Category: Entertainment

Feminism in Hollywood

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Hollywood is generally fairly reluctant to produce films with strong feminist messages. It is far easier to sell women cast as the sexy sidekick or vapid damsel in distress. Older women generally get portrayed as the perfect or controlling mother, wise or bitter hag, or as the uptight nag. (check out this brilliant flow chart for an exploration of why strong female characters in film are so hard to come by). But in the past few weeks I’ve seen two films that surprisingly subvert this dominant paradigm as they explore the stories of women trying to escape from the expectations of patriarchy. Unfortunately, they aren’t being received as such.

The latest version of Jane Eyre was spectacular. Those of us who love the novel have been waiting for Hollywood to finally get this one right. Charlotte Bronte wrote into the character of Jane that longing she as an intelligent woman in her age had for independence. Jane is a person who isn’t afraid to tell the truth even if convention discourages such from a woman. But she also is constrained because she is unable to express outwardly all that she holds in her head. While that is explicitly expressed in terms of her artwork, it serves as a metaphor for women in that era. The best she could hope for was to be a governess and to teach others what she passionately cares about. Charlotte Bronte too felt that gender constraint in her time. Even this tale of a woman struggling to be independent had to be published under a male pseudonym because society would never accept such writing from the pen of a woman. All her gifts were constrained by what the world allowed her to offer.

Into this world of constraint Jane asserts, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.” In willing it so, Jane finds a way to be herself despite the constraints of culture. Yet interestingly it is cultural constraints that are ensnaring that very message with this film version. The film is being received as a beautifully portrayed period piece love story and the audiences in the theaters are mostly women. While the film might be those things, it tells a story that is far deeper than those stereotypical gender-based constraints. That message of women breaking free and being accepted in the world as creative intelligent people is lost amidst the background romantic tale.

The other feminist film of the moment, Sucker Punch, suffers from a similar response. The film itself is a brilliant exploration of the history of the struggle against patriarchy. It portrays young girls who have been betrayed by imposed fathers (step-fathers and priests) being shut away and taken advantage of because they are women. Their attempt to escape this imprisonment is depicted through dream sequences that use Jungian symbolism to show them entering worlds typically controlled by men (church, battlefields, fortresses, technology) and conquering them in order to escape them. They had to play by the rules of those worlds and demonstrate that they could dominate in those realms in order to move past them. It is a deconstruction of those realms that leads to a better world for the girls.

Yet the movie itself follows the same format. It accepts the genre of fan-boy action films and subverts it. The girls look like the typical mindless sex toy – with costumes, lollipops, and choreographed moves expected in that genre – but don’t embody those roles but are portrayed that way in order to enter that oppressive realm and expose it for what it is. But of course, the average movie-goer can’t get past the trappings and understand the commentary. They want it to be a straight fan-boy film full of babes with guns that they can ogle at and therefore criticize it for not meeting their expectations. The message is lost on them for they came expecting the very thing the film serves to deconstruct. Who can hear the feminist message when they are upset that they weren’t titillated enough by the eye-candy?

I loved both films. But as I read the responses of others, I have to wonder what place feminism (as in the assumption that women are people and not just objects) has in Hollywood and therefore our culture. It is so rare for strong whole women to be portrayed or for the patriarchy to be questioned, and when it happens it is lost on most audiences, so what hope is there for that message to ever truly take root in our cultural imagination?

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Back to Narnia

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Aside from the Bible, The Chronicles
of Narnia have been the most formative books in my life. My parents hung a
Narnia map in my nursery, and my dad started reading the books to me at age
three. Soon I was reading the books a couple of times a year.

Wheaton College houses C.S. Lewis’s papers (and has the wardrobe),
and we students lovingly referred to him as St. Jack. My husband and I got to
know each other at the Wheaton Children’s Literary Interpretation Society,
where we’d read children’s books out loud during study breaks. The first
semester we read The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe. My husband was Aslan; I was the White Witch.

So regardless of the reviews, I am excited to go see the movie
version of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The story
is an integral part of my faith journey and I love it. But it’s strange to
encounter Lewis apart from the evangelical lens I’ve always seen him
interpreted through in the past.

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A Princess Story I Can Get Behind

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as posted at The Christian Century blog –

I am not a fan of Disney princesses. I can deal with the tiaras and the pink, but I’m disturbed by the sexualized visions of thinness, the suggestion that to be ugly is to be evil and the promotion of extreme body modification in order to get the guy.

