November 28, 2011
Tangled
As it turns out, he was completely right twice.
Like all good Disney animated features, Tangled has more to say to the adults in the audience than the kids (don't tell the kids that). To be sure, there's plenty of low-brow slapstick involving conking people over the head with frying pans (which I found hilarious) and a horse that acts like a dog (even more hilarious).
The hero (Flynn Rider) and heroine (Rapunzel) are pretty much the same only—well, the same—except with humor, panache, and a keen insight into human nature. These elements come together in a bitingly funny psychoanalytic montage that has Rapunzel harboring second doubts about disobeying her wicked witch of a "mother."
And even the wicked witch is less "wicked" (well, kidnapping and murder aside) than vain, manipulative and self-centered, dysfunctions exhibited under the guise of being "overprotective." If nothing else, Tangled makes for a perfect parable about overparenting.
As Card points out, the climax also contains a perfect example of "eucatastrophe," Tolkien's word for the point in the plot when it is darkest before the dawn, and then redemption springs unexpectedly from utter loss. Or as Milton puts it, "All this good of evil shall produce."
Of course, this is basic, by-the-numbers monomyth stuff, following the classic narrative arc that Robert McKee goes on and on about. Except that sticking to the basics is what makes these stories not only last but often improve in the retelling, like old Neil Diamond songs that get covered by hip bands and take on a new life of their own.
(Consider "I'm a Believer" as a case in point. We now have Neil Diamond covering Smash Mouth covering Neil Diamond covering The Monkees performing a song written by Neil Diamond. It's all good!)
But what again confirmed for me that popular entertainment is the place to find true "artistic genius" is the comic relief, especially Max (the horse). This isn't an actor mugging for the camera, but the writer (Dan Fogelman) and artists dreaming up a bunch of vaudevillian routines and then drawing them (albeit digitally), a skill I truly envy.
These powers of imagination are a tad lacking at the beginning and end of Tangled. The story clunks along getting started—more in medias res would have helped—and stumbles a bit finding the right note to end on. But those are tiny criticisms when the other nine-tenths of the movie is so wonderful.
Labels: anime, criticism, mckee, movie reviews, personal favs
January 24, 2011
The conservative hero
Kate commented a while back (also here) about what makes a good hero:
I'd like to add one more to the list:
Now, I don't mean in the "votes Republican" sense, though as with Michael J. Fox's Alex B. Keaton and William Shatner's Denny Crane, that can work in the hands of a talented actor, even if he's a liberal at heart. I mean in the William F. Buckley sense:
The hero knows there are things in life—from the past as well as the present—worth conserving: institutions and relationships, beliefs and traditions, manners and protocols, the way things are simply done. And these do not easily yield to fashion, trends, or political correctness.
The reason that cops, lawyers and forensic scientists populate television dramas is that these professions are inherently conservative. They have traditions and procedures, the scientific method and the rule of law. And following them can at times put the hero at odds with his ideals.
But violating them will definitely get him into trouble with society, the people who sign his paycheck, and his conscience.
For all his free-wheeling ways, House is a tenacious—even fanatical—empiricist. Every cause has a discernible effect. All consequences can be traced back to a set of precipitating actions. "After eliminating the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth."
And no matter how grudgingly, he goes through channels, even if he has to lie and cheat to do so. He can only do the work he wants to do in the institutional setting of a hospital. Rock, meet hard place. But as Kate puts it, "It actually is harder to color inside the lines." Conflict!
Captain Picard always seems to me to be bucking for a job as U.N. Secretary General. But he does have a irrational devotion to the Prime Directive. Lo and behold, conflict! Though I wish the writers would have made Picard pay a much bigger personal price for this devotion.
Finally in First Contact, Patrick Stewart showed that with the right material he could chew through the scenery like the good Captain Ahab he should have been all along.
No man is a machine. The educated mind wars with mindless instinct. Freedom battles with the rule of law, improvisation with by-the-book, the truth versus the facts, what is legal versus what is right. Perhaps this tension is best summed up by FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth:
Consider the Stargate episode where the team encounters a Guns of the South situation (in which apartheid-era South Africans travel back in time to arm the Confederacy with 20th century weapons). Except in this case SG-1 runs into them during one of their expeditions.
At first, arguing that sure, they're SOBs, but their our SOBs, Colonel O'Neill insists that the needs of Earth outweigh the moral compromise (the ends justify the means). This creates conflict with Carter and the politically-correct Daniel Jackson, who take the high ground.
O'Neill comes around in the end (there really isn't any doubt). But if O'Neill's initial position isn't convincing made, and Richard Dean Anderson couldn't deliver it in a convincing manner, the drama would have ended up as a mush of shallow moralizing with strawman opponents.
Writers can't fall back on the institutional conservatism and forget that the hero has to internalize these values to a certain extent in order to survive (or become a functioning sociopath, which gives us Dexter).
One reason I think Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz are given producer credits on Bones (besides revenue sharing) is so they can defend their characters from writers who would try to turn them into conventional liberals who, you know, think the same way hip Hollywood writers think.
It's the "I don't know anybody who voted for Nixon" syndrome (when Nixon won by a landslide). At least this is my explanation for those awful, politically correct scripts that pop up every now and then on NCIS.
But NCIS remains the most popular one-hour drama on television precisely because it gets one thing exactly right: Leroy Jethro Gibbs as the personification of Semper Fi conservatism.
Even a well-defined supporting character can help stave off these pressures. For example, Linda Hunt as Hetty Lange on NCIS: Los Angeles alone makes the series watchable, as an aging cold warrior adapting to modern times but not leaving the past behind.
