I admit there were moments along the way I really loved, elements I thought were great. I really liked Michael Stuhlburg, the actor who played Larry Gopnik. I LOVED Mrs. Samsky. I thought Sy Ableman was a wonderfully horrible character. I enjoyed the references to F Troop, which I vaguely remember liking when I was a little girl. I loved when the rabbi started quoting Grace Slick at the end. And there was something about the look of the film that I found quite compelling.

But the end? I had heard that it didn't really have an end, that it just STOPPED. And sure enough, it didn't really have an end; it just stopped. I was so irritated that I cut it off before the credits, which I typically watch.

And then, about ten minutes later, the meaning of the ending hit me, and I just started laughing, because I got it, and because it was perfect. I have been thinking about it all day, remembering the entire movie in a different light, and now I wish I hadn't already sent it back to Netflix so I could watch it again.

If you haven't seen the movie and don't want to read any spoilers, don't click on the "continue reading" link. Instead, just watch this terrific cartoon version of Job:

but if you want the details of the epiphany I had about the end, read on:

And then the movie ends.

What the fuck? I said.

And then, the fuck became clear: the fuck is god. God the father is God the fuck.

The cloud is god. The storm is god. God is what fucks you up, and it can do a damn good job. The story of Job ends with God the Father speaking to Job out of a whirlwind. GtF explains that he doesn't have to explain himself, and Job cowers before him, and then everything Job lost is restored to him, and he lives happily ever after.

Once I knew that, the rest of the ending made sense. The problems with the x-rays? They're the boils Satan was allowed to smite Job with after GtF gave his permission, but GtF specified that Satan couldn't kill Job, so we know Larry won't die. Everything else will be returned too. It's hard to want Larry to get back together with his horrible wife, but maybe things will work out with Mrs. Samsky....

And I just LOVE that depiction of GtF as a nasty black midwestern tornado. It totally kicks the ass of the guy on the Sistine Chapel, if you ask me. I seriously feel that that movie was the best, most meaningful bit of theology I have encountered in years. It made the concept of god real to me in ways nothing else ever has.

From now on, God's name is GtF and the mental image of GtF I carry in my mind is that black cloud.

This felt so natural and necessary that it seemed like the natural inclination of my own heart. Whether it was or wasn't, my sense of urgent obligation was supported and fed by my mother's firm belief--which she still lives by--that when you make your bed, you have to lie in it.

It all became more urgent and obligatory in adolescence, when I first encountered the scriptural command to "endure to the end." It shows up in the New Testament, but for reasons I never fully understood, as it set them apart from rather than brought them closer to other Christians (OK, I guess that's the reason), Mormons prefer to emphasize passages in their own scripture that use this phrase, like some passages from the Book of Mormon. (I'm not in a mood to look them all up and link to them. Just google the phrase if you don't believe me. You'll probably turn up this weird page featuring a ring designed by some Osmond.)

Anyway, the point is, this personal moral obligation I felt suddenly became religious. It wasn't just something I had to do because I was wired that way; it was something I had to do to please God. So I did it all the more.

The end I tried most desperately to endure to was the church. I really did not want to leave the church. I didn't want to hurt my family; I didn't want to abandon my roots; I didn't want to live with the ramifications of admitting that so much of my life was based on error; I didn't want all the suffering of my mission to be a mistake, something I could have avoided if I'd just made better, wiser decisions.

When I did leave the church, it wasn't because I was embracing something else. It was because I had to. It was because I was broken. Because I failed. Because I lost. I lost my faith; I lost the battle; I lost my life.

And that was when I learned, viscerally, the truth of the statement that "She who will save her life will lose it, and she who will lose her life shall save it."

It didn't feel like that at first, of course. It felt like failure. It felt like loss. It fucking HURT.

It was necessary, and I'm glad I managed to leave. It has given me so much richness and possibility. This is why I say I'm an advocate of leaving the garden and venturing into the lone and dreary world: because it really is BETTER out there. But I wish it hadn't been so hard. I wish someone had recognized what I eventually realized: that what I had needed all along was not encouragement to endure to the end, but careful training in the fine art of judicious giving up.

I'm still not very good at giving up, though I have made some progress. I no longer finish books or movies I hate (unless I have to write a paper on them or teach them). I occasionally ignore email. (Though never from my friends, 'cause that's just shitty. Yes, you know who you are.) I sometimes find the strength to end bad relationships.

And I have also decided that things I've invested in for years aren't really what I want after all, and that I need to do something else.

But it never feels good---at least not at first. It never feels liberating in the beginning. It feels like loss. It feels like failure. It IS failure; it IS loss. It fucking HURTS.

I'm currently in the process of giving up something big. It feels nothing like "giving up" in the sense of renunciation, the way you give up caffeine, and everything like "giving up" in the sense of admitting defeat. I don't like it. I don't want to do it. But I see more and more clearly that I have few other viable alternatives.

And I still really wish I'd been given some training in this, instead of having to figure it out on my own, as it becomes absolutely unavoidable and necessary.