But my five-year-old daughter lives in the real world. Escaping the princess culture isn’t even an option. So when I heard that Disney’s latest princess flick, Tangled, has a female lead who is strong, adventurous and in possession of a personality, I allowed myself to hope for a non-cringe-worthy princess.

I took my daughter to see Tangled on opening day, and I wasn’t disappointed. The story focuses on Rapunzel’s journey to break free from the woman (Gothel) who kidnapped her as a baby and has held her captive in a tower. But it isn’t just a simple tale of rescue and escape; it is the story of Rapunzel discovering her passions. Her captivity convinced her that she was weak, good for nothing but domestic chores, and in need of protection from the evil world. Yet as she enters that world she discovers that it is a beautiful place where dreams can be fulfilled. The true evil was captivity, which kept her from being whole.

The characters are all living others’ dreams instead of their own. Gothel believes she must remain forever young and beautiful. Flynn Rider is convinced that if he had enough money he could find happiness. The brigands live a life of crime while their true dreams–one wants to be a concert pianist, another a mime–are left unfulfilled. Even Rapunzel’s sidekick is a chameleon, changing to fit into its surroundings. Those who find redemption in the film turn away from the pressure to be what others tell them they should be and embrace who they were born to be.

Disney is finally telling a story that delivers a life-affirming message. As a Christian who constantly prays that my children will be able to live into who God created them to be and not be swayed by the siren calls of our culture, I found the message faith-affirming as well.

Other Christians don’t agree. Todd Hertz’s review misses the point of the redemption story, reducing the film to a story of a girl finding her parents. He suggests that the manipulative words Gothel uses to keep Rapunzel captive (the world is evil, so good must be kept protected) have biblical roots and would be a good discussion starter for family reflection. Armond White condemns the film, asserting that it is “strained through a sieve of political correctness that includes condescending to fashionable notions about girlhood, patriarchy, romance, and what is now the most suspicious of cultural tenets, faith.” He derides the Rapunzel character as “a girl of contemporary spunk, daring, and godlessness,” all apparently evil traits.

It’s hard to raise a daughter. While the culture feeds her lies about how being a pretty princess is all that matters, the church too holds her back from living life fully. Its message is that she cannot be who she was created to be if that involves questioning authority, exposing herself to danger or showing a little spunk from time to time. Women have been held captive by these messages for too long, and I’m grateful that Tangled offers something more affirming–even if it’s in the guise of a princess.

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Harry Potter and Social Justice

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Seeking justice for the oppressed. Working to end the connection of child slavery to chocolate. Helping heal a devastated Haiti. Mobilizing young people to respond to a story of redemption by imaginatively working to build a better world. I think many of us Christians would hope that those words were describing the work of the body of Christ intent on following the path of Jesus Christ in this world. In this case, they are actually descriptions of the Harry Potter Alliance. That’s right – the Harry Potter Alliance.

Since 2005 the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) has existed as a non-profit organization intent on using the weapon of love (and a common affinity for Harry Potter) to combat the dark arts of our world. As their mission statement states, they use “parallels from the Harry Potter books to educate and mobilize young people across the world toward issues of literacy, equality, and human rights. Our mission is to empower our members to act like the heroes that they love by acting for a better world.” And it’s working. With over 100,000 members and nearly 60 chapters worldwide, this real world gathering of Dumbledore’s Army is making a difference.

Like in the case of chocolate’s connections to child slavery and unfair wages. In the Harry Potter books Hermione Granger discovers that the food served at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is made by house elves (unpaid servants) and so she organizes a campaign for their fair treatment. The HPA responded similarly by asking Time Warner, the parent company that markets all Harry Potter merchandise, to switch the chocolate used in that merchandise to Fair Trade Chocolate. They want no chocolate made in the name of the boy who used love to save the world to support systems of injustice like child slavery.

Then between November 2010 and July 2011 (the time between the release of parts 1 and 2 of the final movie, the group is launching the Deathly Hallows Campaign. During that time in the films Harry will be seeking to destroy horcruxes (objects of dark magic representing evil and death) and so as a group the HPA is campaigning to put an end to 7 real world horcruxes (injustices). The destruction of the “Starvation Wages Horcrux” which is the injustice related to the production of chocolate is their first mission.

