I’m around 8 years old. It’s late December, which for a Winnipeger means cold and snow. My parents have entered my room to get me out of bed, a 4 A.M. wake up call my young body is not yet accustumed to. Still half asleep, they usher me into a packed van, ready to make the long drive to Toronto to visit our relatives for the holidays. As the only ones in the family to live outside of the GTA, these trips would be common place and an annual affair.

I have very little awareness of the challenge the 2400 kilometer trek is for the ones behind the wheel. Navigating the treacherous northern Ontario portion of the transcanada highway in the middle of winter while attempting to occupy three boys in the backseat. I do have a distinct memory of being tossed out into the snow with no shoes during one of these trips, the van doors being locked along with the message that I would now need to walk the rest of the way. Good times.

For the most part it is the small things that stick in my memory more than the big events. This big events tend to blur together into a singular portrait I call “summers at the cottage” or “Christmas with the cousins”, littered with a smattering of iconic ventures such as riding to the top of the CN Tower, visiting the Falls, or braving the coasters at Canada’s Wonderland. The smaller memories are the ones that engage my senses, the ones that I can embody and which place me back in the moment. Like being ushered in to the van at 4a.m and snagging a prime spot on the floor of the van by the heater, letting the sound of the hum lull me back to sleep. Or waking up with the sunrise to the presence of those bright red cliffs that tell inicate we are now in northern Ontario. The great lakes coming into view. Obligatory stops in towns like Thunder Bay, Christmas, Wawa, and Sault St. Marie. And of course the first glimpses of the big city skyline, Fighting over those 12 packs of cereal boxes so that we wouldn’t be the one stuck with the bran flakes or rice krispies. The smell of the grandparents house. Sitting and listening to the old transistor radio for the next big police chase or fire, the old hand run manual washing machine churning in the background. 

There was an undeniable sense of adventure that accompanied these early endeavors, breaking out of the bubble that is the middle of nowhere Canada and broadening my understanding of the world. To this day, trying to explain to my relatives what it is like to live in a place where the next significant major city center is 1200 km away is difficult to say the least. Living in the most populated part of Canada where you are never more than a few hours drive from the next massive city center is sort of like living in Europe, where a couple hour flight or a short train ride has them crossing multiple countries and timezones. If you’ve ever tried to give a European a sense of how big Canada actually is then you know what I mean.

Its precisely that vantage point though, distanced as we were, that allowed the adventure to exist. For as much as I love Winnipeg, the sense of wonder that was birthed by making that 2400 km trek never gets old. I point to these trips as the seeds that would grow my love for travel and my inate ability to be fascinated by even the smallest and most ridiculous things. The feeling of entering an unfamiliar space has a way of shaking up the imagination. When we became parents and eventually introduced our son to some of these same experiences, it struck me how, even seeing these well worn roads from a much different perspective this side of 40 was offering something more than mere nostalgia. Such experiences now blended with a greater awareness of history and geography and architecture and culture. It might be following in the footsteps of my childhood self, but it also reframed it as a fresh endeavor, perhaps molding the memories into concrete and tangible knowledge

So why all this reminsicing? My wife and my son and I had done this trip using the Canadian route a couple times before and during the pandemic, but this reflection was actually sparked by a recent trip we took down these same roads, only reliving one of the more expressive of these childhood memories on the American side of the border: embarking over what my young mind only knew at the time to be the “giant bridge”, which I later came to know was called the Mackinac Bridge. Anytime we chose to cut across Michigan rather than snaking our way through northern Ontario, we crossed this bridge. The Mackinac is a 5 mile suspension bridge, listed as one of the longest in the world, spanning the Mackinac Straits, connecting the upper and lower Peninsulas of the state of Michigan (or as they say in Michigan, connecting the “Yoopers” with the southern “Trolls”). 

The thrill of the long ascent would meet with the nervous sounds of those metal tracks lining the top. The majestic views of the strait, when I wasn’t attempting to look straight down at our imminent death, was always awe inspiring. My wife hates heights, and hates heights over water even more. So this was of course the natural choice.

Here is the thing though. This time we weren’t going to Toronto. Rather we were stopping at the bridge to explore something my young eyes had managed to miss through all those years of travel, something my ignorance had hid from my sight: the populated island situated mere miles off the shore. An island where cars had been banished years ago and bikes and horses continue to rule the day. An island where the fudge is as iconic as its array of eclectic and independently owned B&B’s. An island distinct from the mainland and yet somehow still a part of it. An island aptly named Mackinac,

When I first became aware of this island’s existence it immeduately made my bucket list. Which is really more of a multi-paged product of my OCD stored on my computer. It baffled me that the place had managed to hide in plain sight, the ferry dock snuggled under the bridge, bound to the streets of Old Mackinac City. To ask others, “have you heard of Mackinac Island?” was to be consistently met by puzzled looks. Finally taking the plunge would continue to be met with exclamations of, “where is that exactly”!? We left people even more puzzled because, barely a month prior we had vacationed in Oklahoma City. Where is that became paired with “why Oklahoma!?” It sounds silly, but it felt like we were unearthing a little known secret or experiencing a little known exotic locale in our own backyard. And truth be told, it might be a mere 20 minute boat ride from the mainland to the island, but those first glimpses do make you feel like you have travelled to the other side of the ocean.

The first thing that comes into view from a distance is the majestic Grand Hotel looming over the hilly incline When you get closer you are hit with the smells. It is difficult to describe, so I’ll borrow a descriptive from a local; it is a unique blend of fudge, horse dung, and seaside. If that sounds less than ideal, it is not. It is the sort of scent that helps frame a memory and tie you to the place uniquely and forever. When I visualize the place, I smell it. A comforting frame of reference that pairs one sense with the other.

