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I've heard a lot of good things about Sleepy Hollow, so I decided to give it a try and am four eps in on Hulu.
There are, indeed, a lot of good things about it. Each episode has been interesting and entertaining, and there is a diverse cast featuring a black woman as co-lead.
Alas, I my undergrad degree is in early American history and my grad degree is in theology, and that is a bad combo to watch this show.
I keep getting thrown out of it so hard.
The historical details aren't so much changed for dramatic purposes as a few pop-culture elements thrown into a blender on high. And their interpretation of Revelation is just as bad. I was hoping that once the first few episodes set the scene that there would at least be less historical references, so I would only have half the problems.
Alas, that does not seem like it is going to happen.
I don't know how many eps I can take before it gets to be too much.
There are, indeed, a lot of good things about it. Each episode has been interesting and entertaining, and there is a diverse cast featuring a black woman as co-lead.
Alas, I my undergrad degree is in early American history and my grad degree is in theology, and that is a bad combo to watch this show.
I keep getting thrown out of it so hard.
The historical details aren't so much changed for dramatic purposes as a few pop-culture elements thrown into a blender on high. And their interpretation of Revelation is just as bad. I was hoping that once the first few episodes set the scene that there would at least be less historical references, so I would only have half the problems.
Alas, that does not seem like it is going to happen.
I don't know how many eps I can take before it gets to be too much.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-30 03:00 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2014-09-30 03:45 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2014-09-30 04:02 am (UTC)From:In the last episode of the season he meets reenactors and finds there is someone making 'his' kind of clothes, so he purchases new.
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Date: 2014-09-30 04:19 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2014-09-30 03:26 am (UTC)From:However, the writers/showrunners are pretty aware that they are playing incredibly fast and loose with history and theology alike, and rather than try to be accurate, they've chosen to just go for it. It's totally batshit, and if you're able to shut off the part of your brain that wants accuracy, it's a whole lot of fun.
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Date: 2014-09-30 03:41 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2014-09-30 04:20 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2014-09-30 05:27 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2014-09-30 10:09 pm (UTC)From:A show that takes a pop-culture understanding of the Conservative Christian public frothing (not even a pop-culture understanding of what depths they do have, but just the public frothing at the mouth bits), strains out any actual "faith" or "God" bits, puts it in a blender with every other generic pop-culture magic/urban fantasy idea and then hits "10"--not so much.
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Date: 2014-09-30 10:21 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2014-09-30 11:02 pm (UTC)From:There has always, in this country, been a crossover between Christianity and pop culture, the two are often intertwined. (Often to the detriment of both Christianity and popular culture.) The problem today is twofold: first, the depth of what Christian elements are in pop culture is way shallower than it ever was before (which is not a problem on its own until you add the second part) and second, way too many practicing Christians get most of their knowledge of what Christianity actually is and believes from pop culture. Since the 1950s, Christians have done a piss-poor job, on average, of actually teaching our people what we believe and passing on the treasures of the faith to them. So people are left with ... not much, and most of what they do know is all too easy to twist into whatever shape is most convenient for them.
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Date: 2014-09-30 07:11 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2014-09-30 08:37 pm (UTC)From:Anyway, context. Revelation was written in the late first century AD. Christianity was spreading, but was still being persecuted. People getting fed to lions, etc., (although that happened a lot less than pop culture would have it and persecution was mostly local and sporadic depending on who was in charge politically and what their personal feelings were). And Christians had been expecting that Jesus would come back right away, and he didn't, so they had a lot of time to speculate on what it would be like when Jesus did come back. John of Patmos (the guy who wrote the book) had been exiled to the island of Patmos where he had the vision and wrote the book as a letter to people back home, exhorting them to keep faithful amid persecution and promising them that no matter what the evil Roman Empire did, God would triumph in the end and Jesus would return as he promised to usher in the Reign of God.
The book was written in the style of apocalyptic literature, which meant something very different then than it does to us. Yes, the end of the world was involved, but that wasn't the point. "Apocalypse" literally means "vision" or "that which is revealed" (hence the name "Revelation"). There was this whole genre of Jewish and (later) Christian literature starting in the third century BCE, in which people recorded visions of what God's Kingdom was like, and what was going to happen as God's Kingdom came to earth. They were written by oppressed people, heavily encoded to avoid official notice (and we don't have the codes anymore), deeply filled with obscure religious references and allegories and symbolism (which we don't really understand any more because we use different references and symbols, and have for millennia). In the Hebrew Bible, Daniel is mostly apocalyptic, and draws heavily on the more obscure parts of Isaiah (as well as on other religious literature of its day that didn't make it into the Bible). In the New Testament, there are elements of apocalyptic literature throughout the Gospels and hints of it in Paul's letters, but the Revelation of John of Patmos is the only full-on apocalyptic book.
