L. Scott Ekstrom – Writer

When I was a young expatriate, enrolled in a theatre program co-taught by grad school and conservatory, one of my coursemates, a Scotsman who thought my literary tastes puerile (a word I didn’t know and still can’t pronounce), got us into a master class series at a West End venue.  Though a couple of the instructors were names I’ve often enjoyed dropping, the best teacher was a lesser known Shakespearean actress armed with both an arsenal of practical advice for young performers and an incredibly noble view of the arts.  “We are here to serve the audience,” she intoned.  “[That is why] we bow at the end of each performance.”  For a full house of drama students poised to captivate future fans, this was a challenging word.

Back in undergrad I had a communications professor who loved the cinema but avoided certain directors out of, I guessed, spiritual or feminist convictions, or possibly both.  When she referred to the films of these sexist heathens, or whatever they were, as gratuitous, I assumed she meant they contained too many swears, just a little too much skin.  But this was not the reactionary diatribe of a podunk fundy campaigning for decency. Though my college was unapologetically Christian and located almost literally in a backwoods, it was no less academic for being either.  Evangelical as she was, here was a Ph.D. whose grasp of Bakhtinian semiotics and Foucauldian whatchamacallit made my head spin.  She wasn’t just saying the films in question added graphic elements because the producers knew it would help sales or because the director was a horndog, though both assertions would hold up in the court of common sense.  Rather, she objected to the heavy-handed use of violence, profanity, and nudity for artistic reasons, not just moral ones.  I wasn’t sure why.

A few years later, after London, I was living in New York, where I met dozens of the thousands of Christian artists working in a variety of media.  Hundreds of conversations about art and faith began to shed more light in the cave of my developing convictions.  Some of the discussions were about the problem of gratuitousness in art, which one singer-songwriter said happened when the artist’s desire for expression superseded the listener’s need for identification, or something like that.

Such gratuitousness might be found in a Midwestern arena, where a smiling pop princess wows the crowd with writhing and riffing to a song whose lyrics, it seems, she has never read.  It could occur on Broadway when the method actor portraying the sensitive young man in a kitchen sink drama obsesses in the tranquility of his dressing room over a private trauma he later recollects on stage, using substitution to induce live catharsis.  He feels purged; the audience gets puked on. Or it could happen on the left coast when a starlet, new enough in town to believe everything her handlers tell her, shakes the dust from her Bible belt background by taking off her clothes for the camera (and a greater than usual number of crew members), not thinking far enough ahead to realize that once her full frontal reaches celluloid or her derriere goes digital, there’s no takesies backsies.  Her dry cleaner and pharmacist and neighbors and grandchildren will always have the evidence, forever be able to say, I’ve seen that (and those).

My Christian artist friends were not necessarily against getting naked in the name of art.  But some of them were non-actors for whom the question was merely theoretical.  They hadn’t worked as an actor, as I barely had (no pun intended).  So they didn’t really have to think through how practical aesthetics and personal ethics work themselves out in the real career of a person of faith in regular negotiations with directors, producers, and representatives who take 15 % off the top (5 percent more than God).  Whether it was because they were novices and dilettantes like I or because they were seasoned professionals arriving at different conclusions than I might, some of these artists said that Christian actors, many of whom were comfortable with realistic portrayals of violence and coarse language, shouldn’t get so hung up on the idea of nudity.

In theory, I appreciated their hatred of legalism.  Believers in the only true original One are free in Christ and ought to suspend judgment as long as we can.  It is a terrible thing to fall in to the hands of a self-appointed arbiter of everyone else’s good taste.  God save us from the narrow-minded tyrant who draws arbitrary lines for others, pontificates where scripture is silent, puts a fence around the law and says, “This is sanctified, that is not; say poop if you must, as long as you feel bad about it.”

