by Edward Montgomery

“Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophical wreck.”

- Immanuel Kant

The ocean only seems overt.

Though Heraclitus has been immortalized contemplating the quiet flux and power of a river over time, to me, the ocean still seems the bigger mystery. It is something that cannot truly be explored, regardless of our supposed mastery of it. (For all those who scoff at my use of the word ‘mystery’, I ask you to consider the following: would you call the movement of U.S. nuclear submarines along classified routes on the ocean floor exploration? control? a mastery of power? do you really understand how your blueberries from Central America made their way to your supermarket? to your kitchen? why they are always on the edge of spoil? can we do more than simply fear the way a single storm born in the depths of the ocean’s water can bring entire countries to their knees? do you actually understand how the world shudders and moves, shifting in such a way that John McPhee offers this single sentence as his summation of plate tectonics: “The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone”?).

It’s all ridiculous, isn’t it? The way we’re still stuck to the tides, the way we hang on to these routes hidden from the public; the way the world moves. You can commit yourself to the ocean’s mystery, or you can commit to the human law that pretends it has been solved. But not both. And with that said, for all its 1991 absurdity, its overblown acting, and its blatant use of time-everlasting Hollywood clichés, Point Break may be one of the better movies out there to showcase this basic dichotomy. The film’s two protagonists, Johnny Utah (Reeves) and Bodhi (Swayze), the champions of the world’s respective beliefs, will ultimately find that they are moving in the same direction: one a few thousand feet ahead the other, skydiving for a chance at life; the other chasing after, then holding a gun to the madman’s head, chute-less, and screaming for him to pull the ripcord, to show his secrets, even as they both fall at terminal velocity toward the desert.

In some ways this makes more sense than the blueberries.

Both the audience and Johnny fall under Swayze’s spell because he has the satisfied look of a man who has seen something that you have not, and who has been changed. (One wonders if Reeves will always be in love with such men.) Bodhi seems to hold the world and all its secrets in his gaze, causing us to keep glancing over our shoulder, wondering what it is we should be seeing. We live in a world of the individual—perhaps due to technology’s success or religion’s failure (the jury’s still out)—but spirituality nevertheless attracts us. Everyone wants to be part of something larger than themselves, whether it be the FBI or the ocean or the undercurrent of Gaia surging through the surf. Bodhi lives in this world: an individual set in the clay of a spiritual existence, that knows mud and water lay underneath. He is a man who seems to have found the set of rules to an other-worldly sense of being.

Paraphrasing what Roger Ebert said about Point Break, to question the motivations of these characters is pointless. One might imagine that our criticism ends there, that without a human story we have no story at all. But spirituality doesn’t work like that. It burns itself into a flame higher than all of us and attracts us in the same way that the bare bulb attracts the moth. The characters matter less than their ideas. Packed away in a buddy-cop thriller, meta-human realities operate beyond the clever detective work and well-disciplined bank robberies. Point Break becomes (in Ebert’s words) “ingenious” in its pursuit for a life that neither main character can fully describe, much less actualize.

Johnny Utah sees the law as moral system, but succumbs to the charisma of man. Bodhi is entranced by the mystery of the ocean, but doesn’t believe in it fully enough to escape the boy-hood rushes of delinquency. He mistakenly anchors his moral system in adrenaline and epicurean pleasure. Pseudo-spiritualism, wrapped in a hundred-dollar bill of bank-robbing thrill rides? Following the law for ninety seconds at a time and then bowing before the ocean’s strength? This makes sense for a man described as a “real searcher,” and we all envy his courage, even as his system falls apart, piece by piece throughout the movie.

A formulation that I developed many years ago, in the midst of my fading sense of religiosity and growing sense of skepticism was this: There is no such thing as a nihilist. It’s a made-up word, an imagined concept. To reverse this formulation and question someone’s belief in God is to miss the point in the most acute way possible. The real question everyone must be asked is what exactly do they believe in—what defines ‘right’ in their world? And neither Johnny nor Bodhi has an answer. They may not be nihilists in the simplest, Lebowskian sense of the word, but when asked to defend their beliefs in the extreme, neither would have the slightest chance of rationalizing what they do. A question that needs to be asked, then, is whether their inability to defend supposed beliefs is the same thing as having none at all?

Point Break’s attempt at an answer is something more easily described as a lesson in the form of nostalgia. Just twenty years ago, the world was a place where a materialistic and “rational” sensibility of life was easily defined by a mythical southern-California lifestyle. (It’s only in hindsight that our moral systems seem to make sense.) Our great question of meaning in the 90s was one to which surfing could speak. These were the days when the good life was not only made up of the wonderfully awful acting on the part of Reeves, but also when the collective ‘good’ included a belief in a world where technology would only take hold at a pace that we allowed. A belief that God or the ocean or another nameless force could still protect us from loneliness. It was a world where, perhaps, adrenaline existed less in terror and fear of the unknown than in chase-scenes filmed on foot without a single satellite to aid in the pursuit.

We want Johnny to defend the law, to defend this world, even as we know that doing so makes as much sense as chasing the world’s greatest surf for one last ride. The world changes, just as the oceans changes (or perhaps never changes); all the systems will crack or fail outright. The world was ending, at least for Johnny and Bodhi, and a new one was about to emerge. As Johnny tells Bodhi in the end, “You gotta go down” (take a moment to snicker, then finish your drink), but even he realizes they both are on their way toward oblivion.

And that, I believe, merits a mumbled “Whoa” by each and every one of us. We might, after all, be right there with them.

Edward Montgomery is a writer. He can be found here.