Page 2455 – Christianity Today (2024)

Marc Sahabo, a shy, kind man, reaches out to greet me. As I shake his hand, I can’t help thinking about what that hand was doing in April 1994: wielding a machete and killing 15 people during Rwanda’s genocide, which left about a million people dead.

The next hand I shake is that of Felicita Mukabakunda, a woman who was Sahabo’s friend and neighbor for years, until ethnic tensions between the Hutu majority and Tutsi minority rose to lethal levels. When the killings began, Mukabakunda, a Tutsi, hid in nearby marshes while Sahabo and other Hutus went on their rampage. She overheard them say that they planned to take turns raping her before killing her. She also heard Sahabo say he had killed her father, her uncle, and four other family members.

The killers never found Mukabakunda; she and her husband and children fled to a safe area in Rwanda and briefly lived in a camp for displaced persons. When they returned home after the genocide, Mukabakunda learned that 29 family members—including 16 brothers and sisters—had been murdered.

“I had so much hatred,” she told me. “I wanted Marc to die a slow, painful death. I would have killed him if I could.” But Sahabo, fearing for his life, had fled to Burundi, then to Tanzania. When Rwanda later negotiated with Tanzania for the return of the perpetrators, Marc was immediately arrested and jailed. He spent seven years in prison before his 2003 release.

Because of prison overcrowding, some 50,000 offenders—those who were minors during the genocide or those who confessed, including Sahabo—have been released. (Some estimate that it would take about 400 years to try all of the cases in the courts. So today, only the worst, most unrepentant killers remain behind bars, including a few genocide leaders held in Tanzania.)

When Sahabo returned home after his release from prison, he was afraid that surviving Tutsis in the community might take revenge and kill him.

Revenge and fear—just the reactions one would expect in post-genocide Rwanda, even 15 years after the most traumatic event in world affairs since the Nazi Holocaust.

I went to Rwanda recently—just a few weeks before the 15th anniversary of the genocide—to see how the church, which itself needs healing and forgiveness for its role in the affair, is dealing with the trauma today. While some wounds still run deep, and problems remain, I became convinced that something remarkable is afoot in a nation whose soul has been so tragically torn.

A biblical process

“The Rwandans know what their country needs more than anybody,” says Tracy Stone. “They just need access to resources, training, and funding.”

Stone is founder of Rwanda Partners (RP), a Seattle-based ministry with an ambitious mission statement: “Dedicated to working for Rwanda’s healing and reconciliation [by working] directly with the people to develop and implement programs that promote reconciliation and reduce poverty.”

In 1994, Stone had just been abandoned by her husband and was adjusting to her new life as a single mom: “I was a wreck.” But she was encouraged by the stories she read about women, mostly widows, who had survived the genocide, overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds.

Stone didn’t visit Rwanda until 2004, but her visit was so powerful that when she returned home, she quit her job and, encouraged by her new husband, founded Rwanda Partners—with emphasis on the second word. From Seattle, Stone solicits donations (for an annual budget of about $250,000) while her staff in Rwanda, four nationals, do the work on the ground.

Theo Mushinzimana, RP’s in-country director, says, “Any reconciliation in Rwanda is a result of a biblical process that brings perpetrators and victims together at the foot of the Cross.

“When you have a Hutu who has been transformed by the Holy Spirit to repent and be forgiven, his story can be used in powerful ways to help other victims forgive. A repentant perpetrator also helps other perpetrators to heal, showing them it’s possible to move beyond what they have done and be forgiven.

“And when you have a Tutsi who has forgiven, this is huge. It’s a process that requires great truth—truth that only God’s Word can make possible.”

Pascal Niyomugabo, a pastor and RP’s reconciliation coordinator, says the process “takes a lot of patience.

“When we ask someone to forgive, we get a lot of rejection at first,” he says. “With some, it takes a lot longer to heal their wounds. We follow up, but we don’t press them.”

Mistrust in the church

Rwanda Partners and other reconciliation ministries work with local churches, equipping them to take the lead in their communities. It’s a hard enough job, only complicated by a widespread lack of trust of the church because denominational leaders and pastors played a role in the genocide. (The most notorious case was Rwandan Catholic priest Athanase Seromba, who ordered his sanctuary bulldozed while 2,000 Tutsis sought refuge inside; Seromba is now serving a life sentence.)

“The church is in a tight situation,” says Dwight Jackson, Food for the Hungry‘s national director in Rwanda. “It’s taken some severe identity hits because of stories of church leaders participating in the genocide. The preponderance of evidence is that the church—Catholics and Protestants—is complicit, even at a denominational level.”

RP’s Mushinzimana says some pastors feel a “deep-seated sense of guilt” for not doing more to try to stop the killing. Other church leaders still harbor unresolved ethnic hatred, or aren’t willing to undertake the hard work of pursuing biblical reconciliation.

Anastase Rugirangoga, director of the Peacebuilding, Healing, and Reconciliation Program, a nonprofit, notes: “Pastors say, ‘We have Hutus and Tutsis in our church. For me to talk of forgiveness and reconciliation, it is very difficult, because I am afraid of losing some of them.’ Some feel that if the pastor is asking survivors to forgive, maybe he is taking sides with the Hutus. Or if he asks Hutus to repent, maybe he is siding with the Tutsis. So many pastors just preach in general, because they are afraid to say the hard things.”

But many pastors who want to do the right thing feel overwhelmed by the task of reconciliation, because the trauma still runs deep, even in themselves.

Says Mushinzimana, who lost family members in the genocide, “Pastors have been wounded just like other people.”

Nyirindekwe Celestin, an Anglican priest, says pastors often deal with arguments between Hutus and Tutsis in their congregation: “When pastors see this, their church looks like a broken family.”

But the rifts can be healed, like they were in one church Celestin says was “really divided” over whether Hutus or Tutsis would take leadership. When he later visited and found the two sides fasting and praying together, they told him, “We don’t want this to be a Hutu church or a Tutsi church. We want to stay together.” Though a few ended up leaving, most remained and worked through their differences, deciding to share the leadership. Celestin grins as he says, “That church did not divide.”

He says the squabbles illustrate the need for true reconciliation—not mere peaceful coexistence, but confession and forgiveness he says are possible only through Christ.

“It’s very hard to forgive a killer,” he says. “It takes power from above to transform a person. Our main focus isn’t to tell people to forgive, but to accept Jesus as their Savior, and let him transform you. Only then can you forgive.”

Spiritual response to poverty

Déo Gashagaza, executive director of Prison Fellowship Rwanda (PFR), notes another challenge facing the church: addressing poverty. In a nation where the average income is a dollar a day, and where the genocide left many widowed, orphaned, homeless, and hungry, utter poverty—and the unlikelihood of escaping it—can make people bitter, hard, and unwilling to forgive.

“It’s impossible for a hungry man to take on what we teach,” says Gashagaza, who lost seven family members in the genocide. “We cannot respond to the needs of Christians without enabling them to grow both spiritually and economically.”

That’s one critical reason why reconciliation ministries try to help people escape poverty, usually through microenterprise ventures and business co-ops.

RP affiliate Rwanda Basket Company (RBC) is a prime example, working with co-ops of weavers to make baskets and other art, which are then sold in the U.S.; the profits go back to the artisans. The weavers, all women, earn up to $30 a week, increasing their family income six-fold, enough to lift them out of poverty and into the middle class.

“Our primary work is with the most vulnerable women, mostly widows and orphans,” says Michel Kayiranga, RBC’s in-country director. “We’re hoping to sell more baskets so we can add more weavers and get more women out of poverty.”

Asked about what basket weaving has to do with reconciliation, Kayiranga says, “They are working together. No one thinks about being Hutu or Tutsi. They work together, and talk about everything—their common problems, whatever.”

Another vital part of reconciliation is restitution, one of the principles behind PFR’s four “unity and reconciliation” villages, where released prisoners have built over 400 homes for genocide survivors, and where perpetrators and victims now live side by side.

Laura Waters Hinson, director of the 2008 documentary As We Forgive, has teamed up with PFR to form Living Bricks, which raises funds to help build more such homes. Hinson says more than 10,000 ex-offenders have asked for supplies to build these “houses of hope” to make restitution to their victims, because they cannot afford the supplies themselves. Living Bricks makes it possible. (Hinson’s documentary depicts stories of reconciliation in Rwanda, as does a quasi-companion book, also titled As We Forgive, by Catherine Claire Larson.)

Victim rage

In his job, Rugirangoga is regularly cursed at, spat upon, and worse. And he’s smiling as he tells me about it.

“The insults are terrible,” he says. “Very bad language!”

