Breakthrough (2019)

Breakthrough is a god movie. Kid falls through the ice. Mom prays for him. Crisis of faith (or whatever). Kid pulls (breaks?) through. This is one of those DeVon Franklin-produced films that are designed for Christian audiences and that promote (vaguely) Christian ideas. I watched it because Diane Warren's original song ("I'm Standing with You") was nominated for an Academy award.

To be honest, in addition to Diane Warren's song, I thought all of the music from this movie was great. And, as it turns out, Breakthrough is actually pretty well made. It has some really good lines in it. I even think the movie has a strain of agnostic skepticism running through it that I found interesting. But Breakthrough is first and foremost a movie that is super-invested in the god and the power of the god. Or, maybe I should say: the power of people who believe in the god to get things done or make the god do things or speak to the god and ask him to do things. The god actually doesn't appear in the film. What we see instead is people of faith closing their eyes and praying or saying magic words and also people speaking about the power of the god. I found most of that stuff just really laughable. I have no ability to take this kind of thing seriously.

At the end of the movie, Topher Grace (he and Josh Lucas are both really great in this, and I loved Lisa Durupt too) has all of the medical personnel and rescue workers who saved this boy stand up, and I thought, Right – these are the people who actually saved this boy's life. And then he also had everyone who prayed for the kid stand. Ok. Fine. But I'm just not into this idea. Those people are not responsible for the boy's rescue in the same way as the actual people who worked hard to save this boy.

The trouble, for me, is that Breakthrough isn't actually interested in the parts of this story that I think are interesting. The main character, for example, begins to feel that it is not the god but she who is keeping the boy alive, that she has some kind of spiritual or magical power (either) over the god or over life and death. This is a fascinating moment in Breakthrough, but it's one that the film doesn't really want to explore. Instead, there is a single scene where she realizes that she's being a little nuts and then she, like, prays about it for a bit and we're done.

A Few Questions about Etiology and Sexuality

Two weeks ago, my uncle emailed me to ask me if I would tell him more about my sexuality. He said he was curious about some aspects of it and had some questions for me to answer if I was willing. I said yes. His questions surprised me (mostly because of some of the assumptions they made about queerness), but I thought the answers I gave him might make interesting reading, so I'm sharing them here.

I've told some of these stories before on this blog, but because memories shift and pictures of the past change, it makes sense to tell these stories again with the different emphases and valences they have taken on in the ever-shifting present. I found these questions both easy and difficult to answer – difficult mostly because I rarely think about these kinds of things – but I tried to answer them as best I could. These were his questions.

1. How old were you when you were exposed to a sexual situation either in the form of pornography or in person. Was the event accidental or what would be considered a violation, or an abusive event. Were you the victim of any protracted abuse either emotionally, physically, or sexually?
2. How many experiences did you have before you realized you may be homosexual?
3. What steps did you take to open up about it? How old were you when you did?
4. You’ve mentioned that you are an atheist, what impact, if any, did your sexuality have on your theological beliefs?

This is how I responded:

First off, I think it fair to say that I begin from the basic assumption of benign sexual variation: people are different; they have all sorts of different desires; and we know that all sorts of various things form those desires and attractions. That said, I assume that what we call homosexuality or a homosexual orientation is no better or worse than any other basic orientation, and that if it is abnormal (and it is statistically less normal, at this moment in history, than what we call heterosexuality), then that doesn't make it bad or wrong or dirty; a norm is a norm because of societal pressures and assumptions, not because it has some kind of moral authority. This is as true of norms in weight, height, skin color, and right-handedness as it is for normative sexual desires. I want to say, too, that my experiences as a queer person can't really stand in for queer people as a whole, and I have found that people have all sorts of different stories and paths for the understanding of their desires.

The answer to your first question is that I was not ever exposed to sexual situations or pornography at a young age, and I was not sexually abused or violated either emotionally or physically. I first heard of homosexuality at church. I remember feeling different from other kids as a young kid – I was picked on and bookish – but I seem to remember more than anything other people's assumptions about my effeminacy or my lack of masculinity: things like my father telling me not to cross my legs like women do when I sat down but to cross my legs like men do, or other adults telling me to hold books by my side at arm's length rather than close to my chest (one of these is the way women hold books and one of these the way men hold books, apparently). I remember this one time I was at some talk about masculinity and sex held at a park by our pastor and him asking a few of us boys (I can't remember who else was there or how old I was, but this would have been in 6th or 7th grade) what we ought to do if we felt desire toward someone of the same sex. I remember knowing so little about sex and desire that I volunteered an answer and said aloud "you should ask that person". The pastor looked at me like I was an idiot and said "That person wouldn't know anything". I had no idea. I never saw pornography until I was in high school (and of course that pornography was heterosexual), and I don't remember ever walking in on anyone having sex.

Cute Boys                             Me                  

The answer to the second question relates to the church, too. As I said, I felt different as a kid, and of course I also felt sinful as a kid. We were all told how sinful we were all the time. So because I felt sinful, because I felt this different, evil thing inside of me for which I didn't have words, when the pastor brought up "homosexuals" as a kind of bogeyman (he did this frequently), I thought "maybe I am one of those". I always identified with the evil characters in fairy tales and children's stories, even stories from the Bible. I was a sinner, and I knew that, and so I knew I was one of the bad people. What I am saying is that I am not sure that I would have named myself a homosexual unless I wasn't told so frequently that I was bad and that homosexuals were bad. But who knows. I started finding myself attracted to other boys when I was in 9th grade, I think. That would put me at 12 or 13. And I had a name for that from my church. I had never heard of bisexuality or any other option. So I knew I was attracted to other boys, and I knew that made me a "homosexual", and I knew that was very, very bad. I prayed for a long time to ask my parents' god to make it go away, but my desires persisted. Their god didn't do anything to help me.

I know that some people learn about their sexual desires through sexual experiences – a person may try sex with various people and then figure out his or her sexuality from there, but that isn't what I did. I had my first sexual experience with a guy when I was 20 or 21 (quite old by today's standards). I had been attempting to stifle my desires and make them go away for about seven years before I ever was willing to try anything. I would say that I definitely missed out on this period of time that your question assumes. I wasn't really free to experiment sexually, or didn't feel myself free to do so, and so I didn't learn about anything that way.

In answer to your third question about when I began to open up about it – I was 20 or 21. Most everyone by this time had sort of figured things out, I think. If a young man is not talking about heterosexuality all the time, and if he hasn't had sex with a woman, he is probably queer. It's a sort of unspoken rule, isn't it? I think my parents probably knew I was queer (I'm not sure how long they had known), and definitely a good many of my friends already knew. Still, I came out to all of them one by one: first to my best friends, then to my parents. I was in college by this time, and this was very difficult because I had been actively lying for a long time, and this means I was a liar. It's hard to convince people that one is being honest when one has been lying to one's friends for a very long time. Even though it was 20 years ago, and I know that my lies were lies that my society wanted me to tell about myself, I still have a lot of guilt about this.

