StrangeScaffold
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Time Bandits (1981 film) = Finished
🕑 Added 2018-11-12 07:07:30 +0000 UTC There's a passage in the Bible - Isaiah 45:6-7 - that really threw me for a loop when I was younger:"That they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the Lord, and there is none else.,
I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things."
A perfect, loving God...creating evil? The very thought feels wrong. If good and evil are created by the same presence, fundamentally supreme, what can we do in the face of anything? Is action fundamentally meaningless? Is it all a cosmic joke?
Enter Time Bandits.
The movie ends with Evil being unceremoniously turned into stone, as the imposing floating head of the Supreme Being arrives and resolves into the form of a slightly elderly man in a suit. He sets the little people who used to work for him (great representation here by the way, utterly contrary to my expectations) back to their duties with a slap on the wrist and a paycut backdated to the beginning of time itself. It's revealed that their entire adventure, from taking the chronological map that enabled their thievery, to the formation of the villain Evil, was orchestrated by the Supreme Being from the very beginning. A test run to fill a need. He warns that every piece of Evil must be collected, lest everyone suffer dire consequences.
The camera, meanwhile, lingers on a smoldering piece of Evil beneath a tank destroyed by the recent final battle.
Kevin wakes up in his home, which is filling with smoke from a fire as firefighters rush him out. Some of the firefighters have familiar faces, so Kevin looks at the pictures from his bag to confirm whether the events that just transpired were all a dream. His parents bicker in the background over the lost possessions that previously formed the center of their lives. One of the firefighters brings out a toaster oven, which they open. Just as Kevin realizes his pictures remained tangible, he looks up to find the toaster oven his parents are opening is smoking from a fire within--the final piece of Evil. He tries to tell them to stop, to not touch it, but they ignore him. They touch the Evil and are instantly annihilated.
Kevin is alone. The camera pulls back until he's just a speck, and then until he's nothing. Just one invisible life on the planet Earth, before the Supreme Being rolls the cosmic map containing it into a neat scroll and the movie cuts to credits.
KEVIN'S PARENTS
ARE F*CKING
DEAD
THAT'S HOW THIS ENDS
No closure is given. No hope. Just a little boy orphaned by the Evil that remained in the world, abandoned in the cosmic map of the creator.
The message here is grim...but in a sense, true.
It's the twisted shadow of Bill & Ted. Where Bill & Ted says that two goofs with good hearts can change the universe itself, Time Bandits seems to reinforce the idea of the inevitable. The vision of a God-like figure on display here is alien in the way only someone who has truly wrestled with the definitions of his power can capture.
The concept of a being so close to us in appearance and their knowledge of our nature, but so far beyond our thoughts, sensations, or even capability of understanding their operating principles, as to be unknowable. It's closer to eldritch fiction than Sunday School, but it's still true, and it's weird, and I'm not sure it is ever possible to fully be okay with that cognitive chasm. That lack of concrete knowledge, in itself, is okay. That's why it's faith. It's a stumbling block--and a narrative sledgehammer that Time Bandits readily embraces.
If this is all a cosmic joke, Time Bandits says, you might as well laugh.
Then cry.
Comments
Willi Schinmeyer
Now I finally know the name of that movie I used to have nightmares about as a kid! I only remembered the dread of them not having found that final piece, I must have suppressed the fact that it killed the parents as well...
