by Charity Erickson
Now as they were traveling along, Jesus entered a gentrified warehouse district and a wellness blogger named Martha welcomed Him into her farmhouse-inspired loft.
She had a sister named Mary who was seated on the floor beside a reclaimed barnwood coffee table, near the Lord’s feet, listening to His word and fiddling with the doily she was crocheting.
But Martha was distracted with all her preparations: looking for the harem pants that matched her jaunty hat, serving a round of home-fermented probiotic drinks, and resetting the shutter speed on her camera. And she came up to Him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to literally serve the kombucha alone? Then tell her to help me.”
But the Lord swirled the kombucha in his glass as he peered moodily over His Bonhoeffer glasses and said --
“Wait, Lord!” said Martha, “Let me see if I can catch that light.” And she did take a picture. “I think I got it?”
“Martha, Martha,” Jesus said, “you are worried and bothered about many things, but only one thing is necessary. A high-contrast filter.”
Jesus sipped his fizzy drink and continued. “Truly I say to you -- did you know that wine and kombucha have basically the same alcohol content?”
Mary looked up from her hook and yarn. “You know, I think I read that somewhere, too.”
-- Luke 10:38-42, JFTTTV (Jokes From 2010 Version)
Charity Erickson and her husband live and work together in the north woods of Minnesota. Check out her blog for more of her writing and follow her on Twitter @ecumystic.
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by Charity Erickson
The other day, I went to see Edge of Tomorrow, the newest addition to Tom Cruise’s rather extensive sci-fi repertoire. I entered the theater not knowing much about the film, and to my amusement, I found it follows the same basic plot of Groundhog Day--with an alien invasion as the backdrop. (Google confirms that I am approximately the 416,000th person to make this observation.)
The similarities are uncanny: in Groundhog Day, Bill Murray’s Phil Connors relives the same day over and over until he figures out how to love selflessly. In Edge of Tomorrow, Tom Cruise’s William Cage is a military propagandist who finds himself able to reset the same day over and over as he attempts to defeat the time-manipulating collective consciousness of an alien horde that besets humanity. Also, there is a woman!
Each day that Cage resets--which he does by dying--he must find this woman, a soldier wunderkind named Rita, and together they try (and fail) each time to defeat their indomitable foe. Upon failing, Cage kills himself. And then, *respawn*. However, Cage is the only one able to remember and learn from all of their failed attempts to save the world; for Rita, each day she meets Cage is the first.
While the film is pretty meh in the inventiveness of its hero’s arc (even with the whole time travel thing, the film’s action unfolds in a staid and predictable fashion,) the relationship between Rita and Cage saves this piece of science fiction. Really good science fiction, in the end, is not simply speculation about other worlds, realities, futures and pasts; it uses that which is fictive and far away to talk about things that are close: love, war, fear, family. In the case of Edge of Tomorrow, amidst exploding aircraft and vicious aliens, we find a rather poignant statement on what makes a friendship.
Toward the end of the film, Rita expresses frustration with Cage that he is unwilling to sacrifice her life in order to complete their mission and end the war. In her reality, they’ve only just met; yet in Cage’s reality, they have spent the equivalent of years together. She asks him why he cares whether she lives or dies, and he answers, as though it should be self-evident: “Because I know you.” Not “Because I love you,” or “Because I need you,” but simply because he knows her. There is something terribly beautiful about the simplicity of his statement: all it takes to deeply care about another person is to take the time to know her.*
Through the vast majority of the film, the relationship between Rita and Cage reads as a completely platonic, even one-sided friendship, and I find this fascinating as it is not a topic often explored in “serious” film; it is a topic most often relegated to comedy and chick flicks. (The only opposite-gender friendships I can think of in popular media are found in sitcoms--Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy being the most touching example, obvs.) The “bromance” has made the topic of male friendship more common in film, but somewhat-problematically so. Not only does the term whiff of giggling, “no homo” douchebaggery, but it also demonstrates that we are still so ill at ease when speaking about deep friendship, we can’t even figure out a word to call it that doesn’t confusingly conflate it with eros.
