My mom's in town this weekend. Amid much diet-straying and clothing-shopping-related budget destruction, I've managed to slip her enough Valium and rope her to the sofa long enough for us to watch two different movies. If you're not impressed, you haven't met my uber-enthusiastic mom. Trust me, what I've accomplished there is quite a feat.
So, the first film we watched was the documentary Jesus Camp. I don't have much commentary about this movie because I feel like it speaks for itself. Yes, I find it both terrifying and saddening that so many perfectly normal kids are being indoctrinated in a cultish brand of Christianity that manages to talk itself out of the most basic logicalities of our physical world. A couple of these kids seem pretty sharp and I wonder what will become of them-- I predict that either they'll experience some sort of adolescent/early adulthood satori and shrink back in horror at the utter myopia their parents foisted upon them, or they'll sink itchily into some variety of denial, so as to prolong the purity of their delusions about the nature of the god, the world, and god in the world, all the while berated themselves for niggling doubts about the tenacity of their faiths.
And the kids who aren't as swift? They are being so ill-equipped with the tools necessary for functioning productively that I'm afraid the world will eat them alive. One little nervous, spastic girl is coached to continually approach strangers she perceives as "sinners." The first is a pretty blond young woman, wearing tight clothes and plenty of make-up. This woman is polite and takes the encounter in stride, but the bizarre audacity of the child is remarkable. It's clear that she's picked up on the sexual signals the woman is emitting and that's why "God is telling" her that this woman is a prime target for proselytizing. And over the closing credits, we see this same little girl approach a circle of black men in a park. She asks them where they think they're going when they die and they say, of course, "Heaven?!" She asks, "Are you sure?" as though she doesn't believe them. As she walks away from them, you hear her say, "I think they were Muslims." But, to me, these folks looked far more likely to have fit squarely within the sprawling demographic of African American churchgoers. The set of assumptions about appearance and race that kids like this have been taught to make will doubtlessly render them incapable of managing encounters with people who do not fulfill their expectations as they mature.
This evangelical subculture seems so tragically hell-bent on suiting up their kids with a dangerous chainmail of denial, blind spots and aggression such that they may not be able to survive outside of their insular families and church groups. There are a lot more horrors to be found in this documentary, but the above summarizes the aspects I found most troubling. Prepare to be angered or saddened by your viewing-- I fell into the latter emotion, but I imagine there is just cause to feel the former as well.
And the second film I made my mom watch was this year's Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, The Lives of Others. There's no way in hell I could write a commentary on this film that is anywhere NEAR as insightful as Jeff Sharlet's. In the viewing, it's quite clear why this film was ripe for pluckage by the Academy-- it's got all the hallmarks of Oscar-worthy-ness. But Sharlet has quite effectively parsed out all the ways in which the film falls short of a trumpeting-angels type of revelation. Having read his write-up several months ago, I was keeping an eye on Mom's reactions throughout the film. Literally, appearances by the bad guy drew boos. And she seemed to fall right into the filmmaker's hands as she warmed to the sympathetic Stasi agent. Truly, this thing has the subtlety and nuanced character development of a silent-movie spaghetti western. The realist style of the film makes it difficult to NOT be leashed and have our sympathies manipulated and led--we, too, are plenty nervous about such things as technology-age surveillance and totalitarian-government-generated censorship, as we slog through the brackish waters of contemporary American culture. But, in the end, the high contrast between heroes vs. villains in this film prevents it from being the shimmering revelatory godsend of German filmmaking that the Academy voters would have us believe. But like I said, Sharlet says it a whole lot better than I do.
And now is the time wherein Mom and I go shopping. Again.
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