The Astonishing Adventures of Captain Oblivious

“Super-ladies, they’re always trying to tell you their secret identity. Think it’ll strengthen the relationship or something like that. I said, ‘Girl, I don’t want to know about your mild-mannered alter-ego or anything like that. I mean, you tell me you’re a super-mega-ultra-lightning-babe, that’s all right with me. I’m good. I’m good.’”

The Incredibles (2004)¹

 

See, I tend to be oblivious of my surroundings when reading even if the book is not directly in front of my face. Thanks to stockimages at freedigitialphotos.net.

Who would you be as a superhero?

Sometimes I think everyone should have a daft pretend superhuman alter-ego. I call mine Captain Oblivious,² because my ability to remain completely ignorant of things that are right in front of me and that any ordinary person would undoubtedly notice really is quite uncanny. How I gained my powers is a mystery, but their existence and extent is regularly made manifest in my everyday life. I could provide endless examples of my ability to tune out any ongoing noises within earshot if I’m getting on with something at least a bit interesting; of the frustration other people meet with when trying to garner my attention (particularly, as anyone who’s ever lived with me will testify, when I have my headphones on³); of my accidental blanking of people I know well who attempt to greet me in public while I pootle along on autopilot thinking about something else, or perhaps absorbed in a conversation with another friend (who is usually good enough to enlighten me of my unintentional rudeness so that I can do something to rectify it). Still, the most amusing of Captain Oblivious’ adventures are surely found in my total failure to recognise the nature of comments which I am later informed were obviously intended romantically. The details of the following conversation are heavily fictionalised (for my ease and your entertainment), but I would consider the overall substance and gist of it an accurate representation of some real conversations that I’ve had to this effect; I hope they prove vaguely amusing while you consider the nature of the silly secret identity to which your own traits might most readily lend themselves.

“You know, everybody seems to have stories about awful guys who have approached her in the club and tried to get with her, but that’s never happened to me.”

“Never?”

“Well, it probably helps that I don’t go clubbing very often at all. I mean, I think about three or four guys came up to me in the club on graduation night, but they were all wanting to congratulate me on having won the department prize, so…”

“Well, that’s quite nice.”

“Yeah, it was really nice actually. I think the only time a guy I didn’t know at all has come up and spoken to me in the club, he was asking me what drink I was getting at the bar. Which was a bit weird – I mean, why did he care?”

“…”

“What?”

“He asked what drink you were getting at the bar?”

“Yeah – weird, right?”

“Anne, he clearly wanted to buy you a drink. That’s why he was asking what you were getting, so he could offer to pay for it.”

“What? Seriously?”

“Um. Yes. Most definitely.”

“Well, how the kerfluffle was I supposed to know that?”

“Oh no … what did you say?”

“Well, I was getting water, because that’s always what I’m getting when I’m in the club…”

“Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear.”

“So, you know, I said, ‘water’. And he said, ‘well, that’s a bit boring’.”

“And you said…”

“I said, ‘yeah, but, you know, yay hydration!’”

“You did not.”

“I did.”

“Oh my goodness, I am experiencing so much secondhand cringe right now. ‘Yay hydration’?!”

“Hydration is great. Hydration is always a big concern of mine when I’m clubbing.”

“So you brutally rejected this guy with the incredibly smooth line ‘yay hydration’?”

“Hey, I didn’t know I was brutally rejecting him!”

“Well, he doesn’t know you didn’t know. You might have destroyed his confidence for life.”

“Look, if he wanted to buy me a drink, why didn’t he just say so?”

“Anne, he basically did. Only you could possibly have failed to recognise that.”

“Oops.”

“Oops indeed. Still, I suppose you can always console yourself with your lovely department prize.”

“Yeah, I was quite proud of winning the department prize actually. I mean, yeah, the fact that there was no consistent capping policy for language exams did massively inflate my overall grade, but it still feels pretty gratifying to have done that well considering I started without the requisite Latin A-level.⁴ Like, I hadn’t even done any prose comp⁵ before I came to uni. Which, come to think of it, makes it rather strange…”

“What?”

