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SELF-HELPING CINEMA
EXAMINING CONTEMPORARY FILM'S RELATION TO THE LOA (LAW OF ATTRACTION)
ATHEISM AND SELF-EMPOWERMENT AS EXPRESSED IN HOLLYWOOD'S FINEST
IN ASSOCIATION WITH NO LIMITS E-ZINE (HOME OF THE WEEKLY WIDER SCREENINGS COLUMN) &
TRANSGRESSOR E-BOOKS

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There’s an old aphorism many people still cling to for comfort in troubled times, usually in the struggle to come to terms with their emotions when they feel that either they made a serious mistake or have been wronged in some way – “to err is human, to forgive is divine.” Its etymology is of course Biblical: in Christian lore, human beings are fallible, inherently sinful creatures who need the forgiveness of a higher power – God and Jesus – in order to rise above their human folly. Forgiveness is a Christly virtue and followers of Jesus are urged to forgive not simply themselves but other people who wrong them – it is a line even in the Lord’s Prayer, “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us”.

To forgive thus is associated with theist absolute idealism as an ethical constant and “forgiveness” hence considered a prime virtue in humans in imitation of the divine. As an ethic, forgiveness underpins a Western civilization based on Christian principle. However, the secular world has had much cause to jettison this concept, replacing it with a humanist ideal – justice. Correspondingly, many films have called the narrow-minded and wholly irrational ethic of forgiveness into question by comparative association with humanist concepts of justice and (in-)humane notions of vengeance. Without exception, forgiveness in these films is a risible ideal at odds with human nature – at worst it turns normal human beings into monsters and at best is an irrelevance.

The title of a 1970 spaghetti western, one of the first films to pair Italian comedy duo Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, clearly states the oppositional nature of forgiveness as an ideal at odds with human nature – God Forgives, I Don’t. In that challenge lay an atheistic self-assertion in defiance of the credo of forgiveness. Further films would take this one step further into the examination of vigilantism, the individual quest for justice beyond the law. From Death Wish through Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds it is revenge and not forgiveness which defines human nature and righteous action. There is simply no room for forgiveness. Indeed, in film, there never was: as far back as Spanish surrealist Luis Bunuel’s Viridiana, a Christian woman intent on forgiving the outcasts of society and welcoming them into her home is rewarded for her belief by being mocked, robbed and raped by those she would open her house to and forgive, as a good Christian should do.

Would you forgive a rapist? Iconoclastic maverick director Abel Ferrara examined this question in the provocative film of Bad Lieutenant with Harvey Keitel.

In it, Keitel is a police detective, a lapsed Catholic hooked on drugs, sex and gambling who when called on to investigate the vicious rape of a virgin nun is left dumb-founded and conflicted by the naïve woman’s Christian ethic, intent as she is to forgive her rapists. Keitel, troubled by this, feels if he too can forgive the rapists in accordance with the nun’s desires then he too, fallen though he may be, can find redemption in God’s eyes. But: the redemption he finds takes the form of a bullet from mobsters he owes money too. And the nun? Perhaps she found Jesus in the blood shed when she was raped by youthful parishioners, in her own church!

Would you forgive a child rapist? A recent Academy-Award winning documentary also examined the Christian, in this case specifically Catholic, doctrine of forgiveness for sin, and in this case a forgive-able “sin” that true humanists consider a wholly unpardonable abomination. To Catholics, just as God can forgive humans their sins, so the priest is God’s instrument on Earth to pass on this doctrine of forgiveness – hence the importance of confession in Catholic ritual: a “sinner” reveals his sin to the Priest, who forgives him/her in Jesus’ name and assigns the sinner an act of penance, token and trivial that it usually is. The film Deliver Us from Evil examines the case of one such forgiven “sinner”, father Oliver O’Grady. An ordained Catholic Priest, O’Grady went into confession and admitted sexually molesting children in his care.

