Now, remind me, I live in a big, cold urban wasteland.......why?

Off the ol' front porch:


Toward Placentia Bay:


Old lighthouse, Dodding Head, Great Burin Island



Pickin' partridgeberries:


Home again tomorrow. Yeech.

FIRST COUSIN...... ONCE REMOVED
Michael Brown

Apparently meteorites do fall out of the blue and hit the same place twice.

Mike

Just turned 30 on the weekend. Died in his sleep sometime Wednesday,
September 5.

Requiescat in Pace.


Heaven just got a good deal hipper, and gained one more heart of gold.


Cue the angel Corus.

"Hey!"

Requiescat in Pace

Ian Lawson Van Toch

September 16 1984- August 24, 2007

--joined at the hip to my youngest son for grades 7 through 13, and at intervals between then and now

Therefore they are before the throne of God,
and serve him day and night in his temple;
and he who sits on the throne
will shelter them with his presence.
They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore;
the sun shall not strike them,
nor any scorching heat.
For the Lamb in the midst of the throne
will be their shepherd,
and he will guide them to springs of living water,
and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

Revelation 7: 15-17

THE GREAT INVERSION

When did it all go belly-up?, you were wondering one day.

My friend David Warren sends me his latest column for the Ottawa Citizen, which contains the answer. He pinpoints the date as August 10, 1969 ("That's one small step for [a] man...."), and the documentary proof is in his high school yearbook.

I emailed him back with my thoughts on the subject, and, well, they were just so damned insightful I figured they must be shared with the rest of the world. (Thanks to all eleven of you.)

Sir: [that's Warren]

I think you have nailed the year quite well. I enrolled in a Catholic girls' high school in 1966. At that time it looked pretty much as it always had, staffed by the local branch of the Holy Names (Montreal-based order, thriving in Oregon) which had also staffed my elementary school and many others, as well as running their own women's college, site of their blossoming novitiate. I had never wanted to attend [name of school, which shall remain nameless], and had begged my parents to let me go to a new De La Salle school (with boys) but they refused.

When I returned for sophomore year in the fall of 1967, the nuns had taken their first step towards being part of the "new church" by doffing both their elaborate traditional head-gear (in favour of the "hankie veil") and their "names in religion". Sister Magdala Mary was now Sister Debbie if she wanted to be. [names fictionalized but characters real] At [the school] I had followed my elder sister, who had made a name for herself in many noble pursuits which I was convinced I would never live up to. During my second year I was followed by my cousin, who also made a name for herself in many noble pursuits-- and all I wanted was to get out of there and join my friends back in the suburbs at the local public monster-institution. My parents finally relented, urged on by the sight, on a parents' night at the girls' school, of a banner across one of the classroom blackboards which read "God is a marshmallow."

Two years later (1970) during my first year of college I met one of my fellow [the school] drop-outs, who told me the tale of having been in a (fortunately unconsummated) romance with her married drama teacher at her new public school, which had emotionally devastated her and turned a sweet girl very cynical. Although she had left [the school] the same year I did, she had continued to take [nameless instruction] from Sister Debbie, in whom she had confided about her miserable lovelorn situation. The nun's sage advice to the 17-year-old? "Maybe he'll get a divorce." That was around 1969.

Within another year the nuns had, on the whole, chosen to doff their habits entirely (not going nude of course, as far as I know, but donning the equally identifiable uniform of the the polyester dress and blazer), and move into downtown apartments in small clusters...

I knew it was all but over when I ran into my favourite nun on the street in my college town-- a worldly and probably somewhat liberal woman who had been in her twenties and engaged when she decided to "enter", and was therefore much more sensible and clued-in than almost any of her comrades. She had been, as I understood it, the last to want to give up the habit, the community life, and her name in religion..., but there she was walking in front of my apartment doorway in a maroon velveteen pantsuit. She had not left the convent -- it had left her. I tripped on the sidewalk and landed on my knees.

The complete, and apparently overnight, implosion of the great teaching orders and their historic mission to parish schools has always been one of my major markers for the triumph of the revolution, and something of a mystery. Or so it was until I read Ann Carey's Sisters in Crisis: The Tragic Unraveling of Women's Religious Communities... It is a jam-packed book in desparate need of a brutal editor...but I will credit it for explaining (at great and repetitious length) exactly how and why the American sisterhood went kami-kaze. And you can certainly lodge those events, at least as I experienced them, in the festering heart of 1968-70.

I did go to the local public high school in the fall of '68, by the way. And by the spring of '69 even that whitebread and well-moneyed campus had begun its interior crumble. The long-established dress-code was removed as a result of student activism; the "fascist" vice-principal had to transfer his energies from calling the police about Minors in Possession of Tobacco (still a misdemeanour then) and dealing with the cloud of marijuana in which many students were living; an underground newspaper was trumpeting that "Nixon is A-BM" and "napalm is war-gasm"; and the annual May Fete crowning was serenaded with the theme song, "This is the dawning of your sensitivity" (to the appropriate tune from HAIR).

There are many reasons for most people not to be the least nostalgic about their high school days-- certainly for those of us who had nothing in common with "the cool kids". But I have often reflected on how little we understood about just how wretched a time that was for the well-being of the universe. On the other hand, kids in my second high school were still subject to the military (Vietnam) draft (most in our neighbourhood would have the convenience of a college deferment, but not all), so there was a fairly grave reality check driving some of what was happening. And we graduated, and looked forward to college, just a month or so after the Kent State shootings. So I suppose that's an excuse of sorts for taking oneself more seriously than 18-year-olds deserve.

Unfortunately, we are now witnessing the ascendancy of that Kent State generation in power-- the kids who became "cool kids" in 1969 were not the traditional sort who quarterbacked the football team and dated the cheerleader, but the sort who ran the student government and took on the system from within. (I believe that's also the year a high-school kid got himself elected President of our newly-minted parish council!!) They got so full of themselves, so fast, that they lived out one of the truly revolutionary inversions of all time: they actually ENJOYED HIGH SCHOOL (dear God!), and wanted it to last forever-- and they are now fulfilling that dream as they run the American congress, and probably substantial hunks of the EU and the UN.

I remember the moon landing well. I don't remember associating it with "the end of all things"-- we probably thought it was the beginning. I guess one implies the other.

Thanks for helping me get ready for Good Friday, dude.

By the way, saw 300 last night. (First time men have had to show their chests in order to get a movie role! A veritable warehouse full of six-packs. Leonidas channelled Mel Gibson, the movie channelled everything Gibson ever made except Passion of the Christ.)

Husband walked out with about 30 minutes to go-- couldn't take the schlock any more. I was willing to go with the appropriately artwork-style super-heroic depiction for awhile, but groaned as it descended into soap-opera 90's-guy senstivity. A Spartan sobbing about his dead kid that "I never told him I loved him best!" BARF! BARF! BARF! What was Victor David Hanson thinking!

This is a footnote to the above reflection insofar as the decadence attributed by the movie to the Persians inspired but one thought in me: that's us. Spring break at Myrtle Beach.

READ IT AND WEEP

Some days I spend a whole day crobbling together a post for this blog. Other days there is absolutely no point, sometimes for the good reason that someone else has done it, said it, so much better than I could ever hope to.

Today thanks are due [a "hat-tip" hardly says it, a 21-gun salute might begin to cover it] to JULES CRITTENDEN at Pajamas Media and Forward Movement (via Hugh Hewitt), who has put together a post that should sear itself into the mind of every person who will express an opinion and/or cast a vote mindful of the state of our union anytime in the next two years.

Read it, watch every video (if you can bear it), and weep.

Weep for the busloads of cowards, traitors, drunks, frat-boys, shrikes, whores, monomaniacs, saccharine grannies, bloated bores, pocket-stuffers, pimps, pederasts, panderers, gropers, drowners, pasty-white-flabby-assed Monday-morning hangin' judges, posturing nit-pickers, onanist pig-counters, and assorted self-sodden mediocrities whom we routinely elect to the highest positions of power-- perverters of law, of language, and of the truths of history-- denizens of the political pond from the scum at the top, through the toxic larval wigglers in the middle, to the slithering bottom-feeders.

