Note: I wrote this Facebook Note in the first flush of excitement and awe after having seen James Cameron’s Avatar, which I still regard as one of my top two or three favorite movies ever. It quite effectively captures the passionate certainty that used to define my Christian worldview and the way I read the world through that lens. I think the analysis of the various kinds of fiction and why they’re written is still accurate, but I myself have much less certainty about my own worldview. I’m still as opinionated though. (DL, Sept. 7, 2021)
*This note is unfinished, but I’m posting it now because you can see where my thoughts trend. I may or may not get to finish it.*
Avatar is the best movie I’ve ever seen.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s the best movie that’s ever been made.
Good fiction is about feeling, and it’s about truth.
Good fiction draws you into a fictional world in a powerful way, but at the same time will say something true about real life in a powerful way. That is, by means of the fictional world you won’t just understand truth about the real world, you’ll feel it. Powerfully.
Bad fiction, even if it’s fascinating and pleasing, is fiction through and through. There’s no substance. No truth. All the feelings are simply deceiving. Handsome, witty people live as they please, experience complete emotional fulfillment, and never get a disease. Young, sweet-tempered women are wooed by handsome, sweet-tempered, witty men who dedicate every moment to wine and roses for their beloved. Bad fiction is popular.
As an antidote to bad fiction of this kind, it’s very common among literary elites to praise dark, gritty fiction that doesn’t seduce the reader with an unrealistic, sappy world in which everything always works out okay. Because, they point out, everything doesn’t always work out okay. Dark fiction is honest fiction. It does what good fiction is supposed to do. It helps you feel the dark reality that is life on this earth. Open up your eyes, overweight, middle-class, white people. For most humans, life sucks.
And of course, that’s right. The world is a fallen place. Nobody lives happily ever after. More than half of marriages end in divorce, and the ones that last are punctuated throughout with conflict, cruel words, and (in many cases) infidelity. Dark fiction can do a very good job of making you feel the anguish of such moments and of most of life in general. Hopeless romantics should read some of it. Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth is a tremendous novel in this vein.
But what most literary elites don’t understand is that that’s not the whole story.
Scripture reveals that the world wasn’t always fallen, and it won’t always be fallen. There is coming a day when every tear will be wiped away. Hope is real, and it isn’t sappy or sentimental.
But while all of us have experienced the pain and darkness of fallen life to one extent or another, none of us has ever fully experienced the unrestrained, unmitigated joy of unfallenness. That makes it very hard to write about convincingly. It’s relatively easy to provoke dark feelings in other people. We do it mostly every day, and when we want to, we excel at it. It’s much more difficult to provoke feelings of deep joy.
Because it’s so much harder to do, it takes better to fiction to do it.
That’s why The Lord of the Rings and especially The Silmarillion are better fiction than Native Son or Jude the Obscure or The Jungle.
C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien excelled at writing the fiction of joy, and it wasn’t an accident. They worked very hard at it. Everyone knows about Narnia, but Lewis’s greatest achievement in this regard was the second novel in his space trilogy, Perelandra, in which he explicitly sets out to create and explore a virgin, unfallen planet–an Eden. The entire question faced in the novel is whether or not sin will be successfully introduced into that Eden, whether the tempter can cause Perelandra to fall.
In reading that book, I have caught a clear glimpse of what the new Earth will be like–not just rationally, but emotionally. And because there really will be a new Earth, and because that new Earth is the ultimate reality that will last eternally after this world of darkness and shadows and been consumed, Lewis’s novel is far truer than dark novels that explore the temporary truth that this world is a dark and fallen place.
Incidentally, this aspect of joy is what was missing from Peter Jackson’s wretched Lord of the Rings movies. Any guy that’s going to make Faramir lust for the Ring, give Aragorn dirty fingernails and a mid-life crisis, and devote copious amounts of screen time to close-ups of orc teeth clearly doesn’t get what TLOR is all about. It’s about defending, pursuing, capturing a vision of Joy. It’s not about the monsters.
Avatar is the greatest movie of all time because it offers the most powerful fictional depiction of an unfallen world that has ever been made in any medium.
It’s a literally awe-inspiring combination of raw imaginative genius with never-before-known technological brilliance–all geared towards giving you a detailed,
James Cameron spent almost half a billion dollars creating a multi-sensory, 3-dimensional portrayal of an essentially unfallen planet called Pandora in conflict with obviously very fallen human beings from Earth. My imagination, specifically how I imagine what an unfallen Earth will be like, has been permanently expanded.