EPISODE 208 – THE SCARIEST STORY EVER TOLD

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

I’ve got just one poster hanging in my room. I’ve had it for close to twenty years, and I’m pretty sure it’s hung in each of the six different places that I’ve lived since I got it.

Predictably, it’s Star Wars related, though maybe not from the film that people would expect.

Can you remember when you first saw this poster? God, the sense of promise – “Not only am I giving you a new trilogy,” George whispers from the cup of werebantha tea he’s having with Shmi inside the hut, “but it is going to be about how Anakin Skywalker went bad.” Even now, having mostly endured the result, that prospect remains so thrilling.

And in part that’s because Lucas makes this choice of starting with Anakin as a little boy, a minor character on the stage of galactic history. And not only that, but he offers really no hint of evil within him in the whole first film. He’s got tons of talent and some tough backstory, but truly, the only thing scary about young Anakin (other than his acting – bum dum BUMP) is this weird debate that’s going on around him about whether or not he may be the One who brings balance to the Force, whatever-the-heck-that’s-supposed-to-mean-but-it-certainly-doesn’t-sound-good-why-aren’t-any-of-you-Jedi-worried-about-what-that-means?

Actor Jake Lloyd pretty much got crucified for his gee-whillickers-mister stage-kid performance, but in a lot of ways that fit Lucas’ agenda. “I’m not going to let you say there was something in Anakin that made him bad,” he’s insisting in that first movie. “Darth Vader was a sweet, annoying kid, just like you. Deal with it.”

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One of my Jesuit classmates is a guy who had been an assistant district attorney in Milwaukee at the time of the Jeffrey Dahmer case. (Who’s hungry?) He was actually on the case, and he told us one of the most disturbing things about the investigation was looking through Dahmer’s bookcases and discovering that he and Dahmer appeared to have a number of the same favorite books and movies.

I love that.

Monster movies are often built around some sort of alien creature intent on destroying us. It’s the extraterrestials! It’s the germs! It’s the crazy people!

We might have something to do with their horrifying rampage of death – We did those secret experiments! We destroyed their habitat! We played with a Ouija board! (Seriously, though, don’t do that.)

Or we might just be in the wrong place at right time. (Sorry Carol Ann.)

But either way these films tell us that what is confronting us, what frightens us is radically different from us. Foreign. They’re like adult bedtime stories, there to reassure us that our instincts to distrust and fear are absolutely legit, that those other people, places or things are Not Like Us and therefore Dangerous.

But that’s not the truth of our lives. Not usually. Usually what makes our “others” so damn scary is the fact that on some deep down level we know, no matter what our fears, no matter what they might look like, sound like or what they might have done, we we can’t fully separate themselves from us. The guy who had a stranger locked in his basement for fifteen years was always good about loaning me his lawn mower. The religious extremists have pictures of their daughters in their wallets (and they are adorable!). The serial killer writes a newsletter about pop culture and spirituality.

(Whoa. When you put it like that, suddenly I don’t feel so good.)

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I’m not looking to do politics here, for that see: everything else around us (in the words of Tammy Taylor, I’m just so tired, y’all; someone please get me an enormous glass of pinot). But it does strike me as interesting that a good part of what we’re hearing all around our world right now is an instinct to stop people from coming to where we are (wherever that is). There can be good reasons for such a position; but it’s also a great way of avoiding the fact that our “monsters” are really not that different than us.

If you were going to ask a Christian to summarize the demand of the Christian life in just one principle – admittedly, a ridiculously bad idea; hey kid, I know you’ve got this whole “Bible”, but can you pitch it to me in a sentence? – I think many would give some version of “Love one another.”

But you know, we might be better off if instead we all chose “Do not be afraid.” So many of the really bad things we do start with us being afraid.

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Speaking of Christianity, if you were going to think of a horror story that undermines all this scapegoating and other-ing that we’ve been talking about, you could do a lot worse than the Gospels.

Is it sacrilegious to think of the story of Jesus Christ as a horror story? I don’t mean to imply Jesus doesn’t win in the end. On the other hand, have you ever read the end of the Gospel of Mark (the original Gospel)?

