Le Weekend

[Joseph Camosy]

Saw this movie last week called "Le Weekend."

Here's a trailer to the film:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CatPXJu0-H0

The film has a very existentialist theme and reminded me of this passage:

From:  Wilber's "Sex, Ecology, Spirituality"  Page 263-264

(below emphasis mine)

Precisely because awareness has differentiated from (or disidentified from, or transcended) an exclusive identification with body, persona, ego, and mind, it can now integrate them in a unified fashion, in a new and higher holon with each of them as junior partners. Physiosphere, biosphere, noosphere-exclusively iden­tified with none of them, therefore capable of integrating each of them. But all is not sweetness and light with the centaur. As always, new and higher capacities bring with them the potential for new and higher pathologies. As vision-logic adds up all the possibilities given to the mind's eye, it eventually reaches a dismal conclusion: personal life is a brief spark in the cosmic void. No matter how wonderful it all might be now, we are still going to die: dread, as Heidegger said, is the authentic response of the existential (centauric) being, a dread that calls us back from self-forgetting to self-presence, a dread that seizes not this or that part of me (body or persona or ego or mind), but rather the totality of my being-in-the-world. When I authentically see my life, I see its ending, I see its death; and I see that my "other selves," my ego, my personas, were all sustained by inauthenticity, by an avoidance of the awareness of lonely death.

 

A profound existential malaise can set in-the characteristic pathology of this stage (fulcrum six). No longer protected by anthropocentric gods and goddesses, reason gone flat in its happy capacity to explain away the Mystery, not yet delivered into the hands of the superconscious - we stare out blankly into that dark and gloomy night, which will very shortly swallow us up as surely as it once spat us forth. Tolstoy:

 

The question, which in my fiftieth year had brought me to the notion of suicide, was the simplest of all questions, lying in the soul of every man: "What will come from what I am doing now, and may do tomor­row? What will come from my whole life?" Otherwise expressed­ "Why should I live? Why should I wish for anything?" Again, in other words, "Is there any meaning in my life which will not be destroyed by the inevitable death awaiting me?"

 

That question would never arise to the magical structure; such struc­ture has abundant, even exorbitant meaning because the universe centers always on it, was made for it, caters to it daily: every raindrop soothes its soul because every confirming drop reassures it of its cosmocentricity: the great spirit wraps it in the wind and whispers to it always, I exist for you.

 

That question would never arise to a mythic-believer: this soul exists only for its God, a God that, by a happy coincidence, will save this soul eternally if it professes belief in this God: a mutual admiration society destined for a bad infinity. A crisis of faith and meaning is impossible from within this circle (a crisis occurs only when this soul suspects this
God).

 

That question would never beset the happy rationalist, who long ago became a happy rationalist by deciding never to ask such questions again, and then forgetting, rendering unconscious, this question, and sustaining the unconsciousness by ridiculing those who ask it.

 

No, that question arises from a self that knows too much, sees to much, feels too much. The consolations are gone; the skull will grin in at the banquet; it can no longer tranquilize itself with the trivial. From the depths, it cries out to gods no longer there, searches for a meaning not yet disclosed, still to be incarnated. Its very agony is worth a trillion happy magics and a million believing myths, and yet its only consolation is its unrelenting pain-a pain, a dread, an emptiness that feels beyond the comforts and distractions of the body, the persona, the ego, looks bravely into the face of the Void, and can no longer explain away either the Mystery or the Terror. It is a soul that is much too awake. It is a soul on the brink of the transpersonal.

 

 

The highpoint and culmination to the movie (Le Weekend) is a scene where the professor stands up before his dinner guests and makes an honest confession:

 

Thank you for that, Morgan.
I'm grateful for what you said.
Um...
I'm surprised, too,
and taken aback, quite far back.
But I was reminded of something.
Of myself.
Of the self
I hide in myself.
I'm still an anarchist
of the left, I suppose.
I'm still a fool for the truth.
Always my weak point.
So I suppose I should,
on that basis, point out
that the university where I teach
is not a proper university,
but it's an ex-polytechnic, which is now
a factory on the outskirts of Birmingham,
set up to produce only idiocy.
I should point out that
I have just been sacked
for apparently speaking inappropriately
to a female black student.
My older son is a pot-head with rats
in the house that we bought for him
with the last of our savings.
His chosen profession is to watch
television in the afternoons.
I'm broke.
Every bone and muscle in my
body screams with agony
when I attempt to tie my shoelaces.
I'm near shitting myself with fear
and anxiety every moment of the day.
Plus the fact my wife is well aware
that I only cling to her like a
drowning man to a shelf of melting ice
because no one else would touch me.
She's planning, in fact,
to give me the slip later this evening
in order to be with another man.
Well, good for her.
And good for him, too.
So think of me as
falling out of a window...
Forever.
For I am truly fucked. 

 

From Wilber:   "It is a soul that is much too awake. It is a soul on the brink of the transpersonal."  A soul on the verge of  "GETTING IT" (as Werner Erhard might say).

 

It's a great movie!

Joe