This is a short note, and I’m sure the one preacher (that I know of) who reads this blog doesn’t have this issue: but I have to say that it bothers me how little I hear the story of the text in a sermon.

I can’t count how many sermons I’ve heard wherein the preacher starts with the text(s) of the day and moves on to

• a theological concept
• a slice-of-life story
• a saint story
• a reference to vapid, superficial entertainment (think of all those who thought it made them “hip” to somewhat-praise The Da Vinci Code from the pulpit)

I found myself in the awkward position of agreeing with two opposing views at once, and I’m trying to work through the implications in advance of my thesis on copyright and the literary canon.

The work I’m reading now is Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig.  Lessig argues for the value of remix, both in the social and economic realms; in doing so, he praises Steven Johnson’s book on mass media, Everything Bad is Good for You.  This citation sent my mind back to Susan Jacoby’s polemic against anti-intellectualism, The Age of American Unreason.  Lessig summarizes Johnson’s argument as follows:

Aiming to rebut the view that television has become “brain dead,” Johnson argues that TV has in fact become more rich and complex over time, not less.  The reason relates in part to technology.  As people collect not only television sets but DVD players, producers of television programming to give their audience an interest in after-broadcast sales.  A show maximizes its revenue when there’s a postbroadcast demand for DVDs or for reruns.

So how do you create that demand?  One way is through complexity.  As Johnson demonstrates, the most successful television shows have multiplied the number of plot lines running through them.  And though thte shows are always understandable at one viewing, few viewers would understand everything going on in every show.  The fan thus has a reason to watch it again–which means, buy the DVD or tune in to reruns.  Complexity thus drives follow-on consumption. (94)

The point Lessig tries to make is that much of the professional mass media are oriented toward response and community for market reasons–I’ve certainly seen this in my lifelong devotion to various science fiction communities.  The rise of the serial drama in recent years underscores this trend.  Remix of this culture is not only inherent to its form but a valid cultural response.

I don’t have Jacoby’s book at hand, so I can’t specifically account for her rejection of Johnson’s argument.  I can say with confidence, however, that it fit into a larger rejection of the idea that the mass media are intellectually neutral or even beneficial.  Much of The Age of American Unreason is concerned with examining the deleterious effects of video culture concomitant with the death of print culture.  Television not only promotes passivity, Jacoby argues, but it encourages us toward anti-intellectualism and “unreason.”

I agree with much of this argument, particularly because I’ve seen it in my own life.  TV and internet video often makes me intellectually and physically lazy.  I do not approve of myself spending an entire Saturday on Hulu any more than I would approve of someone else watching VH-1 reruns for the same amount of time (and, to be honest, I’ve done the VH-1 marathon thing too).

But I also agree with Lessig’s point–some mass media are good for us, and response and criticism of said media are essential to the advancement of our society.  We need to reexamine the culture of professionalism that legally and culturally limits us in our remix and (dare I say it?) deconstruction of our culture.

Lessig and Jacoby are addressing completely separate subjects, and I suspect they would agree on many fundamentals–and what I derive from the two is an ethics of remix.  Lessig touches on this somewhat by detailing how remix is good for education and personal development, but he never addresses the issue of quality.  Jacoby addresses quality at length, lamenting the rise of academic units devoted to popular culture and fat studies, lambasting literary criticism that takes seriously the ludicrous notion that Bob Dylan and Paul Simon are true poets.  She focuses on what we consume and how it affects our engagement with society and cultural debates, but she never offers a method by which we can intellectually engage the mass media environment we live in.  Both authors describe in horrific detail the decay that a read only–as opposed to a read/write–culture engenders: passivity, laziness, blind consumerism.  Hence the ethics of remix–not remix for its own sake, but a cultural response or even a celebration of the mass media.  And from there, we can develop a means by which we assess quality and even canonicity.

—

Jacoby, Susan. The Age of American Unreason. New York: Pantheon, 2008.

Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York: Penguin, 2008.

I won’t try to refute the arguments I’ve read, whether from friends or strangers or professional opiners, against Obama’s candidacy.  He’s been elected, that’s a fact.  Instead, I’d like to employ my postmodern drive to tell stories rather than support propositions and objective truth.  And I’m only being half-ironic.

