Maleficent: A Fairy Tale for Our Times

The new version of Sleeping Beauty showcases something Disney has been good at for a long time: offering a story that reflects the times. Maleficent is not meant to be a prequel, sequel, or addendum to the 1950's tale of Beauty. It's a new twist on an old story that Disney had already altered from its original version. If you think Disney's earlier portrayal of Maleficent should be set in stone, you won't like this movie. If you approach it with the idea that fairy tales are a flexible vehicle for insight into the human condition, you will probably like this movie quite a bit. It's not a perfect story, but it offers a surprisingly moving narrative that intersects with real life more than you might expect.

A young lady wakes up after falling asleep in the arms of a man who says he loves her. He drugs her and violates her by taking something precious. He then abandons her, brags about his conquest, and turns his back on her despoiled life. 

In the aftermath of her abandonment, she chooses to embrace revenge, hate, and a lust for power. Joy becomes bitterness; warmth and laughter become cold cynicism. She builds walls around her heart and her kindgom so no one can hurt her again. She begins to use others for her selfish purposes. And when the opportunity for revenge presents itself, the girl who once loved to help is the first in line to harm.

If you have not heard this story before, you’re not listening, and I'm not talking about Maleficent's updated story. It’s happening around us all the time. Lest you think I am reading too much into this, Angelina Jolie noted: "The core of [the movie] is abuse, and how the abused have a choice of abusing others or overcoming...What could make a woman become so dark? To lose all sense of her maternity, her womanhood, and her softness?"

Steelheart: Helping the Heroes Along

Have you ever finished a really satisfying book and thought, “How did I not know about this author before?” Brandon Sanderson's YA hit Steelheart is that kind of book. I promptly followed it up with Mistborn: The Alloy of Law, then Warbreaker, then his Mistborn trilogy (in which I am currently immersed).

Brandon Sanderson is a teacher at Brigham Young University who also writes prolifically: he has continued Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series while managing to write seventeen novels, a number of shorter works, and a graphic novel. He’s been nominated for and/or won major literary awards every year since 2005, and he co-hosts an award-winning podcast. I get tired just reading his bio. He probably wrote a novella while I typed this paragraph. 

Even more impressively, his track record would suggest that this imaginary novella I just had him write is very good. I suspect I will eventually read everything he has written. His stories are innovative, thought-provoking, and grounded in a moral universe that fits in well with my Christian worldview.

Days of Future Past: Do Our Choices Matter?

“So many battles waged over the years... and yet, none like this. Are we destined to destroy each other, or can we change each other and unite? Is the future truly set?” – Charles Xavier

X-Men: Days of Future Past is a story about free will and human nature.  Sure, it’s many other

things as well – an excellently crafted movie, an equal rights parable, a commentary on human atrocities, a discussion starter about evolution – but  the latest installment in this thought-provoking franchise is perhaps the most cerebral of all.

As he considers the carnage of the Mutant/Human war, Xavier wonders, “Are we destined to destroy each other? Or can we change who we are?” The Mutants have found a way to jump a few days into the past and avoid small catastrophes, but changing single events cannot alter the larger arc of stubbornly insistent history. All seems lost; both the characters and the conflict are succumbing to the chaos. Bryan Singer noted in an interview:

“[Days of Future Past] confronts the notions of hope and second chances. It's characters that are lost trying to find themselves. In X-Men one and two, the characters had come into their own and knew who they were. In this one, they're all lost. And they're trying to keep it together.” 

The Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking)

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"The Noise is man unfiltered. And without a filter, man is just chaos walking."

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Patrick Ness's opening book in the Chaos Walking trilogy,  The Knife of Never Letting Go,  garnered plenty of awards and overwhelmingly positive reviews when it was first released. Now, like so many other popular YA novels, it's headed for the big screen (Lionsgate bought the film rights).

THE PLOT

Todd is the last innocent boy in a town of corrupted men on a planet that humanity had begun to colonize decades before. The endemic corruption is hardly a secret. Through some odd twist of fate, all men on the planet have the Noise:

“There ain’t nothing but Noise in this world, nothing but the constant thoughts of men and things coming at you and at you and at you… and them’s just the words, the voices talking and moaning and singing and crying. There’s pictures, too, pictures that come to yer mind in a rush, no matter how much you don’t want ‘em, pictures of memories and fantasies and secrets and plans and lies, lies, lies. 

Cuz you can lie in the Noise, even when everyone knows what yer thinking, you can bury stuff under other stuff, you can hide it in plain sight, you just don’t think it clearly or you convince yerself that the opposite of what yer hiding is true and then who's going to be able to pick out from the flood what’s real water and what’s not going to get you wet? Men lie, and they lie to themselves worst of all…Noise ain’t truth, Noise is what men want to be true, and there’s a difference twixt those two thing.”

