Response #3

Sophie’s World Response:

I haven’t read much farther in Sophie’s World at the moment, so here are some more thoughts on the parts I have read.

The first thing I am going to say doesn’t really have anything to do with the plot, but how does Alberto manage to rattle off giant blurbs (“And then came along the English physicist Isaac Newton, who live from 1642 to 1747…”) about these different philosophers and ideas? It’s unbelievable. I understood when he typed things in a textbook-type format and sent them to Sophie, but when he sees her, it’s like he is the textbook. There’s no way he could remember all that without preparing what he says first, or else he has an IQ of around 9000.

My other thought is that I think something major is about to happen. I think that Hilde’s dad will make an appearance soon, or Hilde herself will be revealed, or that all these shenanigans could be all part of a learning experience between everybody. I also think that Alberto is all part of this, as much as he is displeased by the actions of Hilde’s father. He has already called Sophie “Hilde” a couple of times, and he always seems to run into the traps of Hilde’s father, and I think it could be intentional at this point. Of course, maybe Alberto is trying to get away from him, but he is running out of places to hide. I mentioned No Country for Old Men in my last post, and at this point in the book (through “Descartes”), it’s gotten to the point where Hilde’s father has infiltrated Alberto’s computer. I think like Llewelyn running away from Anton, Alberto is being foolish trying to outrun a force that he can’t escape from. 

Real World Response:

It seems to be an ongoing trend for me to try and find philosophical things in every movie that I watch, so when I stumbled across The Usual Suspects on HBO, it was inevitable that I was going to write about it here.

Basically what happens is that five conmen (McManus, Keaton, Fenster, Hockney, and Verbal) are arrested, but are eventually released. They decide to take revenge on the police by performing a bunch of different operations, and while doing so, the get on the bad side of a man named Keyser Soze, an absolutely insane, evil person ever known, almost to the point of urban legend. The movie eventually leads to a boat shootout, where Verbal is one of only two survivors. The police interrogate Verbal in a quest to find out who Keyser really is.      

            What I realized watching this was that the idea of Pantheism is displayed in the movie, where Keyser Soze was connected in everything, like Giordano Bruno believed that all things were connected by the spirit of God. As quoted by Verbal:

“Nobody believed he was real. Nobody ever saw him or knew anybody that ever worked directly for him, but to hear Kobayashi tell it, anybody could have worked for Soze. You never knew. That was his power. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.”

“He lets the last Hungarian go. He waits until his wife and kids are in the ground and then he goes after the rest of the mob. He kills their kids, he kills their wives, he kills their parents and their parents' friends. He burns down the houses they live in and the stores they work in, he kills people that owe them money. And like that he was gone. Underground. Nobody has ever seen him since.”

While God certainly isn’t as evil as Keyser Soze, they have a similar influence on people. Like God, there are people who believe or don’t believe in Keyser Soze. And in the movie, the people that do believe in him believe that he could be anywhere, and connected with everything, like the idea of Pantheism with God, where everything was connected through Him. I wonder if the makers of the movie ever thought of it that way.

(And like that, poof, the analysis is gone!)