Shared Experience
For Valentine's this year Mike and I went to the Moulin Rouge sing along at the Alamo Drafthouse. For those of you not privileged to live in Austin, the Drafthouse is what all movie theaters should be – good food, good drinks, good movies (and often even better prefilm entertainment), and creative special events (like the Vampire Prom last fall, Lord of the Rings viewing marathons complete with meals at all seven hobbit dining times…). So we made it a date and headed to the theater for a night of freedom, beauty, truth, and love (complete with theater supplied props like strobe-light diamond rings and green fairy glow sticks). And I can honestly say I haven't had that much fun in a long time.
First I have to say that Moulin Rouge is one of my all time favorite movies. A deconstrction of how reality and art inform and subsume each other complete with soundtrack – what's not to love? I shamelessly say that I not only know the words to all the songs by heart, but I've worn out three (yes three) CDs of the soundtrack. But my point here is not how much I love the movie, but to reflect on the viewing experience.
When I first saw it eight years ago, I had no clue what to expect. I knew it was an artsy film and when people would talk about it they inevitably asked (in whispers) if I knew what "voulez vous couchez avec moi ce soir" meant. The theater I saw it in was filled with almost exclusively teenage girls – all there because of the popularity of the Christina Aguilera version of "Lady Marmalade." So I watched the movie utterly mesmerized and sat in stunned silence as the credits rolled and the teens around me started chatting and saying what a stupid movie it was. I heard the same response repeatedly in the weeks to come – "stupid movie, "I didn't get it," "it's not even a good musical." They didn't get what they expected to see – a film/musical/love story that fit the normal constraints of those genre – and so their response was rejection and ridicule.
I didn't have a chance to see Moulin Rouge on the large screen again until this past week at the sing along. This time the theater was full of devoted fans – those of us who have watched the movie and listened to the music so many times we know it by heart. We sang our hearts out at the top of our lungs in communal admiration of the film. This shared experience couldn't have been more different from my first viewing of the film. This crowd knew what to expect – we were a community drawn together based on our admiration of the film. Granted community bound by admiration of a particular movie isn't necessarily substantial, but it was still nice to be a part of.
And I could go off about the pros and cons of likeminded community. Is it good to surround ourselves with those exactly like us? How does such encouragement help us grow? Or do we retreat into ourselves if we aren't pushed to engage the Other? But honestly, it was just nice to experience that moment in time. To enjoy it and notice how different it was from a previous experience of the same event. Silly perhaps – but it was nice to find pockets of communal oneness.
julieclawson(at)gmail(dot)com 
Is there a chance that your experience of a similarly-minded community that knows what to expect could relate to our earlier conversation about liturgy?
Rebecca, I had exactly the same thought.
As usual, I think C.S. Lewis has some interesting thoughts on liturgy, and I think buried in there is a similar appreciation for a shared experience that one can enter into almost unconsciously:
"Novelty, simply as such, can have only an entertainment value. And they don't go to be entertained. They go to use the service, or if you prefer, to enact it."
"Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. And it enables us to do these things best…when, through familiarity, we don't have to think about it. As long as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don't notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling. The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God."
"But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself; and thinking about worship is a different thing from worshipping."
"Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the celebrant. You know what I mean. Try as one may to exclude the question, 'What on earth is he up to now?' will intrude. It lays one's devotion waste. There is really some excuse for the man who said, 'I wish they'd remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new tricks."
"Thus my whole liturgiological position really boils down to an entreaty for permanence and uniformity. I can make do with almost any kind of service whatever, if only it will stay put. But if each form is snatched away just when I am beginning to feel at home in it, then I can never make any progress in the art of worship. You give me no chance to acquire the trained habit…"
Sounds like a personality thing to me. Some people like (maybe even need) "permanence and uniformity" and others of us usually prefer creativity and diversity.
Of course, Mike, your statement begs the question: Are permanence/uniformity and creativity/diversity necessarily mutually exclusive? I could see a permanence and uniformity to the shape or order of our worship rituals, but a creativity and diversity in the way we enact the order of the rite.
Maybe we always include the kyrie in our worship, and the words are always "Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy." But maybe we sing it some times, or speak it other times, or pray it meditatively as we approach a cross in the front of the sanctuary. Maybe we sing it to hymn tune. Maybe we sing it to an African chant, or an Indonesian melody. Maybe someone sings it to us. Maybe we say it over and over again as we light candles…
Even within a structure of permanence and uniformity we can experience creativity and diversity. I think that our worship suffers when we believe that it's an either/or proposition.
Hey, if that works for you melissa, cool. However, I had a slightly broader idea of creativity and diversity in mind for myself.
For example, as we said on the website of our (now defunct) church plant:
and
I know that might not be for everyone, and that's fine, but that's what I had in mind by "creativity" and "diversity".
the best boring picture ever.
Mike, your comments put me in mind of Alan Jacobs' recent article/review in "First Things"
"Halter, Smay, and McLaren are all pragmatic people and (to borrow a fancy but useful word from the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss) bricoleurs. A bricoleur is someone who takes up whatever tools are at hand to get a job done. He doesn’t worry about consistency or perfect fit but about making progress toward a goal. So McLaren gathers some Anglican liturgy here, some Orthodox ascetic spirituality there, and adds to them a few tricks picked up from Western monastic traditions. Do they all fit together seamlessly? Probably not, but there’s something here for everyone, surely. McLaren’s model of spirituality seems to be predicated on that most American of phrases: “You’ve got to find what works for you.”"
http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=6443
I think this model is based more on the idea "Let's not reject things that are good just because they're not from "our tradition"."
Or maybe just Paul's statement to the Corinthians that "all things" are ours in Christ.
At any rate, Christians have been mashing up stuff that didn't originally go together for a long time, ever since Paul started quoting poems to Zeus and Greek philosophers in a sermon about the Hebrew God and a resurrected Jewish king. Or since early Christians decided to borrow the pagan midwinter bacchanal and turn it into one of the holiest of their holy days. So I guess I see no reason not to continue the practice.