Lori: For half a second back there, I
thought I saw a real human being.
Wallace: Nobody
asked me to be a human being. Why don’t we change it?
Lori: Change
it?
Wallace: What
were you going to do with these? I’ll help you.
Lori: Why
would you do that?
Wallace: Because
I’d much rather be a good guy.
Lori: You’re
not just acting?
Wallace: Well,
we both are – in the Theatre of Life, I mean.
Lori: I
suppose we are.
The Man Who Knew
Too Little (1997)
 |
| Spot any four-leaved ones? No, me neither. |
One of my favourite films that nobody else
seems to have heard of is a 1997 spy comedy called The Man Who Knew Too
Little.1 To my dismay, some perfunctory online searching reveals
that the reason nobody else seems to have heard of it is probably because most
people – or at least the proportion of ‘most people’ who are given to posting
their opinions online – generally don’t rate it particularly highly: it gets
6.6/10 on IMDB, and a dismal 41% on Rotten Tomatoes. Much of the criticism
levelled at the film seems to centre around the accusation that, in an hour and
thirty-four minutes of runtime, it only really tells one joke, just over and
over again in increasingly ridiculous permutations. And to be fair, I kind of
can’t argue with that. There is only one joke. It just happens to be a
joke that for some reason tickles me enormously.
The joke is this: when our hero Wallace
Ritchie, a perfectly ordinary American chap who works at his local branch of
Blockbuster, is treated to a live audience participation experience called the
Theatre of Life by his rich brother in London, he accidentally picks up the
wrong phone call and ends up embroiled in a very real international spy plot –
all without ever developing the faintest idea that all the crazy things that
are happening to him aren’t just part of the show. Impossibly convenient
coincidence follows impossibly convenient coincidence to the point where
everyone Wallace meets is convinced he’s some kind of unbeatable superspy, so
adept that he can approach these matters of life and death, of betrayal and
torture, of international turmoil and fabulous wealth, with laughter, brazen
casualness, and irreverent tomfoolery. Among other things, Wallace somehow
manages to use exactly the right words to convince the film’s villains that he
knows all about their evil plot; to incapacitate two of their goons even while
he’s tied to a chair;2 and to disarm the bomb they’ve hidden in a
matryoshka doll at an ambassadors’ reception while performing as part of a
Russian folk-dancing troupe. For the first part of the film, you keep wondering
when the penny’s going to drop, but after a while it occurs to you that maybe
it just won’t – and it doesn’t. Even after the foiling of the evil plot is all
done and dusted, right before the credits roll, as Wallace and his new
girlfriend Lori are relaxing on a tropical beach, he manages to unwittingly
knock out an assailant who was bringing him a poisoned drink as part of a
recruitment test by a secret agency. So yes, all right, there’s only one joke,
but I for one think that that joke has enough about it to carry the film comfortably
home into the ninety-fourth minute. The massive incongruity between what
Wallace thinks is going on – nothing more than some fun theatrics – and what
everyone around him knows is going on – real, high-stakes, life-and-death,
fate-of-the-world-in-our-hands kind of stuff – just keeps on yawning ever
wider. The totally unbelievable coincidences just stack up higher and higher on
top of each other as if the filmmakers had a bet on as to how many they could
cram in. It’s hilarious.
And the reason it’s hilarious, of course,
is because it’s ridiculous. It’s a million miles outside the realm of real-world
plausibility that someone as ignorant and incompetent as Wallace should somehow
succeed again, and again, and again, in tasks that sit way outside his
capabilities. Wallace, in other words, is a true impostor. He’s an exaggerated
version of what someone suffering from impostor syndrome thinks she is –
moving in circles he’s not really qualified to move in, somehow pulling off one
impressive achievement after another without really deserving to, being thought
of by everyone around him as vastly more accomplished at this business than he
really is. Ironic, then, that while Wallace is the very essence of impostor-ness
distilled, he hasn’t the faintest awareness of the fact; whereas the
impostor-syndrome sufferer worries about the exposure of a secret impostor identity
that she doesn’t even really have – that she can’t really have, because
it would simply be outside the realm of real-world plausibility that she should
have somehow succeeded again, and again, and again, if she weren’t genuinely
capable of the tasks at hand.
