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Perpetual Adolescence: A Review of Young Adult

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 00:01:00 -0500

The new film Young Adult , the latest from the writer/director team of Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody of Juno fame, features Charlize Theron as Mavis Gary, a writer of young adult fiction living in the Twin Cities who returns to the small town of Mercury, MN to relive her glory days as a high school prom queen and to reclaim her former beau, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson). Although it is not without its funny moments, Young Adult is hardly a pleasant film. Yet it is a compelling and instructive one; in a Hollywood culture that celebrates perpetual adolescence, Young Adult is a rarity, an unsparing depiction of what it is like to remain trapped in adolescent fantasy.

Theron’s performance as a hard-drinking narcissist is garnering her the sort of critical acclaim she received for Monster , in which she played a sexually abused prostitute turned vengeful serial killer. Hollywood fell all over itself praising her transformation from a delicately gorgeous blonde to a disfigured, coarse, and violent woman. Here, she keeps her physical beauty but that only serves to highlight the harsh and unfeeling soul that lurks beneath the facade.

When we meet Theron’s character, she is desperately lonely and facing unemployment, as her once-popular series of books is being cancelled. An alcoholic who ends her days with Maker’s Mark and begins each morning with Diet Coke, she is, with little success, trying to write the series finale, when she is a recipient of a group email with news that her now married high school flame, Buddy Slade, has just had a baby. With memories of their youthful romance and of her dominance of the social scene in Mercury, she decides to return to her town and repossess her boyfriend. That she never pauses over the implausibility or impropriety of her plan provides us with an early indicator of just how astonishingly self-absorbed she is. The film’s writing and the supple performance of Theron make the character of Mavis, despite her delusions, believable.

She encounters her parents only by chance, not having thought to alert them that she was back in town. During an uncomfortable dinner conversation, she broaches the topic of her drinking and they change the subject. The awkward silence strikes just the right disconcerting tone and is highly suggestive concerning the roots of Mavis’s disordered psyche. Mavis’s odd friendship with another classmate, Matt Freehauf, a guy she knew in high school only as the object of cruel humor and a brutal beating, is at once twisted and revelatory of her longing for human fellowship and understanding.

Young Adult keeps its distance from its main character’s disorder , but another critically acclaimed film released in recent months, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia , which also features a deeply depressed young woman (Kirsten Dunst) incapable of adapting to adult life, embraces the main character’s deeply hostile judgment about the human race, namely, that it is evil and merits destruction. Dunst’s performance is at times arresting, as are the film’s visuals, mood, and music (Wagner). But von Trier is less interested in developing her character than it is in deploying her as a vehicle for the expression of a cynical cosmic truth that she alone apprehends.

Young Adult is a more measured film, which does not end up confirming the worst judgments of the depressed, perpetual adolescent, even if, in a convincing twist at the end, it portrays her as retreating to that comfortable universe in which “everyone” in her hometown, is “fat and dumb.”

The denigration of small town life is common enough in Hollywood films. One of the refreshing things about Young Adult is its rather straightforward portrayal of the ordinary families of this small town, particularly the family and friends of Buddy Slade. They are not fashionable or particularly clever or well informed about life beyond their town. But they aren’t fat and stupid either. They are decent, hard working members of their town, intent on building families and supporting one another.

One of the women does call Mavis a “psychotic, prom-queen bitch,” but they also feel sorry for her and thus Buddy’s wife, even after being warned by her friends about Mavis, makes sure she is invited to their house for a party for their newborn baby. Oblivious, Mavis elects to use this public occasion to declare her intentions to Buddy. What follows is public humiliation for Mavis, who is forced to see not only that her plan never had a chance but also that she has been the object of pity from folks she would have spent most of her life pitying, had she ever had a thought or feeling for them.

Mavis has moments of fleeting insight, issuing confessions such as “I’m crazy and no one loves me” and even “I need to change.” Yet, the closer she comes to realizing how much such change would cost, the less likely it is. If that makes for a somber ending, it is, I think, superior to many Hollywood films in which confronting the limitations of prolonged adolescent fantasy leads to an all too facile conversion and a happy ending. As somber and unpleasant as it is, Young Adult is a refreshing take on the motif of the perpetual adolescent.

Thomas Hibbs is dean of the Honors College at Baylor University. His first book on popular culture, Shows About Nothing (2000), is being rereleased in a revised, updated, and expanded version by Baylor University Press.

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Uncanny Man

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

A Case for Irony
by Jonathan Lear
Harvard, 224 pages, $29.95

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A Story From Before We Can Remember: A Review of Tree of Life

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 00:01:00 -0400

A young son in Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life asks his mother, “Tell us a story from before we can remember.” Malick begins his story even earlier by telling the story from before we can remember. With visually arresting imagery and a mesmerizing musical score, a lengthy opening sequence traces the history of the universe, from initial explosion and expansion through the formation of galaxies and planets to the formation of earth and the development of life on what the philosopher Charles DeKonnick calls a “poor little planet born of a catastrophe.”

With the exception of its final, disappointing segment, the film is a truly astonishing achievement, an ambitious artistic exploration of questions rarely formulated by religious believers: How are we to think about cosmology, about the place of human existence in the capacious orders of time and space? What matter to us, to the universe, or to God is our occupying of a speck of seemingly insignificant space in an incomprehensibly vast universe? What we know of modern cosmology and paleontology makes the Psalmist’s question even more weighty: “What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?” ( Psalm 8:4). As one character puts it to God, “What are we to you?”

