Re. Darkness, Part 2: In which Donnie Darko gives us bad news about Jesus
So I’ve done a lot of musing, for years actually, on why so many people (including yours truly) have such a taste for the angsty, brooding and downright gnarly in their cultural consumption. And more to the point, I’ve wondered how such preferences square up with Christian worldview and practice which, in the words of St. Paul, enjoins us to focus our attention on “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious” (Phillipians 4:8). Perhaps this is just rationalization, but I like to think that Paul’s exhortation doesn’t doom us to a lifetime of K-Love and Thomas Kinkade paintings, or even limit us to one of Tolkien and Caravaggio. I like to think that the honorable, true and lovely do in fact exist in the shadows of culture, albeit in their own unique ways. Chiaroscuro is a pivotal feature of painting, after all. But in the first half of this exploration I ended up focusing on the dangers inherent in darker tastes. Now I want to look at two potential benefits that they can bring: first, an encounter with mystery, and second, an encounter with the cross, ie a more honest grappling with our own suffering.
So, first, to the mystery.
Actually, sunglasses *do* make you instantly cool
A sizable chunk of the not-so-indie indie scene within the last five years has been deeply fascinated with the 80s (I don’t think I need to offer proof, but in case I do, *cough cough M83 cough*). And although you won’t find me combing through estate sales for old Atari consoles, when it comes to music I am pretty comfortably settled on this nostalgia bandwagon. Yes, technically I’m a 90s baby, but whatever — that hasn’t stopped me from getting thoroughly hooked on thoroughly retro dreampop. You know, the sort of stuff that came out two years ago but that’s nonetheless doing its best to sound like an awkward fling between Depeche Mode and the Beach Boys. Chiming guitars smothered in cavernous synths, hulked-out drum tracks, all on top of croony stoner vocals. Mmmmm delish.
But I don’t think nostalgia alone accounts for this subgenre’s appeal. I mean, again, I was born in 1990 and I eat the stuff up anyway, soooo…there’s something else going on here. Major clues are to be found in the generous helpings of reverb and those mumbly vocals. This music doesn’t pop, it definitely doesn’t throb, it sometimes grooves but mostly…it washes. As in over you, like the inside of a coastal cave or, dare I say it, a cathedral. There’s a reason the singers of these groups always make their voices sound like they’re traveling down a marble hallway: they want to obscure the lyrics, because the lyrics themselves don’t really matter. These songs aren’t usually about much of anything individually, but instead they come together to create that washing, rushing, sweeping sensation. They sound big — bigger than you, hon, big and maybe a little unsettling.
I bring up dreampop here as an example of a slightly different sort of darkness — not that of angst or suffering exactly, but of ambiguity, the unknown and unsolved; in a word, mystery (there it is!). The whole genre is a smorgasbord of aural and semantic darkness, and although it is a bit of a specific niche, it demonstrates the cultural power and attraction of mystery. Such demonstrations can also be found in the nebulous, multivalent symbolism of myths; in the bursting abstract forms of postmodern art; in our fascination with the bafflingly implacable, ever-abiding Dude. And yes, in the fact that sunglasses, by obscuring your eyes, make you instantly cool (no really, instantly — don’t argue with me. Unless we’re talking about the sunglasses with obnoxious uber-polarized lenses; those just make you look like a bug).
This attraction to mystery exists due to the simple fact that mystery is good for us. Mystery escapes us, and it is therefore humbling. It puts us in our place and shows us something bigger than ourselves, something that we can’t quite control, predict or get our hands around. In the absolutely choice words of St. Gregory Nazianzen, “concepts create idols; only wonder grasps anything.” Of course, it is also in our human nature to try and explain, plan, create, act, control. But inevitably we butt up against the fact that such control will only go so far, and people who don’t get that…well, there’s a word for them. If you need proof of this truth, just think of the last person who told you that he has The Tree of Life or 2001: A Space Odyssey figured out.
Yeah, that guy was annoying as hell. Don’t be that guy. Watch Donnie Darko and revel in the fact that it doesn’t all fit together perfectly in your head. Frank is wearing that stupid bunny suit just because! Speaking of…
Self-help = the f**kin’ Antichrist
Earlier I mentioned K-Love. Ever heard of them? Positive, encouraging K-Love, the Christian radio conglomerate? Ever see those ghastly holy card images in which Jesus is snuggling a lamb and the both of them look like they just tumbled out of a L’Oreal commercial? Christian or ex-Christian millennials, when you were in high school did you ever find yourself vaguely annoyed by the peppiness and seemingly-boundless energy of your youth minister?
Despite the stereotypical images of Christians (and particularly Catholics) as being rigid, dour and repressed, one doesn’t have to look far in contemporary Christian culture for a certain…sunniness. There’s a sort of positive ambience throughout, implying that following Christ engenders cheerfulness, especially if you follow Him in a certain mindset. Stroll through the Christian shelves at Barnes and Noble sometime; it’s a trip. Perhaps you didn’t know this, but apparently, entirely independent of any ecclesial authority, there are approximately 8,000 revolutionary new ways of living out the Gospel that will make your life, your church and maybe even your nation do a 180 and start feeling like a nonstop Newsboys concert.
