The Writer and the Christian

Title: The Dark Knight

Directed by: Christopher Nolan

Written by: Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan

Grade: B+

MILD SPOILER ALERT: These are reviews, but they are also designed to explore the thematic elements and character arcs in order to help Christians better watch and evaluate movies.

The Dark Knight is the sequel to Batman Begins (2005), which was also written and directed by Nolan. Begins was simply the best Batman film made to date, and also garners my rank as best superhero movie of all time. It was perfectly written, amazingly directed, and very ably performed by Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne and his dark alter-ego Batman.

Bale reprises his role as the Dark Knight in this latest in the reinvention of the Batman franchise. He is the best choice for Gotham’s nighttime defender so far (the others being Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, and George Clooney, all of whom were terrible choices, but Kilmer being the best of the three).

As we may or may not recall, at the end of Begins, all of the criminals in Arkum Assylum escape, and Batman and Gordon were about to begin the long, difficult task of recapturing them. The J0ker was already on the loose. The Dark Knight picks up the story a few months later, and the underworld landscape is much different. The Joker has a crew of thugs dressed as clowns, and there are Batman wannabes running around trying to help clean up Gotham.

I had my concerns about the film. The symetry and writing of the first film was perfect, because it was the first. I suspected that the second in the series would not be as good because sequels are more nebulous. When you make a first film, it pretty much has to stand alone and so more creative effort goes into it. But when a film makes enough money to justify a sequel, you are less concerned about it, since it is virtually guaranteed to make enough money for a third film - as The Dark Knight certainly did. As a result, your writing starts to anticipate future stories and each film can drop in how well it stands alone. This held true with The Dark Knight.

All around the writing was much more sloppy than Batman Begins, lacking in nearly any kind of symmetry at all.  Where Begins was a thoughtful philosophical exploration of the meaning of justice, vigilantism and revenge, The Dark Knight is shoddy at best. It is an exploration of the depravity of man and the nature of corruption - both really good themes, handled for the most part well - but the theme was not nearly as self-contained as in Begins.

The writing was not as crisp as we’ve come to expect from Nolan. A comparison of the script of The Dark Knight to The Prestige, Memento,  or even Begins, and it is shockingly paltry. I believe it is Nolan’s first sequal, so that might be part of it. But the story lurches around in search for itself, trying to hit it’s stride, but remains muddled until the last forty-five minutes. It is conflicted about who the villain is, you see. The film is really about the corruption and fall of DA Harvey Dent, but Joker is the more interesting and charismatic character, and the film wrestles back and forth about where it wants to go, with the Joker, and where it must go, with the fall of Dent. And so we get a major climactic skyscraper confrontation between the Joker and Batman over the lives of something like four hundred people. Yet once that is resolved, the real climax of the film is the final step in Dent’s journey, which takes something like another twenty or twenty-five minutes.

Heath Ledger as the Joker was originally an odd choice, or so it seemed a year ago when the cast was announced. Nobody could have imagined Heath to give the performance of his life - a cinematic masterpiece. This has nothing to do with his tragic accidental death, his performance is simply superb; we never knew he had it in him. His Joker is not a cartoon Joker, and he is not “funny” crazy. He is a ruthless, psychotically disturbed crazy,  a dark creature you don’t see that way at first. In the first hour of the film a lot of the audience was laughing at his antics, but by the time the last hour came around, he had become so malicious and dark that the laughter had stopped. Nobody expected the Joker to be seriously unfunny. And he is the perfect, consistent secularist. He calls himself a “force of chaos” to balance out the “forces of order,” which would be the police and society. He denies that social norms hold any sway and challenges Batman about the hearts of everyone in Gotham, saying that they would immediately turn and kill their neighbor to save their own life. “I’m not an evil guy,” he says. “I’m just ahead of the curve.”

Conclusion:

The film is one of the finest to come out this year so far, with an Oscar worthy performance from Heath Ledger and fine performances by all the other principles in the cast. But in contrast with Nolan’s other work, the script lacks structure and needed more direction to clear up the muddled villain conflict between Dent and the Joker. All in all, I give it a B+.

