I want to discourse at length on three words - “I don’t mind.” - as spoken in The Disorderly Knights, on why the scene of which they are the lynchpin became my instant favorite as I read it, and on why that judgment only deepened after I finished the entire series.
I want to discuss, from both a reader’s and a writer’s perspective, the importance of supporting characters. Not just “characters who play an important but secondary role in the plot,” but truly supporting characters: the characters who make it their mission in life to support the main characters. In other words, a prose ode to the men of Saint Mary’s, with pride of place given to Adam Blacklock and Archie Abernethy. (Daniel Hislop fans may also present their case.)
I want to start what I think (only half facetiously) could be a very illuminating debate: “Granting that they both richly deserve it, whom do you want to punch more: Jerrott or Marthe?”
I want to announce that I love the ending of Pawn in Frankincense, and then let you all call me a horrible person.
I want to explore the whole concept of the supernatural as Ms. Dunnett presents it, from religion to the occult, and how it relates to her views on marriage.
I want to talk about Sybilla. Oh, how I want to talk about Sybilla.
That’s just for starters. But I can’t do any of it. You see, I had the great good fortune to come to these books blind (and that word, right there, is intentionally loaded). Someone I trust gave me The Game of Kings and essentially said, “Read this. You won’t be sorry.” So I read it. I admit I found it rough going at first (and there’s another thing I want to discuss: Should the central narrative thrust of Kings have been made apparent earlier, to give us some sort of foothold in navigating this new world? Or is the delayed revelation ultimately necessary to the structure of the whole six-volume work?). But trust kept me going, and then in the courtyard at Threave I surrendered utterly and signed up for the whole voyage.
I tried to stay away from comments and reviews while I read, for it became apparent very early that this is a story built to astonish, in every sense. I intend to go back now, and relish it differently, but the first encounter should, by rights, be on Ms. Dunnett’s terms.
And that’s why I don’t want to post anything. Because I can preface with all of the spoiler warnings I want, but it would still be out there, and I don’t want even to risk ruining for some unknown reader-of-the-future the end of part four of Checkmate. But how do you talk about Lymond without talking about that?
Sometimes you can’t say “Read this because…” You can only say “Read this, and the ‘because’ will become apparent.” The Lymond Chronicles are an experience for solitude, and a favorite chair. They require, as their hero does, an extraordinary trust.
So really, all this post can be is a long “Thank you” to the person who, five months ago, put the first volume into my hands. Who reminded me that the best way to discover a story is to receive it, in trust, from a kindred spirit.
And I’d better stop now, or I won’t be able to resist bringing up Austin Grey...
Since this episode has recently increased in trivia-game value (“Name the Doctor Who episode that guest-starred both a future companion and a future Doctor.”), it seemed like the right time to give it another look. So much good stuff here that it’s hard to know where to begin. It is funny, as all of the best Doctor Whos are (the water pistol!), and heartbreaking, as all of the best Doctor Whos are.
Theologically speaking, it is an elegant illustration of that most difficult of concepts, the coexistence of predestination and free will. Headed for ancient Rome, the Doctor and Donna instead wind up in Pompeii on the day before “volcano day.” Donna wants to warn everyone, but the Doctor just wants to get out: there are certain points in time, he explains, that are fixed, unchangeable. Unfortunately, the destruction of Pompeii is one of those times. Donna, not much impressed by Fate, tries anyway to start an evacuation, but she encounters two roadblocks: the language does not yet have a word for “volcano” (it is this eruption that will give it one), and the city’s soothsayers predict a long and prosperous life for the city and its inhabitants. Donna would scoff at that last one, but for the fact that Pompeii’s soothsayers really do seem to have second sight. One of them even identifies the Doctor as “man from Gallifrey.”
