Jack Reacher and the Illusions of Freedom

In the movie Jack Reacher Tom Cruise plays an updated version of an old fashioned American hero who comes across the path of an elderly villain who had survived for decades in a Soviet gulag. The villain (played by Werner Herzog!!) has become a reptilian boss of an American-Russian gang that uses a construction company as a front to feed its endless hunger. The Russian, known as Zec, which simply means “prisoner” since the man no longer remembers his original name, is missing almost all of his fingers. The reason why is that he chewed off some of the fingers to keep from getting gangrene from frostbite in Siberia and thus dying. The others he chewed off to keep from having to work in the sulphur mines (sounds vaguely similar to the movie Barabbas) where he also would have most likely died

Zec

This willingness to self-amputate shows the drive of Zec to live. His urge to survive has made his criminality become his essential nature, and he confesses at one point to continue engaging in criminal activity long after he has obtained anything he really needs because it has become his nature to simply gobble up more and more of life. His survival instinct has metastasized into a kind of pure evil that commits crime now for the sake of committing crime. He doesn’t want women, or wealth, or fancy cars. Crime no longer has a goal for him, just as his surviving the Gulag had no real purpose other than pure survival itself.

No doubt such people exist. No doubt labor and death camps all over the world contain emotionally, mentally, and spiritually stripped human beings who have essentially turned into automatons that are zeroed in on living for as long as possible. But these are not the only sort of humanity that exists in death camps. The Soviet Gulag, as one example, might have regurgitated Zec, but it also formed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is unfortunately not as well known as he used to be. His existence, though, demonstrates how the Christian vision supports a humane life in the most inhumane of circumstances. Solzhenitsyn survived the Soviet Gulag and learned how to be Christian (and a novelist) as a result. In the early short novel A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alyosha the Baptist survives with joy, not with animal determination. The main character, Shukov, is not a Christian, but he recognizes in Alyosha a miraculous ability to love and forgive and endure that goes beyond any of the other prisoners, some of whom seem to be early versions of Zec. In his non-fiction  Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn recounts his own experiences and his growth of faith, showing that Alyosha was not merely the byproduct of a novelist’s imagination.

During one scene in Jack Reacher, Cruise/Reacher is in the office of Helen Rodin, the defense attorney for an Army sniper framed by Zec. Reacher makes her look out a window into nearby offices where people are working late in cubicles. He then gives a little monologue that includes the following: “So many people talk about freedom and security, safety and success. But what is freedom?”   

Reacher claims that what many Americans consider to be freedom is in fact a kind of low grade serfdom.  The poor saps working late have bills to pay, and bosses to placate, and ladders to climb. Reacher ponders if this is the “freedom” he has spent his life fighting for overseas; has all his efforts really been worth the fight? Provisionally for him it is because his American existence allows him to live in such a way that he can get up and move any time he wants, living off grid.

He says: “It's why I refuse to work for someone else … my freedom is defined by my vision of being safe, secure but able to get up and go.”

Reacher’s freedom in this context obviously contrasts with Zec, who knew what the ultimate cubicle was in the Gulag. But Zec is still trapped, enslaved, by his subhuman programming that drives him to commit crimes even though he doesn’t need to. So what is going on here? On the one hand, the ultimate American fantasy of freedom: the skilled male who can do just about anything and get away with it in style, a man with a kind of old fashioned martial nobility and self-control, who rides into town, rights wrongs, and rides out again, helping the weak, even on the bus that leaves the big city. On the other hand, the criminal who stops hurting others only when the good guy kills him.

In some ways, this is a satisfying fantasy. But . . .  what about Solzhenitsyn? He is not just a tertium quid, a third option on a spectrum between Reacher and Zec. He is the question mark put to all man-made constructions of freedom (and justice). Reacher can never stop moving, can never have a family, can never grow old with grandkids. He is free but only in a limited fantasy sense that men sometimes entertain (sort of like Huck Finn perpetually lighting out for the territory). Zec is just dead. But Solzhenitsyn finds happiness wherever he is, in the Gulag prison, in the woods of Vermont, in post-Soviet Moscow.

"It is for freedom tha Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened by a yoke of slavery."

Healthy Spiritual Paranoia

He's out to get us.

Religion is capable of generating all kinds of weirdness. (And all kinds of weirdos.) At the fringes, in various Christian traditions, superstition can overtake sound theology and sane spirituality, resulting in sundry forms of flakiness. This range can be as innocuous as Aunt Mildred’s strange obsession with following the Old Testament diet to dangerous--even murderous--fantasies of cult leaders like Jim Jones.

