CONSCIOUS CINEMA
ture follows the adventures of a nonconformist
(Robert Duvall) who quietly rebels against the behavioral dictates of a sterile future society in which
people are treated more like cogs in a machine
than as human beings. Under conditions like this,
choosing to be different comes at a high price, but,
considering the alternative, such resolve could be
essential to preserving one’s sanity – as well as
one’s very existence.
ordeal. Choice, it seems, can be an ally even when
we might be tempted to think otherwise.
The degree to which we deliberately make our
choices can have a direct – and tremendous –
impact on how successful we are in realizing our
goals. Sometimes this benefits from choosing to do
some research, employing a variety of beliefs to try
out various probabilities to see which one fits best,
either in our life overall or some particular area of
it. Such is the case in “Hector and the Search for
Happiness” (2014) in which a London psychiatrist
(Simon Pegg) who believes he’s ill-equipped to
help others feel joy sets off on a globe-trotting adventure to find its source. What he discovers may
prove to help him as much as it does any of his patients.
In stark contrast to such deliberation there are
those who blindly engage in behavior they know
to be wrong but do it anyway for reasons that
elude them, a conundrum that naturally prompts
the question, what beliefs drive them? It’s an issue
skillfully raised in “Experimenter” (2015), a factbased, offbeat comedy-drama profiling the studies
of Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard), who conducted a series of controversial
experiments to learn why people would acquiesce
in inflicting pain on others just because they were
told to do so. The results, to say the least, are quite
fascinating, not to mention rather telling about our
belief patterns and the choices we make.
Holding fast to our power of choice may be what
it takes for us to survive under appalling circumstances, even if those choices are difficult and reprehensible in themselves, a notion probed in the
gripping drama, “Sophie’s Choice” (1982). When a
Polish concentration camp survivor (Meryl Streep)
must confront her past and the choices she made to
stay alive, she comes face to face with her choices
and their consequences, both for better and worse,
in helping her see her way through an unspeakable
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Difficult choices also surface in the action-adventure thriller, “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012).
When Gotham City’s Caped Crusader, Batman, and
his alter-ego, philanthropist Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), must make some hard choices about
the future of their beloved metropolis, they must
look to their beliefs to decide what’s right to save
their community, as well as their own souls. With
high-stakes consequences at risk, they had better
choose carefully.
The consequences of our choices provide a recurring theme in a number of films, including such offerings as the dark Martin Scorsese comedy “After
Hours” (1985), in which a bored New York office
worker (Griffin Dunne) seeking a little excitement
in his life gets a valuable lesson in “be careful what
you wish for”; the raucously funny road trip comedy “Thelma & Louise” (1991), in which a pair of
girlfriends (Susan Sarandon, Geena Davis) become
unwittingly embroiled in a multistate crime spree
as a result of the choices they make; the bittersweet