Video Ut Intellectum

"One life ends, another begins."

2010-05-16T07:35:00.000-07:00

In celebration of my new job at Houston Baptist University (and my new MacBook Pro), I have moved my blog over to Wordpress. Same deal, new location. See you there...

http://filmphilosopher.wordpress.com/

The quote is from Avatar (Cameron, 2009), by the way. Not one of my favorite movies, but my vote for James Cameron's second best movie after the first Terminator. (Yes, better than Aliens or Titanic. But, for me, that's not saying much.)

"What is a saint anyway?"

2009-07-18T16:35:00.000-07:00

It's been a month since I posted on this blog. During that time I've been moving (from Berkeley back to L.A.) and running an emerging church chapel in the midst of the exhibition hall at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church.

You may have seen news reports about the Episcopal Church's controversial legislation regarding same-sex marriage rites and gay bishops. But one thing you might not have heard about is our new list of "saints". The Episcopal Church has always had an unusual understanding of sainthood. The movie The Third Miracle (Holland 1999) is a meditation on sainthood. When someone asks the main character (a priest played by Ed Harris) "What is a saint anyway?", he answers "A saint is a person who is with God in heaven. If you pray to that person and your prayers are answered that means that person has a special connection with God." So the Catholic Church looks for miracles to prove that a person is in heaven and has a special relationship with God. The Episcopal Church, however, is a Protestant church that rejects priestly mediation and hierarchy. We think all Christians have a direct connection to God and can be sure they are going to heaven.

To be fair to The Third Miracle, this might be the point of the film. The representative of the Church hierarchy says "We live in a fallen world. Martyrdom, the great act of faith, seems impossible. Therefore, acts of simple goodness, a soup kitchen, kindness to the poor, have come to seem worthy of saint. But true sainthood is of another world. ... A saint loves God beyond the ordinary human power to love God." But the film presents him as unreliable and hypocritical, suggesting that there can be such a thing as an ordinary saint.

In any event, the Episcopal Church recognizes ordinary saints. We remember people for their contribution to the life of the Church, even if they did not demonstrate any "heroic virtue". In other words, most of our saints are along the lines of what Roman Catholics call "Doctors of the Church".

But unlike the Catholic "doctors", we do not limit our saints to theologians. We recognize artists and scientists as saints, too. For example, poets George Herbert and John Donne were already saints. At the last convention, we added C.S. Lewis. This year we added writers John Bunyan and G.K. Chesterton, composers Bach, Handel, Purcell, William Byrd, and Thomas Tallis, hymn writers Fanny Crosby and Isaac Watts, artists Albrecht Durer, Matthias Guenewald, and Andrei Rublev, and scientists Copernicus and Kepler.

Moreover, if you didn't notice from the above list, the Episcopal Church is unlike most churches in that we recognize saints outside our own tradition. For example, joining the likes of Martin Luther and Dietrich Bonheoffer, this year we added John Calvin, Karl Barth, Thomas Merton, and John of the Cross.

Finally, we let in philosophers. Joining Augustine, Aquinas, Berkeley, and Joseph Butler, we now have Soren Kierkegaard.

St. Clive? (as in Clive Staples Lewis) St. Kierkegaard? These are saints who inspire me to heroic virtue!

"The medium is the message."

2009-06-17T21:03:00.000-07:00

Here is an interesting audio interview with Todd Bouldin, founder of Pepperdine University's MFA in Screenwriting. I disagree with Bouldin's theory of the Church's relationship to the secular culture, but the interview did make me realize something. Bouldin started out wanting to make an "impact" for Christ in law and politics and then decided that the media is a more important influence on American culture. This connection between politics and the media helped me see what has been bothering me about the typical theory of how Christians should relate to Hollywood.

In the interview, Bouldin expresses a viewpoint similar to H. Richard Niebuhr. Niebuhr rejected what he called the “Christ-against-culture” position in favor of “Christ-transforming-culture” position. (The fun pictures to the left come from this blog post.) This move has become the party line for Evangelicals in Hollywood. The claim is that Christians in the middle part of the 20th Century rejected involvement with secular culture as sinful. But, having been abandoned by Christians and left to their own secular devices, the centers of culture like Hollywood, Washington DC, and Harvard, only got worse and worse and eventually dragged down all of America with them. According to this narrative, the only hope for redeeming American culture is for Evangelical Christians to move from cultural non-engagement to engagement – from Christ-against-culture to Christ-transforming-culture.

But while Evangelicals in Hollywood are still following this party line, many Evangelicals in Washington have changed their view. (I’m not sure about the Harvard folk.) The difference seems to be that Evangelicals haven’t yet tasted any real power in secular media, but they have in politics. The United States had an Evangelical president. There’s nowhere else to go from there. But despite having achieved genuine power (not just the presidency, but many other influential governmental positions), Evangelicals have failed to transform culture. America is just as godless as ever – maybe more so. Some of the founders of the Religious Right have now admitted that they were “blinded by might” and corrupted by the power they achieved. (Here is a nice summary of this theory.) Instead of the Church transforming culture, culture transformed the Church. Baby boomer Evangelicals still seem intent on the old model (witness Sarah Palin), but younger evangelicals seem to understand the failure of their parents’ ideas (they voted for Obama). Many young people are leaving politics behind for direct engagement with the world. They’re less interested in top down transformation of culture than bottom up revolution. Why bother with ineffective politicians when we can, for example, make a real economic difference by living and working in the inner city?

What we are seeing is that Niebuhr’s categories are misleading. Everyone – even those like Tertullian, Tolstoy, and the Quakers who Niebuhr cites as paradigmatic defenders of the Christ-against-culture position – want to transform culture. The question is not should we transform culture, but how can we transform it. The Christ-against-culture position rejects the idea – held by the Christ-tranforming-culture position – that Christians can use the tools of cultural power (e.g., politics, the arts, higher education, etc.) to transform culture. Rather the Christ-against-culture position holds that the Church has its own tools and its own very different understanding of power. On this view, whenever the Church attempts to use the world’s tools, the Church only succeeds in transforming itself into the world. For example, when the Church uses advertising techniques to market itself, it positions itself as just another product to be consumed and ceases to be an alternative to consumer culture. This is what Marshall McLuhan was talking about about when he said “The medium is the message.”

Unfortunately Evangelicals in Hollywood haven’t learned the lessons of Evangelical engagement in politics. Evangelicals still dream of “impacting” Hollywood by lifestyle evangelism (as Bouldin says, “simply being there”). The assumption of this strategy is that if individual filmmakers “get saved”, then culture will change. The problem is that it won’t work. If getting the President of the United States saved couldn’t transform American culture, then why think getting the president of Disney saved would work better? It is mystifying to me that Bouldin could understand that politics can’t transform culture but think the media can.

What if we give up pursuit of Hollywood power for the kind of direct engagement in the world that young people are discovering in the political realm? This would look like making independent films by, for, and about Christians. I’m not recommending cheesy evangelistic movies of the past, but serious (both dramatic and comic) artistic engagement with the issues that matter to us but which secular filmmakers simply can’t understand. What we need is a Christian version of Spike Lee who makes excellent art by, for, and about, African-Americans. This is a Christ-against-culture position. But it is not a call to hide in some self-imposed Christian ghetto. We shouldn’t create a parallel Christian movie studio. That would be like rejecting both the Democrats and the Republicans to create a third party for Christians. Instead we should -- if we want to transform American culture – reject politics/Hollywood altogether and do something entirely new.

There’s nothing wrong with working in Hollywood or Washington, DC as long as we don’t fool ourselves into thinking that we’re secret missionaries who will have some sort of “impact”. True transformation will have to come from a more radical strategy, the strategy of the Cross. Politics is all about power, but the Cross repudiates power in favor of weakness. That’s why Jesus says thinks like “My Kingdom is not of this world” and “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s”. You might be able to be a Christian who is involved in politics, but you can’t be a Christian politician who uses the tools of Washington to further the cause of Christ. Similarly, the media is all about money, but the Cross reveals money to be an idol. That’s why Jesus says things like “You can’t serve God and money” and “Sell all you own, give to the poor, and follow me.” Again, you might be able to be a Christian who works in Hollywood, but you can’t be a Christian filmmaker who uses the tools of Hollywood to further the cause of Christ.

Am I wrong? Please let me know by posting a comment. I welcome any friendly criticism you can offer.

"When somebody asks me a question, I tell them the answer."

2009-06-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

This weekend I finally got around to seeing last year’s Best Picture winner Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle, 2008). I liked it a lot, but I couldn’t help wondering, “Was this really the best movie of 2008?” My first thought as the film was ending was “That was good, but not as good as Wall-E or The Dark Knight.”

Now, the Academy certainly shouldn’t be ashamed of honoring Slumdog. It may be a mistake, but its not nearly as embarrassing as giving the award to Forest Gump instead of Pulp Fiction in 1994 or giving the award to movies that are actually bad like Crash in 2006 or Titanic in 1997. This line of thinking got me wondering about how often the Academy has be wrong in recent years. Here’s my list of best pictures in retrospect, all the way back to the biggest recent goof in 1994. In my opinion, the only year the Academy got it right was 2007. (Note that these aren’t necessarily my favorite movies; they’re my vote for the best movies of that year. The only years my favorite movies were also the best movies were 2001 and 2002)

The Best Movies of the Past 15 Years
1994: TIE: Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994) and Three Colors: Red (Kieslowski, 1994)
1995: Toy Story (Lasseter, 1995)
1996: Fargo (Coen, 1996)
1997: Boogie Nights (Anderson, 1997)
1998: The Truman Show (Weir, 1998)
1999: Being John Malkovich (Jonze, 1999)
2000: Memento (Nolan, 2000)
2001: Moulin Rouge! (Luhrmann, 2001)
2002: Adaptation (Jonze, 2002)
2003: Dogville (von Trier, 2003)
2004: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondy, 2004)
2005: The New World (Malick, 2005)
2006: Children of Men (Cuarón, 2006)
2007: No Country For Old Men (Coen, 2007)
2008: The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008)

Just for fun, here are my favorite movies of the year. For the most part, they are runners-up for the best movies of the year, though some are more like guilty pleasures. (In particular, I’m not sure I can defend the artistic value of Bottle Rocket, Shaun of the Dead, The Prestige, Hot Fuzz, and Speed Racer. I just think they’re a lot of fun to watch.)

1994: The Shawshank Redemption (Darabont, 1994)
1995: 12 Monkeys (Gilliam, 1995)
1996: Bottle Rocket (Anderson, 1996)
1997: Princess Mononoke (Miyazaki, 1997)
1998: The Big Lebowski (Coen, 1998)
1999: TIE: Fight Club (Fincher, 1999) and The Matrix (Wachowski Brothers, 1999)
2000: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Lee, 2000)
2001: Moulin Rouge! (Luhrmann, 2001)
2002: Adaptation (Jonze, 2002)
2003: Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (Tarantino, 2003)
2004: Shaun of the Dead (Wright, 2004)
2005: The Constant Gardner (Meirelles, 2005)
2006: The Prestige (Nolan, 2006)
2007: Hot Fuzz (Wright, 2007)
2008: Speed Racer (Wachowski Brothers, 2008)

And, while I’m making lists, here is my current Top 10 Favorite Movies of All Time. I try to make one of these lists every couple of years, and they inevitably change. (For example, 1 and 2 new on the list this time, having become favorites since I last made a list in 2004,)

1. Babette’s Feast (Axel, 1987)
2. F for Fake (Welles, 1974)
3. Princess Mononoke (Miyazaki, 1997)
4. Adaptation (Jonze, 2002)
5. Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994)
6. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Stoppard, 1990)
7. The Big Lebowski (Coen, 1998)
8. 12 Monkeys (Gilliam, 1995)
9. The Nightmare Before Christmas (Selick, 1993)
10. The Lord of the Rings (Jackson, 2001-3)

9

2009-05-20T15:53:00.000-07:00

What's with the number 9? I just spent some time looking at movie trailers on the Apple website, and I noticed that this year (2009) we will have movies titled Nine, 9, $9.99, and District 9. What's more they're in my favorite genres: Nine is a musical, 9 and $9.99 are animated, and District 9 is sci-fi. Also Nine is a remake of an art film (Fellini's 8 1/2). And, judging from the trailers, at least two of the movies (9 and District 9) have political themes and the other two are about the meaning of life (Nine and $9.99). It looks like 2009 will be a great year for lovers of film as well as lovers of the number 9.

"To progress by moving backwards"

2009-05-08T13:42:00.000-07:00

I was walking down the street the other day and saw someone pushing a Bugaboo Cameleon stroller. Bugaboo is one of the hippest brands of stroller, largely (I think) because it is the most expensive brand. Personally I prefer both Stokke and Quinny strollers. (Both are only slightly less outrageously priced than the Bagaboo. We were lucky enough to get a gently used Quinny for Maggie at half the list price.) But if I had to buy a Bugaboo, I'd go for the "Cameleon" model. In one of its configurations it transforms into an old-school British-style pram. (The Cameleon is pictured to the left, and an antique pram is pictured to the right.)

This is great example of retrofuturistic design. I discussed retrofuturism in my earlier post on the movie Steamboy. By the way, the current Wikipedia article on retrofuturism has got it wrong. That article limits the use of the term "retrofuturism" to nostalgic representations of what past eras thought the future would look like. For example, if Old Navy started selling silver jump suits, that would be retrofuturistic. And that is definitely one common use of the term. But, as Wikipedia itself notes, the term was originally coined by conceptual artist Lloyd Dunn who used it to mean "the act or tendency of an artist to progress by moving backwards." Dunn was an early practicioner of what has come to be called mashup in which parts of several existing artworks are combined to form a new artwork. Here is an excellent article about the history of the term, written by people who worked with Dunn. The article explains that:

Retrofuturism is an idiom in which expressions are constructed, as in any natural language, out of pre-existing conventional elements. The machine arts (photography, xerox, audiotape, video, etc.), like the work of the contemporary language poets, coin new "words" like no other media in history. Because they are mechanistically reproductive, they also conventionalize and codify information. Conventionalized material, like the cliché (a form of verbal shorthand which collapses entire narratives, often into a few syllables) becomes the raw material for for the construction of new metalogic expressions. Artworks are also complex, like real words, which have an internal syntax all their own. Retrofuturist artworks do them one better by being like sentences, recursive collections of (themselves) recursive words; all parts of which exhibit syntactic structure (and play with it) to express new thoughts (and old ones in novel juxtapositions).

So in its broadest use "retrofuturism" is just another name for "mashup". In its more common use, retrofuturism means the use of design conventions and clichés from past artistic periods to present something that looks modern, even futuristic. This is the way the Museum of Contemporary Art used the term when it applied it to a show of car designs by J Mays (the artist who designed the new VW Beetle, Ford Mustang, and Ford Thunderbird). (You can read more about the show and see some pictures here. And you can get a good sense of what Mays is doing if you compare the 1955 Thunderbird seen here with the 2002 Thunderbird seen here.) And this is what the Bugaboo pram is doing.

Seeing this retrofuturistic pram also made me realize that this is what the emerging church is doing, too. (See my earlier post on the emerging church and/as avant garde.) Having realized that the church's links to philosophical modernism has left it theologically bankrupt, emerging theologians are attempting to return to premodern ancient and medieval theology for resources in constructing a postmodern theology. (Hence such formulations as "ancient-future faith".) In other words, they are looking to the past to find a way to move forward. In still other words, the emerging church is retrofuturistic religion.

"BSG expressed what we really are: all messed up and barely hanging on."

2009-05-06T10:30:00.000-07:00

It's been about six weeks since Ronald D. Moore's remake of Battlestar Galactica (Moore et al, 2003-2009) ended its television run. I have to admit that, depite its defender's hyperbolic claims of greatness, the series left me cold. While I am a fan of science fiction, but I don't feel the need to watch every sci-fi show on TV. I only watch the good ones. And all I can say for Battlestar is that, while it certainly isn't one of the bad ones, it doesn't quite reach the level of the good ones. In that category I would include The Twilight Zone, Star Trek (especially The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine), Twin Peaks, The X-Files, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Lost, and Dollhouse. When compared to these shows, Battlestar is just mediocre.

Battlestar is only a "brilliant" sci-fi show when you compare it to lesser shows such as Stargate, or Heroes. It took me a while to figure out that that's what Battlestar's defenders were doing. Hard core sci-fi geeks are so amazed when a sci-fi show doesn't absolutely suck that they tend to overpraise it. A comment by Geoff Holsclaw over at the Church and Postmodern Culture blog helped me realize what was going one. Holsclaw writes:

Once Firefly was canceled (which still remains unrivaled in my opinion) I thought there would never be redemption for televised science fiction. I thought I was condemned to watching Andromeda or Stargate forever. I thought that I would eternally dwell in a universe created by Gene Roddenberry.

Holsclaw admits that Firefly is far better than Battlestar but then declares the latter great in comparison to crap like Andromeda and Stargate.

But I can't let him get away with his denigration of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. Holsclaw's reason for thinking that Battlestar is better than Star Trek is that the latter was "really just a liberal, multi-cutlural fantasy giving us an image of what we aspired to be as a society without calling us out everything that hindered us." Now, the first half of this statement is true. Star Trek is a fantasy of why liberals aspire society to be. But I disagree that Star Trek didn't criticize liberal society's failings. On the contrary, every alien society the Starship Enterprise encountered was a thinly veiled metaphor for 20th Century Earth. While the future Earth as Star Trek envisioned it was perfect, each of the alien planets had some problem that the Star Trek writers saw in America. The show was specifially designed to critique the failings of our society and point us toward an idealized vision of the future.

As a postmodern Christian I see much to criticize in Star Trek. I think what Holsclaw is Star Trek's liberal assumption that the ideal society would be perfectly godless and secular. But that's not what he explicitly criticizes in Star Trek. He does not criticize its particular vision of the idealized society, rather he attacks the aesthetic of idealization itself:

As someone said, Star Trek was a symbol of what we hoped to be while BSG expressed what we really are: all messed up and barely hanging on. For the most part BSG unflinchingly dealt with the tragic aspect of humanity, that we are simultaneously cylons and humans, uh, I mean sinners and saints.

But I reject his premise that only realistic (as opposed to idealistic) art can be good. Art has both realistic and idealistic functions. Take 80s sit-coms, instead of sci-fi. While it might be important to have sit-coms like Roseanne or The Simpsons which show us a realistic portrait of a messed up family, it is just as important to have sit-coms like The Cosby Show and Family Ties which give us idealized families. An idealized TV family gives us something to aspire to and helps form our moral imaginations with images of what is possible rather than leaving us stuck with our current problems. Maybe no father is as perfect as Bill Cosy's Cliff Huxtable, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to live up to that standard.

Note: I blogged about this issue before in my post on Thomas Hibbs's idea that recent Christian artists have failed to imagine a world where goodness is attractive.

"You don’t have to decide if a landscape is beautiful. You just know."

2009-04-10T11:04:00.000-07:00

There was an interesting Op-Ed in the New York Times this week in which David Brooks comments on recent work by cognitive scientists that shows that our moral reasoning is more akin to making an aesthetics judgment than to working out a math problem. This is not really a new "discovery". One of my favorite books on this subject (Mark Johnson's Moral Imagination)was published in 1994! And this view was defended by David Hume as long ago as the 18th Century (the topic of my PhD dissertation). Similar comparisons between aesthetics and ethics (at the expense of mathematical reasoning) were also made by ancient Greeks such as Aristotle and (arguably) Plato.

So, despite Brooks's headline, these "discoveries" don't mark "The End of Philosophy". Also, the fact that our brains make unconscious decisions implies neither that we can not nor ought not to guide our moral jugdments with consious reasoning. Brooks writes:

Most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. We start doing this when we are babies, before we have language. And even as adults, we often can’t explain to ourselves why something feels wrong. In other words, reasoning comes later and is often guided by the emotions that preceded it.

This is true, but it does not make moral judgment merely a matter of taste. Well, maybe it does, but there is no reason to think that taste is "a matter of taste". Even if we think ethics is analogous to aesthetics, we can still think some aesthetic judgments are better than others.

So I am puzzled by Brook's conclusion:

The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people. It challenges the Talmudic tradition, with its hyper-rational scrutiny of texts. It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.

Why wouldn't "bookish" philosophy help us guide our emotions? And the "new atheists" are mostly evolutionary scientists. What reason would they have to question the conclusions Brooks is discussing?

Most of all, I'm puzzled by the claim that Talmudic tradition is opposed to this view. It seems to me that Talmud anticipates postmodern aesthetics in a lot of ways. (Here is an interesting article about Derrida and Jewish Studies.) Importantly, the Jewish tradition has always allowed for alternate readings of sacred texts and has preserved them side-by-side rather than suppressing one or the other. (Here is a discussion of a brilliant lecture by Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggeman in which he argues that the polyphony of Scripture should lead us to reject religous absolutism.) Why wouldn't the recognition of the aesthetic basis of ethical reasoning should lead us to pay more careful attention to our traditions and sacred texts rather that to make snap decisions?

Sometimes you do have to decide if something is beautiful. But your decision will be based on a combination of emotion, reason, tradition, etc. It won't look anything like a mathematical proof.

"There are no facts, only interpretations."

2009-03-29T16:40:00.001-07:00

The Nietzsche Family Circus is a great dadaist artwork that "pairs a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote". If you refresh the page enough times, you can come up with striking juxtapositions.

Here is one of my random results:

"Faith means not wanting to know what is true."

"Goodbye, Mary Poppins, don't stay away too long."

2009-03-20T16:37:00.000-07:00

Here's a clever analysis by Matthew Moretz of one of my favorite movies, Mary Poppins (Stevenson, 1964). Father Matthew (an Episcopal priest) argues that the title character can be seen as a Christ-figure.

"Eeny, meeny, miny, moe..."

2009-03-10T18:23:00.000-07:00

Here's a parable of nihilism. There is a group of blind men trying to describe something they've been told is an "elephant". One says it is like a snake, another says it is like a spear, another a wall, a tree, a fan, and so on. But each of them, unbeknownst to the others, is actually empty-handed and is completely bluffing. None of them are holding anything, but all of them are pretending to describe something anyway so as not to look ignorant. The "elephant in the room" is that there is nothing there. There is no "elephant".

This is, essentially, the point of Gus Van Sant's film Elephant (Van Sant, 2003). Inspired by the Columbine massacre and other high school shootings, Elephant considers the question of why a teenager would one day murder a dozen of his classmates. The violence comes "out of the blue" (the opening and closing images are a blue sky) without warning or provocation. And Van Sant's suggestion is that the "elephant in the room" is that there is no explanation for the violence. This is just the kind of thing that happens in our world. Things are random and meaningless, hence the film's final lines: "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe..." The killers have no reason for what they do any more than anyone else does.

After the Columbine shooting, there was much speculation in the media about the causes of the killers' rampage. Was it the music they listened to or the video games they played? Was it their parents' fault? Were they bullied by their classmates? Elephant rejects those explanations. Each of the main characters has more reason to shoot up the school than the actual killers do. The other students have alcoholic parents, get punished unjustly by the principal, are made fun of by other students, are accidentally pregnant, etc. But only two of the students turn out to be homicidal. The fact that these students do murder their classmates is just as (and no more) inexplicable than the fact that the other students do not murder their classmates.

