In Memory of John

Three years ago tonight my friend John O'Donohue crossed the threshold that he always considered helping others to travel  one of the greatest privileges of ministry.  He died in his sleep, his beloved at his side, at 52 years old, three weeks after I had last spoken to him.  His extraordinary book 'To Bless the Space Between Us' was near publication, and when it surfaced a couple of months later the opening chapter on thresholds and the inevitability of change made a different kind of sense than I imagine he intended when writing. Those who knew and loved him were bereft; the most astonishing funeral and memorial gatherings ensued in such rapid succession, and went so deep that it seemed to be several months before we ran out of organised events to attend to remember the poet, priest, mystic, artist, humorist, and friend; a man so large in spirit that thousands of people were changed by his death.  It was a privilege to know him, and to be known by him.  I hear his voice on my i-pod all the time - I'm grateful that there were so many recordings made of his work; and I hear his voice in my inner life, calling me to live from my best self.

This year begins with remembering John on this third anniversary; and with reflecting on my own life, amidst wonder and challenge.  I, too, would 'love to live as the river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding'.  I, too, wish to be a blessing to others.  I, too, am frail and flawed and broken; and frequently fail to give to others what I want to receive myself.  John would, I imagine, say to me what he often said, quoting his mighty friend Lelia Doolan, that in times of confusion and fear, you should 'steady yourself', and let the light shine through the cracks, even - perhaps especially - those you have created yourself.

If we are to honor John's memory, we might want to devote this year to one of his other sharpest and most elegant ideas: that the first friendship we must cultivate is the one we have with ourselves.  May 2011 be the year in which you become your own best friend.

Paths of Glory/Seven Samurai

Hearing Stanley Kubrick’s voice on the new Criterion edition of his coruscating anti-war melodrama ‘Paths of Glory’ is like listening to a ghost; not because the director has been dead for over a decade, but because he said so little in public when he was alive.  It’s one of the characteristic delights of a marvelous disc that provides thoughtful context for a film that was so dangerous to Gallic pride that it couldn’t be seen in France for over twenty years after its first release in 1957.  It’s a powerful, painful experience to watch; a story of true horror - on the Front, and in the chateaux occupied by sneering generals playing chess with life while Kirk Douglas tries to save his men from the evil that distorted notions of honor breed.

As is so often the case with Kubrick, the actors aren’t embodying characters, but playing archetypes - you watch Timothy Carey falling apart after being faced with his own death, and realise that he was cast because he acts the way most of us would - his face is crumbling under pressure, his voice a childish moan; it’s like a high school theatre performance.  And that’s not a criticism: it’s the strength of ‘Paths of Glory’ that the people in it - with the exception of the generals and Kirk Douglas - feel like you and me.

Kubrick’s philosophy of glory underwrote his entire career: the question of what makes  a real man surfaces in narrative arcs as diverse as that of Quilty in ‘Lolita’, Barry Lyndon, Alex Droog, and most transcendently, Dave Bowman in ‘2001’.  ‘Paths of Glory’ feels like a template for everything else Kubrick made: men sitting in large rooms and talking, men and violence, men and women, opulent ballrooms, classical music, resistance heroes unable to defeat authoritarianism.  Ego and power, and the echo of formalised feet dancing at parties taking place during wars.  So the function of ‘Paths of Glory’ is to invite us into an appreciation of the director’s later work, while forcing us to think about the idiocy of relationships between people who aren’t allowed to admit doubt.

Like ‘Seven Samurai’ (below), also released by Criterion this month in a magnificent Blu-ray edition, overflowing with genuinely fascinating special features, ‘Paths of Glory’ confronts the economics of death: men who think they are in control haggling over the lives of others, playing with them ‘for sport’.  It’s a short, compact film, which gets under the skin of its star, who in one of the special features - a 1979 BBC interview - reminds us that there was a time when actors were actually expected, and willing, to talk intelligently about themselves.  You feel Douglas’ compassion for his men; and his powerless position in the war game.  You don’t need to remember much about the absurd context for the First World War to experience despair when a man is executed while on a hospital stretcher.  You don’t mind the comedy bad guys because the story is so insane that they seem ironically to fit into its scheme, prefiguring the generals in ‘Dr Strangelove’.  And when it ends, with the heartbreaking, national boundaries-transgressing song from Christiane Kubrick, the actor credited here as ‘Susanne Christian’, a young woman whom Stanley met at a masked ball (there’s a Jungian coincidence for you) you wonder if the director didn’t look back on this film as being his finest declaration that the only thing worth fighting for is love.  Kubrick got a wife, Kurosawa got a profile in the West; the rest of us got two of the greatest films ever made.

