Collateral Beauty

One may ought not to judge a book by its cover, but perhaps ought to judge a movie by its trailer.  Will Smith will not be battling automatons infused with artificial intelligence this time, nor will he be saving the earth from intergalactic predators nor will he be pretending to be Superman with a savvy colonial name.  No, this time he will be exploring the deeper meaning of death, love, time and fate in a pseudo-pantheistic free-for-all.  It is not entirely evident at his point whether his friends in the movie assume the roles of embodied concepts in order to encourage him or whether they will be revealed (in the movie) as the actual incarnations of deeper concepts like ‘love,’ ‘time’, ‘death’ and perhaps others.  Either way, the point will inevitably be to dispense the idea, more subtly than Pez candy, that the universe embodies and expresses itself in a multiplicity of ways, including through humans, nature, animals, inanimate objects, and even concepts/realities like death, love, and time.  This is pantheism, or perhaps even pan-entheism, at is very core and very candidly on display…the idea that there is some ethereal, trans-substantial energy or force behind and beyond the physical reality that unites and binds what we perceive as reality.  This grand fabric of the universe weaves itself into a masterpiece that has a vast array of shades and designs in mind and must express itself accordingly.  The only thing to say about this idea, besides that it is silly and pedantic, is that it is rubbish.  The primary reason for this assessment is that this idea cannot account for evil and suffering adequately.  When a white cop shoots a black man, from this ideology, part of the universe just shot itself.  When a man rapes a woman, from this framework, part of the universe just raped itself.  This theory falls apart quicker than the walls of Jericho on this account.  Did love shoot time?  Did death rape fate?  The moral tuning fork within us screams against this very idea…but that doesn’t alone make it wrong.  The logical inadequacy of this framework to account for evil causes it to shoot itself in the foot…or was that a giant stone that fell out of the sky and crushed its clay toes?