St. Seymour the Strange and Dead John the Seeker
Weekly Essay for Feb. 2, 2004
This weekend I saw two movies. Neither were movies I would have chosen on my own; they were recommendations from other people. Assassination Tango was recommended by Chris (my son) and Ghost World was recommended by Marc (my brother). While they were very different movies, both had something in common: Neither had a strong story line while both were primarily character studies.
I enjoyed the movies although I would be hard pressed to say exactly why. Both were very slow moving (but not boring). Both seemed to go nowhere (but remained interesting). Both were opaque and obtuse. In an extra feature on the disk, various people involved in the Ghost World movie talked about what they thought the title meant. (The movie is based on a comic book by the same name.) Everyone had some sort of grandiose theory, but no one really knew. Assassination Tango was even more obtuse. The closest to an explanation came in a conversation between John and Manuela’s aunt. She said that the tango was love and hate, peace and war; the tango was life itself.
Saturday morning (between the viewing of the two movies) a friend visited us. She was a member of the congregation I used to serve as pastor. She asked how things were going, and I found I didn't have a lot to say. My tongue-in-cheek response was that life was boring.
As I reflected on what I said and what I could have said, I realized that my life was a lot like the two movies. The plot line isn't particularly strong at the moment. There are no cool car chases or great explosions; I haven't been in any Ninja fights and no one has shot at me. My life is nothing like the movies that make lots of money at the box office.
And that's good.
It occurred to me that what makes my own life good is similar to what I found good in the two movies: It is very difficult to put your finger on, but the overall effect is pleasing.
Ghost World is about to two directionless friends just graduating from high school. Enid (played by Thora Birch) and Becky (played by Scarlett Johanson are tossing about trying to figure out who they are. Their plan is to get a job and get an apartment. The hope is life will become less murky once they are out on their own.
Into this mix enters Seymour (played by Steve Buscemi). It turns out that the movie is really about Seymour. Becky sort of fades into the background and because of Enid's confusion and teenage angst, she begins to sort out her own life through Seymour. At the beginning of the movie Seymour is a dork who the girls toy with. And Seymour is a strange dork indeed! But in the midst of Enid's toying with Seymour, she discovers that underneath all that strange, angry, quirky façade is someone who is amazingly strong and resilient. Even though it costs Seymour a high price through social rejection, his life is authentic from Enid's point of view. By the end of the movie Seymour is transformed from a dork into her hero. She, on the other hand, is transformed from calculating controller into lost loser.
And in a funny way this double transformation helps the movie stay true to its own character as Enid fades away into the land of brokenness while Seymour emerges stronger and more resilient than ever. One can guess that Enid will eventually follow a similar path, but there will be a lot of pain and heartache along the way. Her time has not yet come.
Assassination Tango is a completely different sort of movie. The story that carries the movie along is an assassination in Buenos Aires that John (the main character, an Italian New Yorker) is hired to carry out. The subplot (which occurs in New York) is about John, his girlfriend who is young enough to be his daughter, and her daughter, whom John adores.
In Buenos Aires John discovers the tango. Much of the movie centers on conversations between John and Manuela, his beautiful Tango instructor. These conversations are very jarring in the movie; they don't fit the plot. You get the sense that you are not watching John and Manuela on the set but Robert Duvall and Luciana Pedreaza (the actors playing John and Manuela) in a very private moment never intended to be on camera. There are no bedroom scenes and yet one is almost embarrassed by the intimacy of the conversation between these two. The conversation is ridiculously mundane and yet charged with overtones of passion and life. These scenes are much more documentary than cinematic in character.
It is this thespian innocence (this sense that Manuela is not acting, but that this is an insignificant private conversation) that carries the meaning in the movie much as the story of the assassination carries the plot.
In both movies a second look, a reconsideration, is required, because what you see is definitely not what you get. In Assassination Tango the spiritually dead assassin becomes alive through dance, and yet remains the cold, paranoid (although paradoxically alive) assassin to the end. In Ghost World the main character fades away on a bus while the object of her initial disdain grows strong and yet remains as weak and broken at the end of the movie as at the beginning.
