LBTM: Growing Pains

As we begin Part 3 of the movie, CamCam is back at GNN space command central, editing his footage of the mysterious man in the prophet costume. But this time, Mr. Fake Beard and Bathrobe is speaking in Hebrew.

"What's he saying?" CamCam asks.

"I don't know, it sounds like Hebrew," the mystery girl from Part 1 says. Several days have passed since we first saw her (I think), and she's wearing a different outfit, but she still has that greasy smear on her forehead. So if it's not Ash Wednesday, what is that? The Smudge of the Beast?

"I was there," CamCam says. "I heard him. It was English."

As he says this, CamCam appears sincerely and genuinely to be trying to look like someone who is puzzled. This is the only way one can apply the words "sincere" or "genuine" to his performance in this film. "Never let 'em catch you acting," Spencer Tracy said, but it's a rare moment in this movie when we don't catch Kirk Cameron doing exactly that.

We need to deal with this recurring obstacle if we're ever going to get through this movie, so let's just state this directly here: Kirk Cameron is not a good actor.

This is not entirely his own fault. Cameron began as a child actor and, like many child actors, he was for years rewarded for obnoxious behavior, mugging, over-reacting, etc. And for most of his career as a child actor, he was working on a three-camera sitcom with awful writing in a context that never really required him to listen or react when his character wasn't the one speaking. During his formative years, in other words, he was in a sense indoctrinated with some of the worst habits a young actor could develop.

When considering child actors and former child actors, we should always try to be charitable. Think of Stand By Me. That film featured some quite good performances from a quartet of very young actors. The most gifted and impressive of the bunch died at 23. For two of the others, that childhood role turned out to be the best thing they ever did -- one of them is now an accomplished blogger and the other survives as a "Celebreality" relic on VH-1. Only one of the four has gone on to a solid career as a capable adult actor.

Those are roughly the odds for a child actor, the Stand By Me odds -- a 1-in-4 shot at the narrow path to a successful future in acting, with the perils and pitfalls of self-destruction and the Surreal Life looming on either side. For every Doogie or Opie who grows up to become a successful artist, there are even more Drummonds and Bradys and Coreys who wind up as sad-case tabloid fodder.

So recognizing that Cameron is a recovering child actor, I want to be somewhat charitable and not be unfairly critical. Having said all that, though, he's still simply not a good actor.

This is of interest to us here because it seems to me that Cameron's acting woes are inextricably tied up with his particular religious views. Kirk Cameron is famously (infamously?) a born-again Christian and a devout believer in precisely the peculiar variety of American evangelical Christianity that LaHaye and Jenkins teach and promote through their Left Behind books.

In working through the first book in that series, we noted the many ways that Bad Theology leads to Bad Writing. Here I want to turn to the related matter of how Bad Theology can lead to Bad Acting.

The word "theology" means, literally, the study of God, but this is not and never has been the exclusive concern of theology. It is also eminently concerned with the study of human nature. The nature and meaning of human existence is a central concern of all Christian theology. It is also, of course, a central concern of the theater and of acting.

The Rube Goldberg machine of Tim LaHaye's dispensational eschatology is Bad Theology not just because it's a silly 19th-century invention that requires the vivisection and pureeing of scripture, but also because it's based on assumptions about human nature (and divine nature) that are incompatible with what most Christians believe. It's based on assumptions about human nature, in fact, that seem irreconcilable with what most humans believe -- with what most humans know from experience.

Any attempt to dramatize, to act out, this theology is thus going to result in something that seems false, unreal and inhuman. Capable actors will resist this.

We've already seen this dynamic at work in Left Behind: The Movie. Brad Johnson is a capable actor who seems determined to overcome the script he has been given by portraying Rayford Steele as a real, flesh-and-blood human being. In his first, brief scene as Rayford he thus conveyed not just Rayford's dislike for his wife and her brand of religion, but also the guilt he felt as a consequence of having such feelings toward his own wife. We haven't had the slightest glimpse of Hattie Durham yet, but we've already seen enough of Rayford's self-loathing to realize that this is a man who is contemplating an affair.

None of this was true of the Rayford Steele we met in the pages of the book. In the novel, Rayford was not allowed to feel guilt or remorse or the pangs of conscience until after his conversion. The unsaved, in L&J's book, are reprobate and without conscience. They have to be such in order to seem to deserve all of the vicious punishments the book's God has planned for them. And they have to be so in order for the book's readers to be able to enjoy and savor seeing them punished.

Yet with Johnson in the role of Rayford Steele, capable acting seems to correct Bad Theology. Just by doing the job responsibly and portraying Rayford as a real human being, Johnson makes a kind of theological assertion: non-RTCs are human too. Simple, workmanlike acting winds up undermining a central theological premise of the book.

I'm afraid that something like the reverse of that seems to be happening with Kirk Cameron's role in LBTM. He agrees with the theology of L&J, and thus is incapable -- both theologically and artistically -- of portraying Buck as fully human.

But there's another larger problem for Cameron, another way in which his religious beliefs seem to be crippling whatever talents he may have as an actor. A 2003 Christianity Today profile -- "The Rebirth of Kirk Cameron" -- recounts his conversion to evangelical Christianity and the problems this created on the set of his TV series, Growing Pains:

"When he came back from [the summer hiatus in 1990], Kirk was very different," producer Steve Marshall told the cable series E! True Hollywood Story. "No practical jokes, very serious. If he wasn't in a scene, he'd go away." ...

"He seemed kind of sad, and we thought that was odd for somebody who had found religion," adds Marshall. "Usually religion brings joy into a person's life, and he didn't seem very joyful."

As he got deeper into his faith, Cameron found himself wanting to be an even stronger role model in the public eye. He now objected to sexual innuendoes, such as a scene that actually depicted a bad dream his mother was having. Mike Seaver was to be in bed, without his shirt on, lying next to a beautiful girl. The writers wanted him to say the line: "Hey, babe. Good morning. By the way, what's your name again?" Immediately his mother, Maggie Seaver, would bolt up, wake from her nightmare, and be thankful it was just a dream.

"You didn't know it was a dream at first," says Cameron. "It was for shock value. At the time, I felt really uncomfortable with that." He told the producers, "Surely we can think of something else that would make Maggie break out into a sweat." ...

