Blankets
by Craig Thompson
Top Shelf Comix, 2003. 582 pages.

reviewed by Michael Huang

Evangelicalism is changing these days. Its leading institutions, like Wheaton and Calvin College and my own Fuller Theological Seminary, are waking up to the possibilities of the arts, film and other visual arts in particular. We, the heirs of an iconoclastic Protestant tradition that shunned the visual and the metaphorical in favor of the verbal and literal, are now hosting Festivals of Faith and Writing, Centers for the Arts, and Spirituality and Cinema conferences, often with the dream of discovering the next Bach or Dostoevsky or Martin Scorsese in our own bosom and raising him or her to world-class recognition, longevity, and influence. At last the Church will have a say in shaping culture again! Perhaps it is a measure of our impatience that, of course, we expect geniuses to suddenly pop out of soil that only so recently fertilized, when so recently it was exactly this kind of person who would likely to be chased out, not nurtured. How recent it is can be seen by the spate of “growing-up-evangelical memoirs” that have been published as of late, of which Craig Thompson’s Blankets is not only among the finest and most moving, but also emblematic. (It is also the only one that is a graphic novel–but more on that in a moment.)
(more…)

Groping for Spirituality?

Warning: this is long, and there are no pictures this time! This is one of my more academic/critical pieces. I really should be writing my novel now.

The Panels

The quality of the discussions was, on the whole, too uncritical. Most of the panelists were falling over themselves to praise the films for whatever meaning and spiritual significance they could grasp at, no matter how tenuous. Granted, none of the films were bad. All of them were fine works of film art, some better than others, but all were worthwhile. But there was no need to stretch oneself to find theology where none was intended to be seen, or, worse, descend into platitudes and generalizations like “life-affirming” or “hopeful” as a substitute for “Christian.” I would have been fine if the panelists had simply appreciated the films on their own merits, as simply good comedies. Some of the panelists did that, actually. But if that was all we were here to do, to watch funny movies, why bother talking about divine comedy? Why not just say that it’s good to laugh, laugh, and be done with it? Why was there a desperate need to justify it with a thin religious veneer, and a dull one, at that?

Let’s take a look at what the City of Angels Film Festival picked this year and what they said about each film.
(more…)

A Personal Postscript

Previous Writings on The Passion of the Christ
The St. Gibson Passion, Part 1
The St. Gibson Passion, Part 2
Icons and Idols, Part 1
Icons and Idols, Part 2

Yes, I am still alive.  I just had writer’s block that’s all.  I was asked to write a personal reaction to the film for a church newsletter, and seeing that I had planned to do that three weeks before anyway . . . I swallowed my laziness and finally got around to it.  Some of the material here is repeated from prior entries, since it is meant to stand on its own.  It’s actually something of an combination of all the prior writings on the subject.

This is probably the last thing I will write about this film, though I plan to see it again sometime during Holy Week next week.  Though if I get some kind of new insight when I see the film in its most liturgically appropriate setting, maybe I’ll mention something.  Who knows what I say with this blog anymore?

---

Before we watched The Passion of the Christ, my family decided to fast and pray.  The suggestion came from my Sunday School teacher while we were discussing the movie and wondering whether anyone was really prepared for what they would see.  While I was the one who brought it up, and my parents thought it was a good idea, I was ambivalent about fasting and praying before a film.  A movie isn’t supposed to be the same as church; we were going to the Regal Theater up on Rockville Pike, not a cathedral or a monastery.  There is something odd about giving such reverence in a place where there might be all these sniggering teenagers munching on popcorn and slurping sodas–and, for this movie, intrusive evangelists.  Had the movie theater become a substitute church or temple?

I went along with it anyways.  This was a different kind of film, after all.  It wasn’t going to be ordinary entertainment, or even an anticipated release like The Lord of the Rings; we had heard all the hype in the media about Christian leaders buying out whole theaters and audiences sobbing and committing their lives to Christ.  So we sat at our empty dinner table and each prayed in turn things like: “Dear Jesus, let this movie be a reminder of the redemption you have won for us.  We pray that people’s hearts may be moved and that they make come to know you through this film.  Prepare our hearts for the experience.”  We left after we finished, with not a little trembling and fear in our hearts.

The day before I’d downloaded the soundtrack from the iTunes Music Store: not of The Passion of the Christ, but Peter Gabriel’s Passion, which was the soundtrack to the film The Last Temptation of Christ.  We listened to the soundtrack in the car.  Though it was attached to a film that was heretical to the say the least, Gabriel’s music is a haunting, beautiful blend of African/Middle-Eastern instruments and Western melodies, and it evoke the atmosphere of the first century much better than an average Hollywood score.  But we were driving in the dark on Rockville Pike, living in a world that would have seemed alien to the people of the first century.  I wondered whether a movie or any work of art could really transport an audience out of its place and time, especially the time of Jesus–a holy time.  How much could a movie or music do, anyway?

