In Defence of the Remake

Architect: You see, about a hundred years ago, the global entertainment industry ran completely out of ideas … so we built a time machine to snatch people out of the past … back when everyone was still watching good TV shows and movies … We figured if we kept you isolated and we watched everything you did … we might be able to come up with some kind of new entertainment programming … based on your actions and conversations.

Sam: You mean, like, a reality show?

Architect: No, but that’s a really good idea! I can’t believe we didn’t think of that. You should be a writer – or maybe just a studio executive.

The Strangerhood S1 E16, ‘The Montage Exposition’ (2006)

Remakes: yay or nay?

A picture significantly relevant to the post beyond the fact that it includes part of a cinema? No. A pretty one? Yes. That will do.

I ask because there seems to be an awful lot of them about at the moment, not least at the hand of the talented folks at Disney, who have already produced live-action reimaginings of Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty (under the moniker of villain Maleficent), Cinderella, The Jungle Book, Beauty and the Beast, Pete’s Dragon and probably more I can’t think of, and are set to continue their rampage across the dear-held animated stories of your childhood by subjecting a host of others to the same treatment, among them Mary Poppins, Aladdin, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Mulan, Peter Pan, The Sword in the Stone, Dumbo, The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Pinocchio, One Hundred and One Dalmatians (which will re-emerge as Cruella De Vil), The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh (now featuring a grown-up Christopher Robin), and even that ten-minute scene from Fantasia¹ set to Leopold Stokowski’s adaptation of Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov’s version of Modest Mussorgsky’s tone poem ‘A Night on Bald Mountain’.² And who can blame them? Remaking beloved classics is a peculiarly effective method of persuading the cinemagoing public to part with our cash, at least if the profits made by the aforementioned examples are anything to go by: The Jungle Book, for example, having grossed nearly $1 billion worldwide during its cinema run, remains the thirty-sixth highest-grossing film of all time; Alice in Wonderland managed over $1 billion, making it the highest-grossing film of the year outside North America and the fifth highest-grossing film ever at the time; and Beauty and the Beast did the best of the lot by grossing $1.263 billion worldwide, making it the highest-grossing live-action musical of all time and still the tenth highest-grossing ever film of any genre.³ (That’s plenty enough uses of the word ‘gross’ for one paragraph, methinks.)

Should we despair at such data? Should we mourn what appears to be a loss of innovative thinking in the film industry, the first few slick steps of a slippery slope towards the state of creative desolation described by the Architect in the penultimate episode of The Strangerhood (as quoted above)?⁴ Should it give us cause to lament that many of the most successful films of the past few years have not only been unoriginal in the contents of their storylines, but explicitly, ostentatiously, deliberately so – that they have not only imitated earlier work, but made doing so the whole point and appeal of their existence?

Part of me harbours an inclination to answer in the affirmative. The possibility that films presenting original stories should be squeezed out of mainstream cinema, replaced by a torrent of remakes, sequels, and sequels of remakes, is certainly a depressing one.⁵ Originality in fiction is a good thing. Originality is what makes a story spark our imaginations into spirited activity when they are worn down by the dull predictability of everyday real life. Originality is what makes us see the world through different eyes to those through which we have been accustomed to see it. Originality is where the magic of new and astonishing possibilities is wrought.

But all that said, somewhere in this mind and heart and soul of mine there’s still a keen little Classicist knocking about, and said keen little Classicist is swift to chime in that in the classical world, ‘remakes’ (as it were) were arguably even more ubiquitous than they were today.

The place is Ancient Greece, the time is the sixth century BCE, and the event is the invention of the theatrical play. Exactly what happened remains poorly evinced and hotly contested, but what ultimately emerged was a type of performance in which actors playing characters interacted with one another, which was pretty innovative for the time. The earliest playwright whose work is extant today is Aeschylus, who wrote tragedies. And every single play he wrote told a story his audience would already have known. In actual fact, every single play every tragedian wrote told a story his audience would already have known. That was what tragedy was. It selected a chunk of the pre-established mythology known to the Greek people and rendered it in dramatic form. Different playwrights would frequently cover the same material: we have extant versions of the story of Electra by both Sophocles and Euripides, for example. Ancient Greek tragedians, then, produced nothing but remakes and indeed remakes of remakes.

