You May Be Able to Get There From Here

In Harpers, Richard Rodriguez writes about the decline and really the end of newspapers: Twilight of the American newspaper.

Rodriguez discusses the history of The San Francisco Chronicle, formerly The Daily Dramatic Chronicle. The story of the Chronicle, Rodriguez says, is also the story of the Gold Rush city:

“The city very early developed a taste for limelight that was as urgent as its taste for red light. In 1865, there were competing opera houses in the city; there were six or seven or twelve theaters. The Daily Dramatic Chronicle was a theatrical sheet delivered free of charge to the city’s saloons and cafés and reading rooms.”

From the example of San Francisco, points out that American newspapers are about cities:

“In truth, the noun “newspaper” is something of a misnomer. More than purveyors only of news, American newspapers were entrusted to be keepers of public record—papers were daily or weekly cumulative almanacs of tabular information. A newspaper’s morgue was scrutable evidence of the existence of a city. Newspapers published obituaries and they published birth announcements. They published wedding announcements and bankruptcy notices. They published weather forecasts (even in San Francisco, where on most days the weather is optimistic and unremarkable—fog clearing by noon). They published the fire department’s log and high school basketball scores. In a port city like San Francisco, there were listings of the arrivals and departures of ships. None of this constituted news exactly; it was a record of a city’s mundane progress. News was old as soon as it was dry—“fishwrap,” as Herb Caen often called it.”

To some readers this may be an apparent observation, but it was a revelation to me. Rodriguez explains what has changed:

“In the nineteenth-century newspaper, the relationship between observer and observed was reciprocal: the newspaper described the city; the newspaper, in turn, was sustained by readers who were curious about the strangers that circumstance had placed proximate to them. So, I suppose, it is incomplete to notice that the San Francisco Chronicle has become remiss in its obituary department. Of four friends of mine who died recently in San Francisco, not one wanted a published obituary or any other public notice taken of his absence. This seems to me a serious abrogation of the responsibility of living in a city and as good an explanation as any of why newspapers are dying. All four of my friends requested cremation; three wanted their ashes consigned to the obscurity of Nature. Perhaps the cemetery is as doomed in America as the newspaper, and for the same reason: we do not imagine death as a city.”

“We no longer imagine the newspaper as a city or the city as a newspaper. Whatever I may say in the rant that follows, I do not believe the decline of newspapers has been the result solely of computer technology or of the Internet. The forces working against newspapers are probably as varied and foregone as the Model-T Ford and the birth-control pill. We like to say that the invention of the internal-combustion engine changed us, changed the way we live. In truth, we built the Model-T Ford because we had changed; we wanted to remake the world to accommodate our restlessness. We might now say: Newspapers will be lost because technology will force us to acquire information in new ways. In that case, who will tell us what it means to live as citizens of Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor? The truth is we no longer want to live in Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor. Our inclination has led us to invent a digital cosmopolitanism that begins and ends with “I.” Careening down Geary Boulevard on the 38 bus, I can talk to my my dear Auntie in Delhi or I can view snapshots of my cousin’s wedding in Recife or I can listen to girl punk from Glasgow. The cost of my cyber-urban experience is disconnection from body, from presence, from city.”

Related

In an interview with New American Media, Rodriguez discusses the decline of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Title: 140 Characters: A Style Guide for the Short Form
Author: Dom Sagolla
Publisher: Wiley
Pages:  208

I was dubious of 140 Characters: A Style Guide for the Short Form after reading the author’s description of a book that “demonstrates the effect of hypertext on literature by redefining the concept of ‘the book’ using Twitter and iPhone to start”. Reading the book’s opening chapters, I realized it was nothing of the sort. It’s pointless to hold the book to this standard, or what its publisher, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., says is a Strunk and White for those of us who use social media. The author too liked the comparison to The Elements of Style. In an interview, Sagolla says, “I have that book,” and he wants his book to be a “compliment, not a replacement— it’s an update.” To this, let Strunk and White respond,

“When you overstate, the reader will be instantly on guard, and everything that has preceded your overstatement as well as everything that follows it will be suspect in his mind because he has lost confidence in your judgement or your poise.”

The Elements of Style, Part Five

To be fair, these overstatements of 140 Characters value are drawn from marketing statements, so I’ll return to the book where Sagolla will “place Twitter within a lager context of the modern short form of composition.” This is an overstatement, yet his definition of style is rather modest and squishy, “Who is anyone to teach you about style? Style is the sound your words make in the mind. It is the tone taken when you are read aloud by someone else. Style is the ineffable, immeasurable spark of life in the text. Style is a mystery.”

What is the book really about?

Like the Elements of Style, 140 Characters is separated into five parts. The first two parts of the book, on the surface, are about style. The first part of the book discusses how to make your tweets more interesting and descriptive. The second part explains how to make your Twitter style unique, how to expand your Twitter audience, how to repost (retweet) other tweets, how to use hyperlinks on Twitter, and how you can invent your own words and style on Twitter.

The latter three parts, are less about style and writing. Part three, Master, is about how to be successful at Twitter. Part four is hard to summarize: it discusses programming, imitating other Twitter users, and a chapter about iterative writing, which is a confusing topic.¹ The final part is about creating series of tweets, the value of using words and fragments instead of sentences, and how Sagolla created an iPhone framework for books, including 140 Characters.

Much of this book is about how be an interesting person to follow on Twitter, or how not to be annoying. There are etiquette suggestions: Would you send it in a letter? Does anyone really care what your eating? Most of these suggestions can be reduced to considering how what you write will be received by your followers, before you write it. Beyond suggestions for tweeting, the book gives advice on how to measure your relevance on Twitter, which is gathered from how many people follow you, repost your tweets, and other statistics. Some of the tools discussed, such as TweetEffect, which shows when people have followed or un-followed you on a tweet-by-tweet basis, are quite interesting.

What makes the book interesting?