That said, I am happy that films exploring the importance of friendship are being made. Anything that acknowledges and normalizes the role deep friendships play in our lives is a boon to the emotional life of our culture, a guide to better and healthier relationships. When we don’t take friendship seriously in art and media, when we leave it unacknowledged as a source both of joy and pain in life, we do a disservice to the richness to be found in meaningful relationships that are founded neither on kinship nor sexual attraction.
For just as we are interdependent with other people, we are interdependent with our media--we trust it to hold a mirror to humanity, and we inform it, just as it informs us. When media portrays the love among friends as trivial compared to, say, romantic love, that attitude leaches into our lived lives, and we find ourselves either confused by the powerful emotions of friendship or we deprive ourselves of those relationships from the start. Like Edge of Tomorrow, perhaps more films will think deeply about the sanctity of friendship and usher in a future where our definitions of love are bigger. Tom-Cruise-summer-blockbuster-sized, even. Amen.
*Spoiler/Caveat: the film hinted at romance at the VERY end, but I chose to ignore it. BECAUSE IT MADE NO SENSE. And apparently, no such romantic relationship exists in the graphic novel upon which the film is based--which must be why the intimation here seemed so out-of-place.
Charity Erickson and her husband live and work together in the north woods of Minnesota. Check out her blog for more of her writing and follow her on Twitter @ecumystic.
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by Charity Erickson
For anyone who follows along with my regular tweeting about cheese, this shouldn’t come as a shock, but for those who are unfamiliar I will begin with this proclamation: I love food.
I always did love food, though my first food experiences were decidedly ungourmet. My non-fancy Minnesotan family enjoyed dinners of frozen fish sticks and macaroni from a box, and tater-tot hotdish, a lovely meal consisting of all the Minnesotan food groups: cream of mushroom soup, hamburger, Velveeta, and tater-tots--LOTS of tots, which we would garnish with a healthy squeeze of ketchup (or as my Minnesotan ancestors would say, cat-sup). The most exotic dish we regularly ate was chow mein from a can--mushy vegetables in a sweet, grey goo, served over a heaping helping of minute-rice.
And I still have a certain fondness for all these things, because I LOVE FOOD. The food I grew up eating was all about convenience and comfort, necessary evils for a busy family just trying to make it through the day. I try not to begrudge that fact. But I was always hungry for more, which confused and embarrassed me as I was certainly not suffering for want of calories. (And girls aren’t supposed to really like food, anyway, you know?)
In my early twenties I started to meet people who introduced me to new food cultures and I was done, gone, wide-eyed and tripping along on a mission of discovery in new worlds of pleasure, chasing the high I discovered in that first bowl of tom kha gai, rich chicken broth and hot peppers and creamy coconut; and the dissolve into bliss I felt with my first spoonful of Yukon Gold potatoes mashed with real cream, roasted garlic and butter. (The moans I emitted whilst consuming those potatoes made the cook, my friend’s grandmother, visibly uncomfortable.)
As the years passed and my financial situation began to allow, I started teaching myself how to cook. I watched hundreds of hours of the Food Network, read chef memoirs, and collected cookbooks. I developed a body-and-soul connection with gourmand personalities like Anthony Bourdain, sustaining burns and slicing fingertips as I attempted to recreate the various sweets and savories I saw on TV. Cupcakes and custards, steaks with compound butter, goat cheese and mixed greens, meaty stews--I had victories and flops, and I ate far more than I needed. And I loved it.
There are times I feel like I should be more ashamed of treating food as a hobby. For pete’s sake, there are starving people in the world. And I was raised Lutheran! Nevermind that, if I were a real ordinary radical, I would be eating nothing but kale and chickpeas I grew myself! These feelings are inevitably followed by about five days of sustainably produced, locally harvested, meticulously ethical plant-based eating. But then my husband utters a word of dark magic--”cheeseburger”--and it’s all downhill from there, down into into a meaty, cheesy bacchanal. Fast-forward six months, rinse off the grease, repeat.
The cycle is confusing. Honestly? I am not ashamed of how I eat. It is when I think other Christians might be ashamed on my behalf that I wonder if there is something deviant about my enjoyment of good food. I have blessed people with my cooking, but I have also blessed my own figure with extra pounds of flesh in the process. And Christians especially, seem to resent this.