Was this unoriginal? Did it betray a lack of imagination or a slavery to people-pleasing? Can it be sniffed at as creatively lacking? I mean, I’m not actually a great fan of tragedy (one of the key reasons why I was a bad Classicist, the other being the fact that I’m not actually a great fan of Homer), but it’s pretty hard to slate it for a lack of innovation given that this represented the very birth of the western theatrical tradition.

 

A Greek theatre in Sicily, if the tags given this picture on my favourite online stock-photo repository are anything to go by.

The thing is, the tragedians were original – not in their subject material but in what they did with it. Take the story of Electra, as I mentioned briefly above. Sophocles and Euripides both have their versions, of course, and the same events are covered by Aeschylus in his Libation Bearers, which, happily for our purposes, is also extant. The basic outline of the myth is that Electra, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, plots with her estranged brother Orestes to murder their mother and her new husband Aegisthus as an act of vengeance for her murder of their father (which was in turn an act of vengeance for his murder of his other daughter Iphigeneia, as a sacrifice to appease Artemis who had cursed the Greek fleet with unfavourable winds as an act of vengeance for – well, you get the picture, there was a lot of vengeance going on). The three tragedians tell the story in significantly different ways, however. Aeschylus launches into the lengthy recognition scene between Electra and Orestes virtually as soon as the latter shows up, and only has him perpetrate a deception about his real identity when Clytemnestra comes on the scene, whereas Sophocles’ and Euripides’ versions of Orestes are both deceitful about their real identity from the start, even in front of Electra. Sophocles has the matricidal pair finish off Clytemnestra first, and cuts off the action before Aegisthus’ death has even been announced, whereas Aeschylus and Euripides both have the two kill Aegisthus and then Clytemnestra, before an ending which makes explicit that they have rendered themselves guilty and deserving of punishment. And Euripides, as is his habit, just goes a bit weird, really, and introduces an extra plot point of Electra having got married and moved to the country before dealing with any of the standard plot points.⁶

Of course, such differences as these are of a largely mechanical nature, and I have no wish to bore you (or myself) by going on to expound an exhaustive procession of minor plot details that differ from one tragedian to another. As important as differences of plot are, so are the differences of tone and feel and message – much more difficult to pin down or agree upon – that accompany them. Innovation can be displayed both in the substance of the story and the manner of its telling. Euripides’ tragedies are often remarked upon for being remarkably un-tragic compared to the earlier Aeschylus’ grave and weighty dramas, for instances.

Moreover, innovation can be displayed both by forging in an altogether different direction to one’s predecessors, and by tracing but subverting their version of things. There is, happily for the flow of this post, a particularly fine example of such subversion in Euripides’ Electra, in the form of an undisguised parody of the recognition scene in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers: Euripides’ Electra laughs off as ridiculous the notion that a lock of hair, a footprint, and a scrap of cloth should betray any indication that their owner might be her long-lost brother, while these very tokens were the precise ones by whose evidence Aeschylus’ versions of the siblings recognised each other.

Compare Disney’s remakes today. Some, like Beauty and the Beast, have adhered very closely to the predecessors they imitate, almost shot-for-shot in places; others, like Maleficent, have made a point of problematising the story as it was originally told and subverting the notions it presented. Some, like Cinderella, have retained a similar emotional tone to their predecessors, and others, like Tim Burton’s characteristically dark and disturbing rendering of Alice in Wonderland, have told a similar story with a significantly different feel. New plot points and characters are added; old ones are elaborated upon, or changed, or removed. We see Disney scorning as silly the traditional notion of love at first sight, for example, as clearly as Euripides scorned as silly the traditional Aeschylean recognition scene – a fascinating reflection on the values of our own moment in time as compared to those of earlier ones. These new takes on old stories we love do catch us by surprise, do give us fresh perspectives, do open up enthralling new possibilities.

Is this unoriginal?

