What We Talk About When We Talk About Sex

My friend Will Crawley has a story about a BBC investigation into pornography profits; his particular angle is the role that the Christian Brothers Investment Services, one of the biggest investors of official 'Catholic money' in the world, plays in bolstering the porn industry.  Apparently the guidelines for investment are easily made flexible - and so the CBIS apparently has a hefty wad of cash wrapped up in the production of money shots. According to Will: "A spokesperson for CBIS told the BBC Hardcore Profits programme that they aim to influence the moral direction of companies in which they have investments. He also suggested that their policy is a common sense response to the world we live in: any Catholic who believes its right to completely withdraw from any company making any profits from pornography would have to switch off their internet supply, avoid most of the world's hotels, and stop watching television."

The spokesman makes a reasonable point; but the world of 'ethical' investing is always subject to this kind of parsing.  Will once reminded me that there's only one answer to the 'Well, where would you draw the line?' when it's posed as a means to doing nothing, a kind of 'Via Apathy'.  The answer, of course, is 'SOMEWHERE'.  Nothing is done perfectly; but it must be done.

More after the fold

I recall that the Presbyterian Church in Ireland used to define its ethical investment policy as keeping its funds out of alcohol, tobacco, and gambling; but it was ok to have shares in missiles.  Pressure from, among others, my friend journalist Mark McCleary helped encourage them to withdraw the blood money, and a new line was drawn.  It will need to be drawn again, and again; as more information emerges  and our understanding of economics and justice develops.  But at least they're trying to draw it somewhere.

I'm not sure where the line should be in the CBIS story; here's an attempt.

1: It makes sense to strive for ethical investment policies to be comprehensive.  I'm not particularly troubled by whether or not a church invests in alcohol, and tobacco used to be ok to me, partly because of Wendell Berry (although I'm fast becoming an annoying former smoking evangelist; the odd decent cigar aside); but gambling is self-evidently a trap that the rich can play with while mostly insulated from its sorrows, while the million-to-one lottery winners become idealised scapegoats on which the poor can project fantasies of escape that lead, in the cases of the rest of the million, to perpetuated poverty.   So I'm with the PCI two-thirds of the way; and while not investing in alcohol seems a bit strange, given Jesus' early role as a wine merchant, I understand the cultural and socio-economic reasons for divestment.

2: As for porn and weapons, well...It seems to me that there's at least as clear a case for churches refusing to invest in militarism and the 'defence' industry as in pornography.  I have a friend whose job used to be to design computer guidance technology that would help direct missiles toward their targets; he left that job to become a pastor, thank God.  My view is that a philosophy that values human life - whether of the religious or secular kind inexorably leads to non-participation in the mechanisms of war; because we take life so seriously that it prevents us from playing a part in its destruction by building weapons.

(This does not mean that I believe a religious or secular humanist should under no circumstances join the armed forces; I haven't come to a full conclusion about this yet; but Logan Laituri's thoughtful post 'Prepared to Die, But Not to Kill' raises the issues far better than I could.)   Now an argument for pacifism, or neo-pacifism, is made elsewhere on this blog; for now, I guess it just seems that the damage done by explosions is pretty objectively measurable; while porn is just something we're supposed to be disgusted at for nebulous reasons that, it seems to me, are more complex than the friendly mavens of either conservatism or hedonism would like.

3: One of my best friends used to direct porn movies.  It was a job; and I have no idea what he felt about it, as I've never asked.  But his example is merely one part of a multi-faceted web of supply and demand involving the - presumably universal - desire for the eroticised human body.  Sure, I'm aware of the arguments about the exploitation inherent to porn - and I'll take them further; it's not just the participants who may be allowing some of their souls to leak - but we, the viewers, might be giving something of our own dignity away when we watch.  Deeper than all of this, however, is the central point I wish to make: There's a reason religious institutions are preoccupied with pornography; and it's the fact that religious institutions are often, quite simply obsessed with sexuality.  In that sense, the fact that some of us often get worked up about pornography is a good thing: at least we're talking about sex.

Well, of course, we're not really talking about sex; we're making assumptions about the human body, about there being constitutional differences between religious adherents and other people, about women and men, about what is right and wrong.  Some of these assumptions make a lot of sense to me - but not for traditionally conservative moral reasons.  It makes sense to me that human beings are made for something more than self-gratification; it makes sense to me that we are not here to be exploited by each other, nor are we made for objectification.  Religious institutions not investing in pornography thus makes a lot of sense.