The Doctor’s plan (for the Doctor, “run” is a plan) also hits a roadblock when an enterprising street merchant sells the TARDIS as “modern art” to a local businessman, Caecilius. In attempting to recover it, the Doctor learns (short version) that ancient aliens, the Pyrovile, have tunneled under Mt. Vesuvius and intend to use its power to take over the earth and transform humans into Pyrovile. The Doctor can stop them, thus saving the world, by shutting off their machine...but all of the power of Vesuvius that had been diverted will then need another outlet. In other words, Pompeii is a fixed point in time AND it is the Doctor’s choice that causes it.
As a bonus, this is also a nice example of the principle of double-effect. The Doctor does not blow up Pompeii to save the world. He turns off the Pyrovile engine to save the world, and the destruction of Pompeii is an attendant but decidedly un-willed consequence.
And yet, for all of that, the moment that haunts me is yet to come. The Doctor, furious and despairing (“Don’t you think I’ve done enough?” he snarls at Donna), and haunted by the burning of Gallifrey, heads straight for the TARDIS. But Donna, with tears in her eyes and ash in her hair, begs him to “save someone.” She has accepted what had to be done and what must be, but she rejects the Doctor’s fatalist surrender. And so Caecilius and his family are saved (and David Tennant grips Peter Capaldi’s hand and pulls him into the TARDIS).
It’s so easy (for me, at least) to be the Doctor here. To become so overwhelmed by the big picture that we think, because we can’t control that, we can’t control anything. Sometimes we all need a shorthand typist from Chiswick to remind us that we can still save someone.
There’s a lot to chew on here, but I think this is the “pull quote” (for anyone who didn’t click over, he’s talking about the first sentence of a book and the fact that it should invite the reader in, and then how you accomplish that):
“So an intriguing context is important, and so is style. But for me, a good opening sentence really begins with voice. You hear people talk about "voice" a lot, when I think they really just mean "style." Voice is more than that. People come to books looking for something. But they don't come for the story, or even for the characters. They certainly don't come for the genre. I think readers come for the voice.”
I suspect there’s some hyperbole at work here, but he’s fundamentally right. I do want story, and characters, and (to a lesser extent) genre, but above all, I want to trust the author. Cor ad cor loquitur. If I’m going to trust you with my heart, I want to know something about yours.
So for fun (read: narcissistic masochism), I went back and looked at some of my own work in that light. I’m ruling out the screenplays, since I think that there a slightly different principle is at work. That left me with two mostly-outlined-but-mostly-unwritten novels, one drafted short story, and one short story that popped into my head six days ago - characters, plot, and setting all complete - and that has been consuming me ever since.
Now, I could analyze these to death (and have...and will...), but see, I know all of the stories. So for purposes of the “voice” test, I’m going to throw them out here and ask what you think. Here they are, in alphabetical order by title. Speaking of genre, they are all spy stories - a predilection about which I have theories, which will have to wait for another post.
I’m going to cheat a little with the novels: since each has a prologue, I’m going to give you that first sentence and then the beginning of the first chapter. With that said, have at it:
Acceptable Loss
By all rights, Yelena Zelenko should not have been in the Friedrichstrasse station that day.
Not for Profit
They asked me to change the names.
Within His Wounds: A Novel of Recusant England
Prologue opening:
Blood is curse and blessing; for a Howard, it is doubly so.
First chapter opening:
He gave his name as Mr. Edmunds, diamond merchant, neither of which was entirely a lie, though in private he would have exchanged the diamond for a pearl of great price.
The Younger Son
Prologue opening:
30th July, 1809
My Dear,
I have spent the greater part of the night praying that you have already heard the news, so that it will not be me to tell you.
First chapter opening:
My Lord Barham was late.
So. There they are. I was going to ask, Which of them make you want to read further? But perhaps I’d better take the safer route and ask, Do any of them make you want to read further? And of course the follow-up: Why or why not?
Meanwhile, I’m off to finish that short story. Whether or not it needs a new opening sentence.