I personally find this endeavor fascinating. I applaud the mobilization of young people to acts of justice. The political climate in America these days is eerily similar to the totalitarian government J.K. Rowling presents in some of her books. Harry knows there is evil out there in the world and does whatever he can to raise awareness about it and do what he can to fight it. Yet the government power structures, the media, and even teachers mock him for his passion and punish him for trying to build a better world. They say he is the real problem – stirring up fear and trouble when if he would just accept the status quo all would be well. Harry, thankfully, never listened to such lies, so I am encouraged that the HPA is following in Harry’s footsteps by not being frightened away from seeking justice by similar groups in our world.

At the same time, it would be dishonest if I didn’t mention that as a Christian I didn’t know how to respond to this group at first. Not that I in any way oppose their purpose or am one of those people who think Harry Potter is satanic or something. But Harry Potter is a story of redemption, skirting close to even being a Christian allegory (I won’t include spoilers here, but I posted about it here — On Sacrifice, Repentance, and King’s Cross Station). I seek social justice because I believe in the sacrificial act of love Jesus displayed on the cross. God loves the world enough to redeem us through that love and I cannot help by responding by joining in on that never-ending project of reconciliation. This response to sacrificial love by seeking a better world is exactly what the HPA is doing.

When I first encountered them, I momentarily wondered why they just weren’t Christians since they seem to be responding to a re-telling of the Christian story. But then I realize that I was acting just like Voldemort (or He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named) in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows when he dismissed the muggle children celebrating Halloween as being caught up in the “trappings of a world in which they do not believe.” I had sadly slipped into the totalizing stance of thinking that everyone should think like me. But I believe in the good of redemption and reconciliation in whatever form it takes. Justice is justice and good is good wherever it may be found. The more people that can use love to seek a better world the better. Call ourselves the DA (Dumbledore’s Army) or the citizens of the Kingdom; we are working for the same goal.

I love the Harry Potter books. They are fantastic storytelling and one of our few modern myths. I can think of no better legacy for this story than this mobilization for justice. In truth we have no weapon but love and as we all know – in the end, love wins.

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LOST Narrative

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It’s been a busy week around here and while I originally told myself I wouldn’t do this, I feel like writing something about the Lost finale since it’s all I’ve been thinking about this past week.  Let me say upfront, that I fall into the “I loved the finale” camp.  Even now, I have a hard time thinking about it without getting choked up by the final scene in the church.  Sure, there were a lot of mysteries left unresolved, but the finale moved us beyond the need to master and understand the Lost universe.  To leave no loose ends would have turned Lost into a formula to be packaged instead of the story about life and community that it was.  But then again, I’m a Christian; my day to day life is about following a path of unresolved mysteries written about in book full of loose ends.  I think my life would feel hollow if everything I did or believed or if every person I met or event I attended made perfect rational sense or fit seamlessly into a narrative arc with a structured plotline.  Lost subverted the standard trite entertainment storyline, and left those mysteries wide open, leaving us with a story that pushed the boundaries of what modern storytelling is even allowed to do.

Lost, a story about the redemptive power of community, forced the viewer to enter into the communal act of storytelling.  Instead of consuming a product that told us what to think or enjoy, or even what questions we should be asking, Lost provided the space for the viewers to participate in the unfolding narrative.  Our story intersected with the stories of the passengers of Oceanic flight 815; who we were, what we valued, what truths mattered to us simply became another thread in the developing story.  The questions we had, the mysteries we debated were not thrust upon us by the writers of the show, but formed through the community brought together around the common center that was Lost.  The finale gave us a glimpse of how important a community formed around a certain event can become, and invited us as viewers to continue to create meaning out of the never ending intersection of our own stories.

This isn’t what TV is supposed to be about; this isn’t what modern storytelling is even about.  And it’s certainly not what the modern American individualist has been conditioned to be all about.  But the way Lost captured our attention and the way it (especially the finale) connected us on a visceral level to the longing to be a part of something bigger than just ourselves demonstrated that perhaps “the way things are” is not how they are meant to be.  “Live together or die alone” was a central theme to the series, utterly undercutting the messages most of us have been taught to believe our whole lives.  Participating in community, understanding the world and even our whole lives as communal rather than individual acts, is unsettling and challenging to some, but spoke to hearts of millions of viewers who were all wanting to be part of something more.  Perhaps it is just that Lost was truly the first postmodern television series, but it took the pieces of what was expected of a TV drama, and handed them to the audience to hold in faith.  That act of trust allowed us to then step outside the binds of convention and discover larger truth that held far more meaning than a momentary “a-ha” ever could have dreamt of.

