As I was walking out of a screening of “The Backrooms”, I was stuck on the idea that the film, which leaned into a 90s aesthetic with elements like VHS found footage, was directed by a guy who was born 6 years after the 90s ended.

I’m 40. Is this just my first experience of seeing a period piece and realizing that I’m old enough that my childhood was the period? Why was Kane Parsons reaching back into the era of my childhood to tell his story when it would have worked perfectly well in the 2020’s?

I got home and started to shape my thoughts into an essay titled “The Backrooms, Cheap AV equipment and the democratization of nostalgia,” to explore the way that Gen-Z (and it’s successors) reach back into the 90s and early 2000s as a place to ground themselves and to try and discover a feeling of nostalgia for an era they never experienced. I wrote a few sentences and then abandoned the project because I felt that, like the Backrooms, it would be an interesting exploration with no real destination.

But then I happened upon this quote from a post on Nostalgia Japonica - Real Japanese Aesthetics that hinted maybe something was there. The article titled “Japanese Aesthetics for Life and Death: In Praise of Shadows, Fades, Fragments” has the flavor of a manifesto written explicitly to explain the work of a Gen Z art collective working out of Japan.

What draws us more are fragments of the past drifting around, and the afterimages of bright futures that haunt us. The postwar order is now breaking down, images of the past keep flooding our feeds, and it feels as if the ghosts of futures once dreamed of are haunting the whole world.
Now we feel we can’t grasp our reality without facing even a bit of what those broken pasts and lost futures mean to us.

There is a stated belief that, at least for this particular art collective, to explain the present, they must piece together something from the past.

However eloquently this article supported my hypothesis, if it were just a single art collective working out of Japan, that’s hardly enough to say anything general about Gen-Z. And yet, a quick google revealed countless articles, posts and essays exploring Gen-Z’s obsession with the 90s. And though there are many theories, I want to add one more voice trying to understand the phenomenon.

My childhood was exclusive to me. There are pictures of key moments that I could share with others, but the vast majority of my early life lives on only in memory. I share pieces of it with those who were there at those moments, and to some I have told the stories. But otherwise it is mine.

I am a millennial, born in 1986.

That exclusivity is not a reality for my children. To be blunt, a creep at Google or Apple could get into my Photos account and piece together a pretty clear picture of our family’s day to day. They could track every hairstyle my children wore. There would be no milestone left un-photographed, or even filmed. Though I now regret it, my children have lived much of their life on camera. It wouldn’t be a complete picture, but it would be an authentic capture of what happened with dramatically more granularity than my childhood. Key moments, yes. But also drawings I didn’t want to throw away, but did want to keep a record of. Things I really didn’t want to film, but my kids asked me to. The first time any child did anything. And then pair this with the sharing of photo albums and the vicarious living-with of those who are members of those albums.

Family members who my children have never met can recount their lives to them as if they were Truman Burbank on the Truman Show.

I am compelled by this idea in an essay by Mandy Morris titled “The Last Generation to Remember Together”:

Nostalgia grows out of the possibility of being forgotten, taking shape in the space between what happened and what we remember, needing moments that are retold differently over time. When everything is recorded, there is little room for that transformation, and memory begins to function differently.

Today, everything is recorded, and perfectly replayable. As Mandy points out, the lack of fear of forgetting changes our relationship to memory. But I believe the more important observation in the Gen-Z situation is that there is no space between what happened to wonder, question, imagine or transform. Millenials are so terrified of forgetting that we document everything— a practice which ends up obstructing the formation of meaning.

Working through a mystery, I believe, is one of the great generators of meaning. I look at a photo of myself at my 7th birthday and I find the next photo representation of myself a few months later and all I can do about the in-between is piece together clues from the two images. But the act of filling in that gap reminds me that there are an endless chain of “whys” that connected photo 1 to photo 2. As Mandy Morris notes, in the retelling of these memories, we grow in our understanding not just of ourselves, but of our families and the contexts which formed us. I have been left speechless as I look through old photos and see a photo of me and my mother that mirrors an image of my wife and my own son. But it was not the photo itself that I was silent before, but the beyond of the photo. Did that moment mean the same to my mother as the parallel moment did for my wife? Was it just a passing event, or a habit? The speechlessness is a byproduct of the understanding that comes from walking beyond this photo into my own past and my relationship with my mother. Of retelling my story to myself from memory.

Assuming my children inherit my iCloud account, I do not believe they will have this opportunity. They have been too documented by both photo and video to have big questions about the space between.

I teach Highschool Film Classes and part of that job is watching and listening to what highschoolers are watching and thinking about. I’ve been struck by how many have asked the explicit question, “What was life like in the 90s?” It seems to be an era of particular fascination for the generations that follow after mine.

As a sort of regular ice-breaker, and to help me get a pulse on student tastes, I begin Monday classes by asking if anyone has been watching any film or television over the past week. There has been a sharp uptick in media from the 90s and early 2000s, and frankly, minimal interest in current work. Many students report that they watched through Friends, or Twin Peaks, or the “Before Trilogy”.

I’ve heard audible gasps from 16 year olds after I’ve cleaned out an old cabinet and they see a handheld digital camcorder. The idea of filming something on it is exciting enough that some have gone through the work of tracking down secondhand batteries and chargers to make the camcorders functional and then proceeded to do their class projects on them.

When everyone has a truly great camera in their pocket, why this fascination with old forms of media capture that are technically inferior in every way—which we also see in the opening scene of the Backrooms, which is presented as VHS found footage?

