So, this is the third (and hopefully final) post in a series about the complicated relationship between art, politics and martyrdom – if you haven’t checked out the first and second parts yet then definitely give them a look before reading on, as everything from here on out is pretty much a longish response to shtuff covered earlier.
Loose Mythologies
Roseanne Sullivan (another one of our intrepid posters here at DT who continues to provide an extensive education in liturgical music and Quetzalcoatl sightings) deftly pointed out in a comment that the previous pieces are, frankly, somewhat a slice of Debbie-Downer as, well, they mostly just describe all the jazz that goes terribly wrong when we talk about/relate to martyrs and martyrdom generally.
Part I focused a lot on how, when politics and spirituality get too bound up in each other, the line separating them starts falling apart and suddenly we have political attacks being interpreted as an assault on a person’s religious beliefs. Take, for an example, how territorial skirmishes between Christian-or-Islamic-linked gov’ts quickly became matters of WBWJW (what borders would Jesus want?), or look at how post-Reformation European states quickly used the excuse of defending their interpretation of Christianity as a reason for killing people. Sticky-sticky indeed.
Part II zoomed in more on the personal implications of martyrdom (including how martyrdom’s used by particular interest groups), which usually comes down to the loss of the martyr’s personality. As in martyrs, after their death, are often whitewashed, idealized, rinsed of complication and set up on pedestals – in a word: dehumanized. This happens in spite of best intentions and can lead to over-simplifying the actions that led up to their death in the first place; in the end, nuanced situations and histories are painted as black-and-white scenarios, and the whole thing only goes on to exacerbate conflict and entrench culture war.
While this led to a deadlier state of affairs in, say, Elizabethan England than in modern suburbia (see the story of Edmund Campion posted on DT last year – it quickly turned into the catalyst for these reflections), the complicated historical link between religion and politics still leaves tons of after-effects. Take for example in Canada: English and French powers (as mentioned in Part II) were linked with Protestantism and Catholicism, meaning that the killing/martyring of one side by the other (either directly or through Aboriginal proxies) was taken not just as a rebuff to Crown, but to Christ. While Canada has become a pluralist nation in the years since, the eventual compromise between French and English at the end of the 1700’s led to the birth of two different, publicly funded school systems – the Protestant one eventually became the public school system while the Catholic, separate school board survives as a gov’t-subsidized entity in Ontario, Saskatchewan and Alberta. At the moment, the current Albertan gov’t is trying to sort through new guidelines for queer and trans-identifying students and, as the Catholic school board is (due to history, politics, martyrdom) still publically funded, they may be expected to follow suit. Cue everyone freaking out about the kids. Our ghosts are hard to shake.
Making things even more difficult is the apparently human tendency to settle for simple answers to knotty questions – even when a conflict isn’t all that dramatic, we still have a knack for making mountains out of molehills and painting minor inconveniences as statements/acts of resistance against a power wanting to take away life, liberty, freedom or our ability to pick from seventeen varieties of ketchup at the local supermarket. How much crazier do things get when actual lives are at stake?
“Tank Man” – taken the morning after the Tiananmen Square protests came to a close when gov’t tanks rolled over the tents of remaining protesters.
“Flower Power” – iconic shot of protests against American involvement in the Vietnam War.
“Kissing Couple” – taken during the riot after the Vancouver Canucks, uh, lost the Stanley Cup Final.
Thích Quảng Đức burns himself to death in protest against the Vietnamese gov’t’s treatment of Buddhists.
The “Stolen Scream” was posted to Noam Galai’s private Flickr account before being ripped off and used as a symbol of the Arab Spring.
Each of these images came to us from a complicated story, one that doesn’t fit into the loose mythologies we’ve knitted them into – but, then again, nuance doesn’t sell newspapers (or shares/likes/re-tweets) as much as, say, sensationalism. Even when we do have highly accomplished, highly complicated figures living among us, as soon as they die they’re pounced on by the media, bleached, varnished and cropped into images that’re sold all over again. Think Michael Jackson. Think Amy Winehouse. Think, from even just a month ago, David Bowie.
