To Malick’s “Wonder”

To the Wonder Malick

Terrence Malick’s latest, To the Wonder, is an apt follow-up to the enigmatic director’s 2011 classic, The Tree of Life. Both films are beautiful experiences of image and sound, deeply personal memoirs and heartfelt explorations of Christian faith.

To the Wonder has received substantially fewer enthusiastic reviews than Life, however. It’s not a film likely to show up on anyone’s “Greatest Films of all Time” list (as Life did for the late, great Roger Ebert). Why is that? I suspect it has to do with the fact that the film is not nearly as flashy and majestic as Life. There are no nebulae or dinosaurs. The world of Wonder is ho-hum by comparison. The Sonics and strip malls everywhere don’t help. And unlike all of Malick’s other films, it’s not a period piece or in any way exotic. Aside from a few dreamy sequences in France, Wonder is about American suburbia and its attendant quotidian struggles.

At least on the surface. Wonder, I think, is a far more substantial film than many assessments have pronounced it. Far from the “minor Malick” some have labeled it (or at best: “a B-side to The Tree of Life), Wonder is a characteristically ambitious, boundary-pushing film that builds upon the stylistic and thematic trajectories of its predecessors in the Malick oeuvre. I’ve now seen the film three times, and each viewing (as is the case with all of Malick’s meticulously assembled works of cinematic art) reveals new details, thoughts, emotions, epiphanies. Malick’s collaborators—especially production designer Jack Fisk—are all detail people, and it shows. Notice the extensive attention given to space, architecture, rooms, furniture, decor (yep, that’s a globe!) and appliances, for example. The geographies and materiality of everyday life are of great interest to Malick, likely in part because of his interests in Heideggerian phenomenology.

To the Wonder is challenging, to be sure. It’s not at all clear what the film is chiefly about. Love, perhaps? Marriage and parenting? Suffering? Dasein? In some areas, though, Wonder is more overt than Malick’s last few films have been. Take its treatment of Christian faith, for example. The film is imbued with it at every turn. Malick goes so far as to have a priest (Javier Bardem’s “Father Quintana”) as a central character, with his heartfelt homilies and prayers giving the film a liturgical directness that follows from but goes farther than even The Tree of Life.

Sadly, most critics have failed to adequately engage the Christian elements of the film, which are aplenty. Perhaps that’s because we have such a dearth of films like this, which earnestly—sans cynicism or irony—explore Christian faith without preaching or offering pat answers. (Though there are some out there).

In my review for Christianity Today, however, I try to engage the film on this level, making sense of Malick’s spiritual preoccupations in Wonder as well as his other five films. Below is an excerpt from my review, the entirety of which can be read here.

Though many of Malick’s characters struggle with faith and feel God to be distant (Mrs. O’Brien in The Tree of Life, Pocahontas in The New World, Sgt. Welsh in The Thin Red Line), most of them—through encounters with Love or with beauty—come back to a place of belief. Father Quintana (Javier Bardem) in To the Wonder, for example, remains thirsty for God the whole film, even in the midst of suffering. In a beautiful sequence Quintana quotes part of St. Patrick’s Lorica in a prayer that encapsulates the film’s underlying vision:

Teach us where to seek you. Christ be with me. Christ before me. Christ behind me.Christ in me. Christ beneath me. Christ above me. Christ on my right. Christ on my left. Christ in my heart. Thirsty. We thirst. Flood our souls with your spirit and life so completely that our lives may only be a reflection of you. Shine through us. Show us how to seek you. We were made to see you.

Immediately prior to this prayer, Malick’s curious gaze lands on a nun, fully outfitted in habit, standing at a kitchen sink alone, washing silverware. We then see that it is actually Quintana looking at her, and we see that he is moved. In one image: the sacred and the mundane; work and worship; washing away the stain; the specter of Eden in a household chore. In a way the moment echoes the final voiceover of the soldiers leaving Guadalcanal in The Thin Red Line, looking out on the blood-soaked beaches and the baptismal wake of the departing boat: “Darkness and light. Strife and love. Are they the workings of one mind, the features of the same face?”

I suspect Malick’s answer is yes. Pain, struggle, loss, strife: it’s all an opportunity to see the face of God and to grow in faith. Just as nature was created to be resilient in the midst of difficulty (see the asteroid in The Tree of Life, or the palm shoot springing up from the bombed out beach in the final shot of The Thin Red Line), humans were created to press on and grow, emboldened by the grace, forgiveness and guiding Spirit of “the Love that loves us,” come what way.

If you’re interested and have some spare minutes, read the rest of my review here, as well as this one by Richard Brody in The New Yorker, and this piece which offers great insights into Malick’s creative process on the film. Also, if you have not yet seen the film on the big screen—and I highly suggest this format for viewing any Malick film—check this list of current theaters where the film can be found.

Gray Matters

In my first book, Hipster Christianity, I attempted to explore the relationship between Christianity and popular culture by examining the phenomenon of “cool Christianity” and how the realities of trendiness and the notion of “cultural relevance” have been interpreted and enacted by contemporary evangelicals. Among the several motivations for writing that book was a perception I had that many of my contemporaries (Millennial Christians) had mistook relevance for rebellion/edginess and had replaced a pursuit of holiness with a pursuit of “authenticity.” While it is true that in many cases the hyper-legalistic, Christ-against-culture approach of our parents was off the mark and needed to be moved away from, my concern was that the pendulum had swung (as it so often does) too far in the other extreme, replacing conservative legalism with a distorted form of “liberty” that essentially becomes legalism in the opposite direction.

Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism and Liberty (coming out on August 1, 2013) is my attempt to address this “pendulum” problem head on and present an approach to cultural engagement that thoughtfully resides in the vast, glorious terrain between the extremes to which we are so prone to default. Christians have a hard time with nuance. Gray areas are not our strong suit. It’s way easier to just say “yes” or “no” to things, rather than “well, maybe, depending…” But there are many areas where it’s not that black and white. God gives us minds with the capacity for critical thinking so that we might navigate the complexity of these less- straightforward areas of existence.