And then stand in awe and wonder that there were ever people of courage, principle, and eloquence as those celebrated on this post, in such abundance as to have lived and written the history that brought us all into being.
























And then say a prayer that something short of a cloud of anthrax and radioactive fallout, and an acre of severed heads, gives enough of us the wake-up slap to be conscious of what, on our best day, we might be capable of doing for each other.

RECOVERING THE “MERRY” IN CHRISTMAS

Last year I didn't get around to reflecting on the season until a few days after the Big Day. But I had an excuse—my son was married just in mid-December (putting the MARRY in Christmas, big-time).

Of course, if you are trying to preserve the genuine tradition which makes Christmas a SEASON (of twelve days, starting on the 25^th) and not just a one-day gift/food/football blow-out, being a little late shouldn’t make a difference.

The second day of the ancient Christmas season was (and still is) called “Boxing Day,” and such was the theme of my last-year's post-Christmas musings.

A bunch of my friends thought I did a good job of it. So here's the post again. It's more timely this year! There are still seven more shopping preparation days until the Season begins in earnest.

Here [slightly revised] from December 27, 2005:

BOXING DAY

It’s a rare moment when I think there are advantages to living in Canada, and these are often due to the few vestiges of British culture which still survive like blades of grass poking bravely up through the vast cement expanse of an airport runway or suburban parking lot.

One of these last desperate traces of civilization, the official Boxing Day holiday, alas, has disappeared in distinctive Canadian fashion: the laws which once decreed that no commerce should be allowed on Sundays and statutory holidays have been erased by being repeatedly broken. It’s a classic Canadian form of “court challenge”— you just keep breaking the law until you break the system’s resolve. (Saves a lot of time and headache involved with actual statutory amendment enacted by actual elected legislators.)

However, the cultural concept of Boxing Day still lingers— the day after Christmas when, back in “olden times” (that period of history prior to 1968 about which most modern students learn almost nothing) servants could relax a bit and the gentry would treat them to the annual holiday bonus: boxes stuffed with money and gifts. It’s still a day which conjures up, for some of us, images of hanging out and doing nothing, trying out the Christmas treasures, eating the left-overs. I last celebrated it by rising at about 2:00 p.m. and soaking in the tub from 4:30 till 6:00, while drinking champagne and orange juice and reading about architecture. This strikes me as an appropriate way to pass a traditional “holiday” in the literal sense (Holy Day).

Unfortunately, Canadian society has succumbed to moving the traditional after-Christmas sales to Boxing Day, where they had once been staved off until December 27. On that day, somewhere in the distance were the sounds of cash-registers dinging (or whatever it is these computerized models do), but no one in our house was aware of it.

Canada is still blessed insofar as it lacks anything quite equivalent to the American abomination known in the retail world as “Black Friday” – the day after Thanksgiving when hundreds of thousands of people line up in the cold early morning to rush the doors of the malls and big-box stores for Christmas shopping deals. It is hard to conceive of a more unedifying sight than crowds pushing and shoving (sometimes trampling) each other in search of bargains and the hottest gift-fads, without which, one surmises, the birth of Christ would be empty and meaningless.

Canada’s Thanksgiving is in October (usually on or about Columbus Day), too far ahead of the Christmas season for a wild mob scene— besides, without a November Thanksgiving, and its Hallmark-card-merchandising-opportunity to hold them back, Canadian stores have been stocking Christmas items since late September— so what’s the rush?!

Many might be prepared to say a lot of nasty things about people for whom Christmas has descended into this materialistic morass, but more than anything else I think they are to be pitied— they have been victims of a terrible robbery. It is the province of the churches to teach the meaning of Christmas, and to raise the alarum about its abuse and perversion. It’s also the province of the churches to fill their own pews—which is where the initial failure lies, and the great robbery accommodated. If Christmas is rather less than “merry”— an exhausting, pointless, and expensive ordeal, as we often hear of it— some research into an antidote would seem to be in order.

I have given some thought over the past few years as to what might be the key ingredients to a Merry Christmas, and why I usually find it pretty easy to have one.

At the root is the question of appropriate expectations.

When Christmas is all about the awe and excitement of small children, for whom every aspect of the season is cause for joy, the natural melancholy that comes with the end of the party and the turn of the year can be successfully suppressed, for quite awhile. But Christmas changes as children get older—the magic diminishes, and the sense of inexorably passing time increases.

If you try, you can learn to accept that the highs and lows of seasonal celebrations are to be expected— relentless highs are artificial, and suppressing the melancholy is unhealthy. Those who are unprepared for, and resent, the post-gift-grab-and-turkey-blow-out depression, have failed to realize that they have set themselves up for this. It’s preventable.

After due consideration, I’ve developed some simple prescriptions for recovering the Merry in Christmas. It starts with what might seem superficial (but isn’t) and then works its way to the deeper stuff. That sounds backwards, but it’s a way of easing into the optimal results.

Memo for next Christmas: plan well in advance to approach the Christmas season with new strategies relating to:

I. MUSIC

II. SHOPPING

III. DECORATING

IV. PRESERVING ADVENT

Note: the use of the word “Merry” to describe the perfect Christmas in no way implies that this is a formula geared to non-religious seasonal observance. It is the Christian tradition to be merry at the prospect of the Nativity.

That’s the Nativity of Jesus Christ, the promised Messiah, the Redeemer of all mankind, born into history at a time and place commemorated once a year by Christian believers.

While it is possible for the non-believer to enter into some type of generic seasonal spirit with all good will and stuff, the simple truth is (to be blunt), if you are not prepared at least to contemplate the historical reality of the birth of Jesus, and the significance attached to it by Christians, your participation is basically a delusion. And you deprive yourself of its riches.

Christmas 2005 saw some fanning of the flames of the Culture Wars on the part of those who object to the dilution of the holiday’s historical/factual identity into some bizarre No-Name Seasonal Warm-Fuzzathon — the complaints are well-founded (if not always well-argued), and the controversy warranted. (Progress, and fewer controversies, duly noted for 2006.)

But among the voices in favor of keeping “Christmas” in the public vocabulary are those who have argued that non-Christians should be content with trees and carols and greetings called “Christmas” because these things have lost their religious meaning anyway, so their use is palatably secular.

ARGH-H-H-H-H-H!!!!!!

Please, people— your kind of help we don’t need. Christmas isabout the coming of Christ, and the birth of his Church. Deal with it. And don’t insult Jews by pretending it’s their season too—they’d be the first to tell you it is no such thing.

Hanukkah is not a season, but a minor event in the Jewish calendar, significant on a scale with St. Patrick’s Day for Christians. Neither is Christmas pagan in origin, as some multi-culti types claim—it successfully usurped and more or less obliterated a pagan seasonal festival, co-opting some of its trappings (like trees) which were easily absorbed into existing authentically Christian motifs—turning it from a fearful exercise in god-placation and charms against the cold and dark, to a festival of miraculous birth and promise and tenderness directed towards a helpless infant destined to rescue humanity.

This is not to say that paganism can’t capture the flag back again. It’s working very hard at exactly that, in the guise of benign-looking secular banalities and orgies of materialism. These things are not “merry” as applied to Christmas—they are fleeting and corrosive distractions.

RECOVER A TRULY MERRY CHRISTMAS, by starting with:

I. MUSIC

The importance of music to the spirit of Christmas cannot be overstated.

Choose wisely. Ban mercilessly.

I can’t remember when it dawned on me, but at some point I came to realize that the most important ingredient in the Merrying of Christmas in my life has been, by far, the discovery of styles of music that are imbued with the true meaning and spirit of the Nativity.

Our house was like everybody else’s in the 1950’s— Christmas music was the usual mix of classic carols and more modern pop hits. We got the big cabinet stereo in about 1958 and our first Christmas LP album was a little bit of a departure—an important one. It was the Robert Shaw Chorale singing traditional carols a capella. The sound was clear and rich and unadorned. Other versions paled by comparison.

