Resident Theologian
About the Blog
Twitter, Twitter, Twitter
I've written at length on this blog about my relationship to digital technology in general and to Twitter in particular. I deleted my Facebook account. I'm not on Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Tumblr, or anything else. I'm part of one Slack channel, which isn't work-related and is quite life-giving, but I regulate my time on there nonetheless. I use Freedom to block access to the internet for large stretches of the day. The only remaining social media platform in my life—beyond the evils of YouTube and Google, from which I hope to find a way to extricate myself sooner rather than later—is Twitter.
I gave Twitter up for two months last fall, and it was great. But I was persuaded to return, at least in modest ways, given the relationships and connections I'd developed using it. Then Covid hit, and I ditched the rules and was on it far too much from spring break to Memorial Day. But these last two months I have come round to the same conclusion that instigated my initial dropout: it can't be saved. It can't be redeemed. It's purest poison. It cannot be defanged; it only lies in wait. But dormancy is not safety. Twitter is a cancer and the only path forward is digital chemotherapy.
So I stopped liking, retweeting, or tweeting (with a couple small exceptions). I got off for all but 10-15 minutes per day. That's my happy new normal. Here are the steps I plan to take in the coming weeks.
First, to delete all my previous likes and retweets, and most or all of my tweets.
Second, to use it only as a kind of RSS feed for a handful of writers I follow. So that means no scrolling on the Home page, only going to specific profiles and reading their tweets or following their links. But still, no more than a dozen minutes a day, tops.
Third, in terms of my own profile and usage, I will cease liking or replying to others. I will use Twitter henceforth exclusively as a "public facing" repository of links to things I've written, or plainly worded professional information. I'm going to leave my account up—for now—as a one-stop-shop that makes it easy to find me, my work, my blog, my contact info. In other words, I want my Twitter presence to be uniformly boring. I want to be a bad follow.
Fourth, however, I am going to think hard about deleting my account once and for all. I may deactivate for the month of August or September to see how it feels. I've yet to make a final decision about that. If it is true, as I say, that Twitter is a poison and a cancer, then even a boring links-heavy profile like mine keeps the poison in circulation. I don't want to contribute to that. I want to keep contracting my digital footprint until it is comprises nothing but (a) what I've written in formal venues and (b) online space I own.
So we'll see how it goes. Part of this footprint-contraction plan entails more blogging: instead of emailing, texting, or Slack-commenting my ideas and observations, I want to write them out here. That's the goal, at least. I'll check in with reports and reflections as the plan is executed or, as the case may be, aborted or audibled.
In any case, lest this short post was too long and you didn't read: Get off Twitter. It's from the evil one.
An update
I've not written much on the blog these last few months, but I've been busy in the meantime. I'm hoping, though, to get back into my self-imposed charter of "mezzo-blogging," some happy midpoint between tweet-length commentary and full-blown (intimating to find the time for) essays. So here's what I've been up to during my absence, together with what's on my plate for the present and near future.
1. Covid, obviously. Everything hit during our spring break, and students never returned to campus. I've written a few things Covid-related, though I've wanted to find the time to write more. We'll see if I get anything out before school returns.
2. I revised an article for publication in the Journal of Theological Interpretation. It'll come out in the first issue of 2021. It's called "What Are the Standards of Excellence for Theological Interpretation of Scripture?" It's 15,000 words, double the usual limit for the journal. I'm grateful to them for making the exception, and excited to see it appear.
3. I wrote a long review essay of N. T. Wright's Gifford lectures for the Los Angeles Review of Books, where I've written similar pieces before on David Bentley Hart, Patrick Deneen and James K. A. Smith, and Paula Fredriksen. I'm hopeful it will come out this fall. (My editor there, who is supremely gracious, has also extended me some slack on the word count. He's a mensch.)
4. Once the semester was complete—a real endurance test, since both my wife and I teach at ACU, and we had four children 7 years old and under at home with us as we transitioned and taught online—I had 15 weeks ahead of me in which to complete two major book-length projects. The sixth week we took off for a family vacation, and the fifteenth week is full of pre-sessions, meetings, and other "welcome back" activities. So effectively that meant 13 weeks, usually working four days each week, about 6-7 hours per day.
5. The first five weeks were devoted to revising my manuscript (drafted last fall) for The Doctrine of Scripture in the Cascade Companions series. I finished a full penultimate draft, and am very happy with it. I over-shot the word count, though, so this fall I'm going to be working on trimming it down to size. Which, I trust, will only increase its clarity, substance, and readability. I am a fan of small books, but they're harder to write than the larger sort! In any case, it'll be a semester of killing my darlings, all those darn adverbs and dependent clauses cluttering the page.
6. Following vacation, I've given the remaining eight weeks to a revision of my dissertation for Eerdmans, titled The Church's Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context. This one's been a bear, for a few reasons. First, it turns out sentences written by 2015 me are unsatisfactory to 2020 me. So a lot of re-writing. Second, the dissertation-ness of it all. Gotta tear out that academese root and branch. Third, dropping the word count from ~175,000 words to ~140,000. Again, that can only improve the project, but it's been more drudgery than I was anticipating. Writing and even editing has always been a pleasure to me, but this one's been a pain. So be it. I'm grateful for the contracts and the opportunity. Lord willing, both manuscripts will be emailed off by Christmas, and I'll be a free man come January.
7. The next manuscript isn't due till end of year 2022, and that one's the 25,000-word entry in Lexham's "Christian Essentials" series called The Church: A Guide to the People of God. So while I might draft some chapters next summer, most of 2021 will be reading, reading, reading.
8. Having said that, two other short-term projects worth mentioning. One is that I have the privilege of curating a symposium in the journal Political Theology on Karen Kilby's new book, God, Evil, and the Limits of Theology. That should come out late this year, perhaps early next year, depending on the ability of contributors to receive books and get responses out. I won't share the lineup just yet, but just know that when you see it your eyes are going to bug out of your head.
9. The second project is part of a Templeton grant, which I was generously rewarded through Biola University's Gratitude to God project (GTG). I'll be researching and writing on the difference that the doctrine of God makes for a Christian grammar of gratitude. That'll occupy most of my time in 2021. I'm honored to be a part of the project as a junior scholar. I can't wait to meet and learn from those involved in it, especially from other disciplines.
10. Speaking of grants, my home institution, ACU, awards internal grants for faculty research, and I was also fortunate to receive one of those this spring, primarily for my work this summer on turning the dissertation into a book. The grant meant my wife and I could rely on childcare for our youngest two kids this summer, and I could afford to decline teaching a summer course. Lord willing and the creek don't rise, by Christmas 2021 I will have not one but two books published, an article in JTI, an essay in LARB, a symposium in PT, an article in the works from my research on GTG, and maybe some scattershot essays online or in magazines. In the midst of a global pandemic, I'll take it.
11. Otherwise, we've been taking quarantine very seriously. Our kids (as of this coming September, 2, 4, 6, and 8 years old, respectively) have borne the lockdown as well as could be hoped. We've reopened modestly, seeing other families outdoors while social distancing. Besides that, we're mostly just hunkered down and are doing our best to stay sane.
12. I've yet to mention the way in which Covid has rocked and is continuing to rock higher education. That's largely because (a) I still have a job and (b) worrying about it is bad for my mental health. Once I knew I would have a job for AY 2020–2021, I did my best to let go of all the anxieties besetting friends and colleagues around the country, put my head down, and got to work. I've waited to prepare for the fall, for the most part, because it hasn't been clear what exactly the semester would look like. But as of now, the plan is that we will be teaching in person, with students returning one month from now. We're taking all the necessary precautions—mandatory masks, social distancing, hybrid pedagogy, larger classrooms for smaller class sizes, no large gatherings indoors, office hours outdoors or on Zoom, etc., etc.—but the truth is nobody knows what the lay of the land will look like come Labor Day, much less Halloween. We'll be done with residential learning by Thanksgiving, anyway. I don't envy those making these decisions, not least when making alternative choices would mean firing scores of people. Everyone in my orbit here is extending one another a lot of grace. My bosses are the best in the business, and understand what it means to have two children in elementary school and two others in preschool while teaching undergraduates with a 4/4 load in the midst of a pandemic. Few are as fortunate as we are, and I am profoundly grateful to be here, now, even amid so much uncertainty. (Did I mention there's an election in November? And perhaps another mutation of the virus awaiting us in the winter? Oh, and a summer-long nation-wide reckoning with a centuries-old legacy of systemic racism? And protests and riots and institutional upheaval? And an as-yet-unreckoned-with crisis of childcare and education facing us down in the public school system this fall? And, and, and, and ... )
It's been a year, in other words. And we're only halfway through. Lord have mercy on all of us. Blessings on each of y'all in these bewildering and trying times.
A very special episode of Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood
In which Daniel, now the middle child with half a dozen siblings, experiences a tiny setback that flummoxes his otherwise unqualified expectation that everything in his young life ought to go his way.
He sits down and cries—but in the chaos of a bustling household and so many other children, his mother and father are unable to pause the family's life, halt the earth's spin, and sing a song to soothe his self-esteem while ostensibly increasing his emotional intelligence.
Soon enough Daniel stops crying.
Eventually he gets up, discovers a solution to the problem on his own, and moves on.
New essay published: “Be Fearful as Christ Was Fearful"
Over at Mere Orthodoxy, Jake was kind enough to publish a reflection I wrote on life in a pandemic. I actually wrote it all the way back in March, just as Covid was ramping up, when there were all kinds of calls from Christian writers, pastors, and thinkers to "not be afraid" or to be "free from fear." I use St. Maximus to discuss the role of fear in the Christian life, rooted in the presence of natural fear in the life of Christ. It's called "Be Fearful as Christ Was Fearful," and here's a taste of what I'm up to:
In other words, what we see in the Garden is not for show. It is not fantasy or fiction. Christ, because he is truly and naturally human, fears death the way any bodily creature might: for to be destroyed is not good, does not belong to an unfallen world. His humanity recoils from the prospect of the passion, not out of lack of trust in the Father or uncertainty in his vocation, but because he is like unto us in every respect apart from sin. As God with us, he is one of us. And it is only human to shrink before death, even death on a cross.
But Maximus wants us to see that that is not the end of the story, because Christ’s solidarity with us is always redemptive, and so it is here, too. His fear is part of his saving work in that it is exemplary for us. For, far from obstructing his obedience to God, Christ’s natural fear becomes the occasion for it. 'Not my will but thine' is the cry of a heart faithful to God in the presence of fear, not in its absence. It is the cry of courage, which is the virtue that knows the right thing to do, and wills to do it, when disavowal of fear would mean self-deception or recklessness. In this Jesus is our pioneer, the trailblazer of truly human courage, precisely in that moment when fearlessness would be foolish. For the will of the Lord outbids even our rational fears.
In this way, Maximus helps us to see what Christian fear might mean. All of Christ’s action is our instruction, as Aquinas says. Here too: we live as Christ lived, die as he died, suffer as he suffered, fear as he feared. If we are to grieve as those with hope, but still to grieve, so are we to fear as those with faith, but still to fear.
Eleven thoughts on Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove
Last month I read Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove for the first time, and it was even better than advertised. I have some thoughts, mostly on what makes it so good, as well as the underlying themes that (perhaps?) have been overlooked given the book's popularity, Pulitzer Prize, and adaptation into a TV miniseries.
1. The prose is perfect. Perfect. Not perfect the way, say, Michael Chabon's is. There may not be a word in all the nearly-1,000 pages that rises above an eighth grade reading level. The sentences, moreover, are usually on the short side. The prose isn't complex. But it's pitch perfect. McMurtry never fails to communicate exactly what he intends, whether it be an action, a feeling, a thought, or a memory. Or a conversation. Oh my, the dialogue. I felt what all readers have felt reading this novel: I didn't want it to end. Like watching a sitcom for a decade, I just wanted to spend time with my friends. But anyway, reading McMurtry's prose was a delight. The way he uses euphemism and "native" construction—the way an uneducated twentysomething cowboy would think or talk—both in dialogue and in description of action or emotion from a character's perspective: it's nothing short of masterful.
2. The characters! Gus, Call, Lorena, Dish, Pea Eye, Deets, Clara—Clara!—Lippy, Newt, Wanz, Blue Duck, July Johnson, Roscoe, Po Campo, Elmira, Peach, Big Zwey, Wilbarger, Jake Spoon—oh, Jake Spoon—Cholo, Soupy, Bolivar. Each name calls forth a whole world, a flesh-and-blood person, a voice and a story and an inner dialogue. Waiting to have July open part 2 and then Clara open part 3, the latter two-thirds into the story, and for each of them to step onto the page fully-formed and wholly equal to those we'd met long before: it's invigorating, is what it is. Exhilirating for the reader. Because at that point you just don't know who might show up before long.
3. The plot is elegant in its simplicity and beautiful in its execution. An 1880 cattle drive from the Rio Grande to Montana, from the southern border to the northern (somewhere between the Rivers Milk and Missouri), led by two famous Texas Rangers in their 50s, after all the battles have been won and the land "secured" for settlement. A journey from vista to vista that live on in the American mythos. A tale filled with outsize characters and shocking events, combined with the ordinary quirks and peccadilloes of human life anywhere: back-breaking labor, bitter weather, taming the elements and animal passions in tandem, ubiquitous prostitution, city life and wilderness within walking distance, penury and plenty even closer bedfellows, unclaimed bastards and long-lost loves, abrupt deaths and children orphaned, gallows humor and gambling and ghost stories and other ways to kill the time on the short way to the grave.
4. That leads me to what most surprised me about the novel (spoilers hereon). This is a dark story lightly told. And I cannot decide whether that is a virtue or a vice (it's certainly a feature and not a bug). The tone floats upon the surface of the pages, flitting from a Gus monologue to a light-hearted memory to a gripping set piece without pausing for Existential Comment or Thematic Flag-Planting. And that, I think, is why the book (appears to me, at least) to be remembered for the joy and pleasure of the plot and the characters and the dialogue. That was certainly my experience of the first half or so. But make no mistake. This is not a comedy. It is a tragedy.
By story's end, random minor characters have died to no purpose; Jake Spoon, fallen into mindless self-justifying murder, is captured and hanged by his friends before killing himself; July's wife, who never loved him and despises him, runs off to find another man, "marries" a third and is killed by Sioux; July's stepson and best friend together with a runaway, abused little girl are brutally murdered by Blue Duck; Deets is killed by a confused and overwhelmed young Indian boy for no reason; Clara is living alone on hard plains land, with a dying husband and three dead sons in the ground; Lorena has her dreams of San Francisco dashed by being kidnapped and gang-raped by Blue Duck's crew before being rescued by Gus, only to find herself at Clara's, alone in her grief mourning Gus (perhaps losing her mind in the process); Gus himself dies randomly as a result of an accidental run-in with Blackfeet who probably would have meant him no harm if they'd met otherwise. In fact, like Jake Gus chooses to die in a fit of vanity, preferring loss of life to life without legs, thus leaving both Clara and Lorena bereft of his presence and his love. Even Wanz burns himself alive in the saloon that just wasn't the same without Lorena there.
That's only to mention the deaths. Call's bastard son by a prostitute (herself dead) lives in his shadow for two decades, only to learn from others that Call is his father; yet Call cannot bring himself to tell the boy or give him his name, and abandons him in Montana: unclaimed, unnamed, unloved, alone. Call keeps his promise to his dead friend, eventuating with him—alone—back in Lonesome Dove, without meaning or purpose or drive. Why did he take all those cattle and all those men to Montana, and tolerate all those deaths in the process, anyway? Because Jake Spoon made mention of wide green pastures? So what? Or what of Dish, love-sick for Lorena, and July, love-sick for any woman in his orbit (Ellie, Clara, ad infinitum), both too naive and foolish and earnest ever to have their love requited. Even poor Bolivar regrets leaving the outfit and joining his wife south of the border, a house empty of his beloved daughters, home only to a woman who despises him.
Not one person in the whole book proves happy by the end; not one gets what he's looking for; not one finds lasting love or satisfaction. Even Pea Eye, the least unhappy and lonesome character in the story, precisely because he asks little of life except not getting murdered in his sleep, is bewildered and set adrift by Gus's death and Call's actions toward Newt. Never one for words, he is silenced one last time.
Lonesome Dove, in short, is a desperately sad tale. It is bleak, violent, unsparing, even merciless in the fates it doles out to its characters. And yet, for probably 600 or 700 pages, that is not the way the book reads. It reads like a romp, full of color and life and simple joys and little silly detours that make you cackle with glee. It's a book to make you smile, until you don't—because you're crying, or in shock.
Is that just the way McMurtry writes? Or is it a stylistic Trojan horse—slipping in a bleak revisionist Western tragedy in the trappings of a happy well-worn genre? I'm inclined to believe it's the latter, but I confess I don't know enough to form a judgment. I'll have to do some more reading of the book's reception and interpretation to tell.
5. The book is full of provocative themes. One of the biggest is the randomness of life. That Call or Gus lived through the battles of the '40s, '50s, and '60s is sheer luck: the bounce of a rock, a horse's ill-considered step, a bullet's trajectory infinitesimally altered—they're dead, and not the living heroes they find themselves to be as aging men in the '70s. That July Johnson gets mixed up in the Hat Creek's affairs, that Jake Spoon whispers a dream of Montana to Call, is owed to nothing so meaningful as a stray bullet in Fort Smith, Arkansas. All is arbitrary, the luck of the draw. Whether some men are lucky or we merely call men lucky who live in the absence of bad luck, it's chance all the way down either way.
6. If life is random, it's also without intrinsic purpose. What meaning one's life has is mostly a matter of the meaning one assigns to it or discovers in it. Call's nature is to work, and so work he does. When the drive to work leaves him, however, he is listless, lethargic, confused. Why, again, drive cattle north, risking danger to life and limb? Why, for that matter, hang Mexican horsethieves all the while crossing the Rio Grande to steal horses from Mexican rancheros? Why pursue and clear out and kill Indians? Gus asks these questions aloud. Call dismisses them as so much nonsense. But when the question presents itself to him once all is said and done, he has no answer, for there is no answer.
7. Are Gus and Call "good men"? We readers are disposed to think so. Because we grow to love them, our affection tells us they are admirable and virtuous. Are they, though? Call is an unreflective taskmaster, and though he is a gifted leader of men, he acts for no clear higher purpose, and is quite literally possessed by violence when provoked. Gus, for his part, is larger than life, funny, clear-headed, philosophical, lettered, skilled, and wholly undetermined by others' opinions or desires. Then again, he spends most of his time doing nothing; and when not doing nothing, he is gambling, eating voraciously, busting balls, or paying a woman for sex. He openly questions whether the work of a Texas Ranger is just, and does it anyway. Would we call such a person a "good man" in real life?
