Candles

Candles
A Bizarre Mix of Traditionalism and Progressivism, in the Form of Radical Christianity, Hegelian Marxism and Freudian Psychoanalysis.

Monday, June 9, 2014

Believe, Peter Rollins and Being Good

Believe (2014) is a promising new series that was unfortunately canceled due to poor ratings. The series revolves around 10-year-old Bo Adams (Johnny Sequoyah), a extraordinary girl with a host of psychic powers inherited from her deceased Mother. In the pilot episode, we learn that Milton Winter (Delroy Lindo) has whisked her away from the sinister organization Orchestra headed by the world renown geneticist Roman Skouras (Kyle MacLachlan). Bo's foster parents are assassinated by Moore (mastery played by Sienna Guillory) and against commonsense Winter breaks out William Tate from death-row to rescue Bo from a hospital before Moore can get to her. It is quickly revealed to the viewer that Tate is actually Bo's long-lost Father. The gem of the series is the insanely beautiful relationship between a Father and his Daughter.
  
I want to say this is a scene from a promo for the series finale.
The show revolves around Tate and Bo on the run from Skouras's Orchesta and the Government. Bo and Tate have a cute, sanguine relationship that involves much bickering as the two clash on the correct corse of action to take. Besides being chased by the baddies, a common theme in the series is Bo using her precognition to help the people she meets along the journey. This aspect is quite reminiscent of Touched by an Angel. Tate argues with her to mind her own business and not risk going out of their way to help those in need. Tate is cynical and Bo is optimistic, overflowing with good intentions. It is not until the end of the series that Tate comes to terms with Bo as a perpetual goodie-two-shoes.

I want to draw a comparison between Bo, deconstruction, and the postmodern theologian, Peter Rollins. Jacques Derrida, the founder of the post-structuralist philosophy known as deconstruction, has spilt much ink philosophizing about the idea of the gift. His theory of the gift revolves around the idea that a pure gift is that which is given away without receiving something in return. Like a crafty philosopher, Derrida informs us that even if we are thanked for a gift we have given, it is not a pure gift: we receive the social thank you in exchange. Even if we receive a conscious, warm fuzzy feeling from our gift, it is not a pure gift. Derrida has made the pure gift practically impossible, and this is his intent. 

Tate hugging Bo after he discovers that she is his daughter.
Peter Rollins takes the Derridean insight and twists it to be applicable to the Christian concept of Love. His approach to Love is closely associated with the old Greek Virtue Ethics. In other words, love, or the good, is about being good. It is about forming a disposition that is naturally good. This virtue/Derridean ethic of his stands in stark contrast to the conscious choice ethics without passion of Kantianism, of which Nietzsche wrote, "What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure—as a mere automaton of duty?" (The AntiChrist, §11). Rollins argues with Nietzsche, not for an automaton of duty, but an automaton of passion and being. He declares:
For a love that is born from God is a love that gives with the same reflex as that which causes a bird to sing or the heart to beat. For a concrete example of this, we can say that an act of love could involve giving money to someone on the street without stopping to think, or talking to someone who is in pain without thought that we are doing anything special or different from any other daily activity. Is this not what is really meant by the biblical injunction to give so as the right hand does not know what the left has given? The love that arises from God is a love that loves anonymously, a love that acts without such self-centered reflections, that gives without thought" (How (not) to Speak of God, p. 74).
Bo giving Tate the thumbs up after controlling the roulette ball for him in Atlantic City.
Bo exists as the perfect representation of a truly loving individual in the Rollinsian sense. She does not have to compel herself through a monumental force of the will to do good unto others. It comes naturally for her. The opposite is true. Bo has to force herself to do something "wrong," exempli gratia, Tate has to convince her that if she does not help him cheat at roulette with her psychic abilities, that she cannot eat (for they have no money). And what does Bo do with the thousands of  dollars they win? She gives the lion's share of it away to a sick boy who is suffering from cancer, and whose mother is struggling to pay for his proper treatment. Bo gifts the money away without a second thought. It is simply who she is. She is the special girl who helps people. 

Tate fights Bo most of the way. His cynical attitude demands that your first priority is to look after yourself. Yet, Bo is quite selfless. On the eleventh episode, she directly marches into a subway station where her premonition told her something terrible would happen. Towards the end of the series, a character develop in Tate's character is that he finally learns to stop fighting Bo, and to simply let her be herself. Everybody wants her to be somebody else, but Bo just wants to be her caring, loving self. She does not know anything different. She doesn't know how not to care. Her heart bleeds out of her natural being. 

