Play and "21 Grams"

In this post and in as many posts as I can accomplish by June 28, I want to explore at least three movies; theology and ethics with respect to the movies; and moral imagination, storytelling and play, all with respect to the movies. My main interest is in how stories are put together and why they are important to us.

The first movie is 21 Grams (2003), which features Sean Penn in the role of Paul Rivers. The plot can be summed up quickly in one sentence: A man whose transplanted heart is failing finds love before he dies and helps the donor’s wife and the man who accidentally killed the donor to find peace.* 

21 Grams is obviously a story and it ought to be fairly easy to find things to say about the religious extremism of one of the characters, but how on earth can play have anything to do with this movie? Its themes, which also include heart failure, artificial insemination, numbing grief, adultery and a desire for revenge, are deeply serious. Some viewers may consider two graphic scenes of lovemaking erotic play. I did, until I discovered Johan Huizinga’s opinion in Homo ludens. He believes “it is not the act as such that the spirit of language tends to conceive as play; rather the road thereto, the preparation for and introduction to ‘love,’ which is often made enticing by all sorts of playing. This is particularly true when one of the sexes has to rouse or win the other over to copulating.”**

I hope that reading more of Huizinga will help me to answer the question of play in 21 Grams. For now I have three approaches in mind:

(1)  A movie is a product of play. In a book on screenwriting, John Truby writes: “The storyteller is first and foremost someone who plays.”***

(2)  A movie’s content includes acts of play. Besides the scenes in 21 Grams portraying “preparations for love,” there is the mental game Paul Rivers plays with himself and that he attempts to explain to another character. He tells her, “There is a number hidden in every act of life.”

(3)  A movie is received by its viewers through acts of play. Huizinga distinguishes between the “making of works of art” and “the manner in which they are received in the social milieu.” My task currently is to explore how movies, at least some of them, might be received in the milieu of theology and ethics. Exploration is another word for play.

*In filmmaking language, this sentence is the high-concept premise of the movie. It reduces the movie “to a catchy one-line description that audiences will understand instantly and come rushing to the theater to see.” John Truby, The Anatomy of Story, 17.

**Homo ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, 1955, 43. Until I obtain a copy of this book, my notes will be based on a Wikipedia outline of it. I probably ought to delve, among other things, into what Huizinga means by “the spirit of language.”

***Truby, ibid., 6.

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