Stop, Look, Listen

Every pastor knows that moment when you take a step back from something and take in the full extent of how things haven’t worked out as you intended. Often that’s good – you had one idea, but God has worked things differently and it’s all rather gratifying. It goes the other way too – you intended something to be one thing, but events conspired to make it something else, and now if you had the time over again you’d do it very differently. Father Paul – the priest at the centre of Netflix’s Midnight Mass – seems to have one of those moments towards the end of the series; avoiding spoilers, it’s very much the latter for him. He’d envisaged one thing; what actually happens is, to say the least, not to plan. It’s horrifying and ultimately deeply moving as his intentions spiral out of control.

Midnight Mass is for much of the time a slow, considered watch. I can’t remember a show which allows quite so much time for a long discussion about what happens after we die and on other occasions aspects of theology. Centred as it is around a Roman Catholic priest on an isolated island, it is also one of those rare shows which really seems to understand the church and faith which form the anchor of its drama; although it does ultimately become something else, it’s fair-minded and takes religion seriously. Research has been done, and many of the little details ring true. If you’re a person of faith, you will recognise yourself here.
As events take a horrifying turn, however, this is very much a show about how even the best-intentioned of people can find events running out of their control, turning into something far more sinister than they or anyone else could have dreamed of. Father Paul is clearly a man of good intention and many gifts; but so convinced is he of all this that he reads approval for his actions into Biblical texts when a cool-headed step back would see something different. But he’s high on the adrenaline of conviction, and people in those states are hard to stop; even when the alarm bells are ringing, he’s too busy and excited to hear them. He seems to have forgotten a fundamental tenet of his faith – that everybody, including himself, is prone to sin and our most basic motivations should always be interrogated. His failure to do so means his dreams for the island community he pastors turn to ashes in his hands.

We all do it, don’t we? We all have moments – be they quiet conversations over coffee, thoughts scrawled in a journal, career choices or relationship choices – when we’re swept up in the excitement of a moment and fail to examine things closely enough. Unintended consequences may be unintended, but that doesn’t stop them from being consequences. Midnight Mass starts with the dramatisation of one character’s nightmarish moment of unintended consequences overtaking him to devastating effect; the rest of the show tells the story of a whole community ultimately suffering for similar reasons in the light of a very different series of events.

We tend to venerate action and results; such things are tangible, after all. They show us we have achieved something. How often, however, are the actions and results mere noise, convenient fillers of silence that have given us something to do when we should have been focussing more on who we are? God is often more concerned with who we are than what we do, the extent to which we are living a Jesus-shaped life as opposed to the smoke and mirrors we put out there to reflect ourselves and our actions better. He’s not fooled by momentary fruit; Midnight Mass is a powerful reminder that we’d all do a little better to stop, look and listen rather more.

Squid Game: Don’t Panic!

Somebody has said that worrying is like a rocking chair – it gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you anywhere. Like all such statements, there’s both an element of truth in it and it’s also unhelpful, not doing justice to the complexity of reasons and circumstances that lead someone to worry. A similar thing can be said about moral panic – it give us something to do and feel, but it often doesn’t achieve much and obscures much of the truth of what’s really going on. Not the whole truth, certainly, but no doubt part of it.

Squid Game is enormous, and like other things that become seemingly overnight pop-culture sensations moral panic has broken out around it. You surely know its premise by now – a South Korean Netflix show that tells the story of people in dire financial straits who are tricked into playing a series of childhood games (the title is from a children’s playground game of which I’ve never heard) with each other where people who lose the games are summarily killed as they seek a huge cash prize. Even if we take into account that Netflix’s method of counting views is notoriously undemanding in terms of what it defines as a view (you only have to watch 2 minutes of something for it to be registered as a ‘view’ in terms of viewing figures), it is still enormous – roughly twice the ‘viewers’ of the second-placed Netflix show, Bridgerton.

The moral panic around Squid Game seems to be about both the extremely brutal violence and the reports of schoolchildren playing games inspired by the show in the playground, and other associated social media phenomena. I haven’t seen any claims that any children have died or even used guns doing this; in all honesty, I’m not too sure what that side of this moral panic is about. School children have always and will always play games, and those games will often include exclusion and bullying – something which we always need to address. A more pertinent concern is how easy it can be for children who are too young to see this show; Netflix accounts can be child-locked, but to be honest children will often find a way if they want to. Squid Game is a show aimed at adults; that a youth culture wave has swept up around it is in many ways a separate issue – if it is an issue at all.

