I’m sure you’re all aware of the massive blockbuster success of the movie ‘The Hunger Games’ at cinemas at the moment.  If you don’t know what it’s about, the story is set in a futuristic world where the government chooses two young people from each district to compete in the ‘Hunger Games’ – a fight to the death, broadcast on national TV.

Sounds sick, right?  Defenders of the books and the movie say that it’s a critique of totalitarian regimes – and I was inclined to believe the best and think so too until I saw this video from ‘Good Reading Guide’:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suaPDw8LY5M&feature=player_embedded

The points she makes are good ones, and considering how popular this movie is, it’s good to know exactly what it’s about and whether or not you’d want your kid or children you know to see it.  A friend of mine has seen it, and said it’s definitely not a movie for children to see – you see people being killed, graphically – and the message is dubious.

These are the points the reviewer makes:

- The issue is survival – and the ‘good guys’ kill in a more ‘gentle’ way than the bad guys – but they’re still killing.  Survival is not always the most important thing, especially when it involves doing bad things to someone else.

- Stopping suffering through mercy killing is portrayed as heroic – it’s not. It’s still taking a person’s life.  One form of killing is not ‘better’ than another – murder is murder.

- The main characters are ‘de-sensitised’ – waxed, made to overcome modesty, faking affection and openly displaying this – and it’s written/shown in a way that makes this de-sensitisation sound glamorous/cool.. not a great message to be sending out, especially to teenage girls.

- The main character says she doesn’t agree with the regime that forces them to do what they do – but she plays along with it and is made a hero for it – it’s like a Nazi blaming the regime that made him do what he did, but the reality is, he still did bad things.

- She’s made out to be a great rebel – but look at her actions:  she’s not rebelling against injustice, but just trying to save her friends and family.  She deplores the widespread violence and killing of innocent civilians – but then kills one herself when he gets in her way.  It is morally inconsistent.

- This series makes injury and death into entertainment – which in any light is not good. Is it good to turn someone’s graphic death into our entertainment?

In classics and history class we were always taught how barbaric and terrible the Gladiator games of Ancient Rome were – but look, we’re doing it today – and is the fact that we’re just fictionalising it and putting it on a screen make it any better, any more sanitised, any less barbaric?

The irony is, at the Box Office this weekend was another movie that also did extremely well – ‘October Baby’, an anti-abortion drama, brought in the second-highest takings at the box office – but we don’t hear much about the great popularity and success of those sorts of films in the media, do we?

Apologies for the empty spaces the last two Wednesdays – no I didn’t give up posting for Lent..

Last week I went to the Degas to Dali exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery.  It was great; but there could have been more Dali (you really have to look for them – I think there were 2).

While I was there, I went to a talk by the Curator of the National Galleries of Scotland, Simon Groom.  The talk was interesting – he was a great speaker and very funny.  Unfortunately he made some very silly comments about religion (silly in the uninformed sense) and used the phrase ‘utterly remarkable’ a little too frequently while discussing the modern artworks for it to be entirely convincing as an adjective.

One of the artworks he discussed was a large scaffolding-like metal frame with the words “THERE WILL BE NO MIRACLES HERE” on it.  It had been placed in the grounds of the art gallery, with a backdrop of a church spire and part of the city of Edinburgh.  He told us that the artist had taken the quote from a King of some place or other in history, who had visited a part of his kingdom where miracles were taking place frequently, and being an atheist himself the King gave a public order that “There will be no miracles here”.  (Mr Groom didn’t say whether the miracles obeyed the King or not).  The spot on which the artwork had been placed by the gallery was very topical, Mr Groom said, because as our modern society was moving away from superstitions like religion, the quote was a bold statement from an enlightened new age of science and reason that does not need miracles because it is embracing the ‘cold hard reality of life’.

It’s astonishing that a person can stand up in front of a full auditorium and say a thing like that, and far from anyone challenging him, the majority of the audience nod their heads like sheep!

He then began to say that on Sunday mornings, more and more people were visiting art galleries – congregating at art galleries – because it was a place of peace, of beauty, of expression – in effect that modern art galleries are becoming the temples of the secular world. Heaven help us.

Later in the talk, he showed another work by the same ‘no miracles’ artist.  It was a collection of all the churches and places of worship and religion in the city of Edinburgh (I think) replicated in miniature from either wood or cardboard.  Why, as an agnostic, would the artist create pieces of work like these?  Why is he clearly unable to leave the question of religion alone?  Clearly he is searching for truth.

Despite the protests of modern art and culture against religion, the fact is, people still feel the need to protest against it, or to attack it, or to question it.  If indeed the modern art galleries are becoming spaces of secular worship, perhaps it is because there is something about art that makes one confront the higher questions of life.  Perhaps that’s why the Sunday morning crowds at art galleries are increasing – perhaps consciously or subconsciously, they are all searching for some deeper transcendental truth in life that science can’t give them.  The question that religion poses is one that must be satisfied – it’s a problem with an answer that must be sought out; an insatiable mystery that must be unravelled.

Perhaps the metal and wire decree that ‘there will be no miracles here’ is really a defiant cry of protest that is secretly hoping to be contradicted, hoping for some sign to believe in, hoping for miracles to start taking place once again.

“…Sir,” I answered, “there are certain writers to whom humanity owes much, whose talent is yet of so shy or delicate or retrospective a type that we do well to link it with certain quaint places or certain perishing associations. It would not be unnatural to look for the spirit of Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, or even for the shade of Thackeray in Old Kensington. But let us have no antiquarianism about Dickens, for Dickens is not an antiquity. Dickens looks not backward, but forward; he might look at our modern mobs with satire, or with fury, but he would love to look at them. He might lash our democracy, but it would be because, like a democrat, he asked much from it. We will not have all his books bound up under the title of ‘The Old Curiosity Shop.’ Rather we will have them all bound up under the title of ‘Great Expectations.’ Wherever humanity is he would have us face it and make something of it, swallow it with a holy cannibalism, and assimilate it with the digestion of a giant. We must take these trippers as he would have taken them, and tear out of them their tragedy and their farce. Do you remember now what the angel said at the sepulchre? ‘Why seek ye the living among the dead?…”

The quote above is by G.K. Chesterton (from his essay ‘The Dickensian’) – in the context of Chesterton walking around Yarmouth with an old man in a straw hat, talking with him about Dickens.  They look for shades of Dickens here and there, but upon entering a church and seeing the statue of an angel made to represent the one at the Holy Sepulchre, Chesterton’s character rushes off  - to do a multitude of things and to see and experience the life and society of Yarmouth – because Dickens is not to be found in grey shades and whispers among the dead; his legacy and message are very much things of the living world, the present – ‘Dickens looks not backward but forward’.

On the 200th anniversary of Dickens’ birth, most of the tributes to his life and literary legacy mention how relevant his works and messages still are for today’s world.  His concern for the poor and downcast in society and the incredible humanity and beauty he infused his characters and stories with made the world see itself in a new light, and in the ‘Hard times’ of today’s world his messages are still relevant, and his humour is so necessary.  There is so much that can be said about him – but the most important thing is to read him.

“There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.”

- Charles Dickens