Malick’s opening gives dramatic weight to the film’s epigraph from Job : “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? . . . When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” ( Job 38: 4,7). Those questions frame the story of the O’Brien’s (starring Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain as the parents), living in Waco, Texas in the 1950’s. The film offers vivid depictions of the three central characters: Pitt and Chastain as husband and wife and Hunter McCracken as Jack, the oldest of their three sons (played as an adult by Sean Penn). Not only does the film envelop these individual lives in a cosmic drama of creation, it also continually interjects a vertical perspective into their linear story line. Emmanuel Lubezki’s always stunning cinematography here takes the form of mildly disorienting strong vertical camera angles. The suggestion is that we need to look up and down in addition to before and after to get our bearings on events and persons.

In Malick’s hands, the violation of linear narrative unity is neither a postmodern repudiation of the possibility of meaning nor a celebration of the dissolution of personal identity and the absurdity of human life. It opens up the possibility of another perspective on the action, one descending from above, from the God who transcends the entire order of time and space and yet mysteriously intervenes. To underscore this point, Malick locates the majority of the scenes of the O’Brien family outdoors, in the open air, rather than in confining buildings. The camera’s attraction to trees and sunlight bestows upon ordinary events and characters an extraordinary beauty.

Complementing the sparse dialogue between characters is their interior monologues. The characters’ interior conversations occasionally contain comments on other characters, as when Jack expresses wrath toward his father, but more often than not, their intended audience is God, whom they beg for help and to whom they pose questions and express doubts or remorse. There are also voiceover commentaries intended primarily for the audience, the chief example of which is Jack’s mother’s early statement:

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Julie Taymor’s Tempest

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 00:02:00 -0500

More famous for her Broadway productions of The Lion King and the upcoming Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark than for films such as Titus , Frida , and Across the Universe , Julie Taymor has brought a new version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest to the screen. As is often the case with contemporary versions of Shakespeare, Taymor tries to update and refresh the play by changing the male lead, Prospero, to a female, Prospera (Helen Mirren). But that proves the least of problems for this truly appalling version of one of Shakespeare’s finest plays.

Commonly considered Shakespeare’s valedictory because of the main character’s focus on mortality and persistent reflection on the purpose of art, The Tempest is an atypical play”and not just because of its fantastical setting. There is, in fact, very little action in the play. In performances of The Tempest on stage or screen, the poetry must be made, or allowed, to do more work than other Shakespeare dramas. Among the many things Taymor’s version misses, this is perhaps the chief oversight. In far too many scenes, ambient noise and technological excess overwhelm the language.

The Tempest ’s plot runs thus. Now stranded on an island with his daughter, Miranda, Prospero once ruled as Duke of Milan, an office whose duties he neglected in pursuit of knowledge, described both as a kind of magic and as training in the liberal arts. Overthrown by his ambitious brother Antonio, who conspired with King Alonso of Naples, Prospero is put on a boat with Miranda and abandoned at sea. Only the compassion of the King’s counselor, Gonzalo, who gives them supplies and Prospero’s cherished books, saves them from perdition. Landing on a remote island, Prospero and Miranda discover two inhabitants: the beastly Caliban, offspring of the malevolent witch Sycorax, and the ethereal Ariel, a spirit endowed with magical powers but imprisoned in a tree by the witch, who has since died. Using his magic, Prospero frees Ariel, binding him in service to his liberator. Returning from his daughter’s wedding in Tunis, Alonso”along with Antonio, Gonzalo, the King’s son Ferdinand, the court jester (Trinculo), and a butler (Sebastian)”pass Prospero’s island. Observing the chance event and seizing the opportunity for restoration, Prospero has Ariel cause a tremendous storm that shipwrecks the entire crew. With his betrayers now at his mercy, Prospero must orchestrate a restoration of justice in his dukedom even as he wavers between vengeance and mercy.

Taymor’s cinematographic version follows the plot fairly closely. The major alteration is, of course, in the election of a female lead. Alfred Molina, who plays Sebastian, and who worked with Taymor in Frida, calls the changing of Prospero to Prospera “a stroke of genius . . . Instead of ‘another old wizard,’ suddenly it’s this kind of rather gorgeous woman who’s calling the shots. It just gives it a whole new perspective.” One wonders: For whom in today’s audience does the Prospera character count as a fresh take? The legion of moviegoers schooled in traditional theater productions of the The Tempest ?

Stroke of genius or not, Mirren as Prospera delivers the play’s best performance. At least she can handle the language”something that cannot be said of the majority of the film’s other actors, who seem comically ill-suited to mouthing the words of Shakespeare. As Miranda, Felicity Jones is barely passable. But Reeve Carney’s Sebastian, who woos Miranda while looking like a young James Taylor, offers a disastrous performance as a sort of mentally vacant teen heartthrob. Russell Bran downgrades the slapstick of Trinculo and turns in a performance better suited to a stand-up routine on Comedy Central .

From the perspective of literary criticism, the main reason for substituting Prospera for Prospero is to rescue the play from its alleged colonialism and patriarchy. With the powerful male Prospero as the sole educator of his daughter and the enforcer of the servitude of Caliban (a character of color from Algiers), critics sometimes see the play as the embodiment of the vices of white, male, Western rule. The crude, binary conception of power (white, male, and Western is bad; non-white, non-male, and non-Western is good) operative in the critique obscures from view the supply analysis of power in the play.

