Pilgrimage back to Bunyan

“Someday you will be old enough to read fairy tales again.”

— CS Lewis, in his dedication of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

I’m finishing work on a “life story” project for a church group today, which has got me in an even more than usually reflective mood as I consider family history, personal debts, and the things that have made me who I am. Among these are the books that have most shaped me. Ages and ages ago, sometime early in grad school, I wrote a multi-part series of blog posts on precisely this topic. One of the most important early books I mentioned was Dangerous Journey, a lavishly illustrated adaptation of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

This came to mind because just a few days ago Alan Jacobs wrote about teaching The Pilgrim’s Progress and the “great joy” it gives him—not only teaching it, but the mere fact that “so utterly bonkers a book was so omnipresent in English-language culture . . . for so long.” He goes on, in a strikingly incisive paragraph, to note how

One of the “tough” things about [The Pilgrim’s Progress] is the way [it] veer[s] from hard-coded allegory to plain realism, sometimes within a given sentence. One minute Moses is the canonical author of the Pentateuch, the next he’s a guy who keeps knocking Hopeful down. But the book is always psychologically realistic, to an extreme degree. No one knew anxiety and terror better than Bunyan did, and when Christian is passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death and hears voices whispering blasphemies in his ears, the true horror of the moment is that he thinks he himself is uttering the blasphemies. (The calls are coming from inside the house.) 

This captures both the strangeness and the power of Bunyan’s book, as I’ve lately been rediscovering.

I grew up with Pilgrim’s Progress as a load-bearing component of my imagination. My parents had Dangerous Journey at home and I pored over the incredible, grotesque, beautiful, frightening illustrations (by Alan Parry in a style reminiscent of Arthur Rackham) over and over again. My friends and I read a children’s version—with an excellent map—in school. Another time we acted out Christian and Faithful’s trial at Vanity Fair for a school music program. (I played Lord Hategood, the judge.) Occasionally during our church’s summer Bible school the nightly story would be a version of Pilgrim’s Progress in five short installments. I taught this version of it myself once shortly after graduating from college. There was even a two-part “Adventures in Odyssey” adaptation I listened to many times on cassette tape.

I knew Pilgrim’s Progress thoroughly without ever having read it cover to cover.* But you know what they say about familiarity.

Then, late in high school, I discovered Dante. I was on my first medieval literature kick and wanted all the epic poetry I could get ahold of. Dante’s Comedy struck me as both 1) a proper classic, the kind of thing a kid like me should be reading and 2) lurid enough to be interesting and entertaining. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into—it blew my mind. I ended up reading Dante over and over again for several years straight, right through college, and Dante has been a profound influence on me ever since.

But discovering Dante also led me into an easy contempt for Bunyan. Dante, I thought, had fashioned a real allegory. Bunyan—in addition to his other faults, like his Calvinism**—seemed cloddish and simplistic by comparison. What were the ad hoc, making-it-up-as-I-go plot points and symbols of Pilgrim’s Progress worth when I had the masterful intricacies of the Comedy as an alternative?

It’s a typical fault of immaturity to set in opposition things that should really complement each other, but there I was, pooh-poohing Pilgrim’s Progress. I’m bothered even to remember this attitude. And yet, Pilgrim’s Progress stayed with me. And now I’m rediscovering it, having grown old enough to read it again.

Two things have helped rekindle my interest and reopen me to the story, which I freely acknowledged was fundamental to my imagination even when I was most disdainful of it. The first is John Buchan. Anyone who’s followed my John Buchan June readings will know that Pilgrim’s Progress was his favorite book, and that it informed and influenced everything in his fiction from his novels’ stern moralism, hardy sense of adventure, the fact that many of their plots are journeys, and even character names and motivations. Buchan’s love of Bunyan started to bring me back around, the same way a good friend might convince you to give one of their friends another chance despite having made an awkward introduction.

But more important has been revisiting Pilgrim’s Progress itself. A few years ago I broke out my parents’ copy of Dangerous Journey to look at with my own kids and, like me thirty-odd years before them, they found the pictures mesmerizing, horrifying, and impossibly intriguing. They wanted to know more, to find out what’s going on in the story behind these images. The pictures cry out for the story to be told.

And then, right now a year ago, I read Little Pilgrim’s Progress to them a few chapters at a time before bed. Little Pilgrim’s Progress is a children’s adaptation of Bunyan by Helen Taylor, first published in 1947, that abridges, simplifies, and somewhat softens some of the original. The edition I read was a new, large-format hardback illustrated by Joe Sutphin. In Sutphin’s pictures, the characters are all adorable anthropomorphic animals: Evangelist is an owl, Christian is a rabbit, Great Heart is a badger, Giant Despair is a genuinely terrifying hare, Apollyon—rendered “Self” by Taylor—is a wolf, and others are otters, squirrels, toads, dogs, and more. I was worried it would all be a little too cutesy, but I wanted to introduce this story to my kids and I was glad to find the pictures and the adaptation perfectly suited for their ages. It’s brilliantly done.

What I was not prepared for was the way Bunyan’s story, even filtered through an abridgement and fuzzy animals, would wreck me. I had to stop reading Little Pilgrim’s Progress several times—most especially as the characters approached the River of Death and their final, long-awaited but fearful entry into the Celestial City—because I couldn’t hold back my tears. The raw emotional and, as Jacobs notes, psychological power of Pilgrim’s Progress ambushed me. The fear, guilt, anxiety, doubt, grief, and—above all—hope were so real, so true to life in our fallen and wounded state, that the story cut deep. All the more so because I was so familiar with Pilgrim’s Progress that I was, ironically, unprepared to meet it again. I’m glad I did.

I’ve had a long history with Pilgrim’s Progress, a history I should cap by finally reading the whole thing. I think that will be a good post-Buchan summer project. Until then, check out Dangerous Journey and Taylor and Sutphin’s Little Pligrim’s Progress, especially if you have kids and you want something that will really shape their faith and imaginations.

* A lesson in just how literate people who don’t read a book can still be when they have a culture to support their knowledge and understanding of it, something I often think about with regard to medieval people.

** Thank you, I will not be taking questions at this time.

Wildcat trailer reaction

Maya Hawke as Flannery O’Connor in Wildcat

As I noted in my 2023 movie year-in-review, Wildcat is one of the films I’ve been looking forward to this year. Though it was completed and premiered at a film festival last year I hadn’t heard any news about its distribution or release until yesterday, when a great trailer appeared on YouTube.

Wildcat takes place over a short stretch of the early 1950s, when young writer Flannery O’Connor (Maya Hawke) moves back home to Milledgeville, Georgia and is diagnosed with lupus, the same disease that had killed her father when she was sixteen. While struggling with her illness and its severe effects she tries to sell her first novel, a searing Southern gothic religious fable called Wise Blood. Like her short stories, it’s deeply Catholic and Southern and poignant in the sense of sharp, cutting. It’s a hard sell.

It’s unclear from the trailer precisely how much of O’Connor’s life Wildcat covers, but there are scenes suggesting her time among the literary elite in the northeast in the late 1940s, after she had graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and when she was laboring over Wise Blood. The trailer suggests a strong contrast between the world O’Connor leaves behind and the clay-banked roads and nosy church ladies back home in Georgia—a contrast O’Connor was certainly aware of and wrote about.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing in the trailer are the scenes from several of her short stories—”Parker’s Back,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “Revelation,” and especially “Good Country People”—in which O’Connor and her mother Regina (Laura Linney) play major characters like the cynical Hulga or the self-righteous Mrs Turpin. Catching even short glimpses of scenes I’ve imagined many times—a crowded doctor’s office waiting room, a Bible salesman running across a field carrying a prosthetic leg—got me excited in a way I haven’t felt for a movie in a while. Apparently these are intricately intertwined with the events of O’Connor’s real life. I’m curious to see how this works, especially since it’s so easy for a film about a writer to slip into the biographical fallacy (or what CS Lewis called The Personal Heresy): the idea that everything a writer writes is based on his or her actual experiences.