The sense of sight: What greets you when you dock is the glimpse of Main Street peeking through the alley way. Stepping on to the platform, this soon melds into the sounds of its busy foot traffic, the moving wagons, the zoom of bikes, and the clicking of hooves. Dave McVeigh and Jim Bolone’s The Dockporter, a novel that accompanied our drive to the strait, captures this experience perfectly.

For me it mirored my experience of arriving in Venice. It required immediate reorientation, something that I gained by slowly emerging into the thick of the hustle and bustle. Over the course of the next few days some of my most cherished moments would become the early mornings, where these same streets would transorm into a mostly silent and vacant oasis, the sightlines of the sun rising unobscured and radiant across the open waters and across the cobblestone streets. I don’t know if this inspires a descriptive of an “island’ way of life, but it certainly has a way of drawing you under its spell. For the moment, the sheer busy-ness of it all was energizing and stimulating.

The island is essentially connected by a narrow car-less highway that circles the perimeter of the landmass, the only highway of its kind in America.

This is contrasted by the gradient, hilly center. Thus the minute you step off of Main  street you are venturing inwards and upwards on a persistent incline, most of the lodging lining the raised streets above. We stayed at a historical Irish mansion, situated one block off of Main on a central throughfare for bikes, horses and wagons. Once the quiet of the morning oasis met with the busy-ness of the day, it became the perfect place to commune with guests on the porch or to people watch from the wooden lawn chairs accompanied by an endless array of complimentary coffee and snacks. Island life, as it were, comes with very little demands. Its possible to experience the whole island in a day. To experience it well in two days. Three days might be considered a stretch for some, but for us it presented the gift of entering into its rhythms.

When Therasa Weller embarked on a project in the hopes of tracking down the Anishinaabe name of her anscestors, she uncovered a distinct reality of the Mackinac Island Band that she belonged to. The island was unique given that the Anishinaabe who occupied it were born of a varied mix of Bands, which meant that this isolated island did not abide by the singular customs that tended to govern the mainland. This included exogamy, meaninng that, unlike the mainland, mixed clans meant that intermarriage within the tribe was common. The problem for Weller was that this made tracking down her ancestral roots near impossible. It did however grow her awareness of just how unique this island was.

But of course the Islands history isn’t simply confined to its post colonial reality, despite the Fort that still marks one of the highest points of its outer limits. Shaped by the last ice age, the island’s occupation reaches back into the great native american traditions of the early centuries of the emergent civilization, the name (Mishimikinaak in Ojibwe) evoking the great Spirit believed to inhabit the island. It would be in the 1600’s that a French mission would meet the British occupation, resulting in the islands Fort Mackinac being dismantled from its original location on the mainland and moved to its present day spot in the onset of the Revolutionary War. A later treaty would secede the island to the Americans before the onset of the war of 1812, resulting in the now infamous (for island natives) Battle of Mackinac Island. The war, which Britian won, ultimately ended with the land being returned to the Americans, paving the way for the early tourism boom of the 1800’s to reform the island from anceint indigenous territory and modern fishing village to a national (and eventually state) park and summer escape. There is perhaps no greater sign of this transformation than the Grand Hotel, the largest summer hotel in the world, The banning of automobiles would eventually solidify its unique identity both as an island society and as a destination.

All of this really lends the island its aura of distinctivness. It was said (to us) that the population of full time residents sits somwhere between 600 and 1000. It might be easy to mistake the destination as a tourist trap framed by a litany of ready made gift shops, but that would be misunderstanding what this place actually is, Yes, prices reflect the isolated location; bring your own snacks/food from the mainland if you want to save some dollars. But unlike, say, Disneylands Main Street, which reflects a manufactured ideal and an optimistic expression of “Americana”, or even Venice’s overt catering to its incessant tourism, replacing authentic Italian Gelato and Pizzarias with generic, marketable versions (as local Italians will say, if it has bright colors and sits in the open air, its a forgery), the shops of Mackinac Island are indeed independently owned, and plenty even owned by local residents. This is a desination, but its also a home with a local culture fueled by a school, congregations, workers and residents. Even the famous fudge shops, desgned to foster friendly competition (we actaully went during the annual fudge festival, which, its worth noting, is not really a festival as much as an excuse for a late summer season draw) are immersed in a genuine love for the craft. Equally so for the local artists whom line the adjacent streets, giving the island an interpretive representation and crafted presence. This is part of what endeared me to this place, is the apparent authenticity lying beneath the surface of its curated island life. It might be easy for young mainlanders to treat this space as a simple weekend away or a night out at the island eateries, but linger a little bit and get to know the voices who speak its story and you’ll find staunch defenders and protectors of the islands good name. For me, it was a reminder that even the brightest eyes don’t always see the value of what’s right in front of them. And yet this became an opportunity to reshape old memories into something entirely new.

With that in mind, what does it look like to linger?

It looks like buying into the tradition, renting a bike and riding the highway around the island.

It looks like sunsets on the rocks with the original Macinack Island Fudge ice cream, soaking in the sea air and sitting in the shadow of the bridge across the strait.

It looks like perusing the artists shops and inquiring about the artists work.

It looks llike grabbing the famous Love Potion #9 coffee, a spicey brew, from the only coffee shop in town and strolling through the shops of Main street.

It looks like venturing up the incline to admire the majesty that is the Grand Hotel.

It looks like tracking down the different locations for the on location shoot of Somewhere in Time

It looks like listening to the Mackinac Island Podcast interview locals and businesses and helping to unearth the islands story.

It looks like perusing and purchasing a book from the local island bookstore and immersing yourself in the islands history and culture.