“Well, there was this guy in my halls in first year who also did Classics and used to come by my room to borrow my Latin prose comps, but, what with me being such a beginner, I can’t imagine they were particularly better than his.”

“…”

“What?”

“Anne, did the possibility not even cross your oh-so-brilliant mind that this guy might have been asking to borrow your admittedly mediocre prose comps just as an excuse to stop by your room?”

“What? No – why on earth would he do that?”

“Um, maybe because he was interested in you?”

“Ha, yeah, I don’t think so. Although…”

“Although what?”

“Well, it occurs to me that there was one time when he was giving a prose comp back that he said he owed me a drink at the next Classics Society social.”⁶

“And it still didn’t cross your mind?!”

“Well. No.”

“Are you kidding me?! What did you say?”

“Well, I actually hadn’t got particularly involved with the Classics Society yet, so, I, er, told him that I actually hadn’t got particularly involved with the Classics Society yet.”

“You did not!”

“I did. I mean, it was only fair to let him know that he’d probably have some trouble making good his promise, right?”

“So you brutally rejected him too!”

“But I didn’t even know I was doing it! That entire communication took place on a whole different plane of which I had no awareness!”

“That doesn’t make any difference, Anne. It still happened.”

Although actually, even now, I’m not altogether convinced it did. Maybe this guy wasn’t interested in me at all. Maybe he was just really bad at Latin prose comp. In any case, the moral of the story is that the only reliable way to make one’s true intentions clear to Captain Oblivious is to state them explicitly – having first made certain that I’m actually paying attention, of course.

Well, hopefully that little anecdote has given you some time to ponder your own remarkable abilities, O Undoubtedly Remarkable Reader, and the consequent nature and name of your own daft pretend superhuman alter-ego. Do leave a comment if you’ve come up with a good one…

Footnotes

¹ Thanks to BaD_BURN for posting the film transcript here: http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Incredibles,-The.html.

² A housemate of mine remarked that this name works particularly well on the grounds that it sounds a bit like ‘Captain Oblivion’, which one could imagine being the name of an actual, not-daft superhero. Interestingly, both ‘oblivious’ and ‘oblivion’ derive from the Latin obliuiscor, meaning to forget: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=obliuiscor&la=la.

³ I’m sure I’ve recommended my lovely, sustainably-produced, possessing-fabulously-good-noise-cancelling headphones in another post, but since they’re currently on sale on the manufacturer’s website, http://www.thehouseofmarley.co.uk/headphones/on-ear-headphones/positive-vibration-on-ear-headphones-dubwise.html, it seemed opportune to do so again.

⁴ Strictly speaking, I was on the Classical Studies course, for which no previous study of Latin or Greek was required, but had chosen to take, as one of my optional modules, Latin at the level intended for those who did have an A-level, and I subsequently transferred onto the straight Classics course for which a Latin or Greek A-level would indeed have been requisite – as, indeed, it still is, although I was sure I’d heard to the contrary: http://www.exeter.ac.uk/undergraduate/degrees/classics/classics/. Still, that was all a bit complicated to explain in the main text, and what, after all, are footnotes for?

⁵ That is, prose composition, a term which for all practical purposes refers to translation into the target language.

⁶ My university has so many societies. Check it out: https://www.exeterguild.org/societies/.

Rise of the Slightly Rubbish Guardians

“It is our job to protect the children of the world. For as long as they believe in us, we will guard them with our lives.”

