The Pond Overfloweth
Memes, News, and a belated Christmas flick
Happy New Year, crocodiles.
How does it feel to be one week in?
With a new job plus the usual Christmas-New Year inundations, I’ve fallen a little behind on getting these out. Grateful, as always, for your reading this. Honored for the reading-clicking-recommending-encouraging that goes on. Both online and in person.
With new chapters of life to go with the brand new calendar, I’ve got an announcement or two… or as the crocodiles prefer, a Word on the Pond.
Word on the Pond
This year finds me hitting both gas and brakes at the same time.
First, the gas:
Lord willing, I’ll be writing and publishing Shelf of Crocodiles for some time.
For one thing, it’s a blast. Nearly three years in, and having seen what the platform can do, I have no shortage of books, movies, current events, and faith / literary topics to pontificate on. Thus far, writing and publishing here continues to line up with my goals, broadly speaking, as a writer.
Long term, I’m looking at panning my focus over plays and drama (I was a kid actor reading from a big, bag of plays before anything else…)
I’m also looking—just looking, mind you—at publishing a novel I’ve written, chapter by chapter, here on Substack.
No promises; I’m just saying that readers like you make anything possible.
That being the case, I’ve decided to open up paid subscriptions to the newsletter for those who want to support it.
Here’s what that looks like:
What that gives you:
An easy way to support this content and the platform it’s on.
I subscribed for free. What’s changing?
Nothing. If you’re subscribed, you’ll still get all the essays I publish.
As of right now, I plan on keeping my posts public (meaning free—all subscribers get them and anyone can hop on and read.) If / when I offer perks or additional content to paying subscribers, I’ll let you know in case you’d like to hop on board.
I’d rather throw something in the tip jar once in a while. Can I still do that?
Absolutely.
You can always support Shelf of Croc without a paying subscription. Leave a comment or DM me and we’ll talk Venmo / Cashapp / PayPal / what-have-you.
Sharing, restacking, recommending, or posting on social also counts.
Just a heads-up, I’m no longer taking donations via ko-fi.com.
Now the breaks:
Given the job, the commute, a growing family (we’re pregnant with kid #2!) and several passion projects, I’m going to be publishing at a more leisurely pace—every other month to quarterly is what I’m thinking.
Credit for last years twice-a-month collaboration goes to Noah Elkins, and especially to D.T. Adams, who is still killing it with his articles on Christian theology and discipleship, literature, and how those things come together in raising a family.
If you’ve enjoyed his recurring column, there’s more of that here:
With that, scroll on for the memes, and for a very belated, R-Rated Christmas movie that isn’t (this is a huge thing, actually) Die Hard.
Wherever you’re scrolling from, I hope Christmas and New Year gave you rest, revelry, and a shot of joy for the coming year… and oh what a year it will be. We are, as the old Chinese curse goes, living in interesting times. But as the creator of the universe reminded us when he walked and spoke, that’s par for the course1.
How deeply reassuring that Christ himself was born in chaos, in a dank, unimpressive backwater of the known world. That the child in the manger grew up, conquered death, and reigns from birthday to birthday is the miracle we need, this coming year and always.
Happy reading, friends.
In the Memetime…
Literally.
That’s literally what it took to become president of America’s once flagship university. I’ve yet to hear of another job that retains the $900,000 annual salary upon a cheating scandal-turned resignation.
If you’re saying hi, make sure you ask for pronouns... in Renaissance Italian.
Speaking of Rome:
And speaking of collapse…
With the help of British writer-director Alex Garland, A24 productions already has everyone talking about a would-be ‘Civil War.’ One in which (let me finish…) Texas and California join forces against Washington.
Huh?
While I let that premise speak for itself, here’s the the trailer. You’ll get more out of this one below if you watch it.
Happy New Year, Todd from Breaking Bad.
One For the Road:
And from the crew at Loor.tv, a Christian content platform where subscribers choose who to fund…
Forget ‘Die Hard.’ The Best R-Rated Christmas Movie is ‘Children of Men’
If you’ve seen Alfonso Cuarón’s thriller Children of Men, you probably know why. Among creatives, film buffs, and symbolism hunters, the dystopian thriller’s cult following seems to be growing ever year.
For some, I’m just preaching to the choir. But assuming you haven’t seen it, or that you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s the premise.
