A recent book review I wrote for The American Theological Inquiry. It can also be accessed here:
http://atijournal.org/Vol6No1.htm
iPod, YouTube, Wii Play: Theological Engagements with Entertainment. By D. Brent Laytham. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012, 209 pp.
Growing up as a child in the 1980s, my household was besieged by technology. From televisions to video game systems, every new gadget seemed to herald the natural progression in an evolutionary chain of human ingenuity by bringing our species one step closer to eliminating the age-old problem of boredom. Yet, as humans constantly threatened by boredom, we do not simply experience the symptoms of our failure to pass the time purposefully but are victims to a deep existential crisis. Time, which lends acuity to our boredom, is both master and servant, and so we desperately look for ways to both control and contain the tedium of experiencing ourselves alone with ourselves.
In this work, D. Brent Laytham proposes that our love affair with entertainment is representative of a deeper disconnect despite the volume of interconnected activities that make up our lives. Entertainment has revolutionized the ways in which we relate to time, place, and one another. “For the past ninety years or so, entertainment has been aggressively colonizing our habitats, homes, vehicles, tools, bodies, schedules, and, most crucially, our habits and imaginations. Entertainment is normalized and habituated” (26).
In this readable and important work, Laytham has filled the pages with observations at the intersection of theology and entertainment. So too, many of his observations create opportunities for discourse beyond his own analyses. Laytham notes how these might be used to grow talking points in group discussions, and the book itself aids such organization by arranging the chapters with questions to introduce each discussion.
Chapter 1 introduces the challenges and discusses the pervasive extent of entertainment in contemporary culture. Chapter 2 represents Laytham’s own unique theological deconstruction that lies behind the posturing of entertainment as a power in the culture, and it is from this that a theological language crystallizes the dialectical structure of entertainment. Chapters 3 through 10 offer perspectives on types of entertainment. Chapters 11 and 12 examine the cult of celebrity and the people behind the power, while the final chapter is dedicated to the moral make-up of the silver screen. I will not attempt to address everything Laytham lays out, but instead highlight the most salient features of his presentation.
Early in his book, Laytham poses a question: Do you naturally imagine God and the gospel as belonging to one sphere of life and entertainment to another? In helping us to think in terms of relational dialectics, Laytham asserts that “we’ve settled for a world divided between loving God and enjoying ourselves–an easy, unacknowledged truce that divides our lives into zones of sacred pursuits and secular pastimes, discipleship and fandom” (3). Laytham is sensitive on this score; he insists that individuals encounter entertainment not as something whose nature is inherently bent on our destruction but as something subject to distortion by an ontology of sin that permeates our reality.
The nature of entertainment is not one openly opposed to our being, though in most encounters, it imitates the promises of spiritual fidelity, which Laytham describes by a language of theological mimicry. This mimicry disguises the disorderliness of its authority. An example of this comes in the form of devices like the iPod. Laytham claims there is an advertised transcendence, a sense of a world-denying, God-avoiding reality precisely because the transcendence one engages is “sensed within” rather than externally (37). Laytham summons Albert Borgmann’s phrase “regardless power” to explain this reality as something that produces for us desired results despite the encroachment of everyday hindrances that would otherwise prevent such access: “Technology promises this kind of regardless power, offering us an endless procession of ‘magic wands’ that provide an infinite stream of the commodities, products, experiences, and outcomes that we desire. And we become so habituated to the exercise of regardless power that we expect to exercise it everywhere and all the time” (40).
Furthermore, entertainment takes on a form of omnipresence that is a historical rejection of the transcendent reality of the omnipresent God. Taking up the work of Quentin Schultze, Laytham describes the being of entertainment as principality and power. These agencies, whether personal or impersonal, caricature, deceive, and seduce (27). But they are also far more than the activities they superintend: “A power’s agency is always more than the amalgamation of its individual human factors. A power’s fallenness, its capacity for and achievement of evil, is greater than the sum total of the human sinners involved. A power’s resistance to grace continually exceeds the resistance of its individual participants” (27).
This deeper problem speaks not to the ways in which entertainment affects our lives but its ability to overcome us. As a power, we look not to redeem it, but reorient it in its proper place. Laytham expressly rejects a position that inserts itself between the two extremes of media idolatry and technophobia. Laytham proposes instead a dialectical relationship: “One is to name entertainment as a principality, to refuse its quest for primacy in our lives, and to resist its seductive power. The other is to name entertainment as a triviality, and therefore intentionally to enjoy its freeing possibilities” (28). Humanity must resonate this dialectical movement in its mode of engagement, to “make discerning theological judgments whose purpose is neither to condemn nor celebrate entertainment per se, but to help ourselves imagine more fully the shape of fidelity to Christ...” (11).
