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In Japan, fake Catholic ceremonies make up 60% of all weddings.
Sometimes I think 90% of what Japan does is just making fun of us.
I’m super late in doing this Total Request. My apologies!
Br. Bob writes:
How ’bout:
Heath Ledger’s Joker: how does he rank among all-time movie villains? Personally, I gotta put him in at least the top ten, though I don’t exactly know who else would be on that list.
So in that spirit, let’s go ahead and do the Top Ten Movie Villains. This will inevitably be a biased list. I haven’t seen every movie ever, I’m partial to Star Trek and science fiction, and these villains will all come from movies I actually like. (yeah, there’s some good villains elsewhere, but I’m not touching Robocop). So keep that in mind. I know these lists can be contentious, so feel free to post your own contributions.
#10 – The Borg Queen, Alice Krige, Star Trek: First Contact
Strange, sexual, creepy, she was the great unexpected villain of Star Trek. The Borg were supposed to be a collective mind, and here was their queen, The One Who Is Many, seemingly in control. What was her relationship to the Collective? What was her role? Was she the first Borg? Perhaps she was simply a high-function unit, more than a drone but less than an individual. Some have speculated that she was nothing more than a mouthpiece, like Locutus (who’s name apparently means “Speaker”), but she seems profoundly different than the stiff, monotone Picard Borg. Her slow seduction of Data absolutely made First Contact.
#9 – Lady Eboshi, Minnie Driver, Princess Mononoke
I like villains who aren’t clear-cut evil. Nobody wakes up and says “I’m going to be as horrible as I can be to everyone I meet!” When they work for a goal, generally it’s something that they at least perceive as a good. Lady Eboshi simply wants to make sure Iron Town can’t be threatened, to secure a livelihood for her people. She employs lepers in the manufacture of her weapons and treats them with genuine respect and affection. And she wars with the Wolf Tribe because the wolves keep killing the settlers. But she’s profoundly out of the balance, and her actions place her in conflict with the environment around her. In the end, she beheads the Forest Spirit, who becomes a lumbering, oily god of death who ends up destroying Iron Town. What makes her so remarkable is that, in the end, she learns from her mistakes, and resolves not to turn Iron Town into what it was before.
#8 – Seahaven, The Truman Show
Yes, the town. It’s hard to argue Christof as the villain; in the end, he let Truman go. Christof was arrogant and controlling, but he still had some affection for Truman. The town, on the other hand, was the giant lie, the prison Truman was trying to escape. It was the wool pulled over his eyes. This idyllic planned community was downright sinister.
#7 – Count Orlock, Max Shreck, Nosferatu
Orlock warrants a place for the simple effectiveness of his visuals. We’ve seen vampires of this sort only rarely, and never as effectively. Inhuman and terrifying, he appeared more often as a shadow than an actual figure, which only further distorted his strange otherness, elongating his nose and fingers. Sure, it was a German expressionist silent film, but few can match his shivering creepiness.
Visually probably the most unsettling thing in the world.
#6 – Khan Noonien Singh, Ricardo Montalban, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Montalban’s portrayal of Khan is so well-done, most people never realize that at no point in the movie does he ever actually come into contact with Captain Kirk. They never meet face to face. Everything is viewscreens and communicators, Khan distantly promising to destroy everything Kirk loves. “I’ve done more than kill you, Admiral. I’ve hurt you. And I intend to keep hurting you.” Formerly a megalomaniacal Hiter figure, Khan is now motivated, not by any desire for conquest, but simple revenge on Kirk for the death of his wife and child during the exile Kirk imposed. He’s vicious, and he’s angry, and worse, his anger is wholly justified.
#5 – Warden Samuel Norton, Bob Gunton, The Shawshank Redemption
I spent the entire movie trying to get a handle on this guy. When he’s introduced, he’s tough and a little hypocritical, but we have little sense of his brutal streak. He treats Andy Dufresne with some minimum of respect, which is remarkable for his job, and accords him great influence. Norton’s devotion to the Bible doesn’t seem to stretch as far as actually influencing him ethically, though, and he forces Dufresne to engage in embezzling, denies him a chance at a retrial and orchestrates the murder of the one person who could have had Dufresne freed. It doesn’t seem like a transformation, though, as much as his true character showing through. Positively chilling.
