Another recent review of Good War at Not a Walking Encyclopedia.

To pick up on point I made in part 1, it takes putting ourselves in the picture (in much the same way that as Christians we must remind ourselves that we are complicit in Jesus’ suffering and death) in order for the violence in the Abu Ghraib photos to strike us as worth our regard (which, for those of who have suggested that I either naively or willfully snubbed postmodernity in my book, is exactly the problem I’m trying to warn against, considering we live in an image-based culture—call it postmodern, if you like—wherein the tendency is for images to serve only as references to other images, not to any actual event).

But to suggest, as Mike Ciul does, that I am on a quest for shame illustrates, to me, the truly troubling (postmodern?) predicament we find ourselves in. This is where I actually think using the term Postmodern is useful, as a pejorative, an ignominious label. It now seems fitting to evoke the set of larger social/cultural/economic/political circumstances that have brought us to this moment, because it surely takes a combination of powerful systemic forces ordering our lives and perceptions to bring us to the point where we distrust our conscience.

To try to close on this business of shame: Shame is a state of infamy; you’ve been caught in a lie and you have to own up to it, and in the process you (hopefully) wonder why what you did ever seemed a good idea in the first place. Why did you think you could get away with it? Given the associations that I have with the word, I take Mike’s reading of the book to heart. So, do I want to shame the reader into line, into shape, into agreeing with me about the preponderance of violence in our culture, popular and otherwise and what might be its effects? Not quite. There is no “we” when I think about he imagined audience of this book, there are only individuals, a vast array of different kinds of people reading this book all at once. Shame is something the individual experiences much more profoundly than a whole group. Large-scale shame doesn’t work because there’s always someone else there to scapegoat (see the work of Renee Girard, especially I See Satan Fall Like Lightning) to pass the buck to: “It’s not me. I don’t think that way.” So what ends up happening is we all agree that someone should feel shame—just not me—or, as Mike seems to be saying, “Sure, okay, there is a certain amount of shame and guilt involved in looking at violent acts, whether they be on film or on network TV news, but is that it? Is that all you have for us? We should feel shame? Tell me something I don’t know.” Point taken, but I want to suggest that real shame is profound and effecting and can change one’s behavior and outlook on the world, which is what my book is about: the process of seeing: Why we see the way we do? What are the stakes of seeing the way we do?

When I started thinking about shame, I thought of Adam and Eve in the garden. After eating of the Tree of Knowledge and being chastised by the Almighty, they suddenly realize that they are naked and are ashamed to the point that they fashion crude clothing out of fig leaves, or underbrush, or something. Not that the definition of shame in this context trumps all other nuances of the word because it appears in the Bible, but I do find it instructive that shame, in this story of the original moment of civilization, is the result of disobedience encouraged by the result of the lie the serpent tells Eve, the distrust the serpent sows in her. “Look, you think this guy has your best intentions in mind,” he might have said. Shame comes, then, as a result of overreaching, overstepping, becoming so prideful (as C.S. Lewis says, the “ant-God state of mind”) that you feel that you will be able to avoid, elude, shed culpability—you feel, in effect, that you are beyond reproach; you will not be effected/subjected to the same fate as others who have tried what you have tried to get away with and failed. You’re smarter than them. This is how I see shame. (As an aside, it’s interesting to note that this is how Phillip G. Zimbardo, Prof Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford and deviser of the famous 1971 “Prison Experiment,” and author of the new book, The Lucifer Effect, sees the human capacity for evil—a slippery slope beginning with self-deluding.)

So, Mike Ciul is then correct in charging that I am interested in shame, although to say I’m a on a “quest” for it seems to mock the journey anyone embarks on when they start to reflect on their own complicity. And yes, I am interested in why others might not feel it as acutely as I do. But it’s not about not being “cool enough” or “compassionate enough” to look upon these images and see wrong and immediately know it to be wrong and reject it as such. It’s about seeing these images with their extensions of meaning up close, as Flannery O’Connor said of grotesque images in her own work; that these images connect us to a point in the distance that imbues them with intentions beyond our initial ability to comprehend. In other words, images that foreground the mystery of evil and take evil seriously (as the morally blinding effect of pride); instead of settling for the postmodernist tendency to see the predominance and efficacy of violence in popular culture a direct result of the fact that life is violent, chaotic and ambiguous—who is qualified to say what it all means? Death means nothing. It’s just the motherfucker of life (sorry, no other word seemed to work).

