The horror on my television

If you are of a sensitive disposition don’t read on.

Last night I had a very late TV dinner. Flicking through the channels I came across the following scene:

A gagged naked woman is hanging from chains around her ankles. She is absolutely terrified, spluttering her screams through the ball tied in her mouth. She is hanging over a tiled bath. The two men who have obviously tied her there are about to leave the darkened chamber in which this is taking place. As they do so, one of them plants a kiss on her mouth.

A few moments after they exit, another woman enters the chamber. She is wearing only a robe, which she removes. She lies naked in the bath, takes a scythe and begins to run it over the bound woman body. By now the latter is drenched in sweat and spluttering in terror. The second woman uses the scythe to cut away the gag, and the first woman’s screams now fill the room.

I slightly missed the next bit, but when I clicked back, the bound woman had clearly been repeatedly stabbed and was unconscious. The woman in the bath was washing herself in her blood. Then she reached up with the scythe and slashed the victims throat which sprayed blood in all directions.

Later, there was a similar scene of terror as a man threatened another bound and gagged woman with an angle grinder. I didn’t watch how that turned out.

But why, you may ask, did I watch at all? And why am I telling you this?

The answer is because, thank God, I was horrified. But I would be lying if I didn’t add that I was also strangely drawn to watch — and horrified that I could feel that impulse. That is my first reason — the horror.

The second is that this was on mainstream television. It wasn’t even particularly late (about 11pm as I recall). And the third reason is that his film was called Hostel II. That’s right, there was a Hostel I. (Look them up, if you want, I am not prepared to give a link here.)

In other words, there is a market for this stuff out there.

Of course, horror films are as old as the cinema itself. In the 1970s I used to enjoy watching the late-night Hammer films. And yes, they had screaming ladies as well. But Hostel II is in a totally different league. The acting, it has to be said, was superb. Here was total, snot running, eye staring terror, right before your very eyes. It was entirely believable.

And there is the problem. Watching a bosomy maiden succumb to Dracula’s kiss is one thing. Watching a human being in apparent paroxysms of fear and agony is another. This is the entertainment of the Roman arena, not Bram Stoker.

At this point, two questions are going round my head, which is why I am writing this. The first is, whatever happened to our society, that could move from Mary Whitehouse and the Festival of Light in the 1960s and ‘70s to this. For the problem with the likes of Hostel II is not that it is trash, but that it is actually convincing and compelling.

And that brings me to my second question which is what impact such material has on those who watch it for entertainment. The ‘Saw’ series, which has I believe a similar motif, has run to seven versions.

But get this: Thorpe Park has a Saw theme ride. So whilst children may not be allowed to watch the film, but they are familiarized with the concept of ‘torture as entertainment’.

As many of us know, the problem with some experiences in life is that once in our heads, we can’t get them out. I well remember a Malaysian female student of my acquaintance who had become a Christian saying it was very easy to learn English swear words, but very hard to stop saying them.

What, then, if you filled your head last night with images of beautiful tortured women (and they are invariably beautiful women — as one producer of such films said, given the choice people would rather watch a beautiful woman being killed than an ugly one)? And what if you did this for entertainment? What if you are still entertaining yourself with the same thoughts throughout the day today?

Back in the 1960s, I was one of those who thought Mary Whitehouse and her supporters a bit naive and limited. Why should we not be allowed to watch what we wanted as grown-ups? What was wrong with a bit of artistic nudity, for example? But of course the changing of our standards did not release a flood of ‘art’.

I am still minded to write to whichever TV channel it was last night that carried that film. But I suspect it will be a lonely little letter. Surely no one cares anymore? Maybe they’ll frame it.

Tom Davies, the wonderfully eccentric author of the equally eccentric Merlin the Magician and the Pacific Coast Highway (one of the few Christian books that have made me laugh out loud) wrote a sombre follow-up called The Man of Lawlessness, which he identified as the media, pouring a stream of violence and filth into the minds and lives of ordinary people, and especially the young.

Judging by what I glimpsed on television last night, he may have been right. For there is only one place such thoughts could have come from, and one place where they belong, and that is in the lowest pit of Hell.

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U-571, female detectives, it’s all the same

When the film U-571, depicting the American capture during World War 2 of a submarine carrying an Enigma cypher machine, hit the cinema screens, I was one of those who greeted it with derision.

