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A Former Mormon Missionary’s Perspective on ‘The Book of Mormon’ Musical

This is a musical about naive outsiders inserting themselves into a foreign culture…written by naive outsiders inserting themselves into a foreign culture.

A couple disclosures at the outset: I’m Mormon. I haven’t seen the show live, I’ve just listened to the album. I thought the musical was largely funny.

But I have issues. 

It would be petty and pointless to catalog the inaccuracies of Mormon belief in The Book of Mormon, especially since a major plot arc involves the gleeful distortion of Mormonism as it gets translated into Ugandan culture. But I will argue that The Book of Mormon fails as satire. Successful satire distills some true essence from experience and infuses it with humor or criticism or ridicule. The Book of Mormon, on the other hand, lobs its humor, criticism, and ridicule at targets that are far removed from (and at times purely antithetical to) actual, real-life Mormonism.

There are times when the satire stung because it was good satire. The opening number, “Hello!,” for example. There’s something ridiculous about overly enthusiastic 19 year olds marching door to door in ill-fitted short-sleeved button-down white shirts, like so many knife salesmen, trying to “teach” people about life, the universe, and everything. I get it. That was me. Touché. 

But thereafter, any real resemblance to authentic Mormon experience dissipates. Listening to The Book of Mormon felt like listening to a song about me, composed by a Martian whose source material was stuff people wrote in my high school yearbook.

Spooky Mormon Hell Dream

Let’s begin with “Spooky Mormon Hell Dream,” which is an excellent demonstration of how the show suffers as outsiders-looking-in.

The premise of the song is that Elder Price is racked with guilt for having broken a mission rule. He’s haunted by visions of fire, brimstone, pits of sulphur, and yes, Johnnie Cochran. While this vision may sound like familiar ground to many Protestants and Catholics, it is utterly divorced from Mormon experience.

"Fire & brimstone” preaching has always had a hold in American culture. One of the nation’s earliest and most influential preachers, Jonathan Edwards, described man’s relationship with God like this:

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes as the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.

Elder Price’s “Spooky Mormon Hell Dream” fits neatly into this theology. It’s less compatible with Mormonism itself, where “hell” is reserved for the slimmest minority of the human race who have rejected God after having received a perfect knowledge of him. I think it’s fair to say that most Mormons believe that (contrary to Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s depiction) Hitler, Johnnie Cochran, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Genghis Khan are probably ineligible for hell as it’s commonly understood. In Mormon cosmology, the lowest regions of heaven will eventually welcome the redeemed “liars,… adulterers, and whoremongers” of the world.

When Joseph Smith first preached this, many early Mormons struggled with the idea, seeing it as flirting with Universalism. Brigham Young, for example, said the teaching “was a great trial to many.��� “My traditions were such, that when the [teaching about heaven and hell] came first to me, it was directly contrary and opposed to my former education.…I did not reject it; but I could not understand it.”

But this radical departure from the common understanding of heaven and hell would ultimately become fundamental to the very nature of Mormonism. Mormons no longer saw themselves as “sinners in the hands of [the] angry God” of Jonathan Edwards. Rather, they worshiped a God with such profound feeling for humanity, that when he sees human sin and suffering—he weeps. 

I really don’t think this is splitting hairs. Parker & Stone are lampooning an idea that has nothing to do with Mormonism, an idea that Mormonism has rejected since 1832. I honestly question whether any Mormon missionary in the past 100 years has ever spent a second fretting over the agony of hellfire.

I Believe

I’ll turn my attention now to the show’s flagship song, “I Believe.” The rhetorical device in the song works like this: it catalogs a bunch of weird shit that Mormons supposedly believe and then punctuates each one with the full-throated, shoulder-shrugging, blind faith of “I am a Mormon! / And a Mormon just believes.”

I won’t comment on the catalog of supposed Mormon beliefs in the song, but I will argue that the main thrust of the song is antithetical to Mormon experience.

Joseph Smith famously claimed that he saw God. Of this claim, he later wrote, “I don’t blame any one for not believing my history. If I had not experienced what I have, I would not have believed it myself.” His attitude about his own experience mirrors the Mormon approach to epistemology. It’s the LeVar Burton approach. 

If Mormon missionaries were ever to wear you down enough to the point that you let them in your house, you’d find that their approach is the opposite of Elder Price’s. Rather than asking you to “just believe,” they would ask you to find out for yourself that what they’re saying is true.