Okay, yes, we know a lot’s screwed up – so what can we do about it?
Speaker For The Dead
While most people know Orson Scott Card as a highly successful writer of young-adult-oriented science fiction (his more mature books, like the novel Songmaster and short-story collection Unaccompanied Sonata, are criminally neglected), most don’t know that his monstrously popular Ender’s Game (recentlyish made into a downright disappointing Harry Potter wannabe franchise-starter) was actually written* – first as a short story and later as a full-length piece – in an attempt to make a different novel work. That novel was called Speaker for the Dead.
Despite this incredible cover, there are no appearances of giant techno-towers in the book.
Orson (totally badass name) is a writer who’s been able to merge pop fiction with compelling and complicated subject matter,** and in Speaker it shows through the hero’s job description. He’s a guy running through time (jumping at the speed of light further into the distant future) both from his past and toward the opportunity of redemption – without spoiling too much, he was the unwitting catalyst for the extinction of an entire sentient alien race and so has a bit of baggage to work through. His self-imposed penance involves becoming a “speaker,” someone who attempts eulogizing the dead in all their complexity and contradiction.
A typical eulogy, at least in my limited experience, tries to comfort the family by painting a fairly idealized picture of the deceased. There might be a few rough edges thrown in for good measure, but it’s usually only meant to lighten an otherwise totally oppressive mood. You get nothing less than a very complicated feeling to hear alcoholic co-dependents transformed into model parents, or mediocre artists becoming irreplaceable auteurs. Yes, we want to remember the best in someone but, in the process, the person disappears into the gaping cracks of their shiny new pedestal. A “speaking,” in comparison, tries to embrace the dead in their fullness and doesn’t attribute traits that didn’t exist, and likewise doesn’t ignore the more awkward parts of their personalities. In the novel’s introduction, Orson describes having had people come up to him and say how they’ve adapted his model to their very real remembrance services.
Imagine if we treated our martyrs (or our dead, generally) like this? As in, mentioning their flaws just as much as their virtues? Or admitting possible causes of death other than perfect dedication to an ideal? That maybe some were misogynists, or vicious anti-Semites, or generally bad-tempered if woken up before 10am? Maybe we wouldn’t be as quick to turn a person into a symbol if we were constantly aware of how many shades or ambiguities they occupied – and then maybe we wouldn’t be as quick to use them against Others. Maybe we’d see that the Other group has some good points when criticizing a particular martyr or saint, and then maybe a road to some real (if awkward/painful) dialogue could open up.*** And maybe we wouldn’t be stuck with overly simplified (and mostly embarrassing) martyrdom-art.
Film is probably the worst offender when it comes to it: the “Saint Movie” belongs to the elite club of genres that probably has more cringe-worthy entries than respectable ones. And when the saint in question is a martyr then, with a paltry handful of noteworthy exceptions, things get even more embarrassing as nuance packs a few heavy suitcases, buys a ticket to Hawaii and, a week later, sends a text to say it’s all over and, really, it’s him and not you. Even the Passion, with it’s big-budget chops and award-winning pedigree, can’t avoid scenes full of scheming, fuming crowds who can’t wait to rub their knuckles together and send Love to His death. Judas and Pilate were portrayed wonderfully, but the film’s Caiaphas was completely stripped of any complexity whatsoever. Are there any films out there that can serve as models for what a genuinely compelling martyr movie could look like?
As it happens, there is one – but it’s a tad awkward to bring up on a Catholic blog. Just hear me out on this one.
Got Milk?
Meet Harvey Milk:
Now meet Harvey Milk, played by Sean Penn in Gus Van Sant’s 2008 flick Milk:
Yes, this is a gay**** man.
And it’s a very gay movie: Milk tells the story of how Harvey became one of the first openly-homosexual elected officials in the US. To make it an even more awkward topic at the coffee-and-donuts table after mass, it also goes into his personal life and portrays the different players, friends and lovers in his general orbit. But I’m not writing about it as a way to say it’s an overall good movie or to support the totality of what Harvey supported (obviously not), but as it provides an interesting approach to the “Martyr Film” genre as a whole. Because it turns out that on November 7th, 1978, someone came into his office at the San Francisco City Hall and put a bullet in his head. Before putting another one in right after.
