Tag: Sehnsucht

Mad Max: Fury Road

I just got back from watching Mad Max: Fury Road .

[SPOILER ALERT]

It didn’t take me too long to wonder if I had made a mistake–it’s a bit over the top. The world into which we are dropped is pretty terrible–I expected it to be terrible, but not that gross. But the filmmakers are building upon so many other movies in this genre since the original post-apocalyptic Mad Max and its sequel, Road Warrior, that they obviously felt they needed to ratchet up the terribleness a notch or two. I can’t say that I ever got to the point where I felt all the dirt, defects, and disgusting were worth it, but the movie does make a pretty important and interesting religious statement.

Mad Max? Religious?

Mad Max: Fury Road–Christian Imagery

Yes, the terms hope, redemption, and salvation are uttered by the characters and the story is built upon these religious ideas.

It’s an allegory. We live in a world that’s pretty horrible–scarcity, exploitation and religious fanaticism are the order of the day.

At the top are the exploiters. Their power is maintained through a combination of withholding life-giving water, and other physical necessities, occasionally offering a meager “gift” from their bounty.  The exploiters let the oppressed fight each other for these gifts and through promises of rewards in the afterlife, they buy loyalty and sacrifice in this world.

These are the basic evils that concern your average middle-class North American and, more so, the world’s poor.

Sehnsucht

Human beings long for a better world–C. S. Lewis uses the German word Sehnsucht to describe this inherent “longing,” or “yearning” that results from knowing we live in a world that we know this isn’t the way it is supposed to be.

Imperator Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron, is a character of Sehnsucht; her dissatisfaction with the world comes from a childhood memory of “The Green Place”–read, The Garden of Eden. It is her mission to get back to the green place with four beautiful women who have been used as breeders for the corrupt warlord of The Citadel.

It is interesting that where the Biblical narrative moves from a garden in Genesis to a city in The Book of Revelation, the story in the new Mad Max movie moves from city to garden. This reversal is central to the religious statement at the centre of the film.

Heroic Women

One of the things I like about this movie is that the women are actually heroic rather than passive victims waiting to be rescued by a man. This is also a reflection of a positive trend in our culture. There are two men that help out a lot, but the success and fulfillment of the women does not rest solely in the hands of the male heroes.

Max and Furiosa are equally heroic and they even swap traditional gender roles; Furiosa is the better shot, where Max is the healer.  The rest of the band of heroes are comprised of young and beautiful, but also capable, girls and the old, sandy, wizened, desert women which are also formidable in their fight against the exclusively male band of evil guys.

Firiosa is going to lead her crew, sans Max, across the salt flats where they hope they can find a place to begin life again and perhaps plant the invaluable seeds that they carry. They are, allegorically, going to re-establish the Garden, but, in the context of the movie, the garden is blended into the future hope of Heaven.

Max turns them from this goal toward Eden/Heaven.  It’s not certain that such a place exists.  What is certain is that The Citadel has enough water to begin again. They turn away from uncertainty toward certainty.

They return to The Citadel, conquer the bad guys and distribute water to the thirsty masses.

Allegory of Hope

Mad Max: Fury Road is an allegory that describes how a lot of people in our culture understand hope, redemption and salvation.

Our world has some big problems and we need salvation from the rich, powerful, or religious exploiters if we are going to have a better world.   But we no longer believe our redemption will come from an afterlife–our only hope is to do it ourselves, here and now.  This will take courage and sacrifice (and men and women working together), but we just might have a chance if we get out from under the control of the 1% and the religious leaders who exploit the rest of us for their own personal gain.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”In a nutshell, Mad Max: Fury Road shows that, rather than risk an uncertain Heaven, we’ll take a degraded Eden of our own making. #MadMaxFuryRoad #FuryRoad #MadMax” quote=”In a nutshell, Mad Max: Fury Road shows that, rather than risk an uncertain Heaven, we’ll take a degraded Eden of our own making. “]

Although many found this movie entertaining, I’m afraid they won’t find it satisfying. The Sehnsucht we are experiencing will not be satisfied by crawling out from under the thumbs of the exploiters. Nor will it result from a hard flight to return to the Garden.

Our true longings will only be satisfied when we live in the city for which we were made–the City described in Revelation 21.

In Defence of Fairy Tales (3) – Fall

cocoparisienne / Pixabay

Of all the evil characters in fairy tales, I found the Red Riding Hood’s wolf the scariest. He’s been called the “Big Bad Wolf,” but that name evokes a canine domesticated by the animator’s pen.  The wolf I encountered alone in the deep dark woods of my imagination was a terror whose title couldn’t be tamed by alliteration.

Fairy Tales and Evil

Fairy tales don’t just present readers with Creational goodness, they also illustrate the results of human failure to obey God’s one condition—the presence of Evil.  So we encounter both nobility and brutality, beauty and ugliness, harmony and conflict; dichotomies resulting from the distortions of a good Creation caused by the Fall.

In this regard, then, fairy tales reflect reality as it is presented in the Bible: that human beings live in a moral universe.  In man’s disobedience to God, sin entered the world and fairy tales reflect the moral struggle that ensues.  For in almost every fairy tale, characters and their actions embody good and evil, and “it is this duality which poses the moral problem, and requires the struggle to solve it” (Bettelheim).  That humans are moral creatures with the choice between good and evil is fundamental to the biblical worldview.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”Fairy tales a biblical reality: that human beings live in a moral universe. In man’s disobedience to God, sin entered the world and fairy tales reflect the moral struggle that ensues.  #fairytales #creationfallredemptionfulfillment” quote=”Fairy tales a biblical reality: that human beings live in a moral universe. In man’s disobedience to God, sin entered the world and fairy tales reflect the moral struggle that ensues.”]