This inexplicability is mirrored in the film's camera work. Almost all of the film is shot in long tracking shots which follow students as they walk through the hallways of the school. This gives the film a restless, searching tone. But when the camera stops moving, something interesting happens. The camera stands still and lets the action happen around it without focusing on anything in particular. The best example is a scene on the football field early in the film.

The shot starts with the shy and nerdy girl Michelle staring unexplicably into the sky. She then walks off screen, but the camera doesn't follow her. The shot continues to show the field. In the background some students are playing football. They move on and off the screen, but the camera doesn't follow them. This continues for several minutes, an excruciating amount of time for nothing to happen in a movie. Since there is nothing to look at except the football game, we watch that, but the players keep disappearing. We feel that there must be something happening just off screen, but we can't see it. There must be more going on here that we don't know about. Finally a student in a lifeguard shirt walks by and we follow him into the school.

This feeling that there is more going on continues throughout the film. On screen, there is no plot, no story, nothing really happens. But we feel like there must be more going on than we can see, maybe off camera. The elephant in the room, however, is that there is nothing else. This is life as it is. This is life in its meaningless randomness. This is the nihilism of Elephant.

"Historically, many of the greatest philosophers have argued that homosexual acts are morally objectionable."

2009-03-07T07:43:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted for a while, because for the past month I've been deeply immersed in my dissertation. And it looks like I'll be at that for a couple more months still. But something happened that I thought I needed to share with you. I accidently signed a petition asking the American Philosophical Association not to penalize Christian colleges for discriminating against gays and lesbians in their hiring practices. Twice. I accidently signed the petition, and then I did it again.

Actually, I signed the petition on purpose, but I tried to attach a comment explaining that while I didn't agree with discrimination, I did agree that the schools had the right of religious freedom and if the schools had theological reasons for discrimination, then they should be allowed to hire whoever they wanted. But the comment function on the online petition didn't work. So now it looks like I support the cause without reservation. Oh well.

Here's a link to the petition. It's actually a counter-petition in response to a petition asking the APA to censure the Christian colleges. Here's a link to that original petition. As discriminatory schools, it specifically mentions "Azusa Pacific University, Belmont University, Bethal University, Biola University, Calvin College, Malone College, Pepperdine University, Westmont College, and Wheaton College", many of which I would love to work for, and two of which I have already worked for.

Anyway, here are my comments on the counter-petition -- the one I signed but don't entirely agree with:

This petition's distinction between act and disposition is compelling. It says "Institutions can require their faculty to agree to abide by ethical standards that forbid homosexual acts while not ipso facto discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation." In other words, they are not technically violating the letter of the APA anti-discrimination policy. This should be enough to allow these schools to avoid official censure.

At the same time this distinction is somewhat disingenious in that a job candidate at most of the schools in question who was open about having a "homosexual orientation" and did not "repent" of that orientation would be disqualified for the job -- even if he or she promised to remain celibate and to abstain from "homosexual acts". In other words, many of these schools really do discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.

But for me this is an issue of religous freedom. As the petition points out, the discriminatory schools are simply "abiding by their long-standing and coherent ethical norms" -- despite the fact that, as I believe, their ethical norms have turned out to be false. Their position on homosexual acts is deeply grounded in their theological system such that they could not change their position without giving up their entire religious way of life. For that reason I believe these schools should have the right to discriminate based on sexual orientation.

This may or may not be a right we wish to reward with government funding (see my post on Prop 8), but a private organization such as the American Philosophical Association -- which was founded (according to the APA website) "to promote the exchange of ideas among philosophers, to encourage creative and scholarly activity in philosophy, to facilitate the professional work and teaching of philosophers, and to represent philosophy as a discipline" -- should allow for a diversity of moral viewpoints.

P.S. The petition's appeal to authority (quoted in the title of this post) is not exactly convincing. Most modern philosophers see appeal to authority as a logical fallacy. At the same time, it is fun to notice that many excellent philosophers have signed the petition. My favorite is Alasdair MacIntyre. Predictably all my Biola professors and collegues signed. Also: Peter Kreeft, Hugh J. McCann, Alvin Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen, Linda Zagzebski. Even my fellow Hume scholar Donald W. Livingston.

“You’re working for me now.”

2009-02-12T21:18:00.000-08:00

I currently live in Berkeley but Los Angeles is my home. So I never miss a chance to watch L.A.-themed movies. This week I watched for the first time To Live and Die in L.A. (Friedkin, 1985). It was a strange experience. For most of the movie I had the growing suspicion that the film was a piece of crap. It seemed like an utterly cliché cop buddy movie. All the characters speak in fake movie dialogue -- but dialogue that sounds silly, not cool like the fake movie dialogue in a Tarantino film. The alledged "hero" of the movie is an idiot who does all sorts of stupid and dangerous things that only movie cops do and would get real life police officers killed. More than that, the hero is a psychopath. He's beyond Dirty Harry. He's more like a Bad Lieutenant. But the film treats him in a typical heroic mode.... at least until the end.

The end of the movie caught me completely off guard. The hero just dies all of a sudden. And not in a big climactic shoot out or anything. The movie is going along like normal, and BANG, the guy dies. Then the movie goes along without him. It shouldn't be surprising that he dies since he's an idiot and a scumbag. If anything it should be suprising he lived as long as he did.

So the ending was like a Sixth Sense or Usual Suspects moment which sent me back to re-evaluate what I had seen earlier. A little Googling turned up a rather brillian essay that sheds light on the experience I had. It's a pretty long piece, so here are some quotes:

After nearly two decades of regarding To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) with a spectrum of emotions ranging from disdain-at-first-sight to qualified enthusiasm, it occurs to me that of all his works, this is the film I have watched and pondered most frequently. No longer do I see it as a shimmering piece of costume jewelry, but a forceful, semi-serious diagnosis of a prevalent human malady: the discrepancy between what we desire, or what we are pleased by, and what we claim to value, not only in life but in cinema. ...

[Director William] Friedkin redirects the modern cop thriller through the chartreuse time machine of noir, adorned with the MTV confections of Miami Vice, but his film emerges assomething far more nasty and authentic. ... To Live and Die in L.A. is also quite amusing, presumably intentionally, but possibly not. The humor is a conscious or unconscious byproduct of Friedkin’s love-hate relationship with the genre he plunders...

But once the superficialities are shunted aside, it becomes clearer that Friedkin’s film strives to deviate from the norm. Its hero is a corrupt man emblematized by a refusal to change, and his partner willingly swaps his morality for depravity. The villain, who murders only those who have betrayed orendangered his interests directly, is never as unlikable as the hero becomes. The protagonist, whose conduct leads to the death of innocent bystanders, is dispatched in the climax without a tear being shed. The hero’s obligatory “romantic interest” is at the very least a reluctant victim of coercion, and, conceivably, might qualify as a sex slave. And the voracious slickness that taunts Miami Vice (1984-1989) has, by film’s end, become the source of as much discomfort as pleasure. So this is not your ordinary cop thriller. ...

One of To Live and Die in L.A.’s persistent motifs is the creation and pursuit of phony things. As spectators grow to distrust the contradiction between what the film introduces itself to be and what it in fact is, they begin as well to question their own moral gullibility and aptitude in judging what is set before them. ...

I believe Friedkin is intrigued that we are so quick to take sides in a movie, and so easily manipulated to accept complexity as simplicity. This is likely why he adheres to the conventions of the buddy thriller—at times pressing them beyond credulity—before escalating what becomes a point-by-point repudiation of the devices used in such films to make spectators comfortable with dynamics that should not evoke comfort.

In the end, the essay's point is about self-deception, one of my favorite themes in cinema:

once we have agreed to stipulate that Chance is our hero, [Friedkin] wants, like a Judo master, to use the momentum of our own self-deception to flip us on our backs.

You can read the whole essay here at the website 24 Lies A Second.

"I just try and refresh folks memory by way of illustration."

2009-01-31T21:15:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite movies about filmmaking is The Five Obstructions (von Trier and Leth, 2003). It is a non-fiction film in which director Lars von Trier challenges his friend, fellow Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth, to remake his 1967 short film "The Perfect Human" five times, each time under different constraints. For example, once Leth must remake the film with no shot longer than 12 frames (half a second), another time he must make the film as an animated cartoon. Each time Leth remakes the film, he approaches the same material from a slightly different angle thereby revealing a different aspect of the infinitely complex truth of the human condition.

Today I was watching von Trier's own film from the same time period Dogville (von Trier, 2003), and it struck me that von Trier's entire English language career (his Danish language films are another story) has been a Five Obstructions-style series of remakes. Von Trier keeps remaking the same movie a female Christ-figure -- a pure-hearted woman who suffers unjust torments in order to save someone she selflessly loves. In Breaking the Waves, von Trier challenged himself to shoot the film in a hyper-realistic hand-held camera style; in Dancer in the Dark he remade the story as a musical; and in Dogville he remade the film on a single sound stage without any sets in the manner of Thornton Wilder's Our Town or a Bertolt Brecht play.

The strange thing is that Dogville ends quite differently than the previous films it is remaking. In the earlier films, the suffering woman is eventually killed but brings a kind of redemption through her death. These are clearly New Testament sort of stories. At first Dogville seems to be following the same narrative, but in its last ten minutes the story suddenly turns Old Testament: a God-like gangster shows up and convinces the film's Christ-figure to choose judgment over forgiveness. I'm not sure what to make of this. Is von Trier repudiating the earlier films? Or is he merely showing us another aspect of the infinitely complex truth?

At one point, the philosopher-novelist character says he is writing a story based on the events of the film. When he adds that he hasn't come up with a good name for the town yet, the heroine asks him why he doesn't just call it Dogville. He replies: "It wouldn't work. It's got to be universal." Well, if the movie we're watching is called Dogville, does that mean it isn't (and isn't intended to be) universal? So perhaps the point of the film is not to reject forgiveness and mercy entirely but to remind us that grace is not the whole story: there is judgment and justice, too. Rather than read Dogville as a critique of the Gospel narratives, perhaps we should read it as a retelling of the Sodom and Gomorah narrative: God sends an angel to the town but the people rape her and so God destroys the town. This isn't the prettiest story in the Bible, but it is still in there and must be reckoned with.

Starting from this reading it is tempting to see the film as von Trier's reaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. (This was von Trier's first film made after 9/11.) Perhaps, like Jeremiah Wright and Jerry Fallwell, von Trier is interpreting the terrorist attacks as God's judgment on the United States. Especially in light of the closing credits which plays David Bowie's "Young Americans" over images of American crime and poverty, combined with the film's Prologue about the philosopher's attempt to teach the town a lesson about their inability to receive good gifts, von Trier seems to be saying that God has given the U.S. grace upon grace but we have not provided God's gifts with a hospitable place in which to live and bear fruit. And if we persist in our inhospitality we will face God's wrath.

Fortunately this is only one aspect of the infinitely complex truth. Instead of following the townspeople of Dogville, we might instead follow the selfless heroines of Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark. We might choose to take the world's suffering on ourselves and to transform it into an opportunity for love.

"Hand of God, that bible stopped a bullet."

2009-01-29T08:00:00.000-08:00

This week I watched a couple of heist genre movies: Mission Impossible III (Abrams, 2006), and Heist (Mamet, 2001). It occured to me that heist movies suggest various positions on divine Providence.

In many recent heist movies, there is an elaborate, twist-filled plot which makes it seem that the robbers are facing various set-backs until in the final scene the criminals seeming complications are revealed to have been part of their plan all along. Perhaps the best classic example of this plot is The Sting (Hill, 1973). Recent examples include the Ocean's Eleven (Soderbergh, 2001) and Inside Man (Lee, 2006).

What is interesting about the two movies I saw this week is the way they deviate from the conventional plot. In The Sting et al, seemingly unforseen events occur throught the film, but the heroes turn out to have been in control of these events all along. These movies could be read as a symbol of Providence -- God is in control even if we can't initially see how. But in Mission Impossible III (actually in all three of the Mission Impossible movies), it turns out in the end that the villain -- not the hero -- was actually in control of the seemingly random events all along. This a pessimistic vision of a kind of dark Providence. More interestingly, in Heist there are real set-backs, though the heroes manage to be successful in spite of them. Here we have a world of real contingency where there seems to be no providence at all: genuinely random things happen of which no one is in control.

That writer-director David Mamet knows his film is dealing with (the lack of) Providence is seen in these lines, thrown away in a quiet moment in the middle of the film: "We knew this firefighter, this trooper, who always caried a bible next to his heart. We used to mock him, but that bible stopped a bullet. ... Hand of God, that bible stopped a bullet, would of ruined that fucker's heart. And had he had another bible in front of his face, that man would be alive today." In Mamet's world, shit just happens, and even miracles are random and meaningless.

"These are the fittest, well-fed, best-kept horses I've ever seen."

2009-01-27T08:09:00.000-08:00

Recently actor Liam Neeson was a guest on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. He was supposed to be there to discuss his new movie, but the interview ended up focusing on a local New York City political debate about the horses used to pull carriages around Central Park. Stewart maintains that animals "would rather run" freely than pull carriages and deserve "a better life" in a "pastoral existence". But Neeson argues that domestic animals like cows and horses have "been trained for thousands of years" to do this work and actually enjoy it. Neeson's suggestion is that domestic animals can actually be fulfilled by their work (when given humane working conditions) in the same way that humans can be fulfilled by their jobs.

I couldn't get the embed function to work, but you can watch the video here. (The relevant discussion starts at 1:40 and ends at 5:04.)

Neeson's view reminds me of C.S. Lewis's argument in The Problem of Pain that it is the human vocation to domesticate all animals. In contrast to what he calls “atheistical thought” which sees wild animals as natural and domestication as artificial, Lewis argues (based on God's command in Genesis 1:28 to "subdue" the earth and "have dominion" over the animals") that the tame animal is “in the deepest sense, the only ‘natural’ animal – the only one we see occupying the place it was made to occupy".

For a reconstruction of Lewis's view see my essay "Animal Pain and the Community of All Creatures" (esp. p. 10ff) available on my website.

"If you want more meaningful art, build a more meaningful world."

2009-01-05T19:11:00.000-08:00

I found myself with some time to kill in a bookstore recently. Mostly I read philosophy and theology books, but brick-and-mortar bookstores rarely carry a very good selection of such books. I have to go to Amazon to find most of the stuff I'm looking for. So I often turn to the periodical section to kill my browsing time.

This time I ended up reading the Nov/Dec 2008 issue of Adbusters magazine. I've been a fan of the Adbusters anti-capitalist artwork (such as the image above), but I've never read the actual magazine. There were several really interesting articles in this issue.

The first one that caught my eye was about pop art (foreshadowed by Ducham's dadaism) as a critique of American capitalism's implicit nihilism. Author Sarah Nardi quotes Warhol as saying he "wanted to paint nothing" and Murakami as saying he tries to "express hopelessness." You can read the article here.

But a more thought-provoking article was "Virtual Morality" by Andrew Tuplin. Tuplin explores the phenomenon of violent video games such as Gand Theft Auto and amoral virtual worlds such as Second Life. These and other computer programs allow users to act out violent and sexually deviant fantasies.

Tuplin points out that the Enlightenment conception of morality (which most Americans have) is more or less libertarian: the purpose of morality is only supposed to allow us to pursue our own freely chosen goals while preventing us from hurting others in the process. In short, something is morally wrong only if it harms someone. And "harm" is defined as doing something against someone's will. Note that on this view it is conceptually impossible to "harm" oneself (as long as you are not acting out of some sort of confusion or insanity such as addiction). So for those with this conception of morality, there could be nothing wrong with acting out fatasies of rape, torture, pedophilia, etc. if these fantasies are simulated and do not harm any actual person.

Then Tuplin argues that religious ethics can provide an alternative to this view. According to Tuplin, religious ethics teaches that something is wrong if it offends God and that God is offended by our thoughts and desires as well as our actions. On this view, it is morally wrong even to want to rape or torture whether you act on those actions or not. So for those who have this conception of morality, there is no significant difference between virtual and actual behavior.

Now, I see what Tuplin is going for. The subtitle of his essay asks the question "Are we free to do anything we want in a virtual world, or are some things inherently wrong?" So he is attempting to reject the ethical view called "consequentialism" according to which something is wrong only if it harms someone. Instead he want to affirm a form of "deontology" according to which actions are inherently right or wrong regardless of their consequences. But he doesn't seem to understand that one need not be religious to affirm deontological ethics.

And he doesn't seem to understand that one need not hold to a divine command ethics in order to be religious. Historically, the majority of Christian theologians have rejected the sort of ethics Tuplin calls "religious". Indeed, I would argue that, it is logically incoherent to think that morality is based on what offends God.

But Tuplin is on to something when he says "The humanist or secular view of morality is concerned only with what we do. True religious morality is concerned not only with what we do, but with who we are, with what we desire to do." If we disregard his characterization of the two views as religious vs. secular, Tuplin has indeed given us a good alternative to Enlightenment ethics. The point is that for pre-Enlightenment views morality is as concerned with character as with behavior. (Note that this was the view of the Greek philosophers and is not essentially tied to religion.)

The important difference between this view and the Enlightenment view is that morality is not simply about preventing harm to others, but involves preventing harm to oneself. "Harm" on this view is doing something against an ideal, not simply doing something against one's will. This is a health model of morality. If you act in a way that is not healthy (i.e., it is not living up to the ideal of human nature), then you harming yourself and are acting immorally even if you don't harm anyone else.

This view gives us a way to criticize violent and sexually deviant fantasies: it is an abuse of one's own character to have immoral desires even if one never acts on those desires.

"What's Christmas but a time for finding yourself a year older and not a day richer?"

2008-12-25T17:55:00.001-08:00

I'm with my in-laws for Christmas, and last night I got raked over the yule log for suggesting that children should be taught not to care about getting presents for Christmas. I was arguing that Christians especially should be brought up to reject consumeristic celebration of the secular holiday (call it Festivus, if you wish, though I'm not referring to the Seinfeld holiday) on which American children worship the false god named Santa Claus. Though not in so many words, I was more or less accused of being a Scrooge.

Tonight we're watching Scrooge (Neame, 1970), the best musical version of A Christmas Carol, and it struck me that it's the American consumer culture that is Scrooge, not me. Modern Christmas is the triumph of the Scrooges over the Dickensian sentiment.

I don't know how I missed it before, but A Christmas Carol is obviously an anti-corporate screed. It is a critique of Scrooge, a capitalist who refuses to give his employees fair working conditions: no living wage, no eight hour working day, no five day work week, no vacation days, no day off for Christmas, etc. Scrooge hates Christmas, not because he hates people in general (as the musical version would have it), but because Christmas is bad for business. He is being asked to give Bob Cratchit a day off with pay and to give money to various charities. He thinks the whole holiday is a scam by lazy poor people to get money out of hard working rich people. But in the 20th Century, Scrooge got his revenge. He managed to turn Christmas into a money-making business. Even if he has to give people a day off from work, he still makes a profit because he has made their celebration of the holiday all about getting and spending.

I don't have it in for celebration of what Dickens calls the spirit of Christmas. In fact, Dickens's point seems to be that the spirit of Christmas is to be generous to those less fortunate than yourself. (The ghost of dead businessman Jacob Marley tells Scrooge that "'Tis mankind should be our business, though we [capitalists] rarely attend to it.") And I don't even have it in for making merry -- decorating trees, dancing, driking, exchanging gifts. I've written on this blog about my theory of Christian art as redemption of secular culture, and that's what most of our Christmas traditions are about: baptizing pagan rites for Christian purposes. But there are some things that can't be redeemed. Violence is one of them. Consumerism is another. When you try to sell Christmas, the pagan (in this case, American capitalist) element wins, and the Christian attempt at redemption is overwhelmed.

So I say a hearty "Humbug!" on Scroogified gift-centered capitalist Christmas. And wish you instead a truly Dickensian semi-socialist merry Christ-Mass.

"Only in theory do we begin to suspect the power of aesthetics to shape our lives."

2008-12-14T18:15:00.000-08:00

I was in the doctor's office waiting room this week, and I happened to pick up an old issue of The New Yorker from back in June. I was pleasantly surprised to find an essay by Tobias Wolff about a time when he saw Bergman's Winter Light at a church screening in Oxford. I really liked Wolff's optimistic reading of the film:

Bergman takes care to show that Tomas and the fisherman are not alone in their suffering, and that others, equally afflicted—the fisherman’s wife, the pastor’s steadfast lover, his hunchbacked assistant—are able to bear their pain into a still deeper faith and capacity for love.

This is how I want to read Winter Light. It is an unexpected affirmation of faith, not a rejection of faith as it is normally read.

But the point of the essay is not really about Winter Light. It is about the importance of art and beauty. After seeing the film, Wolff says he "felt harrowed, crust broken, buried things churning to the surface." At that point in his life Wolff was an atheist, but he was open to hearing what the minister might say about the film. Until the minister put up a slide of William Holman Hunt's painting "The Light of the World" which Wolff found "garish, melodramatic, cloying in its technique and sentimentality". Wolff ended up continuing in his life as a disbeliever until, years later, he discovered the poetry of George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T.S. Eliot.

Wolff concludes:

We like to think of our beliefs, and disbeliefs, as founded on reason and close, thoughtful observation. Only in theory do we begin to suspect the power of aesthetics to shape our lives.

But he notes that not everyone experiences beauty in the same way. A friend of his who was with him at the Winter Light screening was converted by the Holman Hunt painting that put Wolff off. His encounter with the painting put him on a path that eventually led him to being a missionary in Africa. Peggy Rosenthal over at the Image Journal interprets this as a lesson about the power even bad art can have to point us toward truth:

We must admit that in our popular culture plenty of bad art stirs people to genuinely good religious faith, a faith that issues in loving actions and a Christ-like spirit.

I'm not sure that's quite right. This is a lesson about the importance of context. Wolff writes that "the contrast between Bergman’s severe, honest art and this painting, on the same screen, chilled me" (my emphasis). I actually don't hate the Holman Hunt painting. I think it does have a (perhaps simplistic) kind of beauty. But I can see how in juxtaposition to Bergman's film it would come off banal. So why didn't Wolff's friend notice this jarring juxtaposition? The context of film appreciation is not entirely external. It is internal and subjective, too. We bring our own context to the work.

If all we look at is the objective context of the chapel in Oxford on a night in the winter of 1970, then all we see is the contrast between Winter Light and Holman Hunt. But if we could see into the heart of Wolff's friend, we could see why he was able to experience the beauty of the painting while for Wolff that small beauty was outshone by the brilliance of Bergman's film. Every object has some beauty in it, and every beauty has some truth. And the power of beauty's truth is so strong that it can work even through less than brilliant artworks. I guess I'm ultimately saying the same thing as Rosenthal: even lesser art can shape our lives for the better.

"This is the website of John McAteer."

2008-12-11T10:12:00.000-08:00

I haven't had much time for blogging lately. I've been busy applying for jobs. To that end I have created a website with my professional and personal info as well as samples of my philosophical, religious, and film writings.

Feel free to check it out at http://www.filmphilosopher.com/.

"It all depends on other people."

2008-11-29T21:03:00.000-08:00

I’m not usually a big fan of British historical romance stories, but Atonement (Wright, 2007) actually worked for me. It wasn’t the tragic romance that captured my attention, but the unexpected philosophy. The movie turns out to be a sort of postmodern Masterpiece Theater remake of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 masterpiece Blow Up.

The opening image is a typewriter. The sound of the typewriter is a recurring motif in the film, even being incorporated into the music. We don’t realize it until the end of the film, but the sound of typing functions as a subtle reminder that what we are watching is not the “absolute truth” as the main character Briony Tallis will later call it. It is Briony’s imaginative reconstruction.

