False Witness

The fact that our next Great Awakening never quite arrives due to our wanton, materialistic culture never seems to give forecasters pause, not when an editor is demanding a Bible-beater lifestyle piece on deadline. So on we read. In a recent Entertainment Weekly symposium on Christians in Hollywood (let’s let those four incongruent terms settle in: Christians, Hollywood, Entertainment Weekly, symposium) the creator of the Christian Veggie Tales grouses that the evangelical community doesn’t hold Gibson to the same standards of historical accuracy: “I know what kind of letters we get when we portray a prophet like Daniel as a cucumber.” Or there’s Time magazine, which recently detailed how celebrities are favoring “Jesus is my homeboy” t-shirts, how Dyptyque is now selling scented candles meant to evoke the aroma of a Russian Orthodox Church, and how a new Bible titled “Refuel,” which is packaged like a skateboarding magazine, is being marketed to teenage boys, who will find, along with their New Testament, articles on everything from how to resist pornography (try exxit.org) to how to remove plantar warts (duct tape = miracle worker).

WITH THE DEEPEST EXPRESSIONS of our faith being turned into consumerist elevator music, it was just a matter of time before a full-fledged Christian satire arrived, as it now has in Saved!–a hormonal high-school movie with a twist, in that it is set entirely at American Eagle Christian Academy. From Jonathan Swift to Evelyn Waugh, there is a healthy, if not overpopulated, tradition of Christian satire–the theory being that if God didn’t want us to laugh at His creation, He wouldn’t have made so much of it laughable.

More recently, there has been Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, in which Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is reinterpreted by the hard-of-hearing as, “Blessed are the cheesemakers.” Then there is landoverbaptist.org, a cyber-church which parodies narrow-thinkers and Scripture-distorters with a sermon archive that contains titles such as “From the Tower of Babel to Shuttle Demise: God Doesn’t Want Jews Anywhere Near His Home,” or one that tends to make us Protestants chuckle: “Prepare ‘Goodbyes’ For Your Catholic Friends, For they Won’t Be Joining Us In the Hereafter!” in which “Brother Harry Hardwick explains why Jesus doesn’t like people who pray to his Mother, count beads, and insist on getting their spiritual advice from pedophiles.”

Not all are so broad. Like the path to salvation itself, narrow is the way of good Christian satire, as most consistently practiced by the Door magazine. Launched in 1971 by California “Jesus people” as the Wittenburg Door, it was intended to redress the problems of the Church, much as Martin Luther did by nailing his theses to the door in Wittenberg. When the magazine’s founders noticed they misspelled “Wittenberg” in the magazine’s title, they decided satire would be their medium. Since then, the magazine has been handed off to the Trinity Foundation in Dallas, whose mission is advertised as a “scriptural injunction to mock idolatry.” Thus, there are send-ups of prosperity gospel trendiness, like “The Prayer of Jabez’ Next-Door Neighbor, Shabez.” And there’s “Theological Terms from The Esoteric Dictionary of Quasi-Spiritual Mistaken Knowledge” such as “Apocalips” (“the intensely pursed expression of readers of Left Behind books”) and “Pentetouché” (“a crushing rejoinder to arguments that Moses did not write the Pentateuch”).

SUCH MOCKERY is not, as commonly believed, best practiced by outsiders, but rather by those who operate on the inside fringes of that which is being mocked. The difference between the two is the difference between relying on an ethnographer to relay the scuttlebutt of a tribe whose language he doesn’t even understand versus relying on the tribe gossip to give you the straight dope in the tribe’s own tongue. Sure, the former can observe that Dikumba sports a plate in his lip. But then what? As the Door editors offer in an uncharacteristically earnest disclosure, “We satirize something we love–the Church, and more generally people of faith–with the hope that our prodding might generate some course corrections while inducing a laugh or two.”

ONE GETS THE OPPOSITE SENSATION when watching Saved!, which is produced by REM lead singer/part-time film producer Michael Stipe. Stipe, whose pallor is as anemic as his artistic affectations are pretentious, has described the film’s script, which he’s called “sweetly subversive,” thusly: “It’s like those monster vampire high school kind of movies, only here the monsters are Jesus-freak teenagers.” Good one, Michael. Ironically, Stipe has spent the better part of a decade publicly wrestling with his sexuality, and losing. Not only has he said, “I presume that a lot of people just thought I was 100 percent homosexual. That’s not really the case. Nor am I 100 percent heterosexual. Nor do I adhere to or appreciate the label bisexual.” Whatever sexual he is, he doesn’t “really feel comfortable with labels,” since “labels are for canned food.”