It’s all in a day’s work for Rugirangoga, who conducts three-day reconciliation workshops around the nation. He invites perpetrators and victims without telling either that the others will attend. When the two sides first arrive, the survivors release their wrath—initially on Rugirangoga: “You bring us here before our killers? You are an accomplice! You are a killer!”

Then their anger—15 years’ worth of it—turns to the perpetrators, and continues through much of the first day; Rugirangoga does little to quell it. He brings local police to keep things from getting violent, but he lets the people shout it out.

“It’s part of the healing process,” he says, “because many people have not had a chance to pour out their suffering. This is their opportunity.”

When the victims’ anger turns to the perpetrators, “The killers do not say anything. They are insulted and spat upon, but they keep quiet, because they feel guilty, and they want these people to forgive them.”

Rugirangoga says he knows God is involved in the workshops because most of the participants on both sides show up for the second day—a day of prayer, of biblical teaching about confession and

forgiveness, even of singing together.

Victims remain skeptical that the killers are repentant, but Rugirangoga tells them, “They are here because they want to change. They might be Christians, but they still feel guilty until you forgive them.

“The survivors ask, ‘Are you sure they are not coming to kill us again?’ We say, ‘We are sure, because they have repented.’ We ask the victims, ‘Do you want them to be killed?’ They say, ‘No, their death will not benefit us. Pastor, we are Christians. We want to go to heaven. They have blood on their hands. We don’t want blood on our hands.’

“Then we say, ‘Okay, if you don’t want to kill them, forgive them. God has forgiven them. God has forgiven you. Now they’re asking for forgiveness. Forgive them.'”

The process continues over the next two days. By the end, many are ready to forgive, but some are not. So Rugirangoga appoints a team of killers and survivors who have reconciled to follow up, “to continue to help them process their anger and their feelings.” Some end up forgiving, but some never do.

“It’s hard work,” Rugirangoga says. “But it’s good.”

The tide is turning

Are the efforts of Rugirangoga, Gashagaza, Mushinzimana, Niyomugabo—and so many others—making a difference?

According to PFR, some 60,000 prisoners—many of those who have been released—have confessed their crimes, and more than 12,000 victims have “openly forgiven” their offenders.

But it’s more than just the statistics; it’s also in the personal stories, like one I heard from Fatuma Ndangiza, executive secretary of Rwanda’s National Unity and Reconciliation Commission (nurc), which runs peace-building programs for all ages. The commission is focusing especially on younger Rwandans; 67 percent of the country is under the age of 25, and 44 percent under 15.

Since old attitudes and ethnic animosities die hard, the nurc hopes to change the way of thinking for the next generation—those 44 percent born since the genocide who didn’t witness 1994’s atrocities and didn’t grow up with their parents’ prejudices.

Ndangiza tells a story that shows the tide is turning. A few years ago, armed Hutu rebels entered a school and told the children to separate—Hutus on one side, Tutsis on the other. The children refused, saying, “We are all Rwandese. We are not Hutu or Tutsi.” The rebels said, “If you don’t separate, we will kill you.” The children embraced each other, and a 13-year-old girl said, “We will not separate. We are all the same. Let us pray, and then you can kill us. But we are all Rwandese.”

The rebels threw grenades, killing several children and badly injuring others. The 13-year-old girl was among the dead, and today is regarded as a national hero. “Although that was a bitter experience,” says Ndangiza, “it was also a testimony that tells me attitudes are changing, and that peace and unity are slowly becoming a reality in Rwanda.”

A ‘holy shower’

The story of Marc Sahabo and Felicita Mukabakunda, introduced at the beginning of this article, is a typical testimony of hope.

After his release from prison, Sahabo was invited to attend a reconciliation workshop led by RP’s Pascal Niyomugabo—who is Mukabakunda’s brother. At first, Sahabo thought it was a trap, that Tutsis would be waiting to kill him. But he attended the workshop anyway, and says, “My heart was changed by Jesus. I wanted to ask the victims for forgiveness, to tell them I was no longer the killer they used to know.”

But Mukabakunda hadn’t been ready to forgive. Her brother, who had already forgiven Sahabo, kept encouraging her. Eventually, she decided it was time.

When they finally met face to face, Sahabo got down on his knees before Mukabakunda, folded his hands, confessed his crimes, and begged for mercy. Mukabakunda put her hand on his shoulder, looked him in the eyes, and said simply, “I forgive you.”

Sahabo says that at that moment, he felt like he “just came out of a shower, a clean man, except it was like a holy shower, because I felt clean on the inside.” For Mukabakunda, a heavy burden lifted, and the migraine headaches and nightmares she had suffered for ten years immediately disappeared and have not returned.

Today, Sahabo and Mukabakunda say they are best friends; on the day I visited with them, they shared a beer and many laughs. Their children play together, and their families regularly share meals. The two of them ride a bike from village to village, telling their story.

“I’m not scared of him anymore,” says Mukabakunda. “Without Jesus, I’d go back to hating Marc. But because of Jesus, I have forgiven Marc, and I love him now.”

Theirs is just one of many similar stories I heard in my short time in Rwanda, and one of thousands more like it, all across the country. One can’t help believing that the torn soul of Rwanda is healing, and that hope is on the near horizon.

Mark Moring is a CT associate editor and editor of CT Movies.

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

Christianity Today has a special section on Rwanda on our site, including:

Forty Days for Rwanda | Rick Warren, Kagame open Purpose Driven campaign. (April 17, 2008)

Appreciate Our Efforts | Don’t patronize or belittle Rwandan Christians committed to progress. (April 1, 2006)

Healing Genocide | Ten years after the slaughter, Rwandans begin to mend their torn nation with a justice that is both biblical and African. (April 1, 2004)

Get a downloadable Bible study for this article at ChristianBibleStudies.com.

A movie is like a parade: before you see the fullness of the procession’s pomp and circ*mstance, you see forerunners—standard bearers—that serve as heralds and hint at what is to come. And before you see a movie, you see and hear things that frame your expectations, so you’ll know what about the movie is of primary importance, and why someone should want to see it. The advance banner may well be the plot, but it could also be the cast, especially if the actors have had recent personal troubles. It might be the famous director, or the scale of its special effects.

Rarely, the advance banner of a movie bears the name of a writer, but that’s the case with $9.99. The signal thing about this movie, the thing that people in-the-know find exciting, is that it is based on the short stories of Etgar Keret. Born in Israel, Keret is the author of short stories and children’s books, and co-author of graphic novels. I haven’t read his work, but it sounds like it is original and imaginative, from its very conception. Missing Kissinger, for example, packs 50 very short stories into 250 pages. Keret’s stories are frequently surreal, and whimsical and hopeful rather than bitter. His story “Kneller’s Happy Campers,” for example, concerns a man who kills himself and then looks for love in the afterlife. That one was made into the graphic novel Pizzeria Kamikaze, and then into the feature film Wristcutters: A Love Story, starring Tom Waits and Will Arnett.

From that you can get a feeling for how highly Keret is regarded. The director of $9.99, Tatia Rosenthal, says, “Etgar has been referred to as the voice of our generation in Israel, and the pull I felt toward his work was immense.” She praises his “bittersweet, exacting literary voice and its expression of humanism in a morally ambiguous world … the dry-witted expression of a complex reality through everyday situations, and magical realism.” The film found a producer when one of Keret’s fans, Emile Sherman, sought out the writer while on vacation in Tel Aviv. Sherman praises the script: “touching, funny, sophisticated, humanist.”

Do you really need to know all this about the writer behind $9.99? I suspect that’s the case. Those who anticipate liking it because it comes from the pen of Etgar Keret will have a deeper appreciation of the film, I think, than those for whom the name evokes a blank “Who he?”

In its general outline, the story is one you’ve seen before; it utilizes the convention of enclosing a wide range of people within a physical place (a stagecoach in Stagecoach, an army camp in The Dirty Dozen, a theater in The Muppets Take Manhattan) to explore various undying themes. A man loses his girlfriend, due to his immature, party-hearty character; another man acquires a girlfriend, one who has unusual tastes; a sweetly naïve young man hasn’t the heart to work for a repossession company; an older man tries to be polite and helpful toward a grumpy intruder who simply moved in. The characters interact for 78 minutes, and at the end most stories are resolved, and most for the better.

That kind of movie can indeed be charming, but it’s not necessarily an advance on the last movie you saw that was built along these lines. In two ways it is sure to be different from the last one you saw. In the first place, $9.99 uses a fair degree of magical realism. The man who’s lost his love is consoled by a trio of 2-inch-high drinking buddies (he gives them sips of beer from a medicine dropper; they ride in circles on his record turntable). The acquired girlfriend likes her men “smooth,” and after her accommodating lover shaves his head and his body he seeks yet a further way to show his love. The grumpy intruder is an angel of some sort (he has wings), but is otherwise sarcastic and rude.