He was assigned a token penance and forgiven in Jesus’ name! O’Grady – knowing he would be thereafter be forgiven by Jesus as a good, Godly man – went on to molest dozens of children: when Church authorities discovered one instance, they merely moved him to another parish, where he abused again until likewise being re-assigned until finally moved to Ireland and given a Church pension for life. His victims got nothing: Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict) then in charge of the numerous claims emerging against paedophile priests instructed his bishops to hush up and cover up until the statute of limitations had run out on the accused child rapes so that Catholic authorities would not have to pay recompense. At the same time, Ratzinger-Benedict up-dated the seven deadly sins, naming “extreme wealth” a new mortal sin – indeed, the hypocrisy borne of the doctrine of forgiveness in the instances depicted in Deliver Us from Evil is staggering in its repugnant offense to humanity.

So: is there no room for any kind of forgiveness? To forgive oneself for errors and mistakes made is vital for human progress and individual self-actualization just as the automatic forgiveness of others for their offences is an idealistic abomination.

In the film The Fisher King, directed by Terry Gilliam – whose recent The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is one of contemporary film’s finest fantasies on the notion of positive thinking – Jeff Bridges play a talk radio shock jock who makes an offhand comment which inspires a listener to go on a shooting spree in an upscale “yuppie” nightclub. When Bridges hears of his role in this, he drops out of work and takes to the bottle, so distraught is he, unable to forgive himself. In his efforts to help the husband of one of the shooting victims – now a homeless psychotic (played by Robin Williams in a marvellous turn) – he hopes that he, akin to Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant, by helping a man whose fate he feels partially responsible for, can finally find forgiveness. But where theist Keitel looked outwards for forgiveness, Bridges looks inward, hoping only to forgive himself.

There is a power in forgiving oneself, however, that can be problematic – free from responsibility by absolving oneself of culpability through forgiveness is hardly a humanist advance. Of all people, Steven Spielberg dramatized this ethical conundrum in a short sequence within his masterpiece Schindler’s List in the process offering a rational humanist correlative to the notion of forgiveness – pardon. A concentration camp commandant who believes power lies in taking the lives of those he feels have wronged him (however random this might seem in practice) is told by Schindler that power lies in not killing when one has all the justification to kill, not by forgiving the wrongdoer, but by pardoning them – a wholly different ideology. The commandant practices this newfound benevolence, pardoning people who do him ill, until he looks in the mirror and pardons his reflection – now free of any guilt, conscience or culpability over his actions, he takes a rifle, intending to kill as he has before.

Would you forgive a Nazi?

Coping with anger can be a serious problem, especially if one’s anger type defies convention. Yet, there are distinctions to be made within anger types, for instance between extroverted and introverted anger, and between unhealthy and righteous anger.

There is a great difference between the customer who loses his cool and abuses a checkout clerk at the supermarket and the checkout clerk who keeps their cool and stifles their anger: at least that is the opening analogy that the unconventional and controversial Dr. Buddy Rydell (Jack Nicholson) uses to describe his role as an anger management therapist to new patient David Buznik (Adam Sandler) in Peter Segal’s hit comedy Anger Management, Nicholson soon aptly concluding that Sandler is the clerk in the above analogy – the one who will bottle up his anger until it explodes in violence.

Anger Management is a comedy that both delineates the importance of dealing with anger and gently mocks the human nature prone to both extroverted and introverted anger as well as the gimmicky nature of the title profession as a often pseudo-scientific orientation. Yet within the eccentric humour are many telling and spry observations of self-definition and self-actualization in human nature. For instance, the film begins with a depiction of Sandler as a pre-teen boy, approached on the street one summer day as children play outside by the girl he likes. Somewhat extroverted she says she want everybody to see that she is the first girl he kisses – as they are about to kiss, the neighbourhood bully humiliates the boy by pulling down his pants (a typically childish act in an American culture wherein the “wedgie” is such common practice). As an adult, Sandler has difficulty with public gestures of affection, unable to kiss his girlfriend (Marisa Tomei) with anyone looking.

