What’s Wrong with the World

Unfortunately, Daredevil was only a little bit better – our hero Matt Murdoch (Daredevil’s real name) may have had a guilty conscience when it came to all the bad guys he was beating up at night but not when it came to all the pretty women he was having sex with after those battles!

Huh? What are you talking about? The relationship with Claire? Matt kisses her once then never sees her again (Claire even says something to the effect of "I was wondering when you'd do that," but it's specifically never followed up on). That's it. Matt never has extramarital sex. Nor does Foggy, who goes on a single date with Karen, during with Hell's Kitchen is literally blown up by the Kingpin. Nor does Kingpin, for that matter, at least on screen. I guess you could say it's implied insofar as he's the villain and we have no reason to believe he isn't sleeping with her, but it's certainly not explicit.

Like, seriously, I have no idea what you're even referring to. I'm baffled.

"Jessica Jones" I'll give you with no argument.

I grew up on Marvel, but around the time that Marvel had a lot of internal problems and Image and Top Cow formed from a lot of the refugees from Marvel. I remember being in middle school and early high school and reading Witchblade, the Darkness, Fathom and stuff like that as well as X-Men and a few others. It's actually amazing how tame Marvel and DC were and still are compared to some of the imprints that spun off from them. Though Marvel does now, or had for a while, some R-rated comics. One was more lewd and nude. I think the other was based on War Machine and rated mature because it was pretty damn violent.

I will say this, though. If you can look past the sex, Image and Top Cow had much better stories back then than Marvel tended to have in the X-$TEAM_HERE comics.

By the way,

...have her lead a noble and worthy effort to fight one of the most interesting, insidious and evil super-villains ever brought to the screen by Marvel’s writers (and played brilliantly by the British actor David Tenant.)

Definitely agreed. Ritter was great, but Tenant was the highlight of the show. Brilliant.

MarcAnthony,

Three comments:

1) On the question of Daredevil and Claire, I just assumed that after their kiss, because she slept over they had sex but perhaps it is my mind that has been corrupted by the sexual revolution and I was assuming the worst of Matt Murdock. You may have provided an important corrective to my cynicism here.

2) On the other hand, you simply don't remember Foggy and Marci's fling:

http://marvelcinematicuniverse.wikia.com/wiki/Marci_Stahl

The picture provided in the Wiki helpfully sums it all up -- to be honest I may have been confusing Foggy's exploits with Matt's in my head.

3) It is obvious that after the Kingpin tells Vanessa about his childhood, she sleeps over at his penthouse and I doubt they spend a chaste evening together. You are right though that the show is not explicit about their fornication -- be thankful for small favors!

In summary, I'm not letting Daredevil off the hook :-)

Marci I apparently forgot about (though again, Foggy isn't Catholic and there wasn't anything explicit), but I think you're being distinctly unfair to Matt. It never occurred to me that he was sleeping with Claire, and I don't think it was implied.

As for Kingpin...look, I'm not sure what you want from the show. Are you expecting the evil crime boss/domestic terrorist to be sexually chaste? They didn't even show anything.

"Jessica Jones" was conceived as a "progressive", feminist show, and in light of that I actually think they told a surprisingly good story with some strong performances from the leads. But I do think you're being distinctly unfair to "Daredevil". The worst you can say about it is that maybe Foggy shouldn't have hopped into bed with Marci, but even that didn't show anything explicit.

I just double checked Matt and Claire's relationship. I really don't think they actually hooked up, so I think Matt's in the clear.

"What is wrong with television today" - Maybe what's wrong with television today is that Christians are watching this trash, which supports the industry. So they will continue to produce this evil. Because it doesn't feature "gratuitous nudity," but just has numerous sex scenes, it is okay to watch??? Wow. -d

Maybe it is time to create our own hero – the Chaste Crusader!

Yikes. Sounds about as appealing as Christian metal.

There is good Christian metal out there.

Maybe what's wrong with television today is that Christians are watching this trash, which supports the industry.

Give me a better alternative than the latest Kirk Cameron movie or "Fireproof" and I'm in. You gotta give me some reason to believe the Christians can match up in quality, because right now I'm not seeing it. And as it is, "Daredevil" is actually pretty good on a moral/religious front.

Um, wait a minute, MA, who says you have to watch some TV show or other? That sounds to me like an addiction, not a rational choice.