Part 3 will be along shortly…

I come from Taiwan, or Takasago, as one would call it back in the days of colonization under the Empire of Japan before the end of World War 2. Taiwanese people who are of my grandmother’s generation were educated to be Japanese; for example, the late pastor of my church, like many Taiwanese who were drafted by the Imperial Armed Forces at that time, was to be one of the kamikaze, the suicide pilots who were crashing their fighters into the carriers of the Allies. People of that age often talk to us about the times of the Japanese occupation and the Pacific War. Although they resented the unnecessary War they had to fight and complain about the occasional cruelty of the Japanese, they described the Japanese rule as a period of order and stability, in which even during the extreme of hardship near the end of the War, rarely did riots arise and corruption of the administration were unusual. It seemed that everyone in the neighborhood cooperated to remain organized for the War. I always wonder how this kind of disciplined behavior was attained.

After reading John Hersey’s Hiroshima, I think I know a bit more about the way of the Japanese. Although the emblem of the Japanese Empire is the glorious chrysanthemum signifying the Royal Family, common people refer to themselves as sakura, the cherry blossoms, which bloom brilliantly in the spring for a very short time, usually only a few days, and then fall to the ground. A respectful Japanese is one that suffers tragically, or even sacrifices oneself, for the cause of the greater organization (e.g., the Empire, or, as is observed in the modern, post-War society Japan, the kaisha, the Japanese idea of the “firm”), just like the sakura flowers. Any performance less than this is considered a shame in the Japanese mind.

In Hiroshima, one of the parishioners Father Kleinsorge was taking care of, Fukai-san, refused to be rescued from the fire caused by the atomic bomb explosion, and insisted on staying at the site. “Leave me here to die.” (p. 27 ff.). After some more ado on the part of Kleinsorge to carry the reluctant Fukai-san out of the fire, he still ran back to it. Hersey wrote: “the last the priests could see of him, he was running back toward the fire.” I could almost see that, if the book Hiroshima is ever to be made into a movie, at this point, thousands of sakura petals would be falling down behind the running Fukai-san, paying tribute to his tragic death. Although this scene might be absurd in the sterile ruins of post-atomic Hiroshima, it is metaphorically appropriate in the Japanese mind, and a familiar ending scene in many Japanese tragedies.

A story in the Reverend Tanimoto’s letter to his American friend also gives us some insight into this Japanese way of thinking. Dr. Y. Hiraiwa of Hiroshima University of Literature and Science, and his son, a student at Tokyo University, were buried under their burning two-story house and could not move even a few centimeters. The son thought they were going to die anyway and suggested that they make up their mind up to consecrate their lives for the country”, and they gave Banzai, the Japanese way of paying homage, to Tenno, the Japanese Emperor, “Tenno-heika, Banzai, Banzai, Banzai!” (“Your Majesty the Emperor, ten thousand years of longevity!”) Tanimoto then quoted the later-rescued Dr. Hiraiwa, “Strange to say, I felt calm and bright and had a peaceful spirit in my heart, when I chanted Banzai to Tenno.” “What a fortune that we are Japanese! It was my first time I ever tasted such a beautiful spirit when I decided to die for our Emperor.”

The pastor then recorded another incident: While the bomb
exploded, a heavy fence fell upon a few girls from the high school
Hiroshima Jazabuin. They could not move and the smoke was choking them to death. “One of the girls began to sing Kimi ga yo, the national anthem, and others followed in chorus and died.” To these incidents, the Reverend commented, “Yes, people of Hiroshima died manly in the atomic bombing, believing that it was for the Emperor’s sake.” This is probably why Father Takakura (formerly Kleinsorge) said, “If a Japanese hears the word ‘tenno heika’ [His Majesty the Emperor], it is different from a Westerner hearing them — a very different feeling in the foreigner’s heart from what is felt in the Japanese person’s heart.”

Once the people associated their death to the Tenno and the Empire, either by giving Banzai to the Emperor or singing Kimi ga yo, death seemed to be only a sacrifice for the greater organization to survive, and did not seem to be so formidable anymore, for the Empire would appreciate their death as a tree would value the falling of its petals. Thus a Japanese death, when connected with submission to the larger entity, transformed into a beautiful blossom of sakura.