I have a respect for Steven D. Greydanus that I extend to few film critics. And I really like most of his Very, Very Little Movie Glossary. But seeing as, lo these many years ago, I wrote a script celebrating the Aragorn Complex, I have a couple of thoughts on the trend.
Mr. Greydanus defines the Aragorn Complex thus:
Contemporary Hollywood no longer believes in rock-ribbed, confident, heroic leaders, such as Charlton Heston’s Moses in The Ten Commandments. The Moses of DreamWorks’ excellent The Prince of Egypt — self-doubting, conflicted, reluctant — is much more in keeping with our more skeptical view of heroism and leadership.
The archetypal example, of course, is Peter Jackson’s Aragorn, whose virtue, complexity and all-around worthiness to lead the filmmakers telegraph by vastly punching up the themes of reluctance and self-doubt in Tolkien. (Moses in Exodus also initially resists God’s call, but the DreamWorks film goes way beyond Exodus in this regard.)
I would argue that the real tragedy here is not that “Hollywood” has stopped believing in such leaders as characters, but that “Hollywood” still does believe in them - as politicians. But I digress. (Not really.)
I’m not sure that an unwillingness, or even inability, to believe in such heroes necessarily bespeaks a “cultural poverty,” as Mr. Greydanus calls it in the comments. I admit that, if it does, it is a cultural poverty that I share. Or more precisely, I don’t find such heroes useful. A “rock-ribbed, confident, heroic leader” does me no good. He just leaves me hoping that if I’m ever in trouble, he’ll come along.
I am afraid. I believe that the world is a dark and broken place, and that man is a dark and broken creature. So in my fiction, I don’t want someone who is not broken to fix everything. I want someone to tell me that brokenness does not make heroism impossible. I want someone to tell me that even I still have a chance.
(Necessary caveat: Of course there are stories that pile on the doubts and the flaws until we are left with a hero who is not a hero at all. That’s not what I want, and I admit that drawing the distinction in individual cases is extremely difficult. All ll I want to do here is address the trend.)
And there is this: If we continue to deconstruct our heroes, to remind ourselves that they are not idols or demi-gods, perhaps we will be more likely to search for the source of their heroism as something outside themselves. Perhaps, if all of them are broken, we will more clearly want Someone who is not broken.
Or perhaps not. I realize that I am advocating the more dangerous road. But in a post named for Estel, I prefer to hope.
Not, in this case, an instrument of God. I take that as a given, and maybe someday I’ll actually get it right. (Nobody hold your breath.)
No, I’m thinking about the different instruments that different artists use: the paintbrush, the violin, or (in the case of an actor or singer) the body itself. In each case, the artist must study the instrument, learn everything about how and why it works, and then forget about it in order to focus on the art.
In the writer’s case, the instrument is the mind itself. Of course, I can’t really “forget” about the mind, but the same basic principle holds: I shouldn’t be thinking, “What do I think?” I should be thinking about the story. And there’s the danger.
When I’m writing, I shouldn’t be deciding what I believe. I should be unconsciously using what I believe. It should be the violin, not the music. But that means that before I start, my instrument needs to be properly tuned. Writing frightens me because, while I can lie to myself, I can’t lie in my work. And the question is not, “Do I measure up to what I believe?” (Answer: No.), but the far more terrifying, “Do I really believe it?”
I was a drama geek in high school and college, and I loved it. I am a trained soprano (lyric coloratura, to be technical), and I loved that, too. I haven’t acted or sung (except to myself, usually in the car) in a decade, and yet I don’t really miss either.
I get the occasional wistful feeling, especially when I sit in the audience at performances of the Ventura County Gilbert & Sullivan Repertoire Company, but I think that has more to do with the tendency of the G & S culture to create its own family, united by Patter Trio allusions and “How did you manage the ghosts in Ruddigore?” exchanges.
No, I have acted, but I’m not an actress, and I have sung, but I’m not a singer.