Mind you, I'm not saying that a Christian boycott is going to change the industry. But your response to the suggestion not to watch some show is a rather typical (and, dare I say it, somewhat knee-jerk) response of someone who is all-in for pop culture: We have to watch something. Anyone who suggests that we not watch x because of y content is obligated to "give me a better alternative."

I have a better alternative: Read some excellent old book.

Dan,

In a better, serious, moral Christian country, there would be a television censor that would insist that such sex scenes be removed from the show. Since we don't live in such a country we all must make a decision as to whether or not watching such vulgar stories is worth it or not for the show's other positive qualities.

In defense of popular culture, I turn to this blog's patron saint, G.K. Chesterton's, "A Defense of Penny-Dreadfuls":

One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mass of which we contentedly describe as vulgar. The boy's novelette may be ignorant in a literary sense, which is only like saying that modern novel is ignorant in the chemical sense, or the economic sense, or the astronomical sense; but it is not vulgar intrinsically--it is the actual centre of a million flaming imaginations.

In former centuries the educated class ignored the ruck of vulgar literature. They ignored, and therefore did not, properly speaking, despise it. Simple ignorance and indifference does not inflate the character with pride. A man does not walk down the street giving a haughty twirl to his moustaches at the thought of his superiority to some variety of deep-sea fishes. The old scholars left the whole under-world of popular compositions in a similar darkness.

To-day, however, we have reversed this principle. We do despise vulgar compositions, and we do not ignore them. We are in some danger of becoming petty in our study of pettiness; there is a terrible Circean law in the background that if the soul stoops too ostentatiously to examine anything it never gets up again. There is no class of vulgar publications about which there is, to my mind, more utterly ridiculous exaggeration and misconception than the current boys' literature of the lowest stratum. This class of composition has presumably always existed, and must exist. It has no more claim to be good literature than the daily conversation of its readers to be fine oratory, or the lodging-houses and tenements they inhabit to be sublime architecture. But people must have conversation, they must have houses, and they must have stories. The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important. Every one of us in childhood has constructed such an invisible dramatis personae, but it never occurred to our nurses to correct the composition by careful comparison with Balzac. In the East the professional story-teller goes from village to village with a small carpet; and I wish sincerely that any one had the moral courage to spread that carpet and sit on it in Ludgate Circus. But it is not probable that all the tales of the carpet-bearer are little gems of original artistic workmanship. Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. A work of art can hardly be too short, for its climax is its merit. A story can never be too long, for its conclusion is merely to be deplored, like the last halfpenny or the last pipelight. And so, while the increase of the artistic conscience tends in more ambitious works to brevity and impressionism, voluminous industry still marks the producer of the true romantic trash. There was no end to the ballads of Robin Hood; there is no end to the volumes about Dick Deadshot and the Avenging Nine. These two heroes are deliberately conceived as immortal.

But instead of basing all discussion of the problem upon the common-sense recognition of this fact--that the youth of the lower orders always has had and always must have formless and endless romantic reading of some kind, and then going on to make provision for its wholesomeness-- we begin, generally speaking, by fantastic abuse of this reading as a whole and indignant surprise that the errand-boys under discussion do not read The Egoist and The Master Builder. It is the custom, particularly among magistrates, to attribute half the crimes of the Metropolis to cheap novelettes. If some grimy urchin runs away with an apple, the magistrate shrewdly points out that the child's knowledge that apples appease hunger is traceable to some curious literary researches. The boys themselves, when penitent, frequently accuse the novelettes with great bitterness, which is only to be expected from young people possessed of no little native humour. If I had forged a will, and could obtain sympathy by tracing the incident to the influence of Mr. George Moore's novels, I should find the greatest entertainment in the diversion. At any rate, it is firmly fixed in the minds of most people that gutter-boys, unlike everybody else in the community, find their principal motives for conduct in printed books.

Now it is quite clear that this objection, the objection brought by magistrates, has nothing to do with literary merit. Bad story writing is not a crime. Mr. Hall Caine walks the streets openly, and cannot be put in prison for an anticlimax. The objection rests upon the theory that the tone of the mass of boys' novelettes is criminal and degraded, appealing to low cupidity and low cruelty. This is the magisterial theory, and this is rubbish.

