Yet Another 12 Blogs of Christmas #4: Christmas and Starman issue 27

And now for something a little different.

For those of you who aren’t comic book fans, Starman was one of the best titles of the last 20 years or so. Published by DC Comics, it was a book about legacy and history; not only was it the story of Jack Knight, a young man forced into taking up his father’s mantle as his city’s resident superhero, but it was the story of Opal City and its inhabitants, a disparate group who proved that the past still lives with us. The Wild West, Victorian London, the age of piracy and the age of the Rat Pack all came together to help tell Jack’s story. And yet, for such a large canvas, it was really a book that thrived on relationships – relationships between the characters, and between the characters and history. It’s a fantastic book, and well worth checking out.

But let’s narrow things down, because this is yet another of my twelve blogs of Christmas. Reading writer James Robinson’s Starman follow-up The Shade reminded me that there was a Christmas issue of Starman. Published in 1997, with art by Steve Yowell, ‘Christmas Knight’ tells of Jack’s meeting with Pete, a homeless guy with nothing to wear except a stolen Santa suit and no possessions except a locket containing a photo of his deceased wife and son. Only now the locket has been stolen…

The story isn’t, of course, about a stolen locket. Partly it’s about grace – Jack and Pete’s quest brings them into contact with a number of men on the fringes of society, forced into crime due to a lack of food or shelter, and while Jack is the protector of Opal City, he’s also smart enough and wise enough to realise these people aren’t a threat – he ends up giving them money to buy Christmas lunch. “Ain’t you going to arrest me?” one of them asks; “Not tonight.” Jack replies. While this quest takes Jack into corners of his city he’s not altogether familiar or comfortable with, there’s a sense of ‘there but for the grace of God…’ US census data released today reveals that almost 50% of Americans are now either low income or living in poverty. We live in economic times in which any one of us could end up in Pete’s situation.

And that’s another theme of the issue, and of Starman in general – everyone has a story. In other issues we discover that a super villain collects old transistor radios, and that Batman’s favourite Woody Allen film is Crime and Punishment. It’s not a surprise that we learn that Pete is a veteran of the Korean War, that he knows CPR… Everyone has a story. That’s another strength of Starman, its regular hints of stories that we never see, throwaway lines that point to a bigger history than we ever learn. That Big Issue vendor you pass in the town? He’s got a story full of twists and turns and complex characterisation. Sure, we know this in our heart of hearts, but how often do we suppress that knowledge? Christmas is a time to remember this.

And so Pete ends up spending Christmas dinner with Jack and his friends. While we don’t really get to see dinner, the preparations for it that we do see, interspersed with Jack’s quest, point to it being a redemptive meal – one of the attendees is seeking forgiveness from his family, another gets to spend Christmas with the woman he’s started to love from afar, and a former supervillain gives this family of heroes a priceless signed first edition of A Christmas Carol (the film version of which Jack was watching earlier in the issue – as the second most famous Christmas story of redemption and restoration, it getting namechecked twice is important). A joke is made about the name’s of the dinner’s female attendees – Faith, Hope and Charity – but these virtues are present throughout the issue in more ways than one.

After all, it is Christmas.

 

Grails and Grace: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

“Ask yourself, why do you seek the Cup of Christ? Is it for His glory, or for yours?“

Yesterday I wrote about Raiders of the Lost Ark and about how great it is. But let’s not forget it’s part of a franchise, one of the rare kind where the other films mostly stand up to the original. And, as I was talking about how Raiders is based in Judaism and the Old Testament, today I figured I’d go to the other end of the Bible: step forward Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and its quest for the Holy Grail.

Only despite the whole Da Vinci Code kerfuffle, there’s a problem. Because the Holy Grail isn’t in the Bible, or at least not in any direct way.

Jesus coins the wine/blood symbolism at the Last Supper but there’s no great description of a Grail, they just use a cup to drink from. Boring and conventional I know, but there you go. No, the Holy Grail is basically a medieval plot device.

See, somewhere between 1181 and 1190, a French poet called Chretian de Troyes wrote Perceval: The Story of the Grail. During the poem, Perceval manages to impress King Arthur, fall in love, meets the Fisher King and has a vision of the Grail. Here it’s an object of power, capable of healing the Fisher King if only Perceval asks the right questions – which he fails to do. It’s nothing to do with the Bloodline of Christ, it’s just the cup that the King’s communion is carried in, important because that’s the only food and drink he’s receiving.

