Like a lot of the general movie-going public, Jamie and I plunked down some change to check out Paranormal Activity Friday night. First, my quick review: very, very good. The story is simple, and the audience is really supposed to focus on the characters as they sink ever deeper into their fear over what is in their home. The film’s style is much like that of The Blair Witch Project from ten years ago. But, I didn’t find that movie at all engaging, much less frightening. Part of the issue for me was the migraine I left the theater with after enduring nearly an hour and a half of people who couldn’t hold a camera steady. Paranormal Activity solves both of those problems. In short, if you enjoy thrills and confronting your own fears, you need to go see this film.
Movies don’t frighten me very often. In fact, I’ve tried to remember the last film that really unnerved me when I saw it in the theater, but I came up empty.** Paranormal Activity actually left me rather shaken. It is frightening in a way I have never experienced with a film. [click to continue…]
“If our vocabulary dwindles to a few shopworn words, we are setting ourselves up for takeover by a dictator. When language becomes exhausted, our freedom dwindles – we cannot think; we do not recognize danger. Injustice strikes us as no more than ‘the way things are’.” ~ Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water. Colorado Springs: Shaw Books, 1972. p. 37.
- What is L’Engle saying here? Is she right?
- How does creative language help in the fight against injustice?
- Where do we see this play out inside Harry Potter, and in our culture relating to Harry Potter and other imaginative fiction?
In between the strict rationalism of the scientific fatalist and the elusive, esoteric musings of gnostic spiritualism, and as a necessary alternative to both, is “Myth.” Clyde S. Kilby writes,
We intellectualize in order to know, but paradoxically, intellectualization tends to destroy its object. The harder we grasp at the thing, the more its reality moves away.
So what is to be done? Man finds himself a third characteristic called imagination, by which he can transcend statements and systems. By some magic, imagination is able to disengage our habitual discursive and system-making and send us on a journey toward gestures, pictures, images, rhythms, metaphor, symbol, and at the peak of all, myth….
Myth is necessary because reality is so much larger than rationality. Not that myth is irrational, but that it easily accommodates the rational while rising above it. (Forward to Christian Mythmakers)
Note the place of imagination in discovering and comprehending truth. [click to continue…]
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