So far as I have seen them, in connection with the dirtiest book-stalls in the poorest districts, the facts are simply these: the whole bewildering mass of vulgar juvenile literature is concerned with adventures, rambling, disconnected, and endless. It does not express any passion of any sort, for there is no human character of any sort. It runs eternally in certain grooves of local and historical type: the medieval knight, the eighteenth century duellist, and the modern cowboy recur with the same stiff simplicity as the conventional human figures in an Oriental pattern. I can quite as easily imagine a human being kindling wild appetites by the contemplation of his Turkey carpet as by such dehumanised and naked narrative as this.

Among these stories there are a certain number which deal sympathetically with the adventures of robbers, outlaws, and pirates, which present in a dignified and romantic light thieves and murderers like Dick Turpin and Claude Duval. That is to say, they do precisely the same thing as Scott's Ivanhoe, Scott's Rob Roy, Scott's Lady of the Lake, Byron's Corsair, Wordsworth's Rob Roy's Grave, Stevenson's Macaire, Mr. Max Pemberton's Iron Pirate, and a thousand more works distributed systematically as prizes and Christmas presents. Nobody imagines that an admiration of Locksley in Ivanhoe will lead a boy to shoot Japanese arrows at the deer in Richmond Park; no one thinks that the incautious opening of Wordsworth at the poem on Rob Roy will set him up for life as a blackmailer. In the case of our own class, we recognise that this wild life is contemplated with pleasure by the young, not because it is like their own life, but because it is different from it. It might at least cross our minds that, for whatever other reason the errand-boy reads The Red Revenge, it really is not because he is dripping with the gore of his own friends and relatives.

In this matter, as in all such matters, we lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the "lower classes" when we mean humanity minus ourselves. This trivial romantic literature is not especially plebeian: it is simply human. The philanthropist can never forget classes and callings. He says, with a modest swagger, "I have invited twenty-five factory hands to tea." If he said, "I have invited twenty five chartered accountants to tea," every one would see the humour of so simple a classification. But this is what we have done with this lumberland of foolish writing: we have probed, as if it were some monstrous new disease, what is, in fact, nothing but the foolish and valiant heart of man. Ordinary men will always be sentimentalists: for a sentimentalist is simply a man who has feelings and does not trouble to invent a new way of expressing them. These common and current publications have nothing essentially evil about them. They express the sanguine and heroic truisms on which civilisation is built; for it is clear that unless civilisation is built on truisms, it is not built at all. Clearly, there could be no safety for a society in which the remark by the Chief Justice that murder was wrong was regarded as an original and dazzling epigram.

If the authors and publishers of Dick Deadshot, and such remarkable works, were suddenly to make a raid upon the educated class, were to take down the names of every man, however distinguished, who was caught at a University Extension Lecture, were to confiscate all our novels and warn us all to correct our lives, we should he seriously annoyed. Yet they have far more right to do so than we; for they, with all their idiocy, are normal and we are abnormal. It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal. Books recommending profligacy and pessimism, at which the high-souled errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room tables. If the dirtiest old owner of the dirtiest old book stall in Whitechapel dared to display works really recommending polygamy or suicide, his stock would be seized by the police. These things are our luxuries. And with a hypocrisy so ludicrous as to be almost unparalleled in history, we rate the gutter-boys for their immorality at the very time that we are discussing (with equivocal German professors) whether morality is valid at all. At the very instant that we curse the Penny Dreadful for encouraging thefts upon property, we canvass the proposition that all property is theft. At the very instant we accuse it (quite unjustly) of lubricity and indecency, we are cheerfully reading philosophies which glory in lubricity and indecency. At the very instant that we charge it with encouraging the young to destroy life, we are placidly discussing whether life is worth preserving.

But it is we who are the morbid exceptions; it is we who are the criminal class. This should be our great comfort. The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these maxims of daily life, just as there are a large number of persons who believe they are the Prince of Wales; and I am told that both classes of people are entertaining conversationalists. But the average man or boy writes daily in these great gaudy diaries of his soul, which we call Penny Dreadfuls, a plainer and better gospel than any of those iridescent ethical paradoxes that the fashionable change as often as their bonnets. It may be a very limited aim in morality to shoot a "many faced and fickle traitor," but at least it is a better aim than to be a many faced and fickle traitor, which is a simple summary of a good many modern systems from Mr. d'Annunzio's downwards. So long as the coarse and thin texture of mere current popular romance is not touched by a paltry culture it will never be vitally immoral. It is always on the side of life. The poor--the slaves who really stoop under the burden of life-- have often been mad, scatter-brained, and cruel, but never hopeless. That is a class privilege, like cigars. Their drivelling literature will always be a "blood and thunder" literature, as simple as the thunder of heaven and the blood of men.

