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Pushed to the Limit Films and videos by John Smith

2007-08-13T14:01:00.000-07:00

By Fred Camper

The chaotic late 60s left a mixed legacy, but on the positive side is an artistic tradition that questions "the very roots of everything," in the words of John Smith, who's been making films and videos since 1972. He challenges authority with a lighthearted spirit; his intellectually subtle works can be whimsical, even fun. Smith, who's British, was last in Chicago showing his films in 1984 -- and his works have hardly been seen here since. Now he returns with a program of nine films and videos, ranging in length from one minute to 28 minutes, at the Film Center on September 13 as well as two videos at the Onion City Film Festival, Regression on September 14 and The Kiss on September 15.

At its best, Smith's work evokes doubt not only about cultural givens but about all givens. He dismantles songs, iconic forms of architecture, and the urban landscape, investigating two themes. Rejecting structures that suggest fixed power, he celebrates ordinary things: not a tower but the discolorations of its brick wall. At a deeper level, he constructs little narratives but undermines all human structures by breaking up the sequences of images and sounds.

Smith was born in London in 1952 and lives there today. His second year in art school was seminal: his professors then had been expelled from another school where they'd conducted a sit-in in 1968. They put together a multimedia curriculum informed by "anticapitalist impulses," Smith told me. He learned early on, he says, "to question...the fundamentals of meaning -- don't trust representation, don't trust what you're told." Smith counts as key influences his teachers Guy Sherwin and Peter Gidal, and the films of Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, and Jacques Tati (for "the playfulness of his use of sound and image, explor[ing] ambiguity and alternative meanings").

Smith deconstructs a universal symbol of beauty in the single-take video The Kiss (1999, made in collaboration with Ian Bourn). A particularly beautiful lily seems to grow before our eyes, gradually changing shape; what sounds like breathing on the sound track gives it an almost human presence. Suddenly the sound and movement stop as a glass plate, invisible until now, cracks -- and it seems we've been watching, in Smith's words, "the forced development of a hothouse flower."

The effect is not only iconoclastic in the word's original sense -- image breaking -- but causes the viewer to question the degree of artifice in all "nature" today. The glass shattering converts what had appeared to be a transparent window into a barrier, reminding us of the camera lens, projection apparatus, and video screen. And because the flower and its transformation were so engaging, the shattering shatters our involvement and evokes the way in which every image we see is filtered through an individual's consciousness, a consciousness foregrounded by the video's end. Smith taped The Kiss in real time, placing a cut flower between two plates of glass that he moved slowly together with a clamp; the pressure eventually caused one plate to crack. It was originally shown looped as a gallery installation; as Smith says, there was "much more of a sense of a production line, with one flower after another being crushed."

Regression (1999) is a video version of the 1978 Smith film 7P preceded by a sequence in which Smith talks about the film. Among the problems with the original, we learn, was the fact that a slight jump at each splice tended to distract from the "subtle changes" Smith intended between shots. When he shows the video version, at first one is unsure whether it's the original -- and Smith says that part of his intent was to "tease the audience as to whether the original film did exist." And the video remake turns out to be not much different from the preceding shot of Smith talking to the camera: we just see him singing "The Twelve Days of Christmas." But he shot it singing one verse per day starting on Christmas day, then spliced in each gift in the list from the day on which it was sung, so during each verse he's differently clothed and more or less shaven. Plus Smith doesn't seem to remember the gift for the sixth day, singing "da da da" instead, and the song has 17 verses instead of 12, with more "da da da"s instead of words.

Smith acknowledges the influence of Frampton's 1970 Zorns Lemma, with its street signs organized alphabetically, but Regression pokes fun at this encyclopedic project by picking apart a popular song. Taking the different days literally and creating disjunctive cuts within the verses, Smith reveals a bit of the child's desire to question cultural assumptions: if the singer sings on the different days of Christmas, shouldn't his appearance change?

Smith's 1987 film The Black Tower is perhaps his most entertaining work. In a voice-over he talks about how he was surprised one day by a mysterious black tower he hadn't noticed before. Then he sees it again someplace else. Soon the tower is everywhere -- inside some prison grounds, next to a factory, as if pursuing him. He has a dream that he's imprisoned in it -- and when one of the towers seems to have disappeared he begins to doubt his sanity until a newspaper vendor explains that it had recently been demolished. When he realizes later that the vendor had been talking about the demolition of an apartment tower, Smith is flummoxed, saying, "It seems as though I would have to stay at home from now on." Eating only ice cream, spending his time staring "downward" out of his windows so he won't see any towers, he eventually gets carted off to the nuthouse, where he's "not surprised by the architecture" -- another tower. Months later he's come to understand that "the tower had existed only in my mind," but when he goes to the country to continue his recovery, he encounters another tower.

The tower's dark top, shaped like a small house but windowless, is a bit goofy looking but might also induce paranoia. Adding to its peculiar power is the fact that towers have long been symbols of authority, secular and religious, and that this tower is of unknown origin. But the tower is also a metaphor for human subjectivity. In a way Smith's madness is just an extreme version of what we all do, a way of exploring the borderline between personal vision and hallucination.

The Black Tower also seems concerned with urban change: the tower's appearances and disappearances recall the way that a much loved city can seem defaced by the demolition of familiar buildings and by the construction of new ones, a process over which the individual has little or no control. At one point when the protagonist is troubled by a tower's disappearance, the film cuts back and forth between two versions of the same nondescript landscape; in one version an apartment tower fills the sky and in the other it's missing. Then an image of the building being demolished by explosives makes it clear that Smith has been intercutting "before" and "after" views; later we learn that this is the tower the newspaper vendor was talking about. Here Smith draws a parallel between cinematic effects and changes to the urban landscape, reminding us that the images we see are always the result of human choices.

"Most of my works are made around places I've lived most of my life," Smith says, and in fact The Black Tower was inspired when he first saw the tower itself (yes, there's only one -- he simply filmed it from different angles). Looking out the window of a new apartment he saw the top, painted in nonreflective paint, looking like "a hole cut out of the sky -- and I thought, what the hell is that?" It turns out it was a water tower, disguised by a "house." Near the end of the film, when he finds the tower in the country, he approaches it and says he notices "signs of age and decay." We see a number of closer shots of the bricks, with areas of discoloration, and suddenly this forbidding icon takes its place in the physical world, where everything is impermanent.

The theme of fragmentation and decay is taken up by my favorite work here, the video Lost Sound (2001), made in collaboration with a friend, sound artist Graeme Miller, who suggested to Smith that someone should "make a film that's to do with the sound on audiocassette tape found in the street." Smith replied, "I wish I'd had that idea," so they collaborated on the videotaping and sound recording, though Smith did the editing.

Divided into short sections titled by location, Lost Sound shows discarded audiotapes around London -- strands clinging to a fence, trapped in the crevices of a tree trunk, intertwined with weeds. The sound track combines the voices and songs on the found audiotapes with ambient sounds recorded on location. Visually the audiotapes tell us almost nothing; they must be "decoded" by the equipment that put them on the sound track. But we come to see that the signs, cars, and pedestrians in the videotape pose similar "decoding" problems: what do they mean, where do they come from, who are they? A city that at first seems comprehensible is revealed as a layering of mysteries; we know no more about the passing humans from their images than we do about what's on the crumpled tapes, a point made through contrast when we see tape fluttering forlornly from barbed wire and hear a syrupy song ("Join in the music!").