Petals fall every so often, and when they fall, they do it without a noise. Japanese also die when they are supposed to, without questioning why, without crying in pain. Tanimoto noted, as many others also did, that he “never heard anyone cried in disorder, even though they suffered in great agony.” The people who were dying, “died in silence, with no grudge, setting their teeth to bear it. All for the country!” Mrs. Nakamura thought about the bomb, and the consequent deaths and suffering as a historical inevitability, “It was war and we had to expect it.” She would then add, “Shikata ga nai,” which approximately meant, “It can’t be helped”. Hersey took this to mean that she saw the bomb as “a natural disaster — one that had simply been her bad luck, her fate (which must be accepted), to suffer.” The account of the bombing by Toshio, the then ten-year-old son of Mrs. Nakamura, was surprisingly matter-of-fact, as if the bomb were just as common an event as a visit to a zoo: “In the morning, I was eating peanuts. I saw a light. I was knocked to little sister’s sleeping place. … We went to the park. A whirlwind came. At night a gas tank burned and I saw the reflection in the river. … [His friend] Kikumi’s mother was wounded and [his friend] Murakami’s mother, alas was dead.” Indeed, Japanese see death as much a biological inevitability as life, comparable to familiar facts such as flowers falling from a tree.

This glorification of sacrifice encouraged the Japanese people to dedicate themselves to one another and to the organization to which they belong, even at the expense of great pain on their own part. Hersey used a peculiar phrase, when he described Dr. Sasaki’s response during the explosion of the atomic bomb, to express the extra bravery due to this sort of encouragement: “He ducked down on one knee and said to himself, as only a Japanese would [emphasis mine], ‘Sasaki, gambare! Be brave!’” Even Father Takakura, a German converted Japanese, “had taken on this Japanese spirit of enryo — setting the self apart, putting the wishes of others first”, and was considered by his German colleagues to be too rüsksichtsvoll, too regardful.

After the bombing, pastor Tanimoto experienced two times the Japanese shame of being a survivor. The first time he was running back to inner Hiroshima, hoping to meet his family. There were people trapped by the ruins screaming for help, and the heavily wounded limped toward the outskirts of the city, as the Reverend ran past them. “As a Christian he was filled with compassion for those who were trapped, and as a Japanese he was overwhelmed by the shame of being unhurt, and he prayed as he ran, ‘God help them and take them out of the fire.’” The second time was a few days later, as he went back to rest after helping some heavily wounded: “he tripped over someone, and someone else said angrily, ‘Look out! That’s my hand!’ Mr. Tanimoto … [was] ashamed hurting wounded people, [and] embarrassed at being able to walk upright….” Probably because of this sense of shame, the Japanese do not use the term “survivors” to refer to those who went through the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, but instead used a more neutral term, “hibakusha”, or “explosion-affected persons”. This same sense of shame might also be the factor that caused Fukai-san to run back to the fire and the Navy man to commit suicide (p. 16). In the Japanese mind, surviving a disaster is like resisting the destiny, which is in turn against the spirit of sakura.

The spirit of sakura, the cherry blossoms, entails the Japanese virtue of self-sacrifice of individuals for the benefit of the higher organization, the glorification of such tragic but heroic sacrifice, the justification of the inevitability of death and suffering, and the shame which will be a burden on the shoulders of anyone unable to achieve such goal when the circumstance requires. This is a spirit deeply rooted in the Japanese culture and dictates the behavior of the Japanese people.

Dr. Fay’s comments (excerpt): Very interesting. You bring to your topic a most illuminating personal background.

Mike writes:

If shame is the gateway to redemption, then it has a purpose, but it’s not an end in itself. By the end of this book I felt like Griffith had replaced his quest for cool by a quest for shame. He says he used to think it made him more tough or cosmopolitan to be able to watch shocking scenes. Now he says you have to put yourself in the picture and be shamed into repentance. So I’m asking myself, what’s the difference? Am I not cool enough to look at pictures of torture? Or am I not compassionate enough?

First off, I would say that I don’t think I’m saying one must be “shamed into repentance.” It seems to me that there are other ways of coming to a deep and meaningful examination of one’s conscience that doesn’t involve the drama of shame. I don’t think that shame is quite what I felt/feel when I look at the Abu Ghraib photos. I think I feel lost, at sea, disoriented, given that the facts of the images have been so vigorously denied and defended, mostly by those whose view of the world is woefully binary—us and them.