Lydia,

You posted right before me, but raise an important and related issue -- should Christians and/or those concerned with high culture simply tune out popular culture and ignore it altogether? That is certainly one option and a noble and worthy option in my opinion -- no one's life will be diminished in any way by removing television viewing (even EWTN and CSPAN) from their daily habit and replacing it with reading literature, listening to classical music/opera, or reading religious material and cultivating a deeper spiritual life.

I'm simply commenting on popular culture for those of us who do still...suffer?...from the...habit?...of dipping into popular culture perhaps more than we should. I do think one can find worthy and wholesome stories in popular culture -- movies and even television shows that do avoid sexual themes and liberal madness and celebrate old fashioned virtues of courage, heroism, familial love, romance, sacrifice, etc.

To clarify, I'm not recommending per se that Christians must opt out of pop culture. I am, however, agreeing with Dan that "it doesn't contain actual nudity" is not sufficient to put something into the "not trash" bin, and I would recommend that Christians not watch trash. I think your own explanation of how the sex scenes leave little to the imagination indicates why shows with that feature still belong in the "trash" bin.

If "don't watch trash" ends up meaning that one watches little or no popular TV, so be it. That isn't the end of the world. I'm mainly arguing against any notion that one must watch at least n amount of pop culture TV shows and movies, so one just has to find the best of a bad lot in order to satisfy, as it were, the quota.

Um, wait a minute, MA, who says you have to watch some TV show or other?

No one; I just like several. Having considered it in the past (not because somebody told me too, but because lots of people were), I genuinely don't think I'm addicted, and I read far more then I watch TV - but I don't think watching television is inherently immoral.

I'll go even further - there's a LOT of high quality (and I don't mean this in a technical sense, but an artistic one) television and movies out there, and the idea that there isn't (which nobody here has said, but which I've heard) is a very elitist one. To deny watching them because certain parts are immoral is doing yourself a disservice. "Firefly" contains some non-explicit sex scenes and portrays some immoral ideas, but if you drop it entirely you'll miss out on their very moral follow-up movie "Serenity", which is about a man struggling to make sense of life in the absence of a God to guide him, and in the end devoting himself to the pursuit of the truth at the urging of a preacher...And this is the same show that had an episode tearing down fathers and upholding whores as examples of virtue.

(By the way, the idea that I of all people should be reading more books, or more wholesome books, actually amuses me a bit. Sitting next to me as I type this is Stephen Lawhead's novel "Pendragon", book four in a series that re-imagines the Arthurian legends in a thoroughly Christian light; I stayed up until 2:00 AM reading it. On my Christmas reading wish list is the Maboingion.Trust me, I read enough, and what I read leans far more towards wholesome than otherwise.)

In fact, Jeff is wrong about "Daredevil" anyway, which contained no explicit sex scenes, just Foggy waking up in bed afterward.

(And when I say "not explicit", I think you may misunderstand me. Literally, the Kingpin is never shown in bed with Vanessa. They don't go to bed together. They don't wake up together. At best you can imply they slept together because she stayed over, but even then this was never emphasized or mentioned.)

MarcAnthony,

I like the fact that you are pushing back against me with respect to Daredevil, but here is what I want you to consider. Yes, the show is excellent and certainly does not emphasize the characters sexual exploits in any way. I mean that sincerely. And yet, I would argue that the show does take it for granted that 20-something professionals who have a love-life are to be expected to be having sex -- hence Foggy hooks up with his ex-girlfriend Marci and they wake up in bed together. Hence Matt is referred to as a "ladies man" and has a girl he kisses sleep over at his apartment. True, we don't see them waking up in the same bed, so there is a bit of plausible deniability there. Maybe they spent the night in separate beds and have a chaste relationship -- and maybe I was bitten by a radioactive spider and swing around Chicago at night fighting bad guys with my web-shooters!!! I just don't buy it -- even if I agree with you that Daredevil did not emphasize the sexual elements like Jessica Jones and could safely be recommended to a mature Christian audience that doesn't want to see any sex scenes.