Smith reinforces his ideas about the importance of context through simple but apt editing. The opening section of Lost Sound begins with the strands of tape in close-up, and only a few shots later do we see the urban setting. Another sequence begins with pedestrians seen from the waist down, then closer -- only their legs and feet. Next is a shot of a tiny piece of tape with pedestrians' shadows passing over it; after that we get a view of the whole street. Each section charts a different relationship between tape and urban scene, taking the viewer on a little unpredictable journey. Finally, as happens so often in Smith's work, the representational structure itself seems to break down. Titles and images are flipped left to right, undermining the readability of words, and men loading boxes onto a truck are seen in a repeated loop, foregrounding the arbitrariness of cinematic time as well as commenting on the repetitiousness of manual labor. Lost in an indecipherable maze whose rules change constantly, we see the city as a network of unpredictably shifting relationships and come to doubt even the sounds encoded in the tape fragments.

American Movies: Engram Sepals (Melodramas 1994-2000)

2007-08-13T13:56:00.000-07:00

Directed by
Lewis Klahr

By Fred Camper

Lewis Klahr begins the description of his new series, "Engram Sepals (Melodramas 1994-2000)," with a quote from the iconic Hollywood director Douglas Sirk: "The word `melodrama' has rather lost its meaning nowadays: people tend to lose the `melos' in it, the music." And though Klahr sets his animated cutouts of characters and rooms to popular songs, there's more than music connecting his work to the 50s melodramas of Sirk and Vincente Minnelli.

Addressing a common theme in melodrama -- the individual's struggle for autonomy in the face of social strictures -- Sirk and Minnelli tend to express confinement in terms of the surrounding decor, which is often overwhelming in its sensual excess. In Sirk's Written on the Wind, the opulent surroundings chosen by the oil family seem to affect the characters' actions, just as in Minnelli's Some Came Running, the symmetrical arrangement of the furniture in Gwen's bedroom seems to dictate her self-repression when she rejects Dave.

It takes the genius of a Sirk or a Minnelli to make the viewer feel that a lamp can influence a living being, but the cutout animator faces a different challenge. Klahr's characters, many appropriated from magazines and comic books, are flat still images on the same visual plane as the objects he uses. Both people and objects move with the same jerky, stop-start rhythm (to achieve the jagged animated movements he favors, Klahr places his cutouts by hand on a table or floor). To give his characters some kind of life, he creates visually seductive stories mysterious enough to engage the viewer.

Klahr's superb visual sense is very much in evidence here, where his seductive environments -- sensuous interiors, suggestive objects -- threaten to overwhelm his people, who are even more passive than the characters in 50s melodramas. Drifting through a pop-culture fever dream of hypnotic music and entranced spaces, a kind of inventory of wonders, a comic book cutout can take on the powers of a magician even as he fails to understand what's happening to him or why. Indeed, while many artists have engaged with mass culture, few have rendered its mix of seduction, imaginative stimulation, and destructive smoothness as elegantly and precisely as Klahr does here.

"Engram Sepals" (which Klahr will present Friday only at Chicago Filmmakers) consists of seven short films, three of which have been exhibited previously in Chicago. Though the parts can be shown on their own, Klahr writes that the whole "traces a trajectory of American intoxication -- both sexually and substance wise -- from the second world war into the 1970's." References in the films to drugs and alcohol and to the intoxicating effects of romance and sex underscore the characters' search for authenticity.

Klahr told me that some viewers have decoded his highly enigmatic narratives on their own, but I couldn't untangle all of the six-minute Engram Sepals (2000) even after he outlined the plot for me. Second in the series, it's about a scientist who cheats on his wife with a mistress who steals some sort of secret formula from him, as a result of which he commits suicide. The film does begin with a corpse lying on the floor and ends with an implied suicide, suggesting the rest is the scientist's memory. And there are two women and a laboratorylike building, but the only evidence I saw of a secret formula was a grid of mysterious numbered buttons -- which Klahr says are just the elevator buttons in the mistress's apartment building. And why one of the women repeatedly brushes her teeth is never clear.

No matter, because the real power of Klahr's figures is their mix of sensuality and insubstantiality, which not only allows the viewer to bring his own experiences to the action but makes Klahr's key point about pop culture. Even though this stylish, provocative film, alone among the seven, is in black and white and uses the high-art music of Morton Feldman rather than pop, it makes the stuff of mass culture thoroughly alluring. The discontinuous overall design, inspired by 40s film noir, creates the sense of an incomprehensible labyrinth, and the depiction of some figures in white line drawings on black, Klahr says, was inspired in part by magazine graphics of the 40s and 50s, "where the whites against blacks are so luminous that they have a kind of eternity in them." The figures' insubstantiality suggests both universality and diminution: these are quite a bit less than flesh-and-blood humans. No character seems in control, and the viewer's difficulty in threading his way through the narrative underscores the characters' loss of autonomy.

Indeed, throughout the series the characters hover between existence as individuals and as gutless media creations. Pony Glass (1997) shows Jimmy Olsen with three Superman figures tattooed on his body -- the individual as repository for received imagery. Suddenly one of the tattoos is covered by a bra Jimmy's wearing, suggesting that the film's environment has feminized him. But this isn't altogether a bad thing: Jimmy's bra is seductive visually, showing the intoxicating power not of alcohol, drugs, love, or sex but of imagery alone.

Born in New York City in 1956, Klahr was raised in Great Neck, an upper-middle-class suburb on Long Island, and "grew up on pop culture," he says. His first major creative effort, at about age ten, was a comic book. That interest may have had a significant effect. Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics points out that, unlike cinema, comics of necessity contain significant gaps between panels, forcing the artist to choose what to omit. Likewise Klahr's cutout animation doesn't even approach the illusion of continuous movement or the realistic spaces of a live-action movie:we never get a whole view of the elevator that includes those mysterious buttons. Instead Klahr offers a collagelike ensemble of objects that the viewer connects, almost as if responding to a surrealist painting.

The Hollywood movies Klahr watched on television were another key influence: the intimacy of the home setting, he says, has affected his films -- "the idea of private address." But his biggest influence was Joseph Cornell, whose work he discovered at the 1980 Museum of Modern Art retrospective; Klahr attended five times, overwhelmed by "the emotion, the color, and by everyday things leading to a sense of eternity." Amore recent influence is the technical skill, among other things, of his wife, filmmaker-theater artist Janie Geiser.

One can see how Cornell is a more important influence for Klahr than most other cutout animators. Yet there are crucial differences between Klahr's films and Cornell's boxes and collages. Cornell's enjambment of jarringly disparate forms, such as a wine glass and a map of the solar system, suggests the mind's limitlessness. And Klahr says he was deeply moved by a Cornell box with a birdcage reference when he realized that "the bird had escaped."

