Islands of the Mind

Oscar quotes Gregory of Nyssa, who said that philosophy is “ever in labor but never giving birth."  Likewise, on the matter of mystery islands that reflect the complexity of the human psyche, the series Lost was ever giving labor, but The Voyage of the Dawn Treader gave birth.   No time to explain.  Just see the thing will you?  It's flawless.   10,000 cc's of unalloyed bonum pumped into the American cultural bloodstream.  Now excuse me while I go about becoming that better person which the film motivated me to become.

Incepting Inception

Lord of the Subconscious

What Inception had over its peer Zeitgeist-defining films such as The Matrix and Avatar was that the camera tricks were for the most part in service to the film's guiding idea.  This idea was, in my opinion, a promising one that was at least technically realized.  I pity the jaded souls unable to be genuinely delighted by this film (or unable to at least admit that they were).  The film displayed a sort of imaginative virtuosity that merits sincere appreciation, even gratitude.

And yet, Inception's pop Dawkins ("memes" show up in the first minute) and hand-me-down Freud (daddy issues are the guiding theme) left much to be desired.  Which is to say, the film constructed the architecture of the subconscious, but seemed at a loss as to how to properly fill it.  The fine Times reviewer A.O. Scott grasped this, complaining that director Christopher Nolan did not give his characters "a rich enough inner life."  Yet the same reviewer suggests that such an enrichment might have been achieved with the unruliness of a more thoroughgoing Freudianism.  Not by a long shot.  We have more than enough cinematic ids already.

As he did for Avatar, C.S. Lewis anticipated the better components of Inception.  Not in the Space Trilogy, of course, but in The Great Divorce.   (The somewhat parallel themes of The Matrix, incidentally, were not anticipated by Lewis, seeing that they weren't worth anticipating.)  All this is to say, navigating the subconscious, and the hells we create therein, was a Christian theme long before it was a Freudian one, and Inception suffers from chronologically stunted conceptual poverty.  How much more interesting - indeed richer - might the film have been had Nolan gone beyond Borges to read Lewis' medievally-inspired limbo, some Augustinian depth psychology, or just some Dante.  We needed a Virgil or (even better) a Beatrice; we got an Ariadne instead.

Christian "apologetics" is not enough to respond to a film like Inception.  We might therefore put down Atheist Delusions for the time being (exquisite as it is), and pick up some different writers instead.  Don't get me wrong, it's not that hard Christian thinking is without pastoral function: As Ellen Charry has explained, it very much is.  But an aboriginal error of the Christian life is to think that an intellectual grasp of grace is tantamount to its experience.  Hence the seventh-century Maxiumus' maxim that "the purpose of theology is to safeguard against misunderstandings that frustrate a Christian life of prayer."

When it comes to Christian navigation of the subconscious, there's always the classics such as the not entirely user-friendly, and somewhat risky, Philokalia.  (When an Orthodox nun saw me with it one summer, she raised an eyebrow and commented, "We need a blessing to read that.")  More accessible in the contemporary sphere is Morton Kelsey who has long been cultivating Christian approaches to dreams and the general subconscious.  Nevertheless, I've found the less Jungian Jacques Philippe - a new Nouwen we might call him - to be a more consistently trustworthy guide. Philippe's writing are a needed antiserum for overeducated Christians (start with Time for God, though his best may be Interior Freedom).

Taking a cue from Inception, here is Philippe's answer to what should be contained in the safe of our deepest subconscious, and it's a truth that need not be guarded by the G.I. Joe snow crew:

This is why humility, spiritual poverty, is so precious: it locates our identity securely in the one place where it will be safe from all harm. If our treasure is in God, no one can take it from us.  Humility is truth.  I am what I am in God's eyes: a poor child who possesses absolutely nothing, who receives everything, infinitely loved and totally free.... Our treasure is not the kind that moths or worms can devour.  It is in heaven in God's hands.  It depends on God alone, his good will and unfailing goodness to us.  Our identity has its source in the creative love of God, who made us in his own image and destines us to live with him forever.

