Easy Listening?

QUESTIONING THE VALUE OF COMFORT IN CHRISTIAN ART

To what degree is art supposed to be soothing?

This question, a large-scale issue in theological aesthetics, recently pressed itself upon me in some smaller ways.

Case in point: not long ago I gave a CD of a favorite musician to a friend. She didn’t like it at all, explaining, “You know me, I like music that’s mellow.”

Now, to be clear, I find no fault in easy listening, the songs of Norah Jones have been known to haunt my iPod. But behind the desire for all musical things mellow, I sensed a deeper distrust of art which aims to rattle our audio/visual cages.

This seems to be a common kind of reasoning, especially in the Christian circles within which I operate. Again and again, I’ve found my taste in movies, music and fiction called into question. “Why do you like such depressing movies?” my friends ask, with more than a hint of accusation in their voices.

To some degree, their suspicion is understandable; as Christians, we often claim a spiritual, even scriptural prerogative for all that enters our eyes and ears. We’re called to a life of wonder and worship, focusing on God’s grandeur, so why would I spend hours, alone in the dark, imbibing art which aims to communicate despair and destruction?

For me, this question was first (and best) raised by Schindler’s List.

On its release in 1993, I was stunned by Schindler’s List. Shot mostly in a dreary black and white, Spielberg gives us a stark look at the Holocaust. Perhaps nowhere is this more vivid than by the fate of the girl in the red coat. Wandering through the mire and slime of the concentration camps, we see a lone girl in red, seemingly unaffected by the horrors around her. Only later, do we see this same girl, taken away on a cart, piled with other bodies to be disposed of.

Here was a look at the Holocaust, which sought to present Hitler’s program of “ethic cleansing” in as the unbridled horror that it was, yet in the midst of such evil, we find the possibility of redemption.
Embodying this redemption is the title character, a Nazi that seeks to “buy Jews” out of the death camps – bankrupting himself while trying to rescue a remnant of innocent lives.

It was difficult to watch, but that made the hope it attested to all the more affecting. I saw it three times that winter.

Some months later, a fellow believer expressed to me his reservations about Spielberg’s Best Picture winner. He preferred to think, he told me, about ‘worthy things,’ quoting Philippians 4:8: “Whatever is pure, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is true – think about such things.”

I could see his point: the Holocaust isn’t noble or pure, it was a vile and cowardly program. At best, the holocaust was a cleverly calculated expression of the human soul at its most excremental. In Schindler’s List, Spielberg aims his unblinking lens at one of the darkest, dirtiest corners of human history: greed, cruelty, and murder.

Of course, all those and more can be found in that oldest of works, The Bible. Add up the elements within that could offend, and the Good Book would rate an NC-17. In scripture we find a story which does not overlook the darkest features of human life, but one which stares them down and offers a deeper, bloodier and ultimately more comforting response to evil: instead of ignoring it, the Bible shows us how God intends to defeat it.

Our culture insists that art is a commodity, for our consumption and satisfaction, like (also wrongly) food, or sex. But the purpose of art, you see, is not to make us feel good, tiding us over till the next time we need it and providing us with reassurance. No— good art unsettles our emotions, and points us to something (some One) other than ourselves.

At its most powerful, art exposes internal conflict and acknowledges our powerlessness. Here are spiritual truths that the Christian should readily identify as cornerstones of faith: our fallen nature and our need for God.

Sin and powerlessness are hardly “satisfying,” though their acknowledgment leads us to a satisfaction deeper than we could imagine. In fact, it is not self-contentment but a deep dissatisfaction with self that is essential to a Christian worldview and to a right relationship with God.

[Andrew Campbell lives in Lexington]

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