An obvious example would be Christian patriarchy advocates, who equate the pleasing-to-the-male-gaze-ness of a female body--i.e. her thinness--with her spiritual health. Though women are the usual target of the Christian diet industry, the Rick Warren-endorsed Daniel Plan and Don Colbert’s What Would Jesus Eat are both wildly popular diet resources marketed to the church-at-large, that also preach that healthfulness is next to godliness.
But post-evangelicals and progressives do their part to stigmatize fatness, too. I’ve seen it framed as a justice issue: people who consume more than they need are hoarding resources for themselves. More subtly, post-evangelicals use gluttony as an example of hypocrisy: it’s a kind of sin that those Christians conveniently refuse to pass judgment on the way they do with other sins. The goal of these post-evangelicals is, presumably, to expose the delusions of biblical literalists, who claim to live by strict adherence to all “biblical” standards.
Yet for me, this rhetoric misses its mark (heh). As I mentioned, many fundamentalists do enforce diet standards, and it isn’t uncommon for these to be quite restrictive. And when we admit that we almost exclusively use the word gluttony--the inordinate enjoyment of food--synonymously with the carriage of extra pounds, it betrays a socially conditioned attitude of distaste towards fat in general: “You fundamentalists should feel shame for your gluttony, you fat frauds! But you don’t. Hypocrites!”
It’s sometimes a subtle distaste, but distaste nonetheless. A recent episode of the FX show Louie, “So Did the Fat Lady,” put on display a similar unstated repugnance toward fat-ness. The title character, always on the lookout for romance, finds himself enjoying the company of a chubby woman--despite his best efforts. But when his date refers to herself as a “fat girl,” he rushes to defend her from such slander--”You’re not fat!”--because if she were, it would surely be shame too embarrassing for a woman to handle. *sarcasm*
“What is it about the basics of human happiness, feeling attractive, feeling loved, having guys chase after us, that's just not in the cards for us?” she responds to his disingenuous comment. She brilliantly describes the ambivalent feelings of non-thin women in their awareness of the discomfort they apparently cause other people, especially men who might have otherwise considered them to be amazing women. And while I might not identify with this character’s entire experience, her defense of “the basics of human happiness” hits home. It is intrinsic to humanity to have entirely frivolous interests--sports, art, literature--so why is an interest in food, as a non-essential source of pleasure, any different from these others?
Yet people generally--Christian or otherwise (and I’m speaking to my experience with American culture)--balk at the suggestion that our diverse and restrictive attitudes toward food and the value we place on thinness are wholly arbitrary social constructs. Those who might benefit from the system have no incentive to question it. Those who desire to benefit from the system have no incentive to question it. I don’t want to sound like an embittered outcast, but I guess I am one--so I ask, as a lady who just wants to make her cake, and eat it, with you--you, the one who enjoys the favor of the status quo: what the hell?
Systems, people, our church families--all will try to exact their pound or two of flesh, without making the effort to really understand the other’s deepest desires, loves, needs or struggles. And it’s a casual cruelty, to be embarrassed on behalf of another human being, perceiving their joy and comfort as weakness. It’s taken me a long time be less bothered by it, to not feel a twinge of shame when I admitted just how much I love good food. But I took a big step forward not too long ago: Thanksgiving, 2012.
Every year my family ate more or less the same thing, and of course, I loved it all: Aunt Marty’s cheeseball, Gramma’s wild rice casserole, turkey, gravy, pie, and pecan caramel rolls (I don’t know why, but there have always been caramel rolls). But since I had been practicing my cooking, I decided I would contribute something new: a sweet, spicy butternut squash soup with apple and curry.
It was eyed with suspicion; Uncle Doug was the first to try a taste. He slurped a spoonful. His eyes widened, his face flushed. “Flavor!” he said. I can’t tell you how satisfying that was--to create something so good, to enjoy it myself, and to share it with others. Well practiced gluttony pays off in shared joy. What could be so wrong with that?
Charity Erickson and her husband live and work together in the north woods of Minnesota. Check out her blog for more of her writing and follow her on Twitter @CharityJill.
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by Charity Erickson
So, Richard Foster and I are fighting.