After a friend of hers is raped by an older man, thirteen year old Briony fingers her older sister Cecilia’s lover Robbie Turner. She tells the police inspector, “I know it was him.” The inspector presses her: “You know it was him? Or you saw him?” Briony: “Yes. I saw him. I saw him with my own eyes.” This is a deliciously ambiguous statement. She did see the rapist with her own eyes. But it wasn’t Robbie she saw.

Atonement turns out to be a movie about imagination: seeing things you think you understand but don’t understand. Throughout the film (as with Kurosawa’s Rashomon) we see the same scenes replayed from different (sometimes even fictional) points of view. At various points it is unclear (though, as with Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects, we don’t realize it is unclear until the end of the film) whether what we are seeing is reality, merely one person’s interpretation of reality, a dream sequence, or an utter fiction.

The first line of the film is Briony’s: “I finished my play.” She is excited, but can’t get others to cooperate in the performance and production of the play. So she decides to stick with novels: “If you write a story, you only have to say the word ‘castle’ and you can see the towers and the woods and the village below. But in a play it’s… it all depends on other people.”

After the close of the movie’s narrative, we flash forward to an elderly Briony in present day giving an interview about the story we have just seen. She explains that the story of Atonement must be her last novel. because she has a disease called vascular dementia in which “your brain closes down, gradually you lose words, you lose your memory, which for a writer is pretty much the point.”

Now, Briony’s “novel” is so “entirely” “autobiographical” that she says “I haven’t changed any names, including my own.” She claims it is “the absolute truth” with “no rhymes, no embellishments”. But if Briony is losing her memory, then how can she be trusted to tell the historical truth? And if the story is pure history, then how is it a novel? Shouldn’t we call it a memoir? Not so fast. Briony continues:

“I got first-hand accounts of all the events I didn’t personally witness[…]. But the effect of all this honesty was rather pitiless. You see, I couldn’t any longer imagine what purpose would be served by it. […] By honesty. Or reality.” She was “too much of a coward” to make amends for her false accusations and so she “imagined” the scene, “invented” it. “But what sense of hope or satisfaction could a reader derive from an ending” that told the ugly truth? She admits to changing the facts and giving her character the strength to do what she ought to have done, but says she’d “like to think this isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness. I gave them their happiness.”

This is Briony’s atonement, her attempt to make right the happiness she prevented her sister from having. But notice that the effectiveness of this atonement rests on a paradox. The novel must narrate a happy ending for Cecilia and Robbie while simultaneously confessing Briony’s sin of preventing that happy ending. Briony has to tell the story both as it did happen and as it ought to have happened but did not.

John Mullan gives a nice analysis of this final scene in the London newspaper The Guardian. (He’s writing about Ian McEwan’s novel upon which the movie was based, but his comments apply to the film, too.)

Unlike writers of metafiction, McEwan wants you to identify with characters, to succumb to narrative illusion. For Briony to undertake her “atonement”, her work of fiction must make up for, and confess, the wrong that she has done. In a novel, she can make the world better than it truly is. She can make Cecilia and Robbie survive and meet again. And we must be allowed to believe it.

In other words, the reason Briony’s atonement works (if it does) is that she has made us believe in the love story and feel the aesthetic appropriateness of its narrative conclusion. (Note the ironic symmetry here: like the play from the opening scene, the closing scene reveals that the effectiveness of Briony’s novel “all depends on other people.”) But Frank Kermode seems to give the opposite analysis in The London Review of Books, arguing that we are not supposed to believe the story:

It is, in perhaps the only possible way, a philosophical novel, pitting the imagination against what it has to imagine if we are to be given the false assurance that there is a match between our fictions and the specifications of reality. The pleasure it gives depends as much on our suspending belief as on our suspending disbelief.

But Kermode is using “believe” in a somewhat different sense than Mullan. Mullan argues only that we must be emotionally committed to the story -- that we “identify with the characters” -- not that we accept them as nonfictional representations of reality. So what is Mullan’s point? He is reading Atonement the way postliberal theologians read the Bible.

For modern theologians (both liberals and fundamentalists), the point of Scripture is its representation of reality. Believers must either accept all the Biblical stories at fact value (as do fundamentalists) or they must try to find the philosophical truth behind the mythical stories (as do liberals). But postliberals (and postevangelicals) realize that there is no way to get behind the text. There is no way to know exactly what happened historically and thus there is no way to know to what degree the stories are fact or myth – just as there is no way to know to which bits of Atonement are facts, which are Briony’s false interpretations of facts, and which are pure fictions.

And even if we could know “the absolute truth” about what “really” happened, this would be beside the point. The (historical) truth would, as the elderly Briony says, no longer serve any purpose. (Kierkegaard says much the same thing about the historical Jesus.) But as Mullan points out, this need not imply that we can’t believe the story. For postliberals belief is more a commitment to a form of life structured around the Biblical narratives. We can enter into the story without knowing what really happened. We can, as Mullan says, “identify” ourselves with Christ -- we can let him enact our “atonement” with God -- despite the fact that there are four (incompatible) versions of his life in the four Gospels. Scripture does not mirror the (uninterpreted) reality of history -- it structures our reality and teaches us to interpret history, giving us a “sense of hope or satisfaction”. But it is precisely in this way that Scripture turns out to be true.

"Donc, si vous voulez, mon art serait de vivre."

2008-11-14T11:03:00.000-08:00

We are all artists.

Whether you want to be an artist or not, whether you feel like an artist or not, you are an artist. Even if you haven’t painted a picture since the days of kindergarten finger-paint, even if you haven’t danced a single step since your Saturday morning ballet lessons in elementary school, you are still an artist. Even if you haven’t written a story since junior high creative writing assignments and haven’t played a musical instrument since high school marching band or composed a song since your now abandoned late nights as an undergrad rock star wannabe, even if you have given up on all these artistic endeavors, you are still an artist.

As long as you are alive it is impossible to stop being an artist; for your life itself is your work of art. Every choice you make inscribes a sentence in your autobiography, every emotion you feel paints a brushstroke of your self-portrait, every belief and every desire sounds a note and choreographs a step in the performance of your life.

You have no choice about whether your life will be a work of art. Your only choice is whether you life will be a good work of art, whether you will live a beautiful life and cultivate a beautiful soul.

Unfortunately there are no rules for how to create something beautiful. Aesthetic achievement takes genius, an understanding of your own unique relation to the world. This, of course, does not mean that anything goes. There are clear paradigms of beautiful lives and obvious examples of unspeakable deformities. The problem is that in the art of life, as in any art, there is no mathematical formula for success. Creating beauty takes good taste, an ability to discriminate the relevant details of your life and your world and a sensitivity to the harmonies and dissonances that reverberate from your choices.

And yet, in life as in the other arts, we can develop good taste. We learn first to discern and then to love the good by contemplating the paradigmatic works of beauty available to us in our traditions, the masterpieces lived by the saints and heroes. And we learn in conversation with our contemporary community of fellow artists how to read and interpret these great models of the past by engaging together in a study of the great critics of the past, the master philosophers and theologians, applying the lessons of the classics to our own ever-changing situations.

For Christians, the primary workshop for our training as artists is worship, the regular participation in word and sacrament. Christians believe that in worship we tell God’s story, enact the drama of salvation, and rehearse our steps in the eternal perichoretic dance of the ultimate Reality. In worship we encounter the ground of true Beauty and our lives are sculpted anew into His image and likeness. In worship we are taught how to think and feel and desire, how to represent Christ in our lives the way Christ represented God in his own life. In worship our souls are made beautiful.

But even if you are not a Christian, you are still an artist. Your life is still formed in response to traditions and models you take to be authoritative. We are all artists. May God grant us the grace to live artistically.

"I Voted."

2008-11-04T08:05:00.000-08:00

"You can't mend the heart in a heartless world by observing that the world is in fact heartless."

2008-11-02T08:27:00.000-08:00

Here are some nice reflections on the problem of evil by Andrew Brown, columnist for the British newspaper The Guardian:

"In the end, I suppose, my objections to God are, as they must be, theological: the workings of divine providence are just a little too inaccessible to human reasoning. The problem of suffering remains insoluble. There is no possible theodicy. But I can't, either, take the Dawkinsian view that the problem of suffering is an illusion generated by the illusion of God. You can't mend the heart in a heartless world by observing that the world is in fact heartless. That's not the point. I suppose I end up saying that I accept the Christian account of the problem; I just can't accept Christianity's account of the solution, and so I remain, by the grace of God perhaps, an atheist."

You can read the whole essay here. (Thanks to Episcopal Cafe's "The Lead" for pointing me to it.)

I really like his criticism of Richard Dawkins. And I am sympathetic to his view that there is no solution to the problem of evil -- sometimes I'm tempted to agree. But I wonder what exactly Brown takes to be "Christianity's account of the solution".

I'm a Christian theologian (more or less), and I'm still trying to figure out what sort of theodicy Christianity actually teaches. There have been many different theodicies offered by Christians throughout history. And even the Bible suggests different responses to evil. I don't find it at all obvious which theodicy (if any) coheres best with the majority of other fundamental Christian theological committments.

If there's one thing I am fairly sure of (given my reading of the relevant Biblical texts such as Job, the Psalms, Revelation, etc.) is that the best response to evil is going to have something to do with worship of God generally and in particular the liturgy of the Eucharist. (Then again, I tend to think that everything has something to do with the Eucharist!)

The centrality of worship (prayer, liturgy, communion, etc.) for our response to evil is something the best cinematic theologians have realized. I have already discussed Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (see my earlier post) on this topic. Here let me just mention the work of Ingmar Bergman, perhaps the filmmaker most obsessed with the problem of evil. There are hints of Eucharistic themes in The Seventh Seal (Bergman, 1957) and The Virgin Spring (Bergman, 1960). But the theme becomes most prominent in Winter Light (Bergman, 1962) whose story takes place in and between two celebrations of the Eucharist.

One could argue that Bergman intended these films as a critique of the idea that worship can provide an adequate response to evil. (For a really good analysis of The Seventh Seal along these lines, see Steven Greydanus's essay at Decent Films.) But even if it is true that Bergman intended to reject a Eucharistic theodicy, he was unable to keep the truth from shining through his work. In any event, I think Bergman's intentions were more complex than simply rejecting Christianity. He also struggled with the ability of art to respond adequately to evil -- most significantly in Persona (Bergman, 1966), but I don't think he ever quite gave up hope that art could help us go on living.

Unfortunately I don't have time now to give a detailed analysis of Winter Light (I hope to do so in a future post -- this post was supposed to be a simple link to the essay by Andrew Brown!), but I encourage you to watch it for yourself and try to figure out what is going on in the final scene. Has the priest lost his faith? Why does he go through with the liturgy? Is this an optimistic or pessimistic ending? How does the ending relate to the endings of The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring? And, most importantly, what can we learn from this film (regardless of what Bergman was trying to teach us) about responding to evil?

Let me know what you think.

"Barack Obama will win: It’s all in ‘The West Wing.’"

2008-10-30T13:06:00.001-07:00

Here's a fun article comparing the current presidential election to the final season of the best TV shows in history: The West Wing (Sorkin et al, 1999-2006).

"Abortion confronts the Christian with the most perplexing questions of all."

2008-10-29T20:21:00.000-07:00

This election season many Roman Catholic and Evangelical voters have found themselves attracted to Democratic candidate Barack Obama. At the same time, many of these religious voters feel conflicted because of Obama's pro-choice stand on abortion. That Evangelicals could support a Democrat at all is surprising, of course, because Evangelicalism has, for the past 30 or so years, wed itself tightly to the Republican party. But, for some Evangelicals and Roman Catholics, it is simply too much to ask to forsake the pro-life commitment that the Replublican party has used to gain the loyalty of the "Religious Right" for so long.

In light of this controversy, religious supporters of Obama have given some interesting arguments for Obama. For example, my wife posted about this issue on her blog and received some nice responses. Some pro-life advocates have explicitly argued in favor of Obama, too. But one of the most interesting arguments has come from Obama's running mate Joe Biden who has recently pointed out that Roman Catholic dogma on abortion has shifted throughout the centuries.

Catholic historian Frank Flinn has a nice article on the Church's changing attitudes toward abortion. He explains that it wasn't until 1869 that the pope declared abortion to be absolutely forbidden during all stages of pregancy. Before that, the fetus was not considered a person until the moment of "quickening" (i.e., the moment the mother first feels the baby move in her womb) which usually happens in the middle of the second trimester. Flinn even quotes Anselm as saying: "No human intellect accepts the view that an infant has the rational soul from the moment of conception"!

I suppose the argument here is that if even the supposedly infallible Roman Catholic Church has changed its mind over the centuries about when a fetus becomes a human person, then this is a question too hard for the American government and should be left up to individual people. It's the same point Obama was making when he told Evangelical leader Rick Warren that this question was above his "pay grade". One could reply (as did Biden's own Bishop) that when the Church changes its teaching, the later teaching is always better than the earlier teaching. But this reply would seem to undermine the whole point of conservatism which teaches that "traditional" (i.e., older) teachings are always better. This was the point I was making in my earlier post about same sex marriage. Conservatives can't argue that we should accept the "traditional" view of marriage, because on the traditional view wives are property of their husbands and the possibility of polygamy was assumed: men can own as many wives as they can afford. Here again the conservative argument from tradition doesn't support Evangelical and Catholic positions.

Now, I knew this stuff about the Catholic Church's evolving position, but when I read it again it got me wondering about Evangelicals. Has there been any shift in Evangelical understandings of abortion? A few minutes with Google reveals that there has been.

In 1968 Christianity Today sponsored a symposium on issues of birth control and abortion. And what happened? Evangelical leaders of the day got together and decided ... to be pro-choice. Follow this link for the published summary of the symposium along with some responses. Below are some of the most interesting passages, along with my comments in italics:

"Abortion confronts the Christian with the most perplexing questions of all: Is induced abortion permissible and if so, under what conditions? If it is permissible in some instances is the act of intervention still sinful? Can abortion then be justified by the principle of tragic moral choice in which a lesser evil is chosen to avoid a greater one? As to whether or not the performance of an induced abortion is always sinful we are not agreed, but about the necessity and permissibility for it under certain circumstances we are in accord." -- i.e., abortion is always tragic, but sometimes it is the best choice in a bad situation. Note also the assumption that we should approach the question of abortion with humility -- i.e., we should remember that the answer is above our pay grade.
"The Christian physician will advise induced abortion only to safeguard greater values sanctioned by Scripture. These values should include individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility." -- i.e., it is permissible to have an abortion if you think you won't be able to care for the child.
"The Christian maintains that in avoiding legalism on the one hand and license on the other, the prescriptions of legal codes should not be permitted to usurp the authority of the Christian conscience informed by Scripture." -- i.e., the choice of whether to have an abortion should be left to the individual, not mandated by the government.
"Physicians are called upon to maintain and restore the health of the whole [human being]." -- i.e., abortion may be necessary for the mental (not just the physical) health of the mother.
"We live in a world pervaded by evil. Human relationships become distorted; unwanted children are born into the world; genetic defects are not uncommon and harmful social conditions abound. Therefore, it is the duty of Christians to be compassionate to individuals and to seek responsibility to mitigate the effects of evil when possible, in accordance with the above principles. When principles conflict, the preservation of fetal life or the integrity of the human body may have to be abandoned in order to maintain full and secure family life." -- i.e., there are many kinds of cases in which abortion may be necessary: cases of "distorted" relationships such as rape or incest, cases of "genetic defects", cases of "harmful social conditions" such as poverty, cases in which the mother's bodily "integrity" is threatened such as when her life or health is in jeapardy, and even in cases of "unwanted" pregnancy. Note that many of these cases are spelled out in more explicit detail elsewhere in the report.

So this is a fairly standard pro-choice document. It is also a clearly pro-life document -- what? you can be pro-life and pro-choice at the same time? -- but while affirming the value and sanctity of all human life from the moment of conception, the document's drafters understand that in this fallen world hard choices must sometimes be made. And those choices can't be made for us by government officials who don't know the specifics of our case and try to create blanket rules that apply to everyone. Its a document I think Obama could agree with.

The document actually reminds me a lot of one of my favorite movies on the topic of abortion: Citizen Ruth (Payne, 1996). The movie satirizes both sides of the culture war, indicting both pro-life and pro-choice activists for their mutual failure to treat the women involved as actual human beings rather than pawns in a political battle. (There's a key scene toward the end where the two sides are so involved in screaming at each other about what is in Ruth's best interests that they don't notice her walking away from the whole mess.) In 1968 Evangelicals were the compassionate people writer-director Alexander Payne would one day challenge us to be with his film. But by the time he actually made his film in 1996, Evangelicals were just the butt of his jokes.

"Call it."

2008-10-17T16:10:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week blogger Jason Hesiak posted his reflections comparing the philosophy of No Country For Old Men (The Coen Brothers, 2007) with The Dark Knight (The Nolan Brothers, 2008). His reflections on No Country are great, though I think he under-appreciates The Dark Knight.

In any event, it was insightful of him to juxtapose the two films. Anton Chigurh and The Joker are clearly cut from the same nihilistic cloth. They both -- I would argue, innaccurately -- think of themselves as Nietzschen Übermenschen. Like Hitler, and other evil men who utterly misunderstood Nietzsche, they're really more like Hannibal Lecter than Nietzsche. Like Nietzsche -- and, I would argue, like the Jesus who rejected the legalism of the Pharisees-- they do reject a morality based on "rules" (Chigurh: "Let me ask you a question: if the rule you followed brought you to this [i.e., to your death], of what use was the rule?" and The Joker: "The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules."), but unlike Nietzsche (and Jesus) they are left with a life-denying nihilism because they don't attempt to engage in the "transvaluation of all values" by building a new life-affirming morality based on joyfulness rather than legalism. (Beyond this nihilism, there is also a fairly obvious -- though unremarked upon by Hesiak -- link between Chigurh's coin tossing ["Call it."] and the coin tossing of The Joker's protégé Two-Face ["The world is cruel. And the only morality in a cruel world is chance. Unbiased, unprejudiced, fair."].)

Hesiak has two criticisms of The Dark Knight. His first problem with it is that it explains its philosophy too verbally instead of letting it come out through more cinematic means. He writes that in No Country "no one in the film explains to the audience, or to any other character in the film" the kind of things The Joker is always explaining to Batman. This might be a fair criticism -- but in general I think The Dark Knight is interesting insofar as its explicitly philosophical musings pull us in conflicting directions (see my earlier post on the film). These aren't explanations as much as they are questions.

His other problem is that the film is too nihilistic and doesn't offer any hope. He writes: "So I suppose I could summarize my opinion of No Country of Old Men by saying that I experienced it as a medium through which I lived out my life and my death, and that it was a refreshing experience after Batman: Dark Knight, through which I felt as though I simply experienced my death." This criticism is less fair insofar as The Dark Knight is part of an ongoing series. I expect (or rather, hope) that in the next Nolan-directed Batman film we will see Batman beginning to find his way out of the darkness into which he has descended in the first two films. If The Dark Knight is the middle film in a trilogy, it makes sense that it would be the darkest and least hopeful.

Furthermore, I disagree with Hesiak's suggestion that Chigurh is the "main character" of No Country. I think Sheriff Bell is the main character. (Clearly Llewelyn Moss is not.) On my view the movie is about the sheriff's confrontation with the inexplicability of evil. It narrates his struggle to find meaning in the kind of world where Anton Chigurh could exist. In other words, No Country For Old Men is about the problem of evil.

But the Coens' film doesn't seem to have much to say about the solution to the problem. It just wants to make sure we understand why and how the nature of evil threatens the meaning of life. The Dark Knight, on the other hand, goes further. The Nolans' movie is also about the problem of evil, but, like Batman Begins, it movie is interested in exploring -- and criticizing -- various possible solutions to the problem. True, the Nolans tend to talk about their themes as much as they dramatize them, but I don't see that as being as problematic as Hesiak does.

But regardless of whether you ultimately agree or disagree with Hesiak's essay, it is definitely worth reading. Check it out here.

"Churches could lose their tax-exemption status."

2008-10-14T21:27:00.000-07:00

It seems like every time I watch TV there's an anti-Prop 8 commercial on. (For those of you outside California, Proposition 8 is a voter initiative to amend the state constitution making same sex marriage illegal. This is in response to the recent state Supreme Court decision saying that the California constitution guarantees equal rights to same sex couples.)

Here is a link to the video. (I couldn't get it to embed in this post.) The ad is a point by point response to an earlier commercial for Yes on Prop 8 (embedded below):

Now, one claim from this ad sticks out to me: "Churches could lose their tax-exemption status." The "No On Prop 8" people ridicule this claim because the Supreme Court decision explicitly states that religions will not be affected. But I actually think that, while they are usually paranoid, the religious right is correct in their fears about this proposition. Why wouldn't the same sort of reasoning apply in the same sex marriage case that applied in the interracial marriage case when Bob Jones University lost their tax exempt status for their racial discriminatory policies?

I actually don't know what I think about this issue. I totally agree that Bob Jones's policies were evil. And I agree that the same-sex marriage issue is parallel. But I also think it was part of Bob Jones's religious freedom to keep the races segregated according to their (evil) fundamentalist doctrines. Maybe no churches should be tax exempt. But it seems wrong to dole out tax exemption in such a way that it pressures churches to violate their own religious teachings.

This issue reminds me of the issue of polygamy. Sometimes opponents of gay marriage argue that if we allow same sex couples to marry, there will be no stopping the slide down the slippery slope to allowing group marriage. Again, I think this is a place where the religious right is absolutely correct. But again, I'm not sure that it would be such bad thing to allow polygamous marriage. It was evil of the U.S. government to persecute the Mormon church for their marriage practices -- and it was even more ridiculous for the Mormons to change their doctrines in order to gain public acceptability. If the Mormon religion teaches polygamy, then it is their First Amendment right to practice polygamy.

For more reflection on polygamy, check out HBO's series Big Love, starring Bill Paxton as a man married to three wives. The show is a fascinating look at a variety of viewpoints on polygamy. It does not shy away from the dark side of polygamy as it is practiced in the fundamentalist Mormon "compounds" (forced marriage, pedophilia, incest, etc., not to mention repressive patriarchy), but the central characters' suburban polygamous family is surprisingly healthy. The show seems to be arguing that polygamy is not necessarily evil: if we brought polygamy out of the shadows of criminalization it could be made to work.

And the show's fundamentalist Mormon patriarch gives the best argument against Prop 8 I've heard: If we define marriage as the union between one man and one woman, then we criminalize many of our Biblical forefathers such as Abraham, Jacob, David, etc. In other words, the "traditional" definition of marriage does not seem to be limited to heterosexual monogamy.

"Abortion is murder!"

2008-10-05T14:46:00.000-07:00

When I return to teaching, I plan to assign my students to watch the abortion documentary Lake of Fire (Kaye, 2006). Along with the Jewish homosexuality documentary Trembling Before G-d, it's one of the most stimulating movies I've seen about a contemporary ethical issue. And, like movies such as Waking Life and My Dinner With Andre, the film is made up almost entirely of philosophical discussion, priming the audience's intellectual pump for class discussion.

One caveat I have about the film, though, is that I don't think students will be able to digest the material without expert commentary. Much of the footage is presented without editorial comment -- there is no narrator and very few on-screen titles -- and hence lacks any sort of context and ends up being misleading.

