The Meaning of the End

That's all folks.

by Ben Howard

Yesterday I was reading through a blog post where the author had collected a bunch of articles about Game of Thrones and theology. A few dealt with the issue of morality in the universe created by George R.R. Martin. They made arguments about what the story meant. 

The author of the post responded to one of these articles by saying that, "We can't yet say what the story means because we do not yet know how the story ends."

This phrase struck me in the moment and has stayed with me since. It fascinates me because while it's true, I'm not convinced that it should be.

At their very root, stories are constructs. They are snippets lifted from an ever-evolving, ever-unwinding narrative. We give them a beginning to provide context and an end to provide meaning, but the reality is that the meaning we impose is defined by where we begin and end the story.

Take for example the story of Johnny Cash told in Walk the Line. The story told in the movie ends with Johnny marrying June as the climactic moment in a story of love and redemption. The end of the story re-defines the meaning of Johnny's experiences as an unloved child, his rise to fame, his drug problem, and his unsuccessful first marriage. The story is cast in the light of its conclusion.

Happily ever after?

But in reality that's not where the story ends. It continues through the next 35 years of their marriage. What does that story mean? In fact, the real narrative arc continues on in their children and grandchildren, in their musical legacy, and in the iconography that survives death and continually ripples throughout history. The real story can be found in every aspiring country singer who idolizes Johnny Cash.

So what does a story mean if a story never ends?

To judge something by its end means that you have to choose. Either you can cut off the story and choose to say, "This is what this story means now, in this particular moment," or you can let it play out delaying ultimate judgment eternally because even in death, the ripples never cease. The consequences and effects of a life lived and a story told intermingle with the ripples of other stories and other lives and continue forward, gently fading into one.

The question of whether meaning is tied to an ending is an interesting one to consider now when the world of pop culture, especially TV, stands on the brink of so many of these "important" endings.  Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy ended last year. Mad Men is in it's next to last season. Breaking Bad is approaching it's final year. Even the prolonged (and occasionally frustrating) narrative of How I Met Your Mother is beginning it's final season in the fall.

Is the entire meaning and essence of these stories tied into their end? If Don dies, or Walter goes to prison, or if Ted meets "the mother" and she's terrible, does it ruin what came before it? What about the story that comes after it, the fictional narrative that we'll never see play out?

Worst movie, or worstest movie?

These may seem like insignificant questions once you step back and remind yourself that I'm merely talking about vehicles for entertainment, but the underlying conversation is far larger than that.

Most Christian theology defines itself in terms of its end. That's not just true for people who believe in the rapture, or an eternity spent in a heaven/hell removed from this world, but for those of us who believe in the second coming and the restoration of creation. So many of us define ourselves by the hoped for outcome at the end of the story, but what if this myopic focus blinds us to the beauty of everything else?

What if the end, and the beginning too for that matter, aren't actually real? What if they're constructs we use to delineate and divide life into consumable chunks? And if that's true, what does it mean when we use them to explain the parts in between?

What if stories don't end? What if life keeps going on? What does it mean then?

Peace,
Ben 

Ben Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87. 

You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.

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Death and Don Draper

“You’re born alone, and you die alone. And this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts. But I never forget. I’m living like there’s no tomorrow, because there isn’t one.” – Don Draper, inventor of “love”

by Jesse Baker

Death is inevitable. It is inescapable, and it will consume you. Just like the sins of your past, you will never be able to outrun it. It will catch you. It will win.

Welcome to the theology of Don Draper: a place where nothing is sacred, every closet holds a skeleton, and everything dies if it isn’t dead already. Happy Wednesday!

Death is, perhaps, the only constant in Don Draper’s life. From his younger brother Adam, to Lane Pryce, to the death of his own identity, Dick Whitman, and even to the near death of his doorman, Jonesy, that opens season six. It’s a theme that goes all the way back to season one, when Don gives Rachel Menken an incredible insight to his cynical philosophy: He’s living like there’s no tomorrow, because there isn’t one.

In the premier of season six, we experience a Don Draper who travels to a Hawaiian paradise only to find yet another ghost in the form of Pfc. Dinkins, the first character to draw dialogue from Draper as he floats through this tropical heaven with Megan acting as the Virgil to his Dante, silent for the first five to ten minutes of the episode.

