You Are Here 'A Handmaid's Tale': Now in Feminist Imaginations Everywhere

My newest post at Intellectual Takeout:

And the award for most contrived, unrealistic, and preachy television drama goes to... 

I’ve always thought that the best way to ruin a book’s audience is to make a movie out of it. Once the movie is made (and if it is successful), no one wants to read the book anymore. I'm thinking Lord of the Rings here, The African Queen, Gone with the Wind, Forrest Gump. 

But ruining the book may be the one and only good thing about “The Handmaid's Tale,” Hulu’s dramatization of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel. It might at least save us the trouble of reading about a young woman who is a concubine in a male-dominated future society brought about through some unexplained and improbable coup ... 

Read the rest at here.

Why the Academy's effort to diversity its membership is a bad idea

White men smiling at the Oscars.

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has announced that it will be "diversifying" its membership. This is one more blow to guilty White liberals who dominate the leadership of elite organizations and who use their positions to lecture the rest of us on how to act, even though, in occupying these positions in inordinate numbers, they undermine the very Politically Correct principles they espouse.

The action by the Academy—taken in response to protests by non-guilty non-White liberals who took umbrage at the fact that, for the second year in a row, all 20 of the acting nominees were White (most, if not all of them liberal and probably guilty about it)—will further hamper the privileged status of these people who are constantly preaching to the rest of us about the evils of such privilege while enjoying it themselves.

The problem is this: In shaming guilty White liberals who use these positions to work out the deep-seated guilt associated with being White and possessing such privilege, the Academy is underscoring their hypocrisy, which will undoubtedly result in even higher levels of guilt needing to be atoned for. But since the only avenue guilty White liberals have to do penance for their Whiteness and their privilege is to lecture other people from privileged positions about how evil these things are—and such opportunities are diminishing because of actions like that of the Academy which actually apply the principles they are always lecturing the rest of us about but never following themselves—we will be putting these people in an untenable position.

How does the Academy expect guilty White liberals to deal with their shame now that they have been divested of the opportunity to engage in the hypocrisy that, until now, no one has bothered to notice?

"Brooklyn": (the movie): A Review

On the basis of Joe Morganstern's recent review of "Brooklyn" in the Wall Street Journal, I took my wife to see the movie. It is a story about a young immigrant woman, Eilis (pronounce "Eye-lish") who leaves her mother and sister in Ireland for America in the 1950s, rents a room in a boarding house, gets a job, and meets a young man at a dance with whom she falls in love and gets married. But just as she marries the young Italian plumber, she gets word that her beloved sister has died. Despite the doubts of her husband, who knows the allure of home, she travels back to Ireland to be with her mother, and promptly falls in love with a young Irishman.

How she battles the draw of home and resolves to do the right thing are the chief conflict in the story.

Now if I had read the description I just gave, I would not be terribly interested in seeing the movie. It seems to have a terribly chick flickish quality to it. But Morgenstern's review was glowing. And then I looked it up on Rotten Tomatoes, where its positive review percentage was 99 percent. When was the last time you saw that? And then, of course, there was the excellent trailer.

I worried that, after reading all of these gushing reviews, it couldn't possibly meet my expectations. But I didn't have to worry.

"Brooklyn" is what I call a "small movie"—that is, a movie about something we consider of little consequence: one young woman, a speck in a sea of such people migrating across the ocean for a better life. We talk incessantly about the big issues—immigration, war and peace, hunger—and think they are the important thing. But it is the "small" stories of one or two people that really tells us something important about reality.

Everything about "Brooklyn" is astounding. The story takes place both in Brooklyn and Ireland. And both settings are utterly convincing. I love movies that are able to invoke another time and place in a believable way. Who needs a time machine when you can go back in time with a movie like this and see things as you are convinced they really must have been like?

There is none of the anachronism you see in so many attempts to recreate history where the attitude about the world is just the common, contemporary attitude put in the mind and mouth of a character from another time (like Ridley Scott's "The Kingdom of Heaven," in which Orlando Bloom's character spoils the whole otherwise admirable movie by give a deflating politically correct speech about how unimportant the land they are defending (Jerusalem) is. No person of the time would have said what was put in his mouth. It was utterly disappointing).