Also: Two of my entries from 2009 have been nominated for Brodies* at Main Street Plaza! The Priesthood is Magic is nominated in the "best LDS gender roles discussion" category while Mormon Alumni Association is up for "best life beyond Mormonism post."

I am proud of both entries, though I admit to being especially pleased by the recognition of the post on the Mormon Alumni Association, since that is an idea that has gained some traction in post-Mormondom in general.

Anyway, if you feel so inclined, please read or reread the various nominations, and vote! Polls close February 22.

*The awards are named after Fawn Brodie, who wrote No Man Knows My History, the first non-hagiographic biography of Joseph Smith. The book has irritated believing Mormons no end ever since its publication in 1945, because although Brody admired Joseph Smith enormously, she concluded from her research that most of his claims were false.

As for what it actually had to say about forgiveness, that was pretty trite and unsurprising. I didn't hear a single thing I hadn't encountered several times before in either a Sunday school class, a self-help book, or both. In fact, aside from grisly details about the crimes presented in the movie, the only truly memorable thing it contained was when a woman who had to forgive A) herself for being a drug addict and stealing from her daughter and B) her boyfriend for giving her HIV, told the camera that as a result of learning to forgive, she could sleep very well, and that at night her life was so peaceful "you can hear the ants pissing outside."

Unsuccessful and boring as the movie was, it did make me think that a thorough exploration of the topic is warranted--in some other forum. This project should not have been a movie but a book--a thorough, well-researched, well-documented, well-edited, scholarly exploration of the history of forgiveness and current ideas about it.

I also think that one reason politicians now apologize and ask forgiveness for having sex in airport bathrooms or getting blowjobs from interns and so forth is because we disseminate information well enough that we A) find out about various wrong-doings and then B) hold perpetrators accountable--at least for some things. Wouldn't it be great to get an apology from George Bush and Dick Cheney for the Iraq war? I would LOVE such an apology--but we're certainly not going to get it unless we demand it (and probably not even then).

Still, it would be interesting to see someone discuss and explore these ideas and situations, and consider what it all means. Frankly I thought the movie would try to do something like that--but instead, it just became this "history of a crime" thingy--and not an especially compelling one at that, because interviews went on too long and weren't well edited, and because the observations about forgiveness were trite and preachy.

It would also have been nice to see the movie acknowledge more complexity within the situations it discussed. The Amish were held up as these otherworldly models of forgiveness because they forgave the outsider who shot their children to death, but the film never acknowledged that the Amish are very slow to forgive their own, ostracizing them and forcing them to live as pariahs within the community. That deserves some attention.

Anyway. Only part one of the movie screened last night; the second half will screen in a few weeks, and I'm sure as hell not going to show up for it. I actually recommend that you AVOID THIS FILM. But I do want to mention one really weird pre-movie moment.

Whitney was introduced by one Marlin Jensen, who apparently is a member of the first quorum of the Seventy and serves as LDS Church historian. His remarks were so strange. He began by looking around the audience of about 200 people and saying, "It will be a good long while before I'm part of such a diverse crowd again."

Well. I knew a lot of people in the audience, and it consisted predominantly of middle-aged white Mormons. There were a few people under 30, and a few people of color. There were people whose "diversity" was not quite so obvious: gay people, or people who don't attend church regularly or at all. I couldn't help it: I turned to the friend on one side and said, "That's pathetic." Then I turned to the friend on the other side and said, "That really is pathetic."

Then Marlin Jensen said to Ms. Whitney, "We here in the audience are your friends. You don't have to be afraid of us."

Huh?

First of all, this woman has been making documentaries for years and her work has been nominated for an Oscar (according to the bio read before the movie); she has probably gotten used to attending screenings of her work and is both professional and confident enough to maintain some poise even among an audience of complete strangers.

Second, if we were all her friends, why would anyone have to tell her not to be afraid of us? I can't help thinking that Jensen was trying to reassure himself, not Whitney, that the audience was friendly to him, that he's so unused to being among secular groups that he doesn't even know how to behave in a non-church setting. Which, again, is really pathetic.

Here's a paragraph in the study that really stood out for me:

Possibly to counter these feelings, men who buy sex are often committed to the idea that prostitution is an equal exchange of sex for money or goods. If, as many prostituted women have reported, prostitution is paid rape (Farley, Lynne and Cotton, 2005) then the payment itself (whether cash, food, housing, drugs) functions as the means of coercion to the sex in prostitution (MacKinnon, 2001, 2009). Against much empirical evidence a number of buyers insist that prostitutes truly enjoy the sex of prostitution. This highlights a major contradiction. While the buyer is often aware that it is his money and his purchase of her for sex that gives him the control while removing her autonomy and her dignity, he still seeks to convince himself that she both likes him and is sexually aroused by him. Perhaps this conviction is an attempt to reduce the cognitive dissonance of his sexual use of her under conditions he accurately perceives are not free or equal. Plumridge and colleagues (1997) pointed out buyers' firmly held but contradictory beliefs that on the one hand commercial sex is a mutually pleasurable exchange, and on the other hand that payment of money serves to remove his social and ethical obligations. Most interviewees said they assumed that to a greater or lesser extent, women in prostitution are sexually satisfied by the sex acts purchased by buyers. The interviewees believed that women in prostitution were satisfied by the sex of prostitution 46% of the time. One man argued that women who were "professional prostitutes" all like sex. Another said, "A normal woman is never as highly sexed as a prostitute. It would be wrong." Generally, the literature indicates that women are not sexually aroused by prostitution, and that after extended periods of time servicing hundreds of men, prostitution damages or destroys much of their own sexuality (Barry, 1995; Funari, 1997; Giobbe, 1991; Hoigard and Finstad, 1986; Raymond et al., 2002).