But your comments raise a great question: Why shouldn’t we “put [ourselves] in the picture”? Is there something naïve or sentimental about this? As I write in the book, “We see ourselves looking and think we are in control.” Which is to say, having the intellectual wherewithal to engage in reflexive or self-conscious looking does not get to the root of what I’m talking about. I want to suggest here, if I don’t do so clearly in my book, is that if we don’t consider the cost of redemption—the cost of redeeming what the soldiers did to the detainees in light of the cost of Christ’s redemption—then we are not grasping the importance of the Abu Ghraib abuses, or any other situation in which violence is used as a means of objectifying and controlling others. As Christians, our own suffering is considered in light of the suffering of Jesus, a wholly innocent man. We see suffering in this way not because it is voguish to see the Gospel message as advocating for social justice, but because when we say that Jesus’ suffering was necessary in order to redeem Man from sin (and eternal death), we believe not that all bodily suffering would end, but all spiritual torment (all sins forgiven). Because Jesus once walked the earth as a human and experienced the joy and pain of being human, his suffering is all the more poignant and instructive to us. We are called to be follow him: to turn the other cheek, endure persecution, forgive not seven times but seventy-seven times, love our enemies, embrace the stranger among us, visit the imprisoned, care for the poor and destitute, abhor the taking of human life. We are reminded of these tenets of faith at each mass through the readings. And we participate in his suffering, death and resurrection at every mass through the Eucharist. Of course, this is the radical part, but it is also the core of Christian faith.

Therefore, it is my contention in the book that often Christians commit a certain heresy by believing that God has mandated the use violence as a means of putting those different from us “in their place,” a phrase used often when referring to how the rest of the world should be oriented in relationship to the United States. Actions are deeds informed by ideologies that can be said to illustrate one’s beliefs. Photographs of such startling actions, like those from Abu Ghraib, as I argue in the book (and as Flannery O’Connor says of the violent actions of her characters), have the capacity to wake us up to the ignorance and ugliness of our beliefs and cause us to meditate on those beliefs. I’m arguing that many of us (especially some Christians) see the suffering of others as beyond concern.

So when I look upon the iconic photo of the Abu Ghraib detainee standing on top of the box with wires curling away from his fingers, I don’t suppress the connection my mind makes between this man with arms outstretched and that of Christ on the cross. Is this man not human? Did the Romans not crucify countless others prior to Jesus? Is he not the imprisoned and the stranger among us? Lest you think I’m committing my own heresy, I do not think that the iconic image has the power to redeem (even if it is by way of shame). No image has that power. Only actions have that power. Jesus’ selfless act set in motion a wave of actions that have rippled down through the centuries. Writing a book, although not the most physically strenuous activity, is my small act to keep the wave moving.

There is, in fact, something special about the violence in Tarantino’s brand of film. You really feel the characters’ pain when they are assaulted and mutilated. That’s something I never saw in an action movie. I watched a lot of Schwarzenegger films with my dad and though the body count was much higher, I never felt the loss as much as in Reservoir Dogs or even Pulp Fiction.

In A Good War Is Hard to Find, David Griffith talks about how the violence is disconnected, even funny in Pulp Fiction. That’s true in some ways, but in a way Tarantino’s violence is more connected than in a lot of other films. When the guy’s head is accidentally blown off in the car, it is kind of funny, but his death is also very real. He’s not some enemy who won’t be bothering you anymore, and he’s not some mystic warrior who becomes one with the Force. He’s really gone, and it’s tragic. When you laugh, you feel ashamed.

If shame is the gateway to redemption, then it has a purpose, but it shouldn’t be an end in itself. By the end of this book I felt like Griffith had replaced his quest for cool by a quest for shame. He says he used to think it made him more tough or cosmopolitan to be able to watch shocking scenes. Now he says you have to put yourself in the picture and be shamed into repentance. So I’m asking myself, what’s the difference? Am I not cool enough to look at pictures of torture? Or am I not compassionate enough?

I think violence is an addiction, and despite Griffith’s warnings about turning a blind eye to it, I think you need to turn away from it. (I’m not a born Catholic, I converted 4 years ago, so maybe I don’t really understand the Catholic view of suffering.)

Griffith spends a lot of time trying to shock us. He describes horrible scenes, lurid photographs, violent movies. He talks with his students about these, and he clearly wants them to be shocked. He’s upset and disappointed when they think it’s no big deal.

I’ve decided it’s not a good idea to try to shock people. Despite the cliches, I don’t think shocking people makes them think. It makes them stop feeling. And that’s a problem. Many years ago, there was an article in Adbusters called “Soul Shock.” It described how shock value is used in advertising to get people’s attention, and as the intensity of shock escalates, advertisements try to shock us at deeper and deeper levels. The article stressed that exposure to such shocking media all the time has serious harmful side-effects. Now, several years later, it seems like Adbusters has joined the competition—their magazine is as deeply upsetting as any advertising.