It’s worth mentioning that Sagolla sold the idea for this book after writing and article about the early history of Twitter, How Twitter Was Born, which is reworked as the introduction to the book. It’s this history and Sagolla’s thoughts about Twitter that I found to be the most interesting part of the book, but this content is also the most audacious. For example, here’s why there needs to be a style book for Twitter:

We stand at a frontier in writing. This wilderness grows wilder and less civilized as more writers create ever more content. We must establish a form to this frontier, and develop 140 characters as a standard worthy of the word literature.

Or, what does Twitter mean for other forms of writing?

Short messaging services, and the rich media applications that magnify them, are augmenting society one layer at a time. Superfluous, outmoded forms of communication and consumption are rapidly being replaced with new models. This is happening so rapidly that the old guard barely has time to report on the fact of its own demise.

I’m guessing, since it’s not clarified, that the old guard is newspapers and printed forms of communication, which actually spend quite a bit of time reporting on their own demise. But, those who are losing their jobs at newspapers need not worry; They can become Twitter journalists:

You think you want to be a Twitter journalist? You’ll need to check your facts, provide a truly unique perspective, and most of all lead with action. Do this with fairness, accuracy, and freedom from bias, and you will always have a job.

Finally, how will short form communication make us more free?

Democracy travels in wee packets of ideas, words shaped for speed and accuracy, arriving in moments of need. Now is the best time for free speech; it is blooming all around us. Letters packed into the crannies of text messaging programs, traded between friends and lovers, are the seeds of hope for a more literate generation.

Why the book is difficult to read

If I wanted to argue that Twitter and related forms of communication are bad news for the future of reading and writing, I would use 140 Characters as a example. This is hardly my contention, nor do I believe this book will influence how people compose words outside of Twitter input boxes. Still, if Sagolla’s method of writing were widely imitated or if his writing instructions were taken seriously, this would be really troubling. Sagolla’s advice for people who have too much to Twitter about is to make their tweets into a book. That’s what he did,

Once you have a phrase, simply adding action to that phrase (or a subject) will provide sentence structure. Review The Elements of Style and pick your sentence apart. Perhaps your phrases merit separate sentences. Soon you’ll discover a paragraph has grown around your word.

This entire book was written using a similar system derived from the short form: Fragment. Then there is a sentence. Sentences become paragraphs. Inch by inch, a book is written.

Indeed, the author’s style reads like a collection of fragments. While the author done more than copy a bunch of tweets together, the organization of phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters is sloppy and disjointed. There are many sentences like this, “Plant words like seeds. Increase is not about excess, but about proliferation.” As in this example, the book’s advice is rarely expressed with concrete English. The sound this language make is your mind is that of marketing catchphrases and self-help maxims: “Speak like a leader. Your aren’t merely describing something, you are commanding it to be so. Write yourself out of a stuck situation. Write your conscience.” Moreover, I would guess that there are more fragments- or words-as-sentences than there are sentences in the book. As Jeremy Schultz writes, there are not many complete thoughts in Sagolla’s writing,

“I found 140 Characters to be ultimately a disappointment, a difficult book to read—too many random thoughts, not enough organization, and difficult to digest. I felt like I was reading a collection of quotations or sentences, each one making sense and seeming to be a valuable bit of insight, but not gelling together into a well-structured book.”

The overall organization of the book is just as scattered as it’s paragraphs. The sections and chapters seem like arbitrary markers and, as the book goes on, the sections get shorter and less cohesive. As mentioned in a summary of part five, the final “bonus” chapter does not sum up the various decisions the careful writer of short form must make; rather, it becomes a advertisement for Sagolla’s new business, Dollar Apps.

For as much as the writer may lack lucid style, my inkling was to a greater fault: a writer who wants to be taken seriously, but does not take the time to seriously write.

Does the book redefine the concept of the book?

Again, holding the author to the claim that 140 Characters would mean something new for electronic books, the 140 Characters hypertext edition iPhone application has some nice features, but it’s not novel or great. It has copy and paste, hypertext, web browsing, multimedia features. However, It’s lacking features that are commonplace in most electronic book applications, like a search feature. And, it’s also missing technology that most dusty, old books have, i.e. a bibliography, a notes section, or an index.

There are a few extra features. There’s a recommendation page that recommends the author’s favorite iPhone applications. Two books are listed, but these too are applications, not books!) There are links to three videos and about 30 pictures. The twitter feed for the book, @thebook, is included in application, but, unlike any other Twitter application I’ve used, the messages are truncated (see photo).

The use of hypertext in the book is bland. Many things in the body text that should be linked, such as twitter usernames, are not. When navigating from the text to the web and back, your place in the text is often not anchored correctly, so you return to an earlier part of the text. The links in the table of contents don’t link to chapters in the book, which is really annoying. Most of the links are to tweets and other links are often to uninteresting places on the web, like Wikipedia articles, or to the author’s website and businesses.

1. Sagolla explains how software programs are improved in small iterations, which are tracked and versioned, not unlike the track changes feature in a word processing application. This notion can apply to writing, but is more helpful with long form writing that is produced by several writers and editors. This metaphor is dropped after being introduced, and the rest of the chapter is about experimenting with other short form writing and playing with words, which is confusing. [↩]

Design and Science: The Life and Work of Will Burtin.

E. Roger Remmington and Robert Fripp. Lund Humphries, 2007

I’ve just read Robert Fripp¹ and Roger Remington’s illustrated biography of designer Will Burtin, Design and Science: The Life and Work of Will Burtin. An informal student of the Bauhaus school, Burtin was a well know designer in German, before he and his Jewish wife fled the country before World War II. Preceding his escape, he was requested by both Joseph Goebbels and Hitler to become the design director of the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda.

In the forties, Burtin was drafted in to the U.S. army and was tasked with creating illustrated how-to guides for aerial gunners, many of whom could not read. Still during the war years, he became the Art Director for Fortune magazine. Interestingly, the magazine pleaded that he should be discharged from the military— that his talents would better serve the nation’s interest in this role. In his time at Fortune, Fripp and Remmington say that Burtin founded many of the practices and principles of corporate identity in graphic design. In particular they consider Burtin’s ongoing work for the Kalamazoo based Upjohn Company², including the publication Scope. In his writings and an exhibition Burtin explained his philosophy as a designer:

“To convey the meaning, to facilitate understanding of reality and thereby help further progress, is a wonderful and challenging task for design. The writer, scientist, painter, philosopher and the designer of visual communication, in commerce, are all partners in the task of inventing the dramatic and electrifying to a more comprehensive grasp of our time.”³

Burtin designed packaging for Upjohn products. Photo of Design and Science.