Yes, we got our Bing Crosby album too, and over the years my father kept bringing home the annual pop artist collection “Great Songs of Christmas,” put out by Goodyear (!), that gave us Barbra Streisand warbling “Silent Night” and Bob Goulet crooning I forget what— joined by Johnny Mathis, Nat King Cole, and, oh yes, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They were pleasant enough, but even as a child I understood that they lacked what the Robert Shaw album had — had I been able to articulate it then, I might have given new meaning to the term “Christmas balls.”

Then in the early 1960’s my sister sent away to Life Magazine for a set of books on the Pageantry, Glory, and Merriment of Christmas, with its accompanying LP called “The Life Treasury of Christmas Music”— and a treasure it was. The record changed everything about our sense of how Christmas ought to sound. Its selections included Gregorian chant (which we already knew about, but took for granted), and an international array of medieval dance rhythms on period instruments, Renaissance polyphony, organ solos, 18^th and 19^th-century carols, and a little touch of Huron from Ontario.

From here we developed a taste for early music in general, but especially that of the Christmas season, which introduced us not only to new notions of harmony and the joys of percussion, but to the fuller spectrum of religious truths which are so often the subject of medieval popular song: our forebears did not hesitate to place the miraculous birth of the Holy Babe within the context of his larger purpose, a life destined to end in agonizing redemptive sacrifice. Furthermore, they were not shy about speculating how strangely the circumstances of the Nativity must have struck those ordinary folk lacking the benefit of an Archangelic visitation— including Joseph himself, the subject of numerous songs that speak to his cluelessness and resentment of the implausible claims of his pregnant fiancée.

Christians of an earlier time could meld greater awe and faith with a more intimate human relationship with their Savior than modern man achieves, and all without need of the glitzy sentimentality so typical of our musical chestnuts and greeting card art. The wider, more realistic perspective of our religious ancestors from centuries long past, as expressed in their music, is the best possible antidote to the artificial high and the post-indulgence deflation too typical of the modern Christmas celebration. Life was damned hard for those faithful folk— and they accepted, even celebrated, the melancholy with the joyous. So….

…want a merrier Christmas through MUSIC? – Here’s the prescription:

Rule #1: Listen to NO Christmas music written after 1900.**

Rule #2: Be VERY selective about Christmas music written after 1700.

**[Okay, okay-- we'll make an exception for "In the Bleak Midwinter"-- but that's it! Sheesh.]

Just try it! For one season at least!—yes, you’ll have to give up Bing and his “White Christmas” (but that will also relieve you of his execrable “Mele Kalikimaka” in the process—double bonus).

You’ll hear more than your share of old favorite carols and pop schlock in the stores and elevators—try to filter it out of your head, but if you feel called to absorb some Frosty or Mama Kissing Santa Claus, confine your listening to the muzak of public places.

At home, keep to the older musical traditions, whose texts are rich in the Biblical context and lived experience of the need for redemption through the Divine Child and his generous earthly parents.

Recommended introduction to the world of real Christmas music:

Christmas Now is Drawing Near – by Sneak’s Noyse [Saydisc Records] [my #1 favourite album of all time]

A Tapestry of Carols – by Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band [also Saydisc]

A Garland of Carols, and Fire & Sleet & Candlelight and Voices at the Door– by Coope, Boyes and Simpson [No Masters Voice]

On Yoolis Night or anything recorded by the Anonymous 4

The Carol Albums - by the Taverner Consort under Andrew Parrott

The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols – lots of recordings, the one from King’s College, Cambridge being the most famous; the one from the London Oratory is different, and very pleasing.

Thys Yool – A Medieval Christmas – by the Martin Best Ensemble [Nimbus Records]

An American Christmas - by the Boston Camerata under Joel Cohen [Erato records]

II. SHOPPING

Buy stuff online.

I’ve had great luck with it, mostly using catalogues I started ordering from by phone long before I had a computer.

There are two benefits to this: (1) It keeps you out of malls, which are symphonies of schlock, crass and brassy pageants of crap-for-sale in the din of lousy music and frantic people with cranky kids. (2) If you get the right catalogues and websites, the stuff is a lot more interesting than what’s in the stores.

Have a look at Acorn, Signals, Wireless, The Smithsonian, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Creative Irish Gifts, Coldwater Creek (women’s clothes, jewelry, decorative stuff), Land’s End (good basic clothing, some household items). And there’s always Amazon and Barnes & Noble for books, music, and games. Harry and David for great food (especially fruit). Hammacher-Schlemmer has a few interesting things for people of ordinary means, tucked in between the junk for gazillionaires. Also visit your favorite blog-sites and find fun political novelties (sold through Café Press and similar businesses) to suit every viewpoint and opinion.

I’m not putting links up for these sites, just to emphasize that no commercial considerations have encouraged me to list them—someday when I get my web-act together maybe I’ll run their ads. So….

…want a merrier Christmas despite the SHOPPING? – Here’s the prescription:

Do whatever it takes to stay out of malls and monster stores. Online shopping is leisurely and peaceful and, in my experience, efficient, creative, and reliable.

If you really have to hit the stores, try something out of the mainstream, like gift certificates from a gourmet cheese and deli shop, or cooking school. They smell good and tend to be located in quiet corners of the world.

III. DECORATING

You’ll start to see everything imaginable for decorating your home, inside and out, slipping stealthily into the stores in late September— early October at the latest.

IGNORE IT.

If you must buy ahead, do it in late November and stow it until at least my birthday (December 11).

Start with some decorations which are attractive and festive but are clearly consigned to Advent: a Jesse tree, an Advent wreath, an Advent calendar [on a religious or wintry theme, revealing angels or artworks or folk around the manger— remember that Spongebob Squarepants and Scooby-Do have NOTHING to do with Advent—no cartoon calendars please!], the Christmas crib [permissible early, but keep the baby in storage until Christmas Eve, and if possible place the wise men and shepherds so they can be walked toward the manger over a period of weeks—kids love to do this, but space doesn’t always allow for it].

Think purple, not red and green yet (even poinsettias will cooperate with you in this).

It is fair to say that the true Spirit of Christmas is not invoked by lighting up your yard like a Vegas whore-house— try to keep it under control. The latest fad seems to be these inflatable nylon giants: snow families, teddy bears, etc. They’re generally sort of cute, but bloated (literally) and ostentatious and a little creepy. And remember— accidents happen— what could be more pathetic than a flaccid Father Christmas lying face down on your lawn.

The centerpiece of any indoor decoration is going to be the Christmas tree. Anyone for whom it is not an untenable financial or physical burden, or a danger to your health (like needles make you break out in hives), should get a REAL TREE—please! The fakes are getting better, but they have one big problem: they’re fake. We try to avoid that in all respects this time of year.

When it comes to decorating the tree, many individual tastes will play their part—and many temptations to no taste at all. Your best bet? Decorate your tree only with things that any small child would like to (1) eat, (2) play with, (3) gaze at for an hour. (If you don’t use actual toys, then plausible, well-made replicas or miniatures will do.) Don't forget to lay in a few olive wood ornaments made in Bethlehem. They are attractive and symbolic, and their purchase supports the disappearing Palestinian Christian community who are caught in the crossfire of the Middle Eastern terror wars.

Supplement with religious symbols, memorabilia specific to your family, animal life (birds, nests, small furry things), anything made by your children. Nothing glads the heart and catches the eye like old-fashioned blown-glass figures and objects, dotted here and there between the less shiny and more natural objects. Garlands of wooden beads, popcorn, cranberries, little gold and silver stars are way more warm and friendly than ropes of Wal-Mart twinkle-garland and sheets of “icicles”.

Everybody likes vases and pots of greens around the house—pine, fir, holly, boxwood, ivy, juniper— which should be real if your allergies can handle it. There are beautiful accents to be found in the shapes and warm colours of fruits and berries, for both the vases and tree ornaments (fakes are getting pretty good, and less likely to bring fruit flies than the real thing). So…..