It’s 2027 (gulp…) and for reasons that aren’t fully explained, no babies have been born in eighteen years.
Facing worldwide extinction within, say, the next seventy years, humanity has imploded. From Europe and the U.S. to Russia, Asia and more or less everywhere, civilized life has descended into war, despair, terrorism, famine. Smoke swirls over abandoned cities, polluted fields—and in New York, nuclear fallout. A well-placed PSA tells us ‘Only Britain soldiers on.’ Worldwide disaster being the case, England is the only country still functioning. Its hard fascist government now deals with the refugees swarming in from every corner of the globe.
World and setting are skillfully, even beautifully frightening.
With jarring set pieces channeling the SS, the Warsaw Ghetto, and (this being released in 2006), the Abu Ghraib scandal, British soldiers hunt down immigrants, pillage their belongings, and hold them in cages. In vicious tit-for-tat, lefty, pro-immigrant terrorists kidnap, execute, and set off bombs.
No one is safe and everyone is collapsing. As a former midwife named Miriam puts it: ‘very strange, what happens in a world without children’s voices.’
Here, and not on accident, the movie gives us the Hobbesian universe, riven with death and cruelty. Violent, cynical, and robbed of any fruitful future, Children of Men’s nightmare world is a contorted, recognizable dreamscape of the fall of man—our true condition in a world without God, stalked by death. Nightmarish, but just far enough into the future that cars, coffee shops, and warzone rubble and still recognizable, it’s the closeness to our time hits home.
As does the cursedness.
From ‘repenters’ and angry Jihadists to rich women who dress kittens up like babies, the reactions to this curse are as genuine as they are bizarre.
Here, amidst a fast-moving story with some ingeniously long camera takes, Cuarón serves up the Christmas story.
Perhaps no other film captures the wretchedness of the world Jesus of Nazareth was born into—how many baby boys died in King Herod’s massacre, to name one example—or the burst of hope he brings for those living there.
You’d be hard pressed for a better metaphor of new life’s promise than a newborn baby, or a metaphor of sin and death than worldwide infertility.
In Theo (played by Clive Owen), a hard-drinking bureaucrat with nothing to live for, we find our Joseph. Not long after Theo’s ex-wife Julian—leader of a violent, pro-immigrant militia—appears out of the blue and tasks him with escorting Kee, a wanted immigrant out of England to safety, Theo discovers why.
Kee is pregnant.
In a country barn filled with cows, Kee shows him.
Before Theo even knows it, the miracle transforms him. Seeing with his eyes, he believes.
The brief exchange with resistance leader Luke (a cool Chiwetel Ejiofor) is no throwaway.
Where Theo is stunned, enraptured, Luke is unmoved.
THEO: ‘She’s pregnant.’
LUKE: ‘Now you know what’s at stake’
Theo chases after him.
THEO: ‘She’s pregnant.’
LUKE: ‘I know. It’s a miracle, isn’t it?’
We soon learn why.
Having arranged Julian’s death so that the group can claim Kee’s baby for itself (purportedly on behalf of oppressed immigrants, and so the government can’t claim it first), Luke sees no miracle—just another pawn.
As one of Luke’s supporters blurts out: ‘This baby is the flag that could unite us all!’
Here, Cuarón reaches beyond Christmas and touches another part of the Gospel saga. Those who pined for a literal-warrior King to dispel the Romans, or who rushed in to make Jesus King on a whim2 were also, in a sense, playing chess. Like the Hebrew Pharisees who could neither see, nor accept their salvation, Luke’s doom is loving the darkness, knowing it too well, and believing he can conquer it on his own terms. Near the end, we see how far Luke’s delusions take him—to a doomed shootout with tanks, SWAT teams, and the crying baby holed up in the room with him.
Again, what a metaphor. Talk about missing the point, the hope, the message, of a miracle. Of a messiah come to be fallen humanity’s only, future hope.
Like Joseph, Theo gives up everything. Without looking back, and having already lost Julian, he guides Kee through narrow escape after narrow escape to keep her, and the baby safe. In a wild attempt to get her to the coast and meet up with a ship that will take her and baby to safety, Theo and Kee get caught in a crossfire between Luke’s resistance and the government.
But here, in a crescendo of violence, bitterness, and desperation, Cuarón breaks into the visual equivalent of a Christmas carol. When Mary and Joseph emerge, the sound of a crying baby—the first baby’s cry heard in decades—stops the fighting all around them.