Let’s assume that you know why I decided to vote for Obama.  You (probably) don’t, but that’s okay.  Just assume it, so you can understand why I, alone in my new home of Burbank, California, invited myself to the election night party of the Burbank Democratic Club.  I got off work at 5 p.m., rushed home to my apartment–and as the apartment complex was also my polling place, I stepped up to the booth and placed my vote.  That task completed, I headed out for a potluck dish to bring to the party.  NPR (fill in your jokes here if you wish) was blasting on my car radio as I waded through traffic, following my GPS’s directions to Ralph’s grocery store.  It was 6:00, then 6:30.  Still in traffic.  About that time, I think, Ohio was called for Obama.

I stopped, turned around, and headed for the party.  At the rate I was going, it would be over before I got the chance to celebrate.

I arrived at the party apologetic, out of breath, and a little scared.  I once was involved in Republican politics in a very non-California state.  Would they shun me?  And of course they didn’t, they assumed I was one of them, a west-coast lefty fully devoted to Trader Joe’s, etc., etc.  I cleared away that assumption rather awkwardly by saying it was my first time voting Democratic, for which I got some satisfied head nods.  A convert, I could hear them saying in their minds.

I got to chatting.  Well, first I got a drink.  Then I got to chatting.

There was a French guy; I’m ostensibly fluent in French but was too embarrassed by my rusty skills to try a conversation in his language.  He was in LA for professional reasons and wanted to find a party of Obama voters to celebrate with.  He didn’t have a vote, but he felt he had a stake.  He told me about his first time voting for the president of France, how he was motivated by fear of student riots and Arab youths.  He didn’t tell me who he voted for, but I figure it was probably Jean-Marie Le Pen or someone of that far-right ilk.  Later, this young man learned that it didn’t pay to vote your fears, that the guys on the opposite side of the aisle (or on the opposite bank of the Seine) really didn’t want their nation to fall into chaos.  There are multiple ways of looking at the world, he told me (I’m heavily paraphrasing), and one’s political opponents merely hold a different point of view on how to fix the country–they’re not actively practicing covert sedition.

Yeah, there’s a lot of my point of view in there.  It’s all a bit hazy, but I’m okay with that.  Let’s move on.

A conversation I’m less hazy about was with a woman about my parents’ age.  Brought up in a Jewish Democratic family, she experienced the suppression of hope in quick succession–before she was 16 years old, she had seen assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK; Vietnam;  Johnson’s downfall; and Watergate.  And yet, with Obama on the cusp of an electoral victory at 7:55 p.m.–just 5 minutes before the polls closed in California–she still couldn’t bring herself to believe it’s happening.  And when the place exploded at MSNBC’s projection for the 44th President of the United States, she shouted the celebrants down, “Projected!  Projected!  Don’t get excited!”  

She was only half-joking; in her, I could see the deeply instilled mistrust of electoral hope.  I understood that her fears came from an unhealthy, post-Watergate mistrust of government, but I also understood that she had heard the cries of “terrorist” and “traitor” at McCain-Palin (mostly Palin) rallies.  I understand that she didn’t want this “transformational figure” (as Powell so eloquently put it) to be shot down by someone who really believes he or she is ridding this country of a Muslim or a terrorist or an “Arab” president.  It wasn’t a rational fear, but it was well-informed–that is, it’s based on historical cause-and-effect.  Think William Randolph Hearst baiting his audiences to gun down McKinley–you release a terrible beast when you play with demagoguery.

But I digress.

Anyway, she calmed down when I showed her that even Fox News had called the election.  Apparently, that was good enough for her, and she was giddy for the remainder of the evening, taking pictures of the television screen.  I predict (project?) that her fears returned the next day, and the next day, and the day after that.  Until Obama’s been sworn in.  Until he’s safely a distinguished ex-president.  And maybe even thereafter.  I share that fear, just a little, but my hope (yes, that cliche) is winning out.

But now I’m getting ahead of myself.  Between digression and getting ahead of myself, this will never get done.