This isn’t Ancient Greece, of course – dramatic storytelling has moved on a smidgen since the tragedians’ day, and I hasten to affirm that I’m all for there being more on at the local multiplex than simply remakes and more remakes. Still, I’m also all for there being, as a constituent part of a good variety of films, some remakes. Nothing is completely original anyway – all films (and indeed all fictions) have their influences and generic ancestors – so why should a remake automatically be artistically inferior to a film that uses an original story? It should be assessed for what it does, not what it doesn’t do, and if it does what it does well, then it, like any artistic achievement, should be applauded. In actual fact, a good remake may in some ways be more innovative than an original-story film that nonetheless saturates itself with tired clichés and predictable storytelling. If nothing else, a remake’s innovations often stand out all the clearer by virtue of sheer contrast with the original.

So bring on the deluge, Disney: I’ll be fascinated to see how you engage with your own canon in upcoming releases, how you alter it, how you elaborate upon it, how you uphold or subvert it, and what that says about the kind of story our society is currently telling. And if you manage to spark off the odd blog post idea in the process, well, so much the better.

Footnotes

¹ Comprehensive details of the live-action remakes of pure-animated classics (so not including Mary Poppins or Pete’s Dragon) that we know of currently are provided by Noelle Devoe at Seventeen, http://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/movies-tv/g2936/list-of-disney-live-action-remakes/. I notice she missed the Chronicles of Prydain franchise we’ve been promised as a relaunch of 1985 animated classic The Black Cauldron, http://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/movies-tv/g2936/list-of-disney-live-action-remakes/, although that’s probably because it is in its very early stages, so maybe best not to get one’s hopes up: it’s just that The Black Cauldron was one of my real childhood favourites, and Disney films were about all I watched as a kid.

² Namely this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLCuL-K39eQ.

³ Stats gathered from Wikipedia, notably its list of the highest-grossing films of all time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films.

⁴ It’s a series of short videos filmed on the Sims 2 and dubbed, and one of the staple sources of hilarious quotations that my siblings and I chuck at each other: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0WwO9pv72s&list=PL0E148580E52F7216. “Oh man, I hope that wasn’t me that just died...”

⁵ If, for some mad reason, you’d like to read more of my opinions on this subject, might I point you to a post called ‘Cinema’s Suicide’ that you’ll find under ‘2016’ then ‘January’ in the box on the right.

⁶ Just stick the relevant titles into the Perseus search engine if you want to check this jazz for yourself: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/. Or your favoured whole-Internet search engine will probably work equally well.

The Things We Can't See

The Hobo:           What exactly is your persuasion on the big man, since you brought him up?

The Hero Boy:    Well, I … I want to believe. But…

The Hobo:           But you don’t want to be bamboozled. You don’t want to be led down the primrose path. You don’t want to be conned or duped, have the wool pulled over your eyes, hoodwinked. You don’t want to be taken for a ride, railroaded. Seeing is believing. Am I right?

The Polar Express (2004)

All right, it’s not the Polar Express, but I still think all steam trains are a little bit magical somehow.

“Eagle Owl?”

That’s the special pseudonym by which the Brownies belonging to the unit in which I am an Assistant Leader know me.¹ It’s not a particularly common one, but they’d already had a Brown Owl, a Snowy, a Tawny, a Barn – and it would have been positively ridiculous to dub all six-foot-one of me ‘Little Owl’, so I didn’t have a lot of options left.

“Eagle Owl?”

This was the Brownies’ Christmas party, which took place a couple of weeks ago now. It was designed to be a really chill end to the term: a couple of crafts, a game of Pass the Parcel, and then settling down in front of a Christmas film with popcorn and hot chocolate.²

“Eagle Owl?”

The trouble was, much as the waiters on the Polar Express are apparently able to produce individual mugs of hot chocolate for an entire train full of children nigh on simultaneously – with a catchy song and dance routine to boot – such a thing is, unfortunately, not possible when you’re working out of one small kitchen that’s not even a little bit magical.

“Eagle Owl?!”