I am a writer. Unfortunately, I’m not proud of the way I know that.
Play me a Kiri te Kanawa recording, and I rejoice. Show me Meryl Streep inhabiting Julia Child, and I will laugh and marvel. But let Steven Moffat end “A Scandal in Belgravia” with five simple words (“When I say run, run.”), or let Neil Gaiman make his return to Doctor Who with an episode titled “Nightmare in Silver”, and I turn green.
I want to have written that.
The longing is particularly acute in the Gaiman example, since titles are usually the hardest things for me to write. There’s so much pressure on a title: genre, tone, theme, plot...it has to be everything. In half a dozen words or less. When that title popped up on iTunes, before I saw anything else, I felt a tiny thrill, a certainty that this episode, at least, was in good hands. The “written by” credit only explained what I already knew. So, being the mature person that I am, my interior dialogue immediately commenced: Boy (growl), it must be nice to be Neil Gaiman (snarl, hiss), with all that stinking talent and all (growl) - great, I can’t even come up with a synonym for ‘growl’...
This tends to continue, without synonyms, for an appreciable time, and with the resulting fodder for confession.
But if sin is an emptiness, a lack, then perhaps I can, at least, let it focus me on what I actually do lack. First, I need to clarify for myself that I am not Neil Gaiman. That is not the lack, because that is not what I was made to be. There’s already somebody doing a darn good job of being Neil Gaiman, after all. I need to focus on what Neil Gaiman has done that I can, and should, also do.
He has done the work.
That’s it. That’s what I can emulate. If I want to have written, I first have to write. I will never measure up, but if I am doing my work I will have less time to measure. And maybe I can turn envy into inspiration. Or simply into gratitude.
As for that G & S nostalgia, it’s turning into a neat screenplay. I even have a title.
Long-term relationships are hard. You have to give your heart away without knowing how things will end. Even if they end well, at some point along the way, the other party will frustrate you, or let you down, or be just plain Wrong. It’s a lot to go through with no assurance of a payoff.
I’m talking, of course, about my relationship to television.
Though the cost factor means I often wait for DVD or Netflix, I’m usually willing enough to see a movie. At the worst, I’ll only have wasted a couple of hours, and I frequently learn things from bad movies. “That didn’t work” is easy enough, but “Why didn’t that work?” can be a delightful and illuminating puzzle. Most importantly, at the end of a couple of hours, I will know. I will know whether it worked or not; I will know what happened to the characters; I will know what the movie is trying to say.
TV isn’t like that. TV demands trust. TV builds expectations that, as the years go on, become more and more difficult to satisfy. How many perfect finales have you seen (other than Blackadder Goes Forth)? And when a show fails, whether the failure be minor or catastrophic, it hurts more. You know these characters - you’ve lived with them for months or years - so the betrayal can feel very personal.
I’m going through this right now with Once Upon a Time. It has never been my great love, but I had mostly been enjoying it, and Robert Carlyle is worth watching even when what surrounds him is less than ideal. But now, the whole Tamara and Greg subplot leaves me absolutely cold, they made a serious misstep with “Lacey”, and no one - I mean no one - is as stupid as Regina was in “The Evil Queen”. I will slaughter whole villages to find Snow White, then I will kill Snow White, and once she is dead the people will love me. I hereby challenge the writers to find me one actual person to whom that makes actual sense.
Is it possible for the show to recover? Sure. I sat through Season Three of Lost and was ultimately glad I did. It’s also possible, though, that it will not recover. If it doesn’t, I will not be devastated, but I will be disappointed.
And yet...
There’s a new man in my life. His name is Sherlock. It’s taken me two years to find him, and I owe a very belated hat tip to Joseph Susanka of Summa This, Summa That. I held off because I was afraid he would be great, and that his greatness would demand my attention. My trust. Another tiny piece of my heart. The funny thing is, when I finally sat down to watch him, that’s exactly what I wanted him to do. The fear and the desire can’t be separated. So far, they have both been satisfied, and therefore they have both increased. And very soon, I will reach the end of Series Two, glare at Netflix, and shout, “What do you mean I have to wait until September?!?”
