Talking Out Of Turn

This weekend while the kids were at Grandma’s, we watched a foreign film. We don’t get to do this too often anymore, because the kids have no patience for subtitles, and we have no patience for explaining what’s going on, especially in these avant-garde days of filmmaking. This movie was one that I had never heard of and picked up entirely on the cover and blurb at Blockbuster: Jeux d’enfants, with an English title of Love Me If You Dare.

The basic premise is this: two neighbor children survive a difficult childhood by playing a game which consists of doing whatever the other dares them to do, no matter how outrageous, and those two children grow up without ever ending the game. As children they cause trouble at school, disrupt a wedding by pulling the wedding cake off the table, and so forth; as adults they proceed all the way to playing with other people’s lives and destroying each other, just because neither will give up unless the other one does. The catchphrase throughout the movie, the challenge that they throw back and forth, is this: “Are you game, or not?” The only way that they ever get any sort of reprieve from their terrible game is when the woman dares the man not to see her for an extended period of time (the longest being ten years). The subtext is the possibility that they love each other, but they don’t know how to express that love outside of the game; and since the game is essentially a competition, they can never cooperate toward a common goal, and never set their need to prove that they are “game” aside in the interest of the other’s well-being or happiness. The movie ends with their finally deciding that they love each other, leaving their spouses, and embracing in an everlasting kiss as they are buried alive in cement.

It’s been awhile since I watched something that I would classify as an art movie (and really just about anything that wasn’t shooting for the usual Hollywood demographic falls into that category as far as I’m concerned), and I was struck by something as this movie unfolded to its conclusion. The world’s idea of something poignant is related to irretrievable loss, to those who strive for something and fall short of reaching the goal. We worship Icarus rather than Daedalus. Few lyrics I have heard capture this better than the Jethro Tull song “Pussywillow,” from The Broadsword and the Beast:

In her fairy-tale world she’s a lost soul singing
In a sad voice nobody hears.
She waits in her castle of make-believe
For her white knight to appear…

She longs for the East, and the pale dress flowing;
An apartment in old Mayfair,
Or to fish the Spey, spinning the first run of spring,
Or to die for a cause somewhere.

What the girl in “Pussywillow” really wants is not a resolution to her desire, but the desire itself. And in this world, particularly the art and intellect of this culture for the past thirty years, we have gorged ourselves on wanting to have loved and lost, on wanting others to see us as the noble, afflicted one, who sighs for the eternal hole in his heart. We think that the height of beauty is sadness and despair. We would rather see two lovers die together than deny themselves to live and find happiness apart. This is why so many of us read stories or watch shows about marital infidelity and find ourselves rooting for the adulterers — not necessarily that they will leave their spouses, but that they will continue to be in love with somebody else while staying. (The Bridges of Madison County is the first movie like this that came to mind, but there are many others.) We live, or at least think, as if Matthew 5:27,28 were never delivered to us by God.

Thanks be to God that He does not think like this. There are many in the church today who are trying to recast the death of Christ in terms of its being, not primarily the atonement before a just God for the sins of His people, but a mad act of ultimate sacrificial love, as if Jesus had something to prove to us, and did it by being tortured to death. That’s the Jesus of Godspell, not the Jesus of the Gospel. If Christ died merely to set an example or make a statement, then He died in vain. No, the Father and the Son and the Spirit had a plan before the world was made, to create, justify, sanctify, and glorify a Bride for Christ, and nothing short of absolute victory over sin, death, and the devil would bring glory to God and accomplish His end. Christ was no Icarus; He knew what He was doing, He committed to going the distance to accomplish His Father’s will, and He laid down His own life for the sake of that plan. He took no risks in doing so, and it takes nothing away from God to say that there was zero chance of failure in His plan. For God, there is no victory in failure; this is why He sent His Son, to take the failure of our sins and clothe them in His perfect righteousness, to make us a success in the only things that matter, in Christ.

Don’t trade Christ’s victory in your life for the fleshly desire of intensity of feeling. It all pales before the joy we find in knowing God. Once you taste victory, you will not easily accept the poor substitutes that this world provides. I know this because I was surprised at how little I cared for the love-and-death ending of Jeux d’enfants. I used to be the kind of person who would enthuse about that sort of thing.