It looks like learning the art of doing nothing and having nowhere to go.

It looks like life removed from the mainland, yet remaining accutely aware of the wide world that surrounds it.

Not always a fan of the stuff that comes out of Christianity Today, but they do have some decent stuff littered in the mix.

This take on Barbie is particularly interesting to me given that it touches on some issues I have with certain forms of Christianity while also bringing to light the tensions that Gerwig tables in what is arguably a pointed social commentary.

First off, it rightly frames Barbie, and I think Gerwig’s intent based on the interviews I have heard, within the context of the Biblical fall.

“The movie is a kind of retelling of the Fall. In both Genesis and Barbie, a prototypical woman reaches for forbidden knowledge and then offers it to her male companion. Both are met by a loss of innocence and exiled from perfection.”

But the author then goes on to evoke the language of “original sin”. What’s even more relevant to this evocation is how original sin takes the larger story of the fall and writes it almost entirely into the question of “individual salvation”. The author writes,

“For evangelicals, framing maturation in light of original sin can be deeply unsettling, especially because Gerwig seems to suggest that experiential knowledge is necessary to human development. By contrast, we understand the Genesis narrative as a story of rebellion. In choosing what was forbidden, the woman and man disobey and come under a curse that will plague their entire existence—from the earth under their (flat) feet to their own bodies.”

Notice the emphasis on “human development”, which is then played through isolating the woman and the man by describing existence as “theirs”. The earth gets reduced to that which is under “their” feet and something that only exists in relationship to “their” bodies”.

The writer then goes on to say,

“Even more, much of evangelical theology and practice is aimed at reversing this curse. We understand Jesus as the Second Adam, come to redeem and restore what was lost (Rom. 5:12–20). We look forward to the day when we are perfect once again.

And yet, within this frame, we sometimes overlook the process by which God sanctifies us. As we confess our sinfulness, we then convince ourselves that life with Christ will be an upward trending line of increasingly good performance that eventually results in perfection. Having begun by the Spirit, we’re pretty convinced we can continue in our own strength. But insofar as this approach to discipleship denies our humanity, we will struggle to live with our imperfection. As a counselor told me recently, “You’re not an angel, Hannah. You’re a human being.”

Notice how the appeal to Jesus as “coming to redeem and restore was lost” gets directly tied to the “we” who look forward and the “we” who will be made perfect once again. Therefore, as “we” confess, “we” convince oruselves, finally resulting in this point of observation:

“In this way, sanctification requires that we leave behind plastic ways of being and embrace our God-given humanity, flawed as it is. It requires that we move from idealized forms to the complexity of embodied lives. It requires that we leave Barbie Land.”

So here is the issue I have with all of this. It sells the Gospel as the proclamation that “we” are saved. That existence is about “us” being sanctified. That the process is about a fall being used to bring us to eventual perfection. It then frames the entire existential question that it notes in the film within a personal crisis of sin and perfection. The problem of a world that is not right or not as it should be, meaning a world with sin and death, is explicity defined as a problem with us that needs God’s forgiveness in order to be solved. The world that we percieve outside of ourelves becomes an afterthought. At best any concern for the world becomes part of our own sanctification. We become the primary point of this story of existence.

This is, of course, made all the more problematic when it attaches original sin to an Augustiinian point of perspective on the world. Here any mention of the fall becomes subtly swept up into subsequent appeals to God’s sovereignty. The fall becomes the divinely orchestrated means of our sanctification. It becomes the necessary proocess through which God brings me to perfection. All nods to a cursed reality or a cursed existence become merely a means to establishing the creator-created distinction rather than a reality that exists in opposition to God’s good creatiion.

All of this is a very common way of telling the Christian story, of course. But I think it misses the point of the story. In its rush to make the story of salvation about us and our salvation it quickly bypasses the necessary foundation for which to make sense of the problem salvation actually addresses. Existence is not us and our imperfections, even if there are grains of truth in those observations. Rather, we exist in an imperfect reality. A world with Sin and Death is not reflective of God’s good creation or Divine directive. It exists, necessarily, in opposition to God’s good creation and Divine directive. If we lose sight of this we lose all basis for speaking to the person and work of Jesus as accomplishing a victory over the opposition. If we lose sight of this we lose all basis for speaking to what is good and what is evil in this world. When it comes to speaking to an “embodied existence” in a cursed reality, we lose all sense of what precisely is being redeemed and restored.

Now here is what I think the article teases out that is helpful. I think one of the dangers inherent to the kind of story Gerwig is telling is that it uses relgiious imagery and language to etablish a basis for morality, but then uses that to reinforce an appeal towards living rightly in a materialist world. If Gerwig rightly locates the crisis of the enlightenments appeal to an undefined point of perfection and its culturallly rooted expressions, she also is wise to locate a necessary pushback to these perfections in a rejection of necessary “idealism”. But herein lies the problem. Can we truly reject idealism in a world that is admittedly not as it should be? If the world is indeed moving forward to something, what is that something? Where is it heading? If not to perfection, then where? These questions get to the heart of the crisis inherent to the enlightnment era,, and it is why idealism is both inevitable and also a very real problem when it comes to wrestling with the larger question of “existence”.

Gerwig ultimately takes the oft paved road around these questions rather than facing them head on. She romanticizes the same “fallenness” she presents as the problem. She skirts around notiions of becoming and tries to root the idea of being within the confines of a life lived between 0 and 100. If ideas live forever, existence is meant to die. The sentiment sounds nice on paper, but even a minutia of thought can betray the sentimment as muddled and nonsensicle. Death is made into a god rather than existing in opposition to life. It assumes that life can only be valuable in a world where death exists, and yet it also wants to say that death is at the root of the existential problem.