Gung-ho about his newfound principles, Cameron began to further ostracize himself from the other cast members. He fell in love with his costar Chelsea Noble -- an actress who also was a Christian -- and they began spending their free time together. By the time they married in 1991, none of the Growing Pains cast members were invited to the ceremony.

Cameron became more concerned with being a role model than he was with his role because he had found a spiritual home in a branch of Christianity that had an almost entirely negative concept of virtue. According to this form of religion, being good means not doing certain things -- not doing a lot of things, actually. And being really good, I suppose, means doing almost nothing.

According to this view, being morally good doesn't take any work. It's not something you have to learn, or study, or practice. It comes by fiat, through God's intervening grace. We saw this idea of moral goodness in the book Left Behind: say the magic words and God will transform you into a good person.

Once you embrace this notion of what it means to become and to be good morally, it tends to infect your notion of what it means and what it requires to be good at other things too. Evangelicalism's negative concept of virtue can thus be disastrous for the practice of any vocation that requires study and practice. Like, say, acting.

Here is the line from that CT profile that I found most shocking. This is where Cameron confesses that he doesn't believe or understand that virtue is a craft and craft is a virtue. Cameron describes his life before his conversion:

"There was this aching, empty feeling that left me very disillusioned with the business I was working in," he says. "What else was there? What else did I have to shoot for? I'd basically reached the top of the ladder, and I was 18."

He had "reached the top of the ladder," Cameron said. And he still seems to believe that this is true.

That's an astonishing thing for him to believe when you realize that at this same time he was being introduced to the newest member of Growing Pains' cast: Leonardo DiCaprio.

Now certainly DiCaprio's work as Luke Brower-Seaver, the show's Cousin Oliver, wasn't on the same level as the quality of work he would later go on to do, but he was already clearly a talented and committed actor. Just one year after Growing Pains was canceled he was astonishingly good in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, so I think it's safe to assume that he was already an obviously better actor than Cameron at the time they worked together.

So for at least one year of his professional life, then, Kirk Cameron was confronted, regularly, by an example of what a real actor his own age should look like. And yet he spent all that time on the same set with and in the same scenes as DiCaprio without apparently learning anything -- without even seeming to realize that he needed to learn anything.

At some point, each of us has been in such a situation. Each of us has been engaged in some pursuit when we encountered someone demonstrably and immensely better than us at whatever that pursuit might be. When that happens we really have only two choices: We can give up and find some other activity to pursue, or we can shut up, take notes and learn as much as we can. What we cannot do in such a situation is what Cameron apparently did -- continue deluding ourselves that we are at "the top of the ladder."

I don't want to rub this in too much, but just to clarify why I find this "top of the ladder" comment so astounding, try to imagine an alternate universe in which Mike Seaver and his adopted brother trade their future roles. Imagine Leonardo DiCaprio as Buck Williams. Now imagine Kirk Cameron as Arnie Grape, or Jim Carroll, or Romeo, or Amsterdam Vallon or Howard Hughes.

See what I mean?

Maybe Cameron wishes he had taken the time to learn more about the profession and the craft of acting from his more gifted or more experienced fellow cast members. Maybe he wishes he had tried to learn from DiCaprio the way DiCaprio has spent his career trying to learn from people like Johnny Depp and Daniel Day-Lewis and Cate Blanchett. I don't know.

But Cameron doesn't seem to appreciate that he ought to have done so, that he was ethically obliged to do so -- that not doing so was, in fact, immoral. A sin.

Since I really do believe that Cameron's spiritual and artistic blindspots are inextricably related, my advice to him -- unbidden and probably unwelcome -- is intended to address both. That advice is simply this: Get off the set and get on the stage.

Cameron's most recent project, Fireproof -- an RTC version of Rescue Me produced by the amateur film studio based at Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Ga. -- was just about the worst thing he could have gotten involved with. He needs to get away from choosing projects based on the didactic content of the message (the classic distinction between art and propaganda, between storytelling and sermonizing) and he especially needs to get away from situations where he is the most experienced actor on the set. If he wants to get better, then he needs to surround himself with actors who are better than he is.

So Kirk -- can I call you Kirk? -- let me recommend Shakespeare.

Think regional festivals. Don't bother with Ontario or Oregon, not yet, but I'd bet there are plenty of smaller regional Shakespeare festivals that would be happy to give a former TV star a chance to try acting. You're a celebrity, so you won't have to start at the very bottom of the ladder, but you won't get to jump right in at the top either.

Try Horatio, or Lysander, or maybe even Claudio or Orlando. Then try working your way up to more challenging roles: MacDuff or Laertes or Edgar -- better yet, Edmund. Take your time. Take other people's time. Learn what you have to learn. Learn what there is to learn.

So OK, then. I'm afraid that this blog is an altogether inappropriate forum for offering such advice with any hope that it might be heard or welcomed, but I needed to get that off my chest because I really do think it would be the best thing for Kirk Cameron as an actor and, yes, as a Christian. I really do believe that the negative virtue taught by L&J's anti-Antichristianity prevents him from growing as an actor, but I really do also believe that he might be capable of getting better. (He might actually not be bad as Orlando if he could recapture the charm he once displayed before restricting himself to reciting the words of LaHaye & Jenkins or to explaining how bananas disprove science.)

It doesn't need to be acting, mind you, any craft that requires patient study and practice -- music, woodworking, needlepoint, card tricks -- could also serve as a potential antidote for this negative virtue. But acting is where Cameron started and it's where he still imagines himself to be, so for him I think acting is probably the best place to start learning about the need for learning.

Virtue -- being good, whether morally or artistically -- isn't mainly about abstaining, but about learning and growing. That takes work, of course, but if you want to grow -- as an actor, as a Christian, as a person -- then you'll have to learn to deal with, yes, growing pains.

Comments

[bulbul]

LB:M Monday, yay!
Also, Frist!

[Thal]

Me and my brother had a look at my parents' copy of LB when we went home for Thanksgiving. Ivy gets left behind--she is not an RTC or even a Christian. She is, however, Adorably Funky. That smudge on her forehead is henna.

[bulbul]

I'd basically reached the top of the ladder, and I was 18.
Wow. So, um, Kirk, no Golden Globe? No Oscar? I mean... Wow.