I remember my conversation with my friends Derek and Jaime very well. Derek said to me, "You'll always have a home with us." This was a question of an actual place to live – there was always the fear that my parents would kick me out of the house – as well as a question of an emotional place I could call home. It was the perfect answer. My friend Jill said "I already knew". My friend John hugged me and said he was afraid I was going to tell him that but that he was going to try very hard not to judge me. I don't know how well I remember the conversation with my parents. I most vividly remember my father beginning to talk about sin. I remember that I stopped him. I said to him that the word sin could not mean anything to me anymore because if I believed that I was destined for hell and that I was never going to be happy, then that led to me killing myself. If god simply hated me, then I should die. I had gone down that road in my mind already. But I had decided that instead of dying I was going to try to be happy and live a life in the world.

I don't think my atheism is related to my sexual desires. But I will say that I do think Christianity is incompatible with being a happy, well-adjusted gay person. Christianity has been hostile to homosexual activity for much of its history, and to my mind there isn't much sense in trying to reconcile all of that hatred. But that isn't why I became an atheist. I became an atheist when I realized that I really really wanted there to be a god, but that that desire for someone to take care of me was very similar to my desire for The Lord of the Rings to be real. (Seriously. It is quite a funny comparison, but this is what happened.) Just because I want something to be real doesn't make it real. Believing in a god would make the world so much easier to live in; believing that someone is watching over me and cares about me would make the world feel safer. But that doesn't mean there is a god. It just means it would be really nice if there were one. In other words, I came to atheism rationally through making logical sense of my feelings about the Christian god.

Obviously, a good many ideas have shaped my current views on sex and sexuality – many of which have changed in the last 20 years – but this is my recollection of the period up until age 21 or so. As I say, that was a long time ago, so my memory may be faulty, but this is what I remember.

It is only very recently that I have started to interrogate the interlinked history of homosexual practices and Christianity – I've only just in the last year read John Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality and Louis Crompton's Homosexuality and Civilization – and I think that's mostly just because I haven't really even been interested in the Church's ideas about sexuality. They seem to me merely a method of social control. What is clear from history is that homosexual practices (and even more frequently bisexual practices) have existed in almost all societies everywhere around the globe. What changes around the globe is the different ways those practices have been treated by their societies. I simply haven't had much interest in what made me gay or what makes other people gay. To my mind, once we can say that there is nothing wrong with it, the reasons why people like the things they like sexually seem to matter just as little as why people are left-handed or like cilantro or don't like the color green.

David and Bathsheba (1951)

David and Bathsheba is a really interesting biblical movie. (It's boring, don't get me wrong; I am not here to say that it is a good movie.) But although this movie looks like your typical swords-and-sandals epic – it has the lush score by Alfred Newman, the beautiful Leon Shamroy cinematography, the insanely enormous cast, beautiful art direction, big stars – but what is interesting about this movie is that this movie is skeptical of a Christianity/Judaism that is invested in laws and punishment and destruction. It is also skeptical of priests who interpret the desires of gods. Henry King's film doesn't go quite so far as to say that the priests in David and Bathsheba are corrupt and self-seeking – although it certainly could have taken this tack if it wished – but this is a skeptical film, one that asks its audiences to think ethically about punishment, cruelty, desert, and judgment.

Susan Hayward as Bathsheba

David and Bathsheba conflates a series of events in Hebrew history – the affair of David and Bathsheba and the civil war of Absalom against his father – but more than anything this is a kind of character study of David himself. The film spends long minutes exploring David's face while nothing else happens. We watch David carefully as he makes decisions, as he wars with himself, as he debates the nonsense spoken by the priest of Israel.

As I say, this is a really weird film. It is in the film's third act when we flashback to Samuel's anointing of David as a shepherd boy and then to David's battle with Goliath. Of course, this means that we follow David as a young man (i.e. not Gregory Peck) at the end of the film rather than the film's star, Gregory Peck, whom we have been following for the movie's first ninety minutes.

Despite this poster's promises, Gregory Peck wears a shirt at all times.

The film justifies David and Bathsheba's affair from the beginning. They like each other, an Bathsheba's husband does not love her. He does not even care about her, and is not the least interested in what she thinks. In the end, even the film's god blesses David and Bathsheba's relationship. It is, as I say, a film made by a skeptic. The conflict in the film is that David has forgotten the ways of the god and has broken the Mosaic law. The film doesn't really believe this, but tries to make us believe this in act two by introducing a prophet none of us likes. Then in act three, David argues with Bathsheba about those laws. One of the great moments in the movie is in the third act, when David tells Bathsheba that the god he knew as a boy, in the trees and rocks is not the god of vengeance that the priests preach. (In act two the film watches a beautiful woman get stoned to death for adultery. It's a sequence that judges this kind of law very harshly, but it doesn't seem to treat those laws in an orientalist fashion. In other words, David and Bathsheba doesn't call Mosaic law backward or barbaric as such. Instead, it is asking audiences to judge these laws for themselves, and to be skeptical of unjust law in general.)

But what David does at the end of the film is in fact defy the Mosaic law and go talk to the god directly. Once he does this – once he remembers the god – the god forgives him and it rains in Israel. What the film is saying is that laws against adultery aren't important (it has said that throughout the film). Each man must make the ethical choices that accord with his own beliefs. As long as the individual remembers the god, believes in him, pays homage to him, then his behavior is immaterial – or at least mostly immaterial. Even David's murder of Uriah the Hittite, Bathsheba's husband, is apparently forgiven by the rain that the god sends at the film's end.

Boy Erased

Joel Edgerton's Boy Erased is pretty good. It has its problems. But if you're me, and you grew up in a Baptist house afraid you might be gay, it's pretty intense. I cried so many times that I lost count.

The plot works like this. Young Jared (Lucas Hedges) says goodbye to his mom and dad (Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe) and enrolls in a program that promises to help him get rid of his homosexuality and return to the love of the Christian god. Most of the movie involves time spent in sessions of this conversion therapy – which are all legitimately insane but wouldn't quite sound insane to the ear of a good Christian boy like I was growing up.

Christianity and other spiritual practices already involve accepting things that don't seem rational and making sense of things that apparently contradict one another. And these are desperate young people who really don't want to be gay, so they are willing to try anything that promises the possibility of normal heterosexuality. So the idea that, say, making a list of the different "sins" practiced by members of one's family or learning how to hit a baseball might help a person get rid of same-sex attraction (that's what they call it) can seem like a great idea. At the very least, one can see why someone would be willing to commit to a program like this. The Baptist church has made homosexuality into the unpardonable sin par excellence, so nothing can be off the table when it comes to trying to change a gay kid into a straight kid.

I'm about to say something that I think might be controversial.

