These films have two things in common. They depict characters that are marginalized, living on the edge of society bearing secrets that isolate them from ordinary human relationships. And they both star the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman, an extraordinary actor who has an uncanny ability to appear understated yet riveting.

            In every other way, however, they couldn’t be more different.

            A Most Wanted Man (2014) is a film based on the novel of the same name by John le Carré. A tale of international espionage set in the world of terrorism, we watch a Chechen man, Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin) tortured and fearing for his life, enter Hamburg Germany illegally only to be caught up in forces far beyond his control. And we watch Günther Bachmann, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, a German antiterrorist agent seek to unravel a web of deceit and danger only to discover that he too is caught up in forces far beyond his control.

            As in most le Carré stories, the action is not found in high speed car chases, gun battles and fisticuffs but is located in a deadly cat and mouse game that unfolds as intelligence agents manipulate events and people to try to reach some desired end. Hoffman plays his role brilliantly, a rumpled, alcoholic agent who has been burned by his German superiors and American allies, has watched carefully constructed networks unravel and informants killed, and who is willing to wait, and scheme,

            The tension is palpable as the story unfolds, and as John le Carré never tires of reminding us, in the world of international espionage there are not always clear winners and losers. Even the winners able to shut down some terrorist plot before it occurs can lose something of their souls in the process. A world where deceit, lies, and manipulation are the tools of the trade is hardly a kind place.

            The last film in which Hoffman starred before his death, A Most Wanted Man is very worth seeing. It is both good cinematic art and a compelling, deeply human story.

            Rated R, 122 minutes.

            Mary and Max (2009) is a feature length claymation film, starring two characters, Mary Daisy Dinkle (voiced by Toni Collette) and Max Jerry Horovitz (voiced by Philip Seymour Hoffman). Both are painfully lonely when they become pen pals. Mary is eight years old, lives in Melborne, Australia and has a large birthmark on her forehead that is, as she puts it, “the color of poo.” Max is a 44 year-old severely obese man with Asperger’s who lives alone in a dingy New York apartment. “People often think I am tactless and rude,” he tells Mary. “I cannot understand how being honest can be improper. Maybe this is why I don’t have any friends.”

            If your exposure to Claymation is limited to Wallace and Gromit (must viewing, by the way) or Veggie Tales (good for babysitting but badly moralistic) Mary and Max will be a revelation. The attention to detail is astounding and the humor is dry—in one scene in a cemetery a tombstone in the background reads “R.I.P. Adam Elliot,” with the epitaph “very over-rated.” The film’s director and writer is Adam Elliot. The characters, all troubled and broken, are depicted with a warm sympathy that insists they be website , “Mary and Max is innocent but not naïve, as it takes us on a journey that explores friendship, autism, taxidermy, psychiatry, alcoholism, where babies come from, obesity.” It also explores chocolate, atheism, and the delight of snail mail letter writing.

            Mary and Max is a superb example of the art of clay animation in film, and very worth seeing. Expect to have scenes from the movie lodged deeply in your imagination.

            Not rated, 92 minutes.

            Over the past week the news dominating the media has not been good. The precise stories are not the point, since this next week new ones may take their place. Or the old stories—of Ebola and ISIS, of political paralysis and economic greed, of brutality, mistrust and injustice—may have evolved into new versions, as bad as the last one, or worse.

            And if you take the time to dig deeper into the reality of the brokenness, you find it extends far deeper than we know. Consider “Ebolanomics” in The New Yorker (August 25, 2014, p. 21). It’s a reminder that the problem is not merely individual sin or evil but that the brokenness infects all the systems of the world as well.

When pharmaceutical companies are deciding where to direct their R. & D. money, they naturally assess the potential market for a drug candidate. That means that they have an incentive to target diseases that affect wealthier people (above all, people in the developed world), who can afford to pay a lot. They have an incentive to make drugs that many people will take. And they have an incentive to make drugs that people will take regularly for a long time—drugs like statins.

