Nick Milne’s Study in Contrasts

Nick Milne has an enlightening joint review of Wanted and Wall-E.

Both films end by asking – one explicitly, one implicitly – “well, what have you done lately?” Many of the same pathologies and failures of modern life are laid bare and criticized, but the routes taken towards these ends are dramatically different. To the question as posed by Wanted one can respond only with delusion or despair (3/10); as posed by Wall-E, with hope and awe (9.5/10). If you’re interested in one film and not the other, simply scroll to that film’s poster image; that’s where its review begins.

I responded.

I haven’t seen Wanted, but it seems to me it’s the standard sort of “modern life is stifling” narrative. How many movies are there in which we see young urban professionals stuck in mindless busywork, fully aware that their lives are of no significance, and without any idea of how to escape it? And how often do those movies descend into rank violence?

Those films are popular because that narrative is, to an extent, accurate. People do feel that way. They hate the IKEA nesting instinct, and they hate their bosses, and they hate their apartments, and they hate the struggle to be perfect. They don’t so much want an Office Space sort of apathy, but they do want significance and meaning. It’s the sort of story that inadvertently proves Catholicism true; the constant call to greatness and meaning, and the idea that, not only can it be achieved, but that it’s the whole point of our existence, is at the core of that prefab narrative.

But implicit to all of them is a sort of misanthropy, a practiced cynicism which calls everyone else worthless and values the self alone as the hero. Everyone else is incidental. Hell, The Matrix even came right out and said it. Its the cynicism of the casual philosopher, the high school student obsessed with Fight Club, those people who spend half their day smoking cloves and mocking “the system.” And those are the very people who will go to see WALL-E and hate it, or at least miss the point. They’ll laugh at the humans in their chairs, not mourn the tragedy of it or even recognize how *dark* it is, because that’s how they see everyone, anyway.

WALL-E is beyond affirming; it’d pretty damn theological, or at least anthropological. Life means something. Stuff counts. Latter-day cynics and manichaeans can’t understand it.

Because Youtube Is Awesome

For no reason whatsoever apart from the one cited above.

Myths America Lives By

Mark Shea has a great post up about secular messianism, a constant theme of his. He maintains that both the left’s and the right’s religious wings elevate their political agendas over the Gospel at the same time that they maintain they’re the same thing. He quotes:

There is a liberation theology of the Left, and there is also a liberation theology of the Right, and both are at heart mammon worship. The liberation theology of the Left often wants a Barrabas, to fight off the oppressors as though our ultimate problem were the reign of Rome and not the reign of death. The liberation theology of the Right wants a golden calf, to represent religion and to remind us of all the economic security we had in Egypt. Both want a Caesar or a Pharaoh, not a Messiah.

The impetus for the post is the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of America: The Light and the Glory, one of the first major political books of the religious right, elevating the United States to the status of Chosen Nation. It’s a longstanding view that’s the result of America’s peculiar origin, founded by religious dissidents and therefore had, as its embryonic cultural stock, Puritans, and much as we mock them today, their values still inform American culture. In particular, we’re quite invested in the idea of American exceptionalism — that we’re substantively different than any other nation in history, and that those differences make us better. Our earliest settlers looked at this country as a demon land to be tamed and conquered and made the new home of God, who had clearly abandoned Europe (remember, these are religious dissidents kicked out of their homeland; of course they’re going to think God abandoned Europe!).

Shea mentions that we keep looking for America to be the Church. Why is that? Because from our earliest years, that’s exactly what we wanted it to be and intended it to be. Those communities were unified religious communities with plans to fan our over the entire continent, and every city would be Salem and Plymouth, and the continent would be exactly coterminous with the Church.

Go read Myths America Lives By, an engrossing look at how we cobbled together a series of national myths from the strangest sources. How religious Puritanism informed the post-Revolution notion that we were special because of our democracy, and how clearly this was God’s government. It’s bizarre.

Who is Radio Girl?

Radio Girl is a four-part series I’m developing with local artist Richie Pope, about a young superheroine who mysteriously vanishes in 1994, only to reappear in 2006 without having aged a day. She struggles with her memory, trying to understand what has happened to her, where she vanished to, and what it means for her and the purpose of her life. It’s pretty strange.

It’s also a deliberate pastiche of the sorts of shows I watched when I was a kid in the early 1990’s and the sorts of stories I love to see now. In all, it’s a pretty Catholic story, too; it follows an artistic philosophy I and some comrades have been hammering out called incarnationalism, which is really just applied Catholicism.

Check out Richie’s work!

Spoiler Spoilers

So, a few years ago, DC comics killed of Stephanie Brown, AKA the Spoiler, AKA Robin IV. She had a brief run as the Girl Wonder, and was pretty popular when she died. The victim of what is often called “Women in Refrigerator Syndrome,” where women in comics often have less value and are killed as an impetus to spur the men to action, she was never memorialized in the Batcave like Jason Todd; she received no memory case, and Batman preferred not to speak of her at all. A lot of people were pretty pissed about that.

Well, as comics tend to do, she was recently resuscitated, same as Jason Todd — the one guy in comics who wasn’t supposed to ever come back — except it turns out she wasn’t really dead.