But I’m most pleased to see that Wildcat takes O’Connor’s Christianity seriously. Apparently Ethan Hawke, who directed and co-wrote the film, was inspired to make it when he read the Prayer Journal that O’Connor kept as a writing student in Iowa. O’Connor, in addition to being a brilliant writer, was prickly, hard-edged, had a chip on her shoulder as an outsider in the postwar literary world, and was fervently orthodox and devout. Her faith suffuses her work not only coincidentally but by design. Wildcat’s trailer manages to evoke all of this. Here’s hoping that the full film delivers.

A few other notes:

• The Southern accents sound pretty good. O’Connor was originally from Savannah and, though recordings of her remind me a lot of my paternal grandmother, an Athens native, O’Connor’s speech has some peculiarities that must be down to her roots, Savannah having some distinctive dialect features even by Southern standards. Listen to her read “A Good Man is Hard to Find” sometime.

• I’m interested to see how the film explores what some people perceive as O’Connor’s cruelty (“Sometimes I feel like you’re trying to stick pins in your readers,” her editor says in the trailer). The question of just how unpleasant a writer can or should make the reader feel in order to make a point has concerned me for a long time.

• Maya Hawke looks a lot more like O’Connor than I would have guessed was possible based on what I’ve seen of her in “Stranger Things” and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Kudos to her and the film’s hair and makeup folks.

• I like the cinematography a lot. It’s clearly digital but has some creative composition choices and lens work—e.g. the way the focus and bokeh fall off at the edges off the frame, which reminds me of The Batman. A distinctive look will probably help support O’Connor’s story and give it the otherworldly feel it will probably need.

• Wildcat was apparently shot mostly in Kentucky rather than Georgia. From what I can see in the trailer it looks like a good stand-in, though it’s funny to me that, with so many movies shooting in Georgia as a substitute for more expensive locales, such a Georgia-centric story wound up being shot elsewhere.

It’s striking, having watched the trailer several times now, how present O’Connor’s crutches are. The final “coming soon” shot of O’Connor at the family mailbox, which has been one of the only images available for a while, has them plainly visible but I never noticed them. And there they are behind her as she types up a manuscript or struggles even to walk around the house. Some early film festival reviews I’ve read suggest that Wildcat is not just a story about a writer publishing a novel but a meditation on suffering, the threat of death, and God’s grace. I’m here for it.

Wildcat is currently scheduled for a big-city release on May 3 with wider availability to follow, though I haven’t been able to find any details about that yet. Hopefully we can look forward to a time in the late spring or early summer when we can catch Flannery O’Connor in theatres.

Grace and the Grinch

I’m home with a sick four-year old today, which means I’m also home with the Paw Patrol. This morning began with “The Pups Save Christmas,” an episode in which Santa crashes in Adventure Bay on Christmas Eve, losing his reindeer and scattering presents over a wide area. It’s up to Ryder and the pups to help Santa or “Christmas will be canceled.” Naturally they pull through.

There’s more to the episode than that, but I was struck for the first time by how many Christmas shows and movies center on a team of good characters helping Santa “save” Christmas. They have to work to make Christmas happen, otherwise there’s a real possibility that it won’t. “There won’t be a Christmas this year” is an oft-repeated foreboding in these stories.

By contrast, think of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” a story the daring of which has been lost on us through sheer familiarity. The Grinch, not just a villain but a Satanic figure, does all he can to stop Christmas. He removes all of the Whos’ material means of joy, all the trappings of Christmas that characters in other stories work to save, and Christmas still happens. “It came without ribbons,” he says in outrage that turns to wonder. “It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes, or bags.”

“Paw Patrol” and other “save Christmas” stories show us the logic of magic or paganism—or, for that matter, computer programming, which is more like magic than devotees of either science care to admit. Certain conditions have to be met to get the desired result. If presents, then happiness. Mistakes or missing parts will crash the whole system. All of these stories have a lot to say about “Christmas spirit” and “believing” but this rhetoric is belied by the stories themselves, which always feature a desperate race to help Santa on his way.

What “The Grinch” shows us, on the other hand, is the logic of grace. It shows better than any other Christmas entertainment the pure gratuitous gift of Christmas, a gift that comes into the world through the goodness of someone else and that we have no control over. We can reject it, as the Grinch does at first, but we can neither make it happen nor stop it.

The nearest that that episode of “Paw Patrol” can get to grace is to assert that “Christmas is about helping others,” which is still making Christmas happen through your own best efforts. Again, compare the Grinch. Having put a lot of work into stopping Christmas and failed, he is transformed by it. You might even say converted. The grace given to the Whos extends even to him, and he returns the literal gifts that have proven, through grace, immaterial to them. Now that the presents and ornaments and roast beast don’t matter to him either, he has the grace to share them. Material blessing comes from joy and grace rather than the other way around, which is the Grinch’s starting assumption—and that of a lot of other Christmas stories in which mere mortals have to create the conditions for Christmas themselves.

This is the wonderful paradox of Christmas. The promise that Christmas will happen no matter what we do is a purer hope than any moralistic message about spending time together or helping others. Joy comes from grace, and that joy will produce everything else that makes Christmas meaningful—including helping others. We just have to let it transform us.

CS Lewis, 60 and 125 years later

Last week I was too busy critiquing Napoleon to note the 60th anniversary of the death of CS Lewis here—one more thing to hold against Napoleon—though I did manage to slip through an Instagram memorial. Fortunately, today is Lewis’s 125th birthday, so in the spirit of commemoration and appreciation here are a few good things I read from others to mark sixty years since his passing.

CS Lewis (1898-1963)

At her Substack Further Up, Bethel McGrew has an excellent reflection on her own lifelong connection to Lewis and the way the endless quoting of his work risks simplifying him into a generator of therapeutic fortune cookie messages:

Lewis is much-quoted, for good reason: He is prolifically quotable. (There are also a few famously misattributed quotes, like “You are a soul, you have a body,” which no doubt would have annoyed him greatly.) And yet, there’s a paradoxical sense in which his quotability almost risks watering down his true value as a thinker. There’s a temptation to see Lewis as a one-stop “Christian answer man,” the super-Christian who always had the perfect eloquent solution to every Christian’s hard problems. To be sure, he came closer than most Christian writers to providing a sense-making framework for hard problems. But even he wouldn’t claim to have “solved” them. Indeed, his very strength as a writer was that his work swung free of top-down systematic theologies which claim to provide comprehensively satisfying theological answers.

She continues with a particularly poignant example from A Grief Observed. I recommend the whole post.

At Miller’s Book Review, another outstanding Substack, Joel Miller considers Lewis’s humor in the years just before his death, when failing health should have robbed him of his joy:

Sayer says that Lewis “never lost his sense of humor.” Indeed, he was famously good natured, even amid dire circumstances. On July 15, 1963, he suffered a heart attack and slipped into a coma. Friends feared the worst; some came and prayed; a priest gave the sacrament of extreme unction. Amazingly, an hour after the sacrament, Lewis awoke, revived, and asked for a cup of tea.

True to form, he found a joke in it. “I was unexpectedly revived from a long coma,” he wrote Sister Penelope, an Anglican nun with whom he frequently corresponded. “Ought one honor Lazarus rather than Stephen as the protomartyr? To be brought back and have all one’s dying to do again was rather hard.”

Miller also reflects on his own experience of reading and rereading Lewis. Like Miller, I came to Narnia late, well after many of Lewis’s other books, and I have also read and reread Lewis’s work many times. As Miller notes, though Lewis did not expect his work to be remembered, it’s a safe bet that readers like him and myself will continue to find and appreciate Lewis’s work.

