James E Hartley

Game of English Thrones

Fan fiction is a fascinating genre. Someone writes a book which becomes so beloved that fanatical readers cannot get enough of the characters and the world in which they live. Some of these fanatics start dreaming up new stories and other devoted fanatics gobble up these stories.

Truth be told, fan fiction is not particularly well-noted for the quality of the prose or the stories. It is mostly juvenile writing with adolescent plots.

A question which I had never pondered ere now is: Who is the Greatest Fan Fiction author of all time? The answer is surprisingly easy: William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare is a guy from some obscure town in England named after a popular cosmetic line of all things. He read George Martin’s Game of Thrones (or, to be pedantic, A Song of Ice and Fire) and obviously loved it. As is well known, Martin is a very annoying author. Only five of the seven books in the series have been published; and as Martin is growing long in tooth, there is a race between his inevitable demise and the completion of the remaining books. I don’t think anyone is betting on the latter at this point.

Game of Thrones is really good; the HBO series made it UberFamous, but, as with all such things, the books are even better. Young Billy Shakespeare was clearly so excited about the books that he couldn’t leave well-enough alone, so he started filling the void Martin has created.

Shakespeare’s first bit of fan fiction was Henry VI, part 2, which gives you a good idea of the ambitions of these fan fiction types. Later on, Shakespeare would write a prequel to his own work, cleverly entitled Henry VI, part 1. (I’m not making that up; part 1 was written after part 2.)

Now Shakespeare tries to mask his fan fiction a bit, presumably for copyright related reasons. So instead of the Lannisters vs the Starks, Shakespeare gives us the Lancasters vs the Yorks. Yeah, those name changes will confuse people.

The Lancasters are on the throne. The head of the Yorks thinks he should be on the throne. Civil War ensues. But wait! There are about a half-dozen other people with aspirations to the throne. All sorts of shifting alliances and betrayals. The King is a rather weak fellow, who clings to the throne because his father was Great. The Queen is a scheming woman, having an affair with another guy with royal ambitions. There are warring armies, pirates at sea, and beheaded people galore. One particularly upright lord has a wife who dabbles in black magic, hoping to advance his cause. She summons a spirit from “where Pluto is his fiery wagon sits,”—a veritable lord of fire. (Are you admiring Shakespeare’s shocking originality yet?)

Not content with just the single book, Shakespeare, like all fan fiction writers, finishes his book with the perfect set-up for a sequel. (Guess the title of the sequel to Henry VI, part 2.)

As far as fan fiction goes, Henry VI, part 2 is good. Actually, as hard as it is to believe, it is actually more than good. It is outstanding. The writing is superb. Honestly, it is better than even Martin’s prose. Shakespeare has this incredible way to take even tired ideas for scenes and overused witticisms and make them into something that feels fresh.

Consider Act IV, in which a new pretender to the crown shows up. In the midst of the rebellions and court intrigue, a clothier, Jack Cade, decides to rise up with a band of workingmen and claim the throne for himself. It is a popular rebellion! The people, tired of the games the nobility play, will take matters into their own hands. Cade promises a veritable worker’s paradise:

Cade: Be brave, then; for your captain is brave, and vows reformation. There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny: the three-hooped pot; shall have ten hoops and I will make it felony to drink small beer: all the realm shall be in common; and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass: and when I am king, as king I will be,—
All Cade’s Followers: God save your majesty!
Cade: I thank you, good people: there shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my score; and I will apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree like brothers and worship me their lord.
Dick (the Butcher): The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.
Cade: Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? That parchment, being scribbled o’er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings: but I say, ’tis the bee’s wax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since.

OK, so that bit about killing all the lawyers has been done to death. But, note how Shakespeare turns a tired phrase into a much deeper point about how laws and contracts are made and how those who did not make the laws can suffer thereby.

Note also the preceding bit where Cade repeats the kinds of slogans we have been hearing from utopians for a couple of hundred years. Abolish money and have the government provide what is needed! Get rid of conspicuous consumption! There is no need for allowing a difference of opinion once the right people are in charge! All shall agree!

