Boycott the NFL--its merchandise--until the refs are back

Problem: if you care enough about the NFL to be mad about the replacement referees, you're probably not going to stop watching or playing fantasy football.

Solution: Boycott something else. NFL.com is the official website. Don't go there. Don't buy team apparrel, even if someone on your Christmas list wants them.
If NFL.com traffic and sales dropped 50%, they would notice.

 

Problem: No one is going to read this post who cares, and no one else seems to be calling for this.

Saint Augustine: The Movie -- A Review

Early in “Restless Heart,” the old Bishop Augustine (acting as a narrator for his early life) says, “My mother, who bore me into this world…” and immediately we’re looking at a screaming Saint Monica and a midwife urging her to push. The first thought that came to my mind was, “Really?” But the scene turns out to be not so bad, even kind of inspiring. Which is a good summation of the whole movie.

“Restless Heart” depicts the life of Saint Augustine of Hippo through the completion of his most widely-read work, The Confessions, but it begins and ends with the old Bishop Augustine facing off against Vandal hoards and proud, short-sighted Romans in his final days. This narrative frame allows voice-over narration from The Confessions themselves, which early on the filmmakers use to emphasize events directly from the book (yes, you’ll see teenage Augustine stealing pears—but he’s not very good at it).  The passages from The Confessions become increasingly moving as the film climaxes into his conversion to love and truth.

I have to admit that such cinematic events give me trepidation. A few years ago I got involved in the viral marketing campaign of a film featuring a beloved Catholic saint. After weeks (months?) of spreading the word, I discovered it was a mediocre trifle. The folks behind “Restless Heart,” Ignatius Press Films, are planning a similar campaign, but in this case there is an engaging, though flawed, film at its heart.

Part of the superiority of Restless Heart is the greater “filmability” of the source material—no doubt many Catholics have mused, “Augustine’s such a great sinner, his life would make a great movie.” But despite that, no one has succeeded in doing it until now. If Hollywood, say, Jude Apatow (think Knocked Up, Bridesmaids) were making this movie, we’d have to “enjoy” every bit of raunch and pomp in Augustine’s early life before Learning Our Lesson About Growing Up in the latter section. In the hands of a Catholic production company, the debauchery is handled more discreetly, although little touches convey the ugly lasciviousness of Roman aristocracy. Augustine clearly partakes early on (“Hey, Auggie, you left a bracelet at my place last night”--I'm not kidding), but his relationship with his concubine Callida is portrayed with a sympathetic, if sentimental, dignity. Or rather, Callida is portrayed with sympathetic dignity, and the lovers' affection is genuine—if never exactly a relation of equals. Augustine comes off as a good-hearted but self-absorbed lover and a distant father. It's probably fair.

Where the film is particularly strong is in showing how love and truth, which is to say conscience, tug at Augustine, even as he becomes a spectacular but slimy lawyer and later a silver-tongued puppet in the imperial court (oddly enough, the actor, Alessandro Preziosi, is the child of lawyers and has a law degree himself) . Outside of a couple major acts of cowardice, Augustine is generally gracious to his tenacious mother Monica (Monica Guerritore), even as he vilifies her faith and her church community in public. The film really begins to shine when Augustine, who works himself into a lather of apparent conviction for a big performance, is pitted against the churchman Ambrose of Milan (Andrea Giordana), who has equal rhetorical mettle but also the convictions to back it. It’s no wonder the young man is drawn to Ambrose even as his job is to publicly destroy him.

By the time Augustine’s heart finally does thaw, we’ve gotten a thorough look at his intellectual and cultural world through his creepy and ambitious pagan friend Valerius (Johannes Bandrup), his eerie Manichean benefactor (whose mantra “No one is responsible for anything” drew laughs from the Catholic audience), his cheerful but soulless teacher Macrobius (Dietrich Hollinderbäumer), and the controlled and controlling empress mother Justina (who looks a lot to me like Heather Graham). In Augustine’s world, philosophy and religion are divided, and the justice system, the government, and the military espouse whatever bring them convenience or glory. The credibility of the Christian claim—made present through the righteous Ambrose, the long-suffering Monica, and a Truth that seeks him out—becomes overwhelming, despite its cost to his ambition. Restless Heart thus conveys the central drama of The Confessions to the screen, an achievement not to be underestimated.

