American Movie, social class, Kierkegaard, despair

I recently saw the film American Movie. It's a 1999 documentary about Mark Borchardt, a 29-year-old with a passion for movie making. The film documents his struggles to finish a black and white horror film called Coven.

Struggle he does. Perhaps the most overt theme in the movie is how every card in this working class high school drop-out's life is stacked against him. Mark is intelligent, energetic, determined to succeed, funny and personable. He has a vision and a passion. Yet because of his class situation, there's almost nothing to support him. Certainly very little money and almost no access to people with the education and expertise to smooth his path.

His Wisconsin world is bleak, from the barren, frozen landscape to the small, drab house he shares with his mother (and sometimes his three children from a former marriage) to the cramped trailer where his uncle lives in a mobile home park. Mark supports himself by delivering newspapers and doing janitorial work in a mausoleum/cemetery (at one point this involves washing defecation off a bathroom wall). His best friend is a cheerful, overwieght recovering alcoholic and acidhead whose main activity in life involves buying scratch-off lottery tickets, which he justifies as a better use of his money than drink or drugs.

As for Mark's family, they are less than the American Family Values ideal: His brothers say disdainful things about Mark: he won't finish his film, he's a hopeless dreamer, he's a loser, he has about enough brains to work in a factory. His father, who is separated from his mother, won't help him with the film. He self-righteously doesn't like the "language" in it. HIs mother doesn't think he will ever complete the movie, which he has been working on for years. People come to production meetings, then melt away when he needs them. Luckily, he has a girlfriend who actually doesn't undermine him. Possibly his best supporter is his shrunken old uncle in the trailer, who gives him $3,000 to complete the film and makes it through 31 takes of a scene in which he has to say four short lines that he keeps botching. The uncle is no great enthusiast however: At best, he is a verbally abusive skeptic, the unwilling underwriter of a project he doesn't believe in and has been bullied into financing.

With friends like these, who needs enemies? Yet the grace in the movie is the way Mark works with the people around him. He's largely patient and good-humored through what must be enormous frustrations. He's able to laugh. He's able to see the good in what seem like the biggest collection of misfits ever assembled. He's able to inspire them to be better than they are. He's able to pull them together, however imperfectly, into a community that transcends itself. Through his passion, he draws them in and releases their energies: Near the end, it's amazing to see them all working feverishly against a deadline to edit the movie in the hours--even minutes-- before its premiere.

His mother gives him a place to stay and though often unwilling and largely unable, she fills in as an extra and does camerawork. His acidhead friend is nothing but loyal. He even gets his young children to help with the filming from time to time.

You wonder how Mark keeps on. He gets depressed sometimes--and lashes out bitterly at the safest people in his life, his mother and uncle--but he never despairs.

Kierkegaard and Mark

About the same time I watched this movie, an essay ran in the New York Times written Gordon Martino about Kiergegarrd and despair (happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/kierkegaard-on-the-couch/?scp=1&sq=kierkegaard&st=cse.) This essay, I thought, describes Mark.

According to the Times piece, Kierkegaard distingushed between depression and despair. Despair is the state of not wanting to accept who you fundamentally are, of wanting to get rid of yourself, as Kierkegaard put it. It's a malaise of the spirit. Depression is the blues, the self being out of sorts. Ironically, accepting who you are can lead to depression--if you fancy yourself a wealthy extroverted businessperson but your soul cries out that you are truly an avant-garde musician-- that can be depressing, given the mores of the culture. Yet that very depression--the struggle of the self-- can lead to spiritual growth. Though we've collapsed the spiritual and the psychological in our culture and see despair as a form of depression, a malady of the self, in fact, a person can be depressed and yet spiritually healthy; happy and yet spiritually ill.

Mark, it seems to me, enacts this Kierkegaardian distinction between despair and depression. For as depressed as he gets--and who wouldn't, with his bleak, miserable prospects--he is not a figure of despair. He's fundamentally doing what he was called to do--fundamentally expressing his deepest, most creative self as he enacts his filmmaking. Bad as everything in his life is, including his movie, we respond to his spiritual health and vitality, his integrity. And the rawness, pain and vulnerability of his desire.

