Update From Oxford

I arrived in Oxford on Saturday afternoon for the 2008 Oxbridge conference, and things have been great so far! Saturday night I attended a small dinner/reception at The Kilns, the lovely home of C.S. Lewis which is now owned and maintained by the C.S. Lewis Foundation.  There's something truly magical about being in this place--the gardens and study where Lewis found his inspiration to write such classics as The Chronicles of Narnia among most of his other pivotal books. Its a comfortable place, quiet and stately, very English but not at all pretentious. You can almost feel his presence here.

Other highlights of the conference so far include:

• A beautiful opening worship service at St. Mary's the Virgin Church in Oxford, in which the preacher, Derick Bingham (of Christ Church, Belfast) quoted a glorious passage from C.S. Lewis' famous sermon, "The Weight of Glory," which Lewis delivered in the same pulpit 67 years earlier.
• A plenary address by Richard Mouw (president of Fuller Seminary) which included him joking about being happily Calvinist and yet deeply respecting the ideas of Lewis (who tended toward Arminian thought).  Mouw also showed a clip of Mick Jagger and made references to Derrida, Gergen, and other "postmoderns" in a way that was suprisingly not so tiresome.
• An amazing theater performance in which the famous "Addison's Walk" conversation between C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Hugo Dyson was reenacted. This was the walk (in the gardens of Magdalen College) where Lewis supposedly was convinced that not only was there a God, but that Jesus very likely was his true son.  Lots of great, theological dialogue inspired by Tolkien's notions that in ancient myths we see the divine preparation for the one True Myth (Christ's death and resurrection)... a sort of working-out through the arts of God's mystical revelation and incarnation.

Overall the conference is just as magical as it always is, what with the towering spires of this ancient land and the spirit of Lewis hovering over it all... But most of all his legacy, which includes such great ideas and articulations of the Christian (nay, human) experience. Take this quote from "The Weight of Glory":

"Indeed if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised by the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

It's nice to be reminded that as dire as our human condition is and as corrupted as our desires may be, there is still a spark within us--a longing--that pushes us towards a higher satisfaction. You can feel glimpses of that here at this conference, and as such it's an event that beautifully embodies Lewis' legacy.

Many more great things to come in the next 10 days, doubtless. I'll try to post another update soon!

Films About Guys Who Can’t Grow Up

I saw Step Brothers earlier this week, and laughed a lot. It’s a film about two forty-year-olds (Will Ferrell and John C. Reilley) who act as if they are thirteen and bond over shared interests such as velociraptors and Cops. It’s a very funny, highly enjoyable film; but it’s also a very familiar film. How many of these R-rated “guys stuck in adolescence” films have we seen in the last ten years? Call it the “frat pack” or whatever you will, but the trend is hard to miss: films about guys hanging out with other guys and getting into all sorts of immature mischief.

The list of films is very long, and includes such hits as Wedding Crashers, Anchorman, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Dodgeball, and Superbad. These are films celebrating the R-rated, testosterone-fueled hijinks of man-boys who refuse to grow up.They are films that are immensely popular with mainly male audiences, but why? What is it about watching pathetic grown men acting like infants that we find so fun and appealing? (And I laugh too… certainly).

I suspect it has something to do with the larger trend of demasculization in culture that has taken place in the last few decades. After the first couple waves of feminism, the divorce boom in the 70s and 80s, and the pushing of all sorts of sexual boundaries in the 90s, gender has become a very confusing issue. Men have come out of this time the most damaged, it seems, with fewer and fewer father figures and role models to show them the right way to express adult masculinity. It’s only natural that film and television would express this confused identity in comedic form—historically the site of much of our collective working-out of contradiction and paradox.

I suppose the films of Adam McKay and Judd Apatow are popular not only because they are full of hilarious actors, but because they are giving voice to a large population of American males who feel stuck between an adulthood they aren’t prepared for and an adolescence that’s never felt completely comfortable. We don’t know quite what to think about masculine identity anymore, so the logical thing to do is just parody and laugh at it.

Another Sad Blow for Film Criticism

As if to rub salt in the already gaping wound of professional film criticism, it was announced this week that Disney was revamping “At the Movies,” the syndicated TV series in which Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper (filling Gene Siskel’s original slot) gave weekly “two thumb” ratings to new film releases.

Unthinkably, this “revamping” includes firing Ebert and Roeper and hiring (brace yourselves) Ben Lyons of E! and Ben Mankiewicz of Air America to take the reigns. Now I don’t know much about Mankiewicz, but I do know that Ben Lyons (son of legendary poster-quote whore Jeffrey Lyons) is not a film critic by any means. He’s a film critic in the same sense that Heidi Montag is Christian pop singer.In other words: nothing more than a pitiful wannabe.

In addition to the new hosts, the reworked “At the Movies” will aggressively target a “younger demo,” according to Mankiewicz. In essence this will mean no more nuance or intelligent analysis of film.

Thankfully Roger Ebert has refused to relinquish his trademark ownership of the “thumbs up” moniker, so the new pair will have to use another set of catchy critical criteria: “See it, rent it, skip it.” Doubtless they will put the “see it” designation to frequent use with respect to Jerry Bruckheimer, Tony Scott, and Eli Roth films, and other such wicked awesome frat film favorites.

Granted, Ebert being replaced was a necessary change (he can’t speak anymore), but why couldn’t they have replaced him with some up and coming critic of merit like Variety’s Justin Chang, LA Weekly’s Scott Foundas or The New York Times’ Manolia Dargis(a colleague of mine at UCLA).

Alas, I shouldn’t be too worried. The new version of “At the Movies” will doubtless be cancelled within a year. Young people aren’t going to start watching TV again just to hear what some unproven idiot like Lyons has to say about The Watchmen.

Even so, it is certainly the end of an era—the “Ebert on TV Era” we might say—and that is a painful fact for those of us who’ve looked up to him for so many years.