Here it is, Mssrs. Moffat, Gatiss, Cumberbatch and Freeman (and all the rest of you that I don’t have space to mention). Here’s a piece of my heart.
In his senior thesis, one of my college classmates disputed a small point made by St. Augustine by analyzing and applying Augustine’s major principles to the question. (Don’t ask me for details - it was fourteen years ago and he is smarter than I could ever imagine being.) For most of the year, he really enjoyed working on the thesis (and, in addition to being smart, he is such a genuinely lovely person that I didn’t hate him for that). But there were a couple of weeks when it wasn’t being as enjoyable, and he explained - I am paraphrasing badly - that, having lauded Augustine for pages and pages, and illustrated in detail what a great theologian he was, he had now got to the portion where he had to explain...or more like suggest, really, just put it out there...that in this one tiny instance, well, he would just have done it a bit...differently, is all.
Why do I bring this up? If I may descend precipitously from the City of God to the city of man, it’s because I feel rather the same way about this post.
Is there a screenwriter alive today who hasn’t learned from William Goldman? Who doesn’t have a well-thumbed copy of Adventures in the Screen Trade? Okay, probably there is, but grant me my hyperbole. It was Goldman who first showed me how screenwriting is done, and he remains one of my favorite and most reliable guides.
But every once in a while, he’s wrong.
In Adventures in the Screen Trade, Goldman defines a “comic-book movie.” He gives four markers, but I want to focus on the fourth, which he describes as “probably most important” and from which the other three largely stem: “The comic-book movie doesn’t have a great deal to do with life as it exists, as we know it to be. Rather, it deals with life as we would prefer it to be. Safer that way.”
That’s not the part where he’s wrong. I agree with that, and I think one could have a good time unpacking the implications and debating whether all movies based on comic books are comic-book movies.
Where Goldman is wrong is where he starts to illustrate his point with parallels. And he says this (keep in mind that the book was published in 1983):
The only prime-time entertainment series that is not a comic-book program is M*A*S*H. Not because of its outstanding quality, but because every scene in M*A*S*H, no matter how wildly farcical, is grounded in the madness of death. That is what gives it its tone, that is the heart of the piece. You can make M*A*S*H into My Mother the Car easily enough. Just keep those same wonderful actors and stick them in a giant army training camp here in the States. And the wounded are simply guys hurt in fights or drunken-driving accidents...And what you’ve got then is a bunch of goofy surgeons grousing because they’re stuck on the service and not out in the civilian world, making a fortune. It might be just as funny, and just as successful, and absolutely would be exactly like every other series on the air.
The first few times I read that, I nodded along. But two things happened. First, I watched a lot of M*A*S*H, and while I could appreciate its brilliance, I felt less drawn to it the more I watched it. I decided I was just being perverse - everyone said it was brilliant, so I was determined not to be impressed. But then the second thing happened. That alternate show that Goldman jokingly pitched above as a contrast? Well, take out the army base aspect, and Bill Lawrence put it on the air in 2001. It’s called Scrubs.
In case you haven’t encountered Scrubs, and don’t feel inclined to click over to Netflix immediately (which is...your decision...), it is the story of John Dorian (“J.D.”), who advances from brand-new intern to co-chief-resident of a large teaching hospital, Sacred Heart. It is a laugh-out-loud funny sitcom, bordering on the absurd and often stepping over that line.
When one is dealing with long-running TV shows, any thesis will be an over-generalization. There will always be episodes, subplots, even characters that break the mold. But with that caveat, here’s my thesis. Scrubs is not a comic-book program. And M*A*S*H is.
