Reel Spirituality (Engaging Culture)

Theology and Film in Dialogue

Johnston, Robert K.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781441200907
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie chrétienne

Increasingly, thinking Christians are examining the influential role that movies play in our cultural dialogue. Reel Spirituality successfully heightens readers' sensitivity to the theological truths and statements about the human condition expressed through modern cinema. This second edition cites 200 new movies and encourages readers to ponder movie themes that permeate our culture as well as motion pictures that have demonstrated power to shape our perceptions of everything from relationships and careers to good and evil. Reel Spirituality is the perfect catalyst for dialogue and discipleship among moviegoers, church-based study groups, and religious film and arts groups. The second edition cites an additional 200 movies and includes new film photos.

1
the power of film

[Movie characters’] ideals become our ideals. Their thoughts become standards of our thinking and language. Their style of dress and movement are seen on the streets of our nation. And their moments of triumph and defeat become our successes and our failures.

Jodie Foster, as quoted in Movie Nights

Seen any good movies lately? The question is a common one. In our contemporary world, watching movies has become as normal an activity as eating, sleeping, or using the computer. According to one pollster, viewers in the United States watched on average thirty-eight movies in 2003 (57 percent of all Americans watched Finding Nemo; 45 percent saw Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl; and 42 percent saw Bruce Almighty!). Among adults 95 percent saw at least one movie that same year while only 47 percent read one book the previous year.1 Movies are huge business, with $9.3 billion spent in the United States in 2003 in box-office sales, $23.8 billion on the exponentially growing sales and rentals of DVD and video, and $12.6 billion more being expended on cable, satellite, and pay-per-view television (much of which is film based).2 In Spain, as in most of Europe, movies (and music) are the entertainment of choice.3 And, in India, sales of movie tickets outpace those in America by over two to one.4 Movies are truly a worldwide phenomenon.

Besides advances in DVD and satellite technologies, other transformations in the delivery of movies are taking place. Netflix and Blockbuster Online are making available the pleasures of hard-to-locate movies from around the world, as well as providing viewers a constantly renewable source of DVDs without even the need to put down the remote control and go to the local video store! The production of commentary and special features on DVD supplements has become a specialty in its own right, giving viewers a master class in directing, lighting, editing, music, and camera placement for the price of the movie. Personal DVD libraries are increasingly common and will continue to become more so.

The influence of movies in our society can be noted in other ways as well. In 2005, White House policymakers were reported to be lobbying major studios, writers, and directors to add anti-drug messages within their films. When Revlon, BMW, Chanel, and Amazon.com sought to increase sales in 2004, they created short “movies” starring Halle Barry, Nicole Kidman, Clive Owen, and Minnie Driver.5 Such examples are easily multiplied. When the planes crashed into the towers on 9/11, people said it looked like a scene from a disaster movie. Reality seemed, on that day, less real than the reels at the cineplex. Our only frame of reference for this kind of terrorism was what we had already witnessed in movies like Independence Day (1996) and Air Force One (1997).

Movies, however, are more than profits and box office, Netflix and DVD supplements, advertising and messages. They remain in the twenty-first century our primary storytelling medium, interpreting reality for us and acting as a type of cultural glue. Given its importance as a means of cultural communication, the cinema has become a significant contemporary language in need of understanding and explication. Thus, the University of Southern California is now requiring all its undergraduates to take at least one cinema/television course in order to learn how to “read and write” with media; other colleges are sure to follow suit. Moreover, movies are commonly used as part of the core curriculum in such disparate fields as philosophy, sociology, English, religion, and psychology. And some even believe that cinema studies is positioned to become the new MBA, a means of general preparation for careers in fields as diverse as law and the military.6

“Seeing” Life

The importance of film for both our world economy and our culture is obvious, but it is important not to forget that the power of a movie lies first of all in what transpires within the individual viewer as she or he gazes at the screen. In the movie Smoke (1995), Paul Benjamin stops in one evening at the tobacco shop of Auggie Wren, located on a street corner in Brooklyn.7 Paul is a writer, but his pen has been silenced by the senseless death of his pregnant wife from random gunfire. Whiling away the time, Paul notices Auggie’s camera sitting there. Auggie explains that he uses it every day and invites Paul to look through his photo album. What Paul discovers seems odd to him—picture after picture of the same scene; people passing by Auggie’s corner store. The photographs were all taken from the same spot, at the same time—8 a.m., one each morning—and there are several thousand. As Auggie explains, “It’s my corner. Just a small part of the world, but things happen here, too.” Paul, however, sees nothing except the same picture!