I honestly can't say that the gay conversion therapy in Boy Erased seemed that crazy to me in Baptist terms. None of the activities practiced in the therapy sessions seemed any more or less coercive, violent, bullying, shame-inducing, or insane than anything I experienced in church growing up. I'm really grateful my parents never sent me to any gay conversion camp (Thanks, mom and dad!); that would have totally sucked. But – although the film doesn't have anything to say about this – church life is actually like a constant gay conversion therapy in miniature. An effeminate boy feels constant pressure to behave in more masculine ways, to walk differently, talk differently, bend his body differently, firm up his handshake, tell certain kinds of jokes, play every sport possible, and pursue young women romantically. All while, of course, learning the scriptures and going to church all the time. In fact, if a boy does get a little too interested in masculine pursuits like girls or sports and thus slacks off in his more important spiritual duties, this is mostly ok with everyone. There is nothing, see, worse than homosexuality, except, perhaps, like, straight-up Satanism. So, yes, Boy Erased is a document of a terrible ordeal that several kids are made to endure because of their alleged sexual desires, but I would say that every kid growing up in the Baptist church feels these pressures, and queer kids in the Baptist church are made to feel them acutely.

The other structural element to the film is a set of flashbacks to earlier sections in Jared's life – all while he is an older teenager. These include sequences with a high school girlfriend, a Christian crush at college, and a Canadian painter. These are all intriguing, but I am not going to say anything about them because of spoilers. One of the sections is, in fact, very surprising.

But the film is not, as it turns out, very surprising. It mostly feels conventional. It's a very typical story – something like Thelma from a couple years ago – of a gay kid learning to be ok with being gay (although how he learned that is unclear, even apostrophized by the filmmakers) and then trying to deal with his mostly homophobic parents.

Edgerton's direction is not great either (although his performance in the film is quite good). The whole thing is very somber in tone, and the film is almost completely unbroken by humor of any kind – even though Kidman does her best to lighten the mood occasionally. A more confident filmmaker would have included more moments of humor, and so the fault is mostly with Edgerton's inexperience, I think. But also (and I also complained about this in my We the Animals review), the filmmaking has almost nothing gay about it, either. This is a film about a gay kid that is almost completely unrelated to gay culture. Even Jared's desire for his college friend Henry is rendered only through Lucas Hedges' facial expressions. The camera does nothing to tell us how much Jared desires Henry or what he wants from Henry. (There is, for example, this great sequence when the two go for a run together and Henry lifts his arms to stretch, and Jared sneaks a glance at his exposed belly. The camera shows us nothing – only Jared in medium shot looking furtively at his friend. Edgerton's camera, in other words, doesn't identify with Jared's desires; it stays outside of them, observing them without seeming really to understand.) The only campy moment in Boy Erased is in a single title-card at the end of the film – it is a good joke, but I could've used a bit more of this in Edgerton's relentless movie.

Edgerton also uses slow-motion way more than he needs it, contributing to the overall ponderousness of Boy Erased but not really contributing at all to our understanding of Jared and his journey toward reckoning with his same-sex attractions. But this is actually the point. The purpose of Edgerton's movie is a kind of public service announcement about how terrible gay conversion therapy is. Further, Boy Erased is a film designed to tell people about how awful gay conversion therapy is while not saying terrible things about Christianity or the Baptist church and not being a gay film. This is a mainstream film for mainstream audiences designed to change people's minds about gay conversion therapy and get some laws passed banning the practice. These are, perhaps, noble aims, and I haven't anything negative to say about them, but they make for a stilted film that doesn't hang together as nicely as it might.

The acting is great, though. I liked Lucas Hedges in Manchester by the Sea and Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, and I loved him in Lady Bird, but he carries Boy Erased and does it wonderfully. He gives a beautiful, vulnerable performance, and I believed every second of it. I also really loved Russell Crowe, who is, I know, great in everything. Nicole Kidman (who I also love) is the only one who feels out of place here. She is acting a little too much, as though she is just too different from her character to play her quite without comment. Cherry Jones makes a fabulous cameo and has a great scene. Edgerton himself is also pretty great. Xavier Dolan has actually rather a large part, but I found him distracting. I see him way too much as a sort of outspoken enfant terrible of gay Canadian cinema for me to believe him as a kid who really wants to go back to being a good hetero Christian.

As for Oscar nominations... I don't know. I am skeptical. I don't think this movie is very good, even though my own adolescence made the whole thing deeply moving. I can see Hedges getting some Oscar buzz as the main character, but I have trouble seeing him with a Best Actor nomination. I am fairly certain that Troye Sivan (who also plays one of the kids doing the conversion therapy) wrote an original song for the movie (it is, of course, also quite ponderous). These two seem like the only real shots Boy Erased has for nominations. Nothing else really stands out.

(Sidebar: if you know me and you have seen the movie, you know that there is also something that I should be talking about here that I am not talking about. This is the surprising section to which I alluded above. I don't want to spoil that plot point, so I'll talk about it at another time.)

The Closet and Its Protections: On National Coming Out Day and Love

On this National Coming Out Day, I am in a dormitory on the campus of Louisiana State University, having escaped Tallahassee for Hurricane Michael.

Today – because of all sorts of recent circumstances in my life – I am reflecting on coming out in new and different ways. George Chauncey tells us, in his extraordinary book Gay New York, that young gay men used to come out into gay society. That the phrase come out used to mean something like a debut, an introduction into adulthood or a marking of a new status in the community. Post Stonewall, with the arrival of gay politics and the invention of National Coming Out Day, coming out was coupled with protest and activism: out of the closet and into the streets was the common rejoinder. One came out in order to mark one's positionality as a member of a group of active gay people.

I am fond of both of these formulations of coming out. They both have an intriguing resonance for me, and they seem linked in several key ways to community, to making a statement, to self-definition.

Lately, though, I have been pondering our obsession with outing, with insisting that some gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and other non-hetero people publicly define themselves. I was struck especially by an extraordinary campaign by the actress Chloë Grace Moretz against the film Boy Erased in which Moretz trashed the film (which is about gay conversion therapy) because it was directed by a straight white man and stars a straight white man. Her own film, she said, "was directed by a bisexual woman of diversity". Moretz's position, leaving aside the questionable phrase "woman of diversity", is that one film is more authentic than the other because the roles are played by queer people in one and not the other and because one film is directed by a queer person and one is not. Maybe so, but sexuality doesn't really work that way. And who's to say who is gay and who is not?

I had assumed, for about a year now – at least since Lady Bird – that Lucas Hedges (who stars in Boy Erased) was not straight. This made me more invested in his career and more interested in his artistic choices. Moretz's accusation that Boy Erased had a straight man as its lead performer, then, struck an odd note with me. But he isn't straight, I thought. Who is she to say that he is or is not straight, especially when he has said nothing about it publicly? Worse yet, her statement seemed to throw the gauntlet down – actively to question his sexuality or to ask him to either defend or deny his heterosexuality. This is an unfair position either way, and it is the business of none of us – especially since the film is not about an out and proud young man but a boy who is actively trying to make a life for himself and is in fact negotiating the closet and the very serious risks of coming out. Sure enough, Lucas Hedges recently did come out as "not totally straight", a common enough formulation for young people these days. It would have been nice if Hedges hadn't been pushed to do that, though, and I find Moretz's position totally unacceptable. We don't know what Joel Edgerton's sexuality is either, thank you very much, and it isn't anyone's job to force him to confess it to us so that we can feel better or worse about enjoying his movie.