M*A*S*H is not really about “the madness of death.” It is about the madness of war. Everything that happens (over-generalization, remember) is because of the war. I think that’s the reason for my gradual disenchantment. I got tired of watching Hawkeye rant and complain about the war. I’m not in favor of war, and Hawkeye’s response is natural and believable and probably what I would have done in his place. What it is not is admirable. The only two characters I really love are Col. Potter, the soldier who hates war but understands that there are things worth fighting for and that duty is not a four-letter word, and Major Charles Emerson Winchester, who, however badly he goes about it, is still trying to be a civilized man in an uncivilized world.
There’s a Major Winchester episode in which he reports excitedly to one of his patients that, despite the extent of his injuries, the only permanent effect will be a slight loss of dexterity in one hand. It took all of Winchester’s considerable surgical skill to achieve that result, so he is justifiably pleased, and therefore stunned when the patient is angry. The trouble is, the patient is a concert pianist. For him, there’s no such thing as “slight.” At the end of the episode, Winchester orders some one-handed piano music, and he explains to the patient that he is still a pianist. He has a lovely speech about how he (Winchester) can read and reproduce the notes, but he can’t make music.
Summary of the episode: War can ruin your life, but you can still find hope through a snobby but thoughtful surgeon who is learning empathy.
Twenty-odd years later, on Scrubs, J.D.’s best friend, surgical intern Chris Turk, also encounters a pianist - a kid on a scholarship. But in surgery, Turk makes a mistake, and the kid won’t be able to play again. There is nothing to be done, except for Turk to own his mistake and try to live with it.
Summary of the episode: Even the best of us make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes can ruin someone’s life.
Now I ask you: Which of those is life “as we know it to be” and which is life “as we would prefer it to be”? Which is “safer”?
The fault, in the M*A*S*H episode, is with the war. That’s really the point of M*A*S*H: war is bad. True. Absolutely true. But it gives M*A*S*H just a little, crucial bit of distance. We care about the characters, we are horrified by what they go through, but at the end of the day, we’re not in Korea getting shot at. That won’t happen to us. Plus, we get that warm glow of superiority for nodding along and agreeing that that’s true, absolutely true, War is Bad.
There is no war in Scrubs. There is just death. The true “madness of death”: death that can appear anywhere, to anyone, with no warning, no reason, and no remedy. And as J.D.’s mentor, Dr. Cox, tells him in the first episode, any “victory” they win is just buying time.
The point of Scrubs is that, sooner or later, everybody dies. Including each of us.
This being probably* my favorite Doctor Who ever, I was mulling a long post. It was going to tackle big things, like free will and predestination, and whether we die as we have lived, and whether the parallel-universe plotline of Season Two undercuts the terrible beauty of this ending.**
But Paul Cornell (who ought to know, seeing as he wrote the episode and all) has already said most of what I wanted to say. And, in proportion as he is a better writer than I am, he has said it more briefly: "Grace gets written into the world, in such a way that it turns out it's always been there, through sacrifice." Yes.
* There used to be no need for the qualifier, but then Neil Gaiman had to go and write The Doctor’s Wife.
** I’m still not sure on that last one. And any discussion inevitably raises the related question of whether the parallel-universe plotline of Season Four undercuts the shattering beauty of the end of Season Two. Thoughts, anyone?
The Triduum can be a gloriously immersive experience: physically and mentally overwhelming, but emotionally and spiritually rich. A time when the Mass becomes new again, when we weigh our own petty crosses and thank God that they are only splinters, and when, in the words of one of our catechism students, we remember that Christ “had to become a man so that He could die.”
This year I got the “overwhelming” part. And, I thought, not much else.
I went to the liturgies, knelt for the Tantum Ergo, stood (and stood) for the chanting of the Passion, and rose on Easter Sunday morning to...a grey and gloomy day that about summed up my mood. It wasn’t bad enough to complain about. It was just sort of there, like I had been just sort of there all weekend. I took some consolation from being in the Catholic Church, where you do get points for showing up, and resolved to work on the “emotionally and spiritually rich” part next year.