I have two main reservations in recommending the film. The line “these are facts, not words” is repeated ad nauseum early in the film, and it is used primarily by Augustine’s teacher and then Augustine himself to seduce their listeners into making words seem like and replace facts. A movie based on real events presents images that seem like facts, but can be equally deceptive. I will leave the full fact check to real classical scholars; I am particularly concerned with one. We see the older Augustine only as a man of peace. In reality, Augustine approved the use of force to stem religious dissension, which is a difficult part of his legacy to handle here, but to bring up the Donatist controversy without addressing this legacy is disconcerting. The late encounter with the Donatists is, for me, the movie’s main false note, showing us only what we want to remember about the Doctor of Grace. This gives us a more edifying film but not, as we were implicitly promised, the complete picture.

My other reservation concerns the conversion itself. After all that Augustine has experienced, which the film helpfully recaps in flashback form, he has plenty of reasons to convert. But the conversion itself is portrayed as a kind of emotional collapse. What’s missing is the continuation of what Luigi Giusanni calls “the itinerary of conviction,” beyond the first day Augustine accepted faith. We see unbelieving Augustine, struck-by-grace Augustine, and then ordained bishop Augustine. We miss how this faith grew in plausibility through his post-conversion experiences. The movie omits, for instance, that after his famous experience in the garden, Augustine gathered with friends who concurred with the reasonableness of his new direction due to other's experiences.

Instead, the filmmakers swing for the fences, trying to use cinematic techniques and imagery to portray an inner transformation. The imagery is strong, but the cinematic techniques lead to at least one eye-rolling moment. Perhaps this sequence will be fine for Christian audiences, but for unsympathetic viewers the film wastes some of the good will built up during Augustine’s Roman career. Such missteps are ultimately forgivable because this is an adaptation, and we can be convinced that Augustine really experienced this transformation from his writings. Still, the filmmakers would have been better off entrusting the transformation more fully to their actors.

So, on the last analysis, I absolutely recommend this film, on the strength of the acting, with the caveat that you can expect occasional deviations into schmaltz. The production design is professional enough to not draw too much attention to itself, although people who are sticklers for historical authenticity should ask other sticklers, not me. Most importantly, the “restless” heart of the story is preserved. If nothing else, you can now offer reluctant readers of The Confessions the choice to watch the movie instead. They won’t really get the whole of the book, but they will probably be more interested in reading it afterwards. 

Christopher Nolan (and I) Should Take a Look in the Mirror

If you've delved a little into director Christopher Nolan's oeuvre, you know that it is dark, morally ambiguous fare—with lots of guns. Psychological thriller about a man with no memory? Guns. Crime drama about a potentially rotten cop? Guns, obviously. Superhero origin story? Guns. Puzzle movie about entering people's dreams? More guns than ever.

So when a troubled young man opened fire at a Colorado theater, during the first gunfire scene of the blockbuster trilogy-ending "The Dark Knight Rises," I don't think it can be ascribed to coincidence. In our post-Columbine, terrorist-aware civil society, it's amazing to me that (a) we didn't see an attack like this coming soon and (b) we didn't see TDKR as the perfect opportunity. But the director Nolan, in an otherwise kind and appropriate public statement, doesn’t acknowledge any connection between his subject matter and this tragedy:

“Speaking on behalf of the cast and crew of The Dark Knight Rises, I would like to express our profound sorrow at the senseless tragedy that has befallen the entire Aurora community. I would not presume to know anything about the victims of the shooting, but that they were there last night to watch a movie. I believe movies are one of the great American art forms and the shared experience of watching a story unfold on screen is an important and joyful pastime. The movie theatre is my home, and the idea that someone would violate that innocent and hopeful place in such an unbearably savage way is devastating to me. Nothing any of us can say could ever adequately express our feelings for the innocent victims of this appalling crime, but our thoughts are with them and their families.”

Perhaps the brilliant director was concerned that drawing any connection between his not-so-innocent, not-so-joyful work and the shooting was to invite questions about his own culpability. I am not suggesting that Nolan deserves blame for anyone’s death; if he were so charged, all of us who love his work and Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker would be just as complicit. Nor am I suggesting boycotting the movie: I'll be buying a super-IMAX ticket as soon as I can find a good day to go.

