Related posts:

1. Charles Darwin film ‘too controversial for religious America’ (Daily Telegraph) Creation, starring Paul Bettany, details Darwin's "struggle between faith and...
2. Why should children study religion Earlier this year, Bjørn Ulvaeus wrote an article in...
3. Five minutes with Richard Dawkins Some brief comments on Richard Dawkins [...]...

The second in the series on apologetics at Above Bar Church, Southampton. This one is considering reasons why it is rational to believe that God exists.

Handout available here.

Related posts:

1. Doctor Who monsters This is a fabulous interactive infographic of all the...

Mike Hertenstein writes a very interesting piece about ‘Movie Nazis’ over at Filmwell. Primarily it’s a piece reflecting on After the Truth, a film written by Americans but finally made by German filmmakers in the late 1990s. But in a long introduction, Hertenstein explores our love-hate relationship with Nazis in films. He examines the way they are often presented as evil incarnate, yet we find often find them compelling. We view them as monsters, and yet, as philosopher Hannah Arendt famously observed at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the reality is that evil often seems banal. I was very struck by the quotation with which Hertenstein begins:

Having failed to recognize one of Hitler’s most specifically diabolical features – his way of localizing all the evil beyond his own borders, so as to make himself appear innocent – we have fallen into the same error as himself: we have made of Hitler an image of the Demon wholly external to our own reality. And while we were watching it with fascination, the Demon approached us again from behind to torment us beneath disguises which could not arouse our suspicions.– Denis de Rougemont, The Devil’s Share

This is an enormously important point. While we can point elsewhere – to anywhere but ourselves – as the place where evil is to be found, we excuse ourselves of moral responsibility. The reality is that evil lives within our hearts too, and we are not so far removed from the ‘monsters’ as we might imagine. We too nurture hatreds, and the notion that our darkest thoughts might at some point express themselves in our actions is horrifying. Yet we must also make moral judgments of those who play a part in such terrible events as the Holocaust. This, it seems, is the dilemma, or the tension, at the heart of After the Truth, which I now am desperate to see.

I’m particularly intrigued to read Mike Hertenstein’s article now, since over the last few weeks I have found myself wondering why there seem to be so many films about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in recent months and years. Good has just been in UK cinemas, and in the last six months or so we’ve also had The Reader, Valkyrie and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. What is especially interesting about these examples is that they don’t simply give us the embodiment-of-pure-evil Nazis that Hertenstein is talking about in the first part of his essay. With varying degrees of success, they face us with the moral dilemmas of being a German citizen in the years before and during the Second World War. Good uses the moral carelessness and compromise of one man as a synecdoche of the entire nation. While some knew perfectly well what they were doing, many simply went with the flow after decades, centuries even, of anti-semitism and years of vigorous pan-Germanic nationalism. This is brought out in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which its author John Boyne describes as a fable. The mother of Bruno, the child at the centre of the story, knows what she thinks about Jews, but has no idea – or chooses to shut from her mind – what her husband’s work involves. And he is presented as a good father early on, with a steady sharpening of the focus on the evil with which he is associated. Such films make us ask how we would have behaved if we had been there, what it would have taken for us to become monsters too. They make us look at the darkness of our hearts and the corruption of our wills, and remind us that we need rescuing.

Related posts:

1. To really see what’s going on in a movie, you need to look Bob Davidson, ‘Eyes Wide Open‘, Christianity Today Movies, 14...
2. Resources for churches and communities: Creation the movie (UK release: 25th Sept.) Charles Darwin: eminent scientist, loving husband, grieving father. The film...
3. Good Directed by Vicente Amorim, starring Viggo Mortensen and Jason...

This article was first published on Damaris’s Culturewatch website, and is used with permission. © Copyright Tony Watkins, 2009

In many ways, State of Play is an old-fashioned journalistic drama in which a shabby, hard-bitten journalist risks the wrath of his demanding editor to unearth the truth. But it is much more than this. It is also a gripping political thriller, full of twists, turns and tension. It does have many familiar elements in it – clichés even – but it’s so well put together that this doesn’t spoil the ride. It’s well written, tightly directed by Kevin Macdonald, and with strong performances from all the leads.

Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck in State of Play (Universal Pictures, 2009)

Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe) is covering the story of an apparently random shooting in Washington DC for his paper, the Washington Globe, when he sees an old friend of his on the news. Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck) is a rising star in Congress. He’s handsome, bright and ambitious, and is chairing a committee investigating defence spending. What catches McCaffrey’s attention is that Collins’s attractive young research assistant, Sonia Baker, has died – and Collins is clearly very cut up about it. McAffrey is irritated when a very junior colleague, the Globe’s political blogger Della Frye (Rachel McAdams), comes to ask if Collins was having an affair with Sonia. McAffrey rebuffs her enquiries, but before long their demanding editor, Cameron Lynne (Helen Mirren) has them working together on the story. It’s a story of deceit, corruption and murder. Apparently unrelated events turn out to be connected, and nothing is quite as it first seems.

State of Play is based on the outstanding BBC mini-series from 2003. The series was written by Paul Abbott, who was very wary about his work being adapted for the big screen. His original was six hours of taut drama, and he was understandably concerned about how it could be condensed down to the length of a feature film. The choice of Kevin Macdonald to direct was critical. He had only made one feature film previously, though The Last King of Scotland was an extremely impressive debut. But his background is as an acclaimed documentary maker and so the theme of digging for the truth of a story resonated very strongly with him. He too was concerned about the problem of distilling the essence of Abbott’s work into two hours. The solution was to change it radically. ‘Although the basic story is the same,’ he explains, ‘there’s a lot that’s very different about it. You realise you can’t make another version of something that was good. You have to reinvent, and that’s what we’ve tried to do.’

Cal McAffrey is untidy, single and doggedly determined to expose the truth. McAffrey may fit the stereotype of an old-school journalist, but he is far from being a two-dimensional character. His friendship with Stephen Collins is complex. Having been room-mates at college, they go back a long way, but it is clear that there has been significant tension between them in the past (for reasons that become clear as the film progresses). However, once all the news media start falling over themselves to speculate on an affair between Collins and Sonia, it is McAffrey to whom Collins turns. They have not been talking about the situation for long before McAffrey’s nose for a story makes him suspect that what appears to be a tragic accident may well be much more sinister. Collins’s work on the defence spending committee is bringing him into sharp conflict with private security firms on which the Government is spending vast sums in the Middle East. Could it be that these commercial interests want Collins out of the picture?

While McAffrey follows up his leads, checks out his sources and (sometimes) files his stories in time for the presses to roll, Della Frye is driven by the need to publish something online as fast as possible. In the blogging world she can’t afford to be second. As far as McAffrey is concerned, she is part of the new breed of upstarts who hardly deserve to be called journalists. The tension between print and online journalism, and the decline in newspapers is an interesting and timely subtheme in the film. R.B. Brenner, Metro editor for the Washington Post remarks, ‘In the old world if a story happened at noon, I’m thinking, “OK, we have ten hours until the deadline and the paper’s going to roll.” Now I need to think, “We have two minutes” because readers are going to start coming to our website and want to know the story right now.” As editor, Cam Lynne is feeling the pressure created by the changing face of journalism. They can no longer afford to sit on a story for a day or two while they establish all the facts, confident that competitor papers are a few steps behind, because the story will already be playing out online, whether accurately or not. Now, she insists, they should go to press with a story even if it’s wrong. Then over subsequent days, they can print revised versions, all of which helps sell the paper. McAffrey, naturally, is something of a rebel and keeps stalling with filing the story. He’s sure there’s more to find out. Cam thinks that McAffrey is paranoid when he suggests that there is a conspiracy. But once he finds an indisputable link between the shooting he’s reporting on and the Collins affair, it is clear that the story is ‘as big and as connected as they get’.

Cal McAffrey is concerned above all else with what is true. Collins accuses his friend of turning him into a story, rather than helping him, but the journalist is convinced that the way to do that is by exposing the corrupt corporate forces at play behind the scenes. ‘We’re going to fight back with our own facts,’ he says. Cam is also unhappy at McAffrey investigating a story involving an old friend: ‘Good reporters don’t have friends,’ she says. ‘Only sources.’ When it comes down to it, McAffrey thinks the same. He will do whatever it takes to get to the truth, whether that means compromising his friendships or acting in dubious ways. ‘Did we just break the law?’ asks Della at one point. ‘No,’ replies her colleague, ‘that’s what you call damn fine reporting.’ This exposes an important tension within Cal McAffrey. On the one hand, he is passionately concerned about truth. And yet, while he demands that people have integrity, his own is sometimes compromised. He would argue that he transgresses the boundaries for the sake of a higher good, the truth of the story, but he is as prepared to do so with the apparently minor stories as well as the obviously major ones.

