One of the treats of summer vacation — the time of our annual trip to the states from our home in Israel — is the chance to visit with our four children and seven grandchildren. This visit also entails exposure to contemporary Anglo-American culture, especially movies. During this trip my wife and I have observed how on long car rides our grandchildren watch videos. On a trip to the Sierra Storytelling Festival, our granddaughter Eliana watched on her own device and borrowed my earphones to avoid distracting the other passengers — her Dad, Yeshayah; her uncle, Elishama, who drove; her Savta, my wife Yehudit; and me, her Zeide.
However, when we traveled to Vermont with Sandro and his four children, Gregorian, Boudicca, Aubrey, and Cassia, we were all involved in the media experience. Sandro set up his laptop in the space between the two front seats, where he and 13-year-old Gregorian sat, with the screen facing backward toward the five of us in the middle and backs rows, plugged the external speaker jack into the van’s stereo system, and fired up episodes of Doctor Who and Harry Potter movies.
Doctor Who is a time-travel adventure series produced by the BBC, starring Daniel Tennant as the peripatetic Doctor Who, who, with his companion or companions of the moment, fires up his device, apparently without knowing where it’s headed, and spirals through time, landing, with its nondescript public phone exterior disguise, in some other era. The first episode we watched, called “The Shakespeare Code,” took the doctor, with the convenient sobriquet of Smith, and his companion, Martha Jones, to London in 1599, where they see the end of a performance of Love’s Labors Lost, meet Shakespeare, encounter a trio of witches who are intent on world domination, and with Shakespeare as their ally, do battle with them to prevent their nefarious schemes from succeeding.
This episode was rather entertaining and clever. The next such episode was much less pleasant. On the way back from visiting Marty and Karen, Yehudit’s brother and sister-in-law, in their home near Shelburne Bay, part of Lake Champlain, we watched “School Reunion,” in which Doctor Who and his three companions battle shrieking alien bats who have infiltrated a middle school as their first step in — who guessed it — taking over the world. These sinister aliens, disguised as a school principal and his faculty, attempt to brainwash the young students through some kind of computer program, when they’re not kidnapping and eating them. Doctor Who, employed there as a Physics teacher, and an undercover investigator, Sarah Jane Smith, a former traveling companion of his, who pretends to be a Times of London reporter assigned to interview the principal, combine forces with Doctor Who’s current partners, Rose Tyler and Mickey Smith, along with K-9, an antiquated in style yet futuristic “tin dog” (the interactive computer Sarah Jane has preserved), and one student misfit to rout the invaders, in sequences reminiscent of “the dinosaurs in the kitchen” scene from Jurassic Park.
But that was not all. During the break between videos we listened to a couple of chapters from The Subtle Knife, the middle volume of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, a vastly better written and more engaging fantasy adventure series (to my mind) than either of the others. Then it was back to the screen, the elaborate special effects, and the heavy mood music. It was Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, with more magical derring-do, life-threatening challenges from the Dark Lord, Voldemort (he-who-must-not-be-named, the former Hogwarts student Tom Riddle), who wants to, yes, take over the world! And, as in the other stories sketchily alluded to thus far, he can only be defeated by a small team of dedicated and often misunderstood allies, key members of which are children, commonly on the verge of — or barely into — adolescence.
On Monday, Yehudit and I took Boudicca and Aubrey to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, a movie replete with further episodes in the unending struggle of good versus evil. And everywhere I looked, I saw more examples of this summer’s thematic trend, such as a poster for The Time-Traveler’s Wife, a movie for adults, which has apparently garnered some quite favorable reviews. And now that I’ve found the first volume in Phillip Pullman’s trilogy, The Golden Compass, aka Northern Lights, I can complete my reading of the series, since I started with volumes two and three, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. For those not yet initiated into this further example of English fantasy writing, it features travel between multiple worlds, an evil clerical apparatus, creatures both malign and benign, sinister forces out to strip the life and soul from innocent creatures, human and otherwise, who can only be stopped by…well, you know who — the usual allies — shamans and children.