#4 – Bill, David Carradine, Kill Bill
You don’t break the heart of a murdering bastard. A kung-fu master, a skilled assassin, and even he has a soft spot in his heart. Of course, when he found out his greatest love and best agent had vanished, and turned up in Nowhere, Texas marrying a record store clerk, he was a little angry. Hell, he’d thought she was dead, and as he says, making some who loves you think your dead is a cruel thing to do.
Bill just reacted the way you could expect him to act: murdering her fiance, the pastor, the pastor’s wife, and everyone else in the building. He even tried to kill Beatrix, but she just wouldn’t die.
#3 – Tyler Durden, Brad Pitt, Fight Club
Sure, he was just a hallucination, but a hallucination with a clear and coherant plan for the destruction of civilization and a messiah complex complete with a church and system of sacraments. Durden is the Anti-Christ, pure and simple, actively God’s enemy — “our fathers were our models for God. If our fathers left us, what does that say about God?” — and the enemy of basic humanity. To Durden, anyone in his way was merely an obstacle, something to be done away with as quickly and brutally as possible, not above castration as a method of punishment. He is the ultimate utilitarian and the enemy of human dignity. The only reason he’s not ranked at number one is because of who the next two are.
#2 – Darth Vader, David Prowse and James Earl Jones, Star Wars
The tragic villain, corrupted by his desire to protect his family, manipulated by his mentor, and even before then, impetuous and angry, Darth Vader is one of the most stirringly complex and well-developed figures in, well, modern storytelling. He’s his own villain, his own enemy, the victim of despair and lies. The strength of his figure is that he isn’t beyond redemption, that there was still good in him after all. I mean, his descent was motivated by love, the love of his wife, the love of his country, the love of his children, so of course only love could bring him back. For Vader, the recognition that the Emperor held not one whit of compassion for him as he shocked Luke pushed him to realize where his true loyalties lay.
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#1 – The Joker, Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
That’s right, I put him at number one, and if you don’t know why, go see the movie. He is the most insanely brutal, disgustingly evil character ever to slobber his way across the screen. A self-described agent of chaos, he has no motive but to murder for its own sake, and to destroy because he enjoys destruction. He becomes a terrorist Bin Laden would admire, thrusting Gotham into a terror no American city has ever seen. He holds the entire city hostage in the grip of an almost supernatural fear. He bombs hospitals, boats, poisons his opponents. There is no hiding from him, and Batman is not certain he can be the man he needs to be in order to stop him.
Batman can’t stop him.
His violence draws the worst out of everyone, and his mission was to turn the best of Gotham, the crusading D.A. Harvey Dent, and turn him into just as much the monster, to show that there is no good in anyone, and nobody is above him. Ledger’s performance was stunning, and the role is rumored to have killed him. We’ll never see a villain like that ever again.
Number one, with a bullet, The Joker.
If any of you guys out there have a copy or a scan of this, I’d love to do a review.
Ladies and gentlemen, Heart!
Capturing the Gravity of the Cold War with Unicorns
I have been, for about two years now, toying around with an idea for a book. Of course, I’m always toying around with an idea for a book, but only this summer have I really started to pull my act together and get back into prose fiction. I finished one short story called “The Ways of Things” and am working on another tentatively called “Bolingbroke,” and hopefully, once this workshopping group I’m in gets off the ground, I’ll be writing fiction with some regularity.
Thanks be to God for all that, and for this blog, which gives me the pressure to write every day. I don’t always succumb to that pressure, or sometimes I’ll pull something old of mine off the shelf and just post that, but it has me looking for the sacred in all sorts of pop-culture scenes and putting myself to work in this long, summer exile of mine.
Anyway. So I’ve been toying around with this idea for a book, and I’d love to hear if the learned elders of St. Blog’s think it’s worth a damn.
I was born in 1984, which puts me in a cadre stretching roughly to the early 1990’s, called variously Generation Y (a term I hate for merely placing us after Generation X), the Net Generation, the Thirteenth Generation, and the Millenials, which is my preferred term. We are a particular group of people. We grew up after the age when animation was dedicated solely to selling toys, in what is sometimes called the “Golden Age” of children’s entertainment. We had everything from Animaniacs and Tiny Toons to Batman: The Animated Series. Our television shows had high production values, and didn’t always feel the need to justify themselves with tacked-on moral lessons at the end like those of our immediate generational predecessors. You know what I’m talking about. Every episode of G.I. Joe ended every episode with “Now we know! And knowing is half the battle!” Safety tips to justify twenty-two minutes of violence.
