Ice-Cold Slivers of Grace

Netflix has reintroduced me to Spooks. (Yes, I know that Netflix and imdb follow the American naming and list it as MI-5, but that title only gives you the setting. Spooks tells you that the show is about the people, and about what it’s like to live as a ghost.)

We had lost touch, Spooks and I, early in 2005, when I moved and spent some months without access to BBC America. In some ways, the break-up was a relief: pitch-dark and ambiguous at best, the show not infrequently left one with the urge to take a brisk walk just to be reminded that there was still sunshine in the world.

But there were scenes that haunted me. The climactic sequence in the Series Three opener, “Project Friendly Fire,” is a screenwriting master class. I knew it was brilliant ten years ago. After two more viewings, I’ve grasped how badly I undersold it. A show that could do that pretty much demanded another look, and as I’ve gone back, I’m beginning to think that the almost-unrelenting darkness is a feature, not a bug.

Spooks took a lot of flack in my circles for its 2002 debut episode, which saw our central team hunting down a pro-life extremist who was murdering abortionists. While I thought the script actually made a genuine effort at balance, I did question its right-out-of-the gate placement. It seemed like they were going just for shock value.

I’m cautiously revising that assessment. The episode’s central line (which I did recognize at the time) is something that our protagonist, MI-5 officer Tom Quinn, says during the interrogation: “Killing in the name of life is just about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of.” Yep. And I’m now wondering if, just maybe, that episode was placed first because of that line. And if they meant that line to speak for the series as a whole: Once you decide that the ends justify the means, you will, eventually, become what you are fighting.

Am I giving them too much credit? Possibly. I haven’t made it through all ten seasons. (Yes, I am aware of, and braced for, the carnage to come.) But flash forward just two and a half seasons, to “Love and Death.” Danny Hunter has been sent to try to persuade a rogue scientist to stop his research, which is aimed at creating a weaponized version of the plague. But while Danny tracks him aboard a ferry, MI-5 discovers that the scientist is not, as they thought, just beginning his research. He’s already taken payment from North Korea, and he is headed there now to give them his process and start production. Tom’s successor, Adam Carter, calls Danny and tells him that his mission has changed: the scientist now represents a clear and present danger, and Downing Street has authorized extraordinary measures. And it has to happen now, while the ferry is still in international waters.

So what does Danny do? He throws Tom’s line back at Adam.

Adam counters that that’s not the situation they’re talking about, but Danny is unconvinced. A long sequence of argument and counter-argument ensues, coming, in the end, to Danny trying to grasp the magnitude of what he’s being ordered to do. And then we get the speech. The speech that begins, “Danny, where were you on the 4th of October, 1995, at 8 p.m.?” The speech in which Adam softly, levelly, and step-by-step walks Danny through how you kill someone, and then through what happens after you become a man who has killed someone. (Dear Mr. Penry-Jones: Couldn’t you have let me love Adam less after that speech? Do you know how much it hurts to love him more? Also, will you please be in my movie?)

Spooks gives us a world where grace comes in the form of pain. It is a world of lost souls in which the people we love are the ones who know, on some level, that they are lost. In this season of Advent, I’m reminded that knowing we are lost is the first step in letting ourselves be found.

Meanwhile, I’ll be out taking a walk.

A Perpetual Good Friday

“I used to be a Christian. Then I became a forensic pathologist,” says Nyberg (Richard McCabe) in “Before the Frost,” the last episode of the third season of Wallander.

It’s hard to blame him. At the time he delivers the line, he is examining the corpse of a woman who has been deliberately burned to death. Nine episodes in, we in the audience have learned that that’s more or less par for the course. Carefully photographed to give just enough assistance to our imaginations, Wallander has no shortage of grisly murders, but for me at least, the adjective that lingers in the mind is “bleak.” For most of the characters, this is just the way the world is. The only sensible thing to do is to contain it, to isolate yourself from it as much as possible.

And yet, Wallander himself (a superb Kenneth Branagh) seems incapable of such isolation. His empathy for the victims he encounters plays into one of the oldest cliches in detective fiction: the cop who’s great at his job but a mess in his personal life. Here, that cliche is earned. We sympathize with the daughter who cannot rely on him to keep an appointment, and with the girlfriend who hopes that a loving home life will provide an antidote, make it possible for him not to bring his work home with him. After all, surely he doesn’t need all that empathy to solve the case; in fact, too much of it may get in the way.

On a practical level, this is a very tempting point of view, containing a great deal of truth. And certainly, I would be the last person to argue against the inclusion of high-functioning sociopaths in the canon of detective fiction.

But do we love Wallander in spite of his empathy, or because of it?

