Chapter One
Postcard 1:
Beyond Romeo and Juliet
I sit on the fault lines of a cultural shift. In my right
hand, I hold a video remote. In my left hand, I hold the
gospel of Jesus. I am born for such a time as this. So are
you. Ours is the task of communicating this gospel in
an age of change. Ours is the task of following Jesus into
the future of this cultural shift.
Last century, Karl Barth wrote that the task of
Christian communication was to sit with the newspaper
in one hand and the Bible in the other. Last century.
That was when "gay" meant happy and the Berlin Wall
marked East from West. Last century. That was before
multi-media, the Internet, and virtual reality. Jesus and
the Bible have not changed-both have captured my
heart. But the world I sit in looks totally different than it
did even ten years ago. The future of faith looks increasingly
fragile.
Press PLAY
In 1968, the year I was born, Franco Zeffarelli produced
a film version of Romeo and Juliet. Zeffarelli realized
that while Shakespeare's ancient text had not changed,
the people reading the text were totally different. It was
time to focus on historical literature through the lens
of a contemporary context.
The 60-second cinematic introduction to Zeffarelli'sRomeo and Juliet is one long, slow, camera pan.
From a distance, the lens casts its gaze languorously over
a city. The viewer is allowed a detached distance from
the affairs and passions of that city. A lone male voice
speaks over a soft, orchestral lilt. Slowly a horse and
cart emerge from an ancient city gate and clip their way
across the screen.
Rush ahead to 1996, less than 30 years later, to
Baz Luhrmann's cinematic version of Romeo and Juliet.
Luhrmann, too, realized that while the ancient text had
not changed, the audience had. Once again it was time
to mix the old with the new.
Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet is set in Verona
Beach, a modern city of guns, money, and greed. The
125-second cinematic introduction starts with static and
channel surfing-welcome to the world of multi-media.
A TV appears center screen and the news announcer, a
black female, speaks-welcome to the celebration of the
ethnic and the edge. The camera zooms the detached
viewer into the TV and plunges down two lines of apartment
blocks-welcome to a shift from objectivity to
immersion. Text and image are mixed with an explosive
soundtrack. Images flash by: a statue of Jesus, city scenes,
helicopters, advertising, police around a body, newspaper
headlines. Flames engulf a newspaper-both image and
text-telling of the Capulets and Montagues-welcome
to ancient text amid a cultural shift.
Two directors, two movies, two cultures, one
text. Both movies tell a story that has been told (and
contextualized) for centuries. Yet in these two versions
of the same story, there exist cues about the times in
which-for which-they were made. Not just the trappings
of the culture, mind you, but its very essence.
Culture is like the air we breathe. Without it
we would die. It lies all around us, unrecognized and
unmentioned. And then, every now and again, air
becomes a talking point-when my city has a pollution
warning, when I am forced to study air at the university
level, when my breath clouds in deep white billows
in front of my face on an icy morning. Then I think
about air. In the same way, the culture shifts between
Zeffarelli's era and Lurhmann's have come so subtly that
we may not necessarily notice them until some director
pops them up on a movie screen in such an extraordinary
way that we can no longer ignore them.
When I think about the cultural "air" in which
Luhrmann contemporizes Romeo and Juliet, I find four
clear marks of the postmodern culture: fragmentation
of fast/cutting, individual pick-and-mix lifestyles, tribalism,
and the ethnic edge.
Fast/cutting and fragmentation
Fast/cutting is a filmmaking term for the rapid cutting
between one image and the next. Fast/cutting is the
mainstay of much contemporary video communication.
It is a feature of Luhrmann's introduction of Romeo and
Juliet-a montage of city scenes, people rioting, and
images of Jesus. Graphics and text flash by, juxtaposed
and fleeting.
Fast/cutting also shows up in the use of sound
bites in the news. Studies show that the average length
of a sound bite has decreased from 40 seconds in 1968,
to 8 seconds in 1996. The way in which we are given
information has changed, and therefore the process of
thinking about that information has changed. In every
way, we have moved from Zeffarelli's slow single-shot
pan to Luhrmann's rapidly moving juxtaposition of text,
sound, and image.
