How a John Cusack Movie Made Me Start a Substack

Welcome to UnTaking

This actually is kind of like an 80s teen movie.

I feel like I’m walking onto the auditorium stage of my high school, about to give a speech. My panic grows with each step because I don’t have a speech ready.

How does one begin a Substack? What should be the subject of my first post? I plan to cover a variety of things in this newsletter: movies, music, books, teaching, cultural trends, the usual. Should I just jump in? I mean I already set up an “about” page that explains what UnTaking is…well…about.

I’m desperate at this point, so let me just tell you a story about why I decided to do this. (Pretend I’m Ferris Bueller breaking the fourth wall and talking to the camera here, I guess).

Loneliness and Writing

To understand my purpose here, you have to understand that you’re reading the words of a lonely man.

Not lonely in terms of personal relationships, mind you. My marriage is amazing and I feel a deep sense of belonging there. I also feel fairly appreciated at work. And I’ve been pushing myself to get out there and “hang out” with the humans. It’s worth doing and my life is becoming richer as I challenge my own complacency.

No, my loneliness has to do with what we might vaguely call “community.”

See, I’m a classic dabbler. A dilettante.

My fascinations are wide-ranging, and I have at least an honorary membership in a number of interest-based communities: horror, Christianity, politics, comics, film, all sorts of music, and education are just a few.

But my patience with specialists, experts, and fandoms is thin and I find myself perpetually at the margins of all my communities. I get annoyed when people are too much into their own thing. At the heart of virtually any community is a fiefdom, a hierarchy, and set of gatekeepers wholly invested in defending their turf. Well if they want the turf that bad, they can keep it, I say.

It’s not a terrible life, living at the edges of society. I’ve published fairly regularly the past few years, mostly on my own terms. And I’ve been able to sustain The Sectarian Review Podcast for a good 7 or 8 years now and my undisciplined shuffling between communities there has introduced me to a lot of great people. I feel proud that I’ve been a bit of a bridge-builder, introducing a variety of people to each other because of my citizenship in the margins.

I’m the king of liminal hospitality, I suppose. (I very much hope to continue that tradition with UnTaking).

I guess I’m just not what you’d call a joiner. I suppose some people might latch on to the label “nonconformist,” but I’m suspicious of claiming that identity — a person who proudly calls themselves a nonconformist is often just an arrogant twerp.

This makes life as a writer a bit difficult. I want people to read what I write, but I get bored with what most folks seem to want.

First, I hate evaluating art. I fully understand that’s what the people want and that the algorithms of YouTube demand a million “Why This Movie Sucks” channels. I am happy to let those folks live their lives however they see fit, but I want nothing to do with any of it.

And as for the more high-minded (fringely academic) critics of #FilmTwitter and their insistence on evaluating film on certain aesthetic criteria, this too is a meaningless brand-building, a chasing after the wind. I’m sure I’ll say more about this over time. For now, if you’re looking for another newsletter to “grade” movies or books, you should move on. I don’t even like grading my students papers. (Also, imagine someone walking into a museum and saying “This Sumerian fertility idol is really mediocre. Two stars. It’s derivative and lazily polished.” Most film reviews are about as ridiculous as that).

Second, so much cultural criticism is little more than a predictable extension of the culture wars into the realm of art. Movies and authors are reduced to proxy battles in the moralizing discourses of “who is on the right side of history.” Internet algorithms incentivize making it VERY CLEAR who is a hero and who is a GARBAGE PERSON.

I simply don’t have the energy to find a home for essays that have indeterminant politics. And I have zero interest in having moral conversations with fundamentalists about art, so I retreat back to the margins.

Better Off Dead

No, not me.

I’m talking about the John Cusack movie from the 80s. I wrote something about the movie for Film Inquiry some time ago. It sat in internet limbo for a few years, practically unread. Then, a few weeks ago, I became aware that people in some Facebook groups were reading it (apparently Diana Franklin, the female lead of the film, shared it to a group dedicated to the film). I poked around the comments and saw that I was being scolded as a prude, a humorless tyrant, and apparently an official censor for the Communist Party of some defunct Soviet-bloc state. (By the way, the comments on this are open, so if you’d like to pile on or defend me, please do!).

I was a little taken about, though not really upset by this. It was clear to me that people who were saying such things didn’t really read the essay closely; they were simply responding to what they thought was Another Liberal Doing A Cancel Culture on something they liked. The title of the piece called the movie “A Fantastic, Horrifying Masterpiece Of Offensiveness.” For people who are used to looking at essays about movies through their chosen political lenses, they must have assumed that I deemed the film “horrifying and offensive,” ignoring the fact that I also called it “fantastic” and a “masterpiece.”

My basic argument in the piece is that the movie is brilliant because it recognizes rather icky tendencies in 80s teen movies and blows them up into absurdity. The film is a masterpiece of satire and, to me, a work of genius.

Perhaps I could have been clearer, but frankly I didn’t want to be. To me the movie is great because of its ambiguity. It navigates certain moral tensions in a brilliant way; why ruin that by making some heavy-handed proclamation of its righteousness? But who reads past the title before forming their opinions anymore?

Well, I’m hoping that people who read this newsletter will.

The situation with the Better Off Dead article made me throw my hands up about what I can possible do as a writer. Is there no place for me?

There have been other examples of this critical homelessness as well. I was once accused by some internet liberal of being a Nazi for writing something appreciative about Joker for Pop Culture and Theology.

Even still, I have no interest in conforming to the simplistic expectations of people mired in meme-think. The world is immense and rich and human beings are morally complex. And so is their art.

And so I’m going to use this space to write about things from a perspective that recognizes and appreciates moral complexity. Hopefully I haven’t turned you off here. Remember, that love and curiosity is the foundation of this newsletter, not hostility and anger. I’m happy to let the rest of the internet do what it does and I wish it no ill will.

In the next week or so, look for pieces about Trekkies, Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love, and Julie Schumacher’s great novel Dear Committee Members. I’ll also post links to a recent interview I did about the theologian Clarence Jordan, founder of Koinonia Farm. After the first week, I plan to publish once or twice a week. Please let me know what’s working for you and what you’d like to see me write about.

I’d love to forge here that community that I’ve been missing. I’m trusting that there are more of me out there (I know I’m a “type” and there must me a million of me). I hope you’ve enjoyed this first piece. If you have, I assume you have friends who would appreciate it too. Please share it with them. There is a Chat feature built into the Substack mobile app and I’d love to have ongoing conversations with readers there, as well as in the comment sections of the posts.

Thanks for reading and be sure to subscribe and share. Lots more to come.