Those who know a bit about the War will be aware that the first Enigma machines were actually captured by the Poles before hostilities broke out between Germany and Britain. Then, in 1941, another machine was captured from a U-boat, but by the British destroyer HMS Bulldog.

One argument for this rewriting of history went that the film would not otherwise have been economically viable in the US. According to an article on Wikipedia, the screenwriter David Ayer pretty much confessed to this later:

It was a distortion ... a mercenary decision ... to create this parallel history in order to drive the movie for an American audience.

Well, stupid him, I thought, and stupid Americans for not being able to stomach anything other than a world re-coloured to suit their own view of what ought to have been ‘reality’.

But then it turns out American producers and scriptwriters aren’t the only ones whose fictional world has to shelter their audiences from reality, for apparently BBC One controller Danny Cohen has said he plans to limit the number of male detectives in the channel’s dramas.

“Detectives and crime is the real staple of quite a lot of BBC,” he said, but added, “I felt that we risked having too many male detectives.” Hence, in particular, the series ‘Zen’, starring Rufus Sewell, apparently had to go.

Now the question that has to be asked is, “Too many for what?”

Amongst male detectives, reference was made to Sherlock, Luther, Wallander and Inspector George Gently. Personally I’m only familiar with the first and the third, but I must admit the one thing that never crossed my mind whilst watching either was, “Shame he’s a bloke.”

Nor, oddly enough, did I find myself thinking, “Given all the female crime-fighters one sees in daily life, isn’t this a bit unrealistic?”

So whence the drive to change what appears on our TV screens? Whatever it turns out to be, I’ll guarantee that tucked away in it somewhere you’ll find an ‘ought’ — “There ‘ought’ to be more fictional detectives on television who are women because ...”

Fill in the gap and you’ll learn a lot about modern society and culture.

Fiction is, of course, just that. It is not real-life, and it has always involved the projection of the hopes and aspirations of the author. Yet we must never underestimate the power of fiction to move us as if it were reality. Indeed, there have been works of fiction which have had a seminal influence on society — think Uncle Tom’s Cabin or The Grapes of Wrath.

This is why, personally, I think the Puritan suspicion of the theatre had something going for it. Our easy acceptance of the deluge of popular fiction on our televisions, particularly the ‘soaps’, may be a reflection, as much as anything else, of our blindness to its effects, rather than our robustness regarding its impact.

Indeed, there is no doubt whatsoever (and there is probably a book out there to prove) that the popular media have been used quite deliberately to reshape popular culture. What the ‘fictionalizers’ deem acceptable is thus at least as important as what their audiences find palatable.

I was inclined to pity an American audience that could only cope with ‘historic’ events which featured themselves. But it is not just Americans who demand a parallel universe for their contemplation. Our own producers and writers also insist creating worlds in their own image.

Back in the ‘70s (I’m tempted to say, when Greenbelt was evangelical) there was talk of raising up a generation of Christian artists and writers to influence society. At the time there was also a big debate about whether art should be ‘for art’s sake’ or to convey a ‘message’. I was then, and still am, a fan of the former. Nevertheless, it is clear that there are powerful figures in our modern media who have no compunction at all about operating on the basis of the latter.

Perhaps it is time we woke up to the fact.

John Richardson

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Why 'Piss Christ' was crap art

When I read that Andre Serrano’s ‘Piss Christ’ had been destroyed, allegedly by Christian protesters, I must admit to feeling a frisson of satisfaction that those who live by the sword do occasionally get their comeuppance the same way.

For decades it seems that one of the key elements of art generally, and visual art in particular, has been to shock. It is surely therefore a testimony to the success of an artwork, in these terms, to provoke its own destruction. That ‘Piss Christ’ finally achieved such an accolade arguably moves Serrano into the ‘Premier League’ of this particular genre.

Whilst reading the reactions to this event, however, I was struck by two particular things. One was those who attacked those who had destroyed the work as ‘vandals’. Surely they should have been welcomed as a necessary part of the whole artistic ‘event’. How can a work of art which sets out to make a statement be regarded as successful if no-one reacts? And how can the shocking be shocking unless people are — well, shocked?

The other was a comment about the ‘beauty’ of the work itself — the delicate light and colour of the photo of a crucifix.

At this point, however, I was reminded of a visit I made to the Tate Modern a few years ago which finally brought home to me the hollowness of much contemporary art.