We entered the theater five minutes before the movie began.  Nearly everyone entering brought nachos, popcorn, and sodas.  The chatter I overheard said nothing about Jesus or spiritual matters, which disappointed me, even though I was telling myself “it’s only a movie.” I hoped and prayed that no one would be snacking or slurping during the Crucifixion, though, because movie or not, this was a depiction of sacred subjects.  I still felt uneasy about the kind of reverence I was expecting out of a moviegoing crowd.  This was, after all, a multi-million dollar commercial enterprise.  I dreaded what the ads and credits would look like beforehand.

But when the lights dimmed, the film started immediately.  No ads or trailers preceded them; the Icon Productions logo and the verse from Isaiah were the first things that we saw.  I’m grateful to the theater that it respected the subject matter; from the reports I read later, the ad-free experience was not a universal one.  Perhaps some employee had read the passage where Jesus drives the merchants out of the temple and taken a hint!

The film begins with a shot of the pale, full moon and a clouded sky. At first, during the Gethsemane scenes, I could hear the grating sounds of drinks being slurped and teeth crackling on nachos, but not long into the film the noise died down.  The entire theater was silent as soon as the night-time trial with the Sanhedrin began.  And the drums on the soundtrack began pounding as Jesus was condemned and led away, followed by the jeering mob to Pilate . . . and then the sobbing around the theater began as Jesus was brutally flogged by Roman guards.  The flogging left me curiously unmoved; what I remember most is the sadism of the guards rather than Jesus’s bloodstained, raw body.  (Side note: after watching the nastiness of the Romans, I found the charges of anti-Semitism to be vastly overblown.  The Jewish “villains” get far less screen time than the barbaric Romans.)

I was surprised at the scene that did move me to tears, though, because I knew about the scene before I came to the film, and knew that it had moved others to tears.  As Jesus is carrying the cross down the Via Dolorosa, he falls down under its weight–a nod to one of the fourteen Stations of the Cross of Catholic tradition rather than the Bible. Mary, who has been following along all this time, watches her beloved son fall and remembers a time when he stumbled as a child and she picked him up . . . so when she sees him fall once more, she is rushing to be at his side, in this hour of grief and emotional torment for her.

Then Jesus looks at her sadly and says, “See, Mother?  I make all things new.”

Then the music swelled and I could no longer see clearly, because my glasses had fogged up and my lenses were wet with tears.  In that one line–taken from the book of Revelation, interestingly enough–was all of Jesus’ courage, compassion, and purpose, a seemingly ironic statement in the midst of such evil and death.  I imagined what anyone around him, or even Mary, when and if he said this.  How could a beaten man carrying an instrument of capital punishment, led on by the mob of soldiers and crowds, make things new like this?  It expressed emotionally what Paul wrote later in Philippians: “He was obedient unto death, even death on a cross.  Therefore God exalted him to the highest place, and lifted up his name above all names.”  The price of the new creation was this: a man savagely beaten, and then killed, for the sins of the world.

It was in that moment in the film that I realized just how strange, how almost nonsensical this idea seems on the surface.  Through the blood-spattered film I was staring right at the very core of my Christian faith: the God-man whose victory was won by what seemed like utter defeat.  No wonder the secular commentators had so much trouble with this film–it brought the discomfort, the radical nature, and yes, the bloodiness of Christianity back to the forefront.  Kathleen Norris once wrote that she appreciated how Christianity is, in fact, “a blood religion.”  And as I watched the Cross elevated with the bread at the Last Supper, and the blood drip down from the arms of the Cross as Jesus offered the cup, I saw how every bland wafer and watered-down sip of grape juice echoed these primal events.  Communion became that much more real, more visceral.

I knew then that I was watching a great work of art.

The most haunting scene comes at the end, when the broken body of Christ is carried down from the Cross.  Mary holds the corpse in a pose strikingly reminiscent of Michelangelo’s _Pieta_.  And then she looks up and gazes at the camera, at us, who watched (and thus participated om) the death of her son.  That stare, that sad, knowing, accusing stare, convicted me to the heart.  What are you going to do now?  Mary seemed to ask with her eyes.  Who do you say this man is?

Finally, after the brief Resurrection scene, the house lights came back on.  The voices of the departing people were no more than murmurs and calm whispers, with hardly any laughter to be found.  I could hear the rustling of coats being gathered and saw still-full bags of popcorn and cups of soda carried out of the theater.  My family left a little later.  We could not find any words to say to each other until we had found our car and had driven out of the parking lot.

“Well,” I said, “I don’t know.”  Those were the first words out of my mouth.  But the truth was, I did know, as did my mother and father in the car: that film, whatever its flaws and excessive violence (we would talk about them as we went home), had given us a glimpse of God like no other film we had ever seen.  The experience felt different from the usual “spiritual highs” that you get at retreats or revivals, though; I felt more exhausted than anything else.  But that seems to be part of the point: I had, after all, been confronted in the starkest terms with the truths of my faith.  They had become as vivid as the red blood spilled on the ground and the splinters of the rough wooden cross, as real as flesh.  Could such an encounter cause anything but fear, trembling, and awe?  “Woe unto me,” cried Isaiah when confronted with God’s glory, “I am ruined!  For I am a man of unclean lips.”