The lesson here is that what happens in childhood can shape adult self-definition or, as the old saying puts it, the child is indeed father of the man. However, for an adult to define themselves in deference to childhood emotional issues, no matter how strong they may have been, is an indication of dysfunction. Although the growth to adult maturity is a natural and developmental process, adult self-actualization demands that adverse childhood imprinting be overcome. Yet Sandler here is so consumed by negative thinking and sublimated anger that he represses his feelings, resultantly unable to actualize himself as an independent adult and constantly deferring himself to the presence and demands of others. Aware of this but unable to do much about it, he suppresses the rage until his buttons are pushed and he is sentenced to anger management classes with Nicholson.

Nicholson’s plan, which becomes evident even in his unorthodox methodology, is to make Sandler confront his fear – the result of his childhood imprinting and the one factor retarding his progress and creating the anger he sublimates – and learn to control and curb his anger through self-discipline, the first step of which is to learn the difference between unhealthy anger and righteous anger (in a hilarious scene involving actor Woody Harrelson in drag as a trans-gender prostitute Nicholson hires to confront Sandler).

Although the film’s means of exploring these issues is comedic, the intent behind it is a serious examination of childhood socialization, repressed anger and adult self-actualization: after all, the best comedy is always serious in intent, but not solemn in execution.

With hilarious contributions from a marvellous supporting cast including veterans Luis Guzman and John Turturro and an amusing cameo from notoriously bad-tempered tennis legend John McEnroe, Anger Management is a telling comedy which both amuses and educates the viewer. Although a high profile release it is, however, far from being the only film to use comedy to explore anger management as a serious issue.

Also using comedy to teach lessons on the difficulties of anger management, albeit a savage, black humour, was the film Falling Down, in which Michael Douglas plays a mid-level executive who has lost his job. Unable to express emotion as his circumstances crumble, in an opening scene, Douglas sits patiently in his car, stuck in traffic until he loses patience and simply leaves his car to go wandering. A series of circumstances propel him into an eruption of repressed anger which sees him armed and hunted by the police as a potential mass murderer.

Douglas in Falling Down dramatizes, like Sandler in Anger Management although to much more radically subversive extent, a man unable to control his sense of anger, confusing inappropriate and righteous anger and erupting in violence – it takes the implications of the Sandler character’s condition and exacerbates them in a psychodrama of the dangers – both social and individual – of uncontrollable, psychotic anger. Indeed, Douglas in Falling Down epitomizes what might be termed “the shape of rage” – human action as driven by anger can manifest itself in behavioural abnormalities (from repression in Sandler’s case to potential homicidal rage as in Douglas’). Incidentally, Canadian director David Cronenberg in the film The Brood went so far as to suggest that human anger may manifest itself physically, the film detailing the exploits of a psychiatrist (Oliver Reed) with a controversial anger management approach and the patients whose rage is manifested physically – from body sores through even to pregnancy in one of the admittedly macabre horror film’s most bizarre suggestions.

These diverse films show that anger management is a complex issue of importance in developmental and behavioural psychology.

Unchecked anger, repressed anger and sublimated anger can prevent individual adult self-actualization to the point of psychological and physical dysfunction – some people can live their lives consumed by anger and without either knowing it or being able to do anything about it. Thus, although the films are admittedly entertaining and often wryly amusing, especially Anger Management, anger management itself is no laughing matter, and is vast becoming a subject in increasing self-help literature, as witness such recent successful publications as Dr. Peter A. Sacco’s What’s Your Anger Type?, which seek to educate and inform individuals about the role anger has in their adult self-actualization processes.

From the latest self-help best-seller adaptation starring Gen-X icons Ben Affleck & Drew Barrymore, He's Just Not That into You to the return to the big screen of Ghost screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin in the hit adaptation of The Time-Traveler's Wife, Hollywood's perennial desire to please results in a seemingly endless variations of romantic fiction in which the virtues of positive thinking clash with the realities of circumstance.