8. To be sure, the novel does not "need" Gus and Call to be "good men." I imagine lovers of the novel think they are, though, and would defend the claim with feeling. Such a claim is found in one of the blurbs in my copy of the book. But I have to think McMurtry, even apart from the aim of rendering believable and interesting characters with detail and affection, intends this, too, as a kind of Trojan horse. We want to believe Gus and Call are good men because they appear to fulfill the role. But our love for them and our wanting to be in their company blinds us to a true estimation of their character. And McMurtry wants us to see, on the one hand, the emptiness of our approbation of our ancestors; and, on the other, the vacuity of any such estimation at all.
9. What McMurtry so accurately captures in this novel is the sheer givenness and there-ness of life in all its passivity and activity. The characters in Lonesome Dove rarely do things with foresight or reflection. They do them because they are the sort of things one does in their shoes. You rope the bull or drive the cattle or steal the horses or hang the thief or chase the bandits or pay the prostitute or cross the river or give or obey orders because that's just the thing to be done, the thing all of us do, here and now, in these circumstances (and not others), as the persons we are (and not others). Biases and prejudices here are not rendered in world-historical or structural terms. They're inherited, rarely thought of, and only slightly less rarely acted upon. One simply lives, typically a short while, and dies. What action occurs in between is mostly stumbled into.
10. McMurtry, though his two main female characters (Lorena and Clara) are exquisitely drawn, excels in depicting masculinity. The men of the Hat Creek outfit act exactly as men do in such conditions. The moodiness and boredom and in-fighting, the ball-busting and petty quarrels and venting of pent-up frustration, the paralyzing fear and loneliness that grips them all to one degree or another: it is as true to life as any narrative description of men in close community together as any I have ever read.
11. Perhaps my only real criticism of the book is the almost complete absence of religious matters. By this I don't mean that the novel should be theological in outlook (the way, for example, that Blood Meridian drips theological significance off every page). Nor do I mean that a character should have stood in for the Good Christian, or some such thing. What I mean is that mid-19th century Texas was a land saturated in settler-colonial European-cultural Christianity. If you were a white person in the continental United States (prior to their being United States), you belonged to a civilization that claimed the Bible and Jesus and God and Christian faith as a birthright. Even if, sometimes especially if, you were untutored and unpracticed in such faith, you talked as if you were. The vernacular was marinated in it.
And oddly, McMurtry almost never adverts to such vernacular. The boys of Hat Creek don't wonder around the campfire where they go when they die. There's no fierce defender of the name of Jesus Christ against casual sacrilege. There's no Christian burial (except for a briefly mentioned one right at the end). There's no begging Jesus for mercy with a gunshot wound in the gut. There's basically nothing of the sort. There's not even God-salted or Scripture-ornamented speech. And that seems to me a shocking historical oversight. Everything else in the novel rings true. But not this. McMurtry could well have offered his tragic vision of the old West, with no heroes or only heroes compromised by violence and vanity, a vision untainted by transcendent virtue, and yet one pockmarked by a thousand imperfect encounters with the texts and names and stories and concepts of the Christian religion. I have to think he left it out by intention, and that that intention was to give us an unfamiliar, desacralized West, godless and faithless. But the wiser course by far (as, again, the example of Cormac McCarthy attests) would be to leave the religious in, as nothing but empty ornamentation and self-aggrandizing consecration of the otherwise amoral or evil.
Had McMurtry gone that way, I might call Lonesome Dove a flawless novel. Even as it stands, I'm inclined to think it may well still be perfect.
1. The prose is perfect. Perfect. Not perfect the way, say, Michael Chabon's is. There may not be a word in all the nearly-1,000 pages that rises above an eighth grade reading level. The sentences, moreover, are usually on the short side. The prose isn't complex. But it's pitch perfect. McMurtry never fails to communicate exactly what he intends, whether it be an action, a feeling, a thought, or a memory. Or a conversation. Oh my, the dialogue. I felt what all readers have felt reading this novel: I didn't want it to end. Like watching a sitcom for a decade, I just wanted to spend time with my friends. But anyway, reading McMurtry's prose was a delight. The way he uses euphemism and "native" construction—the way an uneducated twentysomething cowboy would think or talk—both in dialogue and in description of action or emotion from a character's perspective: it's nothing short of masterful.
2. The characters! Gus, Call, Lorena, Dish, Pea Eye, Deets, Clara—Clara!—Lippy, Newt, Wanz, Blue Duck, July Johnson, Roscoe, Po Campo, Elmira, Peach, Big Zwey, Wilbarger, Jake Spoon—oh, Jake Spoon—Cholo, Soupy, Bolivar. Each name calls forth a whole world, a flesh-and-blood person, a voice and a story and an inner dialogue. Waiting to have July open part 2 and then Clara open part 3, the latter two-thirds into the story, and for each of them to step onto the page fully-formed and wholly equal to those we'd met long before: it's invigorating, is what it is. Exhilirating for the reader. Because at that point you just don't know who might show up before long.
3. The plot is elegant in its simplicity and beautiful in its execution. An 1880 cattle drive from the Rio Grande to Montana, from the southern border to the northern (somewhere between the Rivers Milk and Missouri), led by two famous Texas Rangers in their 50s, after all the battles have been won and the land "secured" for settlement. A journey from vista to vista that live on in the American mythos. A tale filled with outsize characters and shocking events, combined with the ordinary quirks and peccadilloes of human life anywhere: back-breaking labor, bitter weather, taming the elements and animal passions in tandem, ubiquitous prostitution, city life and wilderness within walking distance, penury and plenty even closer bedfellows, unclaimed bastards and long-lost loves, abrupt deaths and children orphaned, gallows humor and gambling and ghost stories and other ways to kill the time on the short way to the grave.4. That leads me to what most surprised me about the novel (spoilers hereon). This is a dark story lightly told. And I cannot decide whether that is a virtue or a vice (it's certainly a feature and not a bug). The tone floats upon the surface of the pages, flitting from a Gus monologue to a light-hearted memory to a gripping set piece without pausing for Existential Comment or Thematic Flag-Planting. And that, I think, is why the book (appears to me, at least) to be remembered for the joy and pleasure of the plot and the characters and the dialogue. That was certainly my experience of the first half or so. But make no mistake. This is not a comedy. It is a tragedy.
By story's end, random minor characters have died to no purpose; Jake Spoon, fallen into mindless self-justifying murder, is captured and hanged by his friends before killing himself; July's wife, who never loved him and despises him, runs off to find another man, "marries" a third and is killed by Sioux; July's stepson and best friend together with a runaway, abused little girl are brutally murdered by Blue Duck; Deets is killed by a confused and overwhelmed young Indian boy for no reason; Clara is living alone on hard plains land, with a dying husband and three dead sons in the ground; Lorena has her dreams of San Francisco dashed by being kidnapped and gang-raped by Blue Duck's crew before being rescued by Gus, only to find herself at Clara's, alone in her grief mourning Gus (perhaps losing her mind in the process); Gus himself dies randomly as a result of an accidental run-in with Blackfeet who probably would have meant him no harm if they'd met otherwise. In fact, like Jake Gus chooses to die in a fit of vanity, preferring loss of life to life without legs, thus leaving both Clara and Lorena bereft of his presence and his love. Even Wanz burns himself alive in the saloon that just wasn't the same without Lorena there.
That's only to mention the deaths. Call's bastard son by a prostitute (herself dead) lives in his shadow for two decades, only to learn from others that Call is his father; yet Call cannot bring himself to tell the boy or give him his name, and abandons him in Montana: unclaimed, unnamed, unloved, alone. Call keeps his promise to his dead friend, eventuating with him—alone—back in Lonesome Dove, without meaning or purpose or drive. Why did he take all those cattle and all those men to Montana, and tolerate all those deaths in the process, anyway? Because Jake Spoon made mention of wide green pastures? So what? Or what of Dish, love-sick for Lorena, and July, love-sick for any woman in his orbit (Ellie, Clara, ad infinitum), both too naive and foolish and earnest ever to have their love requited. Even poor Bolivar regrets leaving the outfit and joining his wife south of the border, a house empty of his beloved daughters, home only to a woman who despises him.
Not one person in the whole book proves happy by the end; not one gets what he's looking for; not one finds lasting love or satisfaction. Even Pea Eye, the least unhappy and lonesome character in the story, precisely because he asks little of life except not getting murdered in his sleep, is bewildered and set adrift by Gus's death and Call's actions toward Newt. Never one for words, he is silenced one last time.
Lonesome Dove, in short, is a desperately sad tale. It is bleak, violent, unsparing, even merciless in the fates it doles out to its characters. And yet, for probably 600 or 700 pages, that is not the way the book reads. It reads like a romp, full of color and life and simple joys and little silly detours that make you cackle with glee. It's a book to make you smile, until you don't—because you're crying, or in shock.
Is that just the way McMurtry writes? Or is it a stylistic Trojan horse—slipping in a bleak revisionist Western tragedy in the trappings of a happy well-worn genre? I'm inclined to believe it's the latter, but I confess I don't know enough to form a judgment. I'll have to do some more reading of the book's reception and interpretation to tell.
5. The book is full of provocative themes. One of the biggest is the randomness of life. That Call or Gus lived through the battles of the '40s, '50s, and '60s is sheer luck: the bounce of a rock, a horse's ill-considered step, a bullet's trajectory infinitesimally altered—they're dead, and not the living heroes they find themselves to be as aging men in the '70s. That July Johnson gets mixed up in the Hat Creek's affairs, that Jake Spoon whispers a dream of Montana to Call, is owed to nothing so meaningful as a stray bullet in Fort Smith, Arkansas. All is arbitrary, the luck of the draw. Whether some men are lucky or we merely call men lucky who live in the absence of bad luck, it's chance all the way down either way.
6. If life is random, it's also without intrinsic purpose. What meaning one's life has is mostly a matter of the meaning one assigns to it or discovers in it. Call's nature is to work, and so work he does. When the drive to work leaves him, however, he is listless, lethargic, confused. Why, again, drive cattle north, risking danger to life and limb? Why, for that matter, hang Mexican horsethieves all the while crossing the Rio Grande to steal horses from Mexican rancheros? Why pursue and clear out and kill Indians? Gus asks these questions aloud. Call dismisses them as so much nonsense. But when the question presents itself to him once all is said and done, he has no answer, for there is no answer.
7. Are Gus and Call "good men"? We readers are disposed to think so. Because we grow to love them, our affection tells us they are admirable and virtuous. Are they, though? Call is an unreflective taskmaster, and though he is a gifted leader of men, he acts for no clear higher purpose, and is quite literally possessed by violence when provoked. Gus, for his part, is larger than life, funny, clear-headed, philosophical, lettered, skilled, and wholly undetermined by others' opinions or desires. Then again, he spends most of his time doing nothing; and when not doing nothing, he is gambling, eating voraciously, busting balls, or paying a woman for sex. He openly questions whether the work of a Texas Ranger is just, and does it anyway. Would we call such a person a "good man" in real life?
8. To be sure, the novel does not "need" Gus and Call to be "good men." I imagine lovers of the novel think they are, though, and would defend the claim with feeling. Such a claim is found in one of the blurbs in my copy of the book. But I have to think McMurtry, even apart from the aim of rendering believable and interesting characters with detail and affection, intends this, too, as a kind of Trojan horse. We want to believe Gus and Call are good men because they appear to fulfill the role. But our love for them and our wanting to be in their company blinds us to a true estimation of their character. And McMurtry wants us to see, on the one hand, the emptiness of our approbation of our ancestors; and, on the other, the vacuity of any such estimation at all.
9. What McMurtry so accurately captures in this novel is the sheer givenness and there-ness of life in all its passivity and activity. The characters in Lonesome Dove rarely do things with foresight or reflection. They do them because they are the sort of things one does in their shoes. You rope the bull or drive the cattle or steal the horses or hang the thief or chase the bandits or pay the prostitute or cross the river or give or obey orders because that's just the thing to be done, the thing all of us do, here and now, in these circumstances (and not others), as the persons we are (and not others). Biases and prejudices here are not rendered in world-historical or structural terms. They're inherited, rarely thought of, and only slightly less rarely acted upon. One simply lives, typically a short while, and dies. What action occurs in between is mostly stumbled into.
10. McMurtry, though his two main female characters (Lorena and Clara) are exquisitely drawn, excels in depicting masculinity. The men of the Hat Creek outfit act exactly as men do in such conditions. The moodiness and boredom and in-fighting, the ball-busting and petty quarrels and venting of pent-up frustration, the paralyzing fear and loneliness that grips them all to one degree or another: it is as true to life as any narrative description of men in close community together as any I have ever read.
11. Perhaps my only real criticism of the book is the almost complete absence of religious matters. By this I don't mean that the novel should be theological in outlook (the way, for example, that Blood Meridian drips theological significance off every page). Nor do I mean that a character should have stood in for the Good Christian, or some such thing. What I mean is that mid-19th century Texas was a land saturated in settler-colonial European-cultural Christianity. If you were a white person in the continental United States (prior to their being United States), you belonged to a civilization that claimed the Bible and Jesus and God and Christian faith as a birthright. Even if, sometimes especially if, you were untutored and unpracticed in such faith, you talked as if you were. The vernacular was marinated in it.
And oddly, McMurtry almost never adverts to such vernacular. The boys of Hat Creek don't wonder around the campfire where they go when they die. There's no fierce defender of the name of Jesus Christ against casual sacrilege. There's no Christian burial (except for a briefly mentioned one right at the end). There's no begging Jesus for mercy with a gunshot wound in the gut. There's basically nothing of the sort. There's not even God-salted or Scripture-ornamented speech. And that seems to me a shocking historical oversight. Everything else in the novel rings true. But not this. McMurtry could well have offered his tragic vision of the old West, with no heroes or only heroes compromised by violence and vanity, a vision untainted by transcendent virtue, and yet one pockmarked by a thousand imperfect encounters with the texts and names and stories and concepts of the Christian religion. I have to think he left it out by intention, and that that intention was to give us an unfamiliar, desacralized West, godless and faithless. But the wiser course by far (as, again, the example of Cormac McCarthy attests) would be to leave the religious in, as nothing but empty ornamentation and self-aggrandizing consecration of the otherwise amoral or evil.
Had McMurtry gone that way, I might call Lonesome Dove a flawless novel. Even as it stands, I'm inclined to think it may well still be perfect.
A prediction for post-pandemic life
Very little, if anything, will change.
That's my prediction. Let me clarify what I don't mean, before I say what I do.
What I don't mean is that there won't be personal, economic, structural, and political consequences. There will be, in all kinds of ways we can and can't predict. Many people will have had Covid-19 symptoms and lived to tell the tale; many more will know someone, or know someone who knows someone, who died as a result of the virus. The U.S. and other Western nations may indeed pursue "conscious uncoupling" from the Communist regime in China; that spells uncertainty and international friction for decades to come. Supply lines, products, and consumer convenience may grow volatile and change substantially in only a handful of years. Perhaps most lasting of all, individuals and families forced into joblessness will have had to live (and may continue living) on a combination of unemployment benefits, stimulus checks, and private charity. Whole institutions, such as higher education, may be utterly transformed as a result of the global pandemic and economic shutdown. Many of my friends will be out of a job and devoid of prospects. I might be among them.
Those features are sufficient to describe a world objectively changed in the interval between "before" and "after." And perhaps this is what writers mean when they speak of how "nothing will ever be the same" or "there is no going back to normal" or "everything will be different on the other side of this."
But when I read pieces that assert variations on that theme, I discern something else. The meaning is both more specific and more general. Something like: Each of us will never be the same; the world as experienced by all of us will be utterly different. And though understandable, I think this is one of those moments that, because we cannot see to the end of it, much less beyond it, our imaginations fail when they attempt to reach forward to "life afterward."
It is true that what we are experiencing is unique. But that uniqueness won't last. Unless the death rate were to unexpectedly and rapidly spike, or the economic shutdown were to last half a decade, life will return to normal in two or three years. Again, that won't mean the conditions of our common life will be good. The financial aftershock may be devastating—but lack of jobs, awful wages, and a bad economy are, unfortunately, mundane features of ordinary life.
What I mean is that you and I won't be different. We will remember what it was like to shelter in place. But life will simply resume, mostly the way it was. The virus hasn't forced us into digging bunkers or sleeping on rooftops; neither the electric grid nor even the internet have gone down; we're not piling ten families into a single domicile, rationing scraps and burning books for warmth. We're living our lives at home—which may be bad or good, claustrophobic or monastic, abusive or supportive, lonely or bustling with multiple generations—but still home, the place to which we retire to eat or sleep on a normal day. And what we're doing when we're not working is cooking, streaming, teaching, cleaning, reading, building, going stir crazy, forming pacts with like-minded neighbors, whatever—we're not hiding in our bathrooms, or tearing down the walls for wood, or boarding up the windows out of fear.
I predict, and it's only a prediction, that in a few years this will have become a strange and somewhat surreal memory. If the economy recovers quickly, that will make it recede into the past even faster than it otherwise would. Either way, we'll be the same people we were before we quarantined ourselves. Our attention will be drawn to the next thing, however smaller or less interesting by comparison to our current moment. This will be this, and that will be that, and we'll move on. We ourselves, and the world we experience around us, will for the most part prove unchanged.
That's my prediction. Let me clarify what I don't mean, before I say what I do.
What I don't mean is that there won't be personal, economic, structural, and political consequences. There will be, in all kinds of ways we can and can't predict. Many people will have had Covid-19 symptoms and lived to tell the tale; many more will know someone, or know someone who knows someone, who died as a result of the virus. The U.S. and other Western nations may indeed pursue "conscious uncoupling" from the Communist regime in China; that spells uncertainty and international friction for decades to come. Supply lines, products, and consumer convenience may grow volatile and change substantially in only a handful of years. Perhaps most lasting of all, individuals and families forced into joblessness will have had to live (and may continue living) on a combination of unemployment benefits, stimulus checks, and private charity. Whole institutions, such as higher education, may be utterly transformed as a result of the global pandemic and economic shutdown. Many of my friends will be out of a job and devoid of prospects. I might be among them.
Those features are sufficient to describe a world objectively changed in the interval between "before" and "after." And perhaps this is what writers mean when they speak of how "nothing will ever be the same" or "there is no going back to normal" or "everything will be different on the other side of this."
But when I read pieces that assert variations on that theme, I discern something else. The meaning is both more specific and more general. Something like: Each of us will never be the same; the world as experienced by all of us will be utterly different. And though understandable, I think this is one of those moments that, because we cannot see to the end of it, much less beyond it, our imaginations fail when they attempt to reach forward to "life afterward."