Meet Dan White:
Now meet Dan White played by Josh Brolin in the movie:
Dan was on the same Supervisory board as Harvey in the San Francisco of the 70’s and the two men shared a complex working relationship. Complex obviously in the sense of ending when Dan killed him (and then-mayor George Moscone), later killing himself after serving time in prison for manslaughter. He was a Vietnam veteran, raised a Catholic and saved lives as a firefighter before getting into politics. He could have easily been played off as a nutso Christian fundamentalist out to get the liberal hero and nobody would have blinked an eye. It’s a story we’ve seen ten thousand times before.
But he wasn’t. And, in my opinion, it’s Josh Brolin’s performance as White that really steals the show from under Sean Penn’s feet.*****
Dan is a complicated figure whose ultimate instability comes more from a constant battering from life than from some crazy, uber-conservative time bomb hiding somewhere behind his frontal lobe, just waiting for a chance to snap. He looks out for his family and he eventually comes to respect and even care for Harvey about halfway through their running time together. He’s a little uncomfortable with the gay thing at first, but they’re able to work on a couple projects and put a couple ordinances through together.
Harvey receives a couple ominous death threats through the movie and they’re all connected to his sexual orientation – the whole thing plays as a morbid set of foreshadowing as we all know what’s going to happen at the end. Popular memory of the events kinda casts Dan’s homophobia as the eventual reason why he shot Harvey, thus linking up those earlier threats with the looming finale of bullets/blood – but this is where the film veers away and really makes the treatment rather special.
You see, director Gus Van Sant suggests that Harvey wasn’t killed so much as a martyr for gay rights as for the fact that he turned out to be, at times, an absolute jerk to Dan. Through the film, Milk mostly keeps his animosity under wraps, especially as he thinks that Dan’s in the closet himself – but there’s a crucial scene where Harvey’s having an upscale birthday bash and a drunk Dan shows up at the end looking for support and emotional validation. He’s warmed up to Harvey enough that he’s not afraid of being vulnerable, but Harvey rebuffs him with a surprising pettiness that runs counter to his generally warm attitude through the film. Things go from bad to worse for Dan and, after a couple of perceived betrayals on the part of Milk and the mayor, he eventually loads the gun, sneaks in through a window (to avoid metal detectors) and pulls the trigger on both of them.
So, no matter what one believes about same-sex relationships, one can still admire Harvey’s determination to fight for what he stands for in the face of possible assassination – the film totally could have gone that route and played him as the white knight to White’s backwards, outdated hater, but instead it creates something much more compelling: a martyr film whose very hero is the one laying the pieces for his own martyrdom. There is no politicizing on the part of Van Sant in terms of demonizing Dan White, and he creates a Harvey Milk who is charming, witty, courageous but human enough to crush the spirit of a man who could have been an ally but ended up being his killer. It’s an incredible risk for Gus Van Sant to have taken, and the artistic payoff is enormous.
But what does it mean for us?
Fruit
Van Sant, in Milk, provides an incredible blueprint for how to portray martyrdom in art: his Harvey Milk is a humanized character and doesn’t fit into traditional stereotypes of what a hero should be – he’s a crusader, yes, but it’s his own lack of empathy that brings him down, Shakespeare-style. His killer is portrayed as an awkward, likable and vulnerable man who’s just as much a victim of his own situation as he is responsible for killing the dude who was once his friend. This, rather than being an unbearable cliche, becomes great tragedy transcending the moral context.
It also resists being used as a political bludgeon for or against anyone involved in the current cultural debate – there were no rampaging thinkpieces (that I can remember) in its wake. There weren’t any cries out against those blind, crazy Christians who just need to get with the times. What we’re left with are two broken men who ended up on a collision course. In other words, we’re left sitting with people, not symbols. Their dignity as human beings, against all odds, still intact.
