Pearl Diver

The film "Pearl Diver" was an interesting combination of Mennonite stereotypes and inside jokes.  The Mennonites portrayed seemed to live more like they would have 60, 70, or even 80 years ago in a lot of respects.  I think this was partially done to satisfy the image of Mennonites that most people unfamiliar with the denomination would imagine, Amish.

As for the sense of place, while many Mennonites that I know live in farm houses, very few actually work the farm.  Perhaps this is just due to where I grew up, but the scenes of the bonneted children running out to their dad riding a tractor is no longer an accurate portrayal of Mennonite life.  Driving with mom in an SUV to visit dad at the insurance office while listening to Disney soundtracks would be much more representative.  The film also seems to show people who leave the farming community as less Mennonite than those who stay.  This is a very unfair portrayal.  I like to think that anabaptism is more than a aesthetic or an ethnic community.  I believe that many of the people I know who best fit the Mennonite stereotypes (even if they are a bit different than the film's) embody real anabaptist values the least.  I am not going to go into a lot of theology but I find the most liberal and progressive (read worldly) Mennonite churches following an ethic that best meshes with the jesus's teaching and the spirit that the church was founded in.

In terms of technology, the film seems to be saying that no one entirely accepts or rejects new technology and that there are dangers associated with both the old-fashioned and the new-fangled.  Part of how the film creates a cinematographic style is by keeping the representations of technology to be simple and far between. You didn't see a whole lot of technology in this movie, which is inaccurate, but forgivable since accurate representation of modern technology is not really all that important to a film (hint: storytelling is).

But back to stereotypes, while I found a lot of the stereotypes of faithful and conflicted Mennonites a little overdone, I was also annoyed by the stereotypes of non-Mennonites (the somewhat sleazy real estate agent for one).

As for stories, I was interested in the evolution of stroytelling happening in the film.  While King suggested a certain kind of story to be typical of the Mennonites in the film, I found the film to be typical of the sort of stories that Mennonites in real life are telling RIGHT NOW IN THE REAL WORLD.  I think the story of people who can't live up to their spiritual ancestors and are conflicted about representing themselves to the outside world is much more typical nowadays.

In fact it seems that the role of a Mennonite writer is more to represent the group to the outside than to work through issues within the denomination.  I think the typical Mennonite writer is to some degree flirting with the idea of leaving the church and pushing its boundaries.

Well, these are some thoughts I had.

how things begin

This is my first blog post ever.

Now that that is over with, I hopefully will begin utilizing this form of media regularly and with marked improvement.  This site was set up specifically as a part of a class I am taking on Mennonite Literature as a way to interact with other members of the class, but it may evolve into something else entirely after the semester ends (or disappear, who knows).

Anywho, look for posts about Mennonites and the stories they write.