Archive for the 'Movies' Category

“Sixteen Candles” inspires a reflection

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 11, 2005
in Movies, Vanity and Youth ministry
. 20 Comments

Today is one of the darkest days in sports:  baseball is on the all-star break; there is no football, basketball (NBA or WNBA), or hockey.  The Tour de France is on a rest day.  The Gold Cup of soccer is taking a day off.   No golf.  No major track meets.  No auto racing. This is,as far as I can tell, the single worst day of 2005 to be a sports fan.  Fortunately, I have all my college football preview magazines with which to amuse myself!

Anyhow…

My fiancee and I watched Sixteen Candles on television last night.  It’s one of those films ("Breakfast Club" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" are others) that helped define what it meant to be a high school student in the early-to-mid-1980s.    I had a fleeting crush on Molly Ringwald, as did half the boys I knew.  (I ought to use Google to find out what has become of her).

The film seems dated to me now; certain themes (ranging from racism to date rape) would be nearly impossible to portray in the same way in 2005.  That’s probably a good thing, overall.  But I found myself shifting uncomfortably during the scenes with actors Anthony Michael Hall and John Cusack (long before the latter was a major star.)  The two portray "geeky freshmen" obsessed with sex; last night for whatever reason, their depiction of fourteen and fifteen year-old nerds really resonated with me.

This will no doubt come as no surprise to any regular or occasional readers of this blog, but I was a very nerdy high school boy! (Click the link for an embarrassing photo.)  My clothes came from Sears (Tuffskins jeans, of course); I was nearsighted, slightly overweight, shaggy-haired and nonathletic.  Mind you, I didn’t have the miserable high school experience that so many self-proclaimed "geeks" seem to have had.  I had a small circle of friends who shared my interests in books, music, and politics.  (There were two kinds of brainy, nerdy kids in my school: the ones whose primary interest was in math and science, and the ones who were drawn to English Lit, drama, and government.  I was definitely in the latter group.  I’m not sure if we were any less nerdy merely because we carried around copies of the Federalist Papers rather than a slide rule.)  I became friends with many teachers, and was twice president of our little chapter of the very-nerdy Model UN.  (Junior year, we were Zaire; senior year, we were Peru at the state Model UN convention in Berkeley.)  But though I can say with all honesty that I enjoyed high school, it was not without its humiliations and disappointments.   And last night, for whatever reason, many of those unpleasant memories came back to me as I watched the film with my beloved.  I’m not sure why these memories are coming up now, though it is possible that my 20th high school reunion in October has something to do with it! 

My fiancee and I talked a bit last night about our very different high school experiences.  I always protect her privacy on this blog, but I will say that she and I did not travel in the same sort of high school circles.   She was a popular girl in high school; she was drill team captain and an accomplished club soccer player.  She was — and of course I’m biased — gorgeous as a teenager (and still is).   Before last night, we’d never spent much time talking about what sort of  cliques we belonged to in high school, and it was an enlightening conversation.

When I was in my late twenties, I went through a brief and rather nasty period where I quite consciously thought of myself as getting "revenge" for what had happened to me in high school.   When I was 29, I was in a brief relationship with a gal simply because she was a dead ringer for the most popular girl in my high school, a girl on whom I had had a mad crush but who had never given me the time of day.  I confess that nine years ago, I was quite a jerk.  I dated a former prom queen largely because she had been just that; I was consciously living out a fantasy from my adolescence, and this twenty-somethin’ gal was more or less a victim of that fantasy.  We broke up after a few intense weeks, and I’m pleased to say that years later, I was able to make amends to her for having intentionally "used" her.  To my surprise, when I told her about this, she laughed and laughed and said, "Hugo, after the way I behaved in high school, I probably had it coming!" 

Obviously, I’m well past the stage where I feel the need to prove that I’m not the chubby, awkward "nerd" that I was nearly a quarter-century ago.  But it hit me last night that so many of the young folks with whom I work at All Saints are going through the same sorts of insecurities that I went through.  Before I went to sleep, I brought into my mind about two dozen faces from my youth group: boys and girls; frosh and sophs, junior and seniors.  Some of "my kids" are, from what I can tell, very popular.  Others are on the fringes of high school life.  I began to wonder, and still am wondering, if I do a good-enough job paying attention to those kids who are more "nerdy", or more alienated.  I try very hard to spend an equal amount of time with each kid in the group each week (a daunting task sometimes).  But I wonder if my own life experiences affect how I interact with the seemingly "cool" and "uncool" kids.

I remember one night a few years ago when I was first leading a discussion on sex,  that the conversation quickly became dominated by a small group of older, popular teens.   Without always labeling themselves as such, these were the "experienced" kids.   I had opened up the room to open discussion about feelings and experiences, not realizing that the most sexually precocious kids in the room would quickly take over.   Too late, I noticed that many of the younger kids, as well as the less outgoing and popular ones, were dead silent.  A couple of animated, talkative senior girls had hijacked the conversation — and I had allowed it to happen.  Someone overhearing what we talked about in the lounge that night might well have assumed that all of our kids were sexually experienced and eager to share about it!   I forgot that in that room, there were as many teens who had "never been kissed" as there were teens who had already had sex.    A week later, during a follow-up discussion, I made a gentle and oblique apology to everyone for allowing so many of our young people to be left out.

Now, I’m not saying that it’s accurate to describe high school as a place where "popular=sexually active."  There are plenty of exceptions; some popular and attractive kids are proud virgins; some kids who are on the margins of high school society are quite experienced.  But I have noticed that my teens perceive that equation to be real, just as teens in my era (and in "Sixteen Candles") did as well.  For my generation of high school boys, losing one’s virginity before graduation was seen as the Holy Grail that would guarantee us admission into a "cool" clique of those who had "done it."  There was no more effective way to disprove one’s geekiness than to find a girl willing to have sex with you!  The homosocial desire for approval and acceptance was as much a driving force towards premature sexual activity as biological lust. For too many kids, perhaps boys in particular, the "popular=sexually active" equation is an unquestioned truth in secular high schools.

