"Room Service" is Not Enough
Also Allegory and Appetite, Early Modern Utopias, Gyrovagues, Is the Charismatic Demonic? and More
It’s been a helluva week. I have to say. Everything is good, but sleeping has been bad. And it’s just harder to keep going when you’re tired. This has to be an invitation to greater levels of mental strength, to building psychological resilience to physical challenges, but saying that does not mean it is easy.
“Room Service” is Not Enough - Lessons from Tombstone (1993)
We’ve been going through some classic films from the 90s recently and earlier this week we watched Tombstone (1993). This was one of my favourites from when I was younger. It’s a Western about the real-life characters of Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp. There’s lots about this film that is very cool and still holds up excellently. There are dozens of fantastic one-liners and memorable exchanges and the film builds to a wonderful climax that I won’t spoil for you.
The subtle propaganda message is quite clear in all of this: it’s the life of “freedom” (which basically means no discipline, no rules, no commitments) that is the life worth pursuing.
But one thing about it struck me as very poor and dated, and that is Wyatt Earp’s relationship with the woman who was to become his real-life fourth wife, Josephine. When Earp meets her, he is immediately besotted, and he spends most of his time in her presence pathetically gawping. Amazingly, she is also instantly attracted to him, even though he behaves in this adolescent fashion. There is only one teeny-tiny problem though: he’s married. The film does nothing to critique the fact that he is cultivating romantic feelings for another woman whilst his wife is gradually poisoning herself to death through her addiction to Laudanum and other substances. It actually presents Earp’s not-so-subtle courtship of Josephine as a happy release from his otherwise restrictive and painful marriage. There is no suggestion that perhaps Earp should take some damn responsibility about his wife’s condition and try and think seriously about how he might help her. At the end of the film, she is packed off somewhere and not mentioned again until Earp and Josephine have got together. We are then told that she died of an opium overdose shortly after leaving Tombstone. When? Was it before or after Earp starting his explicitly romantic relationship with Josephine. Who cares? She’s dead, so I suppose he can do what he wants.
There’s a telling scene in which Josephine describes to Earp what she wants from life. I can’t find the quotation but it’s something like: “I want to travel around from one place to another, seeing new things, having nice experiences, never stopping anywhere for too long, and ordering room service wherever I go.” Now, instead of simply registering his disgust at such a banal and clichéd view of how life should be, Earp stares at her as though he’s listening for the first time to the discourses of Socrates or the Sermon on the Mount.
It reminded me of a scene in the film Revolutionary Road, set in humdrum 1950s US suburbia, in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s character tell his neighbours that he’s going to quit his job and his wife is going to work to support him. He’s going to go and “find himself” by becoming a writer or something. After the scene, the wife of the other couple has a panic attack because she’s never heard anything so outlandish and threatening to all to which she is accustomed.
The subtle propaganda message is quite clear in all of this: it’s the life of “freedom” (which basically means no discipline, no rules, no commitments) that is the life worth pursuing. All those things your parents and “the man” told you were good like marriage and hard work and, you know, the Church and “religion”, all of these things are stupid and just get in the way of your having a good time. Ditch them, and you can have “room service” instead.
In the Church, we are seeing a resurgence of interest from young people in traditional forms of worship rooted in the Latin Mass in Roman Catholicism and the Book of Common Prayer in Anglicanism.
Now, the fact is that the world may have accepted this line of piffle for some few decades but I believe that that time is quickly coming to a close. Young people are turning away in droves from the message of irresponsibility and selfishness and looking to traditional sources for wisdom that can help them to escape from the nightmare of the present moment. In the Church, we are seeing a resurgence of interest from young people in traditional forms of worship rooted in the Latin Mass in Roman Catholicism and the Book of Common Prayer in Anglicanism. We are also seeing increased levels of interest in orthodox approaches to the faith and indifference towards attempts to curry favour with the culture by claiming that Black Lives Matter and other forms of woke ideology are, in fact, basically the same as Christianity when in reality they are simply boring palimpsests that will fade away as the movements themselves inevitably die and join their Marxist forbears in the dustbin of history.
The time of this nonsense is over. If you don't believe me, look at the biggest influencers on the internet. They are not woke ideologues but conservative men who preach a message of personal responsibility and hard work. The failure of the Church is not that we should be woker than we are. The failure of the Church is the failure to wake up to the propitious moment that we live in. The culture is ripe for a revival of traditional Christianity. Young people - especially young men - want challenge, structure, discipline. These are the things that make life tolerable and those that give people a sense of self-respect. There’s nothing respectable about wandering around from place to place, lying around in the morning and ordering room service like a giant baby who can’t get out of bed. St Benedict called monks who did that “gyrovagues” and we would do well to remember his critique:
(Gryovagues) spend their whole lives wandering around different regions, staying in different cells for three or four days at a time, always moving from one place to another and never remaining in the same place, indulging their own desires and caught in the snares of greed…It is better to say nothing than to speak about them and their despicable way of life.
The Rule of St Benedict, Chapter 1, ‘The Kinds of Monks’
Having said all of that, Tombstone has an excellent depiction of the value of loyalty in the context of friendship. Doc Holliday, so movingly portrayed by Val Kilmer, even as he is declining and dying from tuberculosis, embodies this virtue in his never-failing assistance to, and protection of, Wyatt Earp. There’s a lovely exchange when one of their crew, Johnson, asks Doc Holliday why he is involving himself in their extremely dangerous war against the cowboys when he should be in bed:
Doc Holliday: Wyatt Earp is my friend.
Johnson: Hell, I got lots of friends.
Doc Holliday: I don’t.
True friendship is a rare gift. When that gift is given, a debt of loyalty is implied. This loyalty, at times, may involve sacrifice and putting ourselves in harm’s way for the protection of our friends.
In a final scene between Earp and Holliday, as the latter lies in his hospital bed, Holliday begs Earp to leave him to die quietly. Reluctantly, Earp rises from his side, takes one final look at Holliday and says, “Thanks for always being there, Doc.”
That’s the kind of friend everybody needs.
The final irony of this is that it is not the upstanding, law-abiding, sober-minded Wyatt Earp who is the hero of this film. When he is not gawping at a woman who he’s not married to, he spends most of his time prospecting for financial gain and only reluctantly take up his weapons to fight the cowboys mostly in a spirit of revenge for the death of his brother rather than concern for the protection of the weak and the vulnerable. It is in fact the drunken, dissolute, and gambling-addicted Doc Holliday who proves himself a loyal and virtuous companion, without whom the day truly would have been lost. A real lesson for us all.
Allegory and Appetite
My critique of Wyatt Earp and Josephine is relevant to a couple of passages from Gregory of Nyssa that I’ve come across this week. To begin with, Gregory gives us the following interpretation of the night when the Angel of Death passed over Egypt and the Hebrews were instructed to mark their upper and side doorposts with the blood of a lamb.
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