In reflecting on these themes in the Lost finale, I was reminded of this paragraph from Colin Greene and Martin Robinson’s book Metavista: Bible, Church, and mission in an Age of Imagination – The world we inhabit is a labyrinth of unfinished narratives, stories and plots.  As we intentionally or accidentally bump into them and enter these often strange, perplexing and disquieting worlds, so we become implicated in their intertwining, overlapping, sometimes imploding and at other times rapidly expanding plots and subplots.  As George Steiner contends, we may have to make a wager on transcendence, that there is in fact a hidden code, teleology, or design to these narratives that it is our task to decipher.  But to do so necessitates that we construe the text, the story or the plot in a particular fashion.  To refuse to do so as individuals and communities is to refuse to indwell the text and to become hearers only of the word and not doers (Jas. 1:24-25).  In other words, what has taken place is a failure of constructive imagination.

Lost has changed the way television works.  Sure, the old patterns of merely entertaining an audience and feeding them the nightly moral of the story will continue.  But with this one show, we were invited to not just reflect on the nature of community but to enter into the communal act of creating our own meaning out of our intersecting threads.  Our entire life experience – the books we’ve read, the films we’ve viewed, the philosophies we’ve debated, the religious paths we’ve trod – contributed to the construction of this particular narrative.  We had to take that wager on transcendence and were rewarded with a mirror into our own souls.  Storytelling must change in the postmodern world as our apparent interconnectedness is unavoidable.  Lost was the herald of that change.

 

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Human Trafficking, Justice, and CSI

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csi nycsi nyI’ve gotten used to popular TV shows going the after-school special route and highlighting some issue or another.  Granted, it boosts their ratings, but it also brings attention to issues that need attention.  So I was intrigued this past week when the CSI franchise did a story-arc across all three shows that focused on the issue of human trafficking.  It pulled no punches.  They showed the horror involved in trafficking and what a complicated system it is.  From moving girls around to sell for sex, or as wombs, or for body parts there are a lot of people making money off of the exploitation of others.  And there are so many people involved in such a large and complex system, that there are no easy solutions to the problems.  The CSI’s weren’t able in other words to solve the crime and and have all the perpetrators behind bars by the end of the 60 minute episode.  The writers were smart enough not to trivialize the issue by giving it a neat solution.  But they were also smart enough to make trafficking about real people.  These girls aren’t just nameless faces – they are someone’s daughter.  And even if those working for justice can’t fix the entire system, they can do something to help one girl, and that is significant.

They also hit the (obvious) nail on the head in trying to explain why this happens.  Basically because the demand is there.  Trafficking isn’t just some evil crime committed by sociopaths, it’s done by corrupt and greed guys who know that there is a high demand for human flesh.  If the businessmen at conferences in Vegas weren’t looking for sex on demand then kidnapping, abusing, raping, and breaking women into submissive prostitutes wouldn’t be such a lucrative business.  But evil and injustice continue to exist because we demand it.  From cheap sex to cheap clothes or candy, we demand that others be oppressed for our benefit.

At one point in the CSI episode, the bad-guy of the week, a Russian pimp (played by the amazing Mark Sheppard), tried to justify why girls supposedly choose to be prostitutes.  He said, “inside, [all women] are whores. They will love to hear the things they want to believe – they are so beautiful, so fascinating, so special that they deserve the best of everything, the finest clothes, champagne, and jewels that money can buy.  And you know how you get the whore to emerge? Tell her there is an easy way to get all of this.”  His words were ironic coming after the unfolding story of girls being kidnapped, drugged, raped, beaten, and murdered by traffickers.  Instead of describing the girls, they more accurately described the traffickers and the johns.  But they also describe all of us who have found easy ways to get whatever we want even if it is at the expense of others.  We will sell our souls because we believe we deserve the best of everything.