Despite these compromises, McAffrey’s commitment to truth comes through very strongly. He is not remotely relativist: what is true is really true, no matter how someone else sees it or spins it. ‘This is a real story,’ he says to Della. ‘It’s not open for interpretation and it does not require opinion.’ Kevin Macdonald describes Della as ‘easy with her opinions and not so hard on the facts.’ But once she gets stuck into the story, she too becomes concerned to unearth the truth. At a time when journalism has come to be viewed with suspicion, even cynicism, it’s good to be reminded that truth is still important in the public sphere. McAffrey insists very strongly that people still care about the truth; the public still wants it and deserves to be told it. He’s right: people do still want to know what is really true. The reason both journalists and politicians are viewed so negatively is because we have come to expect that they are spinning a story for us, telling us what we want to hear or making up sleazy allegations in order to discredit someone. ‘There’s a crisis of credibility in journalism,’ says Russell Crowe. ‘Newspapers can taint people to a massive degree and some people never recover from how they’ve been tainted.’ In a recent UK survey, only 3% of those questioned admitted to trusting journalists, and only 1% said they trusted politicians. But this lack of trust is something that matters to us; we wish we could trust these professions. The reality, of course, is that many politicians and journalists are people of integrity; it’s just that we only notice when people get it wrong.

A key question is why we have reached this point where truth seldom seems to matter to politicians and journalists. Part of the answer is that people who are ambitious to get to the top will often become ruthless and put expediency above integrity: anything is justified in the scramble to climb up. Another part of the answer is that the public has developed an apparently insatiable hunger for sensation. We will lap up whatever sleaze and scandal we can find – and thanks to the Internet we can find plenty of it – whether or not it is true. We are guilty of double standards, though. We accuse journalists of playing fast and loose with the truth, yet we are titillated by the salacious stories they give us. It raises the question of how concerned we are with truth and integrity in our own lives. How often do we play fast and loose with the facts, disparage or even slander people behind their backs, and spin stories to cast us in a good light? How ready are we to believe the office gossip rather than take time to establish the facts? We believe in the idea of a Cal McAffrey-like thorough investigation into the facts, yet our day-to-day experience is often much more like Della’s first blog on Collins: quick to point the finger of blame regardless of what the truth is.

The tension between integrity and sleaze is in all of us to some extent. We know that we are moral failures, that we will do all sorts of things in order to put ourselves at the centre – expressions of our rebellion against God – and yet we admire integrity and goodness and, deep down at least, we value truth – the side of human nature which reveals something of the image of God within us. We wish the latter dominated, but we know how easily the former overwhelms us. This is the fundamental problem in journalism, politics and society because the corruption within our hearts is the fundamental problem facing each one of us. Society needs transforming, but transformation happens one person at a time. And the only thing that can really transform us within is the good news of God, in the person of Jesus Christ, taking on himself the punishment we deserve for our rebellion against him, rising from death and sending his Holy Spirit to live and work in those who trust in him. This message, which at times has had a radical impact on public life, is often treated with derision in our society. It is dismissed out of hand, derided and misrepresented. And this is most often by people who have never investigated the facts, never dug and dug to find the truth, but who make snap judgments or simply go along with the crowd, as noted journalist A.N. Wilson has recently admitted to doing when he abandoned Christian faith twenty years ago. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the biggest news there has ever been, and the evidence is there to be examined by anyone who, like Cal McAffrey, is prepared to investigate it thoroughly.

Related posts:

1. The state of the Internet A good summary of where the Internet is right...

This article was first published on Damaris’s Culturewatch website, and is used with permission.
© Copyright Tony Watkins, 2009

How does an ordinary, decent man become part of one of the world’s greatest evils? This enigma is at the heart of Good, and has been pondered over and over, especially with regard to the Holocaust. Within just a few years, the Nazi regime exterminated almost four out of every five Jews living in German-occupied territory during the war, as well as many more from groups they found objectionable. The moral responsibility for this cannot be laid at the feet of a small minority – Hitler, Eichmann, Mengele and the men who willingly worked with them – whom we easily dismiss as monsters. No, it goes much further, as was explored to some extent recently in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. In what ways are the majority of ordinary citizens, who had no connection with what happened in the camps, implicated in what happened? Good, based on the acclaimed play by C.P. Taylor, suggests that everyone who simply goes with the flow is culpable.

