January 15, 2015 1 Comment

Am I Charlie?

highConcepts_highrez

Is there a place for satire within a society and, if so, what (if any) are its limits?

The recent terrorist attack in Paris on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical weekly magazine, have forced these questions upon everyone, including Muslim cartoonists. I find myself thinking about them both as a citizen of the U.S. and as the author of a satirical novel, High Concepts: A Hollywood Nightmare.

Inspired by the early satires of Evelyn Waugh, in particular Decline and Fall, High Concepts is a comedy about an out-of-work philosophy professor’s misadventures posing as a Hollywood screenwriter. To deploy the verb typically applied to satiric works, the novel “skewers”

  • the way in which modern academia exploits adjunct labor
  • reality TV
  • the intellectual pretensions of the Hollywood elite
  • the intellectual pretensions of the academic elite
  • post-modern architecture
  • slasher film culture
  • pit bull rings

And more!

So I ask myself: is my satire any different from that of the creators of Charlie Hebdo?

In one obvious sense, yes. My novel does not lampoon real people. It is not even a roman à clef. It takes issue with certain social “types” and cultural phenomena, but no real filmmaker, academic, or academic institution appears in its pages.

Not that I necessarily have a problem with sending up real personages or institutions. The target of comedy is pretension, and it is salutary for any society that its leaders and elites be, now and again, brought back down to earth.

Charlie Hebdo targets real people and in a particularly nasty way. A free society should no doubt tolerate this kind of ruckus from the kid’s table (I borrow this metaphor from David Brooks’s recent excellent op-ed), while also looking for more edifying forms of social criticism.

Satire is a deeply moral genre. Satire casts judgment on a social scene from the point of view of a clear standard. In one sense I am Charlie in that I defend free speech; indeed, because I find Charlie Hebdo repulsive, I am something of a test case of tolerance for it. But in another and more important sense I am not Charlie because I criticize society on behalf of a moral standard–one rooted in natural law and the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues–that Charlie Hebdo’s creators would themselves find repulsive.

Within the confines of free societies a clash of cultures continues to rage. This war is not to be waged by force but by persuasion. Literary satire is one means of trying to persuade others by exposing the pretensions of moral standards that cannot live up to their promise.

Filed Under: Art and Culture, High Concepts: A Hollywood Nightmare Tagged: , , , , ,
October 22, 2014 Leave a Comment

How to Make Money as An Author

To be honest, making money as an author couldn’t be easier.

Take the case of Anna Todd, the 25 year-old debut novelist from Texas featured today in the New York Times. The clock on Ms. Todd’s 15 Minutes of Fame began ticking when the prodigious piece of erotic fan fiction she began publishing last spring on Wattpad garnered an enormous worldwide audience. Entitled After, Ms. Todd’s book features Harry Styles, the real-life star of the British boy band One Direction–or, rather, a boy band heartthrob with the same name, band, and features as Harry Styles–in a “steamy” (quoth the Times) relationship with a college freshman. The results? A six-figure multi-book deal with Simon & Schuster imprint Gallery Books plus a tidy sale of the film rights to Paramount. The paperback version of the book appears in stores today as a 584-page epic with added and extended sex scenes.

So there you go. The recipe could not be more straightforward:

  1. Take aim at that healthy portion of the global populace which maintains a robust fantasy life
  2. Pander to that audience by concocting a romance plot in which romance is defined as “lots of sex”
  3. Include as one of the romantic partners a beloved celebrity (or a character with the same name and attributes as a beloved celebrity)
  4. Publish free daily installments to that purveyor of fine culture, Wattpad
  5. Sit back and wait for New York and Hollywood to call

You don’t even need a laptop or good grades in English. Ms. Todd wrote most of After on her smartphone without paying much attention to punctuation.

If you can’t follow these easy directions to success, then I have to say, Dear Author Hoping to Cash In on Literary Fame, there isn’t much hope for you.

Or maybe you’re finding yourself reluctant to copy the recipe of Chez Todd, though you’re not quite sure why. You got into the writing game to attract an audience, but you never thought you’d have to write erotica for teens, twentysomethings (and beyond) to get your mug in the Times. Something about all this just doesn’t sit well with you.