It took me many years (more than a decade, frankly) to come to terms with the humiliations and disappointments I experienced in high school.  Indeed, one of the reasons I wanted to work with high school youth was that I knew first-hand how unhappy a time it can be in the lives of American teens.  But I realize that I still have work to do. I must be vigilant about not giving more attention to the cool and the popular kids than to the awkward ones.  It’s a genuine effort sometimes to treat all kids the same; even youth group leaders pushing forty can be affected by subconscious messages that suggest that the pretty, the handsome, the athletic,and the articulate are more deserving of time and attention.  I know I do a pretty good job of dividing that attention equally, but there is still more I can do, and I resolve to do it next year.

Peeps and a simple-minded attachment to atonement theory

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 28, 2005
in All Saints Pasadena, Christianity, Movies and Politics
. 36 Comments

I’m sitting in my office on this Easter Monday morning a stack of ungraded journals by my side.  We spent Saturday and Sunday with my father up in Santa Barbara, marking both his 70th and the resurrection of our Lord.  In honor of these two important events, I ate far more than was necessary, and I have that vaguely queasy feeling in my tummy this morning.

It’s not Easter without an egg hunt, and my beloved and I hid three dozen plastic eggs around my father’s garden yesterday morning.  The rest of the family hunted with varying degrees of enthusiasm, with relatively few complaints from the shorter folk about my nasty propensity to wedge the goodies high up in trees.  Once all 36 eggs had been found, our group shared the bounty together.  It was discovered that few save your reporter were fond of marshmallow peeps.  Thus I ate far more than my share, and this might explain my shakiness this morning.

I am also proud to report that, egged on by my sister, a number of us (including my father), braved the frigid waters of the Pacific off Henry’s Beach yesterday afternoon.   I felt very proud.

I did enjoy the long Good Friday service at All Saints.  Three hours is a bit long to sit in church, I realize, but I was struck by how many people were only able to attend for a portion of the liturgy.  I’m hoping that they all had work or family commitments that kept them from sitting vigil for three hours; I wouldn’t like to think that most of my fellow Episcopalians just don’t have the endurance to remain focused for that long. 

I think it’s hard for progressive Christians to focus on Good Friday.   The desire to rush ahead to Easter morning is overwhelming.  This seemed especially true for our rector, my friend Ed Bacon, during his brief homily on Friday afternoon.  Let me say for the record that I do love Ed.  He’s one of the reasons I came to All Saints, and I do think he often preaches prophetically (I know, an overused adverb among liberal Christians, but hey, it’s accurate).  Still, I’m sorry that he chose the course he did in his short sermon.  He began with an attack on traditional Christian atonement theory and last year’s Mel Gibson movie, saying that he had found the Passion of the Christ to be, and I quote very much in context, "disgusting."  Ed wasn’t just angry at the violence of the film (which I found a bit overwhelming myself) but the theology behind it.  Like most contemporary liberal Christians, Ed finds the idea that Jesus died to "pay for our sins" to be offensive, and he let us know that in the strongest possible terms. Even more unfortunately, my friend Ed then connected atonement theory to the rising power of what he called the "far right-wing theocracy", offering the recently piece of Terri Schiavo legislation as evidence.  (If you’re having trouble following that, trust me, so was I in the pew.)

Sometimes it’s very hard to be a theologically conservative evangelical with a left-wing world view.  As I listened to Ed last week, I squirmed uncomfortably.  When I first became a Christian, the defining feature of my spiritual experience was the stunning, overwhelming awareness that Jesus had died for me.   One of my cousins, who is very religiously conservative, told me, just before I accepted Christ,  that she had been praying for me daily for more than a decade.  She told me "Hugo, when Jesus was dying on the cross, He was thinking about you."  The first time she told me that, I excused myself from a family party, went into the bathroom, and burst into tears. 

My belief in the atonement was reinforced through prayer and simple experiences. I knew how to poke holes in atonement theory.  Heck, I had to slog through St Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo in Latin when I was in grad school, and wrote a typically snide paper about the influence of feudal law on theology.  I can spout all the feminist critiques of the theory as well, about the problems of "blood sacrifice theology" and the "sacramentalization of violence."   Been there, read that, said that.  But I’ve got to say, in my heart, I’m a very, very childlike guy.  To put it bluntly, my own theology owes more to the likes of Jennifer Knapp and Lee Strobel than it does to a Niebuhr, a Yoder, or a Duns Scotus!   I may have Ph.D. after my name, but my faith is, I admit with a wince, remarkably anti-intellectual. 

I first came to love Jesus because He died for me, not because some progressive preacher told me that he "successfully embodied a radical new ethic of inclusiveness and community"!.   The notion that Jesus was just a man who lived a remarkable life of peace-making and justice, a wonderful role model and no more — that’s not a faith that changes lives. It sure as heck wouldn’t have changed mine. 

I’m aware that this "Jesus died for me" theology is, when unaccompanied by the call to action,  self-centered to the point of narcissism.   And yet without it,  I know that I don’t have the power to do whatever small good things I am able to do.  Whatever small amount of good work I am able to do with my students and with my youth group stems from the absolute certainty that Jesus shed His blood for me, as He shed His blood for countless others.  Despite the violence of Mel Gibson’s movie, I loved it because it made me newly, viscerally aware of the suffering Christ endured for me.  I did cry, quite a bit, and I walked out of that theater feeling humbled and loved and extraordinarily grateful.    The pope may or may not have said "It is as it was" in response to seeing the film — but for me, when I saw it, it was all that I had imagined and more.  It added powerfully to my Easter experience last year, and will continue to do so for years to come.  But it didn’t contradict my commitment to the idea that Jesus wants us to do justice in this life!  And I see no reason why the theology of the atonement ought to be associated with conservative positions on a whole host of economic and social issues.