During the ride home, I find myself reflecting on how the afternoon and evening progressed.  It passed so quickly, the victory was called so soon, that I just didn’t have time to consider the enormity of what had happened.  One offhand comment, spoken by one of my elders to another elder, resonated: “This is his man on the moon,” the “his” referring to me.  And it makes sense: when you consider all the historical garbage that the boomers had to live through–the assassinations, the wars, the scandals–the 1969 moonwalk stands out as a beacon of real progress.  No, not the only beacon, far from it, but it quite definitely qualifies.  It was an achievement that you couldn’t ignore, and a national achievement at that.  One glorious day when unambiguous American pride was warranted.

It fits here, too.  I remembered that wonderful, funny, dizzy feeling I had when I saw the first projections come in: Vermont for Obama, Kentucky for McCain.  No surprises, to be sure, but it hit me, An American state just put their votes behind a black man for president.  I remembered leaving the polling place, my ballot receipt in hand, feeling that surely this moment is one that I can be patriotic.  The Bush administration had sucked it all out of me–the utterly unqualified (though basically honest) Texan so wedded to his bleak conservatism that he twice vetoed children’s healthcare and nearly vetoed the newest iteration of the GI bill.  I wasn’t just sick of the Republicans, I was just plain sick, post-Watergate sick.  And John McCain had made me sicker with his consistent abandonment of the principles that once made me admire him–that, surely, was an even greater disappointment to me than Bush’s incompetence, because I felt personally betrayed by McCain.  For 8 years I defended him as a “maverick” and a hero and a man of honor, and he turned his back on immigrants, on the environment, on campaign ethics, on common sense.  I’m getting far afield from my topic sentence here, but the point I want to get at is that the weeks leading to the election left me hungering for change, real change.  Watching the early projections in my cubicle, beaming with awkward patriotism when leaving the voting booth, clapping my hands with Burbank Democrats–I felt the change actually happen.  My generation had not only elected an astute, intellectual, qualified statesman to the highest office in our country–traits we needed oh so badly–but we proved we could look past the worst parts of our nation’s history and thereby remake history.  And yes, I’m proud.  And yes, I do have some measure of hope.  I hope it will be fulfilled with real, positive change, but this moment is good enough for me, for now.

Second Skin

Second Skin is the best, most profound, and most significant of these three films inspired by geek culture. It is a true achievement, both in documentary film-making and in public discourse about online gaming. Artistically, Second Skin is beautiful—compelling interviews interspersed with machinima sequences and illustrative animations. It succeeds in storytelling because of its focus on several story lines; as the narrative focuses on different aspects of online gaming, the narratives are emphasized or de-emphasized. In a segment focused on addiction, one gamer receives particular attention because his around-the-clock habit wrecked havoc on his life. Another gamer is shown in proximity whose lesser (but still alarming) addiction seems to cause a deepening rupture with his wife.

But the filmmakers do not solely focus on the negative—love lives are formed and disabled people are liberated through the virtual world. The positive and the negative do not cancel each other out; rather, they help formulate a cultural critique that should disturb us all—the reason we want to retreat into the virtual world is that we are dissatisfied with the real world.

Nerdcore Rising

Nerdcore Rising is a vibrant, engaging, and surprisingly profound exploration of so-called nerdcore hip-hop. The film follows MC Frontalot, who coined his genre’s name, on his first nationwide tour—a significant step forward, considering that his music was basically a hobby to that point. Nerdcore Rising is a hybrid between a tour/concert film and a talking-heads documentary; it features live concerts (interspersed and overlaid with brilliant and hilarious animations), a travel narrative with goofy moments, observations from the band and their fans, and interviews with other musicians (other nerdcore artists, hip-hop artists, and even Weird Al Yankovic). The film that emerges from this hodgepodge of techniques is insightful at times, particularly when exploring the disenfranchisement of nerds and geeks that necessitates a music written for them (see especially “I Heart Fags,” derived from expectations on young men to assert false, chauvinistic masculinity).