Perhaps Walker Percy put his finger on the problem when he wrote the following about the presence of erotica in contemporary fiction:

“The real pathology is not so much a moral decline, which is a symptom, not a primary phenomenon, but rather an ontological impoverishment; that is, a severe limitation or crippling of the very life of twentieth-century man [Ed. note--things are looking even more impoverished here in the twenty-first, Mr. Percy]. If this is the case and if this crippling and impoverishment manifests itself often in sexual behavior, the latter becomes the proper domain of the serious novelist” (“Diagnosing the Modern Malaise”).

For Percy, it’s one thing to write about sex as a form of ontological impoverishment, quite another as a way of amusing oneself in the midst of one’s poverty.

But it’s strange. As the Times reports, Ms. Todd has a loving military husband who supported her literary endeavors by encouraging her to quit her day job so that she could write full-time. So: loving husband, six-figure book contract, a film deal, fame. Why would Ms. Todd be experiencing any sort of impoverishment? What could possibly be missing from her life?

What’s missing, if Percy is right, is that she and others–perhaps including ourselves?–don’t have the foggiest notion of who we are and what we’re doing on this planet. Fantasy sex, money, a feature in the Times–such things can distract us from the questions about ourselves we find it impossible to answer. But soon enough the malaise will creep back in and that person looking back in the mirror will demand to know what it’s all about.

To tell the story of that person, we authors will need a very different kind of guide. Instead of How to Make Money as An Author, we’ll need a “how-to” book with a title such as, How to Make Money as An Author Writing Books Which Manifest the Truth of the Human Predicament to a World Which Has Forgotten What That Predicament Is.

Perhaps that is a book I will have to write.

 

The image above of Harry Styles is reproduced courtesy of Fiona McKinley via Wikimedia Commons under the following license.

Filed Under: Art and Culture, On Being a Writer, Writing in an Apocalyptic Time Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,
August 14, 2014 Leave a Comment

Lauren Bacall’s “Slim”: America’s Femme Fatale

It’s been a week of celebrity deaths. Lauren Bacall died yesterday, God rest her soul, a sad event which has inspired reminiscences from entertainment writers around the world. Reflecting upon Bacall’s breakout and now iconic role as Slim in Howard Hawks’ 1944 classic, To Have and Have Not, the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis observes that Bacall’s presence in the film “draws on both feminine and masculine qualities that suggest an excitingly capable woman.” Slim is a thief and possible prostitute with a heart of gold who falls in love with Humphrey Bogart’s character, Harry Morgan, and later helps him smuggle members of the French resistance out of Vichy-controlled Martinique. Slim is Harry Morgan’s not-quite femme fatale in this noir-ish world of danger and deception.

In Arts of Darkness: American Noir and the Quest for Redemption, Thomas Hibbs defines American film noir as a counter to American optimism:

“Instead of the narrative moving toward an affirmation of the American dream, of the efficacy of democratic virtues and the resiliency of the communal foundations of American life in the family, the dream becomes a nightmare, and the vices of greed, envy, and lust predominate. Faith in progress is seen as naïve, replaced by a haunting sense that misdeeds of the past cannot be overcome or rectified. Noir characters are highly susceptible to irrational passion; in their dependence on circumstances beyond their control, they exhibit a potentially fatal vulnerability. Characters find themselves trapped in a sort of labyrinth, in the midst of which they embark upon a quest to solve a set of mysteries, usually involving both a crime and a woman.”

Slim is the woman who helps Harry Morgan escape the labyrinth, but in doing so she embodies a witty but, contra Dargis, dark distortion of both masculine and feminine qualities, evincing the vices of greed and lust and cunning that enable her to fight her way through her and Harry’s nightmarish world. If in Slim Bacall portrays, according to Dargis, “an erotic emblem of American wit and war-ready grit,” she also serves as the femme fatale of the America founded on democratic virtues and the power of the family. Leaving this dream of America high and dry, Slim sails into the night with Morgan at her side, whistling away.

Filed Under: Art and Culture Tagged: , , , , , , ,
August 13, 2014 20 Comments

What Matt Walsh Gets Wrong–And Right–About Robin Williams’ Suicide

Matt Walsh describes Robin Williams’ recent suicide as a “bad decision.” Without any qualification, this judgment presumes too much. Suicide as an objective act is certainly a moral and social evil, but to say that a suicide has made a bad decision at least appears to claim knowledge of that person’s subjective state, and that is knowledge we simply cannot claim to have. In the order of charity, we should in fact presume the very best regarding Williams’ subjective state at the point of his death.