In these and other films is found Hollywood's reckoning with what the self-help / personal development genre terms the Law of Attraction (LOA) as popularized by Australian author Rhonda Byrne in the best selling The Secret. Simply put, LOA decrees that the world is what the individual makes of it: that if one thinks positively, the world will prove a positive place but if one thinks negatively then the world will seem as such. The LOA has been denounced by Christians as fundamantally opposed to their absolutist morality and they are concerned enough to so rubbish the entire self-help / personal development genre as a challenge to their beliefs.

Secret author Rhonda Byrne,
an Aussie

And indeed, LOA is a significant challenge to Christian belief. At its foundation, LOA by asserting that the individual makes their world as they see fit, is an esssentially morally relativist theory and as such defies Christian theist absolutism - the supremacy of God's laws. Although constantly associated with New Age spiritualism, LOA is merely an extention of a truism long held by atheists, rationalists and secular humanists - that the individual, not God, is supreme and makes of the world what he or she wishes. Only the atheist, unanswerable to any moral certainty and free to define themselves as they see fit and shape their world accordingly, is thus truly free to benefit from the pomise of the LOA. For if the LOA is true and the world can be as negative as it is positive depending on an individual's world view, then there can be no absolute right nor wrong, self-actualization as being shaped essentially by the individual's reckoning with the supremacy of their individual self, a tenet of secular humanist education.

Cinema has been indeed exploring this for some time and in this Wider Screenings section is a beginning interactive, video embedded archive examining cinema's reckoning with the truth of the Law of Attraction, beginning with cinema's first evocations of the atheist certainty from which to examine the truth of moral relativism - the defiance of Jesus Christ and the rejection of God as either non-existent or irrelevent - the deployment of blasphemy as an expression of defiant selfhood and atheistic self-assertion of the individual human as supreme.

Atheist self-actualization
in Cool Hand Luke

Two vastly different films of the 1960s examined this concept of defying God - the first screen version of I am Legend (recently filmed with Will Smith) with Vincent Price as a Jesus figure rejecting the cross in The Last Man on Earth; and the quintessential 1960s anti-authoritarian drama with Paul Newman appealing to God only to find himself standing alone in the rain talking to himself in Cool Hand Luke, American Film's first great atheist anti-hero in a dramatic treatment of the conflict between individual self-actualization and the oppressive dictates of absolutist circumstance.

The Law of Attraction works, but for reasons many who believe in it are unwilling to confront in their continued recourse to pseudo-Christian sprituality: it is by definition an atheist, morally relativist credo which - in the manner of the ultimate blasphemy - posits the supremacy of the human individual over that of God.

In that, the underlying truth for the Law of Attraction to have any validity, is an atheistic enlightenment.

The importance of positive thinking in self-actualization cannot be stressed enough, but nor should its evolution and moral / ethical implications as a concept within the self-help / personal development movement be overlooked.

Although positive thinking today implies a determination to succeed, achieve and be all that one is capable of being, the ontological aspects of what is essentially the supremacy of the self within the personal development movement are far more complex than superficially evident and represent a spiritualist push away from orthodox religiosity. In contemporary bookstores, the collective body of work addressing this newfound spirituality is termed “New Age”, its philosophies increasingly popular with the appearance on popular television show Oprah of best-selling author Rhonda Byrne and the popularization of what has come to be known as the Law of Attraction (LOA) in the spectacularly successful book The Secret.

In the 1930s Charles Haanel in The Master Key System proposed that for true and proper self-actualization, a revisionist view of the world was necessary, one that would enable a concept of individual selfhood to emerge not from reaction to the external world of natural circumstance but from the internalized world of the individualized human psyche. In that, his spiritualist re-definitions of orthodox religious belief – which held the individual only able to realize themselves within deference to an omniscient and omnipresent higher power (God or suchlike) – counter-balanced the pioneering works of Sigmund Freud, termed the “father of psycho-analysis”. The intersection of psycho-analysis as the study of the human mind and the revisionism of the incipient personal development movement as spearheaded by Haanel had one important correlation: both stressed the absolute supremacy of the human individual above that of the previously all-important higher power.