Popular culture, and what we consume or abstain from within culture, is one such gray area. There aren’t easy answers in the Bible about whether this or that HBO show is OK to watch. Scripture contains no comprehensive list of acceptable films, books, or websites. Contrary to what some Christians maintain, the Bible neither endorses nor forbids all sorts of things it could have been clearer about.

But scriptural silence about the particularities of 21st century media habits is no reason to just throw up one’s hands and indulge in an “anything goes” free-for-all. Rather, it’s an invitation to think about the gray areas more deeply, to wrestle with them based on what Scripture does say and what we’ve come to know about the calling of Christians in this world. The gray areas matter.

I wrote Gray Matters to give Christians tools to better wrestle with a few of the gray areas that have sometimes proven divisive for evangelicals. More broadly, I hope it helps us to take more seriously our habits of cultural consumption–considering how they enrich, corrode or conflict with our Christian identity. Even if we aren’t tempted to be legalists or libertines, many of us are simply apathetic about the things we consume and the manner in which we consume them. Some of us are downright gnostic in the way that we divorce our media/entertainment habits from the faith we purportedly practice.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but I believe that following Christ and appreciating the goodness, truth and beauty of culture are not mutually exclusive endeavors. Reasonable integration, rather than convenient compartmentalization, should define our engagements with culture as Christians. We must go about it thoughtfully, with moderation, and in community. We must do it well because the world is watching; a reckless posture toward culture can impair our witness. More importantly, a healthy consumption of culture can bring glory to God.

I’ll be sharing more about Gray Matters in the coming months (pre-order if you’d like!), but for now I’ll leave you with the endorsements the book has received thus far.

“Brett McCracken is one of this generation’s leading thinkers on the intersection of faith and culture. In Gray Matters, he explores Christianity’s natural extremes with his feet firmly planted in Scripture. He charges headfirst into controversial questions and leaves no stone unturned. The result is a truly spectacular book that carves a path between an oppressive, rules-based religion and a powerless, free-for-all ‘faith.’ If you start reading it, beware—you won’t be able to put it down.”

—Jonathan Merritt, faith and culture writer; author, A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond the Culture Wars

“Idealism is all the rage among bright young evangelicals today, but Brett McCracken brings something all too rare to the table: he holds his earnest idealism in tension with lucid good sense and winsome moderation. May his tribe increase!”

—John Wilson, editor, Books & Culture

“Martin Luther said the world was like a drunken man, first falling off one side of the horse and then the other. With a fresh and thoughtful look at challenges such as food, music, film, and alcohol, Brett McCracken has offered a new generation a way to stay on the horse.”

—Roberta Green Ahmanson, writer and speaker

“In Gray Matters, Brett McCracken does something quite refreshing—he serves as a wise and discerning guide to the consuming of culture. Many books condemn ‘secular’ culture, just as many books advocate (consciously or unconsciously) accommodating ourselves to culture. Brett has written something much different: a biblically informed and culturally savvy approach to consuming culture in a God-honoring, community-building, and mission-advancing way.”

—Mike Erre, pastor; author, The Jesus of Suburbia: Have We Tamed the Son of God to Fit Our Lifestyle?

“Brett McCracken has long been my favorite reviewer of both music and movies, so it’s no surprise to me that he has written this needed book on consuming culture. A number of wonderful books have been written encouraging readers to create culture, but Brett takes the reader into the everyday world of consuming culture. Brett is an incredibly capable writer, thinker, and connoisseur, and all of this shines through in his work—bringing back into focus that how we engage the world around us matters deeply.”

—Tyler Braun, worship pastor; writer; author, Why Holiness Matters: We’ve Lost Our Way—But We Can Find It Again

“This book is not only clear and engaging, but also careful and wise. Gray Matters is a helpful, critical, reflective exploration of how we should consume culture as Christians that is neither reactionary nor defensive, triumphalistic or despairing. Few younger Christians have navigated these turbulent waters with as much even-handed clarity as this book does, which makes it an important read.”

—Matthew Lee Anderson, MereOrthodoxy.com; author of Earthen Vessels: Why our Bodies Matter for our Faith

Ruminations on Joy

A few weeks ago I read Zadie Smith’s essay, “Joy,” in the New York Review of Books. If you haven’t read it already, I highly recommend doing so. It’s a beautifully written, decidedly contemporary reflection on joy with a tone I suspect Millennial and Gen-X readers will particularly resonate with. I also recommend Gary Gutting’s follow-up piece in the Times, helpfully bringing Thomas Aquinas into conversation with Smith’s portrait of joy.

As I’ve reflected on Smith’s essay the last few weeks, I’ve thought about a few things. The first is that I believe Smith’s ultimate conclusions about joy as opposed to pleasure are somewhat reminiscent of those of C.S. Lewis, whose reflections on joy ring the truest of all those I’ve come across.

Smith’s essay begins with an assumption that is self-evident to anyone who exists in this world: pleasures are rather easy to come by but joy is a bit more elusive. She then describes a handful of moments in her life when she felt that she touched joy, in particular a London nightclub experience in the 90s at the beginning of the ecstasy craze. But was that really joy? The morning-after letdown makes Smith wonder. Maybe joy exists mostly in the tease, the replication, the mimesis of something far rarer or altogether out of reach?

