Modern Christian Artists

Thomas Howard has written about the difficulty for Christian novelists in our modern world: "You can't write about the devil and expect your New Yorker readers, or your graduate departments of English, to take you seriously. It is a problem." Howard wrote this regarding Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, which smuggled ideas of grace and sin into a story that the New Yorker crowd would appreciate. No argument with him here. Perhaps a well written piece of literature with Catholic themes can appeal to the literati if done so subtlely as not to offend, but it can not be done very easily.

I recently attended a reading by two authors: one was William Kloefkorn, the state Poet Laureate of Nebraska, the other was a creative writing professor from some university who had written a novel that the New York Times hailed as brave and powerful, blah, blah, blah, for its extremely pro-abortion story line. Kloefkorn read first and read a selection from his memiors. It was well-written and pretty funny. It received a few laughs and polite applause. Next up was the other author. She was introduced by another professor (I believe) who said she was excited for the reading because it promised "something dirty." It was a crowd of adults, but they cheered that introduction with the zeal of a bunch of 14 year-old boys who had just found a stash of dirty magazines. The author then approached the podium and began with an apology. She said that she had been suffering from a long bout of writers block and for the past few years has been able to write about nothing but teenage sex and therefore the short story she chose to share was about teenage sex. Again, this comment was received with enthusiastic applause. Her story was not only about teenage sex, but her adult fantasies of infidelity to her husband as well. Ignoring the content, the story was not at all compelling and not even that well written, but I suppose I will let that go as my opinion (although it was objectively poor). Her story garnished many applauses, most notably when she described her husband's penis, at which point she broke from her narration to inform the crowd that that was her favorite part of the story, too.

After the two readings, it was clear which was the crowd's favorite. It had nothing to do with the quality of the stories, but the shock value of the content. Who cares that this was an event about literature, the night would have been a success if they had just played clips from the Howard Stern Show. I could not help but think that they would have loved the Kloefkorn memior if he had told about some fleeting love affair from his youth instead of a more meaningful event. It seems that the modern writer has an even more daunting task than writing for New Yorker readers, but in fact has to write to please adolescent libidos.

Of course, the problem is much worse. The masses don't care about literature, anyway. All that matters these days are the talkies and the moving pictures. I wonder if one can make a 'moral' movie that appeals to the moviegoing equivalent of the New Yorker readers and graduate departments of English.* Apparently not. The New York Times offered criticism of Hollywood for its "Anti-choice" position in such movies as Knocked Up. Nevermind the fact that the movie centers on premarital sex, it is apparently not progressive enough for the Times. I have not seen the movie, but (as shameful as it is) I have seen the same writer/director's movie The 40 Year Old Virgin and have a hard time believing that there can be anything more than the most superficial moral message to Knocked Up. I wonder if the Times also criticized Wedding Crashers because it portrayed the anachronsitic institution of marriage? (This, of course, begs the question as to what self-respecting Christian cares what the Times has to say about anything, but that is another story.)

So, as bad as the Christian novelist has it, the Christian screenwriter has it much, much worse. The novelist is allowed to smuggle the True Things into a good story; the screenwriter is only allowed to tell the bad story. I suppose if I must arrive at a point in this post, it is simply this: quit watching movies, or if you are going to watch them, only see movies like Transformers (right Qahal?).
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*The typical moviegoer is a different story. The Passion and all those Pixar cartoons have done fine at the box office, but what do us common folk know, anyway?