Monthly Archives: January 2014

Gravity Becomes Her

Movies

Two Movies, Gravity, Her.

Both what may be called soft-sci.fi., meaning close to what is current technological reality. Both with a female protagonist lost “out in space.” Both Oscar nominated. Both about catastrophic isolation.

That is where the similarities end. Following the trajectories of the two movies they point in two very different directions. As its name suggests, Gravity hurtles down to earth, while Her spins away into some other place “beyond physical reality.” The first is a biblical story. The second is cyber-gnostic.

The enthusiasm with which both were received suggests, I think, a constant tension in any culture affected by the gospel, but there really is only one gospel resolution. (Spoiler alert–plot details follow.)

Gravity tells the tale of a female astronaut struck by a devastating accident in orbit, one which returns every ninety minutes, like manic clockwork, as the debris flies around the earth to arrive on the digital hour with eviscerating effect. Against the odds she manages to get to an abandoned Chinese space-station and board a re-entry capsule just before the whole thing breaks apart and plunges to earth, in a hail of fiery meteors with the astronaut at its center, like the seed of life itself arriving on earth.

Her begins with a desperately lonely man, stuck in an unconsummated divorce, literally ghosting as a profession, writing “personal” letters to other people’s loved-ones, and in his spare time playing holographic video games and engaging in anonymous phone-sex. One day he sees an advertisement for OS, a computer operating system which provides a personal companion who is able to interact dynamically with the purchaser and, so to speak, learn on the job. In this case the OS is “Samantha,” the eponymous Her, and the two end up having virtual sex and falling in love. But Samantha’s abilities grow exponentially and eventually she leaves the man behind, interacting with other OSes and going beyond matter entirely. She says her existence now is “like writing a book” but “the spaces between the letters are infinite.” She tells the man that she still loves him and if there’s any chance he can get to where he is, she’ll be there waiting for him.

The astronaut in Gravity falls in her capsule into the sea, exits and crawls onto land, uttering a heartfelt “Thank you” as she grasps a handful of dirt. In Her Samantha goes terminally offline and essentially invites the man to do the same. The movie ends with an ambiguous scene on the top of a Los Angeles skyscraper, with the man and a woman–someone with a similar story of broken relationship as well as a similarly vanished OS companion–staring at the cityscape with the protective barriers at the roof edge clearly laid flat. The future has never looked so flimsy or out-of-this-world.

Putting these movies back to back there is clearly a terrible sense of the accelerated nature of present human existence–the way in which fragmented relationships combined with technological advances push us ever further into empty spaces. But in the one case there is ultimately a very dramatic slowing and coming down to physical earth, and in the other the hint of final surrender to electronic infinity divorced entirely from material relationship.

Whichever movie garners the Oscars the alternatives they pose will remain a pivotal question. Christian culture has in its own way helped to create accelerated existence (see Light Bulbs). The stress of this experience can only truly be resolved in a progressive decision to love, putting our technology at the service of the weak and needy, and indeed of the earth itself. Short of this humans will be tempted more and more to an “etherealization” of existence, to make their home somehow, somewhere in the ether, rather than on earth.

Meanwhile, the New Testament vision is clear. “I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals.'” (Rev. 21:2-3)

Light Bulbs

Anthropo-theology

I’m going to try something which I actually think is of the essence in contemporary theology. So bear with me, and you’ll see!

Systems—the way things are put together—control our thinking so much more than individual critical reflection. You are obliged to go to grade school from early childhood, and, in the vast majority of cases, when you emerge in late teens you have learned, implicitly, much more about systems—of authority, of grading, of competition and categorization—than any real knowledge in any actual field.

And that is only the most obvious, clunking instance.

Marshall Mcluhan’s’ book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964, coined the famous phrase “the medium is the message.” A “medium” in Mcluhan’s concept is a means of communication, but much broader and more structural than what we would normally understand in those terms: because it’s not the content, but the delivery system itself that is key.

For example, an electric light is a medium because on its own it radically changes the character of the human environment.

Similarly railways and highways change the meaning of the land, turning it into endless sequence, without beginning or end. And the printed word shifts our thought-world to continuity and linearity, overlaying complexity with seamless “rationality”.