Nerdcore hip-hop is always presented as self-effacing, but never as a simple parody of mainstream hip-hop. Amid the fun of MC Frontalot’s performances and his various antics, the film makes an argument: nerdcore hip-hop is in the true spirit of the wider genre’s emphasis on expressing who one is. It is, the film declares, a worthy subgenre.

Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet

The subject of Reformat the Planet—chip tunes, i.e., electronica using outdated video game systems—is, unfortunately, much more interesting than the film itself. It’s worth viewing, to be sure, but it features little cultural critique and suffers from a weak narrative. There is a narrative formed from the rise of chip tunes and the Blip Festival that signals the arrival of this unique musical “scene,” but the film wanders between topics and frequently repeats itself. The argument of this documentary, much repeated but nonetheless lacking the punch of Nerdcore Rising, is that the participants in the chip tunes scene are musicians who want to return to a simpler, grittier style. There’s some meat to that claim—the style subverts both the commercial aim of the video game systems and the extravagance of electronica—but wider implications are mostly eschewed.

What saves Reformat the Planet is the stunning cinematography and editing. The performances imitate the music in multimedia innovation, sucking in the viewer. These sequences do not resemble a music video or traditional concert footage—they’re something new and beautiful in their artistic extravagance and technological simplicity. These sequences often make a better case for chip tunes than any of the interviewees.

Sex Positive is an important film. That sounds like hyperbole, especially if one considers that I attended the world premiere in a half-full theatre, but you wouldn’t think so if you always this brilliant documentary about AIDS activist Richard Berkowitz—irascible and confrontational, but also profound and impassioned. Whether we disagree with him, we have to respect that he legitimately wants to do good, first by fighting the gay establishment in calling attention to promiscuity, then by promoting the concept of safe sex. The most significant contribution that Sex Positive makes is its analysis of what AIDS did to the people in the gay community—the interviewees paint a picture of young, productive men dying at an alarming rate without any real explanation. Sex Positive is shot beautifully, with a shaky or still camera as the interview demands, and interspersed by stock footage that is sometimes shocking but never indulgent. Berkowitz is a compelling subject, and the filmmakers explore his complexities to the extent they are able, even venturing into his years spent as an S&M hustler and a drug addict. What I appreciate about this film is that it explores without being too preachy—though there is some preaching.

Sorry. I’ve given up on C.S. Lewis. Not on his scholarship or his apologetics (though I’m skeptical of those at this point), but on his didactic, overbearing fiction.

It’s useful to trace how I got to this point.

First, there was Narnia. I remember reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as a kid–or, rather, I remember having read it. I don’t think I read any of the other volumes, though they were in my library. Fast-forward to a couple years ago, when that book’s adaptation was brought to life by Disney. The film was decent (not great, certainly not as good as Jackson’s Lord of the Rings), so I was interested enough to pick up the Narnia books again. I didn’t remember anything from them, so I went into my one-volume Chronicles of Narnia with the expectation that I would enjoy it. I should also note that I was reading J.K. Rowling and Lemony Snicket at the time, so I was generally positive toward children’s literature.

So I read Lion.

I hated it. There were some spectacular lines, but the story was disjointed to the point of near-incoherence and the dialogue was stilted, like the worst of Victorian prudishness. It was one of the most singularly horrible reading experiences I had subjected myself to.

Being a glutton for punishment, I read Prince Caspian. More of the same, really; the dialogue improved somewhat, but did Aslan have to jump in, deus ex machina, without any connection with the previous 75 pages? Finally, I gave Lewis a third shot and read The Magician’s Nephew. The only thing–and I do mean the only thing–I got out of it was the observation that Neil Gaiman stole his beginning to Anansi Boys from the creation of Narnia. Other than that, it was crap.

I know I’m being pejorative, and I know I have some Lewis aficionado friends who occasionally read this, but I simply must be honest: I found all three books pretentious, awkward, and intensely overrated.

My impression of Lewis improved somewhat when I listened to John Cleese’s reading of The Screwtape Letters. Finally, here was the Lewis I had been told of–clearly a prose stylist who understands the subtle hypocrises and real triumphs of modern religion. The words themselves, not just Cleese’s performance of them, were marvelous. Screwtape is the only reason I hold out hope for Lewis’s apologetical and scholarly writing.

