One Quote Review: Exit/Entrance by Aidan Mathews

WordPress won’t allow me to format quotes of dialogue from a play so instead allow me to present the relevant quote in an image:

Aidan Mathews dialogue

Aidan Mathews, Exit/Entrance, p. 53. Itallics added.

The play Exit/Entrance was first performed in 1988. I have no idea when it was last performed. It is a play about love and marriage and hope and regret and death. And Hesiod. I wish I could see it live but until contemporary Irish culture wakes up to how simply terrific Aidan Mathews writing is, it is unlikely. Hauerwas’ First Law is: “You never marry the right person.” This interchange between Charles and Helen is a dramatic depiction of the truth of that law. It comes towards the end of the play, which is towards the start of their life together. It is wonderful. Marriage may be, depending on who you listen to (I don’t quite agree), a sacrament; an expression of God’s grace in time and space and material form. It is a heavenly thing, perhaps. But because of that (not in spite of that) it must be an earthly thing made on the ground upon which we stand and from the ground upon which we stand.

Your Correspondent, His favourite exercises are woodworking and sex

Film Review: White Elephant

1.
Right here in the prologue, let me give you my verdict:

This is a film you should track down and watch.

Especially if you are one of the very many Christians who read this blog: please, track down this movie, put your phone away, close over the laptop, draw the curtains, exile distraction and watch this film.

In the rest of what follows, spoilers (if such a term applies) will be shared so come back to read this after watching the film, if you’re the kind of person who thinks movies are ruined by being able to tell what comes next.
2.
In our age, films involving priests as primary characters are rarely satisfying. They are sometimes very good but they usually involve two key character dynamics and one major over-riding point. The character tensions are: how hard it is for a principled individual to work under a hierarchy and how impossible it is to commit to celibacy. The major over-riding point of films involving priests tends to be anti-clerical. Priests are bad and worse, priesthood itself is bad.

3.
In White Elephant you have the character tensions but you do not have the major over-riding point. This places it in a rare group of movies which includes the greatest film I’ve ever seen about vocation, Of Gods And Men, and the recently over-looked Malick movie, To The Wonder. White Elephant tells the story of two dear friends who happen to be priests. The older friend has brought the younger friend, recovering from injuries sustained in a largely undiscussed massacre in the Amazon where a colleague was martyred, to work with him in a massive Argentinian slum, based around the carcass of an unfinished, half constructed super hospital.

4.
The film depicts three communities, interwoven together, overlapping and inter-penetrating. At the heart of the film is the community of priests, centred around Fr. Julian. It includes a volunteer named Cruz who teaches the boys of the favela practical skills, and a driven, compassionate social worker, Luciana, who is played brilliantly by Martina Gusman. These are people of faith* who are possessed by a missional purpose. They want to see the young people of the slum rise out of it. They want to see the dignity of the older people in the slum restored. They want to be enemies of no one. They pray together and they eat together. This is a rare, unflinching look at Christian ministry in community.

The second community the film records is the slum itself, the district of Villa Virgin. The depiction of the city is neither tuned to evoke a sentimental response nor used as a menacing piece of exotica. It is what it is – the result of human beings living close together. There are good things and bad things quite independent of the horrendous decay.

We might called the third community the “Enemies”, although the point of Fr. Julian and Fr. Nicholas’ work is that the people we want to blame must instead be embraced. So the State in the form of an obstructionist city council and a brutal police force are included in this number, as are the two rival drug gangs that vie for control of the district. The plot of the film is nothing more than the interaction of the three main character, Fr. Julian, Fr. Nichols and Luciana, with the different communities that make up Villa Virgin.

* The notes on the film from the Cannes Festival last year describe Luciana as an atheist. Unless I passed out at some point, this is never suggested in the film. In fact, prominently placed above her desk in her office is an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. One might speculate that this shines light on what faith means in a secular age. Many jump to a conclusion that because a character doesn’t appear in scenes where “devotion” occurs, we imagine that they must be irreligious. The underlying idea revealed in this assumption is that religious faith is a gloss that sits on top of a more primal, universally shared idea of what it means to be a human. Unless I missed some explicit signal somewhere, the reviewers** who have come to this “Luciana is atheist” conclusion are reading stuff into the film that isn’t actually there in a way that allows us to read out of their reviews a lot about the hidden assumptions of our age.

