Trapped Inside the Iron Flesh

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part Two
Julian Schnabel (director), The Diving Bell and The Butterfly (2007)

In late 1995, French magazine editor, bon vivant, and inveterate womanizer Jean-Dominique Bauby suffered a stroke. When he awoke, the essential functions of his brain had become completely disconnected from his body. He would never recover the ability to use any part of his body except his eyes, one of which was so damaged, it had to be sewn shut to prevent infection. He would live the entire rest of his life entirely by blinking his left eye.

This movie is based on the memoir Bauby managed to dictate to a special assistant using blink responses. The title metaphor declares that he has become divided. His body has become a massive steel diving bell, submerged deep beneath an ocean he has no hope of escaping, silent and alone. But his mind remains free as a butterfly, traversing the world, reliving his greatest adventures, and constantly making new discoveries. His prison has become his freedom.

Bauby struggles, slowly, to overcome the limitations which his newly limp, leaden body places upon him. He must reconcile with the family whom he alienated with his wild living and his unconcern for their feelings. Through flashbacks, we discover the life he once lived, all glamour and flashbulbs and selfish consumption, a train wreck of hedonism playing out across years. He thought he needed nobody else, and lived like the center of his own universe.

Then the realities of biology collided with him. The movie plays it out like karmic retribution, as though he suffered a stroke in recompense for his heedless ways. This is magical thinking, of course, a retrospective explanation Bauby (or his film adapters) invented for narrative purposes, but if it’s fiction, it’s useful fiction, and the contrast between his past arrogance, and the humility he must now learn, offers a striking contrast of styles and impacts.

The difficulties of “Locked-In Syndrome,” in which severe damage to the brain stem creates a permanent gulf between the rational mind and the body, have been explored before. Philosophers have pondered what this syndrome says about the supposed dualism between soul and flesh. Filmmakers have exploited the helplessness and implicit mortality for horror value. However, telling this story through Bauby’s lived experience, we get a completely different, unexpected viewpoint.

(To its credit, the movie avoids medical jargon and scientific-ese. Though highly specialized in its insights, it doesn’t require technical expertise to understand unfolding events.)

Mathieu Amalric (in the bed) as Jean-Dominique Bauby, composing his book,
with the assistance of a transcriptionist (Anne Cosigny)

The movie’s title, even more powerful in the original French, Le Scaphandre et le Papillon, reflects Bauby’s new two-pronged life. Bauby experiences his body as an old-fashioned steel diving suit, a massive piece of metal trapping him in a strange world with no external contact and limited oxygen. Life becomes a struggle of complete isolation as lovers abandon him, friends address him like an object, and strangers ignore him.

But Bauby quickly separates himself from his unreliable senses. He retains the trait that makes him unique, his mind; and inside his isolated brain, he travels extensively, revisits the triumphs of his youth, and becomes a creature of pure experience. As he achieves this near-Buddhist state of mindful simplicity, he overcomes what other writers (like me) might consider limitations, and composes his memoirs, an eventual bestseller, entirely in his head.

These conflicting impulses, the iron cage of his flesh and the flittering butterfly of his mind, play out across Bauby’s story. Reality is told in fleeting glimpses, all washed-out colors and smeared images, reflecting Bauby’s inability to perceive reality clearly. But when venturing inside his mind, Bauby’s perceptions become hyperreal, saturating the senses and almost overwhelming the audience. Bauby’s two-track life, desperate helplessness and complete freedom, play out before us.

Not everyone will like this film. Like most French cinema, indeed like the French language itself, it unfolds with soporific grace. This film doesn’t adhere to the three-act structure English-speaking audiences have come to expect from their cinema. Viewers unaccustomed to international films may have difficulty adjusting their viewing habits to this film’s hypnotic, wave-like cadences. This isn’t a film for world cinema newbies.

However, art-house movie fans and students of cerebrovascular medicine will both find plenty to like in this film. Audiences willing to adjust themselves to this film’s flow will enjoy, even learn from, Bauby’s journey of self-discovery. Learning to master his newly limp body, and to live entirely within his mind, is hard for him. Watching that discovery is hard for us. Yet in the end, we feel we’ve undertaken that journey with him. And like him, we feel renewed.

