Fatalism in Hollywood

On Fatalism in Hollywood Films

In ancient time , fate is tantamount to agency . Thus fate , like some forms of spirituality more generally , involves the animation of the world , an endowment that involves plans and intentions as well as the natural causal . Thus fate is often personified and treated as an agent , Fate . Thus the later Greeks and then the Romans referred to the fates (depicted as muses ) by name . The earlier Greeks took fate to be a unified force , distinct from the gods . In Homer , for instance , not even the gods - not

even mighty Zeus - could contravene fate (Bernstein 1992

There is , to be sure , something comforting in the idea that the world is controlled by anthropomorphic spirits . Even catastrophes are somehow more tolerable if they can be attributed to a jealous God or malevolent Mali . Misfortunes caused by the malicious whims and jealousies of the gods and goddesses are comprehensible , at least . Earthquakes and typhoons are understandable if they are brought about by angry divinities (Bernstein 1992 . If the temple was crumbled down according to God 's will then such destruction is a meaningful transpiration of event since humanity has disappointed God

For us scientifically sophisticated moderns , this quaint picture can comfortably be dismissed as so much superstition and nonsense . But the notion of fate need not be so simple-minded . Ancient philosophers were obsessed with the idea that our lives are not under our control (Doob 1988 . To be sure , we make our daily decisions and seemingly choose to go this way or that , but in the larger vision of things those choices are , in one way or another , already determined or at the very least tightly circumscribed . Spinoza says in one of his letters that if a stone thrown through the air were conscious , it would believe that it was flying of its own free will (Doob 1988 . In Slaughterhouse Five Kurt Vonnegut has his Trafalmadorians reveal to us (by way of the hero Billy Pilgrim ) that they had inventoried hundreds of civilizations on as many planets , and only on earth did they find creatures who believed in free will (Bernstein 1992 . But even the most libertarian among us find ourselves believing in hands other than our own controlling our destinies . In romance , we find the idea of fate irresistible . Indeed , it seems built into our romantic conception of love ( We were meant for each other . In economics , we find it hard to get away from Adam Smith 's famous metaphor , from Wealth of Nations , of the invisible hand ' that assures prosperity despite the narrow self-interested focus of an entrepreneurial society (1994 . In biology , all but the few consistent evolutionists still tend to adopt a vision of progress , of purposiveness , for example , when they explain the function ' of this or that adaptation for the survival of a species (Doob 1988

We have choices , true , and we may take responsibility for them . But we also sense some larger destiny , some feeling in which we cannot escape our fate...