That advice is simply this: Get off the set and get on the stage.
Worked for Tugg Speedman, right?

[Spalanzani]

OK, this is the one thing today needed to officialy be the best Monday I've ever had. I'd explain about the other stuff that made it good, but it mostly involves breath-taking scenery and I'm no good at descriptions.

[Kit Whitfield]

According to this movie, does anyone in 'London, England' have an actual English accent? Or is it the default Ugly American assumption that all other nations are just pretending to be foreign because we think it's cute? And that ridiculous Stately Home - in London? It's weird: the settings go with the everyone-English-is-aristocratic stereotype, but the accents go on the everyone-is-really-American one. They can't seem to make up their minds.

Mind you, sacrificing health benefits is not such a big threat in 'London, England'. We have the NHS, after all.

Each of us has been engaged in some pursuit when we encountered someone demonstrably and immensely better than us at whatever that pursuit might be. When that happens we really have only two choices: We can give up and find some other activity to pursue, or we can shut up, take notes and learn as much as we can. What we cannot do in such a situation is what Cameron apparently did -- continue deluding ourselves that we are at "the top of the ladder."

There's an alternative scenario, which is unconscious incompetence.

I've worked in various editorial departments. I've read slush pile submissions - that is, manuscripts that come directly from the authors rather than agencies. I've freelanced as well. All this adds up to: I've read a lot of bad writing. Seriously bad writing, much worse than Left Behind.

There are two kinds of artistic ability: perception and creation. You can have the former without the latter: that's where good critics come from. As the saying goes, they know the way but they can't drive the car. Their perception is sensitive and apt, and, as a result, their criticism is sensitive as well. They can't create good art, but they can create good criticism, and that's a valuable contribution to the world.

But creation without perception is a much rarer gift. With the exception of the odd oustider artist who's more talented than they realise, perhaps, I'd say it was almost non-existent. You can't sing in tune if you're tone deaf, and you can't produce good art unless you can tell the difference between good and bad. A successful artist needs both the ability to perceive and to create - and in fact, many writers list among their favourites writers much more talented than themselves. I can appreciate Toni Morrison, but I can't write like her: all I can do is learn from her what I'm capable of learning. And that may not be everything she knows, because she's so much more talented than me. But people's perception is often more refined than their creation, in artists as well as critics.

Then you have people with no artistic talent at all. Those are people with neither perception nor creation; they can't tell good from bad. That's what you see in a lot of slush pile writing: stuff that's so helplessly incompetent that there's absolutely no way of improving it, even if you tried to explain. (You see it in writing classes too, uncomfortably.) There's a saying that if you can distinguish between good advice and bad advice, you don't need advice - and while that's not exactly true of art, because feedback is often valuable and I, at least, owe much to the help of people who read my work with sensitive perception, there is a level of ability where you just have to conclude: I could advise this person, but if they were talented enough to make good use of advice, they would have written a better first draft in the first place.

I'm in no position to speculate about Kirk Cameron, but hubris is only one possible explanation. It's also possible that he simply doesn't have the acting bone, but found himself in that profession nonetheless. In which case, he's probably doing his best; he's just not in a position to judge the difference between good and bad.

[bulbul]

but it mostly involves breath-taking scenery and I'm no good at descriptions
There is this invention we call a 'camera'...

[LeRoc]

Great post, but I hope that Fred will tackle some of the other elements of this film segment as well.

[Steve]

Ah, what great writing, Fred, and timing...I can send this to my friends from church. Here is what I wrote to a friend one week ago today:

After Sunday I can officially not run for president due to the new rule: You can be held accountable for anything your pastor or church says. This line was in the church bulletin:
"Movie Recommendation: Many people are recommending the current movie, Fireproof, starring by Kirk Cameron. The buzz about the movie is that it’s worth seeing, either in the theater or when it comes out on DVD in January."

We think our church secretary who is actually from another church put this in there...but anyway...I can imagine the ads: "Steve for President? How can we trust a guy who attended a church that recommended a Kirk Cameron movie? Who's he gonna pick for Defense Secretary? Bibleman?"

Had not heard of this movie but rushed home to see it got a 39% on Rotten Tomatoes...but that's with most big reviewers ignoring it so I'm sure it would be lower. My favorite quote from the reviews:
"People like Kirk Cameron apparently require Scriptural instruction about how to not act like a complete **** to your wife"

[SueW]

Those are roughly the odds for a child actor, the Stand By Me odds...

I dunno, by that argument you could say that a child actor has a 1-in-4 chance of dying by the age of 25.

I'm guessing Cameron's ladder just isn't very tall. I can't picture him doing Shakespeare.

[Chuchundra]

I heard that Cameron wouldn't do an on-screen kiss with Erin Bethea, the actress who played his wife in Fireproof. Apparently kissing a woman other than his wife, even while acting, is a no-no in his book. So, for the kissing scene, he had his wife wear wig and be the "stunt lips", so to speak.

Anyone who would do that is way beyond saving as an actor.

[Stephen]

I absolutely agree with you, Fred. The word "talent" gets thrown around a lot in places where I think "craft" fits better: talent isn't an excuse not to hone your craft, basically. There are people who don't understand that things like acting and writing are crafts, and they require practice and development, and no matter how much talent you possess you will initially suck at them. I imagine these people account for a great deal of the slush pile dreck that Kit Whitfield gets.

The other thing that concerns me about Kirk Cameron is his conversion. For starters, becoming overly serious and aloof after becoming Christian? Isn't that kind of the opposite of the point? Second, I read an interview with him a while ago where he claimed that he converted because he was dissatisfied and wanted to look for answers. Ignoring the already covered point that he didn't seem terribly satisfied after converting, I don't buy that his conversion resulted from any kind of intellectually honest search for answers. He went looking, and immediately converted to fundamentalist Christianity. Basically, the religion closest at hand. It's a shame there wasn't a more liberal church closer at hand, I guess.

[Raj]

"Left Behind for breakfast on a Monday, Aunt Helga? Is it St. Swithen's day already?"

"'Tis!" replied Aunt Helga.

[jael]

all i can think (having worked "for the UN") is you don't get a job "at the UN". It just aint how it works. could they even try to disguise the willful ignorance?
agh.
:)

[zzyzx]

How does it work then? I'm curious now.