Butin’s most grand and enduring work came after his time at Fortune, as he continued to use “art and design as a means of understanding science.” Throughout his career Burtin created and oversaw a variety of information graphics, but in the 50’s he also began to work with large-scale, multi-media installations that visualized scientific understanding of complex systems. The first of these was an Upjohn-sponsored walk-in exhibition of a human cell.

Fripp and Remmington consider several other projects, including large interactive exhibits on the human brain, human metabolism, and uranium atoms. Seeing these works and reading about how each project was designed and carried out, Burtin’s work seems visionary in how it communicates information using interconnected, multimedia elements that are—despite their complexity— so refined.

Image via monoscope.com

Fripp and Remmington’s narrative of Burtin’s life is crisp and flows well with the documents, photos, and artifacts of Burtin’s work. Several stories in the book are great. For instance, in an argument with architect Phillip Johnson over the lighting in the Johnson-designed New York State Pavilion, Burtin resolved the mater by shooting out the lights with a BB-Gun. Burtin disliked Johnson for his open pro-Nazi position in the 1930s.  Such anecdote are not overstated, though, as the authors’ weigh the Burtin’s legacy based on the influence of his design and ideas.

Other Readings:

• Patrick Burgoyne discusses Burtin’s work and the book, Design and Science, in Creative Review.

1. An important thing to know about Fripp is that he married Burtin’s only daughter, Carol Burtin. [↩]
2. Upjohn was later split and subsumed into the Pharmacia and Pfizer companies. [↩]
3. Burtin treatise Integration: The New Discipline in Design can be read in Looking Closer 3, which available on Google Books [↩]

Paul Auster, novelist and poet, talks about why the novel, and the book, will persist in the digital age.

The complete interview with Auster is available at Big Think. Auster was responding to Phil Roth’s gloomy prediction of the novel’s future:

The full interview with Roth is on the Daily Beast’s Vimeo page.

In to the Uncanny Valley
Joe Kloc, SEED Magazine Online
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/uncanny_valley/P2/

In Seed Magazine, Joe Kloc reports on PNAS findings that monkeys exhibit uncanny-valley-like-rejection of computerized/robotic monkeys. He also considers the history of (psuedo-) scientific explanations of uncanny valley, discussing Freud’s thoughts on the matter and the writings/works of roboticist Masahiro Mori. Kloc looks at how scientific explanations for the uncanny valley phenomenon are proceeding:

It has been suggested, for instance, that we avoid almost human figures because their peculiarities make them look sick, and we have developed an evolutionary mechanism for steering clear of pathogens. Another theory posits that we avoid figures with features slightly off from our own because they appear to be less-than-ideal mating material.

[Asif] Ghazanfar rejects all of these hypotheses. “What is really going on is much simpler,” he says. He believes the uncanny valley response occurs because an animal—human or nonhuman—is evolutionarily inclined to develop an expectation of what members of its species should look like, a supremely important skill, as it lets the animal know with whom it can and cannot interact.

In this sense, life-like robotic and computer-generated models occupy a weird middle ground in an animal’s mind: They are familiar enough for the animal to consider the possibility that they are of the same species, but strange enough that they don’t quite meet the expectation the animal has developed for members of its species. “Any face that violates that expectation is going to elicit the uncanny response,” Ghazanfar says.

Related Readings

• Also in Seed Magazine, anthropologist Greg Laden writes about the uncanny in human expectations of how other humans should look.¹
• John Lennon Monsters in the Uncanny Valley. Richard Eskrow writes about how almost real thinks are creepy, including a AI project that attempts to resurrect the personality of John Lennon in Q&A conversation.
• BBC story on the origins of uncanny valley. (Also about the work of Ghazanfar at Princeton.)

1. Unfortunately, his starting point is a reference to the movie Face/Off. [↩]

In Harpers, Ursula Le Guin writes about how the end of books will not happen any time soon. She considers how book readers these days are readers by choice, since reading is no longer the activity of requirement, popular entertainment, or status that it used to be:

Even during what I have called the “century of the book,” when it was taken for granted that many people read and enjoyed fiction and poetry, how many people in fact had or could make much time for reading once they were out of school? During those years most Americans worked hard and worked long hours. Weren’t there always many who never read a book at all, and never very many who read a lot of books? We don’t know how many, because we didn’t have polls to worry us about it.

[...]

“If people make time to read, it’s because it’s part of their jobs, or other media aren’t readily available, or they aren’t much interested in them—or because they enjoy reading. Lamenting over percentage counts induces a moralizing tone: It is bad that we don’t read; we should read more; we must read more. Concentrating on the drowsy fellow in Dallas, perhaps we forget our own people, the hedonists who read because they want to. Were such people ever in the majority?”

Le Guin’s is concerned for the future of books, but it is not too much of a technological concern. Rather, she observes that much of the trouble for books comes from publishers:

Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the stupidity of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities.

[...]

[According to CEO's] a “good book” means a high gross and a “good writer” is one whose next book can be guaranteed to sell better than the last one. That there are no such writers is of no matter to the corporationeers, who don’t comprehend fiction even if they run their lives by it. Their interest in books is self-interest, the profit that can be made out of them—or occasionally, for the top executives, the Murdochs and other Merdles, the political power they can wield through them; but that is merely self-interest again, personal profit.

As Le Guin’s is saying, the big publishers and book sellers mainly promote and sell mass market, disposable books (whether hard or paper bound) in order to turn quick profits. This reminded me of something I read by writer and programmer, Paul Graham,

I can see the evolution of book publishing in the books on my shelves. Clearly at some point in the 1960s the big publishing houses started to ask: how cheaply can we make books before people refuse to buy them? The answer turned out to be one step short of phonebooks. As long as it isn’t floppy, consumers still perceive it as a book.