One of the reasons I like this blog is because I can put into writing what I am unable to defend intellectually.  I’m not interested in offering up an apologetic treatise on the atonement theory. I’m simply sharing how vitally important it is to me, and how painful it is to have this central facet of my simple faith attacked in the church that I love.   

By the way, if you’re willing to pay a small fee, the best defense of the atonement theory against its critics comes from another man I am proud to call a friend, Fuller Seminary President Richard Mouw.  Mouw, incidentally, was once a former student of my father’s at the University of Alberta…

I must get to some grading.

Oscars done

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 21, 2005
in Movies
. 6 Comments

As always, I’m grateful for the thoughtfulness and the insight of my commenters; there’s some very good stuff below my previous post.

As of last night, my  beloved and I have completed our task of seeing all of the Oscar-nominated films prior to the handing out of the Academy Awards.  (For the record, until I moved to Los Angeles, I wasn’t nearly as interested in such things.)  Not that it’s of interest to anyone else necessarily, of the five films nominated for best picture, here’s how I’d rank them:

1.  "Sideways" (Like last year’s Lost in Translation, a film with dialogue so accurate about the male soul it took my breath away)
2.  "Finding Neverland" (Glorious and moving.  Of course, I’m  a very biased Johnny Depp fanatic).
3.  "The Aviator"(I didn’t want to like it, but I did)
4.  "Million Dollar Baby" (Good, but somehow I just didn’t buy it)
5.  "Ray"  (I loved the acting, but found the film much too long and utterly unengaging)

And I’d very much like to see Annette Bening and Johnny Depp win the Best Actor and Actress Oscars, and Sophie Okonedo and Thomas Haden Church take home the Supporting awards.   No dramatic physical transformations, no evidence of extreme use of the Method, just pure craft.

Whose deep throat?

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 11, 2005
in Movies and Porn
. 22 Comments

This morning’s Los Angeles TImes (registration required) has a review of the just-released documentary, Inside Deep Throat.  In both my women’s history and gay and lesbian history classes, I spend a fair amount of time on the sexual revolution and the coming of the pornography industry.   On occasion, I have discussed the impact of Deep Throat.  While it is probably possible to exaggerate Deep Throat’s importance, there’s little doubt that this low-budget 1972 film had a significant impact upon American society.   The protests the film aroused helped (along with the Roe v. Wade decision the following year) to galvanize social conservatives; the modern culture wars indeed have a seed in this one movie.

But I’m not going to see the documentary.  It’s rated NC-17, and has much explicitness, including extended outtakes from the original Deep Throat.  I’d love to see some of the interviews, but I have no intention of sitting through that much pornographic imagery.  Others will make their own decisions, and I wouldn’t dream of condemning those who go to see the documentary. .  But I’ve got a pretty good gauge of my own comfort level these days, and this film clearly would exceed it.   (If an edited DVD is ever released, featuring just the interviews, I’d love to see it.)

The Times review is enthusiastic and upbeat:

By turns funny and sobering, sweeping and intimate, the consistently
entertaining "Inside Deep Throat" plays like a giddy prance through the
minefield of the last three decades of American sex and politics. It’s
a timeless story, really. Bawdy, can-do upstarts raise the vengeful ire
of the cynically pious.

(Cynically pious?  Ouch!)

Most of those associated with the film are to be interviewed.  At least, all the men involved in making, producing, acting in, and distributing the film.  On the other hand, the star of the picture is not on hand to be interviewed.  Linda Lovelace, who in her later years became a key anti-pornography crusader, died in a 2002 car accident.  Hers is a complicated story.  As Joe Bob Briggs pointed out in his obituary for Lovelace three years ago,

Lovelace may be the only American celebrity to publish four best-selling autobiographies. The first two celebrate free uninhibited sex as the most liberating form of human expression since man learned to speak. The last two describe pornography as a felony assault against women, a menace to the future  of civilization and the very essence of evil. In this one desperately unhappy woman we have both the yin and the yang of the sexual revolution played out before our eyes.

Lovelace, (born Linda Boreman), like so many women who would follow her into porn, came from a background of abuse and neglect.  In the 1980s, she made repeated and consistent claims that she had been forced into making that one famous movie:

When you see the movie ‘Deep Throat,’" she told the Toronto Sun  in 1981, "you are watching me being raped. It is a crime that movie is still showing; there was a gun to my head the entire time."

Whether that gun was literal or metaphorical, no one can say.  What is clear is that Lovelace was addicted to drugs at the time she made the film (she was arrested not long after its release for cocaine possession).  While male co-star Harry Reems ended up a born-again believer and a wealthy real estate broker (after getting sober in the late 80s). Lovelace’s last job was working as a night janitor in Denver office buildings.  She died penniless.

By all accounts, Inside Deep Throat pays scant attention to Lovelace’s claims and sad end.  Producer Brian Grazer told the AP that "I was less interested in the story of Linda Lovelace and more on the movie’s effect on popular culture." 

That’s convenient, Brian.  Though a discussion of the film’s impact on society is a worthy goal, to ignore the impact the film had on its female star is troubling.  Despite some legal troubles, all of the men associated with the film seem alive and reasonably well.  Harry Reems, bless his heart, is a millionare.  But the one woman whose performance was so critical to the picture’s success is unavailable to be interviewed.  She’s not in a position to laugh and reminisce with the fellas who made the film with her.  It’s not the fault of the producers of this documentary that Linda Lovelace died in a car accident.  But to put it graphically, hers was the "throat" that made the movie a success.  (And by naming the entire film after a woman’s orifice, the makers of the film set an industry standard for objectification.  And yes, I am aware that "throat" in this instance functions as both noun and verb.)  Her story and her perspective is absolutely vital to an understanding of the film — and to ignore that voice and that story is irresponsible and wrong.

