Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments

"Hugo" Is a Children's Movie Best Enjoyed By Adults

I made a point of catching Martin Scorsese’s change-of-pace movie, Hugo, because it was highly praised, both by film critic Michael Medved, and my friend Anthony Sacramone of the Strange Herring blog. My own response is ambivalent. This is a brilliant, fascinating, beautiful movie, suitable for all ages. Nevertheless, it hasn’t done very good business (I saw it in a theater almost empty), and that doesn’t actually surprise me much. As Sacramone notes, “…it’s a kids’ film for adults.” I don’t think actual kids will love it (that may not be a bad thing either, as I’ll explain below). But adults, especially ones who love cinema, will embrace it once they discover it. I expect cult status on DVD is in its future.

The titular hero is Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), an orphan boy who lives in the Paris railroad station. He was brought there to live by his drunkard uncle, who took care of the station clocks. After teaching Hugo to do the job, the man disappeared. Hugo has been maintaining the clocks on his own ever since, afraid of apprehension by the Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen in an interesting performance), who takes perverse delight in sending orphans to an institution.

Hugo lives off pilfered food, and also steals small mechanical parts, especially from Georges (Ben Kingsley), an old man who runs a toy shop in the station. He wants the parts for his ongoing project of repairing an automaton (a moving clockwork human figure), his only inheritance from his father. The two of them had been repairing it when his father died, and Hugo believes that if he can get it working, it will somehow deliver a message from his father.

Our Lars Walker on Thor

UPDATE: I just realized Lars already posted this article below here at MC.  So feel free to scroll down and get the whole thing here.  My comments about his insight still represent value-added.  :-)

Lars Walker is a wonderful writer of fiction related to Vikings (and Christianity).  He recently took up his pen, so to speak, to review the new Thor movie.  These lines caught my attention:

To anyone schooled in Norse mythology, the Odin of the movie is almost unrecognizable, except for his long beard, lack of one eye, and possession of Sleipnir, the eight-legged horse (which provides an extremely cool special effects moment). Anthony Hopkins' Odin is wise and good, full of benevolence and cherishing a horror of war. He's kind of like a professor of English or some social science at an Ivy League university—wooly-headed enough to throw away the gods' greatest weapon at a moment of dire military threat. 

The Odin of the Vikings was most of all an extremely powerful magician, a wizard—not the nice kind of wizard like Gandalf, though he was one of Tolkien's inspirations for the character, but the old kind of wizard—treacherous and murderous, with lies on his lips and blood under his fingernails. He delighted in war for two reasons—one in order to feed the wolves and ravens that were his familiars, secondly in order to fill his hall, Valhalla, with heroes who would stand with him at Ragnarok, the last great battle. To this end he raised heroes up and then brutally betrayed them. He was also, according to the eddas, a sexual predator and a known deviate. 

The difference between these two Odins, I think, is suggestive of important—and generally unrecognized—elements in western culture. The script writers have confused Odin with the Yahweh of the Jews and Christians. It doesn't even occur to them that a high god could be anything but kind and peace-loving, since we all have so thoroughly internalized Christian suppositions that even people who reject the Christian religion—and I assume that a large proportion of the people who made this movie do—can't conceive of a religion founded on darkness and brute force and the domination of the weak by the strong. 

What Lars is saying here is something we miss when we think about our culture.  So many of our most basic assumptions are formed by Christianity that we confidently declare how good secularism is or will be.  We don't realize that our type of secularism has a source.  And Lars knows what it is.

 

"Thor": Norse Mythology Mediated By Christian Ideas

I think it's generally agreed that I'm the conservative blogsphere's go-to guy for all matters Norse, so I felt a sort of civic duty to see the movie Thor this weekend, and to let you know what I thought of it.

Briefly put, it's pretty good. Considered on its own terms, as a fantasy/comic book/special effects actioner, it succeeds extremely well. It doesn't scale the heights of Batman Begins or The Dark Knight, but I'd rank it somewhere near the top. Kenneth Branagh's direction elevates the script (not a bad one at all), and the cast is uniformly excellent. Chris Hemsworth, in the title role, will doubtless break many female hearts, and he ought to become a big star if there's any justice in Midgard.

Thor is the son and heir of Odin (Anthony Hopkins), the high god of Asgard. Asgard, in this version (more or less based on the Marvel comic books) is explained in S.M.D. (Standard Movie Doubletalk) as one of nine dimensions, or alternate universes, or something. The “gods” are able to travel to the other “worlds” by means of the bridge of Bifrost, explained as a sort of organized wormhole (Bifrost, the rainbow in Norse mythology, is pronounced “Bye-frost” in the movie, although the proper pronunciation is “beef-roast”). Long ago the gods prevented their great enemies, the Jotuns or Frost Giants (who in the movie do not resemble in any way the big, bearded oafs of the myths), from conquering Midgard (Earth). Because of their memories of this war, humans came to regard them as divine beings.

