Everyday Life and "The Great Gatsby"

            What if my parish had a discussion group for the movies? I can see a problem right away. Last night the women in the choir got together for a potluck supper to bid one of our sopranos goodbye. She’s moving to Oregon. We sat around and Julie and Joan talked about the movies. Julie is thinking of seeing “Mud.” Joan said she didn’t like Matthew McConaughey; what did I think of him? “I didn’t use to like him either,” I said, “but then he was in ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ and he was terrific.” “Wasn’t that a Grisham book?” said Joan. She works at Barnes and Noble and spends most of her salary on books. I didn’t know the answer, but I did get sucked into the problem: moviegoers frequently identify movies by their featured actors.

            I picture the group meeting weekly to discuss a current movie. A facilitator would assign it, members would see it individually, then they would meet, three to five days later. If it were my group they would bring their Bibles, just in case. The first meeting would include a discussion of the suspension of disbelief, and the instruction to put the actors back where they belong. Actors are just one of many elements that coalesce to make a movie.

            The idea behind the discussion group would be a theological one, namely, the interaction between church and culture. Movies and television dramas are, for many people, a major part of everyday life. What do those who belong to a faith community take with them to a movie, not only from their faith but also from other life experiences? What does the movie say or do to them in return?

            I went to “The Great Gatsby” yesterday. I don’t know about other people, but I surrender to a movie from the first moment, even if it’s only a sound or a title on the screen. I am receptive but still critical, still capable of being disappointed. Then I get swept up and my critical sense retreats to the back row. Early in “The Great Gatsby” there is a panning shot across a body of water at night, which ends with a shot of the blinking green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock. Well, darn if they didn’t mess up the shot of the water, overdoing the light on the ripples in the current. It looked airbrushed. As the movie proceeded, I understood that all the cinematography was overdone, in line with the theme of excess in Gatsby’s life.

            I wonder what the imaginary members of my discussion group would make of the movie’s frequent return to a shot of an immense billboard? The billboard depicts the vague image of a man wearing a very clear set of eyeglasses. The voice of the narrator, who is Nick Carraway, says the billboard is like the eyes of God watching everything that happens. It reminded me of a similar theme in “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” which had brought Ps. 139 to my mind: “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” (vs. 7). I’d say to the group, How did that billboard shot strike you? Are you aware of the presence of God in your life? If you are, what is that like? How would you draw it in a picture?

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Theological Reflection and Eleven Movies

            I’ve finally gotten hold of the purpose, goal and method of this study (I think). The idea is to see a move and then “throw theology like a net over it, to capture its meaning.” Following are the movies I’ve seen in the past six weeks, along with notes on theological themes. The themes are not necessarily identical to themes found in the movies.

            “Admission.” Not all movies lend themselves to theological reflection. This one doesn’t.

            “Oblivion” is a source of reflection on four themes. Creation: an alien intelligence subverts the vision God has for the earth. The human person: the dignity of the human person, which is “rooted in his creation in the image and likeness of God” (CCC 1700), is deeply damaged. God: the alien invader calls itself God, the creator of a new kind of human being. Apocalypticism: the movie presents a grim vision of the future.

            “Mud.” I first wrote about “Mud” in terms of art (the movie’s theme and genre) and literature (the Epic of Gilgamesh). The moral life is the theological theme for reflection, considering the contrast between Mud’s lawless life and the lessons Ellis’ parents teach him.

            “42” evokes thoughts on the human community, especially with respect to social justice; and virtue. From the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “Society ensures social justice when it provides the conditions that allow associations or individuals to obtain what is their due, according to their nature and vocation” (CCC 1928). In the movie, Jackie Robinson and Branch Ricky demonstrate the virtue of courage.

            “Iron Man 3.” The actions of Iron Man to liberate the Western world from the evil intent of the Mandarin are possibly a metaphor for redemption, the saving work of Jesus Christ.

            “The Truman Show.” Clive Marsh puts this one in his chapter on God; the producer of the show plays God with Truman’s life. The movie also provokes reflection on the dignity of the human person.

            “The Place Beyond the Pines.” The sacraments (baptism and implicit references to matrimony); church (a scene occurs inside a church); and sin. Sin is a difficult concept. The Catechism discusses it as acts of the will in defiance of God; the movie invites reflection on it as something that darkens and weakens the human mind (see McGrath, 428-9).

            “Do the Right Thing.” Invites thoughts on the human community, but this time more along the lines of what it takes to live in society. “Through the exchange with others, mutual service and dialogue with his brethren, man develops his potential; he thus responds to his vocation” (CCC 179).