And so the question came again: Were you there when they crucified my Lord?  And then I could say: yes, whether I knew it or not.

The Passion of the Christ: A Review

Part One of this review

I will begin the second half of my review on a somewhat unusual note.

On Monday night, ABC broadcast a television movie called Judas, which I decided to watch out of curiosity.  It is a retelling of the Gospel story, from the perspective of Judas Iscariot: not to valorize him, or to denigrate Christ (the script was co-written with a Catholic priest and is theologically orthodox), but to understand how someone who was one of Christ’s followers could think of betraying him.  It begins with the crucifixion not of Christ, but of Judas’s father, a political rebel against the Romans; from that point forward, Judas makes it his mission to help lead a revolt against the Romans.  He can’t seem to find anyone until he sees Jesus throwing the merchants out of the temple.  That impresses him enough that he believes that he has at last found the Messiah that will lead the Jews to independence from Rome.  The story, of course, goes downhill from there . . .

Suffice to say that I couldn’t make it past the halfway point of the film.  The premise was promising, but the acting was worse than mediocre, particularly with the actor who played Christ.  This Americanized, goofy-grinning Jesus says things like “Come and follow me, Judas.  Whaddya say?”, preaches self-help maxims like “I really like you.  I wish you’d love yourself the way I love you,” and, perhaps appropriately, looks a lot like the thumbs-up “Buddy Christ” so effectively satirized in Kevin Smith’s film Dogma.  There’s also this embarassing scene where Jesus and Judas are playfully wrestling with each other, a scene so forced in its attempt to “humanize” Christ that it only succeeds in making him a laughingstock.  Judas‘s Jesus is a Jesus for the lowest common denominator of television viewers; he behaves so fecklessly that it’s no wonder that Judas, a serious person with unyielding political principles, would give up on this Jesus. 

The sheer ineptitude of Judas made me appreciate the real, if imperfect virtues of The Passion of the Christ.  Despite its excessive bloodletting, the film does a remarkable job in capturing how significant, harrowing, and terrible the Passion was.  Jim Cavaziel’s Jesus says far too few lines, but in the time that is spent developing his character, he really does become a Man of Sorrows.  This is especially true in the opening scene of the film, in the Garden of Gethsemane.  Facing temptation from the androgynous Satan figure to give up on his mission–”the sins of man are too much to bear,” Satan informs him–he cries out in agony.  He prays fervently to his Father to take the cup away from him.  He sweats blood, and is exasperated by his disciples’ inability to stay awake.  But at last, after so much struggle, he whispers: “Yet not my will, but your will be done,” and crushes the head of a creeping serpent–a brilliant nod to the prophecy in Genesis 3:15. 

The transition from temptation to victory is absolutely convincing, because the struggle is as real as the outcome.  It is taken with utmost seriousness.  The gravitas of Cavaziel’s performance helps us to see Jesus Christ through him much better than with the New Agey Jesus of Judas, who doesn’t seem to want to bother with such things like struggle, sadness, and pain.  Even the heretical, yet compelling The Last Temptation of Christ effectively showed just how much agony there is in being human, in being filled with anxiety, doubt, and fear; unfortunately, Martin Scorsese’s film gave us a merely human Jesus we could empathize with and pity, but not worship.  Not so with Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ; happily, we have at last a film where Jesus Christ’s fully human side, with all of its anguish, is presented without compromise of his divinity.  That is the most significant accomplishment of this film, in my opinion.  We will not have to choose between bloodless Christs who are more angelic than human and tortured, impotent Jesuses made in the image of neurotic Western man.  The Man of Sorrows is also Christus Victor, Christ the Victor, who sits at the right hand of the Father and will come again in power and glory to judge the living and the dead.  The determination in Jesus’s face in the final resurrection scene leaves no doubt of that.

And then there is the haunting presence of Mary (center of the picture on the right), hovering at the edge and sometimes in the center of the shots, grimly accompanying her beloved son on the road to Calvary.  Gibson, being a Traditionalist Catholic, apparently believes that Mary is co-redemptrix and mediatrix in our salvation along with Christ.  Yet his ideology, objectionable to me as a Protestant, did not interfere with the film at all.  This Mary, played with verve by Maia Morgenstern, is not the ethereal, semi-divinized virgin of so much bad Catholic art.  Instead, she is a middle-aged, identifiably Jewish mother (she and Mary Magdalene are introduced while they are asking the first of the Four Questions of the Passover Seder: “why is this night different from every other night?”  An apt question indeed!), unsentimental but full of sorrow for the suffering of her son.  Morgenstern’s Mary rarely cries.  Calmly, she wipes the blood of Jesus from the spattered ground after his flogging.  She rushes to catch him when he falls under the weight of the Cross.  She kisses his wounds and then takes him in her arms, as in Michelangelo’s Pieta–another brilliant nod to the deeper Western art tradition.  She is that most human of human beings, a grieving mother, and we see the suffering of Christ largely through her perspective.  As a result, Christ’s humanity is that much more real: we see that he is also a mother’s child who tripped and fell, who made tables for a living, like all of us.  As a single man, I can only imagine what it might have been like for the mothers in the audience who were watching the film.  I recall one review in which a mother said that the sight of so much of her child’s blood would have driven her crazy, but because Mary’s faith enabled her to so calmly, lovingly wipe the blood away, she couldn’t help but sob.  Finally, it is her face that gazes at us near the film’s end, a sad, knowing look that reminds us: my son did this for you.  I was struck to the heart by that convicting gaze.  It made me want to cry out for forgiveness: Lord, I did this to you.  Forgive me, Jesus.