** One could further speculate that the critical dullness elicited by To The Wonder is also at work in responses to White Elephant. An idea of faith as a set of outmoded metaphysical commitments that some people have and that might possibly be of social benefit in some settings can be found again and again (good example here). This is a serious journalistic deficit. Imagine how crippled a film reviewer would be if they believed politics was nothing more than elections?

5.
The film does fall into the trap of nodding towards the hierarchical structure of the Catholic church as an obstacle to the ministry being carried out. However, this nod is restrained. Fr. Julian and his team seek to work under the authority of their bishop. This is at times frustrating. The depiction of hierarchy is still negative, but it is viewed realistically.

6.
The film also falls into the trap of depicting celibacy as almost impossible. This is a pity. But the way that it is done is wonderful, if just taken for what it is. Fr. Nicholas doesn’t fall out of celibacy because celibacy is a horrendous burden, but because friendship is desirable. The sex scene and subsequent relationship scenes that ensue are actually profoundly touching because what is communicated is the hunger for the other, not in some tacky counterfeit idea of a physical urge that can’t be resisted but in the sense of an attraction to the beauty of the other self. Falling out of celibacy is not a torturous existential crisis so much as a thing that happens because he loves his friend and desires her and she him. It is not a deficit in the path he is walking but a surplus in her beauty that possesses him. The falling out of celibacy creates internal contradictions but it doesn’t destroy his vocation.

7.
The reason why I want my Christian friends to watch this film is threefold. Firstly, it is a very good, gripping, thought provoking drama. It is superbly acted, it is restrained, it is interesting. These are rare and good things.

8.
Secondly, the film is an informed attempt to show us what it means to do Kingdom of God work embedded in a community. The protagonists are embedded in their community of faith but they live and dress and speak like the community that makes up the favela. Christians mis-use the word incarnational when they are describing this kind of work. What White Elephant offers us is a depiction of what this kind of community based ministry should look like. It is representational, not incarnational. Worship and mission and social justice work are not segmented. It is integrated. This film manages to do all this without being in any way propagandistic.

9.
Thirdly, the film shows us what our right stance should be towards politics, power and the State. We do not resist the State, any more than we seek to resist the drug dealers. We neither want the State overturned nor see that as our job, regardless of how unjust it is. Equally, we neither want the drug dealers extinguished nor see that as our job, in spite of the damage they inflict. Rather we witness to the State that we are citizens of a different Kingdom. The Argentine flag is a recurring motif in the film. Everyone except Fr. Nicholas is Argentinian and his Belgian origin is much discussed because to be foreign is to be strange. But the Christians in this film demonstrate in their words and their deeds that they are holding the State we call Argentina to account by the standards of the in-breaking Kingdom of God, which is their true home and the entity to which they owe allegiance. If that higher allegiance means they must shelter those that the law of the land deem criminal, then so be it. If that higher allegiance means that they must seek to restrain violence against the State even when they wish they could lash out, then so be it. If that higher allegiance calls them to martyrdom, then so be it.

10.
Final point: The soundtrack kicks in with some stirring stuff at important moments.

Your Correspondent, A cool name for his dog would be “Bark Obama”

One Line Review: This Must Be The Place

While I am more than inclined to love movies set in Dublin (especially featuring shots on a street my friend used to live on), this quiet and unusual film about guilt and regret and trauma comes alive when David Byrne (is there anything he wouldn’t make come alive?) begins to sing and from there it gets very interesting indeed.

I think Transfarmer's house is the last one on the right, but I might be wrong

Your Correspondent, Gratitude is the most beautiful thing of all.

Beasts of the Southern Wild and To The Wonder

* While neither of these movies are plot-driven, here be spoilers below. *

Both Beasts of the Southern Wild and To The Wonder are movies you are meant to be mildly embarrassed to love. The reason is that both of them are drenched in something like the uncoolness of fairy tales. Beasts of the Southern Wild is a visual feast that has alligators in it. Therefore it is compared to Terence Malick movies. To The Wonder is a Terence Malick movie and as such is a visual feast. In this one, at least, there is no alligator.

