There is a trend in nearly every culture to try and adapt, in its stories and tales, other cultures to their own, for the sake of relevance and interest. In the medieval days, poets and fireside storytellers took legends about a roman commander named Arthur from the dark ages and made them relevant to their own day, speaking of chivalry and knighthood. In the mid-nineteenth century slaves told stories of Moses leading his people to freedom, something they greatly desired themselves; the same is true of twenty-first century western culture, where we, as those before us, twist and shape old stories to fit our own way of viewing things.
However, there is a pivotal difference that separates merely making one’s story relevant, to completely changing the moral of an old story. In many films and novels being written and brought to the screen today, relevance is not so much the issue as is persuasion and politics. I didn’t think much about this until, when, a couple of summers ago I stumbled into the movie theatre to watch a new film by Ridley Scott, prepared to be awed. I was a fan of his previous work, and expected no less from his new film,
Kingdom of Heaven. The storyline promised to be of interest to me, a history-buff, being about the medieval crusades to retake the Holy Land from the Muslims of the southeast. The beginning of the film was no less promising than I had thought it would be; showing the massing of the Christian armies preparing for war; all of the costumes looked period-perfect, and an early fight-scene seemed genuinely real. I braced myself for a tale of heroism similar to that found in
Gladiator or even
Braveheart.
Yet near the film’s ended, a bitter taste filled my mouth. Instead of fighting the heroic and honor-filled battle to the death which a knight of the thirteenth century would not have hesitated to do, Orlando Bloom in all his prettiness, surrendered the city. This in and of itself wasn’t enough to insure my dislike of the film as a whole, but as Bloom’s character stepped back into the city after waving the white flag, the entire city cheered for him like he had won some great victory. But in medieval society, he would have not been some revered hero for giving up, for surrendering; he would have been an outcast.
The foul taste continued hours after the film’s end, as I wondered what went wrong. I later discovered that the talented Mr. Ridley had not required the actors in his film to learn the historical significance of the events portrayed, nor the background of the sort of people who would form the backbone of such a culture. Ridley Scott’s interest had not been to make a film of historical accuracy or legitimacy, but to make a statement about something called tolerance, and finding the safest way out.
I normally have no problem with films or novels which are written in order to make a statement. Many of my favorite stories are explicit in their beliefs; I freely admit that. That is not where I take issue with such a film—my basis for judging a film is not whether the director is a liberal or a conservative. However, Mr. Scott, in causing the hero of the film, a knight of the chivalric era, to abandon everything that knights of the time period stood for, effectively castrated the film. Where is the power in the story of a character who gives up what he believes in?—yet that in and of itself is not the problem—it is when that surrender is celebrated that things get sticky.
Kingdom of Heaven could have been a great film about a man who failed; yet Mr. Scott had other things to say. Post-modernity infiltrated a classical culture and as a result the film loses any power that it could have had otherwise.
Another film that poignantly (if less so than Scott’s film) portrays the infiltration of post-modern thought into a different time period is
King Arthur, starring Clive Owen and Keira Knightly. The film retells the ancient legend of Arthur and his knights using the original sources of the tale, for the most part, effectively. Arthur is well-played by Owen, who holds to Arthur’s traditionally strong sense of morality, yet the mental makeup of several other important characters—such as Lancelot and Guinevere—are significantly changed to represent the more contemporarily popular attitudes of self-centeredness and feminism. All sorts of ideas float into the picture heretofore unseen in the great legend—premarital sex between Arthur and Lady Guinevere, a rather unheroic and sulking Lancelot, women fighting alongside the men in battle. Instead of being inspired by a fairly well-told tale, we are distracted by seeing the issues of post-millennium America quietly uprooting the motives and actions of pre-medieval characters.
I would like to make it clear that I am not against directors and writers promoting their own ideas. However, when one’s own politics do not fluidly match those of the people one is attempting to portray, the story falls apart.
Relevance is not truly found in making a different person’s situation like your own; it is in finding the relevance in that person’s situation. We as Christians are in just as bad a need to realize this as our secular counterparts; one has only to walk into a Christian bookstore to realize this. Just as filmmakers such as Ridley Scott strip medieval culture of its honor and chivalry, we at times strip our own American culture of its reality. In order to make good, relevant art we must walk down the center of the road, and while filtering everything through our own worldview, not forcing everything to fit into our worldview’s own box.
So now here's the official cover of Coach's Midnight Diner, click the link to check out some short teasers about each story (other great writers such as J. Mark Bertrand, Chris Mikesell, and Suzan Robertson, etc. will be featured). As I mentioned before, this will be my first in-print publication. My story, "The Water Rises," was originally submitted to Relief Journal last spring. The editors at Relief rejected it, but Coach Culbertson, their tech editor, emailed me and said that I should resubmit it for the Diner, a genre anthology he would be opening submissions for in the winter. Well, I submitted it and here we are. It's interesting though, that it's taken an entire year from the initial submission to publication. That's how publishing works, folks.
