Last week, The Boy Wonder and that other schmuck in the black suit talked on voiceover, visual show-don’t-tell and the power of good dialog. This week, we dig into the meat: SYMBOLISM!
LS: Something we were talking about, symbolism in general, there’s a picture that was posted of Rothfuss’ Facebook page. This guy said, “I thought of you.” It had concentric circles. On one side it said, “What the author meant.” And over here it said, “What the English teacher though the author meant.”
DW: [laughs.] Oh right.
LS: And there’s this iddy-bitty dialog like: The door, as he walked through the room was blue. “Well the blue represents his inner angst and…” And the author’s like, “No the door was effing blue.”
DW: [laughs.] No. I chose blue because I was…
LS: Because I like the color blue.
DW: Right. I remember going to my grandmother’s house and the door was blue and that always gave me a sense of calm or…
LS: [laughs.]
DW: The principle’s office door was blue and I was in trouble.
LS: So how much of symbolism is intended?
DW: Well…
LS: Can we ever know, or is that… ?
DW: Or is there a shared text with all humanity that even says, “it doesn’t matter whether it’s intentional or not. What’s coming out of you is the shared text that we’re all drawing from. You pulled from it as you created it. Consciously. Unconsciously. Subconsciously. I’m pulling from it as the reader…”
LS: As I interpret it.
DW: As I interpret it. “Well that wasn’t what I…” Well no, but, blue door being one thing… We wrestle with that when it comes to Christ-figures.
LS: That’s kinda what I’m getting at.
DW: The sacrificial hero. Well is that a…
LS: Is it this? [Pulls The Hero with a Thousand Faces off the shelf and sets it on the table.]
DW: Yeah. Is it Campbell? Is it Jesus? Well and some suggest well… is there something created within us as part of Imago Dei or whatever that recognizes the value of sacrifice as a pretext to understanding the Gospel? Yeah. I think so. I do.
LS: The need for a mediator.
DW: Right! Need for a mediator or need for… that self-atonement is never enough.
LS: Like on Seven Pounds.
DW: RIGHT!
LS: [laughs uncontrollably.]
DW: That’s EXACTLY the movie I’m thinking. That’s why I HATE that movie cause it’s flying in the face of all of that. “Oh. Y’can jist kill yerself and give yer body parts away. Make sure you kill yerself with a…” What was it?
LS: A Portuguese man-of-war.
DW: Yeah. A jellyfish. That movie deserved to be spoiled.
LS: [laughing.] As we’re talking—
DW: Yes. That movie deserves spoilers.
LS: [laughs.]
DW: You should thank me.
LS: [laughs.]
DW: For saving you the time and trouble and perhaps money to see this movie. I’m glad I didn’t spend any money on that movie. Somebody brought it over to my house, “Hey! We’re gonna something else.”
“Ugh. Uhkay.”
So I would say, you know I argued about Wall-E being an image of Christ.
LS: Right.
DW: I don’t know if that was intentional of Pixar or not. In fact, I think they were sort of thinking of the Adam and Eve mindset here. In the midst of chaos here is the reunion, but—
LS: If you deal with first Adam…
DW: Right. If you deal with first Adam, you have to deal with second Adam. That’s what. He. Becomes! Eve turns into a mary at some point, you know, the feminine counter-part to whatever Wall-E is doing at that moment. Again, it’s Andrew Stanton. Is he deliberately portraying a…? No. I don’t think so. I think he’s… But I think that’s the text that comes from.
How do you get there? Well, what makes us human. People keep coming back to love. Love. Love. Love.
It’s the Beatles song All You Need is… Love.
LS: [smiles.]
DW: So how do you demonstrate that? Well you demonstrate that through the image of an Adam. That’s where they’re pulling from and that’s where I’m pulling from to interpret that.
LS: So that’s an okay thing to see that?
DW: I think so. You know we say “author’s intended meaning.” Well okay. How much do you trust the author? Is it … … … I admit. It could lead to eisegesis, but I don’t know that eisegesis is always a terrible thing. I mean is it?
LS: Well we certainly can’t jettison our opinions when we’re approaching something.
DW: And everybody does. Everybody brings an opinion, brings something to the party with you. Not that that has to define it anymore than the author’s. I don’t reject author’s intention.
