Salon.com > Jay Michaelson

Terrence Malick, divine director

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 17:00:00 +0000

“Show, don’t tell,” is common advice to screenwriters and fiction writers. In contrast to primarily non-fictioners like yours truly, those who compose films and novels and stories are rightly encouraged to avoid didacticism, to let the story speak for itself, never to make the meanings and morals too obvious.

Terrence Malick’s typically beautiful new film, To the Wonder, does exactly that, yet its depiction of the divine love/human love parallel is so elliptical as to flirt with inscrutability.

To be sure, Malick’s screenplay does telegraph the main theme of the work explicitly, usually in voiceovers (there are a lot of voiceovers) by a doubt-ridden priest played by Javier Bardem. Bardem’s priest wonders why we fall in and out of love with God, as we watch a couple played by Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko fall in and out of love with each other. If the parallelism were not clear enough, Bardem’s priest—played with brilliant understatement by an actor who often goes for the jugular—tells us how human love can serve as a gateway to divine love. Which (metaphysical spoiler alert) is roughly the final resolution of the film.

SCOTUS, civil religious court

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 18:18:00 +0000

“Civil religion” is one of those twentieth-century terms that seems rather quaint today. And yet, as the Supreme Court marriage cases are heard this week, it seems alive and well, and living in unusual spaces.

On the surface, the Windsor and Perry cases are about constitutional rights, and the limits of federal government (not to mention the procedural questions of standing, mind-numbing to non-lawyers but conceivably dispositive here). Does the combination of federalism and an equal protection violation justify overturning the Defense of Marriage Act? What is the relationship between the US Constitution, the California constitution, and a voter initiative that defines certain rights?

And yet, these questions are surely not the real issue.

What’s next for gay marriage: Conservatism

Sat, 10 Nov 2012 17:01:00 +0000

November 7 was a good day to wake up gay. Marriage equality went four for four in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington, ending a 31-state losing streak in dramatic fashion. Since then, pundits have waxed poetic about “The Single Biggest Night for Gay Rights in Electoral History,” and they have exhaustively chronicled the successful changes in strategy since the LGBT community’s catastrophic defeats just a few years ago.

Clearly, this year’s elections – and President Obama’s “evolution” on the issue – are indeed a turning point for same-sex marriage. But a turn toward what? Other than ballot initiatives in Oregon (2014) and other states, what’s next for marriage equality?

My prediction is an ironic one: Same-sex marriage will prevail nationally not because of further liberal activism but because of conservative logic: specifically, gradual change, federalism and (gasp) the free market.

The polyamory trap

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:59:00 +0000

Newt Gingrich may have scored political points by refusing to talk about an ex-wife's assertion that he asked that their marriage be “open,” but he also thrust polyamory into the national conversation.

This was new territory for many people, but not for LGBT advocates, who hear about it all the time. Won't legitimizing same-sex marriage lead to legitimizing polyamorous relationships too? If two men can marry one another, why not one man and two women? This argument is a favorite of former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, the so-called Christian right and the right-wing blogosphere.

Responding to these arguments is a challenge. On the one hand, I reject the tactic of distinguishing the good gays from the "bad" poly people. Further marginalizing the marginalized is just the wrong trajectory for any liberation movement to take. And it reminds me of the way that some mainstream gay activists have sold out transgender and gender-nonconforming groups. We’re the married gays who make neighborhoods stable and herald the arrival of cool coffeehouses; we're not those awful drag queens. This is all trash, it sells out members of our own community who deserve more than that, and it’s a punt, really, not an argument.