The wonderful gift of life

Lionel Shriver’s So Much for That is a book about life, death and a whole range of things that fit in between of those two. It tells the story of two families, both victims of a deadly disease, and their lives even in the most desperate times. There’s Shep Knacker, a middle-aged man who used to run a successful business but sold it in order to move to a remote island, where he could live the rest of his life away from stress and the western world’s demands. The story begins when Shep arrives at home with plane tickets to Pemba, South Africa, only to be informed by his wife that she has cancer and needs his health insurance.

The situation of Shep’s best friend Jackson is no better. He has two daughters, one of whom suffers from a disease called FD and will be dead by the time of her thirtieth birthday, and another who’s jealous of all the attention her sister gets and compensates for it by eating ice cream. Jackson’s never-ending criticism of the modern society is an interesting theme, which continues to be contemplated throughout the book. It’s true that the few people in charge of society just keep getting what they want, while the rest of us are left to survive in a jungle of rules, payments and punishments. We do what we are told just because that’s expected of us. The lesson is that when you’re arrogant and remorseless enough, you can get away with murder. 

One of the main thematic questions in So Much for That is the value of human life. At the beginning of the book Shep is wealthy, if not even rich, by all standards, but one year of chemo and medication for his wife and he’s one step away from going bankrupt. He’s expected to do everything he can for his wife, no matter how bad his own situation will be when she dies. Basically he’s expected to throw his life away, too, just to give three extra months of pain and misery to the woman he loves. All his life Shep has played by the rules, but in the end he does what we all should do: he decides to live his life and use his money the way he has always wanted, but never had the courage to.

So Much for That is also an insightful depiction of a sick person’s life without all the clichés of seeing everything clearer and gaining a spiritual dimension when you’re close to death. In all its ugliness and despair, it gives you an idea of what it must feel like when people are saying their goodbyes while you’re still fighting, and visiting only because you’re going to die soon. Shep’s wife Glynis is a strong and independent person, and she refuses to give up her personality just because she happens to be fatally ill. In the course of her last year she deals with most complicated emotions, satisfies her most simple and basic needs, and finally, in the end, takes her fate as it is. Even though So Much for That is a book about death and misery, its ultimate message to its readers is that maybe life is worth living after all. We just have to have the courage to make it that way.      

Finnish film production

Many people claim that Finnish films can’t even be spoken of on the same day as American ones, and I’m not a huge fan of the Finnish film production myself either, but sometimes it might be reasonable to try to analyze what makes us form these opinions. Too many people skip Finnish films out of habit and don’t even bother to give them a chance. Sure, the leading roles are always given to the same few actors and you might not be blown away by the special effects, but the truth is that no-one really wants Finnish films to be made like the American ones. It simply wouldn’t be believable.

The best Finnish films are the ones whose makers know Finland’s and Finnish people’s strengths and aren’t afraid to use them. For example in the movie Rare Exports Finnish mythology has been combined with black humor and original Finnish action: not riding in some fancy high-tech motorboat but instead in an old snowmobile. Napapiirin sankarit succeeds in laughing at Finnish people themselves and once again the humor is so bad and tacky it actually makes it good. Somehow it seems that you can’t make a good Finnish movie without snow and winter, but luckily we have more than enough of those.

Finnish children’s movies and animations have done quite well lately. For example Niko - Lentäjän poika has been distributed to many countries and also liked there. Other successful 21^st century children’s movies, which have been acknowledged at least nationally, are Joulutarina and Risto Räppääjä. This might be because with children less is more, and the moviemakers don’t have to try to impress them so badly. When making a Finnish film, for kids or for adults, the best results are achieved with sticking to the kind of homey and down to earth approach to a subject which comes naturally to Finnish people.

Lost in modern art

The headline of this text is quite right if you ask the public’s opinion about modern art. Many people have probably come across it at some point in their life, but despite the effort they just don’t get it. When you used to look at a painting in the olden days, the chances were you could actually tell what it tried to depict. Nowadays many pieces of art can be analyzed and interpreted in multiple ways and this might seem difficult if you don’t think of yourself as much of an art guru.

In my opinion people should be guided and helped more in order to get them interested in modern art. Museums should replace their fancy-term-using guides with people who could translate the language of art into something a normal person understands. When I visited the Kiasma modern art museum in Helsinki I really had no idea why someone had recorded a half an hour image of an empty room, and would’ve loved for someone to have told me. 

There are many good qualities in modern art which unfortunately sometimes go unnoticed when people are so concentrated on not understanding an art exhibition. Modern art is collective: sometimes a work of art has been made by more than just one artist and sometimes even the audience can have a say at what a piece of art turns out to be like. Instead of just a plain picture on a canvas modern art is often three-dimensional, which makes it more impressive. It triggers more senses than just the sight, e.g. it might also contain music.