Evil Incarnate in Cinema

Because I had other things to say about The Dark Knight in my previous post, I avoided too much discussion of Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker. But there is a ton to say about it, and after seeing the film a second time today, I really feel like writing more…

Heath Ledger’s Joker is, in a word, evil. Pure evil. He goes beyond a villain. As others have suggested, he may even be the devil incarnate. He’s motivated not by money but by a desire to see good go bad, to show the world that there is no escaping from sin (in the way that Satan hoped to tempt Christ in the desert and prove him susceptible to sin like everyone else).

In addition to Ledger’s maniacal, full-bodied (possessed?) acting, there are other things Nolan and crew do to make the Joker so utterly disturbing. The fact that he just pops onto the Gotham crime scene, seemingly from hell, makes him all the more devilish. We know nothing of who he is, where he’s from, if he’s really human. When incarcerated, the police can’t find any traces of anything remotely useful for identification. He’s a ghostly ghoul, a specter of chaos who seems to have superhuman abilities to orchestrate mayhem in all corners of the city. (And I’d be lying if I said the ghost-aspect wasn’t all the more eerie in light of Ledger actually being dead.)

Other, more subtle filmmaking touches add to the character’s malevolence. Sound, for example: the dissonant, buzz/drone Joker theme (as devised by Hans Zimmer) is spine-tingling; and the scene where Nolan cuts all sound as the Joker frightfully sticks his head out of the speeding cop car hammers home just how utterly serious this sometimes-funny demon actually is.

Portrayals like this—where evil is totally unexplained and yet so thoroughly convincing—are far more disturbing than the “look what happened in my childhood” villains of the horror film pantheon. Ledger’s Joker reminded me of Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh, or even Daniel Day Lewis’s Daniel Plainview—other recent embodiments of amoral men wreaking havoc, death, and destruction in the worlds they inhabit. It is interesting to me that these performances are increasingly the most lauded and rewarded in our culture. Both Bardem and Day Lewis won Oscars for their performances last year, and Ledger will doubtless be nominated for one (if not win) this year.

What is it about seeing evil so convincingly rendered on screen that attracts our praise? Why are there so many more “tour de force” performances of dastardly wretches than there are of good people? Indeed, why is it so hard to evoke a convincing portrayal of good, pure, moral characters in film and literature? Dostoevsky tried it in The Idiot (in the character of Myshkin) but ultimately failed. Is it even possible to evoke a righteous person as convincingly as an evil one? Perhaps it is because we are fallen and so unfamiliar with righteousness that we cannot produce these performances. But that still doesn’t answer the question: why do we celebrate the evil characters so much? Why are we going so ape-wild over Heath Ledger’s presentation (and I’m guilty of it, for sure) of an evil that is perhaps unparalleled in screen history?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for great acting performances. But at what point should we worry about our attraction to something so devilish as Heath Ledger’s Joker?

The Dark Knight

Some have accused The Dark Knight of being too much movie, and if there is any fault with this epic film, this is probably it. Knight is so absolutely full—overflowing, really—with ideas and provocations… it is almost too much for one movie to bear. As such, I’ve had a hard time deciding just what I wanted to say here about it. I could go on and on about Heath Ledger’s performance (which was spectacular, frightening, funny, disturbing, etc) or talk about the film’s striking resonances with a post 9/11, terrorism-stricken world (not to mention a presidential election year).

But as much as this film is about politics and terrorism and psychopaths and crime, it is also a film about ethics and epistemology and the questioning of the hero myth.

As the marketing campaign indicated it would be, Knight is chiefly about three men: Batman, the Joker, and Harvey Dent. Each has his own way of dealing with a world gone wrong. Batman compensates for his own emotional injuries by donning a mask to battle one city’s criminal underworld to whatever extent he can. The Joker compensates in a different way: by making things even more anarchic. Because he suffers from the world’s cruelty, the Joker makes everyone else suffer. And then there is Harvey Dent, the “white light” of Gotham who offers the city’s best hope for reform. Dent is an idealist, answering the insanity of the world by aggressively dealing in fixed binaries: good vs. evil.

In the end, the approaches of the Joker and Dent (Two Face) prove unsustainable. The Joker’s thesis that chaos necessarily reigns supreme because humans are irredeemably self-destructive is proven untrue in the film’s final setup, but this is no big surprise. The world is obviously not quite as malevolent as the Joker hopes it is.

What happens to Dent and his ideologies, however, is far more disturbing. Doubtless he is sincere about his desires to make things better for Gotham, but his sense of justice ultimately proves his downfall. He appeals only to himself for ethical jurisdiction, rather than any transcendent norms or guidelines. “I make my own luck” is his mantra early in the film, with his two-headed coin his symbolic way of mocking fate. But as the film progresses, Dent comes to see that his bifurcated moral lens is altogether arbitrary and unable to wield much authority over the complexities of morality and law. Having lost faith in “the good guys” by film’s end, Dent loses trust in himself. His coin becomes the two-sided, fate-driven determinant of crucial ethical choices.

This is, of course, exactly what the Joker wants: for Gotham to see that even its most “moral” hope is ultimately subject to the collapse of his unsupportable dogmas. But Batman will not let this happen, and herein the film’s most incisive commentaries come to fruition. Batman orchestrates a cover-up so that the public will not see Harvey Dent’s moral collapse. Taking on the mantle of the “Dark Knight,” Batman becomes public enemy #1 so as to maintain order and hope in a “for the greater good” sort of way. In the film’s beautiful (and tragic) final scenes, director Christopher Nolan’s point is hammered home: in a world as crazy as this one, sometimes deception is necessary to protect the world from itself. If the true ugliness of everything were revealed, perhaps chaos would reign supreme. We need examples, figureheads, Aristotelian moral guidance—otherwise we might give in to the worst within our selves.

This is a stark and disturbing conclusion, and it bothers me in many ways. I’m not sure if Nolan is arguing that this is how it should be (lying for the greater good) or this is how it is, but either way it is frightening.