Like many a utopian leader, Cade meets his end when the people prove fickle. Cade laments, “Was ever feather so lightly blown to and fro as this multitude?” Therein lies the question which runs through this tale. Who should sit on the throne? In this game is there a claim which supersedes all others? Or is it merely a question of who plays the game best? In the game of thrones, you either win or you die? Shall we play? If you were the Kingmaker, who wins?

Ah, you are glad we no longer play such games where nobility engage in endless maneuvers moving up and down the halls of power. Popular sovereignty is best? You want Jack Cade as your leader? But alas, your people inevitably end up running to the person who promises them the most. Maybe you don’t trust the people after all.

A tricky problem, this question of who should rule. Let us hope that William Shakespeare is encouraged by his earliest efforts and will bring us more tales wrestling with questions of leadership. For ideas, I might suggest Plutarch’s Lives. (There is an excellent translation by North he could use.) I suspect it will provide even better source material than A Song of Ice and Fire.

Hipster Church

Why Would Anyone Go To Church? The very way that question is framed suggests there is something odd about church. Even odder are the people who go to church.

Kevin Makins wrestled with this question and then wrote a book with that title. His answer? Well, that will take a bit to explain.

At first glance it would be very easy to dismiss this book. (Don’t worry, there is a second glance below.) Millennial hipster decides that the church of his childhood is boring and decides to start a Cool Church (called Eucharist!) which does Cool things with Cool people. No boring oldsters here! First step: move church to Sunday afternoon so we can all sleep in! I’m not making that up; that is exactly what Makins says. Afternoon church makes it easier to go to those all-night parties with cool emo music and fights breaking out on the dance floor which Makins begins the book by describing.

But wait, there’s more! “A steampunk-themed summer camp, which featured an ‘Imagination Train’ maintained by a bunch of twentysomethings in thrift shop overalls.” (Note “thrift shop”—these Hip Millennials only wear overalls ironically.) Or, “One Sunday, we took photos of every congregant with their hands covered in fake blood in front of a large golden halo. Then, hoping to spark conversations about faith, we pasted eighty of the photos onto an old fence at our city’s Art Crawl event under the title Sinners and Saints.”

But, alas, constantly thinking of hip new things to do is tiring, but when they save on the planning and repeat an event, nobody comes. Sometimes you just get tired. That’s especially true the Sunday after Christmas. So, let’s have Nap Sunday! Instead of that sermon thing, everyone can just stretch out and take a nap!

You see, people don’t want all those old denominations and theological debates. Everyone should be welcome at church. Everyone! Well, almost everyone. One year, the church rents an old gothic cathedral to use on Sunday afternoons. Being young and hip and cool, they do all sorts of young, hip and cool things in this 150 year old building. Predictably enough, damage was done. Repeatedly. Eventually, the church which owned the building kicked them out. And in one of the uglier moments in this book, Makins explains the problem with the church from which they were renting space:

They had witnessed congregational decline and a loss of cultural influence while being stuck with an expensive and impossible-to-maintain building, which drained them of resources. Was it any surprise that the added discomfort of our young congregation finally broke the camel’s back? I had hoped they would be able to respond to these challenges with courage and imagination. I wanted St. Barnabas to welcome a young church and her chaos, but after 150 years of stability, how would I feel if I was of the generation that witnessed members die off and watched youth walk away?
There’s a good chance I’d also cling to the little bit of security I had left.

Everyone is welcome at church as long as you aren’t old and think 150 year old church buildings are worth preserving. If you are like that, well just die off and let the millennials take over. (By the way, the anger dripping in this passage is a mere trickle compared to what shows up in the chapter on the professional church plant advisors.)

The church struggles. One day a newer, hipper church starts up, but it is a bit different. It is cleverly named “New Church”! It is like a church for, you know, grown-ups. People start switching churches. As one of the switchers tells Makins, “It’s nice to see some of our old gang here. It feels like Eucharist was high school and New Church is university!” Makins talks about how angry and bitter he became until he broke down and realized how wrong he was to feel that way.