The film begins in 1937 with Dr John Halder (Viggo Mortensen), a professor of literature, visiting Berlin to see officials in the Nazi Party. He is interviewed by Herr Bouhler (Mark Strong), chair of the party’s censorship committee about some views which he had expressed in a novel on the right to life – ‘a matter of personal importance to the Führer’. Halder is understandably nervous.

In flashback, we see some of the events which have led to this interview. After the Nazis come to power in 1933, they banned books by Jewish, communist or ‘degenerate’ auhors, and burnt piles of them. Halder is dismayed to see this going on outside the lecture theatre where he is teaching, and even more so when his head of department comes to tell him that he may no longer teach Proust if he wants to keep his job. Naturally he concedes for the sake of his career; this political interfering in the curriculum is surely not much more than a temporary inconvenience. It raises an important question for the viewer: Is this the beginning of a process of disempowerment and persecution against which he will vainly struggle, until he is called to account by Herr Beuhler? Or is it the first of many small compromises? We are kept guessing, but while we viewers know how things will develop in Germany over the ensuing years, at this point, Halder himself has no idea of what is ahead. He just wants to protect his job. He certainly has no intention of joining the Nazi Party – unlike his father-in-law with whom there is some tension over the issue. He and his best friend Maurice (Jeremy Isaacs), a secular Jewish psychoanalyst, are scornful of the party and its ideology, and assume that things will soon return to normal.

Jason Isaacs and Viggo Mortensen in Good (Lionsgate, 2009)

John Halder has other problems which consume his energies away from the university. His wife Helen (Anastasia Hille) is a brilliant pianist, but suffers from some nervous disorder which makes her almost incapable of coping with the demands of being a housewife. Unusually for his time and place, Dr Halder is happy to take care of the domestic responsibilities when he comes home. Helen knows what an unusually caring man her husband is, but she doesn’t realise that the pressure is growing within him. Another burden is his mother (Gemma Jones) who lives with them because she suffers from dementia. When a pretty young student, Anne (Jodie Whittaker), shows an interest in him, Halder is flattered and entranced. When he confesses to Maurice that he is preoccupied by thoughts of her, his friend gives a typically psychoanalytic response: ‘Taking refuge in fantasy might be a rational response to an irrational world.’

At this point, the film takes us forward in time again, to his interview with Beuhler who asks him to write a paper setting out the same argument for euthanasia as in the novel. ‘It is essential,’ Beuhler says, ‘that humanity should be at the centre of our work.’ The party’s flattery of Halder is juxtaposed with Anne’s, and he soon allows himself to be seduced by both. Halder is clearly now making compromises which affect the core of his life, not just his work. He is on a slippery slope, and Good powerfully explores how a succession of steps, many of which are in themselves insignificant (though having an affair is not remotely trivial), can become a journey to hell.

He is repeatedly shown as being unsure of what he should do, but his wife tells him to, ‘Have a little faith in yourself and do the right thing. You always do.’ This may once have been true of John Halder, but is now far from the reality. He does have faith in himself, in the sense that he makes his own choices without consulting anyone, except occasionally Maurice. But his choices are entirely based on what is expedient for him, what will make life easier for him, and never on what is morally right. At one point, Freddie (Steven Mackintosh), his new best friend in the SS, encourages him in his affair, saying, ‘If you’re with us, the old rules no longer apply.’ Halder is a weak man and asks, as if seeking some absolution, ‘Anything that makes people happy can’t be bad, can it?’

Good is a clever, well-structured morality play with a central character with whom one easily identifies, allowing us to feel the difficulties of his situation and the strong temptations that come his way. While Halder’s world is safe, we understand why he thinks that no real harm will come of his actions. He is a good example of the dangers of making decisions on the basis of short-term convenience or happiness, since the longer-term consequences are hard to predict and may be disastrous. There are moments when Halder knows what he should do, but doesn’t do it because it’s not a good time for him. But, as Martin Luther King insisted, ‘The time is always right to do what is right.’ Halder is not simply weak, he is cowardly.