And that meant that some of the Brownies had received their hot chocolate before certain others of the Brownies.

“Eagle Owl, I haven’t had my hot chocolate yet.”

This was a conversation I was required to have several times. Wait, I said. Brown Owl is making enough hot chocolates for everyone; she just can’t make them all at once. You shall get yours soon, I said. It shall have marshmallows in it if you asked for marshmallows. You don’t need to worry about it. And, I added in the privacy of my own thoughts, it would be simply marvellous if you would stop needlessly talking over the film.

I was enjoying The Polar Express. It struck, I felt, an unusual tone for a child-friendly Christmas film – darker and stranger and more enigmatic than your typical saccharine stuff. Granted, it had its fair share of slightly nauseating veneration of the ‘Christmas spirit’ – that bizarre sanctity so often afforded the season and all its associated trappings – but that was no less than could be expected. The best thing about it was the titular enchanted steam train itself. I think there’s something about trains that means they naturally lend themselves to magic and adventure anyway – it would probably take a lot of thought and another blog post to pin down exactly what – but this was a specially good one, appearing out of nowhere in the middle of the night with its light slicing through the snowfall, and going on to encounter rails like rollercoasters, a vast frozen lake, and stunning views of the aurora borealis. It helped that the animation was pretty phenomenal.

For such a breathtakingly surreal bit of cinema, however, the moral of the story, at least as far as I was able to read it, seemed incongruously mundane. The lesson learned by our nameless protagonist – listed in the credits simply as the Hero Boy – was encapsulated by the word the Conductor ultimately punched into his train ticket: believe. In the context, that meant believe in Father Christmas – which might not sound like a very sensible thing to do under normal circumstances, but under the premise that he had been picked up by a magical steam train, taken to the North Pole, and personally introduced to the jolly red-coated gentleman himself, it was surely the only sensible thing for him to do. One ought to believe in things which one has been shown very strong grounds to believe in: the film’s message really does seem to be as straightforward as that.

“Eagle Owl?”

Though maybe there was more nuance and profundity being given to that message during all the bits I was missing because I had to deal with Brownies who were worried about their beverages.

“Eagle Owl, I asked for milk and I haven’t got it yet and everyone else has her hot chocolate and I haven’t got my milk.”

By this point, I’ll admit, I had allowed myself to become a tad exasperated with the girls’ understandable impatience. Of that I repent. Still, it did have its uses in germinating in my mind the idea for this blog post.

Did you tell Brown Owl that you wanted milk? I asked the Brownie in question. Well then, she knows you want milk and she will get it for you. She’s probably getting it for you right now, if everyone else has had her hot chocolate. Have faith in Brown Owl, were the exact words with which I concluded.

 

Personally, I can’t see why anyone would opt for milk over hot chocolate, but you know, to each her own, and more for the rest of us.

The Hero Boy’s initial doubts that Father Christmas would bring him presents, I could understand: before his arctic train ride turned the tables, he’d never met the guy, and the only solid evidence he had regarding his existence was stacked up firmly on the ‘against’ side; we saw this in the opening scene, when he looked through a stack of magazine articles about department store Santas going on strike and so forth. The Brownies’ doubts that Brown Owl would bring them hot drinks, on the other hand, baffled me: it was mere minutes since she’d asked them what they wanted, drinks had been appearing at frequent intervals since, and more to the point, they all, based on months or in some cases years of weekly unit meetings, knew her to be a kind and reliable individual committed to their happiness and wellbeing. Why was it so difficult to believe that she would do what she’d said she would?

But of course, my confusion turned to conviction within seconds of my brain linking up the analogy between my exhortation that the Brownies should have faith in Brown Owl, and the Bible’s exhortation that I should have faith in God.

There’s a bit of The Polar Express subsequent to that which formed my opening quotation, where the Conductor picks up on some of what the Hobo said then. “Years ago, on my first Christmas Eve run,” he narrates, “I was up on the roof making my rounds when I slipped on the ice myself. I reached out for a hand iron, but it broke off. I slid and fell – and yet I did not fall off this train.”