The Grail became holy around a decade later, when Robort de Boron fills in the gaps of its history – Joseph of Arimathea uses the cup from the Last Supper to collect some of Christ’s blood after the crucifixion, eventually making his way to Britain (which links in with an early tradition that had Joseph and a bunch of other minor characters from the Gospels making their way across Europe, as well as being the source of the idea that Jesus once visited England as a boy – cue Jerusalem). None of this really has anything to do with the Bible – effectively it’s New Testament fanfic. Somewhere along the line the Grail became the object of a quest carried out by Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and it became enshrined in literature as a sacred macguffin.

And in a lot of ways, that’s the Grail’s purpose in The Last Crusade – it’s an excuse to reconcile Indy with his father, and once this happens, the Grail is lost again. However, it’s this story, contrasted with the actions of the film’s antagonists, that shows that Indy is capable of understanding, and experiencing grace.

Look at the film’s bad guy. Donovan is a suave but ruthless businessman obsessed with the Grail and its potential to bring him immortality. To this end he aligns himself with the Nazis and manipulates both of the Joneses; after all, they’re all really just tools to help him live forever. It’s that arrogance, however, that ultimately damns him – when confronted with a roomful of potential Grails, from which he must drink to receive eternal life, he picks the most ornate. He sees the world from a pedestal and the Grail as his prize – of course it’s going to be shiny and jewel-encrusted. But whoops, it’s the wrong one and it ages him to death instead – “He chose…poorly,” the Grail’s guardian wryly comments. Donovan’s Grail quest was all about the prize, not the lessons learned along the way – after all, he never learned them because the other characters did all the work.

Indy, on the other hand, has purer motivations – he just wants to save his dad’s life and go home. And yet because of this, because his quest is noble and involves risking his neck for that of another, Indy is able to succeed. He does his homework (“Jehovah is spelled with an ‘I!’”), he risks his life, and he’s finally able to act with humility and wisdom – he doesn’t want to be a king, he just wants his dad back. “That’s not the cup of a carpenter,” he mutters about Donovan’s false grail, before picking the cheapest and most inconspicuous cup on offer. This is the right choice, because this is the Cup of Christ and the Grail and it’s associated quest reflects this – humility, wisdom, self-sacrifice, reconciliation. The Christian concept of humanity being reconciled back to God is symbolised through the Spielbergian theme of a son’s relationship with his father, and once this happens the Grail is no longer needed – it disappears and its temple collapses, job done, and all that remains for our heroes to do is return home wiser than when they set out.

Heck, even the audience is enlightened in the final moments – we find out that Indy named himself after the family dog.

I guess it’s appropriate that a trilogy (let’s put aside The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for the moment) that began with Indy confronted by the Wrath of God (in the form of the opened Ark of the Covenant) should end with him encountering God’s grace – judgement and mercy meet around the Easter story in which the Grail myth has its origins. The prodigals return home and a fracture family is reunited. We’ve seen wrath – and melted Nazis – now we get to see healing.

There’s another Indy film after this, of course, but that plays with sci-fi more than it does with myth and somehow it’s weaker for it – it tries to emulate fifties B-movies, but bringing in aliens and Communists (the interchangeable ‘Other’ of films like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers) weakens it somehow – Indy seems to be the detrrmined hero who doesn’t know when to stop even when divine forces are moving around him. It’s that determination and heroism that brings him a measure of healing in The Last Crusade. I’d say he deserved it, but that wouldn’t be grace – Indy’s always been a rough diamond for all his heroism.

But even rogues can sometimes be pilgrims.

Raiding the Lost Ark: What Indiana Jones and the Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church have in common

Apparently yesterday saw an anniversary screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, hosted by Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford. I can only assume that my invitation went missing in the post somehow, because I wasn’t there alongside Simon Pegg and Lost creator Damon Lindelof (who recently wrote a love letter to Raiders).

Raiders is an awesome film, of course, one of those movies where everything, from the direction to the story to the casting to Harrison Ford’s dysentery conspire to capture lightning in a bottle in a way that modern blockbusters often fail to manage. It’s a pure-blooded classic, from the opening scene (BOULDER!) to the ending (BOXES!) via divine retribution (GOD SMITING NAZIS!) and it’s fantastic. Ford could go mad and take the lead role in a new Catwoman movie and we’d still forgive him, simply because he’s Han AND Indy. The guy gets a pass just because of that. He’s even inspired the coolest Mr. Potato Head.

