Little Miss Sunshine and Losing

With one of the indie hits of 2006, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (directors) and Michael Arndt (writer), introduced us to the quirkily disfunctional Hoover family. In Little Miss Sunshine, it is little Olive (Abigail Breslin) who drives the plot. She is seven years old, and is invited to participate in the Little Miss Sunshine Pageant in Redondo Beach, CA. The trick is, the family lives in Albuquerque, is poor, and nobody trusts anybody enough to leave anybody behind. So they all pile into the family's VW bus and hit the road. The driver is patriarch Richard (Greg Kinnear), purveyor of a self-help Nine Steps to something book. His wife, Sheryl (Toni Collette), doesn't have a trait to pigeon-hole her, but she's the manic glue that holds the family together. Sheryl's brother, Frank (Steve Carrell), is fresh off a suicide attempt and may or may not be the world's preeminent Proust scholar, depending on who you ask. Richard's father (Alan Arkin, who won an Oscar for the performance) is along for the ride, too, having been kicked out of his retirement home for lewd behavior and rampant cocaine use. Completing the family constellation are Olive, the would-be pageant queen, and Dwayne (Paul Dano), a Nietzsche-reading sulker who, in his own words, "hates everyone." Quite the rogue's gallery.

A family such as this is certainly ripe for conflict, and much conflict arises on their two day trip across the Southwest. The particular conflict that I want to focus on today is Richard's conflict with his family over his Nine Steps. Fundamentally, the Nine Steps are like any self-help program: They posit a capability inherent in everyone and then attempt to teach you to access it, and then to use it, to achieve your life goals. Richard has drunk his own Kool-Aid to the point that when Frank comes to their house from the hospital, he explains to Olive that Frank "gave up on himself, which is something winners never do." As you might imagine, all the winners vs. losers talk around the home has alienated his son, pushed away his father, and brought his marriage to the brink of divorce. And then, in the ultimate indignity, Richard himself is shown to be a loser, when the book deal he's been counting on falls through.

The losing ways of the Hoovers are brought into sharp relief by the filmmakers upon their eventual arrival at the Little Miss Sunshine Pageant. It is immediately obvious that Olive, sweet, precocious and talented as she is, is no beauty queen. There is a quiet push from the family, now closely bonded together due to the harrowing experiences they've shared on the road, to pull Olive out of the pageant.

Ultimately, Olive herself is asked what she'd like to do. She's clearly intimidated by the other girls, and has never been more sure that she's fat, but she decides to go on anyway. As the family expected, she is woefully out of place, and that's never more apparent than in the talent portion of the competition. But, amazingly, when Olive fails spectacularly in her dance routine, the family runs up on-stage and joins her in the dance, embracing their collective loser-hood.

And really, that's what Little Miss Sunshine is all about. It's about a man, but really a family, who is so afraid of being a loser that he creates a system that "guarantees" winning. But the winning (a happy family) only gets created when the losing is acknowledged and embraced. We might draw the parallel to the Church's "law." The church attempts to create a "Nine Steps" to a good life, to happiness, by giving us all kinds of things to do. But the law can't make us good. In other words, its requirements don't give us the power to keep them. It's only in realizing that we're losers that true winning is possible.

Duplicity and Real Love

I've often said, as I ply my trade, using examples from movies to illustrate the themes of law and gospel, that it's a lot easier to find examples of law in movies than it is to find examples of the gospel. The reason is simple: humans just don't love one another the way God loves us. That kind of the love (the unconditional kind) is simply beyond us, and wouldn't ring true if two characters in a movie behaved toward each other in that way.

But I may have found an example. The below clip, from the Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton) -scripted and -directed Duplicity, has two characters speaking to each other in the language of love. The REAL language of love. Watch:

Now, don't worry about all that junk about the formula, that's just this particular film's macguffin. (For the wannabe cinephiles out there, "macguffin" is a term coined by Alfred Hitchcock to describe the object that everyone's after, the thing that sets the story in motion, but the nature of which ultimately doesn't really matter at all. Think the Maltese Falcon in The Maltese Falcon. Does the fact that it's (69-year-old SPOILER ALERT) made of tar make the movie any less exciting?) Do you feel the power of the scene?