“Someone saved you?” infers another of the train’s passengers, this one known imaginatively as the Hero Girl.

“Or something,” replies the Conductor.

“An angel,” she suggests.

“Maybe,” shrugs the Conductor.

“Wait, wait,” interjects the Hero Boy. “What did he look like? Did you see him?”

“No, sir,” admits the Conductor. “But sometimes seeing is believing, and sometimes the most real things in the world are the things we can’t see.”³

It’s a hashtag-inspirational statement of the sort that tends to end up emblazoned on pointless items in gift shops, but once again, I suggest we draw a rather mundane moral. The Conductor didn’t see who or what it was that saved him from falling off the train, but he believed that it existed on the very good grounds that something saved him from falling off the train – and hence we learn that one doesn’t have to actually see something in order to have very good grounds to believe in it. One doesn’t have to actually see Brown Owl preparing one’s hot chocolate or milk in order to have very good grounds to believe that one is going to get it. One doesn’t have to actually see the precise outworkings of God’s promises in order to have very good grounds to believe that he is going to keep them.

“He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” wrote Paul in the extraordinary eighth chapter of his letter to the community of believers living in Rome.⁴ Jesus’ sacrifice is the ultimate proof of God’s character – unimpeachable justice, unbelievable mercy, unstoppable love – and so we might not be able to see, on any given day, that our unseen Father in heaven is conforming us to the perfect human likeness of his Son, or that he is building up the global family of believers among every people-group and language, or that he has appointed a time when the Lord will return to judge the nations in truth and equity – but we can look back at our salvation and know that that is who God is, and if he has done that for us, how will he not do for us everything else he’s said he will?⁵ If I soon became exasperated with the Brownies’ doubtful impatience, I can hardly defend my own, especially since God is in fact demonstrably more kind and reliable and committed to the wellbeing of his people than even Brown Owl. Nonetheless, I am, marvellously, forgiven my lack of faith – through, of course, that very same sacrifice that throws into light exactly how unwarranted it is. Seriously, take a moment right now to just consider: if God, who, though unseen, is all-powerful over everything that exists, chose of his own free will to give up his one and only beloved Son for the sake of saving you, O Dearly Cherished Reader, how will he not bring about every other thing he’s promised you? Indeed, how will he withhold from you anything – anything – that would be for your ultimate good?

And could there be any greater comfort in which to rest than that?

Given that God is unseen, we have to walk by faith rather than sight – but that being so, we could hardly have better grounds to believe in him as he says he is than what he did for us at the cross. Sometimes, as it turns out, the most real things in the world really are the things we can’t see.

Footnotes 

¹ If you’ve got in your head that I must be helping to lead a gang of chocolate-flavoured tray cakes, allow the Girlguiding website to correct you: https://www.girlguiding.org.uk/what-we-do/guiding-by-age-group/brownies/. 

² My favourite place to get hot chocolate has, I think, got to be the Glorious Art House: https://www.facebook.com/TheGloriousArtHouse/. 

³ I think I’ve assigned all the dialogue to the right speakers; this very handy transcript, http://www.veryabc.cn/movie/uploads/script/ThePolarExpress.txt, doesn’t include that information, and though I could find one or two clips of the relevant scene, such as this rather nice one, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3i3XvyDosQ, they all stopped halfway through the dialogue I wanted to quote. My apologies for any inaccuracy on my part. 

⁴ I know, I know, I quote Romans 8 all the time, but only because it’s SO GOOD. Go on, treat yourself to another peruse of it: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+8&version=ESVUK. 

⁵ On these three points in particular, see, for example, Romans 8:29, Matthew 16:18 and 24:14, ad Acts 17:31, just off the top of my head (well, with a little help from Bible Gateway). But I kind of hate proof-texting like that for such massive themes of scripture.

Conversations with my Internal Hopeless Romantic

“Yes, I get in a dating state, but that’s boarding school for you – starved of male company for years, still now, when a bloke says ‘hi’, I think, nice spring wedding!”

Miranda S1 E5, ‘Excuse’ (2009)¹

 

Nice spring wedding. Disclaimer: wedding may actually be in summer, autumn, or winter; nothing in the picture makes the season at all clear.