Danno on the new Hawaii Five-0 is cast as an old school, Miranda-respecting cop there to steady McGarrett's loose cannon (though that looseness is losing me). The original CSI still has one great ace up its sleeve: Paul Guilfoyle as Captain Brass, a gruff, misanthropic, by-the-numbers cop.
Rex Linn fills a similar role CSI: Miami as Sergeant Frank Tripp, but not quite. For some reason—maybe they didn't want him harshing Horatio's mellow—Tripp is Horatio's subordinate. Thus the institutional check is lost. And so it's pretty much all id all the time.
Even if nobody can be too rich or too thin or too underdressed in the Hollywood version of reality—your protagonist can be way too cool to be believable.
As Margaret Thatcher said, "The facts of life are conservative." A hero—even in the most fantastic of fantasy lands—must be a stubborn realist about life and human nature.
1. The hero is confident in a nonchalant way.
2. The hero has a sense of humor.
3. The hero respects women without putting them on pedestals.
4. The hero know himself.
5. The hero is loyal and [can be counted on to] stick around.
I'd like to add one more to the list:
6. The hero is a conservative.
Now, I don't mean in the "votes Republican" sense, though as with Michael J. Fox's Alex B. Keaton and William Shatner's Denny Crane, that can work in the hands of a talented actor, even if he's a liberal at heart. I mean in the William F. Buckley sense:
A conservative is the fellow standing athwart history yelling "Stop!"
The hero knows there are things in life—from the past as well as the present—worth conserving: institutions and relationships, beliefs and traditions, manners and protocols, the way things are simply done. And these do not easily yield to fashion, trends, or political correctness.
The reason that cops, lawyers and forensic scientists populate television dramas is that these professions are inherently conservative. They have traditions and procedures, the scientific method and the rule of law. And following them can at times put the hero at odds with his ideals.
But violating them will definitely get him into trouble with society, the people who sign his paycheck, and his conscience.
For all his free-wheeling ways, House is a tenacious—even fanatical—empiricist. Every cause has a discernible effect. All consequences can be traced back to a set of precipitating actions. "After eliminating the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth."
And no matter how grudgingly, he goes through channels, even if he has to lie and cheat to do so. He can only do the work he wants to do in the institutional setting of a hospital. Rock, meet hard place. But as Kate puts it, "It actually is harder to color inside the lines." Conflict!
Captain Picard always seems to me to be bucking for a job as U.N. Secretary General. But he does have a irrational devotion to the Prime Directive. Lo and behold, conflict! Though I wish the writers would have made Picard pay a much bigger personal price for this devotion.
Finally in First Contact, Patrick Stewart showed that with the right material he could chew through the scenery like the good Captain Ahab he should have been all along.
No man is a machine. The educated mind wars with mindless instinct. Freedom battles with the rule of law, improvisation with by-the-book, the truth versus the facts, what is legal versus what is right. Perhaps this tension is best summed up by FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth:
I love this country, you know, but I'll tell you something. If I was working law enforcement back in the day when they threw all that tea in the harbor, I would have rounded everybody up and we'd all still be English.
Consider the Stargate episode where the team encounters a Guns of the South situation (in which apartheid-era South Africans travel back in time to arm the Confederacy with 20th century weapons). Except in this case SG-1 runs into them during one of their expeditions.
At first, arguing that sure, they're SOBs, but their our SOBs, Colonel O'Neill insists that the needs of Earth outweigh the moral compromise (the ends justify the means). This creates conflict with Carter and the politically-correct Daniel Jackson, who take the high ground.
O'Neill comes around in the end (there really isn't any doubt). But if O'Neill's initial position isn't convincing made, and Richard Dean Anderson couldn't deliver it in a convincing manner, the drama would have ended up as a mush of shallow moralizing with strawman opponents.
Writers can't fall back on the institutional conservatism and forget that the hero has to internalize these values to a certain extent in order to survive (or become a functioning sociopath, which gives us Dexter).
One reason I think Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz are given producer credits on Bones (besides revenue sharing) is so they can defend their characters from writers who would try to turn them into conventional liberals who, you know, think the same way hip Hollywood writers think.
It's the "I don't know anybody who voted for Nixon" syndrome (when Nixon won by a landslide). At least this is my explanation for those awful, politically correct scripts that pop up every now and then on NCIS.
But NCIS remains the most popular one-hour drama on television precisely because it gets one thing exactly right: Leroy Jethro Gibbs as the personification of Semper Fi conservatism.
Even a well-defined supporting character can help stave off these pressures. For example, Linda Hunt as Hetty Lange on NCIS: Los Angeles alone makes the series watchable, as an aging cold warrior adapting to modern times but not leaving the past behind.
Danno on the new Hawaii Five-0 is cast as an old school, Miranda-respecting cop there to steady McGarrett's loose cannon (though that looseness is losing me). The original CSI still has one great ace up its sleeve: Paul Guilfoyle as Captain Brass, a gruff, misanthropic, by-the-numbers cop.
Rex Linn fills a similar role CSI: Miami as Sergeant Frank Tripp, but not quite. For some reason—maybe they didn't want him harshing Horatio's mellow—Tripp is Horatio's subordinate. Thus the institutional check is lost. And so it's pretty much all id all the time.
Even if nobody can be too rich or too thin or too underdressed in the Hollywood version of reality—your protagonist can be way too cool to be believable.
As Margaret Thatcher said, "The facts of life are conservative." A hero—even in the most fantastic of fantasy lands—must be a stubborn realist about life and human nature.