Then, during Easter week, I got one of those rare runs where you sit down to write and don’t feel like you’re writing - you’re typing, as fast and furiously as you can, and even then your characters are impatient that you’re slowing them down. It was a crazy little spy script, something I’d undertaken just for fun (and to get a couple of scenes out of my head by committing them to paper). But when I caught my breath and reviewed what I had written, I found:
A story that took place almost entirely from a Friday afternoon through a Sunday night
An ignoble death on the Friday and a sacrificial one on the Sunday
A wounded side, followed by...
A (semi-)voluntary descent into a reasonable temporal facsimile of hell
And just as I was congratulating myself on at least giving my fascination with the Stigmata a rest (two previous scripts, two wounded hands), I realized that I hadn’t, not entirely.
But those were all the little things, more or less foreseen in the plotting stage. What I hadn’t really worked out in plotting was what happened on Saturday. I had a checklist of sorts, but it amounted to “Here stuff happens to get us from Friday to Sunday.”
Well, those impatient characters took over and explained a few things to me. They told me that Saturday was about absence. Every line and every action were given their meaning by someone NOT being there. And then a minor character - sort of a subordinate antagonist, though really more of a trickster figure - told me that he was dying, that he wanted the Last Rites, and that he wanted his body discovered in a cathedral late on Saturday night.
Well, the writer momentarily asserted herself. I reminded this upstart extra that he hadn’t even existed in the outline version, that when he appeared he was purely a plot contrivance, that I didn’t want to spend time on deathbed reflections, and that This Was Not a Script About Religion, darn it. At least, not capital-R Religion. It was about truth (of course), fidelity (yes, I suppose), and the sacrifice of the self (all right, all right, I know). But for once, I was trying to be subtle about all that. Having a priest even walk through would be too obvious and fight the tone of the rest of the piece. And the cathedral thing was way, way too blatant.
To all of which, he responded that it was his death, and he was going to have the Last Rites and then rest in the cathedral.
The moral being, never argue with your characters, because who do you think you are, anyway?
All of this is not to say that the script is any good. But good or not, I’m grateful to it. I realized that I had “got something” out of the Triduum, and that there are certain things that really are ingrained in my subconscious. Even when I am trapped in the absence of Holy Saturday, I see it as the time that gets us from Friday to Sunday. I see it through the hope of the Resurrection.
A colleague at work forwarded an essay that then-Archbishop Bergoglio wrote on Luigi Giussani's The Religious Sense. A couple of passages stood out as being of particular interest for artists:
"Faced with the torpor of life, with this tranquility offered at a low cost by the supermarket culture (even if in a wide assortment of ways), the challenge consists in asking ourselves the real questions about human meaning, of our existence, and in answering those questions. But if we wish to answer questions that we do not dare to answer, do not know how to answer, or cannot formulate, we fall into absurdity. For man and woman who have forgotten or censored their fundamental "whys" and the burning desire of their hearts, talking to them about God ends up being something abstract or esoteric or a push toward a devotion that has no effect on their lives. You cannot start a discussion of God without first blowing away the ashes suffocating the burning embers of the fundamental whys."
And:
"The human heart proves to be the sign of a Mystery, that is, of something or someone who is an infinite response. Outside the Mystery, the needs for happiness, love, and justice never meet a response that fully satisfies the human heart. Life would be an absurd desire if this response did not exist. Not only does the human heart present itself as a sign, but so does all of reality. The sign is something concrete, it points in a direction, it indicates something that can be seen, that reveals a meaning, that can be experienced, but that refers to another reality that cannot be seen; otherwise, the sign would be meaningless."