Joseph Smith didn’t see his revelatory experience with God as an exception, but rather as a model that everyone could achieve. The Mormon scholar Terryl Givens wrote:

Joseph apparently believed that the personal epiphany he experienced in his visitation by the Father and the Son—heralding full immersion in the divine light, with all its epistemological fullness and certainty—betokened an order of knowledge that was the right and destiny of all faithful Saints. That very real possibility informs Mormon life, worship, personal aspirations, and shared purpose. To attend any LDS testimony meeting, for example, is to enter into a rhetorical universe in which a language of calm assurance and confident conviction and even professions of certain knowledge overwhelm the more traditional Christian expressions of common belief. It may well be that this sense of shared knowledge—its possession or pursuit—is an even more potent community builder than shared faith.

(emphasis mine)

Elder Price’s “I Believe” also runs afoul of several critical passages of the Book of Mormon, which emphasize the importance of the personal investigation and verification of truth claims. 

Again, it’s not that my feathers are ruffled over an apt parody. It’s that The Book of Mormon fails as a satire because it ridicules Mormonism for traits absent in Mormonism. To call it a strawman is an insult to scarecrows everywhere. 

It’s telling that the show’s most effective satire, “Hello,” is also the only song that requires only external knowledge of Mormonism. 

Evangelical scholar John Mark Reynolds went so far as to call the musical a minstrel show. “When [African] Americans were hurt by the cruel stereotypes, they were told it was 'just a joke' and were painted as petty for not laughing along.” His criticism is excessive by degree but not by kind. 

(And of course I haven’t mentioned the play’s alarming depiction of Uganda, but others have.)

So yeah. The Book of Mormon is funny, I guess. But it’s also irresponsible. And I question the morality of ridiculing (rather than satirizing) a minority group for cheap laughs.

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La La Land

As La La Land is poised to win a slew of Oscars (and probably best picture), I feel the need to comment. The movie is obviously and extraordinarily well made. From the opening dance number to the final montage, it rubs the audience’s nose in its excellence. It won’t let you miss it. That said, I can’t say I really like La La Land.

Let’s talk about what La La Land is not:

La La Land is not daring or audacious for being a musical. Musical theater is having a renaissance in both popularity and ingenuity, the likes of which haven’t been seen in 30 years. I mean, Hamilton. My last post was about Galavant. Other big budget musical in just the past few years with big casts include Les Miserables and Into the Woods. La La Land’s casting was not daring. Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, and John Legend are the opposite of risky picks. La La Land is not my favorite film from writer/director Damien Chazelle, even in 2016. That award goes to 10 Cloverfield Lane.

La La Land isn’t my favorite Emma Stone performance. (I liked her better in Zombieland.)

La La Land isn’t a White Savior parable. Spoiler: Ryan Gosling doesn’t save jazz. His character is a jazz musician who opens a jazz club.

Emma Stone is not a natural singer.  Nowhere is this more evident than in her big number at the end, “Audition.” She sings with all the effort and mechanical aim of a karate chop. Not only does she have a small voice (she consistently marches a scorched-earth retreat from the big notes), she doesn’t seem to have any feel for phrasing or musicality. There’s obvious effort behind each bit of breath support, but she never learns to open up and relax enough to get any real resonance.

But La La Land has undeniable virtues. 

The music is fantastic: “Mia & Sebastian’s Theme” is a top-notch piano solo. “A Lovely Night” is a lovely duet. Ryan Gosling is a surprisingly good crooner. I mean, he’s not Sinatra, but there’s a richness and charm to his voice that smooths out his duets with Stone.

The dance numbers are a thrill. Some of the scenes between Gosling and Stone  (especially at the pool party) are up there with the best moments from the best rom coms.

So, you may ask, why do I have so much trouble liking La La Land? 

La La Land is profoundly shallow. It treats fame as an apotheosis. Celebrity, the film tells us, is the true self-actualization.

This thesis is put to verse, song, and dance in the film’s overture:

“I think about that day I left him at a Greyhound station West of Santa Fé We were seventeen, but he was sweet and it was true Still I did what I had to do 'Cause I just knew Sunday nights We'd sink into our seats Right as they dimmed out all the lights A Technicolor world made out of music and machine It called me to be on that screen And live inside each scene … 'Cause maybe in that sleepy town He'll sit one day, the lights are down He'll see my face and think of how he used to know me”

True love is left behind so that—possibly, someday—the person we truly loved will see our divinization as a celebrity and think back on how they used to know us. Besting the people we love is the end goal, it seems.

This theme continues throughout the movie. Mia (Stone) and Sebastian’s (Gosling) relationship first shows fractures when Mia stares in disbelief as Sebastian takes a backseat to the band’s frontman and plays music he may not like just to pay the bills. By the end of the film, Gosling returns to his true self and is rewarded with modest local celebrity.

Mia, on the other hand, produces her authentic one-woman show. Although the reception that night is a minor setback, she gets rewarded with swift recognition and global celebrity. Hers is the sweetest reward, when she accidentally stumbles into Sebastian’s nightclub, and, as the opening promised, he thinks about how he used to know her, a celebrity.