At World magazine, Samuel D James has a good short essay on Lewis as a prophet:

Precisely because Lewis knew that the claims of Christianity were all-encompassing, he recognized that no civilization that abandoned it could function. This was not because Lewis desired some kind of baptized Anglo-Saxon ethnonationalist state (born in Belfast, Lewis never forgot the high cost of religious intolerance), but because modern man’s alternatives were quite literally inhumane. Lewis saw from afar, with striking prescience, that humans had no choice but to retreat from personhood if they wanted to escape the implications of Christian revelation.

At The Critic, Rhys Laverty elaborates more deeply on the same theme:

At the close of the Second World War, Lewis was one of a number of Christian intellectuals (alongside Jacques Maritain, Simone Weil, W.H. Auden, and T.S. Eliot) who had begun to consider what world the Allied powers would now make for themselves. Lewis saw a future in which the rejection of transcendent values would allow a technologised elite to re-make nature as they saw fit, ultimately overthrowing human nature itself — a process made possible through the ideological capture of education.

Laverty invokes not only The Abolition of Man, as James does, but Lewis’s dramatization of those ideas in the final novel of The Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength, in which the elite of the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (NICE) pursue genuinely diabolical technological progress and control:

With N.I.C.E, Lewis anticipated our contemporary technocracy. “Progress” is our unquestionable sacred cow, and its faithful handmaiden is technology. Whether we are tearing up areas of ancient natural beauty in order to build infrastructure supposedly intended to help protect the environment, prescribing new cross-sex hormones and surgery to enable greater self-realisation, or developing artificial wombs which we unconvincingly insist will only ever be used for the care of premature infants, there is now no technological innovation that we will deny ourselves today if it supposedly contributes to the nebulous “future good of humanity”.

It is only Green Book education which makes N.I.C.E possible. If truth, goodness, beauty, and so on are merely relative then there is nothing to rein in man’s “conquest of nature”. His scruples are mere hang-ups to be educated out. He will be driven by pure reason or pure appetite, with no sentiment to regulate their respective metrics of efficiency or pleasure. 

I commend all four of these essays to y’all. They’re good celebrations of a worthy life and a worthy mind, and have gotten me wanting to reread pretty much all of my Lewis shelf. Which might take a while.

Let me conclude with a brief personal reflection of my own. Growing up in the environment I did, I don’t remember ever not knowing about Lewis. He was a byword for intelligent Christian thought, something that stood out to me among the generally anti-intellectual atmosphere of fundamentalism. My earliest accidental exposure was probably the BBC Narnia films. I recall catching a long stretch of The Silver Chair on PBS at my grandparents’ house one morning. As dated as those adaptations are now, it scared me. But it also riveted me, and stayed with me. Indeed, The Silver Chair may still be my favorite of the Narnia books.

But it was a long time before I actually read anything by CS Lewis. My parents got me a set of his non-fiction books at our church bookstore when I was in high school. I started The Great Divorce one night and something about the Grey Town and the bus ride into the unknown disturbed me so much that I put it away. That nightmare quality again. But when I tried the book one sleepy Sunday afternoon in college—my way prepared by Dante, whom I discovered my senior year of high school—I read the entire thing in one sitting. It’s still among my favorite Lewis books.

From there it was on to The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity and The Four Loves. I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and liked it but returned to the non-fiction, devouring Lewis’s essays on any topic. After college I read The Space Trilogy—all three in one week, if I remember correctly—and delved into his scholarly work: An Experiment in Criticism and, crucially, The Discarded Image. I also read as much about Lewis as I read by him, and dug into the works that Lewis loved only to discover new loves of my own, most notably GK Chesterton.

Only with the birth of my children did I seriously return to Narnia, and now I genuinely love them. My kids do, too. They’ll be yet another generation entertained and blessed by Lewis’s work.

He is one of the few authors who has grown with me for so long—guiding me, enlightening me, introducing me to great literature, telling me entertaining and meaningful stories of his own, and deepening both my understanding and my faith. Where the fictional Lewis of The Great Divorce meets George MacDonald as his heavenly guide, the Virgil to his Dante, Lewis could well play that role for me.

On this, his 125th birthday, just over a week from the 60th anniversary of his death, I am more grateful than ever for CS Lewis. RIP.

Julian the Apostate: cage-stage pagan

From Julian: Rome’s Last Pagan Emperor, by Philip Freeman, a concise and insightful passage that I want to file away for teaching Western Civ.

Of Julian’s attempts to use his imperial power to reform and reinvigorate paganism and to craft a “universal paganism he hoped would defeat Christianity”—a paganism filtered through his highly symbolic philosophical interpretations that would be applicable everywhere, a rather condescending vision of “the common people of every village” in “childlike innocence” offering “an occasional pigeon to their local gods and pray[ing] for gentle rain and health . . . while philosophers and intellectuals would seek the higher mysteries of the Good”—Freeman writes:

But [Julian’s] austere form of Neoplatonism was not a belief system that had wide appeal to the pagan masses. The worship of the traditional gods of Greece and Rome had always taken a multitude of forms and had never been unified. It was not even exclusive. A good pagan might celebrate a solemn sacrifice to Zeus at a city temple in the morning followed by an afternoon visit to a shrine at a local spring and a frenzied festival honoring the goddess Cybele that same evening. The concept of a centralized set of doctrines was completely foreign to paganism. Pagans as such had no defining creeds, no universal priesthoods, and no canonical scriptures in the Christian sense. Julian was not only fighting Christianity but promoting a religion that had never existed.

This is one of the hardest things to impress upon a group of students when teaching ancient Greek and Roman religion. Even the non-religious among people today are so deeply influenced by the last fumes of the Abrahamic faiths that they struggle to conceive of a “religion” with no scriptures, no ethical content, and no standard “beliefs” to speak of. Alternately, often simultaneously, they struggle to conceive of ancient paganism as having any practices either. To them paganism is a set of myths, which they’ve probably gotten third-hand from Percy Jackson anyway.

I’ve commonly heard of religious converts, especially within Christianity to different doctrinal camps and especially to Calvinism, described as going through a “cage stage”—i.e. a period when they would be better off locked in a cage until they can calm down—in which they are rabidly, irrationally, monomaniacally obsessed with studying and sharing their new theological framework. Certainly Freeman’s description of Julian seeking “to lay out in sometimes tedious intellectual terms the philosophical foundations behind his religious reforms” sounds like some of the Calvinists I’ve known.

As a convert from Christianity back to paganism via the urbane schools of Hellenistic philosophy, he seems to have come to the imperial purple in his own sort of cage stage—from which he never returned.

Witch Wood

Last year I decided to reclaim my birth month by dedicating it to John Buchan, one of the great adventure novelists of the 20th century. Starting with one of Buchan’s first, A Lost Lady of Old Years, and ending with his last, Sick Heart River, I read eight of his novels and wrote about them here. I’m glad to say there’s still plenty more Buchan to read, and so John Buchan June returns today with one of his finest mid-career historical dramas, a novel Buchan himself regarded as his best, Witch Wood.

Though set in the Scottish Borders in 1644, Witch Wood begins with a present-day prologue. The narrator relates the legend of the young minister of Woodilee, a quiet rural parish in the Scottish Borders, who was abducted from a lonely spot in the forest by a fairy—or perhaps “the Deil,” the Devil—one night and never seen again.

The minister, it seems, was David Sempill, a young man fresh from seminary when he is introduced arriving in Woodilee. Woodilee is not the most illustrious parish a young minister could hope for but Sempill eagerly takes up his labors for the Kirk, poring over his books and delivering homilies and paying calls on his parishioners. In the course of getting acquainted with Woodilee, he meets many upstanding and quaintly charming members and elders of the Kirk; Daft Gibbie, the village idiot; and, most intriguingly, Katrine Yester, a young noblewoman who lives at nearby Calidon with her uncle, the local laird. David also comes to rely upon Isobel, his widowed housekeeper, for cooking, cleaning, and insight into the locals. He also discovers the Black Wood.