Unfortunately, I was duped again by Lewis when I also downloaded Out of the Silent Planet from Audible.com. It started out well, more or less. Ransom is a lovable, solitary professor at the beginning–a stock character if there ever was one–and I had hopes he would develop out of that. The séroni are truly terrifying in their first appearance, and the narrative held me on the edge of my seat until the lowly doldrums that is Ransom’s encounter with the hrossa. This sequence reveals the total flatness of Ransom; the book might have been called C.S. Lewis Goes to Space. Ransom’s two-dimensional self-righteousness, and the weird neoplatonism of the author, weigh down every paragraph. Ransom learns from the hrossa, but only their language and some transparently didactic religious points that Lewis wanted to get across (particularly when Hyoi tells Ransom about the restrained sex life of hrossa). It was at this point in the narrative that I truly resented the early confrontation between Ransom and Weston; the latter plays the nihilist (we’re supposed to boo and hiss at him, I guess) and the former plays the dignified humanist who is against vivisection. I had recognized Lewis’s precise honing of that conversation for his didactic purposes, but I didn’t realize the extent of it until Ransom meets another species and utterly fails to change.

But the oddest things about the encounter with the hrossa is its parallel with Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver, too, is a fool in a strange land. In each voyage, he–like Ransom among the hrossa–is instructed in the local language and learns it quickly because of his supposed facility for languages. Ransom is an anti-Gulliver in some respects; he is an Oxford philologist, so it makes sense that he recognizes Hyoi’s linguistic capabilities when they first meet. But in other respects, he is a pale imitation of Gulliver; neither character changes, but at least Swift’s protagonist is delightfully complex in his chauvinistic idiocy. Ransom is just the stereotype of an Oxford don who makes strange lands and strange peoples dreadfully boring.

So I gave up. I downloaded Jonathon Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude from Audible.com and was delighted, in the first five minutes, to know that I was going to be given complex characters and questions rather than propositions.

I am profoundly disappointed in my reading of Lewis. I was intrigued by the idea of a Christian science fiction novel, but I won’t be picking Out of the Silent Planet up–or anything else by Lewis–for a long, long time.

Besides school books (of course), here’s my priority reading list (with current publisher, original publication date):

1. Toni Morrison, Mercy (Random, 2008): Wikipedia tells me that this will be released in October.  I will be there the day it comes out.  That is all.
2. William Gibson, Neuromancer (Ace, 1984): I’ve been wanting to read this because it so often comes up in critiques of modern SF literature; it’s sort of the book equivalent of Blade Runner.  I’ve started to read it, and I’m amazed at how it seems to have a coherent story despite its disorienting premise.
3. David Michaelis, Schultz and Peanuts: A Biography (Harper, 2007): I love the idea that the man behind Peanuts was a tortured artist and that one of the most ubiquitous commercial properties in American culture has a great deal of pathos behind it.  I was first introduced to this idea by a comic artist (I forget who) who pointed out that the absent parents are the most striking feature of Schultz’s strip; when I heard that Michaelis had uncovered the reason for this pathos, I knew I had to read his biography.
4. William Empson, Milton’s God (Greenwood, 1961): I don’t know if I’ll agree with all of Empson’s conclusions (probably not), but I’m intrigued by the idea that Milton was so towering a poet that even the most ardent atheist had to pay attention.  Also, I think one of the greatest heresies of Milton scholarship is the one that supposes that he always and everywhere wrote orthodox poetry.
5. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford, 1967): This one is more of a line of research, while my interest in Empson is mostly curiosity. I’m intrigued by the endings of GenX novels and, specifically, how the endings relate to the tension between cool disaffection and melodramatic sincerity.  My hope is that Kermode, having written the definitive book on endings, will aid me in my research.
6. Alister McGrath, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution (Harper, 2007): This was recommended by the Internet Monk as a cogent and sometimes damning history of the Reformation.  I like the idea of scholars committed to a certain religious cause taking a serious look at its origins.
7. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on the Road (Harper, 1942): Last year, I fell in love with Hurston’s writing.  Few modern American writers are so poetic (for me, she is only eclipsed in this regard by Morrison), and none provide such eloquent–if occasionally shocking–expositions of racial inequities.  Dust Tracks is her autobiography, and it now includes what her white editors made her cut in the interest of political correctness.
8. Toni Morrison, Paradise (Penguin, 1997): It is my understanding that Paradise completes a trilogy started by Beloved and continued in Jazz.  Both of the latter novels are remarkable, and I simply must know how Morrison binds her books together.
9. Jacob Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy (Random, 2008): Most anti-Bush books are foaming-at-the-mouth affairs, but I like Weisberg’s approach.  He begins with the assumption that Bush is a failure–debatable, but not debated here–and uses his book to examine the man’s character.  It sounds like solid journalism from what he describes in interviews (I recently heard him on Fresh Air).
10. Douglas Coupland, Microserfs (Harper, 1995): I adored Generation X, even though the ending was extremely odd (see above), and I’m desperate to learn more.  Though I didn’t enter the corporate workforce until the 2000s, I’ve always felt drawn to the business and technology culture of the 1990s.  The tech boom to the tech bust is the most interesting period of business history for me, probably because I grew up with it.  Also, there’s a wild-west/hopeless-slacker combination going on.  I’ve heard good things, and I’m looking forward to reading it.