The power and scope of evil is another truth that faerie stories offer.  In them, we encounter external evils, like ogres, wolves, and villains whose very presence is a sign of the evil that threatens and “often it is temporarily in ascendancy” (Bettelheim).

Evil is not only an external threat but is also found in “the closest circle of intimate relationships.” Most often this intimate evil is signaled in the form of stepmothers.  These tales depict “perverted relationships within the family . . . the [reader] learns that despite all the moral teachings and the wide range of appropriate behaviour hammered into him, he cannot take this world for granted—especially not people” (Shokeid).  Scriptures clearly relate that evil is not only a force from without but also something with which we struggle within ourselves and within those who are closest to us.

In “Cinderella” we find exactly this; evil within the family.  Cinderella’s mother, “who had been the nicest person in the world,” was replaced by a stepmother who was “the haughtiest, proudest woman that had ever been seen” (Perrault).  The hyperbole emphasizes the effects of sin are not experienced only by the wicked, but also by the innocent.  Cinderella “was of an exceptionally sweet and gentle nature.”  Under the guise of close relatives, the [step relatives] function as agents who introduce the outside unprotective world into the safe family shelter” (Shokeid).

Exposing Children to Evil Through Story

Many parents believe that children should not be exposed to realities of evil but only to “pleasant and wish-fulfilling images.”  Some parent beleive children “should be exposed only to the sunny side of things.  But such one-sided fare nourishes the mind only in a one-sided way, and real life is not all sunny” (Bettelheim).

Rather than taking the child out of reality, fairy tales presents her with the reality of the Fall, and that “a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable, [this] is an intrinsic part of human existence” (Bettelheim).  Through the symbols of evil, the child experiences the presence of evil and the moral dilemma that sin presents; they begin to develop the resources to live in a fallen world.

Sehnsucht

Encounters with injustice and, occasionally, brutality bring the reader into another important Biblical reality.  Because fairy tales expose the tension that exists between the good creation and the sin that has entered it through the fall, they provide a sense that things are not as they should be; they create in us a longing for a restoration of all things to what they once were.

C. S. Lewis uses the term Sehnsucht to describe this feeling which literally means “longing” or “yearning.”  Because the yearning is for what has been lost, “the crucial concept in defining this attitude is best expressed by the English word ‘nostalgia.’  In Sehnsucht there “is an underlying sense of displacement or alienation from what is desired” (Carnell).  All mankind has a deep awareness that there is something wrong with the world and “longs for and strives toward the happy ending so vividly expressed in fairy tales” (Meider).

What we long for is the perfection we enjoyed before the Fall.

Fairy tales appeal to us because they tell us something that we desperately want to be true.  They illustrate what we long for and suggest it is a possibility; they provide us with hope that we can become what we were created to be.  Lüthi says, “Every man has within him an ideal image, and to be a king, to wear a crown, is an image for the ascent into the highest attainable realms.”  This ideal is found in all humanity because we are aware of our fallenness.   Nothing is how it is supposed to be, so we long that it be restored—redeemed.

Cinderella creates a sense of longing in the reader.  Cinderella was an exceptional young woman, but the stepmother “could not endure” Cinderella’s “excellent qualities” and so, mistreated her—she “thrust upon her all the meanest tasks about the house” and “made her sleep on a wretched mattress in a garret at the top of the house” (Perrault 39).  The combination of the goodness of Cinderella and the injustice of her treatment at the hand of her step-relatives creates a sense of longing for the past, for life as it was when her real mother lived.  This is Sehnsucht.

In “The Reason For God,” Tim Keller talks about beauty being a clue to the existence of God.  He suggests that “innate desires correspond to real objects that can satisfy them”; we experience hunger, thirst, and the desire for sex and friendship, and these needs can be satisfied with food, drink, and other people.  The presence of beauty, joy, and love evokes an “unfulfillable” desire in us, and we “want something that nothing in this world can fulfill” (134-135).  Keller says that because it is true of other innate desires, it is also true of this one: there is something to satisfy it—or more accurately, a someone.

Although many deny its existence, Evil is real.  Those who believe in the existence of evil might want to question where they are standing when they are amongst those who treat them too lightly and declare them mere fantasy.

Read In Defence of Fairy Tales (1) – Introduction
Read In Defence of Fairy Tales (2) – Creation
Read In Defence of Fairy Tales (4) – Redemption


Resources:

Bettelheim, Bruno. “The Struggle for Meaning.”  Folk & Fairy Tales. 3rd ed. Ed. Martin Hallet and Barbara Karasek. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2002.  376-391.

Carnell, Corbin Scott.  Bright Shadow of Reality: Spiritual Longing in C. S. Lewis. Grand   Rapids: Eerdmens, 1974.

Keller, Timothy.  The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. New York: Dutton (2008).

Lüthi, Max.  Once Upon a Time: On the Nature of Fairy Tales. Trans. Lee Chadeayne and Paul Gottwald. Bloomington:IndianaUniv. Press, 1979

Meider, Wolfgang.  “Grimm Variations From Fairy Tales to Modern Anti-Fairy Tales.”  The Germanic Review.  62.2 (1987) : 90-102.

Perault, Charles. “Cinderella.” Folk & Fairy Tales. 3rd ed. Ed. Martin Hallet and Barbara Karasek. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2002. 39-45.

Shokeid, Moshe. “Toward an Anthropological Perspective of Fairy Tales.” The Sociological Review 30 (1982): 223-233.

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