It is true that what we are experiencing is unique. But that uniqueness won't last. Unless the death rate were to unexpectedly and rapidly spike, or the economic shutdown were to last half a decade, life will return to normal in two or three years. Again, that won't mean the conditions of our common life will be good. The financial aftershock may be devastating—but lack of jobs, awful wages, and a bad economy are, unfortunately, mundane features of ordinary life.
What I mean is that you and I won't be different. We will remember what it was like to shelter in place. But life will simply resume, mostly the way it was. The virus hasn't forced us into digging bunkers or sleeping on rooftops; neither the electric grid nor even the internet have gone down; we're not piling ten families into a single domicile, rationing scraps and burning books for warmth. We're living our lives at home—which may be bad or good, claustrophobic or monastic, abusive or supportive, lonely or bustling with multiple generations—but still home, the place to which we retire to eat or sleep on a normal day. And what we're doing when we're not working is cooking, streaming, teaching, cleaning, reading, building, going stir crazy, forming pacts with like-minded neighbors, whatever—we're not hiding in our bathrooms, or tearing down the walls for wood, or boarding up the windows out of fear.
I predict, and it's only a prediction, that in a few years this will have become a strange and somewhat surreal memory. If the economy recovers quickly, that will make it recede into the past even faster than it otherwise would. Either way, we'll be the same people we were before we quarantined ourselves. Our attention will be drawn to the next thing, however smaller or less interesting by comparison to our current moment. This will be this, and that will be that, and we'll move on. We ourselves, and the world we experience around us, will for the most part prove unchanged.
On writing and bad readers
There will always be bad and disingenuous readers. That's the first thing to know as a writer. They'll always be with us, and they'll always be there, ready to read what you've written—labored over for hours, days, weeks—in bad faith, or to misinterpret it due to laziness or antipathy or narcissism or some other intellectual vice.
For a while now a threefold example of this has stuck with me. It comes from one particular author's writings—a widely read academic whom we'll call Joe Johnson—and has served as a perpetual reminder of this unavoidable fact. The first stems from an essay he wrote; the other two from different reviews of different books by Johnson.
The essay was, immediately upon publication, willfully misread to mean what Johnson clearly did not mean, could not have meant, and clarified in reply that he did not mean. The misreadings seized on a few terms and a couple of minor framing devices he used in the essay in order to turn his argument inside out. It did not matter what he said to clarify; the misreaders were set in their ways.
One review was, hands down, the single most disingenuous, unserious, vicious, and uncharitable engagement with a text I have ever seen in print. Something about Johnson or the book in question clearly irked the reviewer to such an extent that rage, of an immature and pitiable sort, had to be vented in his direction. It was a sad sight to see.
The other review was calm in tone but, by its conclusion, decided that Johnson had failed in some significant way for the simple reason that (we surmise) he did not write the book the reviewer wished he had; or (to say the same thing differently) he did not end up in the "correct" ideological place by book's end. Oddly, though, even the items on the reviewer's wish list would not amount to sources of disagreement between Johnson and the reviewer; they simply never came up in the course of the book. Apparently the reviewer merely wanted Johnson to talk about them, and Johnson impolitely refused in advance.
I recall this threefold example of a single writer's plentiful experience with misreading for at least three reasons. First, if it can happen with a scholar of Johnson's stature—with a writer as generous, catholic, and lucid as he—then it will happen to anyone, including little old me. So expect it, and don't be surprised by it. Second, I confess that when I encountered each of these cases, I felt a small despair grow inside me. Why bother? That is, why bother with writing if this is the result? But then, writers I admire, such as Johnson, keep on keepin' on, in spite of these experiences, and that is exactly one of the reasons why I admire them. And since not all readers are the bad sort, writing need not be doomed to terminate in deliberate misinterpretation and misrepresentation; it might actually reach those open to its message; it might even instruct, edify, enrich, or bring pleasure to such persons. It's worth it, therefore, to try to be among those who make the attempt.
Third, though, I also remember the example of Johnson in order to remind myself: don't be one of them. At all costs, don't be a bad reader.
For a while now a threefold example of this has stuck with me. It comes from one particular author's writings—a widely read academic whom we'll call Joe Johnson—and has served as a perpetual reminder of this unavoidable fact. The first stems from an essay he wrote; the other two from different reviews of different books by Johnson.
The essay was, immediately upon publication, willfully misread to mean what Johnson clearly did not mean, could not have meant, and clarified in reply that he did not mean. The misreadings seized on a few terms and a couple of minor framing devices he used in the essay in order to turn his argument inside out. It did not matter what he said to clarify; the misreaders were set in their ways.
One review was, hands down, the single most disingenuous, unserious, vicious, and uncharitable engagement with a text I have ever seen in print. Something about Johnson or the book in question clearly irked the reviewer to such an extent that rage, of an immature and pitiable sort, had to be vented in his direction. It was a sad sight to see.
The other review was calm in tone but, by its conclusion, decided that Johnson had failed in some significant way for the simple reason that (we surmise) he did not write the book the reviewer wished he had; or (to say the same thing differently) he did not end up in the "correct" ideological place by book's end. Oddly, though, even the items on the reviewer's wish list would not amount to sources of disagreement between Johnson and the reviewer; they simply never came up in the course of the book. Apparently the reviewer merely wanted Johnson to talk about them, and Johnson impolitely refused in advance.
I recall this threefold example of a single writer's plentiful experience with misreading for at least three reasons. First, if it can happen with a scholar of Johnson's stature—with a writer as generous, catholic, and lucid as he—then it will happen to anyone, including little old me. So expect it, and don't be surprised by it. Second, I confess that when I encountered each of these cases, I felt a small despair grow inside me. Why bother? That is, why bother with writing if this is the result? But then, writers I admire, such as Johnson, keep on keepin' on, in spite of these experiences, and that is exactly one of the reasons why I admire them. And since not all readers are the bad sort, writing need not be doomed to terminate in deliberate misinterpretation and misrepresentation; it might actually reach those open to its message; it might even instruct, edify, enrich, or bring pleasure to such persons. It's worth it, therefore, to try to be among those who make the attempt.
Third, though, I also remember the example of Johnson in order to remind myself: don't be one of them. At all costs, don't be a bad reader.
New essay published: “Sacraments, Technology, and Streaming Worship in a Pandemic"
I've got a new piece published over at Mere Orthodoxy called "Sacraments, Technology, and Streaming Worship in a Pandemic." In it I use the work of Neil Postman and Robert Jenson to think about the meaning and "communicability" of sacramental liturgy via mass media and digital technology, then draw some conclusions for streaming worship online today, separated as we are from public gatherings of Christ's body. I also come down pretty hard against celebrating the Lord's Supper during this unusual time of "social distancing." I hope it's useful for others, even and especially those who disagree. Blessings, and stay safe out there y'all.
A clarification on streaming worship
Earlier today I wrote a post reflecting on the phenomenon of churches streaming worship to their members quarantined at home and the difference that catholic and evangelical traditions of worship make for what that means. My brother, who is a pastor, called me up and shared that he thought either that the post was in poor taste or that it was hastily and unclearly written, and might communicate the opposite of what I was intending. So I took it down, and I'll be thinking here in the next few days about whether there's a way to revise or rewrite what I had in mind. But let me say a few things about what I was attempting to articulate, especially for those who read the original post while it was up.
1. I wanted to think theologically about what is happening when Christians live-stream worship, whether that means a sermon, a praise band, mass, or the divine liturgy.
2. I wanted to observe how catholic traditions represent one rationale for streaming worship: the need for a priest and the consecration of the elements—which creates an irony, since those streaming at home cannot partake of the holy sacrament.
3. Whereas evangelical or non-sacramental traditions represent another rationale, lacking the need for an ordained person to preside at worship or consecrate the bread and wine. This suggests a different irony, namely, that such traditions permit households to conduct worship "all on their own," indeed they have long-standing histories of doing so. Which raises the question of why such churches might decide to live-stream worship, and why their members might tune in.
4. Constructively, then, I wanted to encourage these latter traditions to consider looking to their histories of "domestic devotion" and thinking about how to renew them in the minds and habits of their church members. Let a hundred thousand household churches bloom!
5. Critically, though, I wanted to express the concern that when "worship" means "a praise band leading believers in singing," and when live-streaming is mostly centered on that, then low-church traditions and their members have appeared to lose the muscle memory necessary to "do church" together in local, even household, contexts. Which can create, or might reflect, a kind of codependency that is worth recognizing for what it is, which then becomes the condition of the possibility for unlearning such codependency in the coming weeks or months of quarantine.
I hope that helps. Christians, churches, and ministers of every kind are doing all that they can in the face of an unprecedented crisis. Nothing but grace and gratitude to every one of them, including my own.
1. I wanted to think theologically about what is happening when Christians live-stream worship, whether that means a sermon, a praise band, mass, or the divine liturgy.
2. I wanted to observe how catholic traditions represent one rationale for streaming worship: the need for a priest and the consecration of the elements—which creates an irony, since those streaming at home cannot partake of the holy sacrament.
3. Whereas evangelical or non-sacramental traditions represent another rationale, lacking the need for an ordained person to preside at worship or consecrate the bread and wine. This suggests a different irony, namely, that such traditions permit households to conduct worship "all on their own," indeed they have long-standing histories of doing so. Which raises the question of why such churches might decide to live-stream worship, and why their members might tune in.
4. Constructively, then, I wanted to encourage these latter traditions to consider looking to their histories of "domestic devotion" and thinking about how to renew them in the minds and habits of their church members. Let a hundred thousand household churches bloom!
5. Critically, though, I wanted to express the concern that when "worship" means "a praise band leading believers in singing," and when live-streaming is mostly centered on that, then low-church traditions and their members have appeared to lose the muscle memory necessary to "do church" together in local, even household, contexts. Which can create, or might reflect, a kind of codependency that is worth recognizing for what it is, which then becomes the condition of the possibility for unlearning such codependency in the coming weeks or months of quarantine.
I hope that helps. Christians, churches, and ministers of every kind are doing all that they can in the face of an unprecedented crisis. Nothing but grace and gratitude to every one of them, including my own.
A word on Better Call Saul
A brief comment on Better Call Saul, prompted by Alan Jacobs' post this morning:
I think the show rightly understands that Kim is, or has become, the covert protagonist of the show, and by the end, we (with the writers) will similarly come to understand that the story the show has been telling has always been about her fall. No escape, no extraction, no pull-back before the cliff: she, like Jimmy, like Mike, like Nacho, like Walter, like Jesse, like Skyler, lacks the will ultimately and decisively to will the good. They're all fallen; and in a way, they were all fallen even before the time came to choose.
In this way the so-called expanded Breaking Bad universe has made itself (unwittingly?) into a dramatic parable of original sin. Not that there is no good; not that characters do not want to do good. But they're all trapped in quicksand, and the more they struggle, the deeper they sink.
The hatred of theology
In the latest issue of The Point, Jon Baskin writes on behalf of the magazine's editors about what he calls "the hatred of literature." By this team he means the attitude—apparently dominant in English departments a couple decades ago and imbibed by graduate students across the land—that the study of literature exists not to appreciate its multifarious goodnesses and beauties, rooted in love for the object of study, but instead to uncover, unmask, and indict the social, moral, and political problems belonging to its conditions of production. The novel or poem is therefore not an object at all, that is to say, an end, but a means to a larger, political end; criticism thus becomes an instrument of political advocacy. The work of literary art plays no role in calling me or my convictions into question. Rather, the critic measures the work by the correctness of its views or its capacity to activate social change (for the better, that is, more or less in line with my priors), and judges its quality accordingly.
Baskin labels this approach the "hatred" of literature for two reasons. On the one hand, it does not treat literature as an end (however proximate) in itself, but only as a sort of weapon to advance or stymie the cause—whatever that may be. On the other hand, and more important, it quite literally does not arise from what usually stands as the origin story for so many students and teachers of literature: love. Love for the thing itself, for its own sake, just because. A love that does not demand agreement or relevance or revolutionary potential or the "right" politics, but only that ephemeral experience that is the root of all art: an encounter with that which outstrips the mundane, calling to the self from beyond the self. That old word "beauty" is one of the ways we try to capture such encounters.
Reading Baskin as an academically trained theologian, it made me wonder: Is there a similar phenomenon in academic theology? Does one find—or, in recent decades, could one find—in the academy "the hatred of theology"?
I think the answer is yes, in at least six ways.
First, there is a style of doing theology formally parallel to the "New Historicism." Namely, theology reduced to its sociopolitical function. What does theologoumenon X or Y accomplish with respect to certain desired political ends? There's plenty of that around, past and present.
Second, there is what some, at least in the U.K. a few decades ago, used to call "doctrinal criticism." This comprised the study of traditional doctrines from church history and the subjection of them to "critique" under the conditions and presuppositions of modernity. In other words: What is "modern man" permitted to believe, and what of the Christian dogmatic heritage must be revised, and in what ways, in order to fall in line with the Enlightenment and its heirs?
Third, in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, there was a kind of obsessive-compulsive anxiety about methodology that, as the old saw goes, never got around to actually talking about God, but only talked about talking about God. This, too, served as an avoidance strategy for academic theology.
Fourth, there is a mode of theology similar to the first example above that is nonetheless subtly different. It isn't so much about theology being merely a means to a foreordained end. But its utility as a source of or exercise in knowledge is indexed to its practical relevance. So that, e.g., the doctrine of the Trinity must have direct and obvious consequences for human social life—or else, why are we talking about it in the first place?
Fifth, a similarly practice-oriented theology is less interested in the potentially transformative implications of otherwise esoteric doctrines like the Trinity for human life. Instead, it works the other way: such doctrines are ruled out of court in advance. Only certain doctrines and topics are intrinsically practical; it is those that theology ought to attend to. Often this approach is coordinated to, or a function of, a laser-like focus on the church's life and the conduct of its ordinary members. Of what benefit is this doctrine to the average Christian? is the pressing question that filters the worthy from the unworthy loci.
Sixth and last, much theology simply proceeds with little to no reference to God as such. It is identifiable as a kind of Christian discourse (it speaks, as it were, Christianese), but the subject matter, by any reasonable account, is not the God of Christian confession. Something else is thereby sought to "make" the discourse "theological," whether or not that effort succeeds.
I should say that this is a quick and dirty list, with considerable overlap between the different items and almost certainly other examples left off. And I should clarify the quirkiness of theology compared to literature, since the analogy is imperfect at key points.
First, the subject matter of literature is literary artifacts written by human beings. Whereas the subject matter for Christian theology God: alive, on the one hand, yet inaccessible to empirical investigation, on the other. Knowledge of God is mediated by that which is not God. Furthermore, the "love" of which Baskin writes is disanalogous in the extreme compared to the "love" that grounds and sustains theology. For this latter love is personal love, directed (ideally) in complete and utter devotion to that than which nothing greater can be conceived: the author and perfecter of our very souls. Nothing similar can be said of literature (or when it is, it is sad to see).
But this only highlights the oddity, even the tragedy, of loveless theology. To speak and write about God as if he is not the all-consuming fire of one's life—as if, indeed, his existence and attributes are a matter of polite speculation—is to repudiate theology itself. Why bother? One can at least understand the literary critic who "hates" literature in Baskin's sense. In the case of the theologian who "hates" theology, and by implication theology's Sache, it is wholly unintelligible.
Second, theology has a natural home, and it is not the university or even the seminary. It is the church. So there is a community that both houses and is the beneficiary of theology's labor. In that sense theologians and believers are right to expect theology to service the church, which does at some level mean a practical effect. (That is why there is a tradition in the church that understands theology to be a practical science and not a theoretical one; compare, for example, the Franciscans to the Thomists.)
Third, theology concerns not just any God but the God revealed in Jesus Christ, who calls all people, including theologians, to follow him. This entails, in summary form, loving God with one's whole self and loving one's neighbor as oneself. The upshot: theology touches on all of life, for it considers all things in relation to God; therefore theology would be incomplete without speaking to moral, social, and political matters. Even by implication, to speak of God is inevitably to speak of issues of great human import, since that same God, who created humanity, became human in Christ and lived an exemplary life to which all are called to conform. To do theology abstracting from these facts would be a failure of serious magnitude.
The trick, then, is to balance the theoretical and practical tasks of theology without denying one in favor of the other or rendering either synonymous to the other. Above all, though, theology must never be embarrassed to be itself. And to be itself, theology must speak of God, boldly and with unbreakable faith. So to speak of God, however, means one must love God, which is the beginning and end of theology. The theologian, it turns out, is one who loves God and thus, in a manner of speaking, loves theology too.
Baskin labels this approach the "hatred" of literature for two reasons. On the one hand, it does not treat literature as an end (however proximate) in itself, but only as a sort of weapon to advance or stymie the cause—whatever that may be. On the other hand, and more important, it quite literally does not arise from what usually stands as the origin story for so many students and teachers of literature: love. Love for the thing itself, for its own sake, just because. A love that does not demand agreement or relevance or revolutionary potential or the "right" politics, but only that ephemeral experience that is the root of all art: an encounter with that which outstrips the mundane, calling to the self from beyond the self. That old word "beauty" is one of the ways we try to capture such encounters.
Reading Baskin as an academically trained theologian, it made me wonder: Is there a similar phenomenon in academic theology? Does one find—or, in recent decades, could one find—in the academy "the hatred of theology"?
I think the answer is yes, in at least six ways.
First, there is a style of doing theology formally parallel to the "New Historicism." Namely, theology reduced to its sociopolitical function. What does theologoumenon X or Y accomplish with respect to certain desired political ends? There's plenty of that around, past and present.
Second, there is what some, at least in the U.K. a few decades ago, used to call "doctrinal criticism." This comprised the study of traditional doctrines from church history and the subjection of them to "critique" under the conditions and presuppositions of modernity. In other words: What is "modern man" permitted to believe, and what of the Christian dogmatic heritage must be revised, and in what ways, in order to fall in line with the Enlightenment and its heirs?
Third, in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, there was a kind of obsessive-compulsive anxiety about methodology that, as the old saw goes, never got around to actually talking about God, but only talked about talking about God. This, too, served as an avoidance strategy for academic theology.
Fourth, there is a mode of theology similar to the first example above that is nonetheless subtly different. It isn't so much about theology being merely a means to a foreordained end. But its utility as a source of or exercise in knowledge is indexed to its practical relevance. So that, e.g., the doctrine of the Trinity must have direct and obvious consequences for human social life—or else, why are we talking about it in the first place?
Fifth, a similarly practice-oriented theology is less interested in the potentially transformative implications of otherwise esoteric doctrines like the Trinity for human life. Instead, it works the other way: such doctrines are ruled out of court in advance. Only certain doctrines and topics are intrinsically practical; it is those that theology ought to attend to. Often this approach is coordinated to, or a function of, a laser-like focus on the church's life and the conduct of its ordinary members. Of what benefit is this doctrine to the average Christian? is the pressing question that filters the worthy from the unworthy loci.