Graham’s broader point is that book publishers have come around to the idea that they sell media more than they sell physical objects, but that book publishers cannot sell books the same way movie and music studios sell their content.

The book, regardless of its form, is consumed with special care that Le Guin describes beautifully,

But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness—not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won’t move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won’t move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won’t do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it—everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not “interactive” with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer’s mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it.

Into the Dark: Seeing the Sacred in the Top Films of the 21st Century By Craig Detweiler Baker Academic, 2008. 320 pages

Through a Screen Darkly: Looking Closer and Beauty, Truth, and Evil in the Movies ByOverstreet Regal Books, 2008. 340 pages

Chasing Light: Looking for God in the Movies By Roy Anker Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2004. 402 pages

Why do so many Christian writers become film critics?

In the past decade, an astounding number of books and websites have attempted to divine the Christian meaning and value of film. I am going to call this writing Christian film criticism, which is the most used term on the web and in other books. Christian is always a tricky term to use, but I think it’s the best¹. “Critic” is also a complicated word to use, and Christian writers span from Roger and Ebert to academic style criticism— not to mention the usage of criticism meaning disapproval, which there is also plenty of.  There’s a blog article, What on Earth is Christian Film Criticism, that does well at considering both of these terms. I really didn’t know that there were so many books about Christian film criticism until I started reading them. I’ve read parts of most of the books available, but there is a fair amount of overlap in these books and some of these books are poorer in quality and relevance² Because of this overlap, and to be more concise, I’ll limit my survey to a few of these books, and I’ll consider in detail only three more recent, popular books: Through a Screen Darkly, by Jeffery Overstreet, In to the Dark, by Craig Detweiler, and Catching Light: Finding God in the Movies, by Roy Anker. Here is a more comprehensive list of books, which I’ve been reading:

• Screen Deep: A Christian Perspective on Pop Culture, 2007
• Hearing a Film, Seeing a Sermon: Preaching and Popular Movies, 2007
• Religion and Film and Introduction, 2007
• Jesus of Hollywood, 2007
• Theology Goes to the Movies: An Introduction to Critical Christian Thinking, 2007
• Movies that Matter: Reading Film Through the Lens of Faith, 2006
• Finding Saint Paul in Film, 2005
• Faith in film: Religious Themes in Contemporary Cinema, 2005
• The Hidden God: Film and Faith, 2003
• Film as Religion: Myths, Morals, and Rituals, 2003
• Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste, 2003
• Praying the Movies: Daily Meditations from Classic Films, 2001
• Reviewing the movies: a Christian Response to Contemporary Film, 2000
• Reel Spirituality, 2000
• Saint Paul returns to the movies: triumph over shame; 1999
• God and the Movies, 1997

Every Christian writing on film (that I could find) used, reused and overused metaphors of light and dark: “light in a dark world”; “divine light”; “chasing the light (of God)”; “being freed and absorbed by light”; “a hint of God’s light (peaking through darkness)”—I could go on. In Chasing Light, Roy Anker writes for several pages, in technical detail, about the process of making movies— that is exposing film to light. In many cases, as it is in Chasing Light,  these light/dark metaphors are central to the writer’s purpose. The critic’s self-proposed task is to praise films that shed light on beauty and also understand the darker, unexposed parts of film. In most of these books, light is primarily a metaphor for the theology of general revelation. General revelationists believe that truth of a Christian God is revealed in the natural universe and common human events. General revelation is really a placeholder for anything that is not special revelation, which is the authoritative revelation of God i.e. the Bible. There is an important feature to general revelation, what Calvinist and other Protestants call common grace: it is evidence of God’s goodness plainly evident to all humans, including non-believers. As Craig Detweiler in Into the Dark explains,

God began with a beautiful creative act incarnated by Jesus. He is the most arresting image of God, the embodiment of kingdom ethics, and the ultimate lived Truth. We proceed with confidence because the Spirit behind the beauty of creation and the mystery of redemption is also the source of our discernment. We walk by faith, not by fear.

Viewer Discretion Advised

The notion of discernment is an important part of general revelation. Many Christian critics assert that the natural tendency of moviegoers is to have their morals corroded and their baser instincts stroked. But with discernment the Christian viewer can parse the bad parts of film (sin) from the good (the revelation of God)— they can “catch light”. Jeffery Overstreet, who writes reviews for Christianity Today and an online collection of reviews, Looking Closer, says that “The sacred is waiting to be recognized in secular things. Even those artists who don’t believe in God might accidentally reflect back to us realities in which we can see God working.” He will, with discernment, guide the reader into the dark world of Hollywood. But:

[I]sn’t this a dangerous endeavor? You bet you life. (And that isn’t all that we will bet?) There are dangers: pieces of broken glass, glimpses of death, and obscenities spray-painted everywhere. We’ve done a bang-up job of polluting God’s world and making paths to glory fraught with peril.

I recently read the book Rapture Ready, wherein I was introduced to John Howard and John Streck’s useful explanation of how contemporary christian music (CCM) artists abstain from or assimilate into secular, pop music. In Howard and Streck’s book Apostles of Rock: The Splintered World of Contemporary Christian Music, Christian artists are placed in three camps, separationalist, integrationalist, and transformationalist: the seperationalists are completely cloistered in the CCM world, the make indisputably Christian tunes for a Christian audience; integrationists, while their audience is still primarily Christian, are welcome to mainstream exposure; they cross-over the secular world with palatable, Jesus-is-my-boyfriend-style pop; transformatinoalist artists are harder to define because they are outsiders, and diversely so³. These categories are also useful for considering how evangelicals experience film. Christians who write books about Christians watching films are integrationalists, and sometimes separationalists. These writers are adamant that secular film is meaningful to a Christian worldview and instructive to everyday life, but they have selective, complex rules for what makes a film good. Sometimes these critics negatively critique a film for reasons of morality, or what you could call prudishness. But this is the case less than you might suspect. The question of a film’s goodness, rather, is measured by how well it shows the light of God or the darkness of evil. Detweiler describes this as a process, “from art (beauty) to ethics (goodness) to theology (truth)”. Films that show the darkness and “sinfulness” of creation are also to be appreciated, provided that dark and sinful characters are met with redemption or some other cinematic situation that demonstrates the emptiness of life without God’s redemption e.g. despair or death. Indecency and obscenity, while they are seen as unnecessary and gratuitous, are often ignored (with a couple of notable exceptions, which I’ll address later). Sexing and boozing hardly bother these writers in contrast to a much darker, more dangerous presence in films these days, moral relativism. Again, I’ll get to this later on.

