I felt like some escapist summer fare at the cineplex, so I took a couple of hours of vacation time and went to see Salt, which was purportedly a spy thriller.
Excrebable, is what it was. Ludicrously stupid. Redundantly violent. The worst movie I've seen in years.
The basest of behaviors, however, can point us back to first principles. For me, that means the Christian alternative to the practically non-stop fit of vengeance wrought by Angelina Jolie's preposterous character.
Cf. Rene Girard, in Violence and the Sacred: "To make a victim out of the guilty party is to play vengeance's role, to submit to the demands of violence."
Sounds like Angie's Evelyn Salt, alright, beholden to a vendetta. Yes, she does switch vendettas midway through the flick, changing a Russian, retro-Cold War vendetta for her own personal one. But it comes to much the same thing: trying to put an end to violence through violence, not recognizing, or perhaps not caring, that constant retribution creates a ceaseless cycle of reprisal and counter-reprisal.
The apostle Paul urged a different way in Romans 12:19: Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord."
Angie's scriptwriters probably didn't see the right box office equation in that view of the world. (Although Werner Herzog certainly got a lot of ironic mileage out of the "wrath of God" in his film Aquirre, der Zorn Gottes.)
Girard again: "By denying religion any basis in reality, by viewing it as a sort of bedtime story for children, we collaborate with violence in its game of deception."
By shelling out $6 for a late-afternoon matinee of Salt, was I collaborating with volence?
Showing posts with label Rene Girard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rene Girard. Show all posts
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Reading Girard, Groundhog Day 2010
From Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred:
"[T]he judicial process is more concerned with the general security of the community than with any abstract notion of justice."
This may be true. But who defines what serves the general security of the community?
Or, put another way, why was the prison at Guantanamo Bay set up, and why is it still open?
"[T]he judicial process is more concerned with the general security of the community than with any abstract notion of justice."
This may be true. But who defines what serves the general security of the community?
Or, put another way, why was the prison at Guantanamo Bay set up, and why is it still open?
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Girard on Blood Feuds
No scholarship, no matter how great, stands outside of time. The river keeps moving, and even theories of uncanny prescience and blazing insight must take their place amid the flux of events.
No one gets it ALL right; the next wave is always coming.
I say this as someone who is so strongly influenced by Rene Girard’s work that I consider myself a Girardian. And I am not alone. Countless articles, many books, and now of course websites (especially Girardian Lectionary) discuss, expound and extend Girard’s central insights about the relationship between religion and violence. In books like Violence and the Sacred (French, 1972, English translation, 1977), Girard has explored how socially sanctioned violence arose out of religion, and the threat this poses to cultures under Gospel influence, which increasingly can no longer accept such violence.
I am currently reading Violence and the Sacred. In the first chapter, on sacrifice, I was surprised to read a statement that sounded strikingly out of date.
“It may be that a basic difference exists between a society like ours and societies imbued with religion . . . When internal strife, previously sublimated by means of sacrificial practices, rises to the surface, it manifests itself in interfamily vendettas or blood feuds. This kind of violence is virtually nonexistent in our own culture. And perhaps it is here that we should look for the fundamental difference between primitive societies and our own . . . .” (Violence and the Sacred, John Hopkins, 1979, p. 14)
Why does this seem outdated to me? It’s because “interfamily vendettas or blood feuds” have hardly gone the way of the Hatfields and the McCoys. Rather, they have taken a new form in the gang violence, often connected to drugs, that plagues so many cities in the United States − not to mention Mexico, with its epic struggle against drug cartels.
Rene Girard is 85 years old and may not get out to many movies. But he would surely have much to say about Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, where the myth of cleansing violence undergoes a critical reexamination. Maybe Eastwood had Girard in mind when writing the script?
No one gets it ALL right; the next wave is always coming.
I say this as someone who is so strongly influenced by Rene Girard’s work that I consider myself a Girardian. And I am not alone. Countless articles, many books, and now of course websites (especially Girardian Lectionary) discuss, expound and extend Girard’s central insights about the relationship between religion and violence. In books like Violence and the Sacred (French, 1972, English translation, 1977), Girard has explored how socially sanctioned violence arose out of religion, and the threat this poses to cultures under Gospel influence, which increasingly can no longer accept such violence.
I am currently reading Violence and the Sacred. In the first chapter, on sacrifice, I was surprised to read a statement that sounded strikingly out of date.
“It may be that a basic difference exists between a society like ours and societies imbued with religion . . . When internal strife, previously sublimated by means of sacrificial practices, rises to the surface, it manifests itself in interfamily vendettas or blood feuds. This kind of violence is virtually nonexistent in our own culture. And perhaps it is here that we should look for the fundamental difference between primitive societies and our own . . . .” (Violence and the Sacred, John Hopkins, 1979, p. 14)
Why does this seem outdated to me? It’s because “interfamily vendettas or blood feuds” have hardly gone the way of the Hatfields and the McCoys. Rather, they have taken a new form in the gang violence, often connected to drugs, that plagues so many cities in the United States − not to mention Mexico, with its epic struggle against drug cartels.
Rene Girard is 85 years old and may not get out to many movies. But he would surely have much to say about Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, where the myth of cleansing violence undergoes a critical reexamination. Maybe Eastwood had Girard in mind when writing the script?
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