…want a merrier Christmas through DECORATION? – Here’s the prescription:

Keep it warm (colours); keep it real (if possible), natural and simple (outdoor lights and displays); keep it in reserve till well into Advent. Approach it all with an eye to childish delight. Avoid anything that looks like the work of an interior designer – real people don’t live like that.

IV. PRESERVING ADVENT

Now to the serious part. The best way to guarantee a Merry Christmas is to precede it with a real Advent, traditionally a season of preparation only slightly less somber than Lent. In fact, Advent was once colloquially referred to as “St. Martin’s Lent” since it was originally established to last from the feast of St. Martin of Tours, November 11, to Christmas Day (about two weeks longer than the modern Advent season).

There are still those who try to observe the spirit of Advent fairly strictly, avoiding all parties, trees, decorating, etc., until Christmas Eve. In this mode, our forebears postponed celebration until the actual feast of Christmas, and then enjoyed not just an explosive day of excess and abandon on December 25, but on that day inaugurated a 12-day Christmas “season” in the truest sense.

The modern world makes this arrangement problematic. In “olden times” the whole community agreed that the daily grind would come to a halt for the duration of the festivities, so no one was penalized for slacking off—there was no concern about losing business to competitors when little business was conducted anywhere. Today, however, no employed person is allowed to neglect work for a twelve-day stretch after Christmas— at best, we get one day’s grace before most of the community is called back to the full schedule of work obligations. Luckier folks see their offices close for the whole period from Christmas to New Year’s, but only when the calendar cooperates and there are just a couple of work-days between the two holidays.

For this reason most of us are drawn into abbreviating even our shortened Advent, and start the decorating and partying by the middle of December, in the knowledge that big parties after the 25^th have a way of seeming anti-climactic. It’s hard to know whether this feeling is cause or effect— whether we ourselves have created that weird post-Christmas plummeting of joy because we gave in to the pre-Christmas overkill in the first place— but it is reality, and our collective devotion to work prevents us from turning back the clock on this issue completely.

Still, the recovery of some sense of Advent – achieved by restraining the impulse to start Christmas in September (as the stores would have us do), to get the lights and the tree up in the first week of December (only to put the poor old tannenbaum out at the curb with the other garbage on the 27^th ), to spend the whole of Advent in a stressful buying-spree that takes till Lent to be paid off — is the shortest, straightest path to a truly Merry Christmas: a time to meditate on the coming mystery, on how profound is our need to be saved and to reconcile ourselves with God and each other,

Step 1: tame the calendar—make the effort to schedule the festive activities as close to the 25^th as your routine allows; mark the January calendar with Twelfth Night and do your best to keep the tree and decorations in place until then; schedule some relaxed social gatherings for the weeks AFTER Christmas, see friends and family, watch football, hang out, eat left-overs and drink mimosas. Can’t be beat.

First make Advent a genuine season (not just Christmas foreplay), then make Christmas a genuine season (not just a food-and-toy orgasm).

Step 2: While you’re not partying and shopping like mad in early December, find some contemplative reading material about Christmas.

I have several books that have a prayer or reading per day of Advent (Bishop Sheen compiled one)-- and guess what? I’ve never gotten through one yet. But even if you can’t rely on making time for a reading every day, it’s still worthwhile to keep some appropriate material close at hand for the spare moments that present themselves. There are old books of Christmas poems and stories— some are anthologies, others are the works of a single author like Washington Irving, or Charles Dickens’ short stories that aren’t about Scrooge. Listen to or read Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Take a random quiet moment here and there if you can’t manage the daily meditation. So….

…want a merrier Christmas, period? – RECOVER ADVENT.

Discipline your calendar, feed your soul, believe in two seasons instead of one or two blow-outs, spend within your means, and remember why we are doing this at all—“Season’s Greetings” and “Happy Holidays” give you no guidance on this matter.

Even if your particular faith, or your lack of it, makes you resistant to involvement in something called “Mass,” you still can’t get around the fact that what we celebrate this time of year is called “Christ’s Mass”— it belongs to him, the little bundle in the straw whose humble, helpless entry into our world tells you all you need to know about how the faith to which he calls us is like no other movement or cult or philosophy that has ever captured the heart and imagination of mankind.

And therefore be merry,
Rejoice and be you merry,
Set sorrows aside--
Our Savior, Christ Jesus
Was born on this tide.

A Virgin Most Pure, from A Tapestry of Carols

It is now 11 minutes to
THE ELEVENTH HOUR OF THE ELEVENTH DAY
OF THE ELEVENTH MONTH

Yesterday on the 231st birthday of the United States Marine Corps, and on what would have been his 25th birthday, Lance Corporal Jason Dunham was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for performing the classic act of self-sacrifice in battle-- the one we've all heard about but never conceive of in reality: he threw his own body over a live hand grenade to save the lives of his fellow warriors.

Before me sits a book called The Gift of Valor, by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael M. Phillips, who autographed it for me last April at the first national convention of Marineparents.com. It tells the story of Jason Dunham's brief life and heroic death. I have not yet had the courage to read it.

On April 14, Easter Sunday, 2004, Lance Corporal Dunham shredded his body to fulfill the promise he had made when he voluntarily extended his enlistment to return to Iraq: he wanted so see to it that all his buddies made it back home safely. He lived for another eight days, and then was taken off life-support by his agonized parents on April 22, 2004, at Bethesda Hospital in Maryland.

Celebrate Lance Corporal Dunham's life and sacrifice at his memorial website, and also here, here, here, here, and here.

The observances of this day-- performed with special poignancy in the lands of the British Commonwealth, with poppies, bagpipes, and the weight of grief expressed in the words of Canadian doctor Lt. Col. John McCrae in his 1915 poem In Flanders Fields-- are all about not forgetting.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

In Flanders fields.

You have to know something in order to forget it. In 2006 our greatest danger comes from those who refuse to know what Lance Corporal Dunham's mission was and why it mattered-- still matters. Many of those who did know back on September 11, 2001, have forgotten already. It is up to our leaders to remind us, and to remind themselves of the most powerful words in McCrae's poem:

If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

The Marine's Prayer

Almighty Father, whose command is over all and whose love never fails, make me aware of Thy presence and obedient to Thy will. Keep me true to my best self, guarding me against dishonesty in purpose and deed, and helping me to live so that I can face my fellow Marines, my loved ones, and Thee without shame or fear. Protect my family.

Give me the will to do the work of a Marine and to accept my share of responsibilities with vigor and enthusiasm. Grant me the courage to be proficient in my daily performance. Keep me loyal and faithful to my superiors and to the duties my Country and the Marine Corps have entrusted to me. Help me to wear my uniform with dignity, and let it remind me daily of the traditions which I must uphold.

If I am inclined to doubt, steady my faith; if I am tempted, make me strong to resist; if I should miss the mark, give me courage to try again.

Guide me with the light of truth and grant me wisdom by which I may understand the answer to my prayer.

AMEN. OOH-RAH.

HEATHROW AIRPORT, AUGUST 2006:
All my worldly goods in a clear plastic bag

Just returned from London, filled, as usual, with admiration for the way official Britain acts in the face of terrorism (as opposed to the way they speak of late, which can only be described in Mrs. Thatcher's famous term, as "WET"). All passengers were kept out of the terminal until a couple of hours before their departure time, corralled on a 4th-level parking lot. Folding chairs, marquis tents, free water, sandwiches, and granola bars all provided, as well as four to six highly visible information officers at each door with lists of which flights were operative and had or hadn't been called in yet--all of the representatives of officialdom, by the way, sporting generally pleasant attitudes and good manners.

There were numberless whiners, of course, but that doesn't mean that things weren't being handled reasonably well-- the unpleasantness of the experience did not come close to our worst expectations. And, bottom line, is there anything quite so unpleasant as being blown out of the sky by some freaking jihadist with explosives in his lemonade bottle?????? I'll trade a couple of hours on the sidewalk for that any day. It was not nearly as chaotic and irritating as Toronto's Pearson airport two days after a bunch of flights had been cancelled due to a couple of days of serious thunderstorms.