A List of Matters Discussed by Christian Film Critics

To best summarize what I learned about the subject matter of the books I’ve read, I’ll just list the majority of subjects:

• Films directly about God (The Last Temptation of Christ, The Greatest Story Ever Told)
• Films about the Bible or the Church (The Mission)
• Films about Christians (Saved, Jesus Camp)
• How God is revealed or his represented in films.⁴
• The origin and nature of evil (The Exocist)
• God’s intervention in human affairs (Magnolia)
• Films about god-like forces in humans affairs (Signs)
• The beauty of God’s creation
• Films that seem to show the beauty of God’s creation (The New World)
• The absence of God in human events
• How the depravity and emptiness of godless people are depicted in film
• The perceived intervention of God in human events
• Emotions and life events related to spirituality, like stories about a person whose a prodigal or a person redeemed
• Films that the reviewer feels like they are required to watch because of the films cultural popularity or importance.⁵
• Films that “wake us up” (Requiem for a Dream)
• Nihilism and moral relativity (American Beauty)

A Moveable Feast

Babette’s Feast is a film that all Christian critics seem to gravitate towards. Directed by Gabriel Axel, Babette’s Feast is an adaption of a Isak Dinesen’s short story of the same name. It’s a simple story about two pietistic, unwed, elderly sisters in rural Denmark (Jutland). The film’s climax is manifest in a single meal: A talented parisian cook, Babette Hersant, serves the sisters for a number of years as a humble cook; then one day, Babette wins a Paris lottery, receiving 10,000 francs, and invests these winnings in a large, opulent feast, which the religious sisters deride as decadent:

[The sisters] decide to consume the feast but refuse to celebrate it, offering it up as reparation for sin. At the banquet is an army general who remembers enjoying a similar feast at the hands of Paris’s most celebrated chef, a woman. Babette remains unseen though out dinner, but despite all resistance, her meal has a dramatic effect on the diners. Stories are shared, enmities resolved, and new unity celebrated.⁶

Beyond Christian allusions to the last supper and the woman who perfumed Jesus’ feet, Christian critics see Babette’s Feast as a defense of joie de vivre in Christian life. It’s a argument against self-denial and retraction from pleasure, Godly or secular. Reading the various writing on Babette’s Feast is tiresome because there is so much agreement and redundancy between critics. The more I read, the more I found it difficult to decide which ideas are fresh and which are derived, but overall the writing seems to be derived, with many paraphrases and little attribution. But all the writing about the film helped me to better appreciate how Christian critics measure greatness in film. Consider how Roy Ankler swoons over Axel’s work:

Babette’s Feast is a quiet, lyrical drama, slow and painterly in style, packed with delicate but potent images that go to where words cannot stretch, even though virtually the whole story is set in the unpromising setting of a remote and unexciting place among mostly obscure, unexciting people. But it covers a great deal of territory cinematically, intellectually. and religiously— as only a few rare films have. In giving visual life to lsak Dinesen’s fetching story, screenwriter-director Axel makes plausible the toughest of all propositions, whether in cinema. literature, church, or anywhere: that God shows up in human affairs. that divine light does indeed shine, even in the most unexpected places and amid the manifold disappointment of human life. That comes as great surprise to the characters, including the religious ones, and even more to viewers, especially the jaded among them. The three elements that bind the whole of Babette’s Feast together are surprise, splendor, and love. The divine light becomes in this film a palpable manifestation of divine love.

Interestingly, Anker goes on to explain that Babette’s Feast show us how Christians best understand beauty, as they are closer to its source:

Axel’s telling of Dinesen’s Story suggests that because of its notions of divine love, the Christian community is the group most capable of imbibing and grasping the artist’s adoration of a world steeped in sensuous beauty, a beauty that is graceful in its own right and betokens the love of the God who put it there in the first place, It is this notion of a world framed by divine love and for love that lies at the center of Babette’s Feast.

Detweiler poses a related question that complicates this view. Pointing out the vapidity of most Christian pop culture, like CCM, he asks Christians “if you are in touch with the creator, shouldn’t you be the most creative.” As Anker admits, Babette’s Feast, despite winning an Academy Award, is not well-known among secular audiences. So, Detweiler says the Christian critic and artist must go into the dark and engage with the secular world. He says that there should not be sub-cultural art or conversations about art in the Christian world. This critic is like Babette, requesting that abstemious folks in the Christian community look at the beauty in the outside world. Surprisingly, many of the critics discussing Babette’s Feast don’t seem to notice or comment on this parallel with their own writing.

The God Room

Jeffery Overstreet did make this connection. He recounts that he was moved by films like Babette’s Feast to provide a better online discussion of secular film: “I wanted to try writing about film the way C.S. Lewis wrote about books.” However, after reading his reviews on Looking Closer and reading his book, I question how closely he really looks at film, which leads me to a more detailed aside about Overstreet’s writing. Overstreet’s anecdotes and stories are a little too neat⁷, and one may suspect him of making things up. Overstreet boast of interviews conducted in “The God Room,” where filmmakers and actors discuss the religious relevance of forthcoming films. In one such interview, Overstreet talked with Patrice Leconte, director of Les Bronzes (French Fried Vacation), Intimate Strangers, and Man on the Train.