It is that sort of moment that shows the book deserves the second glance. While Makins all too often can’t get out of his own way and drifts back into Rebellious Hipster Mode, that is not the story he wants to tell. He wants to tell the story of how he discovered The Church.

The popular vision of the church is that it is that building in town where people dress up and go on Sunday. Even Christians, who often say that the church is really the people and not the building, all too often think of church as that institutional structure. Makins is unravelling that image. Go back to the yarn and start over.

What is the church? It is a community. With Christ as the Head, it is the worldwide community of people who are acting as God’s agents on earth. What Makins discovers is that local manifestations of that worldwide community don’t all have to look the same. They don’t all need to sing the same songs and meet at the same time and have the same type of sermon. They don’t need to all agree on the secondary matters of the faith. They don’t even all need to have polished Sunday Services:

I am of the firm opinion that, every now and then, church should suck. The music should be out of key, the sermon meandering, and the chairs uncomfortable. That is our reminder that church isn’t a Sunday show—just another product to consume—but a called-out community of people following Jesus together. That’s easy to forget if church is “good” every week.

As Makins discovers, when Paul compares the church to the human body, he really did mean that hands and feet play different roles. A millennial hipster church doesn’t have to look exactly like the Lutheran church of his youth. It can indeed do things differently.

I don’t think other congregations should necessarily do what we’ve done….
I get it. Eucharist is freaking weird. Not every church should be a foot like us. I’ll go one step further: most churches shouldn’t be like us.
But we should be like us.

That doesn’t mean the Lutheran church of his youth got things wrong. Eucharist is a foot, but the Church still needs those hands too.

Although he doesn’t mention the passage, what Makins discovers over the course of this book is that stripped to its essentials, a church looks something like this: “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” (Acts 2:42) Christians gather together for teaching, fellowship, bread-breaking, and prayer. Note that nothing in that passage dictates the form of the fellowship or the teaching. If Eucharist wants to have Nap Sunday, why would anyone outside that local congregation object? If the church down the street wants to play hymns on an organ in an old building, why would anyone at Eucharist object?

The subtitle of Makins’ book captures both the good and the bad of this book: A Young Community’s Quest to Reclaim Church for Good. There is something refreshing about Makins’ story. There is something incredibly good about the way he points attention back to the fundamentals of what a church actually is. Many people would benefit from rethinking the nature of the church instead of just the details of the church they attend or used to attend.

But, unfortunately the tone of the book will mean this book gets a much smaller readership than Makins’ message deserves. Makins doesn’t just want to talk about the Good. He wants to Reclaim the Church. Reclaim it from Whom, exactly? With a bit more charity to the types of Churches and Christians which anger him so much, Makins would have had a much stronger claim on their attention.

The Decline of Leisure and the Academy

May latest essay at Law and Liberty, reflecting on Josef Pieper’s book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture:

The idea of the liberal arts college has been under assault for some time now, not just from without the walls of the Academy. Liberal arts colleges made a Faustian bargain: in exchange for ever increasing tuition payments, we provide students with hypothetically valuable job training in a posh resort.

The result is that there are two forces competing for control of the colleges right now. On the one side, we have the careerism wing, which needs to offer enough practical things to convince parents to part with $70,000 a year in the hopes that the children will get employment paying multiples of that number per year. On the other side, we have the ideologues, who view students as a captive audience for all manner of indoctrination through propaganda. At most institutions, faculty who ask, “What about the liberal arts?” and mean it in Pieper’s sense of the term, survive on life support, and almost nowhere do they thrive.

The point of no return is getting closer.

Read the rest at Law and Liberty

The Dull Lives We Lead

“It was not in his nature to be superlative in anything; unless indeed, he was superlatively middling, the quintessential extract of mediocrity.”

That is how George Eliot describes the protagonist in her novella, The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton.