At one point in this film, Mark, in many way this most spiritual of people, drives around looking at Macmansions and talks about aspiring to the American Dream of material success. He discusses having a Christian ethic but also wanting money, about being torn, about being half a Christian. It's funny in its naivete of expression, but we're drawn, again, to his integrity, his awkward passion to express who he really is.

In the end, his irony is our irony: Reaching his goal of material success might be the very thing that drives him out of depression and into despair. At the same time, in seeking his goal, he is fully, authentically alive.

Do you agree with Kiergegaard's dinstinction? What blocks us--many of us probably more privileged than Mark--from finding and expressing our authentic selves and how do we do this in a way that isn't narcissistic?

New Age Girls (and Boys), Quakers and sweat lodges

I finished a book by Deborah O'Keefe called Good Girl Messages: How Young Women were Misled by their Favorite Books. In it, O'Keefe is critical of much of girls' literature produced between 1850 and 1950 because of the passivity it celebrated in girls and young women, manifested in such poses as fainting, reclining, smiling, submitting, weakening, wasting and dying.

O'Keefe goes on to maintain that very little genuine evil exists in classic girls' literature. Many books relay the message that a girl with a radiant, upbeat, smiling and helpful personality can melt crusty hearts and inspire a new level of generosity, vision and gentleness in formerly irascible authority figures. O'Keefe cites Pollyanna as one of the fictional heroines whose golden, sunbeam personality and determination to find the positive in everything changes her environment.

When I was reading this account of Pollyanna, I was nagged by a memory: at one point I happened to read an article in a New Age publication. A woman wrote about her elementary school daughter coming home from school moping every day because "her teacher didn't like her." The mother had no patience with this whining and told the daughter that if she smiled at the teacher more and was nice to her--if she practiced the good karma of positive thinking and sent that out into the world --the whole situation would change. The daughter took the advice, went out of her way to be nice to the teacher and voila, happy ending!

I have to say I was exasperated by the article. I have no doubt that a positive attitude can help us make our way through the world to some extent, but to elevate that to the status of life strategy seems to me inane at best and dangerous at worst. It's based on the assumption that we will spend our entire lives in safe, secure, middle class world where evil is kept firmly in check. It essentially assumes there is no real evil in the world, just something more akin to bad mood or a bad hair day. Nothing a smile won't dissolve!

The denial of evil is one of my chief problems with New Age philosophy, a philosophy which I think has seeped into Quakerism. I remember a woman standing up in our meeting during the height of the Darfur crisis (or at least the height of media coverage of the crisis) and stating she had not believed in the existence of evil until she started reading about the genocide, but now, even though she hated the word, she could draw no other conclusion but that there is evil in the world.

I wondered --OK, I was being judgmental-- "what universe has this woman been living in?" but then I thought, I'm glad she is seeing the light. Looking back, I realize she was courageous. I think it was hard for her to stand up and risk sounding fundamentalist or narrow minded. There was a denial of Self-- a surrender of her own will that the world be in happy harmony -- in speaking her truth. She was acknowledging that she could no longer live in that false reality. And oh, do we long for that to be the reality, that day when all tears will be wiped away!

I appreciate the Quaker emphasis on finding that of God in everyone, emphasizing grace over sin and understanding every person as having direct access to the light of the Holy Spirit. But if this slides into denying the existence of evil, then we become a society of Pollyannas, hoping to smile injustice away or to melt cruelty because of our radiant "patterns" of good living. Da Nile is a long river.

Humans repeatedly get caught up in social systems that make it easy for them to do heinous things. This does not mean that certain people are inherently evil, and others not. However, it might be a worthy goal, in the words of Dorothy Day, to build a society in which it is easier for people to be good. We can't do that by denying evil exists or by thinking we can eradicate evil with the vibes of our positive personalities.

One of the chief goals of religion is to teach people how to live in the world as it really is, not the world of distortions we create out of own desires. This is hard. It means we have to be transformed to see the distortions for what they are. It takes time, at least that's what I have found, which seems obvious, but read on ...

What most repels some Quakers I have talked to about the Bible is it's seemingly endless litany of unspeakable violence and suffering. Some Quakers want to create their own Bible out of the nice verses--the Peaceable Kingdom, the Sermon on the Mount, 1 Corinthians 13. I like these parts too. But unfortunately, the ultra violence of the Bible more accurately reflects the world we still live in. By telling us about that world and the often mistaken ways characters in that story behaved, the Bible offers us strategies to deal with reality. It doesn't tell us the false story that this world is great. Mostly, it tells us that living in this world is hard and that we have to sacrifice to build a better world, but that if we work at it we can build a community of love that is stronger than all the evil around us.