Good Friday is a fact. Nyberg doesn’t deny it - he has simply asked what is “good” about it. That’s a fair question, and one to which it is not enough to answer, “the Resurrection.” Not only would Nyberg reject such an answer, but giving it in such a simplistic way offers a future answer to a present problem. It’s akin to saying that when Wallander solves the case, that will “solve” the victims’ suffering. It won’t, because nothing can. Wallander’s compassion isn’t useful in solving the case, but compassion is not intrinsically useful: its role is to “suffer with.” It acknowledges the other person as a person - not simply as the locus of a problem to be solved.

Even to the Christian, suffering is a mystery. Yes, we have been told that there is an answer, and that we will receive it: that is the promise of the Resurrection. But if we move too quickly from Good Friday to Easter, we risk losing that moment of acknowledgement, the responsibility to be present with the other person here and now. Did Mary Magdalen stand beside the cross because she understood that it was the pathway to eternal life? Or did she stand there because it was where Christ was?

Wallander sees Good Friday in every case. He wouldn’t use such a term, of course. Like Nyberg, he has lost (if he ever had) that frame of reference. Compassion and hope are not virtues for him, but somehow he still clings to them as instincts.

That’s a horribly painful way to live, and the show is certainly not easy viewing. Which, paradoxically, is its great gift. I do not want it to be easy. I love Wallander because of those apparently-useless instincts that constantly threaten to ruin his life. And in asking us to love him, Wallander (whether intentionally or not) hints that those instincts might have meaning, after all. We are made in the image of a God who died, and, if we are to answer Nyberg, we must imitate Him before we can speak of the God who lives.

Building on Nature

For much of its first season, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was quite pleasant without being especially memorable. I would, until “End of the Beginning,” have summed it up as “Fun while it’s on, but if it went off the air tomorrow I wouldn’t miss it.” Well, it’s been off the air for a couple of months (happily, a temporary state of affairs). And I miss it.

See, it finally drew blood in its last few episodes.

I’ve been wondering - and have come to no answer - whether the ordinariness of the first two-thirds of the season, the lack of any hint as to what the biggest twist would be, is a fault or a virtue. In terms of the practicalities of a television season, I’m inclined toward the former. I know at least one person who dropped the show halfway through because it just didn’t compel a concentrated focus. That’s not the kind of response that wins ratings battles.

On the other hand, viewing the season as a story, I found that my early apathy made The Twist a genuine sucker-punch. That doesn’t happen often. Usually, when a show is going to hurt me, I have some inkling beforehand. It still hurts, but I’m not surprised. (Russell T. Davies* is the only writer I can think of at the moment who has managed to give me both the full foreknowledge AND the full sucker-punch: “He will knock four times.”)

Whether the overall structure was a fault or a virtue, the end of the season did make me sit up and pay attention. And I’ve found myself coming back to one line in particular:

“For the first time in a long time, I wanted something for myself.”

Why that, and not “Let me show you”? Or “Guys, I found it”? (Both great.)

It’s because “I wanted something for myself” is a line I would have written, and written in a superficially similar context: a character who has sacrificed all personal desire to his/her sense of duty. Normally, I’m for that. In fact, if I were to pull one overarching theme out of my assorted fiction, that would be it. And yet here, I was mentally screaming, “And you should have gone for it!”

Because here, the sense of duty was...shall we say...misplaced. And the desire was (is?) the one thing that could conceivably correct it.

It’s a useful reminder for me that desire, in and of itself, is not the enemy. Yes, it often has to be subordinated, if not completely sacrificed, but that doesn’t make the desire bad. We were created to desire the good, and that means that our desires (always making allowances for fallen nature) can often be indications of our calling: the nature upon which grace can build. For the character in question, they most certainly are.

I don’t see my major theme changing. But perhaps I’ll think more about the desires I’m asking my characters to sacrifice. In the meantime, bring on season two!

* It’s August 23rd. It’s possible I have Doctor Who on my mind.

There's a Metaphor for God in Here Somewhere

In lieu of a full post, I present the following grammatically- and theologically-imperfect reflection that I jotted in my "idea" notebook a little while back:

To love an author is to trust them to hurt you.

The Continuing Search for Hope

[Spoilers follow - beyond “The mutant-destroying robots don’t win,” which was never in doubt.]

By the end of X-Men: Days of Future Past, one may be tempted to ask, with Master Samwise, “Is everything sad going to come untrue?” Mind you, I’m as happy as anyone that we can all put The Last Stand behind us - time travel most definitely has its uses. But in spite of all the fun and the well-earned joy, my primary sense as I process this latest entry is one of beautiful melancholy.