It’s also a good exercise for us, as Christians with an interpretation of scripture/tradition claiming that God doesn’t bless same-sex unions as He does opposite-sex ones, to get past our reservations in terms of the story and learn from what it has to teach us about making good art. Humanizing our heroes isn’t the only path to dialogue, understanding and leaving behind the model of culture war: learning to look through someone else’s eyes and appreciating what there is to be appreciated (even/especially if we can’t agree on certain essentials) is one of the only few, necessary skills. We can consider this to be some very needed practice.
The image of Harvey Milk lying in a pool of his own blood (or waving, as it were, from a parade float) is joltingly different from the one we started with: Edmund Campion dangling at Tyburn. Christians are called to believe (easy in theory, ghastly in practice) that a saint can hang from a gibbet like fruit from a tree, on the promise of a mostly invisible God that somehow they, in their physical destruction, will somehow feed the world. And then we go take that promise and strip it both of power and awe by treating it as a mere slogan to be used, either through art or political maneuvering, even if we do it with the best intentions. Especially with the best intentions.
Milk shows us that it can be done with grace,****** that there’s a model here that can prevent our stories from being cheapened, that can give dignity and respect to those who have died while not denying their humanity or their flaws. We’re called and challenged to speak for the dead themselves, and not just for a sanitized image that we feel more or less comfortable with.
Because people aren’t all that comfortable in the end – but sometimes we’re warm.
—
If you have a minute, don’t forget to check out Karen Ullo’s response: “More Thoughts About Martyrdom.” The comment sections for each piece have also turned into a zone for really interesting exploration of these themes.
*
*As a prequel.
**At least it’s true in his early stuff: my own views on the soul were greatly influenced by a heart-twisting scene from his Children of the Mind. A lot of his later work started dropping to an unfortunate level of suck.
*** This is super-complicated, though, because to admit to the dicier elements of our heroes and martyrs means opening ourselves/our cause up to be deflated and attacked. Like mentioned in the previous posts, we’re fixated as a culture on white knights – any besmirching is taken as grounds to dismiss a person entirely. Not the most conducive environment to really working through our cultural and spiritual baggage.
****Yes, I know there’s still a huge discussion about what language to use in the Christian community – as in, some people are more comfortable using phrases like “same-sex attracted” rather than lesbian, queer or LGBT. Full disclosure: I’m a practicing (therefore celibate) Catholic who is somewhere on the queer-straight spectrum and I don’t take the terms that I use lightly. If you’re curious about why some queer Christians use this kind of language, I recommend checking out the blog Spiritual Friendship as they’ve articulated their reasons a lot clearer than I can here without hijacking the whole thing. It’s an ecumenical collective that has plenty of necessary things to say, so give them a read if you have the time.
*****I was sad to see Brolin passed up for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor – he was competing against Heath Ledger’s Joker, though, so what can you do. Penn went on to win Best Actor but acknowledged Mickey Rourke’s superior performance in The Wrestler (Aronofsky fan-boy shoutout!) during his acceptance speech. That’s class for you.
******The made-for-TV version of Joan of Arc was pretty darn good, though. More than worth a watch. Or ten.
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.
Roseanne T. Sullivan says
It was laudable and very tolerant of the director of the movie, Milk, to show Harvey Milk’s assassin, Dan White, as a complex figure, and to not caricature him merely as a conflicted Christian homophobe. But Harvey Milk, the “martyr” in the Milk movie, was not a martyr. A martyr is one who dies for the true faith. And White didn’t kill Milk because Milk was gay, he also killed the non-gay Mayor Moscone. White killed Milk and Moscone for complex personal reasons. It is a big (and unreasonable) stretch to make a martyr in honor of gays out of a man who was not killed for being gay. But when a change in public perception is being orchestrated, who cares if such claims make sense? As long as they fan the flames of false compassion, who’s noticing?
I lived in the San Francisco in the 60s, and I followed the news about Milk’s killing after I moved away. So these events happened during my adult life, and I was very much aware of them and what these people actually were like.
