Useless Beauty

Ecclesiastes through the Lens of Contemporary Film

Robert K. Johnston

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780801027857
• eBook ISBN: 9781441206510
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

How should Christians relate to the difficult and contradictory messages of modern movies? In Useless Beauty, Robert K. Johnston presents the bold position that films can be our "eyeglasses and hearing aids" in understanding the Book of Ecclesiastes. Taking up movies such as American Beauty, Magnolia, and About Schmidt, he addresses such biblical issues as life and death, chance and choice, loneliness and connection, and God's presence and absence to deepen our understanding of life's beauty amid its confusion and pain.

Christian filmgoers, pastors, and youth leaders will find Johnston's book a valuable source of insight into the relationship between Christianity and popular culture.

A BATTERED OPTIMISM

Ecclesiastes and Our Contemporary Context

I tell New Yorkers they have to learn how to mourn and cry, even while at the same time celebrating Christmas with more enthusiasm.

Rudolph Giuliani, during the Christmas season following 9/11

In his 1996 song, “All This Useless Beauty,” Elvis Costello critiques the repeated attempts to turn life into a “sweetheart, plaything, or pet.” After all, “Nonsense prevails, modesty fails / Grace and virtue turn into stupidity.” And yet Costello plaintively asks, “What shall we do, what shall we do with all this useless beauty?”[1] Costello is not alone in voicing such negations and affirmation. In fact, these juxtaposed reflections on life are becoming a hallmark of postmodern Western society.

Many of the young see the modern era as over, even as their middle-aged parents plunge ahead in a futile attempt to make things perfect. Those under thirty often see their parents’ attempts at creating the ideal life as little more than the construction of personal towers of Babel, monuments to hubris that should be judged as such. Those who grew up in the period of peace following World War II have too often believed that they have the answers or can find them (JFK taught them to believe they could achieve anything, even jump over the moon, as their nursery rhymes had fantasized). As “modern” Americans, our wisdom seems almost beyond question. We can know the truth, and the truth will set us free. Yet our obsession with achievement, wisdom, wealth, and status, with bigger houses and the better life, with more gadgets and playthings, betrays our rhetoric. It has left us shriveled and panting, our marriages in shambles, our schedules and commute times unacceptable. Kids know this even if we sometimes don’t. They reject much of what we stand for, much like the wider world judges America as the obnoxious rich kid on the block.

And yet as the millennium has turned, some young people have discovered that however messy and problematic life is (or perhaps because it is messy and problematic), it also remains precious. Life is something to be nurtured in its beauty and fragility. Modernity’s rationality is being called into question by the next generation, and a new wisdom is emerging—from the midst of life itself. Rather than bemoan or fight life’s paradox, a growing number of the younger generation are choosing to celebrate the good they find, even if it is always interwoven with evil. There is a developing recognition of a basic contradiction in life but one that nevertheless includes meaning and hope. Calvin Klein, the always savvy marketer, was one of the first to recognize this trend as he updated the names of his latest perfumes to express the evolving mood of his customers. When the boomers were young, he sold them Obsession. As they aged, he sold them Eternity and more recently Escape. Now their children are buying Contradiction.[2]

Ecclesiastes: A “Dangerous” Book

Given the futility of our struggle to turn life into our “plaything,” what should we say about the useless beauty that life nevertheless provides? Is it grounds for celebration and enjoyment, even during our brief and futile lives? Elvis Costello’s question about life—how to respond to its concurrent vanity and beauty—is, of course, a perennial question. It has been asked again and again. The ancient Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh reflected on life’s paradoxes as did the Egyptian Dispute over Suicide. But nowhere has it been presented with the depth and poignancy of the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes. As its writer, Qoheleth (this Hebrew word is the author’s self-designation, meaning “one who assembles”), recognized, though fanatics may try to discern a world order, whether moral or religious, it will always elude their grasp.[3] Death is the great leveler. Life is too often unfair. We cannot know what the future holds. And yet life offers itself as a gift from the Creator. Life begs to be enjoyed for what it is, even given its contradictions.

But just as older Americans struggle to make sense of the paradoxical thoughts of today’s emerging postmodern generation, so traditional interpreters of Ecclesiastes have struggled to understand the contradictory thoughts of this enigmatic book. How can the writer say, on the one hand, that “those who have never been born” are “better off,” for they “have never seen the injustice that goes on in the world,” and yet reflect a few pages later, “But anyone who is alive in the world of the living has some hope; a live dog is better off than a dead lion” (Eccles. 4:3; 9:4)? Such concurrent reflections of both despair and hope make no sense, and yet we realize from our own experience that they make all the sense in the world.

