How We All Came to Be

We’ve had a lot of good reaction to my last two blogs on the subject of the vile, cheap buffoon and intellectual pretender, Jon Stewart.   He’s not worth any more space, but I wanted to use his absolute lack of taste, and his utter lack of spiritual depth, to discuss something important:  how much, and what kind, of sex should there be in the little town of Courage, New Hampshire?

In modern entertainment, at the very bottom of creation, beneath the bottom of the barrel, among the glistening slugs and the eyeless, sucking leaches, we find  productions like “Deadwood.”

I have tried to watch a few of these episodes but their utter disregard for history is so profound, and their dedication to what I’m sure they think are “groundbreaking” images of pendulous, full-frontal male nudity is so completely tasteless that I can’t say my take is encyclopedic, but I’ve been close enough to that particular Turkish toilet to know it’s worth avoiding.   Another case in point: “Hell on Wheels.” Its pilot episode went out of its way to show us a stream of cowboy urine arcing across the prairie in the twilight.

Why?  Where would this end?   A push-in shot of country cheeks doing a bombs away in the out-house?   What sort of half-wit proposes this kind of thing?   If you think the scarring image of the human form–scorned, made dead, mocked and pranked–actually adds artistic merit then Courage won’t be for you.

Next up on the ladder would be the sort of show that decides, mid-production almost, that the script really wasn’t worth shooting and so we should probably show some bosom. Almost all conventional production these days, falls into this category from time to time. Writing is very difficult work.   Our minds are so enslaved to approved associations that we all tend to write things people expect to hear, things that borrow from everything we’ve heard before, things that stroke some political sensitivity.   We don’t tell the truth naturally, and so it all spells sheer boredom at some point, and when that point is reached we borrow something God invented — sex.    As disgusting as pornography can be, it is certainly more straightforward than teasing you into believing someone actually intends to tell you a story.  Toweling off Penelope Cruz, post-swim, without moving the story forward, is just the dishonest version of the flesh peddler’s trade.

Before we move up the ladder, a story from our post-college days.  My wife had a very honest friend who was once invited to a girl’s night out at Chippendale’s.   Her response feels like a good clean breath of cold spring air.  She declined: “nah, I don’t feel like seeing what I can’t have.”

This woman was no prude, and she was honest about a reality most of Hollywood doesn’t admit.   No one wants to be sitting next to strangers when an image wakes up a desire that, let’s face it, is intensely private.   I can remember watching a movie called “The Deep” with some high school friends.  It was a mixed lot of baseball jocks and a few tightly wound youth ministry girls.   The opening scene featured Jacqueline Bisset, swimming bra-less beneath a t-shirt.  One of the baseball dudes actually began moaning in a way that was only about 95% comic.   The other 5% left one of the girls so uncomfortable she insisted on a particular seating order in the car on the way home.

To pretend human beings are all as sex-callous, and paralyzed from the waist down, as Larry Flynt, would be to engage in a gross lie, and that’s why sex, in any real piece of art, has to be implied not visualized.   Did God show us the temptation David felt when he saw the beauty bathing on the rooftop?  Yes.  Did God choose to show us the actual moment of consummation in that story?   No.   Because God knows you aren’t an idiot.   Larry Flynt, and Hollywood, and Planned Parenthood are the ones who want to turn you into a rutting piece of meat.

Returning to story, let’s go to the honest way of treating a divine gift: sexuality.  In one of my favorite films of all time, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Violet Bix is presented as the sort of woman who made cab drivers, policemen and loan officers stop on the street and ponder the reality of desire. It wasn’t a story that pretended desire didn’t exist, nor was it a story that followed that desire all the way to naked flesh-on-flesh.   It just allowed the temptation to be presented, and it presented it with light-hearted charm.   The police officer goes off to his wife and George Bailey, eventually, goes off a courting.   Do we need to follow Bert the cop back to his afternoon amour with his wife?   Does George need to be seen in the bed of every Bedford Falls virgin?   The answer, for thinking people, of course, is no. There are some rooms we do not need to enter.

On the other hand, there are a few shrieking purists who think a Christian story should be as sexless and dry-cleaned as a choir robe back from the cleaners.    I would point those sorts to Solomon 1:13:

A bundle of myrrh is my wellbeloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.

When was the last time you listened to that from the pulpit?

Enter Hollywood.  When the Almighty speaks a truth, and God’s pastors ignore it, then Hollywood will distort it without mercy.  The truth is that any story, any film, any novel that pretends to a holiness God HIMSELF did not model is not really a story about our condition, and certainly not a story about God’s creation.   Good Christian stories should contend with not just love, but desire, in a way that glorifies the absolute marvel of HIS creation.

So, in practical terms, when we see Jennifer Ehle, in the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, and she’s dressed in her revealing Empire waist dress, her beauty is not making up for poor story;  it’s just adorning exquisite story.

That puts a lot of pressure on the writer.

But God shouldn’t have to do all the work.