There are some Cornell-like astronomy references in the series's first film, Altair (1994) -- but Klahr's characters never escape. The mundane fragment of a liquor bottle floating through Altair is quite unlike Cornell, who tended to avoid mass-manufactured objects. Indeed, Klahr's Muzak-like worlds of prefab interiors and slow, repetitive songs are made up of objects and surfaces at once seductive and alienating, elevating and enervating. Klahr gets the peculiar power of American mass culture exactly right: sensually engaging, it destroys autonomy; brimming with implied gratification, it both allures and sickens.

Considering their surroundings, it's not surprising that Klahr's characters seem so at sea. Elsa Kirk (1999) -- inspired by some 1963 contact sheets of a model apparently named Elsa Kirk -- repeatedly shows Kirk in a curtained doorway as objects and images float by. Though Klahr hints at a crime story -- he includes an empty safe, for example -- the focus is on Kirk standing as if on a theater stage, barely able to move on her own, almost a victim of the images drifting around her. Characters throughout the series are often subjected to the phallic aggressiveness of objects, buildings, and interiors. The richly sensual colors of the intoxicating environments in Pony Glass, Downs Are Feminine (1994), and A Failed Cardigan Maneuver (1999) magnify this effect. In the face of Klahr's collaged onslaught, his characters become curiously passive, even sexually vulnerable -- males are penetrated by other males, for example.

The series is also haunted by references to time: clocks and clock hands occur throughout, and a calendar appears in Elsa Kirk. These combine with the retro objects and decors of various decades, the frozen look of the cutout figures, the stop-start movements, and the halting, ambiguous narratives to suggest the ambivalence inherent in nostalgia: our wish to enter the past is coupled with an awareness of the impossibility of doing so.

One aspect of melodrama that Klahr takes even further than Minnelli or Sirk is the way characters' fates seem determined by the sound track. This is not at all akin to a music video, which subordinates the images to the music; Klahr's characters seem to have some will, but their potential for self-determination is undermined by the way they seem forced to act out the songs. Frank Sinatra's two numbers about broken affairs in A Failed Cardigan Maneuver are matched by fragmented images -- a lone cocktail shaker, an inventory of magazine pictures of women -- that separate characters from one another and from objects, and the many figures in Govinda (1999) seem automatons slowed by the droning sound of the opening song, produced by George Harrison.

This effect is especially striking because Govinda is not only the longest work in the series (at 23 minutes), it's also the only live-action film. Using rephotographed Super-8 movies as well as exploitation and porn videos he filmed directly off the tube, Klahr constructs what he calls "a coming-of-age story for a countercultural person, but not one single character," contrasting this film with those in the series set before the mid-60s. Klahr's 1966 (1984) was filled with longing for that paradigmatic countercultural year, which he was too young to have experienced as an adult. And Govinda, he says, is in part about whether someone who's stepped way outside social norms can ever fully rejoin the mainstream. Early portions of Govinda depict countercultural youth, including 60s or 70s footage of shirtless kids in an alternative high school apparently engaged in drug-induced carousing. The middle section is made up of exploitation films, and the final one shows the 1979 wedding of Klahr's hippieish older brother (who had in fact shocked the family by returning from college with long hair in 1966).

Klahr's choice of material -- porn distanced by being filmed off a TV screen and the weirdly alienated wedding footage, which includes sections freighted with black and purple due to a lab mistake -- creates an almost palpable feeling of loss. None of the characters in Govinda, or indeed any of the films, is free in the way Cornell's imagined bird is. Seeming to bounce around to the stop-start rhythms of Klahr's clocks, his characters resemble spastic marionettes playing out a devolution that acknowledges, as does much of Klahr's work, that the 70s represent an incredible diminution of the aspirations of the 60s. But many different periods of American culture are reflected in his characters' failed quests, their simultaneous entrapment and continued hope, looking for a revelation that never quite comes.

THE TROUBLE WITH VIDEO

2007-08-13T13:55:00.000-07:00

By Fred Camper

1.

Several years ago, in a lecture, Peter Kubelka advocated that each media-form should utilize its own unique properties, rather than try to imitate other media. In film, one works with its rapid succession of individual, still frames: "Cinema is not movement." Kubelka went on to add that he does not like the idea that diverse media can be seen as expressing themselves similarly, or that works can translate from one medium to another, "so that literature translates into theater, theater translates into cinema, cinema translates into video, and video translates into hamburgers."

In early 1985, "The NYC Experimental Video and Film Festival" advertised itself as "...an organization which seeks to unify video and film art despite establishment taboos.... The festival is in a video format; films must be transferred."

2.

In recent years, there has been frequent animosity between the independent film and video communities. Video artists sometimes feel that filmmakers have no respect for them or their medium; filmmakers are often afraid that video will completely take over, and make it impossible to work in their chosen medium. Certainly it has been a shock for film artists who were working on the technological forefront less than a decade ago, in a medium in which new cameras, film stocks, and processes were constantly being introduced, to now come to see cinema as the nineteenth-century, mechanical and chemical process that it is.

My purpose here is not to attack video, a medium with its own unique properties and potentials, but rather, to address filmmakers and the film community on attitudes such as that of "The NYC Experimental Video and Film Festival," and on the more general question of whether a film can survive the transfer to tape, and whether film should be even viewed on video at all. With filmmakers increasingly tempted by the exhibition possibilities of video distribution and cable TV, some reflections on the differences between the two media, and particularly between film projection and the standard TV monitor that now exists, are in order.

The Box. A film image is generally projected on a screen, and viewed in darkness. This image exists in a kind of virtual space. The distance between the viewer and the screen in a darkened room has none of the tangible measurability of distances in a normally-lit living room. The image hovers before one almost as if an image in the imagination. A TV image emanates from a box, which is itself a piece of furniture which occupies a particular place in the interior architecture of a room. Its inevitable materiality and objectness is in stark contrast to the film image's utter ethereality. (It is interesting to note how in contemporary interior decorating schemes the television has come to replace the fireplace as the focal point of a "family room.") Further, TVs are often viewed with some ambient light, which further places the image in a definite setting. Even when viewed in darkness, the curved rather than rectangular image borders and the convex glass of the screen tend to project the image out into and all about the room, whereas the flat rectangle of the film image can fill a room only via its reflected light, so that the internal structure of the image, if such is at all complex, remains entirely on the screen. To make an "environmental" film, one in which the imagery does its work partly in the way in which the film light illuminates the entire room, filmmakers generally must choose images without much internal structure, such as the pure blacks and whites of Tony Conrad's The Flicker and Peter Kubelka's Arnulf Rainer, or the single line of Anthony McCall's Line Describing a Cone. The architecture and placement of a TV set, by contrast, encourage one to see the image as blending into, and even occupying, the room. Its small size is surely a factor here too: rapid movements tend to bleed off the edges into the surrounding space. I am convinced that part of the illusionistic power of commercial TV results from the way in which the imagery tends to seize the surround.

