Posted by Devin Parker

48 hours later and I'm still thinking about Blankets. After I finished reading it, Marilyn and I had a discussion about the differences between growing up in the church in California as opposed to growing up in the church in the Midwest. I'm going to give a couple of story spoilers here; I hope you don't mind, but I have to do so in order to explain what's been on my mind. I'd still recommend you read it if you can find it. There's some nudity and a lot of cursing, but it never seemed gratuitous or exploitative to me. It sounds cliche when artists defend their work with this word - especially filmmakers - but this is one of those works I can honestly say gets away with including these elements because it's honest.

Blankets is largely about the author's childhood, his first love, and his faith in Christ. The author, Craig, has strict parents (his father borderlines on abusive from time to time), is sexually molested by a babysitter, feels guilty for not being more protective of his younger brother, is discouraged from using his artwork to glorify God, and is generally surrounded by pushy, obnoxious jerks, both outside and inside the church (the latter of which, of course, hurt him more deeply). All the while, it's obvious that he wants to serve Jesus, that he knows it's the right thing to do, but ultimately, I think his bad experiences with other Christians ultimately make him leave the church - the matter seems finally settled with a pastor's explanation of a segment of Scripture that seems to suggest that the Bible is a transient, ever-changing, malleable entity, rather than being the eternal, unchanging Word of God - something that convinces him that the Bible itself is suspect.

The romance parts really resonated with me - both the experiences he relates (complete with his concerns about wanting to remain godly in the relationship, and his struggles with doing so) and the way in which he relates them, both in the words he uses and the visual techniques he draws to describe them. I completely understood how he felt - I've been there, myself. But his experiences in church camp, etc., were radically different from my own.

When his Sunday School teacher asks how he might glorify God in Heaven, Craig responds that he would draw. She finds the idea pointless, unable to see how Craig could glorify God with drawings. My Sunday School teacher, depending upon the point in my life, was either my own grandmother, or a guy who played guitar and read Pilgrim's Progress to us. I never felt like my creativity was stifled, though I hadn't yet considered using my artwork to glorify God, so, well, it didn't really come up.

When he goes to church camp - which, in his neck of the woods (Wisconsin) involves skiing - he's surrounded with the same jock/farmer types he runs into at school all the time, and suffers from the same derision and social exclusion. They're supposed to be in a Christian camp, but everyone curses freely and tries to sleep around. At one point he's ridiculed for reading his Bible. My church camp had a couple of kids like that in Kids' Camp, but far less of them in Teen Camp, where people generally seemed to want to be there. I remember hanging out with one or two other guys who weren't really into the "Noah Built An Arky-Arky" thing, but it was never "Ah, screw all this, let's go cruise for babes." I felt a bit excluded in my last years of Teen Camp, but that was my own fault - hormones, you know - and it wasn't like I was a hated outcast, though I think I put some effort into that.

Marilyn was saying that, in the Midwest, or at least in the northern parts where the story takes place and where Marilyn spent most of her life, there's a different atmosphere in the church; that it's more rigid and conformist, based in class differences and job outlooks. You have a lot of people who are farmers, doing labor, slaughtering animals, and so on, working with their hands; people who tend to look at things like art and see only a waste of time, no real future, nothing that's going to put food on the family table. In the story, Craig is regularly ridiculed because of his long hair (as opposed to the ubiquitous mullets) and small frame. He doesn't like crowds, keeps to himself for the most part. When I first met Marilyn, it took a week before she felt like she could be herself and come out of her shell - and this was after writing to her for months!

Anyway, it was interesting, because I was really unaware of the extent of this attitude. It's alarming to me, also. Ultimately Craig decides that he is no longer a Christian - he has no faith in the Church, and he concludes that the Bible is flawed. He says he still has faith in Jesus, but the last mentions he makes in regards to his faith in the story seem to indicate that he's leaning toward a Universalist interpretation of the Divine, so I'm not quite sure how orthodox or unorthodox his faith actually is at the end. As Marilyn mentioned, the last chapter seems rushed, a collection of vignettes that basically explain how everyone ultimately ended up after the central events of the story. Yet I think he still addresses the main issues he brought up through the story, and obviously, since he's still alive (and young yet!), many of these issues probably haven't yet come to a neat conclusion in his real life.

So, I can understand why he - and many other people - could end up so embittered against the Church (and why some feel the same way toward God); he certainly had enough reason to be. If his story is true, then they've let him down and oppressed him far more than they've ever really helped him.

Having said that, I also realize that I'm getting the entire story from his point of view, and it may be skewed for dramatic effect (for example, there are scenes in the story that he couldn't have personally witnessed) or even because he felt oppressed. Nonetheless, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I want to send him an e-mail. I want to tell him that I empathized with his love story, and that I could understand his frustration with people in the Church, even if aspects of it were far more exaggerated than anything I had ever experienced. Beyond that, I'm not certain what to say. I'm disappointed that he's turned his back on the Church, and I hope he hasn't embraced some heretical philosophy about Jesus. But the man has heard exactly that sort of thing much of his life. Based on what he's said in Blankets , I have no reason to doubt that he is a follower of Christ.

What to say?

The Comics Journal hated it, but it's enjoyed a huge amount of popularity. I couldn't help but empathize with it.


This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 28, 2004 at Tuesday, September 28, 2004 . You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments feed .

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