EPISODE 418: SAY SOMETHING

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

Hi. Welcome back. I’m writing this on Sunday afternoon in my favorite coffee shop, a block from the Pacific. A cool breeze is slipping in through the screen door, and it sways back and forth like a set piece from the Haunted Mansion’s never finished Ghost Procession into Coffee Shop, meanwhile I’m listening to this and letting it slowly and temporarily break down all the stony parts of my heart (the greyscale only advances, my friends) until I am like Eustace C. Scrubb after Aslan rips his dragon skin off, shaking, tender and a little bit afraid.

Sometimes bewilderment is vastly underestimated.

(Just found this image of that moment from Voyage of the Dawn Treader. God it’s disturbing.)

This has been such a strange couple of months/year/Monday November 7, 2016. (This could all still be a dream, yes it could, please be gentle with me.) After a lovely winter spent mostly in Los Angeles, I have been on the road about five of the last eight weeks, and still not anywhere near done (mid-June where are you). And even though all of it is has been pretty great I’m maybe just maybe feeling it a li’l bit.

It’s funny, for me the experience of being in another place is incredibly liberating. My writing is never freer, and my excitement to do it pretty much never greater. It turns out the world really is a great source of inspiration.

But at some point it’s also like you’re in a science fiction film where your atoms are slowly spreading apart and by the time you notice it it’s hard to tell where you stop and the chair begins, which of these feelings are real and which are just shorthand for my body saying I am Freaking Out Now, Please Notice Me.

(Have you ever had that experience where you’re with someone who kind of drives you nuts, God love them and give them everything they need in their lives, Inshallah, and you find yourself getting hostile about things that are just not to be gotten hostile about – No I Would Not Like Perrier, Have You Not Heard What They Do To Those Oxygen Bubbles – and only later you realize, I am not angry at carbonated beverages, that is just the sound I make when I just felt trapped and am shrieking for help.)

All of which is to say, if this seems less coherent than usual, yeah, that’s probably true. And if you have a broom and one of those sweepy pans (sweepy pans?) could you help me gather up myself, I seem to be all over the place.

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Many of my recent trips have found me hanging out at retreat centers. You know, like Jesuits do.

And as I’ve travelled amongst these places, which vary from massive old school concrete institutional structures to a two year old wowser of a building, like stop and kiss the ground and hope that the security cameras don’t catch you weeping wowser, I’ve been trying to understand how it is the physical structures of the places impact us in such a way that we feel closer or more open to God.

And I’ve found myself wondering whether part of their power actually comes from the combined experiences of all the people that have been here before us. Like, you know how you can get freaked out when we find ourselves in a space where something terrible has happened? Could spiritual spaces be the same but opposite? Do the walls, the floor, the bones of a place like a retreat center absorb our vulnerability, the skins and pain we shed there and the tears, the laughter, the relief that follow, such that all of that seems easier somehow, safer, like this is already a place of welcome not just in some general Hospitality is Cool kind of way, but more deeply, and for us?

Because I’ll tell you, one of these places was basically just a home being used for retreatants, it is small and non-descript and really ordinary, just a couple bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms -- not at all what most people think of when they think retreat house, really and truly just a home. And yet it has this incredible peace to it that I could not explain and was so simple and beautiful that all I wanted to do was stay a few days and see if I could gather up some of my atoms up or just let them and this analogy go for God’s sake.

Today at 5 o’clock – in fact right now as I’m writing this part, come to think of it – Loyola Marymount is “decommissioning” one of its chapels, which is a strangely NASA bureaucracy way of saying they’re permanently shutting it down. The Huesman Chapel is just about the oldest religious space on campus; generations of LMU students, faculty and staff have prayed here. Also generations of young Jesuits, too, who used to come to Loyola to study and would have their daily Masses here. And now the whole area is being knocked down to build big new dorms, and so today/right now they’re having one last Mass beforehand to say goodbye.