I enjoy the X-Men saga for the action, the humor, the sheer inventive joy of watching various filmmakers play with their ever-expanding gallery of mutant powers (Quicksilver, indeed!). But the saga resonates with me because it is, and always has been, about the battle between Charles and Eric. And the battle is for Eric’s soul.

[Side rant, and you may as well shoot me now: I am probably the only person on the planet who doesn’t like X2. It’s particularly odd when you consider that I really like watching X2. I mean, it’s got Nightcrawler! And Magneto’s escape from his plastic prison! And the “good guy” scene! And a fantastic ending! And Nightcrawler! But I can’t make all of that add up to anything, and I think I’ve finally figured out why. The plot  - for very necessary reasons - completely sidelines Professor X, removing him as a mentor/authority figure until the very end. Which means that the moral choices made by the other characters do not directly reflect upon or affect his relationship with Eric. End of rant.]

Though Days of Future Past resolves and re-sets a lot of plot threads, what it doesn’t restore is at least as interesting as what it does. Logan, for example, receives a great and unanticipated joy, but “some things never change.”

And Charles? Mystique makes her climactic choice, but Raven does not come running back into her foster brother’s arms. And Eric is still on the path he chose at the end of First Class. Days of Future Past shows us, among other things, how lonely it is to be Charles Xavier. “We need you to hope again,Charles,” begs Logan, and hope is just about all he has. By the end of the film, Charles has returned to his wheelchair, doing his best to carry the pain of thousands: there is a glorious moment when Magneto accuses him of repressing his powers so that he can have his legs back, and Charles cries out, “So that I can sleep!”. It is suffering that makes him into Professor X, but it’s not automatic: it happens precisely because he consciously accepts that suffering. I am tempted, in fact, to say that he embraces the St. Andrew’s Cross.* But all of that is not enough to win the battle that he most wants to win.

We in the audience are given a little bit more. A glimpse of an ending that might have been, and might someday still be. The future that Logan so happily averts offers one moment of grace, as the dying Eric reaches, at long last, for his friend’s hand: “So many years wasted fighting each other, Charles. To have just a precious few of them back…”

Hope does not disappoint. I come back to X-Men to be reminded of Charles’ hope, and to remember that it is a hope we are all called to share.

*How ‘bout that? I did say it!

The Dark Night of the Artistic Soul: American Idol, Dorothy Sayers, and the Unnecessarily Long Subtitle

I recently read a terrible book. Not “terrible” in any way relating to vice - very well intentioned - but terrible artistically. I will not describe or name it, as that’s not the point of the post. I’m sure you’ve read a terrible book at some point in your life, so assume it was that one. (Unless you are thinking of Gaudy Night. Then I will be forced to hunt you down.) But that book was published. People paid money to print it, and people have paid money to read it.

Terrible books unnerve me. (So do really great books, but for different reasons.) Terrible books invalidate all of my hopes of validation, my faith that, even though I can’t judge my own work, other people can tell me whether it’s good.

See, not everyone is supposed to be an artist. But as the annual rounds of American Idol auditions amply attest, not everyone who thinks they’re an artist is an artist. So when that little voice starts whispering that there are plenty of untalented people in the world, and who are you to think you’re not one of them...well, how do you know whether that’s “just” depression, or the depression is actually telling you the truth?

Not all opinions are created equal, of course. How about the opinions of people you trust, people whose own work you admire, people whom you try to emulate? Better, but still not good enough. You see, I used Gaudy Night for a reason, up above. If you were to pin me down to one favorite novel, that would probably be it. Now take a look at this:

“I could not stand Gaudy Night. I followed P. Wimsey from his attractive beginnings so far, by which time I conceived a loathing for him (and his creatrix) not surpassed by any other character in literature known to me, unless by his Harriet.”

That’s J.R.R. Tolkien. (It’s in a 1944 letter to his son Christopher quoted in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.) And it’s not just a matter of taste, not a “does nothing for me but I can see the merit in it” assessment. He genuinely hates it, and hates it much more strongly than I hate the unnamed, not-Gaudy Night book that inspired this post. If one of my literary idols loathes the work of another of my literary idols, then how can I be sure of anything? Maybe Tolkien would loathe my work, and maybe he’d be right. In fact, maybe that terrible book isn’t really terrible. After all, it was published. People paid money to print it, and people have… [Cue vicious circle.]

What’s an aspiring writer to do?

I reject the idea that there is no such thing as “bad art”. There are “singers” who cannot sing, “writers” who cannot write, and “actors” who cannot act. (If you’re thinking of Gary Oldman, I will be forced to hunt you down.) But if I can’t trust myself, and I can’t entirely trust other opinions, then how do I know whether I’m a writer or not?