The Image. It is well-known that a standard video image lacks the sharpness and definition of even 8mm film. There are other, and in my view even more important, differences as well. In video, the range of darks and lights, the differences between the blackest black possible and the whitest white, is far narrower than in film. As a consequence, there are fewer intermediate shadings possible. Video colors lack the fullness and saturation of pure film colors; they are less intense. I am not speaking so much of the measurable purity of the light as of the fact that video green seems somehow less different from video red than a film green is from a film red. The video image is thus less differentiated in its internal structure than the film image. Similarly, far less of an illusion of depth is possible on video than in film. One has only to see the extreme deep-focus wide angle compositions of an Orson Welles film on TV to appreciate all these differences. In a Welles image, one senses the physical solidity of each object, but one also feels that the space between objects has the same palpable sensuality. A space is created, all pieces of which are in measurable and articulate relationships with each other. In video, this sense of physical space, of a felt distance between foreground and background, is largely lost. It is as if cinema needs its spatial isolation from its surround to permit its imagery to contain articulate distinctions within, while TV's more integrated relation with its surround muddies its images' internal structure. Indeed, it is no accident that a major use of video by artists has been in sculptural and performance installation pieces.

The Light. The most serious difference between the two media is the differences between the two kinds of light. Cinema light is absolute: it is a succession, rapidly-projected, of still images. On a modern projector, one might see each frame projected three or more times, for 1/144th of a second each, with three 1/144th-of-a-second intervals of darkness following. The key word here is absolute. There is no movement in cinema; that illusion is produced in the brain. With film one has a series of utterly separate, complete-in-themselves, elements, the frames, to work with. In video, there is also a succession of separate images, but these are not presented with the independence of the on-and-off flashes of film. Rather, the scanning mechanism gradually traces an image over the screen; the image then disappears and is replaced by another. As a result "frames" are presented not instantaneously but over time. The intervening darkness may seem like less of a break between images, because the images themselves become visible on the screen more gradually than the instantaneous apparition of the cinema image. While this process occurs far too quickly for the eye to differentiate it, it produces a very different quality of light from cinema's, just as, though one cannot see the individual 1/144th-of-a-second or less intervals of darkness in film projection, one can readily see the difference between movie-projector light and the uninterrupted beam of a slide projector. An important result of this difference is that the transition between adjacent frames is less absolute than in film; thus the differences between separate frames, and the strong contrasts between frames at the point of a cut, are elided. Video light is itself continually alive, continually vibrating; each image is constantly, at every moment, changing; new image areas are burned into the screen as the old image decays; there is nothing as stable as a single film grain on the video screen. Indeed, this sense of constant movement places video firmly in the electronic age, as a medium appropriate to a world populated with myriad electronic devices containing vast stores of information in the form of tiny electrical charges, and in which the constant movement of electrons has become the major transmitter of knowledge. Cinema, by contrast, is like a series of images carved in stone. Stan Brakhage has called video light "hypnotic," an insight I prefer to use descriptively rather than pejoratively. The light is hypnotic, in the way its continual tiny changes constantly lure one's attention, one's eye. One might argue that the flicker of cinema is "hypnotic" compared to the unchanging image of a painting or sculpture, and perhaps we are only speaking of degrees here: but film light also does leave the viewer a certain freedom. The tiny intervals of darkness, and the fixed and unchanging nature of each projected frame, may produce powerful illusions but ultimately leave the mind with those tiny spaces, even if only 1/144th of a second long, that it needs to make its own decisions about what it sees. Video, by contrast, is surely the most persuasive medium ever devised, as its commercial and political uses have made apparent, and I believe the reasons for this are to be found in the quality of its light, and in the way in which the light and imagery, emanating from the furniture-box, fill the room with their presence.

Movement. Movement, either of the camera or of the objects depicted therein, is rendered very differently by film and video. In film, the camera's movement through space can have a radical, even vertiginous effect on the viewer. The absoluteness of film representation gives the viewer a sense of seeking a space with fixed, defined coordinates; motion, then, alters the very dimensions of the perceived world. In video, since the light itself is constantly moving, any motion of the subject-matter is merely additional; a quantitative rather than qualitative change, and is not at all like the change from stasis to movement one gets in film, for in video there is no true stasis. This change, this difference, between movement and stillness in film is only one of the many contrasts which form the very basis of film art and which video radically effaces.

The Frame. Perhaps the most fundamental contrast within cinema is that between the flat rectangle of each projected frame and the implied larger world of which that frame is but a part. It is at the borders of the image that the filmmaker makes much of his statement, because there it is revealed what he has selected, and what he has excluded, from the implied larger setting that spread out before his camera's eye. In the darkness of projection these borders stand for absolute differences: for that opposition on which the art of film lives or dies, the distinction between the undifferentiated and unanalyzed chaos of reality as a whole and the filmmaker's selective act of framing. Video reduces the effect of the frame's borders from cinema's firm and absolute edge to that of an indistinct blur, because of the natures of "the box," of its presence in the room, of the light, and of the monitor screen, whose curved shape tends to efface the image's boundary-line. (Of course, on a simpler level the TV screen does not even reproduce all of the film image; much is eliminated by the curved shape. Modern camera viewfinders are inscribed with inner frames in the shape of a TV screen called "TV safe action areas," presumably indicating that the aesthetic of the framing of at least commercial film has also been affected by video.) It is no accident, but rather a testament to the nature of video and video light, that TV is often viewed in a lit room, while film almost never is, even though film projection is fully bright enough to allow this.

3.

If one accepts my description of the differences between film and video it should be immediately apparent that those qualities most important to cinema will simply not translate to video. Cinema, when it functions as art, depends upon the precise articulations made between different frames, and between different areas of light within the frame. Video, by effacing the differences upon which cinema depends, renders the rich complexity of a film masterwork as an inarticulate haze. A film realizes itself in the gaps between frames, and in the contrasts between light and dark, one color and another, foreground and background, movement and stillness, that it mobilizes towards its expressive ends. In video, those gaps are blurred and bridged, producing an ever-vibrating, ever-alive continuum.

The matters discussed herein are not narrow formal issues that should be of concern only to filmmakers and a narrow group of aesthetes. I have tried to show that the form of the medium a communication is presented in is a crucial part of that communication, and a part of its statement as well. Any work makes its statement not merely by its subject matter or "message" but by the relationship it defines, via its form, between itself and its recipient. If Leni Riefenstahl had made Triumph of the Will about a 1936 Democratic Party rally in the U.S. that was supporting the reelection of Roosevelt, it would still be a fascist film, and an evil one as well. One person can declare to another "I love you" by writing a letter, by sending flowers, by telephoning, by visiting, through a series of carefully selected gifts, by deep attentions to the loved one, or by a crude and uninvited seduction attempt, and the "medium" chosen for this communication helps to define the very meaning that the word "love" has in the implicit or explicit underlying "sentence." All of the differences described above are not merely technical issues, but epistemological and ethical ones as well.

The aesthetic and moral implications of the mechanism of cinema have been explored by several generations of filmmakers and film theoreticians, in a rich series of films and writings stretching from Eisenstein to Epstein, Dreyer to Deren, Bresson to Brakhage, Bazin to Baudry. Video is a comparatively new form. While my description of it may be taken negatively by some, I do not wish to condemn a medium that neither I, nor (I suspect) most of us fully understand. Certainly there is work by video artists that is more than promising in its attempts to utilize video's own properties. But it needs to be said that just as many filmmakers mistakenly transfer their work to video, so a lot of video art flounders by trying to imitate film effects in ways that video cannot.