Moving in more supernatural directions, manifestations of the outlandish run the gamut from strange manifestations of Pentecostalism (anyone remember the fad from a few years ago when gold teeth appeared?) to Catholic statues of Mary bleeding from the eyes.

Exorcism is practiced by many different Christians who share nothing in their practices (again, one can compare Pentecostals with Roman Catholics, though there are practices in between these two). I bet most suburban Christians in America haven’t given two thoughts about real exorcism in as many years.

Visions, manifestations, dreams, demons, levitations, healings, angels, prophecies, blood, secret teachings, special revelations--the spectrum of non-normative Christianity is wide and wild. And most “normal” Christians rightly tend to stay away from the spookier edges where it is easy to get lost in the darkness of cults and wayward personalities.

And yet--take a look at the following passages:

Ephesians 1:20-21: "He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality and power and might and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come."

Ephesians 6:12: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

Colossians 1:16: “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him.”

1 Peter 5:8: “Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.”

Whatever one might think about the more outre practices of the Christian fringe, one must admit that the New Testament is no stranger to the supernatural, and that Paul and other writers indicate that the realm of the divine might impinge upon this material world in less than friendly ways. In other words, biblically we have a right to have a healthy spiritual paranoia. Obviously anything religious can zoom off into dangerous or bizarre areas, and the New Testament urges restraint and scrutiny. But . . . it also gives us uncomfortable pause.

Interestingly, the high points of Christian engagement with culture accept this biblical directive. 

Dante, for instance, used all manner of literary resources to exemplify the reality of the Dark Side, while aware that his poem was “just” art. Demons don’t use hooks to rip apart the damned, and Satan is not miserably encased in ice at the center of the earth. But spiritually speaking, these metaphors enunciate genuine turmoil of the soul and speak to the hunger for immortal love. Some modern readers will reduce these images to mere Jungian metaphors of mental growth and stability, but Dante would have none of that Oprah-fied diminution of genuine truths.

Milton also plays around at a high level of seriousness in Paradise Lost. It is play in the sense that Satan’s persona is made-up, but it is deadly serious in the sense that the negentropic forces of evil genuinely exist and that humans are in big trouble.

William Blake in a more heretical, offbeat way explores similar territory with his fantastic mythologies derived from Christian and esoteric sources (like the Kabbalah), but his art still has the capacity to help us recognize that evil can be palpable and is not just the result of a nascent industrialism’s bad effects on society.

In a more recent vein, Charles Williams draws on his experiences with the occult to craft weird novels of supernatural realities that are both enmeshed in human lives and that exist beyond the material world. His Christian novels of the supernatural are not meant to be literal, and yet they are meant to be real. People really do give themselves over to the occult and hope to damage the goodness in God’s creation. 

On the one hand--the outskirts and beyond of Christian supernaturalism, where hairbrained fanatics dwell. On the other hand--a biblically normed acknowledgement of multiple levels of the created order, some parts of which do not look upon us favorably. In the middle--serious artists who want to get beyond ooga-booga scariness of television or film and use the resources of language to remind us of something important.

Toldja So

I just came across this a few minutes ago on Amazon while looking for something else. It is an in-depth study (apparently) of what the previous blog entry was about. Echoes of Eden resound in a variety of ways through "high" literature to various forms of pop culture. This helps explain why someone can be so enchanted with, say, the Harry Potter series as well as with the Narnia books. Homer's Iliad still has the power to move us, but so does The Avengers. Part of the reason, maybe, is that sometimes our hunger for lost paradise still punches through our imaginations.

Echoes of Eden: Reflections on Christianity, Literature, and the Arts by Jerram Barrs.

Impossible Art

A mighty narrative problem: how do you tell the story of unfallen humanity?

By the nature of our sin distorted vision, we cannot imagine aright what it is like to be unfallen. We can try, of course, and some utopian literature, such as More’s Utopia or Voltaire’s El Dorado or Lewis’ Perelandra, get at it with varying degrees of success. The unavoidable problem, though, is that, according to the various mainstream Christian theologies, human beings now live with distorted imaginations, bent wills, errant loves, and muddied intellects. We cannot literally imagine Eden since our imaginations can see only through a glass darkly. But we urgently feel the need to imagine the unimaginable.