The sad thing is, there are no CSI’s out there working to put us behind bars so that the oppression stops.  We are not going to be punished for benefiting from crimes like human trafficking and slave labor.  And we wont be rewarded either for choosing to step outside of systems of oppression.  There is no carrot or stick when it comes to making a deliberate choice to love others.  We just have to decide that we care enough for someone else’s daughter or son to stop demanding that they be oppressed so that we can have everything we desire.

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Movie Review: Whip It

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This is what a girl power movie should be. I went to see Whip It because it looked fun and was a totally Austin film (there’s something fun about sitting in the Alamo Drafthouse watching a movie where the characters go to the Drafthouse…). I discovered though the most genuine and life-affirming coming of age story that I have seen in a long time. The story is that of small-town Texas girl, Bliss (Ellen Page), who escapes her mother’s beauty pageant dreams for her life by entering a roller derby league. Sounds like the standard cliched formulaic “girl discovers herself” plotline. But Whip It acknowledges the cliche and gives the predictable a twist.

This is a film about a girl being empowered to find herself. But it does so while admitting that life is messy. You have the standard plotline of restricted kid being held back by irrational parents, but it is also more than that. Bliss’ mother isn’t just a controlling mom shoving 1950’s stereotypes of pageant queens down her daughter’s thoughts. She loves her kids and wants them to have more opportunities than she ever had. Bliss’ doesn’t pursue roller derby to rebel, she does it because she has discovered a part of herself she never knew existed. Sure, there is conflict with her family, but the take-home message is that the individual always has to exist in community as a vital part of a family. Bliss realizes that she needs her family and her friends even as she comes into her own.

What she realizes she doesn’t need is the boy. Like any in girl grows up movie, Bliss meets the guy, falls in love, and gets hurt. And doesn’t get back together. She realizes that she doesn’t want to be “that girl” who allows herself to be hurt by guys and who has to change who she is for them. She regrets giving everything to her boyfriend, but comes through the pain more aware of who she is and knowing that she doesn’t need a boyfriend in order to be a whole person. This isn’t a “men – who needs them” message, but it’s a strong reminder that a woman’s worth and identity is not defined by the man she’s attached to.

I also loved that her experience in roller-derby wasn’t based on success but on being empowered by the experience. Unlike the typical guy sports film where the team ends up winning the state championship (and hence proving that hard work pays off blah, blah, blah…), when Bliss’s team comes in second place they don’t despair or choose to learn from their defeat or work harder next time – they break into a joyous team chant of “We’re number 2! We’re number2!” happy in their accomplishment of playing the game. They were a team and they proved to themselves as women that they could do this thing. That, not winning, was what mattered. I loved it.

Whip It was all about this healthy empowerment. It was the story of a girl discovering her own strength in community. She can be fierce and powerful and good, really good, at what she does. She doesn’t need to define herself by the warped standards of this world. She can be herself. This is the sort of story that we need to hear more often. Instead of the standard plotlines of “princess in need of rescue” or “someday my prince will come” found in most girl coming of age movies, Whip It provides a realistic role model I wouldn’t mind my daughter looking up to. Instead of telling women that we are defined by our bodies, our relationship with a man, our ability to compete and win, or our ability to be nice and compliant – we can hear that it’s okay to be ourselves in all of our glory and messiness.

But lest you think that Whip It is just a sappy after school special, remember that this is a movie about roller derby. It has action, fantastic skating scenes, and tough self-assured women all over the place. In short, it’s a fun movie that (thankfully) isn’t just drivel and fluff.

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Playing Children’s Games as Spiritual Practice

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If I could choose how I would like to spend the perfect evening, it would be hanging out with friends with good food and drinks playing board games.  I love strategy games like Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, and RISK, but I also enjoy fun group games like Apples to Apples and Balderdash.  For what it’s worth, a good round of Texas Hold’Em works for me too.  I enjoy the interaction, the intellectual engagement, and the general hilarity than ensues when friends simply have fun together.

 

That said, I sometimes have a hard time playing children’s games.  There is something tediously mind-numbing about painstakingly making one’s way to Candy Mountain in Candy Land or getting caught in the endless up and down circle of Chutes and Ladders.  Building up my Cootie bug, filling my Hi Ho Cherry-o basket, making pairs in Dora Memory, or matching all the pictures on my Zingo card just doesn’t capture my attention.  But my four year old loves it all.