I obviously can’t speak conclusively, and there is almost certainly not a single answer, but my operating theory is this—Gen-Z and their successors have grown up on visual media, as they live through the fragmented and incoherent chaos of the present, like the artists at Nostalgia Japonica, they are looking to the past for meaning.

Research has demonstrated a much deeper connection for Gen-Z (and following generations) to visual media. They were the first generation to grow up with visual dominated social media platforms, and there are plenty of studies—particularly by marketing agencies—to show that Gen-Z consumes way more short form video content and visual media than earlier generations.

But why land on the 90s?

I suspect it is the ubiquity of VHS Camcorders that marked the era. Gen X and Elder Millenials were the first generations to be visually captured in enough detail that one can start to feel the everydayness of the content, but it was still cost-prohibitive enough to leave gaps, and room to wonder. Not just a moment captured in time, but hours of life in motion. Like the Lumiere’s capturing the simplicity of a train arriving at a station or workers leaving a factory, but in the modern home, and simple, and relatable.

And the inherent quality of the media itself leaves room for the imagination--faces outlined, moving, but ultimately unclear.

The photo above is from a Home Video uploaded to Archive.org. One can find countless videos like the source video online.

To my eye, images like the above allow for visual narratives that invite participation, room to imagine and create within the image. Horror filmmakers understand this in the use of found footage. Consider again the opening sequence of The Backrooms— Canted angles, shots of the floor, dropped cameras, allow the imagination to enter the story and it is so much more terrifying than anything you could actually see. The following clip is from the original Backrooms YouTube series. This is one of the earliest monster reveals in the series and presented here with an intense lack of clarity.

To put a fine point on the conclusion being drawn here, the prevalence of data over story in the infinitely documented present has removed the space needed for meaning-making—for the individual to enter into the images and create a place for themselves. And so, Gen-Z (and beyond) have turned to the past, to the last place where gaps existed, but that also spoke to their predominantly visual mode of communication.

The project as a whole feels like contemporary rehash of the struggle the early moderns had after the First World War.

In the wake of violence seen on a scale never before experienced, when technology brought hope but then betrays its uses for great evil, when everyone is aware that information is no longer neutral but a weapon itself, how does one ground oneself? Where does one find meaning?

In the world of art, at least 2 major schools of thought developed to answer this question. Consider the way a poet from each school treats a generally insignificant and everyday thing.

First, William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow”:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Likely a poem you encountered in a High School English Class, and a poem that suggests very much with very few words. For me, the question that hovers over the work is, “Why does so much depend upon the red wheelbarrow?”

Well, no argument is made. It is merely stated “The wheelbarrow matters. The wheelbarrow is meaningful.” And it is the language of the poem that provides the context of meaning. Details are provided about the wheelbarrow but there is no effort to actually justify its existence apart from the words stating that so much depends upon it. This mode of thought is associated with the Neo-Modernists, who looked to ground meaning in the absolute present.

Gertrude Stein is another writer in this category. Though she would insist that “repetition” doesn’t truly exist, she would repeat words in order to “break” any history the reader had with them and allow them to hear the word as if for the first time and to understand it’s meaning in the here and now. Meaning is accessible through direct contact with the thing itself.

Compare “The Red Wheelbarrow” then to a poem by T.S. Eliot who is wrestling with the same loss of meaning. For the sake of space, I will present only the first 2 and last 2 stanzas of his work “Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service.”

POLYPHILOPROGENITIVE
The sapient sutlers of the Lord
Drift across the window-panes.
In the beginning was the Word.

In the beginning was the Word.
Superfetation of, TÒ ÈV
And at the mensual turn of time
Produced enervate Origen.

[Ommitted Stanzas]

Along the garden-wall the bees
With hairy bellies pass between
The staminate and pistilate,
Blest office of the epicene.

Sweeney shifts from ham to ham
Stirring the water in his bath.
The masters of the subtle schools
Are controversial, polymath.

Far from the repeating of the familiar that Gertrude Stein practiced, we begin with a kitchen sink of greek word components to create a term that T.S. Eliot constructed for this poem. In the full poem, from here we pass through the creation of the world, the Gospel of John, 3rd century theologians, 15th century art schools, nature framed through the lens of the holy sacraments. And to where? To Sweeney, who we know from external context to be a Boston-Irish Boxer, shifting on his buttocks in the bath.

Like the red wheelbarrow, the everyday still matters to Eliot, but only because it is contextualized in the grand sweep of history. The past gives the thing meaning. Eliot, and by extension other “Paleo-moderns” like James Joyce and Ezra Pound, have been labeled by some thinkers as “Proto-postmodernists,” in their exploration of the ways that meaning is entirely dependent upon context, over and against the William Carlos Williams school emphasizing inherent meaning in things.

One can quickly see other variations of the Paleo-modernist theme in James Joyce’s Ulysses which translates a day of the very ordinary Leopold Bloom’s life by passing it through Homer’s Odyssey. What right does Leopold Bloom have to occupy 700 pages of anything? Well maybe he has none, but the significance of his day can be constructed through the bulwarks of the past.

It is in this Paleo-modern approach that I see echoes of the Gen-Z project to stop the hemorrhaging of meaning in the present.1

But to understand the remedy for the loss of meaning, we need to properly diagnose the problem. And here I think Byung-Chul Han’s notion of the Erotic vs the Pornographic in the experience of beauty to be very helpful.

For Han, Beauty is essentially “Erotic.” He writes in Saving Beauty

Concealing, delaying and distracting are also spatiotemporal strategies of beauty. The calculation in halfconcealing produces a seductive gloss. The beautiful hesitates before appearing. Distraction protects it against direct contact. It is essential to eroticism. Pornography is without any distraction. It gets right down to it.

