(Ed. Note: Originally published at Film-Think.)

“According to a new gospel of ugliness, there is already more Junkspace under construction in the 21st century than survived from the 20th…”

“God is dead, the author is dead, history is dead, only the architect is left standing.”

– Rem Koolhaas

Junkspace, a term coined by architect Rem Koolhaas, is the keyword for a rambling set of descriptions of the way public institutions, architecture, and postmodernism relate. It is a handy way to think about globalism, suburban sprawl, gentrification, and a host of issues characteristic of our age within one confined metaphor. It is “what remains after modernization has run its course or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fall-out.” Ultimately, Junkspace is not limited to architecture and urban planning. It is post-modernism dreaming itself into commercial and communal forms, erasing the neat little metaphors that have developed around post-modernism such as “web,” “network,” “community,” or “matrix” and setting something much uglier in their place. In an age when the cultural critic is expected to traverse numerous genres, mediums, and “isms” in the course of one review, no less an unsightly metaphor will suffice. It seems that Koolhaas has a lot to say to the critic interested in thinking theologically about culture and/or film. Here are a few interesting connections that can be made:

1. “When we think about space, we have only looked at its containers. Junkspace is the body-double of space… A fuzzy empire of blur, it fuses high and low, public and private, straight and bent, bloated and starved to offer a seamless patchwork of the permanently disjointed.”

This description of our increasingly homogenized cultural space eerily resembles C. S. Lewis’ depiction of purgatory/hell in The Great Divorce. Over time, this only slightly real “grey town” has sprawled out in endless rows of phantom houses on a cosmic scale. It is an unsettling picture. In the same way, most culture is the sprawling “body double” of the authentic artifacts that should be flooding the public square. The first task of the critic is to find and engage films that are worth our attention, to wade through all the “body doubles” and find stories with an actual pulse. Critics can break down the momentum of mediocrity in culture, giving voice to the important moral and social distinctions that are so often glossed over in the “empire of blur.” And in response to Koolhaas’ cynicism regarding the permanently disjointed, criticism can give clearer voice to films that are thinking about reconciliation, making proposals about how greater coherency can be achieved in life.

2. “Junkspace pretends to unite, but it actually splinters. It creates communities not of shared interest or free association, but of identical statistics and unavoidable demographics, an opportunistic weave of vested interests.”

If Christianity is to achieve its place as an active culture among others, it must be able to unite disparate demographics on the basis of something other than some reorganizing social principle. For Koolhaas, this social principle is the failed project of modernism. Criticism can have a formative influence on this process by drawing attention to the cinema of marginalized, oppressed, or misunderstood people groups. Increased attention to the Iranian New Wave in the 90’s renovated our understanding of the Middle East, documentaries like Heavy Load expose misconceptions about developmentally disabled adults, Rosetta led to actual immigration reform in Europe. Christian criticism has the ability to counter-act the splintering tendency of Junkspace culture, selectively engaging with films like these that dialogue with the theological tasks of reconciliation, social justice, and the grounding of diversity in true community.

3. “Inevitably, the death of God (and the author) has spawned orphaned space; Junkspace is authorless, yet surprisingly authoritarian… at the moment of its greatest emancipation, humankind is subjected to the most dictatorial scripts… from the pushy oration of the waiter, to the answering gulags on the other end of the telephone, the safety instructions on the airplane, more and more insistent perfumes, mankind is browbeaten to submit to the most harshly engineered plotline.”

It is intriguing to think that the death of the A/author is the reason it often takes so long to get my check at a restaurant. It is even more intriguing to trace the prolific and “authoritarian” blandness of pop cinema, fiction, and art to the lack of a living God or author to grant its scripts any legitimate clout. We submit to the scripts of culture not for lack of imagination, but for lack of alternative. Criticism is all about standing up to dictatorial scripts and opposing them with authentic and articulate alternatives, by providing authors to reclaim orphaned space. And this notion of orphaned space is one that appeals specifically to Christian criticism, which is inspired by so much theological imagery of Fathers, Sons, and children.

4. “Globalization turns language into Junkspace. We are stuck in a speech-doldrums. The ubiquity of English is Pyrric: now that we all speak it, nobody remembers its use.”

This is to say that Umberto Eco writing about the wax museums that dot America’s landscape was cultural criticism’s finest hour (see: Travels in Hyperreality). Slightly more provocative than the famous portrait of Kramer in a popular Seinfeld episode, Eco strikes at the heart of the habit of imitation (imitivity?) that has dulled creativity in modern culture. In a “speech-doldrum” the only available activity is the rehearsal of past communication events, making it no surprise to see the recent trend in Hollywood of remaking so many older films, or Tarantino’s influential fascination with b-grade cinemas. Theology is the continual exploration of language in finding clearer and richer ways to talk about God’s activity in the world. As a way of communicating, in form it is characterized by the newness it is attempting to translate into contemporary terms. Christian thought redeems the use of words worn by repetition in Junkspace, putting wind back in their sails to continue Koolhaas’ metaphor. Criticism and theology have this in common, celebrating creativity and thoughtful innovation, giving us a fresh vocabulary to think more clearly about ourselves and the world.

5. “Narrative reflexes that have enabled us from the beginning of time to connect dots, fill in blanks, are now turned against us: we cannot stop noticing: no sequence too absurd, trivial, meaningless, insulting.”

My favorite book as a child was Harold and the Purple Crayon. In it a little boy draws himself into a variety of circumstances with his purple crayon, literally filling in future narrative blanks as they are occurring. At times his own craftiness thwarts him, forcing Harold to quickly draw himself to safety within the context of his imagination. Criticism works like this purple crayon, writing creatively on the blank pages between a film and its audience. But how do we prevent cultural criticism from getting caught in the echo chamber of a culture whose “narrative reflexes” have been corrupted? How can we be sure that the right connections are being made, or the proper blanks are being filled? We could be unwittingly signing off on Mad Libs. The contemporary interest in narrative and theology is rife with implications for this issue. Criticism can exercise the narrative reflexes of readers, stretching and working out muscles that have atrophied due to misuse. The drama of redemption as a comparative narrative offers a space in which to explore the stories of others, grounding all the connections that can be made in films and ideas that are far from trivial, meaningless, or insulting.