Unless of course, he’s pinning them on three-headed Jesus-freak teenagers. In which case, it’s perfectly acceptable, as it often is when Christians generally, and evangelicals specifically, regularly get gut-shot without recriminations, even when every other grievance group imaginable has a lobbying arm paid to do nothing but whine when their ox is gored. Why Christians haven’t come up with an effective version of the same is anyone’s guess. Mine are that:

Still, if Christians ever do successfully launch their equivalent of a Council on American Islamic Relations, an outfit which manages to raise their voice in protest every time Ann Coulter barks their way, it is hard to imagine a worthier target than Saved!–not on religious grounds, but artistic ones. For it violates Mary Wortley Montagu’s first maxim of satire, which should, “like a polished razor keen, wound with a touch, that’s scarcely felt or seen.” With first-time director Brian Dannelly, who co-wrote this aggressively stupid script with Michael Urban, he never grabs a scalpel when a bastinado is in reach.

THE FILM’S SETTING, at first glance, seems less a Christian high school, more a Heritage USA-style mini-golf course, since it is overseen by a giant plastic Jesus in running shoes. From there, things get really subtle. The virginal Mary, played by Jena Malone, conks herself unconscious in her pool, right as her figure-skating boyfriend is confessing to her that he’s actually gay. A contractor doing yardwork–that’s right, a carpenter, complete with beatific look and Manson Family-facial hair–dives in to save her, and she has a religious hallucination. The carpenter is Jesus, telling her to do “everything she can” to help her boyfriend find his way. She obliges with fornication, though he still favors the Honcho magazines under his mattress, which his parents discover. He ends up getting checked into Mercy House, a “de-gay-ification” exit ministry. Mary ends up in the family way.

Mary starts to question her faith, even though she belongs to a group of it-girls called “The Christian Jewels,” who keep a dizzying social calendar of abortion-center protests and Promise Keeper rallies. The Jewels’ ringleader, Hilary Faye, is played by pop teen-queen sensation, Mandy Moore, who we can tell is the heavy since the brown-dye job she got for her Serious Thespian phase in teen-weeper A Walk To Remember is now back to bitchy blonde. We are introduced to Hilary Faye popping off rounds at the Emmanuel Shooting Range (“An eye for an eye” is the motto). She tells the newly-knocked up Mary, “I’m saving myself for marriage, and I’ll use force if necessary.”

Despite being members of the same contemporary Christian singing group, Hilary Faye and Mary’s relations are strained not only as a result of Mary’s creeping agnosticism, but from them both fancying Patrick (played by Patrick Fugit of Almost Famous), the principal’s mop-haired son, who wears JC/DC (Jesus Christ/Demon Crusher) t-shirts, and who heads the school’s Christian skateboard outfit (“board for the Lord”). Patrick’s dad, Pastor Skip (played by Martin Donovan, one of director Hal Hartley’s regulars) turns in the film’s best performance and is the most recognizable character to Christian youth movement aficionados as the too-hip-by-half youth pastor, who asks the school assembly corny questions like “Are you down with G-O-D?”

As Mary’s spiritual crisis and physical condition advance, she has a final fall-out with the judgmental Hilary Faye and the remaining Jewels, when the former stages a gossip-circle camouflaged as a prayer group on behalf of Mary’s gay boyfriend. Mary is then consigned to the school’s renegade outcasts, embodied by Jewish bad girl Cassandra (Eva Amurri) and Hilary Faye’s wheelchair-bound brother, Roland, played by Macauley Culkin, who has traded in his boyhood nights at Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch for a different brand of “Jesus juice.”

Their suspicions of Mary’s fall from grace are initially roused when spying her sneaking a visit to a Planned Parenthood clinic. (“There’s only one reason Christian girls come downtown to Planned Parenthood,” says Cassandra. “She’s planting a pipebomb?” asks Roland). But instead they embrace her, help give her the courage to carry her baby to term, show her true love, not the counterfeit churchified version practiced by the Christian Jewels, and help foil the diabolical schemes of Hilary Faye, who plots to have them expelled.

By the end, Mary’s gay boyfriend brings his life partner to the prom, she delivers a bouncing baby, Hilary Faye gets a huge zit and crashes her van into the giant plastic Jesus. Tears are shed. Enlightenment ensues. The moral, which we smell coming around the mountain nearly an hour away, is that we should accept gay people, we should embrace unwed mothers, we should not judge anyone, place hamsters in Easy-Bake ovens, or throw toddlers off overpasses. The last two are actually left unsaid, but just barely. This is a movie that likes its subversiveness obvious.

OF COURSE, if Saved! were as radical as it likes to think it is, the sanctimonious Christian, might, if not made to be more sympathetic, at least be made to speak like someone who hails from planet earth. I spent most of my life in Christian schools, have been friends/rivals with any number of Hilary Fayes, and yet, I didn’t recognize a lick of dialogue that came out of her mouth.

When she catches Mary lusting after Patrick, she says, “I know what you’re looking at, and Jesus does too.” On homosexuality: “You’re not born a-gay, you’re born again.” And when Hilary Faye tries to orchestrate a forced exorcism of Mary, she tells her, “You are back-sliding into the flames of hell.” When Mary makes her escape, she chucks a Bible at her, foaming, “I am full of Christ’s love.”