But the moral panic around the show obscures much of what the show is trying to do – and what it’s trying to do is important. Despite what you may think from a bald description of the premise, this is not mindlessly violence; yes, it’s brutal, gory and shocking. We do, however, get to know a lot about many of these characters, especially as the show progresses through its 9 episodes. We get to know them has human beings, with weaknesses and strengths, hopes and dreams.

Most importantly, this is a show about debt and financial poverty. South Korea has a crippling debt problem; personal debt exceeds GDP by 5%. It’s an epidemic and it’s getting worse; a global pandemic will only have exaggerated it. A show about people having to do terrible things to get out of debt is deeply resonant in its home culture. In an honour/shame culture, the shame associated with poverty and debt is powerfully portrayed here. The show’s second episode gives an extended insight into the personal circumstances of some of the characters that has led them to this desperate place, and in its own way its just as affecting as the killings themselves.

The show also fits in a broader tradition of extreme cinema/television – the exaggerated blood splatter, for instance, as well as the competitive violence recalling films like Battle Royale (also South Korean), where a tidal wave of youth crime is addressed by taking a class of school children to an island, giving them weapons and waiting for them to kill each other. Squid Game also takes place on an island – one of many parallels with the influential and troubling film.

The show pushes us emotionally in the context of a network of characters we grow to care about, in predicaments that are painful and from which most of us would naturally turn away. People in debt have made choices and deserve to be there to some extent, we might say; Squid Game presents us with the logical conclusion of that and a society that forces people to do anything to stay afloat.

So much of the show is designed (brilliantly) to demonstrate how people in such desperate need have agency and choice removed; they are in uniforms of one colour, often seen tramping the stairs of an Escher-inspired set of seemingly endless and aimless staircases. Grown adults are reduced to playing with marbles in a bid to stay alive, people reduced to shadows of themselves by a system that self-perpetuates and grinds up those at the bottom with scarcely a thought for who they are.

Squid Game is designed to ask us difficult questions. You don’t have to watch it, of course. No one is making you do so. It’s OK to be concerned about kids having access to violent content (haven’t they always? – not that this means it’s not an issue). But let’s be sure to listen, and to listen well. One of the many extraordinarily well-staged scenes of mass violence in the show (manipulated by the games organisers) takes place in a hall, lit by strobe lighting. Strobe lighting can be a cliché of action films, lazy and repetitive; here it builds fear and uncertainty to stunning effect. Gradually, a lone voice is heard. One of the players – an old man, who suffers from dementia, has found his way to a relatively safe spot on top of a scaffolding-like tower. Amid the violence and flashing lights, he plaintively pleads with the rest to stop, to look at what they’ve become. In doing so, it’s not hard to think of a Christian desert father atop a pillar, or a John the Baptist like figure preparing the way. As he persists in speaking, the violence slows to stillness – for that day at least. For a moment, people start to pay attention.

He who has ears, let him hear.

#firstimefriday Bill Murray and Embracing The Transcendence Of The Ordinary

In the dark, strange days after 9/11, when the skies over London were still eerily empty of the planes that would on a normal day noisily criss-cross their white plumes overhead, a story spread across the city. There were, it turned out, variations on it, but it went something like this. A Muslim man had unknowingly dropped his obviously full wallet on public transport somewhere in the city; a fellow passenger saw this, picked up the wallet and handed it to its owner. He was very grateful, and as he thanked the person in question, he would lean forward and whisper to him or her “Stay out of [names part of London] on [names a day/date].”

It’s a classic urban myth; it plays on fear and prejudice; it’s always ‘a friend’ or a friend of a friend’ to whom it happened; the actual people involved are always just one remove away. These myths spread like wildfire across cities – even before the internet and social media were in wide use – and become accepted truths. Of course, these days one can find few people who actually believed this myth; but back in the day when most of us heard it most of us believed it, at least for a few minutes. For some of us, such stories become a prism through which we view an issue; the more light-hearted ones become shared jokes which bind groups together. In many cases the truthfulness of these myths isn’t what’s most important; it’s what they mean at a deeper level that matters, the way they shape us and define our views of people or things. Urban myths are in that respect a close relative of what we now call fake news.

Bill Murray is an actor around whom a series of what appear to be urban myths have grown up, and the 70 minute documentary The Bill Murray Stories: Life Lessons Learned from a Mythical Man  (available on Netflix in some countries) is the story of a film-maker trying to get to the bottom of them, establish their truthfulness and meaning. It turns out that the myths around Bill Murray are mostly true – he really did turn up to a student party and do the washing up; he did join the engagement photo-shoot of a random couple; he did play kickball with some people in a park that one time; he did turn up at a bar and start serving drinks behind it.

On they go. The documentary is intoxicatingly cheerful; it’s the good-natured story of a global star, blessed with magical comic timing, who has appeared in some of our best-loved movies, doing nice things for ordinary people. What does it all mean, the film-maker wants to know?