Such is the leaven, a.k.a. the gospel, that the Holy Spirit incepts in our deepest subconscious, one that leads to the freedom that permits real actions of disinterested love in physical reality that we - mercifully - do not create.  Paternal issues are of course important; but largely because they are an image of the far more determinative interrelation described by Philippe. Paraclete and Comforter have long been his.  But Lord of the Subconscious might be a twenty-first century name we should consider bestowing upon the Holy Spirit in light of the themes popularized by Inception.  Hell having been harrowed, the third person of the Trinity can effortlessly navigate the impossibly complex terrain of our own psyches (provided he is granted access). 

Please, by the way, spare me the eye-rolling for Christianizing Hollywood.  I paid close to $10 for the film and I'll do whatever I want with it, thank you.

The Italian Cougar Town

Having acquired some respect for Italian cinema thanks to Gabriele Salvatores' Happy Family, a lighthearted (and inescapably theological) meditation on authorial creation that ran circles around bloated American attempts at the same such as The Truman Show; and having recently shared an Alitalia flight with Tilda Swinton, I was spurred to don beret and summer scarf and march downtown to the Princeton arthouse with Denise, my wife partner, to see Luca Guadagnino's Italian film, Io sono l'amore (I Am Love), starring my plane friend Tilda (there was only a thin first class curtain between us).

"With its close-ups of gorgeous cooking, 'I Am Love' could easily be categorized as a foodie movie," writes The New York Times. The statement is admittedly qualified, but still, this is like suggesting that those interested in a carefree vacation in Japan might benefit from watching Hiroshima.  Such soft commentary calls for some aggressive counter-interpretation, so here goes: I Am Love is "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" in arthouse clothing.  If the theater had pillars, we'd have been clinging.  The film's "prawnographic" scene has generated some buzz, where the chef with whom Tilda will soon have an affair makes her an exquisite dish of prawns. How odd to watch the white witch of Narnia, who offered Turkish delight to Edmund, consume her own fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, to equally devastating effect.

This is not a film about "repression and breaking free" as wikipedia tells us (despite my futile attempt to add some nuance to the entry).  I Am Love is instead a critique of what R.R. Reno calls the Empire of Desire, not a call (like every other film) to submit to imperial demands.   Sometime in the Middle Ages, I imagine an enterprising cleric may have conceived of a sin prevention machine, in which individuals could be placed to convince them not to steal or murder. It took the technology of film to be actualized, but the anti-adultery machine has been perfected, and its name is I Am Love.  Be ye warned, the film contains some borderline pornography (in addition to prawnography), the redemptive factor being its inescapable (and perhaps intentional) ugliness. Insects pollinating flowers are spliced into one particular bout of outdoor copulation, which is not - as some might assume - an endorsement of the "naturalness" of this affair, but a mockery of humans who act like insects.

Tilda Swinton's character was reduced by the film's events (which I shall not here reveal) to a human skeleton, one that she played consummately well.  Swinton seems to be able to manage non-traditional relationships in her own life more successfully than her character did; but no matter - art, in this case, trumps life. Whereas the American Cougar Town takes affairs of older women with younger men to be a comedic setup, I Am Love employs same scenario to traumatize its sophisticated audience into respect for traditional sexual mores. We can sermonize about the deleterious social effects of Cougar Town all we want (and to little effect), but just as the only answer to The Wrestler is the parallel story of a similar man's redemption on offer in Crazy Heart, so the only proper answer to Cougar Town is a film that shows the real consequences of the same behavior, absent the laugh tracks.

Still, I Am Love offers no solution, just an instructive vacuum.  [The closing cave scene is not "resolution," by the way, but Canto V.] As the credits rolled, following ten or so minutes of silence the likes of which I haven't navigated since Requiem for a Dream, I cast off my beret and summer scarf, and asked Denise, my partner wife, "Where do I get my soul back?" Interestingly, she had a ready answer: By reading Tony Woodlief's memoir Somewhere More Holy. America may have given us Cougar Town silliness, but it gave us a Woodlief family as well, who navigated the same tragedies related by I Am Love with the help of a God who really is.