Sixth and last, much theology simply proceeds with little to no reference to God as such. It is identifiable as a kind of Christian discourse (it speaks, as it were, Christianese), but the subject matter, by any reasonable account, is not the God of Christian confession. Something else is thereby sought to "make" the discourse "theological," whether or not that effort succeeds.
I should say that this is a quick and dirty list, with considerable overlap between the different items and almost certainly other examples left off. And I should clarify the quirkiness of theology compared to literature, since the analogy is imperfect at key points.
First, the subject matter of literature is literary artifacts written by human beings. Whereas the subject matter for Christian theology God: alive, on the one hand, yet inaccessible to empirical investigation, on the other. Knowledge of God is mediated by that which is not God. Furthermore, the "love" of which Baskin writes is disanalogous in the extreme compared to the "love" that grounds and sustains theology. For this latter love is personal love, directed (ideally) in complete and utter devotion to that than which nothing greater can be conceived: the author and perfecter of our very souls. Nothing similar can be said of literature (or when it is, it is sad to see).
But this only highlights the oddity, even the tragedy, of loveless theology. To speak and write about God as if he is not the all-consuming fire of one's life—as if, indeed, his existence and attributes are a matter of polite speculation—is to repudiate theology itself. Why bother? One can at least understand the literary critic who "hates" literature in Baskin's sense. In the case of the theologian who "hates" theology, and by implication theology's Sache, it is wholly unintelligible.
Second, theology has a natural home, and it is not the university or even the seminary. It is the church. So there is a community that both houses and is the beneficiary of theology's labor. In that sense theologians and believers are right to expect theology to service the church, which does at some level mean a practical effect. (That is why there is a tradition in the church that understands theology to be a practical science and not a theoretical one; compare, for example, the Franciscans to the Thomists.)
Third, theology concerns not just any God but the God revealed in Jesus Christ, who calls all people, including theologians, to follow him. This entails, in summary form, loving God with one's whole self and loving one's neighbor as oneself. The upshot: theology touches on all of life, for it considers all things in relation to God; therefore theology would be incomplete without speaking to moral, social, and political matters. Even by implication, to speak of God is inevitably to speak of issues of great human import, since that same God, who created humanity, became human in Christ and lived an exemplary life to which all are called to conform. To do theology abstracting from these facts would be a failure of serious magnitude.
The trick, then, is to balance the theoretical and practical tasks of theology without denying one in favor of the other or rendering either synonymous to the other. Above all, though, theology must never be embarrassed to be itself. And to be itself, theology must speak of God, boldly and with unbreakable faith. So to speak of God, however, means one must love God, which is the beginning and end of theology. The theologian, it turns out, is one who loves God and thus, in a manner of speaking, loves theology too.
"Unique": absolute or relative?
Apropos of nothing, it's always bugged me that, grammatically speaking, the modifier "unique" is not supposed to be modified adverbially (as in "relatively" or "somewhat" or "nearly" unique). Instead, either "unique" is absolute or, by definition, it is simply not unique. I recall reading something by David Foster Wallace about this years ago.
Isn't it the case, though, that nothing is absolutely unique? Rather, anything is unique relative to some qualifier, property, activity, or question. Otherwise, it would follow that everything is unique—because nothing is itself but itself—or nothing is, with the exception of God, who alone (existing a se and in se and thus non est in genere) is actually unique in an absolute sense.
I understand the desire to want to mitigate popular usage of "unique" as a less powerful adjective than it ought to be; used colloquially, and always modified by synonyms of "partially," it comes to mean "pretty different," or "a stand-out among other, similar things."
But the notion of its being absolute, semantically or conceptually, makes no sense to me. I'm no linguist, however, and in any case DFW is not to be gainsaid. Happy to be corrected on this point by the more grammatically enlightened.
Isn't it the case, though, that nothing is absolutely unique? Rather, anything is unique relative to some qualifier, property, activity, or question. Otherwise, it would follow that everything is unique—because nothing is itself but itself—or nothing is, with the exception of God, who alone (existing a se and in se and thus non est in genere) is actually unique in an absolute sense.
I understand the desire to want to mitigate popular usage of "unique" as a less powerful adjective than it ought to be; used colloquially, and always modified by synonyms of "partially," it comes to mean "pretty different," or "a stand-out among other, similar things."
But the notion of its being absolute, semantically or conceptually, makes no sense to me. I'm no linguist, however, and in any case DFW is not to be gainsaid. Happy to be corrected on this point by the more grammatically enlightened.
An amendment to the amendment
If you couldn't tell, I've spent a good part of 2019 trying to figure out what to do with Twitter. I limited my time on it, I nixed tweeting, I cut out all but Saturdays, I basically exited for two months. Then a few weeks ago, after seeing friends at AAR in San Diego whom I had "met" via Twitter, I decided to amend my tech-wise policy and dip my toe back into the service. And once the semester I ended, I allowed myself to get back on a bit more while home for the Christmas break.
Following all that experimentation, I think I'm back to where I was last May. That is, at the macro level, the world would unquestionably be better off without Twitter in it, because Twitter as a system or structure is broken and unfixable. But at the micro level, the truth is that my experience on that otherwise diabolical website is almost uniformly positive. Aside from the "itch" that results from any social media participation—an itch that is not conducive to the life of the mind or of the soul—my time on Twitter is basically beneficial. I meet new friends, interact with old ones, and generally have fun talking theology, pop culture, and other such things. I avoid toxic profiles and bankrupt topics, and am not prone to tweet things that could get me into trouble.
So I think I'm going to return in full, with the usual prior disciplines intact (no app on the phone, for example) and one remaining ascetic caveat. I'm not going to sign on to Twitter, either to tweet or to read others, during work hours on weekdays. The best thing about my self-imposed exile was the way in which it freed up my mental energy and attention while reading or writing in my office, as opposed to dwelling on some ongoing thread or idea for a tweet.
So that's the amendment to the amendment. I'll check back in a month or two and share how things are going.
Oh, and happy new year!
Following all that experimentation, I think I'm back to where I was last May. That is, at the macro level, the world would unquestionably be better off without Twitter in it, because Twitter as a system or structure is broken and unfixable. But at the micro level, the truth is that my experience on that otherwise diabolical website is almost uniformly positive. Aside from the "itch" that results from any social media participation—an itch that is not conducive to the life of the mind or of the soul—my time on Twitter is basically beneficial. I meet new friends, interact with old ones, and generally have fun talking theology, pop culture, and other such things. I avoid toxic profiles and bankrupt topics, and am not prone to tweet things that could get me into trouble.
So I think I'm going to return in full, with the usual prior disciplines intact (no app on the phone, for example) and one remaining ascetic caveat. I'm not going to sign on to Twitter, either to tweet or to read others, during work hours on weekdays. The best thing about my self-imposed exile was the way in which it freed up my mental energy and attention while reading or writing in my office, as opposed to dwelling on some ongoing thread or idea for a tweet.
So that's the amendment to the amendment. I'll check back in a month or two and share how things are going.
Oh, and happy new year!
On Episode IX
Well, it happened. Abrams didn't even rise to his own best level. He capped off a 42-year cinematic saga with a stinker so bad that it sullies not only the new trilogy he helped to launch but his own reputation as a filmmaker.
I thought I'd avoid writing about the film, but instead of spending time on Twitter or Slack, let me just share my thoughts here.
What makes The Rise of Skywalker so bad? Well, there are multiple levels of badness involved.
[SPOILERS HEREON Y'ALL.]
First is the filmmaking itself. This was the most shocking thing about IX. I knew Abrams would go for nostalgia and servicing fandom. I figured he'd undermine VIII. I didn't know he would make such a straightforwardly bad movie, one alternately boring (the guy next to me on opening night fell asleep) and poorly told (my wife can't be the only one who found it difficult to follow).
The opening 30 minutes in particular move so fast, across so many worlds and plot points and characters old and new, with such flat-footed awkwardness, that it feels as if Abrams stepped in as director to replace another director who had already filmed all this. But that's not what happened. It's all him. Working for Disney, that trillion-dollar behemoth with all the money and time in the world to let Abrams make the best movie he possibly he could. And the result is shoddy beyond belief.
There are moments of elegance or grandeur. Rey's duel with Ren in his TIE fighter. The unexpected, graceful healing of the serpent beneath the sands. (Nice nod to The Mandalorian, that.) The ocean duel. The Sith coliseum of dead souls, the undead Emperor upheld by a black claw. Finn and Poe shooting up a Star Destroyer while running towards a low-angled tracking camera. The lightsaber "swap" from Rey to Ren (the one good and successful extension of a Rian Johnson idea). The shocking accidental death of Chewbacca at Rey's hands—
Whoops! I forgot, nobody dies in Star Wars.
And there's the rub. The problem is the script. It feels like it was written by committee in a succession of a dozen drafts. The result, at least until the final act, comes across like a series of videogame player quests. The doohickeys sought don't matter in themselves. They're just the next required token to level up and receive the next assignment.
The other problem with the script is its bottomless well of bad ideas. Hux is a spy! (Dead Hux. Dad Hux!) Leia retconned into a Jedi! Leia as Rey's true Jedi Master! A fleet of thousands of Star Destroyers, each as powerful as a Death Star—yet unable to move without being directed by a single frail antenna! (Dracula rules, as ever.)
Worst of all, Palpatine as Rey's grandfather and inexplicably alive after being thrown to his death by Vader in VI and the secret Blofeld-like master-puppeteer behind Snoke and the First Order. (Abrams: The first order? THE FINAL ORDER!) The opening words of the crawl read, "The dead speak!" A nice B-movie callback to the saga's origins. But also a foolish, self-parodying decision by a writer-director who quite literally has done nothing but make sequels and remakes for his entire career. The man does not know anything except what he watched as an adolescent. Sometimes he remixes it well. Here, he does not.
What Abrams needs is whatever happened to Lindelof while making The Leftovers. A kind of creative baptism, liberating him from his felt need to please fans by giving them what they think they want and instead steering into, rather than away from, the original and often deeply weird creative ideas that result.
What Abrams needs is an overseer—what is often known as an editor or producer—who watches his back and tells him when he's gone astray. It turns out Kathleen Kennedy is not that person. After half a decade care-taking the new, post-Lucas Disney period of Star Wars, she has given us a track record by which to judge her. It's not pretty.
For example: Instead of the now-canonical opening lines of the crawl, the obvious opening words should have been, "General Leia Organa has died." Next: "The galaxy gathers to mourn its departed royal leader. Following the Battle of Crait and the mysterious passing of the beloved princess, people flock to join the Resistance in a final push to defeat the evil First Order."
Is that so hard? Abrams thought to honor Carrie Fisher by using preexisting footage of her as Leia paired with digital work to map her face onto other actors in key moments. It doesn't work. It's clunky and forced and, wittingly or not, ends up putting more rather than less weight on her presence in the film.
What else? Poe continues to be little more than Captain Earnest. Finn almost reveals his heart to Rey—the film teases us with it—and then it's left dangling. (Was a scene of closure left on the cutting room floor? Is it meant to pop back up in the next trilogy, when Old Finn and Old Rey lose their only child to the Supremely Final Order's Supremely Supreme Leader, a clone of a clone of Palpatine's great-grandfather's uncle?) At least in part it's left dangling because Abrams decides to make Rey and Ren's final moment a kiss. I'm sure some other version of this film could have sold that, but Abrams certainly does not.
Now, Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley have long been the best things about this third trilogy. And they do excellent work again in their roles. Were it not for them, the movie would be borderline unwatchable. But after Rian Johnson did not so much in The Last Jedi to move their characters along, Abrams freezes them in place until, with a snap of the fingers, their character arcs lurch into their foreordained change/resolution—and off to the climax we go.
Note well: Abrams isn't only copying Lucas (again and again), he's copying himself. The big moment for Ren to turn from evil to good is prompted by nothing so much as an imaginary memory of the last conversation he shared with his father, Han Solo. So Abrams in effect recreates his own scene from VII on the bridge when Ren kills Han—only this time, for no apparent reason, he throws away his lightsaber, having argued himself into it.
Whereas Rey, gone angry and Sith-y because bloodline, turns back to good after a handy chat with Luke in Force Ghost form. And then we're off to the races.
Even writing it out is painful. It's just so, so bad. Not to mention Lando, featuring Billy Dee Williams playing Lando as Billy Dee Williams playing Lando. Or blink-and-you-miss-them new characters like Zorii or Jannah—full of potential, but too little too late. Oh, and Rose, who for no reason at all is relegated to Leia's babysitter. She could and should have been the Lando of this trilogy: introduced mid-chapter, then a fellow front-liner in the finale. Why not include her with the trio of Rey, Finn, and Poe on their (three dozen) mission quests? Just one more way to stick it to Rian Johnson, apparently.
And that's going to be the legacy of this film. Abrams' fundamental failure to understand what The Last Jedi accomplished, and what it made possible. Either Kathleen Kennedy agrees with Abrams in his estimation of that film, or she capitulated to fandom's purported desires (and thus lacks the insight or leadership to steer the ship). Either way, it's quite a thing to behold a billion-dollar franchise lack any semblance of vision across three films made in only a few years' time.
In sum, Episode IX had the opportunity to be something special. Even granting the hand Johnson was dealt (not least the foolish decision to destroy the New Republic, thus reducing the trilogy to a rehash of the original, at least at the formal level), he set up the finale to tell a new story: no Supreme Leader, no Emperor, no Death Star, no consolidated Rebels ready for a Final Mission Once And For All. In Johnson's hands—or Brad Bird's, or Christopher Nolan's, or Tony Gilroy's, or Sam Mendes's, or James Mangold's, or Kathryn Bigelow's, or whomever—it could have been great. It could have been different, new, bold, and unexpected. It could have taken us by surprise, not by resurrecting the ancient dead of the Original Trilogy, but by telling a new story in a new way about these new characters we'd come to care for.
But in Abrams' hands, no one's ever really gone, and there's only ever one story to tell, and re-tell, over and over until the end of time. A pity.
Random Further Comments (Dec 20)
–Is IX worse than the prequels? Not II, which is the worst movie ever made. But it might be worse than I and III. At the very least, it's a discussion. Moments here surpass moments there; but the filmmaking is less shoddy there than it is here. It's all a matter of taste, really. What sort of bad do you prefer your bad movie to be?
–I have long said that J.J. Abrams is the best caster in film. That's his destiny: a producer of blockbuster films who has veto power on all casting decisions. He may also be allowed to touch up dialogue. Otherwise he is not allowed anywhere near a script. He is not allowed to produce or direct films based on preexisting intellectual property. And he is only allowed to direct movies written by someone other than himself.
–After a promising start, Finn's character never got his due across the trilogy. A missed opportunity, in two respects: to explore the psychology of a turncoat stormtrooper, and to consider the moral ambiguity of fighting and killing an opposing military force largely made up of child soldiers (i.e., children kidnapped and brainwashed into service).
–Rey's self-made yellow lightsaber at the end was a nice touch. But as a friend pointed out, it should have been modeled on her long staff: either lengthier in form or double-bladed like Darth Maul's. UPDATE: Turns out I didn't look closely enough. The new lightsaber is made from her long staff, only reduced to a normal size blade handle, rather than fitted into a double-bladed one. Should have spotted it, and that's a solid choice from Abrams et al.
Further Comments Post-Second Viewing (Dec 21)
–I took my oldest to see the movie today, and I have to say, upon second viewing, it was a less frustrating experience. Note well: Not one of the movie's flaws turned out to be something other than a flaw. Everything above stands. But during my first viewing, I thought I would hate to return to the film, even that I might find it unwatchable. It's plenty watchable. And knowing all the terrible script decisions in advance means not audibly groaning at the revelation of each one. That's not nothing, I suppose.
–The second viewing also allowed me to see more of the artistry in the direction, which during the first viewing I found hard to distinguish from the problems in the script (not least since the latter affects the former in numerous ways, especially length of scenes and speed of cutting from one to another). Abrams really is a skilled director of action, emotion, and dialogue. That's what makes the failure of the film painful rather than ho-hum.
–The film was doomed before a single shot was filmed. And it's not micro-elements, it's the macro-frame, the narrative context created from the outset. The three principal mistakes are: Palpatine's return; Rey's lineage; and Leia's central role. All the other flaws (with the possible exception of demoting Rose to a glorified cameo) pale in comparison to those, and could have been incorporated into a quality film. No movie's perfect, after all. This one didn't have to be. It's the deep infrastructure of the story, not particular scenes, that ensure its downfall.
–I was more impressed by John Boyega's performance this time around (and Oscar Isaac's to an extent). Watch him when he's not talking, or just before and after he has dialogue. The reaction shots are priceless. He's never not in character. It only makes the stalling-out of his character arc that much more galling.
–The number of loose threads combined with the amount of yada-yada-ing of plot was glaring on the second viewing. Abrams literally has a character say, "Dark arts. Cloning. Sith jabberwocky..." or some such thing as a comprehensive response to Palpatine being alive. Did they not finish the script? Is there a scene lying on the cutting room floor that resolves Finn's unspoken declaration of love for Rey? Will we ever know?
–Abrams really has issues with killing characters off (also for blowing up entire planets: seven across three films, with two more nearly goners); you can tell by his affinity for fake-killing them and letting them live. M:I:3 opens with the apparent murder of Ethan Hunt's wife—nope. Star Trek Into Darkness ends with Kirk's fake death, brought back to life a few minutes later via Khan 2.0's blood (and also tribbles? It's all so hard to recall the finer points of his scripts). Poe fake-dies in VII, with no real explanation. And in this one both Chewie and Rey "die," only to be not-dead (having never died, in the one case, or been brought back to life, in the other) mere seconds later.
–Must Rey and Ren have kissed at the end? Really? Still not buying it, y'all. (Though that scene at the climax with his face filling the frame, staring "at" Rey, communicating silently, ready to receive the lightsaber: that's a killer. Again, there are solid moments, scenes, and ideas; but in the end it's not just parts that don't add up: the film, finally, is less than the sum of its parts.)
–Having said all that, in the same way that I can enjoy Episodes I or III with my kids, who love Darth Maul and pod-racing and clones and Mace Windu and CGI Yoda and the rest, I was able fully to enjoy IX with my son (his first Star Wars movie in the theater!), who gasped at Rey's family name and laughed at the droid humor and was delighted Ren turned good and found the Emperor truly frightening. (He even leaned over the moment after Rey and Ren kiss, and said, "That's the first time he's ever smiled!") So I'm glad there's that. I wrote above that IX might be worse than I or III. I realize now that's mostly not true. The Phantom Menace is more of an original story, and has genuinely interesting ideas—however poorly executed—and in that respect Lucas has the better of Abrams: the former creates, the latter remixes. But in most other ways IX is superior, also to III. It helps to have sterling actors in gripping roles directed skillfully in gorgeous locales amid haunting atmosphere. If only there were a story to fill it out.
