The canonization of teenagers.
I feel as though, because children were murdered, I shouldn't be expressing shock at bad taste, but I don't think it's just aesthetics that I find so troubling....
You can read the article here. Excerpt:
The word "passion" in "The Passion of Joan of Arc" is based on the meaning "The sufferings of Jesus in the last days of his life, from the Last Supper to his death; the Crucifixion itself" which has been extended to "The sufferings of a martyr, martyrdom" (OED). Joan of Arc was martyred, killed because of her adherence to Christianity.
Should the suffering of someone who was shot — or who huddled in fear of getting shot — by an evil/insane gunman be called The Passion? The closeups of Falconetti and paintings of the Crucifixion reinforce religious faith. If you engage with these images, you experience vicarious suffering, and perhaps you feel you should — you do — believe what was so important to them that they died like that.
But a child in a school shooting has no internal beliefs that brought her to the place where she is suffering. No opponent of her beliefs is putting her to the test. And she would gladly run away if she could. Yes, González made a powerful demonstration of how terrible it is to be caught in a school shooting. But it would be a mistake to take the idea of that suffering and merge it with beliefs that we ought to adopt because of that suffering. The policy proposals of gun control are not the equivalent of the Christian religion. The children happened to be caught, horribly, in a very bad place, but that was happenstance, not because of their belief in gun control.
You can read the article here. Excerpt:
[L]ifting her eyes and staring into the distance before her, González stood in silence. Inhaling and exhaling deeply—the microphone caught the susurration, like waves lapping a shoreline—González’s face was stoic, tragic. Her expression shifted only minutely, but each shift—her nostrils flaring, or her eyelids batting tightly closed—registered vast emotion. Tears rolled down her cheeks; she did not wipe them away.....I become very uneasy when politics looks like religion.
In its restraint, its symbolism, and its palpable emotion, González’s silence was a remarkable piece of political expression. Her appearance also offered an uncanny echo of one of the most indelible performances in the history of cinema: that of Renée Maria Falconetti, who starred in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s classic silent film from 1928, “The Passion of Joan of Arc.”... Falconetti, who never made another movie, gives an extraordinary performance, her face registering at different moments rapture, fear, defiance, and transcendence... [W]hen Joan knows that she is to be martyred, Dreyer’s camera lingers on closeups of Falconetti, with her brutally close-cropped hair, her rough garments, and her anguished silence. Her extraordinary image in that sequence could be intercut almost seamlessly with footage from Saturday’s rally....
Our potential saviors gleam all the more brightly against the pervasive political and civic darkness of the moment.
The word "passion" in "The Passion of Joan of Arc" is based on the meaning "The sufferings of Jesus in the last days of his life, from the Last Supper to his death; the Crucifixion itself" which has been extended to "The sufferings of a martyr, martyrdom" (OED). Joan of Arc was martyred, killed because of her adherence to Christianity.
Should the suffering of someone who was shot — or who huddled in fear of getting shot — by an evil/insane gunman be called The Passion? The closeups of Falconetti and paintings of the Crucifixion reinforce religious faith. If you engage with these images, you experience vicarious suffering, and perhaps you feel you should — you do — believe what was so important to them that they died like that.
But a child in a school shooting has no internal beliefs that brought her to the place where she is suffering. No opponent of her beliefs is putting her to the test. And she would gladly run away if she could. Yes, González made a powerful demonstration of how terrible it is to be caught in a school shooting. But it would be a mistake to take the idea of that suffering and merge it with beliefs that we ought to adopt because of that suffering. The policy proposals of gun control are not the equivalent of the Christian religion. The children happened to be caught, horribly, in a very bad place, but that was happenstance, not because of their belief in gun control.
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