In reducing the play’s emphasis on Prospero/Prospera’s cultivation of the “liberal arts” to a passion for sorcery, Taymor’s film misses Shakespeare’s reflection on the tension between philosophy and politics, liberty and necessity. Questions of justice abound. How should betrayers be punished? Does mercy play a role in political rule? Is it fair to require service from characters such as Ariel whose natures seem suited to unfettered freedom? What is the responsibility of governments to criminal characters such as Caliban? To what extent is the education and reform of such a character possible and its pursuit obligatory? What ought to be done when the goal of reform conflicts with the duty to protect the innocent? Are there limits to the use of techniques (weapons of force or arts of illusion) in political rule? To what extent and in what manner is it possible for the arts of poetry and politics, closely allied in this film, to inculcate virtue and foster the common good? Can poetry contribute to the philosophical goal of achieving self-knowledge?

These questions will not likely enter the minds of film viewers of Taymor’s version of the play, which alternates between the bizarre and the boring, as large stretches of the film depict rather pointless acts and speeches not dramatically connected to the main plot. Especially regrettable is the portrayal of Ariel. Instead of seeing Ariel, who maintains human affections and passions, as a character that transcends gender and sexuality, the filmmakers draw attention to what they deem Ariel’s sexual ambiguity, with the camera lingering on her bosom just a bit too salaciously. In scenes where Ariel’s artistry is on full display, the filmmakers seem eager instead to display their own technological prowess. These are the worst scenes in the entire film. The crucial revelation scene, in which Ariel concocts a vision from the underworld to accuse the traitors (“three men of sin”), looks like a lost scene from Ghostbusters . The remaining computer-generated material seems dated, as if derived from the style of early MTV videos. Neither radical enough in its revisionism for jaded critics, nor trendy enough for the Twilight/Inception generation of fans, the film manages to appeal to no target audience whatsoever. But poor marketing strategy is the least of its troubles. Inattentive to its source material, The Tempest is ignorant of the perilous powers of art, and its capacity to transform souls.

Thomas Hibbs is dean of the Honors College at Baylor University. His first book on popular culture, Shows About Nothing (2000), is being rereleased in a revised, updated, and expanded version by Baylor University Press.

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Dim and Dimiter

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Dimiter
by william peter blatty
forge, 304 pages, $24.99

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Leo Strauss and the Second Cave

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 01:29:00 -0400

In a 1932 letter Leo Strauss wrote, “I cannot believe and . . . therefore I search for a possibility to live without faith.” That search, which began in the 1920s, led him from contemporary theological debates and the modern liberal critique of religion to medieval Jewish and Islamic thinkers and back to Plato and Socrates, from whom Strauss learned that “raising the question regarding the right way of life”this alone is the right way of life.”

David Janssens’ Between Athens and Jerusalem: Philosophy, Prophecy, and Politics in Leo Strauss’s Early Thought is the latest in a series of impressive European studies of the life and thought of Leo Strauss. A revised and expanded version of a book published originally in Dutch in 2001, it is a tightly woven and illuminating treatment of Strauss’s intellectual development up to the publication of his book on Hobbes and his migration from Europe to the United States in 1937. Janssens gives an instructive account of the origins of Strauss’s discovery of Socratic philosophy and also helps to explain something that has often puzzled appreciative Christian readers of Strauss: why he devotes so little attention to, and why his students remain for the most part blissfully ignorant of, Christian thought.

Strauss became a Zionist in 1916 at the age of seventeen, and describes himself at that point as a “young Jew, born and raised in Germany, who found himself in the grip of the theologico-political predicament.” Even after he abandons Zionism for its failure to sustain Jewish identity in isolation from religion, he remains preoccupied with the “theologico-political problem.” It is not surprising that Spinoza and Maimonides figure prominently in Strauss’s initial reckoning with Judaism. Spinoza is the great defender of secular reason against the claims of revealed religion. Strauss is impressed with and by the Spinoza project, but he does not think it offers a convincing defense of reason or a decisive refutation of the claims of revelation. The modern attempt to secure a foundation for knowledge renders reason vulnerable to doubts about whether all knowledge can be reduced to scientific rationalism. Strauss asks, “Is Spinoza’s account clear and distinct? . . . Is its clarity and distinctness not due to the fact that Spinoza abstracts from those elements of the whole which are not clear and distinct and which can never be rendered clear and distinct?”

Strauss’s search may appear to be stymied at this juncture, but this is the case only if modernity encompasses all viable intellectual options. That itself is a historicist prejudice, a bias from which Strauss finds liberation by the study of the history of philosophy. The assumption that every text and author is culturally conditioned is itself the result of a specific set of historical assumptions and therefore dubious. This opens up the possibility that perhaps the truth was known once and may well be accessible to us again, even here and now. Under the tutelage of a certain type of reading, historicism is historicized. According to Strauss, “We need history first of all in order to ascend to the cave from which Socrates can lead us to the light; we need a propaedeutic, which the Greeks did not need, namely, learning through reading.” Strauss also expresses the provocative notion”to which we will return below and to which Janssens devotes an entire chapter”of a second cave beneath Plato’s natural cave.

Strauss’s reading of Maimonides, along with other medieval philosophers such as Averroes and Alfarabi, is a pivotal moment in his search to find a way of life distinct from that of religious belief. In contrast to Spinoza’s direct assault on religion, Maimonides’ approach is subtle and prudent. Central to Maimonides’ project and to Strauss’s own reading is the practice of “veiled” writing, which protects philosophy from the uninitiated and from political rebuke even as it “preserves the sharpness” of Socratic questioning. Medieval philosophers thus point backward to Plato, to the originating conception of philosophy as something always threatened but always available to be recovered.

