Conscience in "Crimes and Misdemeanors"

            “Crimes and Misdemeanors” (1989) is a Woody Allen movie with overlapping storylines. The weightiest concerns Judah, a married man who has been having an affair with Dolores for two years. A crisis arises when Dolores decides Judah’s wife should know the truth. He consults Ben, a rabbi and old friend, who counsels him to confess to his wife and ask her forgiveness. Judah doesn’t see this as an option. The situation heats up when Dolores threatens to expose a shady financial dealing if he doesn’t do what she wants. He confides in his brother Jack; Jack arranges for the murder of Dolores. After the crime, Judah is wracked by guilt. Jack reminds him that he will be brought down too if Judah turns himself in. Judah comes to an uneasy peace with himself, saying that in real life people deny and form rationalizations about egregious things they have done.

            I told Paco about the movie, and he said Judah’s intense feelings of guilt reminded him of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Judah goes to the scene of the crime to retrieve love letters; Raskolnikov keeps returning to the scene of his crime. The difference arises in how the two stories end. Raskolnikov can bear his inner torment no longer and turns himself in to the authorities. In the movie, Judah meets Cliff (Woody Allen), who is a filmmaker. He tells him his story as if it has happened to someone else, thinking it would make a good movie. Cliff says that, to make the story a tragedy, Judah has to have the guy turn himself in. This is when Judah says, “But that’s not what happens in real life!”

            Both Johnston and Marsh analyze “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” Johnston focusing on the movie’s underlying atmosphere of amorality and Marsh enthusing over its “portrayal of how complex moral questions are part of everyday life.” I’d like to look at its treatment of Judah’s conscience.

            As a boy, Judah was taught by his devoutly religious father that the eyes of God were always upon him and that God would surely punish him if he committed an evil deed. Judah grows up and abandons religion, but not before internalizing his father’s teachings. The movie implies that these are the source of his guilt. While his crime is still adultery, the rabbi advises him to make a mature response to his conscience; to seek the joy and peace that come with a clear conscience. Judah gives lip service to the idea but is more worried about the complex issues he is facing. Then the murder happens—he is astounded at how horribly easy it is to solve the problem of Dolores—and his conscience comes forward. There is a scene where he drives through a tunnel and comes to the light at the end. Johnston says this represents Judah’s deciding not to judge himself. Considering the later scene with Cliff, I would interpret it as the moment when his insight about real life arrives: things happen; we do things we regret; we keep moving; we don’t think too much. By the time he meets Cliff, he has suppressed his conscience.

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Church and "The Place Beyond the Pines"

            A few posts ago I described the scene in “The Place Beyond the Pines” where Luke Glanton is sitting in the rear of a Catholic church watching the baptism of his son Jason. Since I am Catholic and have witnessed many baptisms, I watched the scene with sharp attention. Movies often take a light-fingered approach to Catholic rituals and images, appropriating them willy-nilly to serve the needs of fiction. This scene was remarkably authentic, as far as I could tell. The only liberty the filmmakers took was to place the baptismal font directly in front of the altar. Usually the font is in a fixed position to the left of the sanctuary, the raised area that contains the altar, tabernacle and podium; or it is near the door of the church, where it is a sign of welcome to the new Christian.

            The third book I’m reading for the theology-and-movies course examines the interactions that take place between church and culture where movies are concerned. It is Theology Goes to the Movies: An Introduction to Critical Christian Thinking (2007), by Clive Marsh. The body of the book looks at twenty-three popular movies under seven headings. I’ve listed the headings (slightly reworded) in the sidebar, under Themes in Systematic Theology. “The Place Beyond the Pines” appears too recently to have been included in the book. My guess is that, if Professor Marsh were to comment on it, he would do so under the category of redemption. I want to look at it under the heading of church.

            In the movie, neither the baptism scene nor the idea of church has echoes later on. Romina and her mother are Hispanic and so there is a cultural expectation that they are Catholic, but we aren’t shown more scenes of how being Catholic affects their daily lives. Yet the baptism scene is crucial in the movie’s portrayal of Luke Glanton’s life. It emphasizes his status as an outsider.