Because of this lack of commentary, most reviews of the film claim that it is fair to both sides of the debate -- something unusual in the abortion contoversy. But I didn't find the film to be fair and openminded at all. Filmmaker Tony Kaye is not unbiased -- he's obviously pro-choice. I actually have a hard time understanding why anyone would miss this point. Why would reviewers think Kaye is anything but pro-choice? Surely professional film critics don't need the director to come right out and say he is pro-choice before they can detect his viewpoint. (Maybe they've seen too many Michael Moore movies!)

A more charitable interpretation of the critical blindspot is that since the film includes graphic footage of late-term fetuses, perhaps reviewers were led to think Kaye is sympathetic to the view that abortion is murder. After all, these fetuses look exactly like post-birth babies, and hence exactly the same sort of footage is used in many anti-abortion propaganda movies. (This, by the way, is one of the misleading scenes. The fetuses are clearly in their second-trimester of development. But without being told that almost 90% of abortions take place in the first-trimester when the fetus looks more like a sea monkey than a baby, viewers might think that all aborted fetuses look like this.)

Another reason people may mistakenly believe the film is ambivalent is that, in part because of the graphic footage but also because it presents such an array of voices from every side of the debate, the film is so unsettling that it creates a kind of ambivalence in the viewer. It's not that Kaye doesn't know what he thinks about abortion or that he keeps his own viewpoint hidden in the film -- it's that after watching the film, you no longer know exactly what you think about abortion. And that's the most significant aspect of the film. It's also one of the most pro-choice aspects of the film. The film wants to convince us that this is a hard issue that is not as black and white as it is usually presented in political debates. Therefore, the film suggests, we should leave the choice about abortions up to individuals.

Another caveat: I'm not sure the film is primarily a debate about abortion at all. It is a documentary about the people involved in the abortion debate. And it's mostly about fundamentalist Christians who believe that abortion doctors should be assassinated. In some ways, the film is presenting a philosophical challenge to pro-life advocates, asking them "if you agree that abortion is murder, then what makes you different than these extremists?" (Again, I don' t think the film is even trying to be unbiased.) It's a fascinating question: if abortion really is parallel to the holocaust, then why shouldn't pro-lifers declare open war on abortionists like the Allies declared on the Nazis?

Brett McCracken, an Evangelical reviewer, misses this challenge. He complains in his Christianity Today review that the film "purposefully avoids featuring any thoughtful, articulate, or moderate Christians". From the rest of the review, I have to assume that by "moderate", McCracken means a Christian who condemns abortion as murder but also condemns the murders of abortion doctors. While this may be true, the film nevertheless presents the positions of moderate Christians, while putting them in the mouths of extremists. And what this move does is make the extremists look like they have some good points and that they are not (entirely) crazy. So I actually take this to be a rhetorical virtue of the film.

Moreover I reject McCracken's definition of "moderate Christian". I think any view according to which abortion is obviously murder is a pretty conservative one. A truly moderate Christian is one who admits that this is a hard issue about which the Bible has little to say, and who is willing to allow diversity of opinions about abortion. A liberal Christian is one who simply accepts the pro-choice viewpoint as obviously true.

McCracken seems to think that what separates his own (supposedly "moderate" view) from other "fundamenatlist" or "expremist" views, is that he is not interested in forcibly converting nonbelievers. He complains that the film makes all pro-life advocates look like "mindless pawns in a larger and more malicious march toward theocracy". In other words, the film assimilates anyone who votes against abortion rights to the "reconstructionist" viewpoint that the laws of the United States should be revised to match the laws of the Old Testament so that, for example, anyone who uses the Lord's name in vain should be put to death. (Someone in the film actually gives this example!)

Again, McCracken's observation is true: the film does attempt to blur the line between extremist theocrats and more moderate run-of-the-mill pro-life Republicans. But again this is a virtue of the film. I think a strong case could be made (though the argument is left implicit in the film) that anyone whose position on aborion legislation comes from their Christianity and not from publically shared reasons is, indeed, a theocrat. (This point is even more clear when it comes to the issue of gay marriage.) The fact that McCracken is so defensive suggests that, on some level, he knows this critique to be on target.

It's this ability to challenge us to rethink the implications of our deeply held beliefs about abortion that I think is the film's biggest philosophical strength. Without the Socratic ability to recognize that we lack wisdom, we have no hope of escaping the unproductive torment of the "lake of fire" the abortion controversy has devolved into.

"We are white men, sir, not beasts."

2008-09-24T07:00:00.000-07:00

If you haven't seen The Proposition (Hillcoat, 2005), I recommend it to you. I'm not sure there's a lot of new territory here that John Ford hadn't already explored in The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (see my earlier post on these films), but the old puzzle about the relationship between civilization and violence is brilliantly and beautifully retold by first-time screenwriter Nick Cave in the context of a western set in the Australian Outback. These are the same sort of perennial questions about the nature of justice raised again this year by The Dark Knight. (Come to think of it, Liberty Valance and The Dark Knight are almost the same movie!)

"Either you die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

2008-09-21T14:47:00.000-07:00

As hoped for in a previous post, I did finally see The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008), but I haven't been able to write about it yet. I think I need to see it a few more times before I can unravel my thoughts. Here are a few of my confused musings.

First, let me point you to an op-ed by Jonathan Lethem in this week's New York Times. I really liked Lethem's comment that "a morbid incoherence was the movie’s real takeaway, chaotic form its ultimate content". That's exactly the theme I discussed in an academic paper on the philosophy of Batman Begins (Nolan, 2005). I think the movie is intentionally incoherent, pointing to a puzzle in the American soul, a deep ambivalence we have about the nature of violence, justice, and heroism.

This ambivalence is dialectically expressed in a debate between commentators: witness Andrew Klavan's article in The Wall Street Journal and the response by David Cohen in Variety. Klavan argues that The Dark Knight sets Batman up as a symbol of George W. Bush in order to show us that Bush is a misunderstood hero. Cohen agrees with the Bush bit, but sees the movie as a criticism of the president's view of heroism. Lethem seems closer to the target when he says that the movie is playing both points of view off each other.

Both of Nolan's Batman movies have two endings: an ending in which Batman's method is praised and an ending in which it is vilified. In Batman Begins Rachel Dawes visits Bruce Wayne at the site of the burned-down Wayne Manor and says that Bruce was right to have created Batman, that Gotham City needs him. This seems like the end of the movie, but it is followed by a scene in which Lt. Jim Gordon points out that Bruce's method has resulted in "escalation" by giving grandiose ideas to the Joker. In The Dark Knight this theme is elaborated upon: the Joker and Batman are shown to be "two faces" of the same coin. But here we have two endings, too. First Harvey Dent points out that both he and Bruce share the blame for Rachel's death -- only Jim Gordon comes out looking innocent -- and then Gordon goes on to repeat Rachel's idea that Gotham needs Batman. (Actually he says we "deserve" Batman, the dark knight, but that we "need" Harvey Dent, the white knight. I'm not yet clear on what's going on here.)

The philosopher in me keeps hoping for a coherent message. I dream that writer-director Christopher Nolan is working on a trilogy in which Batman finally and unambiguously realizes that his vigilantism was a mistake, thereby affirming Cohen's reading. (It seems sigificant along these lines that, before she dies, Rachel recants her speech from the first ending of Batman Begins.) But, artistically, I suppose I have to admit that the film is a better text for being open to multiple readings.

"What would you do if you suddenly received a box via mail, labeled 'FRAGILE: Contains Peace'? "

2008-09-16T09:03:00.000-07:00

This week I received a little bundle of joy. No, I didn't have another baby. (My first baby is less than four months old, so that's sort of impossible.) In fact, my bundle of joy came in the mail. It was an artwork in a global public art series called "The Priority Boxes" (2006-2009) by Nicaraguan artist Franck de Las Mercedes who sends a box (for free!) to anyone who requests one.

I first heard about the project on Barry Taylor's blog. Barry's box contained world peace as did many of the boxes in the project's photo gallery (imagine what the postal carriers must think), so I kind of expected to receive that too when I ordered mine. But it takes several weeks for your box to arrive, and by then I had forgotten that I had even ordered it. So when it did arrive, it really did bring me joy, something I needed especially on that day.

Browsing the gallery of boxes again after receiving my box, I was struck by the fact that almost all of Paul's "fruit of the spirit" have been mailed out. There's love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and will power (self-control?). I didn't see faithfulness, goodness, or gentleness, though I did see faith and hope. Other non-theological boxes include things like life, truth, beauty, foresight, courage, creativity, etc. And there are a large number of democracy-themed boxes: freedom, human rights, world peace, activism, change, prosperity, humanity, etc. You can order your own box here. You never know what it might contain when it arrives. It might contain inspiration or even happiness.

"Love is always small."

2008-09-09T08:40:00.001-07:00

Christianity Today has a great interview (online here) with Andy Crouch about his new book Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. I've been a big fan of Andy since his days as creator/editor of re:generation quarterly. And his new book sounds especially exciting since it is the kind of thing I've been thinking about, too. See my review of WALL-E.

"And now for something completely different..."

2008-09-04T07:00:00.000-07:00

In the past three and a half months since I started this blog, I've written 50 posts and had over 1,000 page visits. Thanks for your support!

The observant among you will have noticed that my profile says I "almost" have a PhD. That's because I am not yet finished with my dissertation. But I am taking this fall semester off from teaching so I can finish up. Unfortunately that means I will have to write less frequently on this blog.

I'll still try to post at least once a week, but if I haven't posted in a while, you can go back and check out the archives of posts you might have missed. After I finish my dissertation, my next writing project will be on the sort of issues raised in these posts, so I would really love to read your comments!

"I don't like food, I love it. If I don't love it, I don't swallow."

2008-09-02T09:10:00.000-07:00

In honor of this weekend's Slow Food Nation event in San Francisco, here are my Top 10 Slow Food Movies (in alphabetical order):

1. Babette’s Feast (Axel, 1984)
2. Big Night (Scott and Tucci, 1996)
3. Eat Drink Man Woman (Lee, 1994)
4. Fast Food Nation (Linklater, 2006)
5. How to Cook Your Life (Dörrie, 2007)
6. Mostly Martha (Nettlebeck, 2001)
7. Ratatouille (Bird, 2007)
8. Sideways (Payne, 2004)
9. Spanglish (Brooks, 2004)
10. What’s Cooking? (Chadha, 2000)

In case you haven't heard, Slow Food is an international movement trying to combat "fast food" by emphasizing conscious eating (i.e., sustainability and fair trade as well as mindfulness), communal dining, quality food, etc. (For more on the concept of "slow food", check out the international movement's website.) What do you think? Have I missed any movies that should be on the list?

"Is not all religion a contract between man and God?"

2008-08-28T07:00:00.000-07:00

One of the recurring themes of this blog is the problem of evil. My first real post was titled "Theodicy at the Movies". But my interests are all of pop culture, not just movies. Today I want to discuss a graphic novel. Comic book auteur Will Eisner coined the term "graphic novel" as a fancy word for a literary comic book. And what's a comic book but a non animated cartoon?

The title piece in Eisner's seminal graphic novel (actually a collection of graphic short stories, but graphic literature in any case) A Contract With God (Eisner, 1978) is an interesting exploration of the problem of evil -- interesting because, like much great literature, it is open to multiple interpretations. Indeed, I would say that the story's ambiguity is its point. Like the problem of evil itself (at least in Eisner's view), the story is a mystery with no solution.

This is a very Jewish bit of theology. One of my favorite things about Contract is the way Eisner sometimes draws question marks in a font that resembles the Hebrew alphabet. Another example of this font is the word "God" on the cover, shown above left. To the right is one point where we see the Hebrew-esque question mark.

It is important that Eisner doesn't always draw question marks this way. He reserves this font for theological questions. Moreover, the only place he uses this Hewbrew font (other than the title) is in these theological question marks. It is as if Eisner sees the essence Hebraic thought as an unsolvable mystery, perhaps drawing on the tradition according to which the word Israel means "he who wrestles with God". And for the Jews, a nation persecuted for thousands of years, this wrestling revolves around the mystery of evil.

"Jimmy Carter for president!"

2008-08-26T07:00:00.000-07:00

I'm too young to remember Jimmy Carter's presidency. Though I was alive during Carter's time in office, my earliest political memories are of the 1984 Regan vs. Mondale campaign. But after seeing Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains (Demme, 2007), I'm a big fan of Carter. I couldn't agree more with Ed Norton's reaction to seeing Carter backstage at The Tonight Show: "Jimmy Carter for president!"

The movie isn't actually a straight documentary about Carter -- it's actually about Carter's recent controversial book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid -- but I loved the historical accounts of Carter's policies. We can only wonder what would have happened if he had been reelected and allowed to continue his sustainable energy policy, his anti-nuclear weapons campaign, his Mid-east diplomacy, etc.

And Carter's supposed failure in the Iran hostage crisis, turns out to be his greatest success. Carter may be the only president ever to avoid a war, even to his own political detriment. Now that's an Christian president. Unlike the allegedly Christian George W. Bush, who invented a war out of a trumped-up act of terrorism (the alleged connection between Iraq and 9/11), Carter managed to keep our country out of war with Iran, eventually saving all the hostages from actual terrorists.

Jihad: "to strive in the path of God"

2008-08-22T17:30:00.001-07:00

First there was Trembling Before G-d (Dubowski, 2001), then there was For the Bible Tells Me So (Karslake, 2007), and now comes A Jihad for Love (Sharma, 2008). These are documentary films about religious gay and lesbian people, focusing on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, respectively. I loved Trembling Before G-d, but was disappointed by For the Bible Tells Me So's lack of rigorous engagement with the difficult Biblical texts (despite the film's title and the claims of its promotional materials.) But since Jihad was produced by the same people as Trembling, I have high hopes.

It's playing in San Francisco and Berkeley this week, though I haven't seen it, and to be honest, I'll probably wait for DVD. It's not getting great reviews, but for students of the problem of religion and homosexuality, it is surely worth a look. You can check out the official site here. And the trailer is below:

“The gods will do nothing for us that we will not do for ourselves. What we need is a hero.”

2008-08-18T07:00:00.000-07:00

Robert Zemekis has perfected photorealistic computer animation. But why? His Beowulf (Zemekis, 2007) is impressive, but distracting. What is gained from making computer images of people that look exactly like real people? I think I prefer the route taken by (the very similar, but aesthetically superior film) 300 in which real actors are placed on a primarily CG background.

The one philosophically interesting thing about Beowulf's motion capture technology is the way it forces us to redefine animation. If Beowulf is animation, then why isn't 300? What percentage of the imagery must be traditional photography before the film ceases to be "animated"? If we say an animated film can have absolutely no photography, then WALL-E wouldn't count as animated. (Remember the video of Fred Willard as the Buy-n-Large CEO.) After watching Beowulf, it seems hard not to count 300 or Sin City as an animated film. But then do we also have to count the Star Wars prequels or The Lord of the Rings movies which also have a large percentage of computer animation?

Zemekis should have stuck to traditional filmmaking. Now he's gone and confused our whole cinematic ontology.

"Directive."

2008-08-16T07:00:00.000-07:00

Ever since Walt Disney made the first feature length cartoon in 1937, mainstream animated films have most often been fairy-tales, a genre primarily about children/adolescents learning the ways of the world and growing into adulthood. But Pixar's WALL-E (Stanton, 2008) is something deeper. It is a myth, a genre about what it means to be human. Not only that, I also think it is a substantially true myth. I think this is why WALL-E has been generating such hyperbolic reviews. People are unconsciously connecting to their vocation as humans. Or, as the movie puts it, it's about finding your true "directive."

WALL-E is the story of humanity's creation, fall, and redemption. In other words, it is the Christ-story -- with a cute, little robot as an unlikely Christ-figure. In the movie, several characters have misunderstood or even forgotten their directives. M-O blindly follows his directive to obliterate all "foreign contaminates". likewise Auto continues to follow his directive even after circumstances have changed. Only EVE is able to be flexible about her directive and to take into account how following it affects her relationship to others. But most significantly, the Captain and other humans have completely forgotten what their directive is. In Christian terms, they are "fallen" creatures.

So what is the human directive, according to the film? To love one another and to take care of the earth. This is exactly the same directive given to Adam and Eve in the Biblical creation story. "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth" (Genesis 1:28). In other words, make human communities ("be fruitful and multiply") and take care of the earth ("have dominion").

If this is our directive, then to be fallen is to have deviated from this. We have forgotten that having dominion over the earth is to be in a position of caretaker. Instead we have used the earth for our own selfish purposes. We have created technology that (in Heideggerian terminology) "uses up" nature rather than "letting the earth be earth". Instead of taking responsibility and being a servant-leader of the earth, we have created technology to make it serve us. And, as WALL-E demonstrates, this has ironically lead to us being slaves of our technology.

What we need, then, is a savior. We need a new Adam to fix the mistakes of the original Adam. We need someone to come and make it possible for us to fulfill our original directive, freeing us from our slavery to our own human constructions and teaching us to live in harmony with the world. In short, we need Jesus. Or WALL-E. Like Christ, the film's hero teaches the humans to reconnect to one another and brings them the means to live into their directive, defeating the forces that kept them in slavery. And, also like Christ, he gives up his own life in the process but is reborn.

Along with his EVE, this new Adam is the first parent of a new creation, a new community of humans finally living the way they were intended to live. In Christian terms, WALL-E ends with Pentecost, the birth of the Church. This is the true myth. But it also a cartoon about cute robots.

"The past belongs to us, and we can change it."

2008-08-15T14:53:00.000-07:00

Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind (Gondry 2008) perfectly captures the spirit of "fun" I described in my recent post on Bollywood cinema. Based on the lukewarm reviews, (and my own disappointment with Gondry's previous film The Science of Sleep) I wasn't expecting to like this movie. It was fun watching Gondry show us how to recreate big budget special effects with ordinary household items. It reminded me of the pleasures of early silent films, back in the days when movies were "handmade".

But even more than the special effects, I was totally caught up in the sheer fun of filmmaking as I watched Jack Black and Mos Def attempt to recreate Hollywood "blockbusters" with nothing more than a video camera. Given his references to copyright violation, community participation, etc., Gondry obviously has Youtube and other internet phenomena in mind here, but with their mix-and-match cliches and shamelessly "bad" (or should I say "awesomely bad") technical quality, the movies within the movie reminded me of nothing so much as Bollywood. It was just good old, crowd-pleasing fun. This is what filmmaking is all about. Too bad one of the only other filmmakers to understand this is Baz Luhrmann. Speaking of which, I think I'll go watch the shamelessly crowd-pleasing Strictly Ballroom....

"Duniya ki sabse choti prem kahani hogi."

2008-08-08T12:04:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I wrote about Moulin Rouge, my favorite Bollywood movie. If Moulin Rouge isn't technically a Bollywood movie, that's because it's made by an Austrailian and not an Indian. But it has all the conventions of the Bollywood genre: it's a highly exaggerated melodramatic musical, incorporating cliches from numerous classic Hollywood movies.

Today I mention my most recent Bollywood viewing, Dil Se (Ratnam, 1998) -- a Hindi title translated "With My Whole Heart". I watched it this week after Netflixing Spike Lee's Inside Man (Lee, 2006). I enjoyed Inside Man as a Hollywood thriller, though as Roger Ebert points out in his review, the plot is completely unbelievable. But the plot is twisty enough to be entertaining for a couple of hours. What really makes the movie worth watching, though, are the fun characters. The actors are clearly having a great time with the improvisational dialogue, and their enjoyment is infectious.

But, for me, the single most memorable thing in the film is the song under the opening credits: "Chaiyya Chayyia" from Dil Se. It makes no sense thematically to open Inside Man with a Bollywood song, but on the DVD commentary, Spike Lee said he just "likes" it. You can see the song in its original context here:

As you can see for yourself, the music in Dil Se (by the incomparable A.R. Rahman) is excellent. As for the rest of the movie ... well, not so much. Dil Se is one of those new generation Bollywood movies that wants to be taken seriously as art. It is aesthetically and thematically ambitious. Like Inside Man, it is an exploration of complicated and morally ambiguous characters. And that would be all well and good, if the movie didn't seem to be ashamed of its traditions. I have no problem with social commentary as long as it doesn't get in the way of pure fun that a Bollywood movie is supposed to be. In other words, Dil Se could have learned a lesson from Inside Man. Spike Lee managed to insert his trademark racial commentary into the film without distracting from its pulpy genre charms.

Too many young Bollywood directors don't seem to actually like Bollywood movies. They are always complaining that audiences/studios require them to make every movie a melodramatic musical. These films usually still have musical numbers, but (as in Dil Se) the songs seem perfunctory and disconnected from the main action. They could be cut (as the directors wish they would be) without losing anything. Instead of embracing the Bollywood genre elements audiences love, these young directors try to make "serious" movies that end up being just bad versions of American independent movies. They lose their unique Indian flavor. We have plenty of pretentious wannabe Sundance filmmakers. What India has to offer the world is cheesy Bollywood fun.

There are some great scenes in Dil Se. For example, the opening scene at the train station is a nice vignette. It ends with the line I used as a title for this post: "Duniya ki sabse choti prem kahani hogi." Hindi for: "must be the world's shortest love story." It works beautifully. But when the love story starts to aspire to epic proportions -- in this case, Romeo and Juliet meets the suicide bomber drama Paradise Now -- its reach exceeds its grasp. In the end, Dil Se is an interesting failure with wonderful music. Inside Man would have suffered the same fate if it hadn't kept its pretentious under control.

"Tell our story Christian, that way I'll always be with you."

2008-08-07T15:16:00.000-07:00

Ever since I created my blog, I've had a link to Jamie Smith's blog Fors Clavigera. I'm a huge fan of Smith's philosophical and theological publications, but I've been disappointed with the (in)frequency of his blogging. In this week's blog post he reveals why he has been neglecting his blog: he's been finishing a new book. The topic is one of my own personal areas of research, what I would call "liturgical ethics" or the way worship (really art in general) leads to moral formation. Smith puts it this way: "In short, I'm suggesting that before we can ever articulate a Christian 'worldview,' we are engaged in the practices of Christian worship. Drawing on Charles Taylor, I argue that the practices of Christian worship 'carry' within them an 'understanding' of the world that is better described as a 'Christian social imaginary.'"

Smith's book looks great. I'm especially excited about the section on Moulin Rouge (Luhrmann, 2001). It's called "Why Victoria’s In on the Secret: Picturing Discipleship at the Moulin Rouge". Moulin Rouge is one of my favorite movies. I don't know exactly what Smith will write about, but if I were writing about Moulin Rouge and liturgical ethics, I would talk about the way writer-director Baz Luhrmann uses the language of pop music to express his own feelings (and the feelings of his characters). It's precisely the way the writers of the New Testament use the text of the Old Testament -- and the way the Church Fathers use the text of the New Testament. Baz has been "formed" by American popular culture the way we should be formed by the Christian tradition.

If you haven't seen the movie, check out this scene for the best example of what Baz is up to. Another thing that is aesthetically interesting about Moulin Rouge is the way Baz "recontextualizes" pop songs, giving them a new meaning. I've already discussed this idea in my post on Johnny Cash's cover of "Hurt", but my favorite example in Moulin Rouge is the cover of Madonna's "Like a Virgin". You can watch it here. Anyway, there's more to discuss about Moulin Rouge, but I'm out of time for now.