I’ll agree that such elements are imaginative, but they don’t startle the way they once could have. Americans developed a taste for the absurd when Monty Python became a hit on public television in the 1970s; Woody Allen’s early movies helped too. Whether you’re striving for humor or whimsy, it’s useful to pull out a startling, even impossible, contrast. But the more random the association, the less it can persuasively craft character or depict authentic character change. Elements that are arbitrary may be delightful, even scintillating, but for that very reason they don’t make solid building blocks for a story.

The other really different element is that the film uses clay animation to tell the story. Little figures made of modeling clay were set in place, photographed, moved only a tiny bit, photographed again, until your brain hurts just to think about it. It’s an admirable effort, though of course movement can never be entirely smooth, and subtly shifting facial expressions are more approximate than a human actor could have achieved. Does this add to the movie? Well, it makes it more curious an artifact, and you have to salute the exhausting effort required. But as to whether $9.99 might have been just as good, or better, filmed the usual way is an open question.

The title is the price of a book acquired by the reluctant repo man; he responded to an ad reading, “Have you ever wondered ‘What’s the meaning of life?’ … The answer to this vexing question is now within your reach! You’ll find it in this small yet amazing booklet … yours for a mere $9.99.” Throughout the film, Dave attempts to share with other characters the amazing things he is learning—”People think life has only one meaning, but actually there are six!”—but no one wants to listen.

I’ll admit that what intrigued me about the film was a desire to learn what the filmmakers think the meaning of life is. Like the magical realism, like the meticulous clay figures, this turns out to be one more element of a movie that dances and alludes without coming right down to anything, and invites us to believe that dancing and alluding is sufficient in itself. What is the meaning of $9.99? You may think there’s only one meaning, but—once you look past the glow of admiration surrounding the writer—it could be less.

Talk About It

Discussion starters

1. The angel says that he wanted to see his wife in heaven, but after he killed himself he was turned into an angel instead. Is there still a common misunderstanding that people become angels after death? How would you talk about this with someone who finds the idea comforting?
2. Zack sets his piggy bank free, and it appears we are supposed to see that as a sweet conclusion to this strand of the story. But what is likely to happen to that coin-filled piggy bank? Do you think the filmmakers intend us to foresee that subsequent part of the story, or to pretend we don’t?
3. Why does the policeman refuse to accept Mr. Cruller’s confession? What do you make of his statement, “I’m sure that God forgives you”?

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

$9.99 is rated R for language and brief sexuality and nudity. Although this film is animated, it is not for children. A suicide splashes blood over a passerby, twice. Two characters are shown nude and while having sex.

Photos © Australian Film Finance Corporation

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Contrived is almost too soft a word for the premise of The Proposal, Sandra Bullock’s latest romantic comedy offering, yet the fresh dialogue, gorgeous scenery, and ultimately winsome love story make this one of the most appealing romances to come down the pike in recent years.

Bullock plays Margaret Tate, a hard-as-nails book editor in the vein of Meryl Streep’s iconic Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada. She’s so loathed and feared that her employees send out frantic instant messages warning of her impending arrival in the office. “The witch is on her broom.” But unlike Anne Hathaway’s bumbling, lost Andie from Prada, Margaret’s assistant is skillful, competent, ambitious Andrew Paxton. As played by Ryan Reynolds, Drew has confidence to spare and has managed to stay a step ahead of Margaret’s wrath for three years.

Margaret has just scored the coup of a lifetime by convincing her most reclusive author to appear on Oprah. It’s a career-making move, but Margaret’s triumph is cut off at the knees when she’s called into the publisher’s office. It seems that Margaret, a Canadian, flouted US immigration by traveling to the Frankfurt book fair while her work visa was expired. She’s being deported. Her career is over.

Now, in true romantic comedy silliness, Margaret’s urgent problem presents an immediate solution when Drew steps in with a phone message. He told the caller Margaret was “otherwise engaged,” and Margaret’s kohl-rimmed eyes narrow with a nefarious plot worthy of Queen Cleopatra herself. She announces that she and Drew are engaged to be married. Problem solved.

Drew has no desire to go along with Margaret’s scheme until she points out that his career will be toast if he doesn’t. It’s not because Margaret will ruin him. Once deported, she can’t work for an American company. Rather, her successor will fire him because he was Margaret’s assistant.

Margaret drags Drew down to the US immigration office where she jumps the line. Immigration officer Mr. Gilbertson (a marvelous Denis O’Hare) smells a rat and urges Drew to reconsider a move that could land him in prison for five years. All he has to do is admit the truth. Drew says the truth is that they’re in love and getting married and are spending the weekend in Alaska to share the news with his family. But before they get on the plane, Drew enacts a promise from Margaret that she’ll promote him to editor.

And thus, after the most calculating of courtships, the conniving couple travels by first-class plane, puddle jumper, and motorboat to Drew’s utterly gorgeous family mansion in the mouthwatering Alaskan wilderness. They’ve got it all worked out—stay married just long enough to get immigration off their case, then a quickie divorce and they’ll forget it ever happened.

Any savvy movie watcher will guess what will happen over the course of the film. This is a romantic comedy starring two very attractive people who happen to have great chemistry together. But screenwriter Peter Chiarelli pulls off both an absurd premise and a formulaic plotline—and then some. Beneath the flippant veneer lurks a movie that takes matrimony and family quite seriously. Margaret and Drew are led to place of reverence for marriage that compels them to make good on the casual promise that they made when Margaret “proposed” to Drew. Her journey from ice queen to blushing bride ends up being surprisingly moving.

That’s not to say that The Proposal is heavy handed or soggy. On the contrary, it’s good comedic fun the whole way through. Director Anne Fletcher uses a light hand and keeps things moving, while screenwriter Chiarelli peppers Drew’s dialogue with unexpectedly fresh quips. As Margaret and Drew study for their immigration quiz, to prove how well they know each other, Drew asks Margaret if she has any hobbies. “Besides snacking on children while they dream,” he adds.

The stabs at broad physical comedy mostly hit the mark. The movie trailers feature a scene where Margaret and Drew end up crashing into each other while stark naked. The setup actually works, though Fletcher’s camera lingers a bit too long on Bullock’s artfully covered nude body. This seemed an odd choice and a departure in a film that largely feels modest, almost unfashionably so. The flashes of skin in this scene are all that keep The Proposal from being a worthy companion film to the classic It Happened One Night, skirting immorality from an ultimately chaste position.

Bullock and Reynolds are a lot of fun to watch, playing off one another perfectly. As Drew’s functionally dysfunctional family, supporting players Craig T. Nelson and Mary Steenburgen bring a delightful depth to their roles, with Betty White’s Gammy offering comic relief that transcends cliché.

The Proposal represents a welcome departure from the cynicism and blatant sexuality that have marked too many recent romantic comedies. It’s a silly premise, but the emotional honesty and fine comedy make you remember that realism isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.

Talk About It

Discussion starters

1. Why would a fake marriage be so devastating for a family?
2. Have you ever kept a secret in order to gain an advantage or get out of a responsibility?
3. Why is marriage too important to take lightly?

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

The Proposal is rated PG-13 for sexual content, nudity and language. The nudity refers to a scene where the main characters accidentally crash into each other while naked; while no genitalia is shown, the camera lingers a bit too long here, especially on Bullock. Sexual content also includes a male striptease at a bachelorette party; it’s played up for humor/grotesquerie, not arousal, but again, the camera lingers too long. Language includes some four-letter words and a couple uses of the Lord’s name in vain, but overall is relatively mild for a PG-13 film. The family assumes and accepts that Margaret and Drew are having premarital sex.

Photos © Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

There’s an ambitious modesty to Duncan Jones’s debut film Moon, a smart, existential science-fiction drama with one onscreen actor that runs 97 minutes and goes nowhere more exotic than our planet’s natural satellite.

The setting itself recalls the era of the Apollo project, that remarkable period during which, over a three-year span of time between 1969 and 1972, a dozen Americans walked on the moon. Not coincidentally, at least as regards Moon‘s milieu, it’s also the era of philosophically serious science-fiction films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running and Solaris, the influence of which is consciously at work in Moon. There is also a connection to Blade Runner (though not in terms of mood, structure or look).

Yet where these films dealt with apocalyptic, transcendent or large-scale phenomena, Moon engages similar questions of identity and human nature on a smaller scale. Nothing more is ever at stake in the actual onscreen events than the lives of a very small number of characters, although the film explicitly indicates a larger scope of issues. While it doesn’t look like a $50 million film, you wouldn’t guess Moon was made for just a tenth of that figure—especially with a premise that requires a special-effects set piece for an ordinary game of Ping-Pong.

