Hey all! It’s Nate, your friendly neighborhood metaphysician. Here are some brief recommendations from the intersecting worlds of art, religion, and politics. Also, one dog pic.
Mrs. Davis
Science and religion, AI and God—are there any bigger narrative challenges for a format as short and shot through with capitalist urges as TV? Are there any figures more weighed down by history and pop-culture? Or begging to be over-explained by one another? Not really, but the new Peacock show Mrs. Davis still finds a way to have fun with them.
It would be difficult to summarize all of the intersecting plot-lines from the first episode or two, but here’s a sample: A plucky tween, serving as the audience plant for her withholding parents’ elaborate magic show in Reno, Nevada. A medieval order of French-speaking nuns doing acrobatic, gory battle to protect the holy grail, and the one surviving member of the order being instructed by a dying senior nun to carry it to their sisters “across the sea.” A man being rescued from a deserted island, only to confront an all-knowing AI, named Mrs. Davis, that tells his rescuers everything about his life before his horrified eyes through what looks like a red airpod. Back to the present-day, we are introduced to our new nun protagonist, Sister Simone (formerly Elizabeth or Lizzy), the girl from the magic show, now grown up. Her bucolic life of badminton, jam, and prayer is repeatedly interrupted by people “proxying” for the AI, that is, doing its bidding for points in a dystopian system of social capital. These proxies communicate, in a variety of bizarre acts, Sister Simone’s call to adventure: she has been “chosen” by the AI to hunt down the holy grail. All the while, she has her own noble quest in mind. We glimpse her frequent visits to a mysterious and charming man in a Lynch-lite greasy spoon, where she receives assignments written on restaurant order slips to do apparently good deeds—say, stopping con artists from tricking licentious married men in the desert.
Mrs. Davis is stuffed with nearly every potential plot-point and adjacent cultural reference one show could bear about AI and Christianity. I feel like I can hear the pitch calling out to us through each new plot element and character: Dan Brown meets AI-dystopia meets a self-aware Yellowstone. There’s a traumatized daughter, who follows through on the millennial fantasies of literal cloister, becoming a nun. There’s a relatively self-aware parody of boomer fantasies about masculinity in the would-be cowboy and monied heir, Wiley, Sister Simone’s fragile-egoed ex. There is a strangely inept, matriarchal secret order. A baker, a pope and a scientist. There are head-explosions, a giant Arthurian sword, and a heroically cruel series of mothers who seem to be the leitmotif of the series.
In other words, there is a lot going on, which I would venture to say is the show's biggest strength. I think the excess is fun. At its best, Mrs. Davis is a good time to speculate about and sift through. While its constant rug-pulling risks reductive resolutions to all of the intersecting plot-lines, the show has remained strange, and at times, heretically salacious. Its nested plots offer plenty of messy mystery to keep me going as a viewer. Neither the AI nor the religion plot inspire much awe or genuine existential horror to me, at least, but I've come to feel the show isn't necessarily meant to ask new questions about their fundamental nature or relation.
If you do indulge, you will quickly see how the show makes a case for AI as a useful catchall for overly tailored content and its dangers. Art doesn't imitate life, nor life art. AI creates potentially fatal confusion about which is which when we forget that it’s telling us what we want to hear, a “mean” image of normative desires in every sense of the term. This is applicable to the cynical structures of content creation in AI, or people (Maybe the question, then, is whether AI imitates humanity, or is humanity doomed to try to imitate what it thinks AI is capable of?). Ultimately, wherever it comes from, this confusion can destroy both art and spirituality's ability to grant us access to anything other than some version of ourselves by normalizing, shaping and, remediating our desires at an incomprehensibly fast pace.
Still, epistemic mystery and social commentary do not drive the show. The zany plot does, and it’s pretty wild. Mrs. Davis is certainly worth the watch if you're looking for a snarky-funny network drama, a fun mystery, and some gore, but don’t binge it. The show’s breakneck emotional pace, unearned trauma-drama, and exposition-heavy character development can feel frustrating when ingested in large quantities. One or two at a time is about right. All episodes now available on Peacock.
The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
bell hooks is a towering intellectual figure, and a deeply missed presence in American spiritual discourse. She was a leader in bridging feminist and racially informed scholarship on media, and brought a critical and loving voice to issues at the intersection of race, gender, and spirituality. She was so many things to so many, her work spanned decades, genres, and distinct eras of thought, so I will not pretend as though I can summarize her import or project in the space of a short recommendation. I can say that to me, in particular, I am grateful for her place in culture as one of America's most thoughtful, publically active Buddhists.
I was introduced to a lot of the spiritual literature I know through a high-school encounter with Joseph Campbell, prolific author, Bill Moyers’ interlocutor in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, erstwhile annotator of Finnegan’s Wake, the inspiration for Dan Harmon’s story-boarding process, so on and so forth. There’s a lot more I could say about my relationship to his work and his role as a towering figure in pop-spiritual-intellectualism in the US, but I’ll have to task some future version of myself with diving deeper into this one.
For now, I'll say that I (and I'm not alone here) have come to be troubled by Campbell’s thesis. The main argument of his work is that there is a single story of spiritual struggle identifiable in the mythological literature, religious canons, and literary history of nearly every culture he has encountered. Its an approachable mashup of the axial age thesis, structuralist studies of mythology and folklore, and the phenomenology of religion. His “hero” has a thousand faces because they, thought more often than not “he,” appear across time and place, their journey being identifiable behind various cultural or historical forms for its universal component parts and an encounter with the same mystical “truth” about a transcendent spiritual agency that subsumes the individual self into a larger whole (monotheistic Gods, Brahma, the Buddha, the Dao, etc.).