Janssens offers helpful clarification of what Strauss does and does not mean by a “return to” or “recovery of” ancient thought. Strauss does not mean that one can simply bypass modernity. The putting into question of modernity’s project of pure inquiry”its attempt to circumvent and transcend received opinions to arrive at a pellucid intellectual foundation”implies, paradoxically, that the recovery of premodern thought must involve sustained engagement with the various strains of modern thought. Our starting points, our received opinions, are largely modern; unless we understand these opinions, their sources, and their merits, we will not know what is distinctive about antiquity.

The moving back and forth between modern and premodern shows significant differences in the nature of philosophy as practiced in the two eras. Modern “anti-theological ire,” the attempt to trump or refute revelation, transforms philosophy itself into something different from what it was in the premodern era. To compete with the comprehensive claims of revelation”claims that are equally theoretical and practical”philosophy strives to offer a comprehensive, indubitable account of reality and to transform the world so that it is more conducive to human desires. Philosophy seeks, in Descartes’ pithy pronouncement, to render us “masters and possessors of nature.” The late-modern realization is not that this project has failed, but that its success marks the ultimate denigration of man: his subjection to nihilism. Modernity’s “truthfulness from probity,” its exaltation of the courageous confrontation with nihilism, remains entangled with, even as it repudiates, Biblical morality. Instead of “dogmatic atheism,” Strauss proposes “unbelieving eros.” According to Strauss, this is the true Socratic philosophy: “raising the question regarding the right way of life”this alone is the right way of life.”

The conception of philosophy as a life of irresolvable inquiry is a corrective to the audacity of the modern project. Still, Strauss makes large claims on behalf of classical philosophy, which is rooted in the apprehension of the difference between nature and custom or law and which takes its orientation, not from time and history, but from eternity.

The sole weakness of Janssens’ meticulous reconstruction of Strauss’s early thought is that he rarely asks questions Strauss himself does not ask, particularly questions about Strauss’s own conception of philosophy. Strauss’s conception does, however, leave us with questions. The inquiring conception of philosophy means that philosophical reason is essentially discursive; it neither starts from, nor culminates in, any kind of contemplative insight into truth or nature. This reticence raises the question of what sort of content could be given to the meaning of nature that functions so prominently in Strauss’s writings. Moreover, the discursive and inherently temporal activity of philosophy is an odd fit for Strauss’s claim that philosophy is not about time and history but about eternity. At a minimum, these are matters that call for more a probing analysis.

But there is an even more important issue on which Janssens barely touches. As we have seen, a straightforward return to Socrates is not possible. The modern Socratic philosopher must confront revelation. Although Strauss devotes a great deal of attention to Jewish and Islamic thought, he spends considerably less time on Christian thought. Yet the self-destructive transformation of philosophy in modernity has precisely to do with its confrontation with the revelation of the New Testament and Christian theology. Given such adverse effects on philosophy, it might be prudent for the philosopher to avoid any sustained entanglement with Christianity.

Strauss does not avoid Christianity completely, however. He notes the differences between mythological religions and revealed religions and, among revealed religions, between those based in law (Judaism and Islam) and those based in faith and doctrine (Christianity). If he does not engage Christian truth claims in any detail, he does offer occasional, telling comments. Indeed, his strategy seems to be one of quiet denigration. How so?

As Janssens astutely points out, Strauss treats revelation as the source of a “second cave,” an artificial cave beneath Plato’s natural cave. Within that second cave, Christianity would seem to obfuscate, rather than illumine, the contest between philosophy and revelation. First, even before the modern substitution of right for law, St. Paul’s re-crafting of the law as written on the heart obscures the true character of law (nomos). Second, because of Christianity’s shift away from law, Christian thinkers propose a doctrine or way of life”a pursuit of wisdom, open to all”that encompasses philosophy and renders the teaching of wisdom public. Christianity thus confuses the few and the many, private philosophy and public politics. In this view, Christianity would seem to constitute a cave beneath the cave beneath the cave.

Following the lead of Heinrich Meier’s Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem , Janssens suggests, at the very end of his book, that Strauss may have considered it a necessary task of philosophy to refute or encompass revelation, including Christianity. Janssens refers to Strauss’s attempt”in the recently published 1948 lecture “Reason and Revelation””at a genealogy of the development of revelation out of mythic religion all the way to the notion of incarnation. It is hard to know what to make of that lecture or of the argumentative force of genealogy.

This much is clear: Strauss’s reading of modern philosophy as decisively shaped by “anti-[Christian] theological ire” and his own occasional concession of the need for a more direct consideration of Christian claims render dubious the claim that the only, or even the most important, debate is “between Athens and Jerusalem.” It might rather be, as Pierre Manent has intimated, between the two Romes: the Rome of the emperors versus the Rome of the martyred popes; the Rome of Cicero versus the Rome of Augustine.

If recent work on Strauss, including that of Janssens, underscores the enduring importance of theology, it also highlights how much work remains to be done.

Thomas S. Hibbs is Distinguished Professor of Ethics and dean of the honors college at Baylor University.

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Ralph McInerny (1929—2010)

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

According to Aristotle, is the performance of virtuous acts with ease and delight. On that basis, as well as others, Ralph McInerny was a remarkably virtuous man. One of Ralph’s most beautiful books is entitled The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain: A Spiritual Life , the premise of which is that “we can find in the person of Jacques Maritain a model of the intellectual life in the pursuit of sanctity.” Those words certainly apply to Ralph, one of the great Catholic intellectuals of our time. What distinguished Ralph was not just his fidelity, his intelligence, and his astonishing productivity, but his gracious and ready wit. He possessed a knack for conversation with everyone”from philosophers and politicians to the elderly and children. Unlike most gifted individuals, Ralph was never burdened by his gifts. He engaged in serious pursuits joyfully, almost playfully.