Death here is more than simple non-existence. Death speaks far more broadly to its primary expressions in this world- suffering and decay. And ironically, the materilastic worldview inherent in Barbie is not that different than the religious point of perspective it is subtly critiquing. The ultimate point of existence is the self and its salvation. Now, to be fair, I think Gerwig has written a story that is intelligent enough to breathe some necessary nuance into the equation. This is both the stories strength and weakness, as it finds itself wrestling with these big ideas and struggling to bring it all together into a fully coherent portrait of existence and its inerhent struggles. And I think those nuances are trying to cut through the noise of dangerous forms of idealism to locate some semblance of togetherness. But I do think she falls prey to some of the trappings of the worldview that ultimately underlies the story. What she glosses over is the fact that simply romanticizing death and its primary expressions (suffering and decay) does not actually do away with the existential crisis. In fact, it could be said that it ignores it in favor of simply living a life detached from any coherent and definable trajectory, at least at first glance. If she rightly notes that the world we exist in, the same world in which we locate our own imperfections, is something that requires “embodied” living, she misses how it is that we become free to emoby this existence. I am “me” might cut through the noise of our messy and often harmful cultural constructs, but if being “me” becomes my motivation for living in a not right world it becomes easy to simply see suffering and death as necessary to it and our overcoming of such as our measure of success. It simply replaces God with existence as the author of suffering and death, and further yet applies this to an undefined trajectory and unexpressed idealism that appears to be deconstructed but ultimately still remains. It limits our perspective of existence to the here and now while allowing us to pretend that the sentiment “ideas are foreever” somehow justifies this reality as it is. That might afford us motivation to get out of bed and face the struggles while turning them into opportunity, but it doesn’t have the necessary foundation to actually contend for the plasticized illusions that are ultimately driving it.

If my issues with the Christian story presented in this article stem from its message of me as the problem and my potential sanctification as the solution, the worldview that we find in Barbie is every bit as selective in that sanctifiying force. It unifies us around “original sin” by breaking down the illusions of our perfections but then anchors the ultimate goal in my story of overcoming, a story that is completely dependent on the luck of the draw and the harsh nature of a reality that hinges our success as humans on an endless list of external factors. If an Augustinian perspective has a very real penchant of celebrating ones election to that promised sanctification, in Barbieland it depends on being born in the right place and with the right abilities to overcome realities struggles. Unfortunately this “reality” has a way of reminding the many of where they sit on both sides of this forward moving story. Motivation to those who won the luck of the draw. Potential defeatism to the rest. And what is most telling about this is that in its rejection of idealism it quietly sneaks idealism back into the picture as the necessary driving force of a “succesful life” lived between 0-100.

Link to Christianity Today Article

Lengthy car rides tend to translate into plenty of time getting lost in thought

Inspired by consecutive podcasts weighing in the mess that is the present day American Film Industry, I started to think back to the 2010’s, which was really when the whole streaming thing started to become a thing. Initially I was all in, being the one who was going around telling my friends to check out Netflix. It wasn’t that long after though that I started to question the way things were going, observing some of the ways it was “disrupting” the industry. I worried about it because I love film and care about the industry deeply, even living north of the border (as they say although our industry is unique, we are still very much operating in extreme close relationship to the AFI). I see art, and film as an artform, as an important and necessary facet of our lives, and more importantly our lives together. We are formed together through art, and art informs the way we are formed together.

Thus, around the mid part of the 2010’s I made a significant shift in my perspective based on what I was seeing and reading, going from Netflix advocate to the publically anointed “anti-netflix” guy. By and large, in nearly all of the places where I was attempting to raise the alarm bells I was dismissed as a crazy, hopped up on hyperbole and made to be synonymous with “old man yells at the cloud” memes (among other more vile things).

My theories were simple back then. Training people up to expect instant access any time they want at one low cost through a singular space that has exclusive rights to the art is not good for the art, the artists, or the industry. Further, training people up on forms of distracted viewing would lead to devaluing the artform and the decline of theaters. Along with that I suggested that, even if we like the convenience, the way streaming was disrupting the industry was not sustainable. The main response I got, and almost uniformly across the board, was people reminding me of the old system being something that needed to go and that this new system would figure things out.

I eventually backed out of the discourse to a large degree and sort of defaulted to the most reasonable expectation I could find, which was the potential of emerging services creating competition and hopefully accelerating necessary change, even if it meant needing to fight back against the expectations of viewers that the habits of streaming created in the first place. While it made some differences, it wasn’t nearly enough to tame the storm. Thus, especially after Covid, I doubled down on the only real support I felt I could genuinely give- going to the theater.

What I didn’t predict, although the likes of Spielberg did once upon a time, is the insanity that would follow the reopening of theaters. Never in my life had I experienced so many theater releases releasing on a weekly basis. Even seeing three a week I couldn’t keep up. I assumed this was a byproduct of the delays incurred by closures. And yet the trend has persisted, only now it seems to be by design, a response to an increasing number of box office failures, monetarily speaking. A perpetuating cycle that is not sustainable and is not good for the art, the artist and the viewer, even in a landscape that continues, in some respects, to make an astronomical number of films each and every year. It is easy for the few success stories to dominate the headlines (think Super Mario) and to cloud the plethora of struggles behind it (think Elemental).