He doesn’t know this, but we have a long running feud; it has been contentious and bitter and totally one-sided. Ever since everyone and their grandpas started talking about Foster’s Celebration of Discipline, I have been developing a deep-seated resentment against this lovely man and his holy brilliance. “Discipline.” It’s a word I just can’t get over, much less celebrate.
For one already struggling with the old evangelical hero complex, in which I feel the urge to always have to do more, always more, always better, I can’t read Foster without hearing it as something else I’m supposed to add to my already too-long list. And the idea of exerting even more effort in the celebration of something so severe as discipline is dreadful, an extra weight to be hung from an already-too-heavy yoke.
And when there's just so much that's seemingly required, it's overwhelming. My response is to fight against it, or more likely, to just give up. Perhaps I am merely too attached to the lavish comforts of food, drink, and sleep, but it’s much more my style to exercise the spiritual practice of radical self-care, with its promises of holy napping and hearty celebration of chocolate (at least that’s how I do it).
All that said, I decided to put away the bad blood between Brother Richard and myself, and attend his presentation at last week’s Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The title of his session sounded mysterious and terribly interesting: “The Humiliation of the Word in our Day.” What could that possibly mean?
And as he began to speak, waxing rhapsodic about the weight and the beauty of words, I shed a tear. The power of creation and Christ are bound up in the Word and words themselves--amen, hallelujah!--also, there is something eminently moving about how that man wears a ponytail. “The Word is precious,” he said. “A word poorly spoken demeans us.”
Respect to my nemesis. That’s some good stuff.
I was so on board. But then discussion turned to how, in our day, the “humiliation” of the written and spoken word is achieved. And while I will take away and hold close what Richard Foster said about the value of words, I feel it behooves me to respectfully disagree with what came after.
As I understand it, he finds the proliferation of words through mass media and digital formats to be enacting a kind of inflation in the value of words, causing even a word well spoken to lose its currency. Not only were formats like Twitter and blogs taken to task for being generally mediocre platforms for meaningful communication (too fast, too easy), visual media was characterized as passive and mindless distraction from the stuff of real value--the written word. Television and film were cast merely as means for “checking out” of reality.
The problem with thinking about new media as a distortion or desecration of the true, written word is that it shows disregard for the fact that all things must be read, not just words. Paintings, faces, numbers, noises, the posture of the body in embrace, a precious Polaroid, clever, cutting hashtags, and even ClipArt. (Is that still a thing? Clearly I’m the last person who should be defending technology.) The language of literature is not the only thing we read. Whenever we take information in and work to make sense of it, this is communication, this is “word,” and all creation cries out.
But how can we understand without one to instruct us? This is the real problem. Not the democratization of media--as if such a thing were possible, even online--the real problem with the polyphony of voices populating the electronic ether is that often we fail to understand them, and too often we don’t want to admit that we don’t know how to read them with discernment. We struggle to process information, evaluate sources, and understand the purpose and potential behind this innovation; it’s a library whose card catalogue is written in secret code. But it’s a code we must decipher; we must learn how to find Dickens amongst the penny-dreadfuls. We must learn how to separate the gold from the dross.
It is not the word but rather we who are humiliated when we are forced to grapple with our own illiteracy, even as children are navigating this cryptic library with such ease. And when I say “we,” I mean those those of us who have had the privilege of being equipped with strategies for reading at a high level--we’ve been educated in the Western canon, an education that has not prepared us to deal with the rebirth of the word in the digital medium. We have our own secret code, but it will not get us passage through the strange, new words set before us.
And I recognize I am preaching to the choir (or more likely, the very hip worship team); most of you who have found your way to this site are not internet noobs. But there are two things I want to say in conclusion: first, when people denigrate new media as mere diversion, don’t settle for that judgment; but also, don’t simply write them off as out-of-touch. So: Richard Foster, you’re okay, brother. Again, this is a new literacy issue; he and others of the same mind might make this judgment in completely good faith because they are simply unaware of the kind and quality of media that can be found outside of established institutions, how to find it, and how to use it.