Her:     So, I gots a proposition for ya…²

Me:      Oh no, really? Another one?

Her:     Just hear me out, OK? What do you think of … this particular male human of roughly your age with whom you are vaguely acquainted?

Me:      Um. Well, I suppose he seems all right based on the limited information I’ve been able to gather from our vague acquaintance – though ultimately the answer to the question of what I think of him is best characterised by the fact that I don’t think of him very much.

Her:     That’s something I can rectify.

Me:      It’s not something that needs rectifying, actually. I have no need or desire to think about this guy with any more regularity than I do already.

Her:     I disagree. Look, let’s face it, honey, you’ve only ever been genuinely romantically attracted to one guy in the whole of your life so far, and I’m afraid that that’s just not normal or healthy –

Me:      Assertion! On what do you base this outrageous claim?

Her:     On almost every piece of popular media you’ve been greedily consuming since you were old enough to know how. I’ve done digging, honey, and that seam of understanding – that regularly forming romantic attractions towards other humans, at least until you’ve managed to attach yourself to a specific one by means of formal commitment, is simply The Done Thing – extends way deeper down into your consciousness than you like to admit. It constitutes a large part of the reason why you ever pay me any attention.

Me:      I have no need or desire to ever pay you any attention.

Her:     I disagree. And anyway, tough cookies. You can’t shut me up, and besides, this is for your own good.

Me:      For my own good? All you ever do is try to occupy my thoughts with romanticky notions about guys I don’t actually feel romantically attracted to. The whole thing is just a complete embarassing waste of my time. How on earth can that be construed as for my own good?

Her:     Because, as I say, you’ve only ever had one real crush in your twenty-two years of life – and even that one came crashing all the way down to nothing within mere days of it becoming clear that there was no chance of anything happening between you – and, as we’ve established, that’s just not normal or healthy, and so logically, honey, the only plausible conclusion is that you need just a little bit of help in this sphere.

Me:      You really think what you do is a help to me?

Her:     Yes, I do, and one day, when I have at last succeeded in my purpose, you’ll recognise as much too. The ugly truth is this: in order to stand even the slimmest chance of ever having a romantic relationship – which, might I remind you, is something you have never had one of in your sad little life – it is an unavoidable necessity, according to the customs of this day and age, that you are going to have to form a genuine romantic attraction to another human being. And if I might extrapolate from your life so far, you seem to form such attractions of your own accord less than once per decade,³ which is not a rate that looks particularly encouraging as far as your chances of not remaining single your entire life are concerned. Therefore, my poor little pumpkin, I have taken it upon myself to help you by trying to build the occasional romantic attraction. You’ll notice I only pick ones that I think could stand a chance of growing under their own steam if the circumstances were right. I never suggest anyone who isn’t a Christian, for example. All I’m trying to do is give your natural ability to fancy people – which is, as has been proven, there, if generally very inactive – a little bit of a boost. A kick-start. A catalyst, if you like. I provide a question with different parameters – not ‘do you fancy this guy?’, but ‘could you imagine yourself ever fancying this guy?’, and lo and behold, the activation energy needed for a positive response plummets.⁴ From there we can start building.

Me:      Except that I don’t want to start building. Even leaving aside the stupidity of your solution, what’s more to the point is that it’s completely unnecessary. You’ve concocted a bad remedy for a problem that isn’t even a problem.

Her:     Gosh, your hypocrisy is frustrating. There you are insisting that your perpetual singleness isn’t a problem, but don’t forget, honey, I know you better than that, because I live in your head, and in truth, you really like the idea of having a romantic relationship. You long to be uniquely special to someone in that way. You’d love to have someone to be yours and to be with you in everything, to have a kind of claim on that sort of devotion from someone and to give it in return. The Christ-and-the-Church commitment of marriage makes you go all gooey inside. And let’s not forget that you’re very curious about sex.

Me:      Fine. I can’t see the point in trying to deny any of that.