(I suppose it is also worth mentioning that some folks I know have accused Senator Lindsey Graham of being gay and closeted. Accused of being gay – it's an interesting way of putting things. To my way of thinking, Graham deserves our contempt for his actual politics not for his perceived hypocrisy, his perceived queerness, or his perceived closetedness. His relationship to his own sexuality is of no interest to me compared to his reprehensible political positions. And we should all be careful of attempting to out Senators or accusing politicians of queerness. Graham is hardly the only Senator who might be accused of hiding his sexuality.)

This summer I broke most of my rules and dated a closeted Christian guy. He is a really special man whose relationship with the closet was way more complicated than I understood then or understand now. He hadn't told anyone about being gay, and he has no intention of telling anyone that he is gay. His relationship with his family, his relationship with his religion, his relationships with his friends, and his relationship with his workplace all demand his heterosexuality. Those relationships make no room for the possibility of him being anything other than heterosexual. He doesn't want to come out, but, of course, how could he want to do something that would jeopardize and possibly destroy his relationships with everyone he loves, with everything he knows, with everything that gives him value as a human being? The closet, in other words, is a demand that his society makes of him. Closets are created by homophobia, by a restriction of options for queer people. And so I am arguing that queer people owe nothing to those closets. There are no rules for how queer people ought to interact with those closets, for what they ought to do in response to those closets. Queer people did not make the closets and they owe the closets nothing. It is not my job to judge how a person deals with a closet she didn't make in the first place.

Has this man's choice been heartbreaking for me? Certainly. But it is his job to decide what he thinks will make him happy or what he thinks is right. And it is not my place to impose my version of what I think will make him happy onto him. Most of us rebelled against our parents' versions of what our happiness ought to look like. I have no desire to replicate that same system in reverse when it comes to someone I love.

Being queer is very difficult for a very large number of people – and I think sometimes those of us who are out and proud forget how hard being "out" can be. What I want, on this National Coming Out Day is to try not to privilege the "out" position. For some of us, the closet is saving our lives. For some of us, the closet is (merely?) saving our careers. For some of us, the closet is saving us the headache of having to deal with relatives who ask too many questions. The queer people in our lives deserve our love no matter what relationship they have with the closet. Let us love each other with fierceness and generosity.

Some Post-Christianity Musings

I had an interesting conversation today when an acquaintance from my childhood church days messaged me out of the blue. I won't include her name here, obviously, but she's given me permission to share this little exchange. Calvary Road (whose name you will read below) is the church that I attended until I was in the sixth or seventh grade.

 * * *

Hi Aaron. I don't know if you remember me. I was thinking of us as kids and remembering what a cool kid you were. Just looked you up and saw how successful you have become. Just wanted to tell you congratulations.

Of course I remember you! Thank you so much. I don't always feel so successful, but things are indeed going pretty well!

I was reading up on you. You seem to have found your purpose. And you help others too. That's amazing. I'm happy for you. It must have been hard for you at Calvary Road. I'm sorry for anything that you went through there. You were (and are) such a creative soul and an inspiration to me.

This is very sweet of you to say. It is one of the sincere missions of my life to become more generous and to give more and be kinder to others. As for Calvary Road, I don't know... I think adolescence is difficult anyway. In many ways it was quite hard - feeling always that I didn't fit in and feeling always like there was something wrong with me. 

This was my church growing up. But without the fancy doors.

But, it is funny: I always say that that church turned me into a gay man, actually. I am not sure if I would have become gay had not the pastor of that church constantly vilified queer people – pointed them out as different and evil. I, as a boy, felt different, sinful, and strange, as though I didn't fit in, so when I heard about gay people as bad, different, etc. I thought to myself Oh I must be that thing.

In many ways, I think that the church gave shape to my life through that vilification. It's odd. Of course, I think the church did a great deal of damage to me too, mentally and physically (since so much of what our bodies become begins in our brains), and I am very sorry about that. And... then there are my parents, who will never quite know how to love their queer son the way I would like them to love me.

But... perhaps my work now is aimed at redressing a lot of those things, and maybe I am gaining a good amount of satisfaction by attempting to make more space in the world for people like me (and not like me).

Sorry that was a really long answer, but I am feeling introspective today and I appreciated the sensitivity of your comment.

I love your response. I'm honored that you shared it with me. Growing up in that church was difficult and damaging. I didn't see the light until I was 30 (yikes) and they were sabotaging a budding relationship. I ended up leaving because of that. And it wasn't until I was married to my husband for several years with kids that I realized that I didn't fit into the normal heterosexual box. I remember being afraid I was gay as a child and teen. Now I know it's more complicated than that. Not exactly sure what I am, but it's funny when my husband and I check out the same woman.

I think of you often and wish that I could have been a better friend growing up.

And that pastor is dangerous. His words are dangerous. I go to therapy to re-program those things that I learned. He has damaged so many. And it has turned me off of religion.

I’ve been thinking a lot about these things recently because I have been (up until a couple weeks ago) dating a man who is very involved with Christianity and hasn’t figured out (yet) how to reconcile his faith and his queer desire.

And maybe sometimes it does take until age 30.

* * *

I've written about this before – about Christianity and queerness – in my piece in QED from a year or two ago. And I was angry for a long time, rejecting Christianity outright and really being furious with Christianity and what it does to queer people as they grow up. But I have changed my mind in recent years – this has a lot to do with my efforts to understand and empathize with queer Christian students for whom Christianity is still very generative – and I am neither hostile toward Christianity per se nor to belief in a god per se anymore. At least I don't think I am. This has taken me a very long time, though.

There is much more to say about my relationship with this Christian man, too. But I am not ready to narrativize my love for him yet. I am not yet prepared for our relationship to turn into a mere story.

Last Days in the Desert

I love Rodrigo García's work, but Last Days in the Desert did not work for me at all. Maybe it was the white people playing all the roles; maybe it was the fact that Ewan McGregor played both Jesus and the Devil; maybe it was the fact that García's film never asked a question to which it didn't already know the answer. Either way, I was bored.

Violence Untold

Gary Shore's 2014 film Dracula Untold is easily one of the worst movies of the year, and I got so bored that I had to watch it in two parts. I finished off the absurdity this morning, though, and I have some questions.

First, the plot of Dracula Untold involves Vlad Țepeș, the Impaler, apparently after he has become the Impaler but before he becomes Dracula. Fine, but when he meets the vampire who transforms him into Dracula, he makes some kind of deal with him. He can have crazy-ass awesome vampire powers for three days, and then he can go back to being human if he doesn't feast on human flesh during those three days. The rub is this: his yearning to feast on human flesh will be "insatiable" during those three days.

