I know, I know: If I love Roger Ebert so much, why don't I marry him?

What can I say, I'm a sucker for good writing--and the man didn't win a Pulitzer for nothing. Ebert has posted a thought-provoking commentary on the film "Chaos" on his website, in response to an open letter the producer and the director of the movie sent him after his review.

I don't quite know what to say about it here, except that I identify with his response to the film (which I haven't seen). It reminds me of some of the reactions I've either experienced myself or seen in others when a piece of drama seems to have no other purpose but to sadistically abuse its audience and/or characters.

Here's Roger:

your film creates a closed system in which any alternative outcome is excluded; it is like a movie of a man falling to his death, which can have no developments except that he continues to fall, and no ending except that he dies. Pre-destination may be useful in theology, but as a narrative strategy, it is self-defeating.

What I miss in your film is any sense of hope. Sometimes it is all that keeps us going. The message of futility and despair in "Chaos" is unrelieved, and while I do not require a "happy ending," I do appreciate some kind of catharsis. As the Greeks understood tragedy, it exists not to bury us in death and dismay, but to help us to deal with it, to accept it as a part of life, to learn about our own humanity from it. That is why the Greek tragedies were poems: The language ennobled the material.

What I object to most of all in "Chaos" is not the sadism, the brutality, the torture, the nihilism, but the absence of any alternative to them. If the world has indeed become as evil as you think, then we need the redemptive power of artists, poets, philosophers and theologians more than ever.