“Karma police arrest this man…”

This Radiohead lyric quite laconically captures one of the main themes running through the movie. In the opening vignettes, the movie presses fate for an explanation: is there a balm for the brutality of happenstance?

Three short stories set the scene for the film, cumulatively displaying a network of people caught in a web of destruction they have created themselves. The last of these three sketches precedes a declarative statement, that “in the humble opinion of this narrator, this cannot just be something that happened . . . this cannot be just a matter of chance. These strange things happen all of the time.” In beginning thus, the film posits two contrasting views of reality in contest with one another: is life fatal, or is there a face behind the hand guiding the narrative? Does the world spin neatly round and round, meting out reward to the just and retribution to the sinful, or are the wages of universal sin a discipline aimed at bringing all of us to salvation? S--t happens, no doubt, but is there no metanarrative to swallow it in redemption? Does not the idea of punishment makes more sense than the caprice of fate, providing at least the hope that there is a loving father and creator who is chastising His children?

Each character in the film wrestles with this particular angelic demon. Are they getting back what they gave, or are they suffering the discipline of a loving father? While none of them make recourse to the church for absolution, each one of their stories contains simulacra of ecclesial practice. Earl, Jimmy, and Linda each seek the sacrament of unction, but they are not sure that forgiveness in the end is possible. Claudia, Jim (the police officer), Donnie, Stanley, and even Frank find themselves begging for communion, hoping that love can be raised from the ashes of their ill-fated lives. The one thing that unites them all, however, is that without recourse to the religious they are each left only with the raw consequences of sin.

”One may be the loneliest number, but is it the only number?”

We quickly realize that love has gone awry for each of our main characters. Earl Partridge and Jimmy Gator are both dying of cancer, a metaphor for their lives now manifest in their decaying bodies. They have both been like a cancer to those closest to them—men more focused on their own desires than the needs of their families. Approaching death, however, they find themselves hauntingly alone. Jimmy, having abused his own daughter, discovers he has no hope of forgiveness and attempts suicide. Earl struggles with the sins of his youth, his abandoning a dying wife and their young son. He longs to confess to his estranged son Frank in hopes of forgiveness. Both Jimmy and Earl have loved only themselves; hence, they approach death with on this, their cancerous selves.

The sins of these fathers have certainly been passed on to their offspring. Earl’s son, Frank Mackey, knows the pain of love unrequited and, having lost all faith, makes his living by sharing his hardened perspective on the emotion. To him, love is theft. Frank objectifies women—they are things to be used and exploited. A woman is merely a jest, nothing more. Love does not exist for Frank; he knows only the security that comes with shaping random women into objects of desire, pieces of property he can set next to his couch and ataman, or maybe toss into the garage with his car. After all, objects under your control cannot hurt you. A woman who becomes a mere extension of yourself cannot abandon you like your father and mother once did. Somewhat similarly, Jimmy Gator’s daughter, Claudia, inherits a perverted idea of love. As with Frank, love has become a foreign concept. Since all love is abuse, she turns to drugs to survive and becomes a silhouette of herself, a shadow devoid of substance. She allows herself to be stolen, a state she learned early from the abusing hands of her father.

Linda, Earl Patridge’s trophy wife, married him for his money and has never loved him. She has cheated on and lied to him, committing all the usual actions one would expect from a love based on mutual usury. However, now that the end has come for him, she desperately searches for confession and absolution. Unable to find it, a lonely attempt at suicide becomes her only option. It is her last ditch effort to go with him or, at least, to die with him in order not to have to live with herself.

The film’s two wiz kids, Donnie and Stanley, suffer exploitation from their parents and the TV industry. Donnie, now a confused older man, scavenges for a place to put his love. A sense that only perfection is lovable, however, renders him extremely cautious of risking love from his side. Stanley, on the other hand, finds a companion in his books, a solace from the school of subtle abuse enacted upon him by his father.

The Partridge Empire seems to be a unifying link for all of these various characters. Lying quietly in the background of the drama is the world of television, a subtle reminder that voyeurism has become a way of life. Also slipping in and out of the background is the law’s search for the elusive worm. Who is the worm? Maybe the worm is in each and every one of us, a longtime oppressor that keeps us running alone.

“Even the mercy of the Lord burns.”

When the sunshine of human love fails to work, the Good Lord does bring the rain in. By the end of the film all facades collapse, the loosely woven foils of each life begin rapidly to unravel. Each character sits alone to ponder the mess “love” has made in his or her life. Without a miracle, however, it is not clear whether they will wise up. Enter a scene in which thousands of frogs fall out of the sky. Parallel to this obvious miracle run the less evident (but perhaps more powerful) miracles of a son who tearfully forgives his father; a cop who learns to have mercy on a criminal and accept a law-breaking, broken woman; a thief who learns that love is not bound to perfection and that sometimes wrongs can be made right; and a drug-addicted prostitute wrapped in the arms of her loving and gracious mother. The conclusion holds out the possibility that things need not continue to go round and round: there may be a way out. Perhaps forgiveness can spring us from the vicious, imprisoning cycle of sin in our lives. Maybe the painful act of forgiveness can raise love from the dead.

In the end, all we have is hope. Hope that love will redeem not only our sins but the sins of our fathers. Hope that the miracle of forgiveness does exist, that punishment is for our good, and that we will wise up to our own thieving acts. In a life where you must “put no trust in a friend, have no confidence in a loved one; guard the doors of your mouth from her who lies in your embrace; [because] the son treats the father with contempt, the daughter rises up against her mother, the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; your enemies as members of your own household,” we can only “look to the Lord, [and] wait for the God of [our] salvation, [hoping] that he will hear us” (Micah 7:5-7). When sin is the currency of love, who else can we count on to redeem it? Our only hope lies in whether, in the words of Earl Partridge, “all that bulls--t about love is true, you know,” even the cross, the resurrection . . . and the frogs. There is no easy and tidy closure, only the hope of redemption. Only if God can forgive us and we can forgive one another does the possibility of love exist. Forgiveness is the only difference between love and fate, the only remedy for the mess that is life.

1) This is taken from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s well-known poem, “In Memoriam.”
2) Radiohead, “Karma Police,” OK Computer, (Hollywood: Capitol Records, 1997).
3) Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 20.

By Dan Rhodes