[Michael Cule]

The last bit on the sequence actually worked. Avoiding the Big Moment and then "I think he's gone off naked." Nice bit of creepiness.

Otherwise, oh my word... The horrendous music. The moustache twirlling villains. Merging the Euro with whatever the hell currency they have in Korea? Korea for crying out loud!

And apparantly it is common knowledge among American film producers that audiences can't tell the difference between posh houses in California and the real thing in 'Londond, England'.

[bulbul]

How does it work then? I'm curious now.
You get a job at one of the agencies or one of the administrative bodies UN consists of.

[bulbul]

Merging the Euro with whatever the hell currency they have in Korea? Korea for crying out loud!
Won. That's the name of the currency in Korea - both Koreas, actually. Notice how it's not "merged", but "standardized". What does that even mean?
And is it just me, or does Nicky Himalayas sound Russian?

[Raj]

He had "reached the top of the ladder," Cameron said. And he still seems to believe that this is true.

Two words: Clay Aiken

(And let there be no Claymates on this forum, but if there are, deliver me from their wrath. Amen.)

[Tonio]

It is also eminently concerned with the study of human nature. The nature and meaning of human existence is a central concern of all Christian theology.

In my experience, many religions study human nature with certain assumptions about transcendental beings or existence. Are there religions that approach the same subject while being agnostice about anything transcendental?

a branch of Christianity that had an almost entirely negative concept of virtue. According to this form of religion, being good means not doing certain things -- not doing a lot of things, actually.

That's the attitude I picked up from my mother, who wasn't an RTC even though she grew up in a family of Lutherans and Baptists. The attitude was that acting on impulses or trying certain things would get one into trouble, and one was bad if one had those impulses or one wanted to try those things.

We can give up and find some other activity to pursue, or we can shut up, take notes and learn as much as we can.

When one of my children was younger, she seemed to have inherited an attitude that plagued me for a while at that age. She apparently believed she should do well at an activity the first time she tries it. She quickly became discouraged after seeing other children doing well at the activity, like it's all about comparison (as opposed to competition.)

[Amaryllis]

Left-Behind Monday? At work, where I can't watch videos? Bah humbug.

I'll just have to catch the late show tonight.

Meanwhile, Kit:There are two kinds of artistic ability: perception and creation...Then you have people with no artistic talent at all. Those are people with neither perception nor creation; they can't tell good from bad.
Do you think perception can be learned, at all, not just educated? Do you have to have an innate artistic ability to ever be able to say more than, "I don't know much about art/music/books, but I know what I like?" Can a tone-deaf person learn to tell good music from bad? (I remember reading a short story once, about a mother who taught a tone-deaf bunch of 8-year-olds to hear music, and then to sing on key; was that totally fantasy?) Is there an equivalent "disability" in the visual or literary fields-- is it possible to be "art-blind" or "story-deaf", inherently, not just through the pitiable state of arts education? Is such a disability inherent, or a matter of lack of interest combined with lack of education?

Back later...

[Stephen]

Is there an equivalent "disability" in the visual or literary fields-- is it possible to be "art-blind" or "story-deaf", inherently, not just through the pitiable state of arts education?

Well, in terms of sight, I would assume the closest analogy to tone deafness is color blindness. That would certainly hinder your ability to appreciate and judge art, or at least the color aspect of art, but it wouldn't necessarily be damning.

Stories are a completely different thing. The quality of art and music is aesthetic; stories are not. By this I mean the experience of your senses is critical to the appreciation of art and music. By contrast, if you can see the words on the page (or feel them in Braille, or hear them read) and know what they mean, you have the basic building blocks to judge stories (though not necessarily the skill, of course).

[Raj]

bulbul:And is it just me, or does Nicky Himalayas sound Russian?

He sounds, you know, foreign. It's that generic foreign accent that all those foreigner types are supposed to have (save the English, the French, the Germans, the various Spanish-speaking peoples, and East Asians). For more on this type of thinking, see Kit's comments on the stereotyping of the English.

Once, when I was at a train station, a Polish (I think) lady was trying to communicate with a ticket agent. After some unsuccessful attempts at communication, the ticket agent called me over and asked me if I could translate what the possibly Polish lady was saying. I'm Indian (as in "from India"), and look Indian. But hey, I should have been able to talk to this foreign woman in our common tongue of Foreignese, since we were both from that exotic land of Foreignistan.

[Spalanzani]

bulbul: "There is this invention we call a 'camera'..."

I actually did take some pictures (though I don't think they really captured the beauty of the place), and I was going to put them on the internet and post a link, but my computer and/or blog-fetus is just not cooperating right now. Anyway, the place I went was Mt. Takao, west of Tokyo; very nice fall colors on the trees, plus giant statues of big-nosed monsters. I'm trying to put together a blog for my aimless wanderings around Tokyo, so if it ever gets beyond the fetal stage I'll put the link in my typepad info.

[Tonio]

And apparantly it is common knowledge among American film producers that audiences can't tell the difference between posh houses in California and the real thing in 'Londond, England'.

I liked the joke in the second Austin Powers movie about the English countryside looking suspiciously like southern California. Producers in both film and TV have been using Canada as a stand-in for the US for years - the Maltin Guide notes that the first Look Who's Talking is set in NYC but was obviously not filmed there.

[Personal Failure]

"Cameron became more concerned with being a role model than he was with his role because he had found a spiritual home in a branch of Christianity that had an almost entirely negative concept of virtue. According to this form of religion, being good means not doing certain things -- not doing a lot of things, actually. And being really good, I suppose, means doing almost nothing."

So, when God said to make a joyful noise, these people think he meant to sing really awful contemporary christian music as joylessly as possible?

[lonespark]

Wow, Raj. That's...wow.

I mean, we've all encountered or heard of the situation where the little old Chinese woman and the dude from Eritrea both speak Spanish cause they grew up in Cuba or whatever (or maybe that's just my acquaintances?), so the idea that people might have a language in common that's not English isn't ridiculous. But the idea that random people you know nothing about will be able to communicate with each other? All I can conclude is the train station person doesn't understand that the world contains multiple non-English languages. I am completely blanking on the type of upbringing that could leave you with that view.