Which brings me back to today and my long drive. What struck me is that here I was listening to the same pundits who spent years supporting the very same system they were now criticizing while wondering how it was that we got to where we are today. The signs were clear. None of this should be surprising. The present mess is a long ways to go just to come back to some of the basic value systems that we know to be true- systems that uphold necessary support for the art lead to greater appreciation for the art/artform, and greater appreciation for the art/artform is the best way to combat the sorts of expectations that streaming has created while also supporting artists/creatives (fair compensation being necessary) and investing in a landscape that is able to support smaller, independent players along with a whole industry filled with currently struggling creatives doing the creative work on the ground, writers included.

I am certainly standing in solidarity with the writers, whom typically have been the ones most likely to suffer from the present state of things. And their voice is simply representative of the larger systemic problem. I’m still afraid, and somewhat convinced, that the casualties will be large and significant on the other side of the shutdown, and more importantly largely unnecessary given how clear these issues were. But I’m also hopeful that smaller players (like A24 for example) can help lead the way to a healthier future. This is long past the streaming versus theater wars, which was such a shortsighted mantra. It’s not about anti anything. Rather, it’s about building an integrated system that genuinely supports the art, the artists, and the artform/industry.

Film Journal 2023: Cobweb
Directed by Samuel Bodin


Such a fascinating film to unpack on both a technical and experiential level. Full disclosure: I don’t think I fully appreciated the ending. Given the journey this film takes us on (and it’s a journey), it doesn’t really bring that to a satisfying conclusion. At least on an initial viewing. That might change on a rewatch knowing what this story is and where the story goes

But I found the journey itself to be wholly interesting and engaging. While the central character is a young boy with, as it states, a “big” imagination, so much of this film revolves around how the Ditector positions his parents. Their presence is meant to ground the film on one hand while keeping the whole thing just ever so slightly off kilter at the same time. It employs a slow burn approach, which means a good half of this film operates in this largely undefined space built on a lack of clarity when it comes to who this family is and what the heck is going on. We get a smattering of traditional horror notes along the way, but, by design, this is meant to unsettle us with a sense of uncertainty regarding the potential threats out there and the threats lurking on the inside. What we know for certain is that there is something tangibly off with the kid, which is played through his less than ideal schoolyard experiences as well as his chronic nightmares/experiences at home. What we are meant to feel though, if undefinable in the moment, is that something is off with the bigger picture.

It is around the halfway point that things begin to come into view with a bit more clarity. Its here where the Director really begins to flex his horror muscles with some genuinely effective and creepy sequences. Loved his attention to the practical effects and the way he uses the camera movement to play with differing points of perspective. MSome really impressive work for a debut.

Taken together, these two halves do ultimately table some key questions regarding the larger story’s interest in the source of the horror. This is where the ending I think falls a bit short. The clarity of the second half needed to speak more directly to the experiences of the first half. It almost felt like the Director was so eager to get where he wanted to go that the journey itself becomes an afterthought. This leaves those questions swimming around with nothing concrete to attach itself to. Perhaps most notably this is felt with the ultimate development or transformation of the young boy, who struggles with the real world and translates this to the fears residing in his imagination. The pieces are there to break open his story and anchor it in a larger sense of reality concerning how it is that we both face and shape these fears, especially where it intersects with the trauma of our past,, but they are never fully pieced together.

Even with those imperfections this is nonetheless an exciting project that unearths an exciting new voice in the field of horror.

Film Journal 2023: Barbie
Directed by Greta Gerwig


If you’ve seen Gerwig’s previous films then you know she has a unique and signature style. Given that Little Women was a direct adaptation, then you also know her interest in potential subversion of the text/IP. Barbie comes out of the gate swinging, leaving little doubt that Gerwig is all in on the IP’s endless potential for color, fun, and over the top zaniness while also leaving little doubt that this is hers to shape and mold in line with her vision and her style. Unlike Little Women, where there is a history of adaptations and source material functioning as the necessary foundation of what becomes a larger conversation with and about the texts place in history, with Barbie the foundation is more an idea. If both Lady Bird and Little Women tackled the challenges of being a young woman growing up into the modern world, Barbie functions as a broader and often meta take on the systems themsleves, especially as it pertains to history.

It might seem weird to suggest that an IP like Barbie would function as a foundation for such lofty ideas, but Gerwig leaves little doubt that for careful readers of the text this is exactly what we would find. That she wraps this in a careful and respectful celebration of the iconic doll, and has a ton of fun doing so, is simply who she is and what she does so well. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Barbie is the way Gerwig has crafted a film that speaks across the lines of our constructed ideas of gender roles and expectations. She cleverly notes the irony inherent in the idea of a Barbie world where Ken is an afterthought and men are facing the oppressive and powerful forces of an alternative feminist imagination, and the real world governed as it is by the patriarchy. The film uses these constructed realities to explore the interplay between the messiness that the doll represents as both idea and ideology, caught between selling the promise of liberation on one hand and perpetuating stereotypical and impossible images of perfection on the other. True solutions to the problem must find a way to cut underneath or to run inbeteeen the clutter and the noise.

The film also embodies this conversation in a mother-daughter relationship from the real world, which allows Gerwig to explore the generational gap that exists between the idea and the evolution of an idea. Binding these two things together is the idea of “stereotypical” Barbie, played with gleeful commitment by Margot Robbie. The original idea set in contrast to the evolution. There is a line in the film uttered in its climatic moments that explores the relationship between “becoming” (changing and evolving and experiencing and growing in time) and “being” (those ideas or realities that stand outside of time and are eternal). This provides a fascinating exploration for how it is that we relate to the eternal (the idea) through these acts of becoming. I’m not sure Gerwig is quite able to flesh this out to the level that it needed in order to be really and fully substantive, and she ultimately takes some of the easy roads around what are in actuality big and messy and complicated ideas. This typically results in a tendency to romanticize mortality rather than facing its complications and conundrums head on. There is an irony that exists here in the fact that it is tackling the messiness of an idea (the perfect, stereotypical Barbie) by avoiding the full implications of a messy reality, but this is unfortunately a familiar characteristic of a lot of Hollywood films.

