The Apathy of Activity

Adventure is essentially an escape from the mundane. Our prosaic lives demand it. Every day we wake up, get dressed, go to work, come home and have some dinner, watch TV, go to sleep. There are few breaks in the routine. Oh, there's the weekend, when we pursue our hobbies, go to church, sleep in and fry eggs and do the crossword, but even weekends are part of the routine.

So we invent stories about adventure, the positioning of a man or woman against nature, evil, bad guys, wild animals, whatever obstacles to safety and comfort we can come up with. It's the hazard that gets our blood up, the element that animates us, the reason we devise more and more stories of peril.

Many of which are devised quite badly. I watched The Adventures of Tintin recently, and while I wasn't expecting a cinematic masterpiece, I was quite surprised by what I actually got. The whole thing was plot, and the plot never stopped. All two hours were a frenetic race from gunfight to chase to swordfight to fistfight to explosion to secret passageway to......it was utterly exhausting. And while those who read my post on John Carter will know I don't expect every adventure story to be a weighty reflection on life and death, I do want there to be something more than just a series of events.

Even Edgar Rice Burroughs knew you had to put some flesh to the characters. Not so that you could see them develop, but just to add some kind of human factor that would make all the action and suspense interesting in the first place. Without that, the adventures simply become flat images, disconnected and of no value for the viewer or reader.

We can't identify with people who never rest. Because, as exciting as adventures are, it's the rest afterward that makes them most appealing. That's why we long for happy endings, so we can rest assured that the heroes and heroines don't have to go on fighting till the bitter end, that someday they'll get to sit back and relax, with the adventures of youth a happy but distant memory.

This is certainly the structure of Christian theology. We fight now, but with the knowledge that eventually we'll fight no longer, we'll simply rest in the glory of God and the love of Christ, free forever from the fight against evil, against our own natures, against the enemies of our Lord and Savior. Because while all adventures don't have to be philosophically meaningful, all the good ones are symbolic. The Christian story has the advantage of being symbolic and real.

A movie like Tintin has no rest in view, and really would have nothing to offer if the idea of cessation were somehow shoehorned into the script. For directors like Spielberg, who have nothing to say and a great desire to convince us that they do, the idea of progress is a dizzying cumulation of events moving us from one place to another. Unfortunately, there's nowhere to get to, and no place really to start from.

This leads to nothing so much as apathy. Why should we care if the heroes have accomplished their goals? What does it matter if they're still alive? All the movie cares to share with us are their exploits, at breakneck speed, and with no human element. In the Bible, Christ's exploits are prominent, but they have significance and meaning; without those elements, there's nothing to do but sit around waiting for the next poorly executed action movie to spin past our blank stares as rapidly as the reels can go.