Fairy tales aren’t cool. We’re meant to think movies about marriages breaking up and teachers being addicted to heroin are cool cos those things are real. Priests suffering the dark night of the soul and girls making sense of the universe? What is more real than that? But it is a “visual feast”, so we are primed for sentimentality.

In Beasts of the Southern Wild, the little girl, Hushpuppy, is pursued throughout by vast mythical prehistoric creates called aurochs. Their oncoming presence casts a shadow over everything that happens to her.

Beast of the Southern Wild

In To The Wonder, a priest, Fr. Quintana, is pursued relentlessly by doubts about his vocation. The retreating presence of God casts a shadow over everything that he does.

To The Wonder

These movies are easily discarded as fripperies for the pseudo-intellectual. Maybe they are. Neither movie is without fault. But watching them together is illuminating.

As I have said, both are kinds of fairytales so they are kind of uncool. Both of them share a picture of Creation as a Cosmos. Hushpuppy believes that everything is connected. The characters in To The Wonder are striving to make any sort of a connection – with themselves, with each other, with God. But the Cosmos-view of the two movies is subtly, if significantly different. Both perceive some kind of integral, holistic sense to the universe. Neither movie leaves us under the impression that matter is all there is and matter is all that matters. But To The Wonder, as with all Malick movies, has more hope.

Hushpuppy’s Cosmos-perspectice is that: “The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts, even the smallest piece… the entire universe will get busted.”

In Malick’s movies no one thinks this. All the pieces can be out of whack and the “Love that loves us” will still make things right. I wanted To The Wonder to end differently. I wanted Neil to be changed by his friendship with Fr. Quintana so much that he and Marina could be happy. I am spoiling nothing by saying that doesn’t happen. But to close the story off like that is too neat and too easy. Instead, Neil ends happy, but elsewhere. Because all the small busted pieces won’t bust the entire universe.

Which is not to say that Beasts of the Southern Wild is a stupid movie. It isn’t! It is beautiful and funny and in its own way, true. When Hushpuppy’s moment finally comes and she says to her fears, “You’re my friend, kind of” something lovely is depicted in a lovely way that redoubles the loveliness. Those haunting fears that chase us down, they spur us on.

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a better reviewed movie. Maybe that is because movie critics are better able to judge a film than I can. Or maybe in retrospect, the movies Malick has made will continue to attract careful watchers, who when they listen, will find something unique. Beasts of the Southern Wild is unashamedly and impressively a movie that shares the philosophy of a six year old girl. But our philosophies mature. They go past the silliness of Marina’s Italian friend Anna who sees nothing of value in the small Oklahoma town they find themselves in.

And there, To The Wonder, directed by a man who translated Heidegger, is shown to be a deeper (not necessarily better or more enjoyable) (and maybe this is a worthless prize to win when talking about films anyway) movie. Hushpuppy and Wink look over at industrial New Orleans and see ugliness. They refrain from using tools when they can. Civilization itself is unvcivilized.

But when the Parisian Marina arrives in Smalltown USA, she is taken by it. The movie starts on the sophisticated streets of old Europe but it plays out on the plains which she declares “honest”. The humdrum of human settlement, domestication, civilization is a part of the “wonder”, not something that mars it. This reverence for nature in the midst of suburbia survives even as her marriage doesn’t.

The stark dichotomies between the “innocent wilderness” and the “fishtank without water” of urbanity in Beasts of the Southern Wild makes the philosophical perspective easier to digest. This is an irony. Because the movie that is at peace with the supermarket “Everything is so clean!” is the movie that gets closer down to the raw marrow of reality.

Of course, I haven’t eaten a real meal in three days due to the Winter Vomiting Bug so I could just be full of crap.

Your Correspondent, His obese toddler did his stepfather’s make-over.

One Quote Review: Destination Dissertation by Sonja K. Foss and William Waters

I am reading these books about how best to approach doctoral research and I am finding them all to be both boring and likeable. Just like me!

In Destination Dissertation, the project is compared to a long exotic holiday that requires proper preparation, is sometimes trying and must be merely endured but is ultimately rewarding and enriching. I like how they quoted Scot McKnight. I did not like how they confidently break it all down into 29 steps that can be achieved in just twenty minutes a day with just a slim-fast shake and 10 push-ups, or some such goal-orientated bahooey!