Rather, it does suggest that Nolan and other filmmakers and us, their audience, all should ask ourselves: is there some responsibility, which is clearer now in hindsight, not to provide such an attractive opportunity for terror? Was the Joker simply too good, or as they say in Boston, too *wicked* a villain? Too weirdly omnipotent, too undefeated even when he is caught at the end of The Dark Knight, laughing that it is only a temporary setback? I understand from reviews that Nolan brings more clarity in TDKR to the moral issues left hanging with the Joker at the end of the previous movie, but is it adequate to bring that clarity only four years later, after Heath Ledger's Joker had permeated the culture?

I know there are much more sadistic movies than the thoughtful Nolan trilogy (Saw, and some even worse). And movie villains threatening the city or the world with annihilation are a dime a dozen in superhero fare. But that's actually the problem. In other superhero movies, even interesting villains (like Loki in the Avengers) are a little hokey, not readily inspiring of real-life imitators. I can't imagine a street gang drawing a graffiti version of Loki's face, or Lex Luthor, or even the Liam Neeson villain from Batman Begins.

But there *is* a graffiti version of the Joker on my local subway system. That was Nolan's (and Ledger's) genius. They convinced me in TDKR that this weird guy wearing clown paint was really capable of walking into a gathering of genuine drug lords/gang leaders and twisting them to do his own bidding. Apparently the movie convinced real gang members, too, that a comic book super villain could be, for lack of a better term, a bad ass.

I don't know if the shooter in Colorado really declared, "I am the Joker." It doesn’t matter. What this troubled individual did was a strong thematic match with the movie series that he chose as the context for his assault. What Nolan supplied as the Joker’s motivations—hunger for power while remaining beholden to no one, infamy, showing everyone that their assumptions are false—are enough to explain the shooter’s actions. And that's the problem with just viewing this as a senseless act, a paroxysm of mental illness that could have happened anywhere. A mass shooting at the premiere of a Twilight, Harry Potter, or Hobbit movie would have been every bit as tragic for the victims and as chilling for movie theaters, but it would not have made *sense*, thematically.

A movie that would make sense, thematically, is We Have to Talk about Kevin, a film based on a fictional memoir that centers on a school shooter. But you probably haven’t seen or even heard of We Have to Talk about Kevin. And that’s the point—it wasn’t just the themes of TDKR that drew in the shooter, it was how BIG an event it was.

And that's really my point. Serious, thoughtful explorations of the depths of evil belong in culture, they belong in cinema. What all impressed us so much about Batman was that Nolan was able to embed these themes in a blockbuster franchise movie, to bring his interesting brand of moral provocation to the masses.

And maybe he shouldn't have.

We were probably naive to think that Heath Ledger's Joker would remain just a great performance, just a Hollywood popcorn image of evil with no real world impact. It was too awe-inspiring--to use a traditional term, too glamorous.

So what can Christopher Nolan do now? He could state, unequivocally, that his movies attempt not to inspire or justify the kind of evil they depict, but to show the defeat of the very brand of evil that this shooter embraced. To show that, even in the face of the darkest evil, we can and must mourn our victims and honor them by living responsibly and uprightly. Terrorists can win a day, they can take lives, but we will and we must continue to work to build a just and livable society.

But perhaps any such statement would be hollow, sounding too much like the moralistic narrator in the musical Assassins, and belied by the ambiguities in Nolan's own work. What he, and the rest of Hollywood, *can* do is consider whether in the future they can still tell great stories on the blockbuster scale without incarnating evil that seems believable but is also artificially glamorous, without lionizing murderers and making Hannibal Lecter and his ilk the (anti-)heroes of movies. I’m not suggesting they adopt a convention that the hero always wins—they have that convention anyway.

I’m simply suggesting that Hollywood shows the reality that Hannah Arendt observes—that evil is often petty, and even banal. Even if the darkest men manage to blow up a tower or shoot up a movie theater, they often end up cowering to hide from Navy Seals or just giving themselves up meekly. And in the cases that they are not humbled through death or capture, there is nevertheless an emptiness in them that makes them pitiable and ugly, not exciting and glamorous.

The invincible villain, laughing in the face of goodness without screwing up or suffering himself, is mostly or wholly a fiction.

But all of us, myself included, love a “good villain,” often preferring the spectacle to goodness, and our culture will surely validate this observation again by focusing far more attention on the shooter than, say, the men who gave their lives to protect their dates in Aurora.

