Black and White

Nothing is black and white. Not even Manhattan, the 1979 Woody Allen film. Like its vintage, black-and-white predecessors, Manhattan resonates in shades of gray. Frank Rich called it "a prismatic portrait of a time and place."

Slower, lazier, meaner minds fail to appreciate the multifaceted complexity of art and life. Simpler people demand simpler explanations. Does this demand betray the weakness of their brains or the nastiness of their heats? Both traits are to be shunned, I think.

According to the Columbus Dispatch, a Sheridan Middle School seventh-grader was asked to take off or turn inside-out his T-shirt that read, "Homosexuality is a sin, Islam is a lie, abortion is murder. Some issues are just black and white." The boy refused, the school sent him home, a legal battle ensued, and a federal judge ruled that the boy could continue to display the hateful stupidity "as long as it does not disrupt classes."

All of this could have been avoided if somewhere along the line someone had taught the boy, whoever raised him, and the knuckleheaded judge that things are never black and white. Instead, all of them ended up with the numskull notions that sexual orientation is a choice, centuries of religious heritage can be summarized in a word, and that a legal medical procedure is a capital crime.

But the final, stupid simplification of the T-shirt diatribe goes to the root of the problem. Contrary to the typical, ill-informed Christian-conservative conclusion, all issues have more than two tentacles.

No act is always right or wrong. No idea is always good or bad. Not even the act of cutting someone with a knife. Consider the cutter being a surgeon with a scalpel performing a life-enhancing operation or a jealous husband springing from the bushes to decapitate his wife.

To think in black and white, dulls the mind and cheats the thinker of so much color. That's why a film like Casablanca still resonates with new generations and why Manhattan will do the same—without anyone telling them that the author or director is an infallible god or that not appreciating the film guarantees eternal damnation.