My capsule assessment of the Israeli/Lebanese mini-war: The Rumsfeld Doctrine [attack of the High-Tech Toys instead of massive waves of boots on the ground] FAILS AGAIN.

* * * * *

Very much enjoyed being, on the whole, detached from reality in Oxford and environs for ten days. Would much prefer to think about earlier times when folks had a better notion of what was what, while sitting here:

and being one of these:


We thought we'd be fighting off the students and tourists to sit on these hallowed benches, but the nook was empty and we had it to ourselves.

I have seldom hoisted a pint in better company.

Other Tolkien haunts enjoyed:

--the Oxford Oratory
--Pembroke College
--Holywell Street
--Blackwell's bookstores

and these:

ROLLRIGHT STONES (possible Weathertop?)















ROLLRIGHT -- "WHISPERING KNIGHTS"
















ROLLRIGHTS -- RETURN OF "THE KING"

















ROLLRIGHTS -- NEARBY VISTA

WHERE TOLKIEN VISITED [I never read it in a brochure, but you can bet on it] -- a little piece of Normandy in Iffley village, Church of St. Mary, ca. 1170


When reality sucks, try this. Well, this is more real than "reality".

More Canadian Content! --
David Cronenberg: Film-maker with a history of violence

[On the remote chance that you’ve heard of this movie without learning about its plot tricks, be warned that there are major spoilers in what follows.]

“It was evident to me from the beginning that this was a very American story set in middle America, almost a garden of Eden, perfect American town. Of course that made it perfect to be shot completely in Canada,” quipped director David Cronenberg at an interview during the Cannes Film Festival last May, following the première of his new movie A History of Violence.

He got the round of knowing chuckles he was looking for from the press, and accomplished two things with this one glib little swipe. First he gave the requisite nod to an assumed superiority of Canada over the United States, and the former’s greater likelihood of yielding up an idyllic environment for shooting his film. But he also hinted at the more pertinent point that this idealized “American-dream” setting is itself a fantasy and does not really exist anywhere, certainly not in America—the aura of peace and happiness is a veneer over dark secrets and darkened natures.

None of that will come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the Cronenberg portfolio. My own familiarity is limited to the few of his films that I have managed to sit all the way through, plus a couple of others from which I have seen clips that generally made me wish to see no more (Rabid and Scanners come to mind). Together these were enough to illustrate what I understand to be a continuing Cronenbergian theme of the corrosive power of inner demons.

In their crudest rendering, the inner demons are manifested in physical form, in microbial and parasitical critters that transform, devour, and issue forth from their hosts in some creepy and disgusting way. Cronenberg’s later films, while carrying on with as much of his favored sex’n’gore combo as he can paste in, treat the inner demons as more psychological in origin, though still connected to the physical.

When he’s serious, as in The Fly, he can use out-of-control physiological manifestations to ferry talented actors into the realm of real suffering and tragedy. But mostly the actors seem to get there in spite of the visuals rather than by means of them— Cronenberg is known for going for the gross-out shot that is gratuitous and intrusive, and the actor is lucky if he can transcend it.

I have never been able to shake the sense that even if Cronenberg is on to something regarding human frailty, he is handicapped by a modern secularism which fetters the expression of his ideas to the material realm—everything determinative resides in the body, and where destiny is dark (as it usually is), the body is a vessel for all that is vile and repulsive.

He makes the shopworn claim that an exploration of ideas and human behaviors is incomplete without the physical and sexual (implying that there is something daring or unconventional about his insistence on including this stuff--- yawn, snore, blah, blah…), but one can detect in his work a curiously conventional, almost Puritanical hostility or revulsion towards the body. From within the secularist’s frame of reference— that we are thralls at the mercy of our material selves—he appears to believe that our “master” is one cruel and twisted overseer.

Maybe this is just Cronenberg’s particular version of a Canadian “thing” about which Margaret Atwood has written in her lit-crit works [such as Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature and Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature] – her theory being that the wild and forbidding Canadian landscape shapes its inhabitants into people with an eye for the dark and violent. (If it sounds like I’ve read these works, confession time: I haven’t. I didn’t grow up in Canada, and was thus never force-fed “Can-lit” in school. Everyone I know who was, has urged me not to invest precious reading time in the works of Atwood and company, so I seldom do. I’ve read more about Miss Peggy than by her.)

As to the Canadian thing: I don’t think this year’s Cannes Film Festival made quite as much ado about the duelling Canadian directors, Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan, as was made of them back here at home. Egoyan has been less commercially successful and recognizable outside the cinéaste cocoon than fellow-countryman Cronenberg, since his work is usually “edgier”—that’s a film-speak code-word for “contains more graphic deviant sex than most people care to see.” I can’t recall ever seeing an Egoyan film all the way through—about ten minutes of Exotica, his “study” of lap-dancing catering to paedophilic fantasy via the packaging of pre-teen looks in a school uniform, satisfied what little curiosity I might have had about his work. His entry this year is Where the Truth Lies, which will probably tank at the box office owing to the NC-17 rating it received in the United States, about which he has complained bitterly but declined to shave any frames off the artistically important three-way sodomy scene. Cronenberg came away from Cannes with big “buzz”—Egoyan, not so much.

I read a few post-Cannes reviews of A History of Violence (written up in magazines about film as ART with a capital A), and they left me wondering if another of my favorite actors (Viggo Mortensen) was going to be permanently “Cronenberged” for me the way Jeremy Irons was after starring in Dead Ringers, a revolting and pointless tale about twin gynecologists sharing mutual kinks for a woman with a deformed uterus. (It was every bit the gutter-ball it sounds—double yuck.) Up until that point I had been ready to see just about anything Irons was in, but since then I find I can barely look at him—even revisiting his younger self’s tour-de-force in my beloved Brideshead Revisited began to carry a little residual gyne-goo on it.

Worse, doing Dead Ringers seemed to provoke some appetite in Irons for “edgy" stuff (see above definition) and he spiraled into M. Butterfly, Damage, and Lolita. It would be a shame to see Mortensen swirl down that same plug-hole, since he’s already misspent much of his movie career in the bilge tank, in such forgettable efforts as The Prophecy (an incoherent, fall-off-your-chair-laughing religio-horror flick— Mortensen actually does a respectable job as Lucifer, the one well-drawn character in the entire script), or Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (self-explanatory).

The reviews of A History of Violence in magazines about film as ART, written by people who frequent festivals of film as ART, described in clinical detail its explosive gore, jarring comedy, and unconventional sexual acts, and prepared me for something disturbing and a bit sleazy. But that’s not the film I saw. It made me wonder if maybe the Cannes screening was a director’s cut with frames that didn’t make it into general distribution— but I’m more inclined to think it’s a difference in the viewers’ moral universe: skewed and cynical agnostics saw one thing, those of us with faith in humanity and God saw something else.

I had the advantage of watching the film on a Saturday afternoon with only a couple of dozen people in the audience (on its opening weekend—this does not augur well), most of them older than the target movie demographic of 15-25. As a result I was not subjected to the sort of contagious teenage-dumbass over-reaction which apparently has produced gales of laughter at many a screening of the film. (I gather this was the case at Cannes, so now we know that all those European sophisticates are operating at the level of teenage-dumbass.)

Cronenberg gets off on the idea that he is duping his audience into complicity with what is truly horrible by manipulating them into reflexive laughter or cheering at the first sight of it, thereby proving his cynical social Darwinist view of humanity. But I think he has unwittingly undermined his own objective, thanks to the hole in his own moral universe.

Ostensibly Cronenberg presents the audience with two possible scenarios—is the central character what he appears to be, or something entirely different?— and they must puzzle over which one to accept as the reality of the story. But the two competing scenarios prove to be a lopsided mis-match, because the storyteller himself (Cronenberg) does not accept that either version could be equally plausible, for Tom Stall or any other man. He believes that one of them (the happy family in the peaceful town) is universally a myth, and the other (dark secrets and darkened natures) is universal reality.