Here you will see people in the mid-20th century as they really were, not gussied up for early 21st century viewers. There Eilis herself, with whom the viewer simply falls in love. She is innocent but determined. The obviously Irish Saoirse Ronan plays Eilish with an expressionless grace that is hard to describe. And in fact she does what every other aspect of this movie does—from the characters to the director: namely, to never overplay their hand.

There are scenes that in the hands of any other director would have been mined for every ounce of sentimentalism they could produce. But director Tom McCarthy resists this temptation at every turn. Not that there aren't tears shed a number of times (by both the characters and the audience); there are. But the sentiment is never over-sentimentalized—there is not a single instance in which the viewer is called upon to respond in any other way than that which is fully backed up by the events on the screen. The movie is like a finely cooked French meal: Every flavor is perfectly balanced.

Eilis' landlady, Mrs. Kehoe, plays a pivotal part in this story. We are brought back again and again throughout the movie to her dinner table, where she dishes out admonition and advice to the young, sometimes wayward (in one case completely clueless) girls under her roof. She is the quintessence of good sense and, in a stern way, good humor. Contrast her with the Irish shop owner, Mrs. Kelly, for whom Eilis had worked while in Ireland, a cruel, conniving woman, whose machinations when Eilis returns to her original home are the occasion for Eilis' realization of what she must do.

Eilis has not told anyone in Ireland that she is already married, a fact that looms over her trip home. The anxiety that is produced as she falls harder and harder for a young Irish pub owner is made all the more unbearable by the sympathy we have for Eilis—and the empathy we have for her affection for the young Irish man whose subtle and honest attractions we can sympathize with. But when she is invited to the marriage of her childhood friend, they take their vows—vows of loyalty and love that she herself has taken back in America, unbeknownst to the young man sitting at her side—an irony the camera underscores when it refocuses from the bride and groom in the front to Eilis, sitting in the second row behind them, her own heart being pierced by the words she is hearing from the priest.

Again, the expression on Eilis face does not change, but we know she feels the irony as deeply as we do.

But it is when her former employer, Mrs. Kelly, discovers Eilis' secret and tries to use it to manipulate her that she realizes what she must do. This is when the tension breaks and we know that she has decided to do the right thing and return to her husband in America. It is the evil intent of Mrs. Kelly that brings about Eilis' return to the good. How evocative of real life is that? Who says that evil does not have its purpose in the ultimate end of things?

We are heartbroken for the young Irishman who has fallen in love with her—and who has been given every reason to believe it will be consummated. And again, our sorrow is not exploited by the director, who shows him to us, in the lovely house his parents have vacated for him, in the anticipation that she will help him refill it, reading the letter she has sent to him telling him the truth, and informing him that she has gone back to America.

Eilis' makes mistake after mistake, and she pays for each one of them. But despite her failings, she rights herself. She returns to America and to her husband.

There are aspects of this movie that remind me of a Jane Austen story. But the difference is this: In a Jane Austen story, all the loose ends are tied up. Austen begins with an ordered world, into which disharmony is introduced, which resolves finally into a new harmonious order. "People die," as Flannery O'Connor once quipped, "but no one gets hurt." Austen's view of reality is the view from 50,000 feet. It can seem unrealistic, but that is because she shows us reality from an eternal perspective, in which there really is an ultimate resolution to all things.

But in "Brooklyn," people do get hurt. All the loose ends are not tied up. There is damage that for some characters will last a lifetime. But there is beauty too—sometimes in the very events which seem the most tragic. There is comfort here along with the pain—as Kentucky poet James Still once phrased it, a "punishing comfort." It is the view from the ground: Our view here and now. And what we see in this story is that amidst all the rubble that we leave along the way of life, there are plenty of flowers growing. 

Saving Western Civilization, starring Tom Cruise

The following is my "Letter from the Editor" in the new Classical Teacher magazine:

About a year ago, Universal Pictures released the movie "Oblivion," starring Tom Cruise and Morgan Freeman. It is about a man and a woman (Cruise and Andrea Riseborough) stationed on a post-apocalyptic earth. They are charged with maintaining the drones which protect a number of orbiting installations, mining water for the human encampment now situated on one of Jupiter's moons.

