batman & the american supermyth

For my "Faith, Film & Spiritual Formation in Young Adults" class last week we watched "Batman Begins." It tells the story of traumatic events in the life of young Bruce Wayne, his young adult years, and how he came to call himself "Batman." It's a pretty decent movie if you like superhero movies. A New York Times article I just found sums it up well: "In an uncertain world, one the director [Christopher Nolan] models with an eye to our own, [Batman] is a hero caught between justice and vengeance, a desire for peace and the will to power."

The discussion for this week centered around the idea of the American superhero as the cultural myth we tell ourselves about who we are, and what is good and right and true. We're reading a book called "The Myth of the American Superhero" by Lawrence & Jewett. It talks about the cultural monomyth of the hero:

"A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” (p. 5-6)

(Editorial note: this says "fellow man" because the hero is almost always male. When there is a female heroine she has a different sort of myth, usually involving staying home, finding a home, or returning home, the classic in our culture being Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz: "There's no place like home.")

This cultural monomyth, according to Lawrence & Jewett, is very similar across cultural, ethnic, and historical boundaries. The American superhero follows a similar trajectory, with slight differences:

“A community in a harmonious paradise is threatened by evil; normal institutions fail to contend with this threat; a selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task; aided by fate, his decisive victory restores the community to its paradisaical condition; the superhero then recedes into obscurity.” (p. 6)

The American superhero myth is different in that there is an Edenic community at the beginning--either a family or a town or a relationship--and that perfection is shattered by an outside force. Lawrence & Jewett say this is partially based on Judeo-Christian mythology's influence on our culture, and partially on the early American dream of a perfect land, unspoiled, where everything was going to be wonderful. When the early pilgrims and pioneers got to America and realized life was still hard, they blamed it on outside influences because obviously nothing could be wrong with this perfect place! This kind of desire for the perfect community and disappointment at its inaccessibility has made its way into our cultural psyche and comes up again and again in the metanarrative of our cultural stories (mainly film).

Another difference is that the American superhero is not really human. He may be completely human in terms of the story, but he doesn't act human. He is selfless, sexless, and lonely, all while defending a culture whose main values are selfishness, sexual liberation, and friends at every turn. The superhero defends these values but lives outside of them. When he achieves the goal of saving all the normal people he must leave. He cannot actually be part of the society he is working to save. This is true for Batman, because he's Bruce Wayne by day, but has to play a party-boy rich kid with too much time on his hands. This is true for Spiderman, who cannot have his precious MaryJane because if he loves anyone, their lives are in danger. This is true for Superman who isn't human at all, who gets only fleeting moments with Lois Lane, and who can't return to his home. This is also true for Neo in "The Matrix," who has to ignore feelings for Trinity and finally sacrifice her for the good of humanity. And although Lawrence & Jewett say this is the American myth, I think maybe it's more like a Western 20th century myth, because characters like Frodo and Aragorn in "Lord of the Rings," where Frodo can no longer be part of his happy hobbit community once he knows so much of the world, and Aragorn must always be a distant, tormented character even once he becomes king.

One of the most interesting things to think about in all of this is how similar our present understanding of Jesus is to this superhero ideal. One main difference is that most people don't think of Jesus using violence to attain his ends, but they are totally OK with superheroes using violence as a means to a good and just end. Other than that, however, we generally think of Jesus in similar ways: he's a person, but he's more than a person. Only he could overcome evil and save the world. He has powers that ordinary humans don't, and if he wanted he could undoubtedly leap tall buildings in a single bound, etc. He's ostracized by his community and killed, but he does all this for selfless reasons, for the good of a human pop culture which he cannot be a true part of. After saving the day he recedes, making it possible for people to live in a harmonious world (at least after they die).