 

Granted it comes as no big surprise that the child of a couple of board game lovers would like playing them herself (and I admit, I was the same way at her age).  It’s just that, from the mommy side of things, playing those games for hours on end can get a little old.  Now, I love spending time with my daughter, but after the fourth or fifth round of Candy Land as I’m sprawled out on the playroom floor, I sometimes have a hard time keeping my eyes open.

 

But for my daughter, it never grows old.  Each time she builds a Cootie bug, she gets excited about getting to make an entirely new creation.  Each card she turns over in Candy Land holds the possibility of adventures – to whisk her away at any moment to exotic locales like Gum Drop Mountain or the Candy Cane Forest.  Each spin in Chutes and Ladders holds the risk of plummeting her downward and losing all she has worked for or the reward of immediate ascension.  In short, in her life ruled by the power and whims of others (mom and dad), these games hold wonder and mystery.  With every spin of the wheel she enters into a magical world of unpredictability and excitement (not to mention repeated trips to every child’s dream land – the Candy Mountain).  These games are full of blessings she can delight in.

 

So even as I struggle to keep my eyes open as we play yet another round of her favorite games, I realize that I could learn a lot from my four year old about being spiritually present.  When looked at through the right eyes, life is mysterious and full of adventure.  I get to participate in acts of creation each day as I cook entirely new meals.  I am whisked away to exotic locations when I simply stop and notice the beauty of the world around me.  I don’t need the Candy Cane forest when I can lie under the trees with my kids watching the leaves flutter and the clouds float by.

 

I am so used to the ordinary being, well, ordinary, I forget to find the wonder in it.  But seeing my daughter find adventure in what I found tedious reminds me to shift my perspective.  The world is unpredictable and exciting and full of all sorts of blessings I can delight in – as long as I allow myself to be present in it and allow it to be those things.

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Food TV, Michael Pollan, and Generation X

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So I was fascinated by Michael Pollan’s recent (lengthy) article in the New York Times, Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch (thanks Will Samson for the head’s up). In it he takes aim at our cultural obsession with watching television about food while at the same time spending less and less time in the kitchen. While the article explores in depth the cultural and social issues surrounding food tv and cooking in our modern world, his main point is to assert that cooking is important and shouldn’t be abandoned. I generally love Michael Pollan, and aside from his digs in the article at stay-at-home moms and tall women, I agree with most of what he wrote. Cooking is important – it is healthier, cheaper, and better for you to cook from scratch. No argument there. I just don’t know if I would point a finger as vehemently at food television as he does. Pollan writes –

How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking.

That decline has several causes: women working outside the home; food companies persuading Americans to let them do the cooking; and advances in technology that made it easier for them to do so. Cooking is no longer obligatory, and for many people, women especially, that has been a blessing. But perhaps a mixed blessing, to judge by the culture’s continuing, if not deepening, fascination with the subject. It has been easier for us to give up cooking than it has been to give up talking about it — and watching it.

Today the average American spends a mere 27 minutes a day on food preparation (another four minutes cleaning up); that’s less than half the time that we spent cooking and cleaning up when Julia arrived on our television screens. It’s also less than half the time it takes to watch a single episode of “Top Chef” or “Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star.” What this suggests is that a great many Americans are spending considerably more time watching images of cooking on television than they are cooking themselves — an increasingly archaic activity they will tell you they no longer have the time for.

…

The Food Network has helped to transform cooking from something you do into something you watch — into yet another confection of spectacle and celebrity that keeps us pinned to the couch. The formula is as circular and self-reinforcing as a TV dinner: a simulacrum of home cooking that is sold on TV and designed to be eaten in front of the TV. True, in the case of the Swanson rendition, at least you get something that will fill you up; by comparison, the Food Network leaves you hungry, a condition its advertisers must love. But in neither case is there much risk that you will get off the couch and actually cook a meal. Both kinds of TV dinner plant us exactly where television always wants us: in front of the set, watching.

Let me first, say I have a love/hate relationship with the Food Network. I was addicted to it during my pregnancies when I was so sick I had to be hospitalized for severe dehydration. I couldn’t eat much less cook, so I lived vicariously through the Food Network. That said I really can’t stand to watch Rachael Ray, Sandra Lee, Paula Deen, Bobbie Flay or Guy Fieri – but I am a huge fan of all things Alton Brown and Iron Chef America, as well as a Top Chef fan. I admit that most of those shows have little do do with cooking, and are at best simply food porn. Some people like to watch guys dress up in costumes and chase a ball around a field for entertainment, and some of us like watching a chef attempt to make a gourmet meal on a dorm-room hot plate. To each her own.

