Avdat

Katha Pollitt is making sense...

when so many others aren't:

The widespread support for Polanski shows the liberal cultural elite at its preening, fatuous worst. They may make great movies, write great books, and design beautiful things, they may have lots of noble humanitarian ideas and care, in the abstract, about all the right principles: equality under the law, for example. But in this case, they're just the white culture-class counterpart of hip-hop fans who stood by R. Kelly and Chris Brown and of sports fans who automatically support their favorite athletes when they're accused of beating their wives and raping hotel workers.

No wonder Middle America hates them.

HT: Hugo Schwyzer, who links to other people who hold common-sensical notions about what ought to happen to convicted child rapists who are finally apprehended after jumping bail.

Violent movies round three

No herd of wild horses has yet dragged Camassia to see Inglourious Basterds, but she has posted some thoughtful comments (as usual) on Christians and cinematographic violence.

Still not convinced that violence is beautiful and nihilism is cool

Regarding Brad East's hand wringing over whether or not to watch Inglourious Basterds and Adam Kotsko's snarky reply, I think everyone ought to read this little tale of a quadruple murder in a sleepy southern town not far from yours truly's. The obvious rejoinder is that music (or film, or media) don't kill people; people kill people. Just like guns, right? Or in this case, an unidentified blunt instrument.

It's awfully tempting for highly educated, culturally literate persons to think they are different than a twerp like Richard Samuel Alden McCroskey. Different enough that they can live beyond good and evil. But if I may double down on my prudishness with a little proof-texting, I seem to remember that someone somewhere said to somebody, "The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!"

Which is why "intelligent Christians" are right to worry about the the effect that the toxic mix of gratuitous violence (or explicit sex, for that matter) coupled with a nihilistic worldview might have on one's body and soul.

The 2000s suck but the '90s were even worse

All that the talk about Inglourious Basterds has done is remind me how much I absolutely loathed Pulp Fiction. I realize I'm coppin' to a massively uncool opinion here, but coolness was never something I excelled in in the first place.

I can usually say what I think about politics and religion, but I find articulating my (dis)pleasure at the cinema more difficult, so I scanned the Wikipedia article on Pulp Fiction, and I think that Foster Hirsch gets it just right:

If the film is actually about anything other than its own cleverness, it seems dedicated to the dubious thesis that hit men are part of the human family.

Yup. And please, spare me the briefcase speculation; I don't care what's in the briefcase, and if you spend more than ten seconds speculating on "the meaning of the briefcase," then you've been punked. Pulp Fiction "means" nothing. The trail of pop culture inside jokes goes nowhere. It wasn't the violence that offended me, not even the poor spectacle of the unfortunately-named Marvin having his brains splattered all over the inside of that car. It's the proposition that nihilism is cool that offends me.

I was thinking that Pulp Fiction's G-rated twin would be Seinfeld, a show unabashedly about nothing, but I've decided that Who Wants to Be a Millionaire is a better choice. The host, Regis Philbin, dresses like a gangster, and the ideal contestant is a person who gets all the inside jokes in Pulp Fiction. In other words, a person whose head is full of information but who's got jack for knowledge. Much less wisdom.

Building on this cultural quicksand is a fourth estate whose doyens fault politicians who care too much about public policy, and elected officials who dress up vacuous postmodern philosophy in the chain mail of political thuggery--who think that facts don't matter; violence is beautiful, and war criminals are heroes.

Put differently, this is an awful decade, what with war, terrorism, torture, and greed, but it was a long time coming. Doesn't a nihilistic culture deserve leaders like Bush and Cheney and a political discourse dominated by utterly cynical shouting about non-existent death panels?

God, I woke up angry! And I have to work a double!

In the flesh

My adviser preached in chapel yesterday. The materialism of Holy Week is what stands out, she said. Water poured on dirty feet. Bread. Wine. Flesh caught between wood and nails. No doubt this was said in part because the service was a Saint Thomas Mass, and some justification for prayer stations with icons and whatnot is always helpful in a Presbyterian environment. Not only that, but she's a medievalist, and medieval Christianity is nothing if not material.

I found myself remembering Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Now there's a materialistic treatment of the death and resurrection of Jesus. True, the film has a lot of problems, not the least of which is the way that it assumes that X amount of sin must be propitiated by Y amount of pain, and since X is an awfully big number, Y has to be as well. So you get Jesus suffering as much as Wile E. Coyote. I'm not being flip. Only a cartoon character could have taken the punishment that the temple police and the Romans meted out on Jesus and lived to carry his cross up Calvary's hill.

This is a common misunderstanding of Satisfaction Atonement. Anselm's point, as I recall, was that our sins grow more and more every day, making it impossible for any of us to satisfy the debt we owe. So it's not that X has a lot of zeros after it. It's X^∞.

Therefore, only God can pay the debt. Only an infinite being can pay an infinite debt.

In other words, the point is not how much the Son of God suffered, because he could never suffer enough. The point is that he suffered.

