Slow Zoom Towards the Mysterious Unseen
I wrote about a rather obscure short film called Wavelength and the way it parallels our own longing. Read the whole piece over at Mockingbird.
I wrote about a rather obscure short film called Wavelength and the way it parallels our own longing. Read the whole piece over at Mockingbird.
“We don’t do a lot of waiting nowadays. A few extra seconds of Internet load time merits a complaint call. We don’t like waiting, but we’re asked to do a lot of it. We especially don’t like waiting when it comes to movies. We tend to favor fast cuts and snappy punch lines. These movies “reward” the viewers (and also usually the characters) for their time by pairing questions with answers, effects with causes, and situations with explanations. There are actually storytelling formulas that dictate how long the viewer should be left to wonder before the truth is revealed, how long the protagonist should have to struggle before their want is achieved. This is effective storytelling, and a lot of fun, but sometimes we’re left to ask why our own lives aren’t resolving in this “normal” amount of time. The longer we wait, the more our faith is tested. We can’t skip to the end of our stories.”
Contact With Mystery
On Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor, and what 'The Revenant' misses on purpose, over at Christianity Today.
I wrote this piece on Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor, and what 'The Revenant' misses on purpose over at Christianity Today.
“Iñárritu doesn’t offer a deus ex machina solution to a problem his protagonist can’t solve. Rather, the climax is a form of grace that reveals a better resolution than Hugh determined to achieve. Usually the end of a story is about a giant choice that changes everything. Hugh makes a passive choice rather than an active one.”
Taken As We Are
I wrote this reflection on rejection, resurrection, and Vincent Van Gogh for Mockingbird.
I wrote this reflection on rejection, resurrection, and Vincent Van Gogh for Mockingbird.
“As I approached the first room of the exhibit, I wondered how they could make Van Gogh more “alive” than he already is. He is perhaps the most alive of any painter I know. The Olive Trees pulse at the edges of their frame every time I see them at the MoMA, New York City. But as I watched the exhibit’s narrative unfold – an arrangement currently on tour in Warsaw – I realized that it wasn’t only the art that was resurrected there. The experience seemed to exist as a reminder that we, too, could be resurrected. As I wandered between the projected light beams and the wall, the paintings were literally placed onto me, turning myself and other unsuspecting participants into image-bearers in a vaguely biblical sense.”
Writing the Wound: Wim Wenders Narrates Grace
I wrote about Wim Wenders over at Mockingbird.
I wrote about Wim Wenders over at Mockingbird.
“The Salt of the Earth follows Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado’s global pursuit of compelling images and stories. His photo projects take him from the gold mines of his native country to post-genocide refugee camps in Rwanda. Although Salgado narrates most of the film, Wenders’s vision for and attraction to the content shape our reception of the story. Salgado was entranced by the sense of dislocation in the people he photographed, and Wenders in turn reveals this dislocation to the viewer. Near the beginning of the film, Salgado says that photography is “writing and rewriting the world with light and shadows.” ”
Faith Not By Sight
What Picasso's blind man needs is something that cannot be seen. He is seeking more than physical sustenance as he reaches for the bread and wine. He is grasping for what is truly essential.
The whole room is an eerie blue-green, invoking a mysterious or sinister sea-myth. But the man in the painting would never know. He is blind. His thin face is tilted pitiably to the right, letting light fall on his pointed profile. In place of his eye, there is an abysmal bruise. Judging by the man’s emaciated yellow skin, the room could be a prison. The man holds a meager loaf with a hand that could belong to an alien or a corpse. His other hand feels gently for his wine jug. Fluid brushstrokes create a smooth, watery motion on the canvas, emphasizing the Neptunian color palette.
The Blind Man’s Meal (1903) is part of Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period, which lasted from 1901 to 1904. Picasso painted prostitutes, beggars, and drunks in the Blue Period. Their bodies are disproportional, but somehow beautiful at the same time. Picasso depicted a beauty that is not straightforward, not immediate, not explicitly visual.