Second, Christian educators--including internet writers, for writers are educators, after all--have a responsibility to think deeply about new media and how we can open this realm to those unfamiliar to it. We must consider how we can teach the necessary techniques that can lead others to engage it in meaningful ways, and how we can produce the kind of work that makes thoughtful engagement worth the time it takes. The word will not be humiliated in our day as long as we are not content with churning out content; there is new life here, in our digitized selves, waiting for us to give it breath.
So let us not close our eyes, ears, or laptops to the Word, wherever it may be found. Words are intercessors, hanging in the space between bodies and Spirit, and sometimes even the internet groans with longing that keystrokes cannot express. But let us not stay silent; if we shut our screens, perhaps the rocks will cry out.
Charity Erickson and her husband live and work together in the north woods of Minnesota. Check out her blog for more of her writing and follow her on Twitter @CharityJill.
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by Charity Erickson
The other day my mother brought a green suitcase to my house, full of random crap from my old bedroom. There was a Bop-It, an illustrated costume design book for Othello I made during my theatre days, and stacks of journals, sketchbooks and other miscellaneous papers. She and my dad are moving, and their realtor told them, "Get rid of it; get rid of it all."
I pulled a notebook out of the pile and guessed at its contents. "A collection of dour post-pubescent musings," I said before thumbing through the first few pages. And instead of bad poetry, brooding self-portraits, and sketches of Jesus on the cross (as I’d expected) I discovered pages of hard data: graphs and numbers, neat and thoroughly organized information from my single semester of lab time as a nursing student at a Christian college. I had once believed these seventeen pages would pave a straight path to my calling as a medical missionary. Turns out they were a record of my diminishing interest in the sciences, a loss of drive that led my Christian biology professor to declare of me before the entire class: "What a waste."
A waste.
But I showed him; now I'm a blogger.
After my disappointing Christian college experience, I went through periods of not caring at all--and then caring too much--about the ridiculous dogma of various traditions, spinning from progressive, to conservative, and then back again, and I haven't found any branch of Christian culture that wouldn't declare a similar condemnation over me: "What a waste." Whether it be for my female-ness, my cowardly and tender heart, or my craving for nuanced judgment--my distrust of all sacred cows--I have heard the Christians say, among many sects: "You didn't buy into our system. What a waste."
A waste: refuse, garbage, extra leftover filth.
Waste.
And the feminist in me just adores that the prophets refer to all our righteous acts as "filthy rags." Excess blood, period-soaked fabric. Waste. And though Isaiah speaks derogatorily of this natural process of the body, I now prophetically appropriate his words and proclaim in all my heretical, feminist grotesquery: a waste is a gross extravagance. It's something more than what is necessary. It is something that is "too much;" but what I want to do here is argue that instead of looking at our spiritual idiosyncrasies--the things we do, say and believe that don't build upon or add to our official belief system--are not things to disdain or cast off like so much garbage. The inconsistencies we hold onto are "extra," but I'm starting to think that they are also grace.
All of us are at least somewhat aware of the embarrassing aspects of our bodies and our souls, parts that won't fit into any logical schema, facets of ourselves and of our beliefs that can't find room in the systems designed for us to inhabit. Awkward excesses of experience, wounds from endeavors that led to nowhere, that served no special purpose, that didn't teach us much of anything--but are part of us, anyhow. Weird scars that are not badass at all, purple veins and crooked stretch marks. Extra stuff that doesn't correspond with reason or providence. Waste. These things make each person's faith unique. It's not orthodoxy, and it's not pretty, but it's true; our quirks make us who we are.
For example: I once believed I had a supernatural calling in medical missions but now know that it's not going to happen. I have had beautiful words of prophecy spoken over me by people who, it turned out, were con artists. There have been dreams and spirits, and I don't know what to do with them. But do I think it's all bull? Think it’s all in my head, or someone else's head? I don't know. I reserve the right to not decide. I'm still Pentecostal. I think. And it's weird, and uncomfortable, and a bit humiliating, especially in the more "liberal" environments I frequent. It's this additional part of my faith that keeps me from fitting in one place or another. It's wasted faith, but there's something about it that I love too much to let go.