Eliot’s first published work of fiction is a tale of a curate of a small church in England in the mid-19^th century. Reverend Barton is indeed a thoroughly undistinguished man who leads a rather conventional life. He muddles through life; people talk about him. The moment of high drama happens 90% of the way through the story when his wife dies. End of story.

Given that there is not much of a plot, what happens in the book? We are introduced to very many people about town. Crisp one paragraph descriptions which read like they were written for an assignment in a college English Course: “Imagine a dinner party and provide one paragraph descriptions of everyone at the table.” Amos Barton would have received an A on that assignment.

Pity the poor reviewer of Amos Barton. What does one say about a book in which nothing of any importance or drama happens to a character of no importance? In one of the many asides to a reader in the story, Eliot gives this helpful advice:

As it is, you can, if you please, decline to pursue my story farther; and you will easily find reading more to your taste, since I learn from the newspapers that many remarkable novels, full of striking situations, thrilling incidents, and eloquent writing, have appeared only within the last season.

Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

Still here? Good. Because for those of you willing to tarry a bit with Eliot’s tale, there is a lesson. It begins with this question: why do you want heroic tales of heroic individuals doing heroic things in heroic times?

For not having a lofty imagination, as you perceive, and being unable to invent thrilling incidents for your amusement, my only merit must lie in the truth with which I represent to you the humble experience of an ordinary fellow-mortal. I wish to stir your sympathy with commonplace troubles—to win your tears for real sorrow: sorrow such as may live next door to you—such as walks neither in rags nor in velvet, but in very ordinary decent apparel.

A book about an ordinary fellow-mortal? Quelle horreur! Imagine trying to have a discussion about a book like this with a couple of really brainy former students! What is there to discuss? The ordinariness of it all? It is impossible not to channel dear Mrs Farthingale!

The Rev. Amos Barton, whose sad fortunes I have undertaken to relate, was, you perceive, in no respect an ideal or exceptional character; and perhaps I am doing a bold thing to bespeak your sympathy on behalf of a man who was so very far from remarkable,—a man whose virtues were not heroic, and who had no undetected crime within his breast; who had not the slightest mystery hanging about him, but was palpably and unmistakably commonplace; who was not even in love, but had had that complaint favourably many years ago. “An utterly uninteresting character!” I think I hear a lady reader exclaim—Mrs. Farthingale, for example, who prefers the ideal in fiction; to whom tragedy means ermine tippets, adultery, and murder; and comedy, the adventures of some personage who is quite a “character.”

But, my dear madam, it is so very large a majority of your fellow-countrymen that are of this insignificant stamp.

Therein lies the deep challenge of a book about an insignificant life. Think about your neighbors or the people with whom you work or go to school or church. Ask yourself this: do they have interesting lives? Take the most average person you know and imagine a novel of that life. Would you want to read a novel about that life? The honest answer is “Of course not.”

The real lives of real people are boring. Yes, there may be episodes which in a skilled novelist’s hands could come to life and make a thrilling story, but the actual lives of people are rarely that exciting. People are born, some good and bad things happen, and then they die. Do we care?

Think this is melodramatic? Well then, consider Facebook (if you are old) or Instagram (if you are young). What kind of lives do people live on your preferred social media platform? We all know the answer. Everyone else leads a glamorous life online. There are a zillion stories out there about the inferiority complexes afflicting teenagers because their lives just don’t measure up. There are a zillion more stories about how people’s self-worth hinges on the number of likes on the latest post. Not the average number of likes, mind you, just the likes on the last post. What have you done to impress the world lately?

Know what is worse? Other people on your social media platform are leading impressive lives. You feel this. So, you try to impress everyone else with your own happy and fun-filled and interesting life. Ah, but secretly you know this:

Thank heaven, then, that a little illusion is left to us, to enable us to be useful and agreeable—that we don’t know exactly what our friends think of us—that the world is not made of looking-glass, to show us just the figure we are making, and just what is going on behind our backs! By the help of dear friendly illusion, we are able to dream that we are charming and our faces wear a becoming air of self-possession; we are able to dream that other men admire our talents—and our benignity is undisturbed; we are able to dream that we are doing much good—and we do a little.