The Blind Man’s hands and ears are highlighted with lighter yellow and green paint. The emphasis on the hands and ears combined with his placement at the dinner table show us his limited sense of the tangible world. His oversized shirt and beret are almost the same color as the dark walls. But against his sickly skin he is wearing a rich blue scarf. Because he is blind, he does not need decoration or variety of color. Yet, the blue around his neck signals that he still has appreciation of beauty and creativity beyond what is visual. Perhaps the scarf is connected to a memory from his past before he went blind.
The bowl on the table is also decorated. Picasso probably chose this to show that creativity is not merely functional and appreciated by the senses, but also inevitable. Stars and whole planets exist where no one on earth can see them. Our “blindness” or ignorance does nothing to diminish beauty that insists on being alive.
Probably the most recognizable product of the melancholic Blue Period era is The Old Guitarist. The disorienting, angular musician looks like spirit in Dante’s Inferno. Like the Blind Man, the guitarist is also painted looking toward the left, with a sharp chin and nose. But the Old Guitarist looks even more decrepit. If the Blind Man is starving, at least there is hope for salvation. The guitarist is singing about the life that has already left him.
A year after The Blind Man’s Meal, Picasso painted The Frugal Repast (1904). This painting features another blind man and his wife. The set up is almost exactly the same: wine jug, cloth laid out on table, bowl, and bread. This blind man’s head is also turned to the left, his face like a knife. Again, Picasso gives the blind man a scarf around his neck.
What the blind man needs is something that cannot be seen. He is seeking more than physical sustenance as he reaches for the bread and wine. He is grasping for what is truly essential. This is what sets him apart from The Old Guitarist. In the bare darkness, strange and hollowed beauty survives. Like most of the figures in the Blue Period, the Blind Man looks like a wraith. But unlike the guitarist, the Blind Man may belong in Dante’s Purgatorio instead of his hell.
Search for Purpose: Fleet Foxes’ most recent album is also their most honest
While Sun Giant and Fleet Foxes were more like recitations of old legends – a subdued, peaceful collection of stories – Helplessness Blues is clearly a journey. It is a combination of deeper poetry and fuller sound. Pecknold’s voice is ethereal but also raw and hauntingly honest. Sun Giant and Fleet Foxes were closer to hymns, but Helplessness Blues is a supplication, a search for atonement and purpose.
Fleet Foxes were popular by 2007, thanks to MySpace and Napster. Lead vocalist and songwriter Robin Pecknold attributes this early attention to illegal music file sharing. But the music of the baroque pop/folk band seems otherworldly enough to atone for these painfully mundane sins.
The Seattle-born band released their first EP, Sun Giant, in 2008. A self-titled debut album followed, called simply Fleet Foxes. Their second full album, Helplessness Blues, serenaded the public in May of 2011. Although Helplessness Blues (Sub Pop/Bella Union) lost the Best Folk Album Grammy to The Civil Wars’ Barton Hollow, it was listed as one of the year’s best albums by both The Rolling Stones and Entertainment Weekly.
Pecknold calls the album “a synthesis of folk rock, traditional folk, & psychedelic pop, with an emphasis on group vocal harmonies.” Pecknold also lists Bob Dylan, Peter Paul & Mary, Brian Wilson, and Van Morrison as inspiration. The music feels folksy. It sounds like the mountains. The harmony of Pecknold, Skyler Skjelset (Pecknold’s highschool friend), Christian Wargo, and Casey Wescott sounds like plaid shirts and foggy sunrises. The lyrics explicitly invoke apples in the summer, tar seeping up from the ground, the bloody reaper, and rotted fingers.
While Sun Giant and Fleet Foxes were more like recitations of old legends – a subdued, peaceful collection of stories – Helplessness Blues is clearly a journey. It is a combination of deeper poetry and fuller sound. Pecknold’s voice is ethereal but also raw and hauntingly honest. Sun Giant and Fleet Foxes were closer to hymns, but Helplessness Blues is a supplication, a search for atonement and purpose.
The album uses instruments ranging from a 12-string guitar, zither, and fiddle to a hammered dulcimer, and even Tibetan singing bowls, whatever those are. Maybe it is the mixing of so many instruments and ethnic sounds that makes the album feel transcendent.