Reflecting on her drug experience that felt awfully close to joy, Smith writes:

At the neural level, such experiences gave you a clue about what joy not-under-the-influence would feel like. Helped you learn to recognize joy, when it arrived. I suppose a neuroscientist could explain in very clear terms why the moment after giving birth can feel ecstatic, or swimming in a Welsh mountain lake with somebody dear to you. Perhaps the same synapses that ecstasy falsely twanged are twanged authentically by fresh water, certain epidurals, and oxytocin… We certainly don’t need to be neuroscientists to know that wild romantic crushes—especially if they are fraught with danger—do something ecstatic to our brains, though like the pills that share the name, horror and disappointment are usually not far behind. When my wild crush came, we wandered around a museum for so long it closed without us noticing; stuck in the grounds we climbed a high wall and, finding it higher on its other side, considered our options: broken ankles or a long night sleeping on a stone lion. In the end a passerby helped us down, and things turned prosaic and, after a few months, fizzled out. What looked like love had just been teen spirit. But what a wonderful thing, to sit on a high wall, dizzy with joy, and think nothing of breaking your ankles.

To me, Smith’s notion of joy here feels like bittersweet nostalgia and longing more than anything, which brings to mind Lewis’s notion of it in Surprised by Joy. Reflecting on the common qualities of Lewis’s own list of “joy” experiences from childhood, he writes:

For those who are still disposed to proceed I will only underline the quality common to the three experiences; it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasure in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.

Smith seems to agree with Lewis that joy is a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. “The thing no one ever tells you about joy,” she writes, “is that it has very little real pleasure in it.” And yet she seems more perplexed than Lewis on the question of why humans would choose to desire joy over pleasure, even when it can cause so much pain:

The writer Julian Barnes, considering mourning, once said, “It hurts just as much as it is worth.” In fact, it was a friend of his who wrote the line in a letter of condolence, and Julian told it to my husband, who told it to me. For months afterward these words stuck with both of us, so clear and so brutal. It hurts just as much as it is worth. What an arrangement. Why would anyone accept such a crazy deal? Surely if we were sane and reasonable we would every time choose a pleasure over a joy, as animals themselves sensibly do. The end of a pleasure brings no great harm to anyone, after all, and can always be replaced with another of more or less equal worth.

Smith’s recognition of the ultimate disposability and evanescence of pleasure seems to me representative of my generation’s increasing awareness of the general ephemerality of things, and their skepticism of all the tropes (a house, a family, a career, the suburban life…) previously associated (mostly via Hollywood) with a “joyous” life.

Mine is a generation which has grown up seeing about half of all marriages end in divorce. We’ve seen the real estate market collapse a few times, as well the stock market. We’ve seen umpteen holes shot through our heroes and icons (sex scandals, doping scandals, the generally unflattering transparency of 360 degree media).

Meanwhile, the allure of physical possessions seems ever diminished. Books on bookshelves are going the way of the CD. Amassing expensive furniture, investing in home improvements, registering for fine wedding china that will rarely be used… all of it feels pointless in a world whose impermanence is palpable: a world where life is lived via moment-by-moment tweets and Insta-documents quickly forgotten; where natural disaster, terrorism and apocalyptic doom are not feared as much as expected; where market instability, escalating debt and climate change make visions the future look closer to Children of Men than “Tomorrowland.”

Because of all of this (and no doubt much more), many of us are now, on the whole, much more desirous of experiences than things. We’d rather travel, eat amazing food, see movies, have adventures, and live socially in the present-tense than build for anything long-term. Unlike our parents, we tend to rent rather than buy; we work in jobs for years but not decades; we don’t live in one place for very long. We have close friends for “seasons,” but very few for life.

To be sure, the idea of rootedness, permanence and longevity–building an idyllic homestead wherein one’s family can flourish, amidst a tightknit community where “everybody knows your name,” where we can carve out a niche and stake our place for once and all–is desirable, but mostly in a fantasy sense (in the simultaneously nostalgic and eschatological sense, perhaps, of Marilynne Robinson’s reflections on home in the essay, “When I was a Child I Read Books.”) Such a vision confronts us mostly as a stab, a pang, a longing for what we know will probably never be.

And this brings us back to the discussion of joy. For it is precisely in those pangs and longings where joy exists, argues Lewis. “All joy (as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement) emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire,” he wrote once in a letter to Dom Bede Griffiths. “Our best havings are wantings.”

Though I agree with Lewis that pleasure is surely distinct from joy, I also think they are very closely linked. That is, I believe pleasure–mostly the nostalgic remembrance of a pleasure–can often be a catalyst for joy. Zadie Smith’s experience in the London club likely felt more joyous and profound in her memory–with great distance–than it did in the actual moment. Perhaps in the moment it was closer to pleasure than joy. But without that initial pleasure to look back on and long for, would there be joy?

When I consider instances of joy in my life thus far, most of what I would list probably felt more like pleasure at the time. I think of the summer night in Cambridge when I snuck onto the roof of Clare College with friends, looking out over the moonlit gardens, punting down the Cam river well after midnight, with champagne and laughter in ample supply. I think of the long, late-night undergrad conversations at Wheaton with my roommates: about God, movies, theology, relationships and the like. Or the childhood trips with my family to the Tulsa State Fair, an autumnal tradition rife with the screams and whirring of carnival rides and the smells of all things barbecue and fried. Pleasures all.

The memories of all that, the longing for those happy experiences and the intense recognition that they will never be replicated in just the same way… that’s what stirs up joy. Sehnsucht. And it’s not just nostalgia for the past. It’s nostalgia for a future that a lifetime full of accumulated pangs and pleasures leads us to believe exists. Somewhere. Joy is the ineffable, the transcendent, the sublime stasis which a million little experiences grasp at but can never fully capture. An ultimate settledness for which our hearts now restlessly pine.

This is why Smith feels that there is something melancholy about joy, that it has such a paradoxical capacity to bring us pain. And perhaps that is why in today’s world–so untrusted and unstable, where we’re all so aware of contingency and fragility–the idea of joy makes a lot more sense when articulated as a groaning for completion rather than a smiling-face present perfection. Lewis’ characterization of joy as always pointing away or calling us elsewhere (emphasizing our “pilgrim status”) rings true for citizens of discombobulated late modernity. We know all too well the vacuity that so often accompanies lives of consumption; the limited capacity of things to bring lasting pleasure. (Of course, experiences can also be disposable and empty, though I think they have greater capacity to morph into pleasant memories which ultimately bring joy).