“Why are you so preoccupied with stories about temptation and about characters who must decide whether or not to transgress an ethical boundary?” Leconte responds, “There is something very curious and interesting in what you are saying. There is nothing more interesting than meeting someone who casts new light on your work. I have never thought about it, but you are absolutely right in what you say about the obsession in my movies main characters. It’s true that the situations revolve around the temptation of transgressing something that is forbidden… Thanks for shedding some light on my work .. I’m a filmmaker of transgression.”

While we could certainly read an irony or playfulness in Leconte’s answer, Overstreet is satisfied to leave it here, with no examination of what Leconte means by transgression. In this way, I found Overstreet to be self- referential and congratulatory⁸ about his position as a critic but to fall short of his professed task as a critic. Sometimes Overstreet corrects this impression with modesty:

If I hadn’t been paying attention, I would have missed them. This tells me that I’ve missed thousands of other meaningful moments along the way. So I go back, again and again. I pursue conversations with other moviegoers to learn what they saw so that I can fill in more of the picture. I want to learn how to train my attention and judge what is meaningful and what isn’t. In a word, I want to learn discretion.

Yet, I kept finding that Overstreet only looks closely at certain types of films, like Babette’s Feast. He’s too forthright with his druthers and not curious enough to understand films that he dislikes. Other parts of Overstreet’s film writing are short-sighted. A small example of this is his response to A.O. Scott’s review of The House of Sand and Fog,

[Scott] in The New York Times described it as “the story of two rights adding up to a monstrous wrong.” I’m not sure what he means by that. He is right in saying “There are no clear villains, no serendipitous, life-altering accidents, only the slow, inexorable escalation of hasty decisions and excusable lapses in judgment toward an unbearable final catastrophe.” It all adds up to “wrong,” but where are the “rights”? Certainly, the protagonists desire the right things, but they go about pursuing them in self-centered and heartless ways.

Overstreet misses the intentional double meaning of “rights”. It’s the belief in American rights, like the pursuit of happiness, that causes conflict in the film. A small mistake, but is suggests that Overstreet’s focus on matters of morality prevent him from finding deeper meaning in the film⁹. I’d like to move on from the pastoral to the galactic, but I should first discuss another case where morals cause this critic to stumble.

Some of My Best Friends are Gay, But

The following statement augurs trouble ahead, “I have several gay friends, and I value their friendship, even if we disagree on some issues.” In his review of Brokeback Mountain, Overstreet is honest in his belief the homosexuality is sinful, but he also seems to want the reader to understand that he believes homosexuality is no worse than any other sin (that the writer is not bigoted):

“Brokeback Mountain is a film in which all kinds of people engage in all manner of wrongdoing. Yes, there are two men who hastily plunge into an intimate sexual bond, and as a result, their relationship narrows to become an unhealthy sexual obsession rather than a flourishing friendship and love – they become enslaved to their lust, and it disrupts the rest of their lives. But there are also heterosexual people guilty of violent hatred, and heterosexuals who engage in hasty sex soon after meeting [...] “All of us, if we’re honest, can relate to the story of Jack and Ennis. Their story is the human story, from the Garden of Eden to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre to Hamlet to The Lord of the Rings to Grizzly Man: At one time or another, we have all transgressed… we’ve pursued something we wanted, something that wasn’t what was best for us, without regard for the consequences our actions would have on each other, on the future, and on the world around us. Human desire oversteps its bounds, we are weakened by our inappropriate appetites, and it costs us something. That’s the real story of Brokeback Mountain.”

But this and Overstreet’s other remarks about Brokeback Mountain belie this idea. Homosexual transgression is not just sin, it is original sin. Gay love is the enemy of empathy:

“In the moment Jack and Ennis plunge into sex together, their relationship changes. You’ll see it happen as the story progresses. Their deepening care and understanding stops. They become controlled by and obsessed with their sexual connection. Their days of rich and flourishing friendship are numbered.”

Futhermore, Overstreet’s review starts to read like notes from a Narth meeting:

“Families and the church have failed these two men, it seems.”

And,

“We can surely feel compassion for Jack and Ennis, grieved that they grew up in such a harsh and lonely world, where they have not seen a good model of heterosexual intimacy, where they know nothing of God, and where they thus believe they can only find fulfillment in each other. By letting their sex drives lead them, they weaken their freewill. They submit to a master that does not know reason.”

Jesus is Wizard!

Star Wars is a cosmic, well-packaged fabulation of good, evil, and (spiritual) force. As Anker writes,

“Against all odds, then, wrapped in the pop space western that is Star Wars, lies a fetching, luminous, and finally exultant fable of a holy trust, apprenticeship, and pilgrimage that culminates in a resplendent vision of servanthood, reconciliation, and a winsome portrait of the new creation that awaits the cosmos”

It’s no surprise, then, that nearly all Christian film critics write about the film and resoundingly like it¹⁰. Not all Christians feel the same admiration for Star Wars, however. They claim that the spirituality in the trilogy is too much like New Age and/or Buddhist beliefs. They are seperationalists— it’s not cinema, it is the “sinema”. But such detractors are clearly on the fringe, and probably don’t watch movies in the first place. Really, Star Wars is one of only a handful of films that are both entertaining (for kids and adults) and not offensive, and is therefore shown in churches all around the U.S. (Princess Bride is another example of this category of movie.)

This curmudgeonly set is worth bringing up only because diplomatic counter-arguments are made to this group by Overstreet, Detweiler, and Stone. Films that are colossally moral or spiritual are a good place to begin an argument about how secular movies provide spiritual enrichment. In Faith and Film, Brian Stone writes, “Though the Force of Star Wars resembles elements of Zen philosophy and ancient Chinese Taoism¹¹, it also has characteristics that make it an interesting dialogue partner for reflecting on the Christian affirmation ‘I believe in the Holy Spirit.’” Using the Hebrew scriptures as his guide, Stone goes on, in tedious detail, to explain the commonality between the Holy Spirit and the Force in Star Wars. Stone’s broader point is that “[m]ovies do not merely portray a world; they propagate a worldview.” He argues that by merely objecting to sinful Hollywood values is not enough: “We must also become more responsible as Christians for engaging film theologically. [...] The relationship between Christian theology and popular film is, in short, an interfaith dialogue.”