LS: Just that the two dance?
DW: Yeah. Don’t limit it to author’s intention.
LS: Yeah.
DW: Yeah. Exactly. You mean the dance between the two?
LS: Yeah. Reader’s response and author’s intention. It’s-
DW: Yeah. You have to… you have to understand the shared subtext (conscious, unconscious) from which people are drawing this language.
LS: Well is there a point at which it reaches a threshold that like… I know a lot of guys, Christians especially, who get ticked off at other Christians for doing things like Finding God in the Matrix or Finding God in Lord of the Rings or…
DW: Right.
LS: Is there a point at which that reaches a groaning breaking point?
DW: Mmmmmm.
LS: And how do we discern when it’s okay to talk about that or when that’s not okay and we just let art be art? And when does that even… we’re doing that with something that wasn’t actually art, it was just a piece of advertisement and then we become a piece of advertisement?
DW: …and we use advertisement in sermon illustrations.
LS: [laughs.]
DW: I’ve seen people that do that quite a bit. It’s a good question. Well, Looking for God in the Matrix… Well… as long as right next to it you’re Looking for Buddha in the Matrix or…
LS: Right. [laughs.]
DW: Looking for Allah in the Matrix I’m sure there’s a Muslim scholar out there that thinks the Matrix is a wonderful metaphor for… you know…
LS: With the dualism?
DW: Yeah. Yeah. I dunno… I wouldn’t be surprised. One of the appeals of The Matrix is that it’s so fluid, worldview-wise. Zustiak would say it make a perfect postmodern myth because it’s drawing from everywhere. It’s got these multi-sensory things to it.
LS: ‘Till Lost came on.
DW: Yeah. I don’t know. Is it The Gospel According to the Simpsons or The Gospel According the to Sopranos or –
LS: [chortles.]
DW: churning out the [snaps twice.]
LS: According to Dexter
DW: I wonder if some of that is self-justification of watching some of that.
LS: Right.
DW: I think what you have to say is it’s not… you’re not pulling from it. Maybe it’s better The Gospel interacting with… I think maybe that’s—
LS: Where are the cross-sections?
DW: Right. Exactly. So I’m not saying even The Gospel According to Harry Potter, I’m saying, “Here’s where the gospel intersects with Harry Potter and where they’re sharing—“
LS: Similar things.
DW: Maybe it nods to, or maybe it points to, or maybe it points to something within us, again, through Imago Dei that is yearning for this. I’m not expecting in watching this to have the Gospel told back to me.
LS: As an evangelistic tool.
DW: As an evangelistic tool. EXACTLY. Which is… you know… God forbid. But for me, as a Christian who has the Gospel, watching these things, interacting with culture, interacting with the poets. Here’s Paul listening to the poets saying, “We are his offspring.” Paul’s like, “Yeah! That’s not bad.”
LS: Virgil, yeah.
DW: Yeah, and I can now interact with that with the Gospel, use it in my preaching or not use it in my preaching. That’s what I’m trying to do. It’s not Christianity from culture or Learning About God through the Matrix. Gosh, I hope not. Even Learning About God through Harry Potter…
LS: Yeah, that’s not—
DW: “Well Jesus doesn’t act like Dumbledore here.” Well, he’s not Jesus. He’s Dumbledore.
LS: Yeah.
DW: Okay? Or Gandalf or…
LS: Well Gandalf gets testy… often.
DW: When we push that… whether it’s Superman or Neo or Wall-E or Harry Potter or whoever, when we push that to the breaking point, then we allow things to be change. What I’m wanting to know is how does the Gospel wrestle with Dexter? How does the Gospel wrestle with Lost? How does the Gospel wrestle with Mad Men?
LS: Or The Wire and A Song of Ice and Fire. Very pessimistic.
DW: The Wire, yeah.
LS: Or McCarthy! Like The Road. How do we…
DW: Yeah, you have dueling eschatologies there, so…
LS: Right.
DW: This sort of glimmer of hope: we’re carrying “the fire.” What is that? Is it enough just to survive? At some point, no. The Gospel tells us more than that.
LS: Beyond Prometheus, stealing the secret fire.
DW: Yeah.
LS: That’s something I’ve always found anemic in some of these Christian ratings sites. They’re always… well part of it’s political. Part of it’s saying, “Well the Day After Tomorrow is just liberal propaganda.”
