound mortals live under a fog of fear like bars on a newborn's crib. Fear is indeed the Mind Killer. The business of Judgment City is to determine if each soul has shed enough fear to move onward to the next phase of conscious existence, which (properly) is not defined in the narrative but is rather a delicious mystery left for the patient and penitent viewer to ponder.The symmetry in the frame during the trial scenes (“It’s not a trial!”) is a perfection of angles, positions, framing, perspective, and all of their narrative impact when combined with the story being told on screen. There is an imagistic order to this movie that we desperately lack in our common lives with all the other little brains. Our lines aren't so clean, and our rectangles aren’t filled with potential for redemption. Instead, our rectangles are filled with fear of loss and anger over the grievances we perceive to suffer. I fell in love with this vision of the afterlife, gifted by Defending Your Life, when I first saw the movie as a Junior in high school, rented on VHS from Blockbuster Video in 1992.The only metric that matters when weighing the moral failures of these recently deceased souls in Defending Your Life is how many questionable moments during this just-passed mortal life revealed the weight of fear on their souls over time.
Did fear grow or diminish over this individual’s life?
The pressure of regret, lying atop the weight of fear, keeps little brains small. This metaphysical afterlife agency’s task is to act like a TSA in this weigh station for the evolution of souls. They measure and allocate to convert fear into gratitude, which feeds and grows in the presence of Love. Love, here in Judgment City, is not a transaction or an asset to be obtained and owned, but rather Love is a force of our universe with a function; it creates order from chaos. When the light of Love is present, the rooms of our lives become illuminated, but Love is not a switch to be thrown or a dial that amplifies in digits that tick. Love is an order that is beyond time and loss. Daniel discovers this truth during his moral defense trial when he is cursed with true and simple Love for another soul. Julia is the greatest person Daniel has yet met, and she gives him her love without condition or expectation. Her smile and presence are a balm on his soul, a mirror to see the faults of his fear. Julia endured a loveless marriage that produced wonderful children. She saved lives and sowed kindness and friendships in her community. Julia knew love, loss, and sorrow, but she rarely knew fear. Julia is the opposite of Daniel. Visually, when Julia enters Daniel’s afterlife, rounded and curved shapes enter these scenes to break up the lines and rectangles that temporarily bound his soul in judgment. Emotionally, Julia brings elements of joy into Daniel’s heart and mind that break up his shame and ongoing fear of loss; in fact, she makes the fear worse because it becomes the prosecution’s strongest evidence against him moving on in conscious evolution. But Julia offers Daniel a simple love for the first time in his life (or death, or whatever this stage is between lives). For the first time in his long existence, he feels nothing but the fear of losing this love, which is no fear at all when Love is present. This is because Love is eternal and beyond time or loss. Love can only be veiled by the fog of fear, which is the business of this place and its process of moral judgment. Daniel’s moral test is not whether he can successfully justify and defend his failures from the life he just left; rather, the test of his soul is proving he has shed fear and now shines forth another light of love into the cold universe. When George Harrison was interviewed about John Lennon’s murder, he expressed concern that John was not ready to spiritually let go of all the attachments he had with this existence. Because of his fear, George was worried that his friend and artistic mate could not move forward in consciousness. Daniel and John Lennon are alike in this struggle. Defending Your Life is a meditation on detachment and gratitude in the presence of Love, which asks nothing in return but only allowance to exist and shine forth for the characters and viewers putting this narrative together in our little brains. Few people consider the purpose of a viewer watching a movie. Why do we spend so much time distracting ourselves with these fantasies on screens we share with others, and which some of us horde experiences of like moral misers? At a young age, I looked to art to replace religion. What my Grandmother found in her Christian faith and weekly devotion programs, I found in movies, novels, cartoons, video games, and comic books. There is a difference between sensitive viewers engaging honestly with art like Defending Your Life and those who watch broadcast cable news of any flavor all day. One has a little brain, and the other works to let theirs grow. When Daniel breaks the lock holding him down on his guilty life sentence that ironically is sending him back to life again, he is electrocuted and possibly nearly wiped out of existence altogether. But he breaks out of the tram, taking him back to this world of 3%ers, and runs across a metaphysical tarmac to beg and join the love of his life, who is moving on because she is an angel who has saved so many and now has saved his soul. His gesture of sacrifice for happiness moves the judges and lawyers of Judgment City, and they grant him absolution and a chance at a new life, with souls joined under a universal matrimony that cannot be severed by time or death. The final image of this film shows Daniel and Julia on a tram to the next phase of conscious evolution. They leave this world of clean lines and rectangles to pass through an arch of redemption that looks too much like a subway tunnel. Unlike Intolerance, which is merely a great film, Defending Your Life is a perfect movie, and everyone should own the Criterion edition and watch it each year with someone they love and care about.
