Faking Transformations

For the most part, I am drawn to people who dare to live by their convictions. In the mid-‘90s (about twenty years ago now), I followed with excitement Fox Mulder’s quest on TV’s X-Files for “the truth.” I respected Mulder’s conviction that the world was bigger and more unusual than the world handed to him by his elders. I respected his conviction that, as the show put it, “the truth is out there,” bigger than a consumer-minded American ideology. Mulder’s openness to experiences not explained through his partner Scully’s scientific method reflected my own suspicions about any method, process, or brand. There was something of the American way in Mulder’s uncompromising quest. I still think so.

I have to admit, however, that after a while—that is, after about seven seasons—I started to have trouble with this ongoing need, promised by TV, to be after something new every week.

All the time.

Fans started referring fondly to the “monster of the week.” And after a while, Mulder’s disjointed “experiences,” which were constantly being buried or denied by the government, didn’t add up to anything transformative. Like all TV, the program began to represent a cult of the continually new. The message after a while seemed to be, “What matters is that we are here this week.”

This cult of the perpetually new I have also come to view as deeply American.

Having Our Cake and Eating It Too

This past week at a full faculty meeting where I teach, a colleague shared a similar insight into what had bothered her about a recent run of nonfiction books friends had told her she had to read. These works, some dealing with cooking, some with divorce, some with relationships, promise transformations. But the trouble with all of them, my colleague noted, was that the narrators really don’t change. Even though the narrative arc points to a place where they are supposed to gain some sort of spiritual insight, they remain the same character and hold to the same values.

Perhaps, I suspect, that is what we really want. We want transformation, and we want it on our own terms. 

My friend’s critique is important. The new run of memoirs seems to cut a different path from the one mapped out in Augustine’s Confessions. It is not just that they affirm some sort of spiritual wisdom from materialism. And it isn’t just that they are self-infatuated or involved. Rather, they are marketed. They fit our rugged individualism and our need for some emotional experience. The trouble is that the experience is not fully understood by the writer, and it is not sustained and continued. 

It is like too many movies. The writing claims to represent something spiritual, when it really traffics in the emotional. 

My friend's critique concerns me for another reason as well. I have been working for the last nine months on a spiritual memoir. It is an account of how I moved from nihilism to Christianity in my late twenties. I have been having a difficult time with it, in part because I am writing about something that many people will either read as another cliché or as unreality. 

I keep working on it. What seems to work is to tell the truth, no matter how hard it is, and to remember that I am not the hero of it.

'Tis the Season 

Meanwhile, with the Labor Day weekend, we are turning now from the summer movie season, where movies seek big bucks, into the season where movies seek Oscars. It seems that we are in for the presumption, at least, that what we want now are transformative experiences. But I don’t think we should be fooled. Transformation is rare. Though it seems to be sought after by the very wealthy as well as the very weak and the strong, it is faked a great deal of the time. Some of the books my colleague was critiquing will be in the theatres trying to fake us out. I will not bother with them.

I will take my tip from what I think Fox Mulder was really after. The truth may be out there, and it may be strange. But if it fits the ideology of a TV format, I will question it.