Hardy har! Laughs all around! Except that that’s exactly how it went down, with a slimy disrespect for the character and for the integrity of the villain. I like Batman and all, but that was ridiculous. Why not just admit that Batman never memorialized her because he didn’t have the same attachment to her as to Jason Todd, or the sense of defeat for his failure to control Todd’s demons? Why not admit that his not memorializing her was entirely in keeping with his character, who is defined by the loss of people close to him?

Of course Stephanie Brown’s death wouldn’t mean much to him.

(comic from shortpacked.com, which is awesome)

I knew I liked WALL-E for a reason

Some good points over at Theology of the Body on WALL-E:

The other religious theme I found interesting is that of the human expulsion from the Garden of Eden. In this case, humans have to leave the world they have been blessed with due to their own selfishness. As a result, their very nature is corrupted in a way that makes them uncomfortably less than completely human — they are incapable of standing on their own two feet. It is only through the hope of new life, a resurrection of life if you will, that the humans are restored to their previous world, though one that will now require multiple lifetimes of restorative work and a new learning of what it means to be truly human.

That was, more than anything else, what fascinated me about the movie. I’m preoccupied with the idea of apocalypse, not as an end, but as a beginning. I recently dedicated fifteen pages to the idea in a short story called “The Ways of Things,” and WALL-E explored the territory with remarkable depth considering it was really only the setting and not the plot. The credits, a telling through the history of art of mankind’s reclaiming of the earth, struck harder than any other moment in the film. I’m sure that wasn’t Pixar’s intention, but the young boy fishing while the Axiom is covered in moss and vines killed me.

The Rumble

Pope Benedict, who loves America, appointed first American Archbishop Levada of San Francisco his successor at the CDF, the first American in the position and the highest level someone from the States has ever reached in the Holy See (and the second highest any native speaker of English has every reached), and now, he’s appointed St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke to the highest court of canon law.

Some are calling this an American papacy. I don’t buy it.

While Benedict has long had a fascination with America, I think he’s focusing on American prelates more than other papacies for a very simple reason — America is the last superpower, and has a massive, and growing, population of Catholics, and so people pay attention to how the Church here behaves. When we have an abortion flap, people in Australia see it flashing across their tellies. By noting and rewarding the sorts of bishops who are respectful of the claims of the Gospel, Benedict is being a pastor; he’s teaching us what the Church is supposed to be doing, and that the claims of the Gospel are serious, and that we damn well mean it when we say we’re proposing a gospel of life.

The unfortunate reality is that sexual issues are at the very epicenter, with every shade of meaning, of the Church’s rumble with modernity. I say epicenter because it’s an earthquake, and like an earthquake, it will shake until it is done, and every movement needed to happen has resolved itself. Earthquakes are problems sorting themselves out. This confrontation had to happen, because very different sorts of truth claims have collided, and they neither can allow the other, because both are opposed.

It’s simple, really. Modernity seriously proposes that there is no such thing as an honest, definable truth, and that sort of incoherant drivel can’t sustain a culture. So you have a people turning to anything within reach that can provide their lives with a shade of meaning. Hence the worship of the self, and above all, the worship of the body, and of sex. More than anything, otherwise perfectly reasonable Catholics – because it infects us, too – who otherwise support the overall message of the faith turn aside when it comes to sexual matters. Truth is important, except where it affects me.

It can’t go on forever, and eventually, something has to give. When Catholicism proposes that we are more than our bodies, the rest of the world revolts, because the claim is too bold not to. We’re happy to believe our bodies are just shells for our spirit or mind, tools to be used, or that we’re nothing but chemical reactions pretending to be a poet, but propose that our bodies enrich our souls, and our souls our bodies, and as a result, how we use our bodies matter, and the world will not have it.

How dare we suggest that mankind is wonderful?

The Schmuel Song

One of the things I love about Jewish culture is the music. Something about it’s odd cadences and its unexpected notes smacks me in the face, and I respond to it with clenched, trembling muscles, awash in its tension and wires.
If I knew a thing about the technicalities of music, I’d be happy to explain what it is that I like about. But here’s a fun little example.

I Love The Whole World

I love the roadways
I love astronomy
I love cathedrals
And I love Socrates

I love the whole world
and all its mysteries
Boom-de-yadda
Boom-de-yadda
Boom-de-yadda
Boom-de-yadda

I love old ghost towns
I love the Pyramids
I love the X-Men
And I love old Madrid

I love the whole world
And all its holiness
Boom-de-yadda
Boom-de-yadda
Boom-de-yadda
Boom-de-yadda

I love big statues
I love Jerusalem
I love the Great Wall
And I love bubble gum

I love the whole world
Each crazy little thing
Boom-de-yadda
Boom-de-yadda
Boom-de-yadda
Boom-de-yadda

Anglican Wars: Episode V

The Anglican Communion seems poised for dissolution.

One of the oldest single religious bodies on the planet, the Anglican Communion has suffered massive internal dislocations over the past few years, primarily centered on the conduct of the ECUSA and a few other regional bodies in their blessing of same-sex unions and ordination of active homosexual clergy. It’s clear to me that the dispute is more over whether or not there is such a thing as a revealed truth than it is over homosexuality and its conduct. Its postmodern Christianity versus traditional Christianity, and those two bodies are so damnably different that I’m surprised they hung together as long as they did.