Disaster Tourism

At least for now

My friend Matt wrote a comic with some great commentary on the relationship between the Church and culture.  Go read it, because it is good.

There were two really great films that came out this summer movie season.  One was Inception, which I highly recommend but will not be the focus of this post.  The other was Scott Pilgrim vs. the World; a movie that I have already seen twice and anticipate being one of my all time favorites.

My love for Scott Pilgrim is not shared by all, however.  In fact, reviews have been very mixed, and the movie seems to have polarized the critics.  There does seem to be a trend among the bad reviews, however, and that is a tendency to review not the movie, but the perceived intended audience.

As the linked article indicates, many reviewers disliked the movie and lashed out against those who enjoyed it.  According to these particular reviewers, the movie (which both honors and lampoons hipster and video game culture in much the same way that Hot Fuzz honored and lampooned action movies) is only for shallow zomboids who have wasted their lives playing video games.

The real problem, however, is too painfully obvious: these critics just didn’t “get it.”  And it is okay not to “get it.”  What is not okay is claiming that those who did get it are somehow beneath you, or that you are better than them.  For me, one of the things that makes Scott Pilgrim so wonderful is that it appeals to things that I enjoy,  a vernacular I speak, and a sense of humor common among my peers.

[Spoilers begin!] When I see an establishing shot of Scott Pilgrim’s apartment paired with the oh-so familiar slap-bass of Seinfeld, that is funny to me.  When I see 64-hit combos and “KO” announcements a la Street Fighter portrayed in a semi-realistic setting, this has comedic value [Spoilers end!].  The humor is derived from a shared experience.  When you don’t have that same experience, it is natural for you not to find this nearly as funny as I.  That doesn’t mean that the experience is invalid.

What makes me most angry about the critical treatment of Scott Pilgrim is the lack of understanding that not everything has to appeal to everyone.  There are words for art that appeals to everyone; Words such as “broad” and “mediocre.”  People have very different sensibilities, with different ideas of what is funny, moving, or meaningful.  When you make something that is intended to appeal to everyone, you damage the impact your work can have on an audience.  You have to water something down to the point that it hardly says anything at all in order to take into consideration all of the different points of view that are out there.

Scott Pilgrim is not broad, nor is it mediocre.  It is also something that is not made for everyone, but that makes it all the more special for the people for whom it was made.

Update (8/21/2010): 1 random guy wrote a comic about the whole ordeal.

When I was in junior high I was involved, like so many Christian junior highers, with a church youth group.  To provide a some context, I was involved in a youth group at a very small church in a very small town in southeastern Oklahoma.  There’s a lot of good and a lot of growth that took part in my time there, but I would like to talk about something that was not so good.  I want to talk about my youth group leader declaring war on Pearl Jam.

Okay, perhaps I am exaggerating.  I should say, rather, that our youth group leader implied that listening to Pearl Jam (and a few other choice music groups) was an un-Christian thing to do.

We spent one session of our weekly meetings watching a video, which was a few years old by the time I watched it, deploring the horrible evils thrust upon modern day youth by that terrible devil, MTV.  The basic idea is that because MTV showed videos in which un-Christian ideas were promoted, MTV itself was privy to a conspiracy to corrupt America’s youth and should never be watched by Christian children.  The video then went into some detail as to which videos were the most egregious offenders.  Mostly it was music I had not heard of; some R&B and hair metal bands from the early ’90s were included.  However, as the video progressed it started mentioning bands of which I was more aware.  Bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam.

I remember particularly the focus on the Pearl Jam song “Jeremy.”  For those of you who don’t know, “Jeremy” is a song based partly on the real life story of a boy named Jeremy from Texas who shot himself in front of his high school English class.  They criticized “Jeremy” and the video that was in frequent rotation on MTV for celebrating violence and enforcing a message of suicide being a reasonable way to deal with one’s problems.

However, that is not what the song is about.  Not at all, actually.  Here is what Eddie Vedder, singer of Pearl Jam and author of the song’s lyrics, had to say about the song:

It came from a small paragraph in a paper which means you kill yourself and you make a big old sacrifice and try to get your revenge. That all you’re gonna end up with is a paragraph in a newspaper. Sixty-three degrees and cloudy in a suburban neighborhood. That’s the beginning of the video and that’s the same thing is that in the end, it does nothing … nothing changes. The world goes on and you’re gone. The best revenge is to live on and prove yourself. Be stronger than those people. And then you can come back.

The truth is, there were some Christian folks out there who saw something violent on TV, something they didn’t like, and instantly thought that it must be bad because of its nature.  The problem is that the nature of “Jeremy” is a truth that is too hard and too terrible for a lot of people to handle: it is the story of a boy that the Church did not reach.  He was boy who was ignored by his parents, by his teachers, by his peers, and by the Church and found nothing but despair.

Popular music is full with this sort of imagery.  Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins sings in “Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” “Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage / and someone will say what is lost can never be saved / and I still believe that I cannot be saved.”  Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral is a whole album devoted to depression and despair that cannot be cured by drugs, sex, or power and in the end no answer can be found.  These works have been cited as being corruptive, heretical, and outright evil.  Yet I say that some of this kind of music is more Christian than many of the songs we sing on Sunday morning.  If not that, at the very least more meaningful.

I say this because theses songs represent the real pain that people experience in this broken world.  These songs bear witness to the depravity of this world, and the need we all have for God.  They also reflect the ways in which Christians have not only failed to be part of the solution, but often instigate the problems.  These songs are, above all else, honest.  They are honest about the problems we all face and the ways in which we try to deal with them. These are songs about real alienation and rejection that these artists have faced, and too often it is Christians who are doing the rejecting.  The anti-MTV video I was shown as a kid is proof-positive of that.  Rather than try to understand the pain of our broken world, we curse it and try to run away from it.

Do you blame the dark for being dark, or do you blame the light for not shining brightly?