[DBH]

I've been a long-time reader of Mr. Clark's LB Series, but this is the first time I've been inspired to post. Probably because I've seen all of the Left Behind movies. And because this post struck a chord with a conclusion I made -- Brad Johnson does a better job than Kirk Cameron at playing a born-again Christian. Clark's latest post gives an intriguing rationale as to why. (Of course, Johnson may be a born-again himself, but he certainly hasn't been as public or weird as Cameron has been.)

And then there was this point --

According to this form of religion, being good means not doing certain things -- not doing a lot of things, actually. And being really good, I suppose, means doing almost nothing.

I note this because this is practically the exact theme of the third LB movie. The spirit of a preacher speaks to CamCam and literally tells him to do nothing. At this point in the series theology and pop-culture ambitions openly clash with each other. The entire narrative thrust revolves around getting saved. (Each movie's climax focuses on a moment of conversion.) Everything else -- the disappearance of millions, the emergence of a world dictatorship, war -- is almost incidental. Of course, that's the point Clark has been making repeatedly. Left Behind rejects any real-life implications of its narrative for the sake of its crazed theology.

But, at the same time, the producers of the film adaptations must have become increasingly aware that they needed to bring it in terms of actual...I don't know...entertainment. So they hired the guy who directed Action Jackson and created a separate narrative in the third LB movie where the President of the United States gets involved with a resistance movement and infiltrates secret facilities like he's Fox Mulder. In the end he tries to blow up the Antichrist with a missile -- an utterly pointless act within the context of the series.

I mention all this because it's part of the weird mental block this theology creates. It's weird because it's not a complete block. The producers of the movie have some idea about what a conventional movie should be, just as Cameron has some vague concept about acting. However, their religious beliefs keep them from getting over the right hurdle. The result is, as Clark said, neither hot nor cold.

[Tonio]

"No practical jokes, very serious. If he wasn't in a scene, he'd go away." ..."He seemed kind of sad, and we thought that was odd for somebody who had found religion,"

Just a guess - since he now believed that the Rapture and Armageddon was imminent, he was terrified of doing something that would anger his god and result in his being Left Behind. I wonder if LaHaye has that kind of seriousness.

[LeRoc]

we've all encountered or heard of the situation where the little old Chinese woman and the dude from Eritrea both speak Spanish cause they grew up in Cuba or whatever

I am quite familiar with this situation. I am less and less using English as lingua franca, and for example more Spanish or German, with people from all kinds of locations in the world.

[Chrissl]

@Kit:
And that ridiculous Stately Home - in London?

Well of course London. What other place name in England would you expect Americans to recognize? If you said Tutbury or Matlock or York no one would have a clue what country you were talking about ;)

Astute observation about people not knowing it when their stuff is terrible. I've edited magazines and the most astonishingly inept stuff comes in (which, of course, not only the author but the author's friends and family think is just terrific). About the degree of "tone-deafness" involved, my experience is that some people are capable of being trained to perceive their work more accurately and others aren't -- and you can't predict which is which, so as editor or teacher, you have to try it with the full knowledge that some of your authors will catch on and get better, some will remain clueless, and some will get angry at you for saying anything.

I actually think the problem with bad acting here is akin to the problem I see in people with no art experience trying to find illustrations for an article. A lot of people's first instinct is to choose illustrations solely by content and to completely ignore artistic style, which plays havoc with any attempt at competent graphic design. Fortunately I've usually been given veto power when I do layouts, otherwise I'd have to cope with pages where a dark, coarse woodcut pulls all eyes to one side of the page while a light sketch that is actually more important and communicates more about the subject gets zero attention.

Kirk seems to feel that being an actor is all about a sort of "content" too: about who he is, what he says and does on set, and how he's a role model in everything he does. How he does his job, let alone how well, is secondary at best or even irrelevant, and may not even occur to him very often. To put it another way, a lot of RTC artists (including preachers) seem to feel that being a celebrity, rather than actually, y'know, Doing Their Art, is their real job.

[Tonio]

a lot of RTC artists (including preachers) seem to feel that being a celebrity, rather than actually, y'know, Doing Their Art, is their real job.

That concept of role model is really an authoritarian one - the content of the art is irrelevant.

Speaking of RTC artists, my kids were watching an ice skating show on TV that included Amy Grant. Before singing, she mentioned how many children she had, adding that "I have the stretch marks to prove it." My jaw dropped, only because I didn't expect to hear that from a Christian entertainer. There was a time when TV censors would bleep out that phrase. I think it would be hilarious to hear the bleep when Grant talks, because of the temptation to assume that what was censored was much worse.

[Dave Lartigue]

Why should he bother to learn how to act when he already has two awesome excuses:

1) As a Christian, I know that Hollywood won't give me any decent roles.

2) The Love of God is all the "success" I need.

[John]

Isn't this notion of having reached the top (of some ladder) -- of having, perhaps, nothing to learn -- something we heard of echoes of in the Palin candidacy? She never blinked, she said, in considering whether to accept McCain's offer. "You can't blink." This kind of dunderheaded certitude terrified and baffled me. I know it could be read as "strong" rhetoric, but the theme seemed to play out again and again, in every press encounter -- we never saw any layers of insight in Palin. None of that "I know what you're trying to get me to say, but I don't know about that, so I'm going to challenge you back with this related idea." No building up of argument, point by point. No sense of any interrelatedness of ideas.

A morality completely un-based in reality, if you will. Just certitudes, without any work, reason, pros, cons, doubts or process. Everything that's lacking in Cameron's acting.

[Ian]

"Can a tone-deaf person learn to tell good music from bad?"

I think the cure is joy.

I used to be dance-blind until my wife got me watching "So You Think You Can Dance." I had no idea what was going on, but the mishmash of styles was entertaining in itself. So I'm watching, and after a few weeks I'm starting to get some idea what dancing's supposed to look like. It's easy to see the contrast between the dancers who've learned the spirit of the style du jour and those who have not. The judges (when not screaming incoherently about "the hot tamale train") gave technical criticism of their work, followed by a slow motion replay of mistakes and brilliant moments. I few weeks later I saw some ballet on TV and I had half a clue as to what was going on! I felt like Neo: "I know ballet." I'd developed some low-level perceptual artistic virtue without knowing it.