It is immensely dangerous, I think, to protect our heroes from fallibility. The end of Knight suggests that letting the public see a flawed, morally (and physically) disfigured Dent would cause irreparable damage to the fight against crime. But isn’t it true that things would be even worse if later on people found out that Gotham authorities had covered up Dent’s failings, holding the wool over the public’s eyes to keep them gleefully ignorant? Though not a parallel example, the film made me think about Pat Tillman—how the government lied to us about the circumstances of his death to offer us a heroic figurehead who died at the hands of the enemy terrorists (turns out he died by friendly fire). How many other cases are there in politics where we’ve been deceived by a government who concluded it was in our best interest to not know the “full truth”?

The danger and deception of holding our leaders and heroes to too high a standard is never more evident than in the church today. Time and time again the church is made to look foolish because of fallen leaders (Catholic priests, Ted Haggard, etc) who—because they have been painted as incorruptible moral exemplars—do immense damage to the overall legitimacy of Christianity. If we are more about hiding sin than dealing with it, why would anyone look to our gospel for any sort of relevant, reconciliatory truth?

Whether it is a letter than we burn to protect someone from the truth (as Alfred does with Rachel’s letter to Bruce), or a surveillance technology we use in secret “for the greater good,” we must sacrifice full disclosure—The Dark Knight seems to suggest—for the sake of order rather than chaos. Though I agree that things are complicated (morality especially), I’m not sure that protecting people from the dark truths in the world is the best course of action. We need heroes, yes, but not heroes that are too perfect.

I read an essay once by Jenny Lyn Bader that described the transformation of heroes in American culture over the past fifty years, and I think it is instructive here. She argued that our “larger than life” heroes have proven less and less relevant in a world in which life is now larger. Because we now realize that the good guy/bad guy split is a reductive approach to life, we have to look beyond superheroes to more everyday, imperfect yet admirable role models, though it may prove more difficult:

A world without heroes is a rigorous, demanding place, where things don’t boil down to black and white but are rich with shades of gray; where faith in lofty, dead personages can be replaced by faith in ourselves and one another; where we must summon the strength to imagine a five-dimensional future in colors not yet invented. My generation grew up to see our world shift, so it’s up to us to steer a course between naivete and nihilism, to reshape vintage stories, to create stories of spirit without apologies.

In Knight we see the polarities of naivete (Dent) and nihilism (Joker), and how Batman tries to forge the gray middle ground between the two. In the end I’m not sure how I feel about what Batman has become, though I suppose that is how we are supposed to feel. On one hand his is a story of spirit without apology—a man willing to bear the weight of hatred and “be the villain” in order to truly be the hero. But I also don’t feel completely comfortable with his willingness to deceive the public—to keep them from the horrific truths that he is somehow uniquely able to bear. It is a dangerous thing to designate oneself as somehow more capable of dealing with truth than the “average Joes” of the world. Dostoevsky could tell you that. So could Shakespeare. And if Batman continues down that path, he’ll become in truth the villain he is now only pretending to be.

Is “Online Community” an Oxymoron?

L.A. is a lot like the blogosphere. It is sprawling and overwhelming, though manageable if you find your niche. It’s full of pockets and localized communities where ideas and ideologies are reinforced in insulated communities. And like L.A., the blogosphere can be very, very impersonal.

One thing I’ve struggled with during my first year of blogging is the ever present dichotomy of, on one hand, feeling more connected to people than ever before, and on the other feeling a bit isolated from the “real” world. Do you other bloggers feel that tension? It is a very personal thing to share one’s thoughts, but also a very strange thing to do it from so veiled a position. Are humans really meant to be so unrestricted in their ability to mass communicate?

I certainly feel more empowered and willing to say pretty much whatever I want when I write for my blog, which is totally great but also a total misrepresentation of non-blogging life. I wouldn’t dare say some of the things I’ve written on this blog in person to very many people, though that doesn’t mean I don’t believe them. Which, of course, begs the question: what is more “real”? Self-constructed, though thoroughly free-wheeling and uncensored online discourse, or co-constructed, slightly-more-tactful in person communication? I want to say the former, but large parts of me feel that the latter is truer, that it is in the unsaid presences and awkward cadences of simultaneous communication between people that the most important things reveal themselves.

Of course, by saying this, I’d have to say that Martin Luther reading the words of Paul in his isolated monk’s chambers is somehow inferior (in terms of meaning-making) to an insipid dorm room conversation about predestination, and I’m not prepared to go that far. But I think I might be talking about two different things here: communication as arbiter of ideas and communication as creator of relationships. Perhaps one method (the written or otherwise recorded word transmitted impersonally) is superior in terms of elucidating the meaning of abstract ideas and theories, while the other method (in person community and communication) serves better the development of emotional and relational existence. In platitudinal terms: one is better for the head, the other for the heart.

This may sound obvious, but the mainstream of communication theory has heretofore been unable to reconcile the two “purposes” of communication (in William Carey’s terms: the “transmission” vs. “ritual”). Traditional scholarship views communication as either a way to communicate things and ideas from one place or person to another (emphasis on what we communicate), or as a symbolic process of shared meaning (emphasis on the act of communication). With the Internet, though, I think we have to reexamine all of these things; we have to re-conceptualize communication itself.

More presently to my concerns as a blogger: should I view it mainly as a community and value it as such (for the visitors, the comments, the entertaining back-and-forth, regardless of how productive), or should I look at it is a place for ideas to be born and bred? It is interesting to wonder: with all the thoughts and ideas bandied about on the blogosphere every day, is there any resultant progress in the overall level of human understanding? Has discourse been furthered? Or maybe it has made things worse for actual productive discourse? I’d hope it’s not the latter. I’ll continue blogging in the wishful understanding that it is the former.