The then all-powerful and influential Catholic Church recognized the implicit challenge of Haanel’s work to their theist belief, which placed the human individual secondary in relation to the will of the higher power, and banned it. However, news spread about a means of self-actualization which did not rely on a higher authority (at least altogether) and gave the human individual the means of attaining success, happiness, well-being and fulfilment through what was fundamentally a regimented means of positive thinking and Haanel’s book soon became must reading, influential enough to spawn a rash of follow-up works within what would be eventually termed “New Age spirituality”.

Significantly, one of Haanel’s founding principles was that the individual should:

“create ideals only, give no thought to external conditions, make the world within beautiful and opulent and the world without will express and manifest the condition which you have within. You will come to a realization of your power to create ideals and these ideals will be projected into the world of effect.” (Charles Haanel)

2. POSITIVISM & HUMANIST SELF-ACTUALIZATION

In simpler terms, if one thought positively about themselves – their ideology, their spirituality, their psychology – their positivism would manifest itself in a natural world of abundance wherein they could obtain happiness, fulfilment and genuine self-actualization, creating for themselves a world of their choosing within the dictates of natural circumstance. In essence: the human individual was supreme, in charge of their own destiny and unanswerable to the dictates of any higher power as worshipped by any orthodox religion.

The self-help, personal development, New Age movement seized on what was now possible: an abundant positivism within the grasp of every individual regardless of their circumstance. The human being was free to actualize their unique psyche: the individual human being, not a higher power, was the centre of the world and able to make of it what they wished. The process was simple: positive thinking begat the actualization of positivism, changing not simply one’s perception of the world around but the very nature of that world – like attracted like so that the more positivism one exuded, the more positivism one found returned in the world around them. Without accountability to the dictates of the higher power worshipped for its omniscience the human being was for the first time completely free to make of themselves what they wished.

Positive thinking and human individuality conspired to free one from a pre-ordained destiny over which one had no control. Everyone thus began their life at Year One. However, many felt the need for spiritualist confirmation of this and the self-help / personal development movement began to seek regimentation: to organize individualist positivism into a set of laws which could be said to govern the natural world in the absence of the orthodox higher power – from the spiritualism of Deepak Chopra to the simplistic homilies of such as the Dalai Lama, this search for a governing principle with which to outline and categorize individualist positivism as a natural order peaked with the publication of Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret and its revelation of what the self-help / personal development movement latched onto as “the Law of Attraction”. At its core, LOA was a simplification of the concept proposed by Haanel – if one thinks positive, one will attract positive thoughts and other positive thinkers and so make the world one of positivism.

3. POSITIVE THINKING & THE CHALLENGE TO THEIST SPIRITUALITY

Once again, orthodox religions rallied in protest. Christianity in particular denounced the LOA as spelling nothing less than the irrelevance of God, a view that had been embraced by the atheist movement since Nietzsche’s famous proclamation that “God is dead” and the Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre allowed the individual the opportunity to define themselves not in deference to a higher power, but simply by what they were good at.

Although the self-help / personal development movement has embraced spiritualism at the expense of orthodox theism, the results have splintered belief: for example, the collective of disembodied voices known as Abraham Hicks (the creation of Esther and Jerry Hicks) though embraced by many seeking spiritualist validation for positive thinking (perhaps unable to manifest it of their own accord and seeking guidance) was denounced by orthodox believers as evil, that a collective of disembodied voices was what the Bible termed “Legion” and was indicative of demonic possession rather than spiritual enlightenment. Similarly, LOA expert Bob Proctor sought to augment this New Age law with a series of additional “laws”, all of which sought to bring a spiritualist component to what was inherently an atheist, secular humanist concept of human self-actualization in the absence of spiritual accountability, in the absence of belief except in onself.