Earth's moon has been blown up, devastating the earth, which is now barely livable. Cruise plays "Jack," who tries to keep the defensive drones operational in the face of constant attacks from roving bands of alien invaders called "scavs" (short for "scavengers"). Jack has had a memory wipe as a security precaution.

But one day while repairing a damaged drone, Jack is captured and knocked unconscious by the scavs. He wakes up tied to a chair under an intense light. A voice comes from out of the darkness:

And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods.

Jack knows these words because on one of his missions he has discovered an old library, from which he has taken several books (in apparent violation of policy). One of them is Horatius at the Bridge, by Lord Macaulay. The scavs have seen him do this.

From the direction of the voice, we hear the lighting of a match, and we see the face of a man, the light of the match reflected in his goggles. It is Beech (played by Morgan Freeman). "We've been watching you, Jack," he says.

Far from being aliens, Beech explains, the scavs are really human survivors of the alien invasion. They tell the at-first-unbelieving Jack the real story of what has happened to the earth, and allow him to leave their encampment to find out for himself.

As the story progresses, we, along with Jack, find out that he is just one of many Jacks patrolling various parts of the earth, all seemingly identical clones, unaware of the others. The scavs were telling him the truth: Earth was taken over by aliens who are bleeding it dry of its resources. The only humans left are the scavs, who are huddled in caves in the earth, protecting what is left of humanity.

Jack has been fighting for the wrong side.

Beech has let him live because he knows of Jack's secret passion for these books and suspects that they have awoken something inside him. In reading them, Jack has been transformed from a memoryless copy of himself, unquestioningly following the orders of what he now knows to be the very creatures who have destroyed his civilization. A man who was the servant of machines has become a master of his own soul.

In the end, the now fully humanized Jack sacrifices himself in defense of the scavs, uttering Macauley's lines as he does so.

We are now in the process of producing a whole race of Jacks. If you doubt the truth of this charge, go look at the recent federal social studies standards, which include no historical content whatsoever.
We have been taken over by cultural aliens. We are producing memoryless copies of ourselves.

Lost in the mindless devotion to so-called "critical thinking skills" and "college and career readiness"—not to mention our servitude to machines—are the ancient stories and venerable truths that schools once taught as a matter of course—ideas and values that made us human, not just cogs in an economic machine.

Classical education's purpose is not to teach job skills or to reform society, although without aiming at these goals it achieves them better than these other methods do. Classical education is about passing on our culture. If we don't do it, we risk a world as culturally desolate as the physical world Jack sacrifices himself to save.

Cage fighter TKOs 50 Shades of Grey

Cage fighter Yves Edwards takes down 50 Shades of Grey and submits it:

This movie is extremely bad, it's what you get when Nickelodeon decides to venture into the world of pornography. I have paid money to sit in a movie theater and watch garbage that is simultaneously destroying my brain cells, perpetuating the Prince Charming myth, decreasing my faith in humanity and portraying women as irrational and incompetent. I am negatively multitasking on a cosmic level.

Read more here.

Why some critics don't like Les Miserables

The reviews of Les Misérables have been mostly positive, but a significant contingent of critics have been, not just negative, but hostile. On the surface, it's hard not to surmise that some of the hostility comes from the explicit and unapologetic Christian message. But Stanley Fish has put his finger on something deeper, and I suspect he's right.

He points out that the real voices of the actors and director Tom Hooper's penchant for bringing the camera right into the actor's face has deprived critics of the critical distance they need to put themselves above what they are critiquing:

The key to what is intended by these technical choices was provided for me by Hooper himself when he remarked in an interview (also printed in USA Today) that while “we live in a postmodern age where a certain amount of irony is expected, [t]his film is made without irony.” Irony is a stance of distance that pays a compliment to both its producer and consumer. The ironist knows what other, more naïve, observers do not: that surfaces are deceptive, that the real story is not what presents itself, that conventional pieties are sentimental fictions. 

