The Pond Overfloweth
Head, Gut, NFL statements.... and last call for 'Civil War'
Welcome, new readers.
Thanks to a few more of you, ye olde Shelf of Crocodiles recently topped two hundred subscribers. That’s up from a mere seven when I kicked this newsletter off in 2021. As the crocodiles like to say, the more people scrolling, reading, swimming, the merrier.
This month is a double-header—a few thoughts on A24’s apolitical and yet full political box office hit ‘Civil War’ (yes, I finally caved and saw it) and a second guest column by Noelle McEachran.
Noelle took the helm last month, so this is Part II of her two-part guest column on Taylor Swift, modern education, and C.S. Lewis’ ‘The Abolition of Man.’ If you haven’t checked out part I, it’s a great opening salvo.
While you’re at it, check out her writing on faith, storytelling, and how our culture lost the plot on Box Hill Talks.
I will say that Noelle’s concluding thoughts could not better timed—what with the NFL planting its flag on ‘inclusion’ and throwing Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker under the bus for suggesting young women at a Catholic (non NFL-sponsored) grad ceremony might be more excited about starting families than careers.
His speech got political in a few other ways… but of course that’s something the NFL has never, cough, ever done.
“Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world. I can tell you that my beautiful wife Isabelle would be the first to say that her life truly started when she started living her vocation as a wife and as a mother.”
-Harrison Butker
As the old curse goes, we are still living in interesting times.
As always, happy reading.
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Civil What?
A few months ago, the trailer for ‘Civil War’ confused me.
If you’ve seen it, you might know what I’m talking about. Around thirty-five seconds, power-clingy President Nick Offerman says: “The so-called Western forces of Texas and California have suffered a very great defeat.” Immediately, and along with that title, that line whisks us along to several options.
It’s clueless—in what universe would Texas and California fight on the same side?
It’s on purpose—while playing to a topic that’s increasingly on everyone’s mind, Garland scrambles red-blue fault lines for the widest possible audience.
It’s all thrills and misery—the political sides don’t matter.
At the very least, and to paraphrase Roger Ebert, all those gunshots will play great on my home sound system.
Turns out, it’s two and three, respectively.
Having read that British writer-director Alex Garland kept his dystopia untethered from our red-blue divide on purpose, I went in knowing the aim was something indirect. In a choice that actually makes the low-res vision of a fractured, free-for-all America, more potent, Garland put more focus on the character arcs of a few gutsy war journalists than he did on giving us a warning—I’ll credit him that despite his insistence that ‘Civil War’ is a parable.'
That’s almost pushing it, but not quite. If you look closely, Garland has something of an ‘Apocalypse Now’ lesson buried in the hype… or as it were, rubble.
If ‘Civil War’ is a parable, what’s more interesting is how Garland delivers it. Unlike ‘Hunger Games’ or ‘1984,’ ‘Civil War’ is a road trip. The plot follows a few journalists racing to DC to interview the holed-up President before Marines (presumably from the CA-Texas alliance) can close in and shoot him on sight.
Along the way, jaded war journalists Lee (a believable, stricken Kristen Dunst), and Joel (Wagner Moura) show twenty-year old newbie photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) the filthy, greasy ropes.
On our way to seeing what chasing the front line scoop no matter what does to people, Garland’s fractured, chaotic future develops like a polaroid. When we arrive to a final, all out assault on Washington and the White House we find, of course, that we’re at a shockingly American Heart of Darkness.
There’s bloopers to be sure—a moment where Lee barters Canadian dollars in place of useless American dollars for gas is so outrageous (given, well Canada) that the fourth wall wobbles.
And yes, that scene with a camouflage and red-sunglass clad Jesse Plemons asking ‘What kind of American are you’ with his AR pointed steals the show. If you’ve seen it in the trailer, don’t brush it off.
But more than hits or misses, what stood out to me were some big-picture story lessons in plot and world-building sparseness. Thanks to that sparseness, ‘Civil War’ grabs thrills, and delivers. Regardless of its warts—and considering it’s high production cost—a $25 million opening weekend is nothing to scoff at.