Best Summer Blockbusters of all Time

I fully expect that when The Dark Knight tallies its opening weekend haul on Sunday, it will rank among the highest grossing summer blockbuster openings of all time. Sadly it will join the company of lots of blockbuster bilge—such $75M+ openers like The Da Vinci Code and Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones. But there have been a number of certified summer blockbusters that have also been really, really good films. In honor of them, here is my top ten list of the best summer blockbusters of all time.

10) Braveheart (5/24/95): The grandaddy of three hour historical epics, Mel Gibson's Braveheart was the rare summer blockbuster that went on to win oodles of Academy Awards.

9) Superman Returns (6/28/06): Though Brian Singer's superhero film underperformed at the box office, I think it hit all the right notes. There is a somber beauty to this film that is revealed upon each subsequent viewing.

8) Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (5/24/89): This third installment in the Indy franchise may not have made as much money as this year's Crystal Skull already has, but in terms of summer blockbuster qualifications, I think The Last Crusade fits the mold most.

7) Forrest Gump (7/6/94): Another rare example of a summer film that beat the odds and won awards six months later. Tom Hanks' iconic role made for a perfect summer film: a chronicle of postwar Americana, complete with war, love, and comedy.

6) Back to the Future (7/3/85): The awesome first installment in the Back to the Future franchise was a stunning sci-fi adventure like no other. Crispin Glover steals the show.

5) The Sixth Sense (8/6/99): This late summer sleeper hit gave birth to the "shocking ending" trend in contemporary cinema, as well as introducing the world to M. Night Shyamalan. I still remember the thrill of seeing this movie for the first time in the theater, having no idea what was coming.

4) Jaws (6/20/75): Jaws invented the summer blockbuster. It was the first film to use a simultaneous nationwide release (in hundreds of theaters) and saturation marketing. It also caused millions of beachgoers everywhere to think twice about getting in the water.

3) Jurassic Park (6/11/93): This film ushered in the CGI/Digital era of blockbuster filmmaking with a thundering roar. I still remember seeing this epic adventure film twice in the movie theater that summer, and being utterly terrified as a 5th grader.

2) Independence Day (7/2/96): This is the ultimate summer movie: a combination of star power (Will Smith), aliens, doomsday destruction, and patriotism. And the special effects were pretty great for the time.

1) Terminator 2: Judgment Day (7/3/91): The ultimate white-knuckle summer thriller. Every minute of this action-packed film is adrenaline-fueled. It also introduced never-before-seen digital effects that made that liquid metal villain all the more menacing. Here's hoping next summer's Terminator: Salvation will take its place high on this list as well.

Best of the Blog’s First Year: Part Two

Last week—in honor of my upcoming one year blog anniversary (July 18)—I highlighted some of my personal favorite posts from the last year on my blog. Today I am listing some of the most provocative and most discussed posts, as well as those with the most total page views. This will conclude my anniversary week postings… Now we can move on to year two! Top posts by number of comments:

10) The Christian Hipster Revisited (13) 9) Abortion as Art? (Critical Theory Gone Berserk) (14) 8) 100 Greatest Worship Songs of all Time (16) 7) Buzzword R.I.P.: Emerging (17) 6) Christianity: More Harm Than Good? (18) 5) Kitschiest Christian Songs Ever (20) 4) Christianity 101: Exclusivity (34) 3) The Tragedy of (Most) Modern Worship Music (56) 2) No Discussion Allowed (67) 1) Best “Christian” Albums of All Time (85)

Top posts by total page views:

10) Abortion as Art? (Critical Theory Gone Berserk) 9) Top Twenty Defining Films of the 00s 8) Types of Hipsters: Part Two 7) Types of Hipsters: Part Three 6) Types of Hipsters: Part One 5) Review: David Cook, Analog Heart 4) No Discussion Allowed 3) 100 Greatest Worship Songs of All Time 2) The Tragedy of (Most) Modern Worship Music 1) Best “Christian” Albums of All Time

Best of the Blog’s First Year: Part One

My one-year anniversary of being a blogger happens next week, and in honor of that fact (and the fact that blogging is by nature a very self-indulgent act) I'm going to spend the next week revisiting some of my most controversial and popular posts, as well as my own personal favorites. It's great that blogs can archive all posts, comments, etc, but the truth is that most blog posts have relatively short life spans. The blogosphere—like the Internet in general—thrives on new content, new posts, and bite-sized pontificating. If there's a downside to blogging, it is that sometimes I feel like the things I want to say can't properly be said in this format, and that the energy I spend writing it down isn't worthwhile when in a matter of days it might fade into the digital graveyard of well-intentioned ideas.

Nevertheless, I've found it all a very worthwhile endeavor, and when I look back to the second post that I wrote, entitled "The Search" (July 19), I find that the principles and motivations with which I started this blog have more or less carried through and sustained me over the past year.

In any case, the following is an annotated list of fifteen of my personal favorite blog posts from my first twelve months of blogging. Next week I will post a list of the top ten most-viewed posts and top ten by number-of-comments posts, just in case you missed them the first time.

Harry Potter and the Christian Fear of Imagination: A post from last summer when the final book came out, and a treatise against the ridiculous Christian antagonism towards our beloved Harry Potter.

Memories of a Recent October: This was a therapeutic one to write, and captured numerous of my autumnal thoughts and feelings. Plus it was a chance to plug the White Sox!

No Country For Old Men: My thoughts on the Academy Award-winning film, from when it came out back in November. The Miramax website actually linked to this post in their “for your consideration” Oscar campaign site.

The Commodification of Experience: Inspired by The Darjeeling Limited, this post allowed me to articulate some things I’d been thinking about and writing about at UCLA the past year.

Mii, Myself, and My Online Identity: Inspired by a paper I wrote for a Videogame Theory class at UCLA, this post was one of many semi-meta examinations of online/blog identity.

The Case for Criticism: Not a Lee Strobel book! Rather, this is my attempt to legitimate the art of true, productive criticism at a time when everyone seems to be adopting the “critic” title.

Quarterlife Crisis: My thoughts upon turning 25; one of the rare times I wrote about myself and my thoughts in any sort of transparent way.