The artist who deploys irony tests the sophistication of his audience and divides it into two parts, those in the know and those who live in a fool’s paradise. Irony creates a privileged vantage point from which you can frame and stand aloof from a world you are too savvy to take at face value. Irony is the essence of the critical attitude, of the observer’s cool gaze; every reviewer who is not just a bourgeois cheerleader (and no reviewer will admit to being that) is an ironist.

...Endless high passion and basic human emotions indulged in without respite are what “Les Misérables” offers in its refusal to afford the distance that enables irony. Those who call the movie flat, shallow, sentimental and emotionally manipulative are not wrong; they just fail to see that what appear to them to be bad cinematic choices (in addition to prosaic lyrics that repel aesthetic appreciation, and multiple reprises of simple musical themes) are designed to achieve exactly the result they lament — an almost unbearable proximity to raw, un-ironized experience. They just can’t go with it. And why should they? After all, the critic, and especially the critic who perches in high journalistic places, needs to have a space in which he can insert himself and do the explicatory work he offers to a world presumed to be in need of it. “Les Misérables,” taken on its own terms, leaves critics with nothing to do except join the rhythms of rapt silence, crying and applause, and it is understandable that they want nothing to do with it.

I went to see it with most of my children, all of which do not like musicals. They all liked this one, some very much. I think it was one of the best things I've ever seen on screen.

Read the rest here.

When Alfred Hitchcock returned to the Catholic Church

At least one Hitchcock biographer claims that Hitchcock "rejected suggestions that he allow a priest . . . to come for a visit, or celebrate a quiet, informal ritual at the house for his comfort." Here's the real story, from a guy who was there:

After we chatted for a while, we all crossed from the living room through a breezeway to his study, and there, with his wife, Alma, we celebrated a quiet Mass. Across from me were the bound volumes of his movie scripts, "The Birds," "Psycho," "North by Northwest" and others—a great distraction. Hitchcock had been away from the church for some time, and he answered the responses in Latin the old way. But the most remarkable sight was that after receiving communion, he silently cried, tears rolling down his huge cheeks.

Read the rest here.

Trailer for The Hobbit

P. J. O'Rourke on the new movie "Atlas Shrugged"

"In 'Atlas Shrugged–Part I' a drink is tossed, strong words are bandied, legal papers are served, more strong words are further bandied and, finally, near the end, an oil field is set on fire, although we don’t get to see this up close. There are many beautiful panoramas of the Rocky Mountains for no particular reason. And the movie’s title carries the explicit threat of a sequel.

"But I will not pan 'Atlas Shrugged.' I don’t have the guts. If you associate with Randians—and I do—saying anything critical about Ayn Rand is almost as scary as saying anything critical to Ayn Rand. What’s more, given how protective Randians are of Rand, I’m not sure she’s dead."

--P. J. O'Rourke, on the film, "Atlas Shrugged," which is based on the book by objectivist Ayn Rand

Myth and Fact in Angels and Demons

Film critic Stephen Graydamus dispatches several of the numerous historical inaccuracies in Dan Brown's Angels & Demons:

The historical Illuminati was was not founded in the 1500s, and its membership did not include Copernicus, Galileo or Bernini, all of whom died long before the Illuminati existed (in Copernicus’s case, well over two centuries; in Bernini’s, nearly a century).

The Illuminati was an Enlightenment-era secret society. It was founded in the late eighteenth century, in 1776, the same year as the founding of the United States. Its members were politically minded freethinkers with no particular interest in science.

Although the Illuminati were not friendly toward religion, there were no “vows of revenge” against the Church for “crimes against scientists like Galileo and Copernicus.” On the contrary, one would be hard pressed to come up with any evidence of any ecclesiastical “crimes” committed against Copernicus, and while the Galileo affair is certainly a black mark on church history, his fate (lifelong house arrest) was not the sort of outrage that tends to inspire murderous vows of revenge centuries after the fact.