Don't Go To College... Yet

If you have any kind of a social media account, you probably witnessed this week’s viral video, “Go To College,” exhorting youth to pursue higher education rather than just hang out. Produced by website College Humor, which has collaborated with the Obama administration previously, and co-starring SNL actor Jay Pharoah, it makes a catchy tune. And it showcases the success the Obama administration, and the First Lady especially, enjoy using social media for social good.

I find myself torn. Anyone familiar with my background in college education will understand why I think getting your higher degree matters. A good liberal education makes people free, a truth understood since Greco-Roman times. But as one among millions of Americans finding his life options severely circumscribed by inability to pay college debt, I have severe qualms about pressing students into schooling for which they’re often unprepared. There must be a middle ground somewhere.

Ever since the GI Bill created an entire new generation of college-educated middle-class workers following World War II, higher education has undoubtedly been key to entering America’s comfy home-owning central echelons. Because of this, students, especially academically astute students who take standardized tests well, face monolithic pressure to attend college. Being inexperienced, youth remain often unaware of other options available. Thus, except among the poorest Americans, college becomes the supposed funnel to adult economic stability.

This is further compounded by the frequent lack of career guidance colleges provide outside vocational programs. All through high school, the top advice I received was: go to college. In college, my professors urged me into graduate school. In graduate school, my professors urged me into a Ph.D. program and eventual professoriate—during years when spending on college professors was bottoming out. I graduated with a degree, an outdated résumé-writing guide, and $30,000 of debt.

I cornered one professor and demanded guidance on how to pursue a career in my field. He admitted he didn’t know; he, and his colleagues, had been outside the non-academic job market so long, any job-seeking skills they’d once had were irretrievably outdated. Though my major programs (I doubled) both offered career planning classes, they taught only broad, sweeping maxims, from professors who’d spent years, sometimes decades, off the market. I quickly came to despair.

However. During my teaching years, I noticed something distinct and consistent. My best students, almost without exception, hadn’t started college directly from high school. They’d taken time off to pursue something fulfilling, meaningful, or remunerative. This may have involved travelling, getting a job, or starting a family. One particularly successful student had served two tours in Iraq and wrote movingly about PTSD. One spent a year studying evangelism in Scotland. One had been to prison.

Students who worked, traveled, or lived before college entered with important skills. They had better ideas what they wanted from higher education, giving them laser-keen focus on their ultimate final goals. And they were more self-directed, which made them better able to handle college learning. Freshly minted high school graduates were more accustomed to a teacher-centric, classroom oriented learning environment, and unprepared for the hours of autonomous, private study college demands. Many hit a wall.

When America introduced compulsory state-based schooling back in the Nineteenth Century, early backers like Catherine Beecher and Horace Mann needed ways to compel reluctant students into the classroom. One way they accomplished this was to create an undercaste of social rejects and malcontents, whom they nicknamed “dropouts.” We see these instruments of social control perpetuated today whenever anybody says the people who cook food, build roads, and stock shelves deserve “menial” pay for menial work.

Now our highly respected FLOTUS, backed by America’s well-funded media machine, insists online that every job besides literally watching paint dry and grass grow deserves, even requires, post-secondary schooling. But my classrooms were already flooded with students who didn’t want, and were unprepared for, higher ed. They simply didn’t see any other options, a fact with came across in their measurable outcomes. College literally isn’t for everyone. Creating even more pressure forecloses students’ available options.

Nearly a quarter-century ago, John Taylor Gatto wrote something that’s really stuck with me: that life without education is life only half-lived, but we mustn’t mistake education for schooling. Ramrodding students into academic environments for which they’re unsuited does them severe injustice. Why is college universally better than apprenticeship, on-the-job training, or national service? Why can’t youth postpone college until they’re ready? College shouldn’t be a jobs factory. Kids deserve better than more unwanted pressure.

Our Thoughts And Prayers Are With—

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 63
Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers: Prayer for Ordinary Radicals

In one of my favorite quotes, Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard writes: “A man prayed, and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and more quiet until in the end he realized that prayer is listening.” In our era of highly public violence, politicians have increasingly fallen lazily onto the cliché that “our thoughts and prayers are with the victims of this senseless tragedy.” This makes me wonder: what, then, are they listening to? And what is that telling them?

Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove had highly personal encounters with Christian faith during their college years. These experiences led both men to abandon comfortable white middle-class upbringing, forming communities in the poorest neighborhoods of Philadelphia and Durham, North Carolina, respectively. These communities became central points of a spiritual movement, modeled on Benedictine quietism, entitled the New Monasticism.

American public theology once centered on engagement with, and often battles against, worldly authority. Theologians like Dr. King and Reinhold Niebuhr challenged the powerful and the rich to reconcile the lives they lived with the beliefs they claimed. Since around 1979, America’s public Christianity has veered into overt partisanship and defending the old order (see Michael Sean Winters). But New Monasticism, though non-partisan, staunchly challenges the powerful on their thrones.

Like most human activism, however, Christian outreach risks individualistic self-righteousness, or its close cousin, burnout. We’ve all known people, fired by divine fervor, who either consume themselves or everyone around them. Early on, our authors write: “faithfulness requires something we just don’t have on our own.” Prayer provides sustenance when we realize we, ourselves, aren’t sufficient to address reality’s vast demands. But this raises more questions than it solves.

Shane Claiborne (left) and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Claiborne and Wilson-Hartgrove analyze three prayers scriptural and find not a call to wait on God, but a call to act on Christ's mission. In the Lord's Prayer from Matthew, they find hope for community of believers on Earth, a model of Kingdom economics, and a request for strength when the world beleaguers us. In here, they say, Christ calls us to look at ourselves, listen to God, and act.

Christ's prayer in John 17 asks God for two requests. First He asks God to keep us unified in the world, a bastion of Godly mission against worldly distraction. Then He asks that God keep us from the world's greedy demands. We are not called to form colonies in isolation or to be saved but to live amongst the world. Our church exists to save God's world that He so loves.

Paul's prayer in Ephesians 1 calls us to greater openness. God created humankind for a mission, and He created the church to save humankind. To fulfill our Christian mission and receive our Godly inheritance, we must open ourselves to God's quiet requests, and having heard those requests, venture out to live the Gospel. Christianity does not end in our salvation, but begins, so we may fulfill His commandments.

In all cases, early Christian prayer bespeaks very different values from the “our thoughts and prayers” ethic dominating today’s political discourse. Current radical individualism, personal salvation, and getting to Heaven when we die don’t enter these prayers. All three, the longest and most prominent prayers in Christian scripture, announce membership in something larger, a Kingdom with no army, a nation without borders. That’s difficult—but also painfully, radically necessary.

These distinctions aren’t small. Kingdoms act; nations build. When we use prayer to defer our actions, when we substitute pious platitudes for human community, we aren’t engaging scriptural prayer. Because sometimes, when we use prayer to listen, we hear God saying we cannot cast problems exclusively upon Him. God created the Church to live.

I remember once telling my students, when they backed some far-right opinion with an out-of-context Scripture citation: “Empires don’t crucify hairy provincial preachers for telling people to pray more.” This book challenges both my unspoken assumptions, and my students’. When Christians enlist God in partisan debates, we undermine the uniqueness of Christian community. But prayer provides that community’s lifeline. We cannot be the People without talking with our King.

Wilson-Hartgrove and Claiborne do not deny traditions of prayer in conventional Protestant churches, but they call us, having voiced our prayers, to strive higher. They call us to truly live out not just our own prayers, but Christ's prayers for us. Prayer, they say, is not passively laying our requests at God's feet. We pray, and we answer prayer when we strive to achieve the fullness of the Gospel.

Selling Armageddon By the Yard

Rebecca Belliston, Life (Citizens of Logan Pond, Volume 1)

After the banks collapsed and President Rigsby seized absolute authority, the families around Logan Pond banded together. Five years on, Carrie Ashworth, only twenty-three, is raising her orphaned siblings, growing her people’s garden, and running interference with patrolman (read: stormtrooper) Oliver Simmons. But two new members, in a clan that’s been steady for five years, causes friction, made only worse when a government raid jeopardizes the community.

