My Vocation Calls...

In the unlikely case that you follow this blog regularly (whatever that means at this point), bear with both the redundancy of my title and my recent hiatus. In addition to the normal rigors of academia, I am at the end of the semester, where more personal research has been piled onto my already busy load.

More again soon (assuming I survive it).

Internal Revolutions

Sam Mendes tells the story of the courtship of April and Frank Wheeler in a series of vignettes so brief and overshadowed by everything that has come since, that we get the feeling that they can't remember being happy. Much of the rest of the story is their attempt to recover what they had or what they thought they had for a moment.

I must confess that I approached the film with a great deal of anticipation. On more than one occasion, I have imagined what kind of "dream team" I would assemble were I a film producer, and three names that most regularly show up on my list were involved in the making of this film: Mendes himself (ever since American Beauty bowled me over), Roger Deakins (the D.P. who certainly deserves consideration in the "Most Shafted by the Academy" award), and composer Thomas Newman (who could be a runner-up for same, said award). In addition, I must also admit to being a bit obsessed with the film's central theme of the deadening effects of the American suburb. I have felt those effects, and I have witnessed churches that have only reinforced the culture's emphasis on the need to look materially successful and socially together when they should have been proclaiming our own ineptitude. In addition, the fact that Mendes had already addressed the topic so bitingly in American Beauty led me to expect from this film a kind of development of his own ideas about those effects, but not only was this film much more tragic in its handling of those themes, I am even now finding myself wondering if this picture might have marked a retreat from that beautiful piece of satire.

The film has hardly introduced us to Frank and April before we see them at each others' throats, and the undercurrent of all of the screaming is one of settling. Frank struggles to find a purpose, which we get the sense is tied to his vocation, but he settles into a middling position at the same company where his father worked to apparently no distinction. We suspect from April's performance in a poorly received performance of a play that she at least attempted to pursue some ideal version of her dream before settling on a life of the ordinary. (One might be reminded of Ricky Fitts's brutal attack on Angela in AB for being "boring" and "ordinary.") Much of the tension of the rest of the film is between their (mostly her) urge to break from the boring life of the suburbs and those forces that would suppress anything extraordinary. These forces do show up subtly in the allure of financial success, the opportunity to prove oneself, and that oft-used and overdetermined symbol, the house itself. Even (I might say, especially) the children, who aren't so much born into this household as materialize out of thin air, threaten to anchor this couple to mediocrity, according to standards that remain amorphous throughout the film, but which we are led to believe may be solved by a bold move - literally - to France. 

As I watched, superb performances and expert direction kept me rooting for them, hoping for them to be able to break out of the mold and get away, even as it grew more obvious that they would not be able to do so. To some degree, I was frustrated by how their inability to leave Revolutionary Road reinforced the perception that in France everthing would be different. We all know from our own experiences that merely relocating does little to change our identities and consequent behaviors, but that France as a symbol remained a distant beacon, even as things in the American suburbs were falling apart, seemed to contradict that reality. 

To illustrate, bear with a brief digression. My family has a bit of wanderlust. In the fifteen years of marriage, my wife and I have moved five times; this makes me relatively stable by my own family's standards. From the time I was born until I left for college, I moved eighteen times, and most of these were cross-town moves because the neighbors turned out not to be so great, or the lack of neighbors was a factor we hadn't counted on being such a problem, or we didn't like the layout of the house after all. The point is that, while we were sophisticated enough to not admit it, there was a sense in which we hoped and expected the next place that would make it all good. Of course, it never did, and we were foolish in a fallen world to think that it might, but I have found myself reflecting on where that expectation that place should make all the difference comes from. To be sure, some of it does arise out of a refusal to address ourselves as the core of our own problem, but I why do we associate renewal so readily with place? Much has been made of the exact nature of the Garden as described in the early chapters of Genesis, and many exegetes discuss allegorical aspects of the nature of the heavenly city, but the intriguing part to me is that we will be a new people as we enter a new place and each will have been prepared for the other. 