Copernicus was never at odds with Church authority. A cleric and bishop’s nephew, Copernicus published his six-volume work On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres at the urging of the Cardinal Archbishop of Capua, Nikolaus von Schönberg, and dedicated the work to Pope Paul III. Years earlier, Copernicus was invited to advise the Lateran Council, invoked by Leo X, regarding reworking the calendar, and his work informed the Church’s eventual reformation of the calendar. Although his writings proved controversial for a time after his death, the controversy centered on a few passages and isolated words.

Copernicus died at the age of 70, of a stroke. The claim that he was “murdered by the church for revealing scientific truths” is sheer fiction, even libel.

If the larger picture of the Catholic Church’s opposition to science and systematic persecuting scientists like Copernicus — the meta-narrative around which Angels & Demons is constructed — is almost completely without reality, it is also not a mere “product of the author’s imagination.” Just as The Da Vinci Code’s reading of history is drawn from sources like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Angels & Demons exploits a misconception with long roots in American anti-Catholicism: a kind of anti-Catholic master myth celebrated in books like Charles Chiniquy’s 1886 diatribe Fifty Years in the Church of Rome.

Chiniquy’s nineteeth-century polemic claims that Blaise Pascal as well as Copernicus was excommunicated, while Galileo was publicly flogged and sent to a dungeon. None of this is true (Pascal may have had heretical leanings, but never faced excommunication, while Galileo suffered nothing worse than house arrest, and was never flogged, tortured or imprisoned in a dungeon). Nevertheless, even today the picture of the Church systematically persecuting and executing scientists is popularly perceived as having some basis in history.

Read the rest here.

James Bowman Fires Back at David Brooks: Order and freedom in the Western movies of John Ford

James Bowman in an excellent post on why David Brooks is wrong to say that John Ford's movies are only about order and community:

In this movie ["My Darling Clementine"] as in others by Ford, particularly The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), we see both things: both the community and civilization that people, left in peace, will spontaneously create for themselves and the lone man with the gun, free and solitary, whom the community, often without knowing it, depends on to be left in peace. Without the one, there would not be the other.

Read the rest here.

He Was Legend: Charlton Heston, R.I.P.

I was discussing movies with a friend recently, and he told me the story of Lawrence Olivier's remark to Dustin Hoffman on "method acting" on the set of Marathon Man. Method acting is the idea that an actor should internalize the persona of the character he is playing in order the play that character more effectively. Marlon Brando is one of the most famous of the method actors, along with Al Pacino, Paul Newman, and Robert DeNiro. It originated at the Group Theatre in 1930s New York, and was furthered by Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in later decades.

Hoffman was supposed to play a character who was tired and worn out, so he stayed up all the previous night. When Hoffman explained to Olivier, his costar in the movie who had a distaste for method acting, why he was so exhausted, Olivier allegedly quipped, "Try acting sometime."

Charlton Heston, who died Sunday at the age of 83, tried acting sometime. He was definitely of an older school, and once said of method acting, "If you get tied up with your own psyche, digging into your own belly button, you may learn something about yourself, but I'm not convinced you're going to find significant creative truth about some other character."

Heston, like other classical actors, didn't rely on channeling the emotions of the character; instead, he mastered the craft of acting. If you want to see this on display with another actor of this more traditional school, pop in a DVD of the Ten Commandments some time, and watch the scenes in which Yul Brunner, another practitioner of the craft of acting, and Heston played opposite each other. This was true acting by men who had mastered their art. They didn't need to feel what their characters felt: they knew how to act.

In today's cinema, you see the product of the increasingly advanced technology, which can make up for an actor's weaknesses. Today's actor does not have to pay as much attention to where he is facing or how he moves in a scene. The camera and fx people can take care of that. Actors like Heston, trained classically on the stage, needed no special effects or inventive camera work to do the job for them. They made the scene all by themselves.

Heston thrived in a cinematic era tailor-made for the square-jawed, athletic actor: the age of the epic. Who else could play Moses and improve on him? (Moses stuttered) The movies Heston made could not be done today. Although of all the forms of media movies are the least prone to the postmodernist denial of the grand metanarratives (those box office receipts do have their allure), such movies as Heston is best known for are an endangered species: historical epics in which the hero fights for the Good--and wins. We still have epics today, but for some reason filmmakers feel constrained either to place them in a fantasy setting, or, if they attempt history, they seem to feel obligated to pollute it with ludicrous politically correct anachronisms. You get either the Lord of the Rings (for which, let me make clear, I am sincerely thankful), in which heroes live--in another world, or The Kingdom of Heaven, in which you get Orlando Bloom making a speech to the besieged residents of Jerusalem which sounds less like a rallying cry and more like Jimmy Carter's "malaise" speech.