Ralph excelled in so many spheres and combined so many virtues in his person that it is difficult to know where to begin recounting his noteworthy achievements. He was a philosopher (the author of more than two dozen scholarly books, he gave the prestigious Gifford Lectures in 1999“2000), a translator (he translated the texts of Aquinas for Penguin Classics), a critically acclaimed and popular novelist (author of a number of mysteries, including the popular Father Dowling novels, which became a television series), a public intellectual (he appeared on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line and was a member of President George W. Bush’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities), a journalist (with Michael Novak, he founded Crisis , a journal of lay Catholic opinion), and a published poet. In the midst of all this activity, Ralph was remarkably generous with his time and his help, especially for his students, in whose families he expressed an avid interest.

In recent years, after the death of his beloved wife Connie, with whom he had seven children, his thoughts turned increasingly to age and death. In a wonderful and deeply autobiographical volume of poems, The Soul of Wit , he reflected at length on death. He said often that since Connie died, he felt posthumous. They were, indeed, a perfect match. As a graduate student, I met Connie when Ralph introduced her by saying, “Have you met my first wife?” With a wit as quick as Ralph’s, she had no trouble keeping up. Even”or especially”when occupied with thoughts of easeful death, Ralph’s humor emerged. He liked to tell the story about a hospital visit to see a failing Jean Oesterle, his Notre Dame colleague, a convert to the faith, and a translator of Aquinas. Hesitantly, he asked, “Jean, do you know who I am?” She retorted, “Don’t you know?”

Ralph had an indiscriminate love of puns; he seemed to enjoy bad puns more than good ones”a thesis that would seem to be confirmed by a perusal of the titles of his mystery novels ( On This Rockne , Irish Gilt , Law and Ardor , Rest in Pieces , or The Book of Kills ). An appreciation for the nuances and richness of ordinary language informed not only his humor but also his practice of philosophy. His most important philosophical text was Aquinas and Analogy , a study of the way Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, teased out of the complexity of ordinary language unities of meaning. Ralph rejected the idea that Thomas Aquinas provided us with a philosophical system intended to compete with other systems. Instead, Thomas was asking, in a more precise way, questions every human being asks; he was interested in the human good, not the good of professional philosophers or intellectuals. In keeping with this working assumption, Ralph wrote both for elite groups of scholars and for intrigued laymen. With the latter audience in mind, he penned A First Glance at Thomas Aquinas: A Handbook for Peeping Thomists . His distinctive approach to Thomas Aquinas is most evident in his supple account of natural law (see Ethica Thomistica , for example) and in his defense of natural theology in the text of his Gifford Lectures, published as Characters in Search of Their Author , the thesis of which Ralph states thus: “For us it is all but inevitable that, however momentarily, we feel ourselves to be part of a vast cosmic drama and our thoughts turn to the author, not merely of our roles, but of our existence. Natural theology is one version of that quest.”

Ralph’s philosophical work flourished at the University of Notre Dame, to which he moved in 1955, after receiving his doctorate at Laval under the great Thomist Charles DeKoninck and teaching for one year at Creighton. His first office at Notre Dame was in the administration building, the Golden Dome. When he and a colleague became intrigued by the presence of an old safe, they opened it and, amid the clutter, discovered a draft of a novel written by Knute Rockne. At Notre Dame, Ralph held an endowed chair as the Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies; he was also director of the Maritain Center and of the Medieval Institute.

Early on at Notre Dame, he began, in addition to his teaching and philosophical work, to write fiction. The story of how he made the transition from wanting to be a writer to becoming one is illuminating. After a time during which he haphazardly polished off and sent out short stories for publication, only to receive rejection letters, he decided that he would write daily over the next year. If nothing were accepted for publication, he would take that as a sign it was not meant to be. So, every evening, after he put his children to bed, he repaired to his unfinished basement and stood, not sat, before his typewriter to peck away from 10 P.M. to 2 A.M. On the wall in front of him, he posted these words in bold, “No One Owes You a Reading.” He eventually published some short stories and then had a breakthrough in 1969 with The Priest , a novel that became a bestseller. He wrote more than eighty novels and received the Bouchercon Lifetime Achievement Award for mystery writing.

Ralph’s life and career will always be enmeshed with the university he loved”Our Lady’s University. He was, of course, deeply chagrined at the direction of the university. The concerns about Notre Dame’s Catholic identity have become very public in the past few years with the administration’s decisions to elevate the tawdry Vagina Monologues to the status of great art and to award an honorary doctorate of law to a pro-abortion president. Before all that, Ralph objected, in a New York Times op-ed piece called “The Firing Irish,” to the premature firing of Coach Tyrone Willingham and to the unseemly image of a president and priest chasing down potential coaches on airport tarmacs in the dead of night. Even prior to that, Ralph objected to hiring practices that focused exclusively on “academic” criteria and rendered irrelevant knowledge of, and sympathy for, the Catholic faith and intellectual tradition.

For Ralph, the accelerating abandonment of things Catholic at Notre Dame was the direct result of a craven quest for success understood in conventional, and often quite secular, terms.

It is common to say that Notre Dame’s motto is “God, Country, Notre Dame,” but Ralph was quick to remind us that the official motto is vita, dulcedo et spes ”words meaning “life, sweetness, and hope” from the Latin Marian prayer, Salve Regina . How fitting that Ralph’s last book, published just months ago, is Dante and the Blessed Virgin . Again, what Ralph said of Jacques Maritain is equally true of Ralph. Teacher of teachers, he was a “model of the Christian philosopher, of the Thomist, both by what he taught and what he was.”