Bowie Knife

The first scene of Nagisa Oshima's 'Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence' (new on DVD and Blu-Ray from Criterion) is occupied with the horror of a soldier being forced to cut his intestines open as a punishment for being in love with another man.  The last image of the film is the smiling face of a soldier the night before his execution, beaming a greeting of filial affection to a former enemy.  We're in a POW camp run under the auspices of the Japanese military, where Allied soldiers are half-subjected to, and half-ignored by an honor code that proposes self-disembowelment as the response, it appears, to just about any infraction.  In between the attempted seppuku and the smiling greeting, the adorable Tom Conti reflects poetically on the mutually assured idiocy of war, Ryuichi Sakamoto gets angry, and then gets healed while his fascinating and eventually ubiquitous score overplays but not so much that it bothers, and gorgeous burnt light provides a mystical hue to what is ultimately a nightmare that becomes a dream and then finally a reality the audience always wanted: reconciliation between people who were otherwise ready to kill each other.

But not before David Bowie saves the world.

This is probably the least actorly of Bowie's screen appearances; his portrayal of callow/shallow and ultimately penitent youth is all the more resonant because he seems out of place in the movie: we know him to be something other than either the rigid Japanese or the sentimental English colonel; his off-screen status as chameleon works because he's more like us than anyone else in the movie.  He wanders through a context in which violence is sexualised, men are murdered for loving each other, and everyone is fantasising about being somewhere else.  It's probably the most erotic war movie ever made; it's a perfect companion piece to the thematically similar 'Bridge on the River Kwai', whose British Colonel is the antecedent for Sakamoto's character here: both men obsessed with honor over humanity, both undone at the last possible moment, both the points of deepest frustration for the audience.  The formal beauty of the compositions could overwhelm the point of the film: a kind of insider's apology for, or at least critique of, his nation's particular brand of nationalistic idiocy, which here is probably best summed up by the institutional nonsense of lying about killing.  Not far off my homeland's own nonsense, nor that of the day I'm posting this, when a holiday is observed in the US, marking the arrival of a genocidal maniac who no doubt believed God and his queen had told him to love the natives by burning some of them alive.  Oshima and co-screenwriter Paul Mayersberg evoke Columbus and any number of other pioneers of the sacralising of violence, by having Conti's character exclaim, 'Damn your gods.  It's your gods who have made you who you are,' at the point where he realises that he is to be killed to preserve a sense of order that was psychotic to begin with.  And it's in the confrontation of the madness of the scapegoat mechanism where 'Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence' takes on the deepest core of the human tendency to spiral downward into mutually assured destruction.  Regret for the past is why men war with themselves today; an unthinking assumption that someone must be punished is why we kill each other; and the film locates such regret and assumptions in nothing more complex than the cruelty of boys who become men without changing.

But it neither labors nor over-philosophises its point; Oshima trusts us to get it - the first scene is so memorable precisely because it starts half way through where you'd expect.  We're right there - in an attempted imposed ritual suicide; there's no introduction, no preparation, no consolation for those of us who want our war films to pretend that war isn't murder.

At the end, I'm left reflecting on three things (beyond the easy admiration for the remarkable career of producer Jeremy Thomas, who in the splendid interview series on the Criterion disc seems to prove that he hasn't lost any thirst for making films that are both aesthetically compelling and politically humane): How childhood trauma can both cause us to dysfunction within adult relationships, but might also provoke us to live differently; to avoid the suffering we caused others, or was caused to us when we thought we didn't know any better.  On the role of sexual repression as a foundation for violence; and how a well-placed kiss could end conflict between people.  And finally, as Thomas says, how certainty is often the enemy of peace, for in war, 'we are victims of men who think they are right'.  'Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence' sounds, at first glance, like a humorous title; but it's not, and it could not just as easily have been 'Happy 4th of July'.  It's a film that begins with a man being forced to torture himself to death, and ends with the anunciation of what, for Rene Girard, perhaps the thinker most capable of explaining why scapegoating kills us all, would consider nothing less than the axis of history.  Along the way there's blue light, Bowie's blond locks, Conti's smile, Takeshi's ambivalence, Sakamoto's rage.  And a war film that sometimes feels like science fiction, sometimes like romance, sometimes like nothing you've ever seen before.

Tyler Clementi and Me. And You.

Of course I never knew Tyler Clementi, the young Rutgers student who took his own life last month in a tragedy so unfathomably horrific that it doesn’t permit adequate attempts at description.  The story that has emerged so far is that Tyler was enjoying a romantic moment with another guy, while his roommate secretly streamed the encounter live on the internet.  Shortly after Tyler found out, he jumped off a bridge. Of course I never knew him, but his story demands a deeper listening than has yet been promoted or presented by our culture’s spokespeople.  This is not just a story about one man and two acquaintances whose idiotic prank appears to have caused such fear of exposure that Tyler felt he had to kill himself.  It’s a story about all of us.  And we all need to listen to it.

