I made a commitment (to no one in particular, but hey) to limiting myself just to writing comments in the ongoing essay exchange between Jonathan McDonald and Katy Carl, mostly because they’ve been running a pretty compelling ship already but also since there’s this never-ending, ever-growing, always-lurking pile of other potential posts I want to get around to some day – and anyway, a number of those deal with similar themes in connected contexts so it’d all come out eventually. But then I started responding to one of Walker’s comments* and things spun out of control. Thus: new post. Apologies.
As a side-note: polite, intellectually engaging comment culture = awesomesauce. Katy and Jonathan’s essays have really catalyzed us (both readers and contributors) into stepping up and making this blog more of a dialogue than a straight-up, one-way soap box. Bravo to all involved.
But onward!
For those new to the discussion, there’ve been five posts released to date on Deep Down Things (check the links above) all orbiting a nebula of related questions: how do we morally assess a work of art? What responsibility does a writer have to their readership? Under what circumstances might a piece of art do more damage than good to a person’s mind, heart or soul? How do we decide to not read/watch/listen to a book, movie or album on the grounds of potential harm it might do to us personally? And at what point would something like a ban/censorship be justified?
Katy’s recent essay took the discussion into much-anticipated concrete ground by taking some of the ideas worked through in preceding essays and applying them to Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, Purity – the particular ideas that’ve been developed so far make up a growing list of e-words (right now we have four: explicit, exploitative, enticing and endorsing). Walker, in a few comments below her post, summarized where the debate’s currently at and applied the same concepts to two different flicks: The Shawshank Redemption and The Silence of the Lambs.
What got me writing was the language he started using: that of giving a movie metaphorical marks based on e-word criteria – he’d hypothetically pass Shawshank but might give Silence a fail (for reasons he outlined). I’m sure he was mostly being rhetorical for the sake of exploring ideas (more, please!), but it brought up a potential way of moving forward that might cause just as many problems as it solves. That being said, I think a number of these issues would mostly crop up from not really clarifying what each of these words mean and what relationship they actually have to each other.
Let’s start by looking at, for example, the first two e-words: explicit and exploitative – I feel like we’ve already established these as two fairly separate (though related) concepts, and that the only one that may have an intrinsic moral element to watch out for might be the exploitative.** But trying to make clear-cut decisions on what art’s “good” or “bad” for consumption based on exploitativeness (or author-intentions of such) is still quite dicey – Katy brought that up by mentioning her late confessor’s advice that even exploitative material doesn’t necessarily have negative moral effects so long as there’s a certain disposition on the part of the reader. At this point I agree with her – though the way one would discern what disposition would be necessary is another kettle of fish altogether.
Making things even more complicated: what happens when an artist’s subject matter runs along the fault lines of the at-times incredibly subtle distinction between the two? I mentioned A Clockwork Orange (both film and book) in a previous comment and it’s coming to mind again along with (for different reasons) Tarantino’s movies.***
Clockwork, spoiler alert, is basically an old-fashioned thought experiment about the nature of free will, as well as about what we may sacrifice in the name of having secure societies – it was written by Anthony Burgess who, interestingly, struggled with the legacy of his Catholic faith for most of his creative life. His hero (if you can call him that [as he alternates between purported monstrosity and victimhood]) is Alex, a teenager in a near-future Britain whose hobbies include listening to Beethoven and committing acts of morbidly-excessive ultraviolence. Basically, he and his friends spend their evenings breaking into homes, beating old people with baseball bats and raping women in front of their loved ones. And while Alex takes it all with a sense of humour, it’s revolting to read or watch.
Our protagonist eventually goes on to be caught by the authorities and is placed in a system seeking to “cure” him of his violent impulses – the method involves subjecting him to incredibly invasive conditioning procedures. He’s basically shackled to a chair (complete with a device to make sure he can’t close his eyes [the image of him hooked up to this thing’s long become iconic]) and forced to watch clips of sickening crimes while getting zapped by electric shocks – all in hopes that, once released, he’d get nauseous and incapacitated the moment he’s tempted to steal, rape or beat anyone. This is his rehabilitation and it works.
It works indeed and it’s horrifying, though the horror’s part of the point. At the outset of the novel we’re helpless bystanders to his chaotic sprees, but then we’re caught in a place where we’re challenged to decide whether we see his treatment as fitting or too dehumanizing for even his degree of criminality. To make things even more complicated: he’s still a minor. The book/movie poses a deep moral question we wouldn’t really feel if we hadn’t been along to witness the depth of his sadism – it’s an explicit depiction that the author tries to justify (successfully, in my opinion). But it veers too close for comfort to the exploitative because, for Alex, the entire shebang is a big party and he soaks up the pleasure of every stray detail. We’re explicitly shown Alex’s (and not Burgess’s) exploitative attitude to suffering, and unfortunately the extent to which everything is shown (especially in the movie) could come off to some as exploitative itself. It’s a very thin line, and I’m sure there are people out there who do get off on watching the movie, despite Kubrick’s very clear feelings on the matter.****
So the exploitive and the explicit are not without their gray areas and, if we really think about it, that’s just part of their nature. We’ve been trying to articulate and form concrete principles these past few months, but this’s been hard as we’ve constantly been confronted with how art (much like people/the relationships between them) doesn’t fall easily into equations of “this + that = a good/bad thing for me.” So much here, again, depends not only on an author’s intent but also on the critical capacity of a culture (or sub-culture, as practicing Catholics are these days); focusing on educating ourselves/others in terms of *how* to read rather than what to read might be key to that. Obviously that’s an ideal, though, and we’re still far from that reality – any practical response we come up with has to take into account the facts of where we are, as compared to focusing nigh-exclusively on the dream of where we’d like to be.
I think it’d also be good at this point to try to clarify what exactly we’re trying to do here by applying these e-words: are we looking to justify why we keep coming back to (and are fed by) art that makes us morally uncomfortable? Are we looking to see (and define) the value of this kind of art in the face of movements that may reject it as something unfit for aesthetic consumption? Are we trying to define a concrete situation where we feel there could be an outright, unapologetic ban on a book, movie, song or image? Are we trying to sort out the kinds of moral culpability that apply to artists and their audience? While most of what’s being written in this vein has been deeply compelling, I wonder if we’re kinda losing sense of what it is we’re trying to figure out, and why we find the categories of explicit and exploitative to be relevant lenses through which to view art.
The second pair of e-words, enticing and endorsing (by which we mean titillation and glorification, yeah?) seems to focus in on the ways art could influence a person to, from a Catholic perspective, sin. On the one hand, this’s something that someone could easily support banning in the name of prudence: if it has the ability to harm someone, why allow access? Even flirting with the line could be seen as putting oneself in the near occasion of sin. Murky moral ground indeed. But while it might pose certain complications for the reader,***** I’d still hesitate to make the claim that it constitutes grounds not to read something at all. Again, to risk sounding like a broken a-track, so much depends on the reader and their state of mind, heart and critical awareness. That all being said, I’d be interested in hearing a case being made for “the book no person should read” as I think it might clarify some elements in this discussion. Does anyone want to tackle that? What works could be classified like this?
