This is the first installment of Zeitgeist Zephyrs, where I will periodically post meandering thoughts about, links to good reviews (sometimes mine), appreciations, and criticisms for different pop-culture phenomena du jour. Spoilers may follow.
Taylor Swift, Bob Dylan, and My Amateur Thoughts on Music. I was able to narrowly score a ticket for my wife to see the Eras tour when it came through here, and so this year I’ve been treated to quite a bit of Taylor Swift’s impressive oeuvre. In an age of music where it feels like the majority of contemporary musicians have basically one sound, one song, or one album that they achieve notoriety for before fading from view, it is impressive that Swift has been at this since I was a pre-teen (2006), and that her music has undergone so many different “eras” of genre and style, all of relatively consistent quality. I get the sense that she will end up being for people of my generation what Bob Dylan has been for Boomers and Gen X, in the sense of a continually active musician giving voice to a generation’s experiences over a long portion of time, growing up with them, so to speak, through adolescence, young adulthood, and middle age. I wouldn’t say Swift is my own muse, per se, but it would also be inaccurate to say I don’t enjoy her work. The classical scholar in me, at least, is intrigued both by Swift and by Dylan for their borderline neoteric use of allusion both to their own work and to the work of others in nearly every song they write; that, I think, is a lost art in the contemporary music industry. (I would never dare to make a more specific comparison of quality and risk the fury either of Swifties or of Dylanites, both of whom have my sympathies for different reasons.) Incidentally, Dylan’s recent The Philosophy of Modern Song (2022) is a romp in sixty essays through the music that has made the modern world. It’s also visually stunning.
Marvel Should Bring the Ship In To Port. I have been an avid comic book reader since 1999, when my grandfather dropped a box of Marvel and DC comics on my bed when, at four, I was doubled over with fever. I’ve been a comic nerd ever since. When I was fourteen, in 2009, Iron Man came out, and so I grew up through high school, college, two rounds of grad school, marriage, and a kid with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I realized early that I could use the event of these films to motivate me to get work done, and would go to the Alamo Drafthouse in Springfield (or the cheaper Regal) for premieres in exchange for so many pages of seminar papers or thesis completed. (I used NuStar Wars the same way.) So, it gives me little joy to concede that the quality of televised and cinematic Marvel has declined significantly since 2018. (I will also register no small degree of annoyance with our culture’s capacity to hate things as a partial culprit, as it eventually becomes quite difficult to maintain joy in the face of ceaseless and atmospheric negativity.) Some of the Disney+ shows and traditional theatrical releases have been good; I thought WandaVision, Loki, Hawkeye, and Moon Knight were all fairly solid, and I enjoyed parts of Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk. Spider-Man: No Way Home and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 were quite good, I thought. But overall it is a bit difficult to avoid the sense that Marvel and, by extension, Disney have overextended themselves by planning ahead of Endgame without a firm show Bible plotting out the points of the map as they did for the first saga. This was on display in an unavoidable way with the conclusion of Secret Invasion, by far the most underwhelming and poorly written of the shows to date. But most devastating for me was the ruination of Thor: Love and Thunder, which did deep injustice to a decade’s worth of amazing Thor comics under the supervision of Jason Aaron. Those comics do an amazing job of meditating on the powers, limits, responsibilities, births, and deaths of the gods, and the comics that have followed Aaron’s work have dealt with similarly interesting themes as Thor has fully become the All-Father of Asgard. But the Disney need for everyone to have a happy ending seems to be neutering Marvel’s storytelling power. James Gunn made this point recently, in response to the largely positive critical/viewer response to his final Guardians of the Galaxy film, that superhero fatigue is real, but is driven more by the lack of emotional stakes in so many superhero films rather than the genre itself. (After all, insofar as superheroes are just ancient mythology projected onto modern screens, we’ve been telling stories about gods and heroes far longer than we’ve been telling stories about wealthy gangsters or the fate of hedge funds.) To that end, I think they can still stick the landing of the current saga, but afterwards, the MCU should conclude. I don’t mean no one should (or will) ever make another Marvel movie: just that the giant interconnected project of the cinematic universe can safely conclude after literally saving the Multiverse in the upcoming franchises. To that end, Marvel should focus on giving these characters an emotionally satisfying denouement that the final films won’t have time for. In Thor’s case, I commend Jason Aaron’s epilogue about All-Father Thor, in the far future, giving his remaining power to try and resurrect the Earth in the midst of a dying universe. A film that follows Thor at that stage would offer the opportunity to look back at his long career, make room for as many Thor tales in between as one wants in the future, but also give the character a real conclusion (and Chris Hemsworth the chance to stop absolutely wrecking his body in his forties to get ready for this role every few years, which I cannot see him doing in perpetuity anyway). Such a movie could do for the character what Logan did for Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine: dignify the performance with an end.
