1. Leaving the theater after Jordan Peele’s Nope, I heard a woman say, “Well I’m going to have to read some articles about this!” I died. I feel like ever since Get Out, you can’t talk about a Jordan Peele movie (or any movie?) until you’ve read some articles about it. Me, I’m not trying to read more than one article about anything, so I immediately looked for Alissa Wilkinson’s writeup at Vox, which sure enough was comprehensive. Seemingly she covers everything, from the film’s biblical threads, to its racial commentary and interpretation of human nature. Call me crazy but I thought Nope was the most fun and funny Peele movie yet, so I soaked up every bit of the following:
It’s gutsy to start a movie with a verse from Nahum, which is surely one of the Bible’s least-quoted books. But Jordan Peele likes a challenge.
So the text that opens Nope … is Nahum 3:6: I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle … The target of [this prophecy] was Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, which did indeed fall not long after the prophecies, taking the empire down with it. Just before this verse, Nahum describes Nineveh as a lion’s den, the “city of blood, full of lies, full of plunder, never without victims” … Basically, Nineveh arrogantly chews people up and spits them out. So, Nahum says, God will do the same to Nineveh.
Nope is not set in Nineveh, exactly; it’s set in Hollywood. […]
Nope is centrally about how our experiences of reality have been almost entirely colonized by screens and cameras and entertainment’s portrayals of what it calls reality, to the point that we can barely conceive of experiencing reality directly, with honesty and without any kind of manipulation. … But you can’t really opt out of a spectacle culture — it’s around you, and whether or not you want to participate, it tends to suck you in anyhow.
Nope’s monster consumes the film’s characters the way screens consume us, Wilkinson is saying that Peele is saying. Of course, that you have to watch a screen (and then read some articles on a screen) in order to get a warning about screens is some kind of irony — or maybe it just underscores a timeless human conflict. #lowanthropology
2. Why do you watch horror movies, my mother keeps asking me, and I keep struggling to respond. I think it has something to do with this next link, which David Zahl mentioned briefly in his column last week. I’m referring to Agnes Callard’s recent essay for the Point, her answer to the much-debated question of what art is for. Many say art exists for the purpose of beauty, effecting political change, communicating a moral vision, or engendering empathy. Callard’s theory? “Art is for seeing evil.”
Whereas our everyday eyes are “efficient” at overlooking the evils of life, art exists to crystallize them. Even comedies, she says, are basically just things going wrong for people but in a way that’s funny to viewers. This might seem frightening or problematic, and for Plato, it was: he banished artists from his mythical utopia in Republic. But in Callard’s interpretation, the occasionally ruthless, all-seeing eye of the poet/artist might actually suggest the spark of the divine:
What is there that only art can communicate? Surely not the pious moral lessons … If you need preaching done, hire a preacher, not a poet.
There is a certain noble lie that we tell students about art. I was told it, and I hear it retold often by those defending great books and humanistic education. The lie is that art is a vehicle for personal moral edification or social progress, that art aims at empathy and happiness and world peace and justice and democracy and the brotherhood of man. But those are the goods of friendship, or education, or politics, or religion — not of art. The point of art is not improved living; the point of art is precisely not to be boxed in by the sometimes exhausting and always blinkered project of leading a life. […]
Indeed, there are times when the poet’s power to confront what the rest of us turn away from marks such a dramatic escape from the confines of ordinary humanity that we find ourselves drawn to describing them with the language of “a divine spark.” God is, after all, the one who sees the unseen. Going only on the data my own life has provided me, the theory that great novels provide practical guidance strikes me as empirically less well-supported than the theory that they are, in some way or other, divinely inspired.
3. If you’re interested in such things, Callard’s piece might be worth reading in tandem with Jon Baskin’s, about David Foster Wallace’s complicated attempt to “make art moral.”