Readers of Lord of the Rings will recognize the pattern. Even the term used by Tolkien as the epitome of evil, “The Dark Lord,” is replicated by J. K. Rowling in her immensely popular series, followed by its equally popular series of movies. All of which leads me to wonder why vast audiences would rather be anywhere but here and now.
In the spiritual arc of my generation, the term Here and Now, as in Ram Dass’s brilliant and influential book, Be Here Now, has characterized the search for wisdom. If one could only stay centered and focused in the moment, goes the teaching, one could learn everything one needed to grow spiritually and to cope with the vicissitudes of life. The core of meditation, many teachers say, is to ground oneself in the body, in the space one occupies, with one’s breath, and allow thoughts that arise to stream through one’s consciousness and out again, neither to grasp nor to resist them. This is a spiritual practice that has enhanced many lives, perhaps proven difficult for nearly everyone who has tried it, but has in many cases become a central pillar in the spiritual life of untold numbers.
And yet, the boredom of this moment and this moment only, what Chogyam Trungpa calls “rage spread thin,” the restlessness, and the continual repeating of personal obsessions, is intolerable for many, even most of us. We need, we desire, we crave adventure and meaning, an escape from our stolid and prescribed routines. While many find meaning in working for good causes, raising funds, giving hands-on assistance, and engaging in countless other altruistic activities, everyone wants to be inspired and entertained. The chosen entertainment can be stimulating but not inspiring, in other words, not the slightest bit edifying. It can simply consist of constant reinforcement of the dreariest clichés — and too often does. One might use that distinction as a benchmark of its worth.
I am convinced that the power of art — of a great poem, story, novel, play, or movie — to uplift and transform the individual who participates in its enchantment, who suspends disbelief and enters its imaginary world — is perhaps the most valuable aspect of human existence, and one essential to its continuation, since “without vision, the people perish.” Yet one must scrutinize the offerings that appear in the contemporary marketplace to ascertain which are truly beneficial to the consciousness of those viewers or readers who invest their time and money in absorbing them. I will suggest that despite the apparently escapist nature of the entertainments presently drawing attention from a vast public (“the masses”), there are vital reasons for their popular appeal and even some benefit to be derived from them, could they be closely analyzed and applied.
One common thread in these dramas is the threat to the world from demonic forces. What these forces have in common is their sheer selfishness and indifference to suffering. Indeed, they often seem to enjoy the suffering they inflict. These portrayals tap into deep wells of fear. There have in the past been times when human actors have made self-aggrandizement their primary goal and inflicted death, destruction, and incalculable kinds and degrees of suffering on vulnerable humans and other life forms. Such individuals and organized forces exist today and continue to pose a threat to us. Even Mother Nature can pack a wallop. Her immense power to destroy is seldom far from our awareness. Yet human creatures, employing their intelligence and creativity, can form alliances that allay the severity of Nature’s power and mitigate the selfishness of those whose fear of scarcity drives them to appropriate more than they need, to everyone else’s detriment.
The antidote to this justified fear is implicit in the role taken by the unlikely and often ill-prepared heroes of the tales dramatized today by the novelist and the screenwriter. Cooperation among natural allies can effectively counter the selfish designs of those who have lost their humanity, who have, in other words, ceased to be compassionate, ceased to empathize with their neighbors. It is this well of compassion that can be stirred and drawn upon to change the world for the better. Then these journeys to places and times far from the here and now can provide a life-restoring elixir to a world badly in need of it.