Multiverses. Steven Collins once suggested that nirvana cannot be narrativized because it is leaving behind the kind of linear, sequential existence in which stories make sense; parataxis, paradoxically, does not represent eternity as well as a story with a clear beginning, middle, and end, even if part of that story is the idea or the gesture towards the idea that it goes on forever, spatially or temporally. That is why so many sequels and reboots are just garbage: I don’t need to see, for example, the adventures of Young Gandalf or something, because the character’s value is cheapened as mythic archetype the more filled out they become as a fictive biography. (This is also why spin-offs are often bad, as Rings of Power was, or at least unnecessary, as Obi-Wan Kenobi was.) But even so, the multiverse as a concept—the idea that reality is infinite and every conceptually possible configuration of it is realized somewhere—is hot right now in pop culture: Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse and Across the Spiderverse, Rick and Morty, Doctor Strange, and more have cashed in on it. It’s an idea I’m sympathetic to, but also one whose storytelling possibilities depend crucially on a number of emotional stakes done right, including, especially, the enduring importance of the individual instantiation of a life or hypostatic being or whatever as it occurs in this world, in this life. In that vein, I found Everything, Everywhere, All At Once (2022), which I was late to seeing, a really compelling watch. Michelle Yeoh plays a woman whose developing awareness of the multiverse encourages her to become a bodhisattva to save her daughter from self-annihilation. It lands the balance I’m describing well: no matter how many variants of ourselves may exist in the grand scheme of things, we have to direct our awareness of that infinity to the task of living well here and now, in this life, with these people, and with radical, liberating compassion.
Space! Still, even this one universe is big enough to attract anyone’s attention. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2022-) has been probably the best Trek since TOS, capitalizing as it does on the fundamental ideals that made Trek great in the first place: exploration, tolerance, pluralism, futurism, but also hard-hitting, emotionally resonant explorations of the human experience, of social issues like discrimination and healing from the traumas of war, and of ordinary feelings like grief and love. It’s rare that a show is a consistent 10/10 experience for me these days, and I’m so glad that Star Trek can be what provides that for me, years after I watched TOS in my bedroom as a high schooler. (Early interest in religious studies and Star Trek should tell you that I was both popular and cool.) The point of sci-fi is to use our wonder about the future and about the cosmos to help us think through our own experience, personally and socially: that is why shows like Trek, Doctor Who, and the recently resurrected Futurama are either beloved or hated, depending on how well they thread the needle of a compellingly told story with personal stakes while also landing the operatic space fantasy vision. It’s admittedly hard to do. And there is a question of idealism that one has to answer when one tries to do so: does one give in to the hope that the future will be bright, like Trek’s Federation (in its earliest, idealistic, exploratory days rather than its later colonial imperialism), or does one give into the pessimistic view that life in a colonized solar system or galaxy will be feudalistic and dystopian, like in The Expanse or in Dune, or in the vision of the techbros, as Mary-Jane Rubenstein so compellingly argues in Astrotopia? And in our current cultural moment, where space is on our minds in the biggest way it has been since the late 60s—with the new space race propelled by billionaire techbros and with the current string of government whistleblower claims about unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), about which I remain agnostic unless or until something irrefutable in either direction is demonstrated (see below)—these questions about what our ultimate place in the universe will prove to be are powerfully relevant. In that vein, I thought Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City (2023) a compelling UFO story because it has almost nothing to do with UFOs and almost everything to do with stories. Set in a fictional southwestern American town in the mid-twentieth century, Asteroid City is a play under review by a televised documentary, that the viewer experiences both within the world of its own story and in the making-of dressing around the story. At a Junior Stargazers convention in the eponymous town (really just a desert road stop), an alien appears and steals the asteroid around which the stop was built and named, leading to heavy government quarantine of the assembled convention-goers. Anderson smartly avoids the is-it-or-isn’t-it trope in UFO movies, opting instead for, yes, it’s an alien, and yes, it comes down and is visibly seen (even photographed), but it is not the point, being a relatively unknowable variable whose brief apparition rightly inspires only deeper musing on what it is to be human. Anderson’s not everyone’s cup of tea, I realize, and this is arguably his most unhinged movie in terms of his personal style, but as a lifelong fan, I found it another rousing entry in his corpus.