Filmmakers need to take the strongest possible stance in defense of their medium. It is an appalling sign of the utter corruption and anti-art stance present in the academic establishment that many film classes are now taught with the showing of films on video. Film teachers must insist on adequate budgets for film rental and projection. Filmmakers must not dare to hope that some of one's film's qualities will survive the transfer to video. Film viewers must remember to view films, not TV. With schools increasingly exhibiting films on TV, and with new video exhibition possibilities opening up as opposed to a stagnation or even diminution of the number of venues showing independent film, and with supposedly serious "film buffs" increasingly viewing all types of films on cable TV and VCRs, it is all the more urgent to remain true to one's medium. Independent filmmakers are the only group that has pursued the medium's highest possibilities without compromise; to surrender now on this most fundamental of issues would be to literally give up the art.

Naming, and Defining, Avant-Garde or Experimental Film

2007-08-13T13:51:00.000-07:00

By Fred Camper

About naming, no one has ever come up with a satisfying name for the body of work that includes Ballet mécanique, Un Chien Andalou, Meshes of the Afternoon, Dog Star Man, The Chelsea Girls, Quick Billy, Serene Velocity, Zorns Lemma, and Journeys from Berlin/1971, to say nothing of all sorts of more recent work by filmmakers such as Su Friedrich, Janie Geiser, Louis Klahr, Brian Frye, and others. I'd like to think the lack of a stable name is a sign of the movement's health. I mean, to take off on Gertrude Stein's famous remark to the effect that a museum can't also be "modern," if you know exactly what avant-garde film is and how to name it, it probably isn't very "avant-garde," right?

When the North American branch of the movement first burst onto public consciousness in the mid-1960s, and naming became a real issue, various filmmakers expressed discontent with the names in use; some had expressed such discontent even earlier. Stan Brakhage said the appellation "avant-garde" was too European. Peter Kubelka said of "experimental" something like, "I made many experiments in the process of making this film. I left them all in my editing room. What you've seen is not an experiment, but a completed work. (Another problem with "experimental": at the MIT Film Society, where I showed "experimental" films from 1965-71, a couple MIT students once showed up thinking they were going to see films of science experiments! But then, we also had to give a refund to two nursing students who were not expecting an auteurist classic when they bought tickets for a program listed as "Bringing Up Baby — Andrew Sarris will speak.") "Underground" was critiqued from various angles, such as also having inappropriate European echoes, and I think Brakhage may have mentioned the fact that he lived 9,000 feet above sea level in a humorous rebuke to the claim that he was an "underground" filmmaker. "Independent" quickly ran into the problem that, in the Hollywood nomenclature of the time, Disney was an "independent" studio, and now too it tends to mean narrative features not produced by a major studio but with budgets of many millions. "New American Cinema" had some currency for a while, but it also included narrative features, and today it can also mean Hollywood. The then-editor of Canyon Cinema News, Emory Menefee, proposed "undependent," in the sense of not being dependent on anything, but that never made it into general use either. Presently I try to use "avant-garde," "experimental," and "a-g" all in the same piece of writing, as a way of naming a category of films while also indicating that naming is still problem.

So then, what characteristics might be said to be held in common among the films I've listed above and other similar works? Obviously there is no hard-and-fast algorithm for deciding what is or is not an avant-garde or experimental film, and there can be lots of "is it or isn't it" debates at the margins. But I think no sensible person would deny the appellation to Christopher Maclaine's The End or Bruce Baillie's Quixote, nor try to apply it to Gone With the Wind or E.T.

To decide the obvious cases, and help clarify what characteristics are shared in such work, I would instead offer a list of qualities, a six-part "test," as it were. Many avant-garde films will fail one or two of these, but I think that a film that most on this list would agree is "avant-garde" or "experimental" will pass most of them.

1. It is created by one person, or occasionally a small group collectively, working on a minuscule budget most often provided out of the filmmaker's own pocket or through small grants, and is made out of personal passion, and in the belief that public success and profit is very unlikely. "Minuscule budget" means something very different from what the phrase might mean in theatrical narrative filmmaking; here it refers to a figure in the hundreds, or thousands, or in rare cases tens of thousands of dollars.

2. It eschews the production-line model by which the various functions of filmmaker are divided among different individuals and groups: the filmmaker is the producer, director, scriptwriter, director of photography, cameraperson, editor, sound recordist, and sound editor, or performs at least half of those functions.

3. It does not try offer a linear story that unfolds in the theatrical space of mainstream narrative. [The hypertrophic counter-example that proves the rule here is Hollis Frampton's Poetic Justice, which does tell a "linear story" — but the viewer receives that story by reading hand-printed script pages that are piled one after another on a table, not by seeing the script's story enacted on screen.]

4. It makes conscious use of the materials of cinema in a way that calls attention to the medium, and does not do so in scenes bracketed by others in a more realistic mode that would isolate the "experimental" scenes as dream or fantasy sequences. [Examples: scratching or painting directly on the film strip; cutting rapidly and unpredictably enough that the editing calls attention to itself; the use of out of focus and "under" or "over" exposure; extremely rapid camera movements that blur the image; distorting lenses; extreme tilts of the camera; placing objects in front of the lens to alter the image; time lapse photography; collaging objects directly onto the film strip; the use of other abstracting devices such as superimpositions or optical effects; printed titles that offer a commentary that's different from simply providing information or advancing the narrative; asynchronous sound; the cutting together of spatially disjunct images in a way that does not serve an obvious narrative or easily reducible symbolic purpose. I can think of at least one filmmaker — Brakhage — who has done all of these.]

5. It has an oppositional relationship to both the stylistic characteristics of mass media and the value systems of mainstream culture. [Thus in a found footage film using footage from instructional films, the original will be reedited to create some form of critique of the style and meaning of the originals.]

6. It doesn't offer a clear, univalent "message." More than mainstream films, it is fraught with conscious ambiguities, encourages multiple interpretations, and marshals paradoxical and contradictory techniques and subject-matter to create a work that requires the active participation of the viewer.

Without ranging through the whole history of the mode, many landmark films seem to me to meet all of the criteria above, from Meshes of the Afternoon to Fireworks to Twice a Man to Mothlight to Wavelength to La Raison Avant La Passion (Reason Over Passion). I don't propose any mechanical method whereby meeting, say, five of the six automatically qualifies a film, but rather suggest that considering these characteristics might be useful in thinking about this body of work.