There is no doubt however that she is able to locate the emotional core that lies at the heart of the questions she is asking, and she does the work to make it visible and accessible. And the work she does to transcend the lines of our social constructions and speak to everyone at the same time has real payoff. Even further than that yet, Gosling’s iconic and off the rails performance as Ken, the nod to Barbie’s nostalgic pull, the incessant in film references to other films (there’s even some odes to Elf with its imaginative take on a journey between worlds and the search for ones bonded human), the exhuberant dance numbers, it all pays off by being a whole lot of fun. Especially with an interactive and hyped up crowd decked out in Barbie outfits.

Reading Journal 2023: John: Responding to the Incomparable Story of Jesus (New Testament Everyday Bible Study Series)
Author: Scot Mcknight

Mcknight’s commentary on John is part of his ongoing Everyday Bible Series. These are accessible commentaries that aim to blend an emphasis on current scholarship and pastoral concern. By design, these commentaries go verse by verse, breaking passages into bite size and digestible chunks via chapter breaks that can encourage a daily devotional approach.

One of the great things about these commmentaries is how deep they manage to dig in a fairly short amount of time. The format does face some challenges given John’s lengh; all the others I have read, save for Acts, have been on the epistles, which are considerably shorter. Unlike Acts, the thematic weight and sheer breadth of John’s Gospel is a lot, and you can feel the attempts to wrestle it down to fit and serve its format. I do think he finds success, relying largely on teasing out the patterns and points of repitition, but this does demand a bit more work and investment on the part of the reader.

Mcknight begins by noting the uniqueness of the Gospels in terms of literary text and genre in the sccriptures. He notes how the closest parallels are portions of Moses’ biography in the OT, or the different viignettes of the key figures in Israels story. This distances the Gospels from the prophetic texts in terms of interests and focus, an important distinction given how the Gospels exist in the tall shadow of the prophetic history. It represents a shift from “what the prophets said” to an obsessive take on “what Jesus did”. Given the Gospel allegiances to ancient biography and the Caesar Gospels, this becomes one of its most distinctive elements. When one considers how absent this emphasis on what Jesus did is in Paul’s letters, it becomes an even bigger point of consideration.

Mcknight then moves to explore the counter-intuititive nature of John’s Gospel. He suggests that in common approaches we come to the text with “a good idea of who God is” and then ask how Jesus fits into that given the nature of his actions and words in the Gospel. What John wants us to do is gain a good idea of who Jesus is and ask how that fits in to our conceptions of God. This is how faith is formed and expressed in the Gospel of John, faith which operates in conjunction with belief, which in the ancient mindset is understood as “ongoing abiding in who (Jesus) is. For John this is what it means to enter into the grand narrative of the “logos” made flesh. The very logos whom tabernacled amongst us. Here it is important to note how John’s Gospel is composed to reflect a new Genesis, or a new creation text. Less overt to modern readers is how it is also designed around the story of a new exodus. Mcknight does a good job of anchoring us in the ancient story of Israel as we go, the purpose of the Gospel being “to promote believing” in this story.

There is no escaping the long history of anti-semitism and bigotry that follows John’s Gospel in the pages of history, and Mcknight faces that head on. And he tackles this by employing one of this most popular forms of exegesis- learning how to read the story backwards. Here the point and context for the Gospel is stated in 20:30-31 and its emphasis on belief as a whole journey, as the living of the Gospel story. It is within this story then that John is interested in connecting the logos to God by way of consecutively drawn out relationships- John the Baptist, the world, to the coommunity of faith. Here John is using a Greek term and idea (logos) to evoke the timeless and eternal nature of the story of Israel. The Logos in John doesn’t “descend upon or enter into Jesus, the Logos of God became the human nature Jesus bore.” This is crucial to understanding the way the text “baptizes” the Greek term in the Jewish story. The Logos is alligned with the creator. It is “the light” and the very source of life. And in John, the relationship between the baptizeer and the son becomes a key part of the structure in terms of how these relationships function as signposts. This becomes important too when it comes to John’s emphasis on the “world”. So often people read John to suggest God against the Jews and God against the world. Not surprisingly this then results in common perceptions within Reformed circles that John is suggesting that the flip side is God’s sovereign purpose in narrowing the emphasis of God’s love to a “chosen” and select few. The faithful. Those who believe. But this misses what John is saying altogether, which is precisely why we need to learn how to read the Gospel backwards. To hold the Gospels aim and interest in view as we navigate the particularities of Johhns language. In John’s Gospel the “I am nots” parallel the “I ams” as an internalized structure meant to reveal Godself in Jesus. The same applies to the way the Gospel functions as in inward critique (speaking to and from the inside) pointing outwards. What tends to happen is that Christians come to this Gospel and assume an external position looking from the outside in towards the Jews and the world and the non-elect. But if they truly understood the nature of the internal critique they would recognize that such a reading only condemns themselves. And yet the purpose of the Gospel is to believe in a much different truth and a much different story.