Still, whether we’re curating commodities or experiences, It’s up to us to make the most of the little pleasures we come across. We can either celebrate the presentness of pleasure (YOLO, right?!) and stop there; or we can go further and see in pleasure signposts, recognizing that the ecstatic feeling triggered by a dance party, or a small-batch bourbon, or a down-to-the-wire Super Bowl, is not an end unto itself but rather a means by which we can contemplate our true pilgrim status and the telos to which it all must point.

Is Depiction Endorsement? Filmmaker Responsibility in “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Django Unchained”

Of all the 2012 films nominated for best picture Oscars this year, two have gained press as much for their controversial content as for their awards-caliber quality. Those two films are Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained.

The former, a tense action thriller documenting the CIA’s decade-long search for Osama bin Laden, has proven controversial because of its hard-to-watch depiction of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (aka torture) early in the film. The latter, a revisionist pop art spaghetti western about a slave uprising in the Antebellum South, has raised eyebrows because of its over-the-top violence, racially offensive language (over 100 uses of the “n” word), and generally irreverent treatment of a sensitive topic.

The Zero Dark Thirty controversy is a murky one, with accusations claiming either that the film dangerously misleads in its depiction of torture (Senators John McCain, Carl Levin and Dianne Feinstein are leading this charge) or that it gets the facts mostly right and is well within the latitude usually afforded the “based on a true story” Hollywood genre. In his lengthy defense of the film in The Atlantic, Mark Bowden writes,

Torture may be morally wrong, and it may not be the best way to obtain information from detainees, but it played a role in America’s messy, decade-long pursuit of Osama bin Laden, and Zero Dark Thirty is right to portray that fact.

Critics on the other extreme, like The Guardian’s Naomi Wolf, accuse Bigelow of nothing less than deception and propaganda, comparing her to famous “facts”-benders like James Frey and Leni Riefenstahl.

In her acceptance speech for best director at the January 7 New York Film Critics Circle Awards, Bigelow defended the film against such attacks by saying:

I thankfully want to say that I’m standing in a room of people who understand that depiction is not endorsement, and if it was, no artist could ever portray inhumane practices; no author could ever write about them; and no film-maker could ever delve into the knotty subjects of our time.

Though Django Unchained exists in an entirely different universe than Zero Dark Thirty (a much more cartoonish, stylized universe), presumably Quentin Tarantino would echo Bigelow’s sentiment that what a filmmaker depicts in his or her films should not be assumed to be endorsement. For Tarantino, who has since the days of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs been something of a scapegoat/posterboy for the societal hazards of violent cinema, the “depiction is not endorsement” defense is a crucial one. But is it ironclad?

In a recent interview with a British journalist who tried to press Tarantino on the question of the relationship between movie violence and real violence, Tarantino went a little bit crazy, saying “I’m not your slave, and you’re not my master,” as he repeatedly refused to answer any questions on the subject. Clearly (and perhaps tellingly) Tarantino was uncomfortable with the topic. Watch the amusing clip here.

In the wake of the Newtown and Aurora massacres, when questions about the role of desensitizing movie and video game violence seem reasonable if not obligatory, it seems that the burden is on filmmakers like Tarantino to at least ponder the question.

In an interview this month with NPR, Tarantino sort-of addresses the subject of violence and exploitation in Django:

What happened during slavery times is a thousand times worse than [what] I show. So if I were to show it a thousand times worse, to me, that wouldn’t be exploitative, that would just be how it is. If you can’t take it, you can’t take it. … Now, I wasn’t trying to do a Schindler’s List you-are-there-under-the-barbed-wire-of-Auschwitz. I wanted the film to be more entertaining than that. … But there’s two types of violence in this film: There’s the brutal reality that slaves lived under for … 245 years, and then there’s the violence of Django’s retribution. And that’s movie violence, and that’s fun and that’s cool, and that’s really enjoyable and kind of what you’re waiting for.

But that’s precisely the troubling thing about movie violence. As fantastical and as clearly “movie-fake” as it might be, it is so often tied up with the emotional arc of a character we are rooting for or a justice we are vicariously hoping to experience. These are Tarantino films in a nutshell: Kill Bill, Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained, Death Proof. They are revenge fantasies, hypothetical alternate histories in which terrible killers are vanquished with samurai swords, theaters full of Nazis are destroyed by Jews, and evil slaveowners like Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) are terminated by lowly slaves. The violence in these movies is embarrassingly, unnervingly enjoyable because it is employed in the service of a juicy, attractive tale of (mostly) good overcoming evil.

Even when movie violence is gritty, ugly and un-romanticized (as in Zero Dark Thirty), it has a potency that attaches itself to our emotions and causes us to more or less cheer it on. Critic David Edelstein named ZDT the best film of the year but nonetheless finds himself unnerved by some of these questions: “In cinema,” he writes, “the adrenaline rush can overwhelm our squeamish objections to violence. That’s what makes the medium so dangerous. … Bigelow doesn’t just depict the hunt for and killing of Osama bin Laden. She puts it into our bloodstream.”

But is it really the filmmaker’s responsibility to account for the affective, intoxicating power of cinema? Must a filmmaker worry about what others feel, or in extreme cases are inspired to do, because of what they see in a film?

From some angles, the suggestion that artistic depiction is endorsement appears ludicrous. A cursory survey of art history reveals as much. Caravaggio was clearly not endorsing the behavior of the Roman soldiers in his paintings of Christ’s passion, for example. And then there’s the entire tradition of social realist art which intends depiction for the very opposite of endorsement: for chastisement or expose. Courbet’s The Stone Breakers and any number of Ken Loach films, for example, do not depict poverty and inequality so as to endorse their existence; rather they depict them to bring awareness to egregious conditions and abominable injustices.