Thomas S. Hibbs is Distinguished Professor of Ethics and dean of the honors college at Baylor University.

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Oscar’s Parochial World

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:05:00 -0500

In a scene in the Oscar-nominated film An Education , an older British man with designs on a precocious teenage girl concocts a story for her parents about how he is taking her to visit his old professor, C.S. Lewis. Although Lewis does not figure further in the film, this is a pivotal moment. The thrilled parents grant their permission, and their starry-eyed daughter, who dreams of attending Oxford and experiencing a life of fashionable high culture, becomes further enmeshed in the deceptive world of her superficially cultured suitor. The film does a decent, if predictable, job of showing the way bright, eager young souls can confuse sham culture with real education. The film has absolutely nothing to say, however, about what might constitute a true education.

The passing allusion to Lewis and his popularity”even celebrity”among middle-class Brits underscores something that is increasingly rare in our popular culture: art that occupies a middle and mediating ground between high and low culture and that mixes entertainment with an instructive reflection on the big questions. Nowhere is this lack more evident than in the standard type of film that is nominated for an Oscar in the category of Best Picture: a film that very few Americans have seen and that represents not so much high culture versus low as a parochial world of antipopular culture.

Perhaps in the hope of expanding interest in its fatuous and self-indulgent awards ceremony, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has expanded its list of nominees for Best Picture from five to ten. This year’s list includes three films that rank in the box-office top ten for the year 2009: Up , The Blind Side , and the record-pummeling Avatar , about which I have already opined . Of the three, each of which has received some recognition in other year-end award ceremonies, Pixar’s Up is the most finely crafted story”a tale about loving fidelity, grief, old age, renewal, and growing up. It is one of the most compelling films ever made about friendship between young and old.

The inclusion of these three films does not mean, however, that the Academy has gone populist. Not only An Education , but also Up in the Air , starring George Clooney, and the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man investigate the themes of false dreams, detached lives, and empty quests that often attract those who cast the votes for Best Picture. Of the three, Up in the Air is the most enticing story, although it seems in the end to have been produced largely as Oscar bait. (The Best Picture nominee Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire , a bleaker, female version of the also-nominated The Blind Side ’s tale of a rise from the projects, is perhaps the hardest of this year’s films to categorize, except that it comes awfully close to wallowing in the sort of human degradation that appeals to the Academy.)

Among the nominees there is also an interesting group of what might loosely be called war films: The Hurt Locker , District 9 , and Inglourious Basterds . The real revelation here is QuentinTarantino’s Inglourious Basterds , a film that may serve to resurrect a filmmaking career that seemed in irreversible decline. The film stars Brad Pitt as the head of a World War Two Jewish-American commando unit sent to Europe with the purpose of “killing Nazis.” The unit does more than that; it inspires fear in its inhuman enemies. The action is fast-paced and the dialogue, witty. Tarantino’s humor works here in large part because Inglourious Basterds gleefully embraces the clear sense of good and evil that is the presupposition of the plot.

An odd pairing, I know, but Up and Inglourious Basterds seem to me to be the two most noteworthy of the nominated films. What about other, nonnominated films? Not worthy of nomination but worth mentioning are Ponyo , another delightful animated fantasy from Hayao Miyazaki, and Paranormal Activity , a low-budget horror film that uses subtle techniques of suspense to make a chilling case for demonic presence.

There is, for me, one glaring omission on the Best Picture list: Crazy Heart . It features Jeff Bridges as a heavy-drinking, once-famous country-music star whose life is barely held together by his commitment to playing the next gig. Then it is held together by his love for a sometime reporter and single mom played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. What could have been a predictable plot manages to surprise in a number of ways. A downward spiral seems to mark the end of the line for Bridges’ character. But it doesn’t. The possibility of recovery and redemption seems to signal a tidy happy ending. But it doesn’t. Redemption here does not mean recovery of all that is lost; in this case, it involves a distinction between what one wants and what one needs. Crazy Heart is a memorable and richly human film, the best of the year.

Thomas S. Hibbs is Distinguished Professor of Ethics and dean of the honors college at Baylor University .

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Children of Lesser Gods

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:24:00 -0500

Woody Allen’s Whatever Works , a serious contender for worst movie of 2009, is noteworthy mostly as a disastrous attempt to channel Allen’s humor through the caustic verbiage of the increasingly unfunny Larry David. But the problem is deeper than casting. In Whatever Works , David plays the New Yorker Boris Yellnikoff, a once-famous scientist who inexplicably ends up taking in a young homeless woman, Melody St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood), a former beauty-pageant queen from Mississippi who embodies every caricature of the God-fearing, gun-loving South. Replete with Yellnikoff’s screeds against the South and its religiosity, the film sees New York as the place of cosmic enlightenment for backward outsiders. The film also shows how ill-suited David is to anything beyond an extended skit and how astonishingly in decline are the artistic powers of Woody Allen. It is as if Allen set out to make a film that would fulfill the religious right’s worst allegations about Hollywood. Exceptional only for its poor quality, Whatever Works is among a group of recent films that embody the shallow critique of theology pervasive among the so-called new atheists.

This is not, of course, the whole picture on religion in film in 2009. Indeed, one of the year’s most popular films, an Oscar nominee that clearly benefited from the expanded pool for Best Picture, is John Lee Hancock’s The Blind Side . The antithesis of Whatever Works , The Blind Side celebrates both the life of Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman Michael Oher and the white, upper-class family that adopts Oher and gives him a chance at living well. Criticized in the mainstream media for its “selective charity,” the emotionally predictable but nonetheless enjoyable film depicts the Southern and Christian Tuohy family as thoughtful, industrious, generous, and good-humored. Religious themes also surface in dour apocalyptic quest films such as The Road and The Book of Eli . Perhaps most significant of all is the success of Avatar , a deeply religious film that embodies not so much Christianity as the form of religion that has come increasingly to function as a simulacrum of Christianity in our culture, Romanticism.