The argument continues to develop until it begins to illuminate our modern digital existences, and particularly as it revolves around “data.”

Data have something pornographic and obscene about them. They have no inside, no flip sides; they are not ambiguous. In this, they differ from language which does not permit things to come into perfectly clear focus. Data and information deliver themselves to total visibility and they make everything visible.

For Han, the culture of Data is fundamentally Pornographic—it is raw, exposed, and barren of mystery and therefore meaning. Or perhaps we might say the meaning of everything becomes commodification. Nothing is held sacred because it is all outward focused and driven by the utility of sharing for a “like.” Take a scroll through your Photos app and consider how much of your photo roll was taken with the intention of sharing as opposed to remembering.

Han additionally explores the idea of the cinematic technique of close-up as “pornographic,” such that, even if it is not of a sensitive part of the body, it removes mystery entirely.

I don’t think it is then crazy to push this idea to the comparative quality of photos today against the technologies of the past. The phone cameras now algorithmically fill in the lack of detail. We can zoom incredibly far and still parse the image. Think again of the quality of VHS recording, or the faded polaroid.

Over against the Pornographic is the Erotic. The Erotic attracts because there is mystery in it. It is veiled. It leaves room to wonder and to question.

I suspect everyone who looks at the above image will see it differently. The lack of clarity is actually an invitation to piece together a narrative. I would claim it is Erotic, by Han’s definition. And as you begin to provide the narrative, you create and discover the meaning present in the image, as well as it’s personal significance to you.

This is another image pulled from a arbitrarily chosen VHS recording uploaded to the Internet Archive. I have no personal connection to it, but even still it evokes something in me.

Imagine a similar image but captured with the clarity of the iPhone 17. If I have a question about what they hold in their hand I pinch-to-zoom and have an answer. My questions about the image are answered with a data-like approach.

The personal media produced by the current generation is to be consumed. And so clarity and efficiency and the abolishment of mystery are of upmost importance.

Though Han is using the terms Pornographic and Erotic beyond the limited use we typically encounter the terms, note that Gen-Z has been widely documented to support restrictions on pornography and to oppose sex and nudity in TV shows at a significantly higher rate than Millenials.

Data is ugly. Raw exposure is not beautiful. And Gen-Z seems to be longing for the beautiful.

It has been popular to call Boomers to account for the damage they have caused society economically, socially, spiritually and in, it would seem, any other possible way. So I am trying to pay attention when I start to hear voices calling out Millenials for the destruction they bring to the table in their avoidance of sincerity and insistence on blood for injustice.

And here is where I become hopeful.

You have perhaps heard the line “There are lies, damned lies and statistics.” The Millenial generation, enamored, or perhaps simply overwhelmed with tools for the accumulation and processing of data are quick to find the monsters—the CEO whose carbon-footprint is massive, the billionaire who has funded x-many terrorist organizations, the politician who accepted so many dollars from X, Y, and Z—and it is not that this isn’t important. But frankly, I am of the opinion that however valuable the data can be, we humans aren’t meant to process that much. We aren’t designed to be data consumption machines. I am incapable of processing all the pain in the world coming at me in endless feeds. So what do Millenials do with the overwhelm? They focus their rage to attack the monster.

In his Substack Article, “Millenials Tried Being Angry. It Didn’t Work.” Samuel D. James makes a compelling argument that films like “Project Hail Mary” signal a shift from this Millenial posture of rage. He writes:

“There’s reason to suspect that Gen-Z audiences in particular are tired of the guilt, fury, and exhaustion of nonstop activism. Project Hail Mary is a movie for people who care about saving the world but don’t care about assigning blame before they do it.”

Evil is real and must be opposed, but if it is merely opposed without a vision of the good life it hinders, it is simply a pro-forma exercise. It lacks a teleology.

Additionally, when the injury is produced by on-demand, perfectly repeatable data, the wound can never heal. The possibility of forgetting is a necessity for nostalgia to form, but forgetting also allows retelling that heals. A story of pain can be made into a story of redemption if there is space to retell it, space to re-enter the story and walk a different path through one’s memory. This is not to lie to oneself, but to return to the story as the person you have become and see the old world from a place of growth.

Consider the fear many have of AI’s violent takeover when it determines statistically that humans are the most destructive force on earth and should therefore be eliminated. The machine has no narrative, only imminent directive. The Millenial Generation tries to live like the machine, never forgetting, seeking justice.

To return to the Paleo-moderns—they channeled history because not only was there mystery in the gaps that allowed for the construction of narratives, but it also signaled that history might be headed somewhere. It cannot be mere accident that T.S. Eliot eventually became a convert to Christianity (and interestingly even served on an advising council to the Anglican Church with none other than C.S. Lewis!) and many of his works after his conversion do not simply try to understand the present in light of the past, but to understand that history itself is moving toward redemption.
Read the echoes of Julian of Norwich’s famous quote in Little Gidding from Eliot’s Four Quartets

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Compare that to what he concluded in The Hollow Men 17 years earlier.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Hope that looks beyond the darkness.

And so what I hope I see in the work of many Gen-Z artists and following generations is a return to hope. The 90s, sitting on the cusp of great technological development where optimism can run high and is documented in such a way that the viewer can enter in and provide meaningful narratives in the space between VHS tapes and in the rolling scan lines of the screen, becomes a base for the visually oriented artist to plant a flag and look past the Millenial Rage to a better future.