La La Land is a powerful example of the gilded infirmity of Hollywood. The movie is spectacularly crafted, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. I’m about to use a Faulkner quote that I do not invoke lightly—it’s a nuclear option when it comes to criticizing writing these days, but it fits. It fits particularly well, because Faulkner spent a considerable (miserable) time writing for Hollywood.

“He,” that is, the modern writer, Faulkner opines, “must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.”

“Love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” Even all these compounded come up as a sad sum in La La Land.

Compare this movie to Fences (another contender for Best Picture this year) for a moment. If La La Land seems hollow, Fences is all marrow. If La La Land is a kale burger, Fences is a rustic osso bucco. Fences languishes where La La Land succeeds and vice versa. Fences, based on a play, looks an awful lot like…a play (instead of a film). Almost the entire movie takes place on the back steps of a house. But boy does it have substance. It is about nothing if not love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.

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Galavant

I’ve had the opportunity to introduce quite a few people to Galavant, and a common question upon first viewing is, “This was on TV?” That reaction highlights both why the show succeeds and why it failed to get a wider audience while it aired. Galavant is so unlike any other show on TV that it’s difficult to give it a genre. It’s a musical fantasy adventure…sitcom? It draws heavily from Monty Python, but it isn’t the farce that Holy Grail was. So let’s take a look at what made Galavant so fantastic and unique.

Galavant’s most obvious and delightful strength is its music. Alan Menken, the show’s composer (and the genius behind the music of The Little Mermaid, Beauty & the Beast, and Aladdin), is a melodic Midas. The show is almost wasteful with how many catchy tunes it unpacks each episode. “Will My Day Ever Come” has an urgency and a longing to it that almost ignores how funny the lyrics are. (And this is to say nothing of the main Galavant theme from Season 1, or the main theme from Season 2.) Menken’s gift is similar to John Williams, who also seems like and endless fount of unforgettable melodies.

More often than not, the lyrics are pretty great as well. “Build a New Tomorrow,” for example, is so hilarious that it’s easy to miss what a good parody it is. Towards the end of the number, when the village enumerates everyone who’s excluded from voting, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that these were actual requirements for the American voting public:

“The landed and the wealthy and the pious and the healthy and the straight ones and the pale ones and we only mean the male ones. If you’re all of the above, then you’re okay!”

In addition to being really funny, it’s more insightful and subtle commentary than even the “Dennis the Peasant” routine from Holy Grail (which is the obvious inspiration behind the song).

(If the show has one rotten apple, it’s “Different Kind of Princess.” They lyrics are utterly uninspired, and I get the sense that Menken—wizard though he is—has never heard a rock song.)

Galavant is a show where you love everyone and want everyone to succeed, even the villains. Timothy Omundson’s unfolding of Richard’s endearing nature is so gradual that it takes a while to realize how desperately we want Richard to be happy. Karen David is the show’s most extraordinary singer. Luke Youngblood (of Harry Potter and Community fame) brings boundless charisma. It took me a few episodes to realize that the outrageous villain/event planner, Wormwood, was played by Robert Lindsay, who is also the dignified Admiral Sir Edward Pellew in Horatio Hornblower. And who knew that Sophie McShera (Daisy from Downton Abbey) had such pipes?

The cameos are a blast as well. Weird Al, Hugh Bonneville, Ricky Gervais all add to the joyful romp of the show. If there’s one thing that defines the mood of Galavant, it’s that the cast and writers seem to be having so much fun. It feels as though they snuck onto the studio lot after hours and decided to just have at it. There’s a kind of glee in their performance like they can’t believe they’re getting away with making this show. Hence the comment I kept hearing from my friends and family as they started watching Galavant: 

“This was on TV?”

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The High Mountains of Portugal

When I was in undergrad, I presented a paper called “The Trans-Textual Life of Pi.” It seemed edgy for BYU at the time. The gist was that Pi relied heavily on structures from Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of the Life of Arthur Gordon Pym as well as Yann Martel’s own “The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios.” I argued that a reader could not begin to grasp the full force of Pi without examining these hidden, intertextual structures.

In The High Mountains of Portugal, that intertextuality is not just present—it’s the main thrust at the center of the novel. Literally right in the middle of the book is a lengthy and wild exegesis of the Gospels and Pauline Epistles through the lens of none other than Agatha Christie’s Herclue Poitrot. If this strikes you as odd for a novel that is nominally focused on the High Mountains of Portugal, the party is just getting started.