But, let me say it again, "apocalyptic" doesn't mean "the end of the world" it means "a vision or revelation." The end of the world may be the subject of it, but is not the main point of it. And a vision or dream is not the same thing as a chronology of the end times. It's designed to be heavily symbolic and cryptic, not in the x=y sense of a puzzle to be solved, but as a mood to be evoked.
Also, to the extent that the end of the world is the subject, the only reason for having a vision of it is to assure people that no matter how bad things get between then and now, God will win in the end and bring in a time of justice, peace, love, and joy. The battle is not the point; the conclusion is foreordained, and evil loses.
Of course, modern American Christians (particularly conservatives) tend to be extremely literal-minded, despite the fact that literalism is a modern phenomenon, a product of the Enlightenment, and if you try applying it to the Bible you are going to get some really weird stuff that is sometimes misleading and at other times directly in contradiction to what the original writers of the Bible meant to say. Which is why Revelation gets taken as a literal road-map of what's going to happen (despite the fact that, as befits a dream/vision, it is internally inconsistent almost to the point of incoherency if one insists on interpreting it literally instead of metaphorically). There's also the fact that taking a work meant to reassure people being persecuted and appropriating it for a group of people who (despite their complaints) are still pretty powerful in society ... has some interesting and unfortunate results.
And that's just the overall problem with the interpretation of Revelation in American culture generally and Sleepy Hollow in specific. The individual texts referenced are completely misquoted and taken out of context and twisted to fit the needs of the show's plot, but the whole overall understanding of what Revelation is is flawed on the most fundamental level possible.
tl;dr--Revelation is supposed to be a metaphorical/symbolic dream to soothe the fears of people living under persectution and assure them that no matter what happens, God will win in the end and evil will be destroyed. The show uses it as a literal guidebook to make people more afraid of the battle between good and evil because evil might win if we aren't good enough at fighting it!
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Date: 2014-09-30 09:41 pm (UTC)From:Super interesting, especially about the original meaning of apocalypse (I wonder if I'll always think about that when I watch BtVS now) and about the purpose of providing comfort to persecuted people.
I'm a climate scientist, and there are certain types of bad science that I can't handle in shows -- mainly if the science is the point, as opposed to interesting characters or relationships, but also if it's actively spreading misinformation that I think is harmful. Which probably one could argue is usually the case with pop culture representations of history or theology. Along similar lines, I'm a lot more annoyed by bad representations of how scientists work (esp the lone genius stuff) than bad representations of scientific knowledge. It's interesting to see where people draw the line when it comes to their own areas of knowledge.
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Date: 2014-09-30 10:43 pm (UTC)From:May I ask what denomination? It really could have been any, depending on the knowledge level of who was teaching it; the Conservative Christians are the ones who are DEFINITELY THE LOUDEST THAT THIS IS HOW REVELATION SHOULD BE INTERPRETED, which is unfortunate in that I thing they're off-the-wall-bonkers about it. And the denominations that don't believe that (like my own) don't tend to put much emphasis on Revelation because there are far more important and integral books of the Bible to us. And when we talk about Revelation, the beasts and the seals and all that tend to get ... glossed over. Because it's meant to be both symbolic and in code, and we don't have the code and we don't have the references to get the symbolism anyway. There's a lot of important stuff in the book that you can study without getting into any of the "apocalyptic" (in the modern sense) stuff.
But the most common Christian beliefs about the End Times, the ones the Conservative Christians and Fundamentalists are just sure have to be literally true--that whole thing was developed in the late 19th Century and popularized starting in 1909. That's right, it is not the traditional interpretation of the Bible. Conservatives will claim that it is ancient, going back to the first Christians, but they are only partly telling the truth. What really happened was this: in the 19th Century, literalism was in full swing and people were going through the Bible looking for "hidden" meanings and all sorts of things. Various people believed that (since, of course, the Bible can only be interpreted literally even the parts that say up front they are a dream or vision), you should be able to take all the dates and other references and force them to match up. In 1909, a guy called Scofield gathered some of the wackiest stuff out there, made a Bible commentary where the text and the commentary were on the same page (half a page of Bible text half a page of his own commentary, complete with "helpful" and really inaccurate timelines), and sold it. The Scofield Bible became an instant best-seller.