Just For Fun: "I am an immortal."

2008-08-01T07:00:00.000-07:00

This week's earthquake in Chino Hills (a suburb of Los Angeles) reminds me of a scene from the movie Groundhog Day (Ramis, 1993). In the movie, Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray) goes to bed each night on February 2 only to find that he wakes up on February 2 again. After an initial period of hedonism, Phil falls into a depression, but finds that suicide doesn't release him from the cycle. Finally he confides in his coworker Rita:

PHIL: I am a god.
RITA: You're God?
PHIL: I'm a god. I'm not the God. I don't think.
RITA: Because you survived a car wreck?
PHIL: I didn't just survive a wreck. I wasn't just blown up yesterday. I have been stabbed, shot, poisoned, frozen, hung, electrocuted, and burned.
RITA: Oh, really?
PHIL: Every morning I wake up without a scratch on me, not a dent in the fender: I am an immortal.
RITA: Why are you telling me this?
PHIL: Because I want you to believe in me.
RITA: You're not a god. Believe me. This is twelve years of Catholic school talking.

So why does an earthquake remind me of this? Because I missed it. I moved to Los Angeles six months after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, and I moved away one month before the 2008 Chino Hills earthquake. The whole time I lived in L.A., we never had any significant quakes. I felt a couple of brief wobbles, but I never really got to experience a real shaker. It's kinda sad, really. Maybe I'm some sort of good luck charm. Maybe I'm a god like Phil Connors.

I wonder whether the tornadoes would stop if I moved to Kansas or whether the hurricanes would stop if I moved to Florida. As we learned from Spider-Man: "With great power comes great responsibility." What should I do with my new-found superpower? I am Calm Man! No earthquake may shake me!

DVD Miscellany

2008-07-31T07:00:00.000-07:00

As mentioned in a previous post, I'm watching movies at home now. And I've watched a few of Netflix movies last week that I haven't yet written about, because I don't have much to say about them. So I'll collect them all together into one post.

The first movie I tried to watch was The Golden Compass (Weitz, 2007). Like the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and unlike most evangelical Christians, I appreciated the story's criticism of dogmatism. But I did find the critique coming dangerously close to being itself a kind of dogmatic secularism that worships the authority of "science" as much as it criticizes religions for adherence to authority. More importantly, I found the movie boring and confusing. Without having read the book, I found it difficult to follow all the plot that had been shoe-horned into two hours. I imagine this is what people who haven't read the Harry Potter books feel like when they watched the movies. My final verdict: I didn't end up finishing the movie.

I had much more fun with Scanners (Cronenberg, 1981). I'm a big fan of David Cronenberg's early sci-fi/horror movies, though I have enjoyed his more recent "mainstream" movies like A History of Violence less. (Actually my favorite Cronenberg movie -- Dead Ringers -- sort of bridges this gap between horror and drama.) But I don't have anything interesting to say about the movie. I simply liked it. It's just good (admitedly somewhat cheesy) fun.

Then, in preparation for Scott Derrickson's upcoming remake, I watched the original The Day the Earth Stood Still (Wise, 1951). Scott has taken some flak from internet geeks for remaking a classic. But let's face it, Day isn't Psycho. (Someday I'll write up my thoughts on Gus Van Sant's remake of the Hitchcock classic.) I enjoyed its retro special effects, but its social commentary seemed pretty heavy-handed. I didn't find more here than in a lesser episode of The Twilight Zone. Hopefully Scott can do something more with this premise.

Finally, after those three sci-fi films, I watched two religious documentaries: How to Cook Your Life (Dörrie, 2007) and Into Great Silence (Gröning, 2005). (Are you getting an idea of my cinematic taste yet?) The latter film was not nearly as interesting as I thought it would be. Into Great Silence follows the daily life of Carthusian monks who have taken a vow of silence. Watching the film was a nice meditative experience. I particularly loved the sound design. Since there is not talking, each scene involves some cool background sounds. At one point we even hear the snow falling! But I didn't really learn anything new from the film. Life in the monestary was pretty much just as I expected it to be.

How to Cook Your Life, on the other hand, was much better than I thought. The film is a portrait of Zen teacher Edward Epse Brown. When I saw the trailer for the movie, I thought Brown was annoying and not a very good Buddhist. He gets frustrated while cooking. How does that demonstrate non-attachment? But Brown actually ended up being pretty wise. As an amateur chef I appreciated the way he drew life lessons from the act of cooking. He perfectly captured the feeling of Zen bliss that I feel in the kitchen. I really enjoyed sitting at his feet for a couple of hours.

Maggie and Daddy

2008-07-29T07:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I lamented that I can't get out to the movie theater with my newborn baby.

Here's why it's all worth it...

Thank God for DVD

2008-07-28T07:00:00.000-07:00

So it looks like the first casualties of life-with-a-newborn are Wall-E and The Dark Knight. We were able to make it out to the theater a couple of times in the early weeks after Maggie was born, because she used to sleep all the way through them. But now she's awake a lot more and unable to make it through the whole movie.

It looks like we'll have to wait to see these two movies on DVD. I've heard a lot of great things about both of them, but I am especially sad about The Dark Knight since I wrote my first professional academic paper on the themes of fear and revenge in Batman Begins. I'm excited to see how director Christopher Nolan elaborates on these themes in the sequel. But it may be a few months before I find out.

For now there's Netflix.

"What do we do with time?"

2008-07-27T17:18:00.000-07:00

This week's Netflix: Youth Without Youth (Coppola, 2007).

Based on a novel by philosopher Mircea Eliade, this is the story of Dominic Matei, a 70 year old professor who, while hailed as a genius, has left his "life's work" unfinished. After being struck by lightning, Dominic is suddenly 40 years younger and has a second chance to complete his research.

It's hard not to superimpose this story onto director Francis Ford Coppola's own life. Coppola himself turns 7o next year. And he is himself clearly a cinematic genius. And I get the feeling that, like Dominic, Coppola's life's work is not finished. After making four masterpieces in the 1970s (the first two Godfather movies, The Conversation, and -- my favorite -- Apocalypse Now), Coppola drifted off into less interesting work before disappearing entirely. (I am actually a fan of The Godfather: Part III and Coppola's Dracula, but I wouldn't argue that they are in the same league as his earlier films.) Now, after a decade of silence, Coppola is back with the ambition of a young man. Perhaps he will at last get back to completing his life's work.

In the movie, Dominic describes his life's work as the search for "the origin of language and consciousness". For someone like Eliade, this is the search for the essence of what makes us human. In other words, Dominic is looking for the meaning of life. At first he seems to think it has something to do with knowledge -- religious, philosophical, or perhaps even scientific. Then he meets Veronica, a woman who appears to be the reincarnation of an ancient Indian mystic. Veronica goes into trances where she regressess further and further into the history of language, thus helping Dominic complete his research.

But Veronica may or may not also be the reincarnation of a lover from Dominic's youth. And as Dominic realizes that his obsession with completing his work is literally draining the youth from Veronica (while Dominic is not aging, Veronica begins to age very quickly), he leaves her, sacrificing his work in order to save the life of the woman he loves. Is it too simplistic to say that Dominic realizes that the meaning of life is found more in personal relationships than in scientific knowledge?

Hopefully Coppola doesn't learn this lesson. (Or maybe that's why he left filmmaking for 1o years to make wine.) This film is not yet a complete return to form for Coppola. It feels like a old fogey version of something like Donnie Darko or The Fountain. But it's neither as intellectually stimulating as the former nor as visually compelling as the latter. In short Youth Without Youth is more interesting than Coppola's 80s anf 90s work, but it has not returned Coppola to his 70s standard. I think he's still got some of his life's work to complete.

"I have a PhD in horribleness."

2008-07-20T07:00:00.000-07:00

Today is the last day you can watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (Whedon, 2008) for free. After today, you'll have to buy it on itunes for $3.99. But for a limited time you can stream it here.

Role-reversal is a common motif in Joss Whedon's work. For example, blond cheerleaders get terrorized by monsters in most horror movies, but Buffy Sommers is a superhero the monsters are afraid of in Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Here we get the tragic story of Dr. Horrible in which the evil genius is presented as the sympathetic underdog and his superhero nemesis Captain Hammer is a dim-witted yet pompous boor.

What is fascinating about the movie is Whedon's vision of evil. Dr. Horrible is a geek who talks a lot about undermining the "status quo" in which nice guys finish last. Here evil is seen as the use of violence to make the world into your own image of a better place. Notice that there are two ways this could go. If your image of a better place involves everyone bowing to your slightest wish, you could establish yourself as supreme dictator. This sort of egoistic evil is exemplified in the movie by Bad Horse, the head of The Evil League of Evil. But Dr. Horrible exemplifies a more paradoxical altrustic evil. He wants to take over the world, not so much for personal gain but to create justice. For example, at one point he complains that innocent children might get hurt. In short, Dr. Horrible is a vigilante -- like Batman and other characters usually considered heroes.

But it turns out that Captain Hammer is worse in a certain way. He's not even interested in making the world better. He is himself well off, and so he thinks the world is fine the way it is. He thus exemplifies what you might call egoistic good. The only truly good character -- the altruistic good character for those keeping up with my categories -- is Penny, the love interest. So we hate Captain Hammer and want Dr. Horrible to succeed in defeating him and to "get the girl". And we sympathize with the Doctor's aims while also regretting his methods. This is high tragedy -- note that Penny's true goodness is threatened by the battle between egoistic goodness and altruistic evil.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog turns out to be complex and subtle stuff for a musical superhero spoof.

"An invention with no philosophy behind it is a curse."

2008-07-19T13:09:00.000-07:00

This week I finally saw the anime movie of Steamboy (Ôtomo, 2004). Philosophically, it isn't all that deep. (It seems to be recyling Ôtomo's same old Japanese nuclear bomb obsession exhibited more interestingly in 1988's Akira.) But what it does really well is style.

One thing I love is the design style called "retrofuturism" in which artists take images of what past generations thought the future would look like and combine them with contemporary technology. For example, I'm still bummed that we all missed our chance to wear 1950's sci-fi silver jumpsuits in the year 2000. Steamboy is an example of the subgenre of retrofuturism called "steampunk" which is based on the Victorian sci-fi vision of the future a la Jules Verne and H.G. Welles.

Here's a link to an article in Wired magazine about steampunk that includes some pictures of cool stuff, including this computer:It reminds me of a "podtrola" artwork I saw at the Azusa Pacific art gallery in which a student had added an ipod input to the front of an old Victrola.

"Well, we gave it a good shot. Nobody can say we didn't."

2008-07-16T10:07:00.000-07:00

While unpacking boxes, I came across a lost Netflix disc of The Mist (Darabont, 2007). I thought it was a relatively interesting exploration of the socially destructive power of fear. But the movie made at least one huge mistake: they gave the Mist a bullshit sci-fi explanation. I think it would have been better if they had left the source of the monsters unknown (as in Hitchock's The Birds). It's impossible to explain these things without sounding silly. Interdimensional rifts are no more plausible than the crazy fundamentalist character's explanation: "the wrath of God".

In fact, I thought it was interesting that we're never given any reason (other than the other characters' disdain) to discount the fundamentalist's theory. The movie (probably unintentionally) left it open that her explanation is correct. She herself is left unharmed by the Mist, and when another human kills her, that human is immediately killed by the Mist.

As far as I can see, the only reason not to accept the fundamentalist explanation is Albert Camus. The movie ends up being an argument for the necessity of hope in the face of fear. Notice how many characters commit suicide throughout the film. This reminds me of the opening line from Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide." Camus goes on to argue that any belief in a transcendent meaning of life (including religious philosophy's "leap of faith") constitutes what he calls "philosophical suicide". So, on this view, fundamentalism makes the same mistake that suicide makes: it gives in to the despair of thinking that this life is not worth living. The ending of The Mist is a cautionary tale against this same mistake.

While Stephen King's original 1985 novel ends with an affirmation of hope as the heroes set out into the unknown of the Mist to seek other survivors, the movie ends with a mass suicide just before the revelation that the heroes would have been saved if they had held out hope for five more minutes. Combined with the silly stuff about the military experiments into interdimensional portals, the message seems to be that even when our government seems intent on destroying civilization (such as the Cold War era nuclear weapons in King's 1985 or the creation of future terrorists through our meddling in the middle east in Darabont's 2007), we must not lose hope in the future of humanity.

As I read The Mist, the point is that we must not give in to the fear that leads us hate those different than us. There is no guarantee that we will be rescued in the end. In fact, surrounded by the mist of terrorism, it seems likely that we will not be rescued. But all we can do is "give it a good shot" and stay human while resisting despair.

From Los Angeles to Berkeley

2008-07-11T06:00:00.000-07:00

I'm moving this weekend from a town named after a theological entity to a town named after a bishop. I hope to be back on the blog next week.

So long and thanks for all the ducks.

2008-07-09T21:29:00.000-07:00

Thanks to our friend Dan Schultz who brought over a great bottle of wine last night to celebrate our imminent move up north. Read about the 2002 Duckhorn Cabernet and be jealous. It's currently selling online for up to $100/bottle! Thanks Dan!

"I'm filled to the top with fear that it's all just a bunch of matter."

2008-07-07T17:31:00.000-07:00

The most interesting person I've become aware of recently is Australian pop musician Sam Sparro. The DJs on KCRW have been playing his song "Black and Gold" a lot lately. I think it is a compliment to say that the first time I heard it, I thought it was a new Gnarls Barkley song. In other words, it's as good as the best pop music being recorded today. But then I started listening to the lyrics. And I was shocked to realize that it is about why life is meaningless if evolution is true.

Here are the lyrics:

If the fish swam out of the ocean
and grew legs and they started walking
and the apes climbed down from the trees
and grew tall and they started talking

and the stars fell out of the sky
and my tears rolled into the ocean
now i'm looking for a reason why
you even set my world into motion

'cause if you're not really here
then the stars don't even matter
now i'm filled to the top with fear
that it's all just a bunch of matter
'cause if you're not really here
then i don't want to be either
i wanna be next to you
black and gold
black and gold
black and gold

i looked up into the night sky
and see a thousand eyes staring back
and all around these golden beacons
i see nothing but black

i feel a way of something beyond them
i don't see what i can feel
if vision is the only validation
then most of my life isn't real

'cause if you're not really here
then the stars don't even matter
now i'm filled to the top with fear
that it's all just a bunch of matter
'cause if you're not really here
then i don't want to be either
i wanna be next to you
black and gold
black and gold
black and gold

It's pretty clear that the "you" in this song is God. (Though the line "i wanna be next to you" doesn't quite make sense. Maybe be means "close to you".) It's a song about trying to find meaning in an unbelievably large cosmos of "black and gold" stars. It's an existential dread that recalls Pascal's Pensées: "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me."

The philosophical claim here is that if there is no God, then life is meaningless. That's a questionable claim, but it's not crazy -- a philosopher as great as Nietzsche would agree. But Sparro's argument is based on the assumptions that (1) a world that evolved is necessarily meaningless, and (2) evolution is necessarily incompatible with the existence of God. These claims are kinda crazy. I can see no reason to accept either claim. And the second claim is positively dangerous: pitting God against science is a dangerous game that has only hurt both sides of the debate.

But things got even more interesting when I saw the video for the song. I was assuming Sam Sparro was some sort of fundamentalist Christian. (And I wanted to see what the video's director would do with the odd line about being "next to you.) But, boy, was I surprised.

You can check out the video here.

This ain't no ordinary fundamentalist -- he has the mannerisms of a (so called) "flaming homosexual"! A quick Google search confirmed that Sparro is indeed an openly gay Christian: he discusses his orientations (both sexual and theological) in this interview. It turns out that he was raised a fundamentalist -- according to his Wikipedia page, as a child Sparro appeared as an actor on the James Dobson produced Adventures in Odyssey program -- but that he developed a more conflicted relationship with organized religion after realizing he was gay. (My favorite quote: "I was always kind of a non-denominational Christian. What do you call it when people clap their hands and say, 'Yeah'? I was a Gloria Gaynor Christian.")

How many gay fundamentalist pop stars do you know? And how many of those have written catchy pop songs about existential angst? Sam Sparro is one of a kind.

"Let's go home Debbie."

2008-07-04T18:44:00.000-07:00

For the Fourth of July, here are my reflections on one of the great cinematic investigations into the nature of America: The Searchers (Ford, 1956)

At the beginning of the film, John Wayne's character Ethan returns home from a mysterious absence. It is never fully revealed where he has been or what he has done, but it is clear that his travels have made him ill-suited to a peaceful life on the homestead. He is an adventurer at heart, with the possibility of violent action just beneath the surface. So when his brother's wife (with whom Ethan is clearly in love) is murdered in an Indian raid and her daughter is kidnapped, Ethan goes in search of his neice and revenge.

But as the movie progresses it becomes more and more clear that Ethan is not trying to rescue his neice Debbie -- he is trying to kill her. He knows that she will have been raised as an Indian and later given as a wife to one of the Indians. And Ethans's racist hatred of Indians will not allow them to have her. He would rather she be dead. And yet when Ethan finally finds Debbie at the end, despite the fact that his worst fears have been realized and she has indeed been married to an Indian, he does not kill her. In a surprise move, he lovingly sweeps her into his arms just as he did when she was a child.

So why doesn't Ethan kill Debbie? Well, like so much else in this film, this point is left unexplained. But there are clues. Note that just before finding Debbie, Ethan has scalped his nemesis, the Indian chief named Scar. The film has set up numerous parallels between Ethan and Scar, culminating in Ethan's enacting the "barbaric" Indian ritual of scalping his foe. Why would he do this? On one reading it is because Ethan has recognized that Scar is indeed a mirror image of himself. They are both violent men driven by revenge and hatred of the Other.

Likewise, the movie wants us to see that we, too, are just like that. This is true not only because we, as a willing audience, have desired revenge against Scar (and enjoyed watching Cowboys kill Indians) but also because we need the violence of people like Ethan to sustain the kind of civilization we enjoy in America. (This theme is explored further in Ford and Wayne’s movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.) Finally, note here how the film's closing shot mirrors the theater itself, placing the audience in the position of being in the house Ethan cannot enter. Thus the film suggests that, while we may need images of heroes like Ethan, we likewise need them to remain in the movie theater and not enter our community.

"Some labels are best left in the closet."

2008-07-02T19:20:00.000-07:00

This week my wife dragged me to see Sex and the City (King, 2008). I don't have much to say about the movie itself. But I do want to comment on a recurring criticism of the movie. Many reviews complained that it is "too long". But the movie is only 148 minutes. That's just under 2 1/2 hours. Titanic was 3 1/4 hours! In fact, according to my calculations, the average length of the top 25 grossing American movies of all time is 142 minutes -- only six minutes shorter than Sex and the City.

So when people complain about the movie being long, I think they mean it feels long. As Einstein taught us, time is relative. The average length of the top 25 grossing Bollywood movies is 164 minutes long (2 hours and 44 minutes). Clearly there is a cultural difference here. But I don't think it has anything to do with Indian vs. American attention spans. I think it has to do with our expectations of narrative structure.

When I saw Sex and the City, I actually thought the movie wasn't quite long enough. As a viewer of the TV series, I thought poor Charlotte's storyline about getting pregnant didn't get full screen time the way the other three women's storylines did. Charlotte had some great scenes in Carrie's storyline about marrying Big. But on TV, there would have been more truly Charlotte-centric scenes. At 2 1/2 hours the movie is only the length of 5 episodes of the TV show. That's not a long movie, it's a short TV season. In short, I'm arguing that the movie felt long to people because its narrative was structured like a multi-episode arc of a TV series rather than a typical Hollywood movie.

In film school Hollywood screenwriters are taught to build their scripts around a three-act structure (a device which I believe was developed by Syd Field in the 1970s, though some people mistakenly try to trace it to Aristotle's Poetics.). Sometimes (for example in the work of screenwriting teacher Chrisopher Vogler) this three-act structure is combined with features of Joseph Cambell's structuralist-inspired theory of mythology. Here I am suggesting (pace Cambell) that the problem with any of these theories is that they are culturally relative. But because Hollywood has structred movie narratives this way for so long, mainstream audiences have come to expect these structural rhythms. Movies that violate this pattern -- such as Bollywood movies, art movies, and Sex and the City -- feel too long, too slow, or otherwise wrong to audiences used to Hollywood three-act structure.

I think that's why Bollywood movies feel so long to me. I was actually surprised when I added it up and found that the average length is less than three hours. My standard comment to the uninitiated is that most Bollywood movies are, like, four hours long. But thinking in terms of a three-act structure helps me see why I thought this. What I was feeling was that Indian movies are twice as long as American movies when in fact they are less than one and a half times as long. This is because many Bollywood movies are structured around two sub-stories. There is a beginning, middle, and end -- and then another beginning, middle, and end. For example the film may start with be a romance story that culminates in a wedding halfway through the film. But whereas a Hollywood movie would stop here, Bollywod filmmakers start up a new plot. Maybe there is a baby born, or the hero's father dies, or the heroine's brother strikes up a new romance with the hero's sister. In short, it feels to American audiences that the film has been attached to its sequel.

So what's the lesson of all this? I suppose a Hollywood studio executive could draw the conclusion that movies ought never deviate from the standard structure or audiences won't understand it. I would rather draw the conclusion that it is possible to learn alternative structures. I encourage my screenwriter friends to experiment with teaching us new ways of storytelling -- as I believe most young filmmakers are already doing. Finally, I would like to conclude that, because TV is structured around episodes, its structure is more flexible. You can have a one episode story-arc, or a three episode arc, or a one season arc, or an arc that lasts the entire series. The best shows have all these layers of narrative going on at the same time. Thus TV is amenable to a wider variety of story structures, TV is often a better medium for narrative than film is.

In conclusion: Movies are about spectacle, but if you want to tell a story, then use television. Of course, TV still has some growing to do as an artform. But with the history of TV during the last two decades -- from Seinfeld (1989-98) and Twin Peaks (1990-1) to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) and The West Wing (1999-2006) on to cable shows like Six Feet Under (2001-2005) and Weeds (2005-2008) just to name a few of my own favorites -- we are well on our way to a truly golden age of TV.

"Your baby is the miracle the whole world has been waiting for."

2008-06-29T12:28:00.000-07:00

I just re-watched the brilliant movie of Children of Men (Cuarón, 2006). The film portrays a dystopian future in which humans have become infertile and no children have been born for more than 18 years. The film explicitly links children to hope for the future (the main character Theo says "I can't really remember when I last had any hope, and I certainly can't remember when anyone else did either. Because really, since women stopped being able to have babies, what's left to hope for?") and then explores a world without hope, a thinly disguised comment on our own post-9/11 society.

The film argues the familiar point that our society's pervasive fear -- fear of imigrants, fear of terrorists, etc. -- has led us to violate our own and others' human rights. My friend Sara Shady discussed this theme in an essay on Bowling for Columbine in which she reconstructs Michael Moore's argument that our society's violence has its roots in the loss of loving communities. And I explored the same connection between fear and violence in my essay on Batman Begins in which I expore Christopher Nolan's argument that revenge is based on fear and then juxtapose that point to the New Testament's claim that fear is rooted in a lack of faith in God's providence. (I promise to post more about this one of these days.) So the link between fear and violence is nothing new to cinematic philosophizing. But what Alfonso Cuarón adds is a link to the third theological virtue. Along with Columbine's love and Batman's faith, Children gives us hope.