Her:     There! You admit it. And do you see the disparity here? You harbour a desire for a romantic relationship, but you’re not prepared to invest any special effort in achieving the sine qua non of ever having such a relationship, namely a sense of attractedness to a specific human being.

Me:      Do you really think that’s something you can artificially construct?

Her:     Honestly, I don’t know. But to put it bluntly, we won’t know unless we try, and I can’t see a whole lot of other options, can you?

Me:      Not if I accept your premise that it’s more desirable to be in a romantic relationship than not to be.

Her:     Were you paying attention just now? You literally just admitted that you find the idea of being in a romantic relationship desirable.

Me:      That I grant you. But I think you’ll find there’s a very significant facet of this issue to which you haven’t been paying any attention.

Her:     Oh? Pray tell.

Me:      The idea of being in a romantic relationship is an appealing one, certainly – but so, and no less so, is the idea of remaining single my whole life.

Her:     You must be having a laugh. Nobody thinks that.

Me:      Maybe nobody in all that popular media you were talking about earlier thinks that – see, I was paying attention – but you know I try to shape my way of seeing the world after more reliable sources than popular media. One more reliable source in particular.

Her:     Not going to work, honey. We both know that my end-goal is valued as highly in Christian circles as anywhere else – in some ways more so. The kind of romantic relationship you harbour a longing for is, after all, an inextricably Christian one.

Me:      I said one source. Go on, have a look:

I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own gift from God, one of one kind and one of another. To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single as I am. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion … If you do marry, you have not sinned, and if a maiden⁵ marries, she has not sinned. Yet those who marry will have worldly troubles, and I would spare you that … I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord. But the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided. And the unmarried woman or maiden is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to be holy in body and spirit. But the married woman is anxious about worldly things, how to please her husband. I say this for your own benefit, not to lay any restraint upon you, but to promote good order and to secure your undivided devotion to the Lord … So then he who marries his maiden does well, and he who refrains from marriage will do even better.⁶

That’s a few chunks scooped out of 1 Corinthians 7. I think it’s pretty obvious here that Paul considers singleness a more desirable option than marriage, don’t you?

Her:     That’s not how people talk about it in church, though, is it, honey?

Me:      Not usually, no. I’ve met a number of people – all of them, if I recall rightly, married, interestingly enough – who would claim that Paul actually describes the two options as equally desirable. But frankly, I can’t see that in this passage. Obviously Paul’s keen to stress that marrying is no sin, that it’s better to marry than risk falling into sexual immorality, that one who marries does well – but then he explicitly states that one who refrains from marriage does better. And why? Because not having a significant other frees up the time and energy and mental preoccupation which one would – rightly – spend seeing to said significant other’s wellbeing, so that it might be spent instead on doing the work of the Lord.

Her:     Well, that’s all very worthy, I’m sure, but can you honestly say it’s a prospect that actually appeals to you?

Me:      You know what, I can. Suppose I never have a romantic relationship –

Her:     Do I have to?

Me:      Yes, because despite your best efforts – most of them rather misguided – it might well actually happen. Suppose I never have a romantic relationship: just think of the worldly anxieties I’ll be spared. I’ll always be able to make decisions about my life by myself, without having to consult this other person all the time; I’ll be able to choose what I do and where I live and so forth without having to allow for how it fits in with my significant other’s life. I’ll always be responsible for myself and myself only, with no awkward extra layer of concern and authority hanging about between me and God. I’ll always be able to pour all my time and energy and mental preoccupation into serving Jesus, more and more so as the Spirit shapes me after his likeness and I get better at it. Just think of what good use I’ll be able to make of what God has given me if I remain the only one who can really claim a say in what I do with it – if pleasing him, and no one else, is increasingly my sole priority. You know I’m not lying when I say that such a prospect really does appeal to me. It’s a very exciting one, actually.

Her:     I’m confused. Earlier you admitted that you’d really like a romantic relationship, and now you’re saying you find the prospect of functional nunhood an exciting one.

Me:      Of course you’re confused. You represent one aspect and one aspect only of what goes on in my mind and heart. You can’t grasp the notion that I might harbour two totally contradictory desires which both genuinely appeal to me, though with varying strength at different times.