A Brief Aside on UAP. Since 2017, a series of journalistic interventions, whistleblowers, and Congressional hearings have made the increasing suggestion that some UAP are extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). These culminated recently in a Congressional hearing in which David Grusch suggested that the government has retrieved alien spacecraft and even the bodies of alien pilots. So, is it true? I think the public is effectively divided into two camps on this question. The first camp is a kind of extreme gullibility, and the second camp is a kind of extreme skepticism. I would say that people of the first camp are insufficiently aware not only of the hard scientific questions around the idea that there are ETI visiting Earth (space is really big; to travel between stars implies at least a Type II Civilization on the Kardashev Scale; such a civilization would leave visible traces of itself that we possibly would have spotted by now; why can’t we spot them coming through telescopes? etc.) but also of the history of government misdirections and outright lies on all kinds of things. But I would say that people of the second camp are often guilty of a simple hubris: incapable of imagining either a universe full of life, or that our current grasp on physics is limited, or that there really might be something afoot. Granted, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and that has yet to be firmly, irrefutably presented by the whistleblowing crowd, so the skeptics’ camp is more intellectually respectable than the true believers’, but I remain of a “Wait and see” sort of mindset. It’s also the case that UAP maps onto certain kinds of religious and paranormal experience, as Jeffrey Kripal has argued, and that people who claim to have experienced UAP and abduction scenarios often describe their experiences similarly to the way that people describe religious states of consciousness; it’s also clearly the case that ufology’s sociological origins are in Western occultism, which transformed significantly during the Space Age. So among believers, there’s an astrobiological account of ufology, that suggests that we are being visited by beings from outer space (and/or time), and a paranormal account of ufology, which suggests increasingly stranger sources of the phenomenon (from fairies to ghosts to future humans traveling to the past and so forth). And among skeptics, there’s just complex gymnastics to hide the existence of advanced government drones. All in all, it’s a world of discourse that one needs a good academic guide to be able to navigate: I commend D.W. Pasulka’s American Cosmic. For my own part, I am persuaded for philosophical and scientific reasons that the universe is full of life, some of it like ourselves, and that there is some chance we may encounter them someday, though there is also a chance that we are so separated from one another by so many factors that we may never be able to meet or communicate even if we did. One hopes that we are not forever alone in the dark; but our galaxy, at least, seems too young to have yet produced a Type II or III Civilization, or, if it has, they are very good at covering their tracks. Theologically, if anything, I think this deepens my faith rather than challenges it; for more on that, I suggest Ted Peters’ Astrotheology.
On Faerie. The paranormal camp of ufology sometimes suggests that what we mistake for aliens are really fay or daimonia, which also connects the science fictional universe of the imagination to the genre of fantasy. There is, incidentally, some good and much bad fantasy TV available right now. Neil Gaiman’s franchises of Good Omens (2019-) and Sandman (2022-) are excellent, each combining religion, philosophy, magic, science, and mythology into vibrant tapestries told in the tradition of good English fantasy. Gaiman is an atheist-agnostic of a sort, not believing in a deity but also not, particularly, disbelieving in one either; and yet, he is probably the only modern successor to the fantasy tradition of, say, the Inklings whose stories are consistently well made (Philip Pullman, I think, tries so hard to be the anti-Lewis that he ends up making his atheistic Narniad uninteresting). Season 3 of The Witcher dropped on Netflix, with mixed results. Not having read the books the series is based on, I have not been affected by the departures from the literary canon that so bothered Henry Cavill as to drive him off the show, but I can say that Season 1 was quite good, Season 2 was quite strange, and Season 3 has been a restoration of storytelling quality, at least, and of some of the magic of the interactions of Cavill and his costars. The show itself seems to have no idea how it will do in his absence, as he is replaced by Liam Hemsworth (who, unfortunately, has shoes no one could ever fill in the role), as suggested by the marketing campaign for this season. But it is fair to say that The Witcher is, somewhat like Game of Thrones, intended if not as the anti-Tolkien then, at least, as the attempt to inject Tolkien’s Neoplatonic legendarium with something of an Epicurean and quasi-Stoic fatalism. Geralt of Rivia is Aragorn without the idealism, which is to say, a more realistic character: when one reads Tolkien, several characters skew relatively consistently in the direction of the archetypes they are supposed to represent rather than down into the complicated messiness of personal existence. That’s not necessarily a criticism of Tolkien—we need personae for the archetypes, or we can’t access them—but it is to say that a character like Geralt for that reason becomes a more useful cipher for thinking about our life in this world in reflecting on the decisions he makes in his otherworld than a character like Aragorn is. It’s also in that vein that I found the mythological retelling of Sir Gawain and The Green Knight (2021) in some ways a better tale than its original, at least in terms of the moral complexity of the main character as we meet him in the film than in the original legend. Good fantasy is supposed to provide us with faces for the archetypes, and indeed the spiritual beings, that we meet in everyday life, in ourselves and in the world. By contrast, bad fantasy so fetishizes the fantasized world that it becomes an eyesore rather than an induction into mystery. It is in this sense that I am not particularly excited for the return either of The Wheel of Time (2021-), the first season of which was a mixed affair, or of The Rings of Power (2022-), which despite some appreciable elements here and there was ultimately a shameless attempt to make money off of the film rights to Tolkien now that Christopher Tolkien, who was comparatively chaste with whom he allowed to develop these things, has passed away.