For authors like yours truly, that’s a potent reminder that clarity is king.
Put another way—and keeping in mind that dystopian worlds in book or movie can crack under their own weight—confuse, you lose.
With this in mind, I’ll end with a few of the story tricks that made ‘Civil War’ not a parable, but better than the trailer… and in spite of itself, a timely warning for anyone seriously hoping for a national divorce.
“In the case of America, there’s an extra danger given its power and importance in the world. America has an internal concept in its exceptionalism that means it feels it’s immune to some kinds of problems. One of the things history shows us is that nobody is immune. Nobody is exceptional. And if we don’t apply rationality and decency and thoughtfulness to these problems, in any place, it can get out of control.”
-Writer-Director Alex Garland
What ‘Civil War’ Does Well
-If a bit underdeveloped, the concept de jour (a modern-day civil war engulfs America) is crystal clear.
-The concept’s relevant and hard-hitting, perhaps not evergreen. With CA and TX joining forces, Garland plays on everyone’s imagination without pinning himself to one political narrative. Somehow, it works.
-A president rehearsing an obvious propaganda speech at the beginning lays necessary exposition. Conversation among journalists before setting out give us more, but clumsily (the least clumsy example of this is the bus advertisement in ‘Children of Men’ that gives us worldwide collapse in all of fifteen seconds).'
-Beyond that scaffolding, Garland builds out the world of a Civil War visually, scene by scene, letting the concept speak for itself. When the characters discovery two captured looters being tortured at a gas station, or a sniper who won’t reveal what side he fights for pinned by another sniper, the collapse into normalized savagery is as visceral as we need.
-The focus on war journalists is a great layering choice, both for cutaway shots of what they see through the camera, and questions of how we digest, move closer to, and acclimate to carnage.
Very Nightcrawler.
-Character goals are simple—take pictures, become a war photographer (Jessie) and reach the President before the Western Forces do.
-The journey to darkness changes protagonists in probable, and yet astonishing ways. Jessie, the inexperienced journalist is initially so shocked by what she sees that she can’t even snap a photo. Lee, her hardened foil—the character is an on-the-nose nod to award-winning photographer Lee Miller—takes Jessie under her wing.
Near the end, an adrenaline-hooked Jessie is all in, tailing soldiers and dodging bullets without even flinching. But a crumpled Less is traumatized. In the final moments, Jessie’s haunting opening question: ‘If I got shot, would you photograph me?’ is answered in a way we don’t expect.
-Battle sequences (especially the final assault on DC) are superbly loud, kinetic, visually jarring.
No cartoon or horror movie here.
-Action moves forward, taking place over a few days if that (one of Aristotle’s unities).
Last but not least
-Showing us how war, and chasing it to build one’s career, changes a young, idealistic character is about as cautionary as you can get. As far as a warning goes, it’s Garland asking: what kind of mess will our kids, or grandkids be walking into?
That we walk away with this unease from action, not some moral-of-the-story monologue makes it all the more potent.
A Parable?
You be the judge.
But less we forgot (and if there’s one thing ‘Civil War’ might have mentioned…) the last time this happened some 600,000 Americans, out of a population of 30 million, lost their lives.
Everyone knew someone who did not come back.
If we really think the solution to our problems is state-on-state or rural-on-urban, or Christian Nationalist-on-everyone else warfare, ‘Civil War’ might at the very least prompt us to remember this. If we huff and puff and the shooting really starts, all bets will be off.
The Abolition of Women, Part II
A Guest Column by Noelle McEachran
In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis wrote that human nature is oriented by three categories;:
The Head: our logical, rational mind.
The Gut: What we would call the “heart” today. This represents not only our emotions but our appetites.
The Chest: What we are loyal to and motivated by.