The film is arguing that our willingness to settle for war and torture -- note the visual references to Iraq, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay -- is a result of our failure to hope that the world could be better. It's too much to hope that we could fight evildoers without ourselves becoming evil. That's just the reality of war, and reality never changes. Or so we have come to believe. And, by structuring its story around the archetype of Christ's Nativity, the film goes on to argue that this failure of hope is due to a kind of spiritual infertility. What we need is the hope of the Second Advent of Christ, the belief that God's Kingdom will someday be established on earth.

Now, there is a problem with my reading of the film -- a problem I suspect Cuarón himself would raise. The problem is that it is exactly the utopian image of the Kingdom of Heaven -- what Hegel, Marx, and Fukuyama called "the End of History" -- that many philosophers would see as the source of our contemporary woes. When we have a vision of Kingdom Come, we are constantly tempted to bring it about through coercive tactics. And it's not just the Christian Crusades that is the problem here. Secular Communist and Neoconservative regimes have used coercive political and even military tactics to achieve their pre-determined ideals -- and they have done so at the expense of reality.

In an interview included as a special feature on the Children of Men DVD, philosopher Slavoj Žižek gives this sort of criticism. (You can watch the clip online here.) He praises the film's ending (in which the main characters are rescued by a boat named "Tomorrow") for demonstrating that the only true solution to the problem of utopia is postmodern "rootlessness". Žižek says: "What I like is that the solution is the boat. It doesn't have roots. It's rootless. It floats around. This is for me the meaning of this wonderful metaphor: boat. The condition of the renewal means you cut your roots. That's the solution." In other words, to avoid the political coercion seemily inherent in utopian idealism, we need to reject all traditions. We need to move forward, creating our own vision of the future together in such a way to include all viewpoints, silencing none through totalizing claims of absolute truth.

Now, I agree that we need to avoid the totalizing tendency of modernist philosophy which tends to silence alternative voices. But I also think the way forward lies in the rediscovery of tradition, not the cutting of all roots. As Žižek himself says in the interview, we can only have a "world" (or identity) by connecting to a culture's tradition. The key to keeping these traditions from becoming repressive is to see tradition as an evolving narrative -- not a pre-written narrative we are simply enacting in history, but a narrative we are writing together. (See my earlier post on Alasdair MacIntyre's narrative theory of tradition.) In other words, we need a model of utopia according to which the end of history is something that we can never be sure we have in view. We have to always be prepared to change course in light of ongoing discussion. This is what MacIntyre means when, in After Virtue, he says that the meaning of life is to live life as a quest in search of the meaning of life. If we ever think we have achieved perfect happiness, we will necessarily be wrong, because our world is constantly evolving.

Put in Christian terms, we have to keep in mind that because we are finite creatures, the Church will never be fininished with the infinite calling to embody Christ on earth. So whether or not we take the Second Coming to be a literal future event, the Kingdom of Heaven remains a kind of Kantian/Pragmatist regulative ideal that could never actually be achieved. The essential thing is that we have this hopeful vision to ward off the forces of nihilism.

"There's nothing worse in this world than bitterness and revenge. Hold your head up and stay true to yourself."

2008-06-28T14:01:00.000-07:00

I watched Persepolis (Satrapi, 2007) this week. And, as much as I loved Ratatouille (Bird, 2007), I think Persepolis actually deserved the Best Animated Film Oscar more than the Ratatouille did. Persepolis has beautiful traditional animation with its own unique look -- a rarity today in the world of bland computer generated animation.

The story (about being a teenager in Iran) raises interesting and subtle questions about remaining human in a politically repressive culture (see the quote I used as the title to this post). But one thing that struck me while watching the movie was how similar fundamentalist Islam is to fundamentalist Christianity. In fact, I began to wonder if Islam hasn't somehow influenced Christianity in things like the rejection of alcohol, belief in the literal interpretation of Scripture (seen as divinely dictated word-for-word), use of political power to coerce religious adherence, divine voluntarism in ethics (i.e., the belief that God arbitrarily makes up moral laws that have no necessary basis in human nature), etc.

None of these doctrines is traditional in Christianity (I don't know about Islam). They seem to have arisen for the first time around the time of the Protestant Reformation in the Late Medieval/Early Modern period. So where did they come from? Some of these common doctrines are probably due simply to the nature of fundamentalism itself and tend to show up in any religion's fundamentalist wing (e.g., literalism and coercive politics), and others do in fact seem to have derived from a direct historical influence of Islam on Christianity (e.g., voluntarism), but where does the prohibition on alcohol come from?

"This is our last goodbye..."

2008-06-27T07:31:00.000-07:00

Since I finished my one year teaching gig at Azusa Pacific University, I had to turn in my beautiful MacBook Pro yesterday. It was such a sad day that I listened to Jeff Buckley's "Last Goodbye" all day.

The Emerging Church and/as Avant Garde

2008-06-26T07:10:00.000-07:00

In yesterday's post, I used the artistic avant garde as an analogy to explain how progressive theology can be innovative while still remaining within the orthodox tradition.

For example, one of the most notorious pieces of avant garde art is the urinal that Marcel Duchamp claimed was an artwork. (See photo to the left of Duchamp with his urinal) What is important to notice is that without a tradition of sculpture, Duchamp couldn't have made this claim. The title of the piece (Fountain) links it back into this tradition.

Indeed, without a tradition of professional artists, critics, museums, and even the avant garde itself, this piece couldn't achieved the status of art. For example, even an artist as great as Michelangelo couldn't have declared his chamber pot to be an artwork. So, while Duchamp certainly challenged contemporary understandings of the nature of art, he did so by working from within the context of a tradition of art.

Today I want to point out two more interesting features of avant garde art. First, notice that what begins as shocking avant garde experimentation often becomes assimilated into mainstream artistic traditionalism. For example, every textbook of 20th Century art today includes a discussion of Duchamp's Fountain. More radically, remember that impressionism was once considered shocking and avant garde. Now it is considered trite and bourgeois -- you can find Monet posters everywhere from college dorm rooms to dentist's offices. Moreover, impressionistic techniques are used in advertising -- and it doesn't get more mainstream than that!

So what avant garde artists do is experiment with new ways of making art -- new styles and new languages of representation -- and, if successful, these elements become part of the standard vocabulary of visual artists in the popular culture. Now, as I pointed out yesterday, I want to be clear that I don't share the modernist prejudice that only original experimentation is good art. Pop culture can be totally traditional while still being artistically excellent. The directorial work of Clint Eastwood is a good example of this. But even the most mainstream Hollywood movie owes a lot to an avant garde ancestry. Consider the way cinematic narrative language has developed: from Brecht to Goddard to Tarantino to everybody else.

Second, notice that most avant garde art is really bad art. Anyone who has been to a contemporary art gallery can attest to this. Not every artwork that makes it into a museum is worth seeing -- and most of the stuff in private galleries will never make it into a museum. Most avant garde art is failed experimentation. But that's simply the nature of experimentation. Most experiments (whether in art, science, theology, or whatever) don't work out. And that's why the avant garde is so important. Advertisers, Hollywood filmmakers, and other pop culture artists don't often have the luxury of true experimentation. They are working with large amounts of money from investors who demand certain practical results. But avant garde artists are allowed, even expected, by their patrons to make challenging and controversial work. Without the avant garde's constant experimentation, our artistic traditions would never develop any new tools.

Now I want to use these two points as an analogy to explain what the so-called emerging church ought to be about: (1) the avant garde is the source for new ideas which trickle down to mainstream outlets, and (2) the avant garde discovers these new ideas through free experimentation. The role I see for emerging church is to act as the avant garde of Christianity.

Most churches don't have the luxury of radical experimentation. They have to be good stewards of their resources, not gambling them on schemes that may not work. And they have to be more mainstream, appealing to as wide an audience as possible. (I'm assuming here that most congregations should be as diverse as possible. Part of the point of gathering together as Church is to learn from and balance each other.) But emerging churches are made up primarily of young people who are excited about experimentation. They can try new things. They can see what works and what doesn't work, and then what does work can trickle down to mainstream congregations. For example, an emerging congregation might experiment with dialogical sermons (i.e., replacing the traditional lecture format with a panel discussion model that, ideally, includes audience participation). It might take some practice to figure out how to make this work. But once a working model is developed, it could be taught to more mainstream churches.

This sort of experimentation can happen with theology, too. Emerging churches are currently pioneering the attempt to synthesize evangelical and liberal theologies into a single postmodern theology. If a coherent "post-evangelical" synthesis can be worked out, it could be beneficial to more traditional denominations.

In short, what's important about the emerging church is that it has the freedom to fail. To change the analogy, emerging communities can be the laboratory of the church. What this means is that the emerging church should not be an alternative to the mainstream church: it is a ministry to the mainstream church.

"Without our traditions, our lives would be as shaky as a fiddler on the roof."

2008-06-25T06:30:00.000-07:00

In yesterday's post I wrote about the two approaches to Scripture at work in the current controversies within the Anglican Communion. Today I want to look at two concepts of Tradition.

The importance of Tradition is beautifully captured by the opening lines of the film Fiddler on the Roof (Jewison, 1971): "A fiddler on the roof. Sounds crazy, no? But here, in our little village of Anatevka, you might say every one of us is a fiddler on the roof, trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking his neck. It isn't easy. You may ask, why do we stay up there if it's so dangerous? Well, we stay because Anatevka is our home. And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in one word: Tradition!"

Interestingly, despite opening with this affirmation of Tradition, the movie spends the rest of its time describing the kind of cultural assimilation that threatened to put an end to the unique Jewish identity made possible by these traditions. In the movie, the motivation for assimilation is romance. So in the context of a Hollywood musical, the audience is set up to root against Tradition. But in a larger historical context, we can see the loss of these Jewish traditions as a tragedy. In this way, the movie asks interesting questions about the tension between tradition and enculturation.

When he baptized Maggie two Sundays ago, Barry Taylor offered an a propos piece of advice on Tradition. (He attributed it to Pablo Picasso, but I have been unable to find the exact source.) "There are two ways of honoring your traditions," he said. "One is to wear your father's hat. The other is to have children." This quote perfectly captures what, yesterday, I was calling the static vs. the dynamic conceptions of Tradition. Is Tradition, as the static theory says, a set of timeless and unchanging doctrines handed down from one generation to the next? Or is Tradition like a narrative that evolves over time as the dynamic conception says?

In his books After Virtue and Whose Justice, Which Rationality Alasdair MacIntyre argues that the static theory was invented in the 18th Century by Edmund Burke. Whether this is true as a historical claim is less interesting than MacIntyre's distinction between living traditions and "dead" (Burkean) traditions. (Compare Imre Lakotos's distinction between "progressive" and "ad hoc" research programs.)

One problem with dead traditions is that adherents follow them by rote, without understanding where the traditions came from or why they are important and meaningful. These lines (the very next lines after those quoted above) from Fiddler on the Roof exemplify this problem: "Because of our traditions, we've kept our balance for many, many years. Here in Anatevka, we have traditions for everything: how to sleep, how to eat, how to work, how to wear clothes. For instance, we always keep our heads covered, and always wear a little prayer shawl. This shows our constant devotion to God. You may ask, how did this tradition get started? I'll tell you. I don't know. But it's a tradition."

This is the problem Evangelicals often have with any sort of Catholic Christianity (Roman, Anglican, Orthodox, etc.). They claim that Catholics only follow traditions out of meaningless habit. Now, that is certainly true some of the time. But I think this problem is actually more prevalent within Evangelical denominations themselves. Catholics may not choose to educate themselves about their traditions, but explanations of those traditions are available to them. Evangelicals, on the other hand, have an entire theology explaining why sacraments such as baptism and Eucharist don't actually do anything for us, but then they insist, nevertheless, that we must still perform these rituals because God told us to. In other words, the official Evangelical attitude toward sacraments is: We don't know why we do these things, but they're traditions. And this is exactly the attitude Evangelicals object to in Catholics!

And, as I argued yesterday, another problem with the static/dead conception of Tradition, is that it is a form of fundamentalism that doesn't take seriously the ambiguity of the world. Like Scripture, Tradition has to be interpreted. And, also like Scripture, Tradition is not actually univocal. Christianity has always had multiple traditions. Even Roman Catholicism, which solves the interpretation problem by appeal to the authority of the Magisterium, has multiple traditions: there are Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans, Evangelicals, Liberals, etc.

But there is a problem with the concept of living traditions, too, and this is what is most philosophically interesting to me. Go back to the Picasso quote: if the better way to honor one's traditions is by having children, then how do we make sure that the next generation is actually our children and not some random bastard who bears no genetic relationship to us? Consider, for example, the Eucharist. We don't have to "wear our father's hats" by saying exactly the same Eucharistic prayer our fathers said. We can allow the language to evolve in order to remain meaningful to new generations. So, in that sense, the 1979 Book of Common Prayer is the "child" of the 1928 BCP. But what if, in the 2030 BCP, there is no Eucharist at all? Suppose the Church is overtaken by Evangelicals who decide that the Eucharist is too Catholic or too old fashioned and not relevant to today's culture or simply a waste of time, and so they replace the traditional ritual with a longer sermon and more singing? Would that be an evolution of the Anglican tradition or simply a rejection of that tradition? The problem is the one that confonts Tevye at the end of Fiddler on the Roof. After bending his traditions for the sake of his first two daughters' happiness, his third daughter pushes too far in the direction of cultural assimilation: "If I try and bend that far," Tevye says, "I'll break." But how do we know what is too far?

Here I think MacIntyre's concept of narrative is helpful. If, as we attempt to live the next chapter of the Church's story, we want to know if a particular scene is part of our Tradition's narrative, we can see if it is "intelligible" as the next event in our story. It wouldn't make sense if, half way through The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy woke up and found herself living in 1904 St. Louis and singing the song "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas". The audience would be justified in supposing that the channel had been changed, because the film would lack a coherent narrative. In Picasso's terms, the later scene would not be the "child" of the earlier scenes -- it would have no genetic connection.

I also find Arthur Danto's similar Hegelian-inspired theory of art history helpful. In books such as After the End of Art, Danto argues that something can be an artwork at one time in history even though it would not have been an artwork at an earlier time in history. For example, Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (the infamous readymade urinal), could be art in 1917 though it wouldn't have been art in 1719. The explanation for this phenomenon is the narrative shape of history: events gain their identity by how they fit with what came before and what comes after them. (On this point, see also Danto's Narration and Knowledge.)

In other words, being part of a tradition means accepting limitations and pushing the boundaries only one step at a time. An artist can't jump too far ahead of her place in history or no one will recognize her work as art. She may be appreciated as "ahead of her time" by later generations, but she will still not really be an integral part of the tradition. In analogy to religion, she'll be like one of those heretics whose theology we come to appreciate centuries after they were burnt at the stake. They might have been right all along, but they were still heretics. But if our goal is to avoid heresy by remaining faithful to our traditions, then we have to push the envelope from within like the artistic avant garde. (Though I want to point out that it is a modernist prejudice to think that only the avant garde is "real" art. Remaining comfortably within the bounds of current traditions is not a bad thing unless you begin to idolize tradition by denying that the avant garde is art at all.)

Of course, these artistic metaphors don't help if what you want is certainty. Tevye says, "because of our traditions, every one of us knows who he is and what God expects him to do." This is an understandable goal. But it is an impossible goal. Tradition is not the solution to our shakiness; it is the cause of our shakiness. Being faithful to Tradition is a balancing act, like trying to play the fiddle on the roof.

Scripture, Tradition, and the Anglican Communion

2008-06-24T07:52:00.000-07:00

Right now in Jerusalem, conservative Anglican bishops from around the world are meeting at the Global Anglican Future Conference (or GAFCON) to discuss issues surrounding the possibility of a schism (or, euphemistically called "realignment" by the conservatives) in the Anglican Communion. If you read/watch the news at all, you have probably been told that what is at issue is homosexuality: the Episcopal Church (as well as other "progressive" churches like the Anglican Church of Canada). The conservatives, however, deny that the issue is homosexuality. They claim that the issue is the authority of Scripture.

There are a number of problems with the claim that only the authority of Scripture is at issue in the current controversy. Most obviously, there is the fact that many gay Christians do in fact attempt to support their position from Scripture. (For one among many examples, see Mel White's essay at the Soulforce website.) Conservatives may disagree with the pro-gay interpretation of Scripture, but it is simply false that all (or even the majority of) gay Christians reject the authority of Scripture.

Moreover, when many conservatives say "authority" what they mean is "inerrancy". (A major moderately conservative theologian who actually understands the difference is N.T. Wright. See his excellent essay "How Can The Bible Be Authoritative?") The mistake here is the failure to accept the Bible as it was given to us: in the form of culturally mediated narrative, not a set of timelessly true, quasi-scientific propositions.

Another problem is that most conservative appeals to Scripture assume the incoherent Reformation idea of Sola Scriptura. Appeals to "The Bible Alone" are always self-deceptive. In reality, all appeals to Scripture are located within the Weslean Quadrilateral of Scripture-Tradition-Reason-Experience. Without Tradition, there is no Scripture: for example, we only know which books belong to the Bible by the authority of the Church. Without Reason, we cannot make sense of Scripture: for example, we only know when a particular passage is hyperbole or metaphor through our Reason. And it is simply impossible to interpret any text "neutrally", without bringing one's own personal and communal experiences to the text: in theological terms, this is the role of the Holy Spirit in interpretation.

The source of all these errors is the desire for unambiguous and "absolute" truth. (Less charitably, I am tempted to say that the error is the desire to use the Bible to control others, forcing them to submit to one human interpretation of God's Word rather than to God Himself, the Giver of Scripture.) But there is no unambiguous truth. God has not given us a Bible which can serve as a rule calculator or mechanistic world-decoder. Like it or not, God has given us two texts -- Scripture and Nature -- which are both ambiguous and which both require the ongoing, messy task of interpretation by our fallible human community. The search for Truth is infinite.

So, while Scripture does seem to be at the center of the current Anglican controversy, the issue is not that one side accepts Scripture as the Word of God and the other side rejects it. The issue is that one side believes in the "perspicuity of Scripture" (i.e., that the Bible is so clear that it does not need interpretation) and the other side believes in hermeneutics (i.e., that all texts require interpretation) and human fallibility.

But more than this disagreement about the nature of Scripture (better: disagreement about God and the nature of human beings God has created), I believe one of the most fundamental issues dividing Anglicans is the concept of Tradition. The number of conservative Anglicans who are Biblical Fundamentalists as described above is relatively small. Many of those who are considering leaving the Anglican Communion appeal to Tradition, rather than to uninterpreted Scripture. But the assumption they make about Tradition is that it is constituted by an infallible body of doctrines which have been handed down from the Apostles to us. This view, of course, is just another kind of fundamentalism (a Catholic fundamentalism), and, as such, has all the same hermeneutic and phenomenological problems of Biblical Fundamentalism already discussed.

In contrast to this static view of Tradition as unchanging, mainstream Anglicans have a dynamic view of Tradition as evolving through time. This contrast is the contrast Alasdair MacIntyre has in mind when he contrasts Burkean vs. Narrative views of Tradition. These two concepts of Tradition are what I was really interested in when I started this post. But since I've been writing for quite a while at this point, I will stop here and continue my discussion of Tradition later this week.

"This is the moment of your death. I'm not afraid."

2008-06-18T17:41:00.000-07:00

Maggie was baptized last Sunday. And this week I've been reminded of one of my favorite cinematic illustrations of the sacrament of baptism: Fearless (Weir, 1993).

The hero of the movie (Max Klein, played by Jeff Bridges) has a near death experience in a plane crash and then feels invulnerable because he is a “ghost” -- he can't die because he's already passed his own death by. Another survivor (played by Rosie Perez) calls him an “angel”, but his wife rejects this: “he is a human and can’t live up there.” Thus the movie suggests that Max is expressing a Platonic view of fear and invulnerability, and then argues that this lack of fear entails lack of ability to relate to other humans.

In this way the movie could be seen as anti-Christian: any theory of life according to which the suffering of this life is overridden by an other-worldly meaning inevitably drains the significance out of our relationships with other finite and vulnerable beings. But the Christian view is not identical to this Platonic-Stoic view. In the movie, Max's therapist says Max has to re-live his near death experiences to keep up the “high” of fearlessness. (This is confirmed by the fact that Max intentionally puts himself in mortal danger throughout the film whenever his real life starts to close in on him again).

But as Christians we need not be angels or ghosts or physically invulnerable to escape our fear. We don’t have to “live up there” because Christ has come down here. And through baptism we are sacramentally united to Christ in his death raised to new life through him. Like Max, we can’t fear death because we have already died. But this does not entail an inability to acknowledge vulnerability and to relate to humans. Christian fearlessness is closer to a Heideggerean being-toward-death: an acknowledgement of finitude which gives value to our present embodied moments. But what Christianity adds is the Schleiermacher and Otto feeling of dependence/creaturehood that comes along with finitude: once I recognize that I am not God, I can encounter the true God and relinquish control to him, thereby overcoming fear.

Christian Art as Redemption of Culture

2008-06-10T10:02:00.000-07:00

With Baby Maggie here now, I've been home a lot more lately than I have in a while. And I've been looking at my art collection more than I have before.

"Collection" is a bit of an exaggeration. I only own two pieces of original art (as well as a signed print of The Promised Land by Nelson de la Nuez). One is by Amanda Tan, a Los Angeles based artist and personal friend of ours. (You can see a couple of examples of Amanda's art here (you need to scroll down a bit), and here. The Tan piece we have is the most like the piece you can view here.

Our other original artwork is by Robin Zimmerman, a student of mine from Biola. Robin's piece is the one that has been capturing my attention lately. It's in my bedroom where, before I had a baby, I only really spent time when I was asleep. Now I hang out in there a lot trying to get the baby to sleep, so I've been able to contemplate it anew.

The Zimmerman piece (see image to the left) is an icon of St. Francis painted in chocolate (milk, dark, and white). The gold background is made from candy bar wrappers (Twix, I think she said). And the flesh tones were highlighted with caramel. (A year and a half since its creation in late 2006, the chocolate elements of the artwork have held up nicely, but the caramel has begun to run due to gravity.)

The chocolate icon was Robin's final project for an Aesthetics class I taught. In that class we talked a lot about the Incarnation of Christ as an affirmation of the original goodness of creation and an act of redemption of the world. This is a somewhat radical point at an Evangelical school like Biola where students are constantly given subtle Gnostic-like messages about the inherent evil of the world. (I think most Evangelicals unwittingly hold to a kind of Docetist theory of the Incarnation.) But more radically, I was suggesting an Eastern-Orthodox influenced soteriology according to which the Incarnation (and Resurrection) are at least equally significant (and possibly more significant) for our redemption than the Crucifixion. According to the Evangelical "penal substitution" view of salvation, the whole point of the Incarnation was to get Jesus killed as a sacrifice for our sins. But on the alternative Orthodox "theosis" view, Jesus's life (not just just death) is itself an act of salvation. As St. Athanasius put it, "God became human so humans could become gods."

Throughout the class, I argued that Jesus's life was like a piece of performance art meant to embody the Word of God (AKA "the Way, the Truth, and the Life") on earth. (This is certainly the way the author of the Gospel of John sees Jesus's life. Consider his use of the word "sign" to refer to miracles and other acts of Christ.) I also argued that the Christian liturgy is a piece of performance art in which the Church participates in Christ's redeeming work, constituting the continuing life of his Body on earth. Finally I argued that the vocation of Christian artists is to use their painting, music, dance, writing, etc. to also engage in this redeeming work of embodying the Kingdom of God on earth.