Though this movie doesn’t divinize Mary in the way that some Catholic tradition does, I believe that I understand much better as a Protestant what drives so many Catholics to revere her so much as the Mother of God (theotokos).  If the real Maryam (that is how her name is pronounced in Aramaic; in Hebrew it’s Miriam) was anything like this, then she was a most remarkable and blessed of women, worthy of emulation and praise through Christ.  This film may do more work than a thousand Jesuit missionaries to introduce Protestants to Mary.

It may also do more than a thousand theology professors and the combined powers of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien in introducing evangelicals to the depths of the Christian tradition.  The rootedness of this film in the liturgical, artistic, and theological tradition of Western Christianity is quite profound, and adds immensely to the richness.  Here, too is where the objections about the film’s historical inaccuracies are irrelevant.  It is true that the Roman soldiers of that region would have spoken koine Greek, the language of the New Testament, rather than Latin.  It is true that if people were nailed to a cross–many were just hung on ropes–the nails would go through the wrists, not the hand, and that condemned criminals usually just carried the horizontal crossbeam, not the whole thing.  It’s also probably true that most people would not have survived the flogging that Jesus suffered in the film.  But religious art is not about literal historical reconstruction.  In fact, literalism can be a hinderance, insofar as it confuses the depiction of a reality with the reality in itself.  I wrote about this in my previous entry, “Icons and Idols Part 2“. 

Instead, The Passion of the Christ operates on the level of symbol and allusion.  Biblical ones, like the crushing of the snake and the presence of Satan, are present.  So are references to medieval and renaissance art, particularly that of Caravaggio and Michelangelo; there is parody of the Madonna-and-child.  Jesus carries the whole Cross, not just one beam, because that is an image at once familiar and striking to most Western eyes from all the legacy of Christian art.  The scene resonates in a way that it wouldn’t otherwise; the familiar becomes iconic, which is what all art is meant to do. 

The best example is the Eucharistic imagery.  When Jesus elevates the bread at the Last Supper, we are meant to see the elevation of the Host at Communion, and it is juxtaposed with the raising of the Cross from the ground.  The words, “this is my body, broken for you,” take on incredible resonance in this threefold manner, in which the Crucifixion takes on liturgical, physical, and symbolic significance all at once.  Then, as Jesus pours the wine, saying “this is my blood,” his blood drips from the Cross.  That is the one time where the grisliness actually contributed to the film rather than detracting from it.  It shows just how radical a sacrament Communion actually is, how fleshly and, yes, bloody it is.  Our antiseptic church rites seem so far removed from what inspired them in the first place. 

So this depth, this remembrance of living tradition, is what seperates timeless art from merely personal, contemporary, but soon forgotten art.  Every work of art must be a reflection of the artist and his time, of course; there is no getting around that.  But when the work of art is rooted in the Scriptures and in the tradition of the faith, imaginatively rendered without disrespecting it, then we have Christian art that may yet stand the test of time.  It comes from the recognition that Scripture and tradition are not dead memorials, recalled for the sake of reminding the audience how far we have come since then (that is the chief flaw of liberal revisionism).  Scripture and tradition, as they are adapted and appropriated in every time, remain alive and thus powerful.  We encounter God through their expressions, and when artists heed this, art leads us to these living sources.  As TS Eliot said about poets in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent“:

Very few know when there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet . . . and he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.

Despite its faults, The Passion of the Christ succeeds in doing just that.  A movie about the risen Christ, grounded in the Christian tradition that is practiced in churches throughout the world and memorialized by generations of artists, recalls to life the truths of that moment 2000 years ago–that “Passion” on the Cross which means suffering, and victory.  By this sign, he conquered.

TOMORROW: A personal postscript.

The Passion of the Christ: A Review

EDIT, 2/28/2004: Added helpful links.

Warning: “spoilers” included. Not of the ending, of course but of some of the more interpretive scenes not found in or embellished from the Scriptures.

There was only one scene in The Passion of the Christ which moved me to tears. It happened along the Via Dolorosa, as Jesus is buckling under the weight of the Cross. He has been savagely beaten by the Romans and can barely breathe under the weight of that which will later kill him. Mary his mother, Mary Magdalene, and John are following him from behind the gauntlet of taunting soldiers and mobs, but they cannot reach him through the thick of the crowd. After a moment, Jesus can bear it no longer: he collapses onto the ground, the Cross falling atop his broken body. Mary sees this, and with horror and pity, she remembers her son as a toddler, running along a field and stumbling. Just as she remembers running to catch him falling, she pushes her way through the crowd so that she can once again catch her falling son, to be at his side and to heal his wounds, which were so much greater at this time . . . “I’m here!” she cries. “I’m here, my son.”