I remember Bono once being quoted as saying ‘I see fame as a calling’. It’s one of those Bono-isms that winds a lot of people up: I understand that, but I couldn’t help thinking of those words when I was watching this film. It seems that Bill Murray sees fame in a similar way; if one has this ridiculous thing called a celebrity, one might as well do something useful with it, the logic goes. Bono takes that in one direction; Bill Murray in another. The roots of this seem to be in his improvisational comedy background; as the film explains, in improv the artist has to say ‘yes, and … ‘ then move further down the road. Fear must drive you to new things in improv, not weigh one down the way it does so many of us. He has no entourage to bring with him, no PR people to spin. He’s just himself, improvising outside the performance space.

What’s interesting is what this all means to the people Murray meets. One of his directors says ‘he shows up not to take over, but to be present’. One person who testified to one myth’s truthfulness first-hand said ‘He made feel like a bigger person than I am … I’m not part of his story, he’s part of my story.’ Another says ‘By action, if not by word, he’s teaching us how to live.’ It’s an invitation not to live on autopilot, but rather to live wherever the wind blows.

For the follower of Jesus, this all sounds a little like Jesus speaking of how the Holy Spirit, the essence of God, guides us and works. It sounds a lot like an invitation to embrace the opportunity to see transcendence and holiness and opportunity in the ordinary stuff of the day to day, for ourselves and for those standing in queues with us, at the next table, in the car beside us. What if we Jesus followers saw those moments as chances to bring transcendence to others and ourselves in those ordinary moments; what if we did so in such a way so as to not draw attention to ourselves with a lecture or sermon or the like? But something more simple – quietly paying for someone else’s coffee, for example.

I don’t know how all this works. Bill Murray is no Jesus – a quick read around online relates that many have found him hard to work with and that one ex-wife mentioned abuse and addiction as a cause for her seeking divorce (though these claims were later withdrawn). In these true myths, is Murray somehow seeking atonement for all that too? We can but guess. But it all seems to be the sort of gentle, grace-giving, enlightening thing Jesus to which Jesus might call us.

#firstimefriday John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum The World Is A Better Place For Having Keanu Back On Centre Stage

I’m old enough to remember when it was cool and knowing to slag off Keanu. ‘He’s going to play someone with no brain you say [Johnny Mnemonic]? How appropriate?”. How we laughed! I hope I’m also old enough to know better now. Of course, Keanu has been in his share of bad films and has been bad in a few films too. A glance through his back catalogue will also show how many damn good movies he’s been in. As I heard one critic put it recently, his strength doesn’t lie with his voice so much as it does with his body. And your body is a big part of the actor’s trade.

We come now to the third John Wick movie, a franchise that has put Keanu centre stage in the film-goers’ consciousness once more. I think the world is a better place for that. This is a series of films in which Keanu channels grief and its attendant stages – anger, denial, bargaining – through the tightly wound coil of his body, inflicting pain on anyone who crosses his path. By the end of this film, the whole set of three has only covered a few weeks of narrative at most. This is a man whose grief and his reaction to it is leading him further and further down the rabbit hole.

It’s utterly relentless, breathlessly entertaining. You feel every bone snap and every shattered pane of glass deep in your bones; there’s wit laced with the violence too. Death by horse, death by dog, death by book (carefully placed back on the shelf in the right place afterwards, naturally). The world of assassins with a moral code is expanded and doesn’t make sense, but somehow that’s all part of the fun. Asia Kate Dillon is particularly good as the person who makes seemingly arbitrary decisions as to what’s going on on behalf of the ever invisible High Table. There’s a staggering sequence on motorbikes that I would have liked to have lasted longer. There’s a direct quote from The Matrix, and several other cinematic nods besides. And there’s neon. So much neon.

It’s balletic, stylised violence by way of John Woo and The Raid films; the sort of thing Tarantino reached for in Kill Bill but never found as conclusively as he seemed to think he had. It’s absurd, but deliriously entertaining – if two hours of more or less relentless fighting and killing is what you’re after. It’s violence so choreographed as to not be exploitative; this is unreal violence as a spectator sport, as performance art. A man – Keanu – and others, bending bodies to their will, in service of a story and characters you come to love almost despite yourself.

It’s hard to imagine why you’d see this film if you didn’t know what to expect; for me, it was slightly weaker than Chapter 2, which I enjoyed more than the first film. Either way, this is one just to relax and go with. The world is a better place for having Keanu back in big films on the big screen, channelling grief and anger through a body that is cartoonishly unlikely to break. Long may this wick burn.