Now the language of "redeeming" suggests an interesting mode of art-making for Christians. To "redeem" something is to "buy it back". We "redeem" pawned items, financial bonds, or coupons. So "redemption" is an economic term for trading it a marker for something of genuine value. Metaphorically, then, Christ is buying us back from the devil's pawnshop -- from our slavery to sin, error, and death.

What, then, would it look like for an artist to "redeem" something? How might an artist take something from God's good creation which has been enslaved to a dying culture, cut off from the life-giving presence of God, and translate it into the Kingdom of God where it can live again? (Writing this sentence I am reminded of Heidegger's theory of art as "unconcealing" nature's true reality so that it can finally be itself instead of disappearing into modern mechanistic culture where it is used up in service of human beings' shallow goals.)

One way this sort of redemption might look is Robin Zimmerman's Chocolate St. Francis. What Robin has done is to take an "icon" of American slavery -- candy, whose empty calories exist only to enslave us to gluttony, and whose role in the economy is only to reinforce our consumerist addiction to buying what Fight Club's Tyler Durden calls "shit we don't need" -- and transform it into an icon of Christian freedom -- St. Francis, who is known not only for his ability to see God in nature, but (more relevantly) for introducing the vow of poverty into Christian monasticism. Robin has taken something that had belonged to the devil and redeemed it for the Kingdom of God.

Another of my favorite examples of this tactic is the work of St. Johnny Cash with Rick Rubin's American Recordings record label from 1994 until Cash's death in 2003. Cash's five albums recorded during this time consisted mostly of covers of rock songs. But somehow when Johnny Cash sang the same lyrics, their meaning completely changed. An obvious example is his cover of Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus". Originally it was the song of a lover to his beloved. But in some indefinable way Cash makes it sound like Jesus Christ's song to a lost sinner.

But the most artistically successful of the American Recordings covers is "Hurt", originally by Nine Inch Nails. If you haven't seen it, check out the music video by director Mark Romanek here. Consider the chorus of the song:

What have I become?
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know
Goes away in the end
You could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

Hearing Trent Reznor sing these lyrics in the original version of the song, they are the cries of a depressed young man whose heroin addiction has driven away all his friends so that he declares everything he has achieved to be worthless. But when Johnny Cash sings these exact same lines, they seem to echo the message of Ecclesiastes: an old man at the end of his career declaring "all is vanity". (Romanek draws this theme out by setting the video at the run-down Johnny Cash museum "The House of Cash".) When Cash laments the loss of his friends, it is their deaths that he has in mind. (Again Romanek is insightful: on the line "my sweetest friend" we see an image of Cash's wife June Carter who died shortly after the video was shot.) And most importantly, the "you" to whom he is giving all his achievements is God.

In this way, Cash has redeemed a song about nihilistic despair, turning it into a song about the vanity of fame and the need to give one's life to God. And that's what Christian art is all about.

Maggie's First Movie

2008-06-09T13:25:00.000-07:00

We just got back from taking six-day-old Maggie to her first movie: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Spielberg, 2008).

Maggie slept through the whole thing, but I thought it was awesome. The movie itself was harmless fun without much artistic or philosophical interest -- nowhere near as cool as Speed Racer (see my post on that film here.) But it was really amazing to be at the movie theater with my daughter on our first outing away from home since she was born.

It was especially appropriate that out first cinematic experience was a movie about an iconic Hollywood hero meeting his son. I look forward to many more father-daughter movie matinees.

Margaret Susanna McAteer (2008- )

2008-06-06T18:12:00.001-07:00

Maggie Sue is here!

2008-06-05T11:02:00.000-07:00

Margaret Susanna McAteer was born at 10:55am on June 3, 2008. She weighed 7 lbs and was 19 inches long. Both she and her mother are in perfect health.

Pictures are coming soon! For now, enjoy these pictures of her namesakes St. Margaret of Scotland and Susanna Wesley.

I'm off to the hospital!

2008-06-02T03:47:00.000-07:00

My wife has gone into labor, so I'm off to the hospital. I'll be back in a few days...

Nonviolent Heroes and the Failure of the Christian Imagination

2008-05-28T16:51:00.000-07:00

Last year I went to a conference on “Faith, Film, and Philosophy” at Gonzaga University. I gave a paper on what Batman Begins can tell us about the nature of fear and the relationship between justice and revenge. (One of these days, I will post my thoughts about that film.)

One of the keynote speakers was my good friend Ralph Winter, producer of (among other things) the X-Men movies. He gave his standard lecture about advice on being a Christian in Hollywood. His two main points were: (1) Focus on quality filmmaking, not propaganda, (2) Don’t be afraid of dark subject matter since real life isn’t always G-rated.

Now, I don't deny that this is good advice. And I'm not criticizing my friend Ralph. But I do think Christians should be beyond this advice now. People have been saying this same stuff since the 1980s. The problem for Christian filmmakers today is no longer quality. Many of the student films I see at Biola University, Azusa Pacific University, and other Christian film programs are of a very high technical quality. The problem now is what kind of film do you make after you master the craft of filmmaking? Likewise with Ralph's second point. The problem is not being willing to show the darkness. Christian kids these days are really into that. (The class I taught on horror film at Biola was very popular.) The problem is how do you show the darkness truthfully and not just make the world look like a sick place beyond redemption?

The other keynote speaker at the Gonzaga conference was Thomas Hibbs, a philosopher from Baylor University. I highly recommend to you Hibbs’s book Shows about Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from the Exorcist to Seinfeld. (A really nice interview with Hibbs can be found here. I am currently reading his follow-up Arts of Darkness: American Noir and the Quest for Redemption. I'll let you know how it is.) Hibbs argues that recent films have tended to “aestheticize evil”, making it look interesting if not necessarily attractive. He gives examples like The Exorcist, and The Silence of the Lambs. But, drawing on Hannah Arendt's idea of “the banality of evil”, Hibbs argues that these films misrepresent evil. Moreover, he argues that one reason this has happened is that our culture has lost the ability to make goodness interesting and attractive. Think about how much more interesting Batman is than Superman or Han Solo than Luke Skywalker.

I think this phenomenon is partly because, as Ralph Winter points out, real life heroes are not always perfect. But it is also because, as Thomas Hibbs points out, Christians have demonstrated a failure of imagination. We don’t know how to make goodness seem attractive.

This is related to a question Christian media scholar Bill Romanowski poses regarding The Passion of the Christ: “Why did the director have Jesus stand up to invite more scourging by the Roman soldiers? Is this historically accurate, a reflection of Gibson’s theology, or does it disclose a contemporary attitude?” (Eyes Wide Open: Looking for God in Pop Culture, rev. ed. p. 100). Romanowksi never comes right out and says it, but I think he is suggesting that this is a manifestation of Mel Gibson’s image of masculinity and heroism (compare Braveheart), an image formed more by macho American action movies than by scripture.

This line of thinking led me to ask my students at Biola, what would a truly Christian hero look like? How could you represent a hero with specifically Christian virtues of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? In the context of Amerian cinema, would such a person be a hero or a wuss? Attractive or boring?

Hibbs is right: there has been a failure of Christian imagination. We have failed to imagine truly Christian heroes. The most Christlike movie heroes I can think of are actually Hindus and Buddhists: Think the title character in Gandhi, Li Mu Bai in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Ashitaka in Princess Mononoke. I might also mention Xander from the finale to Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Six, and the title character from MacGyver. All of these heroes use intellect and compassion to disarm their enemies nonviolently and then either reconcile with them or at least bring them to (nonlethal) justice.

Can you think of any other examples? The Biola students hated this question and refused to participate in my discussion. Part of the problem was that I assumed that a Christian hero would be a pacifist. Having been indoctrinated into right-wing politics at their Orange County evangelical churches, the Biola students rebelled at my suggestion that Jesus wouldn't support war or killing, even in self-defense. (Somewhat shockingly, when I confronted them with Scriptural evidence of times when Jesus refused to use violence to protect himself from attackers, the students actually argued that we are not supposed to imitate Christ!) But surely we can all agree that peaceful resolution to conflict is better than violent resolution. So even if one wants to defend the just war theory point that Jesus could condone violence under certain circumstances, the fact remains that we need to do serious thought about how to make a movie about peace seem "cool".

And it is not just the question of heroes. The challenge of the Christian imagination arises in any number of cinematic genres: What would it look like to make a comedy that is not dehumanizing (i.e., that never asks us to laugh at someone's misfortune)? What would a romance look like that doesn't trivialize sex or reinforce repressive gender roles? What would an action movie look like that doesn't aestheticize or otherwise glorify violence? What would a "message movie" look like that respects its audience's intelligence and ethical autonomy (i.e., is not manipulative propaganda)? If there are no answers to these questions, I think we should conclude that Hollywood filmmaking and Christianity are incompatible. But I don't believe that. I trust that great Christian artists can solve these problems, if only they would bother to take theses issues seriously.

So let's engage our Christian imaginations, starting with the concept of a hero. How could we portray a hero who is both genuinely Christian and cinematically attractive? Any ideas?

“What does it matter? All is grace.”

2008-05-27T06:30:00.000-07:00

The opening image of Diary of a Country Priest (Bresson, 1951) is of the eponymous diary. The book opens and we see a black ink blot that resembles a Jackson Pollock painting. This sheet is moved to reveal the words of the diary. The abstract “painting” turns out to be a blot sheet inserted between wet pages to keep the ink from bleeding onto other pages. But the accumulated image created by the words of the diary is an image of chaos and disorder. We see and hear the Priest writing the film’s first lines: “I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong in writing down daily, with absolute frankness, the simplest and most insightful secrets of a life actually lacking any trace of mystery.” The Priest sees his life as insignificant, just another accumulation of events that, when seen over time, only amount to a disordered ink blot. This theme of disorder returns when the priest’s friend Torcy says the job of a priest is to create order: “Keep order all day long, knowing full well disorder will win out tomorrow, because in this sorry world, the night undoes the work of the day.”

The theme of struggling for Justice and order recurs throughout the film. One of the Priest’s first duties is the funeral of a townswoman. Her husband says it is “only just” that he be allowed to bury his wife for free even though everyone is required to pay the same funeral fee. The Doctor says “I’m not one to go around babbling about justice. I don’t expect it for myself. From whom should I ask it? I don’t believe in God.” After the Doctor commits suicide, the Priest wonders about the state of his soul, and Torcy replies “God is the only judge. Dr. Delbende was a just man, and God is the judge of the just.” Chantal comes to him in anger about her father’s adulterous affair with her Governess and says “You know quite well all I ask is justice.” The Countess thinks God’s allowing her son to die was “unjust”.

But the Priest sees himself as a bad priest, unable to create the meaningful order he is called to. In the next scene after Torcy tells the Priest to create order, the Priest says “the simplest tasks are by no means the easiest”. The Priest is constantly criticizing himself for not praying enough, but Torcy tells him “you have the spirit of prayer”. What could this mean?

The Priest’s defining characteristic seems to be the stomach illness that will develop into terminal cancer by the end of the film. The illness prevents him from eating anything but bread and wine, leaving him weak and making the townspeople think he is a drunk. The doctor tells him his stomach problem is the result of his alcoholic mother drinking too much while she was pregnant. Clearly the illness is a metaphor for original sin, passed down from parent to child. And the only solution to the suffering caused by sin is the bread and wine of the Eucharist. But this is something the world will not understand: they will only see the Church as a bunch of hypocritical sinners, rather than a group of sin-sick pilgrims in search of the only medicine that can help them.

Indeed, the film seems to see the priest’s suffering as a sign of his closeness to God. After he receives the anonymous letter telling him to resign from the parish, the Priest stays up all night trying unsuccessfully to pray. He finally concludes “God has left me. Of this I am sure.” And the next scene reports “an incredible improvement in my health”. But the very next scene is the Doctor’s suicide. In response the Priest says “I have never suffered so much and likely never will again, even when I die.” The Priest’s emotional distress is presumably because he himself had considered suicide and the Doctor had told him “You and Torcy and I are of the same race, an odd race. … The race that holds on.” If the Doctor could not hold on, how could he? At the Doctor’s funeral, Torcy told him that the Doctor had “lost his faith, and couldn’t get over not believing”. It is this connection between himself and the Doctor that leads the Priest to suffer. But it is at this point the Priest says he realized he “had not lost my faith”. Apparently, the evidence of his faith and God’s presence is his suffering.

Later he has an epiphany when Torcy again discusses with him what it means to be a priest (or to have a “vocation”): “If you can’t pray, just repeat the words! Listen, I don’t think I’ve been wrong about you. Try to answer this. I’ve thought a lot about vocation. We’ve all received the calling, only not in the same way. And to simplify things, I try to put each of us in his place – in the Gospels. In short, I think – or I imagine – if our soul could drag this wretched body of ours back up that slope of 2,000 years, it would lead it straight to the very place where – ” He breaks off because the Priest is crying. The Priest tells us “The truth is that I always return to the olive grove [i.e., to the Garden of Gethsemane where Christ suffered his most emotional anguish while waiting to be crucified.] It was a very familiar and natural movement for my soul. I’d never realized it until that moment. Suddenly Our Lord had shown me grace and reveled through my old master’s lips that nothing would tear me from my chosen place in eternity. I was a prisoner of the Holy Agony”.

Note that the film’s first shot of the Priest is of his wiping his face (a sign of his physical frailty) and film shot immediately cuts to a shot of the Priest looking through the bars of a metal fence as if he were in prison, thereby establishing the metaphor of his suffering as prison. But note also that the Priest sees “prisoner” here is a good thing, something which keeps him from leaving God. His suffering is the evidence of God’s presence, not God’s absence. His suffering is a symbol of Christ’s suffering: by living, whether he prays or not, he is “repeating the words” of the Gospel. His life of suffering is itself his prayer.

He comes close to this insight earlier in the film when he counsels the Countess to “resign” herself to life’s suffering. The Countess is the first to bring up resignation. She says she is “resigned” to her husband’s infidelities. The Priest tells her it is wrong to send Chantal away, but the Countess doesn’t care about right and wrong: “God took my son from me. What more can he do to me? I no longer fear him.” The Priest replies that God only took her son “for a time” but that her “the coldness of your heart may keep him from you forever.” The Priest implies that the Countess loved her son too much and is allowing his death to come between her and God and hence will ultimately come between her and her son in the afterlife. She wonders how love can be bad, how it could ever separate anyone. Love “has it order, its law” that God himself is subject to since it is God’s nature to love.

Next the Priest points out sin’s ability to bring disorder into the world: “No one knows what can become of an evil thought in the long run. Our hidden faults poison the air others breathe. … I believe if God gave us a clear idea of how closely we are bound to each other in good and evil, we truly could not live.” She asks what is “this hidden sin?” and he replies “You must resign yourself. Open your heart”, implying that her sin is the desire to create order and justice. Rather than getting angry about the evil and disorder in the world, she must resign herself to it. She says, recalling the Doctor’s suicide, she is already resigned; otherwise she would have killed herself. He replies, “That’s not the resignation I meant.” What he wants is her to admit that she hates God for not bringing about what she sees as justice. As soon as she does this, he says “Now at last you are face-to-face. He and you. … You must yield to him unconditionally. … Say: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” She says can’t say this, because it would be allowing her son to be dead. But he replies, “The kingdom whose coming you have just wished for is yours and his”, recalling his earlier claim that “there isn’t one kingdom for the living and one for the dead. There is only the kingdom of God, and we are within it”.

Note that the Priest ends up doing exactly the opposite of what Torcy had originally said a priest’s job is: rather than bringing order into the Countess’s life, he gets her to give up the illusory desire for order. She says “an hour ago, my life seemed to me in order, each thing in its place. You have left nothing standing.” He replies “Give it to God just as it is.” When she objects that she is too proud, he says “Give him your pride along with everything else”, recalling his earlier claim that “to die is difficult, especially for the proud”. Eventually she is able to give up her hatred over he son, symbolized by throwing his picture into the fire. As she writes in her letter to the Priest, “I didn’t believe resignation was possible, and in fact it’s not resignation that has come over me. I’m not resigned – I’m happy. I desire nothing.” By giving up her desire for order in the world, she is able to find happiness, a kind of spiritual order within the external disorder. And this leads immediately to her death due to a heart problem, a metaphorical death to this world in order to achieve life in the next.

Later we find out that Chantal had spied on this conversation. But, while she had experienced the very same scene as the Priest, she had interpreted it very differently than the Priest did. When Torcy repeats Chantal’s claim that the Priest had “blackmailed” the Countess with eternal damnation, the Priest says “that’s your version of what happened. I could tell a different one.” Note that had earlier told the Canon (the Count’s Uncle, also a priest) “I don’t see how there could be any report of such a conversation”, suggesting that the truth is ineffable and any account would only be an interpretation.

It is this idea of alternate narratives that is the key to the opening shot of the ink blot sheet. The Priest does indeed share the same motto as the doctor: “face up to it”. But where the Doctor faced up to the disorder of life and interpreted it as a reason to commit suicide, the Priest faced up to the disorder of life and interpreted it as “grace”, the chance to live in “the Holy Agony”. So the Priest does have “the spirit of prayer” but that is because by resigning himself to a life of suffering, he turns his life into a prayer: the re-incarnation Christ’s passion. This is what it truly means to be a priest: to mediate the suffering of Christ to the world and vice versa. The Priest is right that “our hidden faults poison the air others breathe”, but he is also right that “we are bound to each other” in both “good and evil”. Hence the hidden virtue of our suffering purifies the air others breathe.

But this “war” (as Torcy calls it at the Doctor’s funeral), is a mystical and hidden war that requires proper interpretation to be revealed. The last shot of the film is a shadow of a cross that is meant to recall the opening shot of the ink blot. When looking at the diary and its account of the events of the Priest’s life, we might see the very same events as the image of disorder or we might see them as a reflection of Christ’s Holy Agony. The difference is whether we can achieve resignation and the desire for God’s kingdom to come. The film’s last line ought to be our response to the evil, disorder, and suffering in the world: “What does it matter? All is grace”.

"I Can Save You!"

2008-05-26T11:57:00.000-07:00

The Feminarian's comments on my post about I Am Legend made me realize that I glossed over an ambiguity in the end of the movie. Just before writing my post, I had read the review from The Journal of Religion and Film. According to that review, it was the 1971 film version The Omega Man which first transformed the novel's protagonist Robert Neville into a Christ-figure by locating the cure in his blood and then having him sacrifice himself. I was thinking of that point when I emphasized the new film's treatment of Neville as a kind of messiah. As The Feminarian pointed out, this led me to forget the fact that it is the female zombie's blood which contains the life-giving cure in the recent version. Nevertheless, it remains true that Neville originally developed the cure by mixing his own blood with lab rats and only later injecting it into the female zombie.

The Religion and Film review argues that turning Neville into a Christ-figure is odd since the point of the original novel is that Neville is in fact unknowingly evil and is destroying innocent lives in search of an unnecessary "cure". I noted clues to this theme in the new movie -- clues made explicit in the DVD's alternate ending. Here I want to argue that the fact that the cure is ultimately found in the zombie's blood, complicates the Religion and Film analysis. It seems that the new movie is not necessarily, as the review argues, moving further in the direction of making Neville into a Christ-figure; rather, the new movie (even in the theatrical version reviewed by Religion and Film) may in fact be moving back toward the ambiguity of the original novel.

There are, then, a number of ways of reading the film: (1) As in the Religion and Film review, Neville may be read as a Christ-figure who sacrifices himself in the fight against evil and in whose blood the source of life is found; (2) Alternatively, Neville may be read as an anti-Christ who is himself evil and the zombie woman is the Christ-figure who suffers unjust torture, "dies" and is "resurrected" (after the first, failed cure treatment), and in whose blood the cure is found; (3) Or perhaps the point is that the cure for evil is ultimately found when Neville's blood is mixed with the zombie blood, suggesting, as in my original analysis, that God is found in our relationship with others.

My preferred reading is (3). What is interesting is that, in the theatrical version, Neville doesn't realize the importance of learning to live in peace with the zombies -- he simply blows himself up, taking as many of them with him as possible. If, as I suggested in my original post, we are to take the film as some sort of statement about the war on terror, the implication becomes that America's insistence on seeing the entire Arab world as "evil" and in need of a western imposed "cure" is the moral equivalent of a suicide bombing. Neville is a self-proclaimed Messiah, shouting at his enemies, "I can save you!" and wondering why they continue to try to kill him. Perhaps the movie wants us to see George W. Bush in Neville's role.

Or am I completely off? Any additional ideas on how to read this movie?

"Go, Speed, Go!"

2008-05-25T07:25:00.000-07:00

Last night I saw a misunderstood cinematic masterpiece: Speed Racer (The Wachowski Brothers, 2008). It's gotten really bad reviews, but I had more fun at Speed Racer than I have had in years.

In the opening sequence, the filmmakers teach us how to watch this movie. We see the young Speed Racer daydreaming in school about race car driving, but his imagination is represented as an image of himself among his own childlike drawings of cars: Speed is inside a cartoon. And that sums up the movie. It's a cartoon with live action people inside it. (There is a similar sequence later with Speed's little brother Spritle imagining himself inside the cartoon he is watching on TV.)

As a cartoon, then, many of the criticisms of Speed Racer miss the mark. I don't even bother to take seriously the complaints of old people who got a headache from the movie or thought it was edited too fast. People said the same things about Star Wars 30 years ago, and now that movie actually seems pretty slow! It seems like a better criticism that the movie's philosophy (the same kind of anti-corporate neo-Marxism as discussed in my post on The Matrix) is simplistic and obvious. But once you realize that Speed Racer is a cartoon, this criticism evaporates. You don't watch a 30s screwball comedy and complain that there is not enough kung-fu in it; and you don't watch a cartoon and complain that its characters and message are too black-and-white (or in primary colors, as it were). I actually found the moral clarity of the movie refreshing. Exposing us to moral ambiguity is an important function of art, but we do need heroic role-models, too.

So Speed Racer is doing the same sort of thing The Matrix was doing. But whereas The Matrix was a live action version of anime movies directed at an older teen audience (most notably Ghost in the Shell), Speed Racer is the kind of cartoon we watched in elementary school (a point that's hard to miss with all of Spritle's talk of "cooties"). I've heard Speed Racer compared to movies like Dick Tracy and Sin City, (neither of which, by the way, are nearly as cinematically creative and interesting as Ang Lee's Hulk -- another misunderstood masterpiece -- which recreates not only the look of a comic book but also the experience of reading one), but those comparisons seem wrong. Both of those movies were based on print comics while The Matrix and Speed Racer are based on animation. (It is significant that the opening sequence of Speed Racer has the young Speed drawing his own flip book animation. It is in that cartoon that he imagines himself. Later, the walls of the Grand Prix race track are decorated with zebra images which seem to be animated when seen from the drivers' perspective. This is an homage to a 19th Century animation device called a zoetrope.)

In some respects, Speed Racer is doing the same sort of thing attempted by the recent Disney musical Enchanted (Lima, 2007) -- but without the irony. I actually found Enchanted unwatchable. Playful intertextuality is one thing, but Enchanted was just too cynical for my taste. The film assumed that we wouldn't be able to enjoy an old-school fairy tale cartoon without a heaping helping of cinematic deconstruction. I realize that the movie was ultimately trying to help us get back the childlike innocence that allowed us to love the original Disney princess cartoons, but its mode of referencing earlier movies was too ironic and made it impossible to take the movie seriously. Indeed, that's exactly the problem: it didn't take itself seriously enough. The problem is not that it was a comedy; the problem is that, in Disney terms, Enchanted didn't "believe in itself" -- so how could I believe in it? I don't need to be winked at in order to enjoy fairy-tale romance.