A part of me wanted to see the Wheelers get to Paris so that I could have a better sense of either a paradise in which their travails prepared them to inhabit a place that would seem as if it had been designed and waiting for them all along, or that I would see the real and pernicious effects of hoping for the place to make the people.

In the end, what we know is that something amazing has to happen before we can even get there.

"IT'S IN REVELATION, PEOPLE!"

It had to come out sooner or later that I am, in addition to being a film nerd, also a Simpsons nerd. The above call to panic from Kent Brockman tends to come to mind any time I come across eschatologically preoccupied Christian friends. In a recent conversation with a group of them, the talk turned to the rapid increase in communication technologies. After recounting all that is wrong with them and wringing hands about the demise of our culture that they are facilitating, one friend said words to the effect of, "It makes you wonder if the end is near and Christ is coming back soon." No, not really.

In fairness to these kinds of views, I should belabor a couple of obvious points:

1. These technologies are progressing at disorienting rates - Most of us over the age of thirty remember what it was like to actually have to wonder something that - barring our own recall, immediate good fortune, or the ability to somehow find what we wanted to know in the reference section of the library - we were going to have to be content speculating about. The internet soon solved that problem. (Good thing, too, because I don't know how I could have lived without knowing the name of the actor that played Mr. Green Jeans on Captain Kangaroo - Hugh "Lumpy" Brannum, by the way.) Of course, information retrieval was only one of the technological issues we were encountering. People far smarter than I were confronting obstacles to the speed, ease, and mode of communication, and their solutions can be hard to handle. The first time I saw someone speaking on a Bluetooth headset, I caught them from the non-headset side, and just thought that the kind of craziness we're used to associating with big cities had wandered out to the suburbs (which, in a way, it had). I have to admit, between classes on the campus where I teach, I've taken to counting just how many people I see speaking or texting on their phones. Invariably, it is in the neighborhood of one-in-three, and it's hard not to imagine all kinds of deleterious effects or to project forward these kinds of advances to extreme levels of invasiveness and potential control at the hands of would-be tyrants, busybodies, etc.
2. These technologies can seem to promote increased privatization, dependency, etc. - I get that beyond the apparent ubiquity of the technologies or their speed of advance, many thoughtful people see in them not just the potential for abuse but the open door for accelerating the effects of thoughtlessness, which are not pretty things (and I'm not just speaking about cell phone use while driving). One might justly be prone to wonder whether the endless noise that MP3 players and cell phones introduce into our lives more than offsets any immediate, practical benefit they might offer. It's not just leaving the television on for background noise, we now take our distractions on the go, leaving little opportunity to be genuinely alone in our own thoughts for any substantial period, raising questions about possible vulnerability to politicians, advertisers, and our own unchecked lusts.

That said, some Christians should probably be aware of the implications of their luddite fears before pronouncing on them with such self-assurance. First, these claims show a remarkable ignorance of patterns in cultural history. Consider the following statement: "If it be true, that the present age is more corrupt than the preceding, the great multiplication of internet technology has probably contributed to its degeneracy." Now, replace the phrase internet technology with the word novels, and you have a verbatim quotation from the Reverend Vicesimus Knox's essay "On Novel Reading," written in 1778. Did you get that? Reading the kinds of novels that we now think of as ennobling and generally beneficial classics was considered by many religious leaders of the mid-eighteenth century to contribute to unhealthy expectations of life, distaste for traditions, and an over-emphasis of autonomy. The intriguing point is that the eighteenth-century claims were somewhat valid within their own culture, just as many current criticisms about text messaging are valid, but could it be that, just as the first trend turned out not to be the harbinger of the end that many had anticipated, that we too might not want to be looking to the skies just yet?