So I'm trying to make sense of it all, and I think this is how it works: we Christians--as individuals beloved by God--are too complex to classify perfectly into theological groups, categories by which we can be defined and judged by others (and too often by other Christians). There is always some part of a Believer that will end up as waste, as unaccountable excess. This is why it's absurd to equate all Calvinists with Fred Phelps--people are more than the sum of their theological parts. These inconsistencies might look like filthy rags, to some. But these are also the things that make us un-judgeable by others, unable to be categorized, wild.
And I like to think there is something holy about that--that extra, wasteful part of ourselves where the Spirit will minister like it can with no one else who is or has been or will be. Yes, it's waste. But I'm coming to believe that that's not such a bad thing.
Charity Erickson and her husband live and work together in the north woods of Minnesota. Check out her blog for more of her writing and follow her on Twitter @CharityJill.
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by Charity Erickson
My last On Pop Theology piece explored the newest addition to the McConaissance oeuvre, the seriously serious HBO show True Detective, and its struggle to say anything really meaningful about…anything. I received a small amount of (mostly warranted) pushback on social media, but there was one comment that simply went beyond the pale. One comment that bothered me to my very core. I was told that if I couldn’t handle the “weighty themes” of True Detective, that I should just go watch Parks and Recreation.
This pisses me off. Not so much for the condescension (for which the commenter apologized), but for their gross misreading of Parks and Recreation. Because under the bucolic facade of Pawnee, Indiana and Leslie Knope’s fiercely optimistic pursuit of parks excellence, we find a desperate world of thwarted desire, corruption, the futile pursuit of hopeless causes--and Aubrey Plaza’s lifeless eyes. This show is some twisted, messed up shit.
If you dare to plunge into the dark and debauched world of Parks and Recreation, here are ten episodes to highlight the show’s nihilistic despair:
1. Rock Show – Season 1, Episode 6
Hapless troubadour Andy expounds upon the ultimate brokenness of the human condition, setting the doctrine of original sin to music in his song “The Pit:” “The pit/I fell into the pit/You fell into the pit/We all fell into the pit.” Look upon this work ye mortals and despair!
2. Pawnee Zoo – Season 2, Episode 1
Leslie Knope comes under fire for performing the wedding of two gay penguins and highlights the conspiracy of control surrounding institutionalized religion. How can a belief system based on love separate one penguin from the mate of his (and the zoo’s) choosing?
3. The Stakeout – Season 2, Episode 2
Has there ever been a greater miscarriage of justice than the racial profiling of Tom Haverford? And by a government employee no less. For shame!
4. Sweetums – Season 2, Episode 15
As Leslie attempts to introduce healthy snacks to Pawnee concession stands, this episode focuses on the issue of theodicy by asking us: “If sugar is so bad for us, how come Jesus made it taste so good?”
5. Galentines Day – Season 2, Episode 16
You will fall in love with Chris Pratt. You will develop an agonizing and unattainable crush, and it will be emotionally debilitating. If you have never before actualized the total experience of human suffering, this will do it for you.
Except for that, this episode affirms all that is true and beautiful in the world. Sorry. I really do try to be a hateful cynic but sometimes I just can’t deny the weepy feels that rise up from the very core of my soul. Oh god. *sniffle* I just hope he’s happy. *sob*
6. The Fight – Season 3, Episode 14
This is where things get real. This episode is raw and risky; never before on television have we seen something so honest and viscerally disturbing as the hangover everyone suffers the morning after imbibing Tom Haverford’s Kahlua-style liqueur, Snake Juice.
This drunken, debased romp achieves its Sodomesque pinnacle when the manliest man of all, Ron Swanson, is shown strutting his stuff while wearing a woman’s hat--a hat extravagantly embroidered with gaudy, retro beading, no less. God will judge!
7. Li’l Sebastian – Season 3, Episode 16
“Who are we? Where are we going in life? What is the meaning of all of this? These are questions that Li’l Sebastien never had to answer. Because he was a horse.” Enough said.
8. End of the World – Season 4, Episode 6
Armageddon is nigh! And how do the godless citizens of Pawnee respond? With lavish parties and the scandalous playing of flutes. Over the course of the episode, characters deal with regret, disappointment, and the cold and ever-near embrace of death.