Times change, the university needs more dorm space, and we don’t have a lot of options in terms of where on campus. But it’s hard to watch; it’s like destroying all that built-up experience and suffering and grace. You wonder if when the wrecking ball hits it shouldn’t somehow explode into a thousand colors and pent-up words and feelings.

In a year that has been for the church hot garbage – the technical term -- the idea of taking away a space that people have actually drawn solace from feels pretty bad. I can only hope that with its destruction all that grace it holds within it does somehow get released into the universe in a good way. Stranger things have certainly happened.

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WARNING: Avengers: Endgame and last week’s Game of Thrones SPOILERS BELOW

There’s this moment near the end of the great Sondheim musical “Company” where the main character Bobby is sort of visited by the spirits of all his friends on his birthday as he’s trying to decide whether to actually risk being vulnerable and living a real life or just keep being pretty and superficial and afraid. These ghosts urge him on while he sings “Being Alive,” which along with “The Ladies Who Lunch” is pretty much The Song of the Show.

And one of them, this girl Amy who almost called off her wedding because she was herself so afraid, says this: “Blow out the candles, Robert, and make a wish. Want something. Want something.”

A version of that line has kept coming up as I’ve thought about Avengers: Endgame. As in “Say something, Avengers: Endgame. Say something.”

What made Infinity War such a great movie is not just that the stakes were so crazy high and they somehow gave every character their own arc (which is an unbelievable feat and makes the movie not just good but something I feel like writers should study like it’s the freaking Rosetta Stone), but that it was actually about something – call it overpopulation, call it global warming, this was a movie that was grappling with more than tights and puncho.

(Fun Fact: Tights and Puncho is the name of the fictional animated movie I have not created, but already sounds better than most of the things that I have.)

Last weekend’s astonishing episode of Game of Thrones was much the same. Whether you see the Night King’s endless nightmare horde as an emblem of mortality, existential doom or again, global warming* (everything right now is sort of about global warming, but not to worry, I’m sure it’ll be fine…), that is definitely 80 minutes of television that is facing/struggling with/haunted by something bigger. Something Enormous.

I would even say the episode has a thesis, which is at the least that We Fight regardless of the odds because human life is of value, we are of value, and at the most No matter how bad things look hope is still possible as long as we’re actively fighting and fighting together.

The manner of the Thrones characters’ salvation may ring to some as false, because the forces stacked against the characters even at that moment were so absolutely impossible. But over the course of seasons the show had also neatly stacked so many elements up that seemed disparate and unrelated – Arya learning the knife drop move (season 1); Beric being sent off by Ned (season 1); then dying and being resurrected repeatedly for some unknown reason (season 3); the Hound fleeing the Battle of Blackwater Bay because of fire (season 2), and going even farther back the Hound being burnt by his brother as a boy; Arya meeting Melisandre (season 3; God the call back to that last week!); Arya spending most of a year with the Hound (seasons 3 and 4); the Hound being saved by Al Swearengen, who is then butchered with his family by rogue members of Beric’s crew, who he then meets up with (season 6); Arya’s training as a Faceless Man (season 6); and finally the Hound freaking out around fire during the Long Night, and therefore in just the right place to see Arya in need of help. And yet when put together all those elements really do open up the possibility for that kick ass hell yeah oh yes she did resolution.

(If you haven’t seen this stream of a crowd in Brazil watching the end of the episode, it is well worth it. Arya, you are everything and we love you always. Please don’t die in the next two weeks.)

Another way of putting the big picture, in the words of the Evangelist Jon Snow: We have a lot more in common than the things that we think divide us, and We Only Survive Together.

(We’ll see how that plays through in these final episodes. Based on what I know so far, I’m a li’l worried.)

With all that in mind, what can we say Avengers: Endgame is about? Going in you might have thought it would be about facing your failures – Bruce’s failure to integrate and/or listen to the Hulk; Cap and Tony’s multi-movie failure to get beyond their pride; Thor and Star-Lord’s failures to get past their egos and pain in the stopping of Thanos. But instead, weirdly, both Bruce’s struggles and Cap and Tony’s are resolved right away. (Man that digitized Banner-Hulk spooked me. A hard no to more of that, please.)