            For a Catholic and probably all Christians, there are many resonances. For example, the church building and the sacrament of Baptism symbolize, among other things, the vibrant community life of practicing Christians. The sacrament welcomes the new baby into a community of faith, a community whose ideas and beliefs about the nature of God and man’s purpose on earth are, as Marsh says, embodied in practices. In the sad case of Luke, the practice that comes to mind is forgiveness. The movie depicts him as an outsider to the family that includes his baby. But, if he chose to, he could be part of a Christian community that would encourage him to forgive himself for abandoning Romina, seek her forgiveness, and be confident that God has forgiven him. A church community would teach him the value of sacrifice: he must let Jason go for the baby’s own good. It would teach him to trust God and to trust in the goodness of life. There is a good life possible for him without Romina and Jason. The community of faith would support his search for it.

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"Promised Land" Sparks a Dream

“Promised Land” Sparks a Dream

 

            Christians believe in God, who created everything, including mankind; and God’s only Son, Jesus Christ, who was conceived of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit, who is in turn the illimitable love between the Father and the Son. Christian anthropology is the study of mankind in the midst of this reality. It is a principal theme in the study of the Christian faith. It examines the question of who we are in relation to God, and to Jesus Christ, the paradigm of humanity. I’d like to open, in this post, a line of thinking on these matters by recounting the dream I had after viewing “Promised Land.”

            It was actually only the first three-quarters of the movie, since its transmission was interrupted by a thunderstorm. The uncompleted story was, I’m sure, one of the causes of the dream. Another was the inner turmoil of the character Steve Butler, who was convincingly portrayed by Matt Damon. It’s amazing, the subtle things actors can do with facial expressions and body language. The dream made me realize I’d been fully absorbed with Steve Butler’s wracking, ill-at-ease feeling as he wondered, without ever saying so, what he was supposed to do. I dreamt about Matt Damon, but in the dream I’ll call him Bill to underscore that he is playing a role:

            Bill is in a dark place. There is a small opening through which he can see to the outside. I, dreaming, think to myself, “bole of a tree.” In the dictionary this means tree trunk, but in the dream I’m thinking of a growth on a tree trunk. The growth has taken the shape of the opening, which is an irregular, vertical oval about two feet long and ten inches wide. From the outside, the growth has a gnarled look, the look of something elaborately carved by the hand of nature. Inside, the space has the dimensions and expanse of a cave, and it gives access to more internal regions.

            Standing a good distance back from the hole, Bill sees a man outside in the sunlight. The man is wearing a rumpled, long-sleeved white dress shirt. The light is bright, seen from the dark place. It almost dazzles Bill’s eyes.

            I feel the shudder of an electric shock as the man outside presses a key on his cell phone. “Hey, Ed,” he says into the phone, “I see him.” I have a feeling he is coming in after Bill.

            Inside, Bill says to an unseen companion, “He has brown hair. That’s where the brown was coming from.”

The dream ends with Bill on the cusp of a decision. He can let himself be found or he can pick up his gear, clamber over the uneven floor of the dark place and go to the interior regions.

            I don’t know what the color brown was about, but the rest of the dream makes sense to me. It shows Bill where I have often been, wishing to retreat but tired of retreat; unwilling to be discovered and at the same time longing for it.

            The conversation I’m interested in would look at four questions: What does it mean to be a woman in a media culture that focuses mainly on the experience of being a man? How do movies connect us with ourselves? Are movies like dreams? Is there room in Christian anthropology for talk about dreams?

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Atmosphere in "Promised Land"

            Atmosphere has been one of Robert Johnston’s tougher movie concepts for me to absorb. This is what he says about it on p. 147 of Reel Spirituality:

            Atmosphere is the “unalterable given(s) against which the story is told and the characters developed…. It is the unchanging backdrop against which the story is played out…. It is that which is beyond the story’s ability to control.” It is something bigger than the characters, he says. He gives examples: the “existence of lost worlds” in “Jurassic Park” (1993); the” notion of ‘homecoming’” in “The Wizard of Oz” (1939); the “specter of anti-Semitism” in “Schindler’s List” (1993). I kept wishing he would use a different word. Did he mean context or setting, theme or worldview? I looked in the dictionary.

            Backdrop is a theater term. It came into usage in 1913 to describe the painted cloth that in those days hung across the rear of a stage. A synonym is background.

            Atmosphere has several meanings. Those that are useful in a movie discussion are: the air of a locality (if you take it in a metaphorical sense); a surrounding influence or environment (e.g., an atmosphere of mutual trust); the overall aesthetic effect of a work of art; a dominant aesthetic or emotional effect or appeal. Reading these definitions, I felt assured that Johnston had used the right word. Backdrop gave me a helpful visual clue.