I should say, incidentally, that I grew up in a home where modern art was freely available and readily embraced. My parents subscribed to The Studio magazine, and I loved to browse through the back numbers we kept in a vast cupboard halfway up the stairs.

As I traipsed around the galleries, however, I became aware of first a pattern, then a change, in what I was doing. At first I looked at the artwork, then at the label on the wall. Reading the labels told me what the work was ‘about’ — not just the title, which itself could be quite enlightening, but the thought behind the painting, sculpture or installation.

After a while, however, I found I was reading the label first, then looking at the artwork.

Finally, I realized that I actually didn’t need to look at the artwork at all — I could read the label and be just as well-informed, indeed sometimes more so. On the other hand, without the label, I would say that most of the time I entirely missed the point.

And so we come to Immersion (Piss Christ). This, we are told (by The Guardian), was part of a series of such images intended by Serrano as “a criticism of the ‘billion-dollar Christ-for-profit industry’ and a ‘condemnation of those who abuse the teachings of Christ for their own ignoble ends”.

To which I can only reply, “Oh no it isn’t.” Look at it. It is a blurry yellow picture of a crucifix.

There is no discernible hint of ‘billion-dollar industries’ or ‘ignoble ends’ in the work itself. Its all on the label.

And in fact it is the label which ‘makes’ the art ‘work’, for without the word ‘piss’ (and who can tell it is piss without the label?), you just have a blurry picture of a crucifix. The picture, in fact, is not shocking. The ‘shock’ and the ‘message’ are entirely in the label.

By contrast, and almost at random, let us consider Michelangelo’s ‘David’. Actually, given the conspicuously uncircumcised nature of the subject, the label is probably useful here as well — at least if we are supposed to think it is the biblical King David. But who cares? It is just a fantastic sculpture. You don’t want to go up to a label and peer at it in order to ‘get’ what it is about. You just want to look — that, and ask everyone else in the room to shut the hell up.

One day, as an experiment, someone should try just removing all the labels from the Tate Modern and insisting that any new works should also be presented and displayed without labels.

I wonder how the artists would react?

“So Mr Serrano, it’s a crucifix.”

“Yes, but you have to understand, it’s not just a crucifix, it’s ...”

“Thank you, Mr Serrano, but to us, it’s a picture of a crucifix. Very nice. Have you got anything else? OK, a Madonna and Child, and is that a little Satan in that picture? Tell you what, we’ll give you a ring.”

John Richardson
20 April 2011

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War and the Supernatural

George Gittoes, who painted the picture on the front of my 'Revelation Unwrapped', remains one of the most interesting people I have ever had the privilege to meet.

Here he is, speaking (on what I think was a German TV programme) about the supernatural aspect of war. What you have to remember is he was there at the Kibeho massacre and knows what he is talking about first hand. Yet he was, when I met him, a profoundly spiritual (though slightly scary) man - someone I would love to have got to know better.



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EastEnders: anti-Atheist bias

An e-mail I received this morning has drawn my attention to complaints of an ‘anti-Christian’ bias in the BBC ‘soap’ EastEnders.

My reaction, as someone who remembers when this long-running drama first reached our screens is, “You’ve got to be kidding!”

If there is any ‘religious’ bias in EastEnders, it is clearly directed almost entirely against atheists and agnostics.

Anyone watching the programme would realize it is meant to portray the lives of the ordinary unbelieving and half-believing folk of inner London. Yet even allowing for dramatic license, what we see is a deeply unattractive presentation of these people’s lives.

Almost no-one is every nice to anyone. Nobody smiles. Everybody seems to hate somebody. Their lives are a litany (if that is the right word) of destructive behaviours, punctuated by adultery, unfaithfulness and even murder.

It is almost as if the writers are saying, “This is how people behave when there’s nothing to live for and no moral anchor to prevent such outrageous actions.”

As such, this surely is a caricature of the ‘unbelieving’ life — and it has to be said, this is not least because no-one ever just sits in front of the telly watching EastEnders.

John Richardson
17 July 2010

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Why "Rev" isn't funny

I’ve been trying to work out why I don’t find Rev, the new BBC sitcom about an inner-city parish priest in the Church of England, at all funny.

There’s a serious reason for this, which is that I’ve been hoping it isn’t just because it’s about the Church of England and the hero is a ‘Liberal’, whilst at least some of the villains so far have been ‘Evangelicals’. In other words, I hope it’s not because it’s poking fun at me and my kind.