On the basis of what we know thus far, I think we can guess this: Tyler Clementi died as a direct result of a culture of sexual shame in which institutionalized religion is the major investor.  I am angry, and I am going to say something harsh and direct, but I am willing to take responsibility for it.  Please feel free to respond if you wish.

If you have ever affirmed homophobia by not intervening to challenge the snide remarks that all of us have heard, you may be part of the reason that Tyler Clementi is dead.  And most of the time, I myself have not intervened.

If you have ever used ‘us’ and ‘them’ language to divide sets of people into ‘normative’ heterosexual cultures, and ‘others’, you may be part of the reason Tyler Clementi is dead.  I spoke of ‘us’ and ‘them’ for most of my life until a friend challenged me; I still find myself slipping into old rhetorical habits, for our culture is so deeply wedded to the myth that our identities depend on dividing and conquering.

If you have ever disrespected, dehumanized, or belittled a person because of their sexuality, you may be part of the reason Tyler Clementi is dead.

I think I am part of the reason that Tyler Clementi is dead.

We often say in ‘progressive’ religious circles that we want to ensure that we have a ‘conversation’ about sexuality, that we want to create a situation where everyone feels ‘included’; and for sure, this is a noble endeavor.  But too often the premise is that those of us who are straight are merely opening a space for those of us who are gay (or LBTQQI - but more of that later) to be told that ‘they’ are just as good as ‘we’ are.  This is not enough.  It does not allow for people who identify as LGBTQQI people to be seen as good in their (and our) own right; it does not permit a true exchange of gifts between different people; it suggests that LGBTQQI people are welcome despite their (and our) differences, not that they (and we) are just as much alive with gift, made in the image of God, and legitimate as the rest of us (and them).  At its best, this kind of conversation may lead to a better one; at worst, it is just another way of dressing up homophobia as reconciliation.

It emerges also in the context of a culture with a split persona: a religious one that almost always problematizes sex, and a secular one that almost always celebrates hedonism.  Churches often talk about sex and sexuality as challenges to be overcome; while the wider culture doesn’t seem to know what to do with sex except put it on TMZ.

Well, I am tired of the excuses we make for our prejudice, and the disguises we put on our repression.

I am tired of saying ‘we need to have a conversation’, and then not having it.

I am tired of sexuality being reduced in religious practice to shibboleths about homosexuality and adultery.

I am tired of pretending that our bodies are not part of the selves we talk about when we seek to become more human through opening to God.

I am tired of the misplaced shame I feel sometimes when I think about my own sexuality, my desires, my mistakes, my brokenness, the memories I have of humiliation in adolescence and beyond.

I am tired of not feeling free to discuss sexuality in church as anything other than a problem.  I want to celebrate it for what it has become for me: an astonishing gift from God, the space in which love between human beings, made a little lower than the angels has the potential to find its most elegant and connected expression.  The space where we may come closest to mirroring the divine relationship with the human.  The space that can produce such profound happiness, and is so powerful that it leave you feeling as if you've been ripped  apart.

The story of Tyler Clementi is not just about a young man and his roommates' stupid prank.  It is a story about cruelty, and dehumanization, and fear, and the lack of an understanding of how human relationships can promote the common good instead of individualistic gratification.

It is a story about the role that bad religion - most of it Christian - has played in creating a culture of shame around sex and sexual identity in America, and the distortions of human happiness that pass for healthy religious practice.

It is a story about our complicity in this bad religion, and in these distortions.

It’s a story about the end of privacy in the internet age: which could be a good thing, because we may now finally be compelled to tell the truth about ourselves: that we are broken and beautiful at the same time, and that none of us is fully who we claim to be.  We are stumbling pilgrims trying to figure out what it means to be human.  And if I tell you the truth about me, then maybe you might feel safer to tell me the truth about you.

And so, what will we do with the story of Tyler Clementi?

I’d suggest a handful of signposts.

Focus your judgment in the right direction. We should recognize that desire is confusing at the best of times; perhaps especially during the transition from adolescence into adulthood.  The same goes for learning how to behave with maturity in relation to others.  So while what Tyler’s roommates are alleged to have done was stupid and cruel, we should not direct our anger only at the two who apparently put the video of Tyler on line.  They are a symptom of a dehumanizing and childish culture.  They are not its cause.  And if we only concentrate on them, we will repeat the typical mistake of scapegoating, and never face the issues within ourselves that contributed to them thinking nothing of their actions.

