If you knew someone was doing something wrong would you tell?

In the wake of the scandals at Penn State and now Syracuse, it’s easy to say yes, but whistleblowers pay a high price. Consider that the main defense strategy of the accused Penn State coach is to attack the credibility of the coach who turned him in.  Not too long ago, whistleblowers were called “rats,” and I was raised in a culture that taught ratting someone out was as contemptible as committing the original crime. These issues are at the heart of Elia Kazan’s 1954 masterpiece of corruption On the Waterfront.

Marlon Brando’s character Terry Malloy is a former prizefighter turned thug for the mafia-controlled union that controls the shipping docks of Hoboken, New Jersey.  He develops a conscience (with the aid of both a young woman played by Eva Marie Saint and a priest played by Karl Malden) and laments the compromises he’s made.  The question the movie turns on is whether or not Terry will tell a crime commission what he knows. Brando’s performance is regarded by many as the finest ever by an American actor.

Director Elia Kazan personally knew the cost of “naming names.” He testified before the House Un-American Activities commission in the early 1950’s, naming people in the movie industry he knew were Communists. Kazan was greatly reviled for his willingness to testify. As late as 1999, when a 90-year-old Kazan was awarded a lifetime achievement Oscar, some members of the audience at the Academy Awards refused to applaud.

Is it the right thing to tell what you know?  Elia Kazan knew the pain of trying to find the right path from personal experience, and On the Waterfront dramatically illustrates it.  The film won eight Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. It’s generally regarded as one of the ten best American films ever made.

“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? . . . Our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others but—mainly—to ourselves.”

Julian Barnes’s furtive and masterly book, The Sense of an Ending, fits within that broad, 21st century movement of someone trying to make sense of reality (well, at least it’s become massively popular in the 21st century, even if Plato was doing the same thing). The Man Booker Prize winner, it seems almost to have taken the protagonist from last year’s winner (The Finkler Question) and recast him—still single (although divorced), still aging in England, still confused as hell about himself and reality itself.

As Tony reflects on his life in The Sense of an Ending, he realizes time is not as static as we try to make it with atomic clocks and Swiss watches. It varies, rather like your pulse. If time cannot be trusted, how can we trust our memory of a time, the fragmented images and feelings from a year or forty ago (or, for some of us, last week)? As Tony remembers old images and feelings, he finds long-forgotten memories rise to the surface. He comes to the realization that the stories he has told about himself may not be as clear as he has made them.

Ultimately, Tony’s life forces us all to look again at our lives, to examine them with more honesty and less certainty than we have before, and to ask ourselves whether we are the product of what happened to us or the stories we tell about it. Perhaps doing so will give us more compassion—not only for others, but maybe even for ourselves.

For a book that attempts to move beyond the highbrow theory of the 20th century, After Theory seems so…ordinary. The esteemed professor/theorist/critic/writer/gadfly Terry Eagleton manages to tackle the most popular ideas of the 20th century, and one by one topple them over. In doing so he’s essentially trying to answer: What does it mean to be human?

Eagleton, a supposedly avant-garde Marxist theorist, sounds downright old-fashioned when discussing ideas like morality, absolute truth, or universality. He laughs off postmodern ideas of perception (if there’s a tiger in the bathroom, I would like to know absolutely), refers to Aristotle when speaking of morality—and manages to sound like your father (virtue is its own reward), and becomes a materialist when referencing the universal. Our bodies, he argues, are a large part of what make us human. They define how we interact with the world and with each other. “To encounter another human body,” he writes, “is thus to encounter, indissociably, both sameness and difference.”

In doing so, he urges us to a new place. He envisions a world of people doing what they enjoy doing, being good because it is an end in itself, finding happiness through living and acting well (not—gasp—conjuring certain feelings) and finding freedom in dependence. In doing so, he does not present new ideas, but recasts old ones. In being overtly radical, he really simply fulfills the etymology of the word: getting back to the roots. Overall, Eagleton reminds us that we are not human to make or spend money, to find happiness, or exercise our rights. Being human is an end in itself, and we must simply find things to make us more that way.