We also grew up in the Digital Age. I never didn’t know how to use a computer, and in elementary school, the kids were often the troubleshooters in the computer labs, because our teachers barely understood the nearly decade-old machines we were using. We spent our lives using them from the beginning; one of my earliest memories is using the computer at the day-care center where my mom worked when I was three. I think I was playing some Mario knockoff.
What I think is most significant, though, is that we are the first generation to grow up mostly if not entirely after the Cold War, the last generation to have any memory of the Soviet Union (so much that some of my friends, in 1995, hadn’t realized it had broken up), and the last generation for whom the Second World War will remain in living memory, the last generation to largely have grandparents who fought in it, the last generation who could have met Holocaust survivors or have them as grandparents, and as a result, the last generation who will have any contact with firsthand knowledge of that period.
It may seem strange for me to think that that peculiar configuration is the most important aspect of my generation, but consider the impact of the Second World War and the Cold War on the world’s collective psyche. The twentieth century was the century that went insane all at once, the century that saw the most powerful militaries and economies in the world mobilize for essentially eighty years of war. Our parents 
grew up under the constant weight of potential nuclear annihilation, and our grandparents went to war to stop an insane super villain bent on global domination who murdered ten-million people, and in doing so allied with another madman who murdered twenty-million of his own people.
Things went pretty badly for a long time.
The past hundred years were full of murder and destruction on a scale the world had never seen, and the cumulative effect of that, first felt in the aftermath of the First World War in the dada movement’s studied and deliberate insanity, was the rejection of any objective authority and meaning in the world, the cold clinging to material gain under the nuclear veil, and the rejection of the value of the human person. This last one was the central tenet of both the Nazi and Soviet systems, but inevitably, in the militarized society of the postwar United States, it’s clear we embraced a similar ethic. Capitalism, the unrestrained market, the government, patriotism, and democracy were themselves now raised as ideals of themselves. in contrast with communism, the state, and patriotism in the USSR. We knew who our enemy was, and we weren’t afraid to build thousands of nuclear missiles just in case.
Basically, the twentieth century was a moral catastrophe, a slaughterhouse fueled by lies and money. And my generation, those of us in our early twenties, roughly, were born there. We’re of a peculiar birth, born and reared in one century and coming to maturity in the next. And for those of us who are Catholic, that means that roughly our entire lives were spent under the pontificate of John Paul II. It’s why I call us “Generation JPII.” John Paul himself lived in Nazi and Communist Poland, and dedicated himself to countering the lies that governed both of those states, both that the state is the natural expression of a people and a culture, and that a human is only as important as his use by the same.
Now, as a result of this confluence — the time of our birth and the ministry of John Paul II with his particular experience of the driving force of the century — I believe my gen
eration, Generation JPII, is well-suited to examine the history of the century with fresh eyes and well-formed hearts, apart from the fear and callousness the period fostered but with direct experience and access to direct experience of the catastrophe. Above that, the twentieth is our century. We’re its last sons and daughters, its last Catholics. The question is: what do we do about it?
Where does it leave us? If we have a particular responsibility to the world in understanding and interpreting the century of our birth, what is that responsibility? It is to put to paid those lies, turn away from statist nonsense, and embrace the conversion of the Spirit in Christ, which is the only force capable of changing the world. Not militaries. Not democracy. Not market economics. Only Christ, the son of the Living God working through the Church has the moral strength and holy charism needed, because the world can’t be changed by systems. It can only be changed by personal conversion, one at a time.
That’s the only way out of the mess.
I don’t know exactly what the situation is in Spain. What I can say is that Polish society is pro-life. We have reached this objective thanks to decades of prayer and works of apostolate, also carried out during Communist domination. Within the structures of the Catholic Church, we have engaged in intense activity in defense of the life of the unborn.
Like I’ve said. You don’t end abortion through legislation. You end abortion through conversion. Through prayer.
