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People were dumbfounded—perhaps more by my audacity than by my intelligence. My point was how an ethic grounded in a Trinitarian God makes more sense than either modernist or postmodern ethics. Other members on my panel included an African American professor talking about the ethics of Afrocentricism and a Queer Studies professor talking about the ethics of gay sex clubs. Since I knew the audience at this national conference would be most suspicious of my position, I outlined the insufficiencies of modernist and postmodern ethical positions before I argued for the legitimacy of Christian ethics. Several came up to me afterward to assure me that "My university has hired a Christian!"
In any case, I came home feeling successful, only to have my hundred-plus hours of research and writing sullied by a cute 90-minute film.
Waking Ned Devine is incredibly enjoyable—and disturbing. Filmed on the gorgeous Isle of Wight in the English Channel, the wonderfully quirky movie, written and directed by Kirk Jones, presents sprightly characters fascinating to watch. But Waking Ned Devine also presents a postmodern ethic with such delight that it seems far more attractive than traditional Christianity.
"Postmodernism" became a household word (at least in academic houses) soon after the publication in 1984 of Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Post-Modern Condition. In this work, Lyotard calls for a dismantling of "metanarratives": those totalizing explanations of existence that demand universal "consensus." Instead, Lyotard advocates "dissensus," wherein groups of people define themselves not by one metanarrative that they insist is the truth for all humans—as Enlightenment rationalism, like Christianity, had done—but instead by their own localized "language games." For Lyotard, then, different "language games" define what is just differently, explaining the pun behind his 1985 work Just Gaming.1
The notion of gaming informs the entire narrative of Waking Ned Devine. The film's opening shot is a television screen display of the winning numbers in a current Irish lottery game. The camera then pulls back to reveal a white-haired gentleman, Jackie O'Shea, watching the game in his easy chair, trying to surmount his wife's refusal to bring his dessert tart from the kitchen. He exclaims about each of his matching lottery numbers until Annie O'Shea excitedly brings the tart to her winning husband. Only then does she discover it was all a ruse: he was just gaming to get the tart.
In the midst of both games, however, Jackie discovers that the true winner of the lottery lives in their tiny Irish village, Tullymore. With the help of best friend Michael Sullivan, Jackie and Annie set up the next game of the film: inviting everyone who bought lottery tickets to a chicken dinner in order to elicit not only a revelation of the winner but also his or her good graces. By process of elimination, our protagonists figure out that Ned Devine, who failed to attend their homey banquet, must be the winner. Jackie and Michael visit his house only to surmise that news of the lottery killed him, for they find his dead fingers stiffened around his valuable winning ticket.
Dead Ned, of course, cannot claim his £7 million, so Jackie and Michael decide that one of them should impersonate him. To do so, they must engage the cooperation of the entire village in "just gaming," promising to divide the money equally among all 52 citizens. The protagonists make their new language game—Ned Devine lives—in deed seem just; everyone is encouraged to assent or dissent with full knowledge of the material benefits that all will share equally. By visualizing in sumptuous long shots the quaint isolation of the village, the filmmakers eliminate any apparent threat of alternative narratives challenging the villagers' game. As long as everyone within the community is willing to follow "the new rules of the game" (Lyotard), the ethic is pragmatically viable.
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