Very Dangerous, Uninspired Silliness

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 4 August 2014.

Post-Farthington we have a less-focused message

I've been thinking about something that frequently overwhelms me with the project, which is its ever-expanding, all-form-engulfing nature. Don't get me wrong--that's also one of my favorite things about the project, but it makes the project a challenge.

I have to immerse myself into the world of podcasting, but it does seem like a podcast makes our lives a little easier by taking away most of the demands of visual production. It also allows us the freedom of dealing with the story in episodes, which frees us from having to pin down one central, official version of the story and communicate it in a fixed amount of time. It also allows us to deal with a destabilized narrative and multiple forms: we can do a show about the creation of the show, we can play the Witkowski brothers, we can play ourselves, we can bring in friends to play roles. We have a lot of options.  It also doesn't inhibit us from playing a show, running websites, etc.

You brought up the question of the moral education piece of the story, and I think we should discuss it.

I feel like we've lost our grip on it a bit, partially because of the dryness of my prayer life lately, and partially because of improvements in the story itself. Before Farthington, I had a fairly tight morality play in mind that could be told in a series of concerts. Post-Farthington, we have a much more interesting story, but a less-focused message, as far as I can tell. I'm curious how you would describe the message of the story--not because I don't think you have lost it, but because we haven't articulated it in a while.

In my eyes, the core message of the story still is and always has been that we are born to be and called to be saints, and every main character should in some way be an examination of the comic and tragic repercussions of our standing in the ways of our own and each other's sainthood, frequently on our quests to pursue our own fallen visions of sainthood.

Meanwhile, if we could somehow view our plight from God's perspective, we would see that God lavishes us with opportunities to be saints, one of which is each other, in the form of obstacles to sainthood! I don't have a great way to articulate this, but it would be like we are invited into Heaven, the cross jams open the gate for us, Jesus and all the angels and saints welcome us in to meet God, and we hold them off so we can watch a little more TV, get promotions at work, complain about the messes we need to clean up first, win a game of ball in a cup, etc. And then God says, well, if you really need to do all that, I'll help: here's the Holy Spirit and the Sacraments and all of our prayers. And then we say, great, but what we really need is a 14th season of Matlock, to close the McIntire account, a housecleaning robot, a shorter string.

I think postmodernism is a time of very dangerous, uninspired silliness, and the thinking person's response to that is a type of desperate seriousness, generally in the form of retweeting Huffington Post or salon.com articles, which are really more silliness. It seems like a great time to point an audience to the greater reality of God's love for us and our place within that love.

I want to reach people who are tired of trudging through the sludge of irony.