The Black Wood—or Melanudrigill—is a dense forest on the outskirts of Woodilee on the way to Calidon. It is here that David first met Katrine, dancing merrily in a little clearing among the dark trees one afternoon. David is fascinated. But Daft Gibbie warns him away from the wood, and Isobel, though refusing to say why, fearfully urges him not to go near the place at night and quietly works to prevent him from investigating it further.

But David will not be deterred. He finally contrives an opportunity to be away from his house one evening and slips in among the trees, searching for the clearing. When he finds it, he observes a dark, firelit rite around a centuries-old altar. Led by a man in a goat mask, worshipers dance ecstatically and obscenely in animal costumes and when David, with the boldness of youth and theological certainty, confronts them, they mob him. He awakes at home aching all over and with one fleeting, nightmarish memory of the night before—the face of one of his most prominent and faithful parishioners, leading the devil worship in the woods.

David, despite Isobel’s pleading to avoid trouble, determines to root out the heresy in his parish’s midst. He is enraged to see the faces of devil worshipers in his church every Sunday but needs evidence to expose them. He enlists a drunk to help him and attempts to mark members of the cult, with ambiguous results. Is a local woman burning her husband’s clothes to destroy the scent of an oil poured on them by David’s agent during the night? Or because a tramp infected them with fleas?

Further complicating matters are two events: The ongoing Wars of the Three Kingdoms, a conflict fought in several phases as an outgrowth of England’s civil war between Parliament and the supporters of King Charles I, and a new outbreak of the Plague in Scotland. From the wars come political intrusions, with Covenanters supporting a theocratically established Presbyterian Church in Scotland attempting to capture and eradicate Royalist enemies like Mark Kerr, a soldier of the Marquess of Montrose who makes David’s acquaintance early in the book. And with the Plague come more immediate and dire threats to life in Woodilee.

The Plague may prove David’s finest hour, as he offers succor to the sick and dying heedless of danger to himself and works hard with a mysterious stranger to prevent the spread of the disease. But it also proves his undoing, as becomes clear once the epidemic subsides and he finally presents his case against the suspected heretics to the presbytery.

I don’t want to explain much more about the plot, as it is complex, surprising, and moving. Witch Wood is a powerful slow burn, steadily increasing in tension as the naïve David uncovers more and more rot in a seemingly idyllic country parish and his investigations are complicated and thwarted by turns. Buchan, always a master of pacing, carefully and slowly reveals the truth of what is happening in the Black Wood, thereby creating a creeping sense of paranoia and vulnerability, and as the story progresses the novel’s rich and oppressive atmosphere gathers like the darkness as the sun goes down.

Witch Wood’s slow revelation and dramatic change of mood from tranquil to threatening made this one CS Lewis’s favorite novels: “all that devilment sprouting up out of a beginning like Galt’s Annals of the Parish,” Lewis wrote. “That's the way to do it.”

But the horror of uncovering a relict paganism under the noses of a staunch Christian establishment—something familiar especially from later “folk horror” films like The Wicker Man and, more recently, Midsommar—is only part of what makes Witch Wood so good. The Scottish Borders setting and the historical context are not only vividly and accurately drawn, with most of the characters’ dialogue in Scots dialect, but actually matter to the plot, and the characters are among Buchan’s best. Their complexity and ambiguity, even in the case of a seemingly straightforward character like David’s drunk collaborator Reiverslaw, contribute to the anxious mood of the story as much as the nighttime revels David witnesses. And David himself is one of Buchan’s most compelling characters: callow but determined, full of book learning but ignorant of the world, a prime example of what biographer Ursula Buchan calls “one of his most cherished character types: the scholar called to action.”

And Witch Wood is thematically rich, with an intricate plot turning on a series of ironic reversals and themes of faith, authority, and the corruption and perversion of the institutions meant to uphold both. By the novel’s end, in which Buchan surprisingly but perfectly fulfills the promise of that present-day prologue, David is a changed man, having revealed much more—both to himself and to us—than he expected when he first snuck into the Black Wood by night.

Gilgamesh and Job

Sam Kriss, in an essay at The Lamp that is ostensibly a review of Sophus Helle’s new translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh but is really an extended meditation on death, summarizing the value of Gilgamesh’s 4,000-year old refusal to answer:

The Epic of Gilgamesh is here to confront you with the problem of death, not to solve it. It is not therapy. It was not written to make the world any less cruel. But this is precisely why, against myself, I do find it comforting.

This naturally brought to mind Chesterton’s most powerful and challenging paradox, from his “Introduction to the Book of Job,” the Old Testament book that is “chiefly remarkable . . . for the fact that it does not end in a way that is conventionally satisfactory”:

This, I say, is the first fact touching the speech; the fine inspiration by which God comes in at the end, not to answer riddles, but to propound them. . . . Job [is] suddenly satisfied with the mere presentation of something impenetrable. Verbally speaking the enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate than the enigmas of Job; yet Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told. The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

And I happened to read Kriss’s essay this morning before heading to church for a sermon from Ecclesiastes 3, part of an ongoing series about the book which, with Job, is my favorite in the Bible.

Less therapy. More ancient Near Eastern confrontation of enigmas.

Read essays both at the links above. They’re well worth your while.

Jon Daker, RIP

I learned yesterday that a genuine internet legend died this week, aged 82. His name was Jon Daker.

Jon Daker was the accidental star of one of the first real viral videos, a two-minute public access TV segment in which he sang in a recital organized by an elderly piano teacher at his church. I discovered this video in college, in the days before YouTube, embedded with other segments from the same broadcast on an already ancient website that I believe is now defunct. There were probably about fifteen or twenty minutes total preserved from that recital, including some standup comedy, choral numbers, and other soloists, and while many of these were funny or awkward, Daker’s was far and away the funniest of them all—one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

It’s an accidental comedy masterpiece, growing continuously funnier from start to finish. Daker awkwardly introduces himself, he misses his first cue and rushes to catch up, he visibly forgets the lyrics to his second number, he tries to recover with a little gesture and movement at the mic only to end up humming his way to the final lines of the song, and all the while Mrs Unsicker, the piano teacher, sits playing away at her upright piano like a machine. Daker’s portion of the show is only a minute and a half long, but he wraps those ninety seconds up with an iron-jawed stoicism and an obvious sense of relief.

I’ve watched this clip every so often for close to twenty years, and it never, ever stops being funny.

But why? Part of it is the obvious—it’s awkward, it’s embarrassing, he forgets the words, he clearly doesn’t know what to do with his face. His utterly rigid body language screams his keen, moment by moment awareness of how badly it’s going, and that with the pianist pounding through his two songs like an automaton heedless of his calamity there is no stopping. Then there are subtler things—the perfect comedy timing of his name, misspelled, popping up onscreen after his introduction and in perfect time with Mrs Unsicker’s first chord; or the truly daft pairing of Charles Wesley with Dean Martin. The more you watch it the more you see.

But for me, the laughter—and I laugh till I cry—is also a laugh of recognition. It’s sympathetic, even affectionate. I see in Daker’s ninety seconds of gawping, humming, halting Sprechgesang my own worst case scenario for public performance. I flop sweat for him as he nears the end of his set. It’s the laughter you share with your buddy who completely blew his lines in the Christmas cantata, grateful it wasn’t you but glad you can laugh him through the embarrassment. Because in that situation Daker is me, right down to the eyebrows.

That is, he would be me—if I had the guts and humility to volunteer for a solo on television, accompanied by a lady from my church.

