Male Violence, the End of Empire and 'Lawrence of Arabia'

I'm seeing David Lean's 'Lawrence of Arabia' tonight at the Carolina Theatre in Durham.  Again.  I've been fortunate to see it in 70mm (if you don't know what 70mm is, let's just say that it's what movies used to look like when you were a kid - HUGE and CLEAR and EPIC; and it's a format that's very rarely used these days).  This film is approaching fifty years old, but the last time I saw it - a year ago - it seemed so sure of itself and its themes so universal that it could have been made anytime.

Most of us who know it from TV screenings on wet Saturday afternoons, or because our grandparents told us about it may too easily disregard it; seeming like an artefact from the pre-CGI, pre-Tarantino, pre-indie witticism past.  But if what is past is prologue, then this film - about war, and the effects of war on those who try to make it happen - may demand our attention.

This is a film that evokes the end of the British Empire, and therefore the potential end of the concept of Empire itself; even though it's set during the first world war, it was made in 1962, by which time the notion of one monarch somehow ruling the world was fading into memory, and post-colonial theorists were beginning to make the case that Empire was a bad idea to start with.  The place where I was born and raised was about to take on the mantle of the last vestige of this Empire, and some of its people were about to take a leaf out of the revolutionary playbook that had been put to such awful use in places like Algeria, while tragically ignoring, avoiding or de-emphasising the tactics of the non-violent revolutionaries of India and the US Civil Rights Movement.  Turns out that those who wanted to hold onto Empire, and those who wanted to overthrow it were both wrong.

Killing people to prove that injustice is wrong may be the most contradictory paradox.  To keep Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom, the government turned it into something like a security state; to make Ireland free, Irish people killed other Irish people; to keep Ulster British, British people killed other British people.  For decades.  And then we came inexorably to the conclusion that Empire (or an Independent Ireland) didn't matter as much as ensuring that every citizen has a stake in the governance of the society; that equality of opportunity should be enshrined in law; and that the only way to bring a violent conflict to an end is for someone to stop shooting first.

'Lawrence of Arabia' may have stirred a kind of nostalgic patriotism among British audiences in the 1960s - it is, on the surface after all, largely about how an English soldier helped Arabs defeat the Turkish army.  But it's much more subtle than a simple flag-waving exercise - its examination of Lawrence's psyche is deeply subversive in that it admits something that popular war movies tend to ignore: that killing can be addictive.  It foreshadows the recent amazing film 'The Hurt Locker' in Lawrence's admission that he 'enjoyed it' when called upon to execute a misbehaving nomad - but it actually goes further, in that it's clear that while he enjoyed it, he doesn't enjoy the fact that he enjoyed it.

He's deeply troubled, and at the end of the war is no longer the integrated, Noel Coward-esque wit we saw at the beginning.  Lawrence has 'a funny sense of fun' - and David Lean had a very sharp sense of the brutalisation that so many men embrace in order to feel alive, and how we have mislaid other rituals that used to pronounce and even convey adulthood.  The most well known line in the film is probably 'Nothing is written' - Lawrence's refusal to endorse the fatalism of pre-rational ways of doing religion; the human being is supposed to act on history, not be swept away by it.  I don't watch 'Lawrence of Arabia' to be thrilled by the violence or excited by the military 'victories' - they didn't last; and they certainly didn't produce a lasting peace in the Middle East; geo-politics is still dealing with the legacy of how Britain and what became Saudi Arabia tangoed a hundred years ago.  I watch it because, apart from the fact that it moves with grace and notes and a propulsive narrative, and imagery that has never been repeated, it tells the story of a man who faced a crisis, made a choice, and changed the world.  His was dangerous change.  I need to be reminded that I am subject to the male addiction to transformation through outer violence; because if I don't find a way to transform that violence into something that neither seeks to wound nor colonise others into my own little Empire of Self, my life will be dynamite, and not in a good way.

I'm Going to Minnesota - Wanna Come With Me?

After spending 40 minutes trying to get a travel agent aggregator to tell me the truth about flight prices (which amazingly seem to change just as I try to reserve them; I won't name the site except to say that you need one to get down river) , I've just booked my travel to Christianity 21 in Minnesota next month.  In case you don't know, this promises to be a fascinating event, hosted by my friends Tony Jones and Doug Pagitt, with the purpose of exploring some of the questions arising at the intersection of faith and culture.  21 presenters will have 21 minutes each to ask these questions; and a collapsed hierarchy with boundaries erased between speakers and participants who are invited to talk with and not above or at each other.  I'm genuinely excited to be going, to see old friends, and spend a couple of days thinking in conversation with some really interesting people - the most obvious innovation of this gathering is the fact that all the speakers are women, but it's not - as these speaker lineups usually imply -  a conference aimed at a female audience. This must be one of very few events run on similar grounds, anywhere in the world, if not entirely unique.  The very fact that the event is happening may turn out to be its most significant contribution; the fact that the organisers have not made a big deal about the huge sociological and ecclesial significance of the event is part of the reason why I think it's so important.  It almost doesn't matter what actually gets said at the event - I think Christianity 21 may turn out to be a prophetic statement about the nature of being human, historic gender (and other) inequalities; the fact that I expect there will be some real substance to the conversations is more than enough reason to get to Edina, Minnesota in a little over two weeks' time, if you're able.   Would love to see any readers of God is not Elsewhere there - let me know if you're going.