In Griffith’s book, people looking at images of torture and violence are either shocked voyeurs or disaffected onlookers. He talks about the need to put yourself in the picture, to see that the world of the photograph is the same as ours. But there is still another way.

The image at the beginning of the last chapter shows a man pouring water on another man whose clothes are burning. Griffith tells us how horrible it is, how badly the man is burned. But when I saw the image (before reading the chapter) I said “Finally, an act of compassion amid all this violence!”

I’ve read some quotes from John Hersey’s Hiroshima, which had a big effect on Griffith’s life, and what I saw in it is that everywhere amid the tragedy and devastation there is compassion. Maybe this message is more prominent in Buddhism, but I think it is just as important to Christianity as the truth of suffering. In every image of cruelty and suffering we can look for compassion—we know that God is there, suffering with us, and so we know that compassion must be there too.

Photo: Detail of New York Times layout as modified by Brett Yasko. From “A Good War Is Hard to Find.”

The New York Times review bugged me, because it didn’t mention Christianity at all, while the last third was on “postmodernity.” I thought that the search for God’s grace in moments of violence was at least as important a theme in this book as Griffith’s critique of our culture. I wondered if those reading the review would think the book was some odd, secular salvo in the culture wars.

Mark straightened me out:

I read the Times review and I’m not entirely sure the Sorrentino guy paints it as a culture wars thing—I see what you mean about his desire to (maybe) justify postmodern cultural artifacts, but I think the key part is the notion that these artifacts come out of postmodernity—there’s a larger social/cultural/economic/political realm there that one might want to take on before one worries about Pulp Fiction. Or so I thought his point was.

Mark got a chance to read the first two chapters online:

I can see how one might craft a “culture wars” based discussion, at least from what I’ve seen, if Flannery O’Connor becomes the hero and Grand Theft Auto or something is the villain. But it’s not like O’Connor is some darling of conservatives, I don’t think.

I also wonder to what degree Griffith separates writing from moving images—there’s just no way written text can have the same impact in terms of violence as seeing images of war or fake war.

What I do like, and it may point more strongly to the way you’re taking up the book, is that Griffith seems to focus not on representation (as is always done in culture wars debates—Piss Christ is “offensive” because it “negatively” represents Jesus, or whatever), but on what texts do to us, on affect. If texts move us toward grace, compassion, whatever, it might not matter if they’re full of images of violence. But how often might images of violence move us that way?

[...]

Does Griffith ever invoke the whole banality of evil discussion? Seems like that might be a good approach that could probably work in conjunction with his moral/religious argument.

One other thing I was thinking about is whether he discusses images of non-Americans being brutal to other people. It was an interesting thing to consider when the Abu Ghraib mess was at its most publicly visible—no one ever really brought up the occasional images one sees of Iraqis or whoever beheading people—there seems to be an assumption that Middle Easterners do those sorts of things on a regular basis, so they aren’t expected to be held to the standard that American soldiers are held to. Also, the press seems far more reluctant to air images of Westerners being brutalized by Arabs than of Arabs being brutalized by Westerners. Not entirely sure why that is.

There were right-wing pundits who did advance an argument along the lines that, “At least we don’t saw the heads off prisoners, so why are you getting worked up about a little torture?”

Mark also responded to my review:

I like your comment about Pulp Fiction—man rape has a very different status from woman rape in our TV and movies—it’s always the butt of jokes in prison movies, and that scene in Pulp Fiction is intended at least in part to be funny. Rape in movies is a big problem, it seems to me, that people who worry about violence in the media don’t consider often or seriously enough—there’s a new book out, Watching Rape by Sarah Projansky (published by NYU Press), that takes up rape in cinema as its focus. It’s probably interesting. (Also see, apparently, Public Rape, by Tanya Horeck, Routledge.)

It’s always seemed to me that rape scenes tend to be the most violent, not in terms of content, but in terms of affect. Torture scenes (like Reservoir Dogs or horror movies) make us squirm, but rape scenes, at least for me, often feel like they’re actually beating me up, like the images themselves are being violent.

I don’t know how I felt about any of this when I was ten.