Which brings me to this piece by Jonathan Aigner, which I ran across—in keeping with the spirit of Jon Daker—completely by accident this morning, thus learning that Daker had died. Aigner’s tribute to Daker is a genuinely sweet and surprising piece, not least because of the details it offers about the real man behind the viral video. But this passage in particular struck me:

You see, in a world plagued by sin and evil, in which churches increasingly have no room for church musicians without commercial appeal, Jon Daker represents hope, joy, and faith. Here is a regular guy who has managed to lift the spirits of millions thanks to his love of singing and a willingness to crash and burn with dignity.

In my classes I have often lamented to my students that for all the pop music on the radio and store PA systems, we actually live in a less musical world than our ancestors, who had songs for everything and celebrated, mourned, worshiped, mocked, marched into battle, or simply began their daily chores by bursting into song. Think of the last time you heard someone singing in public for no apparent reason, I tell them, and consider how odd you almost certainly found it. That was the norm even within living memory. Now, unless one has the polish of a professional (and digitally assisted) singer, you’ll be hooted into silence.

But there’s a deeper point here, and an explicitly religious one. Aigner links to an earlier post of his in praise of church choirs, in which he invoked Daker with both obvious affection and in service of a great point:

There’s no way John would make it onto any praise team anywhere. He’s not cool enough, young enough, or stylish enough, and his tendency toward performance anxiety doesn’t help, either. But, you know what? John obviously loves to sing, and I’m guessing his service in the Chancel Choir at First United Methodist Church is diligent and earnest. We already know he can match pitch (and sing in diverse styles), and having sought out the services of Mrs. Reva Cooper Unsicker, he must be quite teachable. For those qualities, he would be more than welcome in most church choirs. He could sing in my choir any day, although I probably wouldn’t let him do “Amora” too, okay?

Seriously, there seems to be a trend in contemporary worship culture that says unless you look a certain way, dress a certain way, have the right personality, fit into the targeted age bracket, or meet some other predetermined “coolness” factor, you cannot lead in corporate worship. This is wrong. Worship leadership should resemble the radical diversity of Christ’s Kingdom, and a choir facilitates this quite well.

And that, in its turn, brought to mind CS Lewis and Uncle Screwtape. In Letter 2 of The Screwtape Letters, Lewis’s elder devil mentors his nephew, a tempter in training, with reflections on how to distract his “patient,” the human man subject to temptation, with the embarrassing reality of church:

When he [the patient] goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like ‘the body of Christ’ and the actual faces in the next pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy’s side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to Our Father Below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous.

The one-word name for this temptation, of course, is pride. To which I have to say, Mea culpa—I’ve been guilty of precisely what Screwtape describes here. But this beautiful imperfection, this “radical diversity” that Aigner describes, is the real and joyous face of the church, and I’m willing to bet, based on the way Jon Daker put himself out there, willingly entering into a situation I certainly never would for the sake of the people he knew best, that pride did not enter into his character much. He’s a man we do well not to laugh at, but with.

The world needs more Jon Dakers, and not just because of the laughs. As Aigner fittingly concludes in his piece, “may his memory outlast the internet.” RIP.

Watch the original—first uploaded to YouTube in the summer of 2006!—here or embedded above. For an extra layer of comedy, here’s a version with very literal subtitles. Be sure to read all of Aigner’s memorial post for Daker at Patheos here, and take a moment to read Daker’s obituary in the Peoria Journal Star here.

Lukacs on Hitler as Antichrist

Several weeks ago I shared a longish passage from the late John Lukacs’s 1997 study The Hitler of History in which Lukacs warns against thinking of or describing Hitler as insane or mad. Doing so, he argues, absolves Hitler from responsibility for his actions. Likewise with thinking of Hitler as demonic.

I finally finished The Hitler of History today. It’s excellent, and I highly recommend it if you’d like a deep dive into some of the history of the study of Hitler. But a passage in the final chapter—indeed, in the very last pages—jumped out at me. In concluding the book, Lukacs returns to his warnings against the folly of ascribing madness or demonic power to Hitler but notes that there is one spiritual parallel that can, in some circumstances, be appropriately applied—and not only to Hitler, but to other populist leaders in the age of mass politics, a point he makes clear in this chilling footnote:

In this respect we ought to, again, reject the “demonization” of Hitler, or the temptation to attribute to him the qualities of being “diabolical” or “satanic.” To the contrary, we can see elements in his career that bear an uncanny reminder of what St. John of the Apocalypse predicted as the Antichrist. The Antichrist will not be horrid and devilish, incarnating some kind of frightful monster—hence recognizable immediately. He will not seem to be anti-Christian. He will be smiling, generous, popular, an idol, adored by masses of people because of the sunny prosperity he seems to have brought, a false father (or husband) to his people. Save for a small minority, Christians will believe in him and follow him. Like the Jews at the time of the First Coming, Christians at the time of the Antichrist—that is, before the Second Coming—will divide. Before the end of the world the superficial Christians will follow the Antichrist, and only a small minority will recognize his awful portents. Well, Hitler did not bring about the end of the world, but there was a time—not yet the time of the mass murders but the time of the Third Reich in the 1930s—when some of St. John’s prophecies about the Antichrist accorded with this appearance and this appeal. And it may not be unreasonable to imagine that in the coming age of the masses he was but the first of Antichrist-like popular figures.

Let the reader understand.

Scruton and the Preacher on foretelling the future

The first book I recall reading by Sir Roger Scruton was The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope—a title and theme that are right up my alley. In the introduction of the book he explains his purpose:

My concern . . . is with certain fallacies that seem to justify hope, or at least to make disappointment bearable. My examples come from many areas, but they share a common characteristic, which is that they show, at the heart of the unscrupulous optimist’s vision, a mistake that is so blindingly obvious that only someone in the grip of self-deception could have overlooked it. It is against this self-deception that pessimism is directed. A study of the uses of pessimism will reveal a most interesting feature of human nature, which is that obvious errors are the hardest to rectify. They may involve mistakes of reasoning; but their causes lie deeper than reason, in emotional needs that will defend themselves with every weapon to hand rather than relinquish the comfort of their easily-won illusions.

He begins the next paragraph with this devastating line:

“The belief that human beings can either foresee the future or control it to their own advantage ought not to have survived an attentive reading of the Iliad, still less of the Old Testament.”

— Sir Roger Scruton, The Uses of Pessimism

That particular line—and especially its allusion to the Old Testament—came back to me yesterday morning during church, when, as I leafed through one of my oldest Bibles, I came across the following verse from Ecclesiastes (which, me being the pessimist that I am, is one of my favorite books of the Bible, along with Job and Jonah). Some version of myself in years past had underlined it in heavy black ink.

“A fool also is full of words: a man cannot tell what shall be; and what shall be after him, who can tell him?”

— Ecclesiastes X, xiv

A lesson that, per Scruton’s observation above, should be obvious from even a cursory familiarity with history or literature. But as the Preacher reminds us near the beginning of his book, “There is no remembrance of former things,” and, lest we get on our high horse, presentists that we are, “neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.”

The reminder we may need most in our technocratic and unscrupulously optimistic age.

2020 in movies

It me. Bill Nighy as Mr Woodhouse in Autumn De Wilde’s ADAPTATION of Emma

I originally had an introduction here in which I surveyed theatre shutdowns and the unwelcome pivot to streaming, but that was windy, pessimistic, and irrelevant. So I scrapped it. Here instead, without further introduction, are are my favorites movies of 2020:

Tenet

The Protagonist (John David Washington) and Neil (Robert Pattinson) in Tenet

Tenet is the biggest what-might-have-been of the year, Christopher Nolan having decided to make the most extreme form of the kind of convoluted brain-melting movie he is reputed to make, only to have the COVID epidemic keep people far, far away from the box office.

