This weekend, Jason and Steph and I saw A History of Violence.The movie's premise is promising. It's based on a high-quality graphic novel, a distinction that seems to be the new badge of edginess for hip young directors. It's getting rave reviews from critics in high places, and its complement of A-list acting talent gives it instant credibility.

The film tells the story of Tom Stall, an all-American dad in a small town whose diner is robbed by two sociopathic thugs. A switch flips, and he saves the lives of his coworkers and customers with a startling display of brutal heroism. He's an instant town celebrity, of course, and the diner's business booms. But there's something unsettling, something off-kilter, about this gentle churchgoing man with a wife and two kids killing would-be robbers with reflexive efficiency. His eyes say it all: there's something more under the surface, and he's tormented by it.

Sound promising? It is. But A History of Violence never delivers. All the complex themes and challenging questions are left as an exercise for the viewer while the film zooms in for an extended closeup of the blood and the screams and the bruised thighs and the spilled brains of brutal sex and violence. It'd be a shame, after all, to spend valuable screen time exploring the nature of man or the morality and ethics of violence when you could just show, say, Tom inexplicably raping his wife or closeups of someone's jawless face gurgling.

This is a film based on a graphic novel in the worst possible ways. It reminds me how easy of a ride most graphic novels get: they're considered deep if they even hint at moral complexity, but few are ever expected to do the hard work of exploring those themes in the actual work itself. In this way, A History of Violence also reveals precisely what's rotten at the core of the comic and graphic novel industry that spawned its story in the first place.

I'll be writing more shortly -- it'll have spoilers, so if you really want to see the film, don't click any farther.

America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior. That paradox—more important, perhaps, than the much touted ability of French women to stay thin on a diet of chocolate and cheese—illuminates the hollow at the core of our boastful, careening culture.

Harpers has a fascinating article on America's uniquely Christian Culture, discussing the core religious tension at the heart of our country's social engine. Seventy-five percent of the population, for example, mistakenly attributes Ben Franklin's proverb "God helps those who help themselves" to the Bible, even though it directly contradicts other Scriptural principles. Metafilter has a discussion gearing up on the article, but it's likely to devolve into "religion: pros and cons" within a few hours.

Meanwhile, over on Kierkegaard Lips, my friend Rachel is grappling with some genuinely profound questions about faith and love.

...I got to thinking about how hard it is to love. How hard it is for me to even think about loving my dad. How hard it is to love people that I think are stupid and mean, or on the other hand those who try too hard to flaunt their giant pulsating brains filled with logic and graphs and boxes and charts. I spoke with a few people lately who told me that their own faith is based largely in logic, and that the more "spiritual" aspect of their faith is virtually non-existant. Sometimes I feel like I have the opposite mentality; my faith largely supported by my dreams, visions, and strange conceptual leaps that I make between Biblical idealogy and manic delusional thought processes based in my own excessive existentialism...

I wonder if she might be talking around the edges of this great divide between our stated 'religion culture' and the way we as Americans tend to think and live and truly believe. But then, it's not just a head versus heart issue -- most Americans are as confused about the logical theology as they are about the 'heart' of Christianity. I've been pondering the country's Revivalist history for a while, partially inspired by Catherine's research about Emily Dickinson. I wonder if these sorts of cracks and inconsistencies in the American religious experience are part of our heritage as much as the First and Second Amendments, etc.