There are exceptions to this generalization, the most remarkable of them being Gladiator, which, ironically, was produced by the same director as The Kingdom of God.

Ben Hur was probably Heston's best film, and was one of the best films of any era. I saw it again recently, and was struck by the power of every aspect of the film. I showed it for some of my students at our monthly "Classic Movie Theatre" at Highlands Latin School, and although it was long, there wasn't a student in the room (and I shouldn't need even to mention how tough a crowd modern students can be) who wasn't riveted by it.

He also became an unlikely star of the science fiction genre, playing the lead in one of the best science fiction films ever made: The Planet of the Apes. He also starred in Soylent Green and the Omega Man (based on the same book as was Will Smith's I am Legend), both of which are classics of the genre.

Heston was a conservative in a Hollywood dominated by the political left. In the 1980s, at the height of the scare over a "nuclear winter" (one in a long series of scares which includs global cooling, but the most recent example of which is global warming), Paul Newman took it upon himself to preach the nuclear winter gospel around the country. Heston hit the road to follow Newman, giving the other side at Newman's every stop. The controversy was consummated in a live television debate between Heston and Newman which turned out to be the most informative and articulate expression of both sides of the issue that had yet been seen.

Heston's death comes within a few weeks of that of his friend William F. Buckley. But is wasn't only their conservatism that united them. Heston read one of Buckley's columns on a matter of mutual interest: "Here I'd thought all along that it was your prose that impressed me," he told Buckley, in a letter that ran in the June 12, 1981 edition of Buckley's National Review Magazine, "or your magazine, or even your wry and disheveled urbanity." He continued:

Not so, I now perceive. Our bond is far deeper and more instinctual: we are Brothers in Peanut Butter. Think of the happy hours we can spend debating the merits of Skippy versus Deaf Smith County. When you add peanuts to commercial blends, should they be dry-roasted or salted? Does cashew butter count? ... Why do hotels laugh when you order peanut butter from room service? (Because they are knaves and fools, that's why. You must carry your own in a plastic container, Bill, surely you know that.) In any event, I see our relationship has entered a new dimension. I look forward to exploring it.

He was, in other words, in addition to being a famous actor, a normal person--a very extraordinary normal person. It says something about him that, in a Hollywood famous for its serial relationships, he was married to his wife Lydia for 64 years.

Heston narrated a popular recording of the New Testament. But he not only read it: he believed it. He was a confessing Christian, and now that he is dead, he has undoubtedly met Someone who looks more like God than he did.

"I am Legend": heroic and human

I saw Will Smith's "I am Legend" last weekend and it was not only a very frightening, but a very outstanding movie. While it has a very science fiction-oriented setting--a desolate, post-plague New York City, it is a very human movie: as much about how a man deals with loneliness, as with how he saves the human race.

Karnick on Culture has an excellent review here.

Spielbergia: What Steven Spielberg means to American culture

There is a fascinating article on the relevance of Steven Spielberg's movies to American Culture at The Virginia Quarterly Review.

Is There Such a Thing as the "American Way"?

In the recent "Superman Returns" movie, the mention of "the American Way" was apparently too politically incorrect to include in Superman's traditional formulation: "Truth, Justice, and the American Way". Instead, the best the editor of the Daily Planet (played by Frank Langela) could do was, "Truth, Justice, and all that other stuff."

When I posted this on another blog, it attracted at least two comments that voiced the skepticism only inherent in the newspaper editor's modified formula. The question those commenting seemed to be asking was, "Is there such a thing as the American Way worth mentioning in the first place?"

This seems to me a very important question, and one to which there is a definite answer.

Of course there is an "American Way", and of course it is worthy of mention. I would say furthermore, that, if there is not, we are all in deep trouble.

