Briefly…
Rachel and I were talking with Trevor and Sierra and they told us that they had been watching the new “Penguin” series and that they were impressed with the quality of it. For those who don’t know, the series traces the rise of the batman villain Oswald Cobblepot, aka “The Penguin.” I thought I’d give the first episode a try when I found that my one-month trial prime membership allows me to access the show.
Setting aside a lot of other things we could talk about I want to make one brief note on one aspect of the show, at least of the first episode, which I found glorious: place.
Often superhero films and tv shows hit me a little flat because of there generic-ness. With cities like “Metropolis” and “New York” and small towns like “Smallville” and “Anytown, USA” it is hard to feel like the narratives take place anywhere in particular. That skyscraper that the Incredible Hulk just demolished could be any skyscraper anywhere, that back alley could be any back alley of any seedy edge of any major city, that small-town wheat field in which the new hero or heroine just tested-out their powers could be any wheat filed anywhere.
This is not accidental. This is intentional. The money behind most super-hero fare aim to present the most generic scenes so as to have the greatest appeal. Particularization costs money and demands that our special effects take into consideration the unique constraints imposed upon the production by the non-identical non-cookie-cutter-ish-ness of real places. We just need a few street signs that are distinctly Brooklyn and a shot of Times Square and the rest can be done in a studio in front of green-screens. They make the world in which the stories happen feel like sets from The Truman Show —we know they’re set peices.
But there’s something deeply arresting when creators take the time to help us not merely spectate the story but feel like we come to abide in it. When they world it well. This is what marks the Harry Potter series, Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the first season of the old Netflix-produced Daredevil series, starring Charlie Cox (made before Marvel merged with Disney). They do more than “show” us something, they invite us into a world.
Penguin, at least, the first episode of Penguin, does just that. It makes Gotham City —a city that has all the potential to be just another anywhere Metropolis, an unoriginal site who sole existence it to host a fight between muscular adults in lululemon outfits— something more than just a stage. Gotham, for the first time for me anyways, has come to life. It has become a world which matters to the audience beyond the events of the action movie.
There’s a theological lesson here: So often we do church in the contemporary world the same way that mega-movie production studios do Gotham, with nothing particular about it, it doesn’t feel like any unique place, it carries no memories on its streets, no distinctive skyline, no restaurants with names I’d remember once I close my Amazon Prime browser. Steel structures, hot 20-and-30-somethings wearing cool social media influencer clothes jumping on a stage with perfect auto-tuned voices, jumbotrons, maybe a hip Turkish rug is thrown across the stage underneath the place where the plexiglass pulpit will soon be placed for the 30-min TEDTalk. It’s Anywhere precisely because its nowhere. Our churches have been emptied, by and large, of placeness.
In an age of global-trend-setting-internetting-streamable-constant-24/7-everythingallatonce-ness the local church must contend for place. Walk your neighborhoods, eat at restaurants that have been there since before you arrived, go to parks. Bring the Gospel with you into those spaces and carry those spaces, with all their smells and problems and flavors and sports events and strange customs and favorite foods with you in God’s house.
I was moved watching Penguin, the bad guy, walk through his city. He knows this city; it belongs to him in some real sense and in some other sense he belongs to it. The first episode closes with him sitting on a curb eating a slurpy from a corner mart, his old middle school haunt. I thought, “I want to know this city, Honolulu, like that.”