But part of the power of Raiders is that it’s rooted in religion and folklore, the stakes of the movie hanging on both the evil of the Nazis, and concepts of the Old Testament Wrath of God. The Ark has power beyonf human imagining and that raises it beyond a plot MacGuffin to something far scarier – frankly, none of the characters, good or bad, should be going anywhere near it.

This is pretty true to the Biblical accounts. Here’s the story: Moses leads the Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt after God rains down plagues on Pharoah and parts the Red Sea. Following this, God makes a covenant, or agreement, with the fledgling Israel – this is marked by the 10 Commandments and a box – ark – in which to keep them (I wrote a little about the guy who built the ark here). This Ark became a physical symbol of God’s presence with the Israelites, going before them in battle, infused by the holy power of God and impossible to touch with your bare hands.

This is where Raiders draws upon the biblical texts – there are stories of people dying after touching the Ark and, when it’s captured by the Philistines, they’re struck by a plague of, well, hemorrhoids. The Ark is not something to be messed with.

Anyway, eventually the Babylonians conquered Israel and the Ark disappears from view. No-one knows what happened to it, and it’s at this point that it passes from religious history into rumour, folklore and mythology. Raiders suggests it ended up buried in Egypt, waiting for some hubristic Nazis to dig it up. There are, however, other ideas…

One of the apocryphal (non-canonical) biblical texts, 2 Maccabees, says that the prophet Jeremiah realised that Israel was going down and buried the Ark in an unknown cave, not to be revealed until God Himself made it known.

Meanwhile, others lay claim to safeguarding the Ark, most famously Ethiopia. Apparently there is an artifact kept in the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, Axum, that may of may not be the Ark. The Glory of Kings, a text written in 1225 to legitimise the Ethiopian royal family, says that it’s there, and all Ethiopian churches contain a replica of the Ark. Interestingly, a while ago the Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church said he was going to reveal the truth about the Ark; the next day he changed his mind. This doesn’t exactly help quash speculation.

Then there are the Lemba people of southern Africa, who have a tradition of a mysterious but sacred artifact known as the Ngoma Lungundu, “the drum that thunders” (implying the voice of God). What may a replica of the Ark is on display in Zimbabwe, after being hidden away in a storeroom for years… Which sounds a little familiar.

It’s not just Africa making claims. At the turn of the 20th century there was even speculation that the Ark was in Ireland, with some enthusiasts starting to dig up the Hill of Tara until someone had the sense to stop them before they destroyed one of the country’s spiritual centres.

The fact is, we don’t know what happened to the Ark of Covenant, and that worked in the favour of Raiders – at the end of the film the Ark is lost again, this time to the forces of bureaucracy. Maybe it’s for the best – you don’t mess around with the infinite, to paraphrase another movie. For an archeologist, Indy doesn’t have much success with getting his finds back home – he’s not working with history, he’s working with faith, religion, the divine. “It belongs in a museum,” he says during another of his adventures, but that’s not always true – in the case of the Ark he has to close his eyes and stay out of the way. It’s not often that a movie has something visceral to say about the power of God.

Fortunately Raiders isn’t any old movie.

Never Give Up: Some Thoughts on Captain America: The First Avenger

So last night I went to see Captain America: The First Avenger and it’s a fantastic film. It’s Indiana Jones with superheroes, which sounds dismissive until you realise that Indiana Jones with superheroes is an awesome idea. It’s also one of those films where the casting really works; Chris Evans manages to sell the clean-cut sincerity of a man who only wants to stand up to bullies, be they local jerks or super-Nazis, and Tommy Lee Jones basically plays Tommy Lee Jones in a role that really just requires someone to be Tommy Lee Jones. That’s a winner, but the real stand-out is Hugo Weaving, who turns in a quiet, subtle, layered performance of tragic dignity*.

Anyone who’s read this blog before will know that my film reviews either end up taking the mick, or using them as a springboard to waffle on about the film’s themes. This is going to be one of the latter occasions, because Captain America isn’t the sort of film you can mock. While the Red Skull is gloriously over-the-top, the whole thing is a homage to WWII comic books and pulp storytelling so it really doesn’t matter. He’s called the Red Skull, for goodness sake, saying he’s OTT is just missing the point.