These are two people, in a relationship, who haven't been able to trust each other since the day they met. They've just stolen a formula, worth billions, and are both pretty sure that the other is going to try to get all the money for themselves. In a situation like this, love cannot exist. But then, Julia Roberts begins to play the God role. "I know who you are. And I love you anyway." What a statement! These two sentences, when placed one after the other, have insurmountable power. Clive Owen is powerless before them. But more importantly, he is transformed by them. His distrust becomes trust. Not knowing what Roberts has, he offers the formula. And, in this wonderful scene, he tells us his reasoning. "I look at you...I can't stop looking at you...and I think, 'That woman. She knows me. And she loves me anyway.'"

This is the best non-cheesy illustration of the kind of love God has for us and its effect on us that I've ever seen. And believe me, I know that "loves me anyway" needs a serious theological fleshing-out, but the power of the statement cannot be ignored. God knows us, in all our conniving, self-centered, and jealousy-laden splendor, and loves us anyway. And this love is a creative love, creating trust where there was distrust, care for others where there was self-centeredness, and love where there was jealousy.

Who Are You Praying To?

Recently, the below prayer was said as an invocation at a NASCAR race:

Hearing this prayer, and seeing some of the reaction to it, got me thinking about prayer in general.  Here's my thought:  for whose benefit do you think that Pastor Joe Nelms is praying?  Or let's ask the question this way: is this how he would pray in a room by himself?

I have always been a little bit uncomfortable with public prayer.  You might think this is strange, me being a priest and all.  Before I was a "professional" Christian, I never wanted to pray out loud; I never thought my prayers would be good enough to be out there, side by side with the prayers of the truly (poetically) spiritual.  You know the people I mean.  After I became a pastor and become more comfortable speaking in front of people and more confident in my ability to think on my feet, I became less worried about the ability to pray in public and more worried about the theory behind it.

I mean, aren't we supposed to be praying to God?  Certainly Pastor Nelms has gotten some notoriety for his church, and probably boosted attendance a little bit, but could anyone argue that his prayer was truly intended primarily for God's ears?  Or is it more likely that he wanted the gathered assembly to know that his wife is "smokin' hot?"  Perhaps he'd just seen Talladega Nights the evening before?

In a worship service in seminary, during a public prayer time, someone prayed a thanksgiving for the beauty of  God's creation.  It was autumn, and prayer thanked God for the beauty of the changing leaves, for the reds, yellows, and browns of the season.  When that prayer ended, someone in a different part of the church piped up and said, "And the oranges."  Now, I don't want to disparage either of those people (I don't remember who they were), but that occurrence made me wonder exactly who we are praying to.  Are we praying for the benefit of those around us, or are we praying to God?  What are we to do with Matthew 6:6, wherein Jesus tells his followers that when they pray, they should go into a room and close the door.  Jesus seems to be regularly at odds with public displays of religiousness.

Certainly, we pray communal prayers...as an Anglican, I believe that a general confession (said together) takes the place of individual confession (to a priest).  But confession is a kind of prayer that almost cannot help being personal:  surely we have our own sins in our minds as we confess, and aren't really even aware of the content of the prayers of those around us.

So what do you think?  When we pray in public, are we beholden to the pressures of "quality?"  Is there a component to communal (yet individual) prayer that is missing from prayers said to God, alone?  Who are you praying to and for when you pray out loud in a group.  Or do such concerns prevent you from praying out loud in groups at all?

Finding the Gospel in Finding Nemo

If you missed Finding Nemo on Sunday night, we talked about the film's two (seemingly competing) themes:  "Letting Go" and "Just Keep Swimming."

Letting Go:

Remember the scene where Marlin (Nemo's dad, played by Albert Brooks) and Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) are trapped in the belly of the whale? Aside from the obvious Jonah parallels, there is a lot of good stuff goin' on in that whale's belly. First of all, Marlin tries to get out of the whale's mouth by pushing through the baleen plates (the screen-like stuff they have instead of teeth). See, he's trying by his own effort. He can't do it. He fails. His own effort fails him.

The water begins to drain from the whale's mouth, and neither Marlin nor Dory know what is going on. Dory, who "speaks whale," tells Marlin that the whale is asking them to "go to the back of the throat." Marlin, a notorious worry-wart, says, "Of COURSE he wants us to go to the back of the throat...he wants to EAT us!" Suddenly, Marlin and Dory find themselves hanging on to taste buds on the whale's tongue, with no water in the whale's mouth at all.

The whale makes a noise, Dory (who, remember, speaks whale) says, "Okay," and lets go. Marlon refuses to, thinking he'll be eaten...but Dory tells him that it's time...time to let go. Of course, this is a story point: Marlin has to realize that he's been holding on too tightly to his son. He has to realize that he can't protect Nemo from life. But the Christian parallels are actually pretty stunning.