An example: it is nearly impossible for an adult to imagine the naked body of a member of the opposite sex in a purely unfallen way. Too many immediate distortions of our being get in the way from perfect control of the will. No matter how hard we might try artistically, we cannot imagine a naked man or woman with total purity. It is out of our control, due to sin (Sin, not sins). Yet we feel the pull toward purity, so various artistic attempts throughout time try to render this dignity of unfallen human nature in its primal beauty, but we never quite get it. Greek Classical statuary, for instance, idealizes human form beyond mere prurience. William Blake’s strange, beautiful forms also re-conceptualize the human body as sublimely beautiful.

Blake's Perfection of Form

And John Milton tried. Boy, did he try.

He tried to imagine the unfallen condition, a part of which would be lack of shame since nothing shameful has yet occurred, and not just with nekkid bods. He tried hard to configure a sense of unfallen sublimity through language, image, metaphor, syntax, allusion, and plot. And with some success, at least as near as one can in our fragmented, alienated condition. In Book 4 of Paradise Lost, we see Adam and Eve resting and eating--without gluttony, without waste, in perfect harmony of appetite and love (and vegan!):

Under a tuft of shade that on a green

Stood whispering soft, by a fresh Fountain side

They sat them down, and after no more toil

Of thir sweet Gardning labour then suffic'd

To recommend coole ZEPHYR, and made ease

More easie, wholsom thirst and appetite

More grateful, to thir Supper Fruits they fell,

Nectarine Fruits which the compliant boughes

Yeilded them, side-long as they sat recline

On the soft downie Bank damaskt with flours:

The savourie pulp they chew, and in the rinde

Still as they thirsted scoop the brimming stream;

Compliant nature feeds them. The couple harvest their meal from willing plants. The creek water is just right. Milton probably did not think they actually talked in Miltonic  verse, but the use of elaborate, ballet-like syntax points to perfect equipoise.

(Eve to Adam:)

“O thou for whom

And from whom I was formd flesh of thy flesh,

And without whom am to no end, my Guide

And Head, what thou hast said is just and right. “

She could have just said, “Yes, dear.” But the copiousness of rhetoric is both elegant and playful, a suitable literary ploy for showing (lost) human perfection.

The issue here is to use the resources of language and theology and history (the Classical tradition) to exemplify something noble, something beautiful, something beyond our ken--our pre-fall love and concordance between male and female.

But not just this.  Milton tries to capture how the circumambient realm of nature is oriented toward the king and queen of creation. Animals goof off for husband and wife in an Edenic, prelapsarian icanhazcheeseburger way. How does one imagine original innocence? Milton has the animals playing with one another instead of fleeing, competing with, or killing each other. Now, this might not literally have been the case, but my point is that we,  on the other side of the break, alienated from nature as well as from God and each other, create metaphors of harmony, unity, peace, joy, and love through such means as extrapolating from how our cats and dogs and parrots play with us. This unity among animals for the service of joy is one way to imagine the now unimaginable.

Nor gentle purpose, nor endearing smiles

Wanted, nor youthful dalliance as beseems

Fair couple, linkt in happie nuptial League,

Alone as they. About them frisking playd

All Beasts of th' Earth, since wilde, and of all chase

In Wood or Wilderness, Forrest or Den;

Sporting the Lion rampd, and in his paw

Dandl'd the Kid; Bears, Tygers, Ounces, Pards

Gambold before them, th' unwieldy Elephant

To make them mirth us'd all his might, & wreathd

His Lithe Proboscis . . .

Of course Milton fails, because we can no  longer see what we no longer are. All art must fail. But we can reach for it. We are driven to use art to regain something of what was lost. We earnestly imagine men and women loving each other with perfect equity and without lust. We imagine a fructifying nature where we belong, with no mosquitoes or indigestion. We can imagine playing with cats and dogs and elephants in an equilibrium of rightly measured honor (e.g., Narnia), whereas now we are often merely pathetic in our attempts to put clothing on our animals and in talking to them like children, treating real live humans around us with lesser dignity.

All art fails. All art must fail. This is part of the sadness of great beauty made by humans. And yet the failure of beautiful art can serve as a sign of redemption. We can imagine elephants being silly to entertain their beloved human companions in paradise and this imagined friendship, sometimes intermittently embodied in life today, gives us a picture of what we were, at play in the fields of the Lord.

Adam and Eve laugh at his lithe proboscis. He laughs with them.

(I have been waiting forever to use the word “circumambient.”)

Wasting Time with Books

On the one hand, Charles Spurgeon said this about reading:

Give yourself unto reading. The man who never reads will never be read; he who never quotes will never be quoted. He who will not use the thoughts of other men’s brains, proves that he has no brains of his own. You need to read.