From Chesterton

A friend emailed this: "Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache." -G.K. Chesterton.

Not sure if this is a thumbs-up for the blog or a suggestion that I'm over-sharing...but oddly comforting nonetheless.

Judgement Day, Part 2

[Read Part 1 here] A caveat: I think it's probably impossible to say anything accurate about God.  The word is too small to evoke anything but the flimsiest similes. So we must always interpret what any of us says about God with eyes that know that the most we can see are only shadows dancing on a wall.  They may be good shadows, and the wall may come close to reflecting reality; but they are still only shadows of the truth.

A second caveat: Even though the preceding caveat indicates the impossibility of talking about God, we're caught in a paradox.  Because even though we can't do it, we must.  Life requires interpretation.  And the earth is too big for us not to ask questions about it.  For me, those questions depend on enlarging my vision.  I grew up religious, and I still want to be.  So talking about God is utterly necessary, no matter what the word itself may come to mean.

And so, to Judgement Day, Part 2

Many people raised in Christian circles grew up with an image of God that owes more to the Golem myth or the monsters in Grimm Fairy Tales. (For a postmodern twist, see the last sequence of ‘Inglourious Basterds’ for a vision of God-as-terror that leaves the audience in no doubt who’s in control. It’s horrifying.) The God who-is-love, who is supposed to bathe us in light, who is supposed to be a tender parent, who in the gorgeous phrase ‘knit us together’ seemed to have an evil twin, which, on the one hand, creates a certain confusion among his followers (this God is always male) and is reduced to being nothing more than an antecedent of Austin Powers, with a nice hairy side, and a horrifying nasty genius shadow.

For me, growing up, I knew two kinds of Christians – the first were the kindly ones who baked and prayed a lot, like my grandmother, who exuded grace, tolerance, generosity and welcome. She didn’t seem to think of herself as a bolted-down individual in the same way contemporary culture would have it, in the sense of being an island with a castle whose ramparts would be built higher at the drop of any economic excuse; she had responsibilities to her community, she’d been through a world war, married to a man who fought in it, and lived to serve and give to others. The other kind of Christian, who did their fair share of giving and serving, but they were also the serious kind, the self-consciously “committed” kind, who read their bibles and tried to convince others that they were going to hell if they didn’t accept Jesus. The way to accept Jesus was through a formulaic prayer, preferably said out loud in the presence of another. The way to live for Jesus was to read your bible and pray, and go to worship services, and not swear or smoke, and pretend to yourself that you didn’t have sexual fantasies, and try to convince others to do the same (and that’s before we talk about the cultural and socio-political dimensions of what it means to be a religious person in a society where religion and ethnicity are closely tied. That’s for another day.)

We were told that God loved us; that the arms of Jesus were always open to embracing us, that nothing happened in our lives regarding which God wasn’t already ahead of the game. So, whether we needed to find a parking space or to be healed from cancer, God knew about it, and might even do something, if we pleaded enough. A lifetime of such pleading would produce what they call ‘character’. ‘Healings’ would be rejoiced in; non-healings led to confusion and disappointment. Every few years, stirrings of a revival would occur; and we’d get excited by the hope that the task of saving Ireland would be taken out of our hands as tens of thousands of people spontaneously turned up at the door wanting to be Christians. Of course, it never happened; and we rarely admitted it. At the end of this character-building, miraculous life of denial, you would die, of course. And then the fun really starts. Depending on your understanding of quantum metaphysics, you’d either immediately transfigure upwards, or wait a few aeons until the end of time, at which point Judgement Day would take place. Billions of human beings would stand naked before the throne of God, as images from each of their lives flashed by on a giant video screen, a meta-level tut-tut-tut and wagging finger of admonition waved in your face before you were begrudgingly let into heaven, assuming you had paid mental assent to the right theological formula in that prayer so long ago, or thrown into an ever-burning molten lake, where you would be tortured without end.

Thoughts?