It is my favorite episode of the series.
9. Ben’s Parents – Season 5, Episode 6
The beautiful Rob Lowe cries for twenty-one minutes. For part of that time, he is also eating shrimp cocktail. What devilish monsters would do this to Rob Lowe?!
10. Ann and Chris – Season 6, Episode 12
Nothing gold can stay, folks. Nothing gold can stay. *a single tear*
Charity Erickson and her husband live and work together in the north woods of Minnesota. Check out her blog for more of her writing and follow her on Twitter @CharityJill.
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by Charity Erickson
I’ll get right down to disagreeing with the general critical community at large: True Detective—which debuted on HBO in January—sucks. In it, Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson star as two very serious men (playing against type—the party trick of the whole thing) investigating a series of gruesome killings with a strange religious component in the deep South. Meanwhile, a Moral-Majority-type pastor with political ties and possibly sinister motives is pressuring them to solve the case quickly. (Also: drugs, alcohol, and boobies! Just what puts the "premium" in cable television.)
It critiques religion and Western myths of progress, but it does so in a ponderous, self-satisfied, heavy-handed sort of way. The show stretches out over long, slow scenes of plot-less dialogue. And whenever we are treated to some action, the ominous tenor of the show shoots straight into melodrama. The show is trying to do a lot--too much. In consequence, it becomes quite tedious to watch.
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Considering how seriously the show takes itself, it is disappointing that it’s so inept in its portrayal of religious life. It confuses the language, iconography, and general practices of Catholic and Pentecostal traditions, throwing together elements of one or the other wherever it serves the show’s argument that religious folks are hypocritical, delusional, and even mentally-disabled, criminal deviants (as McConaughey’s Detective Cohle suggests regarding a particular suspect—chew on the problematic insinuation of that claim, will you).
In one critical scene, a young girl describes a man (presumably the deranged murderer sought by our true detectives) who looked like a "spaghetti monster," an allusion to an infamous parody of creationism. The show is setting up religion as the villain, and its critique is neither nuanced nor inspired. We've seen this a hundred times before, and I'm just kind of over it.
But this isn’t even my biggest problem with the show. I can handle critiques of Christianity. I applaud them, actually (and all the more if they are in any way thoughtful). What I really can’t handle about True Detective is its utter lack of humor. When I think of other shows that have successfully explored the dark tendencies of human nature and society—and have done so in a way that I found enjoyable to watch—I think of commonly-regarded masterpieces such as Game of Thrones, Dexter, and The Wire. (Honorable mentions: The Killing--certainly doesn't deserve its bad rap--and Call the Midwife. Does that ruin my badass list? Crap.) These programs feature characters whose “types” are distinct enough to be played against for the sake of humor, yet are also complex enough to be interesting.
There is something almost too wonderful about stories that manage to be honest about the bleak state of human existence while at the same time moving us to delight in the people who inhabit the stories’ worlds. The levity we enjoy in the midst of these dark worlds isn’t just about lightened tension or added entertainment value; it’s about the deep sense of relief in experiencing and knowing that in a grim reality, joy is possible. This confirms our deepest hopes, and it rings so true that it aches. One may experience the world as bleak and without joy, but we want—we need—to believe this isn’t a permanent situation. Light can eventually break through, even when only through the narrowest of cracks.
A story that presents a bleak world without joy is just as false as the saccharin clichés of a Lifetime holiday movie. The dark and the light need each other in order for us to see each for what it truly is; and even a small, faint light can relieve a great darkness.
So, this is why True Detective sucks.
Post-Script: As I was ranting on this topic to a friend, he looked down and was clearly distraught. He looked up and said, “I am so sad you don’t watch Breaking Bad.” Apparently, if one can get just a few episodes past the dissolving bathtub and whatnot, it gets…funny? Perhaps we shall see. Stay tuned, friends.
Charity Erickson and her husband live and work together in the north woods of Minnesota. Check out her blog for more of her writing and follow her on Twitter @CharityJill.