Maybe they spent the night in separate beds and have a chaste relationship -- and maybe I was bitten by a radioactive spider and swing around Chicago at night fighting bad guys with my web-shooters!!!

I looked at it - and I mean this sincerely, at the time, not justifying it afterwards - as a character moment for Matt. As much as he liked Claire, his guilt at being the Man in Black prevented him from forming a serious relationship with her. Thus, in that scene where it might be expected that Matt has sex, he doesn't because he's avoiding getting too emotionally entangled with Claire despite the fact that there's clearly a growing attraction there.

You can also make the argument that Catholic pre-marital sex teachings played a part in the decision, though in truth that never occurred to me because it made sense for them to sleep separately for other reasons.

I do want to emphasize that I really don't think my defense of "Daredevil" is because I liked the show. I generally didn't think there were serious moral problems with it. If I had I would have done what I did with "Jessica Jones" - agreed with you and added that I enjoyed the show anyway for other reasons.

And yet, I would argue that the show does take it for granted that 20-something professionals who have a love-life are to be expected to be having sex -- hence Foggy hooks up with his ex-girlfriend Marci and they wake up in bed together.

Foggy, certainly, and I do agree with you that it's the sexual revolution that caused this sort of assumption to be unfortunately accurate in regards to the real world as well. But Matt? I'm not so sure.

To clarify, I'm not recommending per se that Christians must opt out of pop culture. I am, however, agreeing with Dan that "it doesn't contain actual nudity" is not sufficient to put something into the "not trash" bin, and I would recommend that Christians not watch trash.

Me too.

I have put quite a few shows into the "trash" bin, even when I liked the premise and the plots and the acting. Sometimes because of the gratuitous or disordered sex (I mean, even apart from the actors not being married to each other in real life). Sometimes because of the over-the-top violence. I have rarely, if ever, decided later that "darn, I really SHOULD have watched that series after all". Life is too short, there are too many other goods worth going after. Good books, for example. Though there are plenty of trash books, of course.

On the other hand, I have also read a few books that had a fairly explicit sex scene, that I considered worth reading and am not dismayed that I read it. And would probably recommend to my kids, a few years after they get married. A couple, even, where the sex is not between married persons...yet.

Now, I put some shows into the trash bin that my wife doesn't, and vice versa - we don't always agree on around the edges. (Probably, she isn't going to be as bothered by a mostly naked woman on screen as I might). So I am always cautious about projecting my own choices. I can see, for a fair number of PG-13 rated movies, where one person might be beset by a scene and another person not, all as legitimate differences and without harm to good principles. More and more, recently, I have found myself turning off a movie or a series because I found the OVERALL tenor of it diminishing to my sense of rightness. Not any one specific scene, necessarily, but the whole package is the reverse of uplifting or whole-making. For example, I forget which one it is, but some show piles on pretty graphic (and frequent) death scenes, with double- and triple-dealing secret agents, and whose heroine is a killer woman - something about the fact that it is making a woman into this triple-level loyalties-betraying (or risking) woman spy killing all sorts of antagonists and lying to everyone she ever touches just doesn't do it for me. I don't need it affecting my soul, my imagination, my sensibilities. (Say, Jeff, can you unravel the insistence on shows that make the women protagonists into these extreme soldier types who can throw around a 300 lb lineman with ease?)

I came to that conclusion about Jessica Jones with 1 episode: I just don't need that. I mean, even aside from the graphic, explicit sex scene, I don't think I want her inside-out psyche inhabiting my imagination for an hour. I don't want the incredibly ugly crimes making me want JJ to do (probably) all sorts of wrong things to stop them. And yes, I really don't want dumb love-less hook-up sex in front of me, EVER.

Well, what do y'all think about the violence, which to me was the most prominent feature of Netflix's Daredevil? Gruesome violence is more tolerable or less tolerable than R-rated sex scenes? Not always an easy question.

My 6th-grader (accidentally) saw some scenes of HBO's The Pacific -- which is 10-episode series about US Marines from Mobile, Alabama, fighting the Japanese on distant hellhole islands in WWII. It's superbly done but heavy on realistic war violence, and the poor girl was really affected by it.

Now no part of me would ever say we should censor The Pacific. But film is a powerful medium for sure. We need to be careful what we put before our eyes.

Gruesome violence is more tolerable or less tolerable than R-rated sex scenes? Not always an easy question.