I often show the introductions to these two versions
of Romeo and Juliet to groups wanting to explore
cultural change. After we watch the introductions, I
have the groups list the changes, not just in the filming
techniques but in the aspects of the culture that these
techniques represent.
After doing this with a range of mainstream
churches, I did it with an emerging church group. Halfway
through the exercise, a voice spoke up. "It's real.
Luhrmann's one. It's got more content." This comment
reminded me that technology influences, even changes,
the way we think. When you spend your life immersed in
the fast/cutting of text and image, fast/cutting becomes
the way you process and learn. Suddenly, the slow camera
pan and the monologue become artificial, false, hard
to follow. When you're used to surfing from image to
image, three point sermons start to sound like archaic
King James English.
Fast/cutting is a surface technology. It demonstrates
a change in the way culture communicates. But
fast/cutting is also like the leaves of a tree-just as leaves
are nourished by underground roots, so fast/cutting is
nourished by underground ideas. It isn't just our understanding
of our culture that has become fragmented, but
the culture itself.
In his book, The Postmodern Condition, French
thinker Jean François Lyotard investigates the ways in
which computer technologies influence people's thinking.
His findings lead him to argue for "incredulity
toward metanarratives." In other words, over time and
with the help of our tech-centered world, we have grown
to distrust the idea of one overarching story that can
be used to make sense of everything. Our thinking has
fragmented into many privatized stories.
And that brings with it a whole new set of questions.
As Morpheus uses the remote to change landscapes
around Neo in The Matrix, the question is, "Which reality
is the real one?" As war is constructed in Wag the
Dog, the question is, "Who controls reality?" As Forrest
Gump is digitally inserted into the black-and-white
archives of U.S. history, the question is, "What is true
history?" As Bono from U2 sings, "Even better than the
real thing," the question is, "Where are you standing to
view reality?"
These movies, these cultural leaves, emerge from
underground thinking. Back in 1972, French thinker
Michel Foucault argued, "Truth is a thing of this world;
it is produced only by multiple forms of constraint."
Consider the work of Jacques Derrida, the
father of deconstructionism. I used to think of his
work as part of the remote world of academia-until he
packed out one of the largest auditoriums in my city. I
might have considered him elitist, but my city obviously
considered him inspirational. In an article titled, "Des
Tours de Babel," Derrida explodes previously universal
and objective ways of viewing faith and language.
He argues that at the tower of Babel we see the
emergence of the "city where understanding is no longer
possible." Rather than unify, language confuses, separates,
and fragments. Subversively, Derrida pushes us further.
He uses ancient languages to argue that God's name is
Babel. Rather than unify, God divides, fragments, or,
to use Derrida's favorite term, God deconstructs. It is
not the task of this book to respond to Derrida. Rather,
I want to point out that a packed town hall listened to
Derrida deconstruct Western ways of looking at reality.
The universality of language, philosophy, rationality,
even religion, has become unstable and subjective.
This fragmenting approach has been cleverly called, not
deduction or induction, but unduction, the reversal of
all attempts to achieve knowledge and truth. Such fragmentation,
whether at the surface or on underground
levels, can result in contemporary cultures being both
pessimistic and playfully pluralistic.
Modernity's dream of a better, brighter future is
replaced by kind of hopelessness. "It's dark in there-in
the Future I mean. It's not a good place . I feel like
sleeping for a thousand years-that way I'll never have
to be around for this weird new future," writes a disillusioned
young adult in a Douglas Coupland novel.
In Coupland's Polaroids from the Dead, a hippie mother
puts her children to bed while telling them the story of
the skeleton that enters the gleaming modern city. The
city is in a drought. Its creative visionaries die. The skeleton
speaks, urging the dying city to pray for a vision of
the afterlife. It's a poignant moment of pessimism that
serves to contrast the idealism of hippie dreams with a
dying, prayerless city.
The notion of postmodern pluralism, the fast/
cutting approach to life, needs to be applied with care.
Pluralism is not new; modern liberalism prized plurality.
However, that brand of pluralism remained private.
Plural beliefs were welcomed, as long as they lay within
the overarching, universal metanarrative of the Western
dream.