Even though the movie’s portrayal of Dan White was nuanced, Milk was far more complex that the movie would have you believe. Milk was an unabashed self-promoter, and a frequent frequenter of gay bathhouses, which everyone knows are locations where the most anonymous and loathsome types of perverse encounters happen regularly, and Milk was bitchy and catty and cruel in the normal way practiced by those who openly flaunt their departure from society’s (former) norms of sexual expression. He was also a big supporter of “Reverend” Jim Jones, the founder of the People’s Temple. They all drank the poisoned Kool Aid a few days before White shot Milk and Moscone.
Here are a few things The Guardian had to say about Milk:
“Harvey Milk was a famously horny man in 70s San Francisco, who combined political campaigning with cruising for men half his age. In Milk, he’s presented as a serially-monogamous chap on a quest for The One. True, Harvey is allowed to be a bit flirty, but essentially Harvey is presented as a very domesticated Mary. Apart, that is, from his political altruism which, sadly, stops him settling down to a life of homemaking bliss….
“Apparently, a bathhouse scene was filmed but ended up on the cutting room floor. I have no idea whether this was Van Sant’s call or the studio’s, but with that cut Mr Milk was to all intents and purposes emasculated…. [Not emasculated, but sanitized for mythologizing purposes.]
“But the main reason undoubtedly is that bundling themselves back into the closet is exactly what today’s US gay-rights campaigners are doing in their campaign for gay marriage. In order to try and persuade an unconvinced American public to support gay marriage under the rubric of equality, gay male relationships are being presented, rather disingenuously, as “just the same” as male-female ones…. [Much deplored among some gay activists is the idea that they have to pretend that they support faithfulness in marriage.]
“Just as the campaign for gay marriage is sometimes more about respectability than equality, Milk’s real life wasn’t respectable enough for this hagiography. So it was surgically removed….
“As homosexuals we can’t depend on the heterosexual model,” Randy Shilts quotes him as saying in his biography, The Mayor of Castro Street. “We grow up with the heterosexual model, but we don’t have to pursue it. We should be developing our own lifestyle. There’s no reason why you can’t love more than one person at a time. You don’t have to love them all the same. You love some more, some less and always be honest about where you’re at. They in turn can do the same thing, and it opens up a bigger sphere.”
When I tell you that this was Milk explaining to one 24-year-old lover in San Francisco why he had another younger one in Los Angeles, you may decide that this view was self-serving. You may decide it was naive. Or immoral. Or realistic. Or inspiring. Or corny. What’s undeniable is that it’s how he lived his life and created his politics. But you won’t find it in Milk.”
http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2009/jan/28/milk-gus-van-sant-sean-penn
Shilts reported in his biography of Milk much about Milk’s normal homosexual practitioner’s penchant for young men (a characteristic that was also flagrantly true of another gay icon Rock Hudson, whose friends would stage parties for him with a broad assortment of rent boys to choose from for the night), for example. “Another lover, Jack, moved in with Milk when he was 16 and Milk was 33.”
Even though your main point seems to be that we should be open to the foibles of our martyrs, you seem to be promoting the idea that martyrs don’t have to be good. Let’s clarify the term martyr and then we might see more clearly where the difficulty actually lies, if there is one.
Josh Nadeau says
The definition of “martyr” that I’m working with here is “one who dies for sake of their beliefs” (as I mentioned with the case of Jan Hus in Part II), and so I don’t think that a person has to die or suffer for something that’s objectively true in order to qualify for the title. Like, if a person genuinely believes in something and dies by someone else’s hand for the fact that they were living that out, I would call that person a martyr. Suicide bombers call themselves martyrs, and in a subjective sense they are, even if what they did makes us want to simultaneously vomit and scream into the nearest pillow. So you’re right that I don’t necessarily see martyrdom as synonymous with goodness or truth – it might be more a matter of conviction and death.