Peter Jackson to White Light: "You shall not pass!" [for heaven]

CGI has not necessarily been good to the afterlife. When in the actual heaven, I imagine we will look back to film depictions of it and grimace with embarrassment, followed by relief that heaven is much more interesting (with far fewer gazebos).  Though not without gazebos, Peter Jackson's chronicle of a deceased fourteen year old girl, The Lovely Bones, is something of an exception. Without spoiling anything, I will point out five things to be watched for, things which might - if noticed - be enough to set off a boycott by the Brights of the upcoming DVD release date.

1. Sensing the apophatic impossibility of depicting heaven in film, Jackson wisely doesn't even try. Instead, following The Sixth Sense, Jackson tries his hand at purgatory, "the in between," as one character calls it.   Fans of The Great Divorce will find themselves in familiar territory.  There is, accordingly, only a subtle foretaste of heaven in the film, described more than depicted by one heaven-destined individual in this way: "Of course it's beautiful."

2.  The film does not avoid all clichés, such as the artsy goth girl tuned into the spirit world.  But the white light cliché, which so often substitutes for serious consideration of what it must be like to die, took a serious pounding.  Jackson dispenses with it immediately, making it a scene not of grace and mercy, but of something quite chilling.  Betty Eadie will not be pleased.

3.  And nor will Buddhists.  Early on, the lips of an alcoholic grandmother, played by Susan Sarandon, remarks, "You know the Buddhists say...", which is followed by an empty platitude.  The film's sequence of events flatly contradicts the sentiment, and in case we might miss that, the narrator recites, "As usual, Grandma was wrong."  Within the first fifteen minutes of the film, Jackson has sealed off the pluralist exits, only to steer his audience into subtley Christian turf.

4. Most recent film depictions of the afterlife, fitting safely under the canopy of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, can be critiqued with that perpetual, and admittedly appropriate, evangelical protestation, "What about the cross?"  As if in response, Jackson delicately places the cross as centrally in this film as it was in the last episode of the X-files series. Watch for it, and notice this cross of forgiveness (there are actually two of them) is nothing less than the passageway to heaven itself.  Alice Sebold, whose book inspired the film, insisted that her work was not supposed to be religious, adding, "but if people want to take things and interpret them, then I can't do anything about that." I suppose she also couldn't do anything about that when it came to her chief interpreter, Peter Jackson.

5. A good bit more subtly, Jackson hints at the possibility of hell.  In fact, there's enough justice and setting right in this film to have Jackson scratched off the Cohen brothers party guestlist for the foreseeable future.

We may have needed more than Marky Mark in the challenging role of grieving father, and we could have done without Le Petit Prince montages. But hats off to Peter Jackson, who - theologically speaking - has recovered that poetic device routinely forsworn by most American filmmakers:  Understatement.

Update: A loyal reader passes on this link to the Kindlings Muse podcast that discusses the film, albeit much more extensively. Jennie Spohr and Jeff Keuss make some fine observations. Keuss contrasts The Lovely Bones to the rank materialism regarding heaven in The Invention of Lying. "Heaven is not a place," he retorts, "but a Person: Jesus Christ." Staub's show put Sebold's book into conversation with a more robust, less individualistic Christian understanding of the afterlife. My point is simply that Peter Jackson's film interpretation seemed, at points, to do the same thing.