Ricky Gervais’ The Invention of Lying might be said to articulate the common thesis of the new atheists: God is the big lie. Gervais plays Mark Bellison, a struggling scriptwriter in a world where lying does not exist and is, indeed, for everyone except Bellison, inconceivable. In a world without fiction, scriptwriters are reduced to constructing bland recitations of historical fact. Bellison is not a success, either in his writing career or in his pursuit of attractive women like Anna (Jennifer Garner). For overweight, unattractive guys like Bellison, universal honesty is painful. This is made clear in the phone conversation Anna has with her mother during a date with Bellison. Seated across the table from him, she recounts his physical defects and announces that she won’t be sleeping with him.

Experiencing inner conflict and some sort of genetic transformation, Bellison eventually seizes on an opportunity to lie. The pivotal scene in the film occurs as Bellison visits his dying mother in the hospital and strives to console her. After hospital workers overhear him describing the pleasures of the afterlife, they spread the good news. Soon crowds are camped outside his house, demanding further information about the “Man in the Sky” and his criteria for deciding who gets to live in a mansion in the next life. Gervais / Bellison appears on his porch with a pizza box on which he has written a set of commandments. If this were a Monty Python film, such a scene would be rife with comic possibility. Not here. One friend, realizing that all he has to do to gain eternity in a mansion is to avoid serious wrongdoing, decides simply to stay home, drink beer, and watch TV. Although the film introduces tensions between fact and fiction, truthfulness and lying, it is so devoid of imagination that it simply does nothing with these tensions. Gervais seems to want to poke fun at the banality of religion, but the dullness of this and other scenes to the banality of his own humor.

One wonders whether Ricky Gervais was an adviser for the latest Coen brothers film, A Serious Man , which stars Michael Stuhlbarg as Larry Gopnik, a physics professor awaiting a tenure decision. A sort of postmodern Job, Gopnik is in a bad way; up for tenure, he is receiving secret letters attacking his prospects. His wife is having an affair with a friend of the family, and his kids are deadbeats. On a quest to read the signs of the times, particularly as they apply to his own cursed life, he consults various rabbis, who wander from reflections on the difficulty of seeing Hashem ”that is, God”in the world to oracular recitations of Jefferson Airplane lyrics: “When the truth is found to be lies.” But the Coens have not updated Job; they have served up a dramatically diminutive version and paired him with a vastly diminished divinity. Gopnik somberly muses about God and the uncertainty principle, which, according to his version, means that “you can never know what’s going on.” One searches the screen for Gervais’ pizza box when Gopnik concludes: “The boss isn’t always right, but he’s always the boss.”

Another contender for worst film of the year is The Road , based on the absorbing and luminous Cormac McCarthy novel, a brilliant piece of literature into which are woven subtle theological themes. The nearly complete absence of religious themes, particularly from the film’s closing moments, is not, however, what makes The Road such a dreadful movie. McCarthy’s book”a story about a father (Viggo Mortensen in the film) and son trying to make their way along a perilous path to the sea in the wake of a cataclysmic event”is an emotionally rich exploration of loss and longing, of the loving obligation of a parent not to despair in the face of the most daunting odds. In the transition to the screen, the poetry is lost; in its place is an exhausting repetition of grotesque, stomach-churning events.

If The Road is one of the great disappointments of 2009, The Book of Eli ”an early 2010 release that features Denzel Washington on a post-apocalyptic path to deliver a mysterious book to a place where it can become the basis of a new civilization”is better than advertised. There are hints at the power of reading and of authoritative words”especially when those words emerge from the Word”to undergird political deceit or, by contrast, to provide the seeds for a renewal of civilization. The problem is that the filmmakers seem not to have read much of the good book; the only scriptural passage recited at length is Psalm 23. It fits, but it is also the most obvious passage. Much worse is Eli’s summation of what he’s learned from years of protecting and reading the holy book: Give more to others than to yourself. But Washington’s performance as a man gifted with supernatural powers of self-defense and an undivided will to fulfill the command of God is surprisingly credible. He makes the viewer believe that he has heard the Word and been called. Like McCarthy’s novel The Road (but not the film), The Book of Eli manages to portray God as mysterious and more worthy of our obedience than the jejune “Man in the Sky” of The Invention of Lying and other films.

If the box office is any indication, the most compelling portrait of divinity in the films of 2009 is not the Man in the Sky but the Lady in the Tree”the goddess Eywa who is worshipped by the Na’vi on the planet Pandora in James Cameron’s Avatar . The much-touted look of the film is, indeed, mesmerizing; but the visuals work largely because Cameron is so effective in constructing an entire world, that of the Na’vi tribe. The very blue inhabitants of Pandora are deeply bound, one to another, and to a particular place, particularly to the sacred tree and the goddess who dwells there. The tree happens to sit on mineral deposits that are valuable to the militaristic capitalists who want to relocate the tribe, by diplomacy or war (preferably the latter), so as to exploit Pandora’s natural resources. The film delivers its share of politically pointed clichés, as when the merciless military commander announces a policy of “fighting terror with terror.” What is more telling is the way Avatar , like many recent sci-fi films ( The Matrix and The Children of Men , for example), deploys symbols and themes from a number of world religions. The dominant and unifying myth, however, is that of Romanticism. Avatar embodies a set of standard Romantic divisions between a primitive, basically peaceful, and organic culture, on the one hand, and an advanced, bellicose, and artificial culture, on the other.