If this doesn't carry much weight for you, consider also the history of speculative dispensationalist Christian eschatology in this country. I was an undergraduate in college when the first Gulf War broke out. If you remember that time, you may recall a lot of hand-wringing in the culture at large. Politicians speculated that 40,000 soldiers would be returning home in body bags. The ubiquitous presence and urgent tone of national news coverage regularly crossed from gravity into grandstanding. Not to be outdone, the Christian presses were publishing book after book that laid out who in the book of Daniel Saddam Hussein was supposed to be and when Russia - which was of course known to be "Magog" - would jump into the fray, heralding the final battle. You may cringe, as I do, when I reflect on how badly evangelical Christians handled that situation, but the most serious implications of that behavior was not a damage to reputation but a loss of focus. Here we were, presented with an ideal opportunity to say something meaningful about equity, justice, charity, empire, and the place of faith in politics; and instead we tried to show ourselves masters of "the secret things"(revealing along the way a doubt that the gospel speaks to life in any immediate sense).

There are other practical theological implications of seeing every cultural trend as a potential enemy: we tend to reflect a lack of grace and develop what is commonly referred to as a "fortress mentality." I have written about this before, so I am not going to dwell on this point for long, except to encourage other Christians not to lose the perspective that God's works include both creation and providence. Just as God declared the creation "good" at various points, there is a very meaningful sense - despite real evil, real pain - in which those works that are carried out in providence get a similar declaration. Sometimes that declaration is expressed in judgment, but we should be prepared (as St. Paul was in Acts 17) to recognize his work in surprising places in our culture - not just as some superficial moment of manipulation toward what we want to talk about but because, as the saying goes, "It's all good."

Am I advocating an unreflective or naive approach to culture? Quite to the contrary, I think we need to constantly look for that point at which what is gospel departs from the norms of the world system, but we need to do so 1) mindful of what we really mean when we say gospel - quite the opposite of behaving morally, 2) receiving the works of culture as qualified goods, works of providence mediated through culture, and 3) eager to see where God invades even those worldviews, habits, and artifacts that try to discount the Author of Grace.

The Need to Make Sense of a World

I should disclose a bit about my film habits I suppose:

1. Take several viewings - A friend once asked me, "Why would you want to watch a movie that you've already seen?" The revisionist in me would like to think that I had my witty retort at hand, but this was, alas, one of those lost opportunities when the comeback didn't occur to me until I was later replaying the conversation in my head: "Couldn't we say the same about food? Why do you need to have a steak again? You've already eaten one and know how it tastes." The fact is I like to test movies. Multiple viewings allow me to determine if my initial thoughts on the movie were justified, to peel back layers of a complex film or to expose weaknesses that I had originally been willing to overlook because of my initial favorable bias. 
2. I try to reserve emphatic judgments - I find myself a bit skeptical about critics who can quickly utter self-assured pronouncements less than twenty-four hours after a first viewing. Such snap judgments don't provide the time to interrogate other factors that might have affected my perception (e.g. a friend or press that built up unreasonable expectations, mood/fatigue, unfavorable viewing environment). Maybe the "professionals" have developed such a highly trained evaluative abilities that these hardly factor, but I tend to doubt it.
3. I don't rent; I buy - This might seem financially irresponsible, but I wait for a while. I do my research. I talk to friends or read critics whose tastes tend to parallel my own. By the time I've made a decision to buy, I have a pretty good idea of at least what the film is trying to accomplish. More often than not, it ends up being a film that will at least be interesting to test in the above fashion multiple times. (In addition, I suppose a certain part of me sees films as embodiments of ideas and owning many allows me to, in a tangible fashion, surround myself with ideas.)

So, when I found the Robert DeNiro picture The Good Shepherd in the discount bin at a local supermarket, the buzz that had built up around it (for the last three years) and the fact that it was only six dollars enabled my justification at buying yet another movie.

It was another couple of weeks before my wife and I got the opportunity to sit down to watch it. Since mine was the more favorable response, I will share it first. At an 1:45:09 the film was beginning to feel long. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing with long movies, and in the wrong context the complaint "It was too long!" could make me wish for movie-watching licenses that could be revoked with documented idiocy. A film's feeling long is another issue. The cinematography was beautiful, the acting relatively able, and the broad chronological and geographcial scope seemed like the stuff of moving epic, but... maybe the problem I had with the movie was on this last point. I remember studying Orson Welles's oft-hyped (but I have come to believe incredible) Citizen Kane. Early versions of Mankiewicz's screenplay, as I recall, did not have the "Rosebud" story line but created a blanket study of the life of a great but troubled man. Critics have argued over its meaning or whether it even was supposed to hold meaning in the first place, but the best case for its role as a narrative red herring may lay in the degree to which the film's structure would have fallen apart without it. Can those of you who have seen the movie even begin to imagine it without Rosebud? What would it be? Well, The Good Shepherd gives us at least a pretty good idea of what it would feel like.

