So What?

Alice in Wonderland?

I saw Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland last week.  If I was doling out stars, this would receive one out of five, for the special effects.  Strictly speaking, I should deduct that star because the Jabberwock does not wear a waistcoat but I'm feeling generous (relatively speaking).

Where to start?  If you haven't seen it, you need to understand this film is not based on Lewis Carroll's books.  A few characters and ideas are riffed upon by ... who exactly?  I see in this film, the dead hand of a team of script writers with all eyes fixed upon audience expectations.

I re-read the Alice books a few years ago and what struck me about them, something I didn't notice as a child, is how bad tempered all the characters are.  Including Alice, there is not one sympathetic character; both books are whirlwinds of intemperance.  Carroll's characters are also funny and memorable.  They are probably how adults seem to children.  All except Alice, who is the intemperate child trying to make sense of the misperceptions of the adults around her.

All this is entirely absent from the film, which takes the same old, same old walk through sentimentality on the one hand and violence on the other.  Carroll's characters are either not violent or their violence is comical.  Whatever we think of the Queen of Hearts' 'Off with their heads', it feels as if she doesn't really mean it.  It is her ill temper speaking.

Burton's Alice is an adult and has stumbled upon a Manichean world, bearing a striking resemblance to Hollywood's finest insights into the human condition.  There are good characters and evil characters.  A few characters journey from one pole to the other but all in the timeless tradition of the American Imperialist worldview.

In Carroll's universe everyone is united in their bad temper.  In Burton's, there is no we, 'we' are divided into good (white of course) and bad (red like communists).  So, the script clunks along in a sub-C S Lewis kind of a way.  Alice gets her suit of armour and it feels like Hollywood's Narnia (this was not C S Lewis' best outing into popular culture, Aslan sounded like every American's dream of what God sounds like). 

So, Burton has taken out the humour (that waistcoat is important) and substituted violence.  Poor Alice would have been better off marrying the man lined up for her in the surrounding story, than spending five minutes in Underland (yes, that's its real name apparently - is this ground to demand my money back?).

I am at a loss to know why actors such as Mat Lucas and Stephen Fry took part it in.  Didn't they read the script?  Why did they lend their name to such tosh?  The actress who plays Alice at least gets to wear some decent costumes (one star for that) until we get to the suit of armour (lose the star).

Does it matter?  If you watch the film as an exercise in identifying America's imperial agenda, this film is worth watching.  But we have to say to the world's number one Christian nation, where have these ideas come from?  Even the most radical atheist in Europe can see this is propaganda.  It isn't wholesome entertainment for children.  It is patronising and radically misleading about the nature of good and evil.

Idolatry 17: The Cross

Bertrand Russell in his famous essay, 'Why I am Not a Christian' contends there are two beliefs that are essential for those who call themselves Christian.  He does not appear to have asked the churches what they think constitute sufficient beliefs, which I would have thought to be a fairly minimal requirement.  He also does not seem to understand that belief and faith are not the same thing.  However, we will leave that thought to one side. 

Apparently Christians are supposed to believe in God and immortality.  I will leave these to my next post.  The second belief is 'Christ, if not divine, was at least the best and wisest of men'. 

First, throughout the essay Russell refers to Jesus as Christ.  Christ was not his name; during his lifetime he was known as Jesus of Nazareth.  Christ was an honorific title given to him by the early Christians.  He was a real person, in a real place at a real time.  This is called incarnation.  Christians believe that God lived as a real human being in a real time and place.

It seems incarnation has in the view of many, although not all, Christians removed the ban on graven images (or perhaps on all images as the Orthodox Churches would argue their icons are not graven). The logic of this is that if God were human we cannot be mistaken in visualising him as a human being.  This seems to help a lot of people, although it's not really my cup of tea.  Methodism uses such images rarely.

The problem for me is largely the way in which these images are presented.  Many seem to be sentimental depictions of an idealised man.  He is often seen with children or small animals as we are told he was gentle and mild and meek.  Worse he is too often a fair haired Caucasian man.  It is interesting that every culture seems to depict Jesus as one of their kind.  If you see these images together, it can be very powerful.  However, there is a tendency for the images from dominant cultures to predominate.

Russell spends a lot of time demonstrating Jesus (or Christ as he would have it) was not the best and wisest of men.  He overlooks one fact.  Jesus was murdered.  He was murdered by the political and religious authorities of his day.  Just like millions of people since have been murdered by political and religious authorities.  They have also been enslaved, exploited and generally suppressed and dominated.

Why don't fundamentalist Christians walk around their communities wearing not crosses, but images of lethal injections?  That is what the cross was, it was an instrument of judicial murder and torture.  Lots of people have difficulty believing God was murdered.  It is what Christians believe. 

Surely, no-one could turn the cross into an idol?  Of course they can.  It should be seen for what it is, it is a raw image, not something to make jewelery out of.  But it is also possible to take it too far in the other direction.

Mel Gibson's 'The Passion of the Christ' was in my view a gross misrepresentation of the faith.  It turned a story about the struggle of people for liberation into a sentimental film of the horror genre.  The mixture of gratuitous horror and sentimental scenes of Jesus' nicer than nice friends was hardly edifying.

Worse was the film's misogyny.  Satan was played by a woman and certain scenes, eg where the two Marys wipe up Jesus' blood using towels provided by Pilate's wife for the purpose, were degrading. 

Throughout history people have dwelled upon the pain of Christ's suffering and less frequently on the injustice of his suffering.  This trend became sharper about 900 years ago when the idea that God killed Jesus through the atonement was first formulated.  And of course the idea that Jesus was murdered by the Jews has been an ineradicable stain on Christian history. 

The image of Jesus on the cross is an indictment of all concentrations of power in the hands of unaccountable authorities.  It seems this can be understood most easily by those who suffer at the hands of the powerful.  If we want to know God, this image is the one we need.  Not the image of God the killer of his son, but the image of God tortured and killed by unaccountable humans.