I apologize for my general absence from the blog. Life has a nasty way of throwing itself underneath the  car of my blog. But I am back, and hope to continue with bi-weekly postings. One of the things I would like to do is provide reviews of films from a Christian perspective. And so on that note, next week look for reviews of Wall-e and The Dark Knight, with others to follow.

I have taken a brief rest from posting on Jim Wallis, but I will return to this later. For now, I would like to begin reviewing some of the fiction I have been reading.

First up is Coraline, by respected fantasy writer and graphic novelist Neil Gaiman. I confess myself a fan of Gaiman, whose Stardust I am currently reading - and loving - and whose Good Omens is both literary and hilarious. Coraline is a young adult work, and it is good - really, really good.

The book is creepy and other-worldly, like a dream remembered after waking. Coraline and her parents have just moved into a very old house, which has been separated into three apartment-like flats. The bottom floor is the dwelling of two gigantic old ladies, ex-theatrical actresses both, who are named Miss Spink and Miss Forcible. The top floor, the third, is the home of “the man upstairs,” who claims to be training up a mouse circus.

Coraline is restless, wandering around trying to find something to do, and unable to connect with her distant parents, both of whom did “things on computers” and were always consumed with their work.

So she explores, both inside and out. In the course of her exploration, she discovers a door that used to lead to other parts of the house, before they’d walled it up to make three apartments. The door opens to a brick wall - and sometimes it opens to another world, which is completely identical to the real world, right down to discovering Other Mother and Other Father in the Other Apartment. They, unlike her real parents, don’t have work, and will never be distant and do whatever Coraline wants to do, and love her forever. There’s just one catch.

Other Mother

. . . sounded like her mother. Coraline went into the kitchen, where the voice had come from. A woman stood in the kitchen with her back to Coraline. She looked a little like Coraline’s mother. Only . . .

Only her skin was white as paper.

Only she was taller and thinner.

Only her fingers were too long, and they never stopped moving, and her dark red fingernails were curved and sharp.

. . .

And then she turned around . Her eyes were big black buttons. (Coraline, 27-28).

And Coraline can stay with her loving Other Mother in the Other Place, but something must happen first.

“If you want to stay,” said her other father, “there’s only one little thing we’ll have to do, so you can stay here for ever and always.”

They went into the kitchen. On a china plate on the kitchen table was a spool of black cotton, and a long silver needle, and beside them, two large black buttons. (45).

Coraline would really rather not, and conflict ensues, amid a number of wonderful and insightful events. The book is well-suited for tweens, I think, and there is always a profound lesson. Coraline learns a bundle of them.

“Because,” said Coraline, “when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.” (59)

A good lesson. Here’s an even better one, the heart of the story, so to speak.

“The world will be built new for you every morning. If you stay here, you can have whatever you want.”

Coraline sighed. “You really don’t understand, do you?” she said. “I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted? Just like that, and it didn’t mean anything. What then?”

“I don’t understand,” said the whispery voice.

“Of course you don’t understand,” she said . . . (120)

All in all, Coraline is one of the most terrifying, well-written, moral fantasy stories for young adults I’ve ever read. So I highly recommend you go thou and read likewise.

Wallis’s first official chapter is called “Revival Time,” and it repeats most of what was covered in the introduction, though in somewhat more detail. One of the things I have noticed about Wallis is that he brings up a topic like “social justice,” says that it is important and he’ll get into the details in a later portion of the book, and then when it comes up again he says the same thing he did before, nearly word for word. Apparently “talking about it” and “mentioning it again in the same way” are co-terminus for him.

He brings up Martin Luther King Jr. a lot (p.11-12, 20-21), painting him as a halo-toting saint, as opposed to the reality, which involved a bunch of plagiarism and bunches more ladies on the side. Sure, Augustine wasn’t the bastion of sexual purity, but at least he repented.