So, here’s how atmosphere might be understood in the movie Paco and I watched over the weekend:

            First, the plot. “Promised Land” (2012) tells the story of Steve Butler and his partner Sue, who are employees of Global, a company that drills for natural gas. They go to a small farming community to convince residents that it is in their best interests to lease their land to Global. Global believes a rich deposit of natural gas lies beneath their stretch of countryside, which they plan to release with a process called fracking. Fracking involves blasting the shale that traps natural gas with pressurized chemicals. Global’s initiative raises an ethical dilemma for Steve: (1) Will the project be as profitable for the residents as he and Sue are promising it will? (2) Will the fracking process poison the land, not only ruining it for farming but rendering it uninhabitable?

            Second, atmosphere. The backdrop of the story is the attachment people have to a farm that has been in the family for generations. Steve understands this because he used to do chores on his grandfather’s farm in Iowa. He also knows what it’s like to live in a farming community that goes bust when it can no longer sustain itself. This is why he is, at first, a true believer for Global. In the end he goes back to his roots, emotionally speaking. In a town meeting, he tells the residents about his grandfather’s barn, which was the bane of his existence as a boy. To maintain it, they had to paint it every other summer. When he asked why, his grandfather said it was because “it is our barn.”

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Character in "The Place Beyond the Pines"

Image.  A family group in the sanctuary of a Catholic church, standing in front of the altar. They are Romina, her baby Jason, and the baby’s stepfather Kofi, with a priest, who is baptizing the baby. Romina’s mother is nearby. The wall behind the altar is elaborate with sacred iconography, in the manner of large old Catholic churches. During the ceremony there are cuts back and forth to a man in a pew at the rear of the church. He is Luke Glanton, the biological father of the baby. He is crying.

Plot.  In the first part of “The Place Beyond the Pines,” Luke, a motorcycle rider in a carnival act, discovers he has a son, Jason, who was conceived when Luke was in town a year ago. Now Luke wants to have a life with Romina and Jason, but she has moved on. Out in the woods, he races his motorcycle among the trees to relieve his frustrations. There he meets a man who introduces him to bank robbery. He gets killed by a rookie cop, but not before he phones Ro and says not to tell the boy about himself.

In the second part, the cop struggles with guilt. He has a son the same age as Jason, whose name is A.J. An older, angry cop, whom he has accused of corruption, lures him to the woods at night. He flees. He tries to be an honest cop, but his career ambitions complicate things.

In the third part, Jason and A.J., now teenagers, meet at school. Jason discovers who A.J. is and starts a fight. He ends up in the hospital, where he calls Romina a liar because she refuses to tell him about his real father. He gets a gun and forces the cop, who is now off the force and has been elected district attorney, to drive him out to the woods. Jason threatens to shoot the cop. The cop, thinking he is about to die, says, “I’m sorry, Jason.” Jason changes his mind. He goes away, buys a motorcycle and heads west.

The question I wanted to ask today was, What does this movie say about character? But there was just too much else going on.

Title.  There’s the title, which refers to the lonely spot in the woods where (1) Luke turns to crime; (2) the cop turns around and flees; and (3) Jason turns around after the cop/district attorney says he’s sorry.

Theme.  There’s the persistent theme of how hard it is to be a father to a son. Luke didn’t have a father and now is shut out of fathering Jason. The cop had an attentive father but was never on the same page with him. The cop and his wife divorce. When A. J. wants to come live with him he’s busy running for D.A. Kofi has been with Romina since before Jason was born and tells Jason, “I am your father.” But Jason goes away.

Character.  The movie is a cry of despair. It’s as though a single composite character screams out of the middle of it, “I don’t know what to do!” As though each of the men and the boy come face to face with themselves in the woods—three times, that moment of recognition; that anagnorisis—but the truth they recognize is one of emptiness, lostness and rootlessness.

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The Movies and Me, cont.