“Who Jesus is also changes what it means to be human.” This is why the “all” phrases matter so deeply to John. “to callJesus Messiah is to affirm him as the consummation of Israel’s story”, and this consummation understands that this story is one that speaks to and for the world. We either trust this story or we don’t, and both postions have implications for how we then see not just the world around us, but what the nature of humanity and God. This is what is at the heart of the high priestly prayer. The implications of this, according to John, is quite literally what is behind the reactions to Jesus’ words and actions which send him to the cross. That Jesus is God afffects everything else. “What surprises the disciples in the midst of their chaos is Jesus’ word that they know the way, for they seem to think they don’t.” This is the very thing that should suprise us as readers. And its a surprise, if John has his way, something he hopes to root in the arrival of the Spirit, that should unsettle and disorient us from one perspective into another based on its revelatory force. “To serve Jesus” in John “means walking toward the cross of his death, but with the consciousness that the “Father will honor” that way of life. Not just honor, but redeem in the truth of Jesus’ resurrection and ascencion. A truth that can only truly be underestood in the paatterns and motifs of the story of Israel. A story that is for the world, not against it.

Reading Journal 2023: The Desolations of Devil’s Acre
Author: Ransom Riggs

This final book in the beloved series, and one I was finally able to check off after numerous efforts to pick up and finish (not due to the book, but due to getting distracted by other novels), ends the now sprawling tale in what arguably could be said the only way it rightly could; by bringing us back full circle to where we started. If the individual books reflect different levels of good to great, The Desolution of Devil’s Acre demonstrates that the strength is in the whole. It was sad to see my time with these characters and in this world go, but satisfying to see Riggs committed to bringing resolution to every plot line and character that the series has encountered on the journey.

The previous books were noted for their abililty to take the contained stories of the early entries and use that to break the world wide open. In Desolution the stakes are at their hightest, but things are also dialed back down into the central characters whom form (and inform) the story’s heart- Jacob, Noor. Hollowgasts, Caul and Miss Perigrine. The book strikes a comparitively intimate tone in this regard, but one that acts as the stepping stone into the larger world of Peculiars. Because as has been made clear, they are who they are together. The arc of these individuals is largely attached to the community; Devils’ Acre if you will.

Riggs stays commited to the central plot device, the real world pictures taken by anonymous photographers which inspire and create the different plot turns in each book. By now it is second nature and so ingrained in the process that it is easy to simply read these photos naturally into the story without being distracted by it. One of the effects this has is it shapes our imagination of who these characters are, as these are flesh and blood images that define who these characters look like within the story. It also tends to take a fantastical story and ground it in that flesh and blood imagery, although even the grounded and real world images require an interpretive lens, which is part of the device that Riggs uses to push the boundaries of what we see and read. This is what sets this series apart from other YA series, and there is little doubt this is a huge part of its charm and effectiveness, even this many books in.

Of course, it should go without saying that if you’ve made it this far in the series you are bound to needing to finish it, and rightly so. Rest assured if you are like me and dragging your feet unecessarily despite an eagerness to return to this world one last time, I think this ending will leave you satisfied. If you have yet to read even a single book in the series, I will say that uncertainty in the early going (I was on the fence with the first two books) proves worth the investment as the series goes on. It only gets better as it goes.

Film Journal 2023: Oppenheimer
Directed by Christopher Nolan

Every so often a film comes around that feels impossible to describe in its details but also feels subsequently monumental in its presence. Oppenheimer occupies this space, with the only true certainty I could glean from it being that I was in the presence of something profound and excpetional.

To suggest that this should come as no surprise given the pedigree of its Director is to sell this film short as arguably Nolan’s best work to date and, in other ways, a return to form. By which I mean his inention to dial things back, which feels like an oxymoron given the pure scale of Oppenheimer’s story, and focus on the conversational and dialogue driven nature of the script rather than the visual spectacle. In truth, this actually makes the visual direction on display here stand out all the more with its allegiance to large screen Imax format, black and white/color contrasts, and a subtle visual storytelling approach. Where this perhaps gets the most mileage is in the way he manages to weave a universal, cosmic narrative reach with the intracacies of and its interest in demythologizing a larger than life character, ultimately locating the intimacies of such world shaping moments. Every ounce of this not only feels relevant and important to our present moment, translating across different scenarios and premises big and small, it feels meant to unsettle individual complacency concering conceptions of good and evil.

So much of this also feels like a throwback to an older cinematic style where the simple, barebones and grassroots level backroom drama carries the films undeniable charge and tension on its shoulders. The sort where it is easy to feel transported to a world ripe with a ferevent anticipation and optimism colored and cloaked by a heavily disguised sense of fear. In Oppenheimer, to say that the world hangs in the balance is to feel all the push and pull of its titular stars personal and familial crisis. That is what makes it so powerful as an experience.

Structurally speaking, which is one of Nolan’s greatest attributes and strengths, the films narrative finds a way to weave its 3 hour runtime into a fascainting fusion of narrative contrasts. On one hand a good section of this film is narrowed in on the progression of events that lead to the successful testing of the atomic bomb. This features and culminates in some of the most invigorating and edge of your seat cinematic moments in recent memory. The third act then revists this sequence of events from the perspective of an unfolding and working political thriller/mystery. Suddenly all the sublte work the film has been doing to build and establish the handful of characters as layered and dynamic and complex comes to fruition, effortlessly lending its ground work to an even more explosive finale. It might feel or seem like a daring move to structure the film in this way, but the true magic of the narrative structure comes from the way Nolan has been using a well formed set of moral and even spiritual questions to build out an overarching thematic interest, binding these two sections together with a powerful adherence to the moral quandry at its heart and its appeal to not simply the philosophical questions but to the relevance of such questions to its assumed human responsibility. A responsibility to ask the right questions. A responsiblity to see how these questions play out in the different aspects of our lives.

And let me just say, the film is chalk full of great performances, and everything in this film should be challenging for their respective Oscar categrories in 2024, from score to cinematography to script to production. But is there anything more memorable here than the handful of scenes between Oppenheimer and Einstein? The film reaches moments of transcendence throughout, but it was in these moments that the astounding nature of this achievement really struck me with full force.