Wallis tries to hijack William Wilburforce into the ranks of King Jr., Ghandi, and Desmond Tutu, and I confess I don’t know much about Wilburforce aside from the fantastic film Amazing Grace (go see it now). To hear Wallis tell it, though, the only people who make a difference are progressives, and therefore if somebody in the past made a difference, clearly they’re gonna be progressive too, as if conservatives were simply sitting off to the side nursing a sherry and sniffling at all the poor people through hankies. I am fairly certain that Wilburforce would have been mortally offended by Wallis’s position on abortion and homosexuals. So much so he might go and, ya know, do something.

Then we really get to the meat of the chapter, which is still easing us into acknowledging that there are problems in the world, in case the news might stun us so much that we couldn’t go into work for a week, due to stress. He notes that “the Religious Right did it wrong,” because their religion became “too partisan, too narrow, and too ideological,” and then concludes that they “were used by politics,” (p. 12). And, you know, I actually agree with this assessment. The Christian Right got used, and they begat children that bled blood more Republican than Christian. Living in a small mid-western town really reinforces that one. Yet I still disagree with Wallis about his “solution” to the problem.

To Wallis, there are two things we must acknowledge: “the hunger for spirituality and the hunger for social justice.” (p. 12). Depending, of course, on what he means by social justice, we can agree here too. The other struggle is this: “Can faith enter public life in ways that are respectful of democracy, pluralism, and diversity?” (p. 13). It is here that we stub our toes over Wallis’s real god – Demos.

Which faith is Wallis talking about here? He never says. Only faith can save us . . . whatever that is. Christians would assume he’s talking about their faith, but Wallis never says this. A faith that takes pride in blowing up its enemies and cutting off the heads of those who refuse to convert? Wallis likes the Muslims (p. 16). Unrepentant Judaism? He likes the Jews (p. 15). How about people who mix and match religions? Wallis likes Ghandi (p. 24) and the “spiritual, not religious” silliness (p. 16). To even suggest that Wallis’s faith is the same faith which believes in the actual Jesus of the gospels is just laughable. He said that whoever does not gather with Him is scattering against Him.

No truly Christian approach to politics gives this much of their foundation away. If Wallis was playing baseball, he would get arrested for throwing the game in the first inning.

A true Christian approach to politics is truly Christian, and it involves the following propositions.

1. Christ is lord of all or He is not lord at all.

2. Either all power in heaven and earth has been given to Him (Matt. 28:18-20) or it has not.

3. All political governments must be explicitly Christian governments or they will be destroyed in the way (Psalm 2).

4. Nobody can be forced to convert to Christianity at the point of a gun.

We keep coming back to that agenda hovering just out of sight. “A common-good agenda, rooted in moral center, could unite diverse people on the really big issues.” (p. 28). But what are these really big issues? Wallis speaks of debt-cancellation, economic inequality, and global warming. But are these really the big issues? How about the biggest issue of them all? Israel’s God became King over the whole world through the death, resurrection, glorification, and ascension of Christ to the heavenly throne, where He sits from now until He has dealt with every rebellious heart, including the rebellious hearts of every despot in Africa and the only way to survive the judgment is faith in Christ alone. Will this issue, the biggest issue, unite diverse people?

Wall ends optimistically, kind of. He writes that the “mountains of greed, inequality, and indifference are to be moved” and they “will most likely be pushed aside by the mustard seed of faith,” (p. 29). You know, maybe. All our fingers are crossed for the best, but you never can tell.

We begin our look at Wallis’ book proper in the introduction, which is essentially the ideological equivalent of a drive-by. A lot of faces go by, there is a lot of noise, and when it’s over we wonder what exactly the point of the exercise was.

He opens the introduction like he does in many chapters, by talking about his son Luke, who in this instance came to him believing that some friends didn’t believe in Jesus because their family is vegetarian (p. 1). The result was Wallis and his wife taking Luke on tour with them, to “meet some godly vegetarians,” (p. 1).