In one of their closing sections, the authors suggest that you should spew out what you have to write in one, big, unformated gush of words. They even suggest turning off your monitor and just typing blind. That may be a bit extreme for me but it reminded me that there is no shame in producing dreadful first drafts of things, which is something I commonly do. It’s a nice analogy and I hope it helps you kill a bit of that perfectionist streak that might be holding you back:

Editing as you write is not unlike moving into a new house or apartment and trying to arrange the furniture by focusing on one or two pieces. It’s like moving a single table and a lamp here and there until you get it in just the right place. The problem is that you’ve ignored the couch and the chair and the coffee table that may need to go in the exact place you positioned the table and the lamp. The perfect place is no longer so perfect when the other pieces of furniture fill the room, and you probably won’t be able to keep the perfect placement of the table and lamp. Imagine instead placing all the furniture in a rough, workable arrangement and then making smaller and smaller adjustments until the room is perfect. When you work from that rough arrangement, all of your adjustments take into account the whole, and there aren’t any major surprises or changes along the way. Fast writing, then, gives you the arrangement of the whole room before you begin to make smaller adjustments.

Destination Dissertation, Sonja K. Foss and William Waters, p. 266.

Your Correspondent, He scientifically proved that oceans are God’s tears.

One Quote Review: Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

Francis Spufford, who authored the single finest chapter I read in any book last year, has written something very special in Red Plenty.

In Red Pletny, Spufford tells the story of a strange and wonderful moment at the end of the 1950’s when the Soviets had reasons to believe that within a generation they would have overtaken the capitalist west and won the Marxist utopia long awaited. This seems fanciful to us today for two reasons: firstly we know very little about the Soviet Union and so imagine that the bits and pieces of caricature we have picked up are accurate and secondly, we are constantly told that capitalism is the end of history and it is fanciful and unreasonable to imagine that any other way will ever be conceived.

In other words, this seems fanciful to us today because of our casual ignorance.

In the decade after World War II, the Soviet Union grew, in even the American estimations, at a rate of about 10% a year.

After defeating the Nazis, after the purges of Stalin, after the murderous New Economic Plan, after the invasion of Russia by the White Forces, after the 1917 revolution instigated by only a few thousand people and just a century after most of the population were effectively slaves, this transformation is the stuff of fairytale.

And Spufford is wise enough to root us down in the miraculous narrative by approaching the economic history of a country as if he is writing a novel. What we have in Red Plenty straddles history and fictional narrative and gladly falls head first into politics and philosophy and economics whenever there is need.

This approach isn’t some faddish innovation to avoid turgid economic history. It is fitting in the most appropriate way because the story of Soviet economics in that era was the elaboration of the modified Marxist vision that energised the whole nation. The USSR, no less than the USA, was a nation founded on a story it told itself about itself. With the emergence of computing, mathematicians in Russia slowly became convinced that the progress they had made thus far would now actually accelerate because they could enhance the natural superiority of a centrally planned economy through cybernetic efficiencies.

By fictionalising the historical, Spufford manages us to get down into the contradictions and compromises that people had to make on a day by day basis as they sought to achieve utopia. The tension between belief and unbelief in the Soviet project and the complexity of being in a topia that is destined to become utopia are drawn out beautifully without Spufford having to point at it. It is seriously classy, beautifully written and utterly fascinating.

Behind it all of course is the belief in progress, the cold rationalism that sought to be so unsentimental but ended up being a figment of the 20th Century’s collective imagination. Paragraphs like this stand out with potent clarity:

Electrons have no point of view. They form no opinions, make no judgements, commit no errors. Down at their scale, there are no opinions, judgements, or errors; only matter and energy, in a few configurations from which the whole lavish cosmos jigsaws itself together. Electrons move when forces act on their speck of negative electrical charge or on their infinitesimal pinpricks of mass. They do not choose to move; they do not behave, except in metaphor. Yet the metaphors creep in.

– Francis Spufford, Red Plenty, p. 108.

The metaphors creep in. The utopia is never realised.