Cinema and Theology: The Case of Heaven Over the Marshes

2007-08-13T13:44:00.000-07:00

by Andry Bazin

(Translated and edited by Bert Cardullo)

Abstract

[1] Andr� Bazin�s impact, as theorist and critic, is widely considered to be greater than that of any single director, actor, or producer, despite his early death (at only 40) of leukemia in 1958. He is credited with almost single-handedly establishing the study of film as an accepted intellectual pursuit, as well as with being the spiritual father of the French New Wave. In 1951 Bazin co-founded and became editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cin�ma, the single most influential critical periodical in the history of the cinema. Bazin can also be considered the principal instigator of the equally influential auteur theory: the idea that, since film is an art form, the director of a movie must be perceived as the chief creator of its unique cinematic style. In this review-essay, Bazin reveals that he was also the most religious of film critics and theorists. He is fundamentally holistic in his Catholicism, however, not remotely doctrinal. Spiritual sensitivity and its enablement through cinema are central to Bazin�s view of film as obligated to God, to honor God�s universe by rendering its reality and, by means of its reality, its mystery. Thus Bazin believes that Augusto Genina�s Heaven over the Marshes (1949) is a good Catholic film Precisely because it rejects religious ornament and the supernatural element of traditional hagiographies, in favor of creating a phenomenology of sainthood. Genina, that is, looks at sainthood from the outside, as the ambiguous yet tangible manifestation of a spiritual reality that is absolutely impossible to prove. Hence Heaven over the Marshes confers sainthood on the murdered Maria Goretti not a priori, like most cinematic hagiographies, but only after the fact.

Article

[2] The history of religious themes on the screen sufficiently reveals the temptations one must resist in order to meet simultaneously the requirements of cinematic art and of truly religious experience. Everything that is exterior, ornamental, liturgical, sacramental, hagiographic, and miraculous in the everyday observance, doctrine, and practice of Catholicism does indeed show specific affinities with the cinema considered as a formidable iconography. But these affinities, which have made for the success of countless films, are also the source of the religious insignificance of most of them. Almost everything that is good in this domain was created not by the exploitation of these patent affinities, but rather by working against them: by the psychological and moral deepening of the religious factor as well as by the renunciation of the physical representation of the supernatural and of grace.1 As for �mysteries,� the cinema has been able to evoke only those of Paris and New York. We�re still waiting for it to deal with those of the Middle Ages. To make a long story short, it seems that, although the austereness of the Protestant sensibility is not indispensable to the making of a good Catholic film, it can nevertheless be a real advantage.

[3] All the more so, given the fact that the cinema has always been interested in God. The Gospel and The Acts of the Apostles were the first best-sellers on the screen, and the Passions of Christ were hits in France as well as America.2 At the same time in Italy, the Rome of the first Christians provided filmmakers with subjects that required gigantic crowd scenes, which were later seized upon by Hollywood and are still present today in films like Fabiola (1948; dir. Alessandro Blasetti) and Quo Vadis? (1951; dir. Mervyn LeRoy).3 This immense catechism-in-pictures was concerned above all with the most spectacular aspects of the history of Christianity. These films were simply amplified variations on the Stations of the Cross or on the Mus�e Gr�vin.4

[4] There is also a second category of religious movie, built upon a principle that perhaps represents an advance on Stations-of-the-Cross films. I�m talking here about the priest�s or nun�s story. I have to check this point, but I think we owe the international vulgarization of this type of film to America. The Catholic minority in Hollywood, whose influence is great, found in the cinema a remarkable tool for propaganda. The myth of the �cool� priest who loves sports and jazz easily overshadows the austere reality of the Protestant pastor with a large family. Bing Crosby in a cassock turned out to be irresistible (in Going My Way [1944; dir. Leo McCarey] and The Bells of St. Mary�s {1945; dir. Leo McCarey]). I myself preferred Spencer Tracy in Boys� Town (1938; dir. Norman Taurog) and the ex-gangster priest (Pat O�Brien) in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938; dir. Michael Curtiz): Hollywood decadence! The same trend has not taken hold in France, where we have suppressed the typically Gallic tradition of the ribald monk and the red-nosed priest. Thank God, our cinema has remained relatively free of this new trend, and even if we have had to put up with My Priest Among the Rich (1952; dir. Henri Diamant-Gerger) and The Scandals of Clochemerle (1947; dir. Pierre Chenal), at least we have done so with an embarrassed smile.

[5] The hagiographies make up the third category of religious movie. As the cinema is in itself already a kind of miracle, it was absolutely appropriate to show a rain of roses pouring down ot springs gushing out of arid sands. Several films were made about Saint Th�r�se of Lisieux (a.k.a. Saint Th�r�se of the Child Jesus) and Bernadette of Soubirous5 ; the latest of these films, an American one (The Song of Bernadette), is only a few years old. Here the cinema has exploited above all the popular belief in miracles. This vein is not exhausted, and our children will probably one day see a Golgotha (1935; dir. Julien Duvivier) in 3-D after a color Quo Vadis?. We must note, however, that the hagiography has evolved considerably. Monsieur Vincent (1947; dir. Maruice Cloche) is a saint�s picture without miracles,6 and Rossellini seems not to have emphasized too much the stigmata and the enchantment of the birds in his Flowers of St. Francis (1950).

[6] Heaven Over the Marshes (1949; dir. Augusto Genina), for its part, is about the circumstances that led to the canonization (soon after the completion of this film) of little Maria Goretti, who was murdered at the age of fourteen by the boy whose sexual advances she had resisted. These factors made me fear the worst. Hagiography is already a dangerous exercise in itself, but, granted, there are some saints made to appear on stained-glass windows and others who seem destined for the painted plaster of Saint-Sulpice,7 whatever their standing in paradise might be. And the case of Maria Goretti doesn�t seem to be a priori any more promising than that of Saint Th�r�se of Lisieux. Less even, for her biography is devoid of extraordinary events; hers is the life of a daughter of a poor family of farmhands in the Pontine marshes near Rome at the turn of the century. No visions, no voices, no signs from heaven: her regular attendance at catechism and the fervor of her first Holy Communion are merely the commonplace signals of a rather commonplace piety. Of course, there is her �martyrdom,� but we have to wait until the last fifteen minutes of the film before it occurs, before �something finally happens.�

[7] And even this martyrdom: what is it when you take a close look and judge the psychological motives behind it? A banal sex crime, a trivial news item devoid of dramatic originality: �Young Peasant Stabs Unwilling Girl to Death,� or, �Murdered by a Farmhand Whose Advances She Had Rejected!� And why? There is not a single aspect of the crime that doesn�t have a natural explanation. The resistance of the girl is perhaps nothing but an exaggerated physiological response to the violation of her sense of decency, the reflex action of a frightened little animal. It�s true that she invokes divine will and the threat of hellfire to resist Alessandro. However, it is not necessary to have recourse to the subtleties of psychoanalysis to understand how the imperatives of catechism and the mysticism of first Holy Communion could kindle the imagination of a frightened adolescent. Even if we take for granted that Maria�s Christian upbringing can�t be made to substitute for her real, unconscious motives in determining behavior, that behavior still isn�t convincing, for we sense that she does indeed love Alessandro. So why all this resistance, which can only have tragic consequences? Either it is a psychological reaction that is stronger than the heart�s desire, or it really is the obedience to a moral precept; but isn�t this taking morality to an absurd extreme, since it leads to the downfall of two beings who love each other? Moreover, before she dies, Maria asks Alessandro to forgive her for all the trouble she has caused him, i.e., for driving him to kill her.