            This system does a reasonable job of getting Westerners the drugs they want (albeit often at high prices). But it also leads to enormous underinvestment in certain kinds of diseases and certain categories of drugs. Diseases that mostly affect poor people in poor countries aren’t a research priority, because it’s unlikely that those markets will ever provide a decent return. So diseases like malaria and tuberculosis, which together kill two million people a year have received less attention from pharmaceutical companies than high cholesterol. Then, there’s what the World Health Organization calls “neglected tropical diseases,” such as Chagas disease and dengue; they affect more than a billion people and kill as many as half a million a year. One study found that of the more than fifteen hundred drugs that came to market between 1975 and 2004 just ten were targeted at these maladies. And when a disease’s victims are both poor and not very numerous that’s a double whammy. On both scores, a drug for Ebola looks like a bad investment: so far, the disease has appeared only in poor countries and has affected a relatively small number of people.

            One must be careful, since only God has the capacity to absorb the full brokenness of the world with descending into despair or cynicism.

            One friend appended to an email, “I have been following the news and ‘this world is not my home.’ ‘Even so come Lord Jesus.’” He is half right.

            My friend’s final phrase is from the end of St John’s stunning Revelation that brings the New Testament to its glorious end. The apostle allows us to see behind the cosmic dual of good and evil to the deeper reality of God’s triumph over the forces of death, darkness and disease that have infested his creation. To assure us that this is not merely the optimism of an exiled visionary, Christ as Lord speaks: “He who testifies to these things says,” St John records, “‘Surely I am coming quickly’” (Revelation 22:20). The king will return, will not delay, will consummate his kingdom, and his reign will be one of justice, world without end. This is the hope of every Christian who prays, as our Lord taught us to say, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” So, St John adds, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus!”

            My friend’s other quotation is not from scripture but from the hymn, “This World is Not My Home,” by Albert Brumley (1905-1977).

            This world is not my home,

                 I’m just passing through.

            My treasures are laid up somewhere

                 beyond the blue.

            The angels beckon me from

                 Heaven's open door

            And I can’t feel at home in

                 this world anymore.

It’s an understandable yearning, I suppose, but it’s wrong.

            The brokenness of the world is unnatural, true, and so we should feel the brokenness as wrong, as a perversion of what should be and of what was intended. The reason for my sin and brokenness is not “I’m only human,” but “I’m fallen and in need of redemption.” My hope as a Christian is not to escape this world for heaven, but for God’s redemption to be complete, so that a renewed heaven and earth show forth the full glory of which they are capable.

          The news also provides glimmers of that glory, shining through the darkness, as it were. Last week I also read “Termite Soldiers’ Legs Sense Alarms” in Science News (August 23, 2014, p. 16). This is the species of termite that builds tall mounds of red soil that hardens like rock for defense and is constructed with a myriad tunnels to provide cool air for the bustling millions of insects living below the surface.

Africa’s Macrotermes natalensis termite relies on a fighter caste to defend its hardened, meter-high-plus mounds and up to several thousand square meters of underground tunnels. When an aardvark or other predator gouges the insects’ home, termites known as major soldiers pound their heads against the floors. The vibrations from the drumbeats tell other soldiers to speed to the breach.

            These headbanger alarms vibrate through the walls of tunnels at about 130 meters per second. What lets a soldier know which direction to go is the slight delay between when the vibrations hit the soldier’s leg nearest the drumbeat source and when they hit its farthest leg, says Felix Hager of Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. A delay of as little as 0.20 milliseconds was enough to orient soldiers.

Even in a broken world, creation reveals a few hints of the wonder of what this world, made to be our home, will be like when the rightful king returns.

            I argued in the first installment of this series that one reason we are drawn to detective stories is that we were made to live in an orderly world. When chaos and disorder expands, we yearn for order to be restored, even though it is never perfect or complete in this broken world.