Her:     That doesn’t make any sense, honey. What about the whole ‘each has his own gift from God’ thing? I mean, do you have the gift of singleness, or not?

Me:      Today I do. Every day I wake up single I do.⁷ The notion that every human has inherent within him- or herself a gift of singleness or marriedness, regardless of whether said human is in actual fact married or single, strikes me as a load of rubbish, frankly. I seriously dislike this whole idea of the category of the ‘not-yet-married’ that they talk about a lot over at Desiring God.⁸ For one thing, it (at least implicitly) places this ludicrous expectation on God, which I have in fact seen explicitly articulated elsewhere,⁹ that if he’s caused someone to have a desire to be married, he will consequently cause that desire to be fulfilled. I mean, that’s just silly: one could say the same about any desire. I have a desire to continue to live in Exeter for a long time, for example, but it would clearly be inaccurate and sinful to claim that God somehow owed me the fulfilment of that desire. He never promised that. And likewise, he never promised that everyone who would like a romantic partner will get one. Consider what Paul says about widows, that they’re better off staying single as much as maidens are. I have no idea how people who understand singleness and marriedness as inherent qualities square that circle: is the death of her husband proof that the young widow was really destined for singleness all along, or something?

Her:     Well, that’s a nice gift for God to give you, I’m sure: singleness, whether you want it or not, and then potentially at some stage in the future – I’m holding out hope, whatever you say – marriage, whether you want it or not.

Me:      You know what’s a really nice gift God’s given me? The certainty that whatever happens, it’ll be for my good and his glory.¹⁰ And so I do not need your so-called help to attempt to engineer things one way or the other. In a way, the fact that I don’t form romantic attractions easily is a little gift of its own; it spares me a good deal of annoyance and heartache and means I can put up with singleness a lot more easily than many people.

Her:     It has a lot of disadvantages too.

Me:      So does almost every gift, from a worldly perspective. But the fact remains that each has her own gift from God, and for each of us, what God gives us will turn out to be exactly what best facilitates our sanctification. And let’s face it, honey: that’s better than anything you claim to be able to do for me.

Footnotes

¹ Thanks to Springfield! Springfield! for the transcript I consulted: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=miranda&episode=s01e05.

² I consider this expression to be a Fairly OddParents reference (the episode in question being S4 E11, ‘Shelf Life’), but I suspect that’s probably not its ultimate origin.

³ My Internal Hopeless Romantic here allows for my childhood as time during which she wouldn’t expect me to be forming romantic attractions. Generous of her.

⁴ If you need a quick reminder of how catalysts work in order for the metaphor to make sense, BBC Bitesize has you covered: http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/science/triple_aqa/calculating_energy_changes/energy_from_reactions/revision/5/.

⁵ The ESV translates παρθένος (parthénos) as ‘betrothed woman’ here and throughout the chapter. They most likely have very reasonable grounds for such a translation, but since I can’t see any such grounds myself – see also the relevant LSJ entry, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=parqenos&la=greek#lexicon – I’ve decided to substitute ‘maiden’, meaning a woman who is not and has never been married. I prefer this to ‘virgin’ because it makes it about marriage rather than purely sex, and much as I think the two ought to be inextricably connected, the fact is that in the society in which I live, they aren’t understood as such.

⁶ Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians+7&version=ESVUK.

⁷ I here owe thanks to the friend who first brought me firmly round to this way of thinking about a year and a half ago.

⁸ For example: https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/single-satisfied-and-sent-mission-for-the-not-yet-married. I don’t think it’s a bad article overall – indeed, no negligible amount of the advice it gives about how to spend one’s time as a singleton well is expressive of why I find singleness exciting – but I reject the idea of the third category.

⁹ Assuming I recall rightly, a response to such effect was made by the owner of the Dirty Christian Facebook page to a comment someone had made on one of his posts. Said owner is currently taking a break from social media, but you can still view his previous posts: https://www.facebook.com/thedirtyxian/.

¹⁰ Romans 8:28. Obviously.