And before you go feeling sorry for all those who self-esteem is crushed on an hourly basis, consider this: imagine a new social media platform that will be nothing but the boring detail of completely average people. No fancy pictures or amusing stories. No celebrities. Just stores about the mundane details of mundane lives. Interested in being on that platform? How much time would you spend reading these stories?

By the way, want to read Amos Barton? Click on the image of the book at the top of this post and you can buy it at Amazon. It’s a dull story about a dull life. You aren’t even tempted to buy this book, are you? The lives of regular people just aren’t that interesting. Think about what that says about us.

Jack the Ripper

“As with much of the evidence surrounding these murders, the data is ambiguous, a shifting cloud of facts and factoids onto which we project the fictions that seem most appropriate to our times and our inclinations.”

Alan Moore wrote that in the appendix to From Hell, his macabre tale of Jack the Ripper. (Technically Eddie Campbell shares the credit since he drew the pictures, but, we all know this is really Moore’s book.)

Jack the Ripper surely benefits from having a memorable nickname, but his hold on the imagination of people for a century and a half is remarkable. The guy (or maybe girl—there actually is a theory that the murderer was a woman!) murdered five prostitutes in the Whitechapel section of London in 1888, and people are still writing books about him in 2020. I must admit, I have never quite understood the fascination, but that is undoubtedly in part due to the odd way I first learned about him.

I was in high school, spending my lunch hour browsing in the school library, when I pulled a book off the shelf. It was a Sherlock Holmes story. I had heard of Holmes, never read him, so I figured it was a good time to start. There I am merrily reading away about Holmes and his battle with his arch-nemesis Moriarty. Troubling stuff. And then Watson makes a remarkable discovery. Holmes and Moriarty are the same person! Even more amazing: Holmes is Jack the Ripper.

As the Perceptive Reader has noted, this was not a story written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. My high school self did not know about canonical and non-canonical Holmes stories. The book was such a surreal mess, it was decades before I ever read another Holmes story, and I have steadfastly refused to read another Holmes story written by anyone other than Doyle. I have also never discovered an interest in Jack the Ripper; every time I hear the name, I think about Sherlock Holmes.

(I had never again seen or heard of the novel I read in high school. But, thanks to writing this post and the amazing internet, I discovered what it was. Michael Dibdin’s The Last Sherlock Holmes Story. I thought about buying a copy, but ten bucks exceeded the benefit I thought I might derive from rereading a bad novel for nostalgic purposes. Oddly, the Mount Holyoke Library does not own a copy of this book.)

About a decade ago, I finally read another book about Jack the Ripper. Moore’s book. It bored me. Four women, all prostitutes, decide to blackmail the Royal family for a trifling sum needed to pay off some local gang. The secret is that the Prince had an illegitimate child. Queen Victoria summons the court doctor, William Gull, and orders him to dispose of the women. Jack the Ripper is born. (The fifth women was murdered by Gull in a case of mistaken identity.)

Yep, the Queen of England was behind the murders. Suddenly Sherlock Homes seems like a relatively plausible candidate to be Jack the Ripper.

Moore, being Moore, of course doesn’t stop there. The murders are bizarre and gruesome because Gull is a Mason, and Moore thoroughly enjoys wild conspiracy theories. What starts out seeming like a straightforward tale of a serial murderer turns into a wild mystical journey into the chthonic forces operating along axes of power running beneath the surface of London. Hawksmore’s cathedrals play a role in tapping into these forces. The real meaning of Jack the Ripper can only be seen by stepping into the Fourth Dimension and looking at the pattern of violence in these locations through time. Moore is having a merry time.

On top of all that, there is a veritable Who’s Who of surprise appearances. Blake. Yeats. Wilde. Merrick (The Elephant Man). Crowley, whose inclusion prompted Moore to include this note: “The opportunity to include a fairly spurious cameo by one of the foremost occultists of all time seemed too good to pass up.”