Jesus looks sadly at her, his arms trembling under the weight of the Cross, and replies: “See, Mother? I make all things new.”

That I, an evangelical Protestant, shed tears over a supremely Catholic, Marian moment such as this gives a clue to where the artistic strength of this film lies. This film excels at the Marian angle–we almost seem to see this film through her eyes, the horror and sorrow mediated through her unique grief. Even the portrayal of Satan, for instance, is an androgynous parody of Mary; they are both dressed in black shawls, and at one point Satan is seen carrying an ugly, stony baby, in a grotesque mockery of the Madonna-and-Child. It reminds me that this is, in the end, a Catholic movie made by a Vatican II-rejecting believer; it’s not an evangelical tool for church growth, no matter how enthusiastic my faith community was about it. The film is not a retelling of a Gospel; it is simply The Passion, and the Passion makes no sense apart from the rest of the Scriptures.

Also, while the movie does not contradict the Scriptures, it often embellishes or adds imaginative details to the story. That moving scene I just described is not actually in any Gospel account. Mary is not depicted on the road to Golgotha anywhere; Jesus’ reply is from the book of Revelation. This points to what is both the greatest strength and weakness of this film: many of the artistic flourishes, while technically extra-biblical, are filled with deep resonance not only from other parts of the Bible, but the centuries of Christian tradition and liturgy. But not all of this tradition, particularly the late-medieval ones, sits easily with me. The most objectionable things in this film are just as grounded in certain parts of Catholic tradition as the most powerful parts.  This is why I understand, but ultimately reject, the accusations that this movie is nothing more than pornography, or a sacred snuff film.  Titillation was never the intent of the gruesome late-medieval Catholic meditation on the Passion that this film is clearly a part of. It is, in my theological judgment, misguided, unbalanced, and overly morbid, but it is part of a legacy in Western art that has given inspiration to many gifted artists throughout the centuries.

So yes: this movie is too violent. The dwelling upon the scourging of Christ in particular–to a degree not even approached by the Scriptures–is a serious fault in a movie that contains so many other artistic accomplishments. It really does look, to the untrained eye, like a reveling in the suffering and blood of Christ. That may not have been Mel Gibson’s intent, but the medium of film makes it so, and it’s something that isn’t washed away even by the Eucharistic references that are seen later in the film. “There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Emmanuel’s veins,” an old Pietist hymn went, and it’s so strange and horrible to our modern eyes to see this expressed in such literal, graphic terms. Or at least it ought to be. I wonder how much this is just merely movie violence. Because the degree that this is just movie violence is the degree that the real Passion in real history is cheapened.

I wish Mel would have thought this through before trying to be as “realistic” as possible. The goal of real Christian art is not unvarnished realism, but representation of the divine truths. An Orthodox icon can do that job and look “unrealistic”; “realism” cannot be a sole rationale for the bloody mess that we see on this film. There is something very literal minded about this violence, where it’s only violence and not redemptive suffering. It failed to draw me closer to God, at least; it disturbed me not that Jesus went through this for my sake, but that Gibson would see his Savior in such a way: a raw, stumbling mess lacerated in almost every area of his body. It is this element that led many critics to denounce this film as excessive and pornographic, and on that level I am sympathetic to their arguments. It was an artistically, and theologically, unnecessary choice.  The point of the Passion wasn’t the physical suffering or the gore; it was that Jesus had to suffer at all, because he didn’t deserve one bit of it.  Moreover, he became sin for us, and was separated from his Father.  That was by far the worst suffering he endured, and is something no film could ever visualize.

The way that this movie focuses just on The Passion, too, makes it unsuitable on its own for non-believers. Aside from some well-placed, but all too brief, flashbacks, we don’t get a very clear sense of why Jesus had to suffer such things. I was moved by the film precisely because I was able to fill in the gaps. So a few snippets from the Sermon on the Mount resonated deeply because those excerpts triggered the memory of the entire Sermon; the elevation of the bread during the Last Supper reminded me of the elevation of the Host at every Communion. Those who are unfamiliar with Scripture or tradition will miss these things that are clearly aimed at the faithful, and will only see gore. So the evangelical enthusiasm for this film as an evangelistic vehicle is sorely misguided. The most I can see an outsider feeling for Jesus is a kind of horrified pity–but not devotion or worship. God may yet work through a heart anyways, but I think it will be despite what we see in this movie, not because of it.

TOMORROW or SUNDAY: the virtues of symbolism, art tradition, and Mary

n>So I finished reading Dan Brown’s bestseller The DaVinci Code last night, staying up until 2:00 AM. I had bought the book because I was curious about the controversy the book had triggered about Christian history and theology, which is one of my main interests.  I had heard that it badly distorted church history in favor of wild conspiracy theories, which sounded like fun reading to me.    I expected to groan a lot, though, and I did . . .