It strikes me that this idea of redemption lies at the heart of David Griffith’s essays in A Good War Is Hard to Find. As he describes our “common existence” he seems to desire for Christians to act rather than react, to act justly, tenderly, humbly, rather than react violently either through ouright violence or through complicity with violence born of apathy, boredom, or believing in the euphemistic language used to describe it.

Griffith often alludes to what we should do rather than illustrating it, preferring to illuminate the monster within us all and leave us to our mea culpas. In the best essay here, “City of Lost Souls” (which starts with Faulkner and ends with Abu Ghraib), he comments on the anemic strand of Christianity predominant in America today, saying it could be due to two things: our turning away from a biblical understanding of virtue towards a legal and amoral one, and the multiplicity of Christian churches which prevents agreement on how Christ meant us to live can be found.

Griffith quotes Flannery O’Connor on the lost soul of America: “Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it . . . and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause.” That is, we deny Original Sin.

This observation is poignant an true. But most of Griffith’s time is spent describing violent books, movies, and events, and this isn’t necessary for those who know themselves to be sinners, kept from committing the worst atrocities only by the grace of God. Though Griffith does a good job depicting political situations from a Christian perspective, the explicit violence in this book isn’t necessary; simply reading about these things makes me feel complicit in this violent culture.

The first reviews are from Mike Benedetti and Christine Lavallee.

Several of the essays in the book are available on-line, in excerpted or adapted form:

• Chapters One and Two (“Symphony No. 1 (In Memorium, Dresden, 1945)” and “Flannery O’Connor, Abu Ghraib and the Problem of American Innocence”)
• Prime Directive

See also:

• The “A Good War Is Hard to Find” blog
• Christopher Sorrentino’s review in the New York Times

David Griffith, author of A Good War Is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence In America, is one of those people. So am I.

My peers and I really didn’t question violent entertainment while we were growing up, I think in part because we figured the stories told by adults were probably a good reflection of the world. (Today’s young people may be naturally more skeptical of these sorts of stories, since they can easily share their own videos with their peers over the Internet, and because their video games are more immersive—they can all use adult tools to act out their own stories. For people of my and Griffith’s generation, access to these tools implied some sort of legitimacy.)

In the essay “Some Proximity to Darkness” in Good War, Griffith revists the movies that shaped his sensibilities as a young man, this time taking a cold, hard look at them. I was shaped by many of these movies, and while reading the book I felt that Griffith was taking a cold, hard look inside my own head. Quite a trip.

Some of these movies left me confused about violence, not because they’re bad movies, but because when I first saw them I lacked the courage or clarity to investigate the darker corners. For example, I’ve had many conversations about “Pulp Fiction.” I’ve shared my excitement about Samuel L. Jackson’s performance, about the crazy chronology, about one guy or another getting shot. But I never asked anyone, “How did the rape scene make you feel?” And nobody asked me, either.

Griffith naturally turns his attention there:

Watching “Pulp Fiction” with my dad, I sensed there was something deeply wrong at the core of the scene. I began questioning why on earth it ever seemed anything less than horrific to me. Then a thought hit me: What if Marsellus Wallace was not gagged during his rape? What would have come out of his mouth? What if someone had turned down the blaring chainsaw sax solo so we could hear what was going on in that room? Would we hear him curse Zed and Maynard? Would he yell “stop”? Would he call for help? Would we see his rape differently now that we could hear him scream? The drowning out of the human voice creates complicity in us—because Marcellus can’t cry out in anguish and pain, the consequences seem to be lessened—and we, like Butch, are sworn to the same vow of secrecy, to pretend that this never happened.

It’s not only movies. The other essays in this book cover all sorts of territory: the Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor, the Abu Ghraib photos (speaking of art and violence), “The Electric Chair My Wife’s College Boyfriend Built in His House.” But always there is violence, and, in the end, there is God.

I think this combination is an important one. For a Christian, God is reality. Speculation about violence that doesn’t lead you to reality isn’t very helpful–it’s just cheap thrills. A God who isn’t present even in the worst horrors isn’t much of a God.

In this final week of Lent, we’ll be meditating on the presence of God in the horrors of Christ’s torture and death. As an American who grew up at the end of the twentieth century, I’ll be using movies to aid my meditation. Breaking the Waves is on my list, one of those violent films that wouldn’t have appealed to me as a teenager (Emily Watson is a lousy action hero), but nails my adult understanding of suffering and grace better than anything outside the Gospels. I don’t think Dave Griffith has seen it, but I think he’d like it.