As Paul leafs through the pages, Auggie says to him, “Slow down. You’ll never get it if you don’t slow down, my friend.” And as Paul does, he begins to see small differences in each of the photos. The light changes; the seasons pass. There are bright mornings and dark mornings, summer light and autumn light. There are weekdays and weekends. Different people pass through the photographs, some repeatedly. In several pictures, Paul even discovers his wife walking to work. The pictures bring tears to his eyes as he begins to see life afresh. He discovers the variety and vitality of life once again, this time through a small slice of Brooklyn captured on film.

This scene from Smoke is both a metaphor for what can happen when we watch a movie and a movie clip capable of evoking from those in its audience what it itself portrays. For movies help us to “see.” They focus life for the viewer, giving us a richer variety of experience than would otherwise be possible. Carl Sandburg, the poet laureate, once commented,

I meet people occasionally who think motion pictures, the product Hollywood makes, is merely entertainment, has nothing to do with education. That’s one of the darndest fool fallacies that is current. . . . Anything that brings you to tears by way of drama does something to the deepest roots of our personality. All movies, good or bad, are educational and Hollywood is the foremost educational institution on earth. What, Hollywood more important than Harvard? The answer is not as clean as Harvard, but nevertheless farther reaching.8

For some, going to the movies is still a last resort for what to do on a free evening. And a video is what we rent for our children when we are going out for some more important “cultural” event. But for an increasing number of people, watching a movie is simply part of our normal routine. Movie stories, including some that “make us cry,” have become a regular part of our informal education. When I ask my students how many movies they have seen in the theater or on DVD in the last month, the typical response is eight or nine (an identical number to what polls suggest for adults in Spain). When I ask them to share with a classmate the last movie that brought them to tears, they easily recount the experience.

Yet, though most of us watch movies and are affected by them, we seldom try to understand what we have seen, let alone relate it to our wider religious beliefs and practices. After all, film is one thing, and our religious faith is quite another. Such a disconnect is understandable, at least on the surface. Movies are, on one level, mere entertainment—escapism. Our spiritual faith, on the other hand, concerns our vocation and destiny; it is foundational. But such easy dichotomies crumble under closer scrutiny. Worship services also entertain (consider the pageantry and music), while movies sometimes engage us at the core of our being.

Reflecting on his experience of the movie theater as a young boy, Martin Scorsese remembers how he was taken there by his family:

The first sensation was that of entering a magical world—the soft carpet, the smell of fresh popcorn, the darkness, the sense of safety, and, above all, sanctuary—much the same in my mind as entering a church. A place of dreams. A place that excited and stretched my imagination.9

As the French filmmaker Eric Rohmer recognized earlier, the cinema was for Scorsese “the cathedral of the twentieth century.”10

It is easy to become cute when making comparisons between screen and sanctuary: popcorn and Coke in place of the bread and wine; ticket price for tithe; high ceilings to suggest transcendence; attendees speaking in hushed tones while they expectantly await the start; a certain ritual involved with where we sit and how often we go; a sense of disappointment—even betrayal—if the film/religious service falls short of expectations. But behind all such forced analogies is the primary fact that both cinema and church provide “life-orienting images.”11 As Read Mercer Schuchardt suggests in one of his online Metaphilm commentaries, “Like religion, a good movie really does answer the only three questions worth asking in life: who you are, where you come from, and what you should do.”12

Or listen to George Miller, the producer of Babe (1995) and The Witches of Eastwick (1987),

I believe cinema is now the most powerful secular religion and people gather in cinemas to experience things collectively the way they once did in church. The cinema storytellers have become the new priests. They’re doing a lot of the work of our religious institutions, which have so concretized the metaphors in their stories, taken so much of the poetry, mystery and mysticism out of religious belief, that people look for other places to question their spirituality.13

In the pages that follow, we will need to consider whether Christian theology, as Miller suggests, has become overly rationalized to the detriment of the life-transforming power of its original story. Perhaps it is enough, by way of introduction, to recognize subtly that movies provide for many alternate forms of transcendence. They provide a reel spirituality.