All that aside, even if a book is enticing/endorsing something Catholics can’t morally get behind, it’s still not a clear-cut case of “THIS IS BAD, WATCH OUT” – a person typically makes something enticing/endorsing when they sincerely believe the things they’re writing about are objectively true and a necessity for the world. And when someone goes through all that trouble then there’s usually something we can learn from it, maybe even something we ourselves don’t spend enough time thinking about
When enticingness was brought up in the essays, people were mostly (implicitly or explicitly) referring to sex – it’s a big topic when talking about censorship in general. It’s an obvious starting point to launch into this particular e-word, as presenting something with even slight sexual overtones can provoke really strong responses in some folks – it’s something people can easily claim, again in the name of prudence, should be heavily regulated (or banned) in art mostly for the fact that it could make it hard for someone to live the church’s call to chastity. Which could lead to a mindset of “if a movie shows this much skin or goes too far in showing sex, it crosses the line and shouldn’t be watched by Christians.”
To explore that thought, I want to talk about a film that feels a little funny to be bringing up on a Catholic website, as it’s definitely explicit, enticing and endorsing (though never exploitative) in a sexual sense: Shortbus. In short, it’s basically about an apartment in New York where orgies take place and the film follows a number of characters who, for different reasons, frequent it.
Before going on, I gotta say that this isn’t an all-out recommendation of the film. And I’m not claiming it was necessarily a good idea to make a movie like this – analyzing that would take a whole post (or series) of its own. I will say, however, that the filmmakers seemed to make it for the purpose of actually legit exploring sexuality – and not in the sense of when a TV channel or movie advert screams “we’re exploring sexuality!” when they actually mean “hey, check out these breasts” (HBO, anyone?). John Cameron Mitchell (the director), as it turns out, is more concerned with the emotional impact of sex, relationships and the senses than with penises and vaginas (though there happen to be plenty of both), and has been quoted as wanting to explore sex on screen in a de-eroticized way so as to get at the kernels of the human experience that’re excluded by the gaudiness/exploitativeness of porn. The movie shows everything (people aren’t even faking sex in the film – they’re actually having sex) because the filmmakers find there’s nothing to be ashamed of or hide – this isn’t maliciousness or shallow exploitation…they know what they’re doing and deeply believe it needs to be done. There’s no manipulation in the common sense of the word, just the logical conclusion of a mindset that exists around us today.
This film presents a difficult case for analysis, as it not only promotes lifestyle choices that go against church teaching on sexuality, but the imagery itself might actually cause the person to, from a Catholic outlook, sin right then and there. But again (broken record!) I think it depends on the person and their approach to the film – if I’m honest, I didn’t feel aroused by it. The film was definitely promoting what we consider to be sin, but because it a) resisted the exploitative and b) found the human roots of the characters’ journeys, it could be argued that merit could be found in watching it. It’s not Fifty Shades – the director himself has been quoted as wanting to “remove the cloud of arousal to reveal emotions and ideas that might have been obscured by it.” I feel like I learned a few important (and poignant) things, even though they were mixed in with stuff I don’t believe. And these were things I don’t think would’ve been touched on in a slightly tamer rom-com. That’s not to say, though, that one couldn’t learn those things without watching the film. And it wouldn’t be everyone’s experience watching it either – like, for a given person, it could really be a disaster. But then again for someone else it might constitute a word desperately needing to be heard. Or maybe it was just a bad idea altogether. Thing is, though, institutions like the Index weren’t built to address this kind of nuance – it was meant to be a blanket set of recommendations across the board. How, moving forward in its absence, do we build structures able to deal with subtleties like this? Is it even possible?
That being said, though, while it’s really easy to get overly tied up (not without reason) in the whole sexual element of the enticing-endorsing thing, it’s not the exclusive (or even most potentially sketchy) case here – it’s just happens to be the most obvious.****** It’s much easier to ignore books, movies, songs or images making compelling intellectual and emotional cases against the church – I’m thinking here about Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (the first one was made into a film) and Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael. They were both incredibly popular and made direct accusations against the church, followed up by calls to reject and move beyond it.
His Dark Materials might be best summed up as a counter-Narnia, one in which a compelling and emotional story unfolds that literally has the main characters embracing the fall and making war against heaven in hopes of killing God. I am literally not making any of this up – in Pullman’s worldview, the Christian perspective is a half-formed perversion of truth that demands to be overcome. To that end he created a painful, original, beautiful story in which children team up with fallen angels to take down the universe’s biggest tyrant (aka, YHWH), all for the sake of the world.
Intellectually (and emotionally) it’s both enticing and endorsing – Pullman makes a case and pulls at your heartstrings in equal measure. His writing, plot and characterization are so powerful that, even if you’re not on board with his metaphysics/worldview, you’re still irrevocably swept up – and he makes it very, very easy to get on board with the whole deicide shindig. Would it have landed on the Index? You can bet your golden compass on it. Does it have value regardless? Absolutely. While reading it for a university class, I was smacked upside the face by stunning images and wholly inspired as both writer and storyteller – I felt myself growing as a reader and a person. Yes, to me the final scene was more than a slight cheap shot and ended up wounding me (not in a fun or positive sense) in a way I’ve never experienced before or after in literature. But even if it frustrates me beyond end, it is utterly a work of art. Damn fine art at that.
This could be contrasted with a book like Ishmael – as compared to the subtle and extensive aesthetic pleasures of His Dark Materials, this one is more of a didactic dialogue that should’ve been an essay. It’s a bit of a gimmicky book, even if there are beautiful parts to it that are downright fascinating to read. Which is interesting, because it (and its sequels) are basically about someone talking to a gorilla who tries to convince people (the reader included) to become an antichrist.
Yes, cue the freak-out, but let’s take it in context here: the writer believes that humans, way back when, created problems that spiraled out of control – accordingly, we needed a saviour. So then we, apparently, made up the idea of a saviour, Christ. The author isn’t against Jesus as a person, but believes the idea of needing a saviour has brought about countless tragedies and wasted lives. To cling to him, in this worldview, is to cling to the old paradigm that made Jesus “necessary” in the first place. So the idea to become antichrist is the thought of going to the root sources of our problems (which, to the author, isn’t about concupiscence or the fall so much as how we relate to the earth, agriculture and each other) and solving them.
As contrasted with Pullman’s work, Quinn’s (taking the oft-traveled [particularly by many Christian authors] road of bashing a message over the reader’s head with the subtlety of a garbage truck) is no staggering work of heartbreaking genius. From an aesthetic point of view there isn’t as much value to the reader, and so leaving it ignored is hardly going to diminish the culture. But, even in a book like this (antichrist-y ambitions and all), the arguments from a place of compassion and and genuine desire to make the world a better place. And, from a standpoints of ideas, even if they more-than-slightly presumptive, the experience of reading it is undeniably moving – the book’s enticing and endorsing of a mindset that Christians, by believing in Jesus/grace/salvation/the whole package, resist wholeheartedly. But it’s neither explicit or exploitative, and it’s a valuable text in terms of understanding a specific worldview. Reading it holds the risk, for someone still struggling to understand what Christianity suggests about the world (regardless of age), of accepting an opinion of the church that doesn’t jive with what it actually says about itself. The way it’s written makes it anything but a neutral experience. There were a number of things that tugged at my heart while reading it, which made for a painful experience of the sort you get when you see someone important to you being deeply, deeply misunderstood. And I can completely understand if that sort of pain’s reason enough for someone to decide not to read a particular book.