And for a brief moment:
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.3
It’s a beautiful scene, profoundly human and hard to forget.
Born, Redeemed, Risen Indeed
Ending here—I could go full cinephile. Cuarón’s symbols, palette, and nods to Pink Floyd and Guernica leave plenty to cross reference. Instead, I’ll cut to the chase.
Watching Children of Men spun my imagination, forever coloring the way I think about film, realism. But it also nudged me, making me think about Christ’s birth, and Christ himself, crux and center of everything, in a way that sunk in.
Some months after watching it in theaters I was lonely and frightened, wrestling with demons, insomnia, and homesickness during a college year in England. I remember one night of walking the footpath from campus, looking up at the frigid night sky—and thinking that my Savior’s birth must be Children of Men true.
Miracle in the darkness.
Miracle worth dying for true.
If so, that what else was there?
If He was who He said he was; if he was both Man and God as foretold; if he authenticated that audacious claim with miracles; if, in dying on a cross and rising again, he cleared my debt before a just, omniscient God… then there my hope was found and secure4. And the loneliness and anxiety were small things indeed.
Both crying and laughing, Clive Owen’s mumbled reaction to the miracle baby circled through my mind
She’s pregnant.
You don’t get it… she’s pregnant.
That was a hard season for me.
But I read through John’s Gospel and I think, understood the Christian claim for what it really is—a faith based on truth claims with a capital T, as much a physical, medical remedy for the broken world as insulin for diabetes.
Reading further in First Corinthians, I found Saint Paul saying just as much—if the miracles of birth and resurrection are true, therein lies our hope. If not, Christianity collapses:
“And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.”5
Paul’s reversal, from powerful upholder of the Mosaic law to beaten, chased out, shipwrecked, house arrested evangelist, bears this out. He, like the early disciples and many others, believed it to be true. Some 2,024 years later, that may not make the leap of faith any easier, but it lines up credibly with a following that grew adapted, parsed out core doctrines, flourished under persecution, and after—for a time—building and civilizing the Western world, stays true to itself.
On Trust
Throughout the Gospels, Jesus looked warmly on trust. He healed those who put their faith in him6; but even when he appeared after death and ascended, there were some who did not believe. Given our nature, our inmost pride, and our love of control, that’s really no surprise. Like Luke and the resistance, we’d rather save ourselves or die trying than trust what we have no power over.
In Children of Men no one, not even the good guys, make it out alive. But the miracle birth moves forward, illuminating everything around it, advancing to a hope and a future the characters (and all of us) can only, presently, glimpse.
For the miracle birth and the hope therein, characters gladly sacrifice themselves.
Forgetting themselves and bowing before it, the selfish turn into heroes.
The despondent laugh for the first time in years.
Theo, robbed of fatherhood years ago when his son with Julian died from the flu, remembers, and teaches Kee how to pat the baby’s back. In the glow of the tiny baby and the future it brings, everyone and their filthy rags are at once redeemed7.
What a movie, one that only (I sigh) non-Christians could make by partial accident.
And what, I believe, a real-life story that started with Christmas.
Talk about light in the darkness, blinding light that scares the dark away.
Coming Up
Guest writer Noelle McEachran tackles C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man …a book on education taken from three famous lectures in 1943. Tune in for Noelle’s take on how Lewis’s work candidly predicts the ‘Abolition of Women’ at the hands of third wave feminists.
From the sound of that, Lia Thomas should check it out.
Until next time.
Matthew, Chapter 24. Verses 1-14.
John, Chapter 6. Verse 15.
Adam Adolphe, ‘O Holy Night’
Matthew Chapter 7. Verses 24 - 27.
First Corinthians, Chapter 15. Verse 14.
Luke, Chapter 18. Verse 42.
Galatians, Chapter 2. Verse 27.
WOW! I must watch this film again with this new perspective. Do we know if the Christmas story was on Alfonso's mind while making this movie? Or did he just happen to stumble upon its universal truths via accident or unintentional osmosis?
Wow, it's been a minute and a half since I watched "Children of Men". Your take on it definitely sparks a desire to watch it again. I remember it had an impact, but don't recall seeing the thematic threads in the light you shine here. Thanks for sharing that. And for all the other news and thoughts. Cheering you on!