Marlin, by his own effort, fails to escape from the whale's mouth. In the end, if he holds on to the taste bud, he'll die. There's no water in the whale's mouth. But Marlin THINKS that he has to hold on to live. The very thing he thinks is keeping him alive is killing him. He must let go, succumbing to "certain death" in order to be blown out of the whale's blow-whole, his life saved. We try to save ourselves by our own efforts. We try to "be all we can be." We can't. We keep trying, we hold on. This holding on, the thing that we think is saving us, is actually killing us. It is keeping us from our Savior. Letting go, giving up, and succumbing to certain death is the only way we can live.

If Finding Nemo supports the necessity of death and resurrection, who are we to argue?

Just Keep Swimming (this section of the post was written by my friend Sean Norris, and is a good summary of part of our discussion):

"Just keep swimming" is Dory's refrain throughout most of the movie, and there are a couple points when it is used to encourage other fish as well. The basic idea is no matter what you may be facing "just keep swimming" and it will be okay.

This idea of "just keep trying" is in large part the motto of the world. "When the world has got you down just keep on keeping on." It seems when we are confronted with the unknown or our lack of control of our lives we tell ourselves and each other to just keep trying. Have you ever heard that before? Often times it can be passed off as faith. "I don't know how this is gonna play out, but I am just going to try to do my best and trust God with the results." Or "As long as I am faithful to keep going and not give up, God will honor that."

It seems we are terrified to lose the ability to do something, to truly be out of control. As a result, we still insist on the fact that there is always something we can do even though we don't know what it is. We get so vague to the point that we are satisfied to simply say: "Just try". Try what? Everything we've tried hasn't worked so far, but we don't pay attention to that.

This appeals to our ability has been very loud as of late. During the recent election it was almost a battle cry against the hard times our country is currently facing. It was on the posters; it was chanted at the rallies: "Yes We Can! Yes We Can!" It is the human spirit, and, like Bruce Willis, it dies hard.

That is exactly what happens though when the denial is brought to an abrupt halt, our faith in our ability dies. We can keep the act going for a surprisingly long time, but it will end because life always happens. Cancer happens. Divorce happens. Addiction happens. Flat tires happen. Bankruptcy happens. Death happens. There is always something that comes up that cannot be answered with more trying. We are knocked flat, and we cannot keep swimming. We sink.

This is where we are met with real hope. The cross of Christ stands in our face and says "No You Can't! But He can and did."

Are You Breaking Bad?

Breaking Bad is (allegedly) one of the best shows on TV.  I say allegedly because I haven't seen it.  My TV watching habits are pretty strange:  I don't watch drama on TV.  I watch scripted comedy (Community, Modern Family) and reality (Top Chef, Project Runway) and a couple studio comedies (The Colbert Report, Conan).  I don't watch anything serious on television, except the Friday analysis of Shields and Brooks on the PBS Newshour.

I've been told I'm wrong 100 times, and told I'm missing out 1,000, but I think I just can't believe that great dramatic writers, actors, and directors are working on TV.  I mean, if they were so great, wouldn't they be making movies?  You don't see Charlie Kaufman-scripted, Ridley Scott-directed, Daniel Day-Lewis-starring television shows.

The shows most referenced by people who tell me I'm wrong are The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad.  These are supposed to be the creme de la creme of recent television drama.  But I don't want to talk about their quality today.  Today I want to talk about an article written about these shows by a favorite writer of mine:  Chuck Klosterman.  In his article, Klosterman argues that Breaking Bad is the best of these shows, because it is the only one which "is not a situation in which the characters' morality is static or contradictory or colored by the time frame; instead, it suggests that morality is continually a personal choice."  He implicity criticizes Mad Men for enabling viewers to dismiss the bad things done by its characters as "just how it was back then" because the show is set in the 1960s. He similarly levels critiques at The Sopranos and The Wire for filtering all "good" deeds through the filter of everyone on the show's being involved in the mob, or being drug dealers and/or corrupt, respectively.

