Moral Orel and the impossibility of true religious belief

When I'd first started watching the show Moral Orel, I found it to be quite a funny show about stupid religious people being unreasonable and and doing all kinds of hypocritical things. Pretty straightforwardly exaggerated satire. Or so I thought.

Because being moral can be wrong too.

                                                        But then as the show progressed, I started noticing a serious topic that was being dealt with and that did exist albeit subtly throughout the first part of the show as well. For the first part of the show, it seems as if we as an audience are quite removed from what's going on due to how strange each narrative segment of the show usually is (what with resurrecting the dead into zombies and whatnot). But later on, as the show progresses, it becomes more serious in some parts, partly because the characters in the show no longer appear to be objects existing to be merely comedic in nature. What happens is that their human element is made more plain to see. And what we see then are simply stupid people just like the rest of us, acting out a certain way based on a belief system. These people aren't all that alien to us. In fact, if that's all they were, then there'd be little point in watching the show other than just to make fun of those "religious nuts".

 The show makes it a point to not merely criticize the people in this show. What it intends to do however is to criticize the religious belief system specifically.

The entire first season is mostly only about Orel as a character, and about how he goes about doing stuff he thinks his religion tells him to. The problem though is that Orel follows the instructions he receives to a tee. The show realizes this essential problem of religious faith today. They're convenient. The people following these religions have countless unspoken rules about how to make this religious system survive. Because without careful selection and the right kind of interpretation, these belief systems simply wouldn't survive. This is what the show is about. It's about the fact that not even the religious folks truly believe in their belief anymore. 

Nietzsche had said that Christianity's problem was that it's will to truth would sooner or later render it obsolete, because the truth is not in itself. But more than a hundred years later, we've seen that Christianity's will to survive has trumped its will to truth for now. 

However, there is an undeniable tension that is present. It's about all the ways in which the folk of Moralton have tweaked their religion to try to make it adapt to the changing world around them. This problem is further explored through Orel himself. As stated before, Orel's problem is that he follows the religion too well, which simply won't work out well because it leads to realistic outcomes as consequence to an unrealistic worldview. He has to then be indoctrinated correctly at the end of each episode by his father. 

The colorful cast of "Moral Orel"

Moralton is a town that has one central theme: repression.  It's about the repression of truth, even if truth only an entity that is merely a post- modern construct. It's about how people must fight this notion with all they've got, even if that means not believing in their beliefs anymore, so that they can pretend like things don't have to change. 

After all, change can be painful and uncomfortable, and it's something everyone tries to fight in their own way, and with a belief system of absolute truths, all we see are very non- absolute ways of interpretation. But the interpretation of the religious text is changing along with context, so that then raises an important question in the viewer's mind:

What are they really fighting against? 

Anthropomorphism and Morality in "Fantastic Mr. Fox"

Anthropomorphism in narratives has existed since ages past, but for the sake of this discourse, the only historical context needed is one of the use of anthropomorphism in children's stories, and specifically films with anthropomorphous animals.

Perhaps it is unfamiliarity that makes children so interested in stories involving anthropomorphism, in the sense that although the animals talk and behave, and sometimes even walk as humans do, the very idea itself is one that is strange and- using the word loosely- imaginative and thereby appealing to children's need for newer stimulation for thought.   

This article discusses the historical context of anthropomorphism in children's literature, and this one offers a criticism of such anthropomorphism as being harmful to a child's learning because the child projects humanistic notions of living onto animals.

However, what is the main concern of this present article is what the use of such narratives tells us about the complex thought processes that exist behind the use of such narratives.

Is Anthropomorphism of animals harmful?

Wes Anderson's "Fantastic Mr. Fox" could be called a  deconstruction of such narratives of humanized animals.  It does this not by removing the humanistic traits from its characters, but by exaggerating them. All the animals in this film are very human- like from wearing clothes to having jobs to experiencing  existential crises. 

"Who am I?"

                                   

Mr. Fox asks Kylie, his wife at one point, ‘Who am I?’ and then continues, ‘I’m saying this more as, like, existentialism, you know? … And how can a fox ever be happy without a, a – you’ll forgive the expression – a chicken in its teeth.’

This is Mr. Fox's main crisis: of how he is forced to lived humanly within a humane society, when really, he feels like a "wild animal" as he himself says. He cannot steal chickens from farmers for example, because there is a moral code with a justification (he could get into trouble) behind it that prevents him from acting out in this manner. It is really anthropomorphism that is Mr. Fox's enemy.

 What this offers is a critique of applying humanistic values onto animals, because in essence, this signifies a philosophy of moral absolutism, where morality is not something that is simply born out of societal context probably as a means of survival. In other words, our moral values are limited to context, and are irrelevant when applying to other cultural contexts (or species, in this case). 

This interpretation explains the somewhat unusual ending of the film. Unlike most children's narratives where the character does something wrong and then finally learns from his mistake, thereby resolving his moral crisis, this film ends with Mr. Fox continuing to steal. This is not an immoral end, but rather could be seen as a moral fulfillment in that Mr. Fox has come to terms with his own moral standards. 

Mr. Fox's son Ash goes through a sort of crisis too because of the fact that he is unable to live up to his own societal standards. His own narrative also consists of himself trying to find fulfillment of  the self by negotiating with the societal standards that loom over his life. Ash's cousin Kristofferson on the other hand is valued in society for his athletic skills. This shows us of how these characters' complexes and crises are all in on way or another, driven by similar structures to morality that denote the position of the person (or animal, in this case) in society.

With its ending, the film is not suggesting that stealing may be good or bad. It does not attempt to take up a distinct position, but is rather simply trying to point out that the discourse of stealing is one that should be flexible, and that any absolute position adopted regarding the matter could limit our understanding of the discourse itself and its role in society. 

Without a transcendental signifier such as God, Truth, etc as is the case in a post-modern world, morality has to constantly be re-evaluated according to context because what you consider moral could easily also be considered a prejudice by others, and  may also be an unrealized signified causing harm to the self and to others, without even being necessary in the first place for one's context.  

In this sense then, the film deals with perhaps the most relevant issue to people from since ancient cultures, which is one of negotiating  the self's identity (morals and all) with the culture it belongs to.