Red Plenty features the finest description of cancer I have ever read and the most immersive description of childbirth I can remember. It moves with the momentum of a novel. It lingers with the thoughtfulness of a political theology.

Your Correspondent, He won’t let love disrupt, corrupt or interrupt him

One Quote Review: Esio Trot by Roald Dahl

Mr. Hoppy lived in a small flat high up in a tall concrete building. He lived alone. He had always been a lonely man and now that he was retired from work he was more lonely than ever.

There were two loves in Mr. Hoppy’s life. One was the flowers he grew on his balcony. They grew in pots and tubs and baskets, and in summer the little balcony became a riot of colour.

Mr Hoppy’s second love was a secret he kept entirely to himself.

GAH! I must learn more of Mr. Hoppy! This is why we learned to love novels- Roald Dahl’s storytelling genius. I thought I had read everything he had written for kids, then a lovely South African woman from my church gave me this late work and I read it twice in the same day. Once to myself and once out loud to a fascinated audience. Dahl books were always a chief delight of my childhood, especially when read out loud by an adult.

This is typical Dahl – amusing, fast-paced and terribly immoral in what it teaches children about the world. Therefore, it is tremendous.

Your Correspondent, Now he’s ready for some power-nesting.

One Quote Review: Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

Beautiful Ruins is the kind of book that justifies beach holidays, so you can read it lounging in the sun. I don’t mean that as anything but a compliment.

Here is a bit I liked, because it is a bit that I resonate with. After all, for all the fancy literary criticism you can read about books much more highly regarded than this intricately plotted musing on memory and love, it always comes down to what we can resonate with:

Weren’t movies his generation’s faith anyway – its true religion? Wasn’t the theatre our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral? A million schools taught ten million curricula, a million churches featured ten thousand sects with a billion sermons – but the same movie showed in every mall in the country. And we all saw it!

Your Correspondent, Thinks it might be the most intimate thing possible, to fall asleep next to someone in the afternoon.

Two Quote Review: In The Poor Quarters by Aidan Mathews

Here is Aidan Mathews, writing a letter about the future to his daughters:

From the moment of your real baptism, which will be closer to thirst than to fonts and freshets, you will be propelled ‘immediately’, as Saint Mark likes to insist with his frequent use of the word ‘euthus’, into a desert experience, into the wilderness of the deep evolutionary interior. God will enter your life there as disaster. Your loneliness will grow around you like a monastery. This is not all, but it is everything. For, as my teacher, the poet Denise Levertov used to say to me, if you bring the Lamb of God into your living room, he will almost certainly ruin your carpet. There will be incommunicable spaces of pain and insight within you which have been set aside by God as the pavilion of his presence, like an oxygen tent or like the tent of meeting itself, for the most intimate of encounters.

And that paragraph brought me to tears when I read it because its talk of ruined carpets and incommunicable spaces and intimate encounter with God put words on that which I don’t have it in me to say, even though all that is in me longs to say it.

And then later he writes:

It’s in the cross, however, in the crucial and excruciating obscenity of casual human violence, that God’s self-description as a saviour is exposed, like a photographic negative, outside the encampment in the rubbish dump of Calvary, where the memory of the killing of one condemned criminal signifies God’s total recall of all humanity, especially of those whom humanity has deemed not to be human at all. So, in the Greek of St. John, our weak and wounded nature is lifted up to hang and is lifted up to heaven in the same moment, by the same verb, for the passion narratives vivisect the beating heart of the violence that we call keeping the peace, law and order, the status quo, social cohesion, self-preservation, public demand, the democratic mandate, the moral imperative.

And in writing the first, so deeply personal, paragraph and then the second so brutally wide-ranging paragraph, he once again reminds me that Christian faith is not a proposition about whether God exists and nor is it a psychological coping mechanism that assuages troubled Western consciences. It is the truth. My interiority and humanity’s exteriority: nothing escapes God’s subversive grace, that perhaps looks like a photographic negative because it is our responsibility to develop it.

This book is a collection of reflections on the Gospel of Mark that Mathews shared on Irish national radio in 2006. I didn’t know they were on. I missed them all. I am now deeply grateful to have copies. It is a beautiful and stunning work by a uniquely articulate fellow pilgrim.

Your Correspondent, Knows drinkers often have writing problems