And now there is the internet, the latest and most powerful example of a world-shifting medium. Incorporating in itself several previous media, it creates an explicitly named “cyberspace,” bringing with it a dramatic presence and simultaneity of all parts of the world.

Where is this leading? Without going into a long discussion of the points of convergence of this viewpoint with other contemporary thought (for example, the work of people like Illich and Debord) we can make a swift, radical connection to the thought of Girard.

Girard has conclusively shown that violence is the original human medium, the primary system of human communication.

Girard describes two stages in the work of violence, first disorder, then order. In the first the primary human group is in a chaotic-but-relational state of rivalry, with everyone angry with everyone else. In the second phase it is the group victim or scapegoat who gathers all the violence into herself and so provides order and shape to the universe. You could say, therefore, that the first state is the truly primitive system, the ur-medium so to speak, and then it is the group victim who is the very first true objective medium, organizing violence into order and communication. In this sense you might say violence is to the victim what electricity is to the T.V., structurally contained in the developed medium and making it work.

In turn the group victim is the practical beginning of human culture, so Girard would have absolutely no problem in seeing him or her as the original medium in this light too. All primitive new technology, agriculture, or the arts (including writing) are continually associated with gods. But the gods are original victims, so the cultural meaning of these developments arises from the beaten body of the victim, which provides transcendent definition and order to the transformed material conditions. So, we conclude, all physical media are firmly rooted in the original human medium of the victim.

But, then, if a single man should voluntarily enter the condition of the “original medium” and fill it with love, nonviolence and forgiveness what would be the results? Surely there would be a quickening of the pace of development of new media, because change is freed from the trauma of original/originating violence. And that is exactly what seems to have happened under the cultural impact of Christianity, with the ever increasing tempo of change from the printing press, through mechanical transport, through radio and T.V., and now to the internet. But this is only half the story.

The nonviolence of the new “original medium” must also leak through in the new media, showing the deep effect of their liberating conditions of origin. This is the argument I made in Virtually Christian (without invoking Mcluhan), showing that a “photon of compassion” continues to appear regularly on our electronic screens, our movies and in our audio songs, because of the generative role of the gospel.

But the final impact is still to come. The new “original medium” is an absolutely new level of communication in history, one which reboots humanity as such, together with all its media. There will always be, therefore, a profound human need to return to its primary scene to embrace and integrate the new humanity it brings. This in fact is the meaning of “church,” the situation and experience in which we rehearse Jesus’ cross and resurrection as the new primal human communication. It is the same as the light bulb which changes our world beyond recognition, except a billion times brighter!

Tony Bartlett

Battling Undone

General Theology

Five Propositions in Favor of the Future

1. Original violence (as described by Girard) is the de facto origin of human culture but not the prospective will of God, which according to Genesis is the Sabbath blessing of life.

2. Jesus came not to compensate for sin but to undo it by means of a new way of being human, thereby bringing about the Sabbath blessing and fulfilment of God’s purpose.

3. The loss of sacrificial foundations due to 2000 years of the gospel has exacerbated human violence to the point of extreme crisis (the argument of Battling to the End.) This looks like the inverse of God’s purpose and a failure of the gospel. But God’s will for creation cannot be reversed. Its ultimate triumph is guaranteed by God’s faithfulness. (Genesis 12:3; Isaiah 45:18, 55:10-11; Revelation 21:1-5.)

4. The standard solution to this quandary is to displace God’s purposes to a supernatural, supra-terrestrial space–“heaven.” Aside from this not being a typically biblical viewpoint it leads itself to a fatalist, rapturist mindset which tacitly or explicitly colludes with the violence. A “new heaven and a new earth” is not to be conceived as another planet somewhere in magical space but this earth radically transformed. “A new heaven” confirms this: the “supernatural” itself is to be renewed as part of a revolution in human transcendence; i.e. no longer violent. It is this revolution which signals and makes possible the new earth.

5. To have faith in the triumph of God’s project on earth is, therefore, neither optional nor whimsical. It means to stake your life on the belief that in the midst of human crisis something dramatically and wonderfully new is emerging. The very consistency of this belief in committed Christians at once provides humanity with an alternative future, within the living moment.

Tony Bartlett