Church & Culture

V for Vendetta – on Art as Subversion

01/05/2012

Art, Church & Culture, Empire, Entertainment, Film

Over the weekend I (re)watched V for Vendetta.

As I watched I was reminded that although the relentless noise of media can be used to numb people, good art can also jolt people out of their slumber.

This is of course why art and literature are among the first things to be censored in totalitarian regimes. The powers know artists are a threat, because they can make people see the world differently. In the words of Evey, “Artists use lies to tell the truth.”

Through the power of story, moviegoers watching V for Vendetta find themselves sympathetic to the “terrorist” V, and opposed to a fictional government that is meant to be a parody of their own (nationalist, explicitly religious, homophobic, at war with Muslim extremists, etc.).

Similarly, the film Avatar succeeded in subverting the ideology of whole theaters full of people, getting them to cheer against the side that was meant to represent their own military and economic exploitation of others. (On an artistic level I have mixed feelings about Avatar, but at that at least it was quite successful).

Now my point here is not to argue that the ideologies driving V for Vendetta or Avatar are correct, but rather to demonstrate the rather fascinating way such art forms can subvert the way we look at the world – often without us even realizing it at the time.

Which leads me to pose a question: how often does contemporary Christian art, film, or music serve to subversively jolt people out of their captivity to the story of empire?

If you would only need to change a few lines in most Christian films to make them indistinguishable from Hallmark channel specials, and replace “Jesus” with “baby” in much of our music to make it light pop-ballads, are we really doing anything more than offering sanitized versions of cultural norms?

The Church needs art and artists, but we need to encourage those artists to challenge us like the prophets and poets of old, and to provoke our culture into seeing the world in a new light, the light of the Gospel.

Exploitation, Scapegoating, and the Illegal Immigration Debate.

27/04/2012

Church & Culture, Consumerism, Empire, Justice, Politics

5 Comments

This week strict immigration laws, which had been passed in Arizona and Alabama, were challenged before the Supreme Court.

From FOX News to NPR, discussion turned to our nation’s immigration policy, and talking heads were brought in to tout either the necessity of such bills, or the need for comprehensive immigration reform.

While arguing about which political party has the better plan for dealing with immigration, it seemed both sides of the debate continually overlooked an important but uncomfortable fact.

Illegal immigrants are not the root cause of the problem, we are.

Our personal and national economies are dependent on the artificially cheap prices enabled by our exploitation of cheap immigrant labor.

To talk about immigration policy without addressing that elephant in the room is an exercise in missing the point.

We are perfectly happy to benefit from the availability of cheap houses built by illegal labor, artificially affordable food harvested by undocumented workers, and inexpensive meat processed and packaged by those who have snuck across our borders.

Illegal immigrants come here because, on one level, we want them to. We want them to and we provide them the employment opportunities because our system depends on exploiting immigrant labor, much like it depends on exploiting the cheap foreign labor that sews our clothes and builds our electronic devices.

But we don’t like to talk about it, because we are all complicit, and because acknowledging this dark underside to our “free” market would demand we do something besides vote for one of two slightly differentiated political parties – it would demand we live differently.

Of course when the housing market crashes, when the economy struggles, we find it easier to do without the labor of illegal immigrants and use them instead as a convenient scapegoat. We say that they are taking all our jobs, while simultaneously (and paradoxically) calling them lazy drains on our society. We direct our anger and fear towards the least of these, exploiting them politically and sociologically as we have exploited them economically.

With one hand we offer them employment and hope for a better life, while with the other we round them up as criminals and demonize them.

Until the root injustices of that system are challenged, talk of stricter laws or immigration reform seems to me akin to painting the siding of a building with a rotting foundation.

“The liturgy of consumption births in us a desire for a way of life that is destructive to creation itself; moreover, it births in us a desire for a way of life that we can’t feasibly extend to others, creating a system of privilege and exploitation.” – Jamie Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, pg. 101.

Empire, Liturgy, and Apocalyptic

25/04/2012

Church & Culture, Consumerism, Empire, Entertainment, Idolatry, Kingdom of God, Liturgy, War & Peace

1 Comment

The particular way I’ve been attempting to address war, consumerism, and entertainment – as alternative liturgies to the liturgy of the Gospel community – owes a great deal to the writing of James K.A. Smith.

As Smith explains in this selection from Desiring the Kingdom, such cultural criticism serves as a sort of modern apocalyptic, an attempt to look anew at the empire and break through our sense of uncritical familiarity.

“One of the reasons I’m describing cultural practices and institutions as liturgies is to raise the stakes: I want to give you a heightened awareness of the religious nature of many of the cultural institutions we inhabit that you might not otherwise think of as having anything to do with Christian discipleship.

By religious I mean that they are institutions that command our allegiance, that vie for our passion, and that aim to capture our heart with a particular vision of the good life. They don’t want to just give us entertainment or an education; they want to make us into certain kinds of people.

So one of the most important aspects of this theology of culture is first a moment of recognition: recognizing cultural practices and rituals as liturgies. We need to recognize that these practices are not neutral or benign, but rather intentionally loaded to form us into certain kinds of people – to unwittingly make us disciples of rival kings and patriotic citizens of rival kingdoms.