It’s a shame, because while Tenet is flawed—too loud, too complicated, and too visually confusing for its own good—it is very, very good, with some great action set pieces and excellent performances by the supporting cast, especially Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, and Kenneth Branagh. (How good is the cast? They make you believe all of this “temporal warfare” and “inverted entropy” makes sense. An overlooked accomplishment.) Tenet is also great to look at, with beautiful large-format film cinematography and some great locations. I was fortunate enough to see this, one time, in theatres. I was the only one in the whole place.

Read my full review of Tenet, in which I elaborate on all of these themes, on the blog here.

The Vast of Night

Sierra McCormick as switchboard operator Fay in The Vast of Night

I’m not sure when I first heard of The Vast of Night, but I decided to check it out thanks to RedLetterMedia, who reviewed it some months ago. This was my surprise hit of the year.

Set in a small New Mexico town in 1958, The Vast of Night follows two characters—high school electronics enthusiast and part-time switchboard operator Fay (Sierra McCormick) and smalltown radio DJ Everett (Jake Horovitz)—on the night of the local high school’s biggest game. Fay has received some strange calls at the switchboard and captured some odd radio signals, and with Everett, who plays a recording of the noise on the radio station, thus prompting calls that might provide leads, they set out of investigate the origin of the sounds. The military? The Russians? Something else? Something not of this world?

The Vast of Night entranced me from the beginning. The characters are fun and the dialogue snappy and humorous. And for a low budget independent film it is visually striking, with excellent cinematography (especially Steadicam work, with long shots swooping across the basketball court or down entire city streets), and sets and costumes that evoke the time and place wonderfully well.

But what makes The Vast of Night especially good, and makes it feel so accomplished, is its perfectly calibrated and controlled tone. It captures precisely the strange combination of suspense, tension, and eagerness that comes with listening to a scratchy, staticky radio signal waiting to hear… whatever is out there. The thrill of the encounter with the creepy. Anyone who has hunched over a computer speaker late at night trying to hear a sample of otherworldly audio knows this feeling. The best example comes in a one-shot scene that is a subtle, low-key masterpiece, in which Fay works the switchboard, talking, questioning, listening, trying to check her equipment for problems, trying to connect or reconnect with people, and always, always returning to the mysterious signal to listen—all while the camera, with glacial patience, pushes in to a closeup.

The Vast of Night keys up our anticipation from the beginning and plays it perfectly. It’s wonderfully done, and a lot of fun if you grew up on “Unsolved Mysteries” or “The Twilight Zone,” or if you just enjoy a trip into the uncanny.

Since I imagine fewer people have heard of The Vast of Night, check out the trailer here. For a taste of the film’s slick camerawork and beautiful sets, check out this four and a half minute shot from near the beginning of the film. And here’s an interesting video featuring the film’s director, in which he comments on that scene at Fay’s switchboard and how the film uses sound to build tension.

Greyhound

CDr Krause (Tom Hanks) on the deck of the KeelIng in Greyhound

This is a movie I’d been looking forward to for some years, ever since reading the novel it’s based on: The Good Shepherd, by CS Forester. You can read more about the book in my 2018 year-in-review here.

Greyhound takes place across about forty-eight hours of the life of Commander Ernest Krause, captain of the destroyer USS Keeling, as he strives to protect the merchant vessels of an Allied convoy from U-boat attack. This film offers a stripped down, mostly unromanticized glimpse of life during World War II without a lot of Hollywood exposition or stock characters or cliched plot elements to get in the way. That requires the viewer to pay attention and keep up, something I always appreciate in a movie. Greyhound doesn’t spoonfeed us, but drops us into a situation as it happens and involves us first as witnesses, eventually as participants.

Tom Hanks wrote the script himself and his performance is the centerpiece of the movie. It’s excellent, and it’s a shame Greyhound didn’t get the big-screen release it deserved.

Read my full review of Greyhound on the blog here.

Emma

Anya Taylor-Joy as Emma Woodhouse and JohnnY Flynn as Mr Knightley in Emma

This most recent adaptation of Emma snuck into theatres right ahead of all the shutdowns, but my wife and I didn’t get to watch it until it arrived in Redbox in late Spring. It was worth the wait.

Like previous film adaptations of what is perhaps Jane Austen’s best novel, this Emma has beautiful costumes and cinematography, gorgeous locations in the English countryside, and a bright, energetic color palette, all of which make the film visually stunning from beginning to end. Like other adaptations, this Emma streamlines, condenses, and rearranges things to keep the film a manageable length. Unlike other adaptations—at least the ones I’ve seen—this Emma is an overt comedy, amplifying and exaggerating the comedic elements of the novel, especially the characters and all their foibles. It’s hilarious.

But it’s also quite moving and retains the strong moral core of Austen’s original, since it doesn’t shy away from exaggerating the weaknesses of Emma herself. Anya Taylor-Joy plays Emma as a spoiled but immensely self-assured rich girl, one with some fine qualities but a long way to go toward maturity. The zest with which Taylor-Joy plays Emma—matchmaking with the hapless Harriet (Mia Goth), flirting with Frank Churchill (Callum Turner), and trading zingers with Mr Knightley (Johnny Flynn)—makes her negative qualities, her self-absorption, her obliviousness toward or outright disdain for others, and most famously her cruelty, all the more cutting. Which also makes Mr Knightley all the more attractive, given his earnestness, his sense of honor, and especially his charity toward others.

The litmus test for any adaptation of Emma has to be that scene. You know the one—Emma’s joke at Miss Bates’s expense, and Mr Knightley’s epic chewing out of Emma. This film’s version is perhaps the best I’ve seen. The painfully mixed emotions of everyone involved are expertly portrayed.

The performances are excellent across the board. Taylor-Joy does an excellent job making such a difficult character sympathetic, and Mia Goth’s Harriet is adorably dense and vulnerable. The comedic standouts are Bill Nighy as Mr Woodhouse, who spends half the movie in a wonderful comic ballet of footmen and folding screens and imaginary drafts, and Josh O’Connor as a Nosferatu-like Mr Elton. I laughed every moment he was onscreen. But perhaps my favorite performance was Flynn as Mr Knightley. Flynn is striking in appearance but not classically handsome—in the way the excellent Jeremy Northam’s Knightley was, for instance—and so what attracts us to him is precisely his goodness.

I wondered, when I saw the trailer for this version of Emma, why we needed another one. The last couple years have been crowded with high-profile remakes, often with some faddish social agenda glommed on, usually disappearing fairly quickly. This one should last; it approaches the story respectfully but from a newer angle, making it fresh and fun—a reminder of why people love Jane Austen. I’m glad they made it, and especially glad I saw it. Check it out if and when you can.

The Outpost

Scott EastwooD as ClinTon RoMesha in The Outpost

Based on Jake Tapper’s book, The Outpost tells the stories of Ty Carter (Caleb Landry Jones) and Clinton Romesha (Scott Eastwood), two US Army soldiers who earned the Medal of Honor during the siege of Combat Outpost Keating in 2009.

The army built COP Keating in a mountainous province of Afghanistan but sited it very badly, with virtually the entire interior of the outpost visible from the mountains above. Everyone who entered it became a target—fish in a barrel. We see numerous small Taliban assaults on the outpost early in the film, but when a large force of insurgents, having probed the outpost’s defenses for months, mounts a huge and well coordinated attack, the result is a bloody battle in which COP Keating’s garrison is badly outnumbered and vulnerable from every direction. Not only the heroic efforts of Romesha and Carter but the teamwork of all the men in the outpost and pilots who bring much-needed close air support save the day, though not before eight men have been killed and dozens wounded. The Outpost dramatizes all of this exceptionally well.