On the other hand, Spurgeon had a thing against reading fiction--idle hands, devil’s workshop sort of thing:

How many young people there are whose hearts are just a road along which thoughts of levity and desires for amusement are continually going! How many precious hours are wasted over the novels of the day! I think that one of the worst enemies of the Gospel of Christ, at the present time, is to be found in the fiction of the day. People get these worthless books and sit, and sit—forgetful of the duties of this world and of all that relates to the world to come—just losing themselves in the story of the hero or heroine. I have seen them shedding tears over things that never happened, as if there were not enough real sorrows in the world for us to grieve over! So these feet of fictitious personages, these feet of foolish frivolities, these feet of mere nonsense, or worse, keep traversing the hearts of men and making them hard so that the Gospel cannot enter.

There is an acceptable way of reading this. Spurgeon the Baptist preacher was not entirely wrong in that much of the popular fiction of his Victorian day was trash and probably did fill the minds of readers with nonsense, just like most fiction today. A cinematic American example based that era: remember the writer in the excellent Clint Eastwood movie Unforgiven? He wrote penny-dreadful novels of gunslingers and derring-do, silly novels meant to stoke simplistic daydreams of fallen masculine power. Clergy in 19th century America and  England were opposed to such salacious trash of the day, just as we today are rightly worried about our kids watching trash like the Saw movies or the Fast and Furious franchise nonsense. We cannot fault Spurgeon (and other clergy) for advising his flock to keep from wasting time or money on infantile fantasies that lie about the way life really is.

Jesse James, Superhero

But there is something more here, something not quite right in Spurgeon’s distaste for fiction. Spurgeon and his American counterparts sometimes forbade reading any fiction of any kind, including such classics as Don Quixote. The great American novelist Stephen Crane, for instance (1871--1900), had a Methodist clergyman father who dissed reading novels as an un-Christian waste of time. No wonder a talented child would forsake his faith the way Crane did if it was for him the only way to live out his vocation. By identifying one form of creative art in all its dimensions, whether trash or excellent, with ungodliness, Crane’s father constructed a terrible gap between talent and calling, leaving his son no alternative but to walk away from a constrictive evangelicalism. The Christian tradition at its best has found that the vocation of fiction writer finds a rightful place among all the ways of tending the Garden, which is the primary covenant God made with earth-man (Adam, related to adamah, Hebrew for earth).

I am not sure how widespread this attitude is today, but it still survives, more often now it seems in a utilitarian form. Reading fiction takes up too much time, this attitude says. One should be reading the Bible, or cleaning out the garage, or watching sports, or doing something.  Reading fiction (for some, reading anything) is a monumental bore and/or waste of time. There is no justification for it. Even Christians fall into this-- reading the sports page is infinitely preferable to reading a short story because you gain useful information from the first, since sports is much more important, whereas the second . . . wastes time. And it’s harder to read, anyway. Any reading, including fiction if one must have it, ought to be edifying, upbuilding, educational, improving, and so on. Or at least the reading ought to be simple, entertaining-- vacation, summer-by-the-pool, easily digestible and disposable books. One complaint against serious literature--it’s too hard. Or it’s too downbeat. Or it’s too long.  How many Christians today are aliterate?

But the shape of the lives of human beings is narrative. All the world’s a stage, Jacques says in As You Like It, and we all come on the stage, say our lines, and then exit. Individually we yearn for meaningful lives, we anxiously read our own lives to see if there is a pattern, a plot,  that we are not randomly living random accidental lives that simply stop randomly. Even the most pugnacious atheist wants to believe that his life is not literally a chaotic play of energy in the meaningless space of the cosmos (“I get a job, I do well, I am recognized, my friends like my insights, I go on to accomplish things for the Cause, and then I die-- having completed a worthwhile life that means something, doggone it”).

On a larger stage, the narrative of Scripture is the ultimate template of all plot--beginning, complications, resolution, end. The Bible tells us by its very nature that there is a narrative quality to existence. There is the cosmic sized story of creation, redemption, fall, and restoration, and within that meta-plot, there are subplots. The Bible is full of narrative (not fiction, understand). Compare that to the Koran, which is mostly compiled of legalistic statements and highly truncated and edited stories from the Hebrew scriptures, scattered higglety-pigglety throughout the book.

Give yourself unto reading, indeed. Read some good theology, like Spurgeon says, but also read some good fiction like Crane’s “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” It isn’t a sin. Besides, reading good novels is good for your brain. The science is in.