Incomprehensible Incarnation (Merry Christmas): My attempt to be as poetic as Linford Detweiler in describing what Christmas actually means. (Note that I quote Linford extensively in the article).

Does Jesse James Know Who He Is?: This is another article about—you guessed it—identity. This time it was inspired by the beautiful Assassination of Jesse James film from last fall.

Top-Down Populism: This one got me into some trouble with colleagues at UCLA, or at least sparked a discussion with them. But I stand by what I wrote, and I think it reveals a lot of my foundational political ideology.

In lieu of a real posting: An attempt at a free-written blog post; a thoroughly refreshing, existential exercise that may or may not reveal anything significant about life.

The Hills Are Alive With Confused Identity: There’s that “i” word again… This time it’s with respect to the MTV show, The Hills.

Paranoid Park: My favorite film of the year so far, and one of the most pleasurable reviews to write. I also like this one because I think there was some exceptionally productive dialogue in the comments section.

Saturday Art: In many ways this post captures my fundamental approach to the arts and to beauty.

Flight of the Red Balloon: A gorgeous film and another review I really loved writing. Films like this afford a critic the best opportunities to sound off on the things about cinema they really love: in my case, transcendental aesthetics.

Encounters at the End of the World

Werner Herzog is at the top of his game this year. Catapulted by the unexpected success of Grizzly Man a few years ago, Herzog has regained some of the filmmaking prestige he had back in the 80s with films like Fitzcarraldo. Last summer’s Rescue Dawn was one of my favorite films of the year (I gave it four stars in my CT review) and featured a stunning and grievously underrated performance by Christian Bale. Then a few months ago, Herzog showed up as an actor (playing an eccentric priest) in Harmony Korine’s gorgeous Mister Lonely. But his latest film, Encounters at the End of the World, might take the cake. It’s certainly the best documentary I’ve seen this year.

Like many of Herzog’s films, Encounters is a thing of spellbinding beauty, intrigue, and wonderment. Commissioned by the Discovery Channel, Herzog’s film is unlike most other documentaries about Antarctica. First of all, it’s not about penguins (though “deranged penguins” do make a cameo). Rather than focusing solely on the natural environment or breathtaking photography (though it certainly has its fair share of these things), Encounters is a sort of travelogue that examines the humans who inhabit the seventh continent. More specifically, it asks the typical Herzogian questions: what draws man to live among such a harsh environment? Who are humans in the face of such awesome natural forces?

Herzog interviews a motley crew of scientists, engineers, wayfaring travelers, and otherwise eccentrics from all over the world, who inhabit the “town” of McMurdo Station during Antarctica’s summer months. Herzog’s sardonic voiceovers (in his memorable German accent) frame each interview with editorial commentaries, and as usual his personality adds much flavor to the tonally rich film.

For the scientific junkies among us, there is plenty of amazing stuff here: volcanoes, icebergs, microbiology, otherworldly underwater footage, speculation about the nature of neutrinos, and more. And Herzog manages to make it all utterly compelling, almost holy. Indeed, Herzog is never too afraid to insinuate spirituality into his examinations of nature. He frequently inserts language like “other-worldly,” “cathedral,” and “god” in his reckonings with a nature he continues to be utterly drawn in to and baffled by.

Herzog’s prevailing cinematic conflict is that of man vs. nature, and that is certainly the case in Encounters—a film that concludes rather nonchalantly that human life is reaching its inevitable conclusion on planet earth. He addresses global warming but treats it almost as a convenient sheet over our eyes—blinding us from the obvious truth that nature is winning, will win, and humanity’s days are numbered. Nevertheless, Herzog’s film is not in the least a somber or apocalyptic polemic (like An Inconvenient Truth or something), but rather a jubilant, child-like exploration of a totally fascinating topic.

There are moments in this film that are so beautiful, so true, that one doesn’t mind that the point of the film is to show us how tiny and powerless and, well, stupid we humans are. But I’ve always thought it a valuable thing to be reminded of: that the creation we are a part of is utterly beyond our comprehension and, to an extent, control. Sure, we are changing the climate with our massive pollutants, but there are bigger things going on in nature that we cannot account for.

In this way, Herzog’s analysis of the natural world is both eco-friendly and eco-ambivalent. His relationship to nature is similar to many Christians’ relationship to God: he fears it, loves it, and is totally dependent on it. Indeed, nature is Herzog’s god, and the passion and reverence with which he artfully approaches it is something we all might learn from.

What is America, Anyway?

Every Fourth of July I get a little nostalgic. I also get patriotic, but mostly it’s just nostalgic. Can you relate? I think most of us can. This grand holiday is at once a momentous celebration of American independence, a celebration of American history and culture, but also a day of memories. In fact I’d say that more than 50% of my day this Fourth of July will be spent thinking fondly back to the various Independence Days of my youth, and this is not in the least a sad or pathetic thing.

I’ll be thinking back to the summers in Oklahoma when the neighborhood kids would get together and set off fireworks on someone’s driveway, when we’d prance around under the humid summer moon, sparkler in one hand and melting popsicle in the other.

Or I might recall the various summers I spent at Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Colorado, when the whole family was there, eating homemade vanilla ice cream and apple pie, waiting for me and my cousins to perform Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to Be An American” (complete with hand motions!).

Then there was the Fourth of July my family and I spent in San Francisco, watching fireworks explode over the Golden Gate bridge, or the year I was in Boston, watching fireworks on the banks of the Charles River, Boston Pops playing in the background. Or the insanely hot Fourth of July my family and I spent in New York City, watching an afternoon ballgame at Yankees Stadium, baking in the upper deck as peanuts and hot dogs and beer sizzled in the July heat.

And I remember one time, the summer after the Persian Gulf War (I think it was 1991), we neighborhood kids in Broken Arrow (Oklahoma) marveled as a local war veteran shot off some special “scud missile” firework. That was such a quick, clean, wonderful war. It was one we could name fireworks for.