Both books reject popular Christian interpretations of the fall: Ishmael sees it as the human decision to begin dominating the earth (or, in the book’s lingo, being a “taker” instead of a “leaver”), while His Dark Materials goes so far as to claim the fall was probably one of the best things to ever happen to us as a species. Both try to make an engaging case against a Christian worldview through art – it’s not done out of maliciousness but with the best of intentions and we need to be aware (and thankful, in a way) for that. Response to art like this can involve an outright ban or boycott in the name of protecting minds (that legit could be influenced) or, conversely, call for an attempt to critically engage with it.******* But, while engaging with art seems like an obvious good choice, it’s been mentioned on this blog before how difficult it is to raise the critical awareness of a culture. Again, we have to deal with realities rather than with ideals, even though we don’t really know yet just how to do that.
But imagine if we moved towards equipping people with the tools to engage with this kind of stuff? Imagine if Catholic lit courses taught both of these books from a critical perspective? What if we started challenging people to judge the worldview of a piece of art critically instead of assuming we just mindlessly imbibe what we read (which, to be fair, does happen on occasion [though, granted, it’s a tad more complicated than that])? But again, these questions deserve posts all their own.
Bringing things back, I guess I just want to say the four e-words might better be served as lenses for analysis rather than checkmarks on a list to pass/fail a work of art, or to judge whether it should be banned or boycotted. I think they’re just a good way to describe whether a work falls into a category let’s call, for lack of a better term “morally ambiguous” for its potential to lead a person into sin. I would say that A Clockwork Orange avoids this altogether even if it’s content matter can really scar a sensitive reader/watcher. But art that solidly lands in this category still varies greatly in terms of how Catholics can respond: Shortbus and His Dark Materials happen to be powerful works that have the capacity to feed particular, dry parts of your soul. Ishmael, even if it doesn’t reach the depths necessary to really enrich a person, contains ideas that appeal profoundly to humane parts of a person.
So what’s the point of all this? It all comes down to asserting the value, even if just to a limited number of people, of works of art that raise very, very red flags in our ever-forming list of e-word criteria. I could waste exorbitant amounts of ink with a close reading of these four titles, but in the end I’d conclude by simply arguing that blanket bans, even if it did protect certain minds/hearts/souls, would still deprive the world of something – maybe even something beautiful.
Where can we go from here? I guess some questions still remaining include: how does one discern whether a morally ambiguous work of art will help or hurt you? How do you decide whether to recommend art like this? If, in some parallel universe, the church was in charge of book presses and movie studios around the world, would it be more harmful or helpful to limit access to morally ambiguous art? How much moral ambiguity is too much? How can we challenge people to be able to pick things apart for themselves so as to take the metaphorical meat and leave the bones? Even if we can master that, what risks might still be involved?
I’m very interested in seeing where this conversation goes.
—
*The response was to a particular note found mid-way through the comment section of Katy’s engagement with Jonathan Franzen’s Purity – it starts with “I need to be careful myself about not confusing recommendation with what I think the four e’s are about, our provisional scale for evaluating moral harm that could be done by a work to an ‘average adult’ (not kids or the scrupulous).”
**Jonathan expressed some reservations about giving explicitness a free pass, and I’d love to hear more from him about that.
***As an aside, an analysis of Tarantino’s work on this front would be quite fascinating.
****Interesting factoid: the original text of Burgess’s novel included a final chapter where Alex eventually grows to reject his past and stop feeding his violent impulses, but the chapter was cut from the original publication in America and, thus, from Kubrick’s film. The one-chapter-less novel and the film end with Alex resisting his conditioning, but it stops short of his eventual turn toward empathy and active citizenship.
*****So, in the interests of not having to say “the reader/listener/watcher/audience,” I’ll just stick to the language of authors and readers. Yes, it’s not the most accurate way of doing it, but we don’t really have a general word in English for someone who engages with art other than the plural noun “audience,” and it doesn’t really cut it here.
******And, as the most obvious, the most regulatable.
*******For an related (though personal) exploration of the relationship between boycotting and engaging with challenging art, check out the “Beyond the Spotlight” posts from a month ago.
Josh Nadeau lives in Russia and, when not teaching or writing, may be found winter cycling, hitchhiking or engaged in general shenanigans. He hopes, when he’s older, to maintain a sense of awe.
Thanks, Josh. This is an interesting addition to a fabulous conversation.
Modern-day discussions about literature and morality seem to move freely between writing and film, and it is easy to see why: the imagery of film is so accessible and visceral–often moreso than writing. There is much less work for the imagination to do. I think it’s worth asking the question of whether the relationship between film and viewer is the same as between book and reader, and also what impact the addition of actors is on the moral picture. Much can be simulated in film, but in the case of a film like Shortbus, where the sex is real, it’s much harder to mount a moral defense of the art form. There’s a difference between writing a sex scene and filming one. Whatever I claim my fictional characters do with or to whom, no sin is necessarily committed. However, it is clear that there was something objectively wrong being done in the filming of Shortbus, and I do not think that there is an abstracted stance that can make it morally beneficial. This is “art” that is by its nature damaging to the soul. Not finding it arousing is not justification for watching it. You say you learned things you couldn’t learn from a romcom, and found merit in watching it. I would argue instead that you cannot derive true merit from the moral abasement of others. Abstracting oneself from the moral reality of the film to find a deeper message from it doesn’t alter the basic disorder inherent in its filming one jot. There is nothing about virtue that we can *only* learn through the medium of sin.
Ironically, this is precisely what we learn through A Clockwork Orange. Aversion therapy doesn’t work because brutality cannot teach gentleness. Violence breeds violence. Will everyone who watches violent images become violent? No. A well-formed person will only be repulsed. But that in itself will not justify them watching it, especially if the moral provenance of the image is itself suspect. Now, I’m not actually making these points to lecture you on what films you watch. What I find interesting is that I would not make the same points about books that depict violence. Perhaps there is something to disanalagous in the creation of books and films to make film references helpful in this conversation. The making of a film is so much more complicated than that of a book, even if a script is something like a book, and a scriptwriter is another form of author. The actors are also moral agents, and their relationship to the material and the audience is a complicated one. (One we could explore, but perhaps not here; not now.) Likewise, I think the relationship of a viewer to a film is disanalagous to thatbof a reader to a book in several key ways: the difference in imagery, the time-relationship, the shared experience with other viewers that may be of a different kind than a book club. For these and other not-yet-fleshed-out ideas, I would uphold A Clockwork Orange as a potentially-harmful, but justifiable, book, but Shortbus as unjustifiable.
Hi Victoria!