I’m not entirely sure nudity is always taboo for Christian artists.  Jesus hung naked on the tree, and some powerful if controversial and maybe, I don’t know, misguided artistic portrayals of this central crisis in history forgo the traditional undergarment.  As do other fine representations of many a noble or playful subject.  Walking through the Met, marveling at classical masterpieces centered on the human form, never feels like pornographia, always reminds me that premodern painters and sculptors had no Victorian qualms about letting it all hang out.  It is not the body that is sinful.  But something in us is.

In one of those many hours of chats about God and creative license, me waxing loquacious, as I’m wont to do when I’m passionate about a subject and have the ear of folks who have not yet found me tiresome, I was shocked into silence by someone suggesting it a sign of spiritual immaturity when actors refused to do on-stage nudity.  That seemed, still seems, silly to me.  For while I’m not sure nudity is ever integral to a plot, I am pretty sure, as a matter of both civil and spiritual liberty, that nobody gets to tell me when I have to take my clothes off.

Art that seeks first to titillate may be of the lowest cultural order because it exists primarily as a servant of commerce.  And, whatever its intention, graphic subject matter may have the potential to darken the souls of artist and audience alike.  But more disturbing (and engrossing) than sexploitative details of who did what where and for how long may be the unrelenting exposure of a memoirist’s own soul.  There’s nothing like a page-turning tell-all as penance for the past.  Fueled by the possibility of praise as the ultimate hope for redemption, the self-conscious author casts the reader as his confessor.  One imagines the writer feeling cleansed as manuscript passes from his hands into those of his publisher’s publicist.  It is the rest of the world, his reading public, that is about to get dirty.

Communication is not merely about personal expression, but also about serving the human community for the glory of God.  In trying to do so through the arts, we should enjoy the pleasure of simply getting to practice our craft, whether it’s a collage about dandelions, a dance about nothing, or an essay about God.  But we must also keep in mind we are doing that work to connect to others, in hopes they might experience something for themselves.  And let us hope that something is good, in every sense of the word.

It’s tempting, writing memoir, to say too much, and to do so as quickly as possible.  To shock with the removal of coverups, and to continue to captivate readers until every shred of pretense and pose, down to the last fig leaf, is piled on the ground, and I stand bravely, if uncomfortably, in my own skin.  Maybe, if I dare to mention every ignoble thing I might ever have thought about doing, then you will love me for being so transparent.  Or you could reject me, and I would have the satisfaction of hating you for that.

Kind of a cheap gimmick, I think.  And a lazy one, in that it lessens the need for me to show restraint and you to use imagination.  Worse, it’s manipulative.  Because, really, I’m still going to follow Arthur Dimmesdale’s little way of vague confession–I will be selective in what I show and tell, so that, with any luck, you will like me even more for being so torn up about sins which, I hope you think, aren’t as bad as yours.  Worst of all, if I continue to shame myself for the past, it proves I have taken my eyes off the One who was already stripped on my behalf.

It’s subjective, of course.  A book that leads one person to God could damn another person to hell, or vice versa.  That’s a little dramatic, perhaps.  No work of art has that much power.  One of the instructors at those British master classes was a playwright who said, “The play is in the air.”  Half-way between stage and seat, the script and actors and costumes and lighting designers are consorting with audience members to create meaning.  My lit theory prof would point out the ontological problems in such a sloppy statement.  I’ll concede his accurate criticism of the imprecision.

All I’m saying, as a layman who long ago gave up dreams of academia, is that every individual artistic experience, of a rap or jig or installation or bestselling novel or indie short, is unique.  God knows, two people sitting in the same theater watching the same scene could be doing so with diametrically opposite motives, and then, still, could get out of the experience the opposite of what they had hoped.  God does know that.  So, I remind myself to ask Him about the what and wherefore of my wanderings as both producer and consumer of art, once upon a time dramatic, and now, Lord willing, literary.  And I will keep what I think He shows me to myself.  Mostly.

But if armchair philosophers and would be renaissance men like myself are good at anything, it is forming and sharing opinions.  So I’ll offer one more:  when in doubt, keep your pants on.

@LScottEkstrom is a freelance writer living in New York.

Article and photo credit:  Copyright 2013, L. Scott Ekstrom.  All rights reserved.