I’m not sure Fourth of Julys are ever really about patriotism, at least not as much as they are about family, and the glory of summer, and the making of memories. And perhaps above all it is a holiday about time… It’s a day that celebrates America’s past, which is a rarity for a country that so thrills in the future. But it’s also a day that lets us stop what we’re doing and sink into the present, losing ourselves in the mesmerizing flashes in the sky, the Sousa marches, the barbecues.

It’s a day that captures what is ineffably American, and it has nothing to do with trite slogans (“United We Stand!”) or Gap flag shirts. It has much more to do with the sorts of complexities pointed out by people like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who described in The Great Gatsby how the “fresh, green breast of the new world … pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the first time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”

It has to do with Melville’s whale, or Hawthorne’s letter “A,” or Bob Dylan’s harmonica. It is crystallized in Citizen Kane’s Rosebud sled, or the moment in Badlands when Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen dance in the cold prairie darkness to Nat King Cole’s “A Blossom Fell.”

It has to do with loss, and grace, and all that is good and bad about man’s ambition in the world. And perhaps Jack Kerouac captures it most clearly in his drug-addled prose in On the Road:

“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old…”

I’m not really sure what any of this means, just like I’m not really sure what America means—especially these days. But I do know that things don’t have to be crystal clear or black and white (or red, white and blue) in order to be beautiful. We can and should be thankful for this country, for our place in it, even if we don’t always understand it.

YouTube Goes Highbrow

During the L.A. Film Festival this year, I was first introduced to the Youtube Screening Room, an area of the site devoted exclusively to selected independent films. The Screening Room will feature four short films every two weeks, as well as the occasional full-length feature. Right now the four featured films include Miguel Arteta’s hilarious short, Are You the Favorite Person of Anyone? (starring Miranda July, John C. Reilly, and Mike White), Oscar-winner The Danish Poet (2007 best animated short), Oscar nominee Our Time is Up (starring a fantastic Kevin Pollack), and Love and War (“the world’s first animated opera”). I recommend viewing them all.

This new YouTube venture is terribly exciting, and has the potential to revolutionize the regretfully ghettoized short film form. Previously, short films have been largely relegated to life on the festival circuit, but with the Internet (and especially something like YouTube Screening Room), perhaps the short film will enjoy a popular renaissance.

More importantly, this will further democratize (possibly) the entry points to the film industry. Intrepid young filmmakers who score a featured spot on the site (and user-submitted videos will in fact be a part of it) and garner a million or so views will likely become attractive properties for bigger and better things in Hollywood. The Screening Room also provides a potential moneymaking venture for erstwhile unemployed aspiring filmmakers. Videos on the site will be eligible for YouTube's revenue-sharing program, whereby filmmakers split some of the income from the advertising that accompanies their movies.

Finally, I think that if this is a successful venture, it indicates that the future of all art cinema will in the not-too-distant future be distributed first and foremost on the Internet. Blockbusters and event movies will always (well, for a while at least) be outside-the-home experiences, but art films will increasingly be seen via Netflix, HDNet, or the Internet. After all, not every city is like L.A.: most people in the world don’t have film festivals and 12-screen arthouse multiplexes to go to if they want to see obscure films.

Did God Use Constantine?

It has become fashionable of late for progressive-minded Christians to distance themselves from Constantine. Constantine, if you recall, was the Roman Emperor who in the fourth century first adopted Christianity (which had been criminalized under his predecessor, Diocletian) and made it the empire’s official religion. In a short time, Christianity was transformed from a marginal “rebel” religion that was constantly persecuted to a state-sanctioned, protected entity that became fused with the governing authorities. It was at this moment that the church-state relationship was born. It was the first time when Christians wielded power in the culture, and they would never again relinquish it.

Today, however, many Christians are seeking to shed the Constantinian cloak of power once and for all. After the Crusades, slavery, imperialism, and other such bad side effects of institutionalized, power-wielding Christianity, many Christians are hoping to return to a place of humility rather than power, quiet love rather than public force.

The recent Evangelical Manifesto, for example, has an entire section called “The way of Jesus, not Constantine,” in which the writers firmly situate their hope for evangelicalism outside the state-sanctioned, power-wielding tradition of Rome:

“We utterly deplore the dangerous alliance between church and state, and the oppression that was its dark fruit. We Evangelicals trace our heritage, not to Constantine, but to the very different stance of Jesus of Nazareth. While some of us are pacifists and others are advocates of just war, we all believe that Jesus’ Good News of justice for the whole world was promoted, not by a conqueror’s power and sword, but by a suffering servant emptied of power and ready to die for the ends he came to achieve.”

The thought here is that Christianity was never meant to be a powerful political force, and certainly not a violent one. It is often pointed out that Christianity thrives the most when it is underground and persecuted by culture, not when it runs the culture. Look at the world today: Christianity is on fire in places like China (where it is outlawed), while it is dying out in places like the U.S. and especially Europe, where it institutionalized and entrenched and, well, easy.

Is Christianity better as an underdog? Kierkegaard certainly thought so. In his Training in Christianity writings, the fiery Danish philosopher (a radical Protestant) argues that Christianity has been “done away with” by Christendom—“for it has become an easy thing, a superficial something that neither wounds nor heals profoundly enough.” He writes that Christendom has popularized Christianity and garnered many followers (because “people are only too eager to take part when there is nothing whatever to do but to triumph and join the parade”), but has lost the essential qualities of what he called “contemporaneousness with Christ.” For Kierkegaard, true Christianity requires a suffering and experience of offense that clearly separates followers of Christ (the Suffering Servant) from worldly pursuits. In established Christendom, he writes, “one becomes a Christian in the merriest possible way, without in the least becoming aware of the possibility of the offense.”

Clearly there is precedent for faulting Constantine (and the development of Christendom) for the failures of the church today. And I admit to sympathizing with these thoughts quite a bit. I do think that Christianity is better fit as an underdog movement rather than top dog institution, but part of me wonders: was Constantine really that bad for Christianity? Might he have been used by God—purposefully—to further His church on earth?