A great deal of the credit goes to the impressively fluid contributions of Sam Rockwell, who grounds the film’s emotional contradictions and disconnects in bruised working-class stoicism and a sly streak of humor. Rockwell plays Sam Bell, an astronaut and mining contractor nearing the end of a three-year term at the Sarang lunar base on the far side of the moon. Sam’s job involves monitoring a trio of roaming mining units (nicknamed Matthew, Mark and Luke) and periodically rendezvousing with them via lunar rover to collect shipments of helium-3, now the source of 70 percent of Earth’s energy.

An early title tells us that the Sarang base has a crew of one—but Sam isn’t entirely alone. For one thing, there’s Gerty, who glides about in a ceiling-mounted track system and speaks in the detached cadences of Kevin Spacey, like a mash-up of the HAL-9000 from 2001 and OTTO from WALL-E. Sam also lives with his memories, if that’s what they are, of his wife Tess, whose only contact with Sam is via recorded messages from Earth (live communication is down due to satellite malfunction).

Then, on a routine outing in the rover, Sam sees someone or something that can’t be there. There is an accident that leaves a roaming mining unit damaged, and Sam is injured. Later, recuperating in the infirmary, Sam learns from Gerty that he’s confined to base while a repair crew from Earth makes the three-day trip to get the damaged mining unit back up and running.

But then Sam overhears something that wasn’t meant for his ears, and is suddenly dissatisfied with staying inside the lines. He decides to check out the damaged mining unit with or without Gerty’s permission, leading to an exchange that deliberately evokes the tacit antagonism of Dave Bowman’s relationship with HAL in 2001, though Moon also subverts the genre tropes established by the Kubrick classic.

What Sam discovers when he returns to the scene of the accident, and what he experiences afterwards, is described in many reviews—which is a shame, since Moon is not a mystery or “twist” thriller in which everything turns on a mind-bending explanation. Sam’s disorienting experiences are best experienced as he does, with as little context as possible.

Suffice to say, Sam’s predicament touches on issues from the deconstruction of human nature and the commodification of human life to existential loneliness, alienation and the dehumanizing effects of corporate ruthlessness. Jones confidently covers this material with efficiency and restraint, avoiding both didacticism and unnecessary pyrotechnics.

At the same time, the filmmakers create a world of admirable persuasiveness and visual appeal, from the industrial starkness of the base, to the lunar grit of the moonscape and the rover, to the clunky boxiness of Gerty, who looks like some sort of medical scanning unit (with the odd yellow Post-it note for an added touch of lived-in realness).

It’s not a perfect film, but Moon earns enough goodwill to warrant overlooking small flaws for all it does right—and this is as good a place as any for the obligatory acknowledgement that the first-time filmmaker is the son of David Bowie.

Traditional dramatic theory outlines basic modes of conflict: character vs. character, character vs. nature, character vs. society, character vs. self. Moon plays ambiguously with multiple modes of conflict—including a sci-fi variant, character vs. machine—in the process questioning, though not dismissing, the relevance of the distinctions.

Although Sam’s is the only face we see in person, the story becomes a three-way drama in which the line between the human and artificial worlds is tested. Part of the triangle, of course, involves the interaction of Sam and Gerty. Neither is necessarily quite what we expect them to be—and both, from the perspective of their corporate masters, are merely tools, interchangeable cogs in a larger machine.

Sam chafes at this; Gerty does not. But even Gerty doesn’t necessarily play exactly the role assigned to it (him? her?), while Sam’s reluctance to accept the obvious implications of his circ*mstances are potentially as much a comeuppance to human pretensions as they are ultimately, I think, an affirmation of them.

The truth, for Sam, is partly unwelcome—a point wryly underscored by a couple of ironic soundtrack choices. (In one scene, Sam overtly tries to drown out a message he doesn’t want to hear by grooving to Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine”—whistling in the dark, on the far side of the Moon. Even more pointedly, a morning alarm wakes him to the chorus of Hawkes Chesney’s “I Am the One and Only.”) More dark humor arises from Gerty’s deadpan evocation of emotions, a series of variously inflected smiley faces, digitally displayed in less than perfect sync to the mood of the discussion.

Yet despite facts he would rather deny, Sam is ultimately vindicated—not only by his climactic choices, but by smaller touches, such as the wooden model town that he works on over the years with an X-Acto knife. Granted, he may not remember making all the pieces, but still and all creativity and recreation are an intractable part of the human equation.

By contrast, while Gerty’s actions may be at times somewhat inscrutable, the robot’s claim to be there to help Sam accurately expresses robot teleology. Robots exist to serve human beings; human existence can’t be reduced to a similar teleological proposition. One way or another, Gerty is, in the end, a tool—and Sam, whatever else he may be, is not.

Talk About It

Discussion starters

1. Have you ever had reason to doubt or distrust that something you “remember” really happened? How important is it to be able to trust our memories? How can we know when memory is reliable and when it isn’t?
2. Which do you think is more important, nature or nurture? Are people more influenced by their genes or by their environment and upbringing? Is there any other component that makes people who they are?
3. Do you think human cloning will ever be practical or accepted? If so, do you think it would be morally legitimate or problematic? Why or why not?
4. Would a human clone have a soul? How could you tell?

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

Moon is rated R for language, which almost always means recurring use of the F-word (here used as an expletive, not in a sexual sense). The names of God and Jesus Christ are also repeatedly misused. A character suffers injuries and illness, and there’s some blood and a depiction of vomiting. There is also a brief bedroom scene (nothing explicit), and brief rear nudity in a shower scene.

Photos © Sony Pictures Classics

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

It had to happen eventually. It has been five years since The Passion of the Christ brought the Bible epic back to the big screen, and nearly four since Judd Apatow began producing and directing a string of raunchy comedies—a few of which, such as the musical pseudo-biopic Walk Hard, have dabbled explicitly in genre parody. It was only a matter of time before Apatow or someone like him turned their attention to the religious epic, and the result is Year One, a buddy comedy that takes a relentlessly lowbrow look at the Book of Genesis.

Written and directed by Harold Ramis, who had small roles in Walk Hard and Knocked Up but may be best known as the director of Caddyshack and Groundhog Day, the new film takes at least some of its ideas from non-biblical sources, too. The story centers on two men who are expelled from a village of prehistoric hunter-gatherers, and if the film as a whole is tapping into a trend that began with The Passion, then the opening scenes bring another Mel Gibson movie, Apocalypto, to mind, as one of those men takes part in a wild boar hunt.

Alas, the man in question, Zed (Jack Black), is a tad clumsy and has a habit of spearing his fellow villagers rather than the animal that they are pursuing—but this is not what gets him expelled from the village. Instead, he breaks “the rules” when he goes to the Tree of Knowledge and eats some of its forbidden fruit, hoping the fruit will make him smarter. For this and other transgressions, Zed is sent into exile, and he is joined by his reluctant best friend Oh (Michael Cera), a shy, timid gatherer who talks to the berries he picks.

Thus begins their journey into the early chapters of Genesis. Two of the first people Zed and Oh meet are Cain (David Cross) and his brother Abel (Paul Rudd), and the ensuing conversation annoys Cain so much that he kills Abel right then and there. Feeling guilty—though that doesn’t stop him from pounding a rock into his brother’s face whenever Abel stirs—Cain runs away from home and takes Zed and Oh with him. One thing leads to another and they all end up in Sodom, but not before Zed and Oh have had a chance to meet Abraham (Hank Azaria) and his son Isaac (Christopher Mintz-Plasse).

Along the way, people talk about God every now and then, but his role in the story is rather diminished; indeed, where the Bible ascribes certain actions to God, the film consistently ascribes them to regular people (except for one lightning bolt, the timing of which may point to a higher cause). It is not God but Zed’s fellow villagers who expel him for eating the forbidden fruit; it is not God but Adam (Ramis) whose questions prompt Cain to complain that he isn’t Abel’s “keeper”; and it is not God who saves Isaac from being sacrificed at the last minute but Zed and Oh, who stumble onto the scene just as Abraham is raising his knife.

In addition, the biblical characters we meet are typically made to look rather arrogant, loony or both. Cain may be a murderer, but Abel seems a bit smug when he talks about being God’s favorite; Adam casually invites one of his guests to “lay” with his daughter, and his son Seth (Gabriel Sunday) is inordinately fond of sheep; and while an embarrassed Abraham does back down from sacrificing Isaac, he later announces that God has told him to cut off a piece of every man’s penis, including those of his guests—but don’t worry, he’ll serve refreshments afterwards. Zed and Oh take this as their cue to go far, far away.