The notion of entertainment as a triviality does not exempt entertainment as an event unworthy of God’s creative power. Laytham agrees with Stanley Hauerwas on this point, but steers away from his assertion that within entertainment one finds self-worth and purpose— for Laytham “there is no sense of ‘making a contribution’ in the passive form of many contemporary entertainments” (30). Laytham is certainly correct in a general sense, although one might point to video games, which, with their increasing sophistication, have spawned entire communities where players can vie for top scores, win praise, contribute to a digital world, and be noticed by those outside their true-life communities.
Entertainment culture also evolves and develops under the historic influence of capitalism. On the topic of play, for example, Laytham explores the concept with regard to its contemporary exploitation as a commodity for profit. Corporations are guilty of destroying the creativity and freedom essential to an authentic expression of play and instead have replaced it with scripted forms. Laytham reaches a far less optimistic conclusion than Walter Benjamin did last century on the place of art in an age of mechanical reproduction, saying that the controlling force of capitalism strips us entirely of our creativity so that “somewhere along that profit-seeking continuum lies the demise of play’s essential creativity” (13). Benjamin spoke similarly of the loss of authenticity, but he also questioned whether we ought to ignore what he considered (in the example of photography) a paradigm shift and whether the entire nature of art had been changed primarily due to the increasing volume of participation. It is clear that both Laytham and Benjamin agree that once the commoditization is complete, it is ripe for political exploitation.
The concept of community exists as a major theme both in its inauthentic expression driven by entertainment media and the call to community that resonates in the body of Christ. A negative trend reveals itself as the concept of community continues to transition from physical presence to virtual presence; it runs against the possibility of cruciform living. In its best incarnation, the secular model of the audience as community can only imitate the communion found in the body of Christ—for while audience claims oneness, its authorization remains controlled by vested interests: “So in the midst of this massive cultural transformation the Christian church, called to gather around the One who is worthy of all adoration and praise, struggles to form a people willing and able to assemble bodily as Christ’s body” (18).
These indictments against virtual community however should be advanced in full consciousness of the ever-changing expansion of social interaction. I would venture Laytham agrees that bodily presence alone is no guarantee of true community, even in the Church. And when presence was not possible, the history of Christianity recalls followers in Christ who pronounced their unending, intimate loyalty with those from whom they were separated. Laytham does not ignore this. Returning to his example of the Methodist layperson, he notes that this person could have very well sung in isolation, but even so would have been “joining with the communion of saints, even if none was visible or audibly present” (45). This notion that songs to God in private binding us to the larger community of the church leads to what I would acknowledge can be a very typical experience of many evangelicals outside non-mainline communities, the same who have become the biggest consumers of pop Christian culture. The availability of contemporary Christian music to one’s iPod allows us to manipulate content, control a range of moods, and choose to download the sermons we want to hear, which may very well aid in our praise and devotion. Laytham is on to something when he notes how the hymnal is a genetic marker of the shared fellowship of community and the iPod is not. Yet even the marketing of external speakers for the iPod has the potential of returning us to a more traditional communal experience, an option that was not pressed into service but is inherent to the technology’s realm of possible uses.
Laytham’s last chapter, in which he highlights four responses to Hollywood cinema, is a sturdy deconstruction of the seduction of easy moralizing, and offers a sharp and incisive analysis of the way we have accepted simplistic story lines and moral resolutions that more often than not stand in opposition to an appropriate theological encounter with the world.
While Laytham avoids a complete rejection of entertainment, his book continually challenges the reader to consider how he spends his waking moments in its grip. Laytham does a good job of asserting the dialectical balance of antithetical encounters with entertainment that is accomplished in the inherent tension of the model. Yet one senses it is the persuasive language of sin and fallenness insightfully applied and rooted in a recognizable biblical theology, rather than any affirmative feature (for example, in that of play, which Laytham readily admits, does not resonate in scripture) that captures one’s attention. This lack of a comparable grounding for the trivial in the biblical narrative and theological tradition requires Laytham to widen his theological lens to adopt a broader approach to cultural anthropology. In identifying play as a core task of becoming human, the question of the dialectic remaining a theologically constrained analysis opens the question of whether we are dealing with a natural theology, in which my insights are independent of a particular kind of revelation, or whether we can maintain these insights as a form of Christian revelation, as has been true with the identification of sin. Play invites our observation everywhere. Sin requires a theological mind. Concepts like thanksgiving, blessing, and the goodness of creation seem appropriate, though they are hardly intrinsic to the concept.
Entertainment still remains a moving target. There is need to allow for expansion, especially when entertainment functions in a way that violates our expectations and continues to evolve rapidly. Is entertainment, theology? If we mean by this “the study of the divine” in the proper sense, it is hard to see how even the church qualifies without becoming subject and self-referential. If entertainment is a trivial good as a part of God’s creation set in its subordinate place, then we ought to promote studies like this that seek to venture a theological understanding of our ever-changing world. No doubt Laytham’s book is an able attempt to diagnosis an entertainment culture that has been largely demonized or ignored by our theological communities.
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