Director Rod Lurie stages much of the film in long, unbroken, naturalistic shots that follow the characters around the outpost, giving the viewer a good sense of the geography of the location—always important in this kind of story—as well as subtly involving us in what’s happening. When lulls or mealtime or the boring, routine work around the outpost turns in an instant into combat, the transition is startlingly immediate. Everything feels intensely real.

The performances also help sell what’s happening. Scott Eastwood and Caleb Landry Jones are good in the lead roles, as is Orlando Bloom is a small part near the beginning of the film. The supporting cast is also good, and we get a good sense of the camaraderie of the men in the outpost as they shoot the breeze, rag on each other, and switch—again, instantaneously—into combat mode.

The Outpost is a gritty, unromanticized look at modern combat and well worth checking out.

A Hidden Life

AugUst Diehl as Franz Jägerstätter in A Hidden Life

Though A Hidden Life was screened at some film festivals in 2019, I’m treating it as a 2020 movie since it was not widely available until last year. I’m insisting on this because it was by far the best film I saw in 2020, a movie that made me weep and that I’ve meditated upon ever since.

A Hidden Life tells the story of Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), an Austrian farmer who, when called up for military service by the Third Reich during World War II, refused to swear the oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. For this he was imprisoned and beaten, his wife and daughters were ostracized from their small, tightly knit rural community, and he was eventually executed for treason.

That’s the outline of the story. What Terence Malick’s film of this story does is bring us into Jägerstätter’s life, allowing us to feel the strength he draws from his relationship with his wife Fani (Valerie Pachner), the love he has for his home and his daughters, and the power of his faith in God. It also lets us experience how, once he has made up his mind to refuse the oath to Hitler, something he, a faithful Catholic, believes he cannot do, first local peer pressure attempts to accomplish what the omnipotent Reich seems too distant to do—force him into line—and then how the authorities themselves come down on him. The slowness with which the process plays out is painful to watch; even more so are the suspicious and finally angry glances that Jägerstätter’s neighbors direct toward him and his family. And then there is the prison, the trial, and the wait for the guillotine.

The film takes its title from a line in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch:

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

The hiddenness of Jägerstätter’s life and sacrifice are what have stuck with me ever since. We all imagine ourselves, especially in this self-congratulatory age, taking heroic stands, changing minds, changing the world, even if it takes our deaths. But what if our deaths accomplish nothing? Multiple characters, even those sympathetic to Jägerstätter, remind him of this throughout the film. Would we really follow our faith all the way to the guillotine if there were no grand speeches or multitudes of people whose minds were changed? If no one ever knew our names? If it meant the ruin of our families and the orphaning of our children? If it meant losing?

A Hidden Life left me powerfully convicted.

The film is beautifully shot, with gorgeous Alpine scenery, and wonderfully well acted. But one recurring image, with or without actors in it, conveys Jägerstätter’s moral center: the faithfulness of work. The fields around Jägerstätter’s village are the site of constant labor. Agriculture demands constant care and attention no matter what you’re growing, and it is often thankless, those who receive the benefits forgetting immediately what it took to produce it. It is the same, Jägerstätter’s story shows us, with faith. We live in a pragmatic age, where even the faithful strive for purely earthly ends and equate righteousness with success. But we are not, after all, called to “accomplish” anything; we are called to be faithful, to do the work. A Hidden Life is a beautiful, powerful, and much needed reminder of that truth.

The ones that got away

Here’s a handful of movies from 2020 that I missed but still hope to see in the new year:

• Soul and Onward—I have zero interest in jazz, the most precious of all musical genres, and am heartily sick of 80s nostalgia, but I love and trust Pixar and really liked the looks of both of these, especially considering the talent involved.

• Mank—David Fincher’s telling of a (questionable) behind the scenes story of the writing of Citizen Kane, shot in glorious black and white and featuring a great cast.

• Hillbilly Elegy—Shot partly in my home county in Georgia and based on one of the best and most important memoirs I’ve read in the last ten years. Glenn Close looks amazing in this.

• I’m Thinking of Ending Things—This isn’t ordinarily my kind of movie, but I want to see this purely on the strength of its bizarre trailer.

• The Call of the Wild—Distracting CGI dog notwithstanding, this is based on an old favorite by Jack London and I’m up for anything with these kinds of desolately beautiful landscapes.

• Fatman—Mel Gibson as an ornery old Santa defending himself from a contract killer? Reviews were not good but I cannot not see this.

• Mulan—I’m generally against Disney’s live action versions of its animated classics, as the tendency is to make them slavishly faithful, shot-for-shot remakes. This approach loses the magic of the originals—which were conceived of and designed to be cartoons—in the translation from animation. The most successful so far have been the handful that have had enough confidence to depart from the cartoons and develop enough of their own personality, style, and tone to work as independent adaptations of the same stories. Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella successfully did this. Mulan, based on the trailers, looked like it could. I’ll be interested to find out if it did.

Discoveries

These are films that came out before 2020—one of them over 90 years before—but that I watched for the first time last year. Presented in approximately ascending order, certainly with the best last:

The Hunley

The Hunley is one of the many TNT original movies through which Ted Turner worked out his Civil War obsession during the mid-90s. (Others: Ironclads, The Day Lincoln was Shot, Andersonville, and Gettysburg, which got a theatrical release.) Somehow the film slipped me by until years later. I’m glad to say I’ve finally seen it.

The Hunley tells the story of the Confederate submarine of the same name, famous as the first submarine to sink an enemy ship. The movie does an excellent job conveying the hard work and claustrophobic conditions of manning the sub, and the viewer has to marvel at the effort put into mastering the use and maneuver of the craft by its doomed crew. Despite some tonal missteps in the final scene, some dodgy late-90s CGI, and an obviously lower budget than films like Gettysburg or Andersonville, The Hunley was well acted and gripping throughout, with enough narrative surprises to keep it interesting. Donald Sutherland has an especially good moment as Gen. PGT Beauregard in which he takes this effete Louisiana Frenchman and reveals, however briefly, the man’s hidden depths.

A historical note: The Hunley was produced just before the wreck was excavated and removed from the ocean for preservation, and so twenty years of subsequent research has revealed a lot of things not known at the time the film was made. So while much of what the filmmakers came up with out of necessity has been disproven, it’s still an entertaining imaginative dramatization of an important event in Civil War and naval history.

Last Stand at Saber River

Another late-90s TNT original, this is an adaptation of my favorite of Elmore Leonard’s Western novels. Wounded Confederate veteran Paul Cable (Tom Selleck) returns to Arizona territory with his family to find that unscrupulous Unionist ranchers (David and Keith Carradine) are squatting on his land. The showdown between these two sides is further complicated by a one-armed storekeeper (David Dukes) who is up to more than selling dry goods. The film departs in some regards from Leonard’s excellent short novel, primarily by introducing a lot of marital strife into Paul’s relationship with his wife (Suzy Amis), which shortchanges the strong and sustaining relationship in the book. Nevertheless, this is a beautifully shot Western with a lot of good tension and strong performances and successfully translates the dramatic plot developments of the novel’s final act onto the screen.

The Great Train Robbery

A light-hearted Victorian-flavored heist film starring the late great Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland, and Lesley-Anne Down and written and directed by Michael Crichton, based on his own novel. Very loosely based on a real incident, The Great Train Robbery is the story of a plot hatched by career crooks to steal a shipment of gold bound for the Crimea. This gold being the army’s payroll, the shipment is heavily guarded before and after it’s put on a train for the coast, which means forming a multi-part scheme to get all the access and equipment necessary to steal it. And it will take no small amount of guts, too, as—even with all the other pieces in place—the only moment it is feasible to swipe the gold is on the train as it speeds through the countryside.