I also don’t want to say that Harvey was a hero or even a good person (though what constitutes a “good” person is a discussion for another day) – I just think that the film illustrates an interesting (and/or essential) set of concepts that’s very rare to see anywhere, and that Christian artists could do good to learn from.
The fact that Harvey was killed for personal reasons rather than for the fact of being queer further supports this point: he is considered to be a martyr in the public consciousness (and Moscone having been killed, in the public eye, for having supported him) and thus he went through the whole process of posthumous whitewashing and pedistal standing that was described in the first two parts of the series. People use him as a symbol, support or kind of weapon depending on the day or conversation. Regardless of whether or not he was actually killed for his beliefs, popular opinion believes he was and so it sets the whole martyrdom-related cultural juggernaut into motion all the same. Which is what makes Gus Van Sant’s film such a necessary example.
Van Sant could have gone the easy route of crazed-homophobe-kills-minority-champion, and would have been lauded to do so, but refused and instead opted for humanizing his villain and complicating his protagonist. Yes, I completely agree with you that Milk’s version of Harvey was totally santitized for the sake of mainstream American audiences (certainly not sanitized in full, but enough to make him palatable), but the fact that Van Sant used the flick to challenge the notions of a “pure” Harvey is more than just laudable – it’s a gulp of fresh water in the middle of the festering swamp that is the contemporary culture war. Regardless of the source story, this is the kind of approach that is desperately needed across all communities and faith traditions.
I’m not asking people to see the movie or to believe that it’s an honest portrayal of what happened – I was just surprised and deeply moved by Van Sant’s courage and integrity in making it the way that he did (he could have easily been labelled a pariah for refusing to cater to the popular mythology surrounding his death). And I was at the same time deeply saddened that this kind of necessary approach didn’t organically rise from the Christian quarter, but rather from a very different place entirely. I think we also have a bunch of unhelpful (to put it mildly) popular mythology surrounding our historical figures (martyrs or otherwise) and have a lot to learn about how to relate to our pasts – it so happens that Van Sant is someone who happens to be able to teach us.
Another thing: to say that Harvey was bitchy “in the normal way practiced by those who openly flaunt their departure from society’s (former) norms of sexual expression” implies that all openly queer people are bitchy, catty and cruel. I know (and am glad to call “friend”) many queer people (celibate or no) who don’t fit into that category. It’s sad that some of the more vocal members of the LGBT community tend to perpetuate that stereotype, as it’s a huge oversimplification of an entire group of people, myself included.
Roseanne T. Sullivan says
About the bitchy, mean categorization. I was thinking of friends I’ve had, and categorizations I’ve heard, and true accounts from the life, and glimpses of shows like Will and Grace.
You wrote: “The definition of “martyr” that I’m working with here is “one who dies for sake of their beliefs.'” The definition of martyr I’m working with is a person who is killed for being a Catholic. A person who is killed for just any old reason is not a martyr. That seems to be verge on a kind of Alice in Wonderland thinking, where words can mean anything we want them to mean.
Does this series of posts mean that you are sad because Christians are not willing to understand the humanity and complexity of those whose morals they deplore? “And I was at the same time deeply saddened that this kind of necessary approach didn’t organically rise from the Christian quarter, but rather from a very different place entirely. I think we also have a bunch of unhelpful (to put it mildly) popular mythology surrounding our historical figures (martyrs or otherwise) and have a lot to learn about how to relate to our pasts – it so happens that Van Sant is someone who happens to be able to teach us.” Why him? A true artist of any stripe is not going to rely on “unhelpful mythology.” A true lover of Christ sees Him in everyone.
We must love another as Christ loved. I love my college friend who started practicing homosexuality exclusively when he found that women who he bedded became possessive while all he wanted was uncommitted pleasure and the joys of teasing others who found him attractive. I forgive him for his casual observation years later that he wished he could get a hold of my children to undo the Catholic brainwashing he was sure I was giving them. And I’m sad that he seemed to go a bit mad in Amsterdam after AIDS first came on the scene. He is a good human being worthy of love, but he didn’t treat others as worthy of love, and that’s the truth. The things he used to joke about were horrid, aborted babies, anything that former ages held sacred.