I begin here not simply because this is where Wallis starts, but because his approach to this issue is systemic of Wallis’s approach to Scripture throughout his book. He does not deal with Biblical passages which speak of vegetarianism as belonging to the one with “weak faith” (Rom. 8), nor talk about some of the anti-biblical assumptions (not to mention silly health beliefs) which spur on the popularity of vegetarianism. In fact, he ignores the Scriptures completely. He just assumes everything is fine and dandy with vegetarianism, and treats it as if it should somehow be normative in a world filled with the glory of the gospel. This, of course, is one kettle of fish I don’t want to spill any further.

Every major screeching point Wallis has he trips over here in the introduction, and as his remarks here are fairly sparse, I will try to limit myself to a similar level of word-count frugality.

He speaks of the astonishment of people when who apparently didn’t get the memo that Christianity had, you know, requirements. “I didn’t know Christians could care about poverty, the environment, or the war in Iraq,” (p. 1). It is hard to tell from this precisely what rock exactly these people have been huddled under since about 1973, but the evangelical head-count has been drastically dwindling on this front for some time. We’re all standing at the sidelines scratching our heads. This is something we all know, and the scary fundies before us. “What’s the trouble, now?”

Of course, once we agree that Christians should deal with poverty, the creation order, and the war in Iraq, we’re still not hopping down the yellow brick road arm-in-arm with Wallis. Nobody worth listening to on the conservative evangelical side is saying we should ignore these things, but we are disagreeing with the way in which Wallis and his cronies are going about it. And this, to some, is tantamount to apathy.

Next, Wallis brings up his heroes and their times to shine. He is a fan of Martin Luther King Jr. (that Holy plagiarizing womanizer), Finney, Ghandi, Lucy Stone, the Second Great Awakening (uh-oh), Christian Feminism, the Social Gospel, Liberation Theology, “interfaith dialog,” the Progressive Era, and the New Deal (p. 2-3, 6). This is enough to set off warning bells in any good Christian’s head. The Social Gospel, Progressive Era, and the New Deal were awash in socialist ideology, and as Jonah Goldberg has conclusively demonstrated in Liberal Fascism, fascist teachings as well. Liberation Theology was birthed from the merging of mainline Liberalism with Marxist ideology.

Wallis notes that “revivals often occur when politics is broken . . . Social movements then rise up to change politics,” (p. 2). Here we find just how fuzzyheaded his thinking honestly is. He confuses revivals, a spiritual awakening by the Spirit in the Church, with politics. Anyone who can merge two utterly dissimilar things so easily needs to be kept far from machinery. This is not to say that revivals do not change behavior and therefore politics; they do. But a revival occurs when the faith has lost its saltiness, not when the politicians are particularly inept.

He then speaks of “social justice,” never defining this term, except to say that it should be part of “a force for progressive social change,” (p. 3), which should make us all really nervous.

But what’s his deal with the ol’ RR (Religious Right?). Why, they’re trying to restrict the “moral values issue” to only two things, “abortion and gay marriage,” (p. 5). Those lousy conservatives, fighting against the mass slaughter of 60 million children and man-on-man action. Who do they think they are? What are they trying to do, deal with some issues about which God speaks very clearly and straight into the microphone, not a waver in His voice?

The solutions to poverty, at home and around our spheroid planet, are very complexicated. It is difficult to know what to do or what will help actually solve this thing, but God’s policy on genocide and the ethics of naughty touching are straightforward and travel along the lines of “Quit it!”

He doesn’t like the Religious Right because, “they’re so divisive!” (p. 7). They’re not encouraging the governmentally approved dosage of Group-Hugism. But the real and frankly deeper question is not whether or not we should be divisive, but with whom we should be divided? When lived properly, the Christian life will receive persecution, so we should be encouraged when this takes place that we’re actually doing something right. The trick is to get persecuted by the right folks.

And the fact that Wallis is buddy-buddy with Jimmy Carter, is published in the New York Times, and is universally loved by the established media, the Democratic Party, and most of the politicians in Washington really ought to be telling us something.