So maybe the film is about sacrificing yourself for the good of all…maybe? I mean, Natasha’s story is definitely that -- by the way, Marvel thanks for killing women to achieve your story goals at this precise point in both of the last two Avengers movies, really great. And maybe Tony’s doing self-sacrifice, I guess? Except was there ever any struggle on his part against that? It was really just this is happening, I have to do this, okay, slip me the glove then, no?

But otherwise: Cap is the moral center of this universe and what sacrifice did he have to make? Or how about weird spooky Uncanny Valley Ruffalulk? Or Thor? Or Hawkeye? Or Star-Lord? Or anyone else?

I keep waiting for the pieces to click together and me to realize it’s not that Endgame was one of the weakest of the Marvel films, it’s just that I didn’t get it. But a week later I still find myself saying basically this is not a movie but three hours of nostalgia and hijinks. Remember how much you loved that scene in the elevator in Winter Soldier, or Peter Quill dancing across a planet at the start of Guardians? Let’s go back there. And hey, we’ll do like, super-cool hero poses at the very end. And have a scene which isn’t about story but allowing all our female characters to pose together so you’ll feel better than of our 22 films only one was about a woman and it came out two months ago.

Clearly audiences liked all that; it’s going to be the biggest grossing film of all time, I guess. But in terms of story or meaning, I just don’t see it.

I guess they warned us right from the beginning where they were headed -- a movie that needs a rat to hit a button to actually make the film actually work is just not going to be a film that makes a lot of Sense.

(If you can explain to me how the time travel in the movie actually works, I will send you a big gift, because it seems like reheated nonsense as far as I can figure. Maybe they’ll use it to justify the existence of mutants and the Fantastic Four – they’re in the timeline where Thanos’ snap worked! But as time travel goes, No, Marvel, Bad, no. Forget Marty McFly, The Doctor would slap you upside the head many times.)

Warren Ellis’s take makes a lot of sense: “Do not drink fluids for six hours before you watch ENDGAME, which is the longest @!%!%^# episode of COMMUNITY you will ever sit through.”

++ LINKS ++

I don’t know what this is but I like it.

I do know what this is, it is a scene from the movie The Skeleton Twins, in which Bill Hader and Kristin Wiig play twin brother and sister who are struggling with life, and here they do a lip sync, and I also like it, it really captures so many great things about them and feels like the kind of thing that could happen in my family or maybe yours.

This is a short essay about an interview done with an Australian Jesuit about interacting with people who have been through terrible tragedy, the interviewer being an Australian journalist who wants to learn how people survive those things. And I love it because it’s all about how it’s not about having answers but just being there with them, and how uncomfortable that is.

Says the writer of the essay: “By offering his own bewildered humanity, Steve Sinn allowed Juliet hers.”

Definitely voting yes this week to bewilderment.

Recently I backed a kickstarter for a book of non-fiction stories about friendships made and sustained on the internets. It’s not exactly a thing that I can say I have done or understand exactly myself, but it has been strange for me these last years how much certain newsletters have given me a different sense of a place for myself in the world, a wide and invisible community that I am a part of. Which is weird, you know? And yet true.

So I wrote the writer running this Kickstarter about this, and she said this:

I totally agree with this sentiment, Jim. These invisible communities I've been a part of have not only told me there is space for me in the world, but also showed me how important it is to hold space for others.

I’ve been trying to figure out what this newsletter is at this point and how to do it better. Maybe it is about trying in my own rambly weird pop culture way to acknowledge there is a space in the world (and for those who like that sort of thing in the church) for the rambly and the weird and those with occasional pop culture thirst, and to provide one of many places where we can all hang out and maybe have a party.

It’s crazy out there. But that’s okay. Keep your head down when you need to, and don’t stop dancing.

I’ll see you next week.

PS Just watched this week's Thrones. Dany's reaction is all of us, I think.