My wife and I have gone into a mode called, "saving money." It's a good mode to be in, though it does have its drawbacks (Giordano's pizza is so much better than Little Ceasar, just like it's price is so much higher).
One of the money saving devices we've resorted to is getting movies from our local library instead of the local Blockbuster. So last night Karisa stopped by the library to pick out a movie. Since the selection is smaller, we ended up with the movie "First Knight" starring Sean Connery, Julia Ormand, and Richard Gere.
There are many things to say about this movie. If you haven't seen it, I do recommend it (especially since the library has it for free). I found myself thinking a lot about idealism, fairy tales, and realism while I watched Richard Gere and Julia Ormand portrayal of the classic forbidden love of Lancelot and Guinevere.
"First Knight" is the quintessential idealistic movie. The opening scene of a village burning depicts a medieval village going about daily chores. Apparently, this village is also inhabited by fairies who magically keep everything clean. No one's clothes were dirty, the hay was all perfect, and I have feeling that the village smelled of lavender.
This sort of idealism carries throughout the movie. All the good characters wear nice clothes and all of Camelot wears blue. The evil characters all wear black and dark earth tones. Camelot is a white stone city while, of course, the evil Malagant lives in a castle that is really more of a grimy underground cave.
Compare this to the more recent version of the Arthurian legend: "King Arthur" starring Clive Owen in which the movie attempted to recreate the "real" Arthur as a Roman legion and Merlin as a Scottish highlander chief.
The new Arthur story attempts to rectify my first response to watching "First Knight" which was, "That's so unrealistic," and, "That would NEVER happen!" While "King Arthur" still have plenty of Hollywood fakeness, the overall feel of the movie is, "This is real. It could have happened."
As I thought about it more, though, I realized that it wasn't simply replacing unrealism with realism. It was also a loss of idealism. A whole essay would be necessary to compare Sean Connery's Arthur to that of Clive Owen. Undoubtably they are both men of honor and self sacrifice. However, Sean Connery depicts the man who has created and ideal setting where his values/virtues are embodied. Clive Owen, on the other hand, depicts a man of virtue in the middle of a world where his virtues are considered high ideals but of little value and in which the world's lawlessness and selfishness is overpowering.
It seems that perhaps we as a culture have become more realistic (a good thing) but have lost some of our idealism (a bad thing). We are constantly being more exposed to despair, brokenness, hunger, poverty and a host of other issues in our world today. We are more aware of the world's fallenness than ever before. At the same time, though, we seem to be less capable of dreaming the big dreams. We are more prone to write idealism off as unrealistic naivete.
We will never build Arthur's Camelot on earth. In fact, Arthur's Camelot is simply an echo of the true goodness of the Kingdom of God to come. At the same time, it was with some sadness that I realized that even in our story telling, we don't have imagination for the ideal, but prefer to live in the gritty realism of the world today.
This is the challenge of the both/and Kingdom. How can we both acknowledge the deep darkness and the unpleasant realities of life, while still dreaming the dreams of the truly good.
There are, of course, many other levels of critique that could be applied to both these movies. That is not my purpose today. I'm sure that even these ideas could be applied more fully and developed more clearly. These are just my initial thoughts and I'd love to hear yours, so send me your thoughts if you got 'em!