            Detective stories are also about achieving at least a measure of justice, though it too is never perfect or complete in this broken world. A crime has been committed, so the detective enters the sordid, dangerous world of the criminal, hopefully to find evidence that will bring the miscreant to justice. Our desire for justice is so strong that even though the crime may have nothing to do with us personally, if the case is botched and the criminal is freed we feel a sense of not just disappointment but anger—we believe it wrong even if we can’t justify our response with much philosophical vigor. It’s. Just Wrong.

            The yearning for justice is ubiquitous, deeply rooted in our humanity. This reality, James Sire says in Echoes of a Voice, leads biblical scholar N. T. Wright to include it in his list of four “signals of transcendence” that “point to a realm beyond the material world.” Wright’s four signals include “the longing for justice, the quest for spirituality, the hunger for relationships, and the delight in beauty.”

            This means that detective stories tap a deep longing of our hearts, and even if only in a fictional world satisfy a yearning that is hardwired in our humanity. The question is less why some of us are drawn to detective stories, but why everyone isn’t.

True Detective

            This gritty, dark, at times shocking series stands out from usual television fare. The entire season involves a single crime, and each episode follows the detectives—in this case over a period of 17 years—as they seek to solve the murder. Because it is a cable (HBO, 8 episodes, 2014) production, there are scenes of sexuality besides rough language that is more standard for R-rated movies than TV programs. And though it used to be common knowledge that television was a wasteland not worth much attention, True Detective proves that TV can be very much the opposite.

            The pace of True Detective is never frantic, though the writers never allow the tension in the plot to falter. The cinematography is beyond good, so that settings and landscape shots not only fit the plot, they are lovingly produced and stunningly portrayed to become an essential part of the story. Woody Harrelson (Detective Marty Hart) and Matthew McConaughey (Detective Rust Cohle) are perfectly cast for their roles. And in a surprising and delightful twist, at least for me, True Detective is both philosophically literate and attentive. Detective fiction, because it explores the yearning of the human heart for justice, has the potential to take ideas and their consequences True Detective, a true philosophical drama written by Nic Pizzolatto, includes all these, but never cheats by depending on them to carry the story, instead using them to add color to the story.

            Best of all, T Bone Burnett was hired to direct the music for the series, and that means the soundtrack is both appropriate and a work of art in its own right. “The depth of character is the breadth of music you get to use,” Burnett says in Mother Jones. “So all I have to do is imagine what they’re listening to, and imagine the stories rattling around in their heads. How do you strengthen that? How do you make that resonate? It’s about having the songs become part of the storytelling.”

            “This show does not avert its gaze,” Burnett says. “It takes a good, hard look at who we are right now, in a very profound way... I live in Los Angeles, and I recently took a drive through the middle of the country, and I was stunned by what I saw. In places that had once had purpose, all that’s left is a pawnshop, next to a gun shop, next door to a motel, next door to a gas station, with a Walmart right outside of town. There are people working three jobs just to get by and having to take methamphetamines to do it. That’s the middle of the country, and that’s a plague that’s spreading outwards. We’re not seeing it, and these are things that you see in the show.”

Source: Echoes of a Voice: We are Not Alone by James W. Sire (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books; 2014) p. 206; “T Bone Burnett on How He Chooses Music For True Detective by Asawin Suebsaeng in Mother Jones (8/3/2014) online.

            The world remains a troubled, and troubling place. Wars have proliferated into seemingly never ending skirmishes in numerous places around the globe, and the process of globalization means the West will be party to them even if we believe we are a force for goodness and freedom in a world torn apart by intolerance, greed, religious, nationalist and ethnic fervor, and old grievances. Too much is at stake for us to remain aloof, whether what is at stake is oil, or international terrorism, or human dignity. Most of the time I hear of all this in three forms: brief videos or photos that capture single decontextualized moments in the larger conflict, news stories that try to give some impression of what is happening, and horrific statistics of numbers killed, displaced, or maimed.