Yes, I completely agree with what you’re saying – as this post was already broaching 4000 words, though, I didn’t give the nature of making Shortbus as much attention as I gave the act of watching it. Nowhere here did I want to imply that I think the act of making it was morally neutral – that’s more than clear. And the moral weight is even more extreme because the director is encouraging and recruiting people to act in it who might not have considered doing it in the first place.
I think I was just drawn to examples that draw on extreme lines here – Clockwork for extreme depictions of extreme violence, and Shortbus for trying to mine the space in which beyond-explicit sexual depictions (normally the realm of porn) are humanized and made fodder for insight and connection. I don’t think that watching a movie or reading a book means condoning the act of creating it, and so I still see them as two separate acts that, in specific contexts, are morally independent of each other. Engaging with art, and believing that there is moral room to do so, is not necessarily mounting “a moral defense of the art form.” That’s not to ignore, though, the fact that watching is dependent on the act of creating. It’s a complex thing.
What do you mean, though, when you say “art form?” Is the form you speak of that of “art that causes people to sin in the act of creating it?” In which case I agree wholeheartedly.
To me, this is the moral question posed at the heart of Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (and, to some extent, The Wrestler) – it’s a movie about an incredibly damaged girl who delves further into fragmentation in the quest to deliver the perfect dance. The film is also fairly explicit and could’ve been one of the movies described above (perhaps a future post?), and I had a conversation with a guy after watching it about whether the protagonist’s decision to destroy herself to create art was justified or not. To me, her actions weren’t justified, but her eventual performance of “Swan Lake” probably did move the audience in deep, visceral, necessary places. The creation and the spectating (that’s not the right word, but an appropriate one escapes me) are two separate moral experiences. Granted, the audience didn’t know what it cost the ballerina to dance like that – but would it have made a difference if they did? What kind of difference would it make? And would one’s disposition make a difference?
But getting back to your comments – I agree that the nature of reading a book and watching a movie are two completely different things and have different moral dimensions. One wouldn’t have to sin in the same way to write a novelization of Shortbus. The question here that fascinates me is “can engaging with art created in morally problematic (not even “ambiguous” at this point) ways produce fruit?” and “if yes, is that fruit worth the potential risks?” but I think the question you seem to be addressing here is “can the creation of this type of art be condoned?” (to which we both would agree “no”). Am I wrong in assuming that?
Since you mention (by accident) “Swan Lake”, I have to say that the story the ballet is usually choreographed to portray should also have been banned by the Index: the Prince kills himself having rashly made two conflicting vows, and Swan Queen dies, but … then they are lifted up to Heaven together?
I haven’t seen “Black Swan”, but it sounds like Aaronofsky is channeling (or maybe highlighting?) the same broken moral sense.
Jonathan brought up a good point below:
“The old Index rarely included works of literature, because those are so much harder to judge in intent and effect than non-fiction. For a fictionist to appear on the Index, he usually had to include obscene sexual content (e.g., Joyce) or outright anti-Catholicism (e.g., Hugo). Trying to level a theological argument against a novel is like trying to argue politics with a tree. You cannot attack or dissect a novel or poem directly, you can only try to explain the effect it is likely (but not certain) to have on most readers, and critique or censor it from there.”
Something didn’t land on the Index necessarily because of showing (or even glorifying) content that was not in line with Catholic thought – otherwise things like Beowulf and a number of Shakespeare’s revenge plays would’ve probably made the list. From what I understand, the Index wasn’t about getting rid of depictions of un-Catholic life/philosophy as things that were perceived as directly attacking the church or likely to lead someone away. And even then, there were a lot of things that were added or taken off the list over time after major discernment, so the people making the list themselves were unsure about a lot of things. The fact of having the list itself, even though there were definite benefits, also did some kind of damage. So there’s more than a bit there that’s there needing to be taken into account.
But a lot of this’s visible only in hindsight and you have to give credit to people for doing what they could with what they had – that could sound nauseatingly patronizing but I don’t mean it in that way at all. I mean, I wonder what invisible “monstrosities” we’re doing now that’ll only be obvious to people in a hundred years. Like, it’s too easy either to give shallow praise/criticism of the past (and decisions made there) without digging into the underlying context or trying to see what complicated aftereffects went out. And that stuff is not easy to parse through.
On a tangental note: “Swan Lake” has actually had a troubled history of people playing with the endings for quite some time – occasionally it’s more tragic and occasionally they get saved from their deaths (though the latter kinda feels like Romeo & Juliet without the mass suicide).
Also tangental: Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” veers more towards the descriptive than prescriptive mode of art (two concepts to be further explored in an upcoming post), and so the broken moral sense that’s very much there can be more attributed to his protagonist than to the director (though he is not without his own set of baggage). Btw, this is the guy that went on to direct “Noah.”
On the topic of ending-modification; while the author is not dead to us, of course, still it is the Courts that have the job of interpreting Laws; so I don’t mind that sometimes a reader has a better understanding of what’s going on in some work of fiction than its author (or director) might. I don’t mind having a better way to read (say) Harry Potter than J.K.Rowling suggests in interviews; and it seems to me that there’s a Great Epic waiting to be told, still, at which Lucas’s Star Wars prequels are just a bad attempt. So if people do correct Swan Lake, that’s fine with me; the music doesn’t tell us what happens (though of course, it’s easily possible to vary some story and make it worse).
But now you’ve intrigued me: while, yes, plenty of “Greek Myth” stories just can’t be Catholic, but what dangerous ideas does one find in reading Beowulf?
(Yes, Aronofsky went on to direct “Noah”, having already done “Requiem for a Dream” and “π”. His films do not come from a happy place.)
Got mixed up with the Beowulf comment (may the forces that be take away my English degree) and was thinking about other revenge-based longpoems. Ones against people and not monsters.
I think that Aronofsky’s early period (Pi, Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain) represents his strongest and best work – unhappy places are not necessarily bad things for the production of art. Dostoyevsky can testify to that.
Hi Josh, a great contribution to a great ongoing discussion. Since you asked the question about what are we trying to do here, I think it’s worth remembering that it all started with Johnathan’s attempt to wrestle with the question of how does a Catholic author, now deprived of the clerical oversight once provided by the Index, censor him/ herself? All of the other angles you mentioned for attacking the problematic relationship between morality and art are very valid and worthy of discussion, but this series began with a single, specific goal – and I think you have provided at least one definitive check box on the self-censorship list by bringing up Shortbus. If the creation of the work requires the commission of a sin, it’s definitely time to stop. Now, as consumers (still not the best possible word, but maybe closer than audience?) of art, once the sin(s) required to create Shortbus have been committed, the question becomes, do we participate in that sin by viewing the movie? We need a more experienced theologian than me to give a definitive answer, but I think it depends on the circumstances. Buying a ticket – financially rewarding the efforts of the filmmakers’ sin – seems to me more problematic than if the showing were free. But then, if one is a Catholic film critic whose work requires thoughtful engagement with morally problematic films, does that extenuate the circumstances? I’ll be honest – I don’t know.