I think that the failure to see this is the result of a deep confusion in what a nation, or polity, is, and what our role as Christians is in it. It is a matter I think, of primary loyalty. The concept of a "primary loyalty" is one which few people can articulate, but all possess.

What is a "primary loyalty"? A primary loyalty is a commitment we must have to a thing, and it is a loyalty over which we have no choice and may not even be aware. It is not the result of any commitment we may have consciously made or that we can even escape from. It is something we are born to, in addition to being born into. There are various primary loyalties in our lives. Our family is one of them. If we are Christians, our membership in the covenant community of God is another. Another primary loyalty is that to our community.

When we are born into our family, we take on commitments and responsibilities from which we cannot escape. They are ours by virtue of condition over which we have no control. They are ours whether we wish to accept them or not. When we are told in the Ten Commandments, for example, that we are to honor our father and our mother, we cannot escape the responsibilities of this command by saying that we had no input into who our father and mother were.

Likewise, when we are born into the Church, and are given the sign and seal of this membership in infancy (Baptism), we are shouldered with commitments that are ours regardless of our acceptance of this later in life.

I submit that citizenship is the same kind of primary loyalty as these. If I decide to go 70 mph in a 35 mph zone, and the nice highway patrolman takes me aside and asks why I was going too fast, I cannot say to him that, yes, I saw the sign, but that I had no choice in having been born into a society that sees the limitation of speed as important. I cannot say, "I never committed to following the law, and am therefore not culpable for complying with it."

I can't say that I simply disagree with the laws or with the Constitution or with the current political leadership and expect to be free of the responsibilities that are mine by virtue of my natural citizenship. There are commitments that are mine simply by virtue of my being born into them. There is civil authority (ordained by God, if Paul is an authority on the matter, which he is) that I come under, whether I like it or not.

G. K. Chesterton, in his book, Orthodoxy, takes this point a bit further, and points to another primary loyalty: that to the universe itself--to reality. And he uses the idea of citizenship as the very analog to this:

If a man came to this world from some other world in full possession of his powers he might discuss whether the advantage of midsummer woods made up for the disadvantage of mad dogs, just as a man looking for lodgings might balance the presence of a telephone against the absence of a sea view. But no man is in that position. A man belongs to this world before he begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it ... To put shortly what seems the essential matter, he has a loyalty long before he has any admiration.

...My acceptance of the universe is not optimism, it is more like patriotism. It is a matter of primary loyalty.

The feeling I sense in the comments to the post I mentioned before, in which the American Way (let's take the double quotations off of that phrase so that we do not demean it) is somehow implicated in the fact that there are things about our country that are very obviously wrong. There are things that we do not want to endorse when we confess our commitment to an American Way.

If we say that we are for the American Way, are we not making ourselves complicit in all of the wrongs of our country? Well, we could ask a similar question: If we say that we are committed to our family, are we not making ourselves complicit in all of the wrongs of our family?

Aren't the answers to these two questions the same? I think they clearly are. The answer is, "Of course not." Chesterton says that we can say, "My country, right or wrong," as long as we can say it in the same sense as we might say, "My mother, drunk or sober." There is a primary commitment involved in both cases, one we cannot escape.

Chesterton again:

The world is not a lodging-house in Brighton, which we are to leave because it is miserable. It is the fortress of our family, with the flag flying on the turret, and the more miserable it is the less we should leave it. The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more.

Is this not also true of our country? We love these things--our family, our country, God--Chesterton would add reality--"with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason."

"Men did not love Rome because she was great," he says, "She was great because they had loved her."

If we cannot say this about America, then I think we are in a pitiable state. We have repudiated a primary loyalty. We can repudiate it, but we cannot escape it.

This being the case, what is the American Way? I submit that it is the same thing as Russell Kirk refers to as the "American Cause" (I use the double quotes here only to introduce the phrase, not to demean it). There are, like there are with all things to which we have a primary loyalty, ideal characteristics.