The Backrooms film itself is about a man’s failure to deal with his past. And it does not seem unimportant that Kane Parsons goes back to the 90s, not only to a slower time, but in that time creates a fictional place that provides virtually infinite space. Clark, the protagonist’s, psyche generates the backrooms from the undealt with trauma of his past, an infinite maze where figures from the past spawn in ugly variation. The film itself serves as a caution that data cannot solve our problems. There must be space and we must take time to enter into our stories to process our pain, our history, and even our hopes. Clark, after all, wanted to be an architect, and it seems he accomplished this, but only in the darkest ways. If we will not allow space to exist in healthy ways in our memories, it will come to haunt us in unhealthy ways. We will either create vacancy to fill with meaning, or will live with a vacancy of meaning.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

Matthew 5:6

The way I want this beatitude to read is “Blessed are the righteous,” meaning, “Blessed are those in right relationship with God and others.”

But that is exactly not what Jesus said.

We do not hunger for what we have.

So, in essence, this beatitude is telling us, “blessed are those who want what they do not have,” and I want to imagine that I’ve been training for this my whole life.

Except I think we have no idea what we don’t have.

Every experience of pain should point to things not being the way they were meant to be, of the promise of the coming renewal of the world. We are told that all of creation is groaning for the earth to be redeemed, to be redeemed into the beauty intended from the beginning.

I get excited when my kids sleep in a half hour. I do not live with a serious idea of what I don’t have.

But this is why it’s such an astounding Grace that Christ closed the gap anyway and, as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, became righteousness to us.

May you be given awareness of your need, of your failings, of your weakness, of the brokenness of this world so that you may be hungry, because “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

I have no doubt many of us could make a long list of where we want joy in our lives— and not just hope, but authentic joy. How many dead things do we walk around and step over assuming what is past is past, and what remains is only a memory.

It makes a lot of sense to me that the word “respair” would disappear from our vocabularies as we enter the modern era when it’s so often easier and cheaper to replace than to restore.

Disappointed? Why not just get rid of the old and try something new? A new job, relationship, church, phone. Why expend the effort and vulnerability to “hope again,” when you can pursue another vision of joy somewhere else?

We are quicker to abandon a thing than to hope for its recovery and our eyes are dulled to the possibility of joy in a dark place.

And yet, the light entered the darkness, but we must remember that it was to illuminate the old world created in Genesis. Christ makes all things new, and he makes us new.

I think we need direction for our joy because our hope is so cheap. To loosely paraphrase C.S. Lewis, we’re praying for rain to make another mud puddle to play in, when God wants to take us to the beach.

Fortunately, the God who makes us new, understands our frail hopes and so promises in Jeremiah 29:11

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

May you experience respair, and may you find a surprising joy at the end of your renewed hope.

May you go in Peace.

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.

Hebrews 4:15

James Joyce’s 700-page tome “Ulysses” tells the story of the extraordinarily ordinary Leopold Bloom’s life on June 16th, 1904, as he walks around Dublin and leads a generally very dull life. And yet, every June 16th for the past 100 years, people around the world have observed “Bloomsday”, named in Leopold Bloom’s honor, on which they recount, relive the day, and celebrate the hero of “Ulysses.”

It’s almost absurd, except that our hope rests in that same sort of Ordinary, which is that the Lord of all Creation, who spoke the world into being, in whom we live and move and have our being was potty trained, taught to walk, taught to speak, for Mary’s sake, hopefully put on a sleep schedule, and spent countless days in Ordinary Time. Hebrews says he is able to Empathize with our weaknesses because he experienced them. He has made the Ordinary, Holy.

And that’s what we can celebrate on Bloomsday.

I homeschool my kids. I want them to think well and think differently. I workout and love when my children join in, learning to tune their bodies toward strength and health. I love nature and I think there is profound grace in merely existing in natural places. At least once a year I look at a piece of property in Nebraska, far away from the hurry of modern life, that I could buy outright with the partial equity I have in my California 900-square-foot condo.

As I watch the opening of Captain Fantastic, a man and his children reading great literature around a campfire before breaking into song together, then heading to bed in the home they built and maintain as a tightly functioning unit, I think I’m seeing a glimpse of a dream.

And there is absolutely a lot of beauty in the image.

Ben Cash has retreated with his children into the woods of the Pacific Northwest. They have no electricity. No phone. Not even an address. The plan was that he and his wife would raise them there, the way they wanted, uninfluenced by anything they didn’t want. It would be their own Utopia. But as all Utopias go, things didn’t work out. Ben’s wife suffered from issues that required her removal to a hospital far away.

Despite this guarded, literally conservative approach to the past, it becomes clear that Ben adopts and instills ideologies that actually tear down tradition. What seems like grounded aspiration toward “the good life”, and an authentic liberal arts education, dissolves into a utilitarian will to power. The oldest son, Bodevan, reveals he is a Maoist (one tenet of which is that the works of tradition must be replaced, lest the habits of tradition maintain their power1), and we realize that far from using the wisdom of the past as a lens through which to judge and navigate the present, the works of history are just words and works inside an insulated and isolated environment for the children--and one which cuts them off from the actual operation of the world. Bodevan himself admits as much.

At this point in the film, there would be a beautiful onramp to take this fear-based world of the opening act, and drive it into a place where the children’s love of literature and nature and beauty, where their love for one another and cohesion as a really large family is channeled into a truer and richer vision of what it means to live in the wider world. It does not take this opportunity. And this is where the film begins to falter (and from hereon spoilers will be present.)