But let me be fair — such promises of personal revolution aren’t limited to the Christian sphere of course. We also have Zoloft and bikram yoga. For our listeners in Colorado and Washington, newly-legalized recreational pot is a good bet as well.
Needless to say, I don’t trust this sunniness. I don’t trust books and storefronts and radio stations that exude good vibes. More on that later, but for now, just this observation: that, at least on a cultural level, I frequently find myself attracted to darkness and turned off by “positivity.” Not exclusively, of course, but frequently. But why is that? To repeat what I said in the last post, this proclivity towards melancholy seems a bit backwards regardless of one’s worldview, Christian or otherwise. Shouldn’t I desire to be happy and therefore be attracted to those who seem happy, because presumably they have what I’m looking for?
Eh, well, not if I’m not convinced by their happiness. Not if I suspect (as I frequently do) that the sunny exterior lacks bones and blood and muscle underneath. A body gains strength and vitality by working, by experiencing opposition, by flexing itself against gravity and roadblocks and its own weight. A soul is the same, and a soul that merely apes health by avoiding or ignoring all threats to its happiness will become just as anemic as a body that ensconces itself against all sweat and dirt and funky air.
So there’s this classic scene in Donnie Darko where the titular protagonist, a moody and maybe-kinda-sorta schizophrenic high-schooler, is sitting through an assembly during which local self-help sensation Jim Cunningham is challenging students to decisively let go of their “fear” and thereby begin gleaming new lives of virtue, freedom and happiness. A few kids approach the open mic and ask Jim nervous questions about the various problems they face in life, to which he gives compassionate and pat answers. Then Donnie steps up to the mic and immediately attacks Jim with snark. Jim replies by exhorting the audience to witness this tragic example, unfolding before their very eyes, of a young man lashing out against others because he is “a captive of his own fear.”
Well ok. The thing is, Jim isn’t wrong. But he isn’t right either. Donnie responds:
“You’re right actually! I…I am pretty troubled and I, I’m pretty confused, but I — and I’m afraid; really afraid, really, really afraid but I…I think you’re the fucking Antichrist.”
Rude, admittedly, and taken by itself rather disproportionate. Jim Cunningham may be cloying and naive, but he means well, right? Surely it’s a little over the top to call him the Antichrist? The filmmaker probably just threw in this line so as to highlight Donnie’s antisocial tendencies.
Mmm…I dunno. Donnie’s onto something here, whether or not the film itself is aware of it. His label for Jim may be nearer the truth than it at first seems, and not because of (spoiler alert) the nastiness later found in the guy’s basement. What’s off-putting about Jim, and about the sickly-sweet tendencies of the self-help industry in general, is the claim to have “the answer;” the idea that there is some esoteric method (or, Lord help us, a product) out there that will act as a psychic detox and clear out all our crap in one fell swoop. Even as we want it to be true, part of us recognizes that such a claim is almost surely false.
I would argue that such claims, beyond being merely naive and misguided, are decidedly harmful, as they leave us wasting our energy in the search for a panacea. But when they sneak into Christianity they take on a new level of irony and even insidiousness. They can indeed be “anti-Christ,” because they mangle Christ, squashing him down into a little miracle pill. I’ll say this just once, but I’ll put it in bold because I only recently found it out myself and I think it’s kind of a big deal: Jesus isn’t here to solve your problems! Except in, like, the most ultimate and transcendent way, namely the eternal salvation of your eternal soul. But on the level of the right-here-right-now, there’s no guarantee that he’ll fix your mother’s cancer, or your lousy budgeting skills, or even your porn addiction.
That last example is the really critical one. Most Christians, if they have at least a basic understanding of theodicy, can accept the fact that God never promised to make them wealthy or successful in any worldly sense. If they’ve ever heard of the Beatitudes, they understand that following Christ may in fact entail the opposite. But what’s much harder to swallow is the truth — and it is a truth — that not only is Christ not necessarily going to fix your worldly problems, but he won’t necessarily fix your spiritual problems either, your grapplings with sin and maladjustment.
But within the happy-Christian subculture is the implicit assumption that all good Christians, all followers of Christ, have kicked or are on the verge of kicking (perhaps through some weepy moment of revelation at a retreat or Bible study) their porn habits, their alcoholism, their depression, their bitterness about past breakups, their political rancor, their unease about whether God actually exists or, if he does exist, whether he actually cares. And consequently, the many Christians who do have these problems (and who see no sign of these problems improving) start to a) feel alienated from their faith, b) smother and disguise and ignore those problems in an attempt to overcome the alienation, or c) both. Needless to say, this is a toxic dynamic.
Now it’s high time for me to drop the other shoe, to tie all this back to the pop-culture question I started with, and to maybe even try to explain what Jesus might have come to do instead of making us happy and well-adjusted. But you’ll have to forgive me, as once again this thing has stretched on longer than I thought it would. So stay tuned for Part 3.