But the depiction of “the ugly” in art as means to bring about reform is one thing. Should artists be given free pass to depict the extremes of ugliness (torture, unspeakable gun violence, hundreds of uses of the “n” word) when their only purpose is to convey a purported verisimilitude to the “reality” of the world in which their story is set?

In short, yes. I believe that insofar as an artist honestly sets out to tell a story that is truthful (to the world in which it is set, to the real struggles of its characters), then it is their right and even obligation to not shield us from the darker elements. As I wrote recently in Relevant Magazine, “Something about the way the world is (that is: difficult, risqué, R-rated) tells us that to be truthful, art must grapple with darkness. As filmmaker Akira Kurosawa once said, ‘The artist is the one who does not look away.’”

For me, it all comes down to whether the artist is in the business of seeing the world more clearly and thus focusing the audience’s gaze on a reality in the truest since. This would exclude artists and filmmakers who use depiction and all of its accompanying visceral pull to twist reality and tell propagandistic lies (e.g. Leni Riefenstahl), as well as those who use depiction not to guide the viewer toward contemplation of truth as much as to be provoked, grossed out, titillated or otherwise distracted (e.g. “torture porn” directors like Eli Roth, shock-artists, etc.)

In the case of the two films under discussion in this essay, I’d say Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty fairly passes the test. However foggy the history may be in her narrative of the hunt for “UBL,” it’s clear that her intention is not propagandistic or sensationalist. Tarantino’s Django is a bit of a harder case, because everything about it screams sensationalism and maybe even exploitation. It’s less clear whether Tarantino’s aim here is wholly oriented toward truth-telling (as opposed to merely a stylish exercise in genre and pop culture pastiche), but I’m going to go out on a limb and give Quentin the benefit of the doubt.

His film is not a ripped-from-the-headlines true story like Zero Dark Thirty. But in spite of its flamboyance, the world of Django–the passions, atrocities, hatred, fear, vengeance, occupations, camaraderie–rings true. And the same painstaking, sometimes dirty quest for the destruction of a villain that drives Zero Dark Thirty also drives Django. It’s Hollywood, and it’s life.

And that’s precisely why cinema is at once a powerful, beautiful artform but also something that troubles the waters of our scapegoat-seeking, hyper-violent culture. Cinema tells the truth like nothing else because it sticks like nothing else; as Edelstein noted, it “gets into our bloodstream.” It gets our heart pumping. Cinema is powerful because it is dangerous.

Or maybe it’s the other way around.

In Defense of “Les Miserables”

Tom Hooper’s film version of Les Miserables has received much praise in recent weeks, including multiple Oscar nominations. It topped the list of the “most redeeming films of 2012” (a nebulous distinction, to be sure) that my film critic colleagues and I voted on over at Christianity Today. But the film has also had its naysayers and outspoken haters, most notably David Denby’s amusingly snooty takedown for The New Yorker, in which he employs a prodigious array of negative adjectives (“terrible,” “dreadful,” “overbearing,” “pretentious,” “maudlin,” to name a few) to underscore his scorn for the popular movie.

Among Denby’s critiques (they are legion) is his disapproval of the prevalence of extreme closeups in the film’s depictions of the actors singing their big solos–a device which is, indeed, the film’s most noticeable and polarizing stylistic feature. Writes Denby: “How strange to have actors singing right into the camera, a normally benign recording instrument, which seems, in scene after scene, bent on performing a tonsillectomy?”

les I actually quite appreciated the camera’s tendency to go to extreme close-up. In adapting a beloved stage musical like Les Miserables, Hooper wisely opted to keep much the same (the songs, the period costumes, the overall showmanship). But he also wisely recognizes the inherent differences between the medium of the stage and the screen, and the relative advantages and disadvantages of those forms. The ability of a camera to direct an audience’s attention to specific images at specific times, and to get close enough to faces to capture the slightest nuance of emotion, is one advantage film has over the theater, for example. Watching something like Les Mis in a theater, one gets the experience of the music and the broad scene of a stage full of sets, props, and actors, but one misses out on the intimate expressions of the actor’s faces (unless you are sitting in the front row, perhaps). Film, paradoxically, perhaps, can bring the viewer closer to the action and allow them to be more intimately engaged with a particular actor’s embodiment, gesture, presence. In adapting the musical to the screen, then, Hooper is simply using the medium to his advantage by bringing to the story some elements the stage cannot.

Does the result come across as heavy-handed and emotionally “overbearing,” as Denby suggests? Perhaps. But the almost confrontational emotion and physical directness of Les Miserables seems to me to be less narrative laziness as an earnest attempt to create a visceral experience that conveys universalities through resonant tableaus of image, sound and action.

All films (all narratives, really) are, in the end, curators of moments and consolidators of emotions that help us to see more clearly things that are true about existence. Andrei Tarkovsky, who described filmmaking as “sculpting in time” (“pick[ing] out and join[ing] up facts taken from a ‘lump of time’ of any width or length”) once wrote that art is “a means of assimilating the world, an instrument for knowing it in the course of man’s journey towards what is called ‘absolute truth.’”

As such, art is an editorial process: One shot is chosen over a host of others because it most clearly conveys a specific idea. One brushstroke better captures a real-life gesture than another. One sentence is omitted because the idea can be expressed without it. Language itself is a system of ordering symbols we call words in just the right manner, and usually in the most economic fashion possible, so as to focus one’s attention on exactly the thing that is meant to be understood.

All of this to say: I think one of the problems people have with a work like Les Miserables is that its mode of narration (“sculpting in time” to use Tarkovsky’s expression) is perhaps too ambitious and comprehensive, while at the same time too concise. It attempts to consolidate too much, to assemble a massive array of moments that are each so loaded, so full of emotion and existential plight. To some, the cumulative effect feels too forceful, too dramatic, too sentimental. It may make some viewers (like David Denby) simply exhausted.