Of course, perhaps it’s convenient that Lovelace is no longer alive.  If she were, the producers might feel compelled to interview her.  And her version of the story might spoil their "giddy prance" through our recent social history.

Note:  I wrote this BEFORE reading Echidne’s excellent post on this subject at Alas, A Blog.  There’s a particularly good discussion of the much-maligned Catherine Mackinnon that’s well worth a read.

Women, age, and the Oscars –UPDATED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 7, 2005
in Age, Feminism and Movies
. 77 Comments

I mentioned this morning that I was pulling for Annette Bening to win the Oscar for best actress this year. 

In addition to wanting to see such luminous, flawless acting rewarded, I’d also like to see an "older" actress take home the Oscar.  The dominance of wins by under-40 actresses in recent years has been troubling, and I say that with no disrespect intended towards the winners.  Compare  the winners in recent years for Best Actor and Best Actress, with age at time of performance (awards are always given the subsequent year):

1996: Geoffrey Rush (age 45); Frances McDormand (age 39)
1997: Jack Nicholson (age 60); Helen Hunt (age 34)
1998:  Roberto Benigni (age 45); Gwyneth Paltrow (age 24)
1999:  Kevin Spacey (age 40); Hilary Swank (age 25)
2000:  Russell Crowe (age 36); Julia Roberts (age 33)
2001: Denzel Washington (age 47); Halle Berry (age 35)
2002: Adrien Brody (age 29); Nicole Kidman (age 35)
2003: Sean Penn (age 43); Charlize Theron (age 28)

Average age for male winners: 43.1
Average age for female winners: 31.7

Since 1996, no actress over 40 has won the Oscar (though twelve have been nominated), while six of the eight male winners were over that chronological barrier.

Numbers-crunching doesn’t necessarily tell us a great deal, of course.  But it does tell us something: older actresses are given precious few opportunities to shine, and even when they are given plum roles, rarely are they given the highest honors for their performances.   In recent years, the Academy has shown an interest in rewarding actresses who either undergo remarkable physical transformations (Swank, in both her nominated roles; Charlize Theron in last year’s winning turn) or who turn in gritty, highly sexualized performances (Halle Berry).  It doesn’t seem enough for a woman, particularly a young and "beautiful" one  to merely "act" — she must strip off her clothes, gain tremendous amounts of weight, wear prosthetics, and endure tremendous physical abuse, usually at the hands of men.  Though Hollywood does like to see that kind of visceral, physical acting from men as well, it rarely demands it to the same degree. 

I  mean no disrespect to the young women who have carried Oscar home in recent years; all were surely deserving.  But this year, with the nominations of Annette Bening and Imelda Staunton, the Academy has the opportunity to honor women of "a certain age" (or older)  who underwent no significant physical metamorphosis to play their parts, but who simply acted.  A win for either actress would be most welcome in our household.

UPDATE:  A little playtime with Google reveals that the last seven Best Actress winners were all on the People Magazine "50 most beautiful people" list  either immediately before or after their Oscar win.  Needless to say, Google reveals that the same is not true of the seven male Best Actor winners.  Thought you’d all like to know.

Notes, bicycles, sidewalks

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 7, 2005
in Chinchillas, Class, Movies and Photos
. 16 Comments

‘Twas a busy and very happy weekend.

New pics of Matilde (and her papa) will appear shortly in her album.  I’ve been informed by the good folks at Pet Homes for Ranchies that it is important to limit the number of nuts that chinchillas take in.  Apparently, nuts are difficult for their livers to process.  SO, it’s lots of hay and the occasional raisin from now on…  so far, she hasn’t complained.

We saw Hotel Rwanda and Being Julia over the weekend.  For different reasons, both are highly recommended.  The former, despite its predictability, was intensely moving — and yes, shaming.  The latter was an unabashed delight, and I will be pulling very hard for Annette Bening to win the best actress Oscar.  I’ll explain why in a subsequent post.

I’m thinking this morning about bicycles and affluence and sidewalks.  Let me explain.

My fiancee and I live in northwest Pasadena, in a neighborhood that is largely Hispanic and African-American.  In our part of town, it is extremely common to encounter young men of color riding bicycles on the sidewalk. In the mornings, one sees dozens of them riding off to work, often wearing work uniforms.  In the evenings, they can be seen riding home in equally large numbers.  To avoid the fellows on bikes when we’re both on the sidewalk, many times I’ve had to jump out of the way.  I’ve seen more than one pedestrian-bicyclist collision. 

A few years ago, I struck and injured a young man on a bicycle here in the neighborhood.  I was making a legal right on red late in the evening, and he was speeding along the sidewalk (where I was not looking) and raced into the intersection just as I was turning. He ended up on my hood; his bike was knocked into the road.  I leapt out of the car and ran to his aid.  I had no cell phone.  He spoke no English, and my Spanish then (as now) was very poor.  I told him I wanted to take him to the hospital, and he became agitated.  He limped over to his bike (which had a badly bent frame), picked it up, and started to hobble off.  I ran after him, and not knowing what else to do, gave him all the money I had in my wallet.  He took it, mumbled something, and kept going.  I wasn’t prepared to physically stop him, and I understood his reluctance to see a doctor — though he was clearly hurt.  I’m better now about checking the sidewalks when I’m turning in this part of town!