My wife's utter disgust that she had lost that two-and-a-half hours and my puzzlement I think arose out of Deniro's trust that the scope and politically intriguing nature of the subject matter would be enough to hold our attention, but it was not. And the mixed reviews  it received (which you can see here if you are so inclined) also testify to that fact, but what I find worth talking about is the question of why we need that hook. I am open to your comments as you muse on this question, but my initial thoughts took two directions: 1) In our finitude, we need limitation, or we just get confused, and 2) In our quest to identify with character we need a totem that represents personal (as opposed to broadly philosophical or organizational) interests. That totem need not be a physical item as it turned out to be in Kane, but it needs to be something that matters to a private passion.

Naturally, this got me thinking about aspects of my faith. If you are like me, you get tired of hearing Christians spout the cliche, "It's not about religion; it's about relationship," but there's a truth hidden in the platitude (despite the fact that those who speak it often ignore that truth). Ostensibly, ideologies are theorized and organizations founded to advance the cause of humanity, but there's a grand difference between such causes and actually loving people. The life story of Mohandas Gandhi was ultimately compelling on film because it was about his love of individual people, all those people with whom he had contact, including the British colonists - and not abstract love, but one that would gladly give of himself to feed or nurture.

And Christian religion has its own "hook" to drive home the point of that kind of love: culinary elements - totems, if you will - that make us say to ourselves, "This was not ideology for whom this person gave flesh and blood. It was me. And as we partake of those elements, that hook becomes clear to us in a way that we just can't get from preaching, no matter how charismatic.

At Least I Didn't Stand Up and Tell Them All to F*** Off

I don’t know if you can remember all the way back to my previous post, but, despite all of that bitching about evangelical inability to explore spiritual truths when the medium contains too many f-words (contrary to how that sounded, I am actually referring to multiple instances of just one word, as opposed to resisting all words beginning with the letter “F”), I do still fraternize with many of them. There are many reasons for this, but the simplest version is that, on some level, we at least theoretically share a common view. One week ago, what we literary types might call the “inciting incident” for this blog occurred. A group of evangelical men tried to formulate some kind of approach to our shared culture. Hollywood was generally condemned, except for Juno, since the eponymous heroine doesn’t have the abortion she had considered, and anger was expressed about why there couldn’t be more films of that nature. 

This kind of talk has become very hard for me to endure. My thought tends to be that, when the psalmist wrote that the “earth is the Lord’s,” that he didn’t just mean trees and rocks and rivers and maybe movies made by evangelicals for evangelicals to invite their non-Christian friends to, with the promise of free food:

“Wait, you mean I get a free slice of pepperoni and all I have to do is sit through some poor tract-of-a-movie and endure the onslaught of eighteen earnest people all pressuring me to make a “decision for Jesus.” I sure can’t wait until I get old enough to sit through time-share presentations for a free night in Atlantic City!”

I am curious why so many people who pride themselves on taking the Bible literally fail to interpret that phrase from Psalms 24 as all of the created order. In his letter to the church at Corinth, St. Paul even cited that psalm to allay young converts’ fears about food offered to idols. The reformers might have talked about God’s works in creation and providence, all of which reflect something about the one who set upon them a stamp of approval calling them “Good!”

I can already hear some evangelical objections. Christian doctrine (at least in the west) speaks of a fall of humanity into a corrupted state. Do I mean to suggest that works created in a post-lapserian world by people who don’t even acknowledge the existence of a god can be called good? In a word, “Yes.” Isn’t the centerpiece of Christian history the carrying out of a redemptive work through an act of unrighteousness? If you doubt the Christian view of the simultaneity of this, check out St. Peter’s sermon in the Temple in Acts Chapter 3 or the prayers of early believers in the next chapter. Does this mean that we should speak highly of the people who committed this atrocity? No. Ought they be held accountable for their murder? Sure (as well as the thousands of other transgressions of thought, word, and action that they – and we – have perpetrated).