Eywa Saves

Due to a unique social situation, I was in the position of seeing Avatar again. The literary demerits of the script became all the more evident with a second viewing (I would not survive round three); but tasteless as it may be to admit, I feel vindicated in my review. FroPoCon/PoMoCon matters aside, the theological fruits are there for the picking: "Eywa has heard you! Ewya has heard you!" shouts Neytiri, a native. She is shocked that Jake Sully's kneeling petition, his Judeo-Christian gamble that Eywa might not be merely the "sum total of all living things," (as one bookish earthling insists), but personal and volitional, even salvific, paid off. The instinctive piety of Jake Sully teaches these natives something about their deity that the natives did not previously understand. As a result, their deity intervenes at the darkest hour to save them from certain destruction, which is to say, the Na'vi graduate from Pantheism. The film, weak as it may be in many aspects, teaches something about missions. There is enough actual anti-Christian rhetoric in Hollywood that Christians need not imagine it when it's not really there.

urgent update: Vatican attempts to refute millinerd. Don't be alarmed. They're just trying to get back at me for New Moon.

East of Pandora

Just in time to lift the Avatar Blues, my take on the movie is at Public Discourse today, which does I think - if this is possible - say something that has not yet been said on the matter. I also attempt to address the PomoCon/FroPoCon rift in the mediating spirit of Bob Cheeks. In short, I use Lewis to make the point that Avatar does not illuminate the difference between liberals and conservatives, but instead reveals the more basic division between Adam and Cain.

The (mere) Wrestler

The Wrestler (spoiler code blue, not red) may begin with a stripper reciting an extensive portion of Isaiah 53, and goes on to then depict wounds aplenty - but don't take the bait. This is a film in which Christ-figuring just won't stick. True, the Asbury Park scene was exquisite - as if the boardwalk had decayed for that reason alone; and yes, it was a quintessential Jersey film (the real Jersey, not Princeton). But there is no absolution to this crucifixion.

In short, a stripper and wrester escape the degradation of their bodies at exactly the wrong times, miscarriaging the healing they might have found in one another. Aranofsky is not kind to his audiences, but nor is he reckless. His point, I think, is to implicate. This film implicates the audience for whom a wrestler died, by whose stripes no one was healed. And considering what one must go through to arrive at this conclusion, those who bought a ticket are implicated as well.

School of the Overpriced Ticket

The X-files series, it is too often forgotten, ended with Mulder wanting to believe in "something greater than us - greater than any alien force." Mulder's final gesture was to reach through the smoke of conspiracy to embrace not just any religious symbol, but the cross hanging around Scully's neck.

I wanted to believe there would be something similar in I Want to Believe, but even with that tease of a subtitle, it just wasn't there. I could barely find enough tread to justify Sacramone's "School of the Teachable Moment" (see below). Should that fail, there's always "The School of the Overpriced Ticket," whose graduates seek to find something redemptive despite a film because, and only because, of how much we paid to see it (witness Borat).

Can, therefore, the ugly suffering that the latest X-Files movie so gracelessly depicts be redeemed by the film's numerous visual references to "Our Lady of Sorrows"? Can Scully's wearied, suffering love for her patients be said to have a certain Marian element to it? Perhaps, but with a film this bad, even that seems forced. Believe me: I stepped in it; I know what it is.

No Country for Mayhem

Denise and I saw Batman with our dear friends Jim and Jill (who specifically requested their immortalization in this blog entry). I could say that the Joker serves nicely as the face of postmodernity (notice how he hates narratives of any kind), but that would offend many, so I won't say that.

Instead, a one paragraph film contextualization and analysis: The Oscar-party nihilism of No Country for Old Men gave us the coin-flip killer; a serial murderer who not only "got here the same way the coin did," but gets away as well. The Dark Knight gives us the exact same trope, but places it in a somewhat coherent moral framework where such evil can, as it must, be defeated. Why do I feel like the American screen has been strangely cleansed?

update: A discerning analysis from Thomas S. Hibbs:

"...the film does not succumb to The Joker's vision. It is not nihilistic; it is instead about the lingering and seemingly ineradicable longing for justice and goodness that pervades the film. As Batman put it in the original film, 'Gotham is not beyond redemption.'"

At one point in the article Hibbs wisely calls it the Batman myth.