            One perspective that is difficult to achieve is the view on the ground, the way things look as events unfold not to policy makers, or military commanders, or media correspondents but to the individuals taking part in the action. I sometimes assume I can imagine that perspective, but that is an illusion. Once the conflict is underway, decisions must be made not with careful reflection but in the moment, and all the moments during armed conflict are fiercely unforgiving. Hesitate to shoot, and you might be shot, but pulling the trigger might result in some tragedy far beyond the death of the enemy combatant who has you in his sites. Brokenness is far messier than we usually admit, and armed conflict is the messiest of all. This does not mean we give up on trying to understand, but it does mean our conclusions should reflect a measure of nuance that is far deeper than what we hear from pundits, talk show hosts, culture warriors, and partisan political debates.

            Trying to gain some sense of the view on the ground—though it will always remain badly incomplete—can help in this process. Here are two books that help provide that.

Under Fire: The Untold Story of the Attack in Benghazi (Fred Burton & Samuel Katz, 2013)

            On September 11, 2012, armed men stormed the American diplomatic mission compound in Benghazi, Libya. When the attack was over at dawn the next day, the American ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, the Information Officer, Sean Smith, and two CIA agents, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were dead. Several of the Diplomatic Security (DS) agents, whose task is to provide protection for the Ambassador (and other diplomats) were badly injured, and all were exhausted and dispirited over the fact that on their watch such a tragedy unfolded. Under Fire is their story, told from the perspective of the DS agents on the ground in Benghazi.

            One of the authors of Under Fire, Fred Burton, is a former State Department counterterrorism deputy chief and DS agent. The other, Samuel Katz, is an expert on Middle East security and international terrorism.

The linchpin of America’s ability to lead the world, from around the world, even in locations and war zones where the intelligence community drives the diplomatic engine, is the courage, dedication, and sacrifice of the men and women of the Diplomatic Security Service who find themselves in harm’s way, driving a follow car or maintaining security programs at fortresslike embassies, and those that are not fortresses, in locations that few Americans would be able to locate on a map. American diplomatic interests—and the realities of day-to-day expeditionary diplomacy—could never be protected if this intrepid force of federal agents were not on post and on guard. The true story of the Benghazi attack is not one of failure or cover-up. The true story of Benghazi is that men and women volunteer to place themselves between a bullet or a bomb and America's diplomats and interests inside the crosshairs, inside the most dangerous and volatile locations in the world. [p. 264]

            Under Fire is not all you will need to read about the Benghazi attack. Numerous hearings have been held and reports issued in an attempt to discover what happened and why, and who, if anyone is to blame. Some of this involves an honest effort to find the truth, while much is little more than partisan posturing. Under Fire does not try to sort all that out, but rather tells the story of what the attack was like for the DS agents on the ground that had a tough, unenviable, if not utterly impossible job to do in Benghazi, and put their lives on the line attempting to fulfill it. It is easy, in discussions of Benghazi and similar events and places, for some of the players to fade into invisibility in the background. That must not happen, not because these DS agents are Americans but because they are created in the image of God.

The Good Soldiers (David Finkel, 2009)

            In 2007-2008 an army battalion of soldiers known as the “Rangers,” were sent to Iraq as part of President Bush’s strategy (“the surge”) of increasing the number of American forces in that country. Over a period of 15 months the 2-16 Battalion waited ready to dive for cover when rockets or mortar shells were lobbed into their base, went out on patrol into urban areas where the enemy, indistinguishable from ordinary civilians, prepared hidden traps designed to kill and maim, and kept one another steady in their determination to make a difference in the war. For 8 of those 15 months, Washington Post reporter David Finkel was embedded with the 2-16, living with the soldiers, going with them on missions, and promising to tell their story. “From the beginning,” Finkel says, “I explained to them that my intent was to document their corner of the war, without agenda.” The Good Soldier is Finkel’s attempt to fulfill that promise. Fourteen soldiers of the 2-16 did not return alive, and many more returned to civilian life badly broken in body and soul. And in the background Iraq remains in the news, torn by continuing armed conflict.

