New ways forward | 13 | Faith in Film | Christopher Deacy

ABSTRACT

While it would be facile to suggest that to read ﬁlm through a Christian or theological lens amounts in any way to a deﬁnitive or authoritative reading, it has been my aim in this book to demonstrate how, where and to what extent a theological interpretation of ﬁlm may be seen to be both tenable and as having much to offer to scholarship. At the end of the day, audiences will read ﬁlms in a multiplicity of different ways, and some interpretations will carry more weight and inﬂuence than others. But, it is hoped that a study such as this can help to redress the balance whereby, for far too long, the study of ﬁlm from a religious or theological point of view has been comprehensively overlooked – if not, indeed, shunned – by many commentators, critics and academics. As Joel Martin observed in 1995, if religion is dealt with at all in ﬁlm studies it is as a purely ‘peripheral phenomenon in contemporary social organization’ (Martin, 1995, p. 2) where the forces of secularization are taken for granted. Likewise, in the words of Gaye Ortiz, writing three years later, whenever a new book on theology and ﬁlm is published – and there were at least ﬁve in 1997 alone – ‘the academics in ﬁlm studies titter and scornfully dismiss churchy types who dare to bring God into the rariﬁed presence of cinematic discourse’ (Ortiz, 1998, p. 173). Although the ﬁeld of religion and ﬁlm has advanced signiﬁcantly in the years since then, it has yet to make an impact on the way ﬁlm studies is practised as a discipline. I hope that this state of affairs will change in due course. No matter how felicitous readings of ﬁlm through the lens of feminism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, homosexuality or Marxism happen to be, there is a substantial amount of empirical evidence to demonstrate that a religious reading of ﬁlm should be at the cutting edge, rather than on the periphery, of contemporary scholarly activity. Once it is accepted that ﬁlm and theology can be very creative dialogue-

partners, all sorts of fecund possibilities are opened up. While it is not surprising that overtly religious ﬁlms such as Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) receive the lion’s share of publicity, it has been my aim in this book to outline alternative sites of religiosity, and to suggest that, if a line of demarcation can be drawn between an ‘objectively’ religious ﬁlm and an ostensibly ‘secular’ movie – the classic sacred versus profane distinction – it is a very blurred, broken and permeable one. Questions of religious faith arise in some of the most surprising and unexpected places, even to the point that Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991) – which examines the theme of redemption through suffering in the form of Robert De Niro’s Bible-spouting ex-convict who exacts divine vengeance in order to coerce the lawyer who betrayed him

into confessing his sins – and M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs (2002) – in which Mel Gibson plays a lapsed Pennsylvanian minister who has to face a metaphysical and spiritual conundrum of literally extra-terrestrial magnitude – are no less deserving the attention of the theologian or religious studies specialist than the somewhat hackneyed and predictable controversies induced by Gibson’s Passion and Scorsese’s Last Temptation. Any further research that is undertaken in this area needs to fully embrace what the secular marketplace has to offer. By all means utilize the likes of Gibson’s Passion, but do not think for a moment that any creative conversation that has the potential to take place between theology and ﬁlm should operate within such narrow and conﬁned parameters. The important thing is to view each ﬁlm on its own merits. That way, one

does not fall into the trap of having to make false and unworkable distinctions between different ﬁlms, whereby one ﬁlm is deemed more worthy of the theologian’s attention than another simply by virtue of the fact that its subject matter is, superﬁcially at least, ‘explicitly’ theological. As I have sought to demonstrate in this book, to categorize one ﬁlm as being ‘explicitly’ religious and another as either ‘implicitly’ religious or even ‘non-religious’ is overly simplistic and, taken to the extreme, ends up with the situation whereby only biblical epics or ﬁlms which are made for polemical or confessional purposes are deemed suitable for discussion, while everything else simply does not warrant serious scrutiny. I encountered this problem of ‘labelling’ at ﬁrst-hand when, in August 2000, I sat on the Ecumenical Jury of the 53rd Locarno International Film Festival in Switzerland. In awarding our prize at the end of the competition to a Chinese ﬁlm, Baba (Wang Shuo, 2000), what struck us most is that there appeared to be a clear exposition within the picture of Christian symbolism and values, including the use of the Christmas carol ‘Silent Night’, the backdrop of a Christian cathedral and the theme of sacriﬁce and atonement. Yet, when we spoke to the director, Wang Shuo, afterwards, he commented that the ﬁlm’s appropriation of such motifs was merely accidental and unintentional. This in no way diminishes for me the impact and power that the ﬁlm has, but it does illustrate just how tenuous and discordant the distinction can be between the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’. In the past, when the primary focus of the academic study of ﬁlm was on the auteur, any reading which went ‘against the grain’ of the director’s vision would have been accorded a subordinate status. What I propose, however, is that if a ‘secular’ ﬁlmmaker creates a ﬁlm which is perceived by some audiences to be redolent in theological signiﬁcance, then, irrespective of the degree to which such an interpretation is alien to that ﬁlmmaker’s aims and intentions, the efﬁcacy and integrity of that testimony must not be disregarded. This is not to say, however, that the insights presented in this book will be of

use to all practitioners in the ﬁelds of theology and religious studies. Although a viable case can be made that the use of ﬁlm can transform the way in which

theology and religious studies is carried out, a word of caution is required. For the religious studies scholar interested in, say, Hindu life-cycle rituals, early Japanese Buddhism, medieval Jewish mysticism or any other of the host of specialisms that make up the discipline, it would be most inappropriate to suggest that ﬁlms can, or should, be employed in their research in the same way as they might for, say, the Christian theologian seeking to gain an insight into the way in which a creative and challenging theological vision may be discerned in the midst of contemporary popular culture. Even within Christianity itself, there is by no means a universal acceptance that it is appropriate to enter into a dialogue with secular culture. The origins of this position can be traced back to the early Church, where, for Tertullian in the third century, Christianity should not allow itself to be contaminated by the environment around itself and should maintain its distinctive identity. Nowadays it ﬁnds expression in what William Romanowski identiﬁes as the ‘Condemnation approach’ to popular culture, whereby ﬁlm and pop music are deemed to be evil and must therefore be boycotted by God-fearing Christians (Romanowski, 2002, p. 12). Sympathy for this position can be found in Steve Peters’ Truth about Rock (1998), as well as in the following observation by David Noebel with respect to The Beatles:

As Mark Joseph puts it, ‘From the moment Elvis ﬁrst swayed his hips and Bill Haley rocked around the clock, rock and roll has been on a collision course with millions of Americans . . . It was seen as the Devil’s music and to be avoided at all costs’ (Joseph, 1999, pp. 1-2). Although I ﬁnd this a dangerous position to take – after all, it can lead to the Christian imagination being constrained and impoverished, and it is hard to see how the Church is going to perform its mission effectively if it is not able to communicate in the language of the people – it does illustrate that there is a considerable diversity of perspectives within Christianity alone as to the manner and extent to which the secular media can serviceably be used. Moreover, it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge that, salient and

productive though a theological reading of ﬁlm might be, there are countless other disciplines which are capable of, and amenable to, entering into a creative dialogue with ﬁlm. For example, many of the same texts that I have employed in this study have much pertinent value for scholars working in the ﬁeld of philosophy. Although in Chapter 3 I make a strong case for examining

Groundhog Day in the light of the Christian theme of redemption, there is no reason why, say, a Heideggerean existentialist should not ﬁnd in this ﬁlm ‘one of the most cogent and intelligent extended metaphors for the central tenets of humanist existentialism ever presented on a cinema screen’ (Coniam, 2001, p. 10). Rather than suggest, as Robert Jewett does, that Groundhog Day bears witness to one of the central insights of Pauline theology, in that Phil Connors is faced with the dilemma of either ‘reaping the corruption of emptiness’ or ‘sowing to the spirit’ and in so doing having the opportunity to reap eternal life, from a philosophical point of view the ﬁlm could be seen to epitomize what Matthew Coniam calls ‘the existential picture of life in a Godless universe’ (ibid.). There is no right or wrong reading. Provided that a case can be made for utilizing ﬁlm as a resource in whatever academic discipline, it is possible that all manner of new and innovative ways of ‘doing’ theology or ‘doing’ philosophy (or for that matter ‘doing’ mathematics or ‘doing’ archaeology) can be encountered. From the point of view, however, of theology and religious studies, there is,

ultimately, something immensely signiﬁcant about a ‘secular’ medium that has the capacity to raise vital questions about the spiritual landscape and normative values of western society at the turn of the millennium. Indeed, as this book has sought to demonstrate, some of the most fertile and intellectually challenging sites of religious signiﬁcance in contemporary western culture can be located in the medium of ﬁlm. The western religious consciousness has undergone an immense restructuring in recent decades and, despite its reaching its culturally deﬁnitive form in Christianity, scholars are being faced with a new challenge, one which involves coming to terms with the fact that people’s hopes, fears, aspirations and anxieties – as traditionally expressed within Christianity through the language of sin, alienation and redemption – are increasingly being articulated through new vehicles of expression and outside traditionally demarcated boundaries of religious activity. It is quite possible for human beings to be inundated with religious stimuli without ever having attended a church service or belonged to a religious organization or community. Religion is, rather, implicit in many aspects of human life, to the extent that the ﬁlm industry is one of many contemporary secular agencies that have taken on many of the functions that we would historically associate with traditional religious institutions. It may be the case that not all Hollywood ﬁlms amount to fertile repositories

or conveyors of theological or religious signiﬁcance, but it is in the medium of ﬁlm that prominent expressions of religiosity and rich models and exemplars of Christian activity can be seen to ﬂourish. Without disputing that there is much in popular culture that is trivial and banal, ﬁlm has the capacity to stimulate serious theological reﬂection. Groundhog Day, The Apartment, Nobody’s Fool and The Crossing Guard may not contain any explicitly religious subject matter but they do act as an agency through which audiences can come to a fuller

understanding of how to address and engage with some of the fundamental issues and dilemmas that lie at the heart of human experience, and in particular with the universal human experience of sin, alienation and suffering. Accordingly, irrespective of whether a ﬁlmmaker is Christian or not, different audiences may choose to interpret a given ﬁlm through a Christian lens just as a given novel or poem will always be susceptible to a plethora of different interpretations by its readers, regardless of whether those readings are sanctioned or expressly intended by the author. Escapist, fantasy ﬁlms may be more in keeping with the interests and predilections of the majority of ﬁlmgoers, but, as the experience of American Beauty has shown, ﬁlms which turn Hollywood convention on its head are not only capable of doing well commercially, provided that they receive a viable distribution, but they also have the capacity to resonate with and provoke the religious sensibilities of audiences. So long as there are ﬁlms which enable an authentic encounter with our basic human condition to take place, then ﬁlmmakers will continue to be capable of making a serious and judicious contribution to theological and religious reﬂection. There are thus viable grounds for supposing that theological activity has the capacity to be discerned and apprehended in the so-called ‘secular’ arena, and that, in the medium of ﬁlm in particular, robust instances and manifestations of Christian activity may be found to be available to cinema audiences.