I’ve been reading through the Apocrypha — the extra books of the Old Testament that didn’t make the cut — and so far it’s been kind of unusual.

In the Book of Tobit, we have a man living after the captivity in Babylon who has a family, suffers blindness by curious means, sends his son off to collect money from a relative, receives a visitation from the angel Raphael, and … well, I assume all will end happily, though I haven’t made it there yet.

Reading it today, I was bothered to find my thoughts interrupted by thoughts about “Napoleon Dynamite,” which we had seen for the second time last night.

For those who haven’t seen it, I won’t really try to describe it other than to say that it’s a thoroughly independent film that gets an enormous amount of creative energy from an attitude that’s very hard to describe. The main guy — named Napoleon, of course — is so bereft of any of the qualities of a movie protagonist (or antagonist), and the whole movie is so lacking in any of the usual trappings that make storytelling attractive and understandable that you find yourself thinking it’s all very funny and very engaging, without knowing why.

It’s really incredibly pared down. The writing is sparse since the dialog consists mostly of short, monosyllabic sentences and the acting is more non-acting. The story is very basic, something like this: a teenage boy who lives with his older brother and his grandmother (who has a llama) goes through different interactions at school and at home. He meets a girl he likes, successfully promotes a friend to school president, deals with a sleazy uncle, learns to dance, sees his brother go off with his soulmate, eats a lot of meat and tater tots, and at the end is shown playing tetherball with the girl he likes … as good a metaphor as any for living happily ever after.

It’s a strange movie, for sure, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear people say they thought it was too dumb or odd to be enjoyable. But I did find it enjoyable, and although I wasn’t pleased to note that my mind was recalling the feel of it as I read a kind of Bible story (albeit an apocryphal one, which means I don’t get points removed if I don’t find it relevant), I suppose I don’t feel alarmed by the irreverance either.

The similarity wasn’t in the attitude, since the movie gets a kind of kick out of being intentionally meaningless and absurd, but in the feel of it, the oddness coupled with a perceptable lack of context and analysis from the author. So much so, in fact, that you didn’t get a feeling of who the author was. That’s a common element, it seems, in mythic stories, because I read a Russian fairy tale later on this morning that had that going on as well:

Once upon a time there lived a tsar and tsaritsa and they had a son and a daughter named Ivanushka and Alionushka. After the tsar’s and tsaritsa’s death, they remained alone and went rambling all over the world. …
They walked and saw a herd of goats grazing near water.

“Ah, sister, … I must drink.”

“Don’t drink, brother, or you will turn into a kid.”

But of course, he doesn’t listen and he turns into a goat. Why? No reason, really. Is it a judgment? Did he do something wrong? Is it a blessing in disguise? Is it a cultural reference?

Who knows? You could write another book interpreting this one, and interpreting Napoleon Dynamite and the Book of Tobit for that matter. And there probably are some, because that’s the way we are. But there is something compelling about the fact that you can’t judge the characters. The author (or authors) just don’t give you enough information for that. Lives are reduced to simple lines, to changes that occur without explanation or subtext, but which never alter the basic line from “Once upon a time …” to “… happily ever after.”

To make it even more interesting, I don’t even know that I’m trying to make any kind of specific point here. It’s just an observation really. Which seems appropriate for now.

Let’s hope that the next book of the Apocrypha doesn’t make me think of a movie. I think that would start to indicate a need my spiritual father should be aware of.