            In the past month I’ve seen eight movies; read books and articles including Reel Spirituality, Christian Ethics: An Essential Guide, a section of the Catechism, the article on morality in The New Dictionary of Theology, and a good many movie reviews; begun to watch TV dramas with movie eyes; and posted seventeen entries on this blog, not counting “A Plan” and the glossary I deleted because all it was doing was stirring mud. Here are a few words on what I’ve learned:

            I didn’t expect an insight that has just this week come to the front of my mind—most movies are about men and the experience of being a man. From my list, only “Admission” was about a woman and a woman’s kind of dilemma. It asked the question, What if you were unexpectedly presented with the child you gave birth to and gave away eighteen years before? Coincidentally, there’s an article in yesterday’s Washington Post about another neglected population in the movies, middle-class African Americans. The gist of the article is that the studio system makes for very cautious behavior in the financing and distribution of movies. Hollywood goes for the tried and true.

            My consciousness was raised by “Call the Midwife,” a BBC series based on the memoirs of a midwife in 1950s London. This production is rare in its presentation of a feminine perspective on the kinds of challenges women face. But it comes with a patina of distance: it’s about the 1950s and the sexual mores of that time … an occupation (midwifery) that receives no attention in today’s media … desperately poor people … a foreign country.

            Another thing that has surprised me is my new—it’s more like recovered—attitude of openness to the movies. I’m grateful to Robert K. Johnston’s book for this. It has been freeing to get past actor-worshipping and thumbs-up-thumbs-down approaches to movies. I’ve found my way back to things I enjoy. The escapism, the soul-fulfillment of good stories, the multitudinous opportunities to ask, Now how did they do that?

            Day before yesterday I went to “The Place Beyond the Pines” and in the evening wrote a reflection, which I will post next week. It marked a turn for more serious-mindedness in my thinking about the movies or, I should say, a deepening of my study. I don’t know how to explain it, I feel kind of a fool for saying it, and I fear I’m going to have to live up to it in the next couple of months. Maybe it’s just a natural outcome of immersion. Yes, immersion. I’ve immersed myself in the movies. This is my experience and my motivation.

            In most of my posts I’ve tried to focus on one aspect of storytelling, filmmaking or theology. This is working; each day I see more in a movie or TV drama than I would have before. In fact, writing frequently about a study topic is a technique I’ve wanted to try for a long time, ever since reading William Zinnser’s On Writing Well.

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A Key Image in "Iron Man 3"

            Let me say first that “Iron Man 3” was loads of fun. I hadn’t seen the previous episodes, including “The Avengers” (although my daughter urged me to go). Reviewers said there was too much heavy metal in this one, by which they meant the iron suits (but I guess the suits would have been steel in the story? molded plastic in the special effects shop?). I went with the impression that it was going to be a very noisy film but I wouldn’t mind because Robert Downey, Jr., is so witty. Give me a break!

            My project today is to explore a key image in “Iron Man 3,” keeping in mind Johnston’s assertion that in a novel you have only words, but “movies make use of a three-fold narrative technique—telling their stories through script, music and image” (14). How might a single image “tell” the story of Iron Man?

            It appears at the very end. Tony Stark has promised his girlfriend, Pepper Potts, that he is going to step down from his intense occupation as, in my words, the savior of the free world. It gives him anxiety attacks and disrupts their relationship. Not to mention the fact that it has led to the total destruction of his palatial home on a cliff overlooking an immense body of water (the Pacific Ocean, but that’s in real life). He’s walking through the rubble—I forgot to say, he’s had his large, forever greenly glowing electromagnet surgically removed from the center of his chest, so he really is out of it. He looks happy and calm; in a voiceover he says he’s finally able to sleep through the night. Then he stoops down and picks an object up out of the rubble. It is a short-bladed screwdriver with a thick, stubby plastic handle. He smiles and thoughtfully weighs the screwdriver in the palm of his hand.

            Tony Stark is a mechanic. From the first scene in the movie, where we see him tinkering with one of the multiple iron suits he has made, through the moment of crisis when a little boy he has befriended says, “You’re a mechanic; make something”—this is the story’s anagnorisis; see my Wednesday post—the movie has underscored with colorful imagery the nature of Tony Stark’s soul. He is a mechanic. He fixes things. He solves problems by building new things out of the materials he has at hand. The voiceover continues when the screen goes black. His last words before the credits roll are, “I am Iron Man.” This is a film about identity. Can’t you just see the man in your life, there in the garage, gazing down at an engine, wiping his hands on an oily rag, and murmuring, “I am Iron Man”?

            The visual aspects of this movie had to be prominent because Marvel had the story first. “Iron Man 3” is of the comic-book superhero genre. I haven’t read the comics, but several scenes flashed before me as comic-book drawings—hey! The filmmakers didn’t insert those subliminally, did they?

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