Contrast Enchanted with postmodern satires like Scream and Starship Troopers which manage to work both as a spoof of a particular genre as well as an actual example of that genre. (Shrek might fit in this category, too.) In other words, Scream is a spoof of a horror movie while at the same time, still being a horror movie -- as opposed to Scary Movie which is just a spoof. This is a fine line to walk, and how exactly these movies pulled off this cinematic miracle is unclear to me. What is clear is that Enchanted didn't know the same trick.

There are, however, other recent movies which do manage to succeed in the way Speed Racer does. Consider Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! and Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill movies. These movies speak in a different voice than the postmodern satires like Scream and Starship Troopers. Instead of spoofs, here we have hyper-real "movie movies" as Tarantino calls them -- taking stuff that "only happens in the movies" and then turning it up to 11. These movies reference earlier movie clichés and (especially in Tarantino's hands) even deconstruct them, but they manage to do this lovingly and without "winking" and so without the irony of a spoof -- irony which in the case of Enchanted ends up draining the magic from a genre we loved as kids (and, indeed, still love). An older movie that also succeeds along these lines is The Coen Brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy, but, of course, the godfather of this style is George Lucas whose Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark first showed us how it is done. Not every movie should be like this. But, boy, are these movies fun when done right.

"Light up the darkness."

2008-05-24T10:08:00.000-07:00

I am Legend (Lawrence, 2007) finally made its way to the top of my Netflix queue this week. I didn't really care if I ever saw it, but my wife thought it sounded good. Ironically (or maybe due to our various levels of expectation), she ended up thinking it was really boring and too slow, and I ended up thinking it wasn't too bad.

I liked the slow, quiet parts of the film that explored the psychology of Will Smith's character Robert Neville. I haven't read the original novel, and I haven't seen the Charleton Heston version The Omega Man (Sagal, 1971), so I couldn't be disappointed in how unfaithful the film was to the earlier versions. And, sure, the special effects are bad and the zombies look like computer generated cartoon characters, but that kind of thing doesn't bother me. I'm more interested in story, character, and theme. So I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the film was about one of my philosophical interests: the problem of evil. Unfortunately, I'm not sure the movie has much to say of philosophical interest.

The movie sets up the problem in its starkest form. When he finally meets another human survivor, Anna, who claims to have been led to him by God, Neville responds by rehearsing the havoc wreaked by the zombie-creating Krippen Virus: "Let me tell you about your 'God's plan'. Six billion people on Earth when the infection hit. KV had a ninety-percent kill rate, that's five point four billion people dead. Crashed and bled out. Dead. Less than one-percent immunity. That left twelve million healthy people, like you, me, and Ethan. The other five hundred and eighty-eight million turned into your dark seekers, and then they got hungry and they killed and fed on everybody. Everybody! Every single person that you or I has ever known is dead! Dead! There is no God!"

Anna wants to take Neville to a colony of survivors, but Neville doesn't believe there is any such colony. Not only is there no God, there are no other humans: we are utterly alone in the universe. But at the climax of the film, Neville does indeed hear the voice of God telling him to sacrifice himself to save the world. He becomes so obvious a Christ-figure that it is literally his blood which will provide the cure to the virus. Then Anna takes the cure to the colony of survivors, giving them hope for the future.

So what's the point? Is it simply that we should not give up hope? That we should have a kind of blind faith that there is a God, that God has a plan, and that we are not alone? Whatever the message of the movie is, it seems to be summed up by Neville's speech about reggae musician Bob Marley: "He had this idea. It was kind of a virologist idea. He believed that you could cure racism and hate — literally cure it, by injecting music and love into people's lives. One day he was scheduled to perform at a peace rally, gunmen came to his house and shot him down. Two days later, he walked out on that stage and sang. Somebody asked him 'why' he said: 'The people that are trying to make this world worse are not taking a day off — how can I? — Light up the darkness." Again, the point seems to be that we should keep the faith and continue to fight the good fight in spite of the fact that, to all appearances, we are making no difference. It's a rather traditional theodicy.

Note the line about "the people that are tyring to make this world worse". Combined with the fact that this movie takes place in New York City which Neville refers to as "ground zero", this seems to be a reference to the war on terror. Interestingly, there may be a critique here of the Bush administration's characterization of the terrorists as people who "hate freedom" and want to destroy civilization. When Neville kidnaps a female zombie to use as a guinea pig for his anti-virus research, a male zombie risks his life to save the female. Neville rather obtusely interprets the event this way: "Behavioral note - an infected male exposed himself to sunlight today. Now it's possible decreased brain function or growing scarcity of food is causing them to ignore their basic survival instincts. Social de-evolution appears complete. Typical human behavior is now entirely absent." Of course, what's really going on is that the zombies are not entirely inhuman monsters but have genuine love for one another. (This theme is made explicit in the alternate ending to the film, available on the DVD's bonus disc.)

At another point, Neville refers to the fact that the zombie virus was a product of human technological experimentation gone wrong: "God didn't do this, we did." This line serves both to reinforce the traditional theodicy (by presenting evil is a result entirely of human sin and free will) as well as to suggest again a liberal viewpoint on terrorism (by implying that terrorism was in fact cultivated by America unjust foreign policies and cultural imperialism).

Whichever interpretation we emphasize (whether the reading of Neville as a Christ-figure battling absolutely evil zombies or the reading according to which both sides are morally ambiguous), the point seems to be the same: God is found in our relationships with others. It is when Neville is absolutely alone that he falls into despair about the death of God. But when he meets Anna, he learns again to hear God's voice (significantly, through a memory of his daughter's voice). And what is God's voice telling us? In the words of Neville's daily radio broadcast, "You are not alone. There is hope." In the words of Bob Marley, we can "light up the darkness" by spreading human love like a virus.

As an answer to the problem of evil, it's not terribly deep or original. But it's not entirely wrong, either.

Just For Fun: Derrickson's Remakes

2008-05-23T07:00:00.000-07:00

Mentioning Scott Derrickson's The Exorcism of Emily Rose in yesterday's post reminded me of a humorous idea I had the first time I saw the movie. It occurred to me that Scott Derrickson is remaking the great theological movies as horror movies.

Scott's USC master's thesis Love in the Ruins (1995) was fairly obviously a remake a Wings of Desire (1987) except with demons whispering despair into people's ears instead of angels whispering hope. Less obviously, his first feature film, the direct-to-video Hellraiser: Inferno (2000) was a remake of Bad Lieutenant (1992). Both films are about corrupt, drug-addicted, women-abusing, cops whose investigation of a disturbingly evil crime forces them to face their own evil -- except that in Scott's film, the cop ends up haunted by demons and damned to Hell rather than receiving the moment of redemptive grace which the original film's protagonist experiences. Finally, Scott's first major studio release The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005) was a remake of Breaking the Waves (1996). Both films are Kierkegaardian fables about a devout and innocent young woman who may or may not have heard God's voice telling her to sacrifice her own life in order to participate in humanity's redemption through suffering -- except Scott's version has (what else?) demons.

I can't wait to see what he'll do with his upcoming remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still (due Christmas 2008). Maybe, since this movie is already a remake, it will break the pattern. Or maybe Scott will find a way to secretly make it a remake of The Seventh Seal (1957). Or, since the theological films he borrows from are usually only about 8-9 years old at the time of his remake, and since The Day the Earth Stood Still will star Keanu Reeves, maybe Scott's subtext this time will be . . . The Matrix (1999)???

The Symbolism of Evil

2008-05-22T06:34:00.000-07:00

Recently there were two movies made based on the life of Anneliese Michel, a German college student from the 1970s who claimed to be possessed by a demon. My fellow Biola University alum Scott Derrickson updated the story to 2000s era America in his horror genre film The Exorcism of Emily Rose (Derrickson, 2005). German filmmaker Hans-Christian Schmid made a more straightforward dramatic biography of Anneliese in Requiem (Schmid, 2006). The result was a far more subtle and interesting film. (Sorry, Scott!)

Derrickson’s movie is set up as a courtroom investigation which asks us to decide whether we think Emily is really possessed or not. Requiem is not interested in that question. In fact the film seems to assume that the girl (in this version called Michaela) is not really possessed. Indeed, it seems to assume that she knows she’s not really possessed. Instead, the film asks us why, if she knows she is simply sick and not really possessed, she would go along with her mother and priest’s exorcism scheme? The answer the film suggests is that she wants to recontextualize the meaning of her suffering. If she is simply sick, then her suffering is random and meaningless; but if she is possessed, then she is a martyr.

Once Michaela interprets her own life through the lens of St. Catherine, her own favorite saint, she is able to accept her suffering with peace. Prior to this, she is “ashamed” of her illness, and wants to be a normal kid. The “voices” she hears are her mother’s voices telling her she is a “slut” and that she is not capable of going to college. But when she first attempts to interpret these feelings as demonic possession, her liberal priest tells her that the Devil is only a symbol and recommends she seek medical attention. Then, when, the stress of school almost prevents Michaela from completing the first semester, and her boyfriend wonders if maybe college is not the best place for her, she realizes her mother will be proven right. She begins to give herself over to her symptoms in order to press the possession interpretation, and to show that it is not her weakness that is preventing her success but the Devil. Hence the movie suggests one use of the symbolism of evil is to allow us to create a meaningful narrative out of our suffering.

Note that on this interpretation the film is not necessarily arguing the liberal point that the Devil is just a symbol. The film’s view that Michaela is using the Devil as a symbol is compatible with the conservative Christian view that the Devil is also literally real and can possess other people. More likely, however, the film is making a post-liberal point: it is the Devil oppressing Michaela – in the form of her mother’s criticism (and to a lesser degree in the form of her physical handicap). In other words the Devil is a symbol, but the Devil is not just a symbol, because symbols have their own kind of reality and so no symbol is just a symbol.

Question: I haven't read Paul Ricoeur's The Symbolism of Evil, but from what I understand my reading of Requiem is similar to the kind of thing Ricoeur is doing in that book. Does anybody out there have any insight on this?

"We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are."

2008-05-21T08:50:00.000-07:00

In recent posts, I've been exploring films that generate in their views a kind of self-deception. Today, I want to discuss a film that doesn't necessary trick us in this way, but rather explicitly addresses the issue of self-deception: Christopher Nolan's Memento (1999).

In Memento (as I'm sure you remember), Leonard Shelby has this "condition" called anterograde memory loss in which he can't make new memories. (It's the same problem Drew Barrymore has in 50 First dates, a "less depressing" movie as one of my students pointed out to me, but also a less philosophically interesting film as I pointed out to him.) I find it interesting, that whenever Leonard talks about his memory problems, he refers to it as a "condition". I'm sure its a sign of nothing so much as my own insanity, but when I hear the term "condition", I can't help but think of the philosophical concept of "the human condition".

Leonard has the words "Remember Sammy Jankis" tattooed on the back of his hand. Leonard says he tells people about Sammy "to help them understand. Sammy's story helps me understand my own situation." In the last lines of the film, Leonard claims, "We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are.” In his essay in Movies and the Meaning of Life, Michael Baur argues that Memento is one of the mirrors that can remind us who we are. Just as Sammy's condition is Leonard's condition, so Leonard's condition is our condition. Baur convincingly reads the film as an exploration of the problem of personal identity, in particular giving a Heideggerian critique of Locke's memory theory of identity. I highly recommend Baur's essay. Movies and the Meaning of Life is one of the best anthologies of film-philosophy out there, and Baur's essay is one of the best in the book. I don't wish to challenge his reading. But I do want to add an additional reading. I propose that Memento can also be read as an exploration of what Lyotard called "the postmodern condition". (Again, it's probably just my own insanity, but I can't help hearing a verbal connection between the names Leonard and Lyotard.)

Jamie Smith has already explored some of Memento's connections to postmodern philosophy in his book Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church, but he focused specificaly on themes from Derrida. I'd like to take a more general approach to postmodernism, borrowing a familiar narrative about modernity as the quest for certainty and postmodernity as the acceptance of human finitude. On this narrative, see the work of Richard Rorty, Stephen Toulmin, Nancey Murphy, et al.

(By the way, Smith's Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? should be read by everyone interested in the future of the church. His discussions of postmodern philosophy are basic, but his application of postmodernism to the emerging church is brilliant. He shows why a truly postmodern church needs more than just candles, ambient music, and video screens -- it needs traditional liturgy, the lectionary, spiritual disciplines, etc. Too many of my friends in the Episcopal strand of the emerging church movement are giving up these things in favor of worship practices that are basically just Gen X versions of old-school modernist "seeker sensitive" churches. Smith is right that a truly postmodern church will need to recover its Catholicity. Anyway, back to Memento....)

Let's start at the beginning -- which, in Memento is actually the end. The first image in the film is a polaroid photograph. But the shot is played in reverse so that the image gradually fades away before being reinserted into the camera. I take this shot to be a summary of the entire film. One of Leonard's tattoos reads "Buy film. Camera doesn't lie. Notes can be lost." In one scene, Leonard tells Teddy: “Facts, not memories. That's how you investigate. … Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record, and they're irrelevant if you have the facts.” So I take Leonard's polaroids as a symbol of objective evidence -- he thinks of them as pure, uninterpreted access to the Truth. But the film gradually undermines this view.

On this reading, the opening shot of the fading photograph symbolizes the loss of objective evidence: the postmodern condition as the awareness that all facts are mediated by the perspective one brings to them.

If Leonard's photographs suggest a modernist desire for objective evidence, perhaps we can read Leonard's memory problem as another symptom of modernity: the loss of tradition. Modernity, especially in its radical Enlightenment form, was the rejection of the authority of tradition in favor of, as Kant put it, "daring to know" for oneself. (Hence the Protestant Reformation.) Leonard's condition requires us to "learn to trust your handwriting. ... You have to be wary of other people writing stuff for you that is not going to make sense or is gonna lead you astray." Hence modernity involves radical individualism and autonomy.

Moreover, as Leonard says, in a world without memory, "You really need a system if you're going to make it work", recalling the desire of early modernists like Descartes and Francis Bacon to find the proper scientific and philosophical "method" by which to generate a perfect system of knowledge. Descartes's version of the method involved radical doubt, questioning anything that couldn't be proven with certainty. What he found using this method was that the only indubitable foundation of knowledge is one's own consciousness: "I think, therefore I am." (On this point, consider how much of the dialogue in Memento is Leonard's subjective thoughts in voiceover.)

The problem then becomes how to build a bridge from the subjective to the objective, to prove that as Leonard puts it at the end of the film, "a world outside my own mind." But Memento, following postmodern philosophy, argues that this is impossible. The problem is not just that it is impossible to overcome Cartesian skepticism about the external world, but that there is no such thing as "the" external world. Reality is not "given" to us, but must be interpreted by the knower.

The structure of the film reveals this fact to us. We are shown a scene and then are shown what happened just before that and then what happened just before that, etc. With each scene we are "thrown" (as Heidegger might put it) into the middle of an event and forced to interpret what's going on along with Leonard: "Ok, what am I doing? I'm chasing this guy. ... No, he's chasing me!" But with each new scene we are forced to reinterpret the previous scenes -- every interpretation is revisable, and certainty is impossible.

The most obvious example of this is the scene where Natalie manipulates Leonard. First we see Natalie crying and telling Leonard that a guy named Dodd has beaten her up and Leonard agrees to go "get rid of" Dodd for her. Then we see what took place just before this: Natalie provokes Leonard into beating her up. She takes all the pens with her and leaves the room so that Leonard can't write down what happens. Then when he forgets what he has done, she returns and pretends to cry, etc. What we took to be self-evident, unmediated observation of the scene has been shown to be just one interpretation.

The point is not that there is no such thing as truth (as some modernist philosophers claim postmodernists believe). Clearly, not all interpretations are equally good. But what we need if we are to make better interpretations is context. Leonard points out that, “If people scratch their nose a lot experts will tell you they’re lying. It really means they’re nervous. People get nervous for all kinds of reasons. It’s all about context.” The problem is that without memory, we have no context: “How am I supposed to heal if I can't feel time?”

The first line of the film is "So, where are you?" and the last line is "Now, where was I?" In order to understand who we are, we need to know where we are, how we got here, and where we're going. In other words, we need to be able to tie our present to a past and a future: we need to reconnect to traditional narratives (without necessarily turning them into what Lyotard calls "metanarratives").

As Teddy tells Leonard says, "You should start investigating yourself". In a world without memory, “You don’t know who you are" or "what you’ve become”. Without a narrative context in which to interpret our lives, we are left with no "meaning" of life. But in modernity we have rejected all traditional narratives. The only way to give our lives meaning is through self-deception, creating a narrative and then pretending it is simply a self-evident uninterpreted fact and not a narrative (a process Lyotard describes in The Postmodern Condition).

This is exactly what Leonard does. He gives himself "a reason to make [life in his condition] work" -- revenge. But at the end of the film, we realize that Leonard's revenge-narrative is based on a self-deception. Leonard spoke more than he realized when he said "Sammy's story helps me understand my own situation." It turns out that Sammy's story is Leonard's own situation. And hence as Leonard says of Sammy, "His condition was psychological not physical." In other words, Leonard is repressing his memory due to psychological trauma -- he doesn't actually have brain damage.

On one level, Leonard's psychological trauma is the rape of his wife. But on another level, his trauma is nothing less than the problem of evil. (Like Rashomon, discussed in an earlier post.) The injustice he has experienced makes it impossible for him to fit his world into a morally intelligible narrative. The universe just doesn't make sense to him. Life seems meaningless, and so he creates a false sense of justice to give his life purpose and meaning again: "I'm not a killer," Leonard says, "I'm just someone who wanted to make things right."

Note the multiple levels of self-deception here: Leonard is a killer; revenge is not justice; things are not right, but neither are they wrong in the way Leonard thinks they are (his wife wasn't murdered; she died of a semi-intentional insulin overdose); Leonard is now killing relatively innocent people, not trying to "make things right"; etc.

In order to give his life meaning, Leonard needs to find a life-defining project around which to construct his life-narrative. And in a postmodern world without objective evidence, the more resistant to contingency's project, the better. Teddy says Leonard wanted “to create a puzzle you could never solve.” Thus Leonard creates an unsolvable murder mystery for him to investigate and covers up this self-deception with the further self-deception of Sammy Jankis, a fiction in which he hides his own knowledge of the truth.

After telling Leonard that “You don't want the truth. You make up your own truth”, Teddy adds “So you lie to yourself to be happy. There's nothing wrong with that. We all do it.” But if we reject modernity's equation of truth with objectivity and its suspicion of narrative, then Teddy is wrong. We don't have to lie to ourselves to be happy. We can find happiness in life together, connecting our own life-stories to a communal narrative in which we serve as "mirrors" to remind one another who we are, guarding each other from self-absorption, self-deception, and self-destruction.

"What's this war at the heart of nature?"

2008-05-20T21:04:00.001-07:00

Today we watched Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line in my course on the problem of evil in contemporary cinema. One of these day's I'll post my reflections on the film. But for now, I just wanted to list out some of the more interesting lines from the film:

What's this war in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself, the land contend with the sea? ls there an avenging power in nature? Not one power, but two?
This great evil. Where does it come from? How'd it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who's doin' this? Who's killin' us? Robbing us of life and light. Mockin' us with the sight of what we might've known. Does our ruin benefit the earth? Does it help the grass to grow, the sun to shine? Is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed through this night?
Darkness, light. Strife and love. Are they the workings of one mind? The features of the same face?
Maybe all men got one big soul who everybody's a part of. All faces of the same man. One big self.
Who are you to live in all these many forms? You’re death that captures all. You, too, are the source of all that's gonna be born, your glory, mercy, peace, truth. You give calm a spirit, understanding, courage, the contented heart.
I remember my mother when she was dyin', looked all shrunk up and gray. I asked her if she was afraid. She just shook her head. I was afraid to touch the death I seen in her. I couldn't find nothin' beautiful or uplifting about her goin' back to God. I heard of people talk about immortality, but I ain't seen it. I wondered how it'd be like when I died, what it'd be like to know this breath now was the last one you was ever gonna draw. I just hope I can meet it the same way she did, with the same... calm. 'Cause that's where it's hidden - the immortality I hadn't seen.

Deconstructing Fight Club

2008-05-19T19:49:00.000-07:00

Updated: Be sure to read the comments to this post where I clarify the claims I am making.

I've already written about a couple of movies that seduce us into a kind of self-deception. Rashomon tempts us into reading its ending optimistically, thereby confirming its pessimistic thesis that we often lie to ourselves. (You can read my analysis here.) And The Matrix tempts us into ignoring its Marxist political implications, thereby confirming its thesis that our society is in the thrall of a capitalist ideology. (You can read that argument here.)

Now I want to give a brief argument that Fight Club (Fincher, 1999) does a similar thing: it tempts us into idolizing Tyler Durden as a pumped-up man's man, while simultaneously undercutting traditional masculinity with a pervasive homoerotic subtext. I won't bother to detail the gay imagery and symbolism in the film here. Just take my word for it. (One essay which gives a good catalog of the homoerotic references is Robert Alan Brookey and Robert Westerfelhaus, "Hiding Homoeroticism in Plain View" in Critical Studies in Media Communication, March 2002.)

For now I'm more interested in self-deception. The most interesting scene along these lines is the one where Tyler looks directly into the camera and says, “You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis.” On the surface he is giving a kind of anti-advertisement meant to counter the consumerist messages of the media. But note that the film literally breaks down at this point – the sides of the image warp and we see the sprocket holes.

Here is the scene:

This cinematic device can be read as a simple homage to Bergman's Persona, a film, like Fight Club, about two people with an ambiguous relationship and which also includes a similar scene where the film breaks down. Here is that scene:

But the Bergman reference doesn't entirely make sense. Persona is about the nature of art and the human capacity for communication and other concepts which make sense of Bergman's self-reflexivity. But why is David Fincher revealing the cinematic basis of his film? Why does the film break down at exactly this point in Fight Club? I propose that our attention is being drawn to the fact that we are watching a movie -- a product of the mass media -- at exactly the moment when Tyler is attempting to undermine the influence of the media. Fincher is deconstructing himself. There is another example of this technique when Tyler is getting on a bus and sees a Gucci ad of a naked man and wonders "Is that what a man looks like?" The irony is that Tyler is played by Brad Pitt who has the exact same body as the model in the ad!

Fincher wants us to see that although Tyler is the unnamed narrator's image of an ideal man, that image is something socially constructed by the media. The things Tyler says sound a lot like people such as John Eldredge in his book Wild at Heart (e.g., "God designed men to be dangerous" but our culture teaches us instead "to be a nice guy"). And it is easy to get caught up in Tyler's speeches. But the film subverts itself, pointing out that the message that a "real man" is a macho brute like Mel Gibson (Eldredge argues that Jesus was more like Braveheart's William Wallace than Mother Theresa!) is just another one of the social constructions presented by the mass media.

But we don't notice these acts of self-deconstruction, because we don't want to. In order to realize that the film doesn't think Tyler's brand of machismo is the self-evidently true masculine ideal, you'd have to be able to admit that Fight Club is actually a gay film.