Rebecca Belliston’s third thriller starts well. (The second volume, already published, is entitled Liberty. Guess where we’re headed.) Belliston avoids stock Tea Party clichés about government overreach, preferring to present engaging characters enacting a complex story. But problems arise as the story progresses. Important story elements begin feeling uncomfortably familiar, and the narrative becomes distinctly preachy. Then, in a sudden Blaze, I realized where my concerns originated.

Carrie and the Logan Pond clan have established their outlaw clan around a suburban cul-de-sac outside Auburn, Illinois. This premise uncomfortably resembles NBC’s ill-fated series Revolution, but Belliston avoids showrunner Eric Kripke’s swinging machismo. Carrie’s extended clan has established an equilibrium of domestic tranquility, growing crops and stealthily evading government involvement. They enjoy a pleasant semi-libertarian balance despite America’s suspended Constitution.

One rainy evening, Mariah Pierce and her son Greg suddenly appear, disrupting the balance. Mariah wants to live peaceably with this extended clan, but handsome, bitter Greg has powerful anti-establishment desires. Notwithstanding his relentlessly bad attitude, Logan Pond evidently wants to decorate the chapel for Greg and Carrie, since they haven’t seen a marriage-aged bachelor in years. Sadly, the young adults get along like gasoline and matches.

I enjoyed the first hundred pages or so. Despite the enforced Edward-and-Bella dynamic between the leads, I found the premise and characters engaging, and wanted to like them. Okay, characters occasionally start unnecessary debates about whether to receive society’s collapse with stoicism or radical rebellion, and the government Belliston proposes seems profoundly impractical. But her engaging characters and sophisticated story make forgiving such lapses comparatively easy.

Rebecca Belliston

Then, somewhere after page 100, things change. Local patrolmen raid Logan Pond, seeking undocumented residents for the work camps. Yes, work camps; Belliston’s World War II metaphors aren’t subtle. Though everyone escapes, they lose property, crops, and sense of security. Suddenly, the once-peaceful community starts talking Greg’s radical language, while shy, moonstruck Patrolman Oliver desperately scrambles to repair his patched relationship with Carrie. The novel’s tone abruptly shifts.

Besides becoming more confrontational, Belliston’s characters begin a sudden tendency toward monologues. Both spoken and internal, these monologues turn on how Logan Pond should confront an intrusive government that disregards rule of law. These diatribes and debates seemed remarkably familiar. Desperate to understand where I’d heard these arguments before, I Googled Rebecca Belliston. Turns out she’s a prominent Mormon with a parallel career composing LDS worship music.

And I realized: the White Horse Prophecy.

Current LDS leadership considers the White Horse Prophecy apocryphal and doesn’t accord it Scriptural legitimacy. However, it remains influential in Mormon political circles. Supposedly, Joseph Smith received a prophecy correlating his nascent church with the White Horse of the Revelation, and foretelling that, one day, the US Constitution would hang “as by a thread.” (Mormons consider the Constitution divinely inspired.) Then the White Horse will ride in, heroically restoring order.

Several public Mormons, Glenn Beck chief among them, embrace the White Horse Prophecy as instrumental to their political and social mores. They see change as corruption, activism as Godlessness, and the Democratic Party as forerunner to biblical Armageddon. This dynamic lionizes outsidership as proof of integrity, and positions religious conservatives as bulwarks against overwhelming secularized rot. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more marginalized you are, the more right you are.

Like Stephanie Meyer, Rebecca Belliston uses little or no religious language in her writing. Yet her spiritual heritage shines through her prose, from the chaste romance and studiously mild language, to the sanctification of outsider status, to the belief in the despised community restoring Nineteenth Century values. Belliston starts well, but quickly becomes predictable. What starts as an engaging character-driven dystopian story quickly unwinds into a semi-religious Libertarian political tract.

I suppose, in writing socially engaged fiction, the author’s beliefs will unconsciously inform the story. Should I write a post-apocalyptic dystopia (hey agents, I have a manuscript), it would reflect my Distributist values. I just wish Belliston had permitted her characters to drive her story, rather than yoking them to her beliefs. Because I really enjoyed this story, right up until the moment the author got in her own way.