Seeing the world and our culture in this way requires a kind of wake-up call, a strategy for jolting us out of our humdrum familiarity and comfort with these institutions in order to see them for what they are. Interestingly, Scripture has a way of doing this: it’s called apocalyptic literature.

Apocalyptic literature – the sort you find in the strange pages of Daniel and the book of Revelation – is a genre of Scripture that tries to get us to see (or see through) the empires that constitute our environment, in order to see them for what they really are.

Unfortunately, we associate apocalyptic literature with end-times literature, as if its goal were a matter of prediction. But this is a misunderstanding of the biblical genre; the point of apocalyptic is not prediction but unmasking – unveiling the realities around us for what they really are. So apocalyptic literature is a genre that tries to get us to see the world on a slant and thus see through the spin…

What we need, then, is a kind of contemporary apocalyptic – a language and a genre that sees through the spin and unveils for us the religious and idolatrous character of the contemporary institutions that constitute our own milieu.”

- from Desiring the Kingdom, pg. 90-92.

Action or Intoxication – A post-conference warning

24/04/2012

Church & Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Theology

of Passion Plays and War Movies.

23/04/2012

Church & Culture, Entertainment, Liturgy, War & Peace

4 Comments

Flesh torn from flesh.

Whips, fists, and jeers adding to the torture.

A crown of thorns pressed down.

Nails pierced through hands and feet.

Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was nothing if not explicit about the violence of Good Friday.

But this dramatic portrayal was in a sense nothing new; it came as part of a long tradition of reenacting the crucifixion that stretches back to the Middle Ages.

Over time, these reenactments became known as passion plays.

They served as a reminder of the sacrifice, the pain and suffering the Messiah underwent on our behalf, and the victory on the other side of apparent defeat.

They also developed a darker side, and were at times manipulated to stoke hatred against Jews or enemies of Christendom.

Used for good or ill, passion plays were not primarily interested in making a cognitive argument. They were appealing to the emotions, the heart, and the imagination.

I want to suggest that, in much the same way, war movies have come to serve as secular passion plays.

While not making a cognitive argument for war (few of us would pack a theater for such a lecture), war movies appeal on a deeper level – shaping our hearts and our imaginations.

We are reminded of the sacrifice of war (which I would argue is itself an alternative liturgy to the sacrifice of Christ), the glory of battle, and the honor of dying and killing (or having others die and kill on our behalf).

It matters little if the war depicted involves our particular empire or nation-state. If it does so much the better, but on an emotional level the connection is easy enough to make.

Whether the movie features an established power confronting a rising threat, or a band of courageous rebels taking on the system, both feed into the narrative of empire, and both serve to legitimate war on a precognitive level so convincing we can hardly imagine an alternative.

As we leave the theater we remember the sacrifice, are encouraged never to let it be in vain by failing to repeat the sacrifice when war approaches in our generation, and are thereby told again of the necessity of the sacrificial system as a whole, all while being awakened once more to an awareness of who our enemies are.

Even (and perhaps especially) if such explicitly religious language never enters our minds, the liturgy of this secular passion play does its job well.

Now none of this means I expect to never watch another war movie, anymore than I expect never to return to the mall which has its own set of liturgical practices. But it is important that we realize we are being taught by such films, not on the level of a lecture but on the level of the heart and the imagination, on the level of myth.

Empire and Entertainment – Part II

20/04/2012

Church & Culture, Consumerism, Entertainment, Justice, War & Peace

1 Comment

I think it might be worth clarifying that I have don’t mean to suggest that media and entertainment are always and inherently oppressive. I too enjoy my share of television programs – and if you saw me on a day when a new Doctor Who episode airs you might say that ‘enjoy’ is an understatement.

My concern is more with how we use entertainment, and the specific roles that it has come to play in society.

In particular I am concerned because of how easily entertainment media,

1. Legitimates the narrative of empire: From the rarely challenged assumption that violence is just if done by the “good guys” of a film or TV show, to the consumerist utopia laid out in our profiles of the rich and famous (from ET to Cribs) – media often serves to promote the exceptionalism that says the empire is (of course!) what everyone would want if they were educated/successful/pious/etc.

2. Provides the illusion that we are theologically, politically, or socially engaged: TV and social media are mostly unable to sustain such serious dialogue, both rely too heavily on image, brevity, and the sense of constantly being entertained. They have other uses, good uses even, but I think that we often deceive ourselves into thinking we are engaged just because we posted a link, watched a debate, or argued with someone online. Such actions allow us to imagine we’ve done something without demanding much in the way of critical thought or real sacrifice.

3. Numbs us to our own participation in the injustices of empire: The way that media so often glorifies war and consumerism serves to justify them with an emotional appeal that bypasses thought or debate. We might not actively kill, exploit, invade, or exclude, but others are doing so on our behalf and media is often used as a way to justify such actions so we can absolve ourselves from the difficult ethical dilemma of our own proxy participation in that system.

Again, I’m not suggesting that media or entertainment are inherently tools of empire, simply that they are easy to twist into such a use, and often are. In much the same way that food or sex can be used in life giving ways or destructive (and escapist) ways – so can entertainment.

Empire and Entertainment

18/04/2012

Church & Culture, Empire, Entertainment

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