I’ve never seen any of these young men wearing helmets.  I have no doubt that they can’t afford them.  I am certain that the primary reason that they are riding bikes on the sidewalk (rather than the street) is that they lack the protective gear that wealthier cyclists are able to wear.  They are far less well-defended against traffic than are my fiancee and I.

This morning, my beloved and I went for a ride in the hills.  I rode my Trek, she rode her Cannondale.   While our bikes are not state-of-the-art, they are legitimate road bikes with carbon fiber frames and triple chain cranks and all the other modern cycling amenities.  We had our gloves, our special seats, our Shimano bike clips, and of course, our $130 Bell helmets.  Of course, we rode in the street, with the traffic.  Our bikes are fast enough and sufficiently maneuverable for us to do so.  We are well-protected (as much as humanly possible) against injury.  It is our relative wealth, not our superior respect for the law, that allows us to stay off the sidewalks.

Neither of us commutes to work on a bike.  For us, cycling is a sport, a recreation, a pleasure.   For our neighbors, bikes are an absolute necessity,  often the only means of transportation.    I am confident that if they had the equipment with which to ride safely in the street as we do, they would do so.  Perhaps some local charity exists where helmets can be donated.  But until the day that my fellow riders are as fortunate and well-equipped as I, I’ll continue to be willing to move out of their way on the sidewalks, honoring both their necessity and my privilege.

UPDATE:  My fiancee gently notes that she has a double chain crank, not a triple.

Monday morning notes

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 31, 2005
in All Saints Pasadena, Men and Masculinity and Movies
. 8 Comments

Monday morning notes:

First off, I am so grateful for all the commenters who have come here to conduct a vigorous and civil discourse below some of my more recent posts.  I have had to ban two folks, however, who regularly used profanity or used slurs to refer to others in the thread.  While all viewpoints are welcome, ad hominem attacks on individual commenters are not.

Speaking of thoughtful comments, go here for some interesting and insightful criticism of my Friday post by Keri and others.   More for me upon which to reflect!

We had a busy weekend. Yesterday, I got on the bike for the first time in well over a month, and am happy to report I managed to make it up and down through the nearby Verdugos just fine.  My fiancee and I have our first century ride of the year coming up in just six weeks, in Solvang. My current plan is to do long runs on Fridays and Saturdays, and long rides on Sundays after church.

Speaking of the Solvang area, we saw Sideways on Saturday night.  (Like many folks, we are frantically trying to see all of the Oscar nominees before the awards are handed out; we also saw "Ray" last night and "Million Dollar Baby" a week ago).  "Sideways" is superb, though not untroubling.  For obvious reasons, I’m a huge fan of films that focus on men’s friendships with one another, and the authenticity of the dialogue between the two lead characters in the film was breathtakingly good.  Good enough that I may allow extra-credit papers on the film in this spring’s "Men, Masculinities, and the American Tradition" class I’ll be teaching!

And yesterday morning, at church, one of those marvelous "amen" moments.  All Saints Pasadena is a big church; at our 11:15 service, we average about 750-800 in attendance.  In between the sermon and the beginning of the eucharistic rite, our rector, Ed Bacon, made his customary announcements.  For the past six weeks, like so many churches, we’ve been praying for and collecting money for tsunami victims.  But every time we mention it in public (see this prayer), we always refer to the disaster as afflicting Southeast Asia.  Yesterday, as Ed was thanking the congregation for its generosity, an elderly black woman stood up in the rear of the church, and in a firm voice called out "Ed, Ed."  Ed was silent.  "Yes", he asked "what is it?"  "Ed", the woman said, "the tsunami hit Africa too.  Everyone only talks about Asia, but Africa suffered too."  You could feel the shock of recognition — and yes, of shame, throughout the congregation.   A pause.  "Yes", Ed replied, "you are absolutely right. Africa too."  The old woman sat down, and all around, I could see nodding heads.  Our congregation is perhaps 20% African-American, one of our priests is black — and yet, we had never referred to the tsunami’s impact on Africa before. 

How easily we forget Africa, where far more people die every month of preventable causes than were killed in the earthquake and tsunami on Boxing Day!  I’ve had that woman’s voice in my head since yesterday.  Africa, too.

More soon.

Briefly noted

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 12, 2004
in Blogging, Chinchillas, Faith, Feminism, Links, Movies, Photos and Sexuality
. 10 Comments

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All since midnight.

Read about Opal the anti-instinctual cat (with pictures) at Jenell’s blog.

Amanda has some solid thoughts about Kinsey and sex research; I need to go and see the new movie soon.  (After all, I continue to use his stuff in many classes.  And no, thank you, I don’t need flaming comments from my dear brethren on the right about how Kinsey has supposedly been debunked.)

I am quoted several times in an article in today’s PCC paper on tattoos and branding.

And though it’s been on my blogroll for a while, I want to call your attention to Feminist Mormon Housewives; You’ll visit for the title, but stay for some good writing and some honest insight into a world very different from the one in which many of my readers live.

Oh, and did you want some Friday chinchilla blogging?  Of course.  Here she is again getting some love from her mama.  Click to enlarge:

P1010197


“soft of cheek, with limpid stares…”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 1, 2004
in Body, Men and Masculinity and Movies
. 3 Comments

Today’s New York Times reports on the growing importance of “metrosexual” male actors in Hollywood:

…as a generation of romantic and action heroes have passed into middle age, among them Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford and Kevin Costner…

they have been replaced by young men who look and seem very different. There is the thoughtful, vegetarian Tobey Maguire (star of the just-released Spiderman 2), who turned 29 on Sunday, and the lanky Jake Gyllenhaal, 23, a star in “The Day After Tomorrow.” Other new-model leading men include Orlando Bloom, a slim British actor who stars in “Troy” this summer and was recently cast as the lead warrior in “Kingdom of Heaven,” a Crusader epic directed by Ridley Scott; the baby-faced Leonardo DiCaprio, who rose to fame as the artistic stowaway in “Titanic” and has been cast as Alexander the Great in a movie being developed by the director Baz Luhrmann; and the brooding Ryan Gosling, the romantic lead of “The Notebook,” which opened on Friday.

