Most often I cringe when they sing–but I can still feel the spirit. I think this post is entirely applicable to church choirs. With no motivation to improve, why should the artists among us bother trying? If they can feed the kids with spiritual kitsch, why not? There is a reason BYU is known for its design department, not for its art department. Which is too bad, because we are never going to get Shakespeares of our own at this rate. It seems like, if my read of the market is correct, most art consumers are happy to just feel the Spirit. For something to have the Spirit, it does not have to be great art, as anyone who has heard a humble, sincere testimony will tell you. The art we find for sale in Deseret Book really does inspire those people who buy it and it isn’t because they have no taste it is because it is genuinely inspiring. So The Testaments for its multitude of flaws still managed to bear a sweet, uplifting testimony of the reality of Christ and the Book of Mormon in spite of its being a bad, quasi-Mayan, after-school-special rip-off. The thing is that the Spirit isn’t meant to help you distinguish good art from bad art generally what the Spirit offers you is an idea of the sincerity of the artist.
Nonetheless, at the end of the movie, when Christ appears to the people and heals them, I felt the Spirit. The acting was stilted, the sets and script were absurd, the make-up was horrible, the directing and scoring were distracting, and Christ was played by a kind of Nordic wisp. However, it was a terrible, terrible movie. It told the story of a group of Book of Mormon peoples and it was clear that the creative minds behind it had gone to great lengths to generate a culturally appropriate setting for the movie. They played it in the Joseph Smith building and used it as a missionary tool.
A few years ago, the Church made a movie called The Testaments. The quandary is that they feel the Spirit when looking at that sort of art. They want to be assured that Joseph loved Emma, that Jesus will take care of them, and that their little girls will grow up to be beautiful brides. Average consumers don’t want difficult art or morally complex messages. LDS art seems to be created to be sold and, as such, reflects the interest of the market. In part, this is because of the nature of its distribution. It is often the case that LDS art is accused of being treacly or kitschy. So this cannot be read as a condemnation of all LDS art. In fact, the mediums with which I am most familiar are film and visual art and most of the visual art I know, I know from wandering the BYU bookstore and perusing the Ensign.
It may take a century or two, Atwood cautions, to reach the light at the end of the Gilead tunnel, but reach it we will.In writing this post, I must first admit my personal limitations.
A curious difference between the two novels, however, is that, rather than taking readers on another descent into nightmare, Atwood here foresees the possibility of hope: hope that the forces of resistance and sisterhood will eventually triumph over misogyny, power-mongering and the despoiling of the planet.
In The Testaments, Atwood explicitly wears the mantle that The Handmaid's Tale conferred upon her: that is, literary social critic and seer extraordinaire. While The Handmaid's Tale may not be an exact reflection of "how we live now," it no longer feels as reassuringly improbable as it once did.
But the barren and repressive fundamentalist regime of the Republic of Gilead (formerly most of the United States) that Atwood summoned up so vividly in The Handmaid's Tale has turned out to be not so outlandish after all hence, the popularity of the current Hulu series starring Elisabeth Moss as the handmaid, Offred. When The Handmaid's Tale was published in 1985, American women's reproductive rights seemed relatively secure and global climate change was relegated to disaster movies. Now that it feels like we're living in a society that I find myself thinking of as "Gilead lite," how could The Testaments, Margaret Atwood's highly anticipated sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, possibly convey the same degree of shock as its predecessor? The answer is, it can't. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Testaments Subtitle The Sequel to the Handmaid's Tale Author Margaret Eleanor Atwood