We shouldn’t whitewash evil. But it is possible to be so nuanced in our understanding of human failings that we lose sight of things like how ugly and unnatural some actions are and how horrifying their effects are (eternal damnation being one of them, read Inferno or the vision of hell the children of Fatima saw).
Interesting discussion! By the way, I only used the phrase “downer” in my comment about Part II to echo you, because you used it yourself.
Josh Nadeau says
This is one of the reasons I wish we could all get on a plane, head somewhere for a weekend, sit around, drink tea and chat culture :). Discussion = awesomesauce.
There’re so many threads jumping around in our comments that it’s hard to address them all:
a) The whole definition of martyrdom is a bit of a crux here and I can understand your comments based on the way you use the word. It would seem to be cheap to extend the title of “martyr” to people like Harvey Milk or an ISIS suicide bomber if the word really does exclusively mean someone who dies for the actual Truth – but the definitions I’ve seen and read all point otherwise:
Merriam-Webster (http://www.merriam-webster.com/ – “martyr”):
1: a person who voluntarily suffers death as the penalty of witnessing to and refusing to renounce a religion
2: a person who sacrifices something of great value and especially life itself for the sake of principle
3: victim; especially : a great or constant sufferer
Cambridge Dictionary (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/ – “martyrdom”):
1: an occasion when someone suffers or is killed because of their religious or political beliefs
Dictionary.com (“martyr”):
1: a person who willingly suffers death rather than renounce his or her religion.
2: a person who is put to death or endures great suffering on behalf of any belief, principle, or cause:
a martyr to the cause of social justice.
3: a person who undergoes severe or constant suffering:
a martyr to severe headaches.
4: a person who seeks sympathy or attention by feigning or exaggerating pain, deprivation, etc.
Oxford Dictionaries (the unofficial one – the big one requires subscription: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/ – “martyr”):
1: A person who is killed because of their religious or other beliefs.
2: A person who displays or exaggerates their discomfort or distress in order to obtain sympathy.
3: (martyr to) A constant sufferer from (an ailment).
I take martyrdom in this context, in the sense of dying or suffering for something that you believe in.
b) The Alice in Wonderland thinking – this is the weird paradox with language in general. Like, all languages are living, human-made things that help us understand each other. The word "apple" doesn't objectively mean "apple" – it's just a sound that we make that we have all collectively agreed to associate with the red, juicy fruit so as to be able to understand each other in public. Words really do mean what we want them to mean, and if we collectively decide to change how we use a word (whether because of a government-led intervention, as with the Soviet Union, or because of natural changes over time [like how the word "wicked"can legitimately mean "evil" or "cool" depending on the context]) then we can do that.
Like, each word comes with a long history and set of cultural baggage, but we shouldn't get too legalistic about a particular word having only one possible meaning, because even different subcultures within one culture can use the same word in completely different ways and have a separate set of connotations. Yes, it's subjective and can be a confusing thing, but that's an inherent trait of language. No one group has (or can claim with any legitimacy) a monopoly on a particular language, not even Christians. For the most part, it's a (metaphorically) living thing that moves independently of how we might want to direct or control it. Even if the word "martyrdom" meant, at some point in the past, "someone who died exclusively for Catholicism" (which I don't think it ever did) then it certainly doesn't now, and we can't expect to hold the world to specific historical definitions that aren't in wide use at the moment.
There's definitely something to be said when a subculture (say, Catholicism) decides to maintain different definitions (whether they're more historical or simply different) of words than that of the regular user of English (or whatever language), but we have to remember the limits of those meanings and that, even if we associate a particular word with something, it doesn't mean that everyone else has to associate that word with the same. Language isn't an objective truth, but a subjective tool. A frustrating one at that, but it’s what we have to work with.
c) "Does this series of posts mean that you are sad because Christians are not willing to understand the humanity and complexity of those whose morals they deplore?" Absolutely – I'm sad whenever any human being doesn't take the time to understand and appreciate the humanity/complexity of people whose morals they deplore. I think that this weakness in our mental and emotional nature is one of the reasons why we're mired in different conflicts and/or culture war – in this context it’s a universal thing and not an exclusively Christian problem. I do think, though, that the belief/certainty in one’s moral superiority (whether out of pride or because of believing in a religion) is conducive to gaining particular blind spots, but again that can be an issue with Christians or liberal social justice advocates or atheists or whoever.