            “Promised Land.” Brings up the theme of the human community as well. There is also the struggle of the main character, Steve Butler, to live a moral life.

            “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” This movie directly addresses the themes of the moral life, God, and sin. Sin this time refers to specific acts of adultery and murder.

            “Minority Report.” The dignity of the human person is a significant issue in this one. Agatha, Dashiell and Arthur have been impressed since childhood into service as “precogs.” They are confined to a watery tank and treated as nothing more than oracles predicting murderous acts.

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A Viewing Experience: "Do the Right Thing"

            I’m sitting here in my life weeding the garden and a task walks across the grass. It says, Get up. I want you to do some theology.

            Nothing if not compliant, I stand up, brush the dirt off my hands and say, Where do you want me to start?

            With that movie you watched on TV a couple of weeks ago, says The Task. “Do the Right Thing” (1989). I want you to reflect on it from a theological perspective.

            I remembered the movie well, a powerful and beautiful movie. I had said to my husband, who had come home from a golf trip while I was halfway through, It’s like watching a play. I think this was because of the setting, the framing of scenes, and the time span of the story. It was about a hot day on one block of a multicultural neighborhood in New York City. Most of the action alternated between the street and the interior of Sal’s pizzeria. There was racial tension, which built to a riot and ended in the strangling of a young black man by a white policeman. I didn’t think about these things, though, as I talked to The Task. I had come away impressed most deeply by the movie’s visual quality—it was vibrant with color—and that feeling of having attended a play. I said, I don’t know how to reflect theologically on “Do the Right Thing.”

            Did someone say theology? A man walking down the street came into the yard and stuck out his hand. Hi, he said. I’m Alister McGrath. I’m a theologian. I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. You know, there are four sources of theology and your dilemma is with the fourth. Sources of theology? I said. Yes; four starting points for doing theology. He counted them off on his fingers. Scripture, reason, tradition and experience. Your task is to cast theology like a net over your experience of viewing “Do the Right Thing,” in order to capture its meaning (Christian Theology: An Introduction, 227). I looked meaningfully at The Task, as if to say, Why didn’t you tell me this? The Professor went on: Theology aims to interpret experience.

            I stood there. The Task and the Professor waited for me to say something, but I was at a loss. Another man walked across the yard. Your irises are stunning, he said. I stopped to look at them and heard you talking. Thank you. They’re divisions from a single plant I purchased twenty years ago. Say, I said, have you seen “Do the Right Thing”? As a matter of fact, he replied, I wrote about it in a book about theology and the movies. I’m Clive Marsh.

            Clive Marsh picked up the thread. “Do the Right Thing” is a marvelous film for Christian theology to work with. You have a list of theological themes in your head and you start asking questions. What does this movie, “Do the Right Thing,” show a viewer about human beings, who are made in God’s image and who live in God’s creation? With all its attention to the interaction of various ethnic groups, what does it say about how human beings form a sense of identity? How does it illustrate the barriers that people throw up—this activity is called sin—to living as creatures made in God’s image?

            Huh, I said. Would you all like a glass of lemonade or a beer or something?

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Mystified

            A number of things puzzled me as I read Clive Marsh’s Theology Goes to the Movies. First, the subtitle: An Introduction to Critical Christian Thinking. Whatever did this have to do with the movies? Second, the term God-talk. What did this irreverence point to? Third, a preoccupation with non-believing students of theology and religion. Did they need a special invitation?

            Pieces fell into place when I read the last chapter, “Theology and God,” whose first subheading is, “Why ‘God’ Matters.” Marsh is writing from the perspective of language about God, which can be used by anyone. Believers and nonbelievers today live in a world where cultural products, including movies, evoke images of Christianity. This can be enriching for both. “It should come as no surprise,” writes Marsh, “that a longstanding religious tradition might have something to offer a person wanting to reflect on the meaning of life” (165). He offers his book as a sort of training manual in critical approaches to the meeting of theology and film.

            On the last page Marsh says of himself, “I … am a particular (Christian), critical realist who accepts a strong dose of soft agnosticism within the faith I hold and in the way I use the theological tradition I seek to inhabit” (176). These words are based on a list of “types of belief in God”:

            Atheism “denies the existence of God, and of the value of God-talk” (174). Hostile atheism asserts that such talk if harmful.

            Non-realism is the conviction that language about God reflects nothing more than human imagination. God is a human creation.

            Agnosticism is the belief that the human mind cannot know whether there is a God. Soft agnosticism sees “the value of carrying on with God-talk so long as it proves useful in human flourishing.”