However, it is unlikely that any Catholic artist who takes the question of self-censorship seriously would be tempted to commit a flagrant sin a la Shortbus in the service of his/ her art. The temptation would be toward more subtle sins – and perhaps the biggest temptation of all, to view the mere engagement with one’s characters’ sins as a sin in itself. That one might be worth a post… though I’ve been trying to restrain myself from formally posting about this series because Katy and Johnathan (and now you) have been doing it so well.
I think you’re spot-on in referring to the “four-e’s” as lenses rather than checklists. Art is too subtle for checklists to be anything but problematic, with very rare exceptions (such as mentioned above.)
Hey Karen!
Yup, we started with a straight-up question about how Catholics should or should not go about creating art, but then (especially in the com-boxes) it started morphing a little bit. This post is a bit of a direct response to Walker’s comments when he started expanding discussion of the e-words to how we recommend and engage with art, and so a lot of these issues got brought into it. There was a lot of talk as well about the moral responsibilities of the audience, and so I kinda continued in that vein.
I didn’t even think, to be honest, about buying a ticket as supporting the producers of a film – in Russia we have a whole other set of laws regarding copyright and streaming services, and so accessing something on the internet without money being changed is less morally/legally fraught (although I’m sure some might argue differently). But this is a really important point.
There was a lot of talk in previous essays about the moral participation of the audience and the duty of the artist to guard against potential moral ambiguities – there were some comments made that seemed to paint the audience in a very passive light, thus increasing the weight of the artists’ duty. While I don’t want to downgrade artist responsibility, stripping the audience of moral agency can really lead to a writer becoming too paralyzed over potential harm to really go to the places they need to go in a work. And so we get a slew of banalities instead of art that engages with the pain we actually encounter. So I guess this particular entry could be framed as focusing on the audience and their particular post-Index situation, as well as how their path of discernment is just as fraught with nuance.
I think a discussion of the topic might not be comprehensive until we get a bit more of a holistic angle on how both artist and audience participate in the process. But it does veer indeed from the original post 🙂
You had me at orgy.
Just kidding. I ain’t no moral theologian, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that a movie like “Shortbus” is immoral in the making, promoting, and viewing thereof. The existence of real insights into human nature and weakness notwithstanding (and I do not reject the idea that even a movie like this could have real moments of insight and beauty), I don’t see any justification for its existence or propagation.
On the other hand, I rather like the Russian film “Andrei Rublev,” which includes a sequence that could surreptitiously be called a “pagan fertility rite.” I don’t know if that sequence is justifiable in and of itself, even though it is bookended by an explicit (ha!) disapproval of the pagan rite by characters in the story. The title character’s curiosity gets the better of him, and he wants to see the rite up close, only to be coerced into participation. Indeed, the sequence *could* be read as a warning against lascivious curiosity, because it quickly turns into a very slippery slope.
Interesting that you bring up “Hannibal” in passing, even if only as a meme image. I was recently talking to a friend of mine, an older Catholic man, who thought (without having watched any of it) that the show promoted murder and perverse willfulness by wrapping it in the package of enchanting cinematography and charismatic acting. As much as I like the show, and think that it does not, in the end, promote violence, I could see his point. The show does make violence appear beautiful rather than disgusting or petty, and I can believe that some people could be misled or corrupted by that appearance. (Oh, and “Hannibal” was a network show, not cable.)
The old Index rarely included works of literature, because those are so much harder to judge in intent and effect than non-fiction. For a fictionist to appear on the Index, he usually had to include obscene sexual content (e.g., Joyce) or outright anti-Catholicism (e.g., Hugo). Trying to level a theological argument against a novel is like trying to argue politics with a tree. You cannot attack or dissect a novel or poem directly, you can only try to explain the effect it is likely (but not certain) to have on most readers, and critique or censor it from there.
When I’m not reading works of great pretentious literature, I will occasionally pick up a novel from the detective-fantasy-adventure series “The Dresden Files.” The author Jim Butcher actually has a pretty good head on his shoulders regarding the bad effects of sexual promiscuity—I’m certain he’s close to actually becoming Catholic; pray for him!—but that doesn’t stop him from portraying said promiscuous behavior rather explicitly in his stories. It’s easy enough to skip those passages when I’m reading the novels, but they are troubling enough that I hesitate to recommend them to other male readers. This is actually a fairly common problem in action-adventure novels written for men: cheap sex appeal, post-coital guilt optional.
My next blog post on all this will probably use Mr. Chaucer’s deathbed retraction of his vulgar and obscene works as a starting point of Catholic self-censorship. I don’t know that I agree with Chaucer’s own judgment entirely, but his is a good example of a Catholic artist worried about the ill effects that may have come from his work.
“Andrei Rublev” is one I’ve thought about as well – the ritual sequence you talk about is certainly extended enough to give one pause. On the one hand, I’m sure there’ve been countless folks, remote in hand, waiting to pause the flick at just the right moment. On the other hand, I was surprised at how (both in Tarkovsky’s film and in Shortbus) there were explicit depictions of the human body that were yet somehow de-eroticized – it’s a bit of a puzzling cinematic device and I don’t know how they did it exactly.
On a bit of a tangent, I think that particular scene (and the approach therein) kinda speaks to how Russia (both now and during the USSR) has a much better handle on the difference between nudity and pornography (or, as one blogger tastefully put it, between breasts and boobs). As in, the body isn’t nearly as sexualized over there (and in East Europe generally) as it is over in North America – there’s much less anxiety generally concerning the body and how it looks/is perceived, which is incredibly refreshing. And, I imagine, less room for occasions of sin.
But that brings up the whole thing about what one can recommend in good conscience with regard to culture, upbringing or even age, which is a whole other complicated can of bananas to open.
Agreed that fantastic cinematography can make anything glamourous (even if the showrunners don’t support what’s being done) – more on that when the eventual post on Tarantino comes out. *If* the eventual Tarantino post comes out?
Question: you mention thinking Shortbus is “immoral in the making, promoting, and viewing thereof” – I can certainly get behind the first, and also behind the second in the traditional “buy tickets and enjoy!” sense of promotion, but could you describe a bit more of the dynamics of what might make it undeniably and across-the-board immoral to watch? Is it the explicitness, the potential temptation, the thought that watching-means-supporting or something else altogether? It seems to be a particularly important facet of the discussion at hand.
Another tangent: I actually don’t watch TV outside my laptop, so I’m not even sure what the difference is between cable and network, or which shows are on what.
It’s hard to know how to explain why I think watching an explicit film about orgies is immoral without sounding like a smart-ass. I will email you soon. 🙂
“Avoid sounding like a smartass” is a daily mantra. Looking forward to reading your stuff soon
Could it be fodder for a new post?*
Is all this just a black hole of posting material from which we will never recover?
*Seriously, though, getting down to the nitty-gritty of what precisely would make something across-the-board immoral to watch/read/consume is kinda one of the main threads of this string of posts, so it would be really cool to have that be part of the general discussion rather than in private email land.
Now I know who the brainy one is, I’ll keep loniokg for your posts.