The problem is that the detachment from the body that seems inherent in religious discourse about pornography means that we're talking about something more than (or other than) porn when we talk about porn.  John Ashcroft's notorious covering up of nude Greek statues in the Department of Justice HQ, Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, my own recent Costa Rican beach epiphany can all be gathered up by the same Puritanical net - with Ashcroft seen as a hero for the cause of what it means to be moral, Jackson as a cultural whore (not my words), and me as a kind of weird half-man, half-alien, who needs to be naked in the Pacific Ocean under a starkly moonlit sky to find himself.  The paradox here arises when it becomes clear that religious institutions and individuals have sometimes been pretty holistic in their approach to sex and the body - images on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the conversion declaration of St Francis of Assisi, the Metaphysical poets, and more recently the writings of people like Mike Riddell and Stuart Davis.  But it's rare today for a religious leader to publicly affirm sexuality in all its earthiness and wonder, messiness and delight; it's easier to talk about what we want to stop, the fear of libidinous floodgates opening to unleash meta-level bodily fluids to sweep us all to a red light district hell from which no good can come.  The irony, as far as I can see, is the fact that the sexual repression that characterises so much religious discourse and experience is already a kind of hell; just as much as the places where sexuality is but a commodity in games of pleasure and economic necessity alike.

What I mean is this: when religious institutions talk about the evils of pornography, but hide the rest of what might be said about sexuality under a bushel, what they're usually talking about is at least partly fear of the human body.  Pornography is problematic, to be sure.  But that's not the point.  Sexuality and the body can no more be divorced than my sense of humour and the rest of my personality.  The 'porn part' of sexuality may well be the shadow side; but for a shadow to exist, there must be a source of light.  It's the body and sexuality as sources of light that I wish religious institutions would invest in.

Conversation as Violence/Conversation as Love

I’m grateful to Glenn Kenny and David Poland for their very human, very humble interaction over at The Auteurs film website (read the comments under Glenn's main article from the 4th September), reflecting on the negativity that propels so much of what passes for mature conversation about movies (or indeed, about anything) on the blogosphere.   I trust that it is not inappropriate for me to write something in response; if it is inappropriate, I hope that the desire to advance the good will remit the sin of presumptuousness.  Observing the conversation has had the effect of waking me up to some thoughts that had been stirring for a while, and now seem undeniable. Now, I’m not much for reading blogs. My other vocational commitments require too much attention; and I'm very easily captivated by the temptation to gossip, or to read it, and thereby overcome my plans for any given day. I’ve been allowing the view to permeate that my laptop should be used sparingly; at the risk of sounding like Jan Rubes’ Amish patriarch in ‘Witness’, for me, recently, it doesn’t belong at the dinner table, it doesn’t belong in the bedroom, and there’s a difference between work (an activity that has, to be sure, spiritual contours) and play, (spiritual, too, but not the same thing as reading other people’s commented skirmishes). So I'm choosy about which blogs I read; this is why I don’t usually know who is fighting with whom, or who has just been arrested for what, or what the 'right' thing to think about whatever happens to be.

I want to make a (hopefully) humble declaration of intent - in this case, focused on film criticism, but I mean it to apply generally to how we talk to each other.

Continue reading this post at The Film Talk, where it's entitled 'Film Criticism as Violence/Film Criticism as Love'; but it's really about all kinds of conversation.

A Non-Dogmatic Declaration of Intent (Part 1)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKkBEOOzIjk] In light of the three recent posts on ‘2001’ at The Film Talk – in which I reflected on how and why I love this movie; we had the pleasure of interviewing the man-ape himself, Mr Dan Richter, and most recently Jett told us about a kind of High School Musical version of the opening titles – listener Kyle Meyers wrote to us to explore our thoughts further, asking if we agree/disagree with some comments from Michael Roberts at The Auteurs, which makes an eloquent case for the movie as an atheist tract.