But I’ve already tried to knock the
impostor syndrome out of you by drawing your attention to how ridiculous the
whole thing is, so I’m not going to leave the matter there today. There is,
after all, another way of looking at Wallace’s unbelievable series of
spectacular successes. If, indeed, he is somehow endowed with the ability to
generate these ludicrous coincidences – if he truly has the superpower of sheer
dumb luck – then is he really an impostor at all? Or is he just displaying a
rather unorthodox form of competence? He did, at the end of the day, foil an
international bomb plot almost single-handed, and his mysterious powers don’t appear
to have waned at all afterwards either. If it turns out he can keep that up,
well, is it not then fair to say that he really is some kind of amazing
superspy? Is it not then justified for those around him to recognise him as
such? Does it not make good sense to give him a top position in the field and
send him out to do his thing?
You might counter that, even so, he doesn’t
really deserve the admiration he garners; he hasn’t, after all, ever worked or
trained or even tried to gain expertise in the field of espionage. But
is that really the point? Some people have natural talents (even if in the real
world they never exist to quite the same degree as Wallace’s talent at being
lucky); are such people not to be considered skilled when they exercise those natural
talents? And can we really claim so much of the credit for ourselves even when
it comes to the skills that we have put work in to acquire? I think, for
instance, of my own high proficiency in various dead languages: the series of
fortunate happenstances that permitted me to gain that proficiency was long and
unlikely, and I can hardly claim the credit for, say, the fact that my secondary
school just happened to run a one-off programme of after-school AS-level Latin
in my final year there, or the irresolvable timetable clash in my first year of
university that landed me in a Biblical Hebrew class3 – any more
than Wallace can claim the credit for his own relentlessly improbable strokes
of good fortune.
I’m not saying that hard work isn’t worth
something or that there’s no virtue in rewarding it, but the fact remains that
God, in his providence, ordains certain natural talents and life experiences
and manners of thinking for each of us, that we did nothing to deserve or earn.
On the one hand, you absolutely didn’t attain to the position you’re in due to
an extended catalogue of fortunate flukes for which you weren’t responsible,
because that’s ridiculous and doesn’t happen in the real world; but on the
other hand, you absolutely did attain to the position you’re in due to an
extended catalogue of divine decisions for which you weren’t responsible. You
are where you are because God wants you there. He has his plan for the universe
and he’s given you your role in it. How on earth, then, can you be an impostor
in that role, if it’s been divinely apportioned to you?
Now, obviously there are such things as
real impostors: if you lied in the application form or the interview, don’t
think I’m sanctifying that back to you. My point is that the competence that
legitimately won you the position you’ve got was never really yours anyway: God
gave you it, and you’ll have it to whichever degree he desires you to have it,
for however long he desires you to have it, so as to fulfil whichever purpose
he desires thereby to fulfil. In that sense, it’s kind of no better, no
more virtuous, than sheer dumb luck. Why agonise, then, over which of
them it was that brought you to where you are? Why not rather receive the
earthly positions and privileges you’re given with gratitude, and hold them
lightly, and refuse to rest your identity on them, knowing that God gives and
takes away all these things and does so for his glory?
You don’t need to dread being exposed as
Not Good Enough to be where you’re at, because God won’t fail to give you such
competence as his plans require you to have. And you’re not actually entitled
to any more than that. Doesn’t this, like so many things, at the end of the day
come back to pride? The fear of being exposed as Not Good Enough stems from a
felt need to prove oneself Good Enough, which is rather self-elevating and not
actually terribly reflective of the things God encourages his children to
prioritise. But I’ll leave a proper examination of that issue for my next post.
Wallace Ritchie is the most impostor-y of
impostors, and yet on another level he isn’t an impostor at all. By comparison
with the first state of affairs, you know that the idea of you being an
impostor is ridiculous; and by comparison with the second, you know that there
can be no impostors if everything, be it hard-won skill or sheer dumb luck, is
ultimately a gift of God that he has apportioned as he has chosen in his
sovereignty. And so you can be assured that you, O Appropriately Gifted Reader,
are nothing less than exactly as good as you need to be.4
Footnotes
1 Here’s a trailer to give you a flavour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YAhpfcdx0U.
2 Some kind human has gifted YouTube with a really high-quality
version of the relevant clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T42VFO2Zqp0.
3 I got rather good at Hebrew, as you’ll gather, and actually
taught an intermediate module in it this year – a mere five years after I’d
taken the same module myself. We use Lily Kahn’s excellent textbook: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Introductory-Course-in-Biblical-Hebrew-1st-Edition/Kahn/p/book/9780415524803.
4 I do feel as if I ought to provide some sort of scriptural
evidence for my argument here, but the point that God is sole master over
everything that happens in the universe is just such a given in scripture that
I kind of don’t know where to point you. How about some anti-idolatry satire
from Isaiah, just because it’s very good fun? https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+46&version=ESVUK
I draw your attention especially to verses 10 and 11.
No comments:
Post a Comment