Saving the World and Healing the Soul

Heroism and Romance in Film

McCarthy, Blaugher

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781498219518
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Saving the World and Healing the Soul treats the heroic and redemptive trials of Jason Bourne, Bruce Wayne, Bella Swan, and Katniss Everdeen. The Bourne films, Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, the Twilight saga, and the Hunger Games series offer us stories to live into, to make connection between our personal loves and trials and a good order of the world.

1

The Hero, the World, the Soul

I don’t believe in either modernity or post-modernity. I find no persuasive evidence that either modern or post-modern humankind exists outside of faculty office buildings. Everyone tends to be pre-modern.”1 This claim is made by sociologist Andrew Greeley as he is introducing the idea that human beings have a need to be connected to a cosmic order and that we then find ways to make this connection through story, images, and ritual. In the context of Greeley’s claim, “modern” and “postmodern” (as they are in “faculty office buildings”) refer to philosophical theories about how we know what is real and true. A typically modern, philosophical approach reduces our connection to the world to scientific experimentation and logical inference, whereas the postmodern disparages the view that we can make any connection to an order of things at all. Think of the premodern in terms of medieval cathedrals that draw our attention upward and put us in a grand vertical space. In this regard, the modern, in the philosophical sense, flattens out how we are situated in the world; we live in a rectangular office building with a central hallway and uniform square rooms on each side. In response, postmodern theories ridicule this modern uniformity as yet another grand space—as grand schemes that attempt to connect us to a cosmic order, but in the process impose a homogeneity that constrains us. Postmodern philosophers want us to bask in the disconnected universe and be free. In contrast to these theories, Greeley proposes that stories, images, and rituals continue to connect people, together, to greater meaning and a sense of the order of things.

Greeley is not the only writer to contemplate the power of story to connect audiences to a shared humanity and meaning. Consider the arguments of detective Thursday Next, the protagonist in Jasper Fforde’s comic fantasy/alternate universe/science fiction novel, Thursday Next: First Among Sequels. She is making a case for literature, for writing better books, as opposed to developing plot lines through interactive polling data and demographic analysis.

Humans like stories. Humans need stories. Stories are good. Stories work. Story clarifies and captures the essence of the human spirit. Story, in all its forms—of life, of love, of knowledge—has traced the upward surge of mankind. And story, mark my words, will be with the last human to draw breath.2

In Fforde’s Thursday Next series, Thursday is the kind of hero that we will encounter in the films that we treat. Within a highly advanced world of cloning, various technological communications media, and “reality” TV, she defends the human, which means she champions story.

Peter Brook, renowned theater director, playwright, and filmmaker, speaks of story in terms of a silence, which gathers and articulates a profound sense of human connection. “Silence,” in his account of storytelling in theatre, is contrasted with applause and cheering—with seeking merely to entertain. Silence refers to a depth of experience, experienced by both performers and audience. On one hand, Brook holds, there is a silence that separates—a dead silence. On the other hand, there is a silence that connects.

There are two silences. Perhaps there are many, but there are two ends of the pole of silence. There is dead silence, the silence of the dead, which doesn’t help any of us, and then there is the other silence, which is the supreme moment of communication—the moment when people normally divided from one another by every sort of natural human barrier suddenly find themselves truly together, and that supreme moment expresses itself in something which is undeniably shared, as one can feel at this very moment.3

From his account of this empathetic silence, Brook argues for the priority of storytelling in theater. “Here is a human being, other human beings watching. Now, can we tell the whole story we want to tell, and bring to life the theme we want to bring to life, doing no more than that?”4

It is obvious that stories are alive and well in our world in many ways, and one of the most recognizable ways that stories are told in contemporary popular culture is through the medium of film. Here, Brook’s contrast between noise and silence is profoundly applicable. Amid the big bangs and special effects of the blockbuster, storytelling remains at the heart of good film.

From George Lucas and Star Wars forward, screenwriters, directors, and producers have followed the trail of Joseph Campbell and others who have catalogued the uses of human mythology in various storytelling forms.5 Not only are these deeply human stories alive and well, but also they tend to reinforce ways of framing life as a whole. We are able to witness a set of characters and a course of events in relief—with a meaningful framework that has a beginning that we see through to the end. One of the most commonly used frameworks shows a “hero’s journey” (to use the Joseph Campbell phrase), in which a hero battles against injustice and villainy. This path tends to follow the same course and get to the same conclusion: that no matter how bleak and hopeless things seem, the heroes will not allow the world to be destroyed, and in the process they will discover something noble about themselves, discover friends, and find love and/or gather new hope and direction in their lives. We know well the various genres and their characters and plot lines, and here, we find a ritual element to film: we head to the theatres and streaming devices to witness the same basic stories and images, again and again. A framing of the order of the world and a struggle to find meaning and a place in it are fundamental to a whole host of films.

Saving the World and Healing the Soul is about how four sets of films attempt to put order to the world, and how the heroes of these films (literally or figuratively) save their worlds from destruction...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Chapter 1: The Hero, the World, the Soul
• Chapter 2: Bourne’s Identity
• Chapter 3: Batman’s Quest
• Chapter 4: Bella’s Ascension
• Chapter 5: Katniss’s Rebellion
• Chapter 6: How It All Ends
• Film Bibliography