I'd been watching a lot of dance, and more importantly I'd had hammered home to me by close contrast the difference between good and bad dancing. What mattered most, I think, was that after a while I came to enjoy the dancing itself, not just the soap opera aspects of the show or snuggling with the missus. Once you've got even just a little love of the craft itself you're in a position to learn and grow.

Kirk Cameron's problem seems to be that he loves his conception of God but does not love acting.

[DBH]

If you don't mind me going off on a tangent, I'd like to talk about the acting in another evangelical-marketed movie -- Facing the Giants. I don't think this is too much of a tangent, since Fred Clark mentions Fireproof. Right now the Kendrick brothers are the kings in this particular genre of self-consciously 'Christian cinema.' I hope Clark talks about them more in the future.

Anyway, Facing the Giants was the Kendricks' previous movie. You might have heard about it. You might have also heard that the acting is not particularly good. Technically that is true. The actors are not 'professionals.' Having seen the movie, though, I'm actually grateful that they were no professional actors in the cast. If there had been, the movie would have been absolutely insufferable. As it stands, it has a certain charm. The charm comes from the fact that the cast members actually look and sound like their characters. No one has to fake a Georgia accent. The high school students actually have the appearance of high school students. When it comes to using non-professionals, Alex Kendrick ain't no Vittoria De Sica, but the film does feel nicely rooted in its environment.

Then there's Alex Kendrick who plays the down-on-the-luck football coach on the verge of a religous-based triumph. Again, Kendrick is no professional actor, but I actually thought that he had credibility in the role. I was genuinely touched by the scene where he breaks down crying over the mess of his life.

Now let me attempt to tie this rambling to Clark's post. He notes that most of the people behind LB lack any empathy for the unsaved. The Kendrick brothers, on the other, seem to present a symapthetic portrait of their characters before their religious converstion. To be more precise, though, they show empathy for failures or people who feel like failures. (Of course, when the coach 'submits' to God, his life completely turns around. His big win at the state championship coincides with his sperm finally getting his wife pregnant. Postively Freudian, that is.) You may say that this isn't exactly empathy for anyone who doesn't share their religious beliefs, but there is a difference here from the smug triumphalism that Clark has been critiquing in the LB series.

We should note that, unlike the LB movies, the Kendrick brothers have been actually making genuine dollar at the box office. Right now these are the films which resonate with their core audience. Clark made this point earlier when he noted that the evangelical pop culture has progressed beyond the end-times genre of the nineties. Not that this devalues his wonderful analysis of LB. I always look forward to new installments. However, I am curious as to what he and his readers think of the 'newcomers.'

By the way, I'm a bit of a connoisseur of such movies. If you ever want to discuss the oddness of Unidentified or the repulsiveness of One Night with the King, I'm your man.

[Kit Whitfield]

Do you think perception can be learned, at all, not just educated? Do you have to have an innate artistic ability to ever be able to say more than, "I don't know much about art/music/books, but I know what I like? ... Is there an equivalent "disability" in the visual or literary fields-- is it possible to be "art-blind" or "story-deaf", inherently, not just through the pitiable state of arts education?"

That's very hard to put to the test. I don't believe it's possible to educate someone into being a good fiction writer unless they've already got the potential (I know people hate a published writer saying this; please don't kill me), but perception depends on so many things.

I don't think it's just about education; I know some people who had the same arts education as i did, at least up to age sixteen, who came out with the most goshawful taste. This would suggest that there's a degree of innateness to perception.

It's partly a question of priorities. What do people want from art? One person I know, for instance, would read barely literate science fiction, defending it on the grounds that a) They never noticed style when they were reading anyway because they were too absorbed in the story*, and b) The book itself wasn't the important thing; they just wanted to read a fantasy-world scenario that they could make up their own fantasies about. So that's a person with no incentive to develop good taste, because good books are not what they're looking for: they want fodder for fantasy, which is different from art. (Art can, of course, provide fodder for fantasy, but it's not its sole purpose.)

There's also the degree to which someone is susceptible to what I call the Well Said Fallacy - the tendency to cry 'well said!' when you agree with the message of a story, and from this to draw the conclusion that it's also well put. Everyone's susceptible to it to a certain extent, but some people more than others. The Left Behind books depend very heavily on an audience that supports the Well Said Fallacy: if they're theologically correct, poor execution can be overlooked. Now, I see this as an issue of integrity: the fact that we all do it doesn't mean it's right, and if you really want to claim good taste you have to be prepared to acknowledge quality wherever you find it. Otherwise, again, your priorities are not artistic: your main priority is that art confirms your preconceptions, and that's going to mess with your perception.

Curiosity and willingness to learn are essential, but then, those are character traits. Someone with reasonable intelligence and no curiosity is not going to learn. I can think of another friend who, when we first knew each other, liked books I thought were really mediocre, and couldn't understand what I was talking about when I criticised them. We swapped favourites and kept discussing them, and time passed, and my friend read more stuff of their own volition as well as because of me - and then a few years later, took another look at the books I'd called mediocre, declared that they really weren't very good, and came up with a number of criticisms of them that hadn't occurred to me but were pretty spot on. That person now enjoys 'high' art as well as popular: they started off not having been exposed to very much good stuff, but had a healthy curiosity. They always cared about books being good; they just started off with a low quality bar, and experience raised it.

So based solely on personal experience, I'd say that it's easier to refine your perception than your creative output, but you have to be motivated and not everybody is. Motivation can be just as innate a character trait as talent.

As to people who say 'I don't know much about art/music/books, but I know what I like?' ... well, they don't necessarily have bad taste. They could have really good taste, but just not the vocabulary to explain it or the confidence to call it 'taste'. Another friend of mine is a bit like that: pretty much an autodidact when it comes to art and eclectic in what they like - but what they like tends to be good; they're one of the few people I'll always take a recommendation from. 'I know what I like' might be a refusal to consider quality, or it might be an expression of an innate instinct for quality - or just a way of saying their knowledge on the subject isn't encyclopaedic. After all, we can't be specialists in everything; I wouldn't say I knew that much about music or contemporary art except for 'what I like', but I wouldn't conclude from that that I've got no taste: just not much background knowledge.

*Anyone who experiences that, please don't try and use it to pull rank on people who do notice style: it does not mean that you love books or stories more than people who do care about style. I care about style, and I've based my entire career to date around a love of books and stories. It's just reverse snobbery to pretend that insensitivity to style is a sign of deeper love, and it's very annoying.