On a certain level, comedies like these can serve a valid purpose, inasmuch as they highlight the vast gulf in sensibilities between ancient cultures and our own; it is not a bad thing to realize just how “strange” the ancient world was, or how “strange” we would seem to them. But Year One isn’t really interested in making us re-evaluate our own modern prejudices and expectations; plus, it loses much of the texture of the original stories, for example by turning Abraham into an unthinking zealot rather than a man who was quite capable of negotiating with God, as he did for example over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18).

A recurring theme in this film is the ineffectuality of rules and traditions, and the need for individuals to strike out on their own. Eating the forbidden fruit might not literally make Zed a smarter man, but he does become more curious and adventurous afterwards, almost as a placebo effect. And when Zed and Oh arrive in Sodom, where the pagan king (Xander Berkeley) and his high priest (Oliver Platt) are imploring the gods to relieve them from a drought, much is made of the notion that anyone who enters the temple’s holy of holies will automatically be struck dead—but this, too, proves to be an easy rule to break.

By the time Zed gives a speech telling people that they can make their own destiny, free of religious authority, it is clear that Ramis was trying to put a bit of a message into his film, not unlike the message that came through in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. But the Pythons remembered to keep things funny even when they were speechifying, and their humor was, even at its naughtiest, of a wittier and more intelligent variety. Far too often, Year One is content to wallow in smutty humor or in cringe-inducing gross-out scenes for their own sake (people urinating in their own mouths, tasting animal dung while hunting, etc.).

The end result is a movie that “takes us back” in all the wrong ways. Occasionally amusing but not very funny, and far too coarse and stupid to be all that enlightening, Year One has to rank as the most disappointing Bible-themed movie by a major studio in decades.

Talk About It

Discussion starters

1. Does seeing a movie like this affect how you read the original Bible stories in any way? Does the movie omit important things? If so, what? Does it highlight any aspects of the Bible that you never thought about before?
2. When Abraham says God told him to sacrifice Isaac, Isaac replies, “If the Lord told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?” How would you respond to this? What would you have done in Abraham’s place if God had given you a similar command?
3. Zed tells the people of Sodom that there is no “chosen one,” adding: “Maybe we can make our own destiny. Maybe we can all be chosen.” Do you agree or disagree? What does it mean to be “chosen”? Is Zed properly acknowledging the one who does the choosing? Why do you think God “chooses” people and nations in the Bible?
4. Zed and Oh argue at one point over whether God exists. Do you think the film ultimately tips in either side’s favor?

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

Year One is rated PG-13 for crude and sexual content throughout (no nudity, but lots of sexually suggestive language and imagery; also scenes of people urinating on themselves and tasting animal feces, etc.), brief strong language (a few four-letter words) and comic violence (Cain beats Abel to death with a rock, soldiers attack a caravan, etc.).

Photos © Columbia Pictures

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Women in the market for plus-size clothing may have a harder time finding what they’re looking for, according to a recent article at Crain’s New York. Several clothing manufactures have trimmed or even eliminated their plus-size offerings, while many have moved their larger lines, generally considered to be sizes 16 and up, to an online-only basis.

Popular women’s clothing lines such as Bloomingdale’s, Liz Claiborne, Ann Taylor, and Ellen Tracy are among those cutting their plus-size offerings, citing falling demand as the primary reason. “From March 2008 to March 2009, sales of plus-size apparel fell 8 percent, while sales of standard sizes only fell 2 percent,” reports one New York article.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, neither obesity levels in the U.S. nor the average weight of U.S. women (163 lbs.) is decreasing. So why are plus-size women buying not only less than they used to, but also less than their size-14-and-under counterparts? One reason, offered by “plus-size expert” Catherine Schuller, is that many plus-size women are homemakers and cannot afford to spend a lot of money on clothes. I couldn’t find any statistics on average weights of stay-at-home women versus those who work outside of the home, but regardless, Schuller’s explanation doesn’t seem to fit.

A more plausible reason, offered by Slate‘s women’s magazine, Double X, is that larger sizes are harder both to produce and to fit. A size 10, for example, is designed to fit a range of women who all fall more or less within the specified measurements of a 10. But the range covered by a size 18, by necessity, has to be greater – so the clothes are more difficult to design, less likely to fit an individual woman, and thus more liable to end up hanging on the reduced rack after months of being tried on and passed over. (Double X links to a wonderful array of spreadsheets and statistics, which I highly recommend if you’re curious about bell curves or curves in general.)

On the other end of the spectrum, while America downsizes, British retailer Marks & Spencer recently published an apology to larger-sized women – specifically women with larger bust sizes – for “surcharging” them extra for bras with cup sizes DD and up. In a full-page ad that ran in British daily newspapers and featured the torso of a curvaceous woman in a green bra and matching underwear, Marks and Spencer proclaimed, “No matter whether it’s large or small bras you need, the price will be the same.”

Professional courtesy or publicity stunt? You decide.

Laura Leonard wrote for Her.meneutics about youth-oriented mega-retailer Forever 21 launching, Faith 21, a line for plus-sized teens, which The New York Times covered this week.

For the most part, Miley Cyrus – aka “Hannah Montana” – has been an upstanding and outstanding role model for young girls, with only hints of “scandal” here and there. Cyrus attributes her good behavior to her Christian faith, as she discussed in our recent interview.

Now Cyrus really gets to play the teen rebel role in her next film, The Last Song, a coming-of-age-drama based on a novel by Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook, A Walk to Remember, Nights in Rodanthe). The film, to be released in January 2010 by Touchstone Pictures (Disney’s “grown-up” division), begins production this week in Savannah, Ga.

A recent press release from Touchstone describes the story as being “set in a small Southern beach town where an estranged father (Greg Kinnear) gets a chance to spend the summer with his reluctant teenaged daughter (Cyrus), who’d rather be home in New York. He tries to reconnect with her through the only thing they have in common – music – in a story of family, friendship, secrets and salvation, along with first loves and second chances.”

Salvation? Hmm. We’re intrigued. Another online description states that Cyrus’s character remains angry about her parents’ divorce three years after the fact, and is especially alienated from her father, “a former concert pianist and teacher [who] is living a quiet life in the beach town, immersed in creating a work of art that will become the centerpiece of a local church.”

A local church? Hmm, again. Sparks is a Christian, and so is Cyrus, so it’ll be interesting to see what faith elements might be included here. Cyrus impressed critics with her acting chops in the recent Hannah Montana movie, but this will be her first chance to truly stretch herself into more dramatic range.

When Star Trek hit theaters last month, I wrote that the film was getting “pretty good, though not great” reviews across the board. One of our critics dashed off an e-mail asking, “Do you and I have a different definition of 90-plus percent at Rotten Tomatoes?!”

Well, yes we did. All Rotten Tomatoes tells us is that 90-plus percent of critics liked the movie, but didn’t necessarily love it. Once some analysis was done on the actual ratings at RT, the consensus was much closer to 3-star reviews than 4 – so yeah, pretty good though not great.

Statistics don’t necessarily tell us everything, and the websites that are in the business of compiling a consensus of movie reviews – like Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and the new Movie Review Intelligence – all have different systems for determining what the numbers really mean.

A fascinating story that ran in The Chicago Tribune this week explores these “review aggregators” in depth, shedding more light on their methodology – and why major studios covet a “fresh” rating from the consensus. (Studio execs have even called RT urging them to reconsider certain reviews to change them from “rotten” to “fresh.”)

Here’s the sentence that stood out most to me: “But as rivals Metacritic and Movie Review Intelligence point out, Rotten Tomatoes can give its coveted ‘fresh’ rating to films that any number (and hypothetically all) of its counted reviewers don’t really love. And though all three sites present numerical averages in their ratings, the calculations involve subjective scoring by the aggregators themselves, not just the critics.”

It’s an interesting read. And while you’re checking out Rotten Tomatoes, be sure to stop by the CT Movies area while you’re there.

The centennial of Wallace Stegner’s birth (1909- 2009) is upon us. Two books and a documentary film provide valuable glimpses of his major importance as a writer and environmental activist. They also correct mistaken notions about Stegner.

Stegner sometimes suffered from misidentification. Some depicted him as a literary blood brother to Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. Others portrayed him as a hidebound traditionalist unable to adjust to the modern West. Late in his career, a handful of misguided critics went so far as to charge Stegner with plagiarism.

These critics and naysayers miss Stegner’s major contributions as a novelist, historian, and biographer of the American West. He was also a highly respected professor of literature and a leading teacher of creative writing at Stanford University, as well as an internationally known advocate of conservation. Nearly all of his works and most of his ecological writings dealt with the West beyond the Mississippi.