Violence can also descend into its own analog to pornography. The video game series Mortal Kombat is an excellent example. I remember when the series first came out and my peers scoffed at the hysteria about it. In hindsight, with the rest of the changes in society and in so many people I now notice, it's a testament to our foolishness. Anyone who doubts that violence can be quite similar in that respect should go on Youtube and watch a video collection of Mortal Kombat "fatalities."

Tony,

"Say, Jeff, can you unravel the insistence on shows that make the women protagonists into these extreme soldier types who can throw around a 300 lb lineman with ease?"

This drives me crazy!!! I can perhaps forgive this sin in a superhero movie (the example that comes to mind is the Black Widow, who has no superpowers, and yet is shown fighting and beating up big, strong men constantly) but I won't watch a show with a female fighting protagonist -- I generally like my drama to be realistic and women cannot regularly beat up men. Quick side note on this subject: the excellent actress Emily Blunt, who did a good job in the science fiction movie with Tom Cruise, Edge of Tomorrow (her fighting skills were augmented by a special suit) was in a movie this year about the Mexican drug cartels called Sicario. She was fantastic in the movie and one thing I liked was how the film showed how the brutal violence took a particular toll on her character and how as a woman she really couldn't handle the brutality. Benicio del toro should win an Oscar for his supporting role in that film.

Paul,

Yes, I think the violence can be a problem and unfortunately, I'm like the drug addict who has built up a very, very strong tolerance for the stuff. I thought most of the violence on Daredevil was mild, although there were one or two scenes with the Kingpin that I admit were intense. I won't let my daughters anywhere near any of the action movies I watch -- I like the crazy Asian stuff (The Raid and The Raid 2 out of Indonesia are my favorites.) My older daughter is into the teen dystopian books and so I have been dragged to the movies with her to watch The Hunger Games and now the Insurgent series of movies. They are violent, but the violence is more controlled and when death does occur it has a lot of emotional power and affects the characters in profound ways -- in other words the films take the violence seriously. So I do think context is key -- there are ways to use violence to help propel a story along (like The Pacific) and then there are some action movies that just throw it in to get a rise out of the audience.

Gruesome violence is more tolerable or less tolerable than R-rated sex scenes? Not always an easy question.

I'd say it was graphic, but not gruesome (mostly) - a distinction with a difference. The one exception is arguably Kingpin's beheading of the Russian with a car door, but even that wasn't actually shown directly.

Otherwise, yeah, the world is violent, but I think it's used to good effect. One of my favorite things about Matt is that he routinely gets the stuffing beat out of him, but he keeps going and ends up winning his fights anyway. The single shot fight scene from episode 2 is one of my favorite fight scenes in anything, ever - and the Nobu fight was pretty great too.

And what made them both great was that, both times, Matt got crushed, but he didn't give up. He fought anyway, and won through sheer willpower. That's a hero to admire.

Breaking Bad was the most morally serious show to come down the pike in a long time, never mind its consistently high quality. And the fact that it was an AMC show, and not HBO or Showtime, limited the level of graphic material, both sexual and violent, that could appear.

Some of the British and Scandinavian TV series also hit a level of moral seriousness that is hard to find on American TV. The first series of Broadchurch (UK) and all three series of The Killing(Denmark) come immediately to mind. Broadchurch, especially, is one of the best things of its sort I've ever seen, and I've been watching British series of its type for over 30 years.

There is good Christian metal out there.

Christian metal is so wretched Jesus and Lucifer both facepalm when they hear it.
On the other hand a gospel singer taking you to church is fantastic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm-KsLytcW0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQao9OnpmLU

Just a side note about The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins' father was a Vietnam vet who later taught history in college and it is through the lens of Vietnam that I think the series has a richer meaning.

Christian metal is so wretched Jesus and Lucifer both facepalm when they hear it.

Leah is an exception. In fact, she's better than most symphonic, secular acts from Europe and right up there with Nightwish at their prime.

I think I'm in the minority here that thought Fireproof was okay for what it was.

I offer this for consideration: http://www.jamesbowman.net/articleDetail.asp?pubID=1915

I remember once a friend telling me of a particularly trendy teacher taking this line about the revolutionary working class geniuses from Liverpool who overthrew the tired old musical establishment with fresh and original songs making serious social statements. He was in full flight to this effect when somewhere at the back of the room a voice could be heard declaiming in a bored monotone: "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah/She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah/She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!"