In God and the Movies, Bergson and Greeley posit that God is portrayed in micro and macro ways in film. The macro portrayals of God are often epic Science Fiction and Fantasy movies, Star War being a prime example. The macro God is also cast in films with elements of magical realism they say:

“The God of magical realism is a God of enormous power, a God who can make bells ring even when there are no bells, a God how causes a spring garden to bloom overnight despite the snow, a God who saves a drowning man in a body of a whale, a God who can send the dead back to free a survivor of paralyzing grief.”

At first, I was lost in a discussion of magical realism because I only know this term in the literary sense, in the writings of Angela Carter or Garcia Marquez, but the writers go on to include films such as Like Water for Chocolate and What Dreams May Come, which seem more compatible with the term. Bergson and Greely’s point is that god-like forces, and evil forces, are revealed in both small and fantastic situations in films like Star Wars. The small revelations, like the moment “[w]hen Luke turn off his targeting computer and opened himself to pray for God’s help,” as Overstreet writes, taught us how to pray. An then there’s the big picture, which Anker writes about:

“Obi-Wan is after nothing less than the defeat of Darkness[sic]¹² itself, the metaphysical power that seeks to destroy all that is good in the world.”

Additionally, Anker has a nice way of explaining the spiritual significance of the trilogy of the 1970 and 80s in contrast with the 2000s trilogy: “The future of the Star Wars saga lies in its past… [T]he first of the original trilogy to be filmed showed how light comes out of darkness. The trilogy now underway shows how darkness emerges from light, how people and societies come to lose harmony and hope.” Why is it, though, that even in epic films the largest displays of spirituality are usually the darkest ones— the portrayal of evil? Why is it that God does not, in the world we live in, reveal his light in miracles or any other heuristic events? Why must Christians insist of things like the resurrection, the virgin birth, and the intelligent design of the universe? Or as Lars Von Trier¹³ wonders ,

“The general assumption is that all people are able to differentiate more or less equally between good and evil. But if this is the case, why does the world look like it does? Why have all the good intentions of my parents come to nothing. And why do my own good intentions lead to nothing?”

I’ll leave these question aside, beside having just asked them. But I must point out that majority of Christian criticism is not about the beauty and truth of God in film, but rather about the absence of God.

Film Noir

You will find in Christian criticism that metaphors of darkness and light extend to all types of dichotomies: beauty vs. ugliness, decency vs. obscenity, absolution vs. relativism, the certain vs. the unknown, and so forth and so on. In writings on contemporary secular film, especially the many films that withhold any general or morals truths about the human condition, Christian critics exhibit near obsession with binaries of purpose vs. nihilism or religious enlightenment vs. fractured, postmodern meaninglessness. Detweiler is notably different in this regard. Detweiler blogs about working toward understanding between religious and secular, postmodern culture. He argues that movies are a good place for Christians to learn from a fractured, postmodern world. In his book, Into the Dark, he considers many of the films in the Internet Movie Database’s user-ranked list of the 250 Movies¹⁴, which is, as Detweiler admits, an odd list. Of course, the demotic and non-authoritative nature of the list is the reason Detweiler chose it, it samples the films people watch and talk about, not just canonical film. While Detweiler is fun to read, his book is not cohesive or well-organized and much of what he writes doesn’t make sense, critically or semantically. He will casually uses Biblical words, phrases, and allusions in any given sentence. It’s easy to miss his point or be perplexed by his point all together. Consider this statement,

Art and commerce met in the films created by Hollywood’s “holy trinity” of Coppola, Spielberg, and Lucas. Francis Ford Coppola served as the literal godfather to a new generation of filmmakers fresh out of film school.

Or one of my favorites,

Despite our unprecedented financial and scientific success in the modern era, the twenty-first century can be characterized as a return to the Dark ages

Here he writes about the films of Quentin Tarantino,

Like John the Baptist crying in the wilderness, Tarantino was a forerunner for the messy, transcendent movies that have followed.

And he later on continues,

To some, his success signaled the decline of Western civilization. But to dedicated fanboys (and girls), Tarantino’s unlikely rise demonstrates the newer, democratic possibilities of filmmaking, film criticism, and even theology: general revelation in action.

And there is more,

Quentin Tarantino married postmodern surfaces and brutal violence with the transcendent possibilities of film. Tarantino’s disciples were inspired by the psychic power of cinema to simultaneously outrage and inspire. While some were attracted to Tarantino’s higher calling, other unleashed even flashier (and emptier) forms of film noir.

These cryptic comments about Tarantino bring me to one of Detweiler’s main topics. Detweiler describes a resurgence of film noir and oddly identifies Tarantino has one of the most important figures in this movement, further placing Darren Aronofsky, Christopher Nolan, Alejandro Gonzales, and Guy Ritchie as Tarantino’s disciples. I had difficulty following Detweiler’s definition of film noir¹⁵, but I think I understand his broader point. He is arguing that in dark (noir) films sin bears itself out in the “grim consequences of a world without God”; indeed he says Richard Rodriguez’s¹⁶ Sin City is the “apothesis of film noir.” “Film noir at its best reveals our cold, cold hearts. It understands the murderous impulses that lurk beneath our civil veneer,” he summarizes.

Just like other critics, Detweiler professes the belief  that to be human is to act sinfully. The real difference between Detweiler and other critics, in my reading, is that Detweiler argues that Christian’s should be willing to see and discuss any serious or popular film. He says that Christian is not an adjective. I took this as a rhetorical statement, since Christian is more of an adjective, a type of person or belief system, than it is a noun: Christian should not be a genre or label for art and Christian values should not be a measure of a movie’s watchability. It’s odd then, in his writing on postmodern art, when Detweiler regularly uses postmodern as an adjective; the suggestion seeming to be that postmodernity is not a cultural or historical trend, it’s a movement or a point-of-view. The same goes for moral relativism, which is not a trend from scientific or humanistic facts on the ground, but it too is a political, anti-Christian movement. Again, unlike others, Detweiler is not denouncing the glorification of sin and nihilism in movies these days. He tries to avoid  accusing filmmakers of playing tricks on us, manipulating emotions, or tempting an audience into sin. Detweiler wants people to watch films as an occasion for understanding: ”Only when we agree that we have things worth discussing, convictions worth dying for, can we engage in meaningful dialogue.” Still, I did not do very well in understanding much of Detweiler’s book, partly because of the cant and mushy language he uses, and I often suspected that he was trying to appear more open-minded about certain films than he really was.