The rawer edginess in the latest album allows our relationship with Fleet Foxes to be more personal than before. We have a sense of the present, not the past. “So now I am older than my mother and father / when they had their daughter / now what does that say about me?” sings twenty-five-year-old Pecknold.
The album is clearly about maturing. “Guess I got old,” exclaims Pecknold with half whimsical, half biting simplicity (“Lorelai”). The poetry is woven out of the struggle that comes with growing up and seeing the world in different colors. “I have borrowed all my loans from life / and I can’t, no I can’t get through / the borrower’s debt is the only regret of my youth.” Helplessness Blues is full of questions, from personal identity struggles (“Montezuma”) to beautiful contemplations of the universe (“Blue Spotted Tail”).
The title track speaks to coming out of disillusionment with hope and a plan: “I’d rather be / a functioning cog in some great machinery / serving some purpose beyond me.” These realizations bring a fresh intensity that will intrigue new listeners and allow Fleet Foxes to endure long enough to give fans what they really want: another chapter in the odyssey.
True Grit: Unlikely Redemption
The Coen Brothers like to redeem the most unlikely people.
The Coen Brothers like to redeem the most unlikely people. Their characters are always believable, but seldom people you would want to be. The main characters of O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Raising Arizona are both ex-convicts. In keeping, True Grit’s Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) is a one-eyed U.S. Marshall with a less than savory past. His life of bizarre showdowns and drunkenness is interrupted by a 14-year old girl on a mission. Maddie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) wants picture-perfect revenge for her father’s killer, and she wants Rooster to help her see it done.
When the movie first begins, it feels too slow and rambling. There is little to like in the gruff, carelessly violent Rooster, or the rather aloof Texas Ranger LeBeouf (Matt Damon). Even Maddie could seem like an annoying little girl who doesn’t know her place. But as the roads get tougher and the dangers nearer, all three characters emerge with an increasingly endearing display of grit that is not unlike the gradual and halting evolution of their own relationships.
True Grit received ten Oscar nominations, including Best Director and Best Picture, but the movie is anything but showy. Joel and Ethan Coen convey a sense of dusty sparseness that is both realistic and alien. They almost deglamorize the wild west. Everything about the movie flees sentimentality and emotion. The only sense of intimacy we feel with the characters is during the moments of humor that flawlessly dot the script. All of this, including the formal speech (it is instead of it’s) used in the script seems to separate us from the characters, as if we are supposed to focus on something else.
What is beautiful about the film is that the central theme of revenge morphs inconspicuously into something like salvation. In saving Maddie’s life, we get the feeling that Rooster is trying to atone for his failures. The directors aptly capture the realism of such a story in the lack of a triumphant victory. There is nothing about the revenge in the end, it is about the friends made on the journey. The film does not build into a neatly packaged climax or conclude with all the loose ends tied. The ending is abrupt and pragmatic, as if Maddie herself had written it; for as she says, “time just gets away from us.” So it does, and maybe the Coen Brothers are doing their best to focus on the things that are really worth the time we have.
Downward Spiral: Dave Eggers’ Chilling Apocalypse
In an eerily familiar world, “unsubscribe” means betrayal, secrets are lies, alone time is escapism, leaving work after hours is treason, quality time is inefficient, tardy responses are attacks, and experiencing a moment but failing to live-document it is cheating humanity of information. “All that happens must be known” is The Circle’s mantra.
If you truly “love” your friends, you won’t allow them to keep secrets, not when millions of viewers deserve the truth. This is the world of The Circle. Dave Eggers’ chilling novel explores a future where humanity has eradicated mystery, become truly transparent, and finally knows everything. Published by Vintage in 2013, The Circle proves Eggers can do just about anything because he understands human nature. He gets the glory and the ugliness, the potential for beauty and the tendency toward devastating selfishness. He gets our tendencies to yearn for the transcendent, our penchant to both deny and become god. Eggers creates a society that self-suppresses humanity’s most beautiful qualities. He explores how our obsession with the self puts us at risk of losing it.