First off, the article paints with a broad brush. I see no mention of Vin Diesel, the extremely macho action star who (informally, mind you) won a poll of a group of my female students as “sexiest male actor”. Secondly, this stuff tends to be cyclical; James Dean was certainly brooding, certainly pretty, and, in some significant ways, was a prototype for later “metrosexuality.” The article makes that point only in passing.

I’m also a bit suspicious of the Times’ explanation for these changes:

…with so many women running Hollywood studios, a more feminine sensibility may have crept into the casting decisions.

“The access of women at the very top of the food chain at the studios — Amy Pascal at Sony, Nina Jacobson at Disney, Stacey Snider at Universal, Sherry Lansing at Paramount — has to mean a leavening of the testosterone effect,” said Peter Guber, a producer and host of the AMC cable talk show “Sunday Morning Shootout.” “Their impact is felt. It’s not by design, not as a cabal; it just references their taste. Some of the male leads tend not just to a right-brain but a left-brain sensibility.”

Even if that were true, I’m curious as to the congruence between the “tastes” of a few extremely powerful female Hollywood moguls and “average” American women. One could even surmise, somewhat dangerously, that women in positions of immense influence might have radically different tastes in men — though whether they would prefer them to be more or less masculine than their less privileged sisters is open to question.

I do appreciate that the article notes that all of the actors under discussion are white. Black, Latino, and Asian actors tend to be cast in far more limited roles, roles that often reflect unpleasant cultural stereotypes about men of their ethnic background.

Like many young men, I spent my youth looking to actors to show me “how to be a man.” I was never really happy with my choices! The male film idols of my high school days were the “Brat Packers” (Judd Nelson, Rob Lowe, Robert Downey, Jr., Emilio Estevez, etc.). I didn’t find any of them to be particularly satisfying as role models. Even my favorite actor of my own generation, John Cusack, played and still tends to play men who are afflicted with self-doubt and ambivalence. What I wanted in my screen heroes was something I realize I rarely, if ever saw — sensitivity mixed with certainty, responsibility mixed with spontaneity, deep masculinity linked with gentleness. As much as I hate to admit it, I’ve always thought French actors do a better job “role-modeling” that than American ones. I’ve seen everything Daniel Auteil and Jean Reno have done; more than any others, they are the ones who make me say “Yes, that’s how to be a man.”

I rent and re-rent the latter’s “The Professional” and the former’s “The Widow of St. Pierre” (my favorite film of the past half-decade.) Just like in countless American films, these actors play heroic figures who die in the end — but by God, the French die differently!

Stop it with the fat jokes

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 30, 2004
in Body, Movies and People
. 5 Comments

No, I haven’t seen Fahrenheit 9/11. Not yet, anyway. I’m not much of a Michael Moore fan, actually (yes, there are some card-carrying Christian Socialists who dislike his bombast). But I am really, really, really tired of the number of attacks directed at Mr. Moore’s weight. I’ve got eyes, I can see that he’s a large man. But this is getting tiresome:

Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Blogsurf for ten minutes, you’ll find more.

Seriously, folks, enough already.

Stonehenge and the English on the Passion

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 30, 2004
in Christianity, Movies and Traveling
. 10 Comments

As often as I’ve been to England, I’d never been to Stonehenge before. I drove my brother and his family the some 90 miles from Exeter to the famed stone circle today; it was worth the trip. Today was a lovely, crisp, sunny spring-like day, and we were able to climb some fine barrow mounds near Stonehenge as well.

The Passion has opened in England to almost universally hostile reviews. The other night, the BBC aired a perfectly awful program on Mel Gibson, entitled “Mel Gibson: God’s Lethal Weapon”. Here is a link to the Guardian’s summary of British newspaper reviews:

After all the fuss and controversy, what a “terrible disappointment” The Passion of the Christ turned out
to be for Cosmo Landesman in the Sunday Times. The director, Mel Gibson, is only interested in Jesus’s suffering. “Where is Jesus the inspiring teacher? Gibson literally gives us the body of Christ and not much else … The violence is visceral. Raw. Relentless. You squirm in your seat.” The devout might be inspired by all this, Landesman said, but for most it is “violence overkill”. Any “thematic richness” had been washed away “in the rivers of blood” and the film ended up with “nothing to say”.

The direction was “oddly bogus”, thought Jenny McCartney in the Sunday Telegraph. And the film was let down by its “fundamental crudity of vision”, which “surges energetically into every scene, blotting out much of the pathos and humanity of the passion story”.

In the Mail on Sunday, Matthew Bond agreed with those critics who found the film anti-semitic, “given that it portrays a blood-hungry Jewish mob baying for … Christ to be crucified”. But Gibson also “goes out of his way to heap as much blame as possible on the Romans, who, the spineless Pilate apart, are all portrayed as violent psychopaths”.

In the Independent on Sunday, however, Jonathan Romney argued that the film clearly identified the Jews as “the master criminals”.

Yikes. I don’t think I saw the same film. Or I just saw it perhaps through radically different eyes — through the eyes, perhaps, of the devout whom Landesman treats so typically dismissively.