Related posts
Angsty angst ruins everything
Writing to be read
Good books don't have to be hard
Dramatic conservation
Labels: bones, kate, mckee, television, thinking about writing
January 06, 2011
Impressing the right people
Seth Roberts observes that too often scientists publish papers to impress their colleagues, not to advance the science.
He draws a connection to best-selling author James Patterson, who says of his writing, "I don't believe in showing off. Showing off can get in the way of a good story." It also gets in the way of communicating with the reader.
This New York Times profile of Patterson makes me like him a whole lot--even though I don't think I've read any of his books--because it's clear that he respects his readers and the kind of books they like to read.
What we like and need is a good story, so much we'll read bad books to get them. And put up with typos and bad grammar to get them. Yet when all the ingredients come together, we can't eat just one, even if they're all the same.
Scientists want to be impressive. They want to impress lots of people--granting agencies, journal editors, reviewers, their colleagues, and prospective graduate students. All this desire to be impressive gets in the way of finding things out.
He draws a connection to best-selling author James Patterson, who says of his writing, "I don't believe in showing off. Showing off can get in the way of a good story." It also gets in the way of communicating with the reader.
This New York Times profile of Patterson makes me like him a whole lot--even though I don't think I've read any of his books--because it's clear that he respects his readers and the kind of books they like to read.
If you want to write for yourself, get a diary. If you want to write for a few friends, get a blog. But if you want to write for a lot of people, think about them a little bit. What do they like? What are their needs?
What we like and need is a good story, so much we'll read bad books to get them. And put up with typos and bad grammar to get them. Yet when all the ingredients come together, we can't eat just one, even if they're all the same.
Related posts
Elmore Leonard's rules of writing
Robert McKee's "Story"
Labels: kate, mckee, pullman, thinking about writing
June 18, 2010
Elmore Leonard's rules of writing
In this New York Times article from a while back, Elmore Leonard discusses his rules of writing. Here's the one I consider the most important:
I know that when I'm translating and I hit those "thick paragraphs of prose," I always groan a bit. And speaking of translating, here's a rule I've come up with recently:
Granted, we're in "do as I say" territory. But exceptions only prove rules by being exceptional, and yours and mine probably aren't. As my brother reminded me recently, it all comes down to:
Like that lyrical bit of prose that scans so beautifully (I'm the next T.S. Eliot!), yet on closer examination doesn't really mean anything (again, take pity on the poor translator).
As Philip Pullman has observed, yes, we will put up with bad writing to get to a good story (not the other way around). But why make the reader suffer for the reward?
• Leave out the parts that readers tend to skip, thick paragraphs of prose [that] have too many words in them.
I know that when I'm translating and I hit those "thick paragraphs of prose," I always groan a bit. And speaking of translating, here's a rule I've come up with recently:
• Don't write stuff that will drive your translator up the freaking wall.
Granted, we're in "do as I say" territory. But exceptions only prove rules by being exceptional, and yours and mine probably aren't. As my brother reminded me recently, it all comes down to:
• Getting rid of everything that gets in the way of the story.
Like that lyrical bit of prose that scans so beautifully (I'm the next T.S. Eliot!), yet on closer examination doesn't really mean anything (again, take pity on the poor translator).
As Philip Pullman has observed, yes, we will put up with bad writing to get to a good story (not the other way around). But why make the reader suffer for the reward?
Labels: mckee, pullman, thinking about writing
October 28, 2009
The illusion of authorial control
In a discussion of L'Engle's memoir Walking on Water at A Motley Vision ("We live under the illusion that if we can acquire complete control, we can understand God, or we can write the great American novel"), Patricia comments, "And this is why art as self-expression is art of a lesser light."
I've come to a similar realization recently. Maybe it comes with passing the half-century mark, but I find I've grown tired of angst and self-revelation. What I really want to do is tell an entertaining story, and better it be trashy than chock full of earnest "meaning."
This is what I think Robert McKee is getting at: the artistic import you're striving for is never so grand that you can dispense with story. The story is in control, not your deep thoughts, and you must be prepared to move your ego out of the way and let it go charging on through.
I've come to a similar realization recently. Maybe it comes with passing the half-century mark, but I find I've grown tired of angst and self-revelation. What I really want to do is tell an entertaining story, and better it be trashy than chock full of earnest "meaning."
This is what I think Robert McKee is getting at: the artistic import you're striving for is never so grand that you can dispense with story. The story is in control, not your deep thoughts, and you must be prepared to move your ego out of the way and let it go charging on through.
Labels: deep thoughts, mckee, religion, thinking about writing
August 21, 2009
Robert McKee's "Story"
If you haven't got the time to plow through Robert McKee's five-hundred page monograph on the art of storytelling, he sums it up nicely here. And I also agree with him that "[the art of storytelling] is not lost, it's just changed its address and moved over to television."
Or as Philip Pullman notes about Y/A literature: "You can't put the plot on hold while you cut artistic capers for the amusement of your sophisticated readers, because, thank God, your readers are not sophisticated."
Michael Blowhard praises McKee and gets right to the essence of the argument:
I think one of the reasons television is growing in its influence everywhere in the world is because in television there is no point in trying to be spectacular, and writers are forced to go back into the substance of human conflict in relationships and within human beings, and, as a result, they are producing, overall, the finest work.
Or as Philip Pullman notes about Y/A literature: "You can't put the plot on hold while you cut artistic capers for the amusement of your sophisticated readers, because, thank God, your readers are not sophisticated."
Michael Blowhard praises McKee and gets right to the essence of the argument:
It's idiotic to think that most people's interest in fiction will ever extend too far beyond storytelling, subject matter, hook, and character. An art form that divorces itself from its roots is taking a foolhardy chance.