Still, for the sake of the drama one would think that Cronenberg would at least set the scene for the myth by constructing a credible façade of normalcy, even if he intends to bring it crashing down later.

However, this director’s personal cynicism is telegraphed immediately when the viewer meets the family at the centre of the story. In the opening scene the four family characters come together around a child’s nightmare, and form a portrait more oozingly cloying than the Brady Bunch’s worst TV moments. As the story advances they do ease up a bit on the cloy-o-meter, and eventually the two principal actors (Mortensen and Maria Bello, as Tom and Edie Stall) sink their teeth into superb performances that vastly out-class the unworthy material they have been given, raising it to the level of tragedy.

If Cronenberg has any real genius it may lie in his casting (with one glaring exception: the young daughter, Sarah, played so obnoxiously badly that, as her family is increasingly threatened, concern for her welfare barely registers with the audience). Young newcomer Ashton Holmes, as the Stalls’ teenaged son Jack, does his best with a weirdly-drawn character, much of whose dialogue sounds like unused scraps left over from Seth Cohen in television’s The O.C. That’s not necessarily fatal to his believability—kids in rural Indiana watch cable like everybody else.

However, with a mother who has been to law school, and an intact supportive family, he would be unlikely to envision for himself the kind of bleak future where kids “get jobs, have affairs, and become alcoholics,” as he describes to his high school friend while smoking a joint and loitering on a Saturday night streetcorner. Anyone familiar with the place of college in American culture (like me, for instance, having put three kids through small American colleges) would be aware of the heightened sense of life’s possibilities felt by most American youth, compared to the tell-me-what-hoops-to-jump-through-so-I-can-get-a-job attitude typical of too many university-bound Canadians. The film attributes to Jack Stall a “trailer-trash” hopelessness which is a staple of anti-American stereotypes, but it is a poor fit for this particular boy.

Cronenberg has said he had no idea when he first read the script that it came from a graphic novel, yet the story and characters are baldly cartoonish. The dramatic complications are built on a mound of clichés, with dialogue suited to one-dimensional good and bad guys; the parallel to “old-style westerns,” which the director himself has invoked, is an apt one. There are plot holes** you can drive a truck through (speaking of clichés…), which one might be able to ignore if the rest of the film were similarly flimsy—but the painful unraveling of the two main characters’ relationship is being played out so convincingly that the film’s weak spots are magnified.

Cronenberg’s basic operating premise is that the happy family and the peaceful town are cartoon myths that need deconstructing (a point of view which is itself a modern intellectual cartoon); the audience is supposed to go “hmmm” about the age-old nature-versus-nurture debate (snooze), as various characters whose heretofore peaceable existences are shattered not just by tooth-rattling incidents of violence, but by an apparently deep-seated appetite for it.

“Violence is inevitable,” Mortensen said in a post-première interview. “It exists—it will always exist. But we have free will. We can choose.”

I’m not sure that is Cronenberg’s message in this film—there is a distinct whiff of determinism about it. Yes, Tom Stall made a free choice to put his violent past behind him, but when it is summoned up by circumstance, we are supposed to see not just impulse, but genuine killer instinct. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone buys right into this (with the appropriate anti-American twist): “Cronenberg knows Americans have a history of violence,” he writes. “It's wired into our DNA. Without a hint of sermonizing, he shows how we secretly crave what we publicly condemn, and how we even make peace with it.”

Other critics get on board with this bromide. Desson Thomson [Washington Post]: “A History of Violence forces us to confront our Pavlovian conditioning to violence.” Jonathan Rosenbaum [Chicago Reader]: “Whether violence begets violence, whether perception is reality, whether a destructive animal instinct for combat really is lodged in the peaceful heart of every man—these are the themes that entertain Cronenberg…” (and put the rest of us to sleep?!!)

Allison Benedikt at the Chicago Tribune sees through the pretensions: “Cronenberg squeezes in his requisite social commentary, but the criticism feels detached and tends to lean toward the obvious, with Tom’s cross always hanging out of his shirt after he gives someone a serious beating.” Yes, the cross is a symbolic truncheon, reminiscent of the red surgical scrubs featured in Dead Ringers, fashioned to look like the robes of a Catholic Cardinal, suggesting (wham, wham goes the hammer) how doctors are the modern high priesthood of science—ooh, insight! (Costumes by Cronenberg’s sister Denise, for both films.)

[Sidebar: “ Cusack”, Tom Stall’s alter ego, is an Irish name— so just to make things juicy, one can speculate that the killer-for-hire and his mobster brother were brought up Catholic! (Thanks a lot.) This may explain the cross, since Protestant men are not much given to wearing them. Tom hears a “See ya in Church” from a diner customer, more commonly a born-again Protestant expression than a Catholic one.

One thing is certain: don’t waste any time wondering if the references to Christianity reveal any ambivalence or nuance about religion on Cronenberg’s part—feel free to read the signs as the tiresome clichés about religious hypocrisy that they are. As he told the New York Times, "I'm an atheist, and so I have a philosophical problem with … God and heaven and hell and all that stuff. I'm not just a nonbeliever, I'm an antibeliever—I think it's a destructive philosophy."]

Peter Travers fleetingly detects something rather more important about the story, at least as it has been delivered by the two lead performances: “The family tableau that ends the film is as chilling and redemptive as anything Cronenberg has ever crafted.”

Does Cronenberg ever craft things that are “redemptive”? I haven’t seen enough of his work to pronounce definitively on that, but it would surprise me if that were his conscious aim.

My feeling, however, is that Cronenberg has indeed grappled with the Big O— that is, Original Sin, a largely misunderstood and wholly Christian concept—the one Christian belief, according to G.K. Chesterton, whose existence is absolutely self-evident.

[Sidebar: as defined by the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Original Sin is a state of deprivation of original holiness and justice… a human nature wounded (but not totally corrupted), subject to ignorance, suffering, and the dominion of death, and inclined to sin.]

David Cronenberg doesn’t accept any of this, of course. So he nibbles at the edges of the real story, and never pursues it down its own logical path. When you refuse to buy into the primacy of the spiritual, yet you still want to explain the persistence of evil in the same world where there is love and beauty and goodness, you will inevitably be trapped inside the memory of blood and shattered bone, degenerative disease and deformity, and the split-second passage between the person and the corpse. You will also be trapped in the hyper-significance of that other split-second Big O, the orgasm.

There, in the materialist shadowlands, sits David Cronenberg, film-maker: aspiring artist trapped in a low-rent ghoul.

Believers in Original Sin watch a film like A History of Violence with more seriousness, but less despair, than those who don’t believe.

For the life of me I don’t understand how people could roar with laughter at any point in this film. There are certainly some light moments— Tom’s explanation of how he came up with his alias is genuinely funny (“It was available”), but only mildly so, a very human vapidity in a moment of huge crisis, as he sputters, desperately and lamely, to hold his house of cards together.

The much-vaunted exchange between father and son— (Tom) “In this family we do not solve problems by hitting people.” (Jack) “No, in this family we shoot them!”—is ironic and absurd,but hardly guffaw material, considering the context. I was most struck by the way Mortensen delivered his half of it, flat and unconvincing because his character knows what an empty platitude it is.

More than one reviewer found the two sex scenes funny—I’m afraid the comedy eludes me. The first one is a warm and playful romp that could only happen between long-time lovers. Despite its involving a position that would probably cause Pat Robertson’s ears to stick out even further and flap with alarm, it is nevertheless (in my view) so intimate and affectionate that watching it made me feel more like an intruding voyeur than any cinematic sex ever has before— this was a real invasion of privacy.

The second sex scene, by contrast, is nearly a rape, and is deeply disturbing to watch, not just for its violence but for its incongruity within the story. Maybe we can swallow the idea that Tom could, for an instant, blindly lash out at his wife when she rejects his gesture of conciliation. But when he forces her down with a chokehold it’s plausibility that takes the beating, despite the fact that once she is flattened he regains his senses and begins to release her.

That’s when things get really unpalatable and unbelievable, for it is Edie who pulls Tom back toward her and begins to devour him, having found herself sexually charged up by his violent assault. What follows is rough and desperate sex, not wholly devoid of the remnants of their bond, but still too huge a stretch for the story.