Further Reflections One Week Out (Dec 26)
–Most of my reading, conversations, and encounters in the past week have been with folks who were similarly disappointed with IX, though not always for similar reasons. Even those who have enjoyed it have admitted the shortcomings, vices, or script problems. Less than half a dozen have been unqualified lovers of the film (though I've only found such persons online, not in person—and at least a few appear to have been contrarians who went in knowing the buzz was bad).
But three defenses of the film keep popping up, and they're worth addressing. First: that Palpatine's return was fitting. Second: that superior alternative plots are not forthcoming. Third: that IX is a proper conclusion to the Skywalker–Palpatine trilogy of trilogies as a whole.
Let me take these up together, since they're related to one another, before moving on to some other reflections.
To the second point first: I do think there are superior alternative plots, though the burden of proof need not fall on lowly critics like myself to supply them. Stories are contingent; a thousand things can happen. Fittingness is an art: one says of the fitting conclusion, "Yes, I see now, it could have ended no other way." Abrams wants us to believe that. He's wrong.
But, in any case, sometime in the next week my final(!) update to this ever-expanding post will be an alternative opening crawl and a basic plot line for the film, Palpatine- and lineage-free. (Spoiler: It opens with a royal funeral, and it involves sabotage efforts from without and from within the First Order, including spies.)
But back to the first point: What the defenders miss about the inconveniens of Palpatine's return is not his return full-stop. It is his return out of nowhere, with not a hint or foreshadowing in VII or VIII. It is unfitting because it is a villain deux ex machina—a diabolus ex machina?—wherein the Big Bad, for lack of a better option, is parachuted in to give the story false gravitas it has not otherwise earned and was not naturally heading toward. The truth is that Rian Johnson killed J. J. Abrams' New Big Bad, himself little more than Palpatine Redux, so Abrams did the next best thing: bring back the original. Again, we know this extra-textually, because Abrams made this particular decision upon returning to Star Wars to take over from Colin Treverrow, and neither Treverrow nor Johnson had any inkling of Palpatine's impending resurrection.
This brings us to the third point, that IX works as a sequel capping off the three cycles of Star Wars films. I think some clarity can be shed here by reframing the question one asks. To wit: The following are distinct questions that admit of different answers:
1. Is IX a fitting sequel to VIII?
2. Is IX a fitting conclusion to VII?
3. Is IX a fitting conclusion to IV–VI?
4. Is IX a fitting conclusion to I–III?
Defenders of IX are, so far as I can see, interpreting IX in the light of either The Force Awakens or the prequel trilogy (and thus question #2 or #4). Understood in that way, I can see why they might answer in the affirmative. If the nine-film saga is finally about both the Skywalker and the Palpatine bloodlines, or "houses," then in a way IX works, especially the final act. Moreover, IX works quite well as a kind of direct sequel to VII: the style, the humor, the storytelling, the recycling of tropes, characters, even lines of dialogue: if VII is your jam, you're bound to love IX.
Where IX does not work—at all—is as a sequel to The Last Jedi or as a conclusion to the original trilogy. Regarding the latter, it disentangles and disintegrates the beautiful commingling of the personal and the political, encapsulated perfectly in the final act of Return of the Jedi when the throne room scene functions as both an intra-family drama and a microcosmic battle upon which the fate of the entire galaxy hangs. And this is itself the culmination of a three-film discovery of this very entanglement: Luke is an orphan whose father was murdered long ago, only to learn the would-be murderer is his father, only to realize the princess he sought to help is his own sister. And to save his father he must be saved by him, thus destroying the Emperor, thus destroying the Empire: this is not merely to restore balance to the Force and to bring peace to the galaxy but to restore order and bring peace to his own family.
But IX undoes this: the New Republic is annihilated at the drop of a hat by a Death Star 3.0; the Empire is resurrected as the First Order; the Emperor is resurrected as ... himself. (All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.) But IX gives us no reason to think, with Rey's supposed victory, that days or weeks or months later later it's not all going to play out again, exactly as before. When Luke throws away his lightsaber and Vader throws the Emperor down the shaft, the elation and catharsis we originally felt and are meant still to feel at the simultaneous personal and political victory just accomplished has been reduced to the personal alone.
And as for VIII: The Rise of Skywalker is not just a failure of a sequel to The Last Jedi—at every level—it is a sort of anti-sequel. It actively, intentionally, and painfully seeks at every turn to undo the plot, themes, and character arcs of the previous film. And even if your judgment of VIII is that it is something less than superlative (a misguided judgment, but one I'll permit for now), surely you must admit that a direct sequel that so clearly hates its predecessor, laboring with all its might to unburden itself of its inheritance, is a recipe for narrative confusion, incoherence, and sloppiness. Fittingness is about beauty, harmony, and order. The only honest feeling one can have going from TLJ to TROS is whiplash. Whomever is to blame for that (Kathleen Kennedy above all, also Abrams, but not at all Johnson, who was given free reign and no heads up for what was to come), the result is a fracture within this final trilogy that weighs heavily on the ability of IX to perform its duty as triple finale: sequel/conclusion at once to Rey, to Luke and Leia, and to Anakin. It buckles and breaks under the weight—one chosen by the writer-director, not forced upon him.
–Another word about Abrams: the man loves his narrative cheats and work-arounds. His worst vice is impatience. Kirk must be promoted immediately. Rey must already be a brilliant pilot and swordsman. Finn can be a general just like that. Need a master code-breaker? Poe knows a gal. Need to get to Exogol to stop the super-duper-master-fleet-each-as-powerful-as-a-death-star within 16 hours, plus round up the entire galaxy to come help? Sure, why not.
Worse than this abbreviated storytelling tic, Abrams as often as not refuses put in the time or the effort to earn our affection or trust for his characters or plot beats. Rather, he works with borrowed emotional capital. He knows how we already feel about Han or Leia or Chewie or Luke, and he uses that to his advantage. He brings in a stray "memory" to turn the lead villain into a hero. He has the good guys and bad guys keep flying the same ships, in the same planet locales, wearing the same suits, with the same droids along for the ride: and this time, no one can die, not for good. Does he need to create a new character to rally the troops for a final battle? Nope. Billy Dee Williams will do the job nicely. Should Benedict Cumberbatch play a heretofore unknown adversary for Kirk, Spock, & co.? Nah: Khan 2.0 is what the people want. And you've got to give the people what they want.
–I continue to lament the unintelligible and finally uninteresting character arc for poor FN-2187. If VII, following his desertion, was about Finn's struggle with a kind of cowardice—running away from evil and danger—and VIII about wrestling with recklessness—now running straight into danger and certain death—then IX should have concerned the mean of those two extremes: what it means for this child-soldier turncoat to be courageous, to embody the virtue of bravery.
Instead, we get a replay of both VII and VIII with Finn being funny but Rey-obsessed while also attempting, again, a suicide mission (only this time not kept from following through with it by Rose). And though Abrams has said in interviews that the film was meant to reveal that Finn, too, is Force-sensitive, and that this is what he wanted to tell Rey, this is far from evident in the film, and the half-hearted attempt to address his affection for Rey is clumsy at best (not to mention, for the thousandth time, acting as if Rose, i.e. Abrams' stand-in for VIII/Johnson, doesn't exist). What a missed opportunity.
–If Finn stands for the virtue of courage, it seems to me that Poe stands for prudence: a virtue he learned in the previous film, but which he must re-learn for Abrams here, since what happens in TLJ stays in TLJ. But what if Poe were less earnest in this film, less impulsive and soul-searching and navel-gazing, and more of a straightforward, prudent, wise leader?
As for Rey: I want to say her virtue is justice, paired with religio. Rendering what is due to those to whom it is due in proper proportion, while honoring, with an appropriate piety, those to whom one is indebted—including, in her case, Rey's literal parents, but also and especially her adoptive family: the Resistance, on the one hand, and the Jedi, on the other. (Though I don't love "Rey Skywalker" at the end, I will allow it on this reading.)
–About Kylo Ren's turn. It was not necessary, much less inevitable, narratively, that he break good like his grandfather. Johnson posed this question in VIII: what if Ben Solo were offered the opportunity, considered it, but turned away (whether in weakness or in malice)? That is a story that could have been told well.
A story that involves his repentance from evil also could have been told well. That didn't happen here, not least because the turn is a cheat: saved from death, his own memory converts him. What's more, the film has him simply become Good at that point. But the brilliance of Vader's turn in VI isn't that he goes from Evil to Good at the drop of a hat. Rather, he lets his paternal love for his son overthrow his willingness to cooperate with evil—and only thus does he turn on Palpatine.
Adam Driver's performance overcomes Abrams' deficiencies as a writer here, but the intriguing possibility here was for a transformation that is only partial: so that Ren's conflicted badness—"Millennial Darth" playing dress-up but unable fully to embrace evil's true depths—becomes a conflicted goodness: love and devotion to Rey, perhaps, but not necessarily to her cause or her friends or the ends and virtues she stands and fights for. That is more dramatically interesting, truer to the character, and would have made for a fascinating open-ended "ending": Ben Solo, reconciled to Rey but not to himself or to what she loves. What does the future hold for such a pair? An unstable settlement, for sure, and one less happy-clappy kumbaya in the way that IX wants to repeat VI.
–Speaking of Ren and Rey, I'm increasingly dissatisfied by that kiss. I like the continued theme of attachment overcoming detachment, even as attachment presents the greater temptation for disordered loves and thus for fall into evil. Thus is Anakin lured to the Dark Side by Palpatine via his dysfunctional love for Padme; but thus also is Anakin redeemed by Luke's well-ordered detachment (willingness to die, lightsaber thrown away) rooted in proper attachment (love for his father and sister, unwillingness to kill in anger). This very balance of detachment within attachment is undone in Luke's fear (in the flashback of The Last Jedi) of what the young Ben Solo is capable of: and this unbalance tips Ben over to the Dark Side. What brings him back to the Light is Rey, who she is and what she does, and his, Ben's, overpowering love for her.
But is that love eros? It certainly isn't familial. It seems to me that, even at the level of the text of the films (VII and IX on their own, but also VIII), it isn't eros, either, but rather philia. The love of Rey for Ren and of Ren for Rey is one of friendship. That is itself one of the under-discussed themes of Star Wars, whereby the personal is wedded to the political not through family alone but through the power of friends to band together in the face of unimaginable power and terrible odds. (Perhaps the great failure of the prequel trilogy is its inability to depict friendship well, chiefly between Obi-Wan and Anakin. Not for lack of trying...)
But perhaps I'm not giving Abrams his due. On his terms, the eros of the new trilogy echoes and recapitulates the tragic eros of the prequel trilogy, with filial love anchoring the original trilogy and friendship uniting all three. I prefer my alternative, however, since it is isn't so much a failure of eros as one of philia that prompts Anakin's fall in Revenge of the Sith: his inability to be a friend to Obi-Wan, in truth and in justice. In which case, the redemption of Anakin's grandson by (ugh) Palpatine's granddaughter comes about by that very love whose lack doomed Anakin in the first place. Going forward, in fact, I think I will choose to read IX in this way, regardless of Abrams' intentions, since Ben and Rey's kiss can be interpreted as a kind of exuberant exclamation point in the Hamlet-esque final moments of their ostensible shared deathbed.
A silver lining, that, in an otherwise diverting but finally disappointing denouement to the Skywalker saga. If nothing else, Abrams always delivers by forcing his audience repeatedly to ask a single, lingering question of all of his films. That is, what might have been.
I thought I'd avoid writing about the film, but instead of spending time on Twitter or Slack, let me just share my thoughts here.
What makes The Rise of Skywalker so bad? Well, there are multiple levels of badness involved.
[SPOILERS HEREON Y'ALL.]
First is the filmmaking itself. This was the most shocking thing about IX. I knew Abrams would go for nostalgia and servicing fandom. I figured he'd undermine VIII. I didn't know he would make such a straightforwardly bad movie, one alternately boring (the guy next to me on opening night fell asleep) and poorly told (my wife can't be the only one who found it difficult to follow).
The opening 30 minutes in particular move so fast, across so many worlds and plot points and characters old and new, with such flat-footed awkwardness, that it feels as if Abrams stepped in as director to replace another director who had already filmed all this. But that's not what happened. It's all him. Working for Disney, that trillion-dollar behemoth with all the money and time in the world to let Abrams make the best movie he possibly he could. And the result is shoddy beyond belief.
There are moments of elegance or grandeur. Rey's duel with Ren in his TIE fighter. The unexpected, graceful healing of the serpent beneath the sands. (Nice nod to The Mandalorian, that.) The ocean duel. The Sith coliseum of dead souls, the undead Emperor upheld by a black claw. Finn and Poe shooting up a Star Destroyer while running towards a low-angled tracking camera. The lightsaber "swap" from Rey to Ren (the one good and successful extension of a Rian Johnson idea). The shocking accidental death of Chewbacca at Rey's hands—
Whoops! I forgot, nobody dies in Star Wars.
And there's the rub. The problem is the script. It feels like it was written by committee in a succession of a dozen drafts. The result, at least until the final act, comes across like a series of videogame player quests. The doohickeys sought don't matter in themselves. They're just the next required token to level up and receive the next assignment.
The other problem with the script is its bottomless well of bad ideas. Hux is a spy! (Dead Hux. Dad Hux!) Leia retconned into a Jedi! Leia as Rey's true Jedi Master! A fleet of thousands of Star Destroyers, each as powerful as a Death Star—yet unable to move without being directed by a single frail antenna! (Dracula rules, as ever.)
Worst of all, Palpatine as Rey's grandfather and inexplicably alive after being thrown to his death by Vader in VI and the secret Blofeld-like master-puppeteer behind Snoke and the First Order. (Abrams: The first order? THE FINAL ORDER!) The opening words of the crawl read, "The dead speak!" A nice B-movie callback to the saga's origins. But also a foolish, self-parodying decision by a writer-director who quite literally has done nothing but make sequels and remakes for his entire career. The man does not know anything except what he watched as an adolescent. Sometimes he remixes it well. Here, he does not.
What Abrams needs is whatever happened to Lindelof while making The Leftovers. A kind of creative baptism, liberating him from his felt need to please fans by giving them what they think they want and instead steering into, rather than away from, the original and often deeply weird creative ideas that result.
What Abrams needs is an overseer—what is often known as an editor or producer—who watches his back and tells him when he's gone astray. It turns out Kathleen Kennedy is not that person. After half a decade care-taking the new, post-Lucas Disney period of Star Wars, she has given us a track record by which to judge her. It's not pretty.
For example: Instead of the now-canonical opening lines of the crawl, the obvious opening words should have been, "General Leia Organa has died." Next: "The galaxy gathers to mourn its departed royal leader. Following the Battle of Crait and the mysterious passing of the beloved princess, people flock to join the Resistance in a final push to defeat the evil First Order."
Is that so hard? Abrams thought to honor Carrie Fisher by using preexisting footage of her as Leia paired with digital work to map her face onto other actors in key moments. It doesn't work. It's clunky and forced and, wittingly or not, ends up putting more rather than less weight on her presence in the film.
What else? Poe continues to be little more than Captain Earnest. Finn almost reveals his heart to Rey—the film teases us with it—and then it's left dangling. (Was a scene of closure left on the cutting room floor? Is it meant to pop back up in the next trilogy, when Old Finn and Old Rey lose their only child to the Supremely Final Order's Supremely Supreme Leader, a clone of a clone of Palpatine's great-grandfather's uncle?) At least in part it's left dangling because Abrams decides to make Rey and Ren's final moment a kiss. I'm sure some other version of this film could have sold that, but Abrams certainly does not.
Now, Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley have long been the best things about this third trilogy. And they do excellent work again in their roles. Were it not for them, the movie would be borderline unwatchable. But after Rian Johnson did not so much in The Last Jedi to move their characters along, Abrams freezes them in place until, with a snap of the fingers, their character arcs lurch into their foreordained change/resolution—and off to the climax we go.
Note well: Abrams isn't only copying Lucas (again and again), he's copying himself. The big moment for Ren to turn from evil to good is prompted by nothing so much as an imaginary memory of the last conversation he shared with his father, Han Solo. So Abrams in effect recreates his own scene from VII on the bridge when Ren kills Han—only this time, for no apparent reason, he throws away his lightsaber, having argued himself into it.
Whereas Rey, gone angry and Sith-y because bloodline, turns back to good after a handy chat with Luke in Force Ghost form. And then we're off to the races.
Even writing it out is painful. It's just so, so bad. Not to mention Lando, featuring Billy Dee Williams playing Lando as Billy Dee Williams playing Lando. Or blink-and-you-miss-them new characters like Zorii or Jannah—full of potential, but too little too late. Oh, and Rose, who for no reason at all is relegated to Leia's babysitter. She could and should have been the Lando of this trilogy: introduced mid-chapter, then a fellow front-liner in the finale. Why not include her with the trio of Rey, Finn, and Poe on their (three dozen) mission quests? Just one more way to stick it to Rian Johnson, apparently.
And that's going to be the legacy of this film. Abrams' fundamental failure to understand what The Last Jedi accomplished, and what it made possible. Either Kathleen Kennedy agrees with Abrams in his estimation of that film, or she capitulated to fandom's purported desires (and thus lacks the insight or leadership to steer the ship). Either way, it's quite a thing to behold a billion-dollar franchise lack any semblance of vision across three films made in only a few years' time.
In sum, Episode IX had the opportunity to be something special. Even granting the hand Johnson was dealt (not least the foolish decision to destroy the New Republic, thus reducing the trilogy to a rehash of the original, at least at the formal level), he set up the finale to tell a new story: no Supreme Leader, no Emperor, no Death Star, no consolidated Rebels ready for a Final Mission Once And For All. In Johnson's hands—or Brad Bird's, or Christopher Nolan's, or Tony Gilroy's, or Sam Mendes's, or James Mangold's, or Kathryn Bigelow's, or whomever—it could have been great. It could have been different, new, bold, and unexpected. It could have taken us by surprise, not by resurrecting the ancient dead of the Original Trilogy, but by telling a new story in a new way about these new characters we'd come to care for.
But in Abrams' hands, no one's ever really gone, and there's only ever one story to tell, and re-tell, over and over until the end of time. A pity.
Random Further Comments (Dec 20)
–Is IX worse than the prequels? Not II, which is the worst movie ever made. But it might be worse than I and III. At the very least, it's a discussion. Moments here surpass moments there; but the filmmaking is less shoddy there than it is here. It's all a matter of taste, really. What sort of bad do you prefer your bad movie to be?