Viggo Mortensen in Good (Lionsgate, 2009)

Halder’s personal circumstances may be improving, but Maurice’s are deteriorating (in fact, the Nazis banned psychoanalysis in late 1933, so his continuing presence at this stage is a little anachronistic). Maurice is delighted at Halder ‘seizing the day’ and moving out of home to live with Anne, but is disgusted when he realises that his friend has joined the party. Halder’s accommodation with the Nazis drives a wedge between them, and things become worse as the party makes things increasingly difficult for Jews. It takes the upheaval of Kristallnacht in November 1938 to make Halder realise just what has happened to him.

One stylistic feature from Taylor’s play which screenwriter John Wrathall retains is the musical interludes. From time to time, Halder thinks he hears the people around him singing extracts of Mahler. These moments make Halder question his sanity, but it is wrong to assume that he is insane, and therefore not in full control of his moral faculties. Rather, these moments reveal something of the pressure and tensions he is experiencing, and they increasingly exemplify his moral madness.

The moral decline of this once-decent man becomes increasingly apparent. And the film uses his moral trajectory to reflect that of the entire nation. Just as he sleepwalks into a nightmare, so does the nation. It is chillingly fascinating to see how this man who believes in freedom ends up contributing to its destruction. A man who begins by loving his wife and mother self-sacrificially becomes a man who only loves himself and fails to act in love to those who need him. A man who begins with teaching about ‘clarity of perception’ from Proust ends in a fog of confusion. Good is a powerful, but bleak, exploration of moral cowardice, which has a great deal of resonance for our own day. C.P. Taylor’s premise was that this story is not just about a particular people at a particular moment in history, but about anyone – and everyone. It is a stark reminder that we must not stand by or make numerous small compromises while liberty is eroded. It challenges us to think seriously about what governments do, to discuss the morality of their actions, to resist ignoring what happens if it doesn’t impact us directly. Very recently we have seen the publication of US Government reports justifying the use of controversial interrogation techniques. The argument is that the ultimate goal of the state’s security warrants these extreme measures, which many consider to be torture. Clearly, security is a very important issue. Nevertheless, the question of whether this is an acceptable compromise, or whether this is a denial of the moral principles for which the United States has historically stood is a vital, though contentious, one. For myself, I find it deeply troubling that ethical principles lose out to the consequentialist argument. John Halder’s first moral compromises were, he believed, the way to freedom – a small price to pay for his greater good. We need to be constantly asking the question of whether our governments are stepping onto the same kind of slippery slope. Good’s greatest challenge to us is to resist compromise, to do what is right, not what is expedient.

Related posts:

1. Greg Jesson on showing the Good in films It is easy to portray human brokenness and the...
2. Good films to discuss I often lead film discussions, and equally often I'm asked...
3. Good films to discuss Here are some suggestions for films which are good...

Today’s fast-paced media could be making us indifferent to human suffering and should allow time for us to reflect, according to researchers.

They found that emotions linked to moral sense are slow to respond to news and events and have failed to keep up with the modern world. . . .

Using brain imaging, they found that humans can sort information very quickly and respond in fractions of a second to signs of physical pain in others, but admiration and compassion – two of the social emotions that define humanity – take much longer. . . .

Manuel Castells, a leading sociology expert at USC said: “The study has extraordinary implications for the human perception of events in a digital communication environment.

“Lasting compassion in relationship to psychological suffering requires a level of persistent, emotional attention.”

He said he was most concerned about fast-moving TV or virtual games, adding: “In a media culture in which violence and suffering becomes an endless show, be it in fiction or in infotainment, indifference to the vision of human suffering gradually sets in.”

The introductory sentences sounds like the news media creating scary hype out of this research. But the rate at which the media torrent (to use Todd Gitlin’s phrase) overwhelms us is something which must provoke some moral reflection. It is a worrying thought that images and ideas, perhaps in juxtaposition though without any real connection, may come at us too quickly for us to react at an appropriate level. And if I read the news item correctly, that only needs six to eight seconds.

I have many thoughts from Gitlin in my head at the moment. I’ll try to blog some of them over the next couple of weeks.

Related posts:

1. Twitter a risk to health as well as morality? Yikes! Daily Telegraph 16 April 2009 Physiotherapists and Repetitive Strain...
2. Twitter, the new shovelware | Media Guardian 10 Sep 09 While newspapers may have flocked to get seen on...
3. Facebook infographic An interesting infographic which was posted on mashable.com: [Source:...