The Great Train Robbery is fun throughout, with interesting characters, humorous situations, and a generous helping of wink-wink-nudge-nudge comedy thrown in—a cross between Ocean’s Eleven, The Sting, and one of Blake Edwards’s Pink Panther movies. It’s also very suspenseful, and Connery’s stuntwork aboard the train at the climax was excellent. The Great Train Robbery is a well-crafted heist comedy set in a period one doesn’t often associate with plots of this kind—it’s worth checking out.

9. April

This excellent Danish war film follows a lieutenant (Pilou Asbæk) and his platoon of bicycle infantry through Denmark’s one-day war against the Nazis as they try to halt the German advance into their country. A well-produced and well acted grunt’s-eye-level film about an often forgotten part of the war. You can read my full review on the blog here.

Come and See

The story of a boy who, at the height of the Nazi occupation of Byelorussia during World War II, leaves his family to join Communist partisans and fight the Germans, Come and See is a hallucinatory living nightmare of a film, one I think everyone should watch at least once. You can read my full review on the blog here.

The Passion of Joan of Arc

The best of this batch of “discoveries,” this 1928 silent film depicts the trial and execution of St Joan of Arc (Falconetti). This hypnotic film is told through a series of agonized closeups and energetic tracking shots and follows St Joan through questioning by a kangaroo court, imprisonment and the threat of torture, and her final moments on the scaffold. It’s a haunting and powerfully moving depiction of martyrdom. Like A Hidden Life, I could think about nothing else for hours after I watched it. Highly recommended.

What I’m looking forward to

Daniel Craig as 007 in No Time to Die

To end things on a hopeful note, here are the movies I’m most looking forward to this year. Many of these are actually 2020 movies which have, owing to COVID, been bumped back to 2021. I’m hoping for some return to normalcy and for the survival and revival of theatre-going, and I hope a few good films like these will help.

• No Time to Die—Top of the list for me. Daniel Craig’s final outing as James Bond, with Ralph Fiennes returning as M and some especially stunning visuals in the trailers that have been released so far. Also interested to see Remi Malek as the villain. With Craig stepping away, I hope they’ll hand the series off to Tom Hiddleston or Michael Fassbender while they’re young enough to take a good run at it.

• Top Gun: Maverick—I have almost no sentimental attachment to Top Gun, but I like a couple of Kosinski’s previous films and all the aerial stuff—apparently shot for real as much as possible—looks great.

• Dune—The okayest sci-fi/space fantasy epic in history gets a high-powered filmmaking team for this adaptation.

• Death on the Nile—Kenneth Branagh’s second adaptation of an Agatha Christie mystery, starring himself as Hercule Poirot. I really liked the style of Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express and its lavish, old-fashioned sensibilities—especially its large format film cinematography—so I’m hopeful that this film will continue in the same vein.

• The King’s Man—I liked Kingsman: The Secret Service quite a bit, so I’m looking forward to this lush World War I-era prequel that makes full use of the elegant leather, canvas, and polished oak aesthetic of the period, not to mention cameos from major real life figures. Brilliant casting: Tom Hollander plays cousins King George V, Czar Nicholas II, and Kaiser Wilhelm II. I’d pay just to see that.

• The Last Duel—Ridley Scott returns to the Middle Ages for a story of grievance-fueled judicial dueling. I’m sure it’ll be visually stunning and historically atrocious, as per usual with Scott, who never met a medieval stereotype he didn’t like, but I’m interested to see Adam Driver in one of the lead roles.

• Mission: Impossible—Libra—My favorite action series is set to return with two more films shot back-to-back and released in consecutive years.

• Sherlock Holmes 3—This film is still in pre-production, but I’m hopeful. I quite liked Robert Downey Jr’s take on Holmes, especially the chemistry of his friendship with Jude Law’s Watson. I could take or leave some elements of the earlier two movies but I enjoyed them throughout and have been wishing for a third. Here’s hoping.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! I hope you’ll check these movies out if you haven’t seen them, and that you’ll get as much enjoyment out of watching them as I did. And let’s hope we can start returning regularly to theatres soon. While I’m thankful for home media, watching a Blu-ray or streaming to a small screen can never replace the communal experience of old-fashioned filmgoing. Something else to look forward to with hope in the new year.

Waugh in the time of COVID

Evelyn Waugh (1903-66) on set for his 1960 interview on “face to Face”

From Evelyn Waugh’s interview on the BBC program “Face to Face,” an interview Waugh suspected—with some justification—of being a setup by political enemies. In the words of his biographer Selina Hastings, while the interviewer, a former Labour MP, “was exquisitely courteous . . . he was also perceptive and persistent, and the results were memorable, Waugh’s instinctive hostility only just restrained by a carefully assumed pose of world-weary boredom.”

I’ve written about this interview here before. It’s full of good stuff, especially where Waugh corrects his interviewer’s assumptions about his religion—and religion writ large. But I revisited it the other day while doing some chores around the house, and the following may well be my favorite exchange:

BBC: Looking at yourself—as I’m sure you are a self-critical person—what do you feel is your worst fault?

EW: Irritability.

BBC: Are you a snob at all?

EW: I don’t think.

BBC: Um, irritability with your family, with strangers...?

EW: Absolutely everything. Inanimate objects and people, animals, anything.

Waugh is my spirit animal.

If you’ve ever read anything by Waugh his answer is probably not a surprise. How one could read Black Mischief or Scoop or The Loved One or even Sword of Honour and not come away impressed with the author’s sharp eye for stupidity, absurdity, and humbug and respecting his ability to ruthlessly, even gleefully skewer them is beyond me, but I’m sure it’s happened. That irritability proved one of his artistic virtues. But, as Waugh owns in that interview, it is not a purely positive trait. Far from it.

I’ve actually reflected on that first question and Waugh’s almost immediate reply quite a lot—I am a generally irritable person, usually at the low level of frustration with daily inconveniences, which is its own problem—but I’ve meditated more deeply on it recently. Forget coronavirus—the pandemic of my soul this year is irritability. I’ve been irritated almost continually for months, an aggravation of a preexisting condition. I suffer excess of choler, which cannot be prevented by a mask or social distancing and for which there is no vaccine. Far from worrying about the pandemic, shutdowns, electoral politics, riots and mindless vandalism, and the oceans of cliche and sentimental cant that pass for conversation today, I have worried most over the utter contempt with which I now view almost everyone, including people I used to respect.

I recognize this is a flaw—a sin. So did Waugh.

BBC: Yes. Have you, uh, do you remember—if I may put a Catholic question to you out of the catechism—do you remember the twelve fruits of the Holy Ghost?

EW: I should do. I don’t.

BBC: Well, they include charity, joy, patience, benignity, mildness—

EW: Yes.

BBC: Do you, do you fall short in these?

EW: Yes.

One question slightly later in the interview is suggestive of a partial solution. The interviewer is probably fishing for some kind of gotcha statement about the Labour Party’s socialist welfare state, of which Waugh had been sharply critical, satirizing it in such stories as Love Among the Ruins, but Waugh deflates the question in a way that I think hints at a way forward from mere repentance, which after all is only the first step:

BBC: How high in your scale of virtues do you put the Christian duty of service to others?

EW: It isn’t for me to make these scales. Um, my service is simply to bring up one family. 

This reminded me of something else I’ve written about here before, from a Catholic and near contemporary of Waugh’s, but a very different kind of man: JRR Tolkien. In The Return of the King, Gandalf says that “it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know.” Waugh’s duty, as he sees it, is best performed by limiting his scope to those things within his God-given ambit.

Of course, keeping within the bounds of that ambit is the challenge, especially now. Modern media—especially social media—have widened our scope. That’s the challenge.

You can watch the entirety of Waugh’s “Face to Face” interview on YouTube here. It’s well worth your while—even if Waugh is cagey with his interlocutor, he still says a lot of things worth consideration, or a laugh or two. And you can read about Waugh’s death, which was worthy of any of his novels, here. It wouldn’t be the worst way to go. After all, humility is good for the soul.