It’s that insight that leaves us astonished and wary of our phones after completing The Circle. What began as a series of brilliant social experiments and technological innovations morphs into The Circle – a social media company whose goal is collective social omnipotence. “To heal we must know. To know we must share,” say the Circlers. Echoing 1984, obsessive monitoring systems are praised, and communication is only understood in terms of public sharing that makes Facebook look archaic.
The main character, Mae Holland, loses her identity in a gradual Faustian bargain that includes a lot of smiles, frowns, zings, and likes – split-second substitutions for real relationships. In her hobbies, relationships, and view of life she slowly replaces her spirit of adventure with a compulsion to control. In an eerily familiar world, “unsubscribe” means betrayal, secrets are lies, alone time is escapism, leaving work after hours is treason, quality time is inefficient, tardy responses are attacks, and experiencing a moment but failing to live-document it is cheating humanity of information. “All that happens must be known” is The Circle’s mantra.
Mae is eventually unable to accept uncertainty. The Circle exists to put control at the Circler’s fingertips. Enamored with her popularity and influence, Mae goes “transparent” – a new experiment that allows viewers around the world to watch participants through a 24/7 live feed and comment on the participant’s activities. It’s The Truman Show meets Facebook under the guise of building trust and honest communication. Secrets are lies, after all. Such a system, say Circlers, could provide accountability for everyone from spouses to politicians. Information will thus produce peace; the death of privacy will benefit the public.
Predictably, “transparency” creates more problems than it solves. Like the soma of Brave New World, systems and practices meant to prevent the undesirable results of human passion actually suffocate passion itself. This insatiable need to know spawns an invasive apocalypse, though most of the characters are unaware. It isn’t natural resources that are scarce in this catastrophe, but individuality. On the verge of knowing everything, society has replaced God with the self and replaced the self with something viscerally sickening.
The terrifying part of the story is that it feels real. It cannot be dismissed as implausible – like other apocalyptic scares that can be ignored until evidence for zombies arises and so on – but seems to be looming at the other end of a thousand little choices we have the power to make. Perhaps in this way, The Circle is a moral tale. Egger’s point seems to be that this apocalypse is easily achieved. The Circle’s promises to do good and the cozily mundane settings shock us when we realize they were the foundations for paranoia and devastation. Eggers recreates the exasperation we endure when friends scroll Facebook during important conversations, and the jittery frenzy of people who are offended if we don’t reply in seconds.
Despite its credibility, sometimes the construction of the world seems a bit weak. Eggers uses words like “web” and “PC” to denote a primitive past. It might feel more natural to use “iPhone,” “Instagram,” or an invention we could believe emerged before his creations like CircleSearch, and TruYou. But perhaps the generic history makes the doom even more impending because it isn’t contained in specifics. The progression – or digression – of The Circle is uncannily natural. Eggers implores us to get off of our phones at the dinner table, not because he is old-fashioned, but because he is forward-thinking.
When I finished The Circle I wanted to go out on a kayak unobserved, to think about how little I know and how that is okay. Though tempting, it is difficult to categorize the book as science fiction. The Circle isn’t an alternate world, but one we must deny every day for it to stay fictional. Eggers describes a precipice – it is our choice to jump or not.
A Major Risk: What Liberal Arts Students Can Learn From Birdman
I wrote about faith and Birdman (2014) for my college newspaper, The Empire State Tribune.
I wrote about faith and Birdman (2014) for my college newspaper, The Empire State Tribune.
“Faith is the evidence of things unseen. Studying (or practicing) the humanities requires faith. It requires faith not only in your art, but faith that any art could be worth doing. When is it more than a hobby? When is it worth four years of education and hefty tuition prices? ”
Review: The Theory of Everything
The Aristotelian Triangle published my review of The Theory of Everything.
The Aristotelian Triangle published my review of The Theory of Everything.
“Instead of over-emphasizing the scientific component of the story, the film focuses on the human element – where the real discovery happens. It’s about wondering, yearning, and searching for answers. “Where there is life, there is hope” says Stephen.”