DW: Well, it’s also a bad movie.
LS: [laughs.]
DW: [laughs hard.]
LS: Yes. But what do we cut away and what do we keep? When do we say, “Okay. You used that as a method to tell the story and use honesty about that character that exists in this reality?” And what do we say, “I’m just gonna leave all of that there and take only this principle or this image?”
DW: And that’s coming back to when you intersect the gospel or whatever… is the blowback from too much of culture and not enough Gospel leads to self-justification.
LS: “It’s okay ‘cause I…”
DW: “Well… that twenty minute sex scene needed to be in that movie because of such and such and I’m—“
LS: [laughs.]
DW: No. There are movies that may be very interesting with the relationship of Gospel next to whatever. But for the life of me, I just can’t for my own conscience, for my own capabilities, I just cannot see it.
LS: That takes me to a place I don’t want to go.
DW: Right. It’s just too dark. One of those would be a movie I’m never going to see is Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, which is basically a context without any sort of God figure and people are doing despicable things to each other. And I don’t know if he’s depicting… There’s a couple who lost a child and they’re just abusing each other because that’s the only way they can express this. The value of seeing that and trying to interact with that culture, is that greater than what effect that movie will have on me in a negative sense?
LS: So that’s the standard.
DW: For me. You can’t, like Donald Wildmon, get there by counting profanity.
LS: [laughs.]
DW: Well…
LS: Molly Weasley.
DW: It makes it more real, certainly. And we don’t live in fantasy land. I read a review about Goodwill Hunting where someone said, “Defend this.” Well, this is South Boston. We don’t talk golly-gee-willikers, oh shoot. That’s just not the way people talk there. If the point of a film is to, within this context, depict this kind of fantastical story – the genius and his trials. The genius coming out of the rubble of South Boston without his baggage. In order to tell that story, we have to tell it in this context and he has to be this kind of character and the context has to be this kind of context and in order to do that we have to use this kind of language, because that’s where they are. If that’s the story I’m going to tell, then that’s what I gotta do.
LS: ‘Cause it’s honest.
DW: It’s honest, yeah. And it’s not glossed over. It’s not white-washed. It doesn’t glorify that. When we start glorifying that, like some films obviously do.
LS: Like make it like… fun. Then there’s the threshold beyond that, like Tarrentino who subverts it.
DW: I guess so.
LS: Like with Kill Bill, pushing the violence within multiple genres within one film to such an extent to say that this is… it does this mamma bear/baby bear thing where… at the end it says, “The mother bear has her kids returned and everything’s right in the wood,” or whatever.
DW: I dunno. I appreciate Tarrentino without really getting him. I think I understood Inglorious Bastards. I think what he wanted to say was, “One of the reasons we won the war is that our film was better than their film.” Our propaganda was better than their propaganda. Our propaganda to go in and save the Jews was better than their propaganda of Defend the White Race Homeland. Because we had Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne and everybody else – Gary Cooper – because we had these depictions of “We’re gonna get in there and win this thing”
LS: Of inglorious bastards.
DW: Inglorious bastards, yeah, we had that… that was better motivation. It the end, that’s the film that wins. So… in that context you can play around with, you know, them killing Hitler and the style of it.
LS: Do you think he was talking of his own career? It almost seemed like he was saying something about the violence in the film itself.
DW: I dunno. That’s a good question. Certainly it seemed self-justifying.
LS: In comparing that to Germany’s films.
DW: Oh. Yeah maybe.
LS: Some people think it’s him showing his cards a little bit and saying, “This is what I’ve been doing with my career. I’ve been saying here’s what violence does in film and here’s where it leads us.”
DW: Hmmm. I don’t know about that.
LS: Like, at the risk of using a philosophical cliché, in a Wittgensteinian way. Of subverting language with language, of pushing it to its extreme.
DW: Certainly he does that. Kill Bill does that.
LS: Pulp Fiction.
DW: The anime sequences and the…
LS: Cutting off heads and all that.
DW: Blood everywhere. I dunno…
(Ask the Experts continued next week with part 5!)
Tuesday, December 7th I will be at Ozark Christian College speaking on Harry Potter and Christianity. Go to L13 at 7:00 pm for the lecture, or go 