However, I watched episode 3 last night, without an ‘Evangelical’ in sight, and still found it flat and dull. The one thing I could point out that was just plain irritating was the abundance of stereotypes — the sensible, faithful, and not-at-all-fanatical Muslim woman who wanted to use the church for her Qur’an class (and was quite happy to speak to a strange man on her own in the church), the ‘nice’ church-going family whose father turned up later in a lap-dancing club, the vicar’s wife who is not-at-all-like-a-vicar’s-wife, the slightly creepy archdeacon (actually, that one ...), dumb lay-reader, and so.

But I still felt that couldn’t quite be the problem. After all, Dad’s Army or Father Ted are equally full of stereotypes — but there they are funny.

Then sometime between getting into bed and going to sleep, I realized what it was.

Comedy (indeed, any work of literature) is a production of the mind of the writer. What you see on stage or screen is really their fantasy-creation, and therefore it is an insight into their own thoughts.

Father Ted is the product of people who grew up in an Ireland another comedy writer described as “such a mad country that satire [was] the only way you [could] challenge the madness”, and it reflects the minds of those who found that madness a source of hilarity.

Rev is equally clearly the product of a certain kind of mind. Actually, I suspect it is a mind not at all unlike those of the ‘nice middle-class’ couple in an early episode who are basically attending church to get their child into the church school. And that, I’ve decided, is the problem.

Rev gives us (I am guessing) the perspective of a liberal, white, youngish, urban middle-class mind on the world of Anglican religion. The trouble is, the way that mind sees that particular world is utterly predictable, and therefore not funny.

This review, from someone who does like Rev, says it all:

The other reason I love Rev ... is that ... it cherishes [the Church of England’s] beating liberal heart. [...]

As Canon Lucy Winkett, formerly at St Paul’s Cathedral, once told me, it’s not about expecting people to believe (and I don’t); it’s about being a place where people can bring, should they choose to, the stuff of their lives. It’s about flexibility, inclusiveness and charity, in the best sense of that word.

It was Robert Burns who wrote, “O wad some Power the giftie gie us. To see oursels as ithers see us!” Rev is the world of religion seen by the unbelieving white middle-class, telling it like the writer thinks it ought to be. They have a view on this world, but they can’t get ‘inside’ it. Put yourself in their place, however, and you could write the jokes yourself.

Rev is not funny because it written by people who find the subject matter not a source of hilarity but of earnestness. Ironically, as I have said before, Rev is, in the end, a sermon of its own, but it is preaching to the converted. It is BBC England reassuring itself about the strange world of the ‘God-botherers’. There may be a few fanatics — especially on the Christian ‘Right’, but the good guys are firmly in the middle of the road, and they are normal, having sexual feelings and smoking a crafty fag outside the ‘office’ just like you and me.

And if God isn’t too fussed about them, he can’t be too fussed about us, either. Can he?

John Richardson
16 July 2010

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Sunset at Blakeney

(Click the image for a larger view.)

The sunset has to be one of the classic 'themes' of visual art. (Sunrises are less so. Is this because artists don't like getting up early?) As I was taking this, I found myself musing on the reasons for this popularity. I wonder if it is because a sunset is not only beautiful in terms of its colours, but also evocative regarding the passage of time.

Sunset, as compared to sunrise, is an ending of another day, which itself takes each of us nearer to the end of life itself. Indeed, it takes us nearer the end of time. I remember many years ago as a child walking with my family on a beach with an astonishingly calm sea lapping the sand, and my father said that it reminded him of the scene in H G Wells's The Time Machine, where the traveller finds himself millions of years in the future, on an ancient earth orbiting a dying sun. As you can tell, his comment and the imagery made a deep impression!

In Genesis also, the transformative 'ending' comes in the evening: "And the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day ..."

What should have been a joyful encounter marked, instead, the end of the first 'Sabbath rest' (begun in Genesis 2:3). From here on, it has all been wandering "in the land of Nod, east of Eden". But "there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God," and so the sunset also marks, as my first vicar's wife used to say as she moved the ironing out of the living room, "a day's march nearer home".


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Hitler better than Churchill

Well at least, IMHO, at art.

The Daily Telegraph is carrying a story about Hitler's sketches which failed to get him into the Vienna Academy of Art. The annoying thing, from my point of view, is that they're actually not bad. A critic quoted in the story dismisses them as "only up to 'moderate GCSE standard'", but hey, how many of us are even that good? If I were turning out work like that, I'd be quite pleased.