            It happened soon after sunrise on a quiet Sunday morning and shook every building on the FOB [Forward Operating Base]. Doors bowed from the concussion. Windows broke and blew out. It wasn't the usual rocket or mortar, but something louder and scarier. There’d been no siren, no warning at all, just a sudden explosion that felt like the end of the world had arrived, and before anyone had a chance to do anything, such as run for a bunker or crawl under a bed, there was a second explosion, and a third.

            The day of the lob bombs, this would be called. Soldiers counted fifteen explosions in all, although some may have been mixed in with the roars of missiles being fired from Apache gunships or their own racing hearts. Whatever the true number, the explosions went on for twenty minutes, and only as calm returned did the audacity of what had just happened become clear.

            There had been two long dump trucks. They had pulled off Route Pluto across from the FOB, into a dirt area beyond which was a cement factory. Each was carrying a load of thousands of brightly colored bags of chicken-flavored potato chips that had been manufactured in Syria, but hidden beneath were propane tanks on launching rails, which became visible only as the backs of the trucks rose and the bags of potato chips fell away.

            These tanks were the bombs. Each had been packed with ball bearings and explosives. A 107-millimeter rocket booster attached to the bottom was just strong enough to lob a tank over the high wall surrounding the FOB, at which point it turned nose down and plummeted onto its detonator, exploding with the noise and force of a five-hundred-pound bomb and spraying shrapnel and ball bearings in every direction for hundreds of yards. One after another, the bombs exploded in terrifying succession, until the two launching trucks were finally destroyed by Hellfire missiles, and when the wreckage had cooled enough to be searched, soldiers discovered an inscription on one of the trucks that read, when translated: “A statement from the Holy Koran. Victory is coming from God, and the entire triumph is near.” Other statements had been left, too, in the form of text messages on cell phones. “Little Hiroshima is going to happen to you,” was one. “How was your morning now? Surprises are coming.”

            This was the very first use in Iraq of a weapon that would eventually spread across much of Baghdad and be described by the military as ‘the greatest threat right now that we face” because of its capacity to kill “scores of soldiers” at once. If there was any good news to this first attack, it was that no one was seriously injured. But the damage to the FOB was significant, perhaps in the millions of dollars, and after the attack ended, Kauzlarich went to survey the extent of it, eventually arriving at a collapsed trailer outside of which stood Jeffrey Sauer.

            The trailer had been his. He had been inside, waking up, when the lob bombs began landing nearby. Blast walls surrounding the trailer had stopped the shrapnel, but concussions caved in the roof and walls, and as the trailer came down he covered his head and waited to die. Explosion after explosion—this time Sauer heard them all. Finally, he crawled outside into a smoking landscape of broken buildings and vehicles, and when Kauzlarich arrived, he was standing with a dazed expression, staring at something crawling across the ground.

            “See that bug?” he said to Kauzlarich.

            Kauzlarich nodded.

            “A week ago, I would have crushed it. But it’s Sunday, and I almost got my ass waxed, so I’m gonna let it live,” he said, and as he continued to watch the bug, Kauzlarich continued to watch the face of a man soon would be going home. [175-176]

            What happens to soldiers on the front line is always horrible. For those of us who have never been there, it is also unimaginable. The horror of the front lines is not necessarily reason not to go to war in a just cause, but it is sufficient reason to care for the soldiers who were there, regardless of the cost.

            The Good Soldiers allows us to come along through the long stretches of boredom and brief periods of intense terror that occupied the days of the 2-16 Battalion in Iraq. We not only learn what they did and talked about, but how being there changed them forever, even if they were one of the fortunate ones that were missed by the bullets and shrapnel and crushing explosions.

Under Fire: The Untold Story of the Attack in Benghazi by Fred Burton and Samuel M. Katz (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press; 2013) 275 pages + notes + index.

The Good Soldiers by David Finkel (New York, NY: Sarah Crichton Books; 2009) 273 pages + appendix.