Jesus of Whoville

There are currently posters around the Princeton campus for a Faith film festival, and while arduous viewings of arthouse cinema from decades past would I'm sure be somehow rewarded, I've never been the Ingmar Bergman type. On the lower brow, even more tedious are most of Hollywood's self-conscious efforts at the faith film, for which we can be forgiven an exasperated, George Burns-inspired "Oh God." Conspicuous attempts at film faith (think The Truman Show or Bruce Almighty) are so much less satisfying than when, with an uncanny degree of frequency, faith comes as the unexpected surprise.

Horton Hears a Who was another such surprise, but distinguished itself not with hints or flickers of faith, but with an elaborate, extended theological message, by far the best I've encountered in a popular film. With proportions reminiscent of Lewis' The Great Divorce, the central characters (I remind you) are an elephant, and the microscopic world on a speck that the elephant communicates with, battles for, and for which he ultimately seems willing to die.

To recall a 2004 (ancient in blog years) millinerd theological post (my deconstruction of the parable departs a bit from Leslie Newbigin's), the idea of the elephant as God is a venerable tradition which the film brilliantly employs. The mayor of Whoville, who makes contact from his world with the elephant beyond it through a drainpipe of prayer, acts as a Christ figure; the giant hall of the mayor's descendants recall the genealogies in Matthew and Luke. The film's Trinitarian framework is completed with the Holy Spirit, who I would argue, makes an appearance through the film's prominent feature of sound.

Deaf to that sound is the town council, who serve as perfect Sadducees, ridiculing the idea of there being any elephant at all. Apocalyptic signs in Whoville (such as snow in summer) result either from the elephant's assuring Whoville of his presence, or from his battling against those who seek to destroy the speck. But for the Sadducees, such signs are merely an excuse for a kite flying contest. Strange as it may seem, Horton Hears a Who somehow recovers apocalyptic thought from the mists of Seminary sophistication, restoring its patent, palpable directness. In other words, when it comes to apocalypticism, I far prefer the clarity of Dr. Seuss to the resignations of Dr. Schweitzer.

The theological category of mystery is dangerously en vogue, but the scenario laid out by this film suggests that we should never pursue mystery for mystery's sake. Mystery can never mean obfuscation. The category is necessary due to temporary human incapacity for fathoming the contours of God's relation with our world - but mysteries will not always so remain. Horton Hears a Who somehow conveys the sheer physicality of faith: Big God, small world, real contact hindered by real difficulties. We will, one day, comprehend God's relation to our universe with as much intuitive sense as we understand the relation of the elephant to Whoville in this film. Whoville ears, eyes and senses just aren't big enough to discern the elephant (hence the need for mystery when describing him), but the elephant was definitely there; and "there," a Whoville word used to describe chairs, lamps and tables, barely does the pressing presence of such a massive being justice. Likewise, it's a small wonder that Moses only saw God's back.

Another of the film's more interesting feature is its unintentional commentary on religion in general. The elephant makes actual contact with Whoville, but this leads imitators to make up their own stories about tiny little worlds on specks. Imitating Horton, one creature posits "a world full of ponies who eat rainbows and poop butterflies." The difference of course is such worlds don't exist, and only make sense to the extent they are related to the actual world that Horton actually encounters. Likewise, a deluded man in Whoville who thought he was talking to a giant giraffe through a drainpipe would only be deluded. And while exposing this giant giraffe-delusion would fuel skepticism about a giant elephant, it would do nothing to change the fact that the elephant is still there. Faith is not a happy made-up story, but it can be. Faith, properly understood in this movie, is real contact with a real being, despite any vultures who get in the way, and despite the Richard Dawkins kangaroos who insist, "If you can't hear, see or feel something, it does not exist."

Of course the analogy breaks down, as God omnipotent is a good bit more confident than this rhyming pachyderm. Still, the elephant has spoken, and the Christian faith is poignantly summarized in the words, "I meant what I said and I said what I meant. An elephant's faithful, one-hundred percent."