Perhaps the most instructive lesson to take away from the religious themes in recent films is the way our popular culture seems to vacillate between essentially empty conceptions of a transcendent God and increasingly fertile notions of divine immanence. Given that choice, the attraction of the latter is clear. In nature, we encounter a mysterious other whose regal power is palpable. In either case, we encounter lesser gods than the One who speaks in Eli’s sacred book.

Thomas S. Hibbs is Distinguished Professor of Ethics and dean of the honors college at Baylor University.

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Baylor University’s New Starr

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:41:00 -0500

On a Wednesday afternoon I made my way from my office on the Baylor University campus over to the central administration building to begin the process of reviewing candidate files for the next president of Baylor. I had no idea what I would find. As a member of the advisory committee, I had been involved in initial conversations with the regent search committee about the desired qualifications of the new president and in a listening session with the group I represented, the Council of Deans. That was months ago. The regent committee had held its silence. There had been no leaks. Rumors, mostly from those mistrustful of the board, had circulated. There were no good candidates; the board was not doing a serious search, certainly not a national search; the board wanted a toady; the board was planning to appoint one of its own.

I began to look through the files and was pleased both by how many there were and by some of the high profile names. One in particular jumped out, Ken Starr. Yes, that Ken Starr .

Now, the members of our advisory committee did not have a vote. Yet, on what was certain to be, initially at least, a controversial selection, the board would not, I think, have acted without our support . Much to our surprise, the members of the advisory committee, with representatives of groups (faculty senate and alumni) that had been at odds with recent administrations, ended up unified in support of the candidacy of Ken Starr. What made us overcome whatever initial reluctance any of us might have had?

Certainly folks felt good about the process itself, but beyond that Ken Starr himself emerged as a compelling candidate. He is at once a commanding and a genial presence who combines intelligence and humility. He never seems to forget a name or to miss a chance to take a conversation back, often in a humorous way, to comments made earlier by others. He is also a gifted orator, as was clear in his first public speech at Baylor . On Tuesday afternoon, before a large and enthusiastic crowd, he spoke eloquently of Baylor’s origins, its traditions, and its role in and beyond Texas.

As John Garvey, Dean of the Law School at Boston College and recent president of the American Association of Law Schools said, “Ken is a well known public figure, and people form ideas about such celebrities from what little they read in the media. There are sides of him that are less well known. One example is his representation of Robin Lovitt, a death row inmate whose sentence was ultimately commuted to life in prison. Another is his serious commitment to his faith.”

Pepperdine President Andrew Benton observed, “Ken has had a tremendous impact on our students, the law school, and the Pepperdine community at large. His leadership, his love of scholarship and his devotion to our students helped raise the national stature of our school, and we will benefit from the good he accomplished here for many years to come.” This might seem a pro forma statement from the president’s office but it is echoed by numerous Pepperdine faculty members, including those who identify themselves as politically liberal, and by students.

Defying expectations about what the search committee was up to, this election of Judge Starr as Baylor’s next president was a surprising choice. As a colleague said when the news broke, “I could not have been more surprised if you told me it was SpongeBob.” Initial press reporting has been, as expected, mixed, but even the Houston Chronicle , which has hardly been friendly to Baylor’s leadership in recent years, delivered a quite positive article about the appointment.

Altering and shaping the conversation about higher education is something Ken Starr will, as president of Baylor, be in a position to do. He said as much about what he hoped to do at Baylor in a response to a question from George Stephanapoulos in an interview on Good Morning America . Noting that Baylor has been making significant strides in faculty scholarship even as it remains focused on the integration of faith and learning, he noted that Baylor is in a position to be an important voice in higher education.

In a landscape that is becoming increasingly homogeneous, the world of American higher education needs institutional diversity; it especially needs the distinctive contributions of its religious colleges and universities. On that score, recent history is not comforting. What seems to be an inertial slide toward secularization has plagued many once great religious institutions of higher learning. According to studies by Jim Burtchaell and George Marsden, secularization has not been a plot perpetrated by malicious university leaders. Instead, it typically occurs under capable and personally pious presidents, who seem to suffer from a certain naivete. One might, for example, hear a president at a Catholic university say something like, “Secularization will not affect Catholic schools the way it has affected Protestant schools because of the distinctively Catholic understanding of faith and reason.” The problem of course is that if very few members of the faculty can articulate with any clarity or sympathy that distinctive understanding, it is hard to see how it will forestall secularization.

The vision under which Baylor University now operates (Baylor 2012), articulated during the presidency of Robert Sloan, is designed to counter the inertial slide even as it aims to make Baylor more of a national university. Disputes over the implementation of that vision were the occasion for much publicized divisions at Baylor during the presidency of Sloan, now president at Houston Baptist University.

The goals and “Guiding Convictions” of that document remain. They were part of our committee conversations in this presidential search. These are noble goals for Christian higher education. Much is at stake in their prudent and vibrant realization. Because we have a history of division, tempered certainly in recent years, combined with great aspirations for the future, Baylor desperately needs a president who can hear all voices, someone who will listen, not passively but with intelligence, discretion, and judgment. One thing is clear about a selection that surprised nearly everyone. With the election of Ken Starr, Baylor has entered a period of presidential leadership that is in many respects unprecedented in its entire history.

Thomas S. Hibbs is Distinguished Professor of Ethics and dean of the honors college at Baylor University.

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