That’s rather how I feel when I hear my fellow conservatives commending such childish drivel as Iron Man or the new Indiana Jones movie in the belief — as I perhaps unworthily suspect — that this will make them sound cool, and hip and smart, the kind of sophisticated critics (for such they now seem to us) who can spot aesthetic merit in the very places where those already blessed with the fame and the money that comes with popular success would have wished them to find it. Well, doubtless I am blind to it myself, but such people should know that their opinions ally them to one of the most favored projects of the cultural left, which is to incorporate the heroic tale of the breaking down of distinctions between "high" and merely popular culture into a larger, triumphalist narrative of liberation from the moral and aesthetic constraints imposed by the panjandrums of high culture prior to the 1960s. The reception of the comic book and rock’n’roll into the artistic pantheon is another of the victories of the revolution of the 1960s.

I think I'm in the minority here that thought Fireproof was okay for what it was.

I never bothered to watch it after literally every conservative Christian I saw reviewing it came to the conclusion that it made a mockery of the need for repentance in both of the main characters.

Scott W.

Bowman is very, very good but I think he is ignoring Chesterton's challenge -- I wouldn't for a second compare or elevate a superhero movie to the level of a great painting or a novel. But, sometimes our stories don't have to be the highest of the high culture.

Here is Joseph Epstein on the same theme as Bowman, writing just a couple of weeks ago:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/whatever-happened-to-high-culture/article/1055581

This is how he begins:

My friend Hilton Kramer, the art critic of the New York Times and afterwards the founding editor of the New Criterion, was not a man you asked whom he liked in the Super Bowl. An acquaintance once queried me about which was Hilton’s favorite rock group. I responded that I wasn’t certain but thought him a touch partial to Herman’s Hermits. “I say,” as Senator Beauregard Claghorn, the windbag Southern politician on the old Fred Allen radio show, used to remark, “I say, that’s a joke, son.” As a kid, Hilton may have listened to the Fred Allen radio show, but the likelihood of his having heard of Herman’s Hermits or any rock group of lesser fame than the Beatles is, more than unlikely, preposterous. The Lubavitcher Rebbe might as easily been discovered eating a pulled-pork sandwich at Wendy’s.

I was talking over the phone one day with another friend, Samuel Lipman, who as a child was a piano prodigy and later a powerful music critic and with Hilton Kramer a founder of the New Criterion. Sam was dying of leukemia. I told him I had heard that Steve McQueen had gone to Mexico for laetrile treatment for his cancer. Following a pause, Sam, who was then 58 and had spent his entire life in the United States, asked, “Who is Steve McQueen?” On another occasion, I said to Sam that he rarely mentioned the movies or television. “I consider movies and television,” he replied without raising his voice, “dog shit.” Such for Sam was popular culture; he wasn’t willing to confer upon it even the dignity of the droppings of a horse or a bull.

Hilton and Sam were dear friends, and I do not know to what extent they were aware of my own deviations from high culture. I watch lots of sports on television. The all-too-occasional excellent television sitcom—The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Cheers, Seinfeld—found me at my post on the couch, an avid viewer. Although I don’t read detective or spy stories, I enjoy them, in more passive form, through movies and television. Middlebrowest of all middlebrow activities, I also watch most Masterpiece Theatre productions on PBS. I never find myself violated by a bad movie, though after having watched one, I wish I had instead done a load of laundry. I sometimes drive around the city with Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons blaring away on my CD player. Hilton and Sam, as I say, may not have known about these hopeless dips on my part into popular culture, and had they done so I do believe they would have forgiven me, with a touch of pity added for my wasting my time on such drivel.

I admired both Hilton and Sam greatly, and one thing I particularly admired was their ability to live on an exclusive diet of high culture. I didn’t for a moment think that, in ignoring popular culture, they were missing much, apart, perhaps, from a stronger notion of the general tastes and cultural preoccupations of their countrymen. Between time spent watching six segments of Seinfeld and listening to the late Beethoven Quartets there really can’t be any argument about which is the right choice. Nor can there be any between reading, say, Tolstoy and Stephen King or Sir Ronald Syme and Doris Kearns Goodwin. As for visual art, about suffering and much else, as W. H. Auden had it, the old masters were never wrong, and any competition between them and contemporary visual art ended, sadly, with the triumph of Andy Warhol, after whom serious people no longer needed to be interested in contemporary visual art. The English philosopher Michael Oakeshott notes that one of the signs of being cultured is that one knows what one doesn’t have to know. Contemporary visual art, perhaps for the first time in the history of painting and sculpture, is one of those things a cultured person no longer has to know.