            Critical realism “begins from the assumption that God is.” It acknowledges that our attempts to reflect on God are “mediated by language or imagery, and thus always [reflect] the time, place and culture within which such encounter with the reality of God occurs” (175). Particular critical realism occurs within a religious tradition, e.g., Christian or Jewish. General critical realism looks beyond specific traditions in claims about the divine.

            Naïve realism describes belief in the literal interpretation of religious statements, e.g., the prospect of the faithful being caught up in the clouds to meet Christ at the Second Coming (1 Thess. 4:16-17).

            I found Marsh’s book helpful in my movie reflections, but I am mystified by his self-description and approach to theology. What gets him out of bed in the morning? Living and writing in the UK, he seems to reflect the expanding climate of secularism there. Every book reveals something of its author, but nothing in Theology Goes to the Movies indicates Marsh’s emotions with respect to his professed faith; no talk of awe, wonder, religious experience or transcendence; no sign of attachment or affection.

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Theological Themes in "The Silk"

            “The Silk” is a short feature film, fifteen minutes long, about a man who is dying and his wife. Paco and I saw it at a film festival in March. As the movie starts, the wife is gazing out the window of their bedroom. She turns around and says to her husband that she is going to make his laying-out pajamas from “the silk.” He objects, but she is determined. The silk is a length of Chinese silk that he brought back to New Zealand for her after the war was over, fifty years ago. It is a lustrous indigo blue with an intricate design of a Chinese pleasure garden woven into it. It is so beautiful she has never been able to bring herself to cut into it. Her husband had had to smuggle it home, wrapped around his midriff under his uniform.

            The husband dies just as the wife finishes the pajamas. She takes them to the kitchen table for work on a small finishing detail, saying sadly to the nurse, “He never said goodbye!” Something in the silk catches her eye. She puts her glasses on, leans close and sees a tiny figure on a hill in the pleasure garden, waving its hand. “I’m coming, Herb,” she cries. “I’m coming!”

            What might theology have to say, in reflecting on “The Silk”? It would be a three-way conversation, with the film filtered through my perceptions and theology filtered through my level of understanding. To locate myself: I am seventy-three, was present at the deaths of my parents and sister, and have been affected by many other deaths. Paco and I sometimes talk about our last days. When the film started my feelings were engaged right away. But I don’t think you have to be in your seventies to be tugged by the question, What will it be like when I die?

            Honestly, I don’t know whether to talk about religious belief, religious experience or theology. In everyday language I see three things happening in the movie. (1) The man and woman indicate by their behavior, “I love you and I honor our marriage.” (2) The woman indicates by her decision: “Death is about to part us. Let’s make a ceremony of the silk. You brought it to me in love; I preserved it in awe and trepidation; I will dress you in it for our goodbyes.” (3) There are no goodbyes. The man and woman will meet again in paradise.

            Setting aside theological precision, I understand that (1) the couple’s behavior points to the sacrament of matrimony. The efficacious grace of the sacrament is visible in their words, their body language, and the woman’s act of sewing. (2) Her preparation of the precious silk as the man’s final garment is reminiscent of the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, which is administered at the end of life, as well as the women’s preparations for Jesus’ body at the end of the Gospel of Mark. (3) Christians believe that the finality of death is an illusion. Loved ones will be reunited in the next life, which is a place of beauty. This is a loose and partial illustration of the doctrine of eschatology.

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A Few Notes

            Conscience.  On Saturday Paco and I watched “Minority Report” (2002). It focuses on John Anderton’s crisis when the precogs reveal that he is going to kill a man he has never met. When the moment arrives, the precog Agatha says that knowledge of the future doesn’t mean the future is inevitable. “You can choose,” she tells him insistently. She is speaking to his conscience, his consciousness of himself as a moral being.

            Religious experience.  Yesterday I read a few pages in The Significance of Religious Experience, by Howard Wettstein. It led me to reconsider Clive Marsh’s seven-theme, which is really a seven-doctrine, methodology. What would it be like in my study of religion and theology if I started with issues on which I would stake my existence, rather than with a schedule of teachings? Abraham Joshua Heschel calls this situational, as opposed to conceptual, thinking (God In Search of Man, 5).

            Beauty and Holiness.  Ever since the day thirteen years ago when I read Ps. 27:4—“This is what I seek … to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord”—I have wanted to sink into the experience of these words. But how? Robert K. Johnston quotes Gerardus van der Leeuw, who speaks of an analogy between art and religion. “The paths of beauty and holiness approach each other, growing distant, until finally … they can no longer be held apart” (in Johnston, 73).