I think what I was referring to, though, by “And I was at the same time deeply saddened that this kind of necessary approach didn’t organically rise from the Christian quarter, but rather from a very different place entirely” is that it's sad that this particular model of approaching one's martyrs didn't come from an artist who identifies as Christian. I mean, we're really bound up and constantly engaging with the concept and implications of martyrdom, but no one really cut through the complicated layers of cultural baggage that often accompany our art (particularly, though not exclusively, speaking about film here) about saints and martyrs. It took a film about a sinner, celebrating sin, to do something necessary that Christians haven't been able to do in a movie. That's what's sad – to me it's just another sign that Christian sub-culture today settles for less when it comes to art and aesthetic production/engagement.
d) re: “Why him? A true artist of any stripe is not going to rely on ‘unhelpful mythology.'” Artists of all stripes are capable of relying on unhelpful popular mythologies, and even if something's a fantastic work of art it can still buy into various levels of bullshit. I can appreciate the scope and power of Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy even though I think his way of approaching Christianity is downright poisonous – heck, there are a lot of things he did in those books (on a level of form, plot and storytelling) that were a downright inspiration to me as a writer. Dante's "Divine Comedy" was full of unhelpful mythology but again it doesn't take anything away from it's power and majesty as a poem and masterpiece. By “unhelpful, popular mythology” I mostly mean the kinds of cultural baggage that tends to distance us from the truth either through romanticising, whitewashing or demonizing a person or action, and I just think that it pays off to be aware of said baggage we're bringing with us into a piece we're creating (or generally engage with through life).
e) On whether or not we can nuance things to the point of losing sight of what we think is right or wrong. This is literally something that haunts me, because it makes me wonder about what the human limit is for embodying compassion, understanding and empathy before we potentially start walking off the deep end. It's like having to ask oneself: what does it cost me to understand this person? What does it mean to really engage with that person's dignity? Will there come a point where caring about someone too much will make me lose sight of what is really true in the world? Just like I mentioned in the previous post (Part II) in the comments about how iconography is a limited art that can only do so much, so our human nature can only do so much. I haven't gotten to the point yet (I hope) where compassion and empathy lead to compromise, and the thought that it might happen is something truly, truly chilling. And I don't want to use the possibility of that line's existence as a reason not to see the nuances that are really, actually there.
Which leads into another question: if seeing something as too nuanced can lead us to doing something problematic or wrong, how then are we called to relate the nuances and complications that really do exist in the world? Would knowing the truth in it's fullness be too much for us? Would we break? What does that imply about our nature, and about the nature of truth? At the moment I can’t accept willed ignorance as an answer or response, but I don’t have an answer myself yet.
I agree with you completely though that complicating things more than they need to be (or hair-splitting) can really lead to us losing focus on what matters, and that way too many times people (myself included) can get mired down in that place – but I think in this case (humanizing the other side of the conflict) falls safely in the territory of "things we need to do in order to walk in the truth" rather than "things that, if we engage with it, may be conducive to losing sight of the essentials." Again, this goes into a whole other debate and so it's probably best to end things here before we end up co-writing a thesis.
p.s. I'm glad you brought up the downerness, actually, because it was something that was bothering me in a way that I couldn't put my finger on. I think that there's a lot in Christian culture (as compared to Christianity) that isn't ideal, especially in the way that art is approached, and engaging those issues forms the crux for most of the posts I write here – thing is, even though I think it's important, it can also be a huge slog of negativity and a rather dense slice of "this is how not to do it, this is how not to do it." While criticism's essential, there definitely has to be some kind of joy (and hope) involved – it's a hard balance to try and pull off.