[Personal Failure]

"Isn't this notion of having reached the top (of some ladder) -- of having, perhaps, nothing to learn -- something we heard of echoes of in the Palin candidacy? She never blinked, she said, in considering whether to accept McCain's offer. "You can't blink."

When you do realize that no matter how good you are, there is someone, usually younger, who is better than you, it can be the best or worst moment of your life. After spending a childhood ridiculously overpraised for having an IQ of "star", but never being called on my horrible attitude toward the human race (whom I considered less than me), realizing that I wasn't the be all and end all was, in the end, a good thing.

For my husband, discovering that he wasn't the greatest musician/songwriter/producer in the world (he is extremely talented, just not the best) became paralyzing. After a while, I was able to convince him that you aspire to be the best, you work towards being the best, but you can never achieve it. And that's a good thing, too.

I think John nailed why I hate Palin so much. I don't hate ignorance or lack of intelligence anymore, but I do still hate people who assume that their ignorance is the best thing ever. "Look at all the books I've never read! I'm so much better than those people that want to know things!" Hell, I blink before picking a Pumpkin Spice cappuccino over the Gingersnap. She can't blink before accepting the VP nomination? RRRRR!

[Dylan]

Before singing, she mentioned how many children she had, adding that "I have the stretch marks to prove it." ... There was a time when TV censors would bleep out that phrase.

I'm not sure why they'd bleep out "stretch marks." That doesn't necessarily have anything to do with pregnancy; gain enough weight quickly enough and you're going to have them.

Unless I'm just missing something.

[Kit Whitfield]

Kirk Cameron's problem seems to be that he loves his conception of God but does not love acting.

Yes, that's important. One of the reasons I love Ella Fitzgerald, for instance, is that she sings like she loves music. Something I often quote is Ruskin's 'You will never love art well until you love what she mirrors better', and I think that's true, but after loving truth, you have to love your form. Art is what lasts, the voices of human to human echoing down the centuries, that resonates with the deepest patterns in our minds. It's a sacred trust, and if you don't love the form, you can have no feel for it - and you've got no business mauling about a sacred form that you can't handle and don't love.

[Lila]

Tonio: When one of my children was younger, she seemed to have inherited an attitude that plagued me for a while at that age. She apparently believed she should do well at an activity the first time she tries it. She quickly became discouraged after seeing other children doing well at the activity, like it's all about comparison (as opposed to competition.) I had the same experience with my eldest. She was primed to believe she could do anything the first time she tried it, because for the first few years of her life she pretty much could. I was privileged to be present in the ballet class where she (age 7) discovered she couldn't do a particular move on her first few attempts. She had a brief tearful meltdown, sniffled, straightened her leotard, and dove right back in. I could have cheered out loud. (She's now a professional actor.)

Amaryllis: Can a tone-deaf person learn to tell good music from bad? My father was a professor of music. According to him, actual clinical tone-deafness (the inability to distinguish one frequency from another) is very, very rare. Most people who say they're tone-deaf aren't, and can learn to match pitch with practice. My father's best example was a high school student who took 9 weeks to learn to sing a note played for him on the piano, but thereafter was able to learn to read music and sing in a choir. The ability to produce music accurately is closely related to the ability to judge music accurately; many of my father's (award-winning) choir students complained that he had "ruined" certain popular music for them, by enabling them to hear how badly performed it was.

various, re incompetent people's inability to see their own incompetence: I'm pretty sure someone has referenced this here before, but there's a study that demonstrated this effect in several different realms. (Abstract here.) Basically, people who don't know anything about, say, writing, think they're better writers than they are. People who are very good writers, OTOH, tend to rank their writing a bit low, because they overestimate how good other people are; but if shown a statistically accurate group of samples, the good writers will become more accurate in their estimates; the bad writers stay just as bad, and rate themselves just as high. Mediocre writers are actually able to learn from exposure to better writing.

[Jon]

When I was in college taking the required basic composition classes I always dreaded the moment when one of my fellow students would discover that I was an English major. This discovery invariably led to the moment, just before class would start on the day papers were due, in which I would be deluged with requests from the students with other majors to give their papers a look before they had to hand them in.
(I'm not sure if it's a common practice at other schools, but at mine last-minute, handwritten corrections were acceptable. So, for example, if you misspelled something when typing it, but circled it and corrected the spelling with a pen before turning it in, you wouldn't get dinged for the misspelling.)
There were so many papers that were, like the slush pile contents Kit describes, completely beyond saving. After glancing through the papers I would just hand them back and say, "There's nothing here that I can fix," and let them interpret that however they wanted.
Of course, the absolute worst experience that I had along those lines was when I worked for a printing company. We printed a local high school's monthly student newspaper, and it was my job to prep the files for printing. Technically, it should have simply been a matter of opening the document and sending it to the imagesetter, but in practice it involved a lot more effort, as the discs containing the files would always arrive with missing fonts, broken image links, etc., so I had to look through it a little more carefully.
One time I made the mistake of reading one of the articles. It was like having acid splashed in my eyes.
One of my co-workers, who also had a degree in English, said, "You can't look directly at it. Just fix the layout problems and print it, otherwise you'll end up like the Nazis who opened the Ark in Raiders."

[SchrodingersDuck]

The Nicky/Stonagal/Cothran meeting has to be one of the least atmospheric thing I've ever seen put to film. The average meeting of Cobra Command feels more sinister than this. There's no real edge to it, no feeling of malevolence. "He refused to give up his meddling ways"? What is this, Scooby Doo?

Perhaps to some extent it comes down to a topic that came up a couple of months ago - that evil doesn't take place in dark, smoky back rooms but air conditioned meeting rooms. Either one could be very effective, but the movie can't decide which would be better, so it goes for a middle ground - one minute, Stonagal casually discusses starving hundreds of Arabs, the next he's making bad puns about health benefits. It kills the mood both ways, so TC/S don't come off as moustache twirling schemers or emotionally dead babykilling monsters. They come off as jerks.

And apparantly it is common knowledge among American film producers that audiences can't tell the difference between posh houses in California and the real thing in 'Londond, England'.