Book Journal 2023: Flood and Fury: Old Testament Violence and The Shalom of God
Author: Matthew Lynch

The tagline on the back cover poses the question “what do we do with a God who enacts and condones violence”. Narrowing in on two of the most essential narratives in the Bible associated with violence- the flood story and the Canannite conquest- he works to transform that question into one more in tune with how scripture itself functions as both a sacred and literary work. If the above question is relevant to many of us today attempting to engage this work as a cross cultural movement into an unfamiliar language and worldview, learning the questions the authors and readers of scripture were asking in their world can be helpful in navigating the “challenge of violence in scripture”.

There is a good deal in Lynch’s analysis of these two central narratives that was familiar to me in terms of approach and information, albeit being one of the most concise and accessible treatments of these approaches and ideas that I have come across in a good while. And then there were some wonderful surprises. Some truly paradigm shifting surprises that left me wishing I could put this in the hands of as many people as possible. This was especially true when it came to the conquest narratives. I’ve spent a whole lot less time there than I have with the flood narrative, so that’s where I was most fully engaged.

A quick and cursory summation: central to his claims about these texts is the basic concession that part of the challenge of engaging the text is the existence of contrasting views inherent within the text operating in dialogue. This is of course the result of differing points of perspective being contained and retained and preserved with intention on the part of the Biblical editors. One of the central concerns that emerges from this process is, if God indeed spoke into and acted within history, how does this shape, and indeed reshape their understanding of their present circumstance when it comes to knowing who God is by the way God acts in and for the world.

This becomes especially complex once we begin to contrast shifting points in Israel’s own formation, locating within their story majority-minority points of view. This becomes a stepping point for navigating an important facet of scripture for us reading from our own vantage point as foreigners “into” the culture and language of their day; the role of internal critique. This becomes hugely important for engaging scripture from the outside looking in, as so often the tendency is to assume our role as judge and jury of the other, and such an act of othering, of which assumptions of our being “more” evolved and civilized and them more archaic belongs, is the best way for us to ensure that we miss and misappropriate what the text is doing in its world. A crucial point of perspective is to remember the movement present in the biblical narrative- enslavement, liberation, exile- and to understand that someone looking at this story from the point of exile is to going to be asking particular questions that a liberated or enslaved peope are not. When it comes to being good readers of scripture, and when it comes to learning how to allow these stories to shape us from our present vantage point this side of Jesus’ resurrection, we have to allow these different realities to exist in conversation.

One example when it comes to being good readers of Joshua. Noting how it speaks from the perspective of having arrived in the land and having been unsettled from the land, and how this perspective writes, using an intentional literary design, the “conquest” story in the light of the Exodus narrative, can help bind us to the bigger picture of a people contending with both promise and failure. This only becomes more apparent when connecting the conquest with the flood narrative, illuminating how it was that the ancient readers and authors saw a world to be in contention with the enslaving “spiritual powers”. This plays the connection between Joshua and the Exodus in direct relationship to the true conflict. It also gives us a way of teasing out how it is that we make sense of seeming points of contention when it comes to violent acts commanded by and attributed to the hand of God and a voice that witnesses to the character of God pointing to a different and opposing way of acting in and for the world, including the Canannites. If God did indeed speak into and act within the world in a revelatory fashion (as their convictions held to be), the question that follows, in line with the flood story (itself connecting us back to Geneis 1-5), is how does this character shape the way we live together in our present context. This is what we find in careful readings of the ever changing rules that follow an established people being prepared to take residence in the land within a world filled with violence. As readers of scripture it might feel puzzling at first glance to imagine a seemingly violent text being opposed to such violence, and yet as careful readers such a vision can come alive in transformative ways when we become attune to the larger narrative at play. Not least of which is reckoning the “”liturgical” presence of Joshua, a liturgy bent not on the story of displacing a people but in displacing the idols that hold the world in the grip of violence. Joshua on this front becomes a story of the completed Exodus, one that leads straight into the reality of exile on the basis of these same idols shadowing the greater vision of a liberated creation. Which of course leads to a new Joshua (Jesus), which careful readers can note is told through a Gospel story patterned after the Exodus and the Exile, the very thing that translates it as a “new covenant” story. A completion of both stories brought up together in God’s liberating work for the whole of creation.

A brilliant book, which blends important scholarly interest with pastoral intent. Especially formative for those who struggle to reconcile the sacredness of scripture with pertinent and important questions about the problem of its seeming violent depiction of God. It appeals to a narrative approach mixed with literary and historical criticism, but in a way that upholds the central conviction in the revelatory act of God in and for the world. It holds scripture as sacred, and is intently interested in the question of who God is based on how God acts in and for the world. The character of God should be at the forefront of the narrative, and when we allow the text to speak on its own terms it should draw us closer to knowledge of who this God is. Books like this are an extremely helpful resource then for learning how to become better readers and more faithful adherents to the story contained within in.

Film Journal 2023: Godless: The Eastfield Exorcism
Directed by Nick Kozakis

A gut punch. Not something I expected from an exorcism film that, for all appearances, seems like your run of the mill genre film.

I don’t know how it was pulled off, but the way the Director tows the line between retaining a respect for religion and faith while digging deep into the potential of its abuses was quite profound. This will leave you unsettled, uncertain, angry. All sorts of emotions.

Equally impressive how it uses elements of the genre, employing many of the classic staples of horror to evoke scares and an entertaining ride, to bring out something so rooted in the real, earthy nature of its context.

This would make a fascinating double feature with the Pope’s Exorcist, or even the Exoricsm of Emily Rose. So much potential for discussion. And I say that as someone of faith. This is the sort of dialogue that faith needs.