In both movies, while major changes occur, nothing changes. Both movies end much as they began, sort of coming to a stop and never coming to an end. In both movies major characters remain ambiguous. In both movies the transformations that occur are tempered by a setting that makes the viewer wonder whether anything changed at all.
When our Saturday morning friend stopped at the house and asked how things were going, it is precisely this that I actually wanted to say: While everything has changed, nothing changes. While my life has been transformed, looking at the context I think we might all agree that the transformation is non-existent.
The French Existentialists expressed this opaqueness and obtuseness of life better than anyone else in the modern era, and yet they got it totally wrong. Agreeing with the Existentialists would be like saying these two movies are worthless. Looking at the opaqueness and obtuseness of life and declaring it boring and pointless because it didn't have as much action as "Terminator 3" or as much humor and repartee as "Lost in Translation" or as much cinematic grandeur as "Lord of the Rings," is to completely fail to appreciate the significance of the mundane in every day life.
Jean-Paul Sartre described life in much the same way these two movies pictured life. Sartre portrayed no clear winners while everyone, at some level, lost. His reaction was nausea and dread. But the fact that Sartre could only see loss doesn’t mean he saw all there was to see in life (and this is precisely why these movies require a reconsideration). This is where the Existentialist analysis was simply wrong.
What the Existentialists got absolutely right was that life this side of Eden is full of ambiguity, and even “nausea” and “dread” (to use Sartre’s terms). What is amazing about God’s solution to this problem is that the solution works itself out in the midst of this context. Real life—God’s life—is not an escape from the reality of sin; it is rather a victory in the midst of sin and because of that the victory is usually difficult to identify. Of course there is always the hope of the coming Kingdom, but salvation is not worked out in the context of the kingdom, but rather in the muck of life as it is with all its opaqueness and obtuseness.
What the Existentialists failed to recognize is that the victory God offers is not a clear cut victory of good over evil (thus, it is difficult to identify). Transformation occurs, and yet it often remains nearly invisible. God’s winners often continue to lose. Change for the good is often marked by things reverting back to how they were before the change occurred.
If we reflect on this, it makes perfectly good sense. If salvation offered escape from the muck, then people would no doubt quit seeking God in favor of the good life salvation offers. Seymour (from Ghost World) is, in this sense, the quintessential Christian saint and John (the assassin in Assassination Tango) is the quintessential Christian seeker. Seymour looks like a dork, but once the façade is scraped away, he becomes Enid’s hero. He remains a true hero—a hero in a Christian sense—because he witnesses to his inner character while never forcing it on Enid. In the end he becomes a martyr, but we suspect that Enid will eventually get it and follow in his footsteps. She’s going to be all right, it’s just not time yet. To put it in Biblical terms, if sent out, God’s Word will never return empty.
John, the assassin, exists in a sort of living death. In the movie the tango stirs a life he had forgotten exists. If John were offered this new life on a platter, we suspect that he would not take it because his life is really pretty good: He’s got a solid committed relationship, a wonderful little girl that is like a daughter, a community of friends. He doesn’t know he’s dead. He has to be drawn into the promise of living through a whisper, a glimpse, a dream. Life has to be awakened mysteriously if it is to be awakened at all. If a young evangelist knocked at his door and offered him salvation, he just might shoot him on the spot; the draw, for John, is not the message but the mystery, not the information, but the esthetic.
Back to the Saturday morning visitor at our house: “How are things going?” she asked. In retrospect I think I wanted to say, “I’ve discovered the mystery is much cooler than the message, the esthetic is more beautiful than the information.” I wanted to say, “Once I admitted I was a dork, I finally figured out I was okay.” What I might have said is, “Look how big of a failure I am, isn’t it awesome! I can’t imagine being in a better place.”
But I suspect that wouldn’t have made a lot of sense. In fact, it didn’t make a lot of sense to me until I reconsidered the movies. I’m glad Chris and Marc recommended them.
Copyright © 2004 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
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