Nevertheless, after reading it and its predecessor Angels and Demons, I can still say that despite the inaccuracies, canards, and whoppers about Christianity, not to mention the bad-to-mediocre writing, both novels were entertaining thrillers. If you didn’t know anything about the history of Christian theology or art, the conspiracy theories in the book seem internally consistent and clever. The plot twists are enough to keep the pages the turning. I’ve read reviews elsewhere complaining about how predictable both novels were, but I found this to be more true of the ideologies in them rather than the plots. Perhaps this shows how inexperienced I am with suspense thrillers, but there were points in Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code where I was breathlessly wondering what was going to happen next and who the real villain might be.  So they’re fun books, understandably popular with mass audiences who don’t have theological axes to grind.

But boy, did my axe get sharp while I was reading the parts Brown claims to be “factual.”  The institution of Christianity (Roman Catholicism in particular) is, to say the least, called into serious question about its fundamental beliefs throughout The DaVinci Code.  It’s not quite true that Christianity is wholly evil in the novels, though Brown seems to have trouble distinguishing general Christianity, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Vatican leadership.  (For instance, he treats the potential destruction of St. Peter’s in Angels and Demons as if it were a threat to the entire Christian faith.)  Brown basically accuses the Catholic Church of knowingly inventing the essential doctrines of Christianity–namely, the canon of Scripture and the divinity of Jesus. He postulates that most early Christians regarded Jesus as only a mortal prophet, but that the Church invented his divinity in order to put down the honoring of the “Sacred Feminine” and to ensure an all-male hierarchy.  It’s all Constantine’s fault, he writes, the Roman emperor who convened the Council of Nicea and there decided the Canon and the divinity of Christ on a (close!) vote.  Christianity since then has basically been a big lie, an attempt to put down women and to degrade the sacred value of sexuality in particular.  Only a select few know the real truth.

Anyone who knows anything about what actually happened in Nicea would see that this is drivel, a nearly unrecognizable distortion of the facts.  For example, only two bishops of out 300 disagreed with the primary product of the Council–the Nicene Creed.  Not exactly a close vote there! The controversy being debated there, the Arian question over whether Jesus and the Father were of the “same” or “similar” substance, was less a debate over Christ’s divinity than over how he was divine.  The liturgy of the church had already worshiped Jesus as God for centuries beforehand already; in fact, as soon as the consequences of Arius’s beliefs came out in the open, many bishops once sympathetic to Arius turned against him, which explains the landslide result in the adoption of the Creed.  As for the canon, it was actually decided later in a different council, but only a few books were under dispute, and they did not include any Gospels–it was primarily the book of Revelation, Hebrews, and 2nd and 3rd John.  The four canonical Gospels were pretty much solidified by then.  There was already a wide consensus by the middle of the third century about what the New Testament should look like; the council in 397 that finalized the canon merely confirmed what most churches were already practicing.  It was hardly an imposition from the top-down, as Brown alleges.  I could go on and on about all the inaccuracies of the book . . .

The problem is not that someone is promoting alternative, heretical ideas, or even that the author is doing so based on flawed premises.  The problem is that most people, most Christians even, don’t know much about church history, and thus can’t respond to the challenges. And given the real warts in Christian history–the misogyny of some of the church fathers like Jerome and Tertullian, the Inquisitions, and the Crusades– the book’s ideas sound plausible to those whose impressions are based on half-forgotten college courses and popular stereotypes.  Stereotypes and prejudices figure heavily in the book’s depiction of the church: we live in an age suspicious of authority and hierarchy, so the authoritarian-seeming and hierarchical Roman Catholic Church is an easy target for conspiracy theorists. We live in an age where only recently did women attain equality in the legal and social realms, so the suspicion that the worship of goddesses has been suppressed to keep women down in the spiritual realm is appealing. (I’m surprised that with all the hoopla over Mary Magdalene, Dan Brown forgot about the Blessed Virgin Mary. Rightly or wrongly, she is in fact the “Sacred Feminine” for most Catholics from nearly the beginning, and a sacred feminine encouraged by the most conservative of clerics.)  Finally, and probably most importantly, we live in an age that is fervent in its worship of sex and holds sexuality as being equal with the sacred itself.  So Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a sexual relationship, and the suppressing of the feminine is entirely due to the fear and horror of sex among the fuddy-duddy, sexually repressed male leaders who wanted to deny the wonders of fertility rites and ritual copulation.

So basically the book succeeds by tapping into contemporary prejudices and by being a competently plotted thriller. It’s like Left Behind, the popular evangelical thriller series, but for the NPR crowd. My concern is that people are actually taking the ideology behind it seriously, and that they don’t realize how ill-informed the book is on matters of Christian history. This is one of the reasons I will be teaching Sunday School for adults starting in March on church history–I think there’s a real need to respond as Christians to the wild accusations that this book makes. When not even secular historians interviewed on ABC think that The DaVinci Code has much merit as scholarship, but many people have reported that their faith was challenged by it, we know we are facing a ignorance gap of massive proportions. I say this not to demean the church or Christians–they are my body and my brothers and sisters. But forgetting one’s history is like losing one’s memory. If you forget who you are, everyone else outside can tell you what they want you to be. The salt will lose its saltiness, and in trying to be like pepper or sugar, become tasteless instead.