Walsh writes: “Suicide does not claim anyone against their will.” This also needs qualification. It seems plausible that Williams’ illness in a way, and to an extent we cannot know, “coerced” his judgment. Someone I read yesterday compared living with severe depression to living with a loaded gun next to one’s head. Feeling the nozzle of a gun at one’s temple doesn’t take away one’s decision-making power, but it sure puts some serious physical and psychological constraints upon it. See the Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2282: “Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide.”

See also this excellent interview with the two authors of The Catholic Guide to Depression.

Abuse of drugs and alcohol can also contribute to a suicidal impulse, and we know that Williams recently received treatment for addiction, but until more facts come to light we shouldn’t speculate about how all of this might have contributed to his suicide.

I am no authority on depression, and so I am wondering whether depression can become so bad as to be wholly incapacitating, such that we have to say that the suicide did not really make a decision, did not commit a human act, because his rational faculties, through no fault of his own, were totally impaired. I would be interested to hear from experts on this point.

In any event, it is well to keep in mind possible mitigating factors when assessing the morality of someone’s suicide–especially from a distance.

Walsh goes on to argue that we shouldn’t turn the discussion about depression into a “cold, clinical matter.” “Depression is a mental affliction, yes,” he says, “but it is also spiritual.” Here I think Walsh is onto something. Yesterday I too argued that in moving so quickly past the horror of Williams’ suicide to celebrations of Williams’ talent and cries for better depression awareness that we miss talking about the most important thing in this situation: the need to understand depression, as with every human suffering, in light of Christ’s suffering. We may never understand or be able to control all of the organic causes of depression, but we can do our best to place that suffering, and help others place that suffering, into the very wounds of Christ and join it to his suffering in love and reparation. I’m not saying that taking this supernatural outlook will cure depression, or that the depressed person should not pursue every available human means of healing. I’m saying that only in the Cross does suffering make ultimate sense. Only in the Cross do we find a lasting hope. Our task as Christians is to bring this message of hope to the world, both through advocating appropriate human means of healing and by spreading the Good News that depression and other evils never have the final word.

It is because our culture is losing faith in this hope that it is becoming so sentimental about death. Walsh criticizes the tweet from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that under an image of Disney’s Genie from Aladdin, a character voiced by Williams, said “Genie, you’re free.” Death is freedom for those who die in the love of Christ, but it is doubtful that the Academy meant the tweet to be taken in this context. Again, no one should presume to judge the subjective state of Williams’ soul. We should be praying for his repose and for the consolation of his family and friends. But neither should we construct sentimental heavens that can be entered without cost. This diminishes the dignity of the human person, who can either find his fulfillment and freedom in God or waste himself seeking himself. The sadness of Williams’ untimely death naturally impels us to seek comfort, but let us seek it in that which truly comforts, and not in sweet imaginings.

P.S. Looking for a great weekend read? Try my blackly comic thriller, High Concepts: A Hollywood Nightmare.

More in the mood for some dystopian sci-fi with a romantic twist? Try my short story, “The Bureau of Myths,” just 99 cents at Amazon.

Also on Amazon is my play, The Actor, based upon little-known events in the life of the man who would become St. John Paul II.

 

The photograph of Robin Williams above is reproduced courtesy of 20th Century Fox.

Filed Under: Art and Culture Tagged: , , , ,
August 12, 2014 5 Comments

The Artist and Depression

As I was on Twitter last night following the commentary on the death of Robin Williams, I saw someone post a quotation from Stephen Fry which began, “If you find someone suffering from depression, never ask them why.” I think I know what Fry’s point is. Oftentimes, if not all the time, the depressive cannot begin to explain the cause of his symptoms.

But there is a deeper level at which Fry’s advice seems to be the worst possible. For while someone suffering from depressive symptoms may not be able to explain the organic or psychological roots of his pain, he still has the ability, and I would underscore the opportunity, to ask: “Why is this happening to me? What is the point of this suffering? What could possibly be the basis of a real hope for satisfaction and fulfillment in my life?”

Depression is a disease that needs to be attacked on many fronts and with many different kinds of support, but such philosophical and indeed theological questioning should not be left out of the equation. Walker Percy liked to suggest that the depressed person might be the healthiest person among us, in the sense that he has become acutely, painfully aware that something is radically unstable about the world.

