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.