A Brief Aside on D&D. On that note, the best fantasy that I’ve enjoyed in recent years has actually been that I have personally contributed to with a group of my oldest and closest friends (15+ years now, for some of them) in a D&D campaign that is reaching its fourth year. Our campaign has been a mashup of the popular Tyranny of Dragons and the recently rebooted Spelljammer, which in the course of our story has meant that our group failed to prevent the dragon apocalypse and was sent four hundred years into the future to try and stop a union of dragons led by Tiamat, the Dragon Goddess, and Mind-Flayers from taking over the cosmos. Our cast includes some really fun characters: Bard Pompadour, of the family Pompadour; Patches the Unsure, a human barbarian with a secret past; Gaspar, a Deep Gnome Wizard who spent the first two years of the campaign disguising himself as Steve Buscemi; Calthuk, a Tiefling thief; John Mighty, a washed-up football player; Cururim, a Dragonborn paladin; Toran, a half-giant fighter; Tony Tungsten, a space-Italian-American artificer; and my character, Zephyrus, a djinn-born cleric (for whom, incidentally, this column is partially named). We are assured that we are probably one-to-two years from finishing the story planned by our DM; at present, we are in the feywilds, trying to steal aurichalcum to pilot a ship made from the World Tree. My original character is temporarily dead, and so I am playing a monkey-man based on Sun Wukong in an effort to bring him back to life. I say all of this to say that D&D is great fun, first (where else can you really become a divine monkey, after all?), and second, that there’s something mildly theurgic about creating and inhabiting a small world with other minds, in which one both is and is not the character one plays. Just as any fiction writer knows that there’s some sense in which all the characters of a book are the writer, and yet are independent of the writer, in a sort of microscopic qualified nondualism, so putting on and off a character is like exploring an otherself.
It’s extraordinarily hot. July will have been the hottest month on record since records have been kept on the matter, and even diehard climate-deniers among the GOP hierarchy have started to concede that we are the problem. They have not yet come all the way to actually suggesting that we do something about it, of course, but it’s something. There is nowhere really to go to escape these problems: the Norhtern Hemisphere is experiencing them now, and Australia’s Southern Hemispheric summer is expected to simply repeat them in apocalyptic ways this (Northern) Fall and Winter. Philip Jenkins has argued correctly, in Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith: How Changes in Climate Drive Religious Upheaval, that climate change plays a role in the transformation of religious belief, practice, and demography, as do other “natural” factors like pandemics, disasters, and so forth. It is possible, for example, that the Antonine Plague precipitated the practice of infant baptism among Early Christians as the norm that it is today for Catholics, Orthodox, and certain high-church Protestants; it is undeniable that experiences of natural disasters were frequently interpreted in Christian history as signs of divine wrath that drove the fortunes of ecclesiastical and theological squabbles. In our day, the primary effect of climate change on religious affiliation in America, at least, seems to be entrenchment by deniers or skeptics in religious congregations and therefore association by non-believers of religion with climate denial: only a third of American evangelicals believe that climate change is caused by humans, in part because most vote Republican and are toeing the party line on the topic; far more Catholics (54%) and non-Christians (70%) accept that climate change is human-driven, but in the Catholic case this is still a narrow majority and does not necessarily change voting habits, despite Pope Francis’s Laudato Si and otherwise consistent advocacy for environmental rights and climate action, as well as that of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, often called “The Green Patriarch” for his own efforts. The Nones are far more likely to believe that climate change is human-caused and therefore must be rectified by human policies. In other words, most American Christians are not presenting to our non-Christian neighbors an intellectually serious or ethically motivated awareness of what’s happening to the climate and the very real human and non-human toll it is taking on the world. My sense is that American Christians are setting themselves up to be the (not unreasonable) targets of quite a bit of blame for current and future problems in our society, and that relatively few are thinking through the rhetorical optics and long-term sustainability of ecclesiastical messaging around a variety of social issues. I suppose if numbers were strong that would be less of an issue, but given that Christianity is hemorrhaging people across the board in the United States and Europe, it’s a profoundly and needlessly (and damnably) stupid orientation to have. (That said, the best commentary on American Christianity I’ve ever seen is The Righteous Gemstones.)