This dilemma, between the human individual unaccountable to the higher powers of spiritualist thought and able to manifest their own destiny as they see fit – for good or ill – and the idea of universal constancy akin to theism, is being fought out in contemporary cinema as it responds to the overwhelming popularity of contemporary political atheism, as espoused by such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Although these works deny the existence of any higher power and with it the human search for spiritual fulfilment, they do all stress the supremacy of the human individual as free to be the master of their own destiny – there is no judgement, no heaven, no hell, just an existence that one can make the best of through positive thought, actualizing themselves as morally free individual human beings. In this, there is no difference between core atheist beliefs and the underlying philosophy behind the LOA as both stress the absolute supremacy of the human individual as free to make of the world what they wish, unanswerable to any outside force even though they may search for the existence of such through spiritualist experiments (even arch-atheist Sam Harris felt the need to be a bodyguard to the Dalai Lama).

4. POSITIVE THINKING AT CINEMAS NOW

It is in much contemporary American film that these issues are being fought out with increasing sub-textual complexity. Setting aside the feel-good vacuity of Hollywood’s attempt to capture the positivism of the self-help movement in such as Laws of Attraction and He’s Just Not That Into You, the dilemma between human individualist positive thinking and theist determinations of destiny-by-higher-power can be seen, for example, in such recent multiplex releases as 2012, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus and The Invention of Lying.

The hit disaster movie 2012 is perhaps a case in point, toying as it does with notions popular amongst several self-help devotees that the Mayan calendar predicted that the world will end in the eponymous year. In it, the world faces apocalypse (a natural apocalypse and not one of divine judgement as was implied in such recent eschatological fantasies as The Day the Earth Stood Still and Knowing) and the human race faces extinction. As efforts are underway to save humanity from mass extermination by natural disaster, director Roland Emmerich spends much of the film detailing the positive thinking of its practical protagonists in their efforts to stay alive.

Indeed, what is remarkable about 2012 (beyond its specular special effects) is that those ignorant masses who look to a higher power to save them have no chance whatsoever at future survival wheras those who seek to manifest their own destiny are the “heroes”. The film thus depicts the efforts of positive thinkers to avert catastrophe by creating a means of survival – the more pragmatic the individual human being is in the assertion of their will to survive (their manifest destiny in this case) the more their efforts see fruition and they make the best of an entirely adverse circumstance: significantly, the one religious figure to make such pragmatic efforts at survival is a Buddhist monk who to do so must reject the monastery and go on his own, seeking pragmatic and humanist means of survival above any spiritual comforts. There are few spiritualist comforts to be had in 2012, a film which rejects – though not without examination through the movie – the presence of any higher power and suggests that positivism in the face of despair will allow survival, the triumph of the individual and – albeit allegorically – the continued actualization of the species.

In visionary director Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, a man enters what is effectively a world where anything is possible. Carried away on the dreamy, visual beauty of this world, he is approached by a bookseller offering to sell him the latest self help / personal development best-seller, on how to be successful.

The lure of success – visualized as a Salvador Dali-like series of ladders which extend from the ground into the clouds and so enable the individual to literally climb their way up to the sky above (symbolic of abundance and self-actualized happiness as much as “heaven”) – is such that this man spends much of the remainder of the film trying to return to this part of the dream world possible only in the Imaginarium, so attractive is the desire to be successful. But director Gilliam, though an avowed fantasist, is also sceptical: the man must face the realization that the positivism of his success-driven desires was mere illusion. Thus, the conclusion of the film examines the moral repercussions of success-driven self-actualization where the lure of the potentially illusory can determine a human conduct which will draw negative consequences unto itself just as it fights at all times to maintain positive thinking. Indeed, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is fantasy film’s finest reckoning with the morally relativist implications of positive thinking.

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5. POSITIVE THINKING IN THE ABSENCE OF THEIST SPIRITUAL RE-ASSURANCE

Also a fantasy, but one grounded in reality, is The Invention of Lying. The feature film co-directing debut of famous TV comedian Ricky (The Office) Gervais, The Invention of Lying posits a future where everyone tells the truth.