But it also makes many, many other viewers incredibly emotional. It moves people. Why is that?

Michael Gerson, writing in the Washington Post this week, eloquently reflected on why Les Mis made him cry to the point that he had to explain to his sons why he was “weeping for the imaginary suffering of fictional characters played by highly paid actors”:

People have been attracted to Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables for more than 150 years precisely because it is a comprehensive rejection of skepticism. At 1,400 pages of suffering, vulgarity, pity, fury, revolution, worship and self-sacrifice, comprehensive is the right adjective. Other great romantics reveled in nihilism. Hugo gave the brief for life… [Hugo’s] great book is a vivid description of the workings of grace. Valjean begins as a hardened prisoner. He is shown mercy and learns to show it. He is hunted through a series of resurrections — emerging from a live burial, from the sewers of Paris. His nemesis is broken by his moral certitude. Valjean is saved by his sacrifices. He learns love by raising a daughter, and then the far reaches of love by giving her away. The ending is not particularly happy. Handing over his child to the future also leaves the protagonist broken. In the end, he has surrendered everything he possessed except God. But that is enough. … So perhaps my sons will someday understand there is much to learn about being human from imagined lives. From Hugo and others, they may gain some skepticism about skepticism. They may even eventually discover why it is difficult for a father to contemplate giving up his children to the future, in the long, natural sacrifice of the best things about us. And I hope they will find, as Valjean does in the end, that “there is scarcely anything else in the world but that: to love one another.” Which is worth a few tears.

Some may be (understandably) skeptical of any movie that can bring so many people–even grown men like Gerson–to tears. Surely a movie like that must be manipulative, saccharine, simplistic, right?

I think we should consider the possibility that it may simply be because that’s what art does. In its quest to reflect our world back to us, or perhaps to show us a fantasy world or eschatological vision that is foreign to us, art can strike us in the deepest places of our soul–those pining places beyond day-to-day emotions; the reservoirs of existential longings so often only stirred up by beauty and art.

Movies especially are a form of art prone to elicit such emotional, existential responses. Movies can capture, probe, explore the tangible world in ways no other medium can. We feel the texture of a silk dress in Anna Karenina. We smell the blood-splattered cotton in Django Unchained. We languish at the sight of Anne Hathaway’s tormented face – every line and wrinkle of which the camera so painfully exploits. Movies are visceral.

In a movie, the raw materiality and physical geography on which the story plays out (i.e. nature, sets, bodies, props) can resonate with us as much as the story itself. This is reality, shooting out at us in flickering light. Film theorist Siegfried Kracauer believed that the primary function of cinema was to open up reality and re-focus the spectator on the mundane and everyday elements of life that are typically taken for granted. It is through this encounter with the “texture of everyday life” that cinema serves to reconnect humanity with its estranged material habitat, urging us to look closer and see the world for the concrete thing that it is.

This re-connective power of cinema–which among other things fosters a potent, immersive empathy between audience and whatever action transpires among the flickering pixel players–is so striking that it leads some viewers to build up defense mechanisms so as to resist its affective force. This is one (but not the only) reason why some respond to Les Mis with such skepticism. It’s a movie that embraces, unapologetically, the power of cinema to consolidate the extremes of human experience in such a way that audiences can’t help but be moved.

That is, if the audience is willing to suspend disbelief and accept that yes, a movie is movie. People don’t really sing every emotion and monologue that runs through their mind. Our experience of the world doesn’t jet back and forth in time and space, covering decades in the span of a few hours. Movies are artifice, symbols of truth. But so is all art. So is all language. Without these methods of “assimilating the world,” how could we live?

Notes on Christmas Camp

Last week I attended a Sufjan Stevens concert in Hollywood at the Fonda Theater. It was Sufjan’s Christmas concert tour, celebrating the immense collection of Christmas music in Suf’s catalogue (most recently the just-released 5-disc set, Silver & Gold, which includes no less than 58 tracks exploring Christmas from just about every angle imaginable).

The sell-out concert was memorable, to say the least. The music was alternately nostalgic, warm, absurd, annoying, jolly, kitschy, campy, somber and sacred. Kind of like Christmas.

Sufjan has always been an artist that no one category could pin down. Is he a devout Christian? Is he the savior of folk? A banjo-wielding, sometimes techno-inclined performance artist? A truckerhat-wearing, oboe-playing Liberace for the more clean-cut Millennial hipster? Probably all of the above.

Sufjan’s embrace of paradox manifests itself most importantly, I think, in the way that he very deliberately fuses kitsch, camp and irony with a disarming sincerity and insistence on meaning. In one moment he and his band–which included Rosie Thomas dressed as a chainsaw-wielding snowman–are spinning the giant “Wheel O’ Christmas” to determine which carol they will lead the audience in singing next. In the next minute he is leading his bandmates in the a capella singing–with four-part harmony–of old hymns like “Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates” or “Ah, Holy Jesus.”

Sufjan’s brand of camp embodies the sort of multi-level processing of meaning that Susan Sontag described in her famous essay, “Notes on Camp.”

“The Camp sensibility,” she wrote, “is one that is alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken … between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice.” It is any approach to reality that “sees everything in quotation marks.”

Sufjan’s Christmas work is case and point of what seems like his desire to explore a milieu that is at once the pinnacle of artifice and yet full of echoes of the most meaningful things of all.

Take “Christmas Unicorn,” the 12-minute, cuckoo conclusion to Silver & Gold. On stage, the performance of this insanely campy Christmas anthem includes confetti guns, huge beach balls, techno dance breaks, Sufjan himself wearing a homemade “Christmas Unicorn” backpack and helmet, and about 5 minutes of nothing but the repeated chant: “I’m the Christmas Unicorn! You’re the Christmas Unicorn too!”