You could also, though, check out this week’s meditation from ArtWay. It’s about a charcoal image by Alan Stewart, titled “The Blind Jesus (No-one belongs here more than you).” I love the singular focus, the direct-address of that title. The drawing brings together the evils of everyday suffering, with Christ at the center, entering into it. The image depicts a blind Jesus at the Last Supper, surrounded by all kinds of ordinary-looking people of various ages, races, and abilities. Jonathan Evans’ commentary is great:
The wounded Jesus reassures me that He is never a distant God and like any loving parent experiences his children’s hurt and suffering as his own. His vulnerability reflects the God that came as a vulnerable baby and then refugee and then victim of torture. It reminds me that, whilst sadly we Christians are a very poor advert for Christianity … Jesus is not like this. Jesus is the friend of the overlooked and those on the edge. He is the God of an upside-down Kingdom.
John Beauchamp … writes that “In this Last Supper the marginalised and excluded and devalued are invited to the table. Invited to be with Jesus. To sit and eat with Him. To find themselves with Him and recognise themselves in Him. To find that their embodiment is not a barrier but in fact their passport into the kingdom where all of our human diversity is redeemed and celebrated in a riot of joy and celebration.”
4. For laughs, check out the New Yorker‘s “Summer Reading Assignments for Adults.”
Read “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” for your book club this month. Do you have any clue what your friends are talking about during the discussion? Is it possible that you accidentally read “All the Light We Cannot See” instead? …
If you could be the wife of an aviator, a time traveler, or a tiger, which would you choose, and why?
Parentals of small children will get a kick out of “The Count from Sesame Street Lists All the Ways You Failed Your Toddler Today.”
From the New Yorker.
5. Now, my only association with chess is that I once taught a girlfriend how to play, and after that I never won again. Which is to say, I didn’t have much context for the announcement by Magnus Carlsen, the Norwegian chess grandmaster, that he won’t be defending his world-champion title next year. He explained, “I don’t particularly like it … I don’t have any inclination to play.”
How reminiscent this seems of the moment last year when Simone Biles stepped off the Olympics mat; and not long before that, Andrew Luck‘s controversial retirement; and the outcry that followed both. Seems safe to say that with a certain measure of success, what begins as play becomes grueling work. At Christianity Today, Emily Belz reflects on what all this says about productivity, play, and human limitation.
She describes the chess grind like this:
The chess championship takes months and months of preparation, with players analyzing and discovering new lines of defense and offense that they reveal during the championship. The match is 14 classical games, spread over a few weeks. Games sometimes last six, seven, or eight hours, with no breaks from the clock. It’s exhausting. With chess at that level, most games end in draws — so one slip-up can give your opponent a win and determine the championship. […]
Vishy Anand, a former world champion, told Chess.com he understood exhaustion from the championship matches: “Because I lost, this problem solved itself. Magnus’s problem is a little bit that he isn’t losing.” […]
In an interview with Phoenix Seminary, theologian Kelly Kapic, who has a book on finitude called You’re Only Human, said that when he lies down to sleep at night, his main feeling isn’t fatigue but guilt about things he hasn’t accomplished that day. … “I have felt guilty for actually just being a creature. … God never intended us to do everything.” Kapic goes on to explain that God places his value not on productivity but on “love,” yet we function as if God expects our productivity.
6. In Harper’s, Marilynne Robinson steps up to the plate for a home-run of a defense of the colonial Puritans, which, if you squint, could also be kind of a defense of Christianity broadly. The Puritans, she argues, have been determinedly stymied, “so utterly forgotten,” by history, and she takes a little-known 17th-century minister, Hugh Peters, as representative. Rather than the repressive caricatures we know, in context, Robinson says, Peters and other such Puritans were actually more progressive than many of progressives today. And why? The influence of Scripture:
Peters cites Scripture in support of his [prison] reforms. That the Bible was a liberalizing influence in early modern and specifically revolutionary cultures is as far from our assumptions as the notion that [a Puritan’s] political views were so advanced as to embarrass us in the inconceivably wealthy and comparatively stable twenty-first century.
Though his proposals are justified in religious terms, they are all practical and practicable, given only a more generous outlay of public resources and a real commitment to justice. Peters says,
Let no difference bee made between Jews, or Gentiles, bond or free, stranger or Natives, in either Criminal, or Civil things: for so hath God commanded, and by this means shall the Governors bee true fathers of humanitie.
Strays:
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