In honor of the late Haskell Wexler (1922-2015), I thought I would post this essay I wrote in UCLA film school on Wexler’s iconic film “Medium Cool. Famous for its blending of fiction and reality against the backdrop of the 1968 Chicago riots, "Cool" was at once a forerunner of the “unscripted” reality TV genre and also a prophetic jeremiad in the vein of media critics Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan.

Recently I was asked by Converge Magazine to write a piece for their website reflecting on my book Hipster Christianity four years after its release. I took them up on the offer but rather than reflecting on how the phenomenon has changed or who the new hip pastors and churches are, I decided to offer a summary of one of the main point's of the book—that forms of faith matter and that we must think critically about how medium and message interact.

In my younger days, L.A. was Bayside High, California Dreams, Encino Man, "Valley Girls," Beverly Hills 90210, Disneyland, Hollywood, the Oscars. Or it was a place of constant calamity: the Northridge earthquake, mudslides, fires, various  car chases chronicled by the vulture news helicopters L.A. helped normalize. The point is: my understanding of L.A. was (and still is, to some extent) formed by media portrayals, mass-communicated narratives of "reality" packaged chiefly as entertainment. This is how we understand the world.