Labels: books, criticism, mckee, publishing, pullman, television
August 31, 2007
Pelagius and the fools
We [Stephen Carter and Eugene Woodbury] propose that narrative fiction constructed in a Mormon context and for Mormon audiences often strays from conventional storytelling in several ways. Principal among these is the negation or diminution of the "second act." These stories skip from the first act (the set up) to the third act (the reassuring resolution), leaving out the struggle in between.
One explanation is that the hero's journey (as defined by the Campbellian monomyth) and the struggles he encounters present an unacceptable challenge to authority. Even the need for a journey suggests a rejection of the answers the gospel has provided. In other words, when the prophet speaks, the quest is over.
This missing "second act" also hints at a Calvinist mindset taking over Mormon letters: there is no need to wrestle with angels (as does Jacob in Genesis) or to protest bitterly to God (as does Job), because the proper resolution of our struggles has already been determined. Our fate is in the cards, and God always holds the winning hand.
The obvious exceptions are those Manichean contests in which a theologically-untroubled protagonist, in Hamlet's words, "takes up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing ends them." Hence the travails of the Willie and Martin handcart companies are depicted not as the product of human failure (which might problematically identify God as an unindicted co-conspirator), but as a heroic battle against cruel and insentient nature.
Coupled with the impulse to mollify an established set of authoritative truths is the growing rejection of what I call the "neo-Pelagian" theology that Joseph Smith restored, summed up in the proposition: "By grace we are saved, after all we can do." This challenge to "work out our own salvation" should be embraced, not as a challenge to divine providence, but as an invitation to play God's fools.
A 19th century transcendentalist who belongs alongside Emerson and Thoreau,(1) Joseph Smith resurrected the Puritan ideal of the "city on the hill,"(2) paralleling utopian movements such as Brook Farm. At the same time, he daringly attempted to mend the 16th century Catholic-Protestant rupture and bridge the long-buried 4th century Augustinian/Pelagian divide.
In doing so, Joseph Smith--quite inadvertently--created rich, new fields of possibility in Christian narrative fiction--fields that have shown particular promise in the science fiction and fantasy genres. But fields undermined by the loss of theological topsoil tilled from the revolutionary ideas of its founding prophet.(3)
Pelagius was a contemporary of Augustine and resided in Rome during the late 4th century. There he developed a theology of salvation that would be declared heresy two decades later at the Council of Carthage in 418.(4)
Instead Augustine's views of the Fall, original sin, and grace became official Christian orthodoxy. The opposing stances taken by Pelagius and Augustine do remain alive in Buddhism, in the debate over whether the Buddha himself is possessed of salvific power that can be accessed through faith, or whether he serves primarily as an exemplar to the penitent.(5)
Pelagius, in contrast, has all but disappeared from history.
But in the spring of 1820, he found an unlikely champion in the person of Joseph Smith, whose answer to both questions was: Yes. Smith went on to define a brazenly syncretic theology that would be received by the Christian community about as graciously as Pelagius's teachings were fourteen centuries before.
Joseph Smith's boldest step was to give every member of the human race a personal stake in his own creation and salvation. The most definite pronouncement of this doctrine was made in the King Follett sermon: "Intelligence is eternal and exists upon a self-existent principle. It is a spirit from age to age, and there is no creation about it."
Or as Shakespeare has King Henry lecture his soldiers: "Every subject's duty is the king's, but every subject's soul's his own."
Ask an informed Christian what disqualifies Mormonism from Christian fellowship and he will likely refer to the doctrine of eternal progression.(6) The leadership of the Mormon Church seems to have taken these criticisms to heart as well, resulting in contradictory public pronouncements on the subject.(7) Call it the revenge of the Augustinians.(8)
To be sure, Pelagius was an ascetic, out of the Stoic tradition, and Joseph Smith was not. "The great principle of happiness," he wrote, "consists in having a body. The devil has no body, and herein is his punishment."
Thus any doctrine he promulgated had to lock spirit and matter and grace and works together in an eternal whole, much in the same way that Grand Unified Theories in physics reach back to the first moments of creation, searching for the all-encompassing formula that reunites all observable physical phenomenon.
Expanding on John 3:16, Joseph Smith first posited 2 Nephi 25:23: "It is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do." This is the general theory. Eternal progression implies eternal struggle. The specific theory is found in Alma 12:24:
There is actually a third critical formula in Joseph Smith's Theory of Everything, that of salvation for the dead. This doctrine I consign to the field of eschatology. Still, I'll skip briefly to the eschatological beginnings. Joseph Smith, this time echoing John Milton,(9) observes: "Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy" (2 Nephi 2:22-25).
Unfortunately, the problem with archetypes is that it's easy to remember the mythology and forget the original point. In the Biblical story God's greatest act is to permit Eve to be tempted, and then to act on that temptation, and then to live through the consequences. Joseph Smith portrays an upwards "Fall" in the evolution of the human race.
"This is good doctrine. It tastes good," he boasted, in the much the same way that mathematicians describe their theories as "elegant." In other words, here is the way the story should be told.
The story begins with a big bang, a fall from grace. An inciting incident, through which we enter a probationary state that tests our mettle. During this time, all forward progress is achieved through conflict. In the final resolution we reap the rewards of that behavior. The chickens come home to roost in proportion to the force with which they were sent flying.
Except that what I just summarized is not scripture or theology, but screenplay structure as explained by Robert McKee in his book Story.(10) According to McKee, the most important element of story structure is (and I paraphrase): the probationary state, and the necessity of opposition in all things. The narrative can only move forward through conflict, meaning hard choices. And hard choices ipso facto cause suffering (if they didn't, they wouldn't be hard). Grace--in the denouement--only comes after all we can do.