[8] It should not be surprising, therefore, that, at least in France, this saint�s life has disappointed the Christians even more than it has the non-believers. The former don�t find in it the requisite religious apologetics and the latter don�t find in it the necessary moral apologetics. All that we have here is the senseless crushing of a poor child�s life�there are no unusual, mitigating circumstances. Maria Goretti is neither Saint Vincent de Paul, not Saint Teresa of Avila, nor even Bernadette Soubirous.8 But it is to Genina�s credit that he made a hagiography that doesn�t prove anything, above all not the sainthood of the saint. Herein lies not only the film�s artistic distinction but also its religious one. Heaven Over the Marshes is a rarity: a good Catholic film.

[9] What was Genina�s starting point? It was not simply to reject all the ornament that comes with the subject matter�the religious symbolism and, it goes without saying, the supernatural element of traditional hagiographies (a film such as Monsieur Vincent also avoids these stumbling blocks). He set out to achieve much more than this: his goal was to create a phenomenology of sainthood. Genina�s mise en sc�ne is a systematic refusal not only to treat sainthood as anything but a fact, an event occurring in the world, but also to consider it from any point of view other than the external one. He looks at sainthood from the outside, as the ambiguous manifestation of a spiritual reality that is absolutely impossible to prove. The apologetic nature of most hagiographies supposes, by contrast, that sainthood is conferred a priori. Whether it be Saint Th�r�se of Lisieux or Saint Vincent de Paul, we are told the life of a saint. Yet, good logic dictates, as does good theology, that a saint becomes a saint only after the fact: when he is canonized; during his lifetime, he is simply Monsieur Vincent. It is only by the authoritative judgment of the Holy See that his biography becomes a hagiography. The question raised in film as in theology is the retroactiveness of eternal salvation, since, obviously, a saint does not exist as a saint in the present: he is simply a being who becomes one and who, moreover, risks eternal damnation until his death. Genina�s bias in favor of realism made him go as far as to prohibit in any of his images the supposition of his protagonist�s �sainthood,� so afraid was he of betraying the spirit of his endeavor. She is not, and she must not be, a saint whose martyrdom we witness, but rather the little peasant girl Maria Goretti, whose life we see her live. The camera lens is not the eye of God, and microphones could not have recorded the voices heard by Joan of Arc.

[10] This is why Heaven Over the Marshes will be disconcerting to viewers who are used to an apologetics that confuses rhetoric with art and sentiment with grace. In a way, Genina plays devil�s advocate by playing servant to the only filmic reality possible. But just as canonization hearings are won against the public prosecutor Satan, Maria Goretti�s sainthood is served in the only valid manner possible by a film that expressly sets out not to demonstrate it. In short, Genina tells us: �This is Maria Goretti, watch her live and die. On the other hand, you know she is a saint. Let those who have eyes to see, read by transparence the evidence of grace in her life, just as you must do at every moment in the events of your own lives.� The signs that God sends to his people are not always supernatural. A serpent in a bush is not the devil, but the devil is till there as well as everywhere else.

[11] Italian film not only has good directors like Genina; it also has excellent cinematographers, among whom Aldo Tonti (a.k.a. G. R. Aldo) is probably one of the best in the world. To be sure, a cinematographer�s art may lie in the direction of self-effacement, and Tonti has given us evidence of this. But it seems that in the last few years, more and more plastic composition has become the rule. This has become a way of integrating into realism a vivid and ornate theatricality, which is no less characteristic not only of Italian film but also of Italian artistic sensibility in general. One could even argue that this synthesis is more radically new than the neorealism of Bicycle Thieves (1948), which has always been present, as we know, in Italian film, even if not to so great an extent. (Opposed to it was the public�s more pronounced taste for spectacles with magnificent sets and mammoth crowds.)

[12] In La Terra Trema (1948), for instance, one sees very well how Luchino Visconti, whose wonderful Ossessione (1942) had initiated the rebirth of Italian realistic cinema, strives to create a necessarily grand synthesis between the most rigorous verisimilitude, on the one hand, and the most plastic composition, on the other�a plasticity that perforce completely transforms the verism. Whereas the taste for spectacular grandeur expressed itself in the past through the fame of the star, the magnitude of the set, or the number of wild animals deployed, it has come today to be totally subordinate to the most modest, down-to-earth subject matter. Visconti�s fishermen are real fishermen, but they have the bearing of tragic princes or operatic leads, and the cinematography confers on their rags the aristocratic dignity of Renaissance brocade.

[13] Using the same cinematographer as Visconti did in La Terra Trema - the amazing Aldo, whom the French studios have let get away9 - Genina has been no less concerned to play the game of realism in Heaven Over the Marshes. His peasants are as authentic as were Georges Rouquier�s in Farrebique (1947). Whereas three quarters of Italian films, even those made in studios with professional actors, are post-synchronized, Genina recorded the sound on the spot, and his peasant really say � what they say. When one considers the enormous difficulty of getting nonprofessional actors to speak as naturally as they behave (see, for example, Farrebique), one can appreciate the additional amount of work that Genina imposed on himself in order to obey the dictates of realism, right down to the least discernible details. If this were a minor work, one could regard these details as superfluous. But they are, in fact, part of a coherent aesthetic whole whose essential elements are laid down in the initial script.

[14] To repeat and sum up, Heaven Over the Marshes is the prototype of the accursed film that is likely to upset both Christians and non-believers alike. In it, sainthood isn�t signified by anything extraordinary, either on the physical or the psychological level. Divine grace doesn�t manifest itself in nature as the product of a tangible causality; at most, it reveals itself through some ambiguous signs that can all be explained in quite natural terms. Psychoanalysis or even her simple decency, heightened by a na�ve piety, could very well account for Maria Goretti�s martyrdom. From this point of view, I would consider Heaven Over the Marshes the first theological film to assert�through the very nature of its characters, story, and events�the total transcendence of grace, which occurs at the expense of apologetics, of Christian propaganda that likes to suppose that sainthood is conferred a priori on saintly lives. Hence the embarrassed reaction in Catholic circles to this otherwise very Catholic film.

Notes

(All notes have been provided by the translator/editor, unless otherwise noted.)

This review/essay was first published in French in Cahiers du Cin�ma, no. 2 (May 1951), then reprinted in Vol. 4 (�Une Esth�tique de la r�alit�: le n�or�alisme�) of Bazin�s four-volume Qu�est-ce que le cin�ma? (Paris: �ditions du Cerf: 1958-1962), pp. 60-64. Published here for the first time with the permission of Madame Janine Bazin.

1.Bazin�s note: Except, of course, for films whose supernatural quality is both pervasive and authentically religious, like The Green Pastures (1936; dir. William Keighley and Marc Connelly) and The Road to Heaven (1942; dir. Alf Sj�berg).

2. For example, in America: The Passion Play (1898; Edison Studios), Ben Hur (1907; dir. Sidney Olcott), The Life of Moses (1909; dir. J. Stuart Blackton), and From the Manger to the Cross (1912; dir. Sidney Olcott). In France: Quo Vadis? (1901; dir. Ferdinand Zecca), La Passion (1903; dir. Ferdinand Zecca and Lucien Nouguet), La Vie du Christ (1906; dir. Alice Guy-Blach�), and Mater Delorosa (1910; dir. Louis Feuillade).