Reel Spirituality is one of a growing number of books attempting to bridge the chasm that exists for many between movie viewing and faith. The rift is deep and historic, even if it is now increasingly out of vogue. For while early motion pictures showed the passion play of Oberammergau (1898)14 and the temptation of St. Anthony (1898),15 the growth of the film industry was so dramatic that the church and Hollywood soon came into conflict. Between 1913 and 1916, twenty-one thousand theaters opened in the United States. One of the most engaging portrayals of this early confrontation is John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies,16 a novel about America in the twentieth century, hence the title’s allusion to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

As the story opens, we find ourselves in Patterson, New Jersey. It is the spring of 1910. D. W. Griffith is filming The Call to Arms with Mary Pickford, his teenage star. As the actress faints in the heat, across town the Reverend Clarence Wilmot stands in the pulpit of Fourth Presbyterian Church, feeling “the last particle of faith leave him.” Both Hollywood and the church are struggling, but the novel’s trajectory is clear from the outset: as the church grows old and loses its faith amid the onslaught of culture, film is destined to grow. After all, Mary Pickford is only seventeen. Clarence eventually must resign and is reduced to selling encyclopedias. His son, Teddy, stops going to church. Later, when he is an adult, Teddy finds his daughter Essie, even as a little girl, wanting most to go to the theater, where she is enraptured by the images on the screen.

As the novel proceeds through four generations of the Wilmots, Essie becomes the Hollywood star Alma DeMott. Life is not easy for her, however. Hollywood is a wilderness that invites moral compromise. Her son, Clark, thus pays the price for her profligacy. Clark ends up in a cult similar to the Branch Davidians. He is not so much a believer as someone searching for life’s meaning. With a plot that spans most of the twentieth century, John Updike has chronicled modern American life in terms of the conflict between the church and Hollywood, the sanctuary and the movie theater. Neither side really “wins” the war, but the secularization of society is clearly evident.

In Updike’s fictional world, we used to have giants of the faith. Now we are left merely with struggling artists. In an earlier novel, The Centaur, Updike recounts the conversation of the narrator, Peter, with his mistress, as he lies with her in his painter’s loft in Greenwich Village. He is trying to tell her how life was good in his childhood, despite the fact that his grandfather had lost his faith as a Lutheran minister, and his father had struggled with self-doubt about the meaningfulness of his vocation as a high school teacher. Nevertheless, Peter had felt a sense of place. Now, as a poor artist, he confesses his rootlessness—his lack of a firm foundation on which to stand—and comments, “Priest, teacher, artist: the classic degeneration.”17 Again Updike confronts us with the question, is the movie theater simply a poor substitute for the church? He leaves the answer ambiguous, but the gap between art and faith remains wide.

The Power of Film

As with the characters in Updike’s novels, the theater and the church have sometimes seemed to be in competition with each other. My friend Paul Woolf, a screenwriter and maggid (ordained Jewish storyteller who teaches people about God), tells of growing up Jewish in Brooklyn. He had a strong feeling about Judaism even as a young boy, but the rabbis did not connect with him. The spiritual experiences that he had were more often the result of simple things. He remembers walking down the street when he was four, holding his mother’s hand and realizing that he was in the presence of God. His consciousness seemed enlarged to the point that he could hear every bird singing and every leaf rustling. A similar experience happened when he was ten, as he stayed out playing with fireflies late into the summer evening. He says, “Here were these creatures twinkling their lights, and the summer had breath. I could hear everything. The faraway tinkling bells of an ice-cream truck, dogs barking, my friends laughing. Again, it was a shift of awareness, away from the self to a wider awareness.”18

The next time this happened, Woolf was fourteen. It was the days of movie road shows, and he got dressed up to go into Manhattan to see Spartacus (1960). Woolf sat transfixed as he watched Kirk Douglas, the gladiator Spartacus, say to his wife, played by Jean Simmons, “Anyone can kill, can be taught to fight; I’m not interested in that. I want to know where the wind comes from . . . why we are here.” Woolf describes that all of a sudden there was this “incredible flight of questioning about life. In a film, no less.”19 As the movie ended the audience just sat there, stunned. Woolf concludes: “On ...