The difficulty with a story in which characters aggressively challenge moral centers, either because they exist in the past or because they are ideologically incompatible with lifestyle preferences is that it makes a meaningful landing place for a story difficult to establish.

Ben Cash has a code. He has strong beliefs, and though he makes clear that he and his wife think organized religion is “the single most dangerous fairy-tale ever invented”, one might argue, “You don’t need religion to be ‘moral’.” As it turns out, for this film, you can actually ignore that philosophical question because by any reasonably acceptable standard of morality, Ben fails. Disgusted by the offerings of a restaurant (at which they were presumably going to dine and dash), they leave and execute an elaborate plan to steal all the food they want from a grocery store (including a birthday cake with which to celebrate Noam Chomsky Day). They steal the food and they celebrate. Spouting mantras like “stick it to the man,” and “power to the people”, and this after dismantling businesses run by people we have no reason to believe are any more well off than they are.

The third act could have been an atomically impactful gut punch in concluding the story of a man who desperately loves his kids and is willing to sacrifice everything for their sake. However, at his wife’s funeral—the objective destination of the story—metaphorical funeral bells begin to sound for the weight this story carries.

Ben has led his children across the country to take them to their mother’s funeral so that he and they can have closure. He has been threatened with arrest if he shows up, but even still, he defiantly enters church, steals the stage and in his eulogy states:

It was at this point that the film cut itself off at the knees. I have been profoundly impacted by films that take deep issue with organized religion. That is not my qualm. The issue is the insistence on the children’s mother as being nothing more than “rotting flesh.” So why’d they come? Why does this matter? Why does all of this drama need to happen? And at the end of the day the answer is, “Because Ben wants it to.” That’s it.

The story cannot reach beyond this point. It has torn down anything it could have reached for because the world of the film refuses transcendence.

It actually brought to mind another film that tried a similar push for impact without transcendence—Everything Everywhere All at Once. I really did enjoy that film, but after all the relentless chaos, energy and story the filmmakers attempt the line, “Nothing matters, so we have to be kind.” and my response, “WTF? Why? Why not ‘Nothing matters, so prey upon the weak. Nothing matters, so murder those who annoy you. Nothing matters, so exploit everybody and everything you can get away with.” These are all equally valid conclusions—assuming we want to allow that “validity” can even have meaning here without the ability to reach beyond the material.

Sadly, from the funeral scene on, Captain Fantastic falls into a weak sentimentality. Where else could it go? Having established that Mrs. Cash is only rotting flesh, the children continue to warmly fawn over that rotting flesh until they can burn that rotting flesh by the seaside and dump her ashes in a toilet at the airport (which was her request). Be reverent or don’t, but the attempt to do both does not land here.

(Martin-Shaw inspired aside: I did think it deeply meaningful that the children had contact with the body of their deceased mother. We live in a culture that lives in mortal terror of death and tries to tuck away in corners and under carpets. Here Ben allows his children to mourn well and we could learn a lot from it. Transcendence is on display, whether or not the filmmakers acknowledge it.)

It is frustrating to me, because in many ways the filmmaking is astounding. The patience Matt Ross exhibits in following Ben and his struggle with how he should lead his children into the world is beautiful. The final shot of the film is a moment to live in, and Ross’ choice to cut all music and allow us to sit with the sound of the family living together is truly marvelous. But the question of “why does this matter?” looms too large in the frame for the story to have the impact it seems to want to have.

(We could also talk about Ben’s choice to have his kids attend the local public school, for which they will be so profoundly over equipped that it could have been played as a joke.)

Stories are echoes of the larger story we live in through redemptive history. You can try and live off the borrowed capital from the Old World which infused everything with Transcendent weight. But if you actively defy anything beyond the material world, you will inevitably land in the realm of the arbitrary where you can do or not do, but nothing will ever amount to anything more than an opinion.

Then the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he placed the man he had made.

And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may freely eat the fruit of every tree in the garden…”

Genesis 2:8, 16

When I was in high school, I was one day driving my sister to dance class. I came to an intersection, looked both ways, pulled out and hit a guy on his bike. The guy was OK but the bike was wrecked. In a total panic I was asking questions like “What do you need? What can I do?” He asked for $100 for bike repairs which I did not have. A woman nearby overheard, and told me to come with her to an ATM where she took out $100 and gave it to me, which I in turn gave to the man I hit with the bike.

I didn’t lose anything that day but a headlight and some confidence in my driving, but I spent weeks trying to figure out how I was scammed. No one just gives large sums of money to strangers. It had to be a setup—even though, again, I didn’t lose anything.

Giving freely without conditions feels unnatural.

But actually not only is it natural, it’s the way we, humanity, are instructed to interact with our world. “You may freely eat…”

Freely giving, freely receiving is how we were designed to operate. Sin, which is unnatural, tells us that everything is earned and earned because we’re worth it. Christ in his life, death and resurrection reminds us of this and restores the original order. You are loved, not for what you offer, and despite your constant and gratuitous failure. He freely gave and asks you to freely receive.

May you go in Peace.

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.

Hebrews 4:15

After being born among animals and filth because his parents were refused a reasonable place to stay, he lived for years as a refugee in Egypt, fleeing a state sponsored mass murder of which he was the primary target.

On his return he was hated and hunted by the pharisees and religious leaders until he was eventually betrayed by his own people, who demanded a murderer be released instead of the one who gave many of them sight, and healing, and hope.

He was eventually murdered while the state smiled on.

There are few ways in which Christ can’t directly and literally identify with your experience of pain, betrayals, and exclusion.

