Avdat

The Fighter as model for mutual accountability

There's a lot of great scenes in The Fighter, but this is my favorite. Dicky, just released from prison, approaches his brother Micky's girlfriend Charlene, seeking permission to coach Micky again, a role he'd lost due to bad behavior (language is rough, BTW):

 

Dicky of course is a knucklehead and a crackhead. Having a conversation with Dicky means being treated to a steady stream of one-liners, stale jokes and out-and-out BS. Like the prophet Amos, Dicky lacks the proper history or credentials for telling the truth.

But tell the truth he does! And it's not a self-serving truth. A lot of people try to excuse their sins by appealing to the ubiquity of sin, but that's not what Dicky's up to when he reminds Charlene of her checkered past. Dicky realizes that Charlene's absolute moral superiority in this situation is getting in the way of Micky's success in the ring. It's Micky that Dicky cares about. If before he had wanted to be in Micky's corner to overshadow him, now he wants to be there to help Micky shine. But not by edging out Charlene.

And give credit to Charlene for accepting the truth. Because she really does enjoy an absolute moral superiority over Dicky. She's in Dicky's world, but no longer of his world. Her "balcony view" of Micky and Dicky's dysfunctional family has been invaluable to Micky in terms of his making the right decisions about his career. And yet she acknowledges that this crackhead is speaking the truth. She acknowledges that she can't give Micky everything he needs.

We know that Dicky is clean and sober because in the previous scene he'd given his birthday cake to his erstwhile supplier while declining his invitation to "go upstairs." Charlene doesn't know that. But she is able to recognize the truth when she hears it, and that leads her to trust Dicky.

Which is an extraordinary leap of faith. Addicts are notorious liars.

Legitimate truth-telling is always disinterested, and good listeners recognize and assent to the truth wherever they hear it. I think that this scene is a model for Christian conversation. Minus the F-bombs, of course.

Avatar is probably the worst movie Hollywood has made since Star Wars

Avatar: Gawd Almighty; what a stoopid movie.

You disagree. You saw that movie in the theater. You were cringing in your stadium seat when that thantor was rooting around for Jake. You were dazzled by Pandora's 3D flora and fauna. "That movie was awesome!" you said. You can't shut up about that movie. It's like, the best movie since... Titanic!

You are wrong.

We, on the other hand, watched Avatar on my laptop in the privacy of our own home. Deprived of the 3D effects, we were forced to evaluate the movie based on, you know, plot, character development and dialogue. And by these metrics, this movie fails miserably.

When Neytiri tells Jake, "It is hard to fill a cup that is already full," I groaned out loud. This is what passes for indigenous wisdom? Do Na'vi watch re-runs of Oprah when they aren't out deeply respecting nature?

When the dude back at the base asks Jake, "What do they want? Education? Medicine?" I said to myself, "I know; I know! They want to be left alone! They want self-determination, which a colonial authority cannot impose. Dude, don't you get the irony of your imperialistic project? You would sooo get it if you had a copy of Orientalism on your shelf, or a Che Guevara t-shirt in your drawer."

Can you walk out of a movie that you're watching at home? Yes you can! You close your laptop; turn on the TV, and watch the Britcoms that are on every Saturday night. We watched an episode of As Time Goes By we'd seen a thousand times. (Watching As Time Goes By with Mrs. Avdat is one of the dues I pay in my marriage. If you're married, I'm sure you have your own dues to pay, and I'm sure they're well worth it! As are mine.)

At any rate, the re-run we watched was no more predictable than Avatar. You can see it coming a mile away. Jake and Neytiri fall in love. Jake goes native. There's some sort of event in which Jake has to prove where his loyalties lie. The only thing I couldn't predict was whether the final battle would go the Little Big Horn route or Wounded Knee. Dances with Wolves in space. And I checked the Wikipedia article and found out that I was, by-and-large, correct.

You see, I had to "walk out" on Avatar. I was afraid that somebody would call Jake an "old soul." I trembled that there'd be a Na'vi  assembly in which some chief would intone the truism that whatever decision they made tonight would have to be with the seventh generation in mind. Even worse: the possibility loomed (like an iceberg in the Titanic's path!) that some Na'vi might solemnly swear that Pandora doesn't belong to them; they belong to Pandora.

If the dialogue had resorted to any of these platitudes, I might have had to engage in an act of symbolic resistance to such cinematic cant. I might have set fire to the spirituality and self-help aisles at the nearest Barnes and Noble. Or assassinated Deepak Chopra.

Look. Avatar's politics are my politics. I'm an anti-interventionist environmentalist. But when I go to a movie, I don't want my politics served back to me in the form of cliches pimped out in gaudy special effects. Tell me a good story. Surprise me. Scare me. Make me care.

And regarding the title of this post, Yes, Star Wars is seven different kinds of stoopid. You only like Star Wars because you saw it when you were eight, and for the special effects. Read this:

Vader: When I left you I was but a learner. Now I am the master.

Kenobi: Only a master of evil, Darth.

How is that not utterly wretched dialogue? Those movies are full of crap like that, and light sabers can't redeem it. Even an accomplished actor like Alec Guinness can't made lemonade outa them lemons. If you disagree, I swear we will have to argue about this, and I may even have to fight you over it.

What good is algebra?

It's good for computing the time it took the Beacon of Gondor to send an SOS to Rohan.

This is why I want to be a professor. To get summers off in which I can bring my vast knowledge to bear on pointless minutiae.

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.