Cultural Artifact 2 | The Words

This weekend I watched The Words, originally shown at Sundance Film Festival; a romantic, mysterious and suspenseful drama about a young writer by the name of Rory Jansen, played by Bradley Cooper, who finally achieves his life goal of finally writing a book that a printing house will publish. The only catch is that he didn't write it; instead he found it hidden inside of an old briefcase that he finds in an old antique shop. As his eminence rises and his novel skyrockets in the bestselling ladder, the truth haunts him when the elderly, original writer confronts his actions.

Typically I'm not one for romantic movies, given that they’re unrealistic and entail foreseen events that are idealized for the 21^st century couple. Instead, The Words captures problems that every writer, publishing house, suffering relationship and distressed pasts undergo.

Redemption plays a glacial role in this movie. Lying and guilt transform into content, demanding viewer interaction with the morals involved. Through layers of history interpretation, the culture of the two faded into more of a “let it be” mentality between Rory and the nameless “old man” (the original writer), played by Jeremy Irons. The old man at first comes off as threatening, like Christianity seems to most people, but with time and workability, the words he was writing, for the woman he loved counted for the both of them, for both of their losses. I believe that this movie connects with the class because of the cultural pull-strings that the empire inhibits upon us to steal anything that is inspirational to us and call it our own, instead of making things our own for God’s kingdom, as Crouch asserts in chapter one, page 25 of Culture Making, “Culture is not just what human beings make of the world, it is not just the way human beings make sense of the world; it is in fact part of the world that every human being has to make something of.”

1. Does enlightenment sometimes provide irrational decisions?

2. In The Words, Rory had gone months with writer's block and printing houses denying him the approval of publishing his work. Why do we sometimes feel entitled to sin when things seem impossible?