I’ve written before about how, even though I’m not a particularly political person, I love politics, the feints and dives of the game. I’m not invested in any of the candidates, I don’t place my hopes and dreams in them, and I don’t even really think they can do all that much to begin with. I’m an antigovernment communitarian, which basically means I think that problems are generally best dealt with from the bottom up, based on the needs of local communities, parishes, yada yada.
That said, I am absolutely addicted the Veepstakes speculation. For those of you uninitiated in Ridiculous Political Jargon, the Veepstakes, a portmanteau of veep and sweepstakes, is the quadrennial guessing game of presidential running mates. Normally, it’s not a big deal. The vice-president doesn’t technically have a whole lot of power, and almost never delivers a critical state, absent Lyndon Johnson in 1960. But the vice-president has emerged in recent decades as a powerful position of itself, starting with Mondale in 1976, when Carter took him in as a valued and trusted sort of super-cabinet member.
The VP has also become the president’s natural successor, and this is itself an aberration. The normal path to a run at presidency is either as a state governor or Secretary of State. Secretaries of State that have become president include Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren and James Buchanan. Secretaries who unsuccessfully ran for President number Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, William H. Seward, James G. Blaine, Walter Q. Gresham, John Sherman, Elihu Root, William Jennings Bryan, Charles Evans Hughes and Edmund Muskie.
But vice-president as heir is really a fairly recent development. Five of the last presidential elections since 1960 have featured sitting or immediately-previously sitting vice presidents, and of those that haven’t, three ( going back to 1948 ) included vice-presidents who succeeded to the presidency. Cheney is the aberration in choosing not to run; every two-term vice-president since Nixon has.
It goes further. I hate to be the guy to say it, but I think there’s a good chance neither Obama nor McCain will make through their first term. As much as everyone’s tossing around the Kennedy angle on Obama, I’m a little surprised that the whole, um, assassination issue hasn’t been discussed. I’ve read a few articles about it, but I guess it’s too grim to really consider. But I can see it happening all too well; all it takes is one nutcase who will not see America under a black president. God help Obama.
McCain’s age and his cancer raise the deathwatch over him.
So. There are two candidates, both of whom are going to pick someone a heartbeat away from the office in a very critical time.
Kaine
Finally, this year, the Democratic speculation has been filled with Virginians. Tim Kaine, Jim Webb, and Mark Warner, the latter two have recently dropped out, Webb to focus on his Senate career and Warner his Senate campaign which he is sure to win (he was a brilliant governor). Tim Kaine is the center of most of Obama’s veep buzz lately, which has me excited, because I’ve generally supported him. He’s a Catholic, at least nominally pro-life (which means he’s as pro-life as every Republican out there…), and anti-death penalty (even though he hasn’t stopped very many here in VA…).
Palin
Meanwhile, some speculation is swirling around Alaska governor Sarah Palin for McCain. I mean, come on! She was Miss Alaska 1984, a strident reformer, and brings this whole Laura Roslin feel the office.
Who I vote for will depend heavily on their VP.
Heh. I put Kaine on the left and Palin on the right.
This is a post I wrote on my very first blog back in 2005. I stumbled across it today and thought it was worth a post.
Down over on Unleashed Weapon [a now-dormant blog], my good friend Missina Kinsey gets to thinking upon seeing an advertisement.
Her perfect poise and beautiful skin are enough to make any female feel inferior, but instead of grimacing as I normally (and somewhat subconsciously) do, I was terrified. I had looked her right in the eyes this time to notice that they, as well as the rest of her body, had been altered by some digital means to enhance them to a level of whatever perfection was needed. Both eyes had three silvery white glimmers to make her look more perky, more awake, beaming, or enticing, and it seemed as though she had no soul.. no identity left about her at all.
….
This was an ad for hair dye, a product to change appearance, with a slogan that being blonde isn’t that great after all. I mean, of course not, when you could look like her instead. And yet, the model isn’t even good enough to sell the product anymore that marketing felt some need to make her over and then go the extra step to tweak and stroke over her picture to take away any sign that she is still human.
How superbly representative of our times! I can’t help but think of Simulation and Simulacra and it’s contention that we have reduced reality in the reproduction of it, and here, we have even reduced the reproduction. It isn’t even an image of an image anymore, but something wholly invented designed to affect how we think about the world. It is distortion rather than representation and it is very essentially dehumanizing.