This is part of the plot of Dracula Untold, but of course his desire to feast on human flesh is not at all insatiable, and in fact it sort of comes and goes at the screenwriters' whims. But what got me thinking is the way that the movie thinks of the self. Vlad is able to transform into a kind of cloud of bats. He leaves his human, Vlad-form behind when he wants to move quickly, and then he can fly. You can actually sort of see this a little in the poster. He doesn't become one bat, he becomes a colony of bats. So: how does a colony of bats desire? What does it mean for a cloud of bats to want something, to hunger? This is an important Deleuzean question. Vlad the Impaler – not a singular being but rather a wolfpack, a machine, a colony of bats – desires to feast on flesh. What is desire, then, if it is divided among the pack, shared among the multiple pieces that are Vlad?

Obviously, Dracula Untold does not actually ask this question, but I did while I was watching.

The other thing that Dracula Untold made me think about was this sort of absurd trend in recent cinema whereby a character whom we have all understood for many years to be villainous and evil is redeemed through an origin story that makes this evil villain out to be (surprise, surprise) actually a really great person, totally someone I would let my kids play with and ask to be in my wedding party. I'm thinking specifically of Maleficent, of course, in which we discover that Maleficent (far from the implications of her name) is actually a fabulous fairy godmother, watching over her little goddaughter. Dracula Untold functions in precisely the same way, and it is worth noting that the reason that we know that these characters are good, even though they do terrible things, is that they, like, really love their kids. If you really love your kids and if you do terrible things in order to protect your kids, you are actually still a really good person inside.

The ideological project of this kind of narrative is made all the more obvious in a film like Dracula Untold. The film somehow consistently reminds us that this is a story of Vlad the Impaler, the man who took pleasure in torturing his victims, who was known for utilizing extraordinary torture methods such as – stop me if you've heard this one – inserting a spear through a man's body without damaging any vital organs so that he isn't killed but will live for three days in pain. But Vlad the Impaler is a good guy, because he is violent only because there is a power much much worse who doesn't love kids but wants to turn them into child soldiers.

Eyeliner makes all British actors look vaguely "oriental"

So torture is justified, and violation becomes a good thing. He does it for the children. (There is actually only one child in the entire film, but we'll let that go.) It isn't too much of a stretch for me to see in all of this a justification of U.S. torture methods. In fact, the villain is the same: an orientalized mystical other called the "Turks" who ride under the banner of the crescent moon. And they are inhuman and want only to kill, to destroy, to steal our children. Vlad/Dracula becomes much much worse, of course. He becomes a monster who kills thousands upon thousands of people, feasting on their blood and bodies, and laying waste to an entire land. But the film justifies the violence committed by the good guys (Vlad/Dracula/USA). Without them, we would all be dead, so it is all worth it.

At the end of Dracula Untold, the son, this lone child, is taken away by a faux-Christian monk wielding a crucifix, and what we see as the film ends is something totally different from what we've been watching for the last ninety minutes. Dracula Untold jumps into 2014. It's been five hundred years, and Dracula is hanging out in some wealthy, overcast, English-speaking metropolis. The son he loved has been forgotten completely (dying in the middle ages, presumably). Instead, he seduces a woman by quoting some very old poetry, and he kisses her hand and calls her "my lady". Then Charles Dance, drumming his in-need-of-a-manicure fingernails on a table in an outdoor café, gets up, walks toward the camera, buttons his suit, and says to us Let the games begin. This is actually just bad storytelling: what these "games" are is not clear, but the audience is simply supposed to leave thinking about what fun it would be to have all of the power, sex appeal, and mystery that come with being a vampire.

Au revoir, l'enfant

And this is what makes the whole thing clear to me. As much as Dracula Untold is an origin story, invested in justifying the horrific and extreme violence of its protagonist through recourse to the love of a child, what the film really wants to do is dispense with this business quickly and altogether so that we can get on with the "games", with the fun of having power but not having to deal with childcare. Dracula Untold actually kills the child at the end of the film (he's been dead, in fact, for five hundred years). The film's investment in reproductive futurity is a ruse made apparent by its final sequence, a sequence not invested in the child at all but invested in the pleasure of wielding power, of wielding it not in order to protect anyone (children least of all) but for the sake of power itself. This type of dramaturgy, whereby the reasons behind acts of extreme violence like torture are narrativized in order that they might be justified, is the same exact technique used by our own government as they attempt to justify USAmerican acts of torture in the twenty-first century... against an enemy that looks surprisingly similar to the one Vlad the Impaler fought in Dracula Untold's version of the fifteenth century.

Noah

This post is about Darren Aronofsky's bizarre religious film Noah. I decided to have a conversation about the movie with my buddy Rick. Our own religious backgrounds are slightly different (Rick was raised Catholic and I was raised Baptist), so we have different takes on the way the movie uses religion, but unsurprisingly the same take on the quality Aronofsky's film.

Aaron: First off, when you think of the Noah story, you think: rain, giant boat, animals, dove, rainbow. Those are the standard images, right? There is also this story in the bible where (after the flood) Noah gets drunk and his sons see him naked and cover him. (As a child I thought this part with the naked man was very important.)

Rick: The most fun part of the Noah story is obviously the animals! But Aronofsky makes the bizarre choice of not showing us one single moment with a real animal. Noah and his family don't even collect the animals; the animals, CGI all of them, come to Noah, quickly running into the ark where they're put to sleep by some kind of incense.

Aaron: Right. All CGI and all oddly napping.

Rick: This could have been hugely entertaining cinema, right here. You could have comic relief, obviously ("This one's definitely male"), but also a chance for real spiritual reflection. Maybe Japheth has a moment where he realizes, Hey, this aurochs is another living being, we're all part of God's creation, etc.

Aaron: But the film's version of the god's power is really one of violence and power, no? I mean, the god of the Old Testament is essentially vengeful and terrifying. The film gets that part right – although it is unmoored from any spiritual arrangement. The god in Noah is more like a king or a government.

Rick: In fact, Noah and his family have no agency at all, because not only do they not collect the animals, they don't actually build the ark! The ark is built by what I can only assume are the beings of Genesis 6:4: King James calls them "giants"; my Catholic bible calls them the Nephilim. Darren Aronofsky apparently thinks they're like the rock monster from The Neverending Story. In the movie, they tell Noah that they're fallen angels, but the bible says that they're the result of sexual intercourse between angels and humans, which aside from being biblically faithful, would have been a hell of a lot more interesting from a storytelling standpoint.

Aaron: The nephilim? Giants who are not fallen angels, as the film would have it, but (according to Genesis), the men of old, who were the children of (apparently male) angels and the "daughters of men". The way they worked in Noah made me think of a kind of Hebraic tradition of golems. That's how Aronofsky apparently saw them, but the way they are described in the film is a generic blending of the myth of the fall of Lucifer (who does not really appear in this film) and the Greek story of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to the humans. Aronofsky is Jewish anyway, right? He is not a Christian, so his relationship to the bible is going to be much different from ours (not that I'm a Christian either.)