Final Thought
Reading these books, I’ve mostly tried to understand what Christian critics want from film. For the most part, I think they want filmmakers to ask all viewers, Christians included, to see new, challenging things— to reevaluate their lives based on what is learned from film. The moviegoer needs to do work, which (considering the Multiplex these days¹⁷) is a rather tough sell for secular audiences too. It a tough and admirable position, as many of these writers’ contemporaries, fellow church goers, and friends will disagree with them and continue believing that the ’secular’ is inherently damaging to a person’s soul. These critics want to believe that films, for the most part, can speak for themselves.

But these writers are compelled to be spiritual guides as much as they are critics.¹⁸ I’ve tried to describe differences in opinion among Christian writers on film as much as I’ve pointed out accordance. But the trend of seeing beauty, darkness, and truth— limiting notions in their own right— as strict,  religious terms stands out in all of these writings. And I find that this tendency impedes the critics’ understanding of and imagination for the power of film. For example, is there room left in this view for how Jean-Luc Godard defines truth and beauty: “Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.” Or, how close can we look at certain films before we go blind?

1. I will use the term Christian with the admission that the title is lacking is specificity and meaning. However, any adjectives for Christian will be either pejorative or will further conflate the intended adjectival meaning. With this admission, I will point out that most of the writers I’ve found seem to come from “born again” American Protestantism, if not evangelicalism.  Of course, evangelistic has become an adjective for a types of believers. “Born-again” or evangelical Christianity is important to these writings. At points, too, I would like to use the word fundamentalist, but this word is troublesome, and what’s more there are many types of fundamentalists. Each of these writers, though, is a fundamentalist— they fundamentally believe that their daily life and work is orchestrated by God. [↩]
2. You may have questioned the relevance of this topic altogether. [↩]
3. Rick Moody has a delightful essay on this topic, How to Be a Christian Artist. He writes about the band, the Danielson Famile. In part, his essay is a humorous exposition on how tranformationalist Christian artists do it. http://www.believermag.com/issues/200506/?read=article_moody [↩]
4. This is the thesis of God in the Movies: How do you cast God in a Hollywood role [↩]
5. This does not hold true for canonical films. There talk of the classics and seminal works, but not much writing about films that you would watch in a university survey of film. [↩]
6. from Movies that Matter, by Richard Leonard. [↩]
7. When writing about his interviews with the movers and shakers of the movies, Overstreet over-emphasized the poignancy of his questions, and has a worse habit of guessing the intentions of his interview subjects. [↩]
8. In Relevant Magazine, Brett McCracken agrees, noting that while he liked Overstreet’s book he found the writer to name-drop and be too showy [↩]
9. Overstreet also has trouble with meta conventions, as shown in his review of Tarantino’s Kill Bill: “Perhaps someday we’ll discover that Tarantino can develop a voice of his own, free of allusions and tributes and cross-referencing. And we can hope he’ll learn more about discipline and restraint. For now, the films he’s provided give us scenes of discomforting indulgence, portrayals of brutality that punish the audience as well as the hero, and dialogue that at times becomes sickeningly obscene.” [↩]
10. There are countless Christian books about Star Wars, like Star Wars Jesus. There are so many passages that I would like to share from Star Wars Jesus, but I’ll have to save this for another post. Just take this chapter title, “The Death Star: the act and image of a complete lack of faith. Sensing a great disturbance in the Force,” or “Han Solo is like Jesus, especially when it comes to your subculture.” Along with Star Wars, it would be reasonable to discuss The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, which is often discussed by writers, since its film adaptation in 2001— with a comparable amount of references to Tolkein’s book trilogy; C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia; and other series, such as the works of Madeline L’Engel. I could also add the Harry Potter series and The Golden Compass, which have been given slightly less attention by Christian film critics. Yet, Tolkein’s works contain Christian allegory, despite the author’s intention to not make these allegories direct, and I feel like Star Wars is illustrative in a better way— it is overtly about good, evil, and other Godly themes, but it has also been derided by many Christians. I will mention, as a further aside, that Overstreet jokes about postmodern, elitist film critics think that hobbits are gay. An article I very much enjoyed reading a few years ago, makes a the case for homoeroticism between hobbits very well. [↩]
11. Anker writes: “The Force has moved from a largely magical plot gimmick, a dues ex machina contrivance, to a complex conception that within is posture of love demands an attitude of nonaggression— an odd, even paradoxical, stance for would-be-warriors. It is emphatically clear that the only hope for combating he evil Emperor and his dastardly henchman, Darth Vader, lies in this posture of nonaggression.” Indeed, this sound kind-of New Age to me. [↩]
12. Many of these writers go crazy with capitalization, making proper any word that is an attribute of God. [↩]
13. Overstreet and Anker write about Von Triers but they appear to have an uneasy feeling about Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, and the directors other work [↩]
14. Ranking circa 2007 [↩]
15. He does not give much room for explaining his definition, or how contemporary films that use noir conventions have any  sort-of meta thing going on; He does not explain the jest in playing with the genre. [↩]
16. Perhaps, if Tarantino really had any disciples, Rodriguez would be one. [↩]
17. That’s is, since the 1970s or who knows when. [↩]
18. This tendency is illustrated by the practice of including discussion guides at the end of each chapter in these books, which give the reader loaded and leading questions about how to interpret film. Overstreet and Detweiler seem to have resisted this trend, as they don’t want too much hand-holding, but they still provide supplementary material that imposes a particular way of viewing film. [↩]