Is Greed Good? : Debunking the Myth of the "Christian" Free Market

The Republican Party might not have a demographic monopoly or majority within the Christian faith, but its evangelical members are among its most vocal advocates. An even more interesting question than, “why is this?” might be “why are Republicans, and especially Christian Republicans, so predominantly capitalist?” A recent USA Today poll found that only 37% of GOP members “believe that capitalism and Christian values are at odds,” and that white evangelicals are more likely than any other people group to think that “unregulated businesses will behave ethically.” It seems like modern Christians are placing a great deal of trust in our current economic system. Are we sure that it’s worthy?

After all, capitalism is no more a Christian institution than republicanism. Yet, the modern church has been quick to either justify it in terms of biblical concepts like “stewardship” and “free will,” or to forgo examination completely. Most conservative Christians dismiss participants in the admittedly nebulous “Occupy” campaign as whiners and bums. Whether or not they actually are, the overarching sentiment is one that asserts, “I am not my brother’s keeper.”

There are huge spiritual problems with this attitude. “Stewardship” does not mean hoarding, the “free will” aspect of the competitive “American Dream” does not give you license to withhold help from your less-fortunate neighbor, and an earthly need for income does not justify an idolatrous belief that “the invisible hand of the free market is actually the hand of God,” as religion professor Andrew Walsh states.

Read any gospel, and you will see that Christ himself took no stock in the free market. In fact, if he were on Earth today, he might be more socialist than we’d like to admit. If wealth were a virtue, he would not have thrown vendors out of the temple in rage (Mat. 21:12-13). If his goal was to perpetuate “healthy” financial inequality, he would not have told rich men like Nicodemus to give away their possessions and live in poverty (Mark 10:17-27). The Bible does not condemn worldly success altogether, of course. But the Kingdom of God is not a state that celebrates ladder-climbing for its own sake. The rest of the world might not hear a call to be keepers of their neighbors, but we should (Rom. 13:9, Mark 12:30-31). We are repeatedly warned not to put value in money, because none of our riches will go with us when we leave this world. That being the case, it’s shameful that many Christians will trust God with most everything except their pocketbooks.

By now you might believe that I am claiming socialism as a superior alternative to free market economy. If you are, you’re missing the point. In a perfect, fully redeemed form, I believe that socialism would be the most Christ-like economic system available. In the current world, however, the ugly truth is that stubborn self-interest is not a trait that limits itself to the confines of Wall Street. A socialist structure cannot prove beneficial without universal cooperation, which is impossible to achieve in this fallen world.

But does that mean capitalism is automatically a better option? I don’t think so. No matter how you slice it, the primary “virtue” instilled by a capitalist system is greed. Yes, with socialism, we would be forced to trust that a vast governmental machine would care for the individual. But even now, with capitalism, we blindly assume that corporations will work for our betterment out of basic human decency, despite their primary goal of “getting.” I don’t see much of a difference. Both options rely heavily on the assumption that people are basically good. You see the problem. We humans are not good (Rom. 3:10).

Thank God, then, that He is. That’s why we should place our ultimate trust in his will and his way, not in any system that we could devise. Left to our own devices, we lose the ability to give. Even worse, we forget what we have in the first place.

Empty Darkness: David Fincher's "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” the newest feature by award-winning director David Fincher, is the “Saving Private Ryan” of rape revenge films. It contains sequences of gut-wrenching sexual violence that seek to give viewers a first hand education in the horrors of human depravity - in much the same way that the first fifteen minutes of Spielberg’s famous WWII epic sought to teach the terror of war. Yet, to label this film and author Stieg Larsson’s source material so crudely is to do them both a grave injustice. “Dragon Tattoo” is clearly meant to be an emotional journey into a deep chasm of familial shame, and a glimpse at the blossoming of an angry, anti-social young woman into a human being who is capable of love and trust. 

Too bad, then, that this new adaptation never really connects as much as it needs to in order to be truly successful. I can’t speak for the original (and supposedly superior) Swedish version, but Fincher's “Dragon Tattoo,” while high on shock value, commits the cardinal sin of being deficient in emotional impact. Its stellar, crisp production aesthetic (courtesy of cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth) perfectly echoes the story’s snowy Swedish landscape, but the film itself proves too clinical as a result to provoke any real response from its audience.

This is not to say that it’s a total loss. Rooney Mara’s performance as the now-infamous hacker Lisbeth Salander is endlessly fascinating, and as true to Larsson’s source characterization as I could imagine. Daniel Craig struck others as the wrong actor to play the barely-reputable journalist Mikael Blomkvist, but seemed to me from the outset to be the obvious choice. He and Fincher seem to have wisely agreed to tone down his James Bond charm, and screenwriter Steve Zaillian (of “Black Hawk Down” fame) makes the correct choice of excising some of Blomkvist’s more extraneous (and eyebrow-raising) physical affairs. This has the distinct benefit of making him a more believable and grounded character, even if some of his color is lost in translation. I also hear that we have Craig to thank for the incorporation of Enya’s “Orinoco Flow” into a critical torture scene – one of the film’s scattered moments of pure genius. 

The three-hour long “Dragon Tattoo’s” primary flaw, then, is in its pacing, which feels maddeningly uneven and frequently rushed. The set-up of the central mystery (which takes up the first hundred pages of the novel) is here reduced to a scant fifteen minutes, and feels especially clipped. Characterization is scrapped for rote expository speechifying. Key dialogue exchanges occupying pages of manuscript are often reduced to three or four lines, and cut off before they have the chance to really become interesting. As a result, we never really get the chance to know or become close with Blomkvist, and although such distancing might help us to realize Salander’s solitude and strangeness, her much-awaited moments of fiery retaliation are disappointingly brief. In fact, there is little emotional payoff at any of the major plot twists, and most every revelation feels less satisfying and more like a missed opportunity. That, of course, is when we can actually understand how those revelations were reached; the truncated nature of Zaillian’s script left me wondering if I could have followed the story at all had I not read the novel beforehand.