Rick: But the film's relationship to morality and spirituality is what I'm interested in. Why does God bring the Flood? Because of the wickedness of man. But the movie never shows you in a concrete way just how wicked man has become. You see some men acting like douchebags, and the narrative text in the opening sequence tells you that the descendants of Cain created an "industrial" society. In this same vein, you never see why God loves Noah so much. But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord, says Genesis 6:8. According to Aronofsky, he found this favor because he told his kid once, Hey, don't pick that flower if you don't need it. The thing is, the story in the bible is pretty short, and presented rather journalistically. But given the opportunity to flesh the whole story out, Aronofsky presents the events in the same way. The God of the Old Testament is a bastard. And a fascinating, complicated character! He's capricious, vengeful, loving; Moses even argues with him. But He's barely present in this movie.

Aaron: My favorite characters, for exactly this reason, were the Ray Winstone (descendant of Cain) and Logan Lerman (Ham) figures. Winstone's character understands that he is made in the god's image, right? And so this means that everything he does is justified. His decisions are reflections of the god's own decisions. He mirrors the god. He knows this. But still the god refuses to talk to the descendant of Cain. And he begs him: talk to me. Why won't you speak to me? The arbitrariness of the entirety of the god's decisions is so clear in these moments that we spend with Ray Winstone. The god doesn't like that guy, but - as you say - we never really are told why he should choose this guy over the other.

Rick: Probably the deepest problem with the whole movie is that at its heart is a contempt for humanity. There's never a moment where Noah displays uncommon kindness towards another person or even acts in a way that makes him particularly likeable. All he does is stoically look after his family, which is, as Chris Rock once said, what you're supposed to do, motherfucker! And aside from Ham's barely-sketched love interest in the latter half of the film, not one human being who is not a member of Noah's family is portrayed sympathetically. The movie never once encourages us to ask, Hey, maybe God's making a poor choice here, and Noah himself never questions humanity's fate. At the end of the film, Hermione tells Noah that he's a good person because he "chose love." This is a sort of vaguely Catholic-ish value, but the theological idea of love (based on my layman's understanding) is first of all, a New Testament concept, and secondly, not love for your family, but caritas, or love for humanity. Which this movie clearly does not have.

Aronofsky's The Fountain

Aaron:  I found the way that the film portrayed Noah's (not the film's) contempt for humanity strange. Noah totally goes off the deep end, right? I mean, he sincerely believes that humanity needs to end, and I am intrigued by this because there are these radical left-wing sects that believe that the planet would be better off without humanity. Anti-humanists and then other people who refuse to reproduce, who plan only to die out. The film rejects this as completely psychotic, of course, which is why it interests me – as a kind of rupture in a narrative that assumes we all are on the side of heterosexual reproductive futurity. (Which you might style as the vaguely Catholic-ish value "love"). As for Hermione's argument about "love" at the end of the film, the argument is identical to the one that the Descendant of Cain uses. I was made in the god's image, therefore everything that I do is a reflection of the god and, therefore, the right thing to do. This is, to my mind, identical to what she says at the end of the movie: The god chose you because it knew that you would do what is right, therefore, everything you've done is right. I am, I suppose, agreeing with you that the arguments for what is morally correct here are tortured beyond all sense and end up being just vaguely liberal.

Malick's The Tree of Life

Rick: It just seemed utterly drained of any theology or spirituality. I spent the entirety of the film wishing it had been directed by Terrence Malick, because he has a knack for making a scene seem suffused with spiritual meaning (Noah even has an "evolution" sequence somewhat like the one in Tree of Life).

Aaron: An odd thing, really, since Aronofsky's π as well as his later effort The Fountain (both of which I loved), both interrogate spirituality in rich, fascinating ways. But I for one am glad Malick isn't wasting his time on nonsense like this. I was initially interested in this movie because I am interested in revisioning Biblical mythology from modern points of view. I am interested in stories about old gods and our relationships with them. But, as you say, the god doesn't ever show up in Noah. He just flexes his muscles. For me the god was most present in the film when Ray Winstone was begging him to speak to him and he was answered only with silence. This, to me, is a much more modern understanding of how a person's relationship with god might work. Noah has it both ways – three ways, really. The god is an old man with white hair in the mountains, and the god is in the sky sending the rain, and the god is in your dreams at night. The whole thing was a big ol' mess.

Rick: A total mess, with too much CGI, crappy, ponderous writing, one-dimensional characters, and no moral message beyond Be a good person, and maybe don't eat so much meat. Oh, and every human being alive on Earth today is descended from white people.

Atheist Stories V

I have a lot of atheist friends. And a few of them have asked me to revisit my series Atheist Stories, posts that contained testimonials of conversion stories explaining each person's own relationship with atheism or agnosticism and (of course) faith more generally. For some background, you could visit the first post in the series, but, in brief, a couple of summers ago I became curious about how many atheist friends I had and about their own stories and journeys. I have found these tales nuanced and fulfilling, and because I identify with so much of what my friends shared with me, I have felt part of a larger community of people who have a faith that makes more sense to me than belief in god does. In any case, my hope is that these testimonies are as accessible and as rich to others. My friends will all be referred to by their first names only.

Sue

I grew up in a large family and with one parent who was a geography professor. The playroom wall was covered with maps, the house was filled with art from Inuit and Native American and early Norse cultures, and we used as picture books an old Time-Life series about life in other countries. I loved looking at the pictures of people in Japan, in Kenya, in Australia, in China. My parents' friends and colleagues from the university came from multiple faiths and cultures. From a very young age I was aware that the world was (and had been) full of people and cultures and religions all very different from mine.

As a family, we attended the Church of England on the the corner. Looking back, I think my parents appreciated the community aspect of church-going: that is, the readily available babysitters, the neighborhood teas, the access to assistance in an emergency, the feeling of community. They also loved the music and the excellent choir at that church. One parent was an atheist (although I did not know that until I was adult). The other one believed.

Christianity seemed pretty cool to me, and I thought I believed. I wanted to believe: I liked the music, the ceremonies with cassocks and gold goblets and incense and chanting, the beautiful stained glass windows, the noble suffering of saints. I thought I did. But then I remember being quite small (under ten years old) and sitting in Sunday School forever wondering about the other people not mentioned in the Bible – the Buddhists, the Hindus, the Jews, the Muslims – and why they weren't mentioned in the stories too much, or what happened to them during the deluge, or if Jesus was the Messiah how could we really know because a lot of other people in the world didn't believe the same, or was everyone else going to hell because they weren't Christian? It all seemed so so arbitrary.

My conversion was not sudden. Scales did not fall from my eyes. But it came about in Sunday School as a gradual process of being unable to reconcile two different versions of the world.