The 1972 documentary Marjoe follows Marjoe Gortner as he takes the viewer behind the scenes of the Pentecostal tent revival circuit.  That description is paraphrased from the IMDB plot summary, and it doesn’t even approach a good description of the film.  Marjoe is part character study, part investigative journalism.  We get a close-up view of Gortner’s strange life, from his manipulation by his parents to be the “youngest ordained preacher” at 4 years old to his hippie lifestyle as he presented himself to congregations as a mature man of the cloth.  At the same time, the filmmakers show candid conversations with high-profile pastors as they count money and talk about their extensive foreign properties.  The brilliance of the film is the way these two purposes interact–we are inclined by the corruption we see behind the stages of the revival tents to perceive Marjoe as heroic but we are disturbed by his character flaws and blatant self-interest.

There is a certain segment of Christianity in general and in any denomination that seeks to reduce charges of sinfulness and corruption–Catholic Answers is famous for this, as demonstrated in its tract, “The Inquisition” (filed, notably, under “Anti-Catholicism”).  That segment of Christians and Pentecostals would be hard pressed to work around Marjoe; the film doesn’t show anyone other than Marjoe admitting to using evangelism as a business, but all the evidence is there.  This is shown marvelously when Marjoe guest-preaches and exhorts the congregation to make a “donation” for handkerchiefs that offer spiritual benefit.  During the laying-of-hands segment after his sermon, he and the lead preacher go into a back room and count money.  The film cuts between the counting of money and the Spirit-stricken congregation–then, the preacher hands Marjoe a stack of cash.  For some, this is evidence enough that Christianity has always been about collecting money from the less fortunate, but I think the corruption is more subtle than that.  What the filmmakers have shown is a symbiotic relationship; the guest preacher, especially a celebrity like Marjoe, brings in a crowd who is willing to part with some cash.  That’s why the guest preacher gets a “cut,” and that’s the problem.  An honorarium is a set amount, so the guest preacher is not impelled to force further payment; but the corrupt lead pastor brings in Marjoe hoping he’ll convince the congregation, explicitly or implicitly, to give abundantly and then rewards his guest according to the results.  It is the subtlety of this corruption that convinces me it is both ingrained and widespread.  Marjoe is, therefore, not a film about a select group of nasty preachers and their enablers.  Rather, it is about a corruption that reigned and continues to reign in American Pentecostalism (witness Senator Grassley’s investigation of six televangelists).