In the case of the American Cause, there are three elements or assumptions: a moral, a political, and an economic. The moral assumptions involve the Christian view of the nature of man and the proper view of the relation between church and state. The political assumptions are those which involve the concept of ordered liberty, which is based on the Christian view of man--primarily that he has inherent dignity and that he labors under original sin. The economic assumptions are those, again, which involve the Christian view of man, and imply a belief in economic freedom, which is based on this view of man.

The American Way, which is made up of those things to which we, as Americans, owe a primary loyalty, are ideals. The reality, to which we look to see how we measure up to them, do not affect or qualify them. In fact, if we do not have an ideal to which we expect our nation's action to live up to, then we have undermined our ability to criticize its actions at all, since we have not standard by which to criticize it.

Russell Kirk's book, the American Cause, is the best explanation of this that I know. I highly recommend it.

Superman vs. Jesus Christ

I am sitting here in my office, the door blocked by formidible stacks of books, beating back repeated assaults from two young boys who are demanding that I take them to see the new "Superman" movie.

As I sit here, occasionally taking nourishment from food and coffee passed to me through small holes in my defensive fortifications from my sympathetic wife, I am pondering a recent post on The Acton Institute’s website by Jordan Ballor about the tendency on the part of Christians to see Christian symbolism in the most mundane of cultural artifacts.

The operative statement in Ballor’s piece is this: “The comic figure of Superman may indeed point us to Christ. Many Christian commentators are right in recognizing this. But if we do truly see Christ through Superman, it is by contrast and not by similarity.”

His argument is that the character of Superman in the movie has more to do with Nietzsche’s “ubermensch” than the Christ of the gospels. The Christ of the gospels, he argues, “embodies mercy, weakness, and suffering.” He “humbled himself and became obedient to death…”

Well, yes, if the story stopped at crucifixion, then that would be a complete picture of Christ. But there are a few things that happened after this that really shouldn’t be ignored; namely, his Resurrection and Glorification–and his installation at the right hand of God Himself. We can’t simply limit our view of Christ solely to the role he undertook in his 33 year mission on Earth.

He was “made a little lower than the angels”, but He doesn’t remain that way.

The main point Ballor sets out to make is that we have a tendency to overstate the significance of the typological similarities of the characters in movies and books. And why not? It gets us out of the problem of being more discriminating in what we watch and read if we can simply attribute some sort of Christian significance to it.

Just look at the popularity of Mel Gibson’s "Braveheart" among Christian ministers as a type of the Christian leader. There’s a lot of discussion of his leadership qualities, but little remark on his little brush with fornication in the movie. That’s not to say that I don’t like "Braveheart" or that I see don’t recognize the Christian symbolism in it. My point (and this is where I agree with Ballor) is that this tendency has turned into an unthoughtful reflex action rather than a critical aesthetic confrontation with the work of art.

Witness the books that play off of this tendency in evangelicals, such as “Walking with Frodo: A Devotional Journey through the Lord of the Rings.” Say whut?

Look, I like the "Lord of the Rings". I think it is one of the greatest Christian books of all time. But a devotional? This kind of treatment just demeans the work itself–just as the silly repackagings of the Bible demean the Holy Scriptures.

Part of this, of course, is due the increasingly trivial and opportunistic Christian publishing industry, which tries to milk every evangelical trend for every dollar it can squeeze from it. (Do you have your “Prayer of Jabez Daytimer for Teens” yet?) And if it can do this by being parasitical on the broader secular culture, all the better. It does save us from the trouble of actually enriching the culture ourselves.

I agree with Ballor’s main point, but not the reasons he gives in support of it. There is very obviously typology in movies like "Superman Returns" that evidences Christ–through similarity as well as contrast.

I haven’t seen “Superman Returns.” But my ramparts will be breached in time, and I will be dragged from my redoubt, forced into a well-cushioned stadium theatre seat, and made to ingest mass quantities of buttered popcorn and Cherry Coke. Once thus installed, I will be able to offer informed commentary on the movie itself.

But there has to be some responsible way for Christians to recognize in a work of art the symbolism that follows necessarily on the fact that all nature bespeaks a Creator without getting silly about it.

See Quiddity for responses to this article by Jordan Ballor of the Acton Institute and others.