Thursday, May 3, 2012

Jerry McGuire and Truth

So the wonderfully cute kid in Jerry McGuire utters three truths: the human head weighs 8 lbs, bees and dogs smell fear, and my neighbor has three rabbits.

What's interesting about this, to me anyways, is that they are all true but true in really different ways.  The first statement is true by way of average.  Maybe nobody's head has ever weighed 8lbs, but the average of all  human heads is 8 lbs.  And then there's other interesting questions about who's head counts as human.  I would guess that figure does not count infants' heads as heads.  But we get what is meant - the statement works.

The next claim is basically universal.  We assume ALL dogs and bees smell fear.  Of course there are always outliers, but ostensibly they are so small as to be explained - like people who can't see colors.  Though, there's a huge and really interesting assumption about fear being something you can smell.  What a bizarre and extremely cool idea.  I can smell your fear, literally.

Finally, my neighbor has three rabbits.  This is by far my favorite of the three.  Not just because it's the funniest.  Well here's the thing: it's the funniest because it's local.  So the idea, what makes it humorous, is that we think Truth should not be local.  However, this proves the opposite point - Truth is more exact exactly when it's local.  So while my neighbor might not have three rabbits - in fact they don't - they have a litter of loud, hellspawn kids who embrace life in a way that is beautiful despite my dislike for their kind.

So Truth is complicated.

The little kids declarations are the most interesting part of this movie, which has one of my least favorite ideas of love: you complete me.  Disgusting.  I want to date people who are already whole.  It's sweet; it's sentimental.  But I don't agree with it.  However, I love that kid explaining Truth.

2 comments:

  1. I love this — you rescue a moment of maudlin merd. Here's one more truth that Cameron Crowe could never understand: truth of possible worlds, of Borges.

    I was eating with my kid yesterday in a diner that had a TV playing CNN. He knows, because I told him, that it's all lies. So he said to me: "Dad, it would be great if they at least told interesting lies — then it'd be fun to watch."

    There is a truth in the put on, the truth of Borges, of the Museum of Jurassic Technology — the truth not just of what could be but is because I posit it here as such.

    I'm not quite expressing it well, I fear. But I think you might.

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  2. Actually, these are all empirical truths. The first one is an average, so it is still an average based on contingent facts and not necessary truths. The bit about smelling fear is one of those scientific facts that kids read about in a magazine like Muse. The fear response in animals, mammals maybe, produces a certain hormonal reaction and that hormone is something bees and dogs can smell because they have receptors for it. The three rabbits is, of course, another contingent fact. It might be precise, certainly more precise than the other contingent facts, but it isn't a Truth in the philosophical sense because it isn't necessary.

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