Anyways, I’m going to try to write more often on this blog, on theological and cultural and political issues mostly. I think I have more to say on those things these days than on my personal life.

I have decided to hold off on an extensive review of The Return of the King. This is not, for once, due to laziness (I have written quite a bit of it already), but due to some rethinking on my part about my initial assertion: that the film lacks the melancholy core of the novel. I’d like to watch it again to ensure I wasn’t deceived by first impressions, unrealistic expectations, and distractions.

The distractions in the theater were terrible. I saw the movie at the Regal Theater in Rockville, which was filled with many sniggering, homophobic teenage boys who laughed at all the serious male friendship and manly tears on display. I feel sad for our time, a warped age that always assumes a sexual element to any emotionally expressive friendship. That is all we seem to be able to see. I suspect CS Lewis, who once wrote a book on friendship and love, would tell us that we are now too cynical for real male friendship; even in his time he considered it a dying art. He lampooned, justifiably, the tendency for modern people to look upon the brotherhood in the old tales and war stories as being homosexual. The Lord of the Rings, of course, was written partly in the spirit of those old tales. It’s the kind of tale that we long for so much–the films would not be popular if we didn’t–but is still alien to our culture. And so, because of all the heckling (“grow a cock, Sam!” one of the tamer remarks went), I didn’t feel as moved as I should have during the more emotional moments. In fact, I feel robbed. I really wish I preordered tickets for the Uptown Theater early enough; I’ve always felt the audiences there to be much more respectful.

The homophobic detractors should read the book–they’d be in for a shock. When I returned briefly to the novel, I discovered that Jackson had actually toned down the expressions of friendship between the hobbits. (SPOILER AHEAD: at the end of the film, Frodo only kisses Sam goodbye, on the forehead. In the book, he kisses Sam AND Merry AND Pippin.) Tolkien would have known this kind of affection, being a veteran of the First World War: these are the kinds of bonds forged by men in battle, who know the horror and the despair as well as the brief moments of glory, and know the need to hold on to each other for survival. Tolkien alone survived the Great War out of his group of friends, and he carried that sorrow for the rest of his life; that knowledge pervades the melancholy mood at the core of The Lord of the Rings, which makes the friendships in the story much more precious. All the main characters in the novel know this, as do their counterparts even in the film. That is why they are so expressive–when you have come back from the literal crack of doom, alive only by gracious providence and the help of your friends, wouldn’t you want to embrace and be embraced? Even kissed? Would a snide wisecrack suffice? We have lost the appetite for earnestness, save for a brief flash following September 11, 2001; and even that spark fizzled. So it is, perhaps, until the Sarumans and Saurons of the world are again marching on our gates as they did that fateful fall day and we must fight together for our survival.

Anyways, I’m not entirely sure when I’m going to be watching Return of the King again–some of my friends are coming back to town tomorrow, and we may get together for a showing before Christmas. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing it on a bigger screen, hopefully, and with a more sympathetic audience. Despite a few misgivings, I still think Peter Jackson has accomplished something that will be hard to top in film history: he has restored magic and awe to popular filmmaking, and at his best channelled Tolkien’s deep, ultimately (though not explicitly) Christian storytelling. For that, and for bringing the books to life, I am deeply grateful. And I pray JRR Tolkien isn’t too displeased in Heaven.

an Artmic/AIC production (1987-1990), 8 episodes

In post-apocalypse Mega Tokyo (just how many times has Tokyo been demolished and then rebuilt in anime?), the GENOM Corporation manufactures intelligent androids called “Boomers.” They were instrumental in the rebuilding of the city after the earthquake, but sometimes they get a little malicious and destructive . . . and the bumbling AD Police, the force assigned to stop rogue Boomers, usually can’t stop them. But the Knight Sabers–a mercenary group of four young women in advanced hardsuits–can. Led by briliant leader Sylia Stingray, the team battles errant Boomers and unveil some of the more sinister projects and conspiracies going on beneath the giant ediface of GENOM and its imposing tower.