They are simply incapable of any lying – significantly, there is also no religion in this world. Gervais, losing his job and about to be evicted just as his date tells him she does not want to sleep with him for fear of having chubby little snub nosed kids, goes into a bank and does the impossible, he lies to get money. Soon he finds that he can make people feel good by telling them fictions – his character is a screenwriter – and thinks positively, his positivism and change in attitude gradually prompting his date to reconsider him. However, when confronted by his dying mother afraid of spending an eternity in nothingness, he tells her a story to console her, a story of an abundant afterlife – heaven. Although the heavenly lie was meant merely to placate a dying elderly woman, it is overheard by others who also, not knowing any better, accept it as the truth and soon Gervais must invent an elaborate fiction to explain this positive afterlife, which he attributes to “the man in the sky”. The second half of the film concerns Gervais’ realization that humans have, as a result of this spiritualist lie, stopped thinking positively of their own accord (everything now being the will of the higher power) and acting for their own self-actualization and are instead deferring their hopes on the fabricated afterlife, their destiny now being no longer theirs but the whims of the man in the sky and whatever laws he chooses to enact.

In these films, and others, Hollywood has begun to examine what has been at the heart of the self help / personal development movement for some time – the importance of positive thinking on individual self-actualization in the face of orthodox theist spirituality. Thus, in the pragmatic efforts of the would-be survivors of 2012 and the abundant imaginative possibilities of the Imaginarium in The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus can be found echoes of Haanel’s decrees and examinations of the moral and ethical ramifications of the LOA. But ultimately, from these it is The Invention of Lying which is the most complex assessment of the individual’s ability to make the world what they wish. By depicting a harsh world in which theist belief is a fiction and fabrication which acts against the individual truly manifesting their own, independent destiny, the film ultimately validates what is possible with positive thinking – free moral and ontological choice as to individual self-actualization, a process which the film considers is available only to those who are free from ideological slavery to the notions of theist destiny over individual self-actualization: the atheist.

It is this alliance between atheism as the absence of spiritualist “lies” (or fictions), positive thinking and the corresponding abundance of potential self-actualization as a free, human individual that is embodied in The Invention of Lying as a timely climax to Hollywood’s ongoing confrontation with the self help / personal development ethos of positive thinking.

NEW DIGITAL PUBLISHER TRANSGRESSOR LAUNCHES A PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT E-BOOK RANGE WITH NEW WORK FROM CLAUDETTE ROWLEY, ENTREPRENEUR AND COACH EXTRA-ORDINAIRRE BEHIND THE SUCCESSFUL METAVOICE CORP.
* UPDATED: DEC. 4th, 2009

e-BOOK DOWNLOAD INFO: EMBRACE YOUR BRILLIANCE

Tying into its association with the internet's leading free self-help / personal development e-zine No Limits, Wider Screenings' digital publishing arm, Transgressor, releases uber-coach Claudette Rowley's Embrace Your Brilliance as the centerpiece release in a series of low-to-moderately priced personal development and business management e-books. Developed in association with one of the self-help movement's leading independent publishers, Greg Willson, Transgressor's Personal Development range is available for an exclusive lead-in time at boutique e-vendor Inkstone Digital and is recommended for download onto the BeBook e-reader (in Australia and New Zealand) although as a PDF is compatible with most e-readers and PCs. (read more)

"Claudette inspired and empowered me to see the big, bold world as my playground, my world of limitless possibilities. Bit by bit, we peeled away years of social conditioning ("What makes you think you can do that?") and cliches ("Success comes through hard work alone.") and replaced them with the sheer, indomitable belief that I can do what I choose and that I will only find true success and, more importantly, happiness by unleashing my authentic self and aligning all the pieces and parts of my life with my values. Thank you, Claudette!" (Susan McIntosh, JD; Business Professional; Massachusetts)

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