The anxiety of tapering, and some links

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 10, 2004
in Athletics and Fitness, Books, Christianity, Fun, Links and Movies
. 9 Comments

“Tapering” is the process of preparing for a marathon or other major race by reducing your training and increasing your eating in the days leading up to the big event. I’m three days out from Saturday’s Catalina Marathon, and I am thoroughly grumpy! As I’ve learned through trial and error, you can’t really rest enough in the week before a marathon. After weeks of running five and six days in a row, I am only running twice this week, for short distances. To make matters worse, I gradually ramp up my carbohydrate intake (a reverse Atkins diet), for four full days before the race. The end result is that on this morning, I feel bloated and sluggish. It’s so counter-intuitive to me to do progressively less “studying” before a big test! I always crammed before exams, but in distance running, cramming invariably leads to disaster. Nothing to do but eat and sit and stretch and wait. If I were more spiritually aware, I would no doubt find some sort of Lenten discipline in tapering, but right now, I just feel like an anxious and slothful little piglet.

Here are a few things I’ve noticed lately:

Kendall Harmon posts what I think is the best review of the Passion of the Christ that I’ve seen so far; it’s written by a Father Leander Harding. Here’s an excerpt:

Both for religious and non -religious people there is a stereotype of the cross as the place where an angry God punishes Jesus instead of us. Many of the critical reviews of the movie castigate the movie for promoting this stereotype.

But this is not the story of the cross that Gibson is telling. In the beginning of the film when Jesus is tempted in the garden by the Satan figure, the temptation is “that one man can not bear the sins of the world.” The burden that Jesus bears in the film is not the burden of the Father’s anger but the weight of sin, the piling up of human hatred and evil, from the banal calculating evil of Pilate and Caiaphas to the stupid, intoxicated blood lust of the Roman soldiers… The Cross is not the apotheosis of the Father’s anger but the measure of His love and of the lengths He goes to transform and redeem. That is the familiar Christian story that I believe the filmmaker is trying to tell.

I don’t normally link to quizzes, but this one was particularly brief and fun (thanks to Annika, Lorie, and Candied Ginger); take the Book Quiz at Blue Pyramid. I ended up being “100 Years of Solitude” by Marquez. I’m not sure I identify with the reasons why:

Lonely and struggling, you’ve been around for a very long time.
Conflict has filled most of your life and torn apart nearly everyone you know. Yet there
is something majestic and even epic about your presence in the world. You love life all
the more for having seen its decimation. After all, it takes a village.

Hmmm.

And here is a link to the sermon that my friend Scott Richardson (dean of the cathedral in San Diego) preached last Sunday. At length, Scott quotes from Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. In one part of that famous story, an aged Spanish cardinal confronts Jesus, who has returned unexpectedly to 16th century Seville:

(The cardinal) sees everything (Christ’s miraculous works of healing and love) and commands his guard to arrest Jesus immediately. In the middle of the night the prelate comes to visit the prisoner. Why, he asks, do you come to hinder us? You have no right to add anything to what you have said in the past. Tomorrow I will condemn you and burn you at the stake as the worst of heretics.

You come to set people free. That is not what people want; freedom is a curse for most humans, a terrible burden. We relieve them of that burden and carry it ourselves. You were once offered three temptations by the wise and mighty spirit in the wilderness. You rejected them all in the name of freedom. Instead of taking possession of human freedom, you increased it and thereby burdened the spiritual kingdom of humanity with suffering forever. In place of rigid laws, you gave them free hearts to decide right from wrong, having only your image before them as a guide. It is too much and it has taken us all these years to rectify your tragic error. You once scattered the flock; we have gathered it – weak, rebellious, fearful incomplete creatures created in jest. We save them from the terrible anxiety and great agony they endure in making a free decision for themselves. We will not allow you to so burden them ever again.

Reflecting on both this passage from Dostoevsky and on Mel Gibson’s movie, Scott concludes his sermon this way:

My question now, as I come to the end of this offering, is not: Who killed Jesus? It is, rather: Who uses their gift of freedom to choose to come to the aid of the suffering Christ, and all whom he loves, in the present moment? Who has discovered the truth of the old adage; in choosing service we find our perfect freedom? Who freely chooses to wipe the brow and carry the cross even now? And, most important; is this - active love freely chosen and freely offered - the narrow door that Jesus speaks of…?

Reflecting on the Passion

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 5, 2004
in Christianity and Movies
. 7 Comments

Well, I finally saw “The Passion” with my small group from Pasadena Mennonite. We saw a 4:10 matinee here in town before heading over to the home of a younger married couple in our group for light supper (the traditional Mennonite repast of hummus and pita, minestrone soup, strawberry jello, girl scout cookies and vanilla ice cream). Over this splendid dinner, we had discussion. Opinions, predictably, differed.

I was exceptionally moved by the film. I expected to be, and I was. The violence was as horrific as advertised. I left the theater wondering how non-believers could sit through the two hours of genuinely gruesome brutality. If in my heart I did not believe that Jesus made a necessary sacrifice for me and for the world on the cross, I don’t know that I could have borne the ugliness and cruelty of what was inflicted upon Him (or more accurately, upon the actor who portrayed Him so well).

The women in our group were especially moved by the actress who played Mary. For at least one of us, her portrayal made the entire film work.

I had a variety of quibbles with minor historical points (the pronunciation of the Latin was a long way from classical, the portrayal of Herod reflected Gibson’s now-customary homophobia), but those concerns were hardly deal-breakers. The portrayal of Pilate, on the other hand, matched much of the material I read as a graduate student in early Christian history. As a moviegoer, I was moderately impressed but also somewhat alienated by the violence. As a Christian, I wept with emotion and gratitude. Yes, it’s only a work of art, not the gospel. But for the better part of 2000 years, Christians have used art to represent the wonder and the terror and the joy of Christ’s sacrifice for us; this film is just one more (particularly effective and stirring) contribution to that tradition.

Oscar, Lost in Translation, and the older man/younger woman thing

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 1, 2004
in Movies and Older Men & Younger Women
. Closed

Last night, my bald head and I took my girl to see the LA Opera’s production of Madama Butterfly. (The music, as always, was wonderful — but the highly stylized production left me cold). In any case, this means that we missed the Oscars. Apparently, we didn’t miss any big surprises.