Problem: most people who read it didn't get that Scofield's interpretation was an interpretation and not WHAT THE BIBLE SAID. After all, it was right there on the same page with the text and everything! And it was the first commentary on the Bible most people who weren't pastors had ever seen (and even some pastors, in denominations that didn't prize clergy education, it was the first they'd ever seen). And even the ones who got that it was a commentary didn't know that several of the beliefs that these guys had put together were very similar to things that had been officially declared heresy by the original ecumenical councils. (Short version: in the first eight or nine centuries of Christianity, whenever there was a major dispute about something, all of the Christians in the world would send delegations to a Council where they'd argue for a while and decide what Christians believe. Travel and communication being hard and expensive at the time, only really major issues got decided that way.) Anyway, when people started pointing out that Scofield's ideas were new and not the traditional view, people who liked his interpretation pulled out the old heresy as proof that people used to believe it without a)admitting that it was a heresy or b) admitting that after it was declared heresy it died out and this was somebody independently coming up with something that was sort of similar but different in many ways. (If you're interested in theology of the end times, I cannot recommend highly enough Jason Boyett's Pocket Guide to the Apocalypse: The Official Field Manual to the End of the World. It's accurate, informative, and funny.)
My favorite thing to point out to people who buy into the whole interpretation. It's called "Rapture" theology, right? As in, a "rapture" will come and the saved people will go to heaven while everyone else has to deal with the trials and battles of the end of the world. (And of course, heaven is somewhere else and the earth will be destroyed with all sinful stuff, so who cares about the environment or anything because the planet's toast when Christ comes again.) Anyway, the bit about people vanishing comes from Matthew 24:37-42: "For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. 38For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, 39and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. 40Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. 41Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. 42Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming." One will be taken and one will be left, as in the days of Noah. Rapture theology says that the ones who are taken have been taken into heaven. But in the days of Noah, the ones who were taken away were the ones who drowned in the flood and were swept away by the water. And contrary to the whole "we can predict when Jesus is coming back" schtick, Jesus says quite plainly in verse 36 that even he doesn't know when it's going to happen. And how they can pay so much attention to Revelation and miss the part about how Heaven comes down to Earth, and the earth is spiffied up to match it (NOT destroyed), I don't know. It's not a few lucky ones going up to God and the rest getting zapped, it's God coming down here and fixing all the broken bits and living among us.
no subject
Date: 2014-10-02 02:23 am (UTC)From:I read Revelation in a 7th grade religion class at a Presbyterian private school, but I only attended the school for that year and I don't think it was super sectarian; my teacher might not have even been Presbyterian. I grew up in a heavily Catholic area and my intermittent exposure to Christian teachings involved a bunch of different protestant and Catholic churches. Anyway my memory of the teacher was that she was pretty liberal, especially compared to most other teachers, so I suspect my own very literal interpretations were at least as much a result of a) being 12 years old and b) general exposure to literal bible interpretations in dominant culture, as it was to her teaching in particular.
I remember a year or two later talking with a friend about Revelation, and saying that it sounded terrifying and awful. And she said it sounded great. At the time I figured she said that because she thought she would be Raptured away and didn't care or think about what would happen to everyone else. But I suppose it's possible that she was going with the "Heaven comes to Earth" interpretation. Though honestly, probably not.
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Date: 2014-09-30 08:34 pm (UTC)From:Sleepy Hollow is set in an alternate universe (which it is -- they've shown the city limit signs for the place several times, and, well, no, the Real Sleepy Hollow has about a tenth of the population shown of 144,000). That's how I deal with shows like this (and I was a lit and history major). But I'd watch just to enjoy Tom Mison in a ponytail (I love me a good-looking fellow in a ponytail), so YMobviouslyV...
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Date: 2014-10-02 02:49 am (UTC)From:Plus, it's so open about plucking verses willy-nilly without any attempt to be convincing (just like it does with its history), that it doesn't bother me the way, oh all things Left Behind do.
The one thing I do like, faith-wise, is that the sisters grew up hearing, reading, and memorizing their Bible. What a refreshing concept.
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Date: 2014-10-02 04:25 am (UTC)From:Very true.