This isn’t a teen comedy, it’s a cartoon. And that is where the film’s true crime lies. It’s not that the Christian teen scene isn’t ripe for parody. It’s that it’s overripe. And while Saved! offers an ingenious new wrinkle in a high-school genre that has been worked over more than a Singapore whore, it fluffs the opportunity. The only award it’s likely to pick up, even at the ghastly MTV movie awards which celebrate mediocrity, is for Most Scenery Chewed.

WHILE DIRECTOR DANNELLY himself claims to be the product of Catholic elementary school, Christian high school, and a Jewish summer camp, he fails to offer a slice of life–both interesting and recognizable–and opts instead for clunky narrative-driving devices that would be at home in any maudlin after-school special. It’s a shame, because any of us who claim such a background know it is fraught with natural and dramatically exploitable tensions.

The fashion victim-hood alone would be worth 30 minutes of screen time. Forced to wear a red, white, and blue tie with both Bible and bald eagle embroidery, I was in junior high before I knew there was another option besides clip-ons. Even when my classmates and I made the switch, it wasn’t out of some sense of sartorial enlightenment, but rather, because the extra material that came from making your own four-in-hand allowed for easier garroting of underclassman while dressing out for gym.

We were forced, in my Accelerated Christian Education system (which was bent on accelerating my Christianity a little faster than it did my education), to spend our entire academic day in “offices,” which were desks facing a wall with wooden dividers (demerits for looking over them). The only time you were allowed to get up and leave was when you placed a mini-flag–a Christian flag–in a small hole drilled at the top of your office. This meant that we faced a corkboard all semester, one which often bore Bible-based successory-type epigrams, meaning that your only chance for visual stimulation was to gaze down at the shapely legs of a classmate, hoping that she didn’t cover them with those horrible, uniform-issue flesh-colored hose. Often, these legs would have a two-toned farmer’s tan from the culottes the girls were forced to wear during volleyball practice, their ballooned shorts dropping below their knees so as not to inflame our teenage passions.

This is, to be sure, only a minor instance of the seesawing forces of the ridiculous and sublime, at work in most Christian schools. Often in these settings, order, discipline, and piousness are in pitched battle with the roaring 15-year old id, which insists on doing donuts around the Tree of Good and Evil, even when it doesn’t partake. In fact, in most of the Christian schools I attended, none of the cool kids were guilty of engaging in a sibilant spray of Jesus-speak like Mandy Moore’s Hilary Faye. Few of the nerds did either. In fact, the opposite was always true. Sure, one of your wayward buddies, who might’ve had too much beer at his older brother’s party last Friday night, would inevitably and tearfully storm the altar at a youth summit for some hyperdramatic confessional emoting–the better to impress girls, who tend to reward such displays. But in a place where everyone nursed a slight case of public-school envy, the more reluctant a believer you were, the cooler you seemed. Christian-school kids, of course, had all the same urges and appetites of their public school counterparts, they just felt guiltier about them. But our rebellions were often quiet ones, the indicators of that rebellion so attenuated, that something as simple as the number of zippers in your Chess King shirt, or the length of your wraparound belt, might be the only communicable shorthand that you were in fact, bearing the Mark of Cain.

SUCH NUANCES are all but lost in the blinking-neon clichés that populate Saved! Which is why, a few days later in a fit of palette-cleansing, I went to see Mean Girls, written by Saturday Night Live‘s evil genius, Tina Fey. It’s a Heathers-like knockoff that’s just a tick below, quality-wise, the funniest teen-movies of the last several years, such as Election and Drop Dead Gorgeous.

But Mean Girls is well-acted, smartly observed, and crisply delivered. Regina–the head mean girl–is loathed, and loved because she’s loathed. The sucker fish that follow her every move say things like, “Her hair is so big, it’s full of secrets” or “she punched me in the face, it was awesome.” Aspiring cool kids can’t join the Mathletes, because it’s “social suicide.” “Cool moms” wear tight sweatsuits and offer their daughter’s friends virgin daiquiris, unless the girls want alcohol in them, because “if you’re gonna drink, I’d rather you drink at the house.”

The film has so captured the topography of high school, that at one point, there’s actually a breakdown of the cafeteria seating-chart, everything from JV jocks, to Asian nerds to unfriendly black hotties, to sexually-active band geeks. It’s a film that’s actually been to the world it claims to be reporting from.

By the end of Saved! there’s such a stack-up of windy homilies–preachier than any Hilary Faye character–that it was unclear if movie patrons were expected to throw away their popcorn buckets, or drop an offering in them. The character of Mary, turning the tables on sanctimonious, judgmental Christians, asks “What Would Jesus Do?” It’s a fair question. And the short answer is, I have no idea. I’m not authorized to speak for Him. But I suspect that if He values attention to detail as His creation suggests, and He found himself in this abortion of a movie, He would jump theaters in a hurry to sneak a look at Mean Girls.

Matt Labash is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.