It Gets Better If you find personal resonance with the fear of sexual humiliation, check out Dan Savage’s It Gets Better campaign here.

Come Out, Whoever You Are The semantic gymnastics that have been one of the gifts of the sexual rights movement are so changeable that I’m never quite sure how many letters I need to type to be sure I’m not excluding anyone.

L(esbian)G(ay)B(isexual)T(rans)Q(ueer)Q(uestioning)I(ntersex) is a pretty good start; but another category has been privileged to join: A(lly): which, although its status is ambiguous in the cohort to which it wishes to orient itself, to my mind means anyone who cares enough to commit themselves to be educated about the structures of injustice faced by people whom the dominant culture defines as sexual minorities.  Ally can be a patronizing concept, of course; but I think that the more people who don’t identity themselves (or ourselves) as LGBTQQI consider the A label, the sooner we will experience conversation about sexuality as something that is good for us all, rather than merely stigmatizing socially constructed minorities.

Beyond that, I’d like to suggest a new category.  After A comes E, because E(veryone) is affected by our sex-negative culture.  We may all have been stigmatized because of our sexuality; especially those of us raised in the church.  We are not sure how to make sexuality ‘fit’ with spirituality.  And so we live in a constant state of struggle or denial.  Those of us who are straight could learn from those of us who are gay.  Those of us who are straight might indeed yearn to be invited into a world where sexuality has been such a source of struggle that its stewards have had to learn to transform it from an invitation to suffering into a source of strength.  E(veryone) belongs here.

Like I said, I am angry today, and so I apologize if I have gone too far.  Or, actually, perhaps I’m not sorry at all.  Maybe I’m going to get angrier.  Maybe I need to.  I certainly need not to forget Tyler Clementi, a young man who died because our culture made him ashamed.

I’m sorry, Tyler.  I wish I’d known you.  I’m sorry that I have been part of the reason you were humiliated.  I am sorry that I have been so divided within myself that even though I know what it’s like to experience sexual humiliation, I held onto my own homophobia because it felt safer and more known.  I owe something to you.  I owe it to you to be honest about myself, to stop dehumanizing others, and to do everything I can to make sure that your place in history is simple and clear: that you would be the last.

The Thin Red Line

Two films released by the Criterion Collection this week focus on men at war.  We'll discuss Terrence Malick's 'The Thin Red Line' on the next episode of The Film Talk, and below; later in the week I'll post a piece on 'Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence'.  These are two of the most compelling films released on DVD this year.

When I first saw Terrence Malick's 'The Thin Red Line', it was the turn of the century, Bill Clinton was still in office, the Twin Towers were intact, and the film seemed to be about the past.  The distant past, to be sure: a film that begins with a reptile submerging and ends with a plant growing on a beach seems to exist a long time before we did.  The nearer past, ostensibly: it takes place in 1942 during the early Guadalcanal Campaign (although you'll look in vain for the caption that appeared on the print I saw over a decade ago to indicate it; Malick, it seems, has had that removed from the new Criterion Collection Blu-ray and DVD release: he wants the movie to exist outside time). This is only appropriate, as it aims to be a poem about the primitive roots of violence, the lack of maturity among men who see the world only as a fight, the power of love to sustain even when it is broken, the tragedy of human beings caught in a web that they think dictates that only violence can be the path to power in this life.

Voices of men mingle over images of nature, John Travolta pulls rank on Nick Nolte, ironically mirroring the tragic missing-the-point skirmishes between some blogospheric film critics, Jim Caviezel auditions for Jesus' last day by playing out some of his early life, prayers are sung and sound like food.  Watching it now, after what may be the defining decade of our generation has passed, it's impossible not to think of 'The Thin Red Line' as a film about the here and now.  Jared Leto sends men to their deaths not knowing why or what he's doing, and perhaps not even caring; how was I to know, in 1998, that this was a prophecy about the man about to steal the White House?  Bodies are on fire and I hear the voice of Max von Sydow in 'The Exorcist' invoking the notion that evil is allowed to happen to make us believe we are unlovable.  Youth is wasted as guys accidentally blow themselves up; identity is formed through 'having your own war'; loss is made flesh as its stewards are 'mocked with the sight of what we might have known'.  Terror rules the world.  And then, there's light.  And trees.  And a new, untouched space, underwater, unaware.  A place where poetry underwrites the state of things.  The paradox of 'The Thin Red Line' is that it makes you feel at peace even as it confronts you with horror. It opens up a space of wonder amidst decay, serving as an awe-striking religious shibboleth.  It's not a war film.  It's a warning: of what we are like when we make the economic and political purposes of life depend on an avoidance of the transcendent.