Now, there's another problematic dimension of The Passionthat I cannot overlook before I go. The movie needs to be understood in its context, a context that includes our post-9/11 blood-lust which took the form of a collective, tacit endorsement of torture. With George W. Bush, what you see is what you get. He offered us a no-holds-barred approach to the enemy, of which torture was an unstated but understood part of the package. We took him up on it. Add to that the Saw movies and 24, and this decade Americans have sunk to a level every bit as low as the first decade of the last century, when the knuckles of the lynched Sam Hose could be purchased in an Atlanta grocery store.

I can't help but wonder if more than a few people left Mel Gibson's movie feeling moved by the violence they'd seen in an altogether unhealthy way.

Nonetheless, Jesus did come in the flesh and he suffered in the flesh. And you can't get around that watching The Passion of the Christ. We mainline pastors used to decry the sanitized cross so many of our parishioners believed they'd been saved by--that beautiful piece of gold jewelry around someone's neck. Well, there's nothing sanitized about The Passion. You can almost smell the bread that's pulled out of the oven on Maundy Thursday, and you swear your glasses are speckled with blood after the soldiers work him over in Pilate's courtyard.

Jesus had some really good ideas, but in the end, we aren't saved by an idea. We live in the flesh, die in the flesh, and love and hate in the flesh, and if salvation would be ours, then it has to be wrought in the flesh. Jesus did that.

Stream of consciousness

For some strange reason, this report on the Scientologist view of the afterlife, specifically, Issac Hays' afterlife (it sounds like reincarnation with a gnostic chaser) reminded me of this post on the worrisome trend toward first world population collapse.  The author thinks that middle class parents need to be educated on the facts, and will respond by having more children. 

I think we should really play up the "Your son could be the next Issac Hays" angle.  Or even better, the next John Shaft!  I mean, what do you want to do?  Reduce your global footprint or sire a bad mutha who can watch your back in the nursing home?

Wall-e, part deux

Via Andrew Sullivan I found this critique of Wall-e at a youth ministry blog.  They say that the movie makes fun of fat people, and not only is that not nice, it's hypocritical, given that the success of the movie depends on millions of bottoms in theater seats, popcorn in hand:

While the humans wait for the little white robot Eve (the "dove" in this version of Noah's ark) to find an olive branch and bring it back to the ship to show them the earth is inhabitable again, the people have nothing to do but wait. It is here that the Pixar folks demonstrate an amazing amount of insenstivity in portraying all the humans as shockingly obese "do-nothings" who spend their days laying on hovering lounge chairs, sucking on sugary slurpy drinks while watching TV and being waited on hand-and-foot by robots. As soon as this part of the story began playing out, I immediately wondered how any heavy-set people in the theater must be feeling...

More ironic still is that the film's criticism seems to be levelled at the very folks who are viewing the movie -- you and me, sitting there, doing nothing, watching a screen while consuming buttered popcorn and Junior Mints. The movie wants us to know that mass consumerism will doom this planet and its people. And you can show your support for that message by going out and buying all the Disney tie-in products and toys that will be filling your store shelves, and eventually your landfills, in the next 6-12 months.

This is misguided.  Public health issues ought to be treated as such, and not as human rights issues.  Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On documented the catastrophic consequences of miscategorizing AIDS when the disease was first identified in the early 80s.  Gay rights leaders told doctors, "You can't tell people how or whether to have sex."  And the disease spread like wildfire.

Mutatis mutandis, a sedentary lifestyle does lead to obesity, and obesity is dangerous to one's health. This is true, even if saying it hurts somebody's feelings.  If Wall-e is able to do what MDs seemingly can't, that is, hold up a mirror to obese people and prompt them to make the lifestyle changes that will lower their weight, then good for it.

As for the hypocrisy argument, well, Jesus's advice concerning the hypocrites of his day still holds:  "Do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach."  So watch the movie, but don't buy the popcorn.  Or the action figures.  And take a walk afterward to discuss it.

Wall-e

It's an even less subtle critique of our sedentary lifestyles than Supersize Me.

Natives run off imperialists

No, this post is not about Iraq. 

While it poured yesterday afternoon the kids watched the first half of Return of the Jedi.  While I've seen Empire repeatedly over the years, I haven't seen the third movie since, I don't know, maybe going back to when I was a teenager.  And you know what?  Dude, the movie like, sucks.

Let me get this straight.  For inspiration, George Lucas turns to cannibals on the island of Borneo, transforms them into cuddly teddy bears, and relocates them to a temperate rainforest?  And they destroy the Empire?  Oh, and C3P0 gets to be the Coke bottle from The Gods Must Be Crazy.

It's really quite dreadful.

The honesty's too much

Ever since 1980 you've been wondering, Just what is the meaning of that insult the droid hurled at C3P0 upon 3P0's arrival in the Cloud City, just before he discovered the storm troopers and almost wound up in the smelter?  A rough transliteration might be, "Echukwa!"

Well, the linguistic insights from the previous post can shed light on this enduring mystery.  Clearly C3P0 was manufactured in the south, where civility takes the form of indirect speech that's padded with pleasantries.  And this anonymous droid whom C3P0 finds so offensive was obviously assembled north of the Mason-Dixon line, where people appreciate directness of speech.  Thus we can conjecture that Echukwa probably means something like, "I don't have time for this conversation," a statement far too honest and unadorned with platitudinous falsehoods for our golden protocol droid's sense of decorum and good taste.

And now you know.