MemeThink 101

It seems clear that the battle to think carefully and reasonably is being lost. Oh, don't worry - I'm not here to gripe! Rather than bemoan the loss of our ability to think with clarity and depth, we should embrace the new way of forming opinions quickly and painlessly: MemeThink!

As a template for how to frolic in the shallow end of the intellectual pool, I offer for your consideration the meme I encountered online last week. It provides a great example for how to engage serious subjects by building an argument that does not require any heavy lifting on your part. You, too, can change the world one fallacy at a time! So with no further ado, here's some advice for how to flourish in our brave new intellectual(ish) world.

MemeThink 101

1) Swear. It's a simple way to challenge stuffy prudishness. If someone can't see how cool and edgy it is to be vulgar in even the most ordinary of conversations, you probably don't want them to be part of the discussion.

All You Need Is Kill/Edge of Tomorrow

All You Need Is Kill, Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s widely praised breakthrough novel, was nominated for Japan's Seiun Awards, published in Japanese and English, and adapted to manga beginning this past January. Warner Bros. is bringing it to a theater near you on June 6 as “Edge of Tomorrow,” featuring Tom Cruise as yet another unlikely Japanese warrior (for more info, see The Last Samurai – or maybe not).*

In Sakurazaka's imaginative literary world, the United Defense Force has been fighting Mimics, a nightmarish advance force sent by a race that wants to remake the earth into a habitat in which they can live. That means humanity has to die.

Keiji, a rookie warrior, sustains a horrible injury in his first battle. Rita Vratiski, a virtual goddess of destruction reverentially known as the Full Metal B****, finds him as he bleeds out. He manages to ask her if this is the end. ”Yeah, “ she tells him, “But I’ll stay with you until you die.” And die he does.

Then he wakes up. Through a convergence of unlikely events, he is fated for this to happen over and over again. Every time he dies, he loops back in time. He soon realizes he can train in such a way that he might be able to eventually win the battle – and perhaps the war – on behalf of humanity. He takes courage from the mindset of the samurai: “Strike down the enemy, and learn.” He shakes off his brooding nihilism, stops experimenting with ways to die, and chooses to fight.

"Who Are We?" (Reflections on The Walking Dead, Season 4)

The Season Four finale of The Walking Dead attracted 15.7million viewers, 10.2 million of whom were in the 18-49 demographic. It shattered previous records (the Game of Thrones season finale garned 5.4 million; Duck Dynasty reached 6 million; Breaking Bad’s Season Four finale recorded just under 2 million, and the final show of the entire series hit 10.3 million).

In other words, The Walking Dead is a cultural phenomenon. A lot of people are turned off by the gore (and it’s certainly gruesome), but The Walking Dead offers a gold mine of philosophical, moral, religious, and cultural talking points. I’ve written elsewhere about these issues (see links at the end). What caught my attention at the end of Season Four was the way in which Carl brings up one of the most important questions of all.

Michonne, Rick, and Carl are walking toward Terminus, a fabled place of sanctuary and rest in the midst of the apocalypse. As they get closer, Carl asks, “Will we tell them what we did?” Rick responds, “We’ll tell them who we are.” And Carl asks the right question in response: “Who are we?”

Part of the brilliance of The Walking Dead is that we are constantly challenged to ask what we would or would not do, what we could live with and what we could not. In the end, it all boils down to Carl’s question: Who are we?

Dean Koontz's "Innocence"

Dean Koontz is perhaps the most famous Christian author alive today. He has sold over 450,000,000 books, with 17,000,000 added each year.  He's sold more books than Stephen King, which is no small feat. Since he’s not published by a Christian publishing house, he flies under the radar in Christian circles. That’s a shame. He is writing about horror, hope, good, evil, nihilism and purpose in a way that is captivating, true, and broadly accessible.

His latest novel, Innocence, is yet another highly acclaimed novel of beauty and hope in the midst of a dark, dark word. Rather than working my way through the plot (I really don’t want to give away the ending), I will let Koontz's own words (from the book and from interviews) reveal why his message has resonated so deeply with so many.

FAMILY

“According to my mother, my real father loved freedom more than he loved her. Two weeks before I was born, he walked out and never walked back in, off to the sea, she said, or to some far jungle, a restless man who traveled to find himself but lost himself instead.” 

“You’re too high a price to pay,’ my mother declared on the afternoon when she sent me away. ‘I’ve lived by my own rules, and I expected a cost, but not this. Not you.’”

Koontz’s childhood was troubled to say the least, but he made the best of it. He told the National Catholic Register, “As a boy, I yearned for a normal family life, but later I understood that the darkness of my childhood was in a strange way a gift. Because of the poverty and violence of those early years, I have a depth of experience to draw upon that enriches my work.”

No wonder he writes poignantly of the perils of childhood. In a world increasingly characterized by the fragmentation of families and the damage that comes from rejection, criticism, and abuse, Koontz’s novels offer both empathy and hope. Our history is real, but it’s not our destiny.