Wallace Stegner zoomed out of nowhere to become a leading western writer and public intellectual. Born the son of a ne’er do well frontiersman who had itchy feet and huge, unrealistic dreams of a “big rock candy mountain,” Stegner struggled to find himself as a boy and youth, first in an isolated hamlet in western Canada and later in Salt Lake City, among the Mormons. But his domestic and nurturing mother—Stegner described her as a “nester” —encouraged him to read and protected him from his father’s flaming temper. A voracious reader, Stegner graduated from the University of Utah and gained a PhD in English in 1935 from the University of Iowa. After short stints of teaching at the University of Utah (1935-1937) and the University of Wisconsin (1937- 1939), Stegner landed at Harvard (1939-1944). With his fourth novel, Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), Stegner had also arrived literarily. In 1945, he returned west “like a trout chasing a new lure”; Stanford had “bought” him from Harvard to launch a new school of creative writing.

Stegner’s abundant talents, ambition, and increasingly expanding professional connections quickly placed him among the widely recognized authors writing about the American West. Even while he directed what became one of the country’s finest writing programs at Stanford, Stegner turned out a steady stream of novels, short stories and essays, and nonfiction books about the West. But his most important recognition came from the early 1970s onward, after he had retired. In 1972, his lengthy novel about old and new Wests, Angle of Repose (1971), won a Pulitzer Prize. A splendid biography of one of his mentors, The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto (1974), nearly snagged a second Pulitzer. Another novel, The Spectator Bird (1976), gained a National Book Award in 1977. His final novel, Crossing to Safety (1987), and his Collected Stories (1990) garnered prizes,best-seller status, and warmly positive reviews. He remained active as a writer, speaker, and environmental advocate until a car accident in Santa Fe ended his life in 1993.

Two recently published books, Page Stegner’s The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner and Philip L. Fradkin’s Wallace Stegner and the American West, illuminate and illustrate Stegner’s large accomplishments as a writer and thinker. They also provide fuller, more complex portraits of the man behind his achievements.

Nearly every morning before Wallace Stegner began his daily stint of writing, he warmed up his two-fingered typing regimen with letters to friends, colleagues, and editors. The 285 letters that Page Stegner (Wallace Stegner’s son and only child) gathers in his collection reveal a multitalented, ambitious, and hard-working writer, teacher, and conservation spokesman. Topically organized, Page’s volume includes letters from biographers and critics, about individual Stegner books, from friends and family, about Stegner’s literary career and his years at Stanford, on history and historians, and about conservation.

Stegner’s letters overflow with valuable insights, inviting turns of phrase, and abundant wit. About the shaping power of region, he writes to his earlier biographer, Jackson J. Benson: “I suppose I do subscribe to the notion that places … have a lot to do with the formation of character.” To another correspondent he apologizes: “I am only slow as a sinful conscience.” He confesses, too, his need to reread important books: “A leaky mind knows no mending, it has to be refilled over and over.” Any writer victimized by a killer review would nod in vicarious delight at Stegner’s comment that “reviewers are about their old proportion of stupids to wise men, illiterates to those can and do read.”

Stegner’s letters also illuminate his views on religion and morality. Early in his career Augustana College, a small Lutheran school in Illinois, fired Stegner “for being an atheist.” “I guess I am an infidel at heart,” Stegner told his sweetheart, Mary Page, who became his wife the following summer in 1934. Later he confessed that “ecology is as close to religious feeling as I’m likely to come.” But on the need for upright human conduct he could be stern and almost puritanical—for himself and for others. He instructed his grandson Page to “obey the rules, remember your manners, and be a Good Camper.” A stringent code of conduct and demanding tests of character were centrally important in Stegner’s life, so he often prescribed and preached about those topics to family members and friends.

Page Stegner provides a brief introduction to his father’s letters as well as abbreviated comments prefacing each of the eight sections of his book. The longest section brings together letters from “Special Friends and Family”; a shorter section on “Conservation” includes Stegner’s remarkable “Wilderness Letter,” dated December 3, 1960, first published as part of a commission report to Congress. The closing words of this famous letter— wilderness is “the geography of hope”—remain Stegner’s most widely quoted. Page furnishes a few useful explanatory notes and a chronology of his father’s life. Even more contextual background and additional notes would have been valuable for readers coming to Stegner for the first time.

In Wallace Stegner and the American West, Philip Fradkin deals primarily with three important facets of Stegner’s life and career. First, he demonstrates how specific places shaped Stegner’s life and character; second, he discusses Stegner’s important role as a teacher of writing; and third, he treats selective parts of Stegner’s literary career. Along the way, he also clarifies how and why Wallace Wallace Stegner became the leading voice of the American West from the 1960s into the 1990s—and perhaps remains so in the 21st century.

Fradkin isexplicit about his major purposes. Rather than emphasize Stegner’s literary career, as previous biographers have, he is “more intrigued by the whole man … set against the passing backdrops of his life.” This book, Fradkin adds, is “about a man and the physical landscapes he inhabited and how they influenced him.” The author’s discussions of Stegner’s life-shaping links with East End, Saskatchewan, Salt Lake City, Stanford University, and the small town of Greensboro, Vermont, are particularly illuminating and convincing. Previous interpretations of Stegner have been too uncritical, Fradkin argues, and failed to deal with his temper, his tendency to hold grudges, and his inability to deal with change. These parts of Fradkin’s biography might have upset Stegner, for he avoided dealing with the private lives of John Wesley Powell and Bernard DeVoto in his biographies of those two men. He also blocked and held at a distance interviewers who tried to raise questions about his own private life.

One of themost significant sections of Fradkin’s biography deals with Stegner’s large contributions to conservation efforts. A skilled and Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental journalist/historian himself, Fradkin is particularly sensitive to Stegner’s reluctant involvement in activist groups like the Sierra Club. Rather than manning picket lines, Stegner preferred writing about conservation, as he did in numerous essays and in his notable biography, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (1954). Later, Stegner spent a few months in Washington, D.C., helping Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall prepare his book The Quiet Crisis (1963). And through the publication of his edited book This Is Dinosaur (1955), Stegner helped thwart additional dams in the Dinosaur National Monument. In addition to serving on national committees to expand the national park system and promote other environmental measures, Stegner spearheaded a local group in his Los Altos Hills area, west of the Stanford campus, attempting to impede the rush of real estate developers. If he and his neighbors failed to head off these troublemakers, Stegner warned, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, whence cometh my floods, whence cometh my mudslides, whence cometh my neighbor’s house.” Stegner’s important writings on conservation and ecology, as Fradkin notes, place him in a long line of notable American appreciators of nature and advocates of conservation, stretching from Henry David Thoreau, through John Muir and Aldo Leopold, and on to Rachael Carson.

Fradkin’s treatment of Stegner’s central role in Stanford’s Creative Writing Program is the fullest and most revealing account of that subject to date. When Stegner arrived at the Palo Alto campus in 1946, he gained the support of a well-to-do Texas oil man whose brother chaired the university’s English Department. With this backing, Stegner created a first-rate graduate-level program in writing (it remains today a top -notch program). Among Stegner’s students were Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, Edward Abbey, Ernest Gaines, Nancy Packer, and Wendell Berry. Although Kesey and Stegner had a falling out—largely because of Kesey’s nose-thumbing disregard for guidelines—most students found Stegner a skilled administrator and a wonderfully supportive if essentially nondirective teacher. With Wendell Berry, Stegner forged a father-son and then intimate-friend relationship. Stegner especially admired Berry’s sound “character,” his earthbound ties, and his nourishing southern roots.

Fradkin’s biography and Stegner’s own letters indicate how much he endeavored to break free from an earlier myth-ridden West of rugged individualism and to move toward a modern West exhibiting a communal-mindedness and a realistic and helpful environmental ethic. “I grew up in a cowboy culture,” Stegner told poet Gary Snyder, “and have been trying to get it out of my thinking and feeling every since.” Over time, Stegner abandoned his father George Stegner’s “boomer” attitudes and reckless frontier boosterism and gradually embraced the group partnerships he observed among the Mormons and in the life and writings of John Wesley Powell. As Fradkin points out, Stegner realized that westerners needed to move beyond their extractive frontier mentality, understand the necessity of forging community links, and avoid spoiling their fragile environment. He apprehended, too, how addicted westerners and others were to distorted images of a Wild West in popular fiction and films. An interviewer asked him later in life what were the differences between him and Louis L’Amour. They were both westerners, they were about the same age, and both thought they told the truth about the West. So what was the difference? With a chuckle Stegner replied: “Only a few million dollars.”