But corruption mainly occupies the first third or so of the film–the rest is about Marjoe.  We pity him at the beginning as scenes of his preaching at four and five years old are interspersed with images of him in his mid-twenties, when the film was shot.  He tells us that he was programmed by his parents to preach for money, and we believe him.  What’s more, I think the filmmakers revealed the extent of his programming, though unwittingly.  I think that the filmmakers, good skeptics that they are, believed that just showing a five-year-old claiming to be a preacher would be evidence enough of such programming, but their audience includes believers in miracles.  Who is to say that God may not call a young child and gift him with inspiration?  But that supposition is refuted before we even hear from grown-up Marjoe, when four-or-five-year-old Marjoe declares that he is convinced–not he believes–that the Bible is the Word of God.  The line between conviction and belief is fuzzy at times, but few (if any) four-or-five-year-olds would have the intellectual capacity to honestly assess the evidence and come away convinced in the veracity of Scripture.

As the film examines the grown-up Marjoe, our pity doesn’t fade entirely, though it is significantly complicated.  The filmmakers are shown in the film, laughing along as Marjoe makes fun of the congregants that he hoodwinks, but there is no direct commentary or voiceovers from them.  After a couple of scenes in the beginning, the filmmakers disappear from the film altogether, lending the film’s focus entirely to its titular subject.  We see Marjoe at his best and worst–he claims he is “over” his parents’ manipulation of him because he believes they will receive bad karma as a result.  Obviously, Marjoe is emotionally shallow to still want his parents to suffer and spiritually shallow enough to believe in a complex Hindu principle without any education in that religion.  Later, we see him justify the film’s morally ambiguous setup–no one, including his father at one point, knows the film is an expose or that Marjoe no longer believes in what he preaches.  He’s “bad, but not evil,” and he wonders aloud what he’ll do afterward.  He mentions he would like to go into film, and we should all raise an eyebrow at that point.  Clearly, there are other motives than journalistic honesty at work in the film.  In short, Marjoe is shown as a human being with good traits and bad (but not evil) traits.

Given the film’s emphasis on corruption and on Marjoe, one wonders why there is so much footage of the revivals, on the performance of the preachers and the crowd interaction and reaction.  I suspect there is a strong element of debunking that’s intended here; maybe, like Marjoe, the filmmakers are convinced that the “work of the Spirit” in Pentecostal congregations is mostly the result of a warped crowd mentality.  But I think there’s something more going on, because the filmmakers do not just focus on the parts he tells them to; they fix the camera after they’ve been touched or “baptized in the spirit.”  They show the choirs dancing without suggestion from the pulpit and the people along with them.  Marjoe’s girlfriend states on camera that she can’t believe that the crowd, deep down, believes they are having a genuine spiritual experience, and Marjoe reduces revivals to the same status as rock concerts (a way of “getting off”).  So it seems that the filmmakers are concerned with a question that Marjoe dismisses: can we take these spiritual experiences seriously?  Even if the ethical questions are silenced (they aren’t in the film, but let’s pretend they are for a moment), the question of individual authenticity remains.  The congregation believes Marjoe, believes in God’s power to heal, and the congregants are never presented as stupid or as dupes.  They are presented as they are, and extensively so.  The film left me wondering about these congregants, whether they would feel cheated or satisfied that God had spoken to them, somehow.  That I couldn’t get them out of my mind, that I couldn’t resolve them away with theological or psychological explanations, is an indication of that Marjoe succeeds, and succeeds abundantly.

I’m reading…

• Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman (Pantheon, 2007; via Audible.com): Just started this one, and it’s a true delight.  It’s a dual reading, appropriate for its dual voice narrative.  Grossman seems to take superhero and supervillain tropes seriously and provides a world to explain how they operate.
• Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon by Garrison Keillor (Viking, 2007; via Audible.com): Just finished this one, and I’ve concluded that audio is the only format to read a Keillor book.  Pontoon begins with a transcendent description of Heaven and descends to the earth, to Lake Wobegon, to examine what happens when a citizen dies.  The strength of the novel is that the situations and the characters are both unique and universal; you feel that these people are down the street from you, but you also feel they’re unlike anyone else.  You feel that these situations have happened to you, but they never have.  But most importantly, Pontoon is an example of what happens when an author truly understands oral literature and incorporates it into the Western novel.  Thus, the narrative is recursive, with each person’s story being told, as if the novel itself represents what future generations of Lake Wobegon will say about these people and these events.

Of Kahlil Gibran’s Collected Works, by Alan Jacobs, in First Things.  (Via Little Professor)