BANNED
This week is one of my favorite weeks. It's Banned Book Week. For several years now, our unschooling has included a celebration of Banned Book Week. It started off with Junie B. Jones and led into Goosebumps, Harry Potter, and even The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, and The Color Purple. We read books. We watch movies that are based on the books. It's great! My sons love it.
Banned Book Week also gets us into good discussions about the reasons the books were banned or challenged and whether we feel those are good reasons or not. So far, we haven't found too many good reasons.
Last night at work, I was talking with some of my co-workers about movies. Specifically about Darren Aronofsky movies. I mentioned that I am a fan of his movies, just because he understands human emotions. It's like he feels things in people. It shows through in his characters. We specifically began talking about the movies Noah and Black Swan. We talked about how both of the movies show the psychological effects of the circumstances the characters found themselves in.
That conversation really got me to thinking about the reasons books (or movies) are challenged. I mean, two of the most challenged movies as of late were Noah and Black Swan. Generally, these art forms that are challenged have one thing in common. They present a different viewpoint, and they make people think. They get people outside of their boxes, take them outside of their comfort zones. That's not a popular place to be sometimes. I think of two of my favorite banned or challenged books. The Scarlet Letter and Brave New World. They provoke a lot of thought. They make us question our values, our philosophy, our ideology. Sometimes those questions cause change. I don't think many of us are comfortable with change, and that's why we're not comfortable with books or movies that make us see the need for there to be change in us. We much prefer to not think about those things. We much prefer to stay where we are, right or wrong. It's good enough.
This conversation also got me to thinking about beliefs. Specifically about the beliefs of the writers I mentioned. I have always loved The Scarlet Letter, so much so that I named my nine-year old son after Nathaniel Hawthorne. But during his time, Nathaniel Hawthorne had some pretty controversial viewpoints. Along with Emerson and Thoreau and Bronson Alcott, he was a transcendentalist thinker. Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, considered himself agnostic, even though he was interested in mysticism. Comparing Darren Aronofsky to them, he has said that his movie The Fountain describes his spiritual beliefs. Even though he often talks about God and even the Bible (particularly since the release of Noah), he seems to believe more in spiritual connectedness than in an organized religion.
So that led me to my next pondering. Why is that authors such as Hawthorne and Huxley (and other great authors with controversial viewpoints) and even film writers and directors like Aronofsky seem to have such an understanding of human nature and such an ability to get to the heart of matters in and through their work when we as Christians do not seem to take the time to even think about those things?
Yesterday, I read a quote from another banned book - To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. This quote reads, "Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand (of another)... There are just some kind of men who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live this one, and you can look down the street and see the result." How appropriate is that. Will we ever have Christians who have the vision of some of these banned writers? To me, it just seems if any group of people should care that much, it would be those of us who follow Jesus. He had that vision in a greater extent than anyone else could boast of. And come to think of it, after all, Jesus in His days on earth was banned, too.
Banned Book Week also gets us into good discussions about the reasons the books were banned or challenged and whether we feel those are good reasons or not. So far, we haven't found too many good reasons.
Last night at work, I was talking with some of my co-workers about movies. Specifically about Darren Aronofsky movies. I mentioned that I am a fan of his movies, just because he understands human emotions. It's like he feels things in people. It shows through in his characters. We specifically began talking about the movies Noah and Black Swan. We talked about how both of the movies show the psychological effects of the circumstances the characters found themselves in.
That conversation really got me to thinking about the reasons books (or movies) are challenged. I mean, two of the most challenged movies as of late were Noah and Black Swan. Generally, these art forms that are challenged have one thing in common. They present a different viewpoint, and they make people think. They get people outside of their boxes, take them outside of their comfort zones. That's not a popular place to be sometimes. I think of two of my favorite banned or challenged books. The Scarlet Letter and Brave New World. They provoke a lot of thought. They make us question our values, our philosophy, our ideology. Sometimes those questions cause change. I don't think many of us are comfortable with change, and that's why we're not comfortable with books or movies that make us see the need for there to be change in us. We much prefer to not think about those things. We much prefer to stay where we are, right or wrong. It's good enough.
This conversation also got me to thinking about beliefs. Specifically about the beliefs of the writers I mentioned. I have always loved The Scarlet Letter, so much so that I named my nine-year old son after Nathaniel Hawthorne. But during his time, Nathaniel Hawthorne had some pretty controversial viewpoints. Along with Emerson and Thoreau and Bronson Alcott, he was a transcendentalist thinker. Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, considered himself agnostic, even though he was interested in mysticism. Comparing Darren Aronofsky to them, he has said that his movie The Fountain describes his spiritual beliefs. Even though he often talks about God and even the Bible (particularly since the release of Noah), he seems to believe more in spiritual connectedness than in an organized religion.
So that led me to my next pondering. Why is that authors such as Hawthorne and Huxley (and other great authors with controversial viewpoints) and even film writers and directors like Aronofsky seem to have such an understanding of human nature and such an ability to get to the heart of matters in and through their work when we as Christians do not seem to take the time to even think about those things?
Yesterday, I read a quote from another banned book - To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. This quote reads, "Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand (of another)... There are just some kind of men who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live this one, and you can look down the street and see the result." How appropriate is that. Will we ever have Christians who have the vision of some of these banned writers? To me, it just seems if any group of people should care that much, it would be those of us who follow Jesus. He had that vision in a greater extent than anyone else could boast of. And come to think of it, after all, Jesus in His days on earth was banned, too.
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