And, for that, Bo is one of the subversive and crafty archetypes of Christ. Out of the mouth of babes, comes a logic that subverts the wisdom of the world. For all their machinations, nobody can stop Bo from being the bearer of the Spirit of Christ in her body. She is not a self-righteous Messiah who comes with power to change the world. The subversive revolution of Bo begins with the real, the everyday. Using her gifts, to help those around her, because that is her natural passionate being.

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

The Subversive Insight of MTV's Faking It

MTV's Faking It is centered around the original idea of best friends (Karma and Amy) faking a lesbian relationship for popularity in their super-liberal, oddball Austin, Texas high school. The premise is that in this high school, the misfits are the cool kids. Being different is considered a virtue as opposed to something that will get you ostracized from the group. The plot is driven by the event of Amy discovering, that in the process of faking it, she has unmasked real feelings of love for Karma. The latter, however, is hopeless obsessed with Liam, the handsome artistic boy, who begins to fall for the redhead, who also remains oblivious to any feelings Amy might have for her. Other characters include the sassy, gay Shane and the somewhat conservative soon-to-be Amy's stepsister, Lauren.   


 A screen capture from episode 2 of the series, featuring a dream sequence where Karma (right) kisses Amy (left).  
The aim today is not to discuss the main storyline. While the dynamics between the incredibly endearing Amy and self-centered Karma can tug on the heart strings, there is nothing particularly unique there. The genius comes in the writing craft of Carter Covington, the series' creator, who himself is gay. Covington's genius exists in the subversive message hidden underneath all snappy dialogue. His subversion appears to have escaped the purview of the actors, who seem to have only nice things to say about the fictional high school.

It is effortless to mock conservatives. Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert do it non-stop during the weekdays. It sometimes gives us a good chuckle. Yet, it is a more difficult thing to mock liberals who are supposedly all about humanist tolerance and progressive values. Covington has succeed in subverting the liberal discourse through satire, exposing its hypocrisies and bigotries from a progressive standpoint. The magic of Faking It is that it is a satire which simultaneously critiques both conservatives and liberals. 

Karma and Amy's high school appears to be tolerant of everybody, but their tolerance is merely a façade; a de-humanizing sort of toleration. Covington demonstrates a liberal tolerance that is obsessed with categories which does violence to the singularity of the Other by reducing that singularity to a mere category. Shane thinks he has discovered that Karma and Amy are gay, but too afraid to come out of the closet. In front of all the people at a big party, he announces that they should elect them homecoming queens. He had mentioned to his best friend Liam that he has been wanting to make lesbian friends, and that these two will do the trick. 

Shane nominating Amy and Karma for homecoming.
The students at the school support Karma and Amy as the poster couple, not because they are a good couple, not because of any virtue of theirs, but simply because they represent a new category for the school to feel more liberal, more tolerant. Karma's parents are so happy that she has come out as lesbian, since in their circle of friends this makes them the cool parents with an edgy lesbian daughter. Saying, "I have a lesbian daughter" is mark of social distinction. At homecoming, when Amy makes an off-the-cuff joke, another girl says, "I love lesbian humor," as if everything she does it lesbian, lesbian, lesbian, all the time lesbian. All she is to them is the Lesbian.

Covington has created a brilliant critique of liberal tolerance that is reductionist and violent against the singularity of the Other. In a poststructural vernacular, it is said that this liberalism pretends that the categories are presence without absence, without a remained. Faking It reminds me of that old Fresh Prince of Bel-Air episode where Carlton confronts the frat-boy who wants to keep him from entering the fraternity for not being authentically black (see the Fresh Prince Moment). Carlton protests that, "Being black isn't what I am trying to be. It's what I am." Covington is doing for sex and gender what Will Smith did for race. 

Covington's Faking It explores the dynamics between the category and singularity in a way that is uncommonly critical of liberalism. The modern liberal tradition has a violent tendency to reduce people to their categories—denying absence. Liberal feminism has been criticized for thinking that merely by flooding public offices with women, that feminist objectives will be accomplished. It is a reductionist position because it assumes that women think, believe, act like x. They will do all of this because they are this category. People thought that President Obama would shake up the status quo, because his identity being more or less African American. Yet, once in power, nothing has changed. The color of a man's skin or the fact of female genitalia does not ultimately define a person one way or another. Perhaps this is a natural consequence of identity politics, but it is a violence against singularity nonetheless. 

Such is not to say that categories do not matter, or that identity politics is wrong. Oftentimes, hegemonic relations seek to dominate through an appeal to a common humanity that just happens to be created in the image of the dominant category. The fictional Austin high school is not portrayed as wholly bad. In fact, sometimes its drive towards tolerance can be warm and inviting. Yet, Covington had the genius to subvert liberal tolerance and show how it often turns into its opposite as symbolic violence against the actual person. It is something you rarely find on television today.