The short answer is that great cities are diverse, and diversity is created, Jacobs maintains, through four primary conditions:

2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.

3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.

4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there. This includes dense concentration in the case of people who are there because of residence. (196-197)

(The book is almost 600 pages long. Jacobs is very anxious to establish and support her argument and analysis, and devotes very thorough chapters to each of those points. I'm not even going to try to paraphrase the supporting material here; if you want to understand it, you'll have to read the book yourself.)

Along the way, Jacobs stresses the needs of children, advocating for instance, sidewalks 35 feet wide, because that provides enough room for them to play safely while still in view of adults who live on the street and know them and can take responsibility for them. She offers cogent, interesting analysis of why neglected parks fail to attract users, including the fact that they don't allow for spontaneity and that most people would rather hang out where they can run into other people--they'll choose to walk up and down a crowded downtown sidewalk, for instance, over sitting on a bench in a deserted park. She also says witty, funny things like "A city of almost eight million can support two aquariums and can afford to show off its fish free" (208).

Jacobs hates sprawl, and points out that Americans romanticize nature in ways few other cultures do, at the same time that we are "probably the world's most voracious and disrespectful destroyers of wild and rural countryside" (580), covering some of the finest farmland on the planet with asphalt and covering some of the most stunning vistas in the world with nasty tract homes.

The book got me thinking about cities I have lived in and enjoyed, and what has made them work. Jacobs stresses that great cities, very large cities, are different organisms than small towns and medium-sized cities. And yet I must admit that many of the things I liked best about Iowa City, for instance, were the ways in which IC met the criteria Jacobs established for what a city should strive for.

For all that, part of what intrigued me most about the book was the larger critique of the human psyche and how we interact with each other and our environment. For instance, discussing Ebenezer Howard, a19th-century idealist, Jacobs writes

His aim was the creation of self-sufficient small towns, really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life among others with no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged to the planners in charge. (24)

It's a pretty apt statement. I doubt I am the only person to apply that statement to religion: Mormonism, for instance, is a pretty nice religion if you are docile and have no plans or thoughts of your own and don't mind spending your life among others with no plans or thoughts of their own.

Then there was Jacobs' discussion of whether diversity or homogeneity is uglier. Acknowledging that some people dislike diversity because it can appear "messy," she argues that "homogeneity or close similarity among uses, in real life, poses very puzzling esthetic problems":

If the sameness of use is shown candidly for what it is--sameness--it looks monotonous. Superficially, this monotony might be thought of as a sort of order, however dull. But esthetically, it unfortunately also carries with it a deep disorder: the disorder of conveying no direction. in places stamped with the monotony and repetition of sameness you move, but in moving you seem to have gotten nowhere. North is the same as south, or east as west. (291-292)

Jacobs loves diversity, and recommends that cities cultivate it whenever possible. On the issue of esthetic harmony, she notes that

In seeing visual order, cities are able to choose among three broad alternatives, two of which are hopeless and one of which is hopeful. They can aim for areas of homogeneity which look homogeneous, and get results depressing and disorienting. They can aim for areas of homogeneity which try not to look homogeneous, and get results of vulgarity and dishonesty. Or they can aim for areas of great diversity and, because real differences are thereby expressed, can get results which, at worst, are merely interesting, and at best can be delightful. (299)

Which struck me as a fairly apt criticism of the Mormon church, which ALWAYS goes homogeneity, which it only occasionally tries to disguise--and not just in its buildings, for which it devises fairly unremarkable templates, but in its visual art, its music, its discourse--even the intonations and speaking voices of its leaders, who all seem to go to the same vocal coach. Because it eschews diversity and is so anxious to achieve homogeneity, the few areas where it doesn't--its scripture, for instance, which includes tales of death by gang rape (Judges 19) and divine genocide (Noah etc) along with nonsensical professions that "god is love"--become not sites of complexity and diversity, but just chaos and entropy, or the meaningless intermingling of unrecognizable, and therefore worthless, elements.

And that's my assessment for the day: Mormon aesthetics are homogeneous and boring, and Mormon theology is not merely cruel and contradictory; it's chaotic, entropic and worthless. No wonder I chose to give it all up.