As is well known, Winston Churchill was also a dabbler in paints, and it gave him great enjoyment, particularly during his periods of "Black Dog", but I don't think he would ever be described (or would have described himself) as brilliant.

One of the issues it raises, of course, is that good things can be done by bad people. But then for Christians this should come as no surprise, since we are all sinners.

Perhaps the other point it raises is that it is better to be a bad painter than a great dictator.

John Richardson
24 March 2010

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What next for the West?

Recently I have been revisiting Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence, and have been struck by the importance of his definition of decadence for what we now see happening in the Western world:

All that is meant by Decadence is “falling off.” It implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense. On the contrary , it is a very active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance. The loss it faces is that of Possibility. The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.

It is this which we surely see in our own culture, and it is important not just for those of a ‘religious’ persuasion but for us all.

To put it in its most simple terms, as we look at the present state of the Western world and ask ourselves “What next?” the question is difficult to answer at every level.

What next in art, for example? We have had modernism, and post-modernism. But as Barzun observes, it is the very fact of decadence itself which inspires “the repeated use of the dismissive prefixes anti- and post-”. They are symptomatic not of ideas, but of a lack of ideas. He continues, “The hope is that getting rid of what is will by itself generate the new life.”

And what next socially? One of Barzun’s ‘themes’ of the last five hundred years of Western civilization is emancipation —the desire to be ‘free from’ perceived constraints. The sexual revolution, and now the homosexual revolution, are simply the latest variations on this theme. But over against this, we see another set of forces at work, whereby the individual perceives increasing bureaucratic constraints, just at the point where God and respectability are losing their old power.

Or what of politics? There is an increasing ‘greyness’ about the old parties, whose agendas are no longer clearly distinguished from one another. What was ‘new’ about New Labour was not a radical socialist agenda but a departure from traditional socialism in favour of something much nearer to the middle ground.

As a culture, we are staring into the abyss, not of the unknown but of the completely, and repetitively, known. What we face, in our darkest moments, is not the fear of danger but the fear of ennui — that there really is nothing more to life than this.

This goes some way, I believe, to explaining the various responses to global warming, for what this provides is not simply a threat to be addressed but a moral cause. On the surface, climate-change is a ‘scientific’ issue, but the language of the ‘debate’ about climate-change is anything but ‘scientific’. One well-known campaigner, for example, refers to climate-change sceptics as ‘scumbags’.

Now my own view is that at the end of the day, such people may be wrong, but if they genuinely believe the evidence favours their point of view, then that is all they are. They may be frustratingly wrong, they may be dangerously wrong, but in strictly scientific terms, they cannot, as the term ‘scumbag’ implies, be morally wrong.

But addressing climate-change is not simply about the science —it is a cause, which is why, as we have seen recently, people are prepared to lie about it.

In short, for some people, the climate-change issue provides a welcome cause: a rationale by which to live. It is worth getting up in the morning in order to save the planet. We are moved and motivated by pictures of melting ice-caps and floundering polar bears. But what if we think beyond the challenge? What if we save the planet? What next? And what if we don’t? Will it matter, given that, in the great scheme of things, we know (‘scientifically’) that the planet is doomed anyway?

We have reached a stage where it is best not to think too deeply about anything. In such a situation, to become regularly and blindingly drunk, as some sections of our society now do, may be an entirely rational response. It was, after all the very rational philosopher David Hume who wrote that when his reflections brought on too much melancholy,

I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold and strained and ridiculous that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.

Surely those who fill the streets of our towns and cities with ‘revellry’ on a typical Friday and Saturday night are simply applying (albeit unconsciously) the same remedy. We are developing at one level in our society a class which is not so much ‘under’ as consciously aimless.

Those who are fortunate enough to have the resources and the imagination to construct their own ‘micro-meanings’ will, of course, apply themselves to other goals. For most of the middle and upper classes, these consist of material acquisition and advancement, coupled with ambitions for their children and the ravelling and unravelling of their own domestic arrangements. The trick, however, is not to stop and ask why or for how long. For the inescapable truth, as Hume knew, is that these things last but the blink of an eye, then they, and we, are gone.

How can we of the West deal with that? This is surely as great a challenge to our cultural life as the threat of global warming is to our physical survival.