Nobody seems to be interested in dealing with the works of Jim Wallis, so I suppose it falls to me. Of course, part of the problem might be that almost no evangelicals have heard of Jim Wallis. You can try it at home. Next time you’re at church, ask anybody if they’ve heard of him. Most won’t have.

This means I now have to introduce Mr. Wallis. Socialist, progressive, liberal, social gospeler, unabashed fan of Ron Sider. The leading voice for the liberal “mainline evangelical” left. He has recently published two books on faith and politics, both of which I have read. He maintains he is a prophetic outsider to the established governmental mindset, and also assumes that speaking prophetically to our government means screeching for higher minimum wage laws, universal health care and the U.N. But more on that later.

I would like to take this time to go through Wallis’s most recent book, out this February (2008), called The Great Awakening, which, besides being mind-numbingly repetitive, is poorly written and was badly in need of an editor, though it is a far sight better than his 2005 book, God’s Politics.

Just to give us an idea of what Wallis is doing here, in print and everything, we can merely quote Jimmy Carter, who authored the foreword – undercutting for the first of many times the idea that Wallis is a prophetic outsider. Prophetic outsiders don’t know Jimmy Carter well enough to get him to author forewords. What, we may ask as interested Christians wanting to make a difference for Christ’s Kingdom, are the implications of Wallis’s ideological rants? What kind of effect would they have on America? Why, an increased “commitment to our multiple religious faiths,” (p. x). That’s what all the Old Testament prophets thought, surely.

The solution to America’s problems is “a way to tap the power of the revival of faith in order to inspire and encourage the secular social reforms that are espoused in all the great religions,” (p. x). Secular social reforms? I hardly think the announcement that “there is no King but Jesus” is very secular. It sounds as though Carter simply wants to use all of Lenin’s useful idiots to push the secular agenda through. It also sounds like he thinks there’s a great big group hug coming on. “This is the pathway described to us in this book.” (p. x).

Comforting.

Brian Godawa is a Christian writer/director working in Hollywood. He wrote the award-winning independent film To End All Wars, which starred Robert Carlyle and Kieffer Sutherland, and adapted Frank Peretti’s The Visitation for the big screen. He’s directed documentaries on American history for PBS and the History Channel. Recently he directed a short horror film called Cruel Logic (currently being expanded into a feature film for Ralph Winter (producer, X-Men, Planet of the Apes, etc.), which you should watch here.

It is intimately connected to the discussion over atheism. You can find out more about the project at his website. You can download a copy of the film to your computer from his site.

Modern liberalism is essentially secularism in thinly veiled religious garb, and its salvation is a distinctly secular, though largely pagan, program. Alternateively, in much of Africa and Latin America salvation is depicted in terms of a violent socialist revolution (”liberation theology”) designed to overturn the imperialism and capitalism (real or imagined) of society. Salvation is transformed into political revolution.

- P. Andrew Sandlin, The Full Gospel, p. vii

A good friend of mine who happens to be an atheist has started a series of notes on Facebook entitled “My Atheism”. He just posted this picture with one of his notes, and I thought it deserved a counterpart.

So I made one myself in response (it’s pretty gruesome, but that’s the point):

This, of course, is the main thrust here. I am not accusing my friend of being a holocaust supporter. That would be silly. He does much good, but the classic problem with atheism still stands. It is not a question of whether atheists do good, but how they cannot account for it in the first place. Words like ought, should, need indicate there is some kind of morality being appealed to here that we need to live up to.

If there were a second grader school bus accident, many atheists would be horrified and saddened at the deaths, but - and here’s the kicker - they cannot explain in principle why it is any worse for the electrical synapses in the heads of these kids to stop than for the wiring of the bus engine to stop. Using only material forces (taste, touch, smell, sight) and Darwinian evolution, explain why the one is bad and the other is okay. Moreover, using only material forces and Darwinian evolution, explain bad and good. Is there an overarching, objective standard or isnt there? Physically, bus engines are electricity running through metalic and rubber wiring, and brains are run by electricity running through organic wiring. One is squishy and one is not - beyond this what is the difference?