Do you think American culture got its superhero from its ideas of Jesus, or that our ideas of Jesus have morphed because of our exposure to the American superhero? In what ways do you see Jesus similarly or differently from this superhero template?

just authority

As an addition to my last post, I'll also say briefly that not only do we disagree with just war proponents on whether it is ever right to harm others, but we also disagree on the issue of authority. And perhaps this is more important, because if we say God has given power over life and death to those in authority in civil governments, then we can follow those governments when they say, "Now it is necessary to override this prima facie obligation against harming others."

But if we say there is no higher authority than God, or some moral force that we feel and know to be true, and the government is not higher than my own conscience's understanding of what is morally required of me, then we cannot override this internal command against not killing.

That's all I'm going to say for now, because I'm in class...don't tell my professor I'm actually interacting with this stuff while he's talking about it!

prima facie obligation for nonmaleficence

Huh?!

In my War & Christian Conscience class we're reading a book called "War in the Twentieth Century," edited by RB Miller, and today I read a chapter by JF Childress entitled, "Just-War Criteria."

So Childress says there is a prima facie duty of nonmaleficence, which, in plain English, means that we have a moral duty toward every human to not hurt, kill, or cause them inordinate suffering. HOWEVER, just war theorists (and anyone who thinks war is sometimes or always necessary) believe that although we have this obligation, sometimes other things trump that obligation. For example, it may be right to kill others in a just war whose actions are being handled justly, for the greater prima facie obligation of justice, or protecting innocent people, or keeping some greater evil from happening.

This is, of course, where pacifists differ from just war theorists, because we believe that there will never be an obligation which will trump the prima facie duty to not kill humans (except in cases like when someone is brain dead, or someone is dying anyway and we put them out of their misery perhaps, or maybe there are a few other mercy kinds of killing--so maybe pacifists believe that violent killing is always wrong).

I think this is an interesting way to think about the whole issue of war and peace and what actions are justifiable in order to bring about good ends. Childress says that there will always be conflicts of prima facie obligations, and we have to decide which ones are more morally binding.

For example, imagine you make a promise to a friend to have lunch with them tomorrow, but then your child wakes up sick. Obviously your prima facie obligation is to care for your child, and break the promise to your friend.

This doesn't mean the prima facie obligation to keep promises has no effect on your subsequent actions, however, because you aren't likely to just not show up to lunch with your friend. Probably you will call or email that friend and explain the situation, and try to reschedule. You will show regret for breaking the promise. Your friend will be disappointed that you can't have lunch that day, but will understand your higher obligation to care for your child.

We probably make choices like this every day without thinking about it, in effect putting the duties to which we are morally bound on a hierarchical scale, but it becomes more difficult to decide what to do when the decision becomes a matter of life and death.

So what do you think? Is there ever a time when it's OK to go to war? Does the justice of some other motive ever trump our obligation not to inflict harm on other people? Are there ever times when, because action has not been taken earlier, the most just course of action is to become involved in physical aggression (e.g. cases of genocide)?

For me the obligation not to kill stems from my belief in a God who created all of us as precious people, none of whom are better or worse than another. My belief is in a God who asks us not to harm one another as best we can, and asks us to leave vengeance to God's self. Because of my commitment to this God, and my firm belief in the equality of all people, the prima facie obligation to not kill overrides pretty much all other obligations--but that doesn't mean that the other obligations shouldn't change the way I act! I cannot sit by and just not fight people, because I agree with just war theorists and Christian realists alike that to know that evil is happening and to do nothing to stop it is worse than trying and doing the wrong thing. So my intention is to act in ways that bring forth justice and make war unnecessary so that other obligations do not collide with my obligation of not killing--or more concretely, so that I am acting in loving and caring ways for all the people God has created.

on the other hand...

I posted last week about early Anabaptist martyrs and asked how many of us would be willing to actually die for our beliefs if the need arose.

For my Medieval Women Leaders of the Church class today we read the story of Perpetua, a young woman from near Carthage who was martyred for her Christian faith by the Roman Empire in 203 CE, along with several others. Obviously she's not a leader of the Medieval church because she lived several centuries before the Middle Ages, but she was someone that many Medieval women looked to as a model to imitate even though there was no longer a hostile state to stand up against.