In discussing Stegner the author, Fradkin provides extensive coverage of the controversies swirling around Stegner’s prize-winning novel Angle of Repose. His treatment of this contentious subject is thoroughly researched, even-handed, and persuasive. Fradkin correctly concludes that all participants in the brouhaha made mistakes. In preparing his sprawling novel, Stegner made large use of the letters and unpublished autobiography of Mary Hallock Foote, a talented Local Color writer and artist. Stegner requested permission from Foote’s descendents to use these materials but failed to make clear how extensively he would use them. Nor did Stegner’s brief headnote for the novel reveal much about the extent to which he has creatively appropriated Foote’s unpublished work. In turn the Foote family did not read or comment on the manuscript of the novel when Stegner asked them to do so. And once the book was published, they seemed unable to accept that Stegner had written a novel, not a biography, of their grandmother. Fradkin saves his sharpest darts for critics who accuse Stegner of willful and deceitful plagiarism. He’s right in arguing that if they had read Stegner’s letters on file at the University of Utah and conscientiously interviewed all those involved in the controversy, those critics might never have published their harshest criticisms. To Stegner’s credit, when preparing his final novel Crossing to Safety, he wrote to all six children of the couple portrayed in the novel and secured permission to use the lives of their parents before publishing that work.

Fradkin’s biography sparkles with insights, well-turned phrases, and lively pen portraits. It also complements the previously published literary biography by Jackson J. Benson, Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work (1996). Benson’s thoroughly researched and smoothly written biography was savagely and unfairly reviewed in The New York Times Book Review by a distinguished scholar of 19th-century English literature who knew not Stegner and thought the novelist much more humanly flawed than Benson did. In contrast to Benson, Fradkin eschews literary criticism and emphasizes instead the molding power of places and experiences in shaping Stegner’s character.

Some readers may disagree with a few of Fradkin’s conclusions. He describes Stegner as a man of “implacable” anger who “rarely forgave”; as a person “captive to … guilt” and unable to “adapt” to change. But nearly all of Stegner’s colleagues, students, and friends characterized him as a gentlemanly—even courtly—person, a man with abundant patience, and frequently willing to help deserving students and friends. Perhaps in wishing to avoid a work of hagiography, Fradkin went too far in the other direction. One must grant him, of course, the content of his witnesses’ testimonies. But if one’s sources on Stegner are writer Ken Kesey, editor John Leonard of The New York Times Book Review, Stanford colleague Yvor Winters, and family critics, Stegner’s blotches may seem larger and more negative; conversely, follow the comealy_ments of authors Wendell Berry and Edward Abbey, Stanford colleague Richard Schoolcraft, interviewer Richard Etulain, and wife Mary Stegner, and Wallace Stegner looms as an extraordinary teacher, writer, and human being. Not a few readers will be convinced that the greater weight of convincing evidence lies with the latter group.

Finally, Wallace Stegner: A Documentary, broadcast by PBS to mark the centennial of his birth, provides a brief overview of Stegner’s major roles as environmental thinker and writer. Not as analytical or as smoothly presented as it might be, the sixty-minute documentary produced by KUED of Salt Lake City nonetheless furnishes a brief, balanced introduction to Stegner, including evocative glimpses of some of the landscapes that captured his imagination.

The limitations of the two books and the documentary are minor quibbles. Page Stegner’s helpful collection of his father’s correspondence supplies much previously unpublished information. In the same way, Philip Fradkin’s invitingly written biography portrays Stegner in a more human and complex light. Together these two volumes and the documentary film provide further evidence of Wallace Stegner’s large contributions as an author, teacher, and environmentalist. He remains our Wise Man of the American West. We have not found anyone to replace him.

Richard W. Etulain, professor emeritus of history at the University of New Mexico, is author or editor of more than 40 books. He collaborated with Stegner on Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature (1983, 1996). His latest book, Lincoln Looks West: From the Mississippi to the Pacific, is forthcoming. He is preparing the centennial history of Northwest Nazarene University.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culturemagazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

This volume, the first installment of a projected two-volume study of James Fenimore Cooper, covers Cooper’s life from his birth in 1789 to his departure with his family in 1826 for an extended sojourn in Europe. What Wayne Franklin, director of American studies and professor of English at the University of Connecticut, sets out to accomplish with this work is much more than simply a biography of Cooper—it verges on being a cultural history of the era, as seen through the eyes and actions of James Fenimore Cooper. This exhaustive study seems to cover every aspect of Cooper’s life in detail, and it provides monumental documentation in its 150 pages of endnotes. It is the first major biography of Cooper to make use of primary materials belonging to Cooper’s descendants and until recently unavailable for public inspection.

At times Franklin’s treatment of the minutiae of Cooper’s life threatens to convert his exhaustive study into an exhausting one. The four pages on the horserace between New York’s “American Eclipse” and Virginia’s “Sir Henry” at the Union Race Course in Jamaica in 1823, for example, will tell most readers much more about the New York racing scene than they want to know. And occasionally, given Franklin’s tendency to delve into every nook and cranny in any way related to Cooper’s life, there are surprising (though small) gaps. For example, after a lengthy discussion of the massive land losses suffered by the loyalist DeLancey family (Cooper’s wife Susan was a DeLancey) during the Revolution, and the tracing of Major John Peter DeLancey’s movements as a member of the Pennsylvania Loyalists during the war and his relocation to England, we suddenly find DeLancey back in Pennsylvania living at Heathcote Hall, with no indication of how it came into his possession.

But these are minor complaints, for this is a well-written and well-researched study of the man who was, in the judgment of Robert Penn Warren, “the founder of American literature.” [1] Franklin’s study of the first half of Cooper’s life lends support to Warren’s evaluation. Cooper self-consciously set out to build a career as a novelist, was intimately involved in the development of the book industry in the United States, created new genres of writing with the pioneer story and the sea novel, and used his novels to articulate a vision of the United States that would help establish not only its political but also its cultural independence from England. On this last point Franklin offers a powerful commentary:

the American cultural revolution began not with the publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s The American Scholar in New England in 1837, but rather with the appearance of The Spy in New York sixteen years before. Cooper’s book, written in Scott’s mode but very much against his grain, did not call for cultural independence, as Emerson’s lecture did; it enacted it.

In addition to his writing geared to this end, Cooper was the founder of the “Bread and Cheese Club” in New York City. The “Lunch,” as it came to be known by its intimates, had a membership consisting of writers, artists, professionals, and politicians; its chief shared aim was the enhancement of America’s cultural independence.

Cooper’s beginnings as a novelist, so the story goes, can be traced to his exasperation with a new English novel he was reading aloud to his wife, Susan. (Alas, the specific novel remains unidentified.) He became so irritated with the story that he cast it aside and exclaimed, “I could write a better book than that myself!” Susan suggested that he do just that, and his efforts led to his first novel, Precaution, modeled along the lines of Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

Later in his career a similar incident led to his decision to write a sea novel, and Cooper thus become the precursor of Melville and Conrad (both of whom admired his sea tales). Cooper attempted to shape his career as successful writer and businessman by following the model set by Sir Walter Scott. In general Cooper was an admirer of Scott’s poetry and prose, but his response to hearing praise of Scott’s technical knowledge of the sea in The Pirate was to argue that its author “had very little ‘seamanship.’ ” To prove his point, Cooper wrote The Pilot, showing “how a real sailor might manage the sea.”

Cooper had originally hoped for a career in the navy, and actually spent four years in active service. He left, in large part, because his service wasn’t active enough—he was assigned to recruiting duty while he wanted naval engagements on the high seas. These years were not without benefit for his future career as a writer, however, for his knowledge of shipboard life led him to embark on The Pilot. In addition to a number of sea novels, he also wrote a two-volume History of the Navy of the United States of America (1839) and the biographical Ned Myers; or, a Life before the Mast (1843). Cooper had first met Myers while both were young crewmembers on the merchantman Stirling in 1806, and years later he helped Meyers with his memoirs.

The incorporation into hisfiction of experiences, events, or scenes that Cooper himself had actually been involved in was not unique to The Pilot, but was a general characteristic of most of his novels. The setting for his Leather-Stocking Tales is his childhood Cooperstown and its surrounding mountains, lakes, rivers, and forests. So the fictional Glimmerglass is a reflection of Otsego Lake, where Cooper canoed and played as a child. Not all of the personal experiences thus incorporated into his fiction reached as far back as his childhood. The cave behind the waterfall that plays a crucial part in The Last of the Mohicans was first seen by Cooper at Glens Falls while leading a group of young Englishmen on a tour through upstate New York just as he was beginning to write the novel. While climbing over the rocks, Cooper was so struck by the dramatic setting that he exclaimed, “I must place one of my old Indians here!”

Given this pattern, Franklin tends to assume that most, if not all, of the descriptions contained in the various volumes of the Leather-Stocking saga are based on Cooper’s own observations and experience. In describing Cooper’s travels, for example, Franklin requently treats Cooper’s fictive descriptions of certain locations or routes as an actual description of the hardships Cooper himself encountered. One of the beneficial results of this approach that that the reader is introduced to examples of Cooper’s writing which occur much later in his life than the period covered by this volume.