In contrast, a postmodern pluralism celebrates
the breaking apart of the metanarrative. Instead of one
public, tolerant answer to the big questions, we now have
competing answers-a mosaic of perspectives and ideas
and beliefs. We stand at the postmodern coffee counter,
individually choosing our own mix of worldviews-one
shot or two, small or grande, milk or soy. The public
worldview selection list goes on. We have little choice
but to move from image to image, idea to idea, with the
speed and vigor of Luhrmann's opening montage.
Pick-and-mix lifestyles
Fragmentation represents both crisis and opportunity. In
Luhrmann's world, the camera zooms into a city where
multiple communities are visible. Such communities are
evident in the gender and ethnicity of the black, female
newsreader and the black, male chief of police breaking
up scenes of rioting between various groups, as well as
in the juxtaposition of the Montague and Capulet families.
As our culture liquifies into a montage of choices,
the range of lifestyle options becomes evident. Identity
is constructed from the pick-and-mix options available
within the multifaceted culture.
The term liquid modernity has been used to
describe the cultural shift from the solid, production-oriented,
structured confines of modernity to an insecure,
individual-driven, flexible way of living in contemporary
society. The shift in the culture and the ways in which
those shifts change the people living in the culture
becomes an ongoing dance where each partner leads for
a time.
As those of us living in a postmodern world
negotiate our way through a piecemeal society, our
assumptions about our place in that society are subtly
altered. Angela McRobbie notes, "The reason why postmodernism
appeals to a wide number of young people
is that they themselves are experiencing the enforced
fragmentation of impermanent work and low career
opportunities." There is little that is permanent here-not
your job, not your home, not your family or your
friends. It is the age of the cell phone, the laptop, and the
PDA, where the hot desk has replaced the office desk and
the satellite has replaced the landline. While the factory
prized production, routine, and teamwork, postmodern
industry values speed, innovation, and independence.
The Internet may be the ultimate in pick-and-mix
living. Individuals are freed from external institutions,
whether they are religious, familial, or business. The
individual Web surfer clicks and browses. A virtual screen
offers a global world of possibilities to each individual
mouse. The surfer can construct his or her identity in a
world of chat and e-groups. The Internet never sleeps as
all these equal websites, bound together by the egalitarian
hyperlink, offer their graphics and text. This is a world
of individualized meaning, in which the consumer clicks
supreme.
At the heart of this individual pick-and-mix is a
search for identity. Sociologists Madan Sarup and Tasneem
Raja note, "Millions of people in the world today
are searching for 'roots': they go back to the town, the
country, or the continent they came from long ago .
identity is a construction." Nowhere is this more evident
than at the mall.
Identity and lifestyle walk hand-in-hand
through the malls that define contemporary culture. At
the mall you can survey the wide range of identity garments-the
hip, the classic, the bold, the subdued, the
sweet, the sexy. It is at the mall that we see the extent
to which "product image and style and design take over
from modern metanarratives the task of conferring
meaning." It is at the mall that you pick and mix your
lifestyle. At the same time, the selection isn't as individualized
as it sounds. The choices are still pre-selected by
powers outside of our control.
Even in the seemingly endless sea of choices, the
pessimism of postmodernity bobs to the surface: "I am
a 16-year-old girl and I attend a public high school in
downtown Colorado Springs. Since childhood my body
has been a billboard. Before I could read there were labels
on my shoes, on my jeans, and across my bosom."
Identity is not just about clothes. It's also about
the consumption of experiences in an experience-driven
economy. The humble coffee bean can be grown as a
commodity. It can be converted into a product. It can be
sold as a service. Or it can be the center of an experience
in a place that defines your identity. Experiences become
another accessory the individual consumer can use to
compliment a lifestyle.
Identity is also about making our life stories
public; I define myself as I tell you who I am. That telling
is not always a verbal exchange. Notice how widespread
tattoos and body piercing are among the emerging culture.
These are visual symbols of experiences, public
mementos of a life lived. Ask my friends why they got
a tattoo and you will hear part of their story. Ask me
why I have three earrings and you'll discover that each
piercing was carefully chosen to assert my identity first
as a Christian and then as a minister. In many ways,
body modification is the natural offspring of a culture in
which identity is found in how we look and the experiences
we live out.
Continues.