I haven’t mentioned this so far, but the omission of any reference to G*d in these books and movies is a striking feature, don’t you agree? It’s as if the reference has become too embarrassing, too retro, and too irrelevant, not only to the lives of the characters but, more especially, to the lives, values, and belief systems of the readers and viewers for whom the authors and auteurs have fashioned their work. Putting such an arcane, complex, and loaded concept as “G*d” at the center of any adventure story that is designed for today’s diverse audience is simply seen as too potentially divisive and commercially risky. It remains the province of more parochial and sectarian communities who hold by religious certainties but do not seek to impose their doctrines on society in general. If they do, it makes them even more suspect. The absence of meaningful G*d references also suggests that the characters in these adventures, who are frequently in life-threatening situations, rely not on G*d but upon their skills, aptitudes, and personal character (bravery, nerve, will power), and when these fail, upon the intervention of friends and spiritual allies — dead parents, angels, witches and sorcerers from “the good side,” those who, in other words, practice “white magic” and have not been seduced by the dark side. This transfer of saving grace to lesser than absolute entities points to a shift away from traditional religious certainties to what Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, among others, has called “The Paganization of Western Culture.”*
Nevertheless, one senses at the core of all these stories what in Hebrew is called Hashgachah, Divine Providence. In other cultures there are similar terms in frequent use to denote some power in the universe that rewards and punishes, some principle of justice that does not allow evil to prevail over good. The reluctance to name it, the avoidance of doctrinal certainty by the authors (though not by the limited consciousness beings who perpetuate evil), and his or her at-risk heroes and heroines, implies something else. The definitions of G*d that have been handed down to us, and, by association, G*d His-Her-Itself, have come under deep suspicion, and what one might call a humanist faith in a redeemed world or a pagan reliance on elemental allies or a Gnostic embrace of shifting polarities have replaced monotheism in many people’s minds. The unity in the diversity is hard to perceive and to trust, and the personal connection to G*d is hard to nurture. But the freedom to seek and discover the truth is something that people everywhere treasure. And the drive to be free, and the necessity of overthrowing tyranny in order to obtain or maintain it, is a constant theme of these tales. In this respect they are most in tune with contemporary values and yearnings. To my mind, G*d remains invisible and elusive, hidden, yet Omnipresent.
During the perilous graveyard scene in The Goblet of Fire (#4), I cried out, “Shema Yisrael!” on Harry’s behalf. Yet even the basic rudiments of the Judeo-Christian tradition are absent from Harry’s world. How about reciting the Psalm for the fourth day of the week, Tehillim 94: “O God of vengeance, HaShem; O God of vengeance, appear! Arise, O Judge of the earth, render recompense to the haughty. How long shall the wicked — O HaShem — how long shall the wicked exult?” Read the whole thing. It is surely a mighty spell against the forces of evil and an encouragement to those who utter these words. But no awareness of sacred scripture seems to exist. Are the “muggles” then not merely square but representative of those who attend churches and synagogues, mosques and temples, rather than pagan ceremonies? Are these “straight” people really so out of it? Or are they materialists who lack all spirituality?
Much has been driver underground or forced back into the hills of Britain during the past several thousand years of human habitation. I have noted elsewhere (see my interview, “Poetry Immersion”) about the persistence of the world of Faery in English literary life, which of course means in the popular imagination. One doesn’t have to look far to find evidence of that in the English and Scottish Border Ballads, in Spenser and Shakespeare and Keats, and in the 19th and 20th century fantasists, in George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tokien and Neil Gaiman.
“The return of the repressed” in Harry Potter novels and movies shows us that far from being repressed, these elements of the folk imagination have merely been shunted aside and temporarily displaced by the most prestigious doctrine of the moment, be it Christianity or the Enlightenment or Humanism or Science or Pragmatism. Yet these primitive chthonic elements are still there, exerting their influence and, where able, surfacing with powerful assertiveness. Efforts to tame and domesticate these prehistoric images and beliefs have not succeeded in breeding the wildness out of them. They remain as inherent parts of the national psyche and take other forms in other lands, despite the presence of an official ecclesiastical establishment. They cannot be killed or transformed into something else. They are with us forever.
Belmont, MA
August 10-14, 2009
21-24 Menachem-Av, 5769
*In a lecture at Oxford on May 15, 2009, to honor the memory of Sir Isaiah Berlin.