After a long day in the sun, we find Don at the hotel tiki bar where he is approached by Pfc. Dinkins, a soldier planning to get married while on shore leave from Vietnam. Dinkins is the perfect character to shake Draper back to consciousness. He’s young, he’s in the Army, and he’s struggling with his sense of mortality. Despite his late night stupor, Dinkins is able to enlist Don as father of the bride later that same morning before he returns to a quickly escalating arena of war. Don is aptly positioned as the father to the Vietnam generation, reluctantly giving his blessing to a man who is nothing more than a memory of wars Don wishes so desperately he could suppress.

Upon returning to Manhattan we find Jonesy recovering from his medical episode and Don befriending the doctor who helped save his life. This relationship is a surprising one even to Don’s secretary who seems taken aback when Don refers to Dr. Arnold as a friend. Don Draper doesn’t have friends. He has advertising.

With the ringing of ocean waves filling Don’s ears, he turns to the only person in his world that gives life rather than takes it. Dr. Arnold gives Don some kind of hope that death doesn’t win in the end in a world where all he’s ever known is the complete opposite.

However, the demons of Madison Avenue refuse to be exorcised without a fight. So, in the midst of pomp, publicity, and photo shoots, the king of the Ad Men realizes that he has accidentally switched lighters with Pfc. Dinkins, a phantom he thought he could leave in paradise. And, as if on cue, the photographer pauses the photo shoot to tell Don, “I want you to be yourself.” If only he knew how much he was asking.

Though Don tries to throw the lighter away, his housekeeper promptly returns it, reminding Don that he will never escape his past. His past is his present. His past is his future.

At the funeral of Roger Sterling’s mother (more death), Don drunkenly vomits after a eulogy about the devoted love Roger’s mother carried for her son. It’s as if the mention of true love made Don sick to his stomach (Well, that and all the booze).

Roger later tells his first wife, “He was just saying what everyone else was thinking,” because there is little room in this world for devotion.

Upon returning from the funeral on the arms of his employees, Don confronts Jonesy with an urgent question. “What did you see?” Don pleads, “When you died, what did you see? You must’ve seen something.” “I guess I saw a light,” Jonesy replied. “Was it like a hot, tropical sunshine?” With the extra honesty of a few too many belts, Don is finally asking the only questions he truly wants answered…

Is there life after this one? Is there any hope beyond this prison of death and deceit? How can I escape myself? How can I be reborn?

On the heels of this existential episode, Don embarks on yet another as he pitches his initial ideas for the Hawaiian hoteliers who sent him on his journey through paradise.

“We're not selling a geographical location; we're selling an experience. It's not just a different place. You are different. And you'd think there'd be an unsettling feeling about something so drastically different, but there's something else. You don't miss anything. You're not homesick. It puts you in this state - the air and the water are all the same temperature as your body.”

Don only deepens the suspicion that what he experienced in Hawaii was more than just sunshine and waves. This trip had somehow changed him. He has seen the other side of something, and he’s fixated on finding out how to get it back.

“He got off the plane, took a deep breath, he sheds his skin, and he jumped off.”

“He’s killing himself… He’s going to swim out until he can’t swim back.”

“Maybe he did, and he went to heaven. Maybe that’s what this feels like.”

“I think that’s a little morbid.”

“Well, heaven’s a little morbid!”

It’s as if Don wants nothing more than to die and be reborn.

It only makes sense. It’s what we all want.

For over five seasons now, I have watched Don Draper consistently and habitually choose death. Death is not just something that haunts him and surrounds him; it is something that defines him. Perhaps that is to be expected of someone who wears a dead man’s name as a defense against his past, but I am consistently convicted with the thought that I’m really not so different.

My life may look nothing like Don’s on the outside, but there is a similar longing on the inside. I want to be made new. I want to be able to shed my skin and ‘jump off.’

Maybe if I die in the waves, I’ll be clean. Maybe if I can be reborn, I will no longer have to carry the burdens of my past. I can leave them like footprints to a shoreline where they will be washed away, so I can begin again.

As Don lays beside the answer to our lingering questions from season five (Lindsay Weir from Freaks and Geeks), we know that he has been up to no good again, choosing death and deceit over life and truth. But the New Year is coming, and there are resolutions to be made…

“I want to stop doing this,” he says.