I wouldn't for a second compare or elevate a superhero movie to the level of a great painting or a novel.

I have a theory (for lack of a better word) about this about movies that transcend genres. Superhero movies can be very good, but very rarely do they transcend the genre into "great" works of art. I can think of two exceptions. One is "The Dark Knight", which is, of course, brilliant.

The other is the more controversial example of "The Incredibles", which I would argue transcends both animation and superhero movies to become a classic in its own right.

The Incredibles is a classic. The Dark Knight is self-important and overrated.

The Dark Knight is self-important and overrated.

I generally agree, but it's hard for me to argue with Heath Ledger's performance.

"I have a theory (for lack of a better word) about this about movies that transcend genres. Superhero movies can be very good, but very rarely do they transcend the genre into "great" works of art. I can think of two exceptions. One is "The Dark Knight", which is, of course, brilliant."

The same can be said for most Jazz. There are some very good jazz pieces out there, but are there any that really transcend the genre into greatness? Superhero movies are jazz songs of this generation of youth. So far, there hasn't been a Rhapsody in Blue.

Part of this has to do with the parallels between how jazz developed and the modern (post-Silver Age) trends in comic. Jazz, although being taught as coming from things like the Negro Spiritual and folk music, when it actually developed directly, was from taking Classical music and, "jazzing," it, which was a way of making Classical music into slang or a lower-class dialect. Likewise, after the Silver Age, with the infusion of young blood from the Woodstock crowd, the heroic themes of the Golden and Silver Age were infiltrated with occultism, sex, and gratuitous violence - all in an attempt to be, "relevant." In reality, it was a type of moral bankruptcy, born of sin, that started the slide of comic into the Bronze Age, then the Iron Age, into the current Dark Age. Modern superhero movies are not quite transcendent because they do not have the innocence of the transcendent. A lot of the rationalizations in the comics industry about having older readers so needing more, "adult," themes is just that - a rationalization for indulging their appetites.

Golden and Silver Age comic writers were science fiction writers. They were inventive. They knew how to tell a simple, powerful, uncomplicated story. Modern comics rely on spectacle.

Fredric Wertham was pooh-poohed for his alarm in writing The Seduction of the Innocent, which caused comic books to clean up their act in the late 1950's, but, it turns out, he was prescient, given the unedifying turn and moral decay of some modern comics comic.

I like comics, but I can't recommend them, anymore.

The Chicken

MarcAnthony,

You say,

I have a theory (for lack of a better word) about this about movies that transcend genres. Superhero movies can be very good, but very rarely do they transcend the genre into "great" works of art.

The more interesting question is whether film even deserves a place at the high art table -- clearly Sam Lipman thought they didn't -- I wonder how many other smart critics in the past (or even now) share his opinion?

Masked Elephant,

Thanks for stopping by -- I'm afraid I think you are mistaken about The Dark Knight, although I do think that it works better as part of the whole trilogy of films which end perfectly with The Dark Knight Rises. Refreshing to have a dark, intense superhero trilogy end on such a shameless, upbeat note.

The more interesting question is whether film even deserves a place at the high art table -- clearly Sam Lipman thought they didn't -- I wonder how many other smart critics in the past (or even now) share his opinion?

Bluntly, I think the idea that it doesn't completely absurd, and I don't even know how one can argue the point effectively.

Golden and Silver Age comic writers were science fiction writers. They were inventive. They knew how to tell a simple, powerful, uncomplicated story. Modern comics rely on spectacle.

They often rely on spectacle - especially when converted into movies. IIRC Walker Percy made an observation about spectacle in a Northern vs. Southern context. With little to no religious code or honor tradition to be violated the Northern writers use spectacle as a way to grab a reader's attention. I would say the modern comic book writer relies on complicated stories as much as spectacle, it is rarely pure heroic good vs. pure dastardly evil. For my money The Sandman fit this mold and was inventive enough to transcend the comics genre, it won the World Fantasy Award and was nominated for a Hugo Award. But it also drew heavily on classical literary influences so it may have been more like jazz in that respect.