Play, With a Few Words About "Frances Ha"

            Yesterday Paco and I went to an early matinee showing of Frances Ha. We went then because we wanted to be at home when the predicted derecho-furious, tornado-spawning storms came through. The storms were mostly a fizzle, but Frances Ha was a delight. We came out into the sunshine and I was Frances. I felt like Frances was me or I was her; I looked at the world the way Frances looked at the world. My body type is different from that of the actress who played Frances, and I am seventy-three whereas Frances was twenty-seven, but I walked like Frances. I clambered into the car the way Frances would. When we got home and Paco found a book in the mailbox for me, I exulted over it the way Frances would.

            I say these things as a way of describing the feeling of identification with movie characters that sometimes overcomes viewers, and to explore the idea of play with respect to the movies. I am curious about the following: Are we at play when we watch a movie? What is the difference, speaking of play, between watching a movie in the theater and watching one at home? Has the filmmaker, making the movie, been at play? What is the social meaning of going to the movies? Does it have anything to do with play? What would it be like to do theology in a spirit of play?

            My new book is Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, which is actually an old book, its English translation first appearing in 1938. Its author, Johan Huizinga, insisted to translators that he meant the play element of culture, but they wouldn’t listen. Having come to the conviction “that civilization arises and unfolds in and as play,” he says, his object was not “to define the place of play among all the other manifestations of culture, but rather to ascertain how far culture itself bears the character of play” (ix).

            All right, how does movie-going, as a social phenomenon, bear the character of play? Since, from what Robert K. Johnston says in Reel Spirituality, identification appears to be a widespread if not universal phenomenon—“it is important not to forget that the power of a movie lies … in what transpires within the individual viewer as she or he gazes at the screen” (26)—what would theological reflection say about identification with respect to what Huizinga calls the play-concept? Are the many theologians who are now reflecting on the movies engaged in play? What would it mean for a solitary student to treat theological reflection as play? And what exactly is culture?*

*Culture.   a: the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon man’s capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations   b: the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group.

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