And this matters. Spiritually matters. We will be held accountable for how we have used our time. If I’m not a writer, I should give up pretending to be one and go figure out what I’m supposed to do with my time.

I’ve actually tried that. Oh, how I have tried. Told myself I would be happier, calmer, and much nicer to the people around me if I gave up on writing all of these things no one will ever read. The trouble is, it doesn’t work like that. I wind up jonesing - literally, my fingers start tapping for a keyboard because someone who never existed and who never will exist is talking to me.

Perhaps this is where depression is useful, even a spiritual gift (although, like many spiritual gifts, it’s in a color you hate and you scour the box for the return receipt). It reminds you just how minuscule the odds of success are. And that hurts like all heck, but somehow it doesn’t make a difference. You write anyway.

“It had overmastered her without her knowledge or notice, and that was the proof of its mastery.”

Yes, that’s from Gaudy Night.

Nightmares Should Be Heard, Not Seen

Okay, so I’m a year late on this one.

While hunting for something with which to ameliorate the tedium of jury duty, I discovered a) that the BBC had done a full radio dramatization of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, and b) that it was available on iTunes. It was a joyful discovery on at least three counts.

First, it is beautiful in and of itself: as marvelous a cast as one could hope for (seriously, look at that cast), performing a well-paced and graceful adaptation by Dirk Maggs. In a list of worthy contenders, this may be my favorite James McAvoy performance. His Richard is at once ordinary and unique, frustrating and charming, flawed and glorious - in a word, real. And though he sets the bar very high, none of the others falls short.

Second, having road-tested it, I highly recommend it for jury duty (but be prepared to restrain the urge to laugh out loud).

Third, it met a need I had begun to despair of filling. While I am often wary when a book I love is put on film, I generally want to see the result. Even if the adaptation is profoundly unsatisfactory, it can send me back to the book with a new perspective, if only by making me articulate more clearly why a particular choice was wrong. And even in an unsatisfactory adaptation, one can find treasure. For all the faults of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit (or, “Are we there and back again yet?”), it has given us Martin Freeman’s Bilbo.

But while I knew that there was a miniseries of Neverwhere - and knew that, in fact, the miniseries was the story’s original form - I didn’t want to see it. I’d read mixed reviews, but the aversion was more fundamental. I felt, in some way, that film was not the right medium for this story.

London Below is a collection of fragments, conjured in glimpses. Having the whole picture would diminish both the terror and the wonder, and that’s not just because the picture might be inadequate or not conform to the one I had formed. Richard spends most of the story metaphorically (and often physically) in the dark, and that impression is made stronger when we, as the audience, have only sound to guide us. Take the Night’s Bridge sequence: no visual medium could so completely isolate us in the darkness, with the nightmares waiting on all sides.

But of course sound, too, has its limitations. Lost here, for example, is the brief and beautiful passage about de Carabas’ fear of sleep. And radio requires more words to explain the ending, thus losing the novel’s exquisite simplicity.

The whole question of adaptation - of translating to different media, and what’s gained and what’s lost - gets at the limits of subcreation. The story is always bigger than any of our attempts to tell it. Yes, some versions will be better than others, but I don’t always want to have to choose. Take, if you will, Gaiman’s passage introducing Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar:

“There are four simple ways for the observant to tell Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar apart: first, Mr. Vandemar is two and a half heads taller than Mr. Croup; second, Mr. Croup has eyes of a faded china blue, while Mr. Vandemar’s eyes are brown; third, while Mr. Vandemar fashioned the rings he wears on his right hand out of the skulls of four ravens, Mr. Croup has no obvious jewelry; fourth, Mr. Croup likes words, while Mr. Vandemar is always hungry. Also, they look nothing at all alike.”

Now, that passage only belongs in a book. It has no place in radio. What you get in radio are Anthony Head and David Schofield. Who are utterly perfect, every bit as laugh-out-loud funny and breath-catchingly horrible as you want them to be.

And that’s the problem: I want both. I am still savoring Gaiman’s prose AND I am still chuckling over Head’s reading of “The corpses-to-be have a point, Mr. Vandemar.” They are both part of the story, but they can’t coexist in any medium we could use to tell the story.

And for all I have said about the superiority of radio over film in this case, even radio and novel combined are still incomplete. There is at least one thing I want to see. At the very end, I want to see that open door.

The pain we get from beauty is always the pain of desire. Nothing we can create is ever perfect, and somehow, the closer it gets to perfection, the more aware we are of the gap that remains. That gap is as frightening (to me, at least) as the gap that nearly ensnares Richard.

I’m starting to think of Heaven as the place where we get the whole story - not just one telling of it. Until then, I guess we have to “Mind the gap.”