“If you’re touching on big issues, you’ve got to keep turning these things, examining them, looking at the opposite of what you think. For example, as an atheist, I set out to include the ‘Old Rugged Cross’ sequence in Gridlock to show how good faith can be, regardless of the existence of God - how it can unite and form a community, and essentially offer hope. That was my intention, or my starting point, and yet the real me came bleeding through, because it transpires that hope stifles the travellers. It stops them acting. By uniting, they are passive. The Doctor is the unbeliever. The direct consequence of the travellers in the traffic jam singing that hymn is that the Doctor realizes that no one is going to help them. There is no higher authority.... But I didn’t write Gridlock thinking, this is my take on religion. My foremost thought, and my principal job, was to write an entertaining drama about cats and humans stuck on a motorway. Everything else just bleeds through.” - Russell T. Davies, Showrunner for Doctor Who from 2005 - 2010, in The Writer’s Tale
For two years, my husband and I taught catechism: Confirmation classes, from noon to two on Sunday afternoons, to two-dozen-odd teenagers who were (mostly) there only because their parents said they had to be. Suitably daunted, we fell back on what we knew. Each class was built around one or more film clips, discussion of which would lead into the moral or theological issue to be covered that day.
It worked. And one of the shows that worked best (to what I presume would be Russell T. Davies’ great annoyance if he knew we existed and thought us worth bothering about) was Doctor Who.
Davies certainly never set out to write Catholic theology, but he is an utterly, maddeningly brilliant writer. And the theology works because the stories work. And I would argue that they sometimes work on a level beyond the level he recognizes.
Let’s take Gridlock, shall we? Is it true that no one is going to help the travellers? No, it’s not. The Doctor is going to help them. (As Gandalf asks, “Surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself?”) And “no higher authority”? At the conclusion of the episode, the Doctor will discover that the only reason any of the travellers are still alive is that an unimaginably old being has been slowly, over many years, giving his life to sustain them in existence. As metaphors go, I’m now looking at two of the Persons of the Trinity. (No, the TARDIS is not the Holy Spirit. Although...)
So yes, something bleeds through, and that something is frequently truth. Never has that bleeding been more striking than in the Season Three opener, Smith and Jones.
The episode has, for Doctor Who, a simple enough premise. A human-looking plasmavore, calling herself Florence, hides on earth to escape a murder charge and checks herself into a London hospital, where she has access to all those lovely blood banks. Intergalactic enforcers, the rhinoceros-like Judoon, transport the entire hospital to the moon, where they can search for Florence at their leisure. The Doctor and his new companion, medical student Martha Jones, discover that Florence has killed one of the hospital’s consultants - draining him of all his blood in order to mask herself from the Judoon scans, which are looking for non-human blood.
And, with beautiful simplicity, the Doctor sees the solution: Florence must “assimilate” non-human blood.
Playing a panicky idiot, the Doctor bursts in on Florence, babbling about “rhinos in space,” and lets slip that supposedly the Judoon are going to move up to a “Level Two Scan.” Florence takes the bait, and the Doctor’s blood. It is left for Martha to realize what he has done, aim the Judoon scanner at a stunned Florence, and then (in the interests of continuing the series) invent two-hearted CPR.
I particularly love this climax because it goes beyond the Doctor offering his life to save humanity (which he does several times a season) to present a precise theological reflection on the exact nature of that sacrifice. He’s not just stopping a bullet here. Florence thinks his blood will be her victory, but his blood turns out to be her downfall. This is a triumph that can only come through defeat. Good Friday, anyone?
Now, none of the above is intended to suggest that such a meaning is intentional on Davies’ part. Insofar as it is intentional, I’m certain it’s meant to debunk the Christian story: “See, that’s not so hard to make up.”
But the point is, this story is beautiful. The point is, we all want a man like the Doctor: brilliant, confident, endlessly knowledgeable, at once wrathful and compassionate - a man extraordinary in every way, and yet willing, in a (double) heartbeat, to lay down his life for ordinary humans who may not even know he exists.
On some level, we all desire Christ. Even if we reject Him.