Gone, too, is the sterling sound editing that made Fincher’s Oscar-nominated (and equally labyrinthine) “Social Network” comprehensible. The audio mix here, especially at the outset, is frustratingly mushy, and all the characters resurrect the briefly dormant dramatic mandate that lines must be delivered in a hushed mumble. It’s totally annoying, and since all of the players sport regularly unintelligible Swedish accents, it represents a serious technical misstep. 

Finally, there’s the issue of the film’s graphic content. I sat down in the theater expecting the worst, and “Dragon Tattoo” was only a fraction more tasteful than I thought it would be. It could have been worse, but I would be irresponsible to gloss over this aspect of the experience, especially considering my earlier treatise on discernment. There are several scenes that portray the sexual exploitation and rape of Salander at the hands of her state-appointed guardian, and they are unremittingly intense. The film leaves considerably less to the imagination than Larsson’s novel, but it accurately portrays the inherent evil of rape that too many women experience in their lives. The act itself is not glorified, and certainly does not arouse. It is an act of brutal psychological warfare, and portrayed as such. The film would function were they merely implied, but at a much less effective pitch.

The same cannot be said of later sequences depicting consensual intercourse between our two leads. These were merely implied by the novel, and their inclusion serves no major purpose in establishing or furthering plot or theme. 

In the end, this “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” is a toss-up. It is a functional adaptation of an excellent book, but perhaps only seasoned fans and readers will fully appreciate it. Those uninitiated should not expect a masterpiece. They should, however, expect an exploration of sexual violence that is as dubious in its execution as the characters that inhabit its plot structure. There is some good, and some evil – but not much light either way. Here’s hoping you’re not too afraid of the dark.

Escaping Reality: Steven Spielberg's "The Adventures of Tintin"

Steven Spielberg, absent from the directorial scene since 2008, is back in a big way with “The Adventures of Tintin,” a crazy, pleasantly campy, and all around thrilling film based on the much-loved comics by Belgian artist Herge (unknown to me but acclaimed by others). It is no small wonder to me that Spielberg himself claimed it as the inspiration for his and George Lucas’ classic “Indiana Jones” franchise, and I’ll agree that Spielberg, with his unique blend of blisteringly-paced action and heart-string manipulation, was the perfect helmsman for this new series. 

Quite simply, “The Adventures of Tintin” is everything that “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” should have been. If “Indiana Jones” is going to be in the adventuring business as long as George Lucas seems to want him to be, Spielberg should consider making future installments into animated features like “Tintin.”  This particular brand and style of animation lends itself perfectly to the Saturday morning serial aesthetic and atmosphere that makes Indy so enduringly popular. It might even serve to make George Lucas’ increasingly bizarre story ideas more palatable to audiences.

“Tintin” is perfect proof of concept in this way. It has a story that succeeds in spite of a really fruity-sounding subtitle (“The Secret of the Unicorn”) and action scenes that spit in the face of physics and logical sense in equal measure. It works because the animation, though lifelike enough to keep us involved, is not grounded in any fundamental state of reality. 

Audiences were jarred in “Crystal Skull” when a live-action Indiana Jones survived a nuclear blast by hiding in a refrigerator, and were turned off completely when a flying saucer blasted off from underneath a Mayan temple. This is because Jones, while clearly an element of pulp fiction, is still registered subconsciously as a flesh and blood character that could plausibly exist in our world. Viewers can only take so much of the supernatural or extraordinary in films that are live action, because the illusion of reality will naturally limit their suspension of disbelief, no matter how detailed the visual effects are.

“The Adventures of Tintin” gets away with so much because it has no such restrictions. The entire movie consists of special effects, so the only reality we have to reference during our experience of the film is that of the film itself. That’s why we can see one pirate ship riding a wave over another, a character surviving a crash while sitting on an airplane’s nose, and two cranes “sword fighting” with their arms, without batting an eyelash. 

It also helps, to be sure, that this is the single most thrilling piece of adventure mythos that Spielberg has cranked out since his “War of the Worlds.” It is joyful escapism in the classic tradition, a visual playground made out of kinetic energy and breathless motion. The animation is jaw-droppingly gorgeous, rivaling Pixar’s best (and maybe even surpassing it). And the 3D, while not entirely necessary for the fullest enjoyment of “Tintin,” does actually add quite a bit of depth to the experience, in much the same way that it did for James Cameron’s box-office extravaganza “Avatar.” It never feels gimmicky, cheap, or exploitative. I went into the film largely to see if Spielberg, one of our great American directors, would find a way to use the technology artistically. I was not disappointed.

It’s not a perfect film, but the only critiques I have are relatively minor. The ending feels too open, and doesn’t quite pay off as well as earlier sequences suggested it would. In addition, Spielberg does at points seem to get drunk on the freedom that filming on a digital frontier can provide, and his hot-dogging with swooping camera movements occasionally draws more attention to the computer-generated “wonderland” setting than is really necessary, especially during some of the more frenetic action set pieces. He never forgets the basics of his craft, nor does his experimentation ever knock us out of sync with the story. He simply has a tendency to go overboard here that I have never noticed before. Being a sometimes overly enthusiastic storyteller myself, I can’t say as I blame him. A kid suddenly presented with all of the finest toys in existence will use them with exuberance and vigor that matches the excitement of finding them at his fingertips. Steven Spielberg’s flights of fancy have entertained us for decades. No one more richly deserves the right to play.