Saved by the Colon

I've just seen Blood for Oil, the movie. I'm sorry, I meant There Will Be Blood. Revolving around "1911," it was extended confirmation of Hollywood's cherished fantasy that all big business (except, perhaps, movie-making) and all religion (except, perhaps, Scientology) are necessarily corrupt. Oscar? You can count on it. Why the cynicism? Guess you could say I caught it from the worldviews on offer in this years top films, and am just throwing back a little. Amidst such adulation, they can take it. Of course, much business and religion are corrupt, no argument there. But did I really need an oil tycoon didactically muttering "I hate people," and a minister publicly licking the arthritic fingers of an old lady to be so reminded? Of course I did.

Yes, the soundtrack was brilliant. But much depended upon Eli the screecher-preacher's acting, and hence much was lost. Eli was forgiven by critics, I suppose, because he was just one of many satellites orbiting in the solar system of which Daniel Day Lewis' acting was the blazing sun. I don't think it necessary to send up a spoiler alert flare to cite one line from the final scene, where the über-actor's character forces the preacher to say the twin propositions, "I am a false prophet," and "God is a superstition." (The less subtle equivalent to "I got here the same way the coin did" in No Country for Old Men.) What no one seems to realize is that the statements - together - are in no way problematic, granted one uses the proper punctuation. "I am a false prophet: God is a superstition."

Sibling premises to convey the same meaning would include, "I am not a false prophet: God is not a superstition," or better yet, "I am a true prophet: God is real."

No Country for Old Men

"It was the cognoscenti's last joyride after the death of God." That's how art critic Maureen Mullarkey describes deconstruction's heyday in 2008. Wait, make that 1998. Sorry, wrong again, 1988. Or was it '78 or '68? Ah, that's right. 1968.

She then connects Weiner's World (party time, excellent) to that joyride. When a catalog marries Weiner's conceptual art to hot theorists Baudrillard and Lacan, she invokes philosopher Roger Scruton, who

"once charged both with charlatanism. He called them impostors who abuse the terms of their disciplines 'to deceive the reader into thinking that they are thinking when in fact they are doing no such thing.'"

This leads to a question: Why is it that deconstruction historically received a colder reception in philosophical country than in the literature or art worlds? Philosophy professor Anthony Kenny (whose new book is reviewed in the current First Things) has an answer, and it's not snarky as much as it is straightforward. The fame of Derrida (et. al.), has prospered in art and literature departments because their members "have had less practice in discerning genuine from counterfeit philosophy."

Fortunately, the sterling discipline of theology is, like philosophy, able to detect any and all counterfeits. Right? Well, no. And perhaps that's why James K.A. Smith seems so concerned.

International Treasure

"The best one can say for this franchise," writes Matt Seitz reviewing National Treasure: Book of Secrets, "is that almost every character is educated and proud of it." But I'm feeling a bit more generous (if not as incisive). The series also encapsulates contemporary squabbles about the nature of Christian faith.

In the first film, John Voigt says the treasure isn't real. It's just a myth to keep the British occupied with endless searching. Cage responds in his Cagey way, "I refuse to believe that." Later he adds, "I just want to know it's not just something in my head or in my heart," and hence continues the pursuit.

Bad as Cage's "acting" can be, he captures in those few lines what it means to be a Christian. Either what we're after is real or it isn't. It's either Voigt or Cage. To call that a choice between the modern and the postmodern fabulously misses the point. To think one can navigate a place between Voigt and Cage on matters essential is enough to inspire yet another thesis (2.75).

Vanity, Vanity

Woody Allen's career has been subject to comment in the five years millinerd has been up and running. An early post (back when my writing style was unforgivably bloggish), posited the connections between Manhattan and Lost in Translation. And it should not go unremarked that Manhattan (bedding a teenager) has become a self-fulfilling prophecy in Allen's life. Yet, it was a necessary film, because Woody, while venerating the town with his black-and-white reverence, sees straight through Manhattan intelligentsia and cuts it perfectly to pieces.