Medieval Old Testament scholars called Ecclesiastes one of the Bible’s “two dangerous books.” (The other was the Song of Songs with its overt sensuality.) Though its trenchant observations on life reveal a fragile joy—a useless beauty—its paragraphs also brim over with a cynicism and even a despair that seem out of place in the Bible’s grand narrative.[4] “Nonsense prevails, modesty fails. / Grace and virtue turn into stupidity.” And yet what of life’s useless beauty? Is such a conclusion simply fatalistic hedonism, a Hebrew contextualization of “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die”? Or might we combine these contradictory trajectories of pessimism and wonder in other ways?

Fascination with this short book in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures has continued throughout the centuries, for the questions it poses have an enduring appeal. Artists in particular have found Qoheleth’s reflections captivating. Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, described Ecclesiastes as “the truest of all” books, this “fine-hammered steel of woe.”[5] The novelist Thomas Wolfe described Ecclesiastes as “the greatest single piece of writing I have ever known.” George Bernard Shaw compared it to Shakespeare. Ernest Hemingway was fascinated by the book. His novel The Sun Also Rises uses as an epigraph the book’s opening poem. A character in John Updike’s Rabbit trilogy describes Ecclesiastes as “the Lord’s last word.” And U2 used this short book as inspiration for its song “The Wanderer.”[6]

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts displayed an exhibit of contemporary sculpture and installation art in the spring of 2000 titled Vanitas: Meditations on Life and Death in Contemporary Art. Using Ecclesiastes 1:2–4 as the epigraph for his exhibition catalogue (printing the text in white against a black background), the curator, John Ravenal, began his remarks, saying, “The theme of Vanitas concerns one of life’s fundamental tensions, between the enjoyment of earthly pleasures and accomplishments and the awareness of their inevitable loss.” After referencing seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting, which often contained sustained visual expression of this theme, he commented:

It is only natural that this venerable subject, which for so long has epitomized human self-reflection, should resurface now. The historic milestone of a changing millennium encourages both backward and forward glances as we take stock of the human condition, assessing distance traveled and progress yet to be made. A host of pressing global issues—including frequent outbreaks of civil and international warfare, widening polarization between rich and poor, and pervasive environmental destruction—make it impossible to avoid the perception that conflict and crisis are hallmarks of contemporary life.[7]

In ways that echo the Book of Ecclesiastes, the exhibit by fourteen contemporary international artists juxtaposed beauty and death (darkness, loss, and decay). The artists recognized that these are not only perennial opposites but also facets of the same experience. Rather than stifle creativity, this bittersweet awareness had spurred these artists.

It is not just the music of Elvis Costello and U2, the fiction of John Updike, and the art of selected contemporary sculptors that have turned recently to the theme of Ecclesiastes, however. Contemporary filmmakers have found its concerns to be central to their understanding of life as well. Some “prophets” of the modern period—Akira Kurosawa (Ikiru) and Woody Allen (Crimes and Misdemeanors)—dealt with the theme of life’s vanity and yet the need for joy. But as the new millennium has dawned, films such as Magnolia, Run Lola Run, Life as a House, Moulin Rouge, My Name Is Joe, Monster’s Ball, Signs, George Washington, and About Schmidt have taken up this contradiction with renewed vigor, using as a central theme life’s faint joy amid and within what is bleak and unpromising.

There is perhaps no better example than the 1999 Academy Award–winning movie American Beauty, which calls into question our contemporary obsession with producing “beauty” while simultaneously suggesting that there is another more fragile beauty that is present for those who have eyes to see it. Lester’s voice-over at the movie’s beginning and end serves in a similar way to the opening and closing poems of Ecclesiastes, bookending what happens in between: “It’s hard to stay mad when there’s so much beauty in the world. . . . I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life.”

Ecclesiastes and Contemporary Movies

Contemporary film, rather than being a deterrent to faith, can provide the spectacles, the eyeglasses, to clarify our vision as we look at Ecclesiastes’ enigmatic text. In saying this, I am making three simultaneous claims. First, the sages, the wise men and women of our age, are often filmmakers. They are the ones who are creating the root metaphors by which we seek to live. They are the ones who are providing our read on reality, our informing visions, our stories and myths. “Seen any good movies lately?” is a common question for most of us.

Second, interpreters always read texts (view films) in light of their own understanding.[8] The era of seeing total “objectivity” as a value when reading a text is over. A text is “objective” in the sense that it has been created by someone and given to us, not created by us. But this text must also be interpreted by readers who bring their visions and perspectives to bear on the material. Such a focus on the reader/viewer need not cancel out one’s concern for the text as text. Rather, it puts the text into a helpful conversation with the reader of it.