It’s immoral to watch because people were exploited sinfully to create the movie, and you are watching them commit immoral acts. We are quite probably being stimulated ourselves. Wouldn’t it be immoral to watch any of those scenes in person? Why would you want to? Your viewing supports those who made the film and debased themselves to act in it. The letters in the New Testament are full of admonitions to not even mention immorality. We are supposed to keep custody of our eyes. A movie like that fills our eyes with evil acts.
And the Old Testament is full of descriptions of wickedness. Is it immoral to retell the story of Absalom appropriating his father’s harem? The rape of Dinah? The division of the Levite’s concubine? I’m not suggesting it would be ok to depict these stories graphically on stage or on screen, nor even to tell these stories to young ones, but St. Paul’s admonition is not a simplistic command for imaginative purity. I’m not disagreeing with your moral general sensibilities. I think they are well-formed, and that revulsion is the best response to a movie like “Shortbus.”
The only reason I even happened upon “Andrei Rublev” in the first place was that Vatican list. It’s a good film for the most part, but I cannot quite justify the way the “fertility rite” sequence was filmed. Whether that is enough to condemn the film as a whole, I don’t know, but the papal stamp of approval on that list still gives me uncomfortable pause.
Hi Roseanne!
I agree with Jonathan that lines from St. Paul like “dwell on whatever is good and true” don’t necessarily imply that we shouldn’t talk about the truth of sin whatsoever – are there other particular verses that you’re thinking of?
In an above comment I asked the question “what is it that might make something undeniably, across-the-board immoral to watch?” with a couple possible answers:
a) the explicitness
b) potential occasion of sin
c) the thought that watching-means-supporting-what-you-watch
To which I’d add (thanks, Karen!):
d) monetarily supporting the producers by paying for it
Figuring out the precise dynamics of how it works is a worthwhile (and potentially very necessary) thing. I think that supporting the movie by buying a ticket/the film itself definitely crosses the line into actual support, but what if there wasn’t any transaction involved? The explicitness itself only creates immoral situations where a person is tempted – so what if, even with it being the film that it is, a person wasn’t tempted to objectification or direct sexual sin? If you walk into it knowing that you’re probably going to be tempted in ways that will go beyond your ability to resist, then yes it’s an occasion of sin – but what if that wasn’t the context/mindset with which you were going into it?
Which then leads into “c)” – you wrote that my “viewing supports those who made the film and debased themselves to act in it.” I’m not entirely convinced here – if there was money involved then absolutely I’m rewarding them in a way for doing it, and if I was writing reviews in a public magazine encouraging people to go out and see it then it would also be suspect, but that’s not the situation here either. This is analysis for the sake of better understanding people and art – so is there still morally suspect support that’s going out to the producers? If so, how? That’s not meant to be facetious – I’m just trying to get to the core of the question.
The question of “why would you want to watch something like this?” is addressed down below, though in a general context and not just in the context of this film.
I’m not sure if the motivation of “not filling our eyes with evil images” can be applied to every context, because there are lots of cases where people are doing great work all over the world and have to do so in countries and contexts where terrible things happened and are trying to make sense of it all so as to work towards preventing it from happening again – their eyes are filled with evil and the effects of evil, and they put themselves in that position for the sake of what they hope to be the greater good. Maybe they break because of it. Maybe they are wounded. Maybe that woundedness is used to help others who are wounded. It’s not a simple thing.
A movie about orgies is immoral. All the sophisticated verbiage you can muster is not enough to make it legitimate. It is evil to have written it, produced, directed, acted in it, or watched it. Or promote it as valuable. Catholics who justify something like that are just too sophisticated for their own salvation. Such a movie is an occasion for sin, no matter what the intention is.
And I don’t understand why you are getting so much space at Dappled Things to promote this kind of stinking thinking. I turned “Andrei Rublev” off after I saw enough to be shocked at why it was on the Vatican website’s best film list. Ask your confessor about the sinfulness of watching a movie that shows orgies with people really having sex. Unless you have a modernist one at your disposal.
I think that one of the things that we’re getting tied up in is a difference of what we think art is and can be – we’ve all been going around talking whether or not a piece of art is moral or immoral, but I wonder if (philosophically speaking) this is actually proper to do.
I think about people in the past who labelled snakes as immoral creatures and killed them where they were found, or those who would believe that a weapon (one particularly designed to kill people, rather than animals) in and of itself is evil. Neither of these things have moral weight (because they’re objects and not moral agents), but the kinds of interactions that people have with them can indeed be so. It might have been immoral to create a sword with the hope that it would be used to kill your neighbour, but it isn’t immoral to study it to learn as much as we can about the people who made it or the situations that lead to its creation. I wonder if art is the same way, and if we can really say with philosophical integrity that “Fifty Shades” or “Shortbus” are intrinsically moral or immoral objects. As objects, do they carry the weight of their creator’s intentions?
Even if we can’t say with integrity (and with certainty) if they are indeed intrinsically moral or immoral (though I obviously lean at the moment towards “objects have no intrinsic moral weight”), we can without a doubt say they certainly have influence over people. But, again, let’s look at the analogy of the sword. Imagine it lying in the middle of a field – it’s rather a harmless thing, really, just sticking up there. But if there’s a desperate farmer whose family was just killed by members of a local (and other) ethnicity, and he comes into that field and sees the sword, he may very well be tempted to use that sword to kill a different (probably uninvolved) person’s family with it. So, yes, if the sword wasn’t there then the person might not have gotten hotheaded and committed those sins and there would be less violence and probably a couple more people alive. But, really, it wasn’t the sword that was influential – it was the person’s disposition and background circumstances, projected onto the sword, that really influenced him to pick it up and start slaughtering innocent people and leading him, himself, to become the monster he hated.
I wonder if looking at art in this frame might be helpful for us – like, is it possible to take the sword out of the field and into a museum? To take an object out of a dangerous context for the purposes of trying to figuring out as much as we can about why the killing started? It’s obviously not a direct or perfect analogy by any means, but I hope you’re getting what I’m going for here.
That said, there’s a lot of art that would need to be just slightly moved out of context for the influence to moral harm to be negated or downplayed, but Shortbus might be better compared to an enchanted sword that really would play on the mind of the holder. But I chose the example of Shortbus for analysis precicely because, unlike with “Fifty Shades” or other elements of straight-up porn, there *are* elements in there that could be useful or beneficial, but they’re bound up so much with parts that could influence a person to sin that the questions rises: to what point do we give up on that piece of potential good? At what point are we able to uncomplicately throw out the baby with the bathwater? And those are the questions that I’m interested in with regards to Shortbus. I wonder if there’s a context to engage with art like this which would enable one to get through the shell and get at the nut.
I was moved by certain beauties in the film and I am trying to see if there’s a way that they can be rescued, as it were, from the intentions of the filmmakers and the sins of everyone involved in bringing the film to fruition. And I’m not letting this go because I want to believe there’s a way not to leave any beauty behind – films like this are the front line of questions like that, and if we abandon the act of asking those questions then there’s a chance that something’ll be lost. Maybe something that’ll be essential to some people or some contexts. I’m not advocating that everyone should watch this movie – I just want to know if *any* practicing Catholic can watch it morally and try to salvage the moral disaster that it is and bring whatever fruit out possible of it. In the end, this isn’t really about Shortbus and it won’t end with Shortbus – this is about whether or not God is expressed even in the midst (though independent) of sin in a way that we might not be expecting, and if there’s any way for anyone to, without falling, wipe his face.