The first time I read the book, I had no idea what was going on beyond the fact that the Queen of England was ordering murders and the fact that the victims were prostitutes gave Moore license to work in all sorts of lascivious bits. Yawn. The book has been collecting dust.

Then along comes a former student who tells me about a new book she is reading. The Five by Rubenhold. It is an archival journey into the stories of the victims. Lots and lots of archival work. The conclusion: only one of the five victims was actually a prostitute. Jack the Ripper just found the women sleeping on the ground and killed them, but the press decided to sensationalize matters by saying the victims were all prostitutes. Insert obvious moralizing by the author.

Now, when I was hearing this tale, I got to wondering about Moore’s book. I reread it, but this time, I read the appendix along with the story. Moore provides a page by page description of his sources for all the assorted scenes in the book. Reading the notes along with the story made sense of the story itself.

Moore seems to have read just about every Jack the Ripper book out there, and then freely wandered through the clues to craft a story. He acknowledges throughout which parts of his story are based on fact and which parts were purely his creations in order to weave the facts into a tale. (Spoiler alert: there is zero evidence the Queen of England ordered the murders. Whew.)

The history of Jack the Ripper theories turns out to be more interesting than Jack the Ripper. Moore plays fair with the facts (well, assuming his appendix is reliable). But, the facts are a hodgepodge of random details. We know five women were murdered, their throats were slashed, and they were disemboweled. Grisly stuff. There are conflicting and unreliable eyewitnesses to the activities of the women in the hours before the murders, but no witnesses to the murders themselves. The relative lack of blood at a couple of the locations suggests the women might have been strangled first or that they were killed elsewhere and their bodies were dumped where they were found. Now, amateur sleuth: Whodunit?

The police and newspapers also received quite a few notes from Jack the Ripper himself. Jack’s name comes from one of these notes. So, does the title of Moore’s book; one of these notes claims to have been written “From Hell.” To help you solve the murder, you can also try to figure out which, if any, of these notes were actually written by the murderer.

Surrounding the details of the case was an impressive amount of sensationalization. The Newspapers had a field day. An entire cottage industry arose, making profits off the deaths. The sites of the deaths became instant tourist attractions, and vendors popped up to sell merchandise. Moore again: “I include the scene to give an indication of just how long the public’s ghoulish fascination for the Whitechapel murders (from which the present author cannot in all conscience exclude himself) has been an established fact.”

If all these scraps and details are fascinating to you, you can easily join the band of Ripperologists. Yes, Ripperologist is a real term. My first foray into Ripperology came when I reread Moore’s book and thought about the book my former student read. If Moore is accurate about the known facts, then Rubenhold’s book is wrong. A quick glance through some of the Ripperologist forums reveals my amateur sleuthing is backed up by the less amateur sleuths. It simply is not true that nobody has ever examined the lives of the victims, and the story that they were all just sleeping on the street when the murderer found them is ludicrous.

This is the fun of being a Ripperologist, by the way. You get to make up your own theories. After all, we can’t prove that the Queen of England did not order the murders or that the Masons were not involved. What is the answer? In the second appendix to his book, Moore tells the tale of how he came to write From Hell: “Slowly it dawns on me that despite the Gull theory’s obvious attractions, the idea of a solution, any solution, is inane. Murder isn’t like books.”

It is hard to escape the conclusion that the reason Jack the Ripper lives so large in the public imagination is that his crimes were ghoulish and yet he was never caught. He killed five people. According to the ever-helpful Wikipedia, killing five people barely gets you onto the serial killer list. There are over 225 serial killers with more than five victims. I have only heard of a handful of names on that list, and none of them have the name recognition or cachet of Jack the Ripper.

I’d like to think there is an uplifting message here, but I am afraid there is not. Looking at Jack the Ripper, both the person and the fascination with him, is staring into the abyss. Sometimes, it is good to stare into that abyss just to remind ourselves of how far there is to fall if we get too close to the edge.