As children's literature critic Jenny Sawyer notes, "It's the hero's struggle--and costly redemption--that matters."(11) Or as my sister Katherine sums up in her review of Spider-Man 3: "The audience is willing to let the hero suffer." She cites Edmund from C.S. Lewis's Narnia books as an example, explaining why he is not a victim or a poor little boy, but the favorite character of many readers:
Which is why the attitude, "Well, he learned his lesson. He's sorry. Hey, you know, bad things happened to him too, so let's just let the whole thing drop," just doesn't work in terms of good storytelling.
As I noted earlier, Mormon authors have proved quite successful in the science fiction and fantasy genres. Not only because Mormon theology supplies the material and primes the creative pumps, but because the genre provides that degree of aesthetic distance that keeps those worrisome struggles from cutting too close to the bone.
Story evolves out of a "what-ifs" leading to conflict that must be resolved by the protagonist. And while man vs. nature and man vs. "the other" are standard sources of dramatic conflict, they don't well serve stories that evolve out of contemporary, suburban lives without degrading into utopianism (i.e., "we were a perfect little family until you came along").
This is the Mormon version of what Moira Redmond calls "Dreadlit," or young adult literature full of "utterly unmemorable, dreary, pointed tales in which girls and boys learn their lessons--actual and moral--in the most punishing ways possible."(13)
This is not a problem confined to Mormon letters. "What is wrong with the modern literary novel?" asks Julian Gough in May 2007 issue of Prospect Magazine.(14) "Why is it so worthy and dull? Why is it so anxious? Why is it so bloody boring?" The reason, he argues, is that "western culture since the Middle Ages has overvalued the tragic and undervalued the comic."
Which wouldn't by itself be such a bad thing, except that most "serious" fiction "contains not so much tragedy as mere anxiety. Pushed to look for tragedy in lives that contain none," Gough observers, "to generate suffering in order to be proper writers, they force themselves to frown rather than smile."
Lost in this perpetual winter of discontent is a sense of humor about human fallibility. And here Gough unwittingly draws a line straight to Joseph Smith. Hearkening back to the ancient Greeks, he notes that while tragedy was the "merely human" view of life,
I find this perspective highly amenable to a Mormon theology that posits a God possessed of human empathy, a God with a rich sense of been-there, done-that sensibility and humor. But we've been seduced by the same temptation. Concludes Gough, "If the subject is big, difficult and serious, the writer tends to believe the treatment must be in the tragic mode."
To be sure, as Robert McKee observes in Story, laughter is not an emotion. Rather, laughter is a reaction to incongruity. A tragic fact is a settled fact; humor is up in the air. The human comedy is a Hail Mary pass thrown into the end zone. A religious philosophy that acknowledges only settled facts on the ground can never be funny. Or compellingly dramatic.
The Bible is full of wry and bawdy humor. But we've been programmed to ignore and misinterpret it. In The Humor of Christ, Elton Trueblood notes that
Though his actions, in fact, Christ lived the life that Gough wishes to reclaim for the novel. The novel, insists Gough,
But this is tricky business, he admits. Humor with teeth--humor that engenders struggle--got Rabelais, Voltaire, and Cervantes (and Salman Rushdie) in trouble with the church and the law. And yet popular literature also suggests a way around this paradox. In a recent analysis on what she calls "bad-tempered doctors with hearts of gold"--Cox (from Scrubs), Becker (from Becker) and House (from House)--my sister concludes:
As it says in Moses 6:38, "There is a strange thing in the land; a wild man hath come among us." A deep and abiding longing for such "wild men"--mouthing off, telling tales out of school, tweaking God's nose--can be detected in the wistful longing with which Mormons share J. Golden Kimball stories, knowing that his kind will never come again.
Or to paraphrase Gough, the Mormon novel "needs the barbarians. It secretly yearns for them." Because without them, the audience is unlikely to stay through the second act, and so will not grasp that illustrative moral that the author so desperately wishes to elucidate in the stunning climax and the reassuring conclusion to the story.
This essay was the second of two papers presented with Stephen Carter at the 2007 Salt Lake City Sunstone Symposium and later at the 2007 AML Writing Conference. It is based in part on "To the contrary."
1. What Richard Bushman terms "19th century radical Mormonism . . . willing to challenge virtually everything in American culture." Transcript of the Pew Forum Biannual Faith Angle Conference on Religion, Politics and Public Life, May 2007. [return]
2. Ibid. "What is not recognized about Joseph Smith is that there is a very deep strain of what I am calling 'civic idealism' in him, by which I mean the construction of a new kind of urban society that would embody Christian principles more thoroughly." [return]
3. Ibid. "Mormons resisted high Calvinist theology in the 19th century. They were, like so many other groups, trying to differentiate themselves from the evangelical culture of the revivals, which basically came out of a Calvinist view of depravity. Mormons don't like the idea of depravity. So that led to an emphasis on works. You are capable of choosing the good, and God will recognize and reward choosing the good. In the late 20th century, that is reversed . . . . Right now, grace is getting more and more powerful among the Mormon teachers." [return]
4. "Pelagius and Pelagianism," The Catholic Encyclopedia. [return]
5. Eugene Woodbury, "Japan's Buddhist Protestant Reformation." [return]
6. Bushman, op cit. "Things [other than polygamy] are more likely to be scandalous to the theological order of the larger Christian community. For example: the ideas of God having a body of flesh and bone, existing in time and space rather than outside, and having once been a man like ourselves. That sort of business just drives other Christians up the wall." [return]
7. As Eugene England puts it [no reference], "There seems to be at present a bad case of loss of nerve, of preferring negative, safe religion to the positive, adventuresome kind championed by the founders of Mormonism."