The line occurs to me from Patti Smith’s “Babelogue:” “We worship the flaw, the mole, the mole on the belly of the exquisite whore,” which has always struck me as, despite the rest of the song-poem, a very well-formed appreciation for the “dappled things” in the world, an appreciation for the world in it’s varied splendor, and an embrace of imperfection as, yes, part of what makes us human. How healthy is it to pretend a thing is as it is not?
In his excellent Letters to a Young Catholic, George Weigel relates a story where a priest once commented to him that he believe he would have to spend the rest of his life convincing people that death and suffering are good for them. I think he may very well be right. We live in an age where we can get surgery to improve our looks or pop a pill to grow us hair and in every way defeat some very basic things about what it means to be human. We have decided, it seems, that there is nothing in suffering worth getting, and if there is, well, we don’t want it, and if we do, we’d rather not endure the unpleasantness. So, we have decided we can’t even be bothered to endure the most mild and basic form of unpleasantness: not being staggeringly beautiful according to the modern mode.
I’ve said before that everything matters, and nothing is in vain, but as a society, we have decided that we are malleable. That our form is irrelevant. We can change our faces, buttocks, even our sex, if we can afford it. Nothing is built in; the forms are incidental.
We are, to put it mildly, minds in a shell, and every effort should be made to remodel that shell until it is more cosmetically pleasing. Missina above makes a very bold, very daring claim: that her improved level of perfection made her less, not more, than she was before. That being enhanced meant being reduced. I think she hit the nail on the head.
We’ve just reached three-thousand hits! I’d like to thank the Academy.
I’d like to welcome Santogold, N*E*R*D and that dude from the Strokes to the show.
It’s all about power, isn’t it?
I spent a good chunk of yesterday reading about the group “Roman Catholic Womenpriests” (hereafter RCWP). The RCWP is, if you aren’t already aware from being a studious blogonaut, a smallish group that holds faux-ordination ceremonies for women, who are thereafter somehow priests, deacons, or in a few cases, bishops. Or, as they call it, womenpriests, womendeacons, and womenbishops.
What language! That language speaks volumes about their views and their aims. As much as they speak about women “reclaiming their spiritual heritage,” and “taking their rightful place within the Church,” I look at those hideous word formations and can only say “then why on earth make the distinction between ‘priest’ and ‘womanpriest?’”
It’s because it’s not about reclaiming jack.
I try to be a pretty charitable guy, and look at people’s understanding of themselves, not just their motives, to try and understand their actions. You can’t make sense of a person’s deeds without making sense of the person. I find it hard, though, to be generous to this scene. Because, in the end, it’s all about power.
People want power. We want it badly. We want to be important and influential, to be respected and, not only heard, but heeded. We want our decisions to matter, and to be given responsibility in areas that matter. We also want to be able to do what we want without someone challenging us. We want to be able to make decisions regardless of anything. We are, all of us, prideful people.
We also, as a whole Church, have not gotten over clericalism, the idea that the clergy is better than us. We haven’t. We think they’re higher, more important than us, because they have power. We don’t consider their responsibility, only their influence. That’s the problem with RCWP — they want power, and believe that the ordained have it. They talk about women’s right to be priests, and women being just as deserving, and women being just as capable, as though any of that was relevant.
It’s relevant in a power structure. It’s not relevant in the Church.
Kevin and I were talking about this yesterday, and he related some pretty bitter parish council power struggles about which his mom had told him. The council at this parish was full of infighting, squabbling, petty backstabbing, and all of it plainly evident in their meetings. When the pastor attended, he promptly dissolved the council, concluding it’s very character was unhealthy and unchristian. The voices of protest were raised, decrying the loss of power, claiming they were the representatives of the people (despite being appointed, not elected), and accusing the priest of seizing more…power.
What they forget, what everyone forgets, is that Christianity isn’t, inna final ‘nalysis, about power, but service. It is the death of self for the life of Christ, self-denial instead of self-assertion, and giving rather than recieving. The Christian should never seek honors or seek power.
Which brings me back to RCWP. Their actions, which they call “prophetic disobedience of unjust law” or something to that effect, are blatant rebellion against the Church, not the submission to which Christ calls us. It is telling that their vows of ordination do not include one of obedience; they are, in the end, their own authorities, rejecting their excommunications because, ya know, they love the Church so much.
It is truly staggering.