I'd guess that house was built no earlier than the 1950s - perhaps the 1930s if you really pushed it. The whole thing looks like the sort architecture you might find rendered in cheap plastic at the bottom of a goldfish bowl. There's no sign of organic growth, no sign of being lived in. And, tellingly, it only has a couple of chimneys, all at the front of the house. Any authentic stately home has dozens of the things, since before central heating, every room had its own fire.

On the other hand, London (if you push the definition of London to include everything inside the M25 motorway) does have a few houses like that, but they aren't bought by powerful, sophisticated, educated businessmen; they're bought by footballers and yuppies. Had the camera panned down to show Stonagal wearing a Gucci suit stepping out of a black Koenigsegg CCX while an Alfred Pennyworth lookalike hands him a gold Blackberry, I'd wouldn't have been surprised. Trying to pass this house off as a sign of great taste and elegance however is a no-no.

[Amaryllis]

@Kit: still at work, and don't have time to actually read your answer. :(
Or anybody else's. :(
But if I can impose with one more quick question: I seem to remember you once or twice mentioning a couple of books that you'd found helpful as a writer/artist. (can't recall if it was here or your own blog.) Anyway, I'm looking for Christmas presents for a young artist; would you mind repeating the titles & authors?

[lonespark]

So, One Night With the King is repulsive, hmmm? I had a vague idea that I might enjoy, just because I love epic movies and there aren't enough of them to satisfy my wishes.

Also, what's the deal with The Nativity Story? Is it a "Christian" movie? I shall end up seeing it because I enjoy the cast, but what sort of expectations should I have?

[SueW]

She never blinked, she said, in considering whether to accept McCain's offer.

But she sure winks a lot. *smirk*

[inge]

Amaryllis: Do you think perception can be learned, at all, not just educated?

IMO, yes -- but if you lack "talent", you'll never get into that positive feedback loop that makes it easier to get classes and material and people to talk to, and learning will be a hell of a lot harder. Combine that, and you get a great big "why bother".

And if you have to overcome slight disabilites and need years to reach the level of a not-talented beginner, you need a very strong motivation if you want to get anywhere.

I have tried my hand at various arts at various perceptive, creative and performing abilities, and I have overcome insufficient perception (fashion) and slight disability (singing), but never the conviction that I was hopeless at something (painting).

[Thomas Daulton]

Kirk Cameron a bad actor? Coulda been worse. The part might have gone to Steven Baldwin (another born-again from what I hear).

Hey, don't get me wrong, I loved Steven B. in "Threesome". But he seems to have bounced back from the immorality of that movie with a vengeance... imagine what fundamentalism does to already-poor acting skills...

[bulbul]

Raj,
But hey, I should have been able to talk to this foreign woman in our common tongue of Foreignese
As it so happens, I am fluent in Foreignese. It's no big deal, really, you just have to SHOUT AT THE TOP OF YOUR LUNGS and point in various directions.

[inge]

Personal Failure: When you do realize that no matter how good you are, there is someone, usually younger, who is better than you, it can be the best or worst moment of your life.

I was always good at (nearly) everything and brilliant at nothing. Always in the top quintile, never the best, which somehow led me to the conviction that everyone was more talented than me...

[Kit Whitfield]

@Amaryllis:

Certainly - and, indeed, Merry Christmas to your young friend! The one I'd recommend most highly is Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way; some people find it trippy-hippy, but a) I've got nothing against that, and b) it actually works. The other one is Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones, about which you can say similar stuff; trippy-hippy books about creative play tend to be of much more practical use than schematic now-you-buy-a-whiteboard-and-draw-a-plot-chart books, and they also encourage you to have more fun learning. The Cameron book was so valuable I've actually mentioned it in the acknowledgments of my forthcoming novel.

To put it another way, a lot of RTC artists (including preachers) seem to feel that being a celebrity, rather than actually, y'know, Doing Their Art, is their real job.

That might explain why he thinks he 'reached the top of the ladder' at 18. He hadn't become a great actor in the artistic sense, but he'd become a celebrity. If his aim was fame rather than art, then yes, he had got to the top of a ladder - or at least, fairly high up; I mean, I hadn't heard of him, but everyone in America seems to have.

I remember reading a review of some reality TV star-search where a contestant was quoted as saying something along the lines of, 'I'd love to be an actress - walking down red carpets and accepting Oscars'. Actually acting wasn't what she envisioned. Fields in which practitioners can become famous often attract untalented fame-seekers.

People who are very good writers, OTOH, tend to rank their writing a bit low, because they overestimate how good other people are

From the point of view of a writer who's professional but who hesitates to describe herself as 'very good', I think it may also be a question of scale. If you're trying to be the best writer in your English class, you're competing against twenty to thirty people, but if you're trying to be a seriously good writer, you're judging yourself (there's no point competing) against the entire human race throughout the whole of human history, which encompasses works of breathtaking genius. That's pretty humbling; there's no point getting upset about it, because the world would be a sorry place if there were no greater artist in it than you, but it does give you a more moderate sense of your own talents. Being serious about the art means having a sense of its magnitude. Naturally, if you're judging yourself against the whole human race, but your examiner is judging you against the rest of the class, you may end up 'underestimating' yourself according to the terms of the study.

On a related subject, I'd recommend George Eliot's Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, where she remarks on works published in the days when getting published was rather too easy - early examples of Mary Sue fiction, it would seem. She talks about 'those moral qualities that contribute to literary excellence -- patient diligence, a sense of the responsibility involved in publication, and an appreciation of the sacredness of the writer's art', and the bad novelists' lack of them:

No educational restrictions can shut women out from the materials of fiction, and there is no species of art which is so free from rigid requirements. Like crystalline masses, it may take any form, and yet be beautiful; we have only to pour in the right elements -- genuine observation, humour, and passion. But it is precisely this absence of rigid requirement which constitutes the fatal seduction of novelwriting to incompetent women. Ladies are not wont to be very grossly deceived as to their power of playing on the piano; here certain positive difficulties of execution have to be conquered, and incompetence inevitably breaks down. Every art which has its absolute technique is, to a certain extent, guarded from the intrusions of mere left-handed imbecility. But in novel-writing there are no barriers for incapacity to stumble against, no external criteria to prevent a writer from mistaking foolish facility for mastery.

Acting also can take any form, and may suffer from the same problem.