The Great Movies?

Terry Pratchett had an uncanny ability to isolate an aspect of the world, turn it inside out and drop it into the fantastical world of his creation. The result is inevitably an amusing tale, littered with enough slightly more than thinly veiled references to keep your brain locked in looking for the jokes. Underneath the narrative is a substantive point. It really is a rare talent.

Moving Pictures takes on Cinema. An old man guarding a secret dies, and the next thing you know, people are flocking for reasons they do not understand to Holy Wood in order to follow a dream they never knew they had of creating and starring in the clicks, a sort of moving picture which will be shown on large screens to people eating Banged Grains. Seems innocent enough, right?

Ah, but it is not. It is dangerous. Very, very dangerous.

Supposing there was somewhere reality was a little thinner than usual? And supposing you did something there that weakened reality even more. Books wouldn’t do it. Even ordinary theater wouldn’t do it, because in your heart you knew it was just people in funny clothes on a stage. But Holy Wood went straight from the eye into the brain. In your heart you thought it was real. The clicks would do it.
That was what was under Holy Wood Hill. The people of the old city had used the hole in reality for entertainment. And then the Things had found them.

Movies are not like books. That is a trite observation. But, people who write books have long been warning that the advent of this new type of entertainment is going to kill the book, and when the book dies, Civilization dies. Pratchett is offering an explanation about why movies are so dangerous. (Unrelated note: Pratchett writes books.)

As even semi-regular readers of this space know, I am a fierce advocate for reading the Great Books. You don’t need to only read Great Books, but your life will be fuller, richer and more enjoyable if you regularly read them. A question which often comes up is why Books? What if one were listening to Great Music or viewing Great Paintings? Is that the same? As good? This question is difficult, but seems answerable. Yes, listening to Bach or standing before a Michelangelo sculpture has merits akin to reading Shakespeare or Dante. The experience is different, and it provides an interesting twist to the parlor game of ranking Great Books authors. Is Dickens or Austen the superior novelist? Is Dostoevsky or Stravinsky the superior artist? Enjoy.

But, whenever I have had this discussion with students, the conversation inevitably turns to movies. Is there such a thing as The Great Movies? I don’t mean are there movies which are better than others (obviously there are) or movies which are philosophical (again, yes). The question is whether there are movies that can make a claim to being as Great as the Great Books. Is The Godfather a Great Movie in the same way that The Aeneid or Canterbury Tales or The Prince are Great Books?

There is no doubt that great (small-g) movies can be analyzed for their artistry and themes. It is easy to imagine a fascinating discussion, even a good college level course, on the movies of Hitchcock or Coppola. The question is not whether there are things in Vertigo or Apocalypse Now worth discussing. There are things worth discussing everywhere you look. Agatha Christie and Louis L’Amour have amazing bodies of work, but I have never heard anyone make the claim either one wrote Great Books.

Why do movies feel different than books? That is what Pratchett is getting at in the passage above. A book must be filtered through the mind. At a minimum, the squiggly lines on the page must be interpreted by the brain to conjure up words and then sentences and then ideas. Even the most passive reading requires the mind to be working at interpretation and analysis. But, a movie? Can a movie bypass the entire cognitive realm and enter straight into the heart? Are movies so immersive that they can be absorbed unconsciously? And if so, what does that do?

To get at this question, consider three movies which I have recently seen, each of which can stand in for a type of movie

1. Killer Bean Forever. You have probably never heard of this movie. (If you have, I pity you.) A former student told me about it after her boyfriend told her she needed to watch it because it is the best movie ever made. (As I told my former student, it is time to upgrade her boyfriend.) The movie is unwatchable. It has a curious history. Jeff Lew, a name you have never heard, made this film all by himself. It took five years. It is an animated tale about a coffee bean who, like James Bond, scurries around fighting evil coffee beans.

