Rethink Mission: Inspiring gospel-centered missional churches

By Justin McLaury

When I was five and in kindergarten, I brought home the Scholastic book order form and began to pester my mom to let me get something, anything, from the so-thin-it-was-translucent, brilliantly-colored double sheet of literary delight. What we settled on, after some persistent persuasion on my part (some would say “hounding”) was a paperback of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, with an accompanying vinyl record that could read it to me even when my parents were exhausted from having already read it countless times any given day.

I loved the book, not only because (despite my lack of a wolf-suit) I could still make “mischief of one kind and another,” but also because, like many children, I dreamed of a place where I was in charge, where the things I was scared of were scared of me and where what I said would go – a place like the one that grows in Max’s room in Sendak’s book. I wanted a place like the one Carol, one of the Wild Things in the movie, described as being, “where only the things you want to happen would happen.”

Looking back on the book and my experience with it as a child, I am struck by how powerful a ten-sentence story can be to show the interplay between anger, fear and power and how these three things affect both self-awareness and relationships. Sendak was able to achieve such a complex task with so few words by carefully crafting his language and by showing much of the story through surreal, narrative pictures; the images in the book are so good that a reader could understand the story without any narration at all.

Which is why, when I heard that Spike Jonze was creating a movie adaptation of my favorite childhood picture book, I was both excited and nervous. The visual nature of the original story makes it a great candidate to be transformed into a great movie, but the excellence of the source material combined with the paucity thereof would make crafting a compelling film remarkably difficult; one misstep, one misinterpretation, one hastily constructed moralizing soliloquy could torpedo the film and put it up in the massive failure category with Mike Myers’ The Cat in the Hat.

While the film has gotten good but not great reviews (scoring a 69% on Rotten Tomatoes), it is an incredibly successful adaptation of the book. Not because it is line-for-line identical to it (in order to make a feature-length movie, a lot of story, and an indie-rock soundtrack, had to be created to supplement the original ten sentences) but because Jonze and Eggers (Jonze’s co-writer) managed to invite us into the story without patronizing us, to allow us to identify with the points-of-view of the characters and with their flaws.

Like the book, the movie does more showing than telling, more questioning than moralizing. The characters and settings are surreal, yet they remind us again and again of ourselves and of our lives as they float back and forth between caricatures of childhood and stark pictures of brokenness. As I sat and watched the movie, I saw that the things I struggled with as a boy — powerlessness, fear, anger, unrealistic expectations, resentment, disillusionment — are still the things that haunt me today. And the thrilling experience of having my fears exposed, which brought me back again and again to my worn-out paperback of Where the Wild Things Are (the line in the book, “We’ll eat you up we love you so,” which was treated much more softly in the movie, still scares me today when I think about the picture that went with it), will no doubt bring me back to this film, time and again.

At the end of the day, each of us is “just a boy (or girl)
pretending to be a wolf pretending to be king.”

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The thing that I appreciated most about Jonze and Egger’s treatment of Where the Wild Things Are is that, while the film doesn’t answer any of the questions it raises about family and power and the existence of a true and reliable source of good in the world, it does provide a cathartic acknowledgement that things are not as they should be – that there is no place where only the things you want to have happen will happen. Our families and relationships are broken (even if they’re good), we are subject to authority that doesn’t always have our best interest at heart, and, despite our best intentions, when we exercise authority, we don’t do so great either. At the end of the day, each of us is “just a boy (or girl) pretending to be a wolf pretending to be king” (Douglass, the Bird Wild Thing). And that’s not very much, is it?

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Justin is a marauding barbarian in the spiritual lineage of Genghis Khan, a conceptual natural disaster, a lover of casseroles and British tea. He is usually clean-cut and clean-shaven yet is quite snobby about having been a mac user since the PowerPC days.

These are his thoughts, what are yours?

Rethink Mission is about the intersection of the gospel, the church and culture. Weekly we feature reviews and other interactions with artistic expressions of the culture around us.

by Casey Hobbs

Just the other day, I flipped my channel to the original treatment of John Steinbeck’s classic Of Mice and Men, starring the fiery Burgess Meredith.  I knew the story from having seen Gary Sinise’s 1992 remake a few dozen times but I was immediately drawn back into this version of Steinbeck’s tale.

Of Mice and Men is a simple story set in the vast farmlands of Central California in 1937. Of course, this was the time of the Great Depression, right before the start of the Second World War. Jobs were hard to come by and this became a time of wandering farmhands picking up a job here and there with very little hope of things getting better. For the most part, these travelers would be solitary men, hardened by life and suspicious of others.

George and Lennie are different than the rest. George is an undersized but strong character who cares after his much larger friend. Lennie is a physical specimen of a man but he is inwardly weak. While he is the quintessential gentle giant, he is also mentally challenged. His inadvertent actions cause chaos and leave a trail of destruction behind the pair. Throughout all the difficulties, George sticks by Lennie, defending, protecting, and caring for the larger man.

The two men endure with a hope of a coming day when all will be made right. One day they will get a place of their own. One day the work of their hands will sit on their table. One day George will take care of his friend and Lennie will take care of his own responsibilities.

As familiar as this story is, you have very little need for me to recount the details of how this tragedy unfolds. The well-meaning Lennie becomes alarmed while sitting alone with the daughter-in-law of the ranch-owner and, in his panic, kills the poor woman. When the men find out what has happened and it becomes patently obvious that Lennie is responsible, the ranch becomes a mobile lynch mob. George, who has protected Lennie for all these years, must now care for his friend one more time and runs in front of the angry mob to find him.

The story ends where it began. The two friends are together. Unlike their autonomous fellow-workers whose only unity is based upon the things they hate, these two are united by their love for one another. George reluctantly recounts their dream to his friend one last time before he must make a decision. He knows the angry mob will exhibit no mercy on Lennie. One way or another, Lennie will not live through the experience. In a mysterious and somehow beautiful way, George is finally forced to kill his only friend. Love looks so strange in Of Mice and Men and it seems so normal in our world as to be automatic.

“Unlike their autonomous fellow-workers whose only unity is based upon the things they hate, these two are united by their love for one another.”

Friendship and loyalty are not something made for the movies. The love and commitment we must have for one another as brothers and sisters in Christ is not empty sentiment nor is it a dream. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: “By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come to us like a dream.”[1]

When was the last time you thought this seriously about Christian community? It is so difficult in our context today to pay such close attention to others. We would so much rather follow a set of rules or keep a relationship at a superficial level. God has freed us for so much more in Jesus Christ.

The truth is, that as the two characters in Steinbeck’s story, we are all bound to a new land. We are going to live together in our Father’s house. While we wait, how will we live life together?

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[1] Bonhoeffer, D. Life Together. San Francisco: Harper-Collins. 1954, p. 27.

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Casey is a displaced Northern Californian who is presently a seminary student and a restaurant server in Birmingham, Alabama. He is involved in a community of Christ-following sinners known as Tapestry of Hope and has a blog where he chronicles his adventures as a spiritual waiter.

Rethink Mission is about the intersection of the gospel, the church and culture. Weekly, we feature reviews and other interactions with artistic expressions of the culture around us.