I wouldn’t label the attempt as “stinking thinking,” but I believe you said that because all this might smell of an attempt at moral compromise, of disguising one’s own morbid curiousities as a kind of cultural philanthropy. Which is why I value all your comments and contributions here – you ask questions and challenge people for the sake of the unguarded person who might not be able to parse out all this stuff. I keep talking about what might be lost by dismissing art like this, and you reply about what might be lost by even bringing it up and exposing it to a larger amount of people. We’re both concerned with loss, though with different losses. And I think there’s room for both concerns here, though they seem on a certain level to be in conflict.
Some people would say that this’s a kind of hair-splitting that creates issues where none existed before – I would suggest that these issues were always there but they aren’t really talked about. And I wonder, as I wondered in the Spotlight-related three-parter from last month, if we’re contributing to the broken state of the world by not asking them. All of this in the end, as it all does, comes down to the salvation of souls. And I wonder if we’re inhibiting the mission by not calling a spade a spade. Which, I’m sure, is a statement that could also be used against this kind of analysis. There’s a kind of mystery here.
So, lots of expected conversation about Shortbus (and a bit about A Clockwork Orange), but I’m very curious to hear people’s thoughts about the other two books. Ishmael doesn’t have the artistic kapow to really be that unforgetable/necessary, but His Dark Materials presents a really interesting case for discussion – heck, it could easily get a whole post/series on its own.
I ran out of time to talk about His Dark Materials in my first comment. I agree that “His writing, plot and characterization are so powerful that, even if you’re not on board with his metaphysics/worldview, you’re still irrevocably swept up” with regard to the first book. It’s a damn good story that happens to be informed by a very perverse world view. But I thought the second and third books failed to deliver. They’re more like the atheist equivalent of preachy “Christian Lit.” I thought the insistence on Pullman’s world view took precedence over good storytelling, to the point that none of his characters were genuine characters anymore, just symbols in an atheist fable – which I suspect is probably the reason they never made the sequels into movies. Who is really going to pay money to watch a bunch of kids fight a god who isn’t even all that terrifying, just petty?
Yeah, that’s what I thought about the very end, though I felt the second book was also really powerful. And the scene in the third one where they lead the souls (and their tormentors) out of limbo nearly-if-not-totally had me in tears. The concept of meeting one’s own death (an external-though-linked figure, like their personal animal-spirits) had me rolling in writer’s-envy.
Re: ideas taking precidence over characterization – people have (sometimes convincingly) leveled those charges against Lewis and Tolkien and so that’s certainly worth further exploration. Except for a couple plot twists near the end, though, I’m not sure if I got that sense as much as you did. I haven’t read them in a long time and’ve thought about a re-read for a while. If reading a whole series didn’t take so much time…
The role of terrifying baddie went to one of the angels (Metatron [very nearly Megatron!], if I remember correctly – he was the main threat while Yahweh turned out to be a wrinkled presence who was ultimately relieved when put out of his misery. If you gave all the guys different names and placed it in the realm of pure fantasy (rather than religion) then it would be pretty compelling stuff.
I think the film series flopped because they botched the first film (which wasn’t really good by any standard other than visually) and because there were a lot of Christian-boycotts (one of the recent examples where Christian lobbying had a major effect on the film industry). That said, the BBC and New Line Cinema are coming out with a TV adaptation so they’ll have another kick at the can soon enough.
It’s been too long since I’ve read them to point out exactly where I thought they went awry, other than the ending (which was quite heartbreakingly bad, both from an aesthetic and a moral point of view). I guess it just depends how swept up you get in the magic as to whether they come off as too preachy or not. I think the same thing is fair to say about Lewis and Tolkein, especially Lewis. I just liked his magic better. I never actually saw the Golden Compass film – didn’t boycott it, just didn’t catch it. I can’t say to what extent bad filmmaking played a role in not having any sequels – but I can say there have been *plenty* of poor film adaptations based on book series that got sequels, anyway, so there was obviously something more going on.
We don’t just get plenty of sequels to poor film adaptations, but *two-part* sequels.
To put Rosanne’s emphatics in a different way, … the film described would seem not to be explicit so much as litteral. For myself, I’m of the Hitchcock school of thought that the implicit is more powerful than the explicit, and the litteral is, basically, a filmmaker using a lie about depiction in order to propose a lie about human nature. It’s possible that the filmmaker (and all the actors) sincerely believes both lies, but that does not itself make for good film.
Now, if the film described were a documentary about bonobo apes or anacondas… well, that’d be different. For one thing, beasts nonrational will do as their instincts prompt, and there’s no sin in that. I don’t know what scientific or documentary value would be in such a project but that is perhaps beside the point.
Whether watching such a film is in itself good or ill… well, someone had to read Nietzsche if only to condemn his suggestions. Most published books are supposed to have been read by some editor. A film is different from a book (as has been noted) in that it may ask the actors to act and not merely portray, and is otherwise usually a huge project involving the cooperation of many… the watching, whether by a censor or properly-detached critic, would not necessarily be wrong (so far as was needed to form a proper judgment). But that’s quite a different proposition from saying film-such-is-good-to-watch-uncritically.
Absolutely agree with everything here. And I think that this blog, to take a line from Karen, is a kind of laboratory of culture where we are able to discuss and go through the mechanics and various patterns involved in the making and consuming of art – we’re helping each other to approach things more critically.
Now, a more important thing: “I’d conclude by simply arguing that blanket bans, even if it did protect certain minds/hearts/souls, would still deprive the world of something – maybe even something beautiful” writes Josh.
Since Josh does not follow this with an argument, I suppose he means “assert” rather than “argue”.
Family life is beautiful. Human sexuality has an appearance of beauty even prior to family life; however, it also points towards and informs family life, in its very nature, and is not perfected in the exclusion of forming a family. To try to deny the beauty would be futile; this kind of beauty, however, is not enough.
The ocean is beautiful.
The arctic is beautiful.
There is plenty of beautiful architecture.
But drowning for the sake of the ocean, or freezing for the sake of the arctic, or being crushed by a poorly-built house for the sake of enjoying some deceptive architectural beauty… these are not true appreciation of beauty, they are sacrifice on the altars of false gods. It is idolatry. If a beautiful house or even a church is too worn to repair, it must be pulled down. Men cannot live in the ocean as fishes. The castor plant makes beautiful seeds, but you must not eat them!
If we were jurists applying the law in a criminal case, it would behove us to remember that it is evidence and law that convict or acquit a man, and not the jury as men. As Catholics, we hold that it is our own final choice that condemns us or not, rather than avenging angels or a jealous god.
It should be the total character of a book or film that gives or deprives a censor-guarded readership of what beauty the book may contain, not a censor’s whims.