In his 6/11/07 appearance on Radio West, Robert Millet put so much distance between the church and the principle of eternal progression that I was reminded of the famous scene from Tootsie. Asked how far he can pull back from a close-up of Tootsie (Dustin Hoffman in drag), the cameraman responds, "How about Cleveland?" Millet's explanation that the subject "never comes up" in his BYU classes suggests a theology beholding more to populism than to orthodoxy.
Millet's reticence is understandable (though he is on record teaching this very same subject), as he is simply echoing Gordon B. Hinckley. In the transcript from his 4 August 1997 Time Magazine interview, Hinckley said of Lorenzo Snow's famous couplet:
But in a 20 July 2007 interview with Helen Whitney published on the church's official website, Dallin Oaks prevaricates several orders of magnitude less:
8. Which is not to say that the average Mormon would accept this particular interpretation. For a discussion of the transition in Mormon theology away from Joseph Smith and towards a more mainstream (though rather half-hearted) Augustinian/Lutheran belief system, see Mormon Neo-Orthodoxy by O. Kendall White, Jr. (Signature Books, 1987). [return]
9. John Milton, Paradise Lost, 12: 473-476:
Compare Moses 5:11:
10. Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, Regan Books, 1997. [return]
11. Jenny Sawyer, "Missing from Harry Potter--a real moral struggle," The Christian Science Monitor, 25 July 2007. [return]
12. Katherine Woodbury, "Spider-Man, Angst, Redemption, and All That Good Stuff." [return]
13. Moira Redmond, "Tales of a Seventh-Grade Scare Tactic: The new Gothicism of children's books," Slate, 29 May 2002. [return]
14. Julian Gough, "Divine comedy," Prospect Magazine, May 2007. [return]
15. Elton Trueblood, The Humor of Christ, Harper & Row, 1975. [return]
16. Katherine Woodbury, "Cox, Becker & House." [return]
One explanation is that the hero's journey (as defined by the Campbellian monomyth) and the struggles he encounters present an unacceptable challenge to authority. Even the need for a journey suggests a rejection of the answers the gospel has provided. In other words, when the prophet speaks, the quest is over.
This missing "second act" also hints at a Calvinist mindset taking over Mormon letters: there is no need to wrestle with angels (as does Jacob in Genesis) or to protest bitterly to God (as does Job), because the proper resolution of our struggles has already been determined. Our fate is in the cards, and God always holds the winning hand.
The obvious exceptions are those Manichean contests in which a theologically-untroubled protagonist, in Hamlet's words, "takes up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing ends them." Hence the travails of the Willie and Martin handcart companies are depicted not as the product of human failure (which might problematically identify God as an unindicted co-conspirator), but as a heroic battle against cruel and insentient nature.
Coupled with the impulse to mollify an established set of authoritative truths is the growing rejection of what I call the "neo-Pelagian" theology that Joseph Smith restored, summed up in the proposition: "By grace we are saved, after all we can do." This challenge to "work out our own salvation" should be embraced, not as a challenge to divine providence, but as an invitation to play God's fools.
A 19th century transcendentalist who belongs alongside Emerson and Thoreau,(1) Joseph Smith resurrected the Puritan ideal of the "city on the hill,"(2) paralleling utopian movements such as Brook Farm. At the same time, he daringly attempted to mend the 16th century Catholic-Protestant rupture and bridge the long-buried 4th century Augustinian/Pelagian divide.
In doing so, Joseph Smith--quite inadvertently--created rich, new fields of possibility in Christian narrative fiction--fields that have shown particular promise in the science fiction and fantasy genres. But fields undermined by the loss of theological topsoil tilled from the revolutionary ideas of its founding prophet.(3)
Pelagius was a contemporary of Augustine and resided in Rome during the late 4th century. There he developed a theology of salvation that would be declared heresy two decades later at the Council of Carthage in 418.(4)
Instead Augustine's views of the Fall, original sin, and grace became official Christian orthodoxy. The opposing stances taken by Pelagius and Augustine do remain alive in Buddhism, in the debate over whether the Buddha himself is possessed of salvific power that can be accessed through faith, or whether he serves primarily as an exemplar to the penitent.(5)
Pelagius, in contrast, has all but disappeared from history.
But in the spring of 1820, he found an unlikely champion in the person of Joseph Smith, whose answer to both questions was: Yes. Smith went on to define a brazenly syncretic theology that would be received by the Christian community about as graciously as Pelagius's teachings were fourteen centuries before.
Joseph Smith's boldest step was to give every member of the human race a personal stake in his own creation and salvation. The most definite pronouncement of this doctrine was made in the King Follett sermon: "Intelligence is eternal and exists upon a self-existent principle. It is a spirit from age to age, and there is no creation about it."
Or as Shakespeare has King Henry lecture his soldiers: "Every subject's duty is the king's, but every subject's soul's his own."
Ask an informed Christian what disqualifies Mormonism from Christian fellowship and he will likely refer to the doctrine of eternal progression.(6) The leadership of the Mormon Church seems to have taken these criticisms to heart as well, resulting in contradictory public pronouncements on the subject.(7) Call it the revenge of the Augustinians.(8)
To be sure, Pelagius was an ascetic, out of the Stoic tradition, and Joseph Smith was not. "The great principle of happiness," he wrote, "consists in having a body. The devil has no body, and herein is his punishment."
Thus any doctrine he promulgated had to lock spirit and matter and grace and works together in an eternal whole, much in the same way that Grand Unified Theories in physics reach back to the first moments of creation, searching for the all-encompassing formula that reunites all observable physical phenomenon.