What about degrading cinematic forms like pornography? Are those “good” as well? I don’t want to venture into theodicy here, but I must trust that from some heavenly perspective they accomplish the divine will, even as we find them morally repugnant. On a more human level, let us not forget the role of sin as counterfeit. While the content might be something explicitly contrary to God’s law, there is a sense in which it unintentionally does honor to the very beauty it distorts. Obviously this does not mean I must watch what creates a problem for me, but there might be some helpful tools that allow you to find grace without doing yourself spiritual harm. Here’s what I’ve been thinking along those lines (by no means normative, but maybe helpful):

1. Know the Form/Genre – Film is a visual medium, and good films (of whatever genre) rely heavily on expressing their stories in visual terms. They may not tell you everything that you want to know or everything that you ought to believe. I think many Christians’ objections to film arises because (like the culture, as a whole) they are uncomfortable with ambiguity, and good films might rely upon visual means for relating the deceptive nature of appearances. Christians should be the last people to make snap judgments based upon sight. I acknowledge that some of this ambiguity in film might be related to the moral relativism of those who made it, but some might also arise from an admirable desire to provoke thought, as opposed to conclusions. 

There are many books and other resources out there that can help you get acquainted with the elements of film and how to evaluate movies. I find this one of the best. Find one that works for you.

2. Know Yourself – Acknowledge that there might be truly beautiful and admirable elements to movies that you just can’t watch. The other side of this issue is refraining from assuming judgmental postures toward those who are okay with films, books, or music that we are not. Our tendency is, of course, the opposite of this, projecting our own weaknesses onto other people and judging them according to those criteria in the worst possible light. Furthermore, snap judgments that are concerned primarily with how we appear to others will necessarily tend toward those areas that are easy to judge superficially. Forget sex, violence, and profanity for a moment. When was the last time you assessed your own tendency to gravitate toward films that feed a sense of futility of life or pride of your place in life?

3. Know the Culture – stop trying to wage the America-as-Christian-nation battle, acknowledge the world-wide uniqueness of the Christian subversion of quid-pro-quo, and begin working from an understanding of America-as-Babylon: a place of shallow self-centered values. Grace will then seem the exceptional quality that it really is, rather than an empty word from an irritatingly strident people. And when you see it (maybe even in your own life from time to time), you may be more likely to be thankful for it. To go with this, you might want to take advantage of one of the few sites that encourages Christian engagement and discernment.

4. Work within Community – Invariably, I am the worst judge of my own spiritual blind spots (hence the term blind spots). I might think that the worst things in the world for me to see on the big screen is a pair of naked boobies, while everyone around me realizes that my tendency to get caught up in the illusion of my own righteousness might make what most people think of as “safe” family viewing dangerous territory. The problem occurs when I am alienated from those who a) know me well enough to see the problem, b) possess discernment about such things, c) care enough to say something about it, and d) love me enough to persist. “a” tends not to be much of a problem, since your faults are clear to pretty much anyone who is more than even a casual acquaintance. Trust me. Our reluctance to get involved in others’ lives tends to be the biggest obstacle. If you are a Christian who doesn’t have caring community, perhaps you ought to check out your own commitment level or examine the nature of that body you call a “church.”

A more immediate application of this idea might be to try to watch with friends who you know don’t share your weaknesses. (Careful, this requires candor.) To use myself as an example, I find it especially helpful to let my wife serve as a set of “warning eyes” for explicit sexual content on screen, since my viewing it can incline me toward a distorted view of sexuality.

