Book Review: A Landscape With Dragons

Subtitled The Battle for Your Child’s Mind, this book speaks to the importance in forming your children through literature that teaches morality and virtue.  The book was written twenty years ago in 1998 and some of the info is a bit dated, but there is still enough great information in the book to make it worth reading.  Author Michael D. O’Brien had some keen insights that proved to be prophetic at the time of the writing; many of the dangers he warned our culture is headed toward have already come to pass.

The book begins with a description of how dragons have traditionally always been a symbol of evil.  The Bible identifies Adam and Eve’s tempter as a serpent or snake.  Saint George converts an English town by defeating a great dragon.  Several other cultures have dragons, and whether they be Gorgons or Apophis or Tiamat, they are usually malicious or sly.

Next O’Brien spends some time showing how our culture that has been Christian for so long is now slipping back into paganism.  Instead of cherishing the great gift that our knowledge of God is, our culture has decided it no longer needs such knowledge.  He shows that we’ve found many ways to worship creation instead of the Creator as our God.  This part of the book gets relatively theological, and I wouldn’t expect those who don’t already agree with the Catholic position to find it very convincing.

This leads us to the fourth chapter, which is where the book really starts to shine.  Now that O’Brien has laid the groundwork, he can begin to relay the real message of the book.  He laments the replacement of storytelling by electronic entertainment.  If this was bad in 1998, it has to be an order of magnitude worse now in 2018 when we carry tablets and smartphones and laptops around with us wherever we go.  He makes some very convincing arguments against the regular use of electronic entertainment that, even by themselves, make the book worth reading.  Next he shows how modern entertainment, both literature and tv/movies, are sending our children either mixed or outright harmful messages that subvert Christianity and praise paganism.  He demonstrates this with some great examples, including Star Wars, Disney’s The Little Mermaid, and Jurassic Park.

Lastly, O’Brien purposes a system by which parents can evaluate the entertainment that their children will be consuming.

The last two chapters demonstrate how to use this system to evaluate popular fantasy books for older children.  First he takes on the decidedly pagan ones, even the ones that may have some Christian themes in them.  Next he moves on to the Christian ones by looking at the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and George MacDonald.  Although the works of these authors are all Christian and lead children in a positive direction, there are some themes in the later two’s works that we as parents are able to discern that don’t quite fit the Catholic understanding of our world.

Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is a phenomenal work of Catholic fantasy.

O’Brien’s Conclusion really brought the message home for me.  He points out that we, the parents, are the ones who create the culture our children are raised in.  We do that by providing them with the entertainment to inspire them to recognize and avoid evil while cultivating goodness and virtue.  We can’t afford to let ourselves be influenced by Satan, who is craftily weaving his destructive messages into 99% of the entertainment that we allow into our homes, our minds, and our hearts.  Satan is real, and he is out there trying to deceive us.  The readings from this weekend’s Mass speak to our responsibility as parents: “‘Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!’ says the Lord.  Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who care for my people: ‘You have scattered my flock, and driven them away, and you have not attended to them.  Behold, I will attend o you for your evil doings’, says the Lord.” (Jeremiah 23:1-3).  It is our responsibility as parents to shepherd our children, to provide for them a environment that bring them to Jesus.

Lastly, the book includes an appendix with 90 pages of family reading suggestions.  They range from picture books for kids to books for adults.  I haven’t chosen any yet, but I’m very happy to have the resource as I begin to try to transform my family’s entertainment consumption to be more in line with what O’Brien is proposing in this book.

A Catholic Perspective on Why Star Wars Fans Hated The Last Jedi

Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm for $4.1 Billion in 2012 generated a lot of excitement from Lucasfilm fans.  At the time I was a moderate Star Wars fan, but I was and still am a big Indiana Jones fan.  I, and so many other fans of these two franchises, were excited about the possibility of more chapters being added on, of more stories being told.

Although the next chapter in the Indiana Jones saga is still a few years off, Disney immediately began producing a new set of Star Wars movies.  Even more exciting to fans was the fact that a new trilogy would be produced and would include the characters from the original trilogy produced back in the 1970’s and 1980’s.  How exciting to see the heroes of our childhoods back for more adventures!