It is quite astonishing that a film-maker in the 21^st century has the gall to offer his audience the repugnant and misogynist myth that women get turned on by being beaten. And it is discouraging that a modern young actress acquiesced to this director’s proposition. Cronenberg says of the scene:

Edie’s dealing with someone she doesn’t know—a Tom/Joey hybrid creature, and she finds that repulsive and exciting at the same time. Joey’s violence does have an erotic component… It’s the best sex she’s ever had, and also the most terrifying. Does she want more of it or not?

Elsewhere he says:

Sex and violence have always got on very well together, like bacon and eggs. I think there is always a sexual component in violence and a violent component in sexuality, to me that’s just a natural thing to explore. As George Bernard Shaw said, ‘Conflict is the essence of drama.’

Very symmetrically put, but no, not deep, not clever, not natural, and not true—and what does Shaw have to do with it? That bit is just a non sequitur.

Sorry, I’m not buying. Maria Bello has done too good a job of creating a realistic loving wife for us to graft this hackneyed grotesquerie on to it.

The actress commented shortly after the film wrapped that for the period when this scene was being shot she felt ill at the prospect of going in to work in the morning; she also noted that the large scab shown on her back in the film was a real injury incurred during the shooting. Well, she should have listened to her inner rumblings and told her director to stuff it— that scene was a violation of her character as well as her personal dignity.

Sure, Edie experiences the feeling of being simultaneously attracted and repelled by the husband she thought she knew—drawn to his obvious suffering, as he clings like a drowning man to shards of the refuge he had constructed for himself; yet horrified by the capacity for efficient mayhem he has suppressed for nearly 20 years.

But I don’t believe for a minute that this woman could give herself over to orgasm after being slapped and choked— and I really don’t accept the notion that the man who has known nothing but tenderness with her all those years could give himself over to choking and thumping her in a sustained assault. Cronenberg added both the sex scenes to the script (surprise, surprise). While one was at least a believable character study, both were unnecessary and disruptive in their way— the first gave “too much information!” as the saying goes, and the second violated the logic of both characters.

Graphic sex has a way of taking the audience out of the story and into the reality of the actors’ personal selves, which does neither the story nor the performers any favours. As actors these two have more than enough talent to have communicated in their eyes and faces every emotional nuance that either sex scene served, unimpeded by the intrusive realities of, for instance, yet another cinematic flash of Viggo Mortensen’s photogenic buttocks. (Ditto the later frontal flash from Bello.) How much nuance was communicated by that unexpected moonrise?

[Sidebar: It is no great compliment to Mortensen that his star-turn in Lord of the Rings has taken him from being a B or C-list actor in the front ranks of every director’s rolodex under the category “Willing To Get Naked And Have Sex On Screen” – to now being an A-list actor, still in the front ranks of the rolodex under "W.T.G.N.A.H.S.O.S.". I’ve never seen Maria Bello in anything else, but apparently her name is in that same part of the rolodex. (As one reviewer put it, “She’s never heard the words “No Nudity clause.”) What a sad way to get work— neither of them will ever know if that’s a deciding factor in their being cast in anything.]

Bottom line (as it were) — even if we pretend for the moment that the sex scenes contribute to the story, where and how they struck anyone as “funny” is quite beyond me.

The only places I can imagine spontaneous laughter breaking out are the aftermath shots of the gun battles, but these are not “funny ha-ha” or even “funny peculiar”—they’re just ludicrous. The flesh-blasting and bone-crunching always seem to exceed the credible capacities of the weapons and fisticuffs which produce them, and the prosthetic and technically-generated enhancements are glaringly obvious. Allison Benedikt nails it again:

Cronenberg may want to say something important about violence, but he’s also head over heels for it, ending each gunfight and neck-breaking with a close-up on the victim, blood either pooling behind his head or brains spilling from his face. Big laughs.

There were no big laughs either time I saw the film, though on my second viewing there were persistent titters during the final shoot-out— these, however, issued from a trio of teenagers skipping school, who talked steadily throughout the film (perhaps made twitchy by the array of small metal objects perforating their lips, chins, and eyebrows beneath greasy dyed bangs). This was teenage-dumbass at work, and not to be taken too seriously.

It’s worth mentioning, however, that it is a huge challenge not to elicit laughs when the bodies pile up in any sort of drama — I’m thinking particularly of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. It takes a fairly able director to pull off the domino-of-death climax without getting hoots from his audience. That doesn’t mean we’re all ghouls— it just means that some scenes don’t work with modern audiences or perhaps were not even very well-written to begin with. How many theatre companies even bother to do Titus Andronicus these days?

One can’t be blamed for suspecting that Cronenberg’s subconscious aim is to make the audience complicit not so much in society’s dark side as in his own— as in, “Hey, I’m not a kinky weirdo if everybody else is just like me.” The gore-fests in this film are fast and forgettable, and the fact that they didn’t set me or my fellow adult movie-goers giggling is probably due to our having dismissed them as silly distractions, preferring to move on and focus on the good acting work.

So, what about the Big Themes as I see them, Original Sin and redemption? I’m not going to claim that this is what the film is really about, or what it ought to be about. Merely that this is what the film could have been about. I doubt these themes interest the graphic novelists, I know David Cronenberg doesn’t believe in their existence, but I do think that the lead actors were working with them, whether they knew it or not. (I’m not sure actors ever know intellectually what they’re working with, but instead draw on instincts and a reservoir of unarticulated observations collected by osmosis.)

Tom Stall used to be Joey Cusack, and apparently (although back-story details about everybody in the film are a little sketchy) he used to kill for a living. He was good at it, having lightning reactions, overwhelming martial arts skills, and deadly accurate aim. At some point he lost his taste for that life, went out into the desert for three years, and remade himself. (Very John the Baptist, very Jesus, very St. Anthony of Egypt—or so it resonates with me.) Somehow he ended up in Millbrook, Indiana, met and married a local beauty with brains, and settled down into peaceful anonymity.

What happened out there in the desert? Did Joey transform himself into the consummate con artist, out of total self-interest? Or did he undergo a genuine conversion? I’m willing to wrestle with those questions because I believe that either possibility could actually happen. David Cronenberg stacks the deck against Tom because he doesn’t buy into conversion—real conversion, real fundamental change in human self-understanding, real exercise of self-mastery. When violence re-asserts itself in Tom’s life, we are given to understand that the nature of Joey Cusack has merely lain dormant and is instinctively unleashed to repeat its familiar patterns. We are expected to blur the distinctions between murder-for-hire and legitimate self-defense or protection of the defenseless.

It’s not so surprising that an artistic collaboration— issuing as it does from a community of people predominantly wedded to the socially irresponsible principle of mindless pacifism— asks us to see no difference between self-defense and deliberate homicide. These are the same sort of folk who cast the word “murder” as a net to include police shootings (where the target is a racial minority), war (where death is inflicted by Americans in uniform—avoiding the term when referring to terrorists in street-clothes), and moral prohibitions of condom-use (where the source is the Catholic Church).

Cronenberg wants to impute guilt to the audience that takes satisfaction in the deaths of the first set of hoodlums, as if there is no difference between Tom shooting them and them shooting the hotel staff and their child, or (as they intended to do) the diner waitress. But there is a difference-- spare us the "moral equivalence" stuff. Tom is not free to choose to do nothing to stop them. It is his duty to intervene, with "extreme prejudice” if necessary.

It is traumatizing to be the agent of violent death, but Tom’s response is not excessive just because it is professionally effective; nor is there excess in his son’s later decision to pick up the shotgun and save his father. Cheering at these deaths is a kind of childish release of tension, but any viewer whose sense of justice feels satisfied is “complicit” in nothing, and need not apologize. Sometimes you do end up solving your problems by hitting or shooting because you’ve run out of options and innocent lives are at stake. Mario Bello is less reticent than her director on this subject regarding her own child:

I don't think you understand what levels or what fears [sic] until you have a child of your own. I mean, I've never loved someone so much and I've never been so afraid in my life. And the truth is I would kill someone, whoever tried to hurt him. I would. I have no doubt about it.