And yet beneath the glitter, foil costumes, synth, and quirky preciousness, the song tries to capture a kernel of truth about Christmas–namely that it has become something of a hot mess of commercialization, sentimentality and religio-cultural-fantastical pastiche.

The “Christmas Unicorn” declares: Continue reading →

Five Reasons I’m Voting for Mitt Romney

My vote won’t matter at all in California, but I sent in my ballot last week anyway, voting for Mitt Romney. Am I super excited about everything Romney stands for? Not at all. I’m uncomfortable with his Mormon faith, regret that he supports drone strikes & the use of torture, and absolutely wince when he says things like “America is the hope of the earth.”

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m also not one of those people who thinks Obama is an unqualified disaster of a president. I like a lot of things about him and had high hopes for his presidency four years ago. I think he’s a good guy, a family man, and not the villain the Ann Coulter Fox News crazies would label him.

But for this moment in America, I think it’s wise to switch course and give Romney a chance. Here are a few of my personal reasons for voting for him:

Abortion. I’m pro-life and this will always be a deal-breaker for me. Fighting for the “reproductive right” to destroy a living being will always be sickening to me, and I’ve been particularly sickened this year with the Democrats’ tactic of equating the pro-life cause with some sort of “war against women.” That’s just silly and makes disturbing light of the real issue: the war on unborn children, which takes more than 1.2 million lives a year in America.

The Economy: I have real concerns about the U.S. economy, both in its current state and its long-term viability. And so much else depends on a solid, growing economy: national security, the effectiveness of our foreign policy, our education system, the plight of the poor, and so on. The federal government is addicted to accumulating debt and spending money that isn’t there. On the track of spending and debt-accumulation we’re currently on, the world my children will inherit will look something like the landscape of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Dire. I have hopes that Mitt Romney’s business-savvy and focus on private-sector growth and job creation will prove much more effective for America’s economic recovery and long-term fiscal stability.

Religious Liberty. Continue reading →

When Your Social Media Feeds Get You Down

You know those days when your Facebook and Twitter feeds are just so painfully, overwhelmingly negative? When every other post is a political rant, declarative missive about one’s consumer habits (“farewell, Chick Fil A”!), or esoteric theological brawl about terms (say, “complementarian” and “egalitarian”) that mean nothing to your non-Christian friends? Those days when every passing tweet sparks an idea or response in your mind, but you are just too exhausted and mentally drained to bother engaging? Those days that leave you embarrassed to be part of evangelicalism and tempted to just move to some corner of the globe where the only Christianity that exists is new and vibrant, rising from the ashes of a collapsed Christendom?

I know those days, and I bet many of you do too.

On those days, when the reports of Christianity’s slow death in America are clearly evidenced by the number of Christians screaming at each other instead of worshiping God together or proclaiming the gospel, sometimes I despair. But then I remind myself of an important fact: God and his purposes will carry on in spite of it all. In spite of me. In spite of you. In spite of our insufferable tendencies to poach Scripture to justify our own positions. In spite of the Westboro Baptist type crazies, the gay-embracing Episcopalians, the Reformed blog warriors, the angry Texas megachurch pastors, the “I need to pick a blog fight at least once a week” rabble-rousers, and every last sorry one of us. This whole thing is–thanks be to God–so much bigger than any one, two, or million of us.

I remind myself of the truism which my pride so often obscures: that the Christian life is not, after all, about me, and that my purpose on earth is not about maximizing my own happiness. Rather, it’s about joining in God’s mission, submitting my will to His, seeking first His kingdom. It’s about giving up my grip on my life, losing it to save it (Luke 17:33). It’s about remembering the call to deny myself (Matt 16:24), to be humble (Phil. 2-3-4, Romans 12:3), sacrificial (Romans 12:1, John 15:13), and always, out of love, putting the interests of others before our own.

At the core of it, I think, is the idea that to truly follow Christ is to be willing to subordinate one’s pride and will to the Other; to give up what we think we’re entitled to and subject ourselves to something transcendent and true–something that may not fit comfortably with what we think or desire or feel to be right. It’s to admit the feebleness of the “if it feels good, do it” philosophy, instead recognizing that we’re alive on earth for far bigger things than just “feeling good.” It’s to accept the fact that–because we are fallen and our desires are disordered–our Self is not a trustworthy guide (apart from an encounter with the gospel and the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit) in the pursuit of the righteousness and flourishing for which we were designed.

Such an idea is revolutionary and absurd in our society today, of course, where the prevailing sentiment is “do what makes you happy” and the highest virtue is the assertion of each person’s absolute sovereignty over their identity and their own curated vision of the good life.

“Baby you were born this way” shouts Lady Gaga to anyone wrestling with non-normative gender or sexual identities. “Baby you should speak what’s on your mind, because your opinion is as valid as anyone else’s!” shouts the Internet to every would-be blogger or social media sharer. “Baby you are owed all sorts of things from the government, which exists to hold your hand every step of the way, because you deserve it!” shout the governments of countless nations in the world in the unfortunate position of having more and more entitled citizens and less and less means to support their dependencies.

In such a society, no wonder we’re all at each other’s throats. No wonder the discourse is so heated and (mostly) infantile. It’s a natural byproduct of the fetishizing of individualism and entitlement. Everyone wants to hear themselves opine. Everyone’s simply asserting their own rightness and right to be affirmed in whatever feels to them to be good and true and just, even if goodness and truth and justice aren’t really things they’ve honestly explored much. Naturally, arguments in such a society don’t often go anywhere productive.

It’s disheartening when I see Christians falling into these patterns just like everyone else. We of all people should recognize the folly of a “what’s right in his own eyes” approach to living. We of all people should recognize the existence of transcendent truths and ultimate authorities (namely: God’s self-revelation via Scripture) to which we must defer. We of all people should know that we’re entitled to absolutely nothing and that God is to be worshipped whether we have or have not.

