Kristi's Revolutionary Road: A Response

First, I am doing this blog post because I’m afraid you missed Kristi’s entry on the movie Revolutionary Road, and how it pertains to some of her own struggles. I don’t think the email update went out to subscribers, and it’s too good a post to miss.

Second, I started writing a comment on her article and realized it was turning into a post of my own. So I’m putting it here instead.

It’s funny. I know almost nothing about the movie Revolutionary Road, but this is the second time I’ve read about it in the last couple of days. The other time, it was only mentioned briefly, in an article bemoaning the fact that people don’t want to go see realistic “adult” dramas these days, but instead seem to want escapism in the form of fantasy or comedy. This article mentioned Revolutionary Road as one of the supposedly high quality dramas that no one wants to see.

Well, duh. I know Christian fiction is sometimes criticized for glossing over the rough stuff of reality. I’m one of the people who has made that criticism. But I think we need balance in our stories—books, movies, whatever. We shouldn’t be afraid to admit how tough life is, but we should offer some hope. Not pat, easy answers that ring false, but hope.

I think everyone knows how tough life can be. Do we particularly need literature to tell us that?

What we don’t know, sometimes, is that there is hope when things seem hopeless. Kristi asked what we would say to folks like the couple in Revolutionary Road. Well, obviously, one of those pat, easy answers would be that they need God. I haven’t seen the movie, but it sounds as if these people are hopelessly mired in earthly things, in their own petty ambitions and concerns.

Ted Dekker has a great book called The Slumber of Christianity, which talks about this very thing. That Westerners, including Christians sadly, have lost the ability to imagine Heaven and so are concentrating on finding fulfillment in the here and now. And human beings are wired for the eternal, so that’s never going to work.

I’m starting to ramble on, but this is Kristi’s subject, so I’ll let her pick this thread back up in her next post.