Expanding on John 3:16, Joseph Smith first posited 2 Nephi 25:23: "It is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do." This is the general theory. Eternal progression implies eternal struggle. The specific theory is found in Alma 12:24:
[N]evertheless there was a space granted unto man in which he might repent; therefore this life became a probationary state; a time to prepare to meet God; a time to prepare for that endless state which has been spoken of by us, which is after the resurrection of the dead.
There is actually a third critical formula in Joseph Smith's Theory of Everything, that of salvation for the dead. This doctrine I consign to the field of eschatology. Still, I'll skip briefly to the eschatological beginnings. Joseph Smith, this time echoing John Milton,(9) observes: "Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy" (2 Nephi 2:22-25).
Unfortunately, the problem with archetypes is that it's easy to remember the mythology and forget the original point. In the Biblical story God's greatest act is to permit Eve to be tempted, and then to act on that temptation, and then to live through the consequences. Joseph Smith portrays an upwards "Fall" in the evolution of the human race.
"This is good doctrine. It tastes good," he boasted, in the much the same way that mathematicians describe their theories as "elegant." In other words, here is the way the story should be told.
The story begins with a big bang, a fall from grace. An inciting incident, through which we enter a probationary state that tests our mettle. During this time, all forward progress is achieved through conflict. In the final resolution we reap the rewards of that behavior. The chickens come home to roost in proportion to the force with which they were sent flying.
Except that what I just summarized is not scripture or theology, but screenplay structure as explained by Robert McKee in his book Story.(10) According to McKee, the most important element of story structure is (and I paraphrase): the probationary state, and the necessity of opposition in all things. The narrative can only move forward through conflict, meaning hard choices. And hard choices ipso facto cause suffering (if they didn't, they wouldn't be hard). Grace--in the denouement--only comes after all we can do.
As children's literature critic Jenny Sawyer notes, "It's the hero's struggle--and costly redemption--that matters."(11) Or as my sister Katherine sums up in her review of Spider-Man 3: "The audience is willing to let the hero suffer." She cites Edmund from C.S. Lewis's Narnia books as an example, explaining why he is not a victim or a poor little boy, but the favorite character of many readers:
Lewis understood what silly adults and the Spider-Man 3 screenwriters failed to grasp: that . . . in order to take someone seriously, you have to take their actions seriously, as well as the consequences of those actions. Lewis takes his children protagonists seriously, which must be very refreshing to the average child.(12)
Which is why the attitude, "Well, he learned his lesson. He's sorry. Hey, you know, bad things happened to him too, so let's just let the whole thing drop," just doesn't work in terms of good storytelling.
As I noted earlier, Mormon authors have proved quite successful in the science fiction and fantasy genres. Not only because Mormon theology supplies the material and primes the creative pumps, but because the genre provides that degree of aesthetic distance that keeps those worrisome struggles from cutting too close to the bone.
Story evolves out of a "what-ifs" leading to conflict that must be resolved by the protagonist. And while man vs. nature and man vs. "the other" are standard sources of dramatic conflict, they don't well serve stories that evolve out of contemporary, suburban lives without degrading into utopianism (i.e., "we were a perfect little family until you came along").
This is the Mormon version of what Moira Redmond calls "Dreadlit," or young adult literature full of "utterly unmemorable, dreary, pointed tales in which girls and boys learn their lessons--actual and moral--in the most punishing ways possible."(13)
This is not a problem confined to Mormon letters. "What is wrong with the modern literary novel?" asks Julian Gough in May 2007 issue of Prospect Magazine.(14) "Why is it so worthy and dull? Why is it so anxious? Why is it so bloody boring?" The reason, he argues, is that "western culture since the Middle Ages has overvalued the tragic and undervalued the comic."
Which wouldn't by itself be such a bad thing, except that most "serious" fiction "contains not so much tragedy as mere anxiety. Pushed to look for tragedy in lives that contain none," Gough observers, "to generate suffering in order to be proper writers, they force themselves to frown rather than smile."
Lost in this perpetual winter of discontent is a sense of humor about human fallibility. And here Gough unwittingly draws a line straight to Joseph Smith. Hearkening back to the ancient Greeks, he notes that while tragedy was the "merely human" view of life,
comedy was the gods' view, from on high: our endless and repetitive cycle of suffering, our horror of it, our inability to escape it . . . . And the best of the old Greek comedy tried to give us that relaxed, amused perspective on our flawed selves. We became as gods, laughing at our own follies. [emphasis added]
I find this perspective highly amenable to a Mormon theology that posits a God possessed of human empathy, a God with a rich sense of been-there, done-that sensibility and humor. But we've been seduced by the same temptation. Concludes Gough, "If the subject is big, difficult and serious, the writer tends to believe the treatment must be in the tragic mode."
To be sure, as Robert McKee observes in Story, laughter is not an emotion. Rather, laughter is a reaction to incongruity. A tragic fact is a settled fact; humor is up in the air. The human comedy is a Hail Mary pass thrown into the end zone. A religious philosophy that acknowledges only settled facts on the ground can never be funny. Or compellingly dramatic.
The Bible is full of wry and bawdy humor. But we've been programmed to ignore and misinterpret it. In The Humor of Christ, Elton Trueblood notes that
we habitually think of [Jesus] as mild in manner, endlessly patient, [and] grave in speech . . . [but] a prosy literalism misses the wry humor . . . and the point of the teaching.(15)
Though his actions, in fact, Christ lived the life that Gough wishes to reclaim for the novel. The novel, insists Gough,
cannot submit to authority. It is written against official language, against officialdom, and against whatever fixed form the novel has begun to take--it is always dying, and always being born.