And yet, even when betrayed by one of the 12 in his inner circle with a kiss, after being denied 3 times by one of his best friends, he did not close his circle or his arms, but instead opened them wider allowing them to be nailed in that position so that all would know they are welcome in.

You are seen in your hurt and weakness. You have a companion on the dark road. You are loved through it all.

May you go in that peace.

The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

Mark 12:31

Wendell Berry has characterized modern political discourse as groups pressuring other groups to do the things they themselves are unwilling to do. Certainly the way we vote should reflect the love we are called to as Christians, but if it is not accompanied by person to person expressions of that same love, what good is it? Whoever wins the election may have the ability to influence behavior, but they cannot change hearts. They will not love your neighbor for you.

Jesus is Lord of all Creation, the country included, and yet he still bent down to wash his disciples’ feet.

The hands of Jesus aren’t just around the world, but also mending the wounds of the broken people in it. May you be a known as a Christ Follower who overflows with his love.

May you go in Peace

The film certainly divided the audience in that theater. The man to my right stood up during the closing credits and told his girlfriend that it was the worst movie he’d ever seen. My friend, who sat to my left, not hearing this comment looked me in the eye to state that this was “The End of Cinema.”

He did not mean that this was the concluding chapter in the history of film, but that what Malick had done in his intensely controlled, but emotionally lush, thematically rich combination of visuals, dialogue, sound and music is the very thing that cinema was uniquely designed to do. Cinema found culmination in this work. The Tree of Life could not exist in any other form. It would not be a good book. It certainly isn’t a song. Impossible as a stage play. It does and can only ever exist as film.

Three years before the The Tree of Life was released, in 2008, I saw trailers for the Wachowski Brothers’ Speed Racer. It looked stupid. The ridiculous saturation. The cliched lines. Unintelligible flashing lights trying to pass for action. And after the profound disappointments of the Matrix sequels and V for Vendetta, I had exactly zero interest in seeing it. If I had any doubts in my resolve and had cared to read critical reviews (which overwhelmingly panned it), I would have been steeled in my opinion that this was not a film worth my time.

Here we are 18 years later, and in that intervening time, I never stopped hearing voices—often of those I respected deeply—using phrases to describe the film as a “misunderstood masterpiece” or “an avant-garde blockbuster that was too ahead of its time.” I saw Jupiter Ascending—the first film I ever hated—and read about the travesty of Cloud Atlas, which continued to affirm my opinion that The Matrix was a fluke and the Wachowskis have no actual talent for filmmaking.

But the voices didn’t stop. “The greatest racing film ever made.” “Should have won the Oscar for Editing.” “An art-house film disguised as a racing movie for kids.”

So this past week I caved. I teach high school film classes. It was Senior Ditch Day and AP exams were happening at the same time, which meant my class attendance was virtually non-existent. Why don’t we give it a go for the few stuck in the screening room with me?

I’ll say it. “I was wrong.” And I have never seen anything like Speed Racer.

In the final racing sequence of the film—amidst a blur of flashing lights, blurring lines, car sounds and flashbacks—I was surprised to recall my friend’s statement about the The Tree of Life as “the End of Cinema”. And in one particular moment during which I could no longer parse individual images—even if the film where paused, I could not tell you what I was looking at—I still had no doubt what was happening. It was emotion painted on celluloid, and in total service to the story.

But it is not just speed and overwhelm on display. Michael Bay is another filmmaker often, and perhaps rightly derided for form over substance, but I would defy anyone to claim he isn’t a master of visual exposition. The opening of Armageddon is case in point. Several storylines kicked off with minimal dialogue and zero confusion. It may not change you, or ask anything of you, but for what it is, it is masterful. So too here we see the visual medium used in ways to create meaning in exclusively cinematic ways.

Speed Racer is not the first to utilize the techniques that it champions, but is the only film I’ve seen to make it part of it’s essential vocabulary. What other filmmakers might do once in their film with a wink and played for laughs, the Wachowskis fully commit to. Instead of shot-reverse-shot, in a film about speed, why not just whip the camera from car to car.

Is it ridiculous and over the top? Absolutely. Does it play perfectly into the momentum and emotion of the moment? Absolutely.

It’s fun to imagine the early pioneers of film being confronted with the pure cinema on display here. What would the Soviets, who theorized techniques of film editing based on the limited film processing techniques of the 1920s and 30s, say when faced with the vision of a character as a child, transitioning to a shot of the same character as an adult via the head of a character in a third location providing commentary that contextualizes both shots at the same time?

A cocktail of Pudovkin’s “Parallelism,” showing two different incidents occurring at the same time, his “Simultaneity,” which we commonly refer to cross-cutting between two scenes happening at the same time, “Leitmotif,” which repeats shots to create a cumulative meaning over the course of a film, all assembled in a comprehensive blend of Eisenstein’s “Metric,” “Rhythmic,” “Tonal,” and “Overtonal” montage.

Buckle up, Comrade.

To put a fine point on it—the strength of this film is the editing. With perhaps the exception of some quieter family moments, every single shot is planned to the nth degree because of an intricate tie to the shot that comes before and the shot that comes after (or, as seen above, simultaneously!).

Lest anyone walk away from this with the impression I think The Tree of Life and Speed Racer ultimately stand on equal footing, I’ll say clearly: The Tree of Life is the sort of film you watch, rewatch, digest and walk differently afterwards. Speed Racer, well, not so much. Though it is worth saying out loud that despite the incredible play the Wachowskis use in the film, there is a genuinely sincere core, which is perhaps why the film works. Every other film I’ve seen where “MORE!” felt like the guiding principle could not take itself seriously at any point. And yet, at the center of this story is a nuclear family who cares, who expresses care, and who stick together. The filmmakers don’t seem to be winking at the camera either—”See isn’t this cute in the middle of this chaos”—and I think it serves as a landing place for minds and senses overwhelmed by the rest of the movie.