Here's where "on the other hand" comes into play: Perpetua and the others with her were excited about their martyrdom. They couldn't wait to be put to death for the sake of Christ. In fact, one of the other women, Felicitas, was pregnant in jail and she kept praying that she'd deliver her baby in time so she could join the others in martyrdom (which she did). Several others weren't arrested with this group so they voluntarily showed up at the jail so they could be killed for Christ, too. Perpetua had a two-month-old baby but she rejoiced that she loved Christ enough to leave him behind.

So where is the line between martyrdom and an unnecessary act of suffering for no good reason? When does it become selfish to allow oneself to be killed, even if it's for the name of Christ? These are difficult questions which I don't pretend to be able to answer completely, but here are some thoughts.

I think when it's necessary to show up an unjust system through civil disobedience (which in the case of Perpetua was just openly being a Christian), that after seeking God it could definitely be the right thing to do to submit to martyrdom if one is arrested. I think this would be preferable to compromising one's beliefs and renouncing one's faith just in order to live.

But if the goal is to be martyred, I think that is definitely not a worthy choice. If the martyrdom points to an injustice that those who witness it might do something about, then martyrdom has a purpose. If people are recruiting other Christians saying, "Come join us and die!" I think that is not what Christianity is about.

And then there's the question about children...but like I said before, I'd rather have my son grow up knowing I stood for what I believed in than to have me around but know that I'd compromised my principles. But maybe that's selfish of me, I don't know.

The important thing to me is whether it is necessary to die, whether it will show up the injustice of an evil system, and whether one stands for one's beliefs firmly to whatever end happens.

into the wild & the bourne ultimatum

Last week for my "Faith, Film & Young Adults" class we watched Into the Wild but I won't post my whole analysis so I won't give away the movie, since probably most of you haven't seen it. It just came out of the theaters and isn't on video yet but my professor managed to get it for us (legally). I recommend it. A young man just after college decides to leave the security of his upper-middle-class life, and sends the money he was supposed to use for law school to a non-profit. He heads off “into the wild,” at first traveling around the lower 48 United States (with a sojourn in Mexico) penniless, and then heading up to Alaska to live off the land for as long as he can. Along the way he meets interesting people with whom he connects, but his ultimate dream is to prove himself by making it on his own in the wilderness. I, too, have been drawn to this romantic ideal of living off the land, and I think it's common as Americans to want to make it on our own, to show we don't need anyone else, to go off in the woods by ourselves in order to find out who we are without all those pesky people who try to shape us one way or the other. This movie shows the romantic side of this dream as well as the not-so-romantic side. It was well done and I felt like it was a good movie.

For one of my "choice" movies I watched The Bourne Ultimatum with my husband. I'd seen it before, but we own it so we watched it again. It's not my favorite movie, or my favorite genre (action, violence...) but I had a lot more to say about it than I thought I would. (I'm going to give away pretty much this whole movie, so if you haven't seen it and want to, you probably shouldn't read this part.)

“Jason Bourne,” who has been a top-secret agent for an undercover government agency that assassinates world leaders for the US government, has been on the run for several years. This is the third movie in the trilogy. In the first movie he had amnesia and had to figure out who he was and why people were trying to kill him, and in this movie he is attempting to fit together the last pieces of his identity and show the injustice of the agency he was working for by making it known to the country. The agency is still trying to kill him, but they have trained him well enough that he's smarter than them, and he eventually gets the documents he needs and has the agency exposed. He also goes back to the place where he was “trained”: where his identity was erased and he was made into a machine to do the bidding of this agency. He confronts his father figure there, and refuses to kill him or others (as much as possible) even while they are constantly attempting to kill him. He learns his true name, escapes, and is able to, presumably, live a fairly normal life from then on, since the agency he worked for has been dismantled. The film deals with the themes of identity formation, seeking roots, and uncovering “lies” one has been told or ways one has been coerced into living that it turns out are not just.