5. Change your glasses – I can’t tell you how many times I have had the list from Philippians 4:8-9 mis-represented to me. St. Paul tells that church to meditate on whatever things are pure, lovely, etc., but a responsible hermeneutic of this passage in light of most of the history of the Old Testament likely does not mean that we should think only about rainbows, peach cobbler, and smiling grandmothers. The purpose of our religion is not to make immoral people “nice,” but to raise the dead – a pretty violent act, to be sure. I hope it doesn’t seem impolite to you if someone tries to be candid (albeit from clouded perspective) about what spiritual deadness looks like to them. Although P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia is brutal to watch, he may have captured, better than any writer since Dostoevsky, how our self-absorption can cause us to abuse those we are supposed to love . Don’t you see… the book of Judges is “lovely” because the casting of a BIG problem suggests an even BIGGER solution.

One thinker I admire has said that "People of grace should be quick to spot grace when they see it."

Amen.

Fade.

More Than Herring

First, introductions are in order.

Allow me to start with origins of the blog's title. When I began to set up my blog, I tried to enter a title. It got rejected. I tried to enter another one. It also got rejected... Oh, you probably wanted something more meaningful than that (or I at least wanted to imagine an audience that wanted something more meaningful). Both of these titles, which I absolutely had to have at the time, but which I have since forgotten, had some oblique reference to film. So does the current title, except this one was clearly meant to be, so I will remember it forever, or at least as long as I can see it at the top of the page. As with most manifestations of artistic forms, there is something in film that must be artificial even as it simulates what the artist perceives as a reality. This tension between life and art, and trying to reproduce the one in the other, is nothing new, but I rarely tire of it, and since a blog is all about unsolicited musings, you (whoever you are) will likely see a lot of it on this page.

Friends have frequently told me that I should be a film critic, which has generally been their way of saying that I pick at films the way a finicky six-year-old picks at a poached fish filet. Coincidentally, the effect of my film-picking on those around me also parallels the effect of the six-year-old's negotiations on those at the table - somewhere between running away and holding him down to cram the fish down his esophagus (a little mullet down the gullet, if you will). I generally reconstrue my puzzled observers' comments as complimentary so that I can continue to live and behave as I please and still remain shocked that no one wants to be in my presence for long periods of time.

I would introduce myself here, but you likely don't care and I don't particularly enjoy talking about myself in front of a pretend audience. If you are going to pretend to listen to me, you should need to put some effort into it (eye contact, carefully placed acknowledging utterances, etc.) to be at all convincing.

I will, however, reference my motivation for finally beginning my own blog.

The title of this entry, "More Than Herring," is a reference to one of my favorite comedies, Woody Allen's Love and Death. Boris's unrequited love, Sonja, who is herself desperate to find a husband, settles instead for Leonid Voskovec, the herring merchant. (The fact that I didn't have to look up any of that should give you an idea of just what a film nerd I am.) Later, she expresses regret for her marriage to a man who "reduces all the beauty of the world to a small, pickled fish." I wish I didn't see that everywhere. In my life-experience, I have spent time around very religiously devout people who evaluate every film they watch almost exclusively for the presence of traditional values, and I have traveled the halls of academia (often entering the classrooms as well), where the pressure to focus on a pinstripe-narrow topic through a highly filtered theoretical lens is just an accepted part of the process of graduate study - one in which I am currently engaged, so I will try to moderate my comments... some other time.

Nevertheless, it seems that all of us finite bi-peds have a little Voskovec in us, but what I find troubling is our apparent self-assurance in that narrowness. The Christians regard themselves as recipients/instruments of grace, which would be a lot easier to believe if they were quicker to see evidence of that grace in the world, as opposed to a kind of culture-wars dualism that can completely overlook some amazing spiritual ideas. (If you would like an example of the kind of limited view to which I am referring, check out a few reviews at this site.) Likewise, many allegedly tolerant students and professors mock, deride, and alienate anyone who would even open-mindedly inquire about a point of accepted orthodoxy. I understand that the perception of widespread chronic silliness can be frustrating, but if the intellectual elites are engaging in rejection-without-refutation, what is to become of the rest of us?

With that said, I am willing to accept the criticism that even a perspective like this one that implies its own breadth might, ironically, represent some form of parochialism. If you find that to be true, introduce yourself and your view.