But.

Every person I personally know who watches cooking shows says it has inspired them to spend more time in the kitchen. Far from being the cause that keeps us away from the stove, it has been the impetus that brought us back. You see, we at the tail-end of Generation X are the children of the 80’s, in other words, the children of convenience. We grew up on diets of poptarts and hotpockets. Dinner was the McDonald’s drive-thru or maybe Chili’s on special occasions. I remember my mom mocking a friend who claimed to always make her soups from scratch – condensed Campbells was our normal fair. Just recently I had to explain to my husband that you could make mayonnaise from scratch. We are the generation that never learned to cook. Most people I know would have no idea how to make their own pasta sauce – or even why they should. That is until they started watching the Food Network. All of a sudden a generation that never had the opportunity to learn how to cook is abandoning the drive-thru and learning a new skill. On numerous occasions I have watched a Food Network show, downloaded the recipe and tried it myself. Recently a friend told me that her tween daughter one evening paused the Food Network show she was watching and went to the kitchen and made the featured dish. For me and many of my friends, the Food Network has taught us how to cook.

But not only are we learning how to cook, we are rethinking what we are eating. When we see Michael Simon say he would never use frozen boneless skinless chicken breasts or hear Jamie Oliver discuss seasonal produce, some of us start asking why. Why is it better to eat whole foods instead of processed things? Why should I eat in season? Why is is better to buy whole chickens than just the breasts? Sure these are all basic aspects of cooking that our grandparents knew well – but which my generation never learned. There were valid reasons our parents gave up wholesome food for pre-packaged convenience, but how can we honestly be expected to know what’s better unless we are taught. And for better or worse my generation’s teacher is The Food Network. It of course has it’s issues. It’s corporate, has the products it must push, and seems to care little about ethical issues related to food. But perhaps all that is a symptom of a problem and not its cause.

So, I agree with Michael Pollan’s conclusion. To be healthy we (men and women) should be spending more time in the kitchen cooking from scratch using whole ingredients. But, from my limited perspective it’s not necessarily the Food Network turning us into couch potatoes, it is instead helping save us from what we’ve already become.

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Stories That Mean Something

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So for the last month or so, Mike and I have been watching the Firefly DVDs. Now that we’ve seen them and the movie, we can now join in on the “what a fantastic show, what idiot cancelled something that good???” outcry. I like good stories – stories that go deeper than mere entertainment, that take the time to explore the human condition. Stories that ask questions and in doing so run up against the mysteries of the universe.

Of course, most of these good stories fall into the SciFi/Fantasy realm. There is something about that genre that allows for the unknown to be explored and tested. And there is something about those of us who are drawn to those stories that allow for them to be lengthy tales. Part of the magic in something like Lost for example is the convoluted drawn-out path the story has taken. Having cut our teeth on epic tales like Lord of the Rings or three part stories like Star Wars, we want worlds we can enter and stay for awhile. That’s why I think Deep Space Nine is my favorite Star Trek series – we got to see a continuing story of a community unfold. So it was sad to get caught up in the Firefly story and have it cut short before it even really began.

But it made me wonder why so many of us within the emerging church are caught-up in these sorts of stories. During the spring it seemed like every person on my twitter page was watching Lost as the mystery unfolded and deepened. I wonder if in part it is our affinity for these ever-developing stories that brought us to the emerging conversation in the first place. Too many faith communities act as if the story is over – as if the story of our faith was merely a static event of the past that holds no mystery or wonder for us now. That sort of story isn’t engaging or alive and can only be entered into in the most perfunctory of ways. But those of us who had an inking that there is some sort of epic tale unfolding around us and who believe that God in all his mystery is still at work in the world wanted to join our friends at a campfire and tell better stories. And we find ourselves watching together the good stories like Lost, or Firefly, or Lord of the Rings, or The Matrix because in them we see glimmers of the stories we want to affirm we are a part of. Or as Sam says in Lord of the Rings, “Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why.”

So what stories hold the mystery for you? What are the good stories you watch or read that go deeper than just entertainment?

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