If we believe that God orchestrates history and has everything under control (and I, for one, believe this), don’t we have to see Constantine and his impact on Christianity as being God-ordained? Let’s think about the good things Constantine and the birth of Christendom did for Christianity. First of all, Constantine was the one who convened the pivotal Council of Nicea in 325, the first attempt at theological consensus and the birth of, among other things, the doctrine of the trinity, the holiday of Easter, and a concise articulation of Christian beliefs in the Nicene Creed. Without the precedent set by Nicea (which would likely not have happened without Constantine), Christian unity would have been long-delayed or otherwise impossible. And unity is crucial to Christian history.

Furthermore, perhaps we can look at the adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire as the event God used to really get His church disseminated throughout the world. Would Christianity have spread as fast and as far had it stayed underground? We’ll never know. But once Constantine sanctioned and protected it, Christianity was allowed to thrive and grow like never before. It also added a legitimacy to Christianity: the Roman Emperor breaking with tradition to adopt this upstart religion? People undoubtedly considered Christianity in a new light after this.

But I don’t want to offer an apologetic for Constantine, or Constantine-esque Christianity. I only want to suggest that before we go rushing to cut ourselves off from what we (and most secular people) perceive as a pretty suspicious institutional past, we should consider that 1) despite everything, the church is still thriving on earth; and 2) If you were Constantine and you discovered this amazing new way of thinking, wouldn’t you also want to us all your power to strengthen and spread it?

It’s easy for us in the comfy Christianized 21st century to scoff at Constantine, but I wonder: would we prefer that he had been as tenuous and apathetic about spreading Christianity then as we are now?

Seventeen Songs for Summer

It’s stifling hot in L.A., gas prices are surpassing $5/gallon, and the L.A. Film Festival is going on down the block in Westwood Village. This can only mean one thing: Summer is here!

In honor of this wonderful, extreme season, I’ve put together my annual summer music mix (I actually make several of these, to help pass the time in my new hour-plus commute). This year’s mix—comprised entirely of songs released within the last several months—is heavily electronic, 80s-nostalgic, more happy than morose, and a guaranteed good time.

Thanks to iTunes (and I promise they are not paying me to say this), you can locate and download these songs ala carte, with ridiculous ease. Hooray digital capitalism! Anyway, here’s the playlist. My soundtrack to the summer of ’08.

Coldplay, “Strawberry Swing” – Arguably the best overall song on Coldplay’s new album, this track—with its cheery rhythms and sunny guitar riffs—waxes nostalgic about blue skies, swings, and young love.

The Radio Dept., “Freddie and the Trojan Horse” – Sweden’s new-wave shoegazer outfit presents the perfect summer song from their wonderful new EP. It’s sweet like a popsicle.

Mates of State, “Help Help” – This bouncy, synth-bass-heavy pop gem from the husband/wife duo known as Mates of State is the best song off of their recent album, Re-arrange Us. You’ll love it, I promise.

Weezer, “The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived” – This song is a goofy good time. Borrowing a melody from a familiar Shaker hymn, Rivers Cuomo throws down a rock-opera of a pop song that features about a dozen kitschy mutations of its catchy chorus. Lots of fun. M83, “Graveyard Girl” – If you haven’t heard the new album from French electronica geniuses M83, I highly recommend you check it out. The new single, “Graveyard Girl,” is a blissful shoegazer anthem with a hilarious video (see below).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY8iy8S0S4w]

Sigur Ros, “Festival” – My favorite song off their new album, this 9-minute opus builds from nothing to a grandiose climax that will doubtless shake the rafters in concert. Truly breathtaking.

The Notwist, “Good Lies” – The first track off this German electronic band’s new album is perfectly joyful, even in it’s solemnity. Cut / Copy, “Hearts on Fire” – Listen to this song and you’d think you were listening to New Order or something else from the dancefloor 80s. But no, this is 2008 music from Australia. And it’s super cool.

Vampire Weekend, “Mansard Roof” – The Afro-pop hipsters from NYC may be a little overrated, but their bouncy tunes, like “Mansard Roof,” are absolutely perfect for summer. Check out the summery vid:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlgNFwoApec] Wolf Parade, “California Dreamer” – What’s a summer mix without a song about California? This new Wolf Parade song (from their just-released, At Mount Zoomer) is an epic anthem that alternates between delicate balladry and headstrong rock energy.

The National, “You’ve Done it Again, Virginia” – Every summer mix needs a few somber entries, and The National is always good for that. This new song from their recent Virginia EP features more luxuriant Sufjan piano and their usual "Gatsby with a cocktail" tragic elegance.

Cat Power, “Ramblin’ (Wo)Man” – This song from her recent Jukebox album is a sweetly feminine riff on Hank Williams’ song, “Ramblin’ Man.” A jazzy, sexy song for humid summer nights.

Ladytron, “Ghosts” – Britain’s favorite electro-goth-pop band’s new album, Velocifero, is fantastic. And this song is the first breezily haunting single. See below for the trippy video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yaEwcmrR4Q] Matt Wertz, “5:19” – This first single from Matt’s upcoming album, Under Summer Sun (to be released in August) is a lovely acoustic number with hyper-melodic hooks, perfect for summer love and heartbreak.

Fleet Foxes, “Ragged Wood” – One of the best discoveries of 2008, Seattle’s Fleet Foxes offer Beach Boys-esque harmonies with Appalachian and Irish traditional ancestry. It’s gorgeous, and the formidable “Ragged Wood” is a perfectly sweet/somber track to sample.

Nine Inch Nails, “Discipline” – For something edgier, try this fantastic new single from NIN’s The Slip—the album Trent Reznor gave away for free online this spring.