I think that in a few years’ time modern art could be well on its way to achieving a valuable goal. Art should be for everyone to experience and create, since we all have a need to express our feelings in some way. Modern art has already taken into consideration that painting of scenery is not for everyone: it’s more free and versatile than traditional art. Now people only have to be encouraged to try it out – they might just like it.

E-books - books of the future

The statement of the headline might very well soon be true: as more and more parts of the average person’s life are being transferred in to the world-wide web, there’s no reason why books would be an exception. However, this doesn’t mean I personally support the idea. Don’t get me wrong, the internet is a decent source of information, especially if you need it fast, but people also need something in their lives that is concrete. It doesn’t matter if it’s just a paper-back book or the morning’s paper; it gives you the feeling of actually doing something instead of just watching other people act. You can’t put E-books in your bookshelf for other people to see what is important to you. After all, books can tell a lot about people and their lives.

Another thing that worries me about this E-book system is the possibility of books eventually suffering from the new publishing channel. They might be shortened because no-one wants to stare at a screen for hundreds of pages, or made easier to understand to lure in the bigger audiences. This is in my opinion what has happened to newspaper articles on the internet. The subject is almost never covered thoroughly, because people don’t have the patience to focus on anything for longer than the bare minimum. They want to be told the main points immediately and in a clear, compact way. This leads to everyone knowing what has happened, but no-one concentrating on why.

Some might reason their fondness of E-books by saying that everyone has access to them. In my opinion this is not true, since not nearly as many old as young people know how to use a regular computer, not to mention an IPad. Libraries, which are one of the best benefits our tax money offers us, would become unnecessary because there’s no such service provided on the internet. People might buy fewer books since what use is there in owning a file which will just be saved on a database among other meaningless stuff? Old-fashioned books which have actual pages have meaning, a soul in them. They not only tell a story but have one of their own as well. Books are a source of knowledge, entertainment and strong emotional experiences which make people’s lives better in a simple but significant way.       

A mother and her son

We Need to Talk About Kevin was released in the autumn of 2011 and is based on a book by Lionel Shriver. It tells the story of a troubled young boy who becomes a school shooter, but the relationship between Kevin and his mother is also a big theme. It hasn’t gained the huge international attention it in my opinion should have. This might be because most people only look for entertainment when watching a movie, and We Need to Talk About Kevin doesn’t offer that. It makes you uncomfortable, scared, hopeful, furious, sad, thoughtful, and many other things but leaves no-one cold. It’s not a movie you can watch, enjoy and forget the next day.

When I saw We Need to Talk About Kevin I was impressed by how well it matches Shriver’s book. Both the movie and the book start off a little slowly and it might be hard to follow the story at first, but if you just concentrate and get past the beginning you’ll be mesmerized and unable to stop watching or reading. The actors, especially Tilda Swinton as Kevin’s mother and Ezra Miller as Kevin himself, have done an amazing job. They haven’t been given that many lines, which means that a bulk of the acting and communication has to happen via gestures, expressions and body language. Miller is magnificent as the cold, indifferent and twisted teen-aged boy whose main goal in life seems to be making his mother’s life miserable. Swinton manages to impersonate the mix of confusion, disgust and unconditional love her character feels towards her son in a startlingly believable way. 

We Need to Talk About Kevin has many themes, the most obvious one being school shootings and the amount of pain they cause. I like that Shriver and the movie’s producers haven’t settled on filming one and a half hours of gory details of how the shooting itself happens but have tried their best to get to the bottom of why some people feel so desperate that they think the only way to ease their pain is to cause it to someone else. Kevin is not described as crazy or under the influence of violent computer games, but simply a victim of the modern world. He feels that nothing matters, it’s all so shallow and meaningless, and when nothing matters there aren’t that many restrictions limiting your actions.

One of the movie’s important themes is built around Kevin’s mother. She’s not the motherly type to begin with and even when Kevin is born she finds it difficult to love him like a mother is supposed to. In this kind of a situation, can you blame it on the mother? This seems far-fetched to me, since Kevin’s little sister grew up to be perfectly ordinary. Then again, if Kevin wasn’t getting any bad influences from around him, it would mean he was born a bad person, and I don’t feel comfortable believing this either.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is one of those movies that stays with you long after the credits have scrolled off the screen. It keeps you in its grip until the last shocking revelations, but still in the end doesn’t leave you completely lost and hopeless. It’s a timeless story of terror, guilt and regret, but ultimately of hope in humankind.