Will Speed Racer endure? I don’t know.

Is Speed Racer the “End of Cinema?” Hardly.

But I do believe Speed Racer is a place where many could rediscover the play that ought to be present in a work of art and to be inspired to continue to push the medium to create greater meaning and joy in the stories that are told.

“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.

“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.”

Matthew 5:13-16

What does it mean to be “salt and light?” For context, let’s remember that this passage comes right after the Beatitudes and Jesus is talking to a crowd of outcasts gathered on the fringes of society and has been telling them they’re blessed when they are meek and mourning and persecuted and poor in spirit.

So before you put on your “salt and light” game face and pretend to be something you’re not, remember that the Beatitudes still apply and the rules are still the flipped, upside-down, counter-intuitive rules of the Kingdom of God.

You will fail, you will fear, you will hurt, you will feel lost, you will be persecuted, and that’s when you’ll understand the flavor the salt brings, and the hope the light offers.

And then you will relay that light to the broken world.

The light has come into the world, and he loves you.

Go in Peace.

I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.”’ And he arose and came to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.

Luke 15:18-20

Enter the story of the Younger Brother.

You’ve spit in your father’s face, left home and lived a failed life, and are now headed back.

You crest the hill, and your father’s house comes into view.

Do you believe he would run to you?

Or are you still practicing your speech?

Your speech to explain why your faith has been lukewarm lately, but it’s going to get better soon. To explain why you haven’t read your Bible or prayed in weeks, but you’ll start tonight. To explain why you haven’t yet dealt with the shameful stain of sin on your conscience, but you’ll confess tomorrow?

Whatever you think you need to say first, the good news is all your talk is useless, because he’s already running.

And as one writer put it, he’s so excited he forgot to put his shoes on.

Go in peace.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

Matthew 5:9

When asking “what does it actually look like to be a peacemaker,” it’s critical to look to the one who was both called the “Prince of Peace” and was born the son of God.

He laid himself down, submitted himself to the will of his father, and counted himself as nothing in order to make Peace between us and God.

We ask, “but when we lay ourselves down for someone we’re at odds with, what if they take advantage of us, what if they continue in doing wrong to us?”

Well at worst, we get a glimpse of the unshaking grace of Christ who repeatedly meets us in our failure and rejection of him with forgiveness and love.

At best, they get a glimpse of the same.

Go in the peace made for you at great price because you are dearly loved.

A Thief hangs on a cross.

He doesn’t know how long it’s been. His life is no longer measured by the movement of the sun, but by the endless weight of deciding if another breath is worth the pain of lifting his cruciform body with his nail-pierced feet so his lungs can decompress enough to draw in a little more air.

He saw his brother in the distance looking at him. It was probably just for the shameful spectacle but he likes to think his brother was actually checking on him. Not that there was anything to be done.

His mother will be too ashamed to see him here. He won’t see her again.

So he is alone. Labored breaths and waiting.

Another victim of the state is raised on a cross next to him. He looks familiar—maybe he saw him once from the back of a crowd when everyone ate their fill of bread and fish. He didn’t steal anything that evening.

“This is the King of the Jews” is hung over the man’s head. A lot of people hated this man. The Thief doesn’t know his story but he can tell by the way they expressed their hate across the man’s body. It seems odd to think he himself got off easy, even as he awaits his own death.

There were murmurs of an opposition leader entering the city. This one seemed like somebody — the Jews even risked throwing a parade for him with palm branches and singing. Right in front of the Romans. Nobody stands up to the Romans and this is just another example of why.

“The King” has a lot of visitors. Most of them spectators, mockers. But there are a few women and a few friends who hang close. They will stay until the end. If the guards let them.

The guards take the King’s clothes and are dividing them up. They try to get him to drink some vinegar.

Just let the man die.

It’s not long before the “Important People” show up and start yelling. “He saved others; let him save himself, if he is the Christ of God, his Chosen One!”

Who is this guy?

The Important People continue to mock.

“Some of these idiots even thought he was the Messiah.”

“I heard a naked guy who slept in a graveyard next to pigs call him the Son of God once.”

The Christ of God? The Jews’ Messiah? The Chosen one? The King of the Jews?

But, to the Thief, the King is just another man, dying the same death as him, measuring his final hours in gasping breaths. This is not how Messiahs die. This is not how Kings die. This is not how Gods die.

Time passes. And through profound pain the Thief listens and watches. Strange darkness settles over the land.

Before long another thief annoyed with the endless stream of onlookers in his final shameful hours cries out, “Are you not the Christ, save yourself and us!”

Yet something has changed, because the first Thief finds he cannot stay silent. “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.”

Then, perhaps the Thief’s last words: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

King Jesus responds, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

He saw no sermons, no miracles, no resurrection.

He witnessed no battles, no conquests, no parade .

What did the Thief see in Jesus, who was both hailed as Messiah but could no longer move his body, except for the small amount his pierced hands and feet allowed? What did he see in this King of the Jews who chose to no longer display his power in miracles, but instead to slowly bleed and asphyxiate. What did the Thief see in this man, who seems to have willingly chosen to wait and suffer and forgive, even until his dying breath?

What hope. What power. What imagination.

Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

Romans 5:9-11

One of my favorite books is Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. It’s a series of letters from a 70 year old pastor with a fatal heart condition writing to his 7 year old son whom he will not see grow up. At one point the old pastor writes this:

If your identity is a redeemed Child of God, even during this most divisive season, you don’t get to play by their rules, you don’t get to hate like they hate, you don’t get to despair like they despair. You are called to love, to give, to hope.

Of course you’ll fail to do that--we’ll fail to do that.

But the wonderful reality is that when we were enemies, the Lord took our sins upon himself that we might know the profound Love he has for us.

Now, you are the Beloved Children of God.

Go in Peace

Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.”

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live. Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

“Yes, Lord,” she told him, “I believe you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who comes into the world.”

Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. “Remove the stone,” Jesus said.

Martha, the dead man’s sister, told him, “Lord, there is already a stench because he has been dead four days.”

John 11:24-27, 38-39

In the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, Jesus is far away and hears his good friend has died. He travels to visit the family. He talks with Martha and tells her, “I’m the resurrection and the life.” And then, “the dead will walk again,” and Martha says she gets it. He then tells her to “take me to the tomb.” Martha at this point seems to think Jesus just needs some closure, because even when Jesus then says, “Open the tomb”, Martha, who should be connecting the dots right now, instead opens her mouth and says “But he’s going to smell bad.”

Shut up, Martha! Don’t you get it? He’s about to raise the dead.

And isn’t this the church? Jesus standing with his pierced hands held out and calling to the hurting and broken world that he is going to make new, and there’s lus, elbowing him in the ribs and knowingly whispering “You should know, That one’s going to smell bad.”

Shut up, Church! He’s about to raise the dead.

And that’s the good news, the only thing you, or anyone else brings to their resurrection is their death.

Are you able to die?

Yes?

Come on in.

The Resurrection and the Life will take it from here.

Go in Peace.

Now Thomas, one of the twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.”

John 20:24-25

I like to imagine the week after the resurrection in the room with the 11 disciples and the locked door. 10 of them excitedly discussing the empty tomb and the risen Christ. The 11th, Thomas—Doubting Thomas—listening to it all and saying “No, I can’t believe it, it’s not enough.” Then Christ appears and there’s a moment when Thomas considers the stories he’s heard, he listens to the other apostles saying “See, we told you!” and he does see now, with his own eyes, the thing he wants with all his heart to be true.

But his doubt still wins and he says “No, it’s still not enough. I need to feel his hands.”

Maybe this is you. You’ve heard the stories, maybe even seen some things that look like miracles, but you need to feel his hands.

Because He is risen, may you feel his wounds where your wounds and doubts are greatest, and may you feel hands of Jesus working love and grace into your life.

May you go in peace.

… this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it. For David says concerning him,

“‘I saw the Lord always before me,
for he is at my right hand that I may not be shaken;
therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced;
my flesh also will dwell in hope.

Acts 2:23-26

The special challenge of Christian Hope is that we have such cheap things to practice with. That is, things that are unproven and unknown—things in which we’re desperately looking for future potential.

“I hope she answers.” “I hope he understands.” “I hope I’m protected.” “I hope this works.”

And as often as not it doesn’t, and they don’t.

Whereas Christian Hope asks us to look backwards to a thing accomplished on a cross, 2000 years ago, on a garbage dump outside Jerusalem.

You aren’t looking at what could happen, but what already has. So now, today, and even tomorrow, when you say, “I hope He loves me,” you have full assurance he does.

Go in Peace.

I have provided all kinds of grain and all kinds of fruit for you to eat.

Genesis 1:29

One of the jokes I’ve always heard about Sunday School is that if you don’t know the answer to a question, just answer “Jesus,” “God,” or “The Bible,” and you’ll probably get it right. I think I’d like to add “God throws a feast” to that list.

God creates man and invites him to eat anything he wants.

The Israelites overthrow their enemies, and God commands a feast,

During times of Peace in Israel, God commands a Year of Jubilee every 7 years to keep the party going.

The prodigal returns, and the father throws a party.

In his last hours with his disciples, Jesus invites them to a feast.

In the first days after the resurrection, Jesus again invites them to eat with him on the shore of the Galilean Sea.

And at the end of time, as seen in the Book of Revelation, we are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.

Our God is the God of grace who gives and gives and gives, despite our behavior and far beyond our deserving, with exuberant generosity.

And best of all, it’s for His sake He celebrates, which means we’ll never be uninvited.

His love for you is profound and secure.

Go in Peace.

And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, “Do not weep.”

Luke 7:13

In the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, Mary And Martha come to Jesus to tell him that their brother is very ill and will die and can Jesus please come before that happens.

Yet Jesus waits a couple days before going to where Lazarus by that time has died and is laid in a tomb.

When Mary comes to Jesus we read this:

“When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled.”

Jesus knows that in a short time death will be defeated. He has even already declared that he is going to raise Lazarus from the dead but even still a few verses later we read the famously short :

“Jesus wept.”

As I read this story its not Lazarus’s death that causes Jesus to cry--that’s a temporary problem--but rather the pain he sees in the faces of those he loves.

When you find yourself in a season of mourning, don’t run from it, but rather follow Mary and Martha in running to Jesus, carrying your pain with you. He is the God who became man to feel your pain, and heal your pain, to redeem your pain.

Run to him. Take others with you.

Go in peace.

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.

John 13:34

When John first heard the commandment “as I have loved you” he may have thought it was a reachable goal. But I imagine him standing at the foot of the cross remembering “as I have loved you” and realizing that it was always an…

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