Death Cab for Cutie, “I Will Possess Your Heart” – This 8 minute song is slow to build and mostly instrumental, but there is something quite dreamy about it. Its travelogue video is a perfect accompaniment to those of us traveling abroad this summer:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq-yP7mb8UE&feature=related]

Is Teenage Pregnancy Now Cool?

Have you heard of this latest “what is happening with our kids” shock story? Apparently 17 high school girls at Gloucester High in Massachusetts decided last fall to make an unusual pact: to all get pregnant and raise their babies together. They wanted to, ya know, throw baby showers and stuff. Sure enough, they pulled it off, roping in whatever willing males they could find (including a 24-year-old homeless man) to help with the project. The group/club/clique members are expecting their bevy of babies sometime this summer.

The story broke just days after it was announced that 17-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears gave birth to her baby, and a few months after Juno became the hippest teen-preggers pic of all time. Obviously it has people wondering: has pop culture made teenage pregnancy the new “it” thing?

In the past, teenage girls who became pregnant while freshmen in high school viewed it as a life-altering tragedy. Not at Gloucester. Reportedly the girls high-fived each other when one of their pregnancy tests came back positive. School officials are baffled, wondering what went wrong with their sex-ed programs and generous contraceptive distribution. Unfortunately no amount of contraceptives will prevent this new reproductive trend: girls trying to get pregnant.

This story horrifies me, in the way the recent Abortion Girl story horrified me. In both cases, pregnancy—the most sacred and miraculous of all human phenomena—was turned into little more than a recreational activity, a game. For Abortion Girl it was a means to make a political/artistic statement: getting pregnant as many times as possible, so as to abort as many times as possible. With these Gloucester girls, getting pregnant was a social activity, like going to the mall or the prom—just something fun to do together.

Has creating a human life really been reduced to this? Call me crazy, but to bring a life—indeed, a soul—into the world (a world that has seen better days) seems to me a rather serious proposition. Yes I know it often happens on accident, but when it is planned should it not be planned with the utmost care and selfless love? Having a baby should not be like buying a new purse or getting a new haircut, and it certainly should not be an action taken out of desperate adolescent loneliness (it was suggested that the girls did this so they could receive some unconditional love).

Whatever the cause (and I don’t think it’s Juno), I’m pretty sure it doesn’t bode well for our society. God help us, and God help those poor little girls and their future children.

The New (and Improved) Coldplay

I wasn’t quite sure what I expected when I bought Coldplay’s new album earlier this week—I suppose I expected it to be a lot of patented sappy love songs and stadium anthems for the middle class preppies in the suburbs (I bought my copy in Starbucks, after all). But I have to say, this album shocked me—in a very good way. Is this really Coldplay? These songs are inventive—even progressive! They still have that ethereal “to the rafters” grandeur to them, but—amazingly—they are more restrained and nuanced than anything they have ever done.

From the gorgeous, electronic instrumental opening (“Life in Technicolor”) to the ghostly hidden coda track (“The Escapist”… aka part II of “Death and All His Friends”), this is an album of lush musical diversity and sonic subtleties. It’s exquisite. It’s not radio-friendly in the least (apart from the title track), but it may very well prove to be their most popular album. It’s certainly their best since Parachutes.

It’s also an album that—in some ways—represents what an album could (should?) be in this era of the death of the album. It is fitting that Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida” song has been in all the iTunes ads this spring. This is an album for the iTunes age. With ala carte music consumption, music has re-oriented itself to songs over albums, randomized playlists over coherent LPs. Viva la Vida is an album in the sense that it is one collection of songs released together, but other than that it seems to be something altogether different. These songs have little to do with one another, and some sections of some of the songs have little to do with other sections.

Indeed, I wonder how we can categorize “songs” in the context of this album. Several tracks on Viva have more than one musical thought going on. Track 5 is the clearest example: “Lovers in Japan / Reign of Love” is a couplet of an upbeat rock number and a mournful electro-ballad, respectively. You might say the latter (which is my favorite song on the album) compliments the former, but I’m hard-pressed to see them as anything more than two completely separate emotional moments juxtaposed because, well, sometimes our moods change that fast.

Other songs on the album don’t even name their dual sections. Track 6, “Yes,” begins as an eastern-inspired minor chord anthem about sexual frustration (featuring Chris Martin singing in the lowest key he’s ever attempted) and then becomes a breezy shoegazer romp (apparently called “Chinese Sleep Chant,” but not advertised as such on the album cover). Same goes for the final track, “Death and All His Friends,” which ends on a rousing, rhythmically-daring note, only to be followed by the aforementioned fade-out song (“The Escapist,” also unadvertised). Many of these multi-section songs could easily have been split into separate tracks, but they weren’t. Why? It’s almost as if Coldplay is rewarding iTunes buyers by giving them two-for-one specials; or perhaps they are just showing how interesting an album of haphazard shifts and unpredictable turns can be.

The album feels totally incoherent, but in a coherent sort of way. It feels like an album of the 21st century, where our only frame of reference is, in fact, disjointedness. The album mimics our digitally fragmented lives, when everything is on shuffle and our attentions and cares and feelings are so interchangeable and fluid that sixty minutes of musical narrative (even five minutes of one song) have a hard time connecting with us. Indeed, Coldplay’s lyrics on this album are hardly narrative at all—just words and thoughts and random images, strewn together paratextually in the way our laptop screens bind together our images, emails, memories, interests, and connections. We are a windows world now; our interfaces are multifarious and rarely singularly focused. Sometimes we feel mournful (“Cemeteries of London”), sometimes joyful (“Strawberry Swing”), but hardly ever do we feel wholly one or the other. Coldplay’s album is the musical embodiment of this.

The title alone (Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends) shows how eclectic this album really is. The use of Spanish indicates the international feel of the music, and the nonsensical bonus title shows that the album is, well, anything you want it to be. Viva borrows bits and pieces of world music (Middle-eastern, North African, Latin American, etc) and borrows from a wild array of styles—everything from shoegazer to tribal organ to electronic minimalism. It’s pastiche of the highest order, and I absolutely love it.