It was a funny comic strip, Peanuts was, even if it relied too heavily on eccentric Snoopy for its humor.

The first of all the Peanuts TV specials, “A Charlie Brown Christmas” (1965) was so painstakingly written by Charles Schulz that it ended up being a comic masterpiece which didn’t need any heavy reliance on Snoopy.  It  just needed a lot of imagination and some top-notch jokes.  To Schulz it needed to be meaningful too, and with Linus quoting the Gospel of Luke (and the singing of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” at the end) it did become meaningful in a way other Christmas cartoons on TV never did.

Vince Guaraldi’s music is famous now, with its hooks and charm, and the voices—Peter Robbins as Charlie Brown, Kathy Steinberg as Sally, etc.—are unbeatable.

A Charlie Brown Christmas (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the John Updike short story, “Made in Heaven,” written in the Eighties (and from the collection titled Trust Me), something important is concentrated on.  The piece chronicles the years of marriage between Brad and Jeanette Schaeffer, and it begins with the words, “Brad Schaeffer was attracted to Jeanette Henderson by her Christianity . . .”  Christianity, or something like it, is there, to be sure, but it doesn’t last.  The “something important” which happens is that unbelief masquerades as belief, for a long time.  It’s an unbelief afflicting both Brad and Jeanette, who seem unable to do anything about it, and I myself certainly suspect they can’t.  Can it not be said their minds are being blinded—yes, blinded—to the light of the gospel?  (See II Cor. 4:4.)  To me it can, notwithstanding this is hardly a point Updike is making.

What is doubtless true is that “Made in Heaven” reflects the erosion of Updike’s own recognized faith in orthodox Protestant doctrine.

It’s in a story such as “Augustine’s Concubine” that Updike introduces us to true believers, converts.  A 1970s work included in the collection, Problems and Other Stories, “Concubine” revolves around the love life of Augustine and of his married lover before Augustine’s conversion in the fourth century.  And before hers.  Updike makes it seem inevitable that Augustine will surrender to God, but not that she will.  Yet she enters a cenobium.

What comes about after all the illicit sex is not only chastity but also asceticism (“She, too, could taste the dry joy of lightness, of renunciation”).  A tribute to the former concubine concludes the story:  “She was a saint, whose name we do not know.  For a thousand years, men would endeavor to hate the flesh, because of her.”  What comes about, then, is a history of (Catholic) chastity and asceticism, something Updike, with his understanding of people’s faith in orthodox doctrine, sympathetically presents.

Cover of Problems and Other Stories

I saw about an hour and 50 minutes of the Robert Zemeckis film, Flight (2012), before the projector’s audio went down and the theater crew was unable to fix it.  It’s okay, though; by that time I was tired of the movie anyway.  It’s yet another film about a serious alcoholic (this time a pilot) and it’s a bit draggy.  Its most powerful and suspenseful shot-series comes rather early, after which the movie is often good but not that good.  It’s good in the sense of not being utterly routine—and there is superb acting aplenty.  Denzel Washington is masterly as the pilot.

Another thing:  Parents, pay attention to the R rating.

Denzel Washington (Photo credit: Dalboz17)

Abbie Cornish is an intelligent actress playing an intelligent but non-cerebral woman in Bright Star (2009), written and directed by Jane Campion.  Her, Cornish’s, Fanny Brawne is dignified, passionate, agonized; in short, the performance is magnificent.  Ben Whishaw, who enacts the English poet John Keats—Brawne’s real-life lover—is unerring, and the film is a gem.  It centers on the John-and-Fanny romance and suggests that amatory love, when it isn’t painful, is as beautiful as a Keatsian poem.

Cover of Bright Star

Most, though not all, of the novel The Just and the Unjust (1942) is taken up with a trial wherein two reprobates stand accused of murdering another reprobate, a drug dealer.  Abner Coates is the assistant district attorney who helps to prosecute the men, hoping for a severe verdict.

Abundant human evil and human folly are featured in this engrossing novel by James Gould Cozzens, the latter of which—folly—Abner himself demonstrates by unfairly disliking a county chairman called Jesse Gearhart.  An admirable man, Abner is also a flawed one.  He has a disdain for “things as they are” in his environment, which in his case reflects an attitude not fully adult (or fully righteous).

Subplots spring up in the book, such as one about a schoolteacher tried for lewd conduct—a subplot which, alas, turns offensively sexist for a brief bit.  Also, Cozzens’s prose is frequently as sloppy as I suppose Dostoyevsky’s is in the original Russian.  At any rate, it wouldn’t surprise me if The Just and the Unjust was one of the best novels about the law and the courts ever written.  It does a good job of showing us, as has been accurately pointed out about the book, that the law is only as strong as the people who handle and make use of it.  It’s smart and exploratory.

Critics have attacked Cozzens for siding with privileged characters (e.g., an assistant district attorney).  What fools.  Privilege has to go to somebody.  Does it also offend them that Job and Abraham and Solomon were rich?

The Just and the Unjust (Photo credit: Wikipedia)