When celebrities such as Robin Williams and Philip Seymour Hoffman take their lives on account of their depression, we have a laudable impulse to show our compassion for their malady and to praise their talents. This is right to do. Yet as I was listening to the retrospectives on Robin Williams’ life on the news this morning I became concerned that perhaps we were moving by Williams’ suffering too fast. I make no judgments about Williams’ psychological problems and how he was handling them–I have no knowledge of that and no wish to judge. My point is that we should not move too quickly past the question: “How is one to live with apparently unbearable suffering? How is one to find any positive meaning in it?”

There is only one answer to these questions. The meaning of suffering can only be found in the heart of Christ. Christ takes our suffering up into his and gives it an eternal value. In saying this I don’t mean that psychological and medicinal remedies are not important for the person suffering from depression. I mean, rather, that artists and others suffering from depression need also to benefit from the spiritual aspect of their struggle. Artists are not special in this regard, but the cultural prominence of celebrities like Robin Williams highlights the crucial need of exploring the question of suffering in the only context in which the question can be answered: a Christian theological one.

Filed Under: Art and Culture Tagged: ,
August 11, 2014 4 Comments

Robin Williams, Rest in Peace

It was Barbara Nicolosi who said, in a talk I heard her give several years ago, that light comedy has its own role to play in the development of culture.”Just to make people laugh,” she said, “that, too, is a grace.”

Robin Williams died today, one of the great comedians of our time, and may God grant him every mercy and peace. Though his prodigious comic gifts would be enough to earn our praise, Williams was more than a comedian. He was also a gifted dramatic actor, as his Oscar-winning turn in Good Will Hunting eminently proved. I didn’t like everything Williams did, but so many of his performances, and not least his manic improvisations in interviews, delighted and charmed me.

I am saddened to hear that Williams’ battle with depression seems to have gotten the better of him. The artistic temperament and the depression that sometimes comes with it can be its own kind of cross, and those of us who are artists are well reminded to regularly pray for those in the arts and entertainment industry.

And so I pray for Robin Williams tonight, and for his family and all who mourn him, with special thanks to God for the graces that he gave us through this deeply talented man.

Robin Williams, rest in peace.

Filed Under: Art and Culture Tagged: ,
July 25, 2014 Leave a Comment

3 Questions for Zach Braff

Or anyone else who might be interested.

In his recent interview with Elvis Mitchell on KCRW’s The Treatment, actor-writer-director Zach Braff (Scrubs, Garden State) talked about his new film, Wish I Was Here, which Braff described as a story of a man “searching for himself in a quirky, funny way….struggling to find his own spirituality.” Zach no longer professes the Jewish faith in which he was raised and claims not to believe in any “higher power.” Braff’s intriguing interview raises three questions:

1. Why should human beings feel a spiritual void if there is no higher power to begin with? Is this a mere residue of a religious upbringing (Cf. “Catholic guilt”), or do human beings possess some kind of natural desire for the spiritual?

2. How is it possible that a human being would have to go in “search of the self”? What is the self that it is something that can be lost? And how does the search for the self relate to the struggle to find a spirituality? Is it the same struggle?

In the interview Mr. Braff states: “When you don’t believe in a higher power per se, what my spirituality is is finding some way of dealing with the, I don’t want to say ‘curse,’ but the mind-f@!# of living on a spinning rock in the middle of infinity. What my spirituality is is the science of it all, the earth, the elements, the fact that we’re evolved from cells and looking into nature. You know, I see God in little things, I mean I feel cheesy saying this but it’s the truth, in an orchid…I see that as my higher power…or you go online and see some bizarre-looking animal that lives a zillion miles under the sea and I see some higher power in that….”

3. The poet William Blake talked about the ability “To see a World in a grain of sand,/And Heaven in a wildflower….” Is that what you find, too, Mr. Braff, in the zygote and the orchid and the bizarre sea creature? If so, then this is an interesting kind of spirituality or transcendence, a transcendence based upon “the science of it all” in which you stand in what the novelist Walker Percy called “a posture of objectivity over against the world, a world which he [the scientist] sees as a series of specimens or exemplars, and interactions, energy exchanges, secondary causes….” From this godlike vantage point, the world indeed looks pretty spectacular, but also ultimately reducible to material actions and reactions of finite duration. Question: how is it possible to sustain transcendence or spiritual uplift when the object of one’s privileged vision, beautiful as it is, is also as prone to decay as you and I are?

Filed Under: Art and Culture, Writing in an Apocalyptic Time Tagged: , , , , , , , ,
July 7, 2014 Leave a Comment

Why, J.J. Abrams, Do You Feel the Need to Titillate?