            Creation.  Last year I plunged into gardening, with the dream of turning my yard into an English garden. There would be a dense shrub border around the perimeter, small trees and many flowers. The response of the earth is a continual marvel to me: “If you plant it, it will grow.” I wish I could find the verses in the Bible which speak of God’s delight in Wisdom at play on the earth, because that’s what it feels like.

            Story.  I also read an essay called “Religion Without God,” by Ronald Dworkin. Dworkin looks directly at an issue that Johnston and Marsh approach obliquely: it isn’t necessary to believe in God to live an ethical life. His argument made sense until I came to the sentence: “There is no direct bridge from any story about the creation, or … [etc.] … to the enduring value of friendship and family, or … [etc.]." No bridge, I thought, except the human need for story.

            Church, temple, synagogue, mosque.  Not the building but the awareness, found in indigenous religions too, of being a member of a community that stands in awe of ultimate reality. The ground-hugging foundation of tradition is part of this. I belong to the Judeo-Christian tradition. The first words of the Gospel reading yesterday, on Pentecost Sunday, hearkened back to the first words of Genesis, in which the Spirit of God hovers over the waters.

            Sabbath.  Some theologians have “called attention to the need for a restructuring of theology in which praxis would … be the very foundation of theologizing” (The New Dictionary of Theology, 784). Keeping the Sabbath holy is the practice of setting aside creative activity—making things happen in the world—in order to pay homage to God the Creator. We can extend this to a practice of Sabbath-time, remembering, “Great sacrifices were offered on that day, and there was rejoicing over the great feast of the Lord in which they shared” (Neh 12:43), and “Rejoice in the Lord always” (Phil. 4:4).

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The Editing of "Crimes and Misdemeanors"

            Another story in “Crimes and Misdemeanors” looks at Cliff’s work as a documentary filmmaker. Because he needs money, he obliges his pompous brother-in-law Lester’s request for a biography. We see him unenthusiastically filming Lester as he talks about himself. Halley, another filmmaker, views the footage after Cliff edits it. “I didn’t know you were going to cut it this way,” she says mildly. The viewer doesn’t know what she’s alluding to until Cliff screens the film for Lester. We see Lester growing more and more agitated as Cliff, slouching in a chair, laughs silently to himself. When we’re shown parts of the film, we see that Cliff has edited it to make Lester look ridiculous. In one scene he puts Lester’s voice into the mouth of Mr. Ed, the talking horse.

            It’s taken me a few movies to appreciate Johnston’s explanations of editing and framing (pages 164-171). With “Crimes and Misdemeanors” the puzzle piece of editing falls into place. I’m no film professor, but my guess is that “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” with its seamless interweaving of disparate storylines (I count six), is a masterpiece of editing. I have a history of bias against Woody Allen movies. Watching them unreflectively, I’ve felt uncomfortable with his worldview without being able to articulate why. Recently I watched part of a TV documentary on Allen, which was kinder to him than Cliff is to Lester. It helped me to understand his methods and his madness.

Allen has a prodigious imaginative and comedic talent, and he is a comic for whom nothing is sacred, including meaning. Why did he cut “Crimes and Misdemeanors” the way he did, layering a murder story with other stories? The editing is masterful where technique is concerned, but the stories taken together do not deliver a unified insight about human problems, either from the standpoint of moral complexity (Marsh), or what an amoral universe might be like (Johnston).

            In “Crimes and Misdemeanors” Allen is just having fun. His cameraman shoots footage of Cliff shooting Lester. Wow, says Allen, let’s have Cliff shoot Lester in revenge; we’ll have him display Lester as a laughable idiot. No, it doesn’t make sense; Cliff needs money but he certainly won’t get paid for this. And yeah, we can have a real shooting; a guy has his mistress done away with. Oh, people want meaning, do they? Okay, we’ll put in a lot of references to vision. Judah is an ophthalmologist; Ben the rabbi is going blind; Cliff sees movies with his niece; he tells her not to listen to her teachers but just to “see what they look like;” Cliff makes movies, which are visual artifacts; Judah metaphorically sees the light at the end of the tunnel (Johnston, 159).

            Although “Crimes and Misdemeanors” hosts an extended discussion of morality in the story about Judah, it’s not about morality or the lack of it. The message is in the editing, especially in the last few minutes of the movie, which reprise brief scenes from all the stories. The message is this. Life is a jumble of events and situations that have meaning only in the experience of the viewer beholding them. Our job is just to get through the day.

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