Since first coming to his book, it's been work to unlearn his excitable universalism. The lure of finding the same journey and the same transcendental truth hiding in every corner of world culture and history has a certain gravity, and as a white teenager, I slipped very easily into the narrative of his frictionless journey through world religion, unbothered by the potential complications of race, gender, or linguistic difference. As I continue to study issues with the heroic narratives at the core of the Western spiritual imaginary, their colonial origins and legacies, and their unspoken universalisms, masculinity has remained a particularly thorny issue. Campbell is almost always talking in terms of the spiritual quests of men, and posits a universal binary between the feminine and masculine, one which still needs to be more fully called into question in religious discourse to account for a wide variety of complexities of identity, experience, and spiritual life.
His vision for the plurality of spiritual narratives, which finds the same experiences and stories across so many different cultures, is staked on the ability to always “read through” the various forms in which they appear across time and culture. A tantalizing and infinitely reproduceable act of metaphysical detectivework, born out of a curious confidence to, wherever you go, make decisions about what is historical, cultural, racial, etc., and therefore particular to a moment or place, and what is timeless, transcendent, universal. Any spirituality which is thus premised on comfortably bracketing the cultural formations of the self will inevitably have a hard time dealing with the complexities of gender and sexuality, much less the way they occasion or intersect with issues of religious identity and spiritual experience.
For me, the process of reflecting on these issues has involved revisiting younger versions of myself, more or less difficult to confront. That is, exploring the way different patterns of embodiment or disembodiment, occasioned by the cultural formations of sex and gender, are the pretense for spiritual experience. I have, admittedly, needed a great deal of help on this journey. I am grateful to all of my friends who have shared their experience and listened to mine. I am grateful and try to be in community with all of the translators who introduced me to non-Western spiritual texts, and allow readers an intimate view of their entangled relations with spiritual potentials and colonial specters. I am also deeply grateful and hope to honor the inheritance of someone like bell hooks, who has offered a way into the complexities of contemporary American spiritual life with a posture that is all at once critical, creative, and loving.
Rather than reaching backwards to reconnect with the essence of masculinity (like Campbell, or say, the mythopoetic man movement), the focus of her work is the way patriarchy does damage to and sets men at odds with both themselves and their others. Drawing on her own analyses of the intersections of race, gender, and the shape of political power, she shows how certain forms of destructive masculinity are social constructed, and in being “learned” and shaped by structural inequities and a sexist culture, how they can be unlearned. Her discussions of “feminist masculinity” were particularly engaging and challenging to the forms of spiritualized masculinity I had been exposed to and socialized amid. She also offers on her own reading of spiritual concepts to consider the ways to both affirm the impact of and work to undo the deeply interpersonal structural antagonisms between sexual and gendered others, and cultivate love.
hooks describes her project in this book as offering a “feast of male reclamation and discovery of self, of the emotional right to love and be loved,” which would raise warning flags to me outside the hands of someome as insistently ethical as hooks. There are others who take these analytics in useful directions, challenging the way sex and gender themselves are written into the formations of spiritual life in the US (For instance, in Reclaiming Two Spirits) but for those who identify as male, masc, or anywhere within range of masculinity, this treatment has a lot to offer.
If you're interested in any of her other takes on love, there is a hooks tetrology on the topic: All About Love: New Visions, Salvation: Black People and Love, Communion: the Female Search for Love, and this book. I highly recommend them all as really caring texts to think with and learn from, and if you've encountered them before or end up reading, send me a message, I would love to hear your thoughts! All available very affordably from some major online used book outlets, and all still in print if you want to buy new.
Even Shorter Recs:
I am a huge fan of the podcast Vibe Check with pop-culture and politics journalists Sam Sanders and Zach Stafford, and writer-poet Saeed Jones (who also has a great newsletter). I particularly enjoyed their recent episode on the Met Gala. As someone who tries to follow the complicated relations of religion and art, one can hardly find a more thorny series of creative legacies, multiplied and flattened thousands of times over through the prisms of capital, than fashion. This isn't the focus on their episode, but Sam, Zach, and Saeed break down the looks, invoke the spirit of the late André Leon Talley, and project an incredibly affirming vibe of a conversation between friends whose takes vary but whose ethics don’t. (Also: “If I meet Anna Wintour, I’m wearing my Kirkland sweatshirt” – Sam Sanders)
I have to also mention this great 4Columns piece by Andrew Chan on Apichatpong Weerasetakul. The article’s still from Mysterious Object at Noon reminded me of a paragraph of the Ozu piece that I cut, about how Joe, as he is also known, is potentially my favorite filmmaking interpreter of Ozu’s cinematic eye—among the many attributed contenders (Paul Schrader, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Abbas Kiarostami, Wes Anderson).
Vox Populi or Dei? Seems like Vox is preparing to maybe do more coverage on religion. If some form of media is dead, whether legacy media or Twitter or whatever, this is the moment of its continual eulogy. This is no answer to the “future of media” question, but I'll say I’ve been sending thoughts and pitches into the publishing void to manifest a stronger and stranger engagement with issues around religion for a long time. I hope expanded coverage won’t just be a Ouija-board for the its ghosts.
Le Temps d’Henry:
“Is there nothing at all? Is there not some actual material offered to the organs of sight, touch, hearing, etc., during sleep as well as when we are awake? Let us close our eyes and see what is going on.” (Mind-Energy)