Rise of the Guardians (2012)

How has Dreamworks Animation managed it? The studio behind such exceptional motion pictures as The Prince of Egypt, Shrek, and – a film which for some time enjoyed the status of being my absolute favourite – How to Train Your Dragon, has proved unable to persuade me, an unabashed fan of all things animated, to pay money to see any of their original-story releases (i.e. not including the sequel to HtTYD) for nearly the whole of the past five years. Trailers for such titles as Turbo, Home, and The Boss Baby have left me altogether uninspired to take a trip to the cinema.¹ It probably doesn’t help that the last original-story release from the studio that I did see, Rise of the Guardians, was … well, it was all right. Nothing special.

The moon that constitutes Dreamworks Animation’s company logo appears in Rise of the Guardians practically as a character, which is entertainingly meta.

Rise of the Guardians is a dissonant, sprawling, hyperactive sort of a film featuring a coalition of childhood myths – Father Christmas, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Sandman, and our protagonist Jack Frost – who collaborate in defence of the joyous, carefree nature of childhood against the newly-intensified fear-inducing activities of the Bogeyman, otherwise known as Pitch Black. Our heroes possess, between them, a wealth of highly powerful magic, so one wouldn’t have thought, perhaps, that one solitary adversary would present all that much of a threat, but the trouble is that the Guardians’ power has one fundamental weakness: it depends entirely on children believing in them.

Pitch’s strategy, therefore, is to sabotage the Guardians’ efforts to carry out those activities by which they make their existence known to children: he kidnaps all the Tooth Fairy’s subordinates so that they can no longer flit round collecting children’s teeth, he destroys the Easter bunny’s stock of painted eggs so that children attending Easter egg hunts are uniformly disappointed – and every time a child stops believing in a Guardian, said Guardian is weakened. So Tooth’s feathers begin to moult, and the Bunny is reduced from the size of an adult human to that of an ordinary rabbit.

The big final showdown of the film sees our variously dilapidated heroes confront Pitch in a darkened suburban street. Beside them are a young boy called Jamie and a collection of his friends, whose help the Guardians have enlisted along the way.²

“You think a few children can help you?” Pitch mocks, backdropped by an army of shadowy nightmares. “Against this?”

Father Christmas attempts to lift his staff against Pitch, but stumbles. Jamie gasps, anxious, but Jack Frost and the Easter Bunny are quick to reassure him. “We’ll protect you, mate,” asserts the latter, rather incongruously in view of his puny size.

“Aw, you’ll protect them?” echoes Pitch. “But who’ll protect you?”

Nobody seems to have an answer, until we see a new resolve in Jamie’s eyes and he steps forward: “I will.” The other children soon follow his lead until there is a whole line of them standing in front of the Guardians.

Pitch, unperturbed, sends a stream of nightmares straight at them – but when Jamie thrusts out a hand against the nightmares, they turn into the golden good-dream sand of the Sandman, familiar to us from earlier in the film. The process continues and soon all the Guardians are looking a lot more like their usual selves, upon which they start employing the full force of their magical abilities against Pitch until he is defeated. The fact isn’t made totally clear, but I think we have to assume that when the golden sand goes whizzing all over the sky, it’s also causing numerous children to have dreams of such a sort that they start believing in the Guardians again, thereby empowering the Guardians to fulfil their duty of protecting those children from Pitch.

 

And this is probably about what you’d get if Father Christmas and the Sandman were for some reason conflated into one character...

In short, the Guardians are just as reliant on the children they are sworn to protect as the children are on them. This, indeed, forms the heart of the film’s storyline. And in this way, although the Guardians’ purpose, as stated in my opening quotation, may sound terribly grand and assertive, the gist of it turns out not to be ‘so long as the children of the world are young and naïve and vulnerable enough to have need of us, we will guard them with our lives’ so much as ‘we are literally entirely dependent on the children of the world believing in us in order to be able to exercise any of our powers of protection over them’. Which being so, is it even the Guardians who are really doing the protecting? Or are they arguably just a convenient external agency by means of which the children are, after all, able to protect themselves? One might, perhaps, characterise the relationship between the Guardians and the children as a mutually beneficial partnership, or even as a contract of service: the currency of belief buys the service of protection. In any case, it’s with the children, and their ability to choose to believe or not to, that the real power in the equation rests. All of which surely renders these supposedly mighty protectors called the Guardians a bit … well, a bit rubbish, frankly, doesn’t it?