It is only Breaking Bad, of these four shows, which gives it characters "personal agency," or what we might call "free will," according to Klosterman.  Breaking Bad is the story of a chemistry teacher diagnosed with cancer, who takes to dealing drugs to provide for his family as he faces his own death.  Klosterman describes a scene

"in which Walter White (Bryan Cranston)'s  hoodrat lab assistant Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) tells Walter he just can't "break bad," and — when you first hear this snippet of dialogue — you assume what Jesse means is that you can't go from being a law-abiding chemistry teacher to an underground meth cooker. It seems like he's telling White that he can't start breaking the law after living a life in which laws were always obeyed, and that a criminal lifestyle is not something you can join like a club. His advice seems pragmatic, and it almost feels like an artless way to shoehorn the show's title into the script. But this, it turns out, was not Jesse's point at all. What he was arguing was that someone can't "decide" to morph from a good person into a bad person, because there's a firewall within our personalities that makes this impossible. He was arguing that Walter's nature would stop him from being bad, and that Walter would fail if tried to complete this conversation. But Jesse was wrong. He was wrong, because goodness and badness are simply complicated choices, no different than anything else."

Wow.  "Goodness and badness are simply complicated choices, no different than anything else."  A couple of counterpoints:  Steven Hyden, a critic for The A.V. Club, calls Breaking Bad 

"a masterfully suspenseful crime drama, [which] deals with troubling, real-life subject matter in frank, no-holds-barred fashion: the fragility of life and family, the potential for evil lurking inside good people, the possibility that humanity is a ruthless me-first game with no rules or order."

What Hyden calls "the potential of evil lurking inside good people," Jesus might call white-washed tombs...people who only appear to be "good" (Matthew 23:27).  The Psalmist says,

"I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight; so you are right in your verdict and justified when you judge. Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me" (Psalm 51:3-5).

So is Breaking Bad the best show on TV because of it's courageous depiction of human beings as free agents, able to choose between right and wrong?  Or is Klosterman crazy?  I'd answer these questions myself, but there was a Mythbusters marathon on, and I missed Breaking Bad all together.

Who Are You on the Inside?

For those of you who couldn't join us on Sunday evening, we watched Christopher Nolan's 2005 series reboot Batman Begins.  Two themes that jumped out were the difference between who you are on the inside and what you do on the outside, and an ethical question about doing evil to stop evil.  Here are some relevant clips:

In this clip, Rachel (Katie Holmes) accuses Bruce (Christian Bale) of being too busy being a billionaire playboy to care about the welfare of Gotham City.  Little does she know, he's Batman, fighting to save Gotham by night.  She's doing what we all do: judging the man by his actions (or, at least, what she knows of them).  This way of judging was put forward by Aristotle in his Nichomachean Ethics.  A man acts in good ways and bad.  If his good deeds outweigh his evil deeds, then he is good.  Pretty standard stuff.  But the Bible says something quite different:  "The LORD does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart" (1 Samuel 16:7).  Jesus also called the Pharisees "white washed tombs," claiming that though they were beautiful on the outside, inside they contained only death (Matthew 23:27).  It seems, then, that the Bible would dispute Rachel's claim that it doesn't matter who you are on the inside.  Jesus said quite clearly that it doesn't matter what you do on the outside...it's the content of your heart that counts.

In this clip, Ra's Al Ghul (Ken Watanabe) and Ducard (Liam Neeson) try to convince Bruce that killing a murderer is morally justified.  They're making the argument that things that look evil on the surface are not evil if they are to a good purpose.  The theological word for this is "casuistry," or more simply, self-justification.  Bruce argues for a more "legalistic" morality, a code in which killing is killing no matter who the victim is.  Obviously, this example is heightened and dramaticized, but don't we make decisions like this every day?  The lies we tell "for the greater good," for instance?  The urge to self-justify is a very human one; it's just not a Christian one.  Christ came to save us while we were helpless...that is, unjustified (Romans 5:6-8).  In fact, he says, the helpless and unjustified are the only ones he came for!  The others have no need of him.

Batman Begins seems to be in support of the Dawes/Aristotle method of judging a man but behind Jesus Christ's demolition of casuistry.  Where do you come down?

What's Your Favorite Book?

This week's post will be a naked attempt to start a discussion (or at least generate comments).  In the sermon on Sunday I mentioned that my favorite book was A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving.  I recommend it to anyone.  I read the first line, which I love.  But that's not my favorite passage.  In the film adaptation of Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, Michael Douglas, a writer, says of his lover, “She was a junkie for the printed word. Lucky for me, I manufactured her drug of choice.” So, what is your favorite non-Biblical English-language passage of reasonable length…your drug of choice? Mine comes from Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and it is the final paragraph of the novel. For a bit of context, the novel’s narrator has just experienced the summer in which he feels he has grown up:

"When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another’s skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness — and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything."

In the comments, post your favorite passage, or simply the title of your favorite book, with a bit of context as necessary. I can’t wait to read them.