The full line from the quote you mentioned, Jesse, was: “I could waste exorbitant amounts of ink with a close reading of these four titles, but in the end I’d conclude by simply arguing that blanket bans, even if it did protect certain minds/hearts/souls, would still deprive the world of something – maybe even something beautiful.” So I wasn’t asserting this (though I do believe it) so much as saying that if I wanted to expand this whole thing then that’s something that I’d like to follow up with more arguments. Luckily the comment section has been fruitful space for that.
I find your analogy of the arctic/ocean/architecture really fruitful here, because this is precisely the kind of model I would suggest for dealing with these kinds of art. Yes, the arctic would kill an unprepared individual, which is *why* we don’t go into the arctic unprepared. We train people, we have fleece, we build structures to protect people from the temperatures so they can do what it is they’re wanting to do. We don’t just say “the arctic is dangerous so we shouldn’t go.”
And why do we go to the arctic anyway? Here we can get to the beginnings of an answer to a question a number of people brought up: if there’s any [moral] danger, why go there in the first place? We could say that we are quite satisfied with our continental or sub-tropical environments and shouldn’t really need to venture anywhere else. But there are two reasons (among others) why people do end up there.
The first reason is for tourism – there’s something there about that in the sense that a regular person would want to see an exotic beauty, but the amount of time, money and energy invested in order to get them there might be seen as a tad wasteful.
The other reason is science – we want to know how the world works and why things are the way they are. There are conditions in the arctic that are unlike anywhere else on earth – there are creatures never before seen, there are methods to test the ways we relate to fossil fuels, there are potential new trade routes that could make life easier for everyone, there are peoples there that maybe we’ve never made contact with before. All we need (at least to get a certain distance) is a really good parka. Or, in the case of the ocean, some major duty-scuba suits or submarines. And how much is there in the ocean for us to know and discover?
Of course no one’s going to live in the furthest north or at the bottom of the sea (yet?), but there is fruit drawn from expeditions that are properly prepared and equipped for the dangers. Is this also possible with art? I kinda feel like we might still be in the stage where we don’t have the proper infrastructure and so are still in testing phases to see if the environment is indeed too hostile for us. We haven’t discovered fleece yet, so we’re trying all sorts of materials, venturing out, seeing what happens, coming back, because we feel like maybe there’s something on the other side, out there, something the Spirit might be calling us toward.
Maybe “Shortbus” is located way too north/deep for any real, useful fruit to come out of it, but maybe not. But then, going out that far and coming back empty-handed, we may find that “Jennifer the Damned” is right in the sweet spot. And maybe someone will find, in that book, just the answer they were needing to hear about something. But we have to ask those questions in order to feel out the edges of any anwer. We have to test the borders of the maps if we really want to find out if there’s another continent out there. Maybe we’ll find it, or maybe we’ll fall over the edge of the world. There’s still so much we don’t know, but something might be at stake if we stop probing. Obviously, though, it has to be in the right context otherwise we’ll lose a limb or two. Or a heart. Frostbite is not fun.
To this travel/exploration analogy, Josh and Jesse, I would add one other possible reason for venturing into potentially hostile (moral or geographic) territory: the rescue mission. If someone unwary has gotten themselves stranded amidst glaciers or quicksand, and you have the training and resources to follow them and some reasonable hope of pulling them out, you don’t shrug your shoulders and say, “too bad, but they shouldn’t have walked in that direction; they’re on their own.” You suit up and go after them. I think you’re right that in many cases, and I don’t exempt myself from this by any means, we as Catholics have tended to do the cultural equivalent of shrug and say “too bad” rather than suit up and go after the lost, whether out of pusillanimity or a legitimate concern with the health of our own souls, which is our first responsibility. (Or out of a reluctance to pursue the adequate training and resources, which might stem from either or both of these motivations, or from mere sloth, or from any other motive you could name.)
That brings us to the ways in which this isn’t a perfect analogy, since risking danger to the body can be meritorious, while risking danger to the soul — entering into occasion for sin — is better avoided whenever there is a choice. So, among the many live questions here, one seems to be this: under what circumstances, if any, can we say that someone is properly equipped to engage with art that is at best morally dubious in such a way that what might pose an occasion of sin for many is not a danger to you, and you can state this with confidence and moral certainty? Karen’s and Jonathan’s recent posts take some steps toward answering this, but as with so many other things, the answer doesn’t seem to be simple.
If there’s a reasonable chance of rescuing your son or daughter or wife or … from a Cave of Bacchus, by all means do so. But, as when rescuing someone from glacial cravasse or deep water, protect yourself with suitable equipment; in the case of the Cave, wear clothes.
“under what circumstances, if any, can we say that someone is properly equipped to engage with art that is at best morally dubious in such a way that what might pose an occasion of sin for many is not a danger to you, and you can state this with confidence and moral certainty?”
That’s the golden question here.
Can one really make that judgement with integrity about oneself? Which is why community (and placing oneself in the context of obedience, whether with a spiritual director or otherwise) is so important, and why these posts (and the ensuing comments) have been such a breath of fresh air. I mean, how often do we end up going against these questions alone?
I wonder if, unfortunately, we’re going to get the clearest answers (as it often happens) through hindsight – that’s not to say that we can’t strive for answers now, though, or to excuse a person from the attempt. I just wish I could ask people from fifty or a hundred years in the future about how this debate goes and what things will be obvious to them that we’re absolutely in the dark about now.
It doesn’t really help, either, that we’re trying to engage with issues that deserve books rather than quick, not-nearly-enough blog posts. But try we must.
“Wear clothes;” “don’t be a smartass:” words to live by. 🙂
Yes x 1,000 w/r/t the need for community and obedience (obedience to the truth, to the spiritual and intellectual tradition, to the rules of good art, to a good director when you are lucky enough to find one). And another major yes to wanting postcards from the future. I often wonder if the drift toward content warnings isn’t the beginning of a pendulum swing back in the opposite direction we’ve been headed, away from exploitation and explicitness and back toward the implicit in art. As such, it’s been equal parts ironic and amusing and maddening to watch the vocal defense of the virtues of restraint and basically censorship coming from institutions that a century or even fifty years ago would have been at the forefront of the drive toward expressionism and exhibitionism and letting it all hang out. And it’s also been a “breath of fresh air” for me, to be part of a community where these kinds of questions are taken with moral and aesthetic seriousness and the answers aren’t taken as given, but explored with intellectual honesty and integrity.
Yes, the one advantage this format has over giving the subject proper book-length treatment is that we can develop the ideas in community. Where two or three are (virtually) gathered…
Josh, it’s been ages in internet-time, but I don’t want to neglect to say thank you for this post. I keep typing out longer responses and not having time to finish them — another response-to-responses! — but “thanks” ought to be simple enough. 🙂
Long responses always welcome regardless!
When life allows, of course.
I just picked up a book called Sacred and Profane Beauty: the Holy in Art by Gerardus van der Leeuw. Seems like it might be helpful. Has anybody read it? (As in – please save me the trouble if I’m wasting my time…?)