So it’s a very good thing that in the real world, we have a protector whose ability to do what he does has absolutely nothing to do with how many people believe in him. God’s relationship with his people is altogether different from the Guardians’ with the children: it is not a mutually beneficial partnership, because there’s no contribution we for our part could offer God that he might possibly lack without us. He is the self-sufficient source of everything that is, the eternal Trinity, the uncaused cause, satisfied in himself before anything else existed, necessarily greater than all of it, and with absolute power over every atom. How could the Creator of all lack anything, such that he would be dependent on his creation to provide it? Such a thing would defy all logic.

And for this reason, it’s not on to approach God as if our belief in him, or any practical manifestation thereof, could function as currency, in the same way that the children’s belief in the Guardians does. The following is from Psalm 50:

Not for your sacrifices do I rebuke you;

your burnt offerings are continually before me.

I will not accept a bull from your house

or goats from your folds.

For every beast of the forest is mine,

the cattle on a thousand hills.

I know all the birds of the hills,

and all that moves in the field is mine.

If I were hungry, I would not tell you,

for the world and its fullness are mine.

Do I eat the flesh of bulls

or drink the blood of goats?³

Of course, we don’t make animal sacrifices under the new covenant with Christ, but that was what obedience to God’s commands looked like according to the covenant with Israel as laid out in Torah, and so the same point applies now to any kind of obedience we undertake with the expectation that we are somehow doing God a favour, or presenting a bargaining chip, when in actual fact everything belongs to him already. In fact, it strikes me as even more ludicrous to have this kind of attitude about a prayer or a Bible-reading session or a morally sound decision or the mere reality of belief that underlies all such things, than about a blood sacrifice. After all, blood sacrifice was and remains the necessary means by which a holy God’s relationship with unholy humans is established; these other things are actually privileges bought by the establishment of that relationship – in our case, perfectly and permanently through Christ’s death and resurrection. And yet I know I am guilty of getting it in my head – vaguely, subtly, so that it’s hard to acknowledge and reject the fact – that deigning to access such privileges represents my giving God something he lacks. How mad is that? And how utterly arrogant? Granted, it is of course true that God wants and desires and asks obedience of his people, but the key thing to realise is that this is because he has chosen to achieve his purpose of increasing his own glory through us, not because we have something he needs in order to achieve that purpose. Indeed, Psalm 50 continues:

Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving,

and perform your vows to the Most High,

and call upon me in the day of trouble;

I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.

The way we glorify God is when he delivers us. He asks of us thanksgiving, which by definition is an acknowledgement of our dependence on him rather than the meeting of a need that he has. When the children in Rise of the Guardians make a point of the fact that they believe in the Guardians, far from testifying to the greatness of the latter, it exposes that the former are the ones who really hold the cards; and likewise, if we think that our belief in God or the obedience that follows therefrom is fulfilling his needs, we don’t glorify him, but only fashion a false glory for ourselves. We reduce him – to a greater or lesser extent – to a convenient external agency whereby a power that really belongs to us might be exercised. If, on the other hand, we recognise that we have nothing to offer, that all we can do is give thanks for good and cry out for deliverance from evil, we witness with great clarity to the absoluteness of God’s power, the willing generosity of his grace, that he is the only Saviour, needed by all, needing none – and a much better guardian than anyone else could ever be.

Footnotes

¹ Although actually I just read the description for The Boss Baby on the Dreamworks website, http://www.dreamworksanimation.com/film/, and the mention of the words ‘unreliable narrator’ has already caused me to think it might be worth a look after all…

² Some kind human has uploaded the scene to YouTube – in HD, indeed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-rBH4qSF0w.

³ I’m a big fan of this one right now: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+50&version=ESVUK.