It only makes sense. It’s what we all want. 

“Happy New Year,” Megan utters as she falls asleep on Don’s chest.

Happy New Year, indeed. Only time will tell what 1968 will hold.

Jesse Baker is living his dream of serving as a youth minister in Nashville, Tennessee. He has a deep passion for music, the experiences it creates, Zaxby's Cajun Chicken Clubs, and bears. You can follow him on Twitter @Jesse_Baker and you can find more of his writing at his blog On Unforced Rhythms where most of the titles also begin with the word "On."

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Mad Men and the Power of Sin

Beautiful. Cynical.

by Lyndsey Graves 

I was never going to watch Mad Men. I caught about ten minutes of an episode once, channel surfing on vacation with friends, and there was some sort of affair going on and everyone in the TV was clearly terribly unhappy. I didn’t want to host such misery in my own television.

Then I agreed to watch “just the first episode” and of course I was hooked. The first season (that’s all I’ve seen) of Mad Men is beautiful, artistic, witty, and addictively voyeuristic. But the first word I’d use to describe it is cynical. I watch the show out of love for the characters and writing, not because it makes me feel good.

One of the most fascinating and frustrating aspects of the characters’ intertwining storylines is that they are all a little bewildered by their own unhappiness. Behind webs of words and actions, deceit and hidden motives, successes and failures, lie carefully hidden layers of sadness, need, and that distinct feeling of unbelonging – along with a kernel of hope that these unexpressed desires will be fulfilled somehow. For each character this dilemma is unique, but most of their stories also share a sense that they can’t quite do what they want to do – what they know is right. The depth of the show’s cynicism lies in the fact that no one is pretending their lies or affairs or petty behavior are right; it is just how things are.

Depravity in motion

Mad Men strikes quite the contrast to the almost aggressively bright outlook on humanity I’ve encountered from a good many people in churches. The show’s characters are usually sympathetic, but they are not “good people”, and at least some of them know it. This is exactly why we sympathize – because they so evidently struggle against themselves. I think we can fairly label this human tendency toward such selfishness, intentional or not, as “sin”, and the writers are counting on the fact that we can all relate to it for many of the show’s moments of greatest tension and pathos.

Could it be that pop culture is more willing and ready than we think to admit something about human depravity? Just how mad do we think the men involved in this show could be? Or what about Mad Men's cable cousin, Breaking Bad? The entire concept of that show is the slow, steady devolution of a man. Or The Walking Dead, another AMC show, that utilizes the time-honored zombie motif as a way to explore the depravity of humanity. In each case, there seems to be a deep brokenness to the world, to the relationships and the characters inside of it. The world is going crazy and they’re drawn inexorably into it. 

While this deep darkness permeates these shows, the same isn't true in much of pop culture. Instead, there is a constant push to refrain from calling certain destructive habits “sin” and a reaction against value judgments overall. I understand the desire not to condemn, to look for the best in people, to offer hope and affirmation rather than despair and finger-pointing – and yet, at least in the social circles where I currently find myself, the word “sin” is an unfashionable conversation-stopper to a degree that I find dishonest.

Good or bad?

It seems frustratingly glib to pretend that there is nothing really wrong with anybody, that the sinful are really just unfortunately misguided or environmentally disadvantaged. At its worst, it feels absurdly privileged (a word I normally don’t like using) to assert that people really aren’t all that bad. I don’t know any victims of generational poverty, of child abuse, of addiction, of gang violence, who would say that.

 
I still bristle whenever I hear the messages of condemnation hurled down by the holier-than-me. I’m certainly not here to say that people are 100% bad, incapable of doing good – or that sin carries no elements of environmental influence or simple misunderstanding. Neither does Mad Men think so. But this world and the people in it are in dire need of redemption at some fundamental level; somewhere far beyond our own attempts to set things right. I think the world Mad Men speaks to – desperate for authenticity, for the truth beyond the layers of advertising we are all wrapped in – won’t reject us for admitting it.

Lyndsey lives and works in Syracuse, NY. She majored in theology at Lee University, which is like eating cake or listening to thunderstorms - too enjoyable to be called work. Also, no one will pay you to do it. You can follow her on Twitter @lyndseygraves and you can find more of her writing at her blog To Be Honest.