Here’s how “the Resurrection” goes there (this is Mark 16):

“1 When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body. 2 Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb 3 and they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?”

4 But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. 5 As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed.

6 “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’”

8 Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

That’s it. No comforting sight of the risen Jesus, no sweet new miracles (“Look, he walks through walls!”; “Look, he can teleport!” “Look, he can make it look like he has eyeballs in his hands!”) (you know kids would love that last one). We don’t even get a single bacon and eggs beach breakfast. There’s just the announcement that Jesus has risen, and Marys and Salome FREAKING OUT and GETTING OUT OF THERE.

Tell me that is not the ending of a horror movie.

In fact, it was such a disturbing ending that some other writer later tacked on additional verses in which Jesus shows up and rebukes various people for not believing he had risen. Might as well have just had Jesus say, “And shame on you, Evangelist!”

But even putting Mark’s version aside, the story of Jesus is on one level the story of a guy who is more and more understood by his community as Other, as Threat, as Not-Us, until finally he is put through the brutal death reserved for society’s monsters.

And yet, because we’ve been told the tale from the monster’s point of view we know that in fact he has done nothing to justify that treatment, that they’re killing not just an innocent but the one who loved humanity more fully and more generously than anyone else, the son of God himself.

It’s the same dynamic that plays out in “Frankenstein”, actually. The monster looks pretty, um, monster-y, and kills that little girl, so you can see why they want to get rid of him. But we the audience know it’s all a big mistake, that he’s an innocent here.

That’s a radically destabilizing thing for a horror story to do. It brings the whole social mechanism of judgment and punishment into question. It becomes impossible to avoid the question, “What are we doing?”

Or, even bigger: “Wait: Who was the monster in that story?”

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If you’ve got some time and inclination, there’s a great movie on Netflix I highly recommend with the very on-the-nose name of “Monsters”. (And okay, yes, "They're no longer aliens, they're residents," is not exactly the scariest tag line, and "Now it's our turn to adapt" makes it sound like group therapy. But look at the gas masks! The crashed helicopter! Those atrocious leggings! This is scary stuff, people!)

The film is about this photojournalist forced by his boss to bring his daughter from Mexico back to safety in the United States. There’s been this sort of slow-term alien invasion in certain parts of the planet, and Mexico is overrun.

It’s the first film by Gareth Edwards, the same guy who made “Rogue One”; my friend and fellow Star Wars uber-fan Ken Anselment recommended it to me. And it plays with a lot of the ideas about monsters and horror we’re talking about here. (Here’s a nice interview with Edwards about the film, too.)

I also recommend “Logan”, the latest and last in the long series of X-Men movies about Clawed Hugh Jackman. The film is loosely based on a fantastic comic miniseries called “Old Man Logan”, in which the super heroes are all dead and the U.S. has collapsed and the West is now run by cannibalistic inbred descendants of the Hulk. (Which are just as disgusting as that sounds.) (Also, why is there so much talk about cannibalism in this episode? Is it because I’m finishing this just before dinner? Yeesh.) And for reasons we’re not told at the beginning the now-aged Logan refuses to pop his claws anymore under any circumstances.

The movie goes in many different directions, some of them pretty wonderful – it’s bar none the best X-Men performance by Patrick Stewart (Sir Patrick if you’re nasty); there really is nothing like a Shakespearean-trained actor spouting curse words – but underneath it’s about the same things as the book, namely love, and the monster within.

(Great poster. Says it all. Take a lesson, "Monsters".)

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(Is it unethical for a Catholic priest to use donuts as a means of subliminal messaging? I'm sorry. I'll stop.)

++ LINKS ++

Vulture did a long interview with David Letterman last week. 'Member when David Letterman was on television? *sigh*

Also, want to get a sense of the enormity of our universe? Try this. (You begin by clicking on “universe”.) Watch out for bacon.

Norway shows in addition to a very high standard of living it has the best ideas on how to deal with internet commenters. The Queen of England may have an even better idea. And Ireland’s Danny MacAskill reminds us there’s a lot more to the world than all of that.

We made it through another week. Take some time to celebrate. There’s beauty all around us. The cranks can bray at us all they want, but we still get to decide what kind of life we’re going to lead.