As the story begins, Thor is about to be officially named Odin's heir in a great ceremony in Asgard. In the midst of this, Jotun spies make an incursion into Asgard. Thor, enraged, leads a punitive expedition into Jotunheim, killing a number of the frost giants. Odin, who loves peace, appears to rescue Thor and his friends when they're about to be overwhelmed by numbers. He berates Thor for his impetuousness and banishes him to earth (he lands in New Mexico), also sending his mighty weapon, the hammer Mjolnir, down with him.

John Piper on Ayn Rand

It has gotten back to me that my ambivalent approval of some elements of Ayn Rand's work may not have been ambivalent enough for some.  Along those lines, I think it may be useful to offer readers a chance to see what John Piper has written on the topic.  Here's a clip:

To this day, I find her writings paradoxically attractive. I am a Christian Hedonist. This is partly why her work is alluring to me. She had her own brand of hedonism. It was not traditional hedonism that says whatever gives you pleasure is right. Hers was far more complex than that. It seems so close and yet so far to what I find in the Bible . . .

Cogent Christian responses to Ayn Rand are few. Positive Christian assessments are almost non-existent. I aim for this treatment to be both Christian and primarily positive, even though Ayn Rand was an atheist and outspokenly anti-Christian. I trust I will be forgiven the presumption of stepping outside my own specialty: My field is neither literary criticism nor philosophy but biblical, theological and pastoral. I write this because I take pleasure in extending to others the delight I have had in learning from Ayn Rand.

Read it all here.

Considering Atlas Shrugged on Film

This piece was originally written for the Breakpoint blog.  Crossposted with their permission.

Christians have a deep ambivalence about Ayn Rand that probably draws as deeply from the facts of her biography as from her famous novels.  When the refugee from the old Soviet Union met the Catholic William F. Buckley, she said, "You are too intelligent to believe in God."  Her atheism was militant.  Rand's holy symbol was the dollar sign.  Ultimately, Buckley gave Whittaker Chambers the job of writing the National Review essay on Rand's famous novel Atlas Shrugged that effectively read her and the Objectivists out of the conservative movement.  The review characterized Rand’s message as, "To a gas chamber, go!"  Chambers thought Rand's philosophy led to the extinction of the less fit.

In truth, the great Chambers (his Witness is one of the five finest books I've ever read) probably treated Rand's work unfairly.  Though Rand certainly made no secret of her contempt for those unable or unwilling to engage in true exchange of economic value, she was right to tell interviewers that she was no totalitarian because of her abhorrence for the use of force.  She did not believe in compulsion.  Instead, she wanted a world in which a man stood or fell on his productivity.  Rand saw production as the one great life affirming activity.  Man does not automatically or instinctively derive his sustenance from the earth.  He must labor and produce.  This was Rand's bedrock and explains why she had such contempt for those who try to gain wealth through political arrangements.  She saw this parasitism on every point of the economic spectrum from the beggar to the bureaucrat to the purveyor of crony corporatism.

 

The critical tension between Rand and Christian theology is on human worth.  Christians affirm the inherent and very high value of individuals because of their creation in the image of God.  Rand values human beings only for their achievements.  A person who does not offer value is a leech, a “second rater.”

Atlas Shrugged, the film, is well worth seeing, both because of the challenge posed by Rand’s worldview and because it avoids the pedantic speech-making of the overly long novel.  Rand doesn’t trust her story to get her philosophy across.  The novel struggles under the weight of her desire to teach.  Thanks to the constraints of the film medium, we learn through the development of the characters and the plot.  As a result, the tale comes through quite clearly and simply.

The story proceeds from a fascinating premise:  what if the most able were to go on strike and take their gifts away from the broader society (like Lebron taking his from Cleveland!)?  These talented individuals stop producing because society (in the form of government) has begun to take their contribution for granted and seeks to control the conditions under which they live, work, and create.

Government action occurs under the rubric of equity, but these people who “move the world” -- as one conversation in the film expresses -- do not understand what claim the government has to order their lives or to confiscate the fruits of their labor.  The villains of the piece are not so much any welfare class as much as corporatists who want to link their companies to government arrangements so as to assure profit without the need for strong performance.  They go on about loyalty and public service, but it is a mask for mediocrity and greed.  The heroes (Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggert) want to make money, but they are virtuous because they give obvious value for every cent they earn.

The underlying moral is that we must not make too great a claim to control the inventors and entrepreneurs lest we frustrate them into inactivity.  Though we think we gain by taxing and regulating their efforts, there is a strong possibility that we will lose a great deal more by blocking the creative impulse and inspiring a parasitic ethic of entitlement.