So then, an atheist can be legitimately horrified at the holocaust, but what could he say to a Nazi soldier shoveling bodies into a mass grave to dissuade him? All atheists want people to stop doing undesirable things. They’re very good at getting that message across. If somebody stole their shirt, they’d believe that to be a bad action and call the cops. This nobody doubts. The real question comes in justifying their moral indignation to others. What, exactly, is the difference between desirable and undesirable? And, ultimately, how can that difference stand up against the concept that - if the Nazi gets away with it - there is no final judgment. Nobody gets to sit around for 30 minutes after they die to contemplate their wrongs. People who are deeply wrong - child molesters, Nazis, Hilary Clinton (for example) - will go to the grave and that will be that. They will never know they were wrong (or, really, what wrong is). If they evade punishment in this life, they will have cheated justice.

In the atheist worldview, Ronald Regan, Ronald McDonald, three year olds, Mother Teresa, Pol Pot, puppies, and Jeffrey Dahlmer are no different. They are organic machines synapsing their way through a meaningless cosmic accident and acting in different ways - and then they return to dust, and this cycle will continue until the sun goes out and this small hunk of rock freezes over and spins silently through space for eternity - nothing matters and nobody cares what they did for their blink under the sun.

Yes. I haven’t been posting with much frequency lately. I know. We’re all ashamed of it. But hopefully that will change.

Meanwhile, in my absence, I’ve done a few fun things that make for fun edu-muh-cation. In particular, John Granger, better known as the Hogwarts professor - one of the leading literary authorities on Harry Potter - has hosted one of my papers on his website as a guest essay. My thanks to John, and I encourage all of you to bask in the wonderful atmosphere over at his blog. You can read my paper here.

Also, I recently discovered that Jim Wallis - who some of you might possibly have heard of recently - is coming to Columbus, Ohio to do a “Justice REvival” at the Vineyard church there (the Vineyard is a charismatic/faith healing denomination started in the 80s). Wallis is the leading political spokesman of the whole neo-evangelical shebang and Christian leftism in general. His positions are delighted over by Jimmy Carter, Bono, Bill Hybels, Rick Warren, Brian McLaren, Desmond Tutu, Ron Sider, Tony Campolo, and a host of others. It’s evangeligoop shot straight out of group-hugist hell.

In the interest of objectivity (or possibly stomach ulcers), I got his latest book, The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America. Three days later, I have finished going through the book - and the ink from several pens. I marked that book up leftways and upside down, and about the only thing I didn’t do was write my own index in the back (it already had one). I’m hard at work on a response. Here, for your enjoyment (or development of stomach ulcers) are some of the choicest quotes.

First from Jimmy Carter, who wrote the foreword:

What we need is a way to tap the power of the revival of faith in order to inspire and encourage the secular social reforms that are espoused in all the great religions. This is the pathway described in this book, (p. x).

And now, straight from the horse’s mouth:

The Third Great Awakening . . . helped usher in the progressive era, the social gospel, and the New Deal, (p. 2).

Religion has no monopoly on morality, (p. 32).

The kingdom of God literally brings a great reversal to the values, assumptions, and norms of the world as we have known them. This is whi Christianity in defense of the established order - “Christendom” “Christian civilization” “Christian nation” “Christian empire” and the rest - have never made sense, (p. 62).

Churches cannot provide health care for 47 million Americans who don’t have it … or ensure enough affordable … [or] socail security … or a social safety net for children. … Only governments … can do that, (p. 71).

The Pentagon cannot be expected to be faithful to the teachings of Jesus, but the church must be, (p. 73).

The role of the state is ‘to defend and promote the common good of civil society … [The common good should] make accessible to each what is needed … food, clothing, health, work, education and culture . . . (p. 86).

As a Christian, and an evangelical Christian at that, I want to say emphatically that America is not, and should not be, a “Christian nation,” (p. 180).

The list, horrifically, goes on. But I’ll limit your development of stomach ulcers for today.