The head and gut alone are not enough. They both need to be disciplined and directed by the chest. The “chest” represents for Lewis a sense of honor, of higher principle, of loyalty to something bigger than cold reasoning, or mere appetites and emotions. Don’t confuse the chest with mere morality, although it includes that.[1]
Lewis predicted that when you dismiss the chest (honor, loyalty, morality), education and culture will merely showcase an ongoing pendulum swing between the gut and the head. Swinging between mind and emotions, between reason and appetite, means missing the greater picture of what it means to be truly human.
We see this clearly in recent history. The World War Two generation was all “head.” They were of the cold, stiff upper lip; your feelings don’t matter, tribe. Then, with the Boomers, the pendulum swung from head to gut, which gave rise to the age of therapy in which emotions took the throne.
Lewis considered a culture of people who are only motivated by head OR gut to be petty, tribal, and animalistic. He predicted that if this is how education unfolds, then what you will wind up with is the competing propaganda narratives of people who are in power and want to stay in power—and an entire civilization of people who are vulnerable to those competing narratives.
Narratives—as Taylor Swift made clear in her interview comment—like womanhood should never, ever, be associated with having kids.
‘When the interviewer brought up that the singer is turning 30 soon and asked if she would like "to be a mother someday, to have children," Swift had a firm response.
"I don't really think men are asked that question when they turn 30, so I'm not going to answer that now," she told the outlet…
-Hayley Fitzpatrick, Good Morning America
Where Does this Leave Us?
Because we live in a time when the “heart/gut” is over-elevated above the head and chest, third-wave feminists like Taylor Swift equate freedom with lack of restraint. Because the heart/gut includes both emotions and appetites, freedom for moderns is a simple exchange—break the bars, destroy the cages, drop all binaries, boundaries, and barriers to our appetite.
Strangely, many moderns assume this is a new thing. As if we alone have cast off religion, morality, rules, and tradition. We alone embrace a daring new world in which women must never be associated with childbearing.
But history has been there many times over, albeit with different manifestations. Past cultures would have taken our measure and instantly spotted the problem: we have fallen into the simplistic but fatal error of the average three-year-old.
For some reason, we have wholesale adopted the assumption that merely to gratify appetite, passions, and inward feelings is freedom and happiness. What Lewis understood is that far from freedom, letting “gut” take the throne is, instead, enslavement. It is an enslavement to self; to whims, irritations, moods, and animalistic cravings.
Again, in Lewis’ day, it was cool logic on the throne. Lewis literally captures this in his novel That Hideous Strength. This was his attempt to write The Abolition of Man as fiction. Near the end of the novel, the characters encounter the horrific rule of a disembodied human head, kept alive with machines and placed on a throne. This head quite literally represented the absolute truth claims of science and reason apart from the heart and chest.
Today, instead, there is a heart on the throne (although the head still gets dragged out when needed; during fake epidemics, for example). The “heart” may seem sweet on the face of it. But this stripped-down version of humanity creates monsters as well.
As Lewis put it:
“In a sort of ghastly simplicity, we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
Whether “heart” or “head” is uppermost, in either case, you find humanity at its worst. A “ghastly simplicity” in which humans are reduced to mere animals. The final stage of degeneration.
Instead, children should be trained at an early age to love and hate the right things, “To make the pupil like and dislike what he ought” as Aristotle put it. Lewis similarly argued for an education in which students acquire knowledge while being trained in their loyalties.
“The head rules the belly through the chest. The seat of magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habits into stable sentiments… It may even said that by this middle element that man is man. By his intellect, he is mere spirit, and by his appetite, mere animal.”
Though we are discussing women, these truths affect every aspect of our modern life. But since woman, as a concept, is on the chopping block…
What is a Woman?
No one knows… except for trans women. Men pretending to be women are the only ones who apparently know exactly what a woman is. A woman talks with a silly lisp, dresses like Barbie, and poses in corsets. Having won “Woman of the Year,” in just one year, a middle-aged white male, Bruce Jenner, did a better job at being a woman than women can.
Don’t worry, ladies; I got this.
Because women have been abolished.