Well, for a film as complex and transcendent as ‘2001’, ‘agree/disagree’ must be a trick question.  I’ll say this: we know that Kubrick tended not to publicly interpret his films, even saying that he wouldn’t contradict a viewer’s perceptions even if they differed from his own intentions; so we’re not going to find a meta-interpretation from the Creator, this side of the Stargate at least.  And, even if we could, I’d suggest that the search for one Ultimate Meaning in a film is not the richest way to approach it.  What purpose is served by me ‘proving’ myself ‘right’, and you ‘wrong’ if what you get out of the film serves you already?  Why would I want to tell you that you’re misguided if ‘Mr Holland’s Opus’ makes you want to be kinder to people?   (To the person with whom I had that very conversation, I apologise.  I think I’m growing up.  I hope.)  This does not mean that I won’t advocate for certain films being rich and beautiful experiences; it just means I have reached a turning point where I realise that I have zero interest in competing with other people’s opinions.  I’d much rather participate in a conversation that allows for a variety of interpretations to enhance each other.  So, please, tell me why you love ‘Transformers 2’ or ‘The Headless Woman’, or ‘GI Joe’ or ‘Goodbye Solo’.  I’m genuinely interested.  I’d like to tell you what I thought too.  But I’m not interested in proving you wrong.

This is important to me – I love films, some more than others.  Some people I love happen to enjoy some of the same films, some more than others.  Some people really dislike some of the films that I love.  There are ways of talking about this that serve the purposes of better human relationships, and ways that push us apart.  The opening titles of ‘The Film Talk’ have me saying ‘I could never love anyone who didn’t love ‘Field of Dreams’’; this is mostly a joke, and a hyperbolic way of underlining my admiration for a much-maligned movie; one that I happen to think is both profoundly true on an emotional level, and one of the most elegantly told linear narrative stories in recent US American cinema.  But of course I don’t mean that I could never love anyone who didn’t love it.  Invert that statement, and you might be closer to the truth – it’s easier to relate to people who share common interests; and so if you like some of the same movies I do, or perhaps you like movies in the same way I do, it might mean we’re more likely to be friends.

But I suspect this should not be so.  I declare it only as a confession of my own human weakness: I am as superficial and fickle as any of us; I’m a work in progress, and it will serve me better to try to remain open to whatever nurtures the common good.  Disdaining someone because her favourite movie is ‘Crank’, or because all he likes to do on a wet Saturday is to indulge in the collected oeuvre of the makers of what Cahiers du Cinema might call ‘les flics des chicks’?  Does that make my life more whole?  Does it grant more light in the world?  Does my indulgence in snark give me anything other than a sensation, to quote the late Northern Irish politician David Ervine’s reference to sectarianism, not unlike urine down the inside leg – a warm glow that turns bitter pretty soon?

If these rhetorical questions sound patrician, I beg your indulgence; I’m not trying to impose my opinions on anyone.

In fact, that’s the point.

I’m tired of snark in film criticism; tired of attempts at monopolizing the conversation; tired of skirmishes whose purpose appears to derive more from a desire to be seen as ‘superior’ than to express what is, for me, the highest experience of art: to reflect us back to ourselves, and offer, as Professor Levy says in the coda to ‘Crimes and Misdeameanors’, the courage ‘to keep trying, and even to find joy from simple things, like … family, their work, and their hope that future generations might understand more’.

Next week, I'll post my own faltering attempt at a theory of how my approach to films (and life generally, or at least how I communicate about life) is radically changing.

Woodstock: 'The biggest hassle is dealing with politics'

In preparation for the release of Ang Lee's 'Taking Woodstock', which Jett and I discuss on Episode 86,  I watched Michael Wadleigh's director's cut of the original documentary (a gorgeous, filled-to-the-brim Blu-Ray) - a telling experience, given that it's so full of the evocation of an era gone by that we're all supposed to want to live in.  Some immediate reactions followed by a question or two:

The film really takes its time to get ready; the split screens give a sense of the fantastic madness of the endeavour, what immense planning has gone into it, and how enormous the scope of the event was when it actually happened.

'There has to be some way of stopping the influx of humanity' - Bill Graham's considered opinion of how to keep the show business-friendly.

'It's about what's happening now' - the succinct thoughts of someone who typically says 'man' at the end (and/or beginning) of every sentence.

'I want to know why the fascist pigs have been seeding the clouds' - concertgoer disappointed that the CIA or somesuch have made it rain.

'Helen Savage please call your father at the Motel Glory in Woodridge' - either an indication of just how community-oriented this festival was, or proof to conspiracy theorists that coded messages were being sent from the stage to J Edgar Hoover.

'The brown acid is not specifically too good' - a lovely understated piece of pharmaceutical advice.

When the concert finally starts, the most obvious thing is how enormous Richie Havens' hands are; he's not precious about asking for guitar mikes to be turned up; it's clear that nobody cared about professionalism or needing to show i.d. or, by the mid-point, making money.  It was about communication; people unshackling themselves; taking the risk of looking stupid because social norms have made them afraid to smile at strangers.  Or at least that's what I want to hope it was about.

