Maximum Sydow

I've been playing the main plot of Skyrim for once, instead of getting sidetracked, which is kind of the main appeal of any mainline Bethesda game. But the main plot of Skyrim has Max von Sydow so it's generally worth a revisit. If only Skyrim had better writing. I got to imagining, what if Ingmar Bergman wrote Skyrim? I watched Through a Glass Darkly again last night and mulled it over.

Of course, there's no question about the existence of gods in Skyrim, though what a pantheon means in that world is different to what God means in Bergman's. The Elder Scrolls video game pantheon is basically a set of powerful administrators or, in the case of Daedra, gangsters. The underlying problems of Through a Glass Darkly are the human capacity to perceive God's existence and the absence of consequence for amoral thoughts and actions. The movie concludes with the proposition that love may be proof of God's existence, or God literally is love.

How does that square with Minus and Karin, brother and sister, sleeping with each other? They clearly love each other but in the visual and moral chaos of that literal shipwreck (unless the crew received divine punishment) their impulsive coitus is the kind of act that could ultimately undermine their love in the long term.

I saw a bit of Russell Brand this morning talking about Trump's verdict. He brought in the issue of whether or not you could have true justice in a world in which people don't believe in a loving God. Now that I think Brand is taking money from Russia, I look at everything he says in a different light. Obviously he's getting at the increasing disparity between how reality is perceived by two factions of the American public, a division that may not have been so bad if we had a unifying morality. The question implies the problem; perception of the problem may exacerbate it and thereby be in Putin's interest?

I don't see belief in a loving God as necessary for a moral system. A legal system or a set of moral guidelines within personal relationships can be governed by the imperative to prevent the maximum amount of physical and mental suffering possible, influenced by the recognition that when people suffer they're more likely to inflict suffering on others. This may produce a workable system but is it satisfying? And what if God is a spider, as Karin discovers to her horror? After all, the satisfaction of many is founded on the suffering of others.

Perhaps God, like Karin's father, is both compassionate and predatory.

I also watched Twin Peaks last night.