As a novelist, Cooper learned by trial and error. One early mistake, never to be repeated, was to have the final chapter of The Spy typeset, including page numbers, before he completed the middle part of the novel. This decision forced Cooper to race through many events covered in the novel’s middle chapters, and to eliminate some intended scenes entirely. He mastered his trade sufficiently well. Franklin’s chronological narrative in this volume ends with Cooper as a very successful writer— embraced by his countrymen, perhaps the best-known American around the world outside of major political figures —at the age of 37. His departure for Europe occurred at the height of his American popularity, and on his return after seven years abroad he became embroiled in many controversies, both literary and legal, that prevented him from again achieving that level of popular acclaim. He became alienated to the point that he announced his retirement from his career as a writer, which proved to be temporary.

Cooper was a pioneer when it came to interest in understanding Native American culture.

Franklin’s introduction, which provides an evaluation of the importance of Cooper’s entire oeuvre, along with his references to many of Cooper’s later writings and his foreshadowing of certain later events, allow us to address the broader question of Cooper’s lasting significance. Franklin’s catalogue of items marking Cooper’s importance may be summarized in the following points. 1) “Cooper invented the key forms of American fiction—the Western, the sea tale, the Revolutionary romance.” 2) A distinctive “combination of literary innovation and business acumen” allowed Cooper to invent “the very career of the American writer.” 3) Through the five novels of the Leather-Stocking Tales, Cooper “invented the core myth of the expansive new nation.” 4) The “American environmental conscience” begins with the unfolding story of Natty Bumppo as outlined in the five Leatherstocking novels. As Franklin argues, “In Cooper, landscape is not a series of pretty pictures; it takes on a moral value in itself.” 5) “Cooper’s elegiac response to the crisis of Native American character and culture” is an early effort to understand Indian culture in its complexity rather than reducing it to a depiction of either the blood-thirsty or the noble savage. Combined with Cooper’s concern for the wanton destruction of the American wilderness, this perspective provides an early critique of the Lockean view of the improvement of nature, unlimited expansionism, and Whiggish optimism as practiced by European settlers in interest in North America. 6) Cooper was a “representative man” in the turbulent and expanding new republic. He was a combination of creative genius, acute businessman, economic speculator, and community activist.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote of the rich associational life of Americans:

Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools. Finally, if it is a question of bringing to light a truth or developing a sentiment with the support of a great example, they associate. [2]

Cooper was an example par excellence of Tocqueville’s joiner, and a review of his major associational connections both supports Tocqueville’s assessment of the pervasive nature of associations in American life and shows Cooper’s wide-ranging social involvements and interests. During his truncated stay at Yale he was a member of the Linonia Society, one of the two debating clubs on campus. As an adult he was an active member in the Otsego Bible Society, and was selected as one of its three delegates to the national founding meeting of the American Bible Society in 1816. The primary aim of the society was to promote “the wider circulation of the Holy Scriptures without note or comment.” As Franklin notes, “This was a profoundly democratic principle,” in tune with Cooper’s developing political views; he was steadily moving away from the high Federalist position of his father, Judge William Cooper, and toward open support for the emerging Democratic Party. Cooper was one of the active founders of the Otsego County Agricultural Society in 1816, and later helped draft the constitution for (and became an active member in) the Westchester Agricultural Society. Again, Franklin argues, there was a democratic (with a small “d”) impetus to the efforts of these agricultural societies.

As noted earlier, Cooper founded the Bread and Cheese Club, a weekly gathering of community and literary leaders. He was a member of the New York Association for the Improvement of the Breed of Horses, which he referred to as “The Jockey Club.” While not a serious horse breeder himself, he did occasionally attend the races the association sponsored—perhaps this is the reason for his jocular designation of the group. On a more serious note, he was a member of the planning committee for the New York City gala honoring Lafayette during his visit in August, 1824. Later, while in France, Cooper was invited to visit Lafayette at his estate on a number of occasions.

While Cooper was just one ofthe American crowd when it came to joining or forming civic associations, he was a pioneer when it came to interest in understanding Native American culture. As a child he had had some contact with the tribes located near Cooperstown, and as an adult he had occasion to meet various Native delegations traveling to or from Washington. He also read the available literature, and incorporated the latest “anthropological findings” (even if incorrect) into his fiction. Cooper had read An Account of the History, Manners, and Customs, of the Indian Nations, who once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States, written by Moravian missionary John Heckewelder, and he took the name for perhaps his most important Native character, Chingachgook, from that volume. Franklin argues that the notion of “totem” is not only important in the way that Cooper understood the Native view of life, but that The Last of the Mohicans “has a totemic principle at its core.”

It strikes me that Cooper may be particularly helpful to us today as we sift through the contemporary arguments over multiculturalism to find a foundation for understanding human experience. Natty Bumppo, self-described in chapter 17 of The Deerslayer as “white in blood, heart,natur’, and gifts, though a little redskin in feelin’s and habits,” spends much time in this novel reflecting on the differences between “white man’s gifts” and “red man’s gifts.” Beyond the differences in “gifts,” however, Natty recognizes a common humanity that unites white settlers with Native Americans. It is worth the effort to briefly reconstruct what this untutored frontiersman of early American fiction has to say on this score.

This theme is announced in the opening chapter of The Deerslayer, when Hurry Harry declares that he is free to eliminate any suitor to Judith Hutter, whom he hopes to marry. Harry states the classic Lockean state of nature position: “[W]hen we live beyond law, we must be our own judges and executioners.” Natty disagrees and articulates a rough-hewn natural law argument: “I know we live in the woods, Hurry, and are thought to be beyond human law,–and perhaps we are so, in fact, whatever it may be in right,—but there is a law and a law-maker, that rule across the whole continent.”

Throughout the novel Natty guides behavior in accordance with his understanding of his “white gifts,” and therefore refuses to help Hurry Harry and Thomas Hutter when they plan to take Indian scalps to sell to the Crown. He does not begrudge Chingachgook his desire or right to take scalps, however, because doing is among “red gifts.” But there are limits what these “gifts” allow. After Harry and Thomas Hutter are taken prisoner by the Iroquois and Judith suggests using an ivory chess piece carved as an elephant to ransom them, Natty at first refuses because thinks the carving is an idol. When Judith suggests that idolatry may be an Indian gift, Natty disagrees: “God grants no such gifts to any of his creatur’s, Judith … . He must be adored, under some name or other, and not creatur’s of brass or ivory. matters not whether the Father of all is called God or Manitou, Deity or Great Spirit, He is none the less our common Maker and Master.”

Later in The Deerslayer (chapter 25) Judith once again questions Natty on his understanding of gifts. Natty says, “You find different colors on ‘arth, as any one may see, but you don’t find different natur’s. Different gifts, but only one natur’.” Judith asks, “In what is a gift different from a nature? Is not nature itself a from God?” Natty thinks that Judith is quick-witted but on the wrong track. “A natur’ is the creatur’ itself; its wishes, wants, idees, and feelin’s, as all are born him. This natur’ never can be changed the main, though it may undergo some increase or lessening.” Gifts, however, are not as essential (in manifold ways) as is nature. Natty continues,”Now, gifts come of sarc*mstances. Thus, if you put a man in a town, he gets town gifts; in a settlement, settlement gifts; in a forest, gifts of the woods … . All these increase and strengthen until they get to fortify natur’ it might be, and excuse a thousand acts and idees. Still the creatur’ is the same the bottom.”

Natty, of course, is too busy to develop this rudimentary distinction into a fully developed theological or philosophical position. And the relationship between Natty’s views and those of James Fenimore Cooper remains an open question. The author of the Leather-Stocking Tales tends to use the language of Providence rather than Natty’s language of “gifts.” Nor have worked out a theology of gifts and nature in Natty’s terms, but at least initially it strikes me as worth further reflection as way to recognize the importance of cultural autonomy within a context that avoids cultural relativism.

In sum, James Fenimore Cooper provides much food for thought, not only his fictional portrayal of the development of America from wilderness to developed community, but in his later explicitly political reflections, especially the essays contained in The American Democrat. But reflections on those later writings must wait until the appearance of Wayne Franklin’s concluding volume. In the meantime, it can be hoped that the appearance of the first volume of this comprehensive biography will lead to rediscovery and renewed appreciation a premier chronicler of the American experience.

Steven D. Ealy is a senior fellow at the Liberty Fund.

1. Warren was the primary author for the chapter on Cooper in Cleanth Brooks, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren, American Literature: The Makers and the Making (St. Martin’s Press, 1973), vol. 1, pp. 280-289; quotation at p. 283.

2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 489.

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