James Parker in The Atlantic recently called this the last time we were able to police ourselves; there was only a brief window before the festival gave birth to its evil twin, Altamont, infamous for being the site of the killing of Meredith Hunter during a Rolling Stones concert.  Parker tells us that Woodstock itself was not without tension - the burning to the ground of 12 food stands in an outbreak of less than peace-enhancing radicalism not making the final cut of  Wadleigh's extraordinary framing of 'what's happening in America'.

'America is becoming a whole', according to Sri Swami Satchidananda's on-stage invocation, whoe sentiment I want to embrace.  But the mingling of idealism, optimism, wish-fulfilment, fear and anger about the war, and whatever else was going on then gives way today to, at the very least, a question: What the hell happened to these people?  These people, who looked so beautiful, who spoke without embarrassment about the potential for love to be realised as a political strategy, and some of whom created communitarian experiments that actually worked, who, at their most open were willing not to refuse light from any quarter - knowing that the only recently baptised military-industrial complex was failing humanity, so let's look East...  What happened to them?

Well, they became my parents - and I can still see traces of the sentiments expressed in the field when my mum and dad talk about politics and tolerance, especially in a general suspicion of institutions that try to tell you how to be.  But my folks are just two people; and they weren't even there.  It's fashionable to say that more of the Woodstock generation learned indulgence than self-costing activism for a better world; that the gruesome scenes of Reaganite techno-greed a decade or so later were built on the foundations of a social cohort that had taught themselves they could have anything they want, and now.  And there may be some truth in that; surely some of the people responsible for nurturing the vision of being American as selfish, angry and afraid that came to dominate pubic discourse over the past forty years were in that field at Bethel.  But let's also acknowledge that the leaders of recent social movements that have achieved real change were there too, at least in spirit.  There are still true believers out there; they still have something to say; they're still doing things that would slow the world down, and would give us peace and music if we were ready to listen.

So, what 'Woodstock' means to me?

1: I'd love to make a film like this; and the democratisation of cinema may well allow someone to do just that right now.

2: My generation is lonelier than they were.

3: The Who look ridiculous; but so does everyone else.  Some in a good way.

4: The contrast between the anti-war movements of 1969 and 2009 depends on the existence of the draft.

5: The most pessimistic thing I can say?  Some of these people are saying the same things today that they said then.  And it didn't work.

6: The most optimistic thing I can say? Watching Joe Cocker redefine what a human body needs to do to make a sound in 1969  (and it's amazing) looks not that different from watching what Joe Cocker does to make a sound today (and it's still amazing); if he can do it...well...

Why 'Inglourious Basterds' Changes Things

Everyone's up in arms about Quentin Tarantino's 'Inglourious Basterds' - our pal Glenn Kenny loves it, and details the wish-fulfilment of its director as a key to interpreting it; Christianity Today published a review that has elicited comments ranging from acclaim to disdain for the fact that the magazine sent someone to see it; The New Yorker is non-plussed, damning Tarantino as an 'idiot de la cinematheque'. I've only seen it once, and so there's a lot of room for my response to change.  But for what it's worth, I was shaken out of my own apathy/disdain for Tarantino, whose cheer the 18 year old version of me was more than excited to lead when 'Reservoir Dogs' presented more realistic violence on screen than I had ever seen before, thereby confronting the audience with our own complicity in violence outside the confines of the theatre.  Post-Dogs, his appetite for kitsch seemed to overwhelm what I began to feel was a misreading of the moral sensibility of the first film; I'm still not sure what to think of 'Pulp Fiction', 'Kill Bill' et al.

But 'Inglourious Basterds', which takes his obsession with movies, and with movie violence, to its furthest extreme, changes everything, and made me reconsider everything I thought about its director before.  I think I may have seen a film that represents the most well-fed aesthetic cinematic sense (where else could you find the footprints of both Petra von Kant and Indiana Jones, and pretty much everything in between?), as well as a political genius: In its homage and pastiche, 'Inglourious Basterds' is applauding and indicting cinema for its successes, failures, and pretensions; in its portrayal of Nazis as human and their actions as absurd makes the evil of the Third Reich seem more cruel than in any previous 'serious' film; in its offering of a novel way to kill movie villains, it is exposing the audience: us, for what we are, or at least for what we may be - people who enjoy the representation of the killing of other human beings, and who don't care enough when it happens in the real world.

My genial co-host and I talk at some length about these matters over at The Film Talk. Do join us.