Lane

Growing up in small-town Texas, religion was always a part of my life. Not a huge part, mind you, but Sunday mornings were usually spent at church, and a good majority of Wednesday evenings were spent at church, as well. I did get baptized at least once. I was somewhat active with youth groups and choir/band.

It was never explained to me why we were Christians or why we should be; it was just accepted that we were. When I think about it now, it was the general scare tactics and flawed logic that we all know and love: You can't go to heaven if you don't know God. You can't know God unless you go to church. Bad people go to hell; good people go to heaven.

Honestly, I didn't think much about it and just accepted it as all of my friends and family were Christians and that is what we did or how we were supposed to act. It was our very own shade of normal.

Fast forward a handful of years. I'm now a freshman in college. Living away from home for the first time. Meeting new people and trying to become my own person. About a month into my first semester I met a wonderful woman. She was weird like me, and life was great.

I would come to learn over the course of the next 6 months that she was bipolar. She hadn't been diagnosed yet, but that would come shortly. I forget what happened, but she was acting erratically one night and I flipped out and took her to the ER. Nurses and hospital staff were asking me what happened to her arms. She would cut herself for reasons that I didn't understand then, and I still don't now. She got assigned to a hospital room, and I was given permission to stay the night in the room with her.

The next day her mother showed up and everything kind of went to hell. My girlfriend had told some stories about her mother and how fundamentalist she could be. I always took those stories with a grain of salt because who doesn't have less-than-flattering stories about their parents?

I had met her mother and within about 5 minutes or so she made a statement to me that basically boiled down to God put you in her life so you could watch out for her. Why did you let this happen?

That hurt.

That hurt more than words could ever say. There I was, this stupid college freshman who is trying to play at being an adult. As far as I know, I had never even heard the term "bipolar" before that incident. At this point, I'm fairly certain that I shouldn't have been living on my own, much less trying to be responsible for another person.

As much as I would like to say that I had some sort of witty retort, I didn't. I just listened to what her mother had to say and filed it away for dissection later. And dissect it I did.

What little faith I had to begin with was shaken. I could no longer look at this "God" as a loving individual who had a plan for every one. I mean, you look at the love of your life laying in a hospital bed after making a rash decision because her brain isn't wired the same as everyone else's and tell me that it is part of a master plan. You look them in the eyes and see the pain and confusion and uncertainty and tell me that God loves them.

Once I reached that conclusion, it was all downhill from there. I started questioning relying on this "God". God can't do anything for me that I couldn't do for myself. God doesn't do anything for any one because he doesn't exist.

Caleb

It would be an understatement to say that I "grew up in a Christian home". I delved into my faith as deeply as I could from childhood through adulthood. I read all of the church fathers from Anselm and Augustine to the mainstream Christian apologists like C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton and even Christian mystics like A.W Tozer. I felt a personal connection with god when I meditated and prayed. I had as much genuine faith as any person can be said to have had. I even spent several summers at worldview camps debating with straw-man atheists and learning to better understand their insidious attacks on my faith.

It was actually the worldview training that sparked my first investigations. It occurred to me that all over the world, in other religions and cultures, there must be similar programs teaching similar young people why their view of the world was correct and how to defend their current beliefs against the incursion of other systems. All over the world there were people just like me, born into different circumstances with different experiences, who were equally as convinced of their particular rightness as I was of mine. Had I been born into different circumstances, at this moment I would be just as convinced of some other point of view as I was of my current one. I would be just as sure and armored as I was now but professing in a completely different position and it would be impossible to know it was the "wrong" one.

This led me to the realization that it is impossible to determine the objective truth of any view when drawn from subjective human experiences. And considering that all human experience is based on subjective sensations, even if objective truth existed it would be indistinguishable from any other set of experiences. And if all beliefs are a function of experience, then it renders free will impossible. And in a universe without free will, choice – and thus punishment or reward for actions – has no meaning. With the the objective truth that is required as the basis for any religious belief unknowable, I came to understand that nihilism is the only possible stance for me.

But I missed the comforting arms of faith, so as an unscientific control study I tried practicing the worship of the Valar from J.R.R. Tolkien’s universe for 30 days. It was very satisfying to know that 14 super powerful beings were looking out for me. I prayed to Tulkas in the mornings to give me strength through the day and praised Aulë when my work was good. At night I asked Varda to watch over me and Estë to give me rest. I felt genuine gratitude to the Valar for my good fortune and happiness. Were it not for the extreme rebellion of my intellect, I would still be one of the faithful. This experiment satisfied me that faith was a strong placebo that produced contentment without any divine effort.

After my experiment I spent the same amount of energy exploring my new atheism as I had in practicing my various religious beliefs. And the more that I read of Hawking and Sagan and Greene and Dawkins the more that I realized that this fit the world that I knew and experienced. It explained the universe that I inhabited, not the one that I wished existed.

What you must remember is that I would rather believe in magic, even now. It is pleasurable to believe in a system provides infinite and eternal rewards for the incredibly low commitments that modern Christianity demands. And yet I found that I could not go back. Because not only does Christianity fail the intellectual test of logic, but it fails the emotional test of magic and wonder.

I think that modern Christians expect too little of their religion. The Bible presents a world of poetry and magic where supernatural beings take human and animal forms to do battle for good and evil. People part seas, call fire from the sky, walk on water, stop the sun and come back from the dead. Donkeys and snakes can talk, pigs are infested with demons, god can live in a golden box carried on poles and some guys try to rape two angels before they destroy a town. Those parts are mainly ignored by modern Christians because they don’t actually fit with our experienced realities. Our universe is much less paranormal and governed by natural processes that can be investigated and explained without magic.

I’m not saying that gravity and natural selection aren’t magical in their own way, but they lack the purely human poetry that the creators of mythologies seek to build. The Bible seems much more likely to have been invented by humans seeking to inject magic into a universe they wished for rather than an explanation of the universe that we actually live in.

I want to believe in a god in the same way that I want to believe in dragons; a world in which they existed would be a better and more fulfilling world. And yet we have as much proof for one as the other.

In case you missed them:
Part I. / Part II. / Part III. / Part IV.

Out?

The last time someone came out to me was Friday morning.

People come out to me more often than you might think, actually. These are students, mostly: young people who are working through a lot of things. For many of them, I am the first person over thirty that they've told, and they are seeking advice or support or sympathy.

The so-called closet (I am not fond of the term) is obviously a complicated device and I am careful whenever anyone decides to tell me that he or she is coming out of it.

I have a number of contradictory thoughts on this topic, however. I don't believe that people ought to be compelled to tell me they are queer in some way, but then, last term I was teaching a course called Sex & Drama, and I had two gay – or somewhat gay – students who never told the (apparently entirely heterosexual) class that they were gay. These students never publicly identified, even for the purpose of the course and its subject material, with the gay characters in the performances we examined. I thought it all so strange!

But, of course, from what I know about social pressures at this College – they are fairly intense and rather socially conservative – I can assume these students had a good reason for their silence. And they are entitled to that silence.