However, Manhattan does not qualify as a pole of Woody's career. The poles are better located between Crimes and Misdemeanors, which brilliantly posits the question of meaning; and Match Point, a remake of the same film which definitively answers the question in the negative. (I suppose one needs there to be no meaning to justify sleeping with one's stepdaughter.)

Aside from some unconvincing acting from Scarlett Johansson, Match Point is one of Woody's finest films, as is it one of the finest atheist films imaginable. Not that I agree with the verdict of meaninglessness, but it's so perfectly expressed. If only Woody had swerved God-ward, what might he have done? Perhaps he still will. But in the meantime, screenings of Match Point might as well accompany Christopher Hitchens' book tour, while verdicts of meaning will depend upon lesser (but not awful) films such as M. Night Shyamalan's Signs.

Woody never had to preach in Crimes and Misdemeanors. Never, in that film, did he invoke the supernatural without a trace of humor. But in Match Point, for the first time in his career (correct me if I'm wrong), he introduces the supernatural with unmistakable seriousness, only to just as seriously dismiss it. This time, for the first time, Woody preaches. One senses in these deus ex machina tactics a fear that he might be wrong on the meaning question, which he is.

In Match Point Allen creates a vacuum-sealed, impenetrable universe with no possibility for meaning. Similar to the film's plot is the novel Crime and Punishment, which makes a brief appearance. But perhaps Allen should read it again, as Dostoevsky's novel and Allen's film come to completely opposite conclusions regarding redemption. Who knows? At the end of the age, Dostoevsky might arise and judge Woody Allen for daring to let Crime and Punishment into his film.

Consider a dinnertime dialog near the beginning of Match Point: "I think despair is the path of least resistance," someone chimes, only to be corrected by the main protaganist who calmly insists, "I think faith is the path of least resistance." But it is at the end of the film when [spoiler alert] the question raised so beautifully by Crimes and Misdeameanors is answered: "It would be fitting if I were apprehended," the perpetrator suggests. "At least there would be some small sign of justice. Some small measure of hope for the possibility of meaning." But no apprehension, no meaning. It's all pure chance. We're left with the sentiment that it's better for a newborn child to be lucky than to be good.

The tragedy is that Woody, at the peak of his powers, is half right; and one does not have to give up on meaning to agree with him. Contained within the canon of Holy Scripture is the same idea:

"the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all."

Indeed Solomon wrestled with the theme of Match Point already, but knew that such pockets of meaninglessness did not lead to the same overall verdict. Instead, meaninglessness is being slowly conquered by meaning, otherwise known as the Kingdom of God. Ecclesiastes submits Match Point moments to a God who brings meaning still, not to mention fitting apprehension.

Ahh... the Bible. Where one gets all the insights of atheism without having to subscribe to false premises. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

Biblicizing Transformers

Biblicizing movies is my custom. I'm beginning to realize it's less piety than the an attempt to avoid boredom. Fooled by good reviews, I found myself watching Transformers. I concede some good parts, but being bored, I biblicized. Using the fallen angels bit on this film would work, but it's too easy. Instead my one Bible verse review reads: "Get behind me Satan."

Consider that (spoiler alert) towards the end of the movie Optimus Prime says to the teenage hero, "If I can't kill Megatron, I will sacrifice myself," which Optimus solicits the boy's help to do. Then Optimus says something which is inexplicable apart from this millinerd-patented interpretation. He says to the boy emphatically, "Get behind me." Why not, "I'll protect you" or "Watch out." No, it was "Get behind me."

Like Peter, the kid doesn't listen. How is this not a reference to Matthew 16? I'm getting tired in my old age of films with teenagers who can do no wrong and who save the world. It was no different with actor Shiah LaBeouf in "Disturbia" which I was forced to see on a plane. Teenagers can do wrong. In Transformers, the kid's Petrine Messianic triumphalism kept Optimus Prime from becoming a Christ-figure who could sacrifice himself to save the world.