Rand’s atheism, materialism, and reduction of the human being’s value to economic productivity are all severely problematic for a variety of good reasons.  But one might compare her political and economic thought to chemotherapy, which is basically a form of poison designed to achieve a positive outcome.  You don’t want to take it if you can avoid it.  You hope the circumstances in which you would use it don’t arise.  However, in an age of statism, it is a message that may need to be heard.  Not so much in the hopes that it will prevail as much as to see it arrest movement in a particular direction which will end badly if it continues.

 

The Wit of Stillman

On Sunday I watched my weekly Netflix rental, this one a movie I'd only seen once before—Whit Stillman's Metropolitan.

I'm going to have to buy the whole Whitman trilogy, delightful films that yield increasing rewards with each viewing. Stillman is apparently a Christian of some kind (for years he's been trying unsuccessfully to do a movie about believers in the Caribbean. Metropolitan opens with the chords of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”).

Stillman delights in turning cultural expectations on their heads. In Metropolitan, his first film, he portrays Manhattan “Yuppies” (one character insists they ought to be called “Urban Haute Bourgeouise”) as sympathetic and even mildly disadvantaged. In Barcelona, two American cousins, a businessman and a naval officer, deal with the European narrowmindedness and prejudice. And The Last Days Of Disco, set in Manhattan in a strangely ambivalent time period, celebrates the discotheque as a place of joy and a strange kind of innocence.

At one point in Metropolitan, Tom Townsend (Edward Clements) quotes a Lionel Trilling review of Mansfield Park to debutante Audrey (Carolyn Farina), in order to explain his dislike for Jane Austen. Audrey asks him what books of Austen's he's read. He says, “None. I don't read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelists' ideas as well as the critics' thinking. With fiction I can never forget that none of it really happened, that it's all just made up by the author.” The great joke is that the film itself is pure Jane Austen, though the comedy of manners has been transported to a small fortress of civility in a barbarian land.

Does Marriage Complete You?

I recently attended a film festival at Union University featuring the work of students.  One of the first films shown was a thirty minute story about a young couple.

The plot was simple and touching.  A young man expresses his romantic interest in a waitress at a diner.  They fall in love and marry to the disapproval of her parents, who don't think much of the young fellow.  After a brief period of happiness, the two lose their jobs and fall upon hard times.  Indeed, they become homeless and are forced to live in a tent and steal baths in the swimming pool of a local apartment complex.

I won't give away the ending, which was nicely done and brought about a big, appreciative response from the audience.  Instead, I want to focus on the main idea presented in the story.  The primary thought expressed throughout is that even if a young person has nothing else, it is enough to have the sincere love of a husband or wife.  You can be homeless and desperate.  You can be almost without food or access to taken for granted resources like bathrooms and showers.  But if you have committed, romantic love, then you have everything you need.

I am certain that this thought, put over in a very charming and inspiring way is what caused the students to cheer as they did.  The film deserved their applause.  It demonstrated talent and imagination.  It did what films are supposed to do which is to inspire us and make us think.

But despite my admiration, I disagree with the message as nicely as I possibly can.  Thinking in the way the film suggests is right and ideal strikes me as a recipe for unhappiness.  Marriage is beautiful.  Romance is one of the most delightful experiences in life.  Commitment is a rock in life which makes many great things possible.  But marriage, portrayed in the film as the ultimate in romantic love which abides no matter the challenges, is not enough.  The line from Jerry Maguire ("You complete me.") is not true.

My wife complements me almost as much as it is possible for another person to do so.  She is scheduled and organized. I am not.  She is scientific and quantitative. I am in love with the arts and humanities.  When we married I was a fairly new Christian. She had been a committed believer for many years.  She plans activities for the children.  I am more fun and spontaneous.  I could add more examples.  The most notable, of course, is that she is female while I am male.  She is the other with whom I am designed to make a pairing.  But she does not complete me.  She cannot be the sufficient reason for my happiness or my soul satisfaction.  To put that responsibility upon her would be intolerable and unfair.  She cannot do it, no matter how wonderful I think she is (and I do).

The kind of fulfillment and completion suggested by the student film is not truly possible with another person.  The only way to find it, I believe, is through a relationship with God.  Only God holds the possibility of true fulfillment and completion.  He has given me a purpose in life and an eternal destiny.  He is my only hope for knowing the deep truth beneath all things.  I love Ruth.  I only love her more now than I ever did before.  But I recognize that I only have her because of Him.  And the things she can never give me, He can.

The feeling almost all of us know so well, the feeling of complete romantic and psycho-sexual immersion in a person of the opposite sex is a type of spell or chemical haze.  Our hormones take legitimate feelings of love, attraction, and appreciation and turn them into an all-consuming obsession for the other person.  College students are probably more apt to feel that than almost any other age group.  But the chemical haze eventually disappears and the view ahead becomes clear once more.  And if we are looking in the right direction, there He is, looking back at us . . .  offering our soul's true and rightful desire, greater (amazingly perhaps) than even the love of our natural other.