But this is tricky business, he admits. Humor with teeth--humor that engenders struggle--got Rabelais, Voltaire, and Cervantes (and Salman Rushdie) in trouble with the church and the law. And yet popular literature also suggests a way around this paradox. In a recent analysis on what she calls "bad-tempered doctors with hearts of gold"--Cox (from Scrubs), Becker (from Becker) and House (from House)--my sister concludes:
What makes all three of the doctors interesting to watch is that all three of them act the role of "fool"--not a fool in the Ben Stiller sense--but a fool in the Shakespearean/King Lear sense. They say things other people don't admit or want to hear.(16)
As it says in Moses 6:38, "There is a strange thing in the land; a wild man hath come among us." A deep and abiding longing for such "wild men"--mouthing off, telling tales out of school, tweaking God's nose--can be detected in the wistful longing with which Mormons share J. Golden Kimball stories, knowing that his kind will never come again.
Or to paraphrase Gough, the Mormon novel "needs the barbarians. It secretly yearns for them." Because without them, the audience is unlikely to stay through the second act, and so will not grasp that illustrative moral that the author so desperately wishes to elucidate in the stunning climax and the reassuring conclusion to the story.
This essay was the second of two papers presented with Stephen Carter at the 2007 Salt Lake City Sunstone Symposium and later at the 2007 AML Writing Conference. It is based in part on "To the contrary."
1. What Richard Bushman terms "19th century radical Mormonism . . . willing to challenge virtually everything in American culture." Transcript of the Pew Forum Biannual Faith Angle Conference on Religion, Politics and Public Life, May 2007. [return]
2. Ibid. "What is not recognized about Joseph Smith is that there is a very deep strain of what I am calling 'civic idealism' in him, by which I mean the construction of a new kind of urban society that would embody Christian principles more thoroughly." [return]
3. Ibid. "Mormons resisted high Calvinist theology in the 19th century. They were, like so many other groups, trying to differentiate themselves from the evangelical culture of the revivals, which basically came out of a Calvinist view of depravity. Mormons don't like the idea of depravity. So that led to an emphasis on works. You are capable of choosing the good, and God will recognize and reward choosing the good. In the late 20th century, that is reversed . . . . Right now, grace is getting more and more powerful among the Mormon teachers." [return]
4. "Pelagius and Pelagianism," The Catholic Encyclopedia. [return]
5. Eugene Woodbury, "Japan's Buddhist Protestant Reformation." [return]
6. Bushman, op cit. "Things [other than polygamy] are more likely to be scandalous to the theological order of the larger Christian community. For example: the ideas of God having a body of flesh and bone, existing in time and space rather than outside, and having once been a man like ourselves. That sort of business just drives other Christians up the wall." [return]
7. As Eugene England puts it [no reference], "There seems to be at present a bad case of loss of nerve, of preferring negative, safe religion to the positive, adventuresome kind championed by the founders of Mormonism."
In his 6/11/07 appearance on Radio West, Robert Millet put so much distance between the church and the principle of eternal progression that I was reminded of the famous scene from Tootsie. Asked how far he can pull back from a close-up of Tootsie (Dustin Hoffman in drag), the cameraman responds, "How about Cleveland?" Millet's explanation that the subject "never comes up" in his BYU classes suggests a theology beholding more to populism than to orthodoxy.
Millet's reticence is understandable (though he is on record teaching this very same subject), as he is simply echoing Gordon B. Hinckley. In the transcript from his 4 August 1997 Time Magazine interview, Hinckley said of Lorenzo Snow's famous couplet:
I don't know that we teach it. I don't know that we emphasize it. I haven't heard it discussed for a long time in public discourse. I don't know. I don't know all the circumstances under which that statement was made. I understand the philosophical background behind it. But I don't know a lot about it and I don't know that others know a lot about it. [emphasis added].
But in a 20 July 2007 interview with Helen Whitney published on the church's official website, Dallin Oaks prevaricates several orders of magnitude less:
One of the succeeding prophets said: "As man is, God once was. And as God is, man may become." That is an extremely challenging idea. We don't understand, we're not able to understand, all [about] how it comes to pass or what is at its origin, but it explains the purpose of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. [emphasis added] [return]
8. Which is not to say that the average Mormon would accept this particular interpretation. For a discussion of the transition in Mormon theology away from Joseph Smith and towards a more mainstream (though rather half-hearted) Augustinian/Lutheran belief system, see Mormon Neo-Orthodoxy by O. Kendall White, Jr. (Signature Books, 1987). [return]
9. John Milton, Paradise Lost, 12: 473-476:
Full of doubt I stand,
Whether I should repent me now of sin
By me done and occasioned, or rejoice
Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring
Compare Moses 5:11:
Were it not for our transgression we never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil, and the joy of our redemption, and the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient. [return]
10. Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, Regan Books, 1997. [return]
11. Jenny Sawyer, "Missing from Harry Potter--a real moral struggle," The Christian Science Monitor, 25 July 2007. [return]
12. Katherine Woodbury, "Spider-Man, Angst, Redemption, and All That Good Stuff." [return]
13. Moira Redmond, "Tales of a Seventh-Grade Scare Tactic: The new Gothicism of children's books," Slate, 29 May 2002. [return]
14. Julian Gough, "Divine comedy," Prospect Magazine, May 2007. [return]
15. Elton Trueblood, The Humor of Christ, Harper & Row, 1975. [return]
16. Katherine Woodbury, "Cox, Becker & House." [return]
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