Martel’s latest novel reads like all of his other books got together and decided to write their own book. (See The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, Self, Life of Pi, Beatrice & Virgil, and 100 Letters to a Prime Minister.) The novel is a trio of related short stories like The Facts Behind &c. It’s surreal in a no-nonsense way like Self. It’s a story (with animals) of competing narratives like Pi. It’s densely allegorical like Beatrice & Virgil. But rather than reading like a Frankenstein’s monster of past works, Martel takes what was best of each of his earlier pieces and synthesizes them into something else entirely.

By now it should be no surprise that Martel is a gifted novelist, but he’s an overlooked master of the short story. He often employs short stories as disciplined études to explore vast subjects. “Manners of Dying,” for example, is ultimately a shocking and powerful indictment against the death penalty, but the story’s structure is much more modest. It’s a series of fictional reports of prisoners’ final moments before hanging.

In each of the three stories in The High Mountains Portugal (“Homeless,” “Homeward,” and “Home”), a man wrestles with bereavement. In “Homeless,” the man is obsessed with an iconoclastic crucifix he believes is tucked away in a village church somewhere in the High Mountains. The crucifix depicts a chimpanzee, rather than Christ, on the cross. He finds the artifact at terrible cost—along the way, he destroys his uncle’s prized automobile, terrifies villagers, ruins his health, loses his job, and runs over a boy. In the end, he points out the simian icon to a woman in the church. His purpose is nebulous, but he hopes that this will somehow prove that God is a sham (or at least a farce). The effect is lost on the woman. She shrugs, and the crucifix remains in the church.

In “Homeward,” a physician is performing autopsies when he gets a visit from his wife who expounds upon the pseudo-gnostic theology of Agatha Christie. It’s easily the strangest section of the book. No sooner does the wife leave than the mother of the boy who was killed in “Homeless” arrives at the physician’s office with her husband’s body in a suitcase. What follows is a surreal autopsy of the husband in which the physician discovers through allegory how the man lived. We then find out that his wife died some time ago. The whole thing may or may not be a ghost story.

Finally in “Home,” a Canadian senator moves to Portugal with a chimpanzee.

As I said, each story is a study in bereavement, but each story is so much more. Rather than being a series of case studies on grief, the stories explore meaning itself, its intersection with the fact/fiction nexus, its intersection with the faith/doubt nexus, its relationship with truth, and its relationship with peace and joy.

In a way, The High Mountains reminds me of the dialogic arguments in The Brothers Karamazov. The interplay between Homeless, Homeward, and Home is similar to the tension between Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” and the “Life of Father Zosima.” In The Brothers Karamazov, brother Ivan tells a parable called “The Grand Inquisitor” wherein he lays bare the deficiencies and horrors of Christianity. Later in the novel, we read the “Life of Father Zosima,” which serves as an indirect rebuttal to the Inquisitor. Dostoevsky leaves it to the reader to decide whether Ivan or Father Zosima (atheism or Christianity) “wins.”

I guess Martel tried something like this way back in Life of Pi. You’ll recall the competition for the better story—the story with or without animals. But Martel does so much editorializing that it’s clear that he considers the story with animals to be the better story. He shows more restraint in _The High Mountains; _he doesn’t explicitly name a winner, though it’s pretty clear that “Homeless” is the worst treatment of grief.

At every turn, the novel gleams with the poignancy and beauty of grief. With every page, I was pulled into the vacuum that remains when a loved one passes. And like any good Martel novel, it is in turns hilarious and chilling. The protagonist in “Homeless” begins walking backwards as a way to protest the loss of his father, his lover, and his child. The descriptions of his walk add some humor and levity to the narrative. But the humor begins to sour as his backwards walk becomes clearly symptomatic of a consuming darkness. After he runs over the boy in the mountains, he stumbles into town with his signature walk. The boy’s grieving father doesn’t recognize his son’s killer, but he’s struck by his mournful look and gait. I physically shivered when I read that after the death of his son, the father too began to walk backwards.

It certainly wouldn’t be a Martel novel without a generous serving of allegory. The book is so rich in symbolism that I won’t try to unpack it here. I will just say that there is a lot of fascinating imagery involving chimps, Jesus, evolution, and religion. Does spirituality lead us to the next step in our evolution, or is it something to leave behind? Does Jesus show us how to transcend human nature, or does he hold us down? In finding our place in the universe, should we return to nature or to God or both?

And for all that, The High Mountains just isn’t the same caliber as Life of Pi. The bones of Pi fit together so well that the finished body was destined for beauty. Martel’s latest offering is made of more awkward stuff. Still, I enjoyed it and would recommend it to die-hard fans.

On a personal note, I finished the novel as I was traveling to New Orleans for my cousin’s funeral. As I helped her sister clean up the library, I noticed that my cousin owned the complete works of Agatha Christie twice over. She had an omnibus edition, but then she had each book individually. It was strange to read this book about loss and Christie and then to stumble on her complete works as I was packing up some grief.