There are, by my count, ten shootings (or deaths by other skull-cracking means—it all happens too fast to enable a coroner’s report on the spot) in A History of Violence, all of which are unambiguously done in self-defense or defense of others in extreme jeopardy. (One could argue that Richie Cusack’s death is nearly an execution, but he has a gun tucked under his arm and has made his intention to kill Joey/Tom abundantly clear.)

Roger Ebert makes the persuasive argument that, “If Tom Stall had truly been the cheerful small-town guy he pretended to be, he would have died in that diner. It was Joey who saved him.” However, we have all heard of ordinary folk who have done extraordinarily heroic things in an emergency, made possible by nothing more than a flood of adrenalin released by their sense of duty and concern for others in need. It is possible that Tom Stall’s reflexes are stimulated by at least a mixture of altruism, fear, and an expertise at survival—it is not necessary to believe that old appetites play a part in the action.

Is Joey Cusack capable of conversion and redemption? Real, permanent redemption? The quick answer to that is the Catholic one, which holds that any and all human beings are capable of redemption, but that no conversion should ever be assumed to be permanent while we are still alive—we (Catholics) do not believe that one is ever “saved” on earth (as the Evangelicals express it in the past tense, tying it to one transformative temporal instant), but we must strive for continuous conversion all the time, every day. (St. Thomas Aquinas is quoted in the Catechism: “There is nothing to prevent human nature’s being raised up to something greater, even after sin." And St. Paul: “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.”)

Genuine, unsalvageable psychopaths do exist, but they are rare. On the evidence at hand (in particular his changed way of life), Joey/Tom is afflicted by no deeper defect than that which we all carry, a vision clouded by Original Sin. Like all other men, Joey need not be fated to be a slave to his past if he chooses another path. He can “put on the new man” as St. Paul exhorts us, and even, like Paul, and Peter, and Abraham before them, enshrine his new life in a new name. (A more clever writer might have called this character “Paul [Saul] Thomas” instead of “Thomas Stall,” layering on the symbolism of faltering doubt and conversion. But a more clever writer would not have written this particular screenplay at all. Clever actors improved upon it.)

Joey/Tom journeys to sue for truce with his criminal brother, and perhaps bring closure to his own criminal past. He enters the house unarmed, so there is no question of premeditation. Later, having fought savagely and killed to save himself, he slinks home and tries to take his place at the family table, sitting down to face the wreckage of what he once had. There is clearly a desire to rebuild, expressed in tentative, tortured looks and gestures on the part of all of them, but everything that once held them together is gravely damaged.

The believer in sin and redemption also believes in forgiveness, a Herculean task for this family. If they inhabit a universe where there are no moral distinctions between homicide and self-defense, they will be overpowered by the fatalistic belief that violence is in the blood, from generation to generation. But if they believe in free will, they will know that forgiveness and conversion are possible.

The one completely unsettled issue at the end of this story is that of justice and restitution. The “born-again” Tom will never have peace when he has never answered for his earlier crimes. And if he is re-admitted to the family circle, their peace will likely always be at the mercy of the next shadow from his past. This is a dilemma with no conceivable resolution (except perhaps, ironically, the Witness Protection Program the sheriff imagines Tom is already in!)— a dilemma which the Stalls around the dinner table are nowhere close to confronting yet. The best you can say about the final tableau is that it offers a glimmer of hope.

Rounding off the corners of A History of Violence are the performances of Ed Harris and William Hurt, who are winning heaps of praise from most quarters for, in my view, taking an expert ride astride the broken-down horses which are their tired gangster roles. High opinion of Harris’s skillful characterization seems universal, but critics either love or despise Hurt’s hammy cameo.

The film score works well, as underplayed Copland-like Americana, contributed by Howard Shore of Lord of the Rings fame. The lighting is noticeable, which is a bad thing—everything is under-illuminated, sometimes as if in tunnel-vision. (Again, all the subtlety of wham, wham goes the hammer.)

The setting successfully evokes the little bite of Eden that some of us know is real. David Cronenberg needs to join those of us who have actually passed some time in Franklin, (Tennessee), Phelps (Wisconsin), Marietta (Georgia), Randolph (Vermont ), Crystal Falls (Michigan), Mineola (Texas), Bardstown (Kentucky), Jacksonville (Oregon), Sackett’s Harbor (New York), and Epping (New Hampshire) before he pontificates to us that the peaceful American town is a fool’s fantasy. He don’t know squat about it.

Joshua Tyler at Cinemablend.com writes one of the better “emperor has no clothes” reviews of this film, making precisely the point that Cronenberg just doesn’t know “normal”:

I don’t think Cronenberg has any concept of what normal people are like… The movie feels like he’s been stuck in a filmmaking vacuum for so long he’s no longer properly able to differentiate between fantasy and what the world is like out here for the rest of us… There’s a gripping, intense experience buried in History of Violence, but Cronenberg’s embarrassing and awkward unfamiliarity with normalcy degrades it.

On a personal note from the world of us normal folks, I couldn’t write a word about this movie without mentioning my young friend April Mullen, the girl who gives great scream over her hot fudge sundae when the first round of bad guys rolls into Stall’s Diner. She's already had a bigger audience, I think, than she’ll get with this movie: the millions upon millions who watched her portray Mary Magdalene in the unsurpassed Toronto Way of the Cross for World Youth Day 2002. But now she’s been seen (and heard!) at Cannes, and good things may well be in store for her. I wish her the best of luck (and pray she steers clear of that rolodex).

Thanks to the skewed agnostic critics of film as ART, I was fully prepared to hate A History of Violence, but found that I couldn’t. Some of it is just too well done. It’s a shame that on the whole it is so much less than it might have been. It’s a chuckle to hear the cast of this film lauding their director (chacun a son ghoul, I guess) for giving them the freedom to play their parts as they saw them. The truth is, they left him eating their dust.

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Heads up, look out for **plot holes! Just for starters:
The Baddies --
The two drifting bad guys who set the plot in motion are obviously on the lam from some previous crime. (Oh so obviously-- their expository dialogue is clumsier than the cloying family portrait that follows it. "Keep heading east, huh? Avoid the big cities, right?") Their strategy is to make slow progress over thousands of miles, through backwoods locations where everyone will know that they are strangers as they commit needlessly savage acts in pursuit of piddling amounts of money, thereby bringing maximum attention to themselves and leaving a messy trail of evidence where it can be easily detected. Blowing people away in the diner on the main street of a small town in broad daylight for the contents of the cash register is just another brilliant move. These guys are suicidal idiots. How could they possibly have eluded capture anywhere in the last five hundred miles, long before they hit Indiana??!!!!

The Goody --
Tom Stall pops up in Indiana and lives for the better part of two decades without ever having contact with any family member or friend from his past, and managing never to reveal a single chink in the armor of his adopted identity. He has been married for 17 years to a woman smart enough to finish law school who has been content to see no evidence whatsoever of his life before he met her, yet professes shock when she learns he's not who she thought he was. Having successfully maintained his cover story all these years, when the jig is finally up Tom's attempts to cover his tracks couldn't be more unprepared or lame. ("What do you think you heard?" he transparently asks Edie from his hospital bed.) How did he manage to get married, buy a house and a diner, and file his income taxes, while sharing his life with a lawyer, and never have a past?

The Wifey --
Tom's situation has clearly been eased by his having an incurious wife who is clueless to the fact that his background is full of holes. But hey! How much do we really know about Edie? Presumably she has a family, maybe living right in Millbrook-- did they never want to know anything about her husband? Why does no one in this close-knit family ever mention Grandma or Uncle Howie? What is Edie trying to hide? Who is this woman? Hmmmmmm.....

Favourite critical comment about the director:
"As a filmmaker whose roots are in horror films, Cronenberg has mutated over the last few decades as a true original filmmaker."
[Brian Eggert, film guide on Amazon.com)