Meanwhile the lead character could have come across as horribly jingoistic but the film takes time to undercut any propagandism, going on to show why everyone should feel free to respect and sympathise with Cap, regardless of whether or not you feel moved to chant “USA! USA!” at any point.

The heart of the movie is seen right up front. Steve Rogers is a scrawny seven-stone weakling with a liat of ailments as long as the film’s credits, all of which mean he’s declared unfit for the army, and therefore punching Nazis. Recognising something in the way Steve refuses to quit trying to enlist, he’s recruited for a secret experiment to turn him into a peak physical specimen – a ‘super soldier’. The experiment is successful but can’t be repeated, with the film following Steve’s journey from being used as a propagandist laughing stock to becoming the central hero of the Marvel Comics universe, all of which is driven by his total refusal to give up or back down.

I guess that’s the lesson of the movie: never give up, never surrender (as another good film once said). I wonder how many times the same story is repeated – we’re young, idealistic, full of hopes and dreams, then as time goes on we get worn down, become clockwatchers, abandon those dreams as naive and hopeless. We give up, and even when we tell ourselved it’s necessary, it’s still an act of surrender.

Despite this, there are still times we have a choice, aren’t there? Times when we need to either speak out or stay quiet, take a stand or hide in the background. It’s interesting that the movie gives Steve these choices when he’s at his weakest, before he gets his powers, and when he’s sidelined by the army he so wants to serve – yeah, his moral code says he’s going to take on the bullies, but at key points he doesn’t have much in the way of back-up. It’s easy to make the right choice when, say, Tommy Lee Jones is growling at your side, but what happens when you’re on your own? How does that affect the ethical choices we have to make?

In the end, the world of Captain America didn’t need a colossus striding the skin of the world, or a stooge of politics, it just needed a brave and decent man to do the right thing. And I guess that’s all that can be asked of you and me as wel: do the right thing; never give up.

* Not really. He plays a skull-headed loon weasel. But he does it beautifully.

*SPOILERS* Lost Finale *SPOILERS*

Obligatory spoiler warning, although I’m not sure I’ll be giving anything away – I suspect I’ll spend a chunk of tomorrow drawing flowcharts and diagrams…

Anyway, Lost is over. Was it a good ending? I don’t know yet – we got some great moments (Ben’s redemption, character reunions, Jack going Batman/Mortal Kombat on the Big Bad), but I’m not sure if the resolution served or solved the ongoing mysteries. Not that it automatically matters – the producers have said that the show was more about the characters than the questions, and I agree that’s the most important thing – but Lost became known as the show that was an enigma wrapped in a riddle, surrounded by a mystery. A lot of that fell by the wayside, however, and normally that’s something that bothers me (I’m the guy who likes to think that these sort of shows are largely plotted out from the start), but somehow… Somehow it didn’t matter, because in the end, Lost was about the characters.

See, at some point I stopped caring about polar bears and four-toed statues and hatches. What really mattered was that Hurley got through all this in one piece, and that Desmond got off the Island and back to Penny (I’m allowed one ‘ship, okay?), and that when Ben was offered a shot at salvation that he actually took it. I want to see a buddy cop show with Sawyer and Miles. The fact that they were all pawns in a battle between two opposing forces was almost just gravy; I’d've watched a show with them all in if en masse they’d pulled a Rose-and-Bernard and walked away from the conflicts.

In the end, we got a scene that wasn’t a million miles away from another show that finished recently – the revelation that (some of) the final season was actually set in a purgatory-like situation, where the characters gather after their various deaths (it’s more fuel for my theory about TV’s Cosmic Bartender… And maybe its saying something about the differences between US and British culture that in one show the afterlife is an ecumenical church, in the other it’s a pub). Everyone gets to move on to the next life, job done; maybe a bit too neat, but don’t read this as real souls, read it as characters who’ve played their parts and now the writers give them some peace. Works for me.

So was it a satisfying end to six years of mysteries? Probably not. Was it a good end for the characters? On balance, probably yeah. The good guys won and there were moments of triumph. There was the hope of redemption, and a nice ending for Hurley.

And at the end of the day, that’s really all that matters.