 

The Omega Man

Saturday night I sat down with two physicists from Union University and watched Charlton Heston in The Omega Man.  The film is part of an unofficial apocalyptic trilogy which includes Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green.

First thought: Heston was still rocking his own hair in this film.  I like that.  One of the great improvements in today's Hollywood is that a guy like Bruce Willis is allowed to run around without a hairpiece.  Heston didn't need one with that great face of his.

Second thought: I have apparently never seen this film outside of running into it on cable.  Seeing it uncut on DVD is a whole new experience.  There are several scenes I don't recognize from previous viewings.

Third thought:  Though it obviously can't compete with the Will Smith remake (the third version of Richard Matheson's book I Am Legend) in terms of effects or heart-racing action, The Omega Man is a much more substantial film in terms of ideas.  Heston is holed up in his residence surrounded by artifacts of western civilization.  He is a scientist and a renaissance man.  Thanks to a last minute success, he is immune to the plague that has decimated the human population and left the overwhelming majority psychologically unstable, murderous, and mutated.  They live their waking hours at night under a cultic leader who rails against technology and progress.  Instead, he emphasizes a tribal sort of brotherhood in thrall to his own charismatic leadership.  The imagery is hard to miss.  Heston is the older, white man holding on at the apex of social achievement and trying not to fall off the mountain like the rest of the world has.  His antagonists, the Family, are a proxy for sixties radicals who want to chuck the entire civilizational project and embrace primitivism.  NEXT PARAGRAPH SPOILER . . .

The writers of The Omega Man do something interesting with the end of the movie.  Heston's character has been working successfully on a serum made from his  own blood.  Thanks to a reversal of the plague in one victim, it is clear that it works.  Heston is killed with a spear through the chest as he tries to save a young woman who is succumbing to the disease and to the siren call of the leader of the Family.  He slowly expires hanging cruciform on a fountain that turns red with his blood.  Daybreak comes and the last surviving humans come to him hoping to all leave together for the wilderness where they can start anew.  Heston's last act is to give them the serum.  They drive off, apparently saved by Heston's sacrifice.  So, Heston's character is clearly a Christ figure.  What is so intriguing is that his Christ figure is a man of science.  Faith and knowledge merge in the film's climax.

You don't get any of that in the Will Smith version which basically treats the mutated human beings as equivalent to zombies.  Again, Smith's performance is terrific, as is the entertainment and excitement value of the film, but the big ideas aren't there.

Also interesting is the fact that neither of the two big versions have run with the actual premise of Richard Matheson's book.  In Matheson's story, there is a last man remaining from civilization as we know it who spends all day every day locating the mutated humans and killing them.  He is grim in his determination to kill these creatures who now lurk in the night.  The great twist in that story . . .

SPOILER ALERT

. . . is that the man we have identified with as a hero throughout the book is finally captured.  He listens to how they talk about him and suddenly realizes that, in their view, HE is the monster.  His death will be like a kind of deliverance for them.  Quite a nice twist.  I wonder why Hollywood hasn't gone that way with the story?

 

Film Review: "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader"

The big question you’re bringing to this review, I’m pretty sure, is, “Is The Voyage of the Dawn Treader worthy of its source? Is it more like the first movie, which we loved, or the second movie, which we didn’t even bother to see?”

I’m happy to report that for one C. S. Lewis geek at least, the movie was very satisfying and provided an extremely good time at the movies. (I saw it in 3D. I don’t know if that matters or not; you’re on your own on whether to spend the money. Personally, I’m a sucker for flashy magic.)

It should always be borne in mind that books and movies are different species of story. What works for one may not work for the other (though it’s nice when they do). I ask just three things of a film adaptation of a beloved novel. First, it should make some effort to follow the general outline of the original (extra points for dialogue faithfully carried over). Second, it should hit most of the dramatic high points. And third, it should deliver something like the same emotional impact.

For this particular viewer, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader succeeded. Very well. I’m not sure yet, but I might even like it better than the first movie.

The Time Traveler in the Charlie Chaplin Footage

It's a big deal on the net right now that a filmmaker seems to have found a woman talking on a cell phone back in 1928 in the features section of a Chaplin film.  Here are a few problems:

1.  If you come from far enough in the future to time travel, you probably aren't carrying a phone about the size of a Motorola Razr.

2.  Whoever put the DVD together could have inserted this person.

3.  Okay, you have a cell phone, where are the towers you need to get a signal?

4.  Okay, you have a cell phone, who are you talking to on the cell phone?

5.  My suggestion is that she's holding something black against her face.  A cold compress for pain in the jaw or ear, perhaps?