–I have long said that J.J. Abrams is the best caster in film. That's his destiny: a producer of blockbuster films who has veto power on all casting decisions. He may also be allowed to touch up dialogue. Otherwise he is not allowed anywhere near a script. He is not allowed to produce or direct films based on preexisting intellectual property. And he is only allowed to direct movies written by someone other than himself.
–After a promising start, Finn's character never got his due across the trilogy. A missed opportunity, in two respects: to explore the psychology of a turncoat stormtrooper, and to consider the moral ambiguity of fighting and killing an opposing military force largely made up of child soldiers (i.e., children kidnapped and brainwashed into service).
–Rey's self-made yellow lightsaber at the end was a nice touch. But as a friend pointed out, it should have been modeled on her long staff: either lengthier in form or double-bladed like Darth Maul's. UPDATE: Turns out I didn't look closely enough. The new lightsaber is made from her long staff, only reduced to a normal size blade handle, rather than fitted into a double-bladed one. Should have spotted it, and that's a solid choice from Abrams et al.
Further Comments Post-Second Viewing (Dec 21)
–I took my oldest to see the movie today, and I have to say, upon second viewing, it was a less frustrating experience. Note well: Not one of the movie's flaws turned out to be something other than a flaw. Everything above stands. But during my first viewing, I thought I would hate to return to the film, even that I might find it unwatchable. It's plenty watchable. And knowing all the terrible script decisions in advance means not audibly groaning at the revelation of each one. That's not nothing, I suppose.
–The second viewing also allowed me to see more of the artistry in the direction, which during the first viewing I found hard to distinguish from the problems in the script (not least since the latter affects the former in numerous ways, especially length of scenes and speed of cutting from one to another). Abrams really is a skilled director of action, emotion, and dialogue. That's what makes the failure of the film painful rather than ho-hum.
–The film was doomed before a single shot was filmed. And it's not micro-elements, it's the macro-frame, the narrative context created from the outset. The three principal mistakes are: Palpatine's return; Rey's lineage; and Leia's central role. All the other flaws (with the possible exception of demoting Rose to a glorified cameo) pale in comparison to those, and could have been incorporated into a quality film. No movie's perfect, after all. This one didn't have to be. It's the deep infrastructure of the story, not particular scenes, that ensure its downfall.
–I was more impressed by John Boyega's performance this time around (and Oscar Isaac's to an extent). Watch him when he's not talking, or just before and after he has dialogue. The reaction shots are priceless. He's never not in character. It only makes the stalling-out of his character arc that much more galling.
–The number of loose threads combined with the amount of yada-yada-ing of plot was glaring on the second viewing. Abrams literally has a character say, "Dark arts. Cloning. Sith jabberwocky..." or some such thing as a comprehensive response to Palpatine being alive. Did they not finish the script? Is there a scene lying on the cutting room floor that resolves Finn's unspoken declaration of love for Rey? Will we ever know?
–Abrams really has issues with killing characters off (also for blowing up entire planets: seven across three films, with two more nearly goners); you can tell by his affinity for fake-killing them and letting them live. M:I:3 opens with the apparent murder of Ethan Hunt's wife—nope. Star Trek Into Darkness ends with Kirk's fake death, brought back to life a few minutes later via Khan 2.0's blood (and also tribbles? It's all so hard to recall the finer points of his scripts). Poe fake-dies in VII, with no real explanation. And in this one both Chewie and Rey "die," only to be not-dead (having never died, in the one case, or been brought back to life, in the other) mere seconds later.
–Must Rey and Ren have kissed at the end? Really? Still not buying it, y'all. (Though that scene at the climax with his face filling the frame, staring "at" Rey, communicating silently, ready to receive the lightsaber: that's a killer. Again, there are solid moments, scenes, and ideas; but in the end it's not just parts that don't add up: the film, finally, is less than the sum of its parts.)
–Having said all that, in the same way that I can enjoy Episodes I or III with my kids, who love Darth Maul and pod-racing and clones and Mace Windu and CGI Yoda and the rest, I was able fully to enjoy IX with my son (his first Star Wars movie in the theater!), who gasped at Rey's family name and laughed at the droid humor and was delighted Ren turned good and found the Emperor truly frightening. (He even leaned over the moment after Rey and Ren kiss, and said, "That's the first time he's ever smiled!") So I'm glad there's that. I wrote above that IX might be worse than I or III. I realize now that's mostly not true. The Phantom Menace is more of an original story, and has genuinely interesting ideas—however poorly executed—and in that respect Lucas has the better of Abrams: the former creates, the latter remixes. But in most other ways IX is superior, also to III. It helps to have sterling actors in gripping roles directed skillfully in gorgeous locales amid haunting atmosphere. If only there were a story to fill it out.
Further Reflections One Week Out (Dec 26)
–Most of my reading, conversations, and encounters in the past week have been with folks who were similarly disappointed with IX, though not always for similar reasons. Even those who have enjoyed it have admitted the shortcomings, vices, or script problems. Less than half a dozen have been unqualified lovers of the film (though I've only found such persons online, not in person—and at least a few appear to have been contrarians who went in knowing the buzz was bad).
But three defenses of the film keep popping up, and they're worth addressing. First: that Palpatine's return was fitting. Second: that superior alternative plots are not forthcoming. Third: that IX is a proper conclusion to the Skywalker–Palpatine trilogy of trilogies as a whole.
Let me take these up together, since they're related to one another, before moving on to some other reflections.
To the second point first: I do think there are superior alternative plots, though the burden of proof need not fall on lowly critics like myself to supply them. Stories are contingent; a thousand things can happen. Fittingness is an art: one says of the fitting conclusion, "Yes, I see now, it could have ended no other way." Abrams wants us to believe that. He's wrong.
But, in any case, sometime in the next week my final(!) update to this ever-expanding post will be an alternative opening crawl and a basic plot line for the film, Palpatine- and lineage-free. (Spoiler: It opens with a royal funeral, and it involves sabotage efforts from without and from within the First Order, including spies.)
But back to the first point: What the defenders miss about the inconveniens of Palpatine's return is not his return full-stop. It is his return out of nowhere, with not a hint or foreshadowing in VII or VIII. It is unfitting because it is a villain deux ex machina—a diabolus ex machina?—wherein the Big Bad, for lack of a better option, is parachuted in to give the story false gravitas it has not otherwise earned and was not naturally heading toward. The truth is that Rian Johnson killed J. J. Abrams' New Big Bad, himself little more than Palpatine Redux, so Abrams did the next best thing: bring back the original. Again, we know this extra-textually, because Abrams made this particular decision upon returning to Star Wars to take over from Colin Treverrow, and neither Treverrow nor Johnson had any inkling of Palpatine's impending resurrection.
This brings us to the third point, that IX works as a sequel capping off the three cycles of Star Wars films. I think some clarity can be shed here by reframing the question one asks. To wit: The following are distinct questions that admit of different answers:
1. Is IX a fitting sequel to VIII?
2. Is IX a fitting conclusion to VII?
3. Is IX a fitting conclusion to IV–VI?
4. Is IX a fitting conclusion to I–III?
Defenders of IX are, so far as I can see, interpreting IX in the light of either The Force Awakens or the prequel trilogy (and thus question #2 or #4). Understood in that way, I can see why they might answer in the affirmative. If the nine-film saga is finally about both the Skywalker and the Palpatine bloodlines, or "houses," then in a way IX works, especially the final act. Moreover, IX works quite well as a kind of direct sequel to VII: the style, the humor, the storytelling, the recycling of tropes, characters, even lines of dialogue: if VII is your jam, you're bound to love IX.
Where IX does not work—at all—is as a sequel to The Last Jedi or as a conclusion to the original trilogy. Regarding the latter, it disentangles and disintegrates the beautiful commingling of the personal and the political, encapsulated perfectly in the final act of Return of the Jedi when the throne room scene functions as both an intra-family drama and a microcosmic battle upon which the fate of the entire galaxy hangs. And this is itself the culmination of a three-film discovery of this very entanglement: Luke is an orphan whose father was murdered long ago, only to learn the would-be murderer is his father, only to realize the princess he sought to help is his own sister. And to save his father he must be saved by him, thus destroying the Emperor, thus destroying the Empire: this is not merely to restore balance to the Force and to bring peace to the galaxy but to restore order and bring peace to his own family.
But IX undoes this: the New Republic is annihilated at the drop of a hat by a Death Star 3.0; the Empire is resurrected as the First Order; the Emperor is resurrected as ... himself. (All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.) But IX gives us no reason to think, with Rey's supposed victory, that days or weeks or months later later it's not all going to play out again, exactly as before. When Luke throws away his lightsaber and Vader throws the Emperor down the shaft, the elation and catharsis we originally felt and are meant still to feel at the simultaneous personal and political victory just accomplished has been reduced to the personal alone.
And as for VIII: The Rise of Skywalker is not just a failure of a sequel to The Last Jedi—at every level—it is a sort of anti-sequel. It actively, intentionally, and painfully seeks at every turn to undo the plot, themes, and character arcs of the previous film. And even if your judgment of VIII is that it is something less than superlative (a misguided judgment, but one I'll permit for now), surely you must admit that a direct sequel that so clearly hates its predecessor, laboring with all its might to unburden itself of its inheritance, is a recipe for narrative confusion, incoherence, and sloppiness. Fittingness is about beauty, harmony, and order. The only honest feeling one can have going from TLJ to TROS is whiplash. Whomever is to blame for that (Kathleen Kennedy above all, also Abrams, but not at all Johnson, who was given free reign and no heads up for what was to come), the result is a fracture within this final trilogy that weighs heavily on the ability of IX to perform its duty as triple finale: sequel/conclusion at once to Rey, to Luke and Leia, and to Anakin. It buckles and breaks under the weight—one chosen by the writer-director, not forced upon him.
–Another word about Abrams: the man loves his narrative cheats and work-arounds. His worst vice is impatience. Kirk must be promoted immediately. Rey must already be a brilliant pilot and swordsman. Finn can be a general just like that. Need a master code-breaker? Poe knows a gal. Need to get to Exogol to stop the super-duper-master-fleet-each-as-powerful-as-a-death-star within 16 hours, plus round up the entire galaxy to come help? Sure, why not.
Worse than this abbreviated storytelling tic, Abrams as often as not refuses put in the time or the effort to earn our affection or trust for his characters or plot beats. Rather, he works with borrowed emotional capital. He knows how we already feel about Han or Leia or Chewie or Luke, and he uses that to his advantage. He brings in a stray "memory" to turn the lead villain into a hero. He has the good guys and bad guys keep flying the same ships, in the same planet locales, wearing the same suits, with the same droids along for the ride: and this time, no one can die, not for good. Does he need to create a new character to rally the troops for a final battle? Nope. Billy Dee Williams will do the job nicely. Should Benedict Cumberbatch play a heretofore unknown adversary for Kirk, Spock, & co.? Nah: Khan 2.0 is what the people want. And you've got to give the people what they want.
–I continue to lament the unintelligible and finally uninteresting character arc for poor FN-2187. If VII, following his desertion, was about Finn's struggle with a kind of cowardice—running away from evil and danger—and VIII about wrestling with recklessness—now running straight into danger and certain death—then IX should have concerned the mean of those two extremes: what it means for this child-soldier turncoat to be courageous, to embody the virtue of bravery.
Instead, we get a replay of both VII and VIII with Finn being funny but Rey-obsessed while also attempting, again, a suicide mission (only this time not kept from following through with it by Rose). And though Abrams has said in interviews that the film was meant to reveal that Finn, too, is Force-sensitive, and that this is what he wanted to tell Rey, this is far from evident in the film, and the half-hearted attempt to address his affection for Rey is clumsy at best (not to mention, for the thousandth time, acting as if Rose, i.e. Abrams' stand-in for VIII/Johnson, doesn't exist). What a missed opportunity.
–If Finn stands for the virtue of courage, it seems to me that Poe stands for prudence: a virtue he learned in the previous film, but which he must re-learn for Abrams here, since what happens in TLJ stays in TLJ. But what if Poe were less earnest in this film, less impulsive and soul-searching and navel-gazing, and more of a straightforward, prudent, wise leader?
As for Rey: I want to say her virtue is justice, paired with religio. Rendering what is due to those to whom it is due in proper proportion, while honoring, with an appropriate piety, those to whom one is indebted—including, in her case, Rey's literal parents, but also and especially her adoptive family: the Resistance, on the one hand, and the Jedi, on the other. (Though I don't love "Rey Skywalker" at the end, I will allow it on this reading.)
–About Kylo Ren's turn. It was not necessary, much less inevitable, narratively, that he break good like his grandfather. Johnson posed this question in VIII: what if Ben Solo were offered the opportunity, considered it, but turned away (whether in weakness or in malice)? That is a story that could have been told well.
A story that involves his repentance from evil also could have been told well. That didn't happen here, not least because the turn is a cheat: saved from death, his own memory converts him. What's more, the film has him simply become Good at that point. But the brilliance of Vader's turn in VI isn't that he goes from Evil to Good at the drop of a hat. Rather, he lets his paternal love for his son overthrow his willingness to cooperate with evil—and only thus does he turn on Palpatine.
Adam Driver's performance overcomes Abrams' deficiencies as a writer here, but the intriguing possibility here was for a transformation that is only partial: so that Ren's conflicted badness—"Millennial Darth" playing dress-up but unable fully to embrace evil's true depths—becomes a conflicted goodness: love and devotion to Rey, perhaps, but not necessarily to her cause or her friends or the ends and virtues she stands and fights for. That is more dramatically interesting, truer to the character, and would have made for a fascinating open-ended "ending": Ben Solo, reconciled to Rey but not to himself or to what she loves. What does the future hold for such a pair? An unstable settlement, for sure, and one less happy-clappy kumbaya in the way that IX wants to repeat VI.
–Speaking of Ren and Rey, I'm increasingly dissatisfied by that kiss. I like the continued theme of attachment overcoming detachment, even as attachment presents the greater temptation for disordered loves and thus for fall into evil. Thus is Anakin lured to the Dark Side by Palpatine via his dysfunctional love for Padme; but thus also is Anakin redeemed by Luke's well-ordered detachment (willingness to die, lightsaber thrown away) rooted in proper attachment (love for his father and sister, unwillingness to kill in anger). This very balance of detachment within attachment is undone in Luke's fear (in the flashback of The Last Jedi) of what the young Ben Solo is capable of: and this unbalance tips Ben over to the Dark Side. What brings him back to the Light is Rey, who she is and what she does, and his, Ben's, overpowering love for her.
But is that love eros? It certainly isn't familial. It seems to me that, even at the level of the text of the films (VII and IX on their own, but also VIII), it isn't eros, either, but rather philia. The love of Rey for Ren and of Ren for Rey is one of friendship. That is itself one of the under-discussed themes of Star Wars, whereby the personal is wedded to the political not through family alone but through the power of friends to band together in the face of unimaginable power and terrible odds. (Perhaps the great failure of the prequel trilogy is its inability to depict friendship well, chiefly between Obi-Wan and Anakin. Not for lack of trying...)
But perhaps I'm not giving Abrams his due. On his terms, the eros of the new trilogy echoes and recapitulates the tragic eros of the prequel trilogy, with filial love anchoring the original trilogy and friendship uniting all three. I prefer my alternative, however, since it is isn't so much a failure of eros as one of philia that prompts Anakin's fall in Revenge of the Sith: his inability to be a friend to Obi-Wan, in truth and in justice. In which case, the redemption of Anakin's grandson by (ugh) Palpatine's granddaughter comes about by that very love whose lack doomed Anakin in the first place. Going forward, in fact, I think I will choose to read IX in this way, regardless of Abrams' intentions, since Ben and Rey's kiss can be interpreted as a kind of exuberant exclamation point in the Hamlet-esque final moments of their ostensible shared deathbed.
A silver lining, that, in an otherwise diverting but finally disappointing denouement to the Skywalker saga. If nothing else, Abrams always delivers by forcing his audience repeatedly to ask a single, lingering question of all of his films. That is, what might have been.
The 11 Best Hour-Long TV Dramas of the Decade (2010–2019)
A few months back I posted this list to Twitter, but I thought I'd re-post it here, with a bit more commentary, as well as a reshuffling due to Mr. Robot's outstanding fourth season.
First, to the rules. This is a list of hour-long dramas: so no half-hour genre-exploders (Atlanta, Louie) or comedies (Parks and Rec, Brooklyn 99). I'm also only thinking of TV series, with discrete seasons that tell something of a unified narrative: thus excluding miniseries (e.g. The Honourable Woman) and specialty shows (a la Sherlock or Black Mirror). Further, in order to qualify the series must have at least three seasons to its name (so The Knick falls short and both Succession and Yellowstone ran out of time before decade's end). Seasons prior to 2010, however—such as Mad Men's first three or Breaking Bad's first two—don't count for the purposes of this list. I am solely considering television seasons comprising hour-long dramatic episodes shown or streamed between 2010 and 2019.
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Now to the list:
1. Rectify (SundanceTV, 2013–2016)
2. The Americans (FX, 2013–2018)
3. Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–2013)
4. The Leftovers (HBO, 2014–2017)
5. Better Call Saul (AMC, 2015–)
6. Mad Men (AMC, 2007–2015)
7. Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–2019)
8. Mr. Robot (USA, 2015–2019)
9. Justified (FX, 2010–2015)
10. Fargo (FX, 2014–)
11. The Expanse (SyFy/Amazon, 2015–)
Comments:
–My, that's a M-A-N-L-Y list. No apologies—one is who one is, one likes what one likes—but I'm not blind to it.
–Some shows got the cut due to waning quality in later years: I'm looking at you, The Good Wife, and you too, Orange is the New Black.
–Others were marked by high highs matched only by equally low lows: e.g. Homeland, True Detective.
–Consulting my annual lists, I was reminded of Boardwalk Empire, which is sorely underrated. The fourth season is up there for single-season masterpieces. But I'll never be able to shake Matt Zoller Seitz's comment, when he reviewed the short-lived series Boss, that the character Nucky Thompson should have been played by Kelsey Grammar. The show becomes an immediate classic in that alternate universe.
–Hannibal! A real show that really played on NBC—NBC!—for three—three!—seasons! That second season, y'all.
–You know, I never got around to watching the final season of Halt & Catch Fire. An unjustly overlooked show, beloved by none but critics. But the fact that I just never quite found myself needing to finish the story might say something. About the show, or about me, at least.
–It would be easy enough to keep the list to a clean ten and leave off The Expanse. But it just got too good in those second and third seasons, I couldn't do it.
–Were it not for Mr. Robot's second season, I might have been willing to move it up to the top five. Alas.
–Game of Thrones is so strange. Those last couple seasons were so dreadful overall (fun at times, but almost always stupidly silly), and the series was far from flawless in the first six. But the sheer narrative scope, the quality of the source material, the heft of the story and acting, the excellence (at times) of the writers' ability to juggle so much so deftly, and, man, those big moments: it still deserves much of the awe it garnered.