John Richardson
26 November 2009

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Music to die to

Last Saturday I was reminded why Martin Luther wrote about music, that “it alone produces what otherwise only theology can do, namely, a calm and joyful disposition.”

The occasion for this was a visit to the High Barn, at Great Bardfield, to hear Gordon Giltrap, my favourite solo guitarist, where we were also treated to a set by another guitarist, Clive Carroll.

Now I have to admit I’d never heard of Mr Carroll before this, and as I hadn’t booked the tickets I was a trifle disappointed to have precious ‘Giltrap time’ being taken up by someone else. But within ten minutes I was completely hooked. Carroll has a virtuosity with the guitar which has, literally, to be seen to be believed. A recording may capture the sound, but seeing him live you realize it really is just him, and it really does involve just one guitar.

As well as enjoying the concert, however (and Carroll duetting with Giltrap was an added bonus), I found myself wondering at the power and mystery of music. We refer loosely to animals such as whales and birds ‘singing’. But a biologist will tell us that the sounds they make serve not to entertain but to inform — to mark out territory, to announce danger or food, and so on.

Yet it is surely difficult to treat human music-making in the same reductionist manner. There is certainly a ‘visceral’ effect to some music. Certain beats and rhythms do seem ‘primitive’, in the sense that they draw on an almost biological impulse. But the sheer difficulty of some musical forms surely demolishes the notion that biology is the basis for our production and enjoyment of music.

Indeed, I would go as far as to suggest that music is one of the points at which materialism is confronted by a different view of reality. Luther believed that “the devil, the creator of saddening cares and disquieting worries, takes flight at the sound of music almost as he takes flight at the word of theology.” And the Bible speaks of how David’s music soothed the demon-troubled Saul.

We speak of how music ‘lifts us up’ —but lifts us up to what? To some illusory experience of electrical impulses in the neural cortex? Can it be that all the music of the world, and all the musicians, and all those who have ever listened to music and been moved to sing and to swing, to sway, to dance, to laugh, to march, to cry —all this is just the bumping together of atom and molecules, yet another fortunate by product of the Big Bang,  like the ‘Good Samaritan’ impulse of some to help, rather than beat up (or eat) the stranger?

Remember the scene in Philadelphia where Tom Hanks’s character is listening to La Mamma Morta, whilst wheeling his drip-feed round the room? OK it is acting, but the emotion of the scene is instantly recognizable. I am of the view that there is music not only to live for but to die to, precisely because there is (or seems to be) something about music which is truly transcendental. The music, says Hanks’ character, “fills with a hope” —and so do we.

So I want —amongst others —John Renbourn’s The Pelican, Gordon Giltrap’s Nursery Chimes and why not the Cocteau Twins’ Pearly Dewrops Drop? That’ll do for now.

John Richardson
24 November 2009

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Tarantino 'proves his critics right'

(A helpful review of Quentin Tarantino's work, in my view. Just a pity the reviewer didn't spell "Inglourious" right!)

[...] Violence has particular power on film precisely because it involuntarily activates our powers of empathy. We imagine ourselves, as an unthinking reflex, into the agony. This is the most civilising instinct we have: to empathize with suffering strangers. (It competes, of course, with all our more base instincts). Any work of art that denies this sense – that is based on subverting it – will ultimately be sullying. No, I’m not saying it makes people violent. But it does leave the viewer just a millimetre more morally corroded. Laughing at simulated torture – and even cheering it on, as we are encouraged to through all of Tarantino’s later films – leaves a moral muscle just a tiny bit more atrophied.

You can see this in the responses of Tarantino himself. Not long after 9/11, he said: “It didn’t affect me because there’s, like, a Hong Kong action movie? called Purple Storm and they work in a whole big thing in the plot that they blow up a skyscraper.” It’s a case-study in atrophy of moral senses: to brag you weren’t moved by the murder of two and half thousand actual people, because you’d already seen it simulated in a movie. Only somebody who has never seen violence – who sees the world as made of celluloid – can respond like this. Read more

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Softened by evil

(This replaces a previous post. I didn't see enough traffic to that, so I thought a more 'eye catching' title might get people reading about this man who has something to say that we should all hear. It’s a good deal more important than what the Presiding Bishop of TEC has to say in her video. The new title comes from a line you can just hear at the beginning of the second video, "You don't get hardened, you actually get softened by doing this." To understand the 'this', you need to play the rest.)