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by Charity Erickson
The French show Les Revenants (translated as “The Returned”) appeared on the Sundance Channel at the end of 2013 to much acclaim. It was billed as a more distinguished kind of zombie show, The Walking Dead for the discerning television viewer. Though, as many critics have since pointed out, this is a mischaracterization. A revenant is something wholly different from a zombie. A revenant is a reanimated corpse; one who retains the appearance, memory, and mind of a fully-human being who once was dead, and now is not. Revenant—it’s a beautiful word. (Just say it aloud: “revenant.” There is almost a sacred sound to it, don’t you think? Now say “zombie.” Doesn’t it sound terribly un-Christian?)
There is a quiet and awe-full beauty to The Returned that is perfectly expressed in the word “revenant,” and since my spell-check is recognizing the word, I shall keep using it. The eight-episode series follows the return of several long-deceased individuals to a village in the French countryside and the disturbing supernatural manifestations that begin to haunt the town following their appearance. What fascinates me about the show is how it borrows from Christian tradition, taking inspiration from the more strange details of the resurrection narrative.
The revenants in The Returned recall Matthew 27:52-3’s nonchalant aside about dead folks appearing in Jerusalem; further, they display characteristics of Christ’s resurrected body, his appearance in some kind of alternative visage, unrecognizable to those who knew him best (John 20:15, Luke 24:16); they also (quite unlike zombies) manifest Christ’s ability to instantly transport himself through space (multiple examples in John 20, Luke 24). The show also makes explicit reference to apocalypse lore, which posits that at the “End Times” revenants will rise (as some Christians infer from Isaiah 26:19).
The bizarre details offered in scripture are tantalizing to the imagination: What is the nature of a resurrected body? On The Returned, the revenants are bound by their physicality in some ways, while in other ways, they transcend (or lack?) normal human functioning. They possess ravenous hunger, and yet, they are unsatisfied by food and unaffected by hard drink; they rarely sleep; some can teleport, yet they cannot manage to escape the general geographical location where they died; they display miraculous healing capabilities, yet their flesh begins to decompose. They all hope to return to the lives they were living before they died, yet they are told they must have some kind of supernatural mission—from God, even; why else and by what other power would they have been called out from their graves?
The Returned creates its own theology of the revenant, using the return of the dead as an opportunity to explore themes of grief and coping, how faith can provide solace in the midst of devastating loss, and how faith can make loss all the more wrenching; it considers memory and the body; and it looks at the nature of love, how it can be pure and beautiful while simultaneously being a kind of sickness, both magical connection and destructive codependence. Typically, such “prophetic imagination” is lacking in the Christian’s approach to the texts about revenants in scripture, and there is often a dearth of the deep meditation we find here on the themes at which they hint. We do not feel free to let our imaginations run wild, even when considering the bizarre, inexplicable passages of the Bible. We are so obsessed with figuring out what “really” happened that we miss the opportunity to seek out truth and beauty.
And I’m not talking about those who create stories about how the dinosaurs got on the ark or who try to explain the physics behind the sun standing still—to my mind, these are Christian science fictions if there ever were any—rather, I am referring to those of us who already reject staunch biblical literalism, who (as a friend recently mentioned to me) can get so caught up in parsing genres and contexts and syntax that we cease to regard scripture as a wild, living Word. If our search for the truth in scripture turns into merely an alternate form of artless literalism, we will miss out on the richness it has to offer. No matter what your view of how scripture is inspired, it can still be an inspiration, a means for unbinding the imagination. And I think that is a holy thing.
Not that we need to relinquish thoughtful study, or seek out ‘secret knowledge’ in the text. But viewing The Returned has reminded me of how intensely edifying it can be to take even our careful study of scripture and let our imaginations go feral with it, unfettered in the moment by the strictures of correct theologies, moralities or spiritual analogies. We might be surprised what comes out of the exercise.
The Returned is uninterested in being “Christian” (as my husband described it to someone at church, it is “stereotypically French” and could perhaps offend, shall we say, one’s more puritanical sensibilities) but as a meditation on resurrection, it still has much to offer the Christian mind. For those looking for renewal in their pursuit of the “prophetic imagination,” this show will give you much to think about, and is definitely worth seeking out.
Charity Erickson and her husband live and work together in the north woods of Minnesota. Check out her blog for more of her writing and follow her on Twitter @CharityJill.
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