–For me, at least, separating rankings by time limit and/or genre makes things so much easier than it would otherwise be. How are you supposed to compare Mad Men to Parks & Rec, or Veep to Mr. Robot? But once you sort for genre and running time, the top 10-20 dramas more or less sort themselves.
–Watch Rectify. It may well be the only TV show—given my predilections to tell people to turn their screens off, not on—that I suggest people ought to watch, and without reservation. It's that good.
First, to the rules. This is a list of hour-long dramas: so no half-hour genre-exploders (Atlanta, Louie) or comedies (Parks and Rec, Brooklyn 99). I'm also only thinking of TV series, with discrete seasons that tell something of a unified narrative: thus excluding miniseries (e.g. The Honourable Woman) and specialty shows (a la Sherlock or Black Mirror). Further, in order to qualify the series must have at least three seasons to its name (so The Knick falls short and both Succession and Yellowstone ran out of time before decade's end). Seasons prior to 2010, however—such as Mad Men's first three or Breaking Bad's first two—don't count for the purposes of this list. I am solely considering television seasons comprising hour-long dramatic episodes shown or streamed between 2010 and 2019.
Now to the list:
1. Rectify (SundanceTV, 2013–2016)
2. The Americans (FX, 2013–2018)
3. Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–2013)
4. The Leftovers (HBO, 2014–2017)
5. Better Call Saul (AMC, 2015–)
6. Mad Men (AMC, 2007–2015)
7. Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–2019)
8. Mr. Robot (USA, 2015–2019)
9. Justified (FX, 2010–2015)
10. Fargo (FX, 2014–)
11. The Expanse (SyFy/Amazon, 2015–)
Comments:
–My, that's a M-A-N-L-Y list. No apologies—one is who one is, one likes what one likes—but I'm not blind to it.
–Some shows got the cut due to waning quality in later years: I'm looking at you, The Good Wife, and you too, Orange is the New Black.
–Others were marked by high highs matched only by equally low lows: e.g. Homeland, True Detective.
–Consulting my annual lists, I was reminded of Boardwalk Empire, which is sorely underrated. The fourth season is up there for single-season masterpieces. But I'll never be able to shake Matt Zoller Seitz's comment, when he reviewed the short-lived series Boss, that the character Nucky Thompson should have been played by Kelsey Grammar. The show becomes an immediate classic in that alternate universe.
–Hannibal! A real show that really played on NBC—NBC!—for three—three!—seasons! That second season, y'all.
–You know, I never got around to watching the final season of Halt & Catch Fire. An unjustly overlooked show, beloved by none but critics. But the fact that I just never quite found myself needing to finish the story might say something. About the show, or about me, at least.
–It would be easy enough to keep the list to a clean ten and leave off The Expanse. But it just got too good in those second and third seasons, I couldn't do it.
–Were it not for Mr. Robot's second season, I might have been willing to move it up to the top five. Alas.
–Game of Thrones is so strange. Those last couple seasons were so dreadful overall (fun at times, but almost always stupidly silly), and the series was far from flawless in the first six. But the sheer narrative scope, the quality of the source material, the heft of the story and acting, the excellence (at times) of the writers' ability to juggle so much so deftly, and, man, those big moments: it still deserves much of the awe it garnered.
–For me, at least, separating rankings by time limit and/or genre makes things so much easier than it would otherwise be. How are you supposed to compare Mad Men to Parks & Rec, or Veep to Mr. Robot? But once you sort for genre and running time, the top 10-20 dramas more or less sort themselves.
–Watch Rectify. It may well be the only TV show—given my predilections to tell people to turn their screens off, not on—that I suggest people ought to watch, and without reservation. It's that good.
With Mr. Robot till the end
The TV show Mr. Robot ends its four-season run in six days.* It began four and a half years ago, in the summer of 2015. It didn't exactly begin with a bang, but the whimper of its premiere (if I may mix metaphors) snowballed into one by its first season finale. Its seemingly omnipresent, omniscient mastermind of a creator Sam Esmail appeared to be the Next Big Thing in TV: a child of 90s cinema, he was and is Fincher and Spielberg and Soderbergh and PTA and Tarantino all—at least aspirationally—rolled into one. Eventually writer-director of every single episode—40 in total by series' end—the show is the complete vision of a self-styled auteur if ever there was one.
The second season lost much of the good will and momentum generated by the first. Sprawling, dense, literally and figuratively dark, trapped for much of its time in Elliot's mind: both critics and viewers in notable numbers dropped the show then, or so it appears from online commentary and anecdotal conversations. And although season 2 contained high points, especially in the back half of episodes, much of the criticism was justified.
I'm here to tell you, though, that not only are seasons 3 and 4 worth your time. Not only do they contain some of the most creative, entertaining, formally innovative storytelling in the medium. They might make for the two best seasons of TV in the last 3-5 years, at least for hour-long dramas.
The only comparable series in terms of back-to-back seasons during the same time frame would be Atlanta (though not an hour-long drama), Succession, The Leftovers, Better Call Saul, The Expanse, and The Americans (though its strongest run was seasons 3-4 in 2015–2016). Pound for pound, Mr. Robot is a peer to those heavyweights, and it might actually be the champ.
I realized this in the last six weeks when, on Sunday or Monday evenings, I had the choice to catch up on any number of quality shows: Watchmen, Silicon Valley, The Good Place, The Mandalorian, Jack Ryan (okay that one turned out not to be so good). And I kept finding myself, against what I felt to be better (or rather, public critical) judgment, opting for Mr. Robot: both to-breathlessly-see-what-happens-next, and for the sheer pleasure, the emotional thrill, of experiencing one more hour in Sam Esmail's world. Not one episode has let me down.
Season 1 was all world- and character-building, along with establishing the style of the series. Season 2 went inward, at times too deeply or wildly, but without ever quite losing sight of the goods or goals of the story and its characters.
But seasons 3 and 4 have been masterful as exercises in pace, plotting, tone, tension, and two different balancing acts: narrative and character arcs, on the one hand, and form and substance, on the other. I find myself, against all odds, caring about Elliot and Darlene and Mr. Robot and Angela and the rest. And the virtuosic experimentation has been exquisitely married, at each juncture, to the nature of the action and the purpose of the narrative and where we find the characters therein: whether that involve a silent episode featuring a heist and a host of isolated characters texting one another, or a multi-act stage drama bottle episode, or an "uncut" single-shot thriller—or whatever. It is beyond thrilling. It's mesmerizing. I find myself drawing closer to the screen, so captivated I'm standing, the music of Mac Quayle blasting as the odd angles of the camera dislocate the persons on screen relative to one another.
However Esmail concludes the series this Sunday,* he'll be ending the way he always envisioned: not with the external action, but with the internal drama of Elliot's soul. That's as it should be. He's set us up for more than one big surprise. But the revelations won't make or break the series. He's already made good on his promise. Mr. Robot is the real thing, and I'm with it—with him—till the end.
*Update: Unbeknownst to me, the fourth season of the show does not contain 10 episodes (like the previous three), but 13. I thought I checked this back in September, but perhaps I just assumed. Episode 9 only confirmed the assumption in its "feel" as a penultimate episode. Well then! Episode 10 certainly proved that assumption wrong. The good news: three more hours of what is still a great show.
The second season lost much of the good will and momentum generated by the first. Sprawling, dense, literally and figuratively dark, trapped for much of its time in Elliot's mind: both critics and viewers in notable numbers dropped the show then, or so it appears from online commentary and anecdotal conversations. And although season 2 contained high points, especially in the back half of episodes, much of the criticism was justified.
I'm here to tell you, though, that not only are seasons 3 and 4 worth your time. Not only do they contain some of the most creative, entertaining, formally innovative storytelling in the medium. They might make for the two best seasons of TV in the last 3-5 years, at least for hour-long dramas.
The only comparable series in terms of back-to-back seasons during the same time frame would be Atlanta (though not an hour-long drama), Succession, The Leftovers, Better Call Saul, The Expanse, and The Americans (though its strongest run was seasons 3-4 in 2015–2016). Pound for pound, Mr. Robot is a peer to those heavyweights, and it might actually be the champ.
I realized this in the last six weeks when, on Sunday or Monday evenings, I had the choice to catch up on any number of quality shows: Watchmen, Silicon Valley, The Good Place, The Mandalorian, Jack Ryan (okay that one turned out not to be so good). And I kept finding myself, against what I felt to be better (or rather, public critical) judgment, opting for Mr. Robot: both to-breathlessly-see-what-happens-next, and for the sheer pleasure, the emotional thrill, of experiencing one more hour in Sam Esmail's world. Not one episode has let me down.
Season 1 was all world- and character-building, along with establishing the style of the series. Season 2 went inward, at times too deeply or wildly, but without ever quite losing sight of the goods or goals of the story and its characters.
But seasons 3 and 4 have been masterful as exercises in pace, plotting, tone, tension, and two different balancing acts: narrative and character arcs, on the one hand, and form and substance, on the other. I find myself, against all odds, caring about Elliot and Darlene and Mr. Robot and Angela and the rest. And the virtuosic experimentation has been exquisitely married, at each juncture, to the nature of the action and the purpose of the narrative and where we find the characters therein: whether that involve a silent episode featuring a heist and a host of isolated characters texting one another, or a multi-act stage drama bottle episode, or an "uncut" single-shot thriller—or whatever. It is beyond thrilling. It's mesmerizing. I find myself drawing closer to the screen, so captivated I'm standing, the music of Mac Quayle blasting as the odd angles of the camera dislocate the persons on screen relative to one another.
However Esmail concludes the series this Sunday,* he'll be ending the way he always envisioned: not with the external action, but with the internal drama of Elliot's soul. That's as it should be. He's set us up for more than one big surprise. But the revelations won't make or break the series. He's already made good on his promise. Mr. Robot is the real thing, and I'm with it—with him—till the end.
*Update: Unbeknownst to me, the fourth season of the show does not contain 10 episodes (like the previous three), but 13. I thought I checked this back in September, but perhaps I just assumed. Episode 9 only confirmed the assumption in its "feel" as a penultimate episode. Well then! Episode 10 certainly proved that assumption wrong. The good news: three more hours of what is still a great show.
A Twitter amendment
Last weekend I was in San Diego for the annual meeting of AAR/SBL, and (as has become my custom) I mostly saw old friends and new acquaintances. Most of the latter I have "met" online; most of those "meetings" were on Twitter.
Tomorrow marks 8 weeks since I began my experiment with decreasing my Twitter usage: zero time on that infernal website Sunday through Friday, and 30 minutes or fewer on Saturday; moreover, no active tweeting (original, RT, replies, etc.) on any day of the week: only occasional links to something I've written.
After San Diego, I'm reconsidering my experiment, or rather, considering an amendment to it. I think I'm going to try a modest "return" to being an active rather than passive user on Twitter, albeit within the same time and use constraints I've already set for myself. That is: limit both reading and tweeting to Saturdays, for 30 minutes or so, but become a sort of power-user for that half-hour of time: sharing thoughts, interacting with others, retweeting, threading ideas, following new accounts, replying and connecting, etc., etc.
It's another experiment, and if the various negative consequences of using Twitter that caused my first self-imposed exile return in any way, I'll drop it ASAP. Twitter brain, group think, the itchy need to check replies, inability to focus reading, long dark rabbit holes that bruise the soul: none of that, thank you very much.
But seeing old friends and new (and in the flesh, at that!), so many of whom I've met through that otherwise detestable website, persuaded me that there might be additional such benefits on the horizon. Given Twitter's systemic effects, I continue to believe that it ought to be burned to the ground. But perhaps I can squeeze a few more drops of good out of it before it (Lord willing) does so.
Tomorrow marks 8 weeks since I began my experiment with decreasing my Twitter usage: zero time on that infernal website Sunday through Friday, and 30 minutes or fewer on Saturday; moreover, no active tweeting (original, RT, replies, etc.) on any day of the week: only occasional links to something I've written.
After San Diego, I'm reconsidering my experiment, or rather, considering an amendment to it. I think I'm going to try a modest "return" to being an active rather than passive user on Twitter, albeit within the same time and use constraints I've already set for myself. That is: limit both reading and tweeting to Saturdays, for 30 minutes or so, but become a sort of power-user for that half-hour of time: sharing thoughts, interacting with others, retweeting, threading ideas, following new accounts, replying and connecting, etc., etc.
It's another experiment, and if the various negative consequences of using Twitter that caused my first self-imposed exile return in any way, I'll drop it ASAP. Twitter brain, group think, the itchy need to check replies, inability to focus reading, long dark rabbit holes that bruise the soul: none of that, thank you very much.
But seeing old friends and new (and in the flesh, at that!), so many of whom I've met through that otherwise detestable website, persuaded me that there might be additional such benefits on the horizon. Given Twitter's systemic effects, I continue to believe that it ought to be burned to the ground. But perhaps I can squeeze a few more drops of good out of it before it (Lord willing) does so.
Luddites and climate activists, unite!
I encourage you to read Ben Tarnoff's piece in The Guardian from a couple months back: "To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution." The very worst approach to technology is fatalism: it's inevitable; it's the future; we just have to accept it. The second worst approach is denialism: it's not so bad, since (obviously and necessarily) nothing so central to our lives could as bad as the naysayers suggest. The third worst approach is a failure to make connections. This last characteristic is one oddly ubiquitous among liberal folks I talk to about this issue. If either free-market liberalism or the digitization of our lives is so good, then why are the effects so bad for the environment? And what brakes stand in the way of further ecological harm? Denial underwriting technological fatalism certainly won't do the trick.
Perhaps climate activists are allies in waiting for Luddites, and vice versa. As Tarnoff observes, both perceive the costs of technology in the present tense. In a time obsessed with either moment-to-moment minutiae that don't matter or a utopian future that doesn't exist, the present problems bearing down on us, in the form of both climate change and technological takeover, seem like the right place to begin.
Perhaps climate activists are allies in waiting for Luddites, and vice versa. As Tarnoff observes, both perceive the costs of technology in the present tense. In a time obsessed with either moment-to-moment minutiae that don't matter or a utopian future that doesn't exist, the present problems bearing down on us, in the form of both climate change and technological takeover, seem like the right place to begin.
MCU Phases 4 & 5: dream or nightmare?
I have a mixed relationship to the Marvel movies that have so dominated the last decade of Hollywood. On the one hand, I readily enjoy them. I think, for the most part, that they are well made blockbusters, occasionally quite good, directed competently, written with care, and acted superbly. Their achievement as TV-like serialization across 23 films (and three "phases") is, as Matt Zoller Seitz has written, without precedent and accordingly impressive.
On the other hand, I'm neither a comic books "fan" nor an apologist for the MCU. I've read all of two graphic novels in my life, and have nothing invested in "geek culture." I furthermore share the general sentiment that the Marvel-fication of cinema as such is an unhealthy trend. It isn't good that there's a new superhero movie out every three weeks, and that Hollywood wants any and all blockbuster filmmaking to be (a) built on preexisting IP and (b) part of a larger "cinematic universe."
At the same time, I think it's too easy to use Feige and the MCU as a scapegoat. Marvel's (and Disney's) success did not and does not necessitate a systemic change in Hollywood, or the monotonous assembly line of genre fare we've seen in its wake. Moreover, while critics like Scorsese are certainly right to be exhausted by the last decade, two factors militate against an overreaction. First, great films continue to be made and recognized. Second, "cinema" includes more than the art house: indeed, cinema intrinsically includes the spectacle of sheer, broadly appealing fun. Scorsese and his cohort of directors know that more than anyone.
Having said all that, with Feige and Marvel taking a victory lap right now, it is a fascinating and revealing thing to look into Disney's plans for the MCU going into the next 3-4 years. For denizens of the art house, it is indeed a nightmare of sorts. For geeks, doubtless it is a dream. But like all dreams, it's going to come to an end. Indeed, in looking at the lineup below, it's hard to believe it's real.
So far as I have been able to put together, what follows is the forthcoming schedule of theatrical films and television shows (exclusively on Disney+) on the slate for 2020 through 2023 or so. Beginning with 2022 I'm taking educated guesses on timing. Movies are bolded and shows have a (+) after them. Read it and (alternately) weep or rejoice.
2020
2021
2022
2023
Feb – Captain Marvel 2
On the other hand, I'm neither a comic books "fan" nor an apologist for the MCU. I've read all of two graphic novels in my life, and have nothing invested in "geek culture." I furthermore share the general sentiment that the Marvel-fication of cinema as such is an unhealthy trend. It isn't good that there's a new superhero movie out every three weeks, and that Hollywood wants any and all blockbuster filmmaking to be (a) built on preexisting IP and (b) part of a larger "cinematic universe."At the same time, I think it's too easy to use Feige and the MCU as a scapegoat. Marvel's (and Disney's) success did not and does not necessitate a systemic change in Hollywood, or the monotonous assembly line of genre fare we've seen in its wake. Moreover, while critics like Scorsese are certainly right to be exhausted by the last decade, two factors militate against an overreaction. First, great films continue to be made and recognized. Second, "cinema" includes more than the art house: indeed, cinema intrinsically includes the spectacle of sheer, broadly appealing fun. Scorsese and his cohort of directors know that more than anyone.
Having said all that, with Feige and Marvel taking a victory lap right now, it is a fascinating and revealing thing to look into Disney's plans for the MCU going into the next 3-4 years. For denizens of the art house, it is indeed a nightmare of sorts. For geeks, doubtless it is a dream. But like all dreams, it's going to come to an end. Indeed, in looking at the lineup below, it's hard to believe it's real.
So far as I have been able to put together, what follows is the forthcoming schedule of theatrical films and television shows (exclusively on Disney+) on the slate for 2020 through 2023 or so. Beginning with 2022 I'm taking educated guesses on timing. Movies are bolded and shows have a (+) after them. Read it and (alternately) weep or rejoice.
2020
May – Black Widow
Fall – The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (+)
Nov – The Eternals
2021
Feb – Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Spring – Loki (+)
Spring – WandaVision (+)
May – Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
Summer – What if...? (+ animated)
July – Spider-Man 3
Fall – Hawkeye (+)
Nov – Thor 4: Love and Thunder
2022
Feb –Deadpool 3
Spring – Moon Knight (+)
May – Black Panther 2 [update: confirmed]
May – Black Panther 2 [update: confirmed]
July – Ant-Man 3
Fall – Ms. Marvel (+)
Oct – Blade [February seems a better bet, but since they specified October, that suggests "scary"]
Oct – Blade [February seems a better bet, but since they specified October, that suggests "scary"]
2023
Feb – Captain Marvel 2
Spring – She-Hulk (+)
May – Guardians of the Galaxy 3
May – Guardians of the Galaxy 3
July – Fantastic Four reboot
Nov – X-Men reboot [perhaps FF or X-Men are introduced back-door via a summer or fall Avengers 5, a la Black Panther or Spider-Man in Civil War—that seems wisest]
–It's worth noting that not included here are even further sequels: Shang-Chi 2, Doctor Stranger 3, Spider-Man 4, Black Panther 3, The Eternals 2, Captain Marvel 3, and so on. It also assumes some sort of big team-up. [Updated question: Will there be another "Avengers" movie, properly speaking? Or will team-ups just happen organically within other characters' movies?] And there are definitely even more properties and characters to be introduced not mentioned here.
