ArteFact

Last summer, Netflix released the fourth and penultimate season of the sci-fi horror drama Stranger Things to widespread rave reviews. Many fans saw this latest installment as a return to the exceptional storytelling of the show’s first season. For those of us with an interest in theology, it provided a compelling exploration of the age-old battle between good and evil that resonates with Catholic spirituality.

Ruth Ozeki’s novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness, is a conundrum—at turns enraging, confusing, impenetrable, intriguing, luminous, and beautiful. Its protagonist, Benny Oh, is the precocious child of an American mother and an Asian father. His mother, Annabelle, though insecure and unassertive, has found happiness in the cocoon of her family. His father, Kenji, is a jazz-clarinetist and is a loving but free-spirited and somewhat irresponsible husband and father. Benny is kept safe and is content in the closed circle of his family group. This happy domesticity is destroyed, however, when Kenji, drunkenly returning home from a gig, lies down in the alley behind their house and is killed by a truck hauling live chickens.

The short story “Leaf by Niggle” is Tolkien’s most sustained autobiographical work reflecting on his relationship with his art. It provides unique insight into how Tolkien conceived of the proper relation between one’s “creations” and the rest of one’s life. The story portrays an artist named Niggle, a painter whose main flaws are his kind heart, which makes him “uncomfortable” in front of other people’s problems, and his perfectionism, which leaves him consistently dissatisfied with his own work.

Reviews of HBO’s remake (2021) of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage have been lukewarm. While heaping praise on Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac—whose chemistry as a couple can make even divorce seem enviable—critics have questioned whether the five-part miniseries, created and directed by Hagai Levi, really adds anything to our understanding of marriage in modern life.

Reading Czesław Miłosz’s poetry can feel a bit surreal these days. Frequent visual echoes of his poems flash by on screens, images of cities turned to rubble, armored vehicles patrolling through wreckage, and refugees fleeing across eastern Europe. Miłosz’s poetry is partly a poetry of witness, work influenced by his first-hand confrontation of Nazi and Communist aggression during and after the Second World War.

Although the title of Peter Morgan’s The Crown suggests a story about the monarchy and politics, the driving force of the Netflix original series is marriage. And, considering how the latest season ended with the breakdown of the marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana of Wales, it is beneficial to explore the theme of marriage thus far in the series, in order to enter thoughtfully into the anticipated fifth season’s treatment of the subject this coming fall.

The Fourteenth Station: Jesus Is Laid in the Tomb

The Word

has weight

pondered unbroken

carefully carried

quietly placed

solemnly sealed...

“Look, see a world that holds more wonders than any since the earth was born . . .”

So begins writer and director David Lowry’s The Green Knight (2021), an adaptation of the 14th century Arthurian legend, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This first line establishes the theme that animates the film: that our world is stranger than we can ever fathom, full of mystery and enchantment, and it is how we respond to this mystical order that occupies our lives.

Naoki Urasawa’s 74-episode anime series Monster (directed by Masayuki Kojima) provides a slow, graphic, confronting, blow-by-blow account of a person’s relationship with past, future, and others. In keeping with the title, the series provides a visceral portrayal of both the personification of monsters, and of how close a person—even one we consider “good”—can be to becoming a monster themselves.