Finally, we are at a propitious moment for understanding Ecclesiastes afresh, for the paradoxes and contradictions recognized as central by postmodernity are central as well to this Old Testament book. Qoheleth’s cultural read has come full circle. He too lived in a time of outward affluence and saw both an exaggeration of the inequalities between rich and poor and a growing instability for the privileged. As Qoheleth recognizes, “What has happened before will happen again. . . . There is nothing new in the whole world” (1:9). Though we read Ecclesiastes through our contemporary eyeglasses, could it be that these glasses are helping us to see something of the original paradox that Qoheleth observed so well? Such is the contention of the present book.

Religion and film criticism from a Christian perspective has often judged films according to a standard of truth already and independently understood. The exercise of theology and film criticism has been viewed as largely a second order analytical reflection about themes independently understood based on the Christian tradition. The conversation has thus tended to be unidirectional, flowing from faith to film, church to Hollywood, theology to the movies. What has been judged more fundamental, theology, has been given epistemological priority. But there is another possibility: We might profitably reverse the “hermeneutical flow.” This phrase belongs to Larry Kreitzer, an Oxford University professor who has argued in a series of four books on literature, film, and theology that theological interpretation can helpfully move from film and novel to the Bible, not just from the Bible to film.[9]

Philip Yancey, in his best-selling book from the 1990s, The Jesus I Never Knew, does just that, discovering in a dozen Jesus movies a recognition of Jesus’ real humanity that had escaped him as he grew up reading the Bible in a conservative Christian context.[10] Similarly, Robert Jewett, a leading New Testament professor, in his book St. Paul Returns to the Movies, entertains the notion that “certain movies afford deeper access to the hidden heart of Paul’s theology than mainstream theologians like myself have been able to penetrate.”[11] Jewett’s beef is with Pauline scholars in the West who have misunderstood, he believes, the discussion of grace in the Book of Romans. Interpreters of that book have understood grace in terms of a “guilt” needing individual forgiveness rather than a corporate “shame” needing to be overcome. Jewett believes that our cultural blinders have kept us from interpreting the text as originally intended by Paul. To move beyond our impasse, we need a new set of stories with a different informing vision. He believes that Hollywood movies provide that alternative perspective, giving us new spectacles to help us see beyond the fixations of our Western, individualistic mind-set.

The parallel proposition of the present book is that contemporary movies afford interpreters a deeper access to Ecclesiastes’ center of power and meaning than does much of mainstream Old Testament scholarship. A few scholars have revealed a willingness to accept paradox and contradiction as the heart of Ecclesiastes. But nonlinear thinking is a recent development, and it has been hard to grasp by most of those schooled in the twentieth-century Western world.

Movies function as modern-day parables, giving us fresh eyes to see and ears to hear. Conversely, the paradoxes and tensions found in Ecclesiastes can provide interpretive lenses for the viewing of movies. The conversation is most productive and vibrant if it is two-way. Movies and biblical text can provide mutually penetrating perspectives on how viewers/readers hold on to themes of despair and joy concurrently. This mutual conversation holds the promise of helping us to celebrate “all this useless beauty.”

As the millennium dawned, several of us who teach or study at Fuller Theological Seminary organized a conference in Cambridge, England, to explore just such a hypothesis. The conference was held in September 2000 as part of a larger festival exploring “Theology through the Arts” (the name of the event). One hundred and fifty people crammed into the historic Peterhouse Theatre to watch Liar, Liar; Pleasantville; My Name Is Joe; and American Beauty and then to put these disparate movies into conversation with Ecclesiastes. A special edition of that biblical text had been prepared by the British and Foreign Bible Society, making use of the Good News Bible translation.* We read portions of the text prior to viewing a particular movie and then again after viewing it, before we began our discussion. The dialogue flowed insightfully between film and Bible.

One particularly memorable moment took place after the vi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. A Battered Optimism: Ecclesiastes and Our Contemporary Context
• 2. The Existentialist Alternative: Akira Kurosawa and Woody Allen
• 3. Death and Life: Alan Ball and American Beauty
• 4. The Saddest Happy Ending: Paul Thomas Anderson and Magnolia
• 5. Chance and Fate: Tom Tykwer and Run Lola Run
• 6. An Ambiguous Joy: Marc Forster and Monster’s Ball
• 7. Can God Be in This? M. Night Shyamalan and Signs
• 8. Confessions of a Workaholic: Alexander Payne, Election, and About Schmidt
• 9. Humanity at Full Stretch: Let the “Preacher” Respond
• Appendix A: Ecclesiastes’ History of Interpretation
• Appendix B: Christian Film Criticism
• Appendix C: Biblical Criticism and Useless Beauty
• Notes
• Movies Cited
• Index