Living In Post-Reality America

I’ve recently been enjoying noodling on Whisper, the smartphone-based social media app where every status update is anonymous, and everyone's in everyone else’s network. It’s mostly been playful and uplifting, and I’ve had a few really heart-warming conversations. But occasionally I get some class-A weirdos, as demonstrated in this exchange from earlier this week:

MEPHISTOPHELES: I believe the younger generations widespread introverts, social anxiety, and crippling shy people are a direct result of technology. When you don’t have to socialize, you don’t learn the skills.

ME: Or, alternatively, technology provides a means of communication for the introverts, shy people, and thinkers who were already there, but you previously got bullied by self-righteous jerks like you.

ROWAN: Anyone would become an introvert by picking technology over social situations. It’s common sense

ME: Duncan J. Watts proves “common sense” is often wrong. Susan Cain proves introversion is caused by having a large amygdala, not social choices. You prove being loud doesn’t make you right.

ROWAN: And because you’re quoting one man doesn’t make you right lol. This generation is pitiful

I stopped the conversation here because I saw no purpose in going any further. “Rowan” dismissed evidence altogether. Since Rowan had already decided reality works according to “common sense,” a remarkably slippery criterion, nothing I could say could possibly matter. Citing sources was a cause for laughter, because sources aren’t real evidence; truth comes from inside, not from accord with facts.

Welcome to post-reality America.

On Tuesday this week, New Jersey governor and Republican presidential aspirant declared, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, that global warming, euphemistically called “climate change,” isn’t an important issue today. This despite his state’s economic dependence on sea-lane shipping, which may be imperilled by warming, acidified seas. This despite near-unanimous scientific consensus. When questioned on his evidence, Christie replied: “That’s my feeling.”

We’ve reached a point in American public discourse where common sense and feelings are considered more valid than evidence, including evidence that common sense is unreliable. People considered legitimate candidates for nationwide office can nakedly abandon facts, dismiss expert testimony out of hand, and mock anyone who disagrees. And ordinary citizens, seeing this behavior greeted without consequence in public, mimic it in private.

Common sense is, in essence, a projection of individual experience outward. Global warming hasn’t inconvenienced me personally, Governor Christie thinks; therefore, even if it’s real, it’s small beer. I see introverts poring over their smartphones, and many Whisper users bonding over social anxiety problems, Rowan thinks; therefore, “technology” causes introversion. No further argument matters. Your evidence, ipso facto, is ridiculous.

Donald Trump, who should probably legally change his name to “Republican Frontrunner Donald Trump,” has become low-hanging fruit in this regard. His tales have become legendary: I made myself rich (he was born rich, and Bloomberg places his wealth at a third of his claims). Mexican border-crossers are rapists (first-generation immigrants have lower crime rates than the general population). President Obama wants to welcome a quarter-million Syrian refugees (twenty-five times the real number).

Politifact has rated Trump’s stump speech claims “Pants On Fire” a whopping sixteen times. By contrast, after nearly seven years of presidency, it’s given Barack Obama that rating only nine times. Trump lies so often, and so outrageously, that it’s hard to determine whether he even knows what truth and reality are. Most importantly, the more outrageously Trump lies, the higher his poll ratings climb. He has no incentive to make friends with reality.

Sadly, whether from social network users or presidential candidates, common sense is deceptive. The fact that introverts use digital information technology doesn’t mean tech causes introversion; it’s equally or more likely that introverts find tech’s relative quiet and asynchronous communication appealing. And high crime in immigrant neighborhoods doesn’t make immigrants criminals; if we force immigrants into impoverished areas where criminals prey on the populace, some get caught in the crossfire.

Then, when caught with proof that their claims don’t reflect reality, people belittle reality. My ability to cite evidence proves “this generation” is pitiful. If journalists cannot find evidence of Muslims celebrating 9/11 in Jersey City, then journalism is a massive leftist conspiracy. Private behavior reflects public examples. Reality has become an optional appendage to truth, which we comprehend only internally.

Maybe my status as former academic colors my opinions. Maybe my belief that claims require evidence reflects my experience grading papers. But it shouldn’t. When reality places second to feelings, it permits powerful people to ignore issues, peoples, and problems. We all suffer from optional reality.

Addendum: only as I was preparing this essay for publication did I notice something about that final Whisper. In mustering evidence, I quoted two sources; Rowan mocked me for “quoting one man.” The misogyny in that statement, though glaring, is huge enough to deserve its own response. Later.