***********

Looking for something else on YouTube, I came across this documentary about Afghanistan featuring the Australian painter and documentary film-maker, George Gittoes, whose painting The Preacher features on the cover of my book Revelation Unwrapped. Be warned, it is quite hard to watch.

Shortly before the book was published (initially by me paying for its printing and distribution) I saw a black-and-white version of The Preacher in the Sydney Diocesan newspaper, Southern Cross, after it had won a prize for religious art. It was based on a photo George took during the Kibeho massacre in Rwanda (see here for an account), and it showed a man in a distinctive yellow jacket whom George saw preaching hope to those facing death.

I knew it was ideal for the book, but I also knew we couldn’t pay much for the rights to use it, so I asked a friend in Australia to write and ask (a) whether he’d let us use it, and (b) what he would charge. The answers were (a) yes — provided he could see the cover first — and (b) nothing. Since then, the book has sold several thousand copies, but George not only let us use the picture for nothing, he lent us several other pictures and came along with his artist friends to the book launch at St Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney (where he called me a crazy Pom).

I found George Gittoes to be one of the most fascinating — and scarey — people I’ve come across. He is a deeply spiritual man. In an earlier documentary for ABC he said words to the effect that if you work for God you wouldn’t earn much — you’d have a great time, but there was no money in it. At the same time, this is a man who has seen more death and destruction than most of us could imagine existed, let alone cope with. You need to watch this video below. The phrase “That’s what they’ll kill you for ... they want to kill the judgement in your eyes,” has got to be one of the most profound things you’ll ever hear. Try to turn up the beginning and listening to that as well.

George is a man doing something astonishing, combining art, faith and passionate commitment. He deserves more attention, but there aren’t many of his paintings you’d ever be able to hang on your walls. (I do wish he’d get his hair cut again, though.)

If I were to sum up what I think George’s art expresses, it is that where the human spirit meets true evil then people either turn into demons or become Christ-like. The terrible reality, though, is that any of us could go either way.

John Richardson
2 August 2009

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George Gittoes: an amazing bloke

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Modern Art and the death of ...

Here is another great piece by 'Theodore Dalrymple', this time on modern art:

The successful modern artist’s subject is himself, not in any genuinely self-examining way that would tell us something about the human condition, but as an ego to distinguish himself from other egos, as distinctly and noisily as he can. Like Oscar Wilde at the New York customs, he has nothing to declare but his genius: which, if he is lucky, will lead to fame and fortune. Of all the artistic disciplines nowadays, self-advertisement is by far the most important.

This is reflected in the training that art students now undergo. Rarely do they receive any formal training in (say) drawing or painting.

[...] It is true that they are sometimes taught just a little art history. I had what was for me a memorable conversation with an art student when she was my patient. She was in her second year of art school, and told me that one of the things she enjoyed most about it was art history. I asked what they taught in art history.

‘The first year,’ she said, ‘we did African art. But now in the second year we’re doing western art.’

I asked what particular aspect of western art they were doing.

‘Roy Liechtenstein.’

As satire would be impossible, so commentary would be superfluous. The task is not so much to criticise as to understand: that is to say, to understand how and why this terrible shallowness has triumphed so completely almost everywhere in the west.

I am reminded of the thesis of the late, great Hans R Rookmaker, put forward in his seminal Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, that the history of art shows us both the rise and the decline of Western civilization, at the heart of which lies the rise and decline of Protestant spirituality.

Although he eschews a spiritual analysis, Jacques Barzun also identifies a decline in the Western 'spirit', in his From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life.

One of the (several) tragedies of recent evangelical history is that in the 1970s some attempts were being made to integrate theology and artistic culture.  This relied, however, on what might be called a 'confident Calvinism', which on the one hand recognized that every area of life could and should be brought under God's sovereignty, but which, on the other hand, also had a very particular theological perspective.

Unsurprisingly, this has now largely ceased as some branches of evangelicalism have given up on the (Protestestant) theology and others have given up on the culture.

Perhaps there is still time for a reawakening. Personally, I have long been struck by the fact that the first result of someone being filled with the Holy Spirit in the Bible is that they are gifted with artistic endowment (Exodus 31:1-5).

A quick Google took me to this website for Christian Artists, but I wonder what happened to that earlier promise? (And also what happened to the old members of the CYFA Arts Workshop - now thereby hangs a tale!)

JPR

10 January 2009

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