This is the original OAV series, which has inspired several knockoffs (Bubblegum Crash, AD Police Force, and most recently Bubblegum Crisis 2040). On the surface, it doesn’t seem like a terribly original anime–”women in sexy uniforms stop malfunctioning and malicious robots” is what the plotline often boils down to–but there’s some attention to detail and storyline that sets it apart from the crowd. There are, for one, the Blade Runner references and homages–it’s pretty clear from the very first episode that this is really a homage to that great Ridley Scott film by the animators. Second is the animation quality–dated, perhaps, by current standards, but very high quality for its day. The action scenes are still quite well-directed, though so many animes have taken after BGC and stolen designs, concepts, and other aspects enough that watching it now makes it seem very familiar, much like reading quotes from Shakespeare that have now become cliches. As far as story and character go, the notable episodes are 5, 6, and 7, all which deal with some difficult decisions that the characters have to face. There’s some basic emotional resonance there absent from the rest of the series, which are otherwise run-of-the-mill action plots. Characterization-wise, most of the main girls fall into well-known “types” one finds in action films and anime, so there’s nothing to write home about in particular. Now, of course, one can’t talk about BGC without mentioning the music, which is for the most part top-notch, then-state-of-the-art-produced 80s J-pop. The melodies are better developed than most of the dreck that topped the charts in that decade, though age has inevitably made some tunes sound rather “cheesy.” But the music always fits the action on screen, and the DVD set includes some decent music videos for the songs (the non-live action ones, that is. The live concert videos, alas, are incredibly embarassing to watch now). BGC has, ultimately, become a classic and is well worth watching to examine the roots of many current anime tropes. You won’t watch it to be emotionally involved or intellectually provoked, but it’s lost little of its charm and fun over the years.

FRANKENSTEIN, OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS
by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1818)

Robert Walton, an explorer trying to discover a Polar Passage, sights a strange, giant creature among the icy environs. Shortly thereafter, he encounters a man on a sleigh, of ill health, who calls himself Victor Frankenstein. He is chasing after that creature, his own monstrous creation, who he created in an obsessive desire for knowledge and power, only to find himself haunted and distressed at every turn by his creature–whose only desire is for companionship, respect, and love from his creator, who hates him, and society, which abhors him. Frankenstein retells his story to Walton, interspersed with the creature’s own eloquent thoughts about how he became a murdering wretch. The two of them are bound by destiny to end their lives in misery and shame.

I don’t know which Hollywood screenwriter turned a multilayered, profound piece of literature such as Shelley’s Frankenstein into cheap horror schlock, but anyone who is only familiar with the Halloween caricature is in for a surprise. Frankenstein is immensely readable (compare this to Percy Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound,” which covers some common ground, and see the difference), but there are some genuine wrestlings about why men seek after knowledge, and the ways in which that pursuit can have unintended consequences. There are cogent allusions to the Bible, the myth of Prometheus, and Paradise Lost, reflecting the way in which Frankenstein’s Faustian quest becomes a degraded recaptulation of God’s creation of man and the rebellion of Satan. Plus, there are moving and eloquent entreaties from the creature himself, whose descent from goodness to coldblooded vengeance is detailed in a startingly believable, psychologically plausible manner. Nor does Shelley’s work merely echo stereotypical Romantic themes such as the innocence of man before society and the oppression of social mores–while those elements are present, Shelley’s narrative brings up numerous ambiguities in those ideas (some of which were heavily promoted by her famous husband). So there’s little surprise that this text is assigned in most English departments and classes on Romantic literature–this is, its popular reputation aside, a genuine work of Literature, capital L with all its hoity-toity implications. There’s too much richness here that Hollywood has put aside in its filmed versions, and it would be a great shame if most people aren’t aware of just where those visions came from.

Stanley Kubrick Special #5
DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB
directed by Stanley Kubrick (1964)

Mad General Jack D. Ripper of the Strategic Air Command, concerned about the purity of his “precious bodily fluids,” launches a pre-emptive attack on the Soviet Union with his bomber wing, based at Burpelson Air Force Base. His executive officer Captain Mandrake, President Merkin Muffly, and the Premier of the Soviet Union Kissoff, all try to rein in the bomber team currently headed toward its target in Russia, before the dreaded Doomsday Device is set off, ending all life on Earth. But why is ex-Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove smiling so much?

One could go on about the tight plotting and belivability of the situation depicted in the film (the opening disclaimer notwithstanding), or the unforgettable image of Major Kong straddling the nuclear bomb, but the real star of the show in Dr. Strangelove, is, without a doubt, Peter Sellers. He plays three roles in this film: Captain Mandrake, the President, and Dr. Strangelove, and in each of those three largely improvised performances he comes up with unforgettably hilarious lines. (The comedic monologue as he speaks to the Premier is especially funny–never have multiple apologies been so true!) The obvious phallic references throughout are both funny and satirical; Kubrick’s slams on the military mindset and the military-industrial-sexual complex were dead on for that time period, when the world was regularly on the brink of destruction. Somehow, brilliantly, he found a way to make people laugh at the sheer horror and absurdity of the situation. Though this is a laugh-out-loud comedy, the subtext of the film is very dark indeed, suggesting that given the chance, human beings will destroy themselves and take the whole world with them for the sake of ideology and “purity of essence.” This film also marks the beginning of Kubrick’s idiosyncratic use of music; the world’s destruction is set to the score of Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again,” and the lush, serene string music that accompanies the beginning of the film is incredibly ironic . . . . Though we are not quite as afraid of nuclear annihilation by the Russians now, the film remains incredibly watchable and compelling, and an eternal indictment against the gungho/hawkish element that seems to be itching to attack anyone, at any opportunity, regardless of the consequences.