I wish I could have been there at the script meeting when they discussed the scene between Carol (played by Alice Eve) and Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) when Kirk, although he’s been asked to turn around while she disrobes (no dressing room being available?), nonetheless turns around anyway and gets a load of Carol divulging her very best Victoria’s Secret underwear. I wish I could have been there to ask J.J. Abrams, “What exactly is the point? Why do you feel you need to titillate the men (boys) in your audience? Seeing Carol in her skivvies does absolutely nothing for your plot–absolutely nothing; it doesn’t even serve as prelude to a cheap romance between her and Kirk (at least not in this movie). So why, Mr. Abrams, do you feel the need to titillate? Is it because you think that men (boys), being what they are, need this sort of thing, even in a pretty darn good space adventure (and Star Trek: Into Darkness is a pretty darn good space adventure). Do you feel we can’t endure 120 minutes of your story without a little bit of soft porn thrown in? Why do you feel the need to pander in this way? Or do you think this is part of your “art”? Or did you feel you had to cave to some producer higher up in the food chain? What was it? I’d really like to know. Because you’re a good filmmaker, Mr. Abrams, and your film would have lost nothing if this scene had been completely rewritten. In any event, please know that I asked my 13 year-old son to look away while I forwarded past this scene. (Yes, that’s easy enough to do. But it sure disrupts the experience of watching your film.)

I also wish I could have been there at rehearsals to ask Alice Eve: “Really? Is soft porn really why you went into acting? Is it because you feel your acting talent can’t carry a scene that you allow yourself to be used in this way?”

Feminism is fraught with all sorts of problems, but one wishes that by now it would have succeeded at least in giving female actresses the courage not to allow themselves to be objectified by (predominantly male?) filmmakers–or by their own ambition.

Alas, this seems too much to wish.

Filed Under: Art and Culture, The Craft of Screenwriting Tagged: , , , , , ,
June 26, 2014 2 Comments

Terry Teachout on Art & Persuasion

Terry Teachout, drama critic for the Wall Street Journal and critic-at-large for Commentary, among other accomplishments, was just awarded a Bradley Prize by the Bradley Foundation. Teachout’s remarks upon accepting the award are well worth a read. Here’s a preview:

“Unfortunately, America also has its share of earnest, well-meaning, narrow-minded folk who don’t much care for art, as well as some who flat-out dislike it. I understand why they feel that way: art can sometimes open doors that you’d rather keep closed. In addition to giving comfort and joy, art also has the miraculous ability to let us live in other men’s skins, to test our perceptions and beliefs against theirs, and perhaps to be changed as a result. It does this by portraying the world creatively, heightening our perception and enriching our understanding of things as they are. Art makes sense of life.

“To strive toward so noble a goal, the artist must first of all be able to tell the truth as he sees it about the world he sees around him. That task can only be pursued to the fullest degree under the aspect of freedom. Where there is no freedom, there is no art, save at the risk of the artist’s neck. And this freedom includes, among many other things, freedom from the paralyzing obligation to persuade.”

Although I agree with virtually everything in these observations, Teachout is surely wrong, at the end of them, to divorce art from persuasion. For an artist “to tell the truth as he sees it about the world he sees around him” is, in fact, to persuade. It is to say, “This is how things are–and if you aren’t seeing things this way, you need to start.” Satchmo’s riffs, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”: these artists in these works are showing rather than telling. But in showing how things are they are calling us to a way of seeing we may not be used to. And that is a kind of argument, even if no words are involved.

I’ll have more on Teachout’s remarks tomorrow. Meanwhile, let me know what you think.

Filed Under: Art and Culture Tagged: , , , ,
June 22, 2014 3 Comments

Talking Children’s Literature with Sheila Liaugminas

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

On Tuesday, June 17 I had the pleasure of appearing on Sheila Liaugminas’s radio program, A Closer Look, in order to talk about children’s literature and the power of the imagination. It was full hour, and our conversation ranged over several topics:

  • my humorous Kingdom of Patria series for middle grade readers
  • the importance of good literature for children
  • why the imagination is an integral component of moral and spiritual formation at any age
  • the Catholic underpinnings of the whole genre of children’s literature
  • where writers get their ideas
  • the book and film, The Fault in Our Stars

You can enjoy listening to the interview here.

I’d love to know what you think of it and to continue the conversation.

Filed Under: Art and Culture, Kingdom of Patria Series, The Craft of Fiction Tagged: , , , , , , ,
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