This film, like many others, is about the issue of authority, and the misuse of power. Specifically this is about the misuse of power by the American government, which is a fairly common plot in our culture. It speaks to our culture's uncertainty about whether it can trust its own government, but it also speaks to us about how we view those in authority over us in general. “Jason Bourne,” whose real name is David Webb, trusts this government agency and gives his life to it. Then one day he wakes up and realizes what's going on. He can remember the face of each person he's killed, but can't remember their names. He wants to apologize, but he can't find words or actions deep enough. He doesn't know who he is apart from this evil system, but he knows he is better than it, that he can beat it, and that it is evil. He has a sense that he needs to go back to the beginning of it all, confront the ultimate authority figure, and show up the evil system by his own goodness and sense of truth, right and wrong. I found it interesting that in this film, the “good” is represented by the young, the intelligent, and women. They are less willing to be coerced into using evil means to attain a good end. The personifications of the evil system are all old men.

I liked the suspense, the fact that good was fighting evil and good won, and the criticism of the abuse of power. I didn't like all the violence. It's too bad it seems impossible for our culture to show a powerful overcoming of evil without the “good” side using violence—even though it's less violence than the other side uses. I liked that women were shown as being less coerced into “ends justify the means” thinking, but I didn't like that the women were still powerless to stop those who were thinking this way. The women could help Jason Bourne, but he was the only one who could “save” them and show up the injustice in the system. He also literally saved the lives of women who could only stand by passively, trying not to get shot.

A "holy moment" occurs in Bourne's moment of honesty that he could remember all the faces of those he'd killed, but not their names, and his confession of feeling powerless to be forgiven of those acts. His ability to admit his powerlessness was a holy moment, a moment of paradoxical forgiveness and redemption. Also, the fact that he was not willing to stoop to the level of those who were trying to kill him was a holy theme. Of course it's necessary to do this with the protagonist—it seems that filmmakers know the Just War criteria better than those who run real wars, and they use these criteria to make the protagonist look good: he doesn't use force unless necessary, and then only in proportion to the threat. He doesn't kill innocent people, he doesn't even kill those who aren't innocent if there's another way. He only uses violence when he is threatened, not before. Although in some ways he is seeking revenge, it is not a revenge that requires the lives of everyone who has wronged him. Instead he seeks justice: the exposure of the unjust agency for which he was working. He seeks, as Romans 12:21 puts it, to “overcome evil by staying in the good” (my translation). It is also perhaps a “holy moment” to think about how and when we have trusted an authority figure/institution and then realized they were abusing their power—even authority figures in the church.

anabaptist martyrs

For my Radical Reformation class, unfortunately, we're apparently just going to be focusing on the 16th century Radical Reformation in present-day Germany & Switzerland (mainly), so we aren't going to do anything with Quakers. Oh well...at least I'll get to study our spiritual "cousins." So far we're learning about the beginnings of the Anabaptist movement in Switzerland, mainly with several (Felix Mantz, Conrad Grebel, George Blaurock) having a public disputation (like one of the presidential debates) with Ulrich Zwingli (leader of the Swiss Reformation in Zurich) regarding whether or not infant baptism was biblical. Zwingli won, so the others decided they were no longer going to follow the state church, and they met together on January 21, 1525 and decided they were just going to do it: they rebaptized each other in "believer's baptism," as rational, thinking adults.

This made the powers that be very angry, especially when these people decided to go around preaching that what Zwingli and the Zurich city council were saying was unbiblical. So the Anabaptists (as they were dubbed by their enemies--like the name Quakers) got thrown in jail and threatened. Anabaptists also didn't want to pay tithes to the church/state for pastors who they didn't believe were following God, so that got them in a great deal of trouble. They also chose not to bring in their infants to be baptized.

So, like early Friends, these first Anabaptists were persecuted fairly harshly: they were thrown in jail, beaten, and eventually martyred in various ways including drowning ("Is that enough water for you?"), and being locked in a room with several other people and burned, and burned at the stake, and tortured, and many other unpleasant things. A few recanted in order to not be killed, but many died for their faith, for attempting to live out what is actually written in the Bible instead of traditions that had grown up in Christianity.