Mostly, I lament that so many Christians seem to be missing the reality that life is much more fulfilling and liberating when it’s not just about me. This is not to say humanity is incapable of magnificent wonders which bring glory to God, gifts which should be cultivated and celebrated. Nor it is to say that spirited discussion and debate–even insisting on one’s own position being right–is out of place in the Christian life. All of it can glorify God.

It’s just that in everything we do in this Christian life, humility makes things better. Try it. Christ increases when we decrease. He becomes greater when we become lesser. The world opens up in glorious new ways when we diminish; when we relinquish our insistence on being at the center of it. The jasmine smells sweeter and the wine tastes smoother; the faces of strangers across from us in Starbucks–or behind the avatars to which we tweet–become more real and beloved. The cadences of Emily Dickinson poems and summer rainstorms take on greater beauty.

And we look at ourselves in the mirror and consider: This familiar face, ill-proportioned and sunburned; and this fleshly body, experiencer of such pleasure and pain, is far more than just a lonely, isolated mass tweeting its way through life. Through the mirror dimly all we see is the chronically disappointing person who never quite satisfies us: the blogger who is never quite popular enough, the billionaire superhero who still isn’t satisfied, the Facebook poster whose clever or provocative posts don’t ever change anyone’s minds.

But in Christ we see more clearly the truth about ourselves: that we are the beloved property of the God of all creation, Who invites us (if we are willing to give up our own sovereignty) to be used as a specific piece of a spectacular plan, far grander than those plans which our own minds conjure up. Is this something that should give us big heads? No. But it should give us hope.

Place, Patriotism, and Sehnsucht

I’ve always loved Independence Day, for a lot of reasons but chiefly for the nostalgic memories it evokes of childhood (sparklers, barbecues, blockbuster movies, swimming pools, popsicles) and the celebratory community it cultivates among Americans. Divided though we may be along red and blue state lines, most are joined in at least the basic sentiment of thankfulness on this day: for freedom, for apple pie, for a day off work. If not everyone experiences this day as an expression of patriotism, they at least enjoy it for the hot dogs and corn on the cob.

American Patriotism of the sort often exhibited on July Fourth–and also before sports events, at some elementary schools before the day begins, and in most country music–has for some people become rather gauche and vulgar. To these skeptics, patriotism is brash and unbecoming, something associated with “freedom fries,” yellow ribbon militarism, Toby Keith, guns and George W. Bush. Patriotism is simply an emotionally manipulative arm of nationalism, they suppose; a dangerous ideology that can fuel reckless foreign policy and unseemly cultural arrogance.

While some of those criticisms are valid (to be sure, patriotism has at times throughout history been used to galvanize nations around dastardly plans and policies), I think it’s a mistake to assume that a) patriotism is the same thing as nationalism, and b) patriotism is a manufactured extension of hegemonic ideology.

Patriotism is more existential than ideological, I think. It’s less about propagandistic justification for “exceptionalism-oriented” foreign policy (though it can be this) than it is a natural feeling of admiration and nostalgia for the place we call home.

It’s the thankfulness we feel for the particular nuances of the world that reared us: the culture (in America: jazz, baseball, the national parks, pretty much everything Ken Burns has documented in his films), the history (1776, Abraham Lincoln, Buzz Aldrin and so on), the landscape (for me: the windswept prairies and thunderstorms of Middle America), and the people (our parents, our teachers, the kids we played with in the street).

Patriotism is a good thing. It’s the natural emotional connection we have with place. We’re wired to ache for this notion of “home.” It’s what the Israelites longed for in the Sinai. It’s what the Hobbits longed for (the Shire) during their Middle Earth adventures. It’s what constitutes part of C.S. Lewis’s Sehnsucht: a nostalgic longing for the “Green Hills” of his Belfast childhood, “the low line of the Castlereagh Hills which we saw from the nursery windows.”

Yes, patriotism is provincial and “self-focused.” Necessarily so. Everyone has a different place they call home, a different assemblage of culture they treasure. The diversity of patriotisms (American patriotism vs. Swedish patriotism, for example) does not need to be thought of in terms of competing patriotisms. Rather, it should serve as an affirmation of the richness and complexity of culture and a celebration of the diversity of God’s created world. It’s natural to feel that “my country is better than yours!” and it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. If no one felt this pride, the Olympics would be a snooze and Disney World’s EPCOT Center would be far less interesting. When I travel to a foreign country I want the people I meet there to take pride in their country and culture. If I went to Switzerland and the Swiss citizens I met insisted that their chocolates, mountains and watches “were nothing special,” I’d be hugely disappointed.

Lewis wrote in The Four Loves that a healthy patriotism is based on a love of home and “is not in the least aggressive.”

It asks only to be let alone. It becomes militant only to protect what it loves. In any mind that has a pennyworth of imagination it produces a good attitude towards foreigners. How can I love my home without coming to realise that other men, no less rightly, love theirs? Once you have realised that Frenchmen like cafe’ complet just as we like bacon and eggs–why good luck to them and let them have it. The last thing we want is to make everywhere else just like our own home. It would not be home unless it were different.

And so this Independence Day, I’m not going to feel bad about my pride in America. I’m not going to shrink from patriotism, as if it’s anything other than a natural and good thing to feel. I will be careful not to confuse it with nationalism, however, and will not forget the fact that as Christians, “our first love must be the kingdom of God, over and above any love of country, no matter how pure and honorable that love might be.”

Ultimately my fondness for “home” and all of its nostalgic resonances–Gettysburg, Old Faithful, college football tailgating, Norman Rockwell, Kansas City barbecue, cherry cobbler–should point me heavenward, stirring my heart but not satisfying it, stoking the fires of Sehnsucht just as the Irish green hills did for Lewis.

Culture, politics, and religion for those who love words.

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