What is curious about this movie is that it is not just my former student’s boyfriend who loves it. It is a cult classic, complete with the modern sign of cultural relevance, a zillion memes. It is a trivial matter to mock this movie, but the more interesting question is wondering why anyone would watch it, let alone love it, let alone, at great risk to his relationship, convince his significant other to watch it. It is 90 minutes which could be spent reading a book. If you want the whole James Bond vibe, Ian Fleming is right there on the shelf. It you want corny jokes, there is Terry Pratchett, whose worst joke is better than anything this movie offers.

Yet, people watch Killer Bean Forever. A perfect example of truly Mindless Entertainment. It is hard not to despair thinking about movies like this.

2. Les Miserables. Another former student has spent years trying to convince me that Broadway Musicals are the highest form of art imaginable. Now theater is not the same as movies (as Pratchett notes). But there is a movie of Les Miserables. I finally watched it. Unlike Killer Beans Forever, this movie was a Hollywood spectacular with a cast of movie stars. It was nominated for Awards, Big Awards, and even won a few.

The summary: watching it is an endurance test. I can see how someone obsessed with Broadway Musicals would be glad that Hollywood took notice and made a Big Budget Production. A person like that might be able to see through the movie for a sort of second-hand enjoyment of the beloved Broadway show. But, for someone just watching the movie, with no particular fascination for the original musical, there is nothing here worth seeing.

The plot is like watching a Spark Notes version of Hugo’s massive, sprawling novel. The novel is a Great Book (if you get past the fact that it really needed an editor to cut the length down by at least a quarter). The movie strips out most everything, leaving bare bones. The cast looks good on the screen; these are stars. The problem: most of the cast cannot sing. For a movie in which all the dialogue is sung, this is a real problem.

Why do people watch this movie? The movie could remind you of a Great Book. It could remind you of a magical night you spent seeing the production on Broadway. Maybe you just like seeing movie stars in elaborate costumes. The movie is, in other words, Spectacle. You could watch Hugh Jackman playing Wolverine or Jean Valjean, and your choice is primarily going to be driven by whether you would rather see him with Steel Claws or wearing a Top Hat. There is nothing Great about this movie. Spectacle is simply a way to pass a couple of hours which will be enjoyed by people who enjoy this sort of thing.

3. Citizen Kane. If any movies are going to make a claim to be Great, surely this one would make the cut. When the American Film Institute made its list of the 100 Best Films, Citizen Kane topped the list. It is thus as close to Officially the best movie ever made as a movie could be.

I watched it for the first time years ago. It bored me to tears. I rewatched it recently. It is not as boring as I thought. To enjoy it, however, you have to sit back and absorb the artistry. It is wonderfully crafted. Orson Welles is clever, both as a director and an actor.

The movie can be enjoyed and it can be analyzed. A conversation about Citizen Kane could sound similar a conversation about a Great Novella, but not a Great Novel. Thinking about Citizen Kane makes it obvious that movies are simply too short to be compared to David Copperfield or Middlemarch.

Even making the comparison to a shorter book, however, there is still the very real difference in the experience. It is, as Pratchett noted, true that the movie just bypasses the critical facilities on its way into the memory. You watch a movie. After it is done, you could take apart the movie and analyze what you have seen, but the experience of watching a movie, even an extremely well-crafted movie, is more passive than reading even the most generic genre fiction story you could find.

Is Citizen Kane a Great Movie? The longer I think about this, the more skeptical I become. Most movies are either the Mindless, truly Mindless, productions like Killer Bean Forever or Big Budget Spectacles like Les Miserables. But, even films which might rise above Mindless or Spectacle are viewed in the same manner. I think Pratchett may be onto something is asserting that movies are not like books at all, that movies weaken reality by going straight from the screen into the brain. You sit back and absorb a movie. You can’t sit back and absorb The Brothers Karamazov or War and Peace.

If true, the implications of this for the future of Western Civilization are, to put it mildly, troubling. What happens if a generation rises up that spends so much time watching Hollywood productions that it loses the ability to read?