Ocean's 13

It is interesting that all of these movies end in a monetized version of the beatific vision, specifically the scenes where the group stares blissfully at fountains or fireworks. I shall commence my practice of the one Bible verse film review (patent-pending), and the first one's easy: "...for the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light" (Luke 16:8). Actually, that one verse covers all three Oceans.

Spidey gets religion

Here at millinerd, we often try to point out hidden gospel themes in films (sometimes despite them). Having been coaxed to Spider Man 3 tonight against my will (I thought it'd be lame), I'm sorry to be unable to perform my usual task. There is no hidden gospel theme to point out in Spider Man 3, because the theme is completely unhidden, even obvious down to forgiveness only possible through the cross or demons weakened by the sound of church bells. Despite ten thousand eulogies, American Christian culture somehow persists.

The questionable effort to make a sci-fi Christian production company now looks all the more bizzare, as it's already been done... well.

301 might have won

Unmolested pro-life propaganda playing in theaters nation-wide for nearly a month? Thanks to the remarks of a wise friend whom I saw the film with, a hidden parable emerged.

spoiler alert (even though we should all know our Herodotus).

The story begins with eugenics. Sparta: A civilization barbarous enough to allow only its flawless infants to survive (yet thinks itself supremely "civilized"). Later in the film, when faced with someone who escaped the infanticide, a disgusted captain tries to kill the "reject", but the mutant nonetheless gains the hearing of King Leonidas.

Still, the king refuses to allow the less-than-perfect soldier to fight, and as a consequence, Sparta loses the war. A more crisply articulated morality tale for the pro-life cause is difficult to conceive. The moral? Civilizations that demand designer babies lose.

Children of Men

A guest post by Denise Milliner

As some of you may know I am the designated fiction reader in the family. Poor millinerd just doesn't have time to read anything that falls outside the categories of "Art" or "Theology". So today I'm here to discuss the latest movie-based-on-a-book: Children of Men.

In P. D. James's 1992 novel a chilling but not-too-distant future is described: humans have inexplicably lost the ability to reproduce and must grapple with the problems unique to the end of civilization. The church has become irrelevant, democracy redundant, group suicide (voluntary and involuntary) a convenient solution. Around the world humanity is grappling with what it means to literally have no future. This is no futuristic science fiction scenario. James pointedly tackles the very questions we must concern ourselves with today - care for the elderly and end of life issues, the maternal instinct, rites of passage in a post-Christian society, the dissociation of sex from procreation and the role of government in guaranteeing quality and meaning in life.

I haven't seen the movie yet, but that's not going to keep me from commenting on it. And why should it? After all, as this interview makes clear, director Alfonso Cuaron didn't bother to read the book before making a movie based on it.

"I had a very clear vision of the movie I wanted to do. So I said to [screenwriter Tim Sexton], you read the book, and based on this movie I'm telling you, there are elements of the book which you will write into the movie."

In other words, Cuaron made a movie he thought up using an idea or two from James's masterwork and a screenwriter.

Based on most reports the story Cuaron tells bears little resemblance to the novel. The characters have been reorganized, assigned new and important human rights activism responsibilities and the Warden of England, the locus of power and evil and bureaucracy and hopelessness in James's tale has been entirely written out. The first child to be conceived in a quarter century is borne not by a devout (and deformed) woman but a persecuted refugee. I'm not surprised that the profoundly Christian nature of James's work has been jettisoned - all that Book of Common Prayer stuff isn't exactly current to today's moviegoing audience. But I am disappointed that the other powerful themes have been supplanted by Cuaron's desire to raise the alarm about U.S. policy.

The brooding and evocative power of Cuaron's work has drawn much praise so we will probably see the film, but I heartily encourage you to take time to read the book. And, of course, this would hardly be a millinerd.com post without an audio link, so for more on James and her work check out this program from Mars Hill Audio.