Circus of Books
Ryan Murphy, Executive Producer; Rachel Mason, Director/Screenwriter
Netflix, 2019

Circus of Books, available on Netflix, is a documentary about Barry and Karen Mason, a wholesome, friendly straight couple who have made a career out of selling hard-core gay porn.

The documentary takes viewers through the story of how Barry and Karen left respective careers in cinematic special effects and journalism to run their L.A. business, a shop called Circus of Books.

The film is made by their daughter, which shapes the narrative arc into a story about their family dynamics. Karen in particular has an astute business acumen, but struggles to square the store’s success with her identity as a pious Jewish woman.

For example, she lived in fear that her fellow synagogue congregants would learn what she did for a living. The children were trained to respond to any questions about their parents’ occupations with, “They run a bookstore.” The family tension is heightened when one of their sons comes out to them as gay. One might expect that, after dealing in hard-core gay erotica for so long, the couple wouldn’t bat an eye. On the contrary, the documentary highlights a duality which may be familiar to Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s readers: being able to tolerate certain identities and lifestyles among other people but having great difficulty accepting them in one’s own family.

J.E.S.U.S.A.
Kevin Miller, Writer/Director/Editor
Hat Rock Capital LLC and Kevin Miller XI Productions Inc., 2020

I’ve watched Kevin Miller’s documentary J.E.S.U.S.A. twice now. The first time made an immediate impact on me, but the second time made me want to watch it a third time. Multiple views are needed to absorb, internalize, and process its rich content and dueling expressions of ugliness and beauty. Impressive in his dialectical interplay of complementary and expanding ideas, Miller has created a thoughtful, sometimes distressing, utterly engaging visual triumph that I’ve always wanted to see but could never find.

About the first half of this gem of a documentary explores the pervasive American Christian fixation on violence and militarism cloaked in an insular nationalism, but then gradually deploys this unfortunate pathology as a case study of a much broader exploration into dehumanizing, othering, mimesis, and scapegoating in our conscious or unconscious attempts to ignore commandments of Jesus that He meant for us to take seriously. As David Bentley Hart remarks in the film, we’ve “been inoculated against the Gospel” — given just enough to make us immune to the fulness of the Christian faith that includes nonviolence.