Yes, I loved Lord of the Rings. I’ll probably buy the extended versions of the DVDs. But I was really pulling for a small sweep for Lost in Translation, which I flat-out loved as I have loved very few other films I have ever, ever seen. The Bill Murray character made me weep. Never before have I seen a performance that could capture the tension between the “want tos” and the “have tos”, between desire and obligation. How often have I felt myself to be there! The one kiss between Murray and Scarlett Johansson was the most exhilaratingly bittersweet romantic moment I’ve seen on screen in recent years…

Of course, good gender studies profs have an obligation to look a bit below the surface (obsessed with socio-cultural subtext as we all are). And the film’s treatment of the older man/younger woman relationship was breathtaking. Sofia Coppola’s screenplay “got” the complexity of that relationship perfectly. And the best analysis of the film’s treatment of the subject came in this article by Caitlin Flanagan in yesterday’s Times. I quote it at length because it left me nodding my bald head vigorously:

The reason this movie lingers and unsettles, the origin of its appealing strangeness is that it deals not just with the nature of old men’s attraction to young women (so much a part of the natural order that it hardly merits consideration) but with the under-explored and far more interesting nature of young women’s attraction to older men. “Lost in Translation” addresses the underlying and deeply taboo element of most May-December romances, as they are experienced by the girls involved in them: father fixation.

Charlotte knocks around in schoolgirl clothes: sweater vests and untucked oxford shirts and running shoes. Bored out of her mind in her hotel room one day, she draws on a big lipstick pout, the effect as artless as that of a 5-year-old who gets into her mother’s makeup. She has an adolescent’s sulky mien, and like clever girls everywhere, kids her own age just don’t get her. Often when she meets Bob in the hotel bar after hours, he is still wearing the dinner jacket he wore on the day’s shoot (he has come to Tokyo to make a commercial). Charlotte finds him drinking scotch, smoking a cigar, lost in weary rumination over another long day at the office: Dad.

He lights her cigarette like a Hollywood lover, but after a late night on the town, he carries her to her bed like a sleeping child, wrapping her in a spotless white comforter and closing the door softly behind him so as not to wake her. His primary ministration to Charlotte is emotional: at last someone who knows more than she does, who can match her manqué jadedness with the real thing.

While their conversation is emboldened by their attraction to each other, his physical dealings with her are not only chaste, they’re prim. What is holding him back? He sleeps with another woman amid his affair with Charlotte, so compunction about his marriage vows certainly isn’t the problem. The two attempt to kiss good night at one point, but there was a flinching, resisting awkwardness to the moment not lost on the audiences with whom I saw the movie, who squirmed right along with the characters: Don’t. The most mesmerizing moment of the movie is their first successful kiss, on which the movie ends — for where could it go from there?

The bold emphasis is mine. And I think Flanagan is right on target, both about the film, and about the essence of the ancient attraction that this deeply fearless picture captures so perfectly.

The Passion and the Cross; more Mennonite responses

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 26, 2004
in Aggression and violence, Christianity, Faith and Movies
. 4 Comments

Two more nuanced editorial reviews of the Passion appeared in today’s edition of the Mennonite Weekly Review online.

Paul Schrag writes:

Though extreme violence is the movie’s centerpiece, it is violence invested with meaning and taken seriously, not crassly winked at or offered as shallow entertainment. As a story of Jesus’ life, the film is incomplete. But as an imaginative vision of Jesus’ last hours, it makes an unforgettable and mostly positive impact.

But I really liked what Robert Rhodes had to say:

One of the luxuries of life in North America is that Christianity is not of necessity a suffering faith. Here, because we are free to gather and worship, we can afford to focus on “victory” and “new life” and the many blessings of conversion and redemption.

Perhaps this is why so many seem offended by the extreme degree of violence to be found in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Here, we are not used to focusing on the bloody rigors of the cross, or on the quivering tendons and gushing blood of the man nailed to it. Instead, our faith lexicon, especially among more mainstream Protestants, is filled with images of renewal and grace and, ultimately, of arguably undeserved comfort. Unfortunately, placing so much emphasis on the joys of redemption robs the cross, and our faith, of some of its radical strength.

Such violence is what Christ endured for us all, as Gibson’s movie makes painstakingly clear. It is good that we remember this, too. We also should consider the contribution each of our sins made to that violence, and to the violence that continues all around us even today.

The Anabaptist tradition embraces constructive suffering, and it embraces the cross not merely as Jesus’ unique sacrifice (which in one sense it is) but also as Christian duty. The preeminent modern Mennonite theologian, the wonderful John Howard Yoder, writes:

The innocent, silently uncomplaining suffering of Christ is not only an act of Christ on our behalf from which we benefit; it is also an example of Christ for our instruction, which we are to follow. This portrait of Christ is to be painted again on the ordinary canvas of our lives. Did not Jesus himself say that those who would follow him must deny themselves and take up their cross?

(Bold emphasis is Hugo’s). Where Anabaptists break with other evangelicals and with our Catholic brothers and sisters is over the sense that Jesus’s response to the cross ought to be our own response to the threat of violence. As He went to Calvary, so too should we, rather than take up arms (either as individuals or in armies). Jesus’ action is redemptive but also normative for our lives.

One more line from Yoder:

No one created in God’s image and for whom Christ died can be for me an enemy, whose life I am willing to threaten or to take, unless I am more devoted to something else - to a political theory, to a nation, to the defense of certain privileges, or to my own personal welfare - than I am to God’s cause: his loving invasion of this world in his prophets, his Son, and his church.

When I do go see the Passion, it will be with those thoughts in mind.