Nature of Existence

The Nature of Existence

94 Minutes

Reality, as such, is ungraspable. Naked experience cannot be trapped in words, nor can life be reduced to mere definition. Everything of ultimate concern – God, love, nature, emotion, even something as seemingly simple as a flower – none of these can truly and honestly be spoken about. Words point only to themselves, circling round and round in endless, meaningless tautologies. The nature of existence, in short, is unsayable. That is the message of the Flower Sermon, a parable much beloved by the Zen Buddhists.

It’s too bad that Roger Nygard didn’t take this message to heart before deciding to make The Nature of Existence, his monumentally vacuous documentary in which he attempts to tackle some of life’s “big questions.” An unending torrent of words with no meaning, Nygard’s film is so maddening, so profoundly annoying, that instead of filling me with a burning desire to plumb the depths of my soul or of the Universe’s mysteries, I was instead tempted to take up Nihilism as a defensive shield against the movie’s jumbled inanities.

It’s not that I think the nature of existence an unworthy topic for a film. In fact, it just might be the only worthy topic for a film, despite its inherent futility. I mean, think about it – all great art, when you come right down to it, is about the nature of existence. What else is a Mozart string quartet about than the mere fact of its being? Is a Cezanne still life “about” what it depicts? Or is it less about apples than it is about the wordless, timeless experience of viewing it? And film, too, that most totalizing of mediums – the greatest films are about much more than what they represent on screen. They are about the nature of existence itself, that felt apprehension of reality that occurs as you watch it. The greats can do this. But not only them. Even directors of more humble talents can convey a sense of what it means to simply exist. You can see it every day, in thousands of movies if you look closely enough. It’s why we love films, I think. They can show us what it means to be alive, what it means to be. Most of them do it in a roundabout way – it is not their main intent. A gesture here, a pattern of light and shadow there – the profundities come though on the sly, without any authorial forethought.

But even when tackled head-on, this subject matter can be handled better than in The Nature of Existence. Take a documentary from 2005 by Ward Powers, for example. Somewhat awkwardly titled One: The Movie, Power’s film is disturbingly similar to Nygard’s in terms of intent and method. One day seized with the unshakable desire to make a film about the interconnected “oneness” of all reality, Powers, who had never made a film before, set out on a quest to ask some of the world’s greatest religious and philosophical thinkers, people like Father Thomas Keating, Robert Thurman, Thich Nhat Hanh and Barbara Marx Hubbard, 20 simple questions. Questions like, “Why do we exist?” “What is the nature of God?” “What is the meaning of life?” “Is there an afterlife?” I can remember receiving a profound feeling of connection from most of the interviewees. There was something about the way Powers filmed his subjects that allowed him direct access to the depths of them. The film moved me greatly, showing without words the truth of its thesis.

The Nature of Existence had the exact opposite effect. As Nygard tells it, he was badly shaken up by the events of September 11, 2001 and so began asking himself the “meaning of it all.” Frustrated by not having the answers, he decided to make a movie about the topic of existence. But instead of choosing people who might have some unique insight into the nature of his concerns, Nygard decided to ask a seemingly random assemblage of people some questions and see what happened. The mixture of people interviewed in this movie is truly bizarre. Here’s a partial list: His buddy Joe. The actress Julia Sweeney. A fundamentalist “Extreme Christian Wrestler” named Rob Adonis. His cab driver. Biologist Richard Dawkins. Irvin Kershner, the guy who directed The Empire Strikes Back. A spiritual guru named “Aha,” who looks uncannily like Harry Knowles, if Harry Knowles had gobbled a massive amount of psilocybin before being interviewed. Physicist Leonard Susskind. King Arthur Pendragon (a Druid). “Outsider” folk artist Butch Anthony (obsessed with alligators.) A surprisingly sagacious 13 year-old girl. His Holiness Swami Chiatanyananda. Science fiction author Orson Scott Card.

And it just goes on like this. In one scene he’s randomly interviewing the hippie waitress at a New Age restaurant and the next he’s flying off to China to talk to some Taoist monks. The pacing and the rhythm of this movie was truly off the wall bat shit insane. Five second sound bites from a hundred different people, all juxtaposed to no discernible effect. Nobody gets a chance to elaborate and almost everybody is treated with a level of mocking disdain familiar from Nygard’s well-known documentary, Trekkies. The few people who had an intelligent take on things were cut short. When visiting Jerusalem, Nygard interviews Rabbi Baruch Kaplan. Asked about the nature of God, Kaplan begins to give an interesting, albeit technical response, expounding upon the Jewish conception of God as being beyond all binary distinctions, categorizable neither as finite nor infinite, since all categories place limitations upon the entities so categorized. And so on. But rather than letting him finish, Nygard freeze-frames him in the middle of a sentence and with a snide, “Well, that gave me something to think about,” moves on to the next idiot interviewee.

This could have worked. Assuming that Nygard had decided to stick to putting the big questions to ordinary people – his friends, minor celebrities, the guy who works at his favorite pizza place – he could have made a decent film about the nature of existence. Average people, people who aren’t “experts” in religion, say, or cosmology, can have just as profound an insight into fundamental reality as anyone else. It’s just that Roger Nygard is too disingenuous, too cynical, too untalented in every conceivable way to make this happen. Or he could have gone the other way, too. Ward Powers showed in One: The Movie that interviewing the big guns about the big questions can bring big results. But Nygard couldn’t do that, either. And so, with his slapdash approach he achieves nothing but random noise. The only thing I learned about the nature of existence while watching The Nature of Existence was that time is fleeting, and that the 94 minutes I spent watching this movie is gone forever. I am an hour and a half closer to death and I spent it watching this stupid, stupid film.

by Shannon Gramas