Luke fights Vader in an epic battle between good and evil

The first new film opened to near universal acclaim.  Movie review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes showed the movie was given positive reviews by 93% of movie critics and 87% of audiences.  Although many themes and plot elements were very similar to the original Star Wars trilogy, there was enough new material to keep both hardcore Star Wars fans, as well as the general media, happy and entertained.  After more than 30 years, fans finally got to see Chewbacca, Princess Leia, C3PO, and R2-D2 back on the screen.  We witnessed the death of Han Solo (who was the best character in a franchise driven mostly on the strength of its characters), but had to wait until the closing seconds to finally get a glimpse of the elderly Luke Skywalker.  The Force Awakens ended on a bit of a cliffhanger, with Rey finally finding the planet of Luke’s exile.  The movie ends with Rey handing Luke the lightsaber he lost at the end of The Empire Strikes Back and symbolically telling him the universe was once again in need of the hero Luke Skywalker.  The film created many questions that left the audience excited and anxious for the next sequel.

The Force Awakens was liked by almost everyone.

After two long years of waiting, the next chapter titled The Last Jedi was released, and the reaction was much different.  While Rotten Tomatoes showed that a very strong 91% of critics approved of the movie, only 46% of audiences reported liking it.

The Last Jedi was controversial among Star Wars fans.

There were various suggestions thrown out as to why fans were so critical of the latest chapter.  Perhaps it was because very few of the questions raised in The Force Awakens were answered in a meaningful way.  Or maybe it was because of the many plot contrivances that used concepts not seen in any of the previous eight Star Wars movies.  Conceivably it was because the characters were mostly dull and underdeveloped.  Some even suggested it was because Disney focused too much energy on advancing the female characters at the expense of the male characters – most the male characters were weak, ineffectual, or foolish while the female characters were smart, graceful, and determined.

I believe it was so despised by Star Wars fans because the producers of the movie made a concerted effort to subvert the characters – especially Luke Skywalker.  In one of the trailers, the villain Kylo Ren is heard saying “Let the past die.  Kill it if you have to.”  The producers chose to make this the major theme of the movie.  But what they set out to kill was the feelings of admiration for the heroic character that we’d appreciated since childhood.  Throughout the movie Luke is made to look like a grumpy, miserable failure.  He stubbornly and selfishly refuses to leave his self-imposed exile, even it it means letting the entire universe fall into evil.  Instead of looking at the priest-like Jedi order as the keepers of peace and justice in the galaxy, he now sees them as hypocritical, vain failures.

This is all so very different from the Luke Skywalker of the original trilogy.  In the OT Luke had to struggle against evil, both evil that assailed him by being his direct enemy (the Empire), and the evil that tried to seduce him from within (his father being Vader).  He is repeatedly warned by Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda not to give in to the dark side of the force.  Though it would give him great power, it would corrupt him.  He is warned against anger and the desire for vengeance, and exhorted to overcome them.  In the end, the only way to defeat the Emperor, who is the personification of evil, is to abandon all power, the light and dark sides of the force, and depend on his father’s conversion back to good to save him. The final message of the original trilogy is that mercy and love are more powerful than hate and sin, and Luke is the personification of that message.

The Luke of the original trilogy is a completely different character than the Luke of the new trilogy.

How does this tie into our Catholic faith?  The Last Jedi is taking the virtue that the original Star Wars movies inspired in us and throwing it into the trash.  Star Wars isn’t, and never was, a set of Catholic movies.  It has some concepts in it that are decidedly un-Catholic.  But one does not have to look hard to find many Catholic messages in it.  Messages about self sacrifice, about caring for others more than yourself, about struggling against evil, even when all hope seems lost.  “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. (Romans 12:21)”  Messages that good wins out over evil in the end if we have courage and perseverance, and that their is no gray line between good and evil.  “God is not the author of confusion. (1 Corinthians 14:33)”  The Last Jedi is here to tell us we’re stupid for finding these messages in the original trilogy.  And that is why so many Star Wars fans hated it.