Barbenheimer, Misogyny, and Fascism. Finally, I note that I saw and liked Barbie (2023), appreciating the way its message complies with what John Behr, for example, has been saying about sex and gender from a historic Christian perspective throughout his career, which is that these are definitions “in Adam” and that we should take Paul seriously when he says that in Christ there is no male and female (Gal 3:28). I would’ve written my own review, but I don’t need to, because Amy Peeler already wrote a great one here. The response to the film from the right has been predictable, but I also note the strange (but also maybe inevitable) way in which it has dovetailed with far and alt-right sentiments online, as some kind of indication of cultural breakdown necessitating the loud intervention of a traditionalist ethos. Despite a brief stint in college where, when I was becoming Orthodox, I was exposed to and temporarily sympathetic to some aspects of traditionalist thought, grad school, life, marriage, and adulthood cured me of that, and I find traditionalism ridiculous and the vision of masculinity it promotes, even when religiously inspired, to be basically nihilistic, and for the most part entirely disconnected from Christianity’s intellectual and ascetical traditions on these matters. I also note that the division the movie has inspired correlates with a worldwide hangover of fascism at the moment, from Putin, Xi, and Modi to Trump (now facing his third and most consequential indictment). Idealistically I’d like to hope that I won’t live to see the world go down this path again, and that instead I will live through the victory of classically liberal, inclusive, democratic, and egalitarian values in the United States and elsewhere, but I have lived long enough to know how easy it is to be disappointed on these fronts. Enter Oppenheimer’s pseudohistorical lionization of its eponymous scientist, by all accounts a rich, privileged man whose main complaint about the bomb he helped create was that he was excluded from control of its afterlife, and I fear that, indeed, we are perhaps beset by an all-encompassing amnesia about the horrors the world endured to create the global order, with all of its imperfections, failures, and outright sins, but also its real accomplishments and virtues, of the last eighty years.
As for the comment about how UFO experiences often map onto religious experiences, one of the main reasons for my personal skepticism about UFOs is that they tend to map so neatly onto tropes found in pop culture. There's absolutely nothing we haven't been taught to expect, for example, in Grusch's claims: the bodies of alien "pilots," UFOs recovered by the bad guys in WWII, secret government sites, reverse engeneering, etc. There's no imagination there; just the same old tired sci-fi tropes going back to the 1950s. He could have at least borrowed from Stross's "A Colder War," which (while basically just a Cold War history report with shoggoths added) presents a much more plausible view both of extraterrestrial life and how governments would be likely to use it.
David, thanks for this fascinating post. I haven't seen Barbie yet, but your comments make me want to. Your citation of Behr is also really interesting. I've been wanting to do some more reading on theology and gender for some time. Do you have any recommendations? I would also be interested in anything that's shaped your thinking on transgenderism. I share your suspicions of the traditionalist voices, but I will admit that I am also fairly skeptical of Judith Butler's work (John Milbank calls her one of the most overrated thinkers of our time, and I tend to agree). Have you read Abigail Favale or Kathleen Stock? I realize that those names might cause some to write me off immediately as transphobic, but I really am looking for some thinkers that don't just reproduce the left/right talking points. I've also found Pope Francis really helpful here: he enacts a true pastoral care for all, but he's also critical of gender theory and aware of how it can collude with our technological domination of creation. Sorry for rambling. I'd be grateful to hear any of your thoughts on this and to get your book recommendations.