Well, let’s try this: it should be self-evident that the two images of God – devoted and tender parent, and pyromaniac monster are incompatible with each other. Unless God is insane.

People will, I am sure, want to argue about the theological content of that statement; and I’m very happy to have a conversation on this blog about that. But it’s not my priority – I want to say something, not about God (which, as I've noted, is a concept I find it very difficult to talk about), but about the images of God that constitute so much of our subjective experience of the divine, or of what we call the divine.

It's well known that Carl Jung once had a dream in which he saw God taking a massive cosmic dump on a village church, which only moments before had been basking in dappled sunlight on an orchard of a day. The church exploded; and Jung was able to find a way to see and express spirituality as an inextricable part of what makes a whole human life. It changed our understanding of psychology. It changed our understanding of theology. But, at least where I was being formed, Carl’s boat didn’t seem to make its way across the Irish Sea. And, for much of my life, I lived in fear of a God who would one day humiliate me in front of the whole human race. A God who would treat me in ways that I would never treat a friend, or my own children; in ways that no sane person would treat anyone they loved.

Where does this lead me? A few hypotheses.

Any father who would wish to expose his children’s mistakes in public, without a willingness to acknowledge his own errors or the times he did not prevent harm coming to those children is, at best, in need of psychological intervention.

The God who appears in our fantasies of Judgement(alism) Day is not worthy of the name. The God who appears in these fantasies is a projection of our own shadow; when we imagine God telling us what we did wrong, and that we can get into heaven anyway, we are ceding responsibility for our lives, and betting on a finger-crossing theological formula to get us through our fear of death.

There is no such thing as Judgement(alism) Day.  The concept is a psychological projection rooted in childhood trauma, fear of authority figures, and the struggle to take responsibility for our own lives. We need to get over it. I think that’s what God would want.

The Exodus of Henry Gibson

You know Henry Gibson.  He's one of those character actors who beefed up everything he was in, and indelibly so.  Fully worthy of Jett's appellation 'an OTG actor' (no matter how bad the movie, when he's on screen, your reflex is to say 'Oh Thank God').   You can't imagine 'Magnolia' without his Luciferian bar-loiterer Thurston Howell, stirring William H Macy to humiliate himself with his unrequited love Brad (evoking the sinister sliminess of Richard Burton in 'The Medusa Touch', Gibson here seemed to invest his voice with supernatural powers); 'The Blues Brothers' would be poorer (and the climactic, ridiculous chase sequence much less funny) without his absurd white supremacist; and, despite 'Nashville's status as a fully ensembled ensemble, it is his character, Haven Hamilton, who sings the overture and facilitates the coda.

He helped anchor work as various and memorable as 'The Long Goodbye' (which Elliott Gould told us recently may have a sequel on the way), and Joe Dante's wonderful homage to 50s kitsch sci-fi 'Innerspace'.  And who else played two different guest roles on both 'The Fall Guy' and 'MacGuyver'  (with character names like Meriwell Cooper, Milton Bach, and my personal favourite, Pinky Burnette; not to mention Reilly O'Reilly (you heard that right) in something called 'The Luck of the Irish.  To be sure.)  He also made it into 'The Littlest Hobo', which happens to have been my favourite show when I was eight years old.  In one of those eyebrow raising coincidences that actors of his generation seem to carry in their pockets, he got his stage name from Jon Voigt, an old roommate, who, along with others who have spoken to the press since his death on Monday, seems to have shared the view that he was one of the kindest men they knew; and, yes, it was a deliberate attempt to evoke the name of the author of 'A Doll's House'.

But I'll remember him most for 'Magnolia', in the dark velvet smoking jacket, sneering at all-comers, laying down the gauntlet to the universe, saying No to grace.  He clearly hasn't seen the weather forecast.  'Magnolia', of course, is soaked with references to the numbers '2' and '8', indicating the 8th chapter, 2nd verse of the book of Exodus (in case you haven't been doing scripture memorisation lately, that's a sentence about the potential for certain amphibious creatures to interrupt your day, make you look, and maybe even wise, up).  If memory serves, the introduction to the published shooting script for 'Magnolia' has Paul Thomas Anderson saying that he got the biblical reference from Henry Gibson, meaning that he had much more of a hand in that movie than simply sitting devilish and asking for another drink.

'It is a dangerous thing to confuse children with angels', says Thurston Howell, egging Macy's Quiz Kid Donnie Smith to shred a little bit more of his ego; 'It's not', says Donnie later, throwing up his embarrassment, not knowing that tonight will be a turning point toward his own redemption, and perhaps the end of his loneliness.  It is, however, a dangerous thing to confuse Henry Gibson with nothing more than a thesp-for-hire.  You can't imagine anyone else playing his roles.  Rest in Peace.