In contrast, the New Age worldview offers religion lite. You fly in for a weekend and you fly out "spiritually renewed." A New York Times story recently ran about three people dying in a sweat lodge run by a New Age guru named James Arthur Ray. Ray's retreat typifies what's wrong with this kind of so-called spirituality: middle-aged people paying more than $9,000--$9,000!!-- to fly to Arizona for a short course in becoming Spiritual Warriors that included the deadly sweat lodge only loosely based on Native American models.

A website the New York Times linked to at http://Newagefraud.org/ is eloquent in its pleas for people not to confuse New Age shams with genuine Native American religious practice: "Learning medicine ways takes decades and must be done with great caution and patience out of respect for the sacred. Any offer to teach you all you need to know in a weekend seminar or two is wishful thinking at best, fraud at worst. ..."

The Native Americans are saying just what serious spokespeople from other religious traditions say: Religion is hard! It takes time! Decades! It's messy, it's dirty, it's perilous, it changes us in ways that challenge our egos... we don't so much erase our egos as have to jump over the barrier they put up. That's why faith is so often likened to a seed or a plant (Christian tradition) that gets planted in "dirt" and takes a long time to sprout, or seen as something that has to take place with in the cycle of Nature (Native Americanism), not in a room, not in a weekend. It comes with messy traditions that we don't want to touch... but that's part of what we grapple with, the darker sides of our collective humanity ... and yet some Quakers seem to want to just build a high-walled garden and pull out all the "pretty" parts of the "spiritual life" for themselves and have a little dabble of Native Americanism, a few verses from the ever-popular poet Hafiz, some watered-down Zen Buddhism, a taste of Roman Catholic mysticism through Gerard Manley Hopkins ... how can that work?

Anyway, to what extent do you think Quakers are in Pollyanna mode when we "speak truth to power?"

Is profanity demonic?

I'm reading the diaries of Dorothy Day. Day converted to Roman Catholicism about the time her daughter was born in the late 1920s and then devoted the rest of her life to founding Catholic Worker, an organization which served the poor and published an influential newspaper. Day lived among the poor, worked passionately for peace and is now on the road to sainthood. She strove to build a society in which it was "easier to be good."

I hope to get back to the major themes of Dorothy Day and her life in other posts but she wrote something in a recent diary entry (February 18, 1970) in which she mentioned profanity, and, especially, the use of the F-word at peace marches and rallies:

"I have myself been at enough demonstrations, parades, marches of protest ... to know ... the shouting of four-letter words ... I myself cringe before such words, because of the hatred and contempt they express and involving the perversion of the act of creation. The love of God for man and man for God in the Song of Songs, in the book of Hosea is compared to love with involves both mind and soul and body, and implies a physical act which results in the miracle of creation. ... What I am trying to say is that the use of the [F-] word coarsely or humorously applied to the sexual act, is calculated to enrage. There can even be an element of the demonic to it."

I went to the peace demonstration in Washington DC before the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 and was bothered by the element carrying "F ... Bush" placards, as I did not find that particular stance conducive to peace building.

Dorothy Day, ruminating on such cursing, used the term demonic. From context, I take it that she defines "demonic" as that intended purposely to enrage another and that which twists an act of creation into something sordid. Do you agree? If so, is the F-word (which I think is her main target) always demonic? Is there a difference between a person having a spontaneous outburst of profanity in response to, say, a frightening event, and a calculated plan to bring a placard with profanity to a demonstration?

I wonder about it, because that word has become so mainstream in our society.

Defending the faith

I found this on the New York Times website:

“ You might remind your children that, although much harm has been done in the name of religion, much good has, as well. Commemorate the Underground Railroad, Mother Theresa, volunteers who visit prisons and hospitals, all those who sacrifice for peace and justice. Don't let your daughters become cynical because so much good is private and evil is so public.”
— Anne W.

from a blog (?) called This I Believe.

What do you think? Do you think religion gets a bad rap? Do you think it's helpful to speak up more?