As I was pondering these Anabaptist martyrs and their Quaker counterparts over a century later, I was wondering how many of us would actually be willing to die for things like being baptized as adults (or not at all) now. How many of us would die to prove the point that icons shouldn't be used in worship? Maybe these things aren't of so much importance to us now--now we have more of the opinion of, "If it works for you, do it," but how many of us would actually die for our faith? How many of us would even be willing to be persecuted or made fun of for our faith?

How many of us, especially as Friends, are willing to take a stand and say, "This is what I believe in because I know in my heart of hearts that it is Truth"?

(The website where I found the photo says it's Annekende Vlasteran, but I don't know anything about her...yet.)

once

For my Faith, Film & Spiritual Formation of Young Adults class we have to watch 15 movies this semester and write about them. It's a tough assignment, but somebody's got to do it! =) We watch 11 assigned films and then we're supposed to pick 4 others to watch and review. I watched the movie "Once" the other day and decided to use it as one of my 4 extras, so here's a bit about what I thought of the film.

The film portrays a male and a female musician in Dublin, Ireland who meet and build a friendship through playing music together. The man has recently broken up with his long-time girlfriend, and the woman has left her husband in the Czech Republic and
moved to Ireland with her 2-year-old daughter. There is sexual tension as the two work together and connect with each other through music while trying to decide whether to return to their exes or get together.

Many aspects of the young adult experience are portrayed, such as: can a man and a woman be “just friends”? Where does loyalty lie in relationships? How long should one try to make a relationship work? What is more important: connecting with someone through a shared interest/passion, or through commitment and love? Where is the line between friendship and love?

In many ways, although this film has a definite plot, it's basically a film made to showcase a certain set of songs. It's almost an extended music video with a plot that draw the songs loosely together. I liked the music, and the way that the music told the story without being a “musical.” The music told the story more with emotions than with words.

I liked that in this story, the two musicians decided to stay loyal to their partners and went back to the ones they had committed to rather than throwing out the past and trying to start something new. Although in the film you're not sure if that was the right choice because in some ways you want them to get together, it's encouraging to see a film that doesn't encourage adultery/promiscuity--and it's fairly common in real life (at least in my experience) to not be sure if one made the right decision or not.

Even though I did like that they went back to their previous relationships, I also didn't like this, because their previous partners didn't seem as good for them as they would have been for each other. But especially for the sake of the child this seemed like the best choice. It was a choice, perhaps, between continuing to be “emerging adults” (the stage we're focusing on in my class, roughly ages 18-30) and moving into the stage of actual adulthood. They were unconsciously asking questions like: do we make the choice that feels right but is more transient and self-serving, or do we make the more mature decision and stick to our commitments and do what's right for the child? This is something I'm learning to deal with, since I have a one-year-old, and I have to learn to make good choices about what is best for him, so I think I struggled with whether this was the right choice for the characters because I'm struggling with these kinds of choices (not to cheat on my husband, but how to put my family first while still doing what's right for me) on a daily basis.

For the class we're supposed to talk about some "holy moments" in the film, and there were several in this film. The characters were able to provide each other holy moments for the absolution and healing that needed to happen in their lives before they were ready to reconnect with their former partners. They both needed to be seen as beautiful people on their own before they could go back into a relationship where they tried to receive affirmation of themselves through their partner. They were able to give this affirmation to each other, encouraging one another's art, loving each other without a need to take that to any sexual level, and listening to one another's music for the truths it said about the hurts they'd received and the places where they truly wanted to be. They were able to do what was right for one another, to truly hear each other's deep needs, and to make choices that spoke to those deep needs rather than to the transient felt-needs that each of them may have liked to have fulfilled instead. They gave this gift to one another, which was a more important gift than a romantic relationship with one another would have been.