In regard to celebrities announcing their queerness, I deplore the pressure put on these figures to "come out". Most of these people are out. They are carrying on relationships, have kids, their families all know, and (to put even more fine a point on it) we know. We know they are gay or queer and we don't even know them. So to whom are they "coming out"? It seems to me fairly clear that the answer to that question is "straight people". And why ought that to be important to any of us?

More to my purposes for writing this today, you will have noticed that I am hedging my bets on calling celebrities or my students "gay". I worry about a term like this because I am not entirely sure of what gay means, and I think it is important to recognize that we don't all experience identifications in the same way.

When I had the big sexuality conversation with a former student to whom I am very close, he assumed that I already knew what he was about to tell me, and so he said something like "well, I figure you know what I am gonna say, so...". And the truth is: I did and I didn't. My experience of being gay is one thing – I experienced it as a deeply ingrained piece of me that I wanted to hide from my Christian parents, and now I experience it as a way that I live my life: a public choice I make on a daily basis to celebrate my own queerness, to seek out other queer people, to consume as much queer culture as possible. But what did being gay or queer or bisexual mean to my former student? I didn't know the answer to that and knew I didn't.

I'm seventeen in this photograph. Lifetimes ago.

One of the troubles with the narrative of "coming out" is that it assumes that we all come out the same, and that once "out" we are all the same - that we've all come out of something nebulous and dark and repressive and now we're all out and proud and happy. But "coming out" is just a story. (The standard version goes more or less like this: I was born gay, I struggled with my gayness all through my adolescence and I felt very conflicted, silenced, and filled with self-hatred through most of my teenage years, but it gets better, and now I am somewhat of an adult and I can tell you that "this is who I am" and I am happy.)

When we fit our lives to the "the story", the story itself takes over. For myself: I don't believe that I was born gay, I didn't struggle with my gayness all through my adolescence, and I was very in love with a young woman when I was in high school. Oh but who can remember? The truth is that the story takes over. We can't escape it. I started high school twenty years ago, and "the story" is so much a part of our collective consciousness of what it means to be a gay person in the 21st century United States that I can no longer remember what I was thinking back then. I can only remember the story.

So now when someone tells me that she is gay, I want to hear what that is like for her, what it means to her, how she has bent her life around that concept.... Or not! There are so many of us. I know so many different queer people – and they live such different lives. The next time someone tells me he or she is gay, I want to begin to respond with something like Welcome to the family, but tell me more. I want to know how you think about queerness and how you experience that queerness.

52163 over 16604

I think that the first thing to note about Life of Pi is that it is basically a kids' movie. It's rated PG (a fact I had apparently not noticed before buying my ticket). I had also forgotten that Life of Pi is in 3D. (The 3D works quite well and enhances the picture nicely, by the way; it isn't simply an unnecessary addition used to increase the price of your ticket.)

Ang Lee's film takes Yann Martel's survival novel (the book works like The Swiss Family Robinson and Robinson Crusoe) and makes a kind of fairytale out of it, something magical and filled with wonder. In fact – and how often does one get to say this? – the movie is better than the novel. Much better. Lee is able to use both CGI and 3D in ways that bring the story to life in a way Martel's prose never does. The film works more like 2001: a Space Odyssey or one of Jules Verne's great novels, where there are always new things to discover, and the world is a place of remarkable synchronicity and spectacle.

Lee and his screenwriter David Magee (the magical storyteller behind Finding Neverland) also manage to deal brilliantly with the book's incredibly problematic third section. The movie cannot escape its source material's insistence on the quote power of storytelling unquote (something I found clichéd in both the novel and the film), but it manages to deal with the pitfalls of this banal aphorism by using the medium of film itself – well, digital cinematography, anyway – to illustrate the power of cinematic storytelling. You'll see what I mean when you see the picture. The end of the film is never shown, only narrated, whereas we see the entire middle section of the film, we're in it. The second version of the tale feels less real – necessarily so – because we never actually see it. Gérard Depardieu does not eat Bo-Chieh Wang's leg.

The performances are lovely. Suraj Sharma, in his first film role, is great as the younger Pi, and Irrfan Khan (whom you know from Slumdog Millionaire and Mira Nair's films Salaam Bombay! and The Namesake) is just superb as the older, Canadian Pi. Irrfan Khan gives one of my favorite performances of the year, in fact. He is truly lovely in the film. Indian megastar Tabu is also great as Pi's mom. I want to say, too, that I loved Mychael Danna's music. It's absolutely beautiful, and can hold its own with any other of this year's scores.

I had been worried about the CGI in the movie, and the truth is that Life of Pi doesn't always look real. In fact, an overwhelming majority of it looks computer-generated. But Lee deals with this, as well. The realistic scenes with Irrfan Khan and Rafe Spall, his interlocutor in Montréal in the present day, all have a similarly CGI-inflected feel. The effect of this is that the "real" feels artistic and computerized from the beginning, so that when a tiger jumps toward the camera (a lovely homage to Apocalypse Now) it struck me as just as "real" as the scenes at the adult Pi's kitchen table in Québec.

Like I said, though, Life of Pi is a kids' movie. Lee and Magee have softened the book's violence for the film. Violence always exists just out of the view of the camera; there is no blood at all (a shocking artistic choice, really); and one never truly feels that Pi is in any danger whatsoever. The cannibalism and murders in the book are completely excised for the film, allowing the movie to avoid the strange feeling I had when I finished the novel, that all of this fantasy and the cliché of "the power of storytelling" covered over something much more sinister. The film has none of these complications, making for a more straightforward tale, and to my mind a much less troubling one.

The religious element of the novel takes up a similar amount of space as it does in Martel's novel. I fail – as I did in the book – to understand how this section of the story makes any sense or has any relation to the rest of the tale. Sure, it's comical; Pi is a Hindu, a Christian, and a Muslim, and apparently sees no contradiction in combining the three religions. The film makes him a sort of Kabbalist, as well. But gods have basically nothing to do with the story/stories of Life of Pi. This is a tale of a young man and a Bengal tiger. The addition of religion seems a digression (at least it did to me) in both the novel and the film. At the very least, the tale told by Pi – his total abandonment of religious dogma and, indeed, many moral principles, while at sea due to (obviously) hunger and its attendant madness – seems to demonstrate the deficiencies of dogma when confronted with true life-or-death struggles such as, oh, you know, being abandoned at sea for the better part of a calendar year.

The film of Life of Pi is less about gods and more about the universe. This movie is a kind of paean to the beauty of the world in which we live, the world we think we know, but which holds many wonders that we can see if only we pay attention: the ocean and its vastness, the many animals of the world, the stars and the solar system, the extraordinary fact of edible plant life, even evolution. Life of Pi asks us to be grateful for these gifts, and entreats us to look at them with new eyes, thanking the universe for what it has granted us, that it has allowed us to perceive even the small part of the splendor it allows us to access.