On my part, I often try to say that I appreciate superhero movies because they serve as parables or myths that show us the moral drama lurking beneath our respectable social facades and complex personalities and choices. These tales draw us into the deeper level of our desire—we long for One who can save us from seeming inescapable evil, who can show us that goodness exists and that it does have the last word.

But in the run-up to the Dark Knight Rises, I’ve been more focused on its box office success, whether it will “beat the Avengers—not whether it can show me something about my humanity. Once this shooting happened, my fever to see the movie as early as possible vanished. This tragedy reminds me that, thanks to Nolan, at the heart of the Hollywood money-making attraction is a human story about terror and hope, one that resonates with the sacrifice of those men in the movie theater.

In other words, I still want to see The Dark Night Rises (in IMAX), but I think will be looking at it differently.  

Joe Paterno and Destroying the Ring of Power

“I would use this ring for good.

But through me it would wield a power too terrible to imagine.”

I believe in Joe Paterno. But I feel stupid for having believed him when he lied to us all.

The reason I say I believe in him? When he put himself forward as more than a football coach, but as a mentor and leader of men seeking “Success with Honor,” I believe that he meant it. This was not the case of a hypocrite, a man with a pretense of moral beliefs but never seeking to live them out. Rather, it was the case of a man corrupted by the power he accumulated to accomplish his goal. The honor seeped away as he allowed an assistant coach to prey on young boys with impunity.  As of yesterday, the success was taken away by the NCAA, who vacated (erased from the record books) a large number of Penn State’s victories under Paterno.

Paterno’s defenders (or former defenders) wonder how the same man who went far out of his way to inspire an injured player could be as distant and callous as the recent Freeh report suggests that he was in front of the evidence of sexual abuse by Jerry Sandusky. The simple answer is: Tribalism. We tend to like the notion of a universal morality, of treating everyone with equal regard, but most individuals throughout history (even those we think of as the most virtuous) have preferred those closest to them. It wasn’t that Paterno, by any account, limited his concern to players who would be useful to him—it isn’t a problem of utilitarianism. Rather, if you were a player, a coach, a booster, etc., you were part of the Penn State family. Protected. Cared for and cared about.

Jerry Sandusky was a valued part of that family. His accusers were not. This theory explains why not reporting Sandusky to the proper authorities was seen as “humane,” according to one email. Not humane to the victims, not humane globally, but humane within the family.

But I don’t think this explanation is adequate. Just as convincing, if not more so, was the need to maintain the success that Paterno had built. And for Paterno, 74 years old in 2001 when the more important allegations broke, holding onto that success had come to mean keeping himself in the driver’s seat, retaining his position as head football coach rather than retiring amidst scandal and bad publicity.

This is why I compare Paterno to Gandalf’s saying from Lord of the Rings. I believe he set out to do something truly good. He gained influence and authority and trampled checks and balances in the name of maintaining that good, the “grand experiment” of a marriage of academics and athletics. And for a long time, it seemed to work. There was never a point that Paterno recognized, “I have too much power. Even if I try to use it rightly, I won’t be able to.” Even as he flushed away his program’s honor and, ultimately, its future success, I believe he thought he was protecting Penn State, not just himself. His own reputation and his work at the school had fused.

So he had to develop an excuse, to protect himself so as to protect his work. In his deathbed interview, when a good Catholic would confess all, he lied, and I believed him. His story was that he was just a naïve old grandfatherly man, unversed in sodomy and afraid of violating university policy. He regretted stepping away from the investigation, now, but he stepped away. This was balderdash, and it should have been seen as balderdash by all of us. Joe Paterno ran Penn State, insofar as he wanted to—he was not the sort of man who could step away. Instead, the Freeh report tells us, he intervened on Sandusky’s behalf in the name of compassion, just as he had intervened on disciplinary proceedings for players on other occasions. 

There’s no exact allegory for the One Ring. It doesn’t signify the atom bomb, or anything else, directly. In this case, it could have been the arrangement within the university, in which the football coach was bigger than the president not only in popular perception but in administrative reality.

Or is “Success with Honor” not really possible in the sleazy world of college football? Perhaps developing a set of institutional checks and balances would be sufficient to tear down the idolatrous practice of “Coach said so.” But perhaps a sport that damages young men’s brains and exchanges the goal of higher learning for a state-wide or region-wide tribalism is itself a kind of One Ring of our university system. If so, how many university presidents will have the courage of Frodo?