–It seems clear that, although 2020 will revert to 2 films in the year—a sort of deep breath after Endgame and before the onset of Phase 4—beginning the following year, it's going to be four MCU films per year going forward. And that, as they say, will test the market's limits.
–It's worth noting that not included here are even further sequels: Shang-Chi 2, Doctor Stranger 3, Spider-Man 4, Black Panther 3, The Eternals 2, Captain Marvel 3, and so on. It also assumes some sort of big team-up. [Updated question: Will there be another "Avengers" movie, properly speaking? Or will team-ups just happen organically within other characters' movies?] And there are definitely even more properties and characters to be introduced not mentioned here.
–It seems clear that, although 2020 will revert to 2 films in the year—a sort of deep breath after Endgame and before the onset of Phase 4—beginning the following year, it's going to be four MCU films per year going forward. And that, as they say, will test the market's limits.
Experiments in Luddite pedagogy: dropping the LMS
This semester I wanted to experiment with teaching my courses without the use of an LMS. For those unfamiliar with the term, LMS stands for "learning management system," i.e., an online program for turning in assignments, communicating with students, updating the syllabus, inputting grades, etc. Some of us used Blackboard back in the day. My campus uses Canvas.
Now, Canvas is without question the best LMS I have ever encountered: intuitive, adaptable, not prone to random glitches and failures, useful for any number of pedagogical and technological ideas and goals. So far as I can see, after 15 years or so, the technology has finally caught on to the vision of using the internet well for teaching purposes, a vision ahead of its time one to two decades ago, and which probably, as a result, led to a lot of wasted time and self-defeating habits.
But, you might be wondering, if Canvas is a good LMS, why did I want to experiment with not using one? Here's why.
1. I want to be intentional in my use of technology, in my life and in the classroom. My campus is an LMS-supporting and Canvas-deploying atmosphere. I've never heard of anyone even broaching the topic of not using it, or even of using it as minimally as possible. The presumption is not that one ought to decide whether to use an LMS but how. I wanted to test that presumption.
2. I have many colleagues who are not only tech-savvy but pedagogically creative, even brilliant, in the ways they put Canvas to use in their courses and in their classrooms. I am not among them. Partly for philosophical reasons, partly for pragmatic reasons, I simply do not put Canvas to maximal use. Indeed, in most of my courses I put it to minimal use: sometimes exclusively as an online home for the syllabus and for students' grades. Which raises the practical question: If that's all I'm using it for, why use it at all?
3. My diagnosis of students—a diagnosis I share with them, since the diagnosis applies to our culture more broadly, and since some of my classes try to tackle the problem head-on—is that they are overly reliant upon, even addicted to, screens: above all their smartphones. Part of my move toward (so-called) Luddite pedagogy is that I don't want to contribute to that addiction if (a) there are alternatives and/or (b) that contribution would not justify the additional screen time it would require. In other words, if I'm going to ask, encourage, or (Lord help me) mandate that my students be on their devices more than they already are, then I had better have a very good reason for it. Do I? Do we?
4. The three greatest "needs" addressed by an LMS are communication, syllabus, and grades. All other uses, so far as I can see, are optional: each professor is (or should be) free to employ it—or not—to whatever further pedagogical ends she has for her course. But those differ per the nature of the class, the character of the instructor, the style of assignments, and so on. What then of those necessities?
5. Communication is most simply dealt with: I communicate with my students face to face, in class, or via email. Communication via LMS has only ever seemed to me like one more thing to add to all the other modes of digital communication in one's life (text messages, Google Chat, Slack, Facebook messaging, Twitter DMs, Instagram DMs, on and on). I only know if someone has messaged me on Canvas if Canvas alerts me by email. Why not just cut out the middle man?
6. I understand the desire for an online syllabus. I prefer not to have one, but for those who do, I would go one of two ways. Either Google Doc—which is simple, accessible, and revisable—or a one-page blog post, preferably on one's own domain (examples: Alan Jacobs; Jeffrey Bilbro). Moreover, I discovered that my students were (a) ignoring my verbal instructions about assignments and scheduling in favor of what Canvas told them and (b) ignoring the syllabus PDF on Canvas in favor of what Canvas's schedule of upcoming assignments told them. It turns out that form isn't content-neutral and the medium is the message (ever and ever, amen): students have been trained by LMS programs since middle and high school not to read or even to listen and instead to consult their online home page for course guidance. If the home page says jump, they jump. If it says nothing, they know there's nothing to do—even if the professor or the written syllabus says otherwise. So this semester one of my experiments was the lack of a Canvas home page "consultation" device: they had to read the paper syllabus I handed out to them as well as pay attention to what I said in class. A novel concept, no?
7. Immediate and ever-ready access to grades is both the greatest expressed desire on the part of students and that which has caused me the most worry about presumptive usage of LMS in higher education. Students and professors talk as if the absence of such access is a cause for anxiety in an already anxiety-ridden generation. My observation has been the opposite. From what I can tell, immediate and ever-ready access to grades does not alleviate but rather generates and increases student anxiety. Students' default settings on Canvas—which they have not only on their tablets and laptops but, naturally, on their smartphones—sign them up for email alerts and push notifications for any and all changes to the grade sheet, including changes to other students' grades. For though they can't see others' grades, they can see the average grade for an assignment, which changes as others' grades are entered or modified. Now, students, like the rest of us, are already addicted to their phones. Add to that the ever-present possibility that grades might be entered, or start being entered. Add to that receiving push notification after push notification updating the average grade for a course assignment, prior to receiving one's own grade. It's a recipe for stress. And even if, on the instructor side, you do your part to minimize all those alerts, students can still go online and check their grades at any moment, calculating their (incomplete and rarely predictive) average and comparing their individual grades to how their peers did (on average). I am flat unpersuaded that this is a good thing.
So I opted for my little experiment (with support from my chair). What have I done, and how has it gone so far?
1. Each student receives a printed copy of the syllabus the first week of class along with detailed verbal commentary by me. I also email a PDF to everyone in the class. I'm not a "revise as we go" teacher, so any changes are minor (e.g., no class on X day because my kid is sick, etc.).
2. I communicate in class or via email (or one-on-one in office hours)—full stop.
3. All assignments are completed or submitted by hand or in person: quizzes are taken in class without the use of laptops or phones; papers are printed out and turned in during class; there are no online class discussions; etc. Reasonable exceptions are permitted due to ability, availability, emergencies, and so on, but these are the norms.
4. One of my courses uses a bunch of scanned PDFs of chapters and essays. I simply uploaded all of them into a university Google Drive and shared it with the students in the course.
5. As for grades: This proved the biggest experiment of all, though it's merely a throwback to the way professors did things for decades before the advent of LMS. I keep a spreadsheet for each class where I input grades, absences, etc. The students' names are in a random order, and each student has a (privately assigned) number. At the end of each week, I print out the spreadsheet, minus their names, and post it outside my office. (This is the FERPA-approved method.) Students know their grades are updated weekly, and can come by anytime. They received their confidential identifying number by individual email early in the semester, and their grades remain anonymous that way. For my smaller courses (seminar-like in numbers), I bring the spreadsheet to class when I return major assignments like papers.
6. Why this route for grades? First, to undercut the anxiety of alerts and notifications. Second, to remove one more digital temptation for perpetual checking and refreshing: "I wonder if he'll update them online now? I wonder if he already has? I'll go ahead and check." Third, to motivate me to grade in a timely fashion. Fourth, to encourage students to come by my office and, if they have questions about grades, to ask me questions then and there rather than via email the moment grades are posted online. Fifth, to routinize the giving and posting of grading so that it's not a pall hovering over my head at all times, but has a structure and rhythm within the work week.
7. So: How have students responded? Without a single complaint. Not one problem. Now, we're in week 10 of 15. Perhaps there will be some students who organize mass protests at the end of the semester for one reason or another. I solicit anonymous feedback mid-semester, and that is where I got the idea to bring the grade sheet to my smaller classes when papers are handed back. But otherwise it's been smooth sailing on the student side: no missed assignments, no botched communication, no "but Canvas said!" I'm honestly still a bit shocked that there haven't been a few more complaints or requests for online grades: I told them up front that it was an experiment, and that I was open to revision or reversion if it didn't go well. But I've seen no resistance on their side whatsoever.
8. And on my side, it's been one long victory march. I've deleted my Facebook account, I've reduced Twitter to ~30 minutes on Saturdays, I severely limit my time on email, and now I'm not spending hours on Canvas when I could be doing something more productive with my time. Again, the point isn't that any and all LMS usage is evil or time poorly spent; it's that such usage ought to be intentional and purposeful. For me, it had become one more digital box to check, not a positive contributor to my pedagogical goals or my students' well-being. I have colleagues who use it well and I have other classes in which I too use it (hopefully well enough). But as for this semester, the net benefits have been manifold. Less time on the laptop, less time online, more time for other work tasks, and more timely and efficient grading. Win, win, win, win.
9. The question now is next semester. This semester I have all upperclassmen in elective courses. Next semester I'm teaching a one-week intensive in January, another elective for upperclassmen, but also a freshman survey class that is lecture-based. The intensive course relies on Canvas both before and after we meet, so I will probably keep it (though I suppose I could drop it if I solved the problem of how to give them their grades apart from the LMS grade sheet). But I'm disinclined to nix the LMS for the freshmen, for two reasons. First, they're coming from high schools where they relied on an LMS, especially for grades, and at this stage the lack of one might freak them out. Second, I have productively used online discussion posts for an assignment in this particular course, and unless I think of an alternative, I'm loath to drop it. But since I'm new to this experiment, and since it has gone so well (even better than I imagined, if I'm honest), I might keep trying to think creatively about what it would mean to go LMS-free across all my classes.
We shall see. More reports to come from my haphazard attempts Luddite pedagogy. Until then.
Now, Canvas is without question the best LMS I have ever encountered: intuitive, adaptable, not prone to random glitches and failures, useful for any number of pedagogical and technological ideas and goals. So far as I can see, after 15 years or so, the technology has finally caught on to the vision of using the internet well for teaching purposes, a vision ahead of its time one to two decades ago, and which probably, as a result, led to a lot of wasted time and self-defeating habits.
But, you might be wondering, if Canvas is a good LMS, why did I want to experiment with not using one? Here's why.
1. I want to be intentional in my use of technology, in my life and in the classroom. My campus is an LMS-supporting and Canvas-deploying atmosphere. I've never heard of anyone even broaching the topic of not using it, or even of using it as minimally as possible. The presumption is not that one ought to decide whether to use an LMS but how. I wanted to test that presumption.
2. I have many colleagues who are not only tech-savvy but pedagogically creative, even brilliant, in the ways they put Canvas to use in their courses and in their classrooms. I am not among them. Partly for philosophical reasons, partly for pragmatic reasons, I simply do not put Canvas to maximal use. Indeed, in most of my courses I put it to minimal use: sometimes exclusively as an online home for the syllabus and for students' grades. Which raises the practical question: If that's all I'm using it for, why use it at all?
3. My diagnosis of students—a diagnosis I share with them, since the diagnosis applies to our culture more broadly, and since some of my classes try to tackle the problem head-on—is that they are overly reliant upon, even addicted to, screens: above all their smartphones. Part of my move toward (so-called) Luddite pedagogy is that I don't want to contribute to that addiction if (a) there are alternatives and/or (b) that contribution would not justify the additional screen time it would require. In other words, if I'm going to ask, encourage, or (Lord help me) mandate that my students be on their devices more than they already are, then I had better have a very good reason for it. Do I? Do we?
4. The three greatest "needs" addressed by an LMS are communication, syllabus, and grades. All other uses, so far as I can see, are optional: each professor is (or should be) free to employ it—or not—to whatever further pedagogical ends she has for her course. But those differ per the nature of the class, the character of the instructor, the style of assignments, and so on. What then of those necessities?
5. Communication is most simply dealt with: I communicate with my students face to face, in class, or via email. Communication via LMS has only ever seemed to me like one more thing to add to all the other modes of digital communication in one's life (text messages, Google Chat, Slack, Facebook messaging, Twitter DMs, Instagram DMs, on and on). I only know if someone has messaged me on Canvas if Canvas alerts me by email. Why not just cut out the middle man?
6. I understand the desire for an online syllabus. I prefer not to have one, but for those who do, I would go one of two ways. Either Google Doc—which is simple, accessible, and revisable—or a one-page blog post, preferably on one's own domain (examples: Alan Jacobs; Jeffrey Bilbro). Moreover, I discovered that my students were (a) ignoring my verbal instructions about assignments and scheduling in favor of what Canvas told them and (b) ignoring the syllabus PDF on Canvas in favor of what Canvas's schedule of upcoming assignments told them. It turns out that form isn't content-neutral and the medium is the message (ever and ever, amen): students have been trained by LMS programs since middle and high school not to read or even to listen and instead to consult their online home page for course guidance. If the home page says jump, they jump. If it says nothing, they know there's nothing to do—even if the professor or the written syllabus says otherwise. So this semester one of my experiments was the lack of a Canvas home page "consultation" device: they had to read the paper syllabus I handed out to them as well as pay attention to what I said in class. A novel concept, no?
7. Immediate and ever-ready access to grades is both the greatest expressed desire on the part of students and that which has caused me the most worry about presumptive usage of LMS in higher education. Students and professors talk as if the absence of such access is a cause for anxiety in an already anxiety-ridden generation. My observation has been the opposite. From what I can tell, immediate and ever-ready access to grades does not alleviate but rather generates and increases student anxiety. Students' default settings on Canvas—which they have not only on their tablets and laptops but, naturally, on their smartphones—sign them up for email alerts and push notifications for any and all changes to the grade sheet, including changes to other students' grades. For though they can't see others' grades, they can see the average grade for an assignment, which changes as others' grades are entered or modified. Now, students, like the rest of us, are already addicted to their phones. Add to that the ever-present possibility that grades might be entered, or start being entered. Add to that receiving push notification after push notification updating the average grade for a course assignment, prior to receiving one's own grade. It's a recipe for stress. And even if, on the instructor side, you do your part to minimize all those alerts, students can still go online and check their grades at any moment, calculating their (incomplete and rarely predictive) average and comparing their individual grades to how their peers did (on average). I am flat unpersuaded that this is a good thing.
So I opted for my little experiment (with support from my chair). What have I done, and how has it gone so far?
1. Each student receives a printed copy of the syllabus the first week of class along with detailed verbal commentary by me. I also email a PDF to everyone in the class. I'm not a "revise as we go" teacher, so any changes are minor (e.g., no class on X day because my kid is sick, etc.).
2. I communicate in class or via email (or one-on-one in office hours)—full stop.
3. All assignments are completed or submitted by hand or in person: quizzes are taken in class without the use of laptops or phones; papers are printed out and turned in during class; there are no online class discussions; etc. Reasonable exceptions are permitted due to ability, availability, emergencies, and so on, but these are the norms.
4. One of my courses uses a bunch of scanned PDFs of chapters and essays. I simply uploaded all of them into a university Google Drive and shared it with the students in the course.
5. As for grades: This proved the biggest experiment of all, though it's merely a throwback to the way professors did things for decades before the advent of LMS. I keep a spreadsheet for each class where I input grades, absences, etc. The students' names are in a random order, and each student has a (privately assigned) number. At the end of each week, I print out the spreadsheet, minus their names, and post it outside my office. (This is the FERPA-approved method.) Students know their grades are updated weekly, and can come by anytime. They received their confidential identifying number by individual email early in the semester, and their grades remain anonymous that way. For my smaller courses (seminar-like in numbers), I bring the spreadsheet to class when I return major assignments like papers.
6. Why this route for grades? First, to undercut the anxiety of alerts and notifications. Second, to remove one more digital temptation for perpetual checking and refreshing: "I wonder if he'll update them online now? I wonder if he already has? I'll go ahead and check." Third, to motivate me to grade in a timely fashion. Fourth, to encourage students to come by my office and, if they have questions about grades, to ask me questions then and there rather than via email the moment grades are posted online. Fifth, to routinize the giving and posting of grading so that it's not a pall hovering over my head at all times, but has a structure and rhythm within the work week.
7. So: How have students responded? Without a single complaint. Not one problem. Now, we're in week 10 of 15. Perhaps there will be some students who organize mass protests at the end of the semester for one reason or another. I solicit anonymous feedback mid-semester, and that is where I got the idea to bring the grade sheet to my smaller classes when papers are handed back. But otherwise it's been smooth sailing on the student side: no missed assignments, no botched communication, no "but Canvas said!" I'm honestly still a bit shocked that there haven't been a few more complaints or requests for online grades: I told them up front that it was an experiment, and that I was open to revision or reversion if it didn't go well. But I've seen no resistance on their side whatsoever.
8. And on my side, it's been one long victory march. I've deleted my Facebook account, I've reduced Twitter to ~30 minutes on Saturdays, I severely limit my time on email, and now I'm not spending hours on Canvas when I could be doing something more productive with my time. Again, the point isn't that any and all LMS usage is evil or time poorly spent; it's that such usage ought to be intentional and purposeful. For me, it had become one more digital box to check, not a positive contributor to my pedagogical goals or my students' well-being. I have colleagues who use it well and I have other classes in which I too use it (hopefully well enough). But as for this semester, the net benefits have been manifold. Less time on the laptop, less time online, more time for other work tasks, and more timely and efficient grading. Win, win, win, win.
9. The question now is next semester. This semester I have all upperclassmen in elective courses. Next semester I'm teaching a one-week intensive in January, another elective for upperclassmen, but also a freshman survey class that is lecture-based. The intensive course relies on Canvas both before and after we meet, so I will probably keep it (though I suppose I could drop it if I solved the problem of how to give them their grades apart from the LMS grade sheet). But I'm disinclined to nix the LMS for the freshmen, for two reasons. First, they're coming from high schools where they relied on an LMS, especially for grades, and at this stage the lack of one might freak them out. Second, I have productively used online discussion posts for an assignment in this particular course, and unless I think of an alternative, I'm loath to drop it. But since I'm new to this experiment, and since it has gone so well (even better than I imagined, if I'm honest), I might keep trying to think creatively about what it would mean to go LMS-free across all my classes.
We shall see. More reports to come from my haphazard attempts Luddite pedagogy. Until then.