Cinema
Does Evangelicalism Deny Metaphor?
Daniel Radosh said the following in his recent piece “The Red Hot Christian Blockbuster“:
But in making evangelism—and acceptability to the most insular Christian audiences—a priority, Christianese films all but guarantee artistic failure. Art demands an honesty that the evangelical bubble would find intolerable. (Emphasis mine)
This is something that I have been thinking about as I work on my paper discussing the influence of the Oxford Movement on Gerard Manley Hopkins‘ poetry (if that last phrase made no sense to you, just keep reading, because it doesn’t quite make sense to me yet either, that’s why I am writing a paper on it). Anyway, this thought has kept popping up in my mind:
Does evangelicalism deny metaphor?
At the center of Art is the Metaphor: Symbol, Signifier, Signified. In Christianity this is called sacrament. In denying the sacramental nature of life, living, and worship, does evangelicalism deny itself art. I think this is the root cause of contemporary evangelical music, movies, and fiction being B-grade at best: metaphor is denied, therefore art is denied. Those who invoke the metaphor, and therefor enter the mode of art, are being truly honest in using symbols. Most evangelicals think truth is declared in the denial of signifier and symbol, that if metaphor does not exist only the literal is left. This is untrue. Only the opposite is truly honest, truly art: if there is only literal there is no art and no honesty.
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My Recent Media Excursions
While I was on vacation in Vermont I became addicted to “Deadliest Catch.”
The new Coldplay album, Viva La Viva Or Death And All His Friends, is fantastic, I think their best yet.
Ladron Que Roba a Ladron is an excellent, and curiously made movie—an American movie in Spanish about Latinos and immigrants. With a good dose of Oceans 11. Rent it!
I just listened to Stephen Colbert’s I am America and So Can You. I had to try hard to not disrupt my cubicle budies with riotous laughter. Audiobooks are a great way to recover work/life balance while at work.
That reminds me, I need to start listening to Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver right now.
All Finished With the Best Picture Nominees
I have finally viewed all of the Academy Award Nominees for Best Picture from last year. Do I agree with the selection of No Country for Old Men?
Yes, when considering the type of film the Academy and critics favor. After all the film theory, studies, viewing I have been doing this year I have to say that No Country for Old Men was best in the traditional cinematic sense of authorship, cinematography, and metaphorical layering of meaning (also known as auteur theory, mis-en-scene, and operatic meaning—do we need all this film jargon?). No Country for Old Men was a narrative with a meta-narrative that finally eclipsed it in the final scene, as the torch of the father leads the old sheriff into Hades as Helena and others have done in myths before. The film mythologized the contemporary, and this was what made it so great. We are left feeling the continual fragmentation of the world of the 1980s in the film, as we look for Old Men to guide us into the unknown.
The other four films, generally speaking, dealt with contemporary issues via the past or present. I liked Juno the best out of these movies, entertainment wise, and I think Juno is a possible Best Picture candidate because it ushers in a new generation of “independent” film making and comedy, as seen in other movies like 40 Year Old Virgin, Waitress, and Knocked Up. The morality tale as comedy is a way of film making that is being revived and in one sense is Shakespearian.
Atonement was all about the ending, or was it an ending? Atonement was a film that surprised in unexpected ways. The post-modern dilemma of film, story, and “reality” unfolds over time, and “reality” is seen as eroding gradually from both directions. The horror of war erodes the future from the past/present, and the horror of sin and guilt erodes the past from the future/present. In many ways, Michael Clayton functioned in the same way, as fact/fiction or truth/lies were interwoven into a story that presents itself as a drive toward an atonement of compliance with the forces of corporate America and un-hindered capitalism.
There Will Be Blood was a peculiar film. It felt like Citizen Kane. The ending is haunting, frustrating, perplexing, and beautiful. The final words and actions, daresay the whole life, of Daniel Plainview are the antithesis of the Christian story. His actions are an anti-atonement: a taking of blood that is not sacrificial but monster-like. He is a modern day Grendel.
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This work by Thomas T Turner II is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