3. For example, in Italy: Quo Vadis? (1913; dir. Enrico Guazzoni) and Fabiola (1917; dir. Enrico Guazzoni). In Hollywood: The Ten Commandments (1923; dir. Cecil B. DeMille), Ben Hur (1926; dir. Fred Niblo), King of Kings (1927, dir. Cecil B. DeMille), and The Sign of the Cross (1932; dir. Cecil B. DeMille). In America subsequent to the publication of Bazin�s essay: Ben Hur (1959; fir. William Wyler), King of Kings (1961; dir. Nicholas Ray), The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965; dir. George Stevens), and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988; dir. Martin Scorsese).

4.Famous museum of wax figures in Paris�the Parisian equivalent of the waxworks exhibitions of Madame Tussaud (1760-1850) in London.

5. Saint Th�r�se of Lisieux was a French Carmelite nun (1873-1897), born Th�r�se Martin, whose saint�s day is October 3rd; she was canonized in 1925. Films: Therese (1916; dir. Victor Sj�str�m) and Th�r�se Martin (1938; dir. de Canonge); recently: Th�r�se (1986; dir. Alain Cavalier).

Saint Bernadette Soubrious (1844-1879) was a peasant girl who had a vision of the Virgin Mary at what has become the shrine of Lourdes. Films: The Song of Bernadette (1943; dir. Henry King); more recently: Bernadette of Lourdes (Il suffit d�aimer, 1960; dir. Robert Dar�ne) and Bernadette (1988; dir. Jean Delannoy).

6. A film of the life of Saint Vincent de Paul, directed by L�on Carr� from a script by Jean-Bernard Luc and Jean Anouilh (1947). Pierre Fresnay starred and Claude Renoir did the cinematography. Saint Vincent de Paul was a French priest (1580?-1660) who founded charitable orders; his saint�s day is July 19th.

7. Church in Saint-Germain, Paris.

8. See note 5, 2nd paragraph, and see note 6. Saint Teresa of Avila was a Spanish Carmelite nun (1525-1582); her saint�s day is October 12th.

9. Aldo (born Aldo Graziati, 1902-1953) went to France in 1921 to become an actor but trained there as a cameraman instead. In 1947 he returned to Italy with the crew of a French production and stayed to become one of Italy�s most distinguished postwar cinematographers.

*Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 6, No. 2 October 2002

Buddhism, Christianity, and The Matrix: The Dialectic of Myth-Making in Contemporary Cinema

2007-08-13T13:39:00.000-07:00

by James L. Ford, Ph.D.

Abstract

[1] This essay analyzes the recent film The Matrix from the perspective of modern-day myth-making. After a brief plot summary of the film, I note the well-documented parallels to the Christian messianic narrative of Jesus. I then go on to highlight the often overlooked parallels to the Buddhist existential analysis of the human condition. In particular, I note a remarkable resonance between The Matrix and the fourth century (C.E.) philosophical school of Buddhism known as Yogacara. By highlighting the syncretic or combinative nature of the film’s symbolic narrative, I submit The Matrix as a cinematic example of the dialectical process of myth-making by means of Peter Berger’s theory of socio-cultural construction.

[2] Humans are mythologizing and, as Peter Berger would suggest, "world-building" creatures. We appropriate elements from our past and present to fashion epic narratives and myths for a variety of existential, sociological, and religious ends. Myths are not fixed narrative forms, however. Studies of traditionally oral cultures evidence considerable elasticity in the details of a particular myth.2 And history also demonstrates that myths often evolve as a result of cultural diffusion and contact. Myths are constantly adapted to new cultural contexts and worldly realities. While the invention of writing inspired a more fixed status for some myths, it did not halt the ongoing adaptation and amalgamation of previously disparate mythological themes and concepts.

[3] In this essay, I will examine the recent popular science-fiction film The Matrix, written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski, from this perspective of mythological adaptation. While the Christian metaphors throughout the film have been well noted, significant elements of a Buddhist worldview are often overlooked. In particular, the symbolic and existential parallels to a fourth century (C.E.) philosophical school of Buddhism know as "Consciousness-only" (Vij�avada/Yogacara) are indeed striking. In addition to noting such parallels, I will submit The Matrix as a provocative example of modern-day myth-making. Appropriating familiar symbols and motifs into a new epic narrative is clearly not a contemporary phenomenon and I will borrow from Peter Berger’s dialectical theory of "world building" to elucidate this process. The foundation myths of many religions arguably reflect the same dialectical process I will try to illuminate here. Although The Matrix is not likely to become the foundation myth for a new religion, it will perhaps inform the worldviews, if only subtly and temporarily, of thousands of young adults. Indeed, this is the destiny of most myths. But who knows, this may become a classic along the lines of The Wizard of Oz or Star Wars.

[4] To characterize a contemporary film as "myth" is not without problems, not the least of which is qualifying such a genre into an acceptable definition of myth. Here I will adopt a definition offered by Finnish folklorist Lauri Honko. She delineates four criteria of myth with respect to form (narrative of sacred origin), content (cosmogonic in terms of cultural origin or existential condition), function (model for human activity), and context (in the sense that myth provides "the ideological content for a sacred form of behavior").3 I suggest that The Matrix qualifies in all respects as a mythological narrative. It is also important to note that myths are not disembodied texts divorced from time or place. Their language, symbols, and meaning are invariably tied to the context and worldview of origin. Moreover, the functional use of myths may range from a children’s story hour to a mechanism of political legitimization. In other words, myths serve any number of social, religious, ideological, or pedagogical functions. Movies, like any narrative form, can be considered a form of myth if they meet the criteria noted above. Star Wars, The Fisher King, Blade Runner, and 2001: A Space Odyssey represent appropriate examples according to this perspective.

Article

The Matrix: A Plot Summary

[5] For those who have not seen the film, I offer here a very brief summary of the plot. The basic premise is that the world as we know it is not objectively real but a computer simulation (the Matrix) wired into our minds by a species of artificial intelligence—"a singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines," we are told. This cyber-species was originally created by human technological know-how, but eventually took over after emerging victorious in a war waged for generations that virtually destroyed the world. It (they?) now breeds humans as an energy resource (sort of like living batteries) and inputs the virtual Matrix to keeps our minds occupied—"And so," we are informed, "they built a prison out of our past, wired it to our brains and turned us into slaves." A small colony of humans has survived independent from the artificial race in a place called Zion, below the surface of the earth. They await a foretold messiah who will conquer the Matrix and restore human control to the world. That is the basic story line revealed through the first third of the movie.

[6] We are introduced to the hero Neo (an anagram for "the One"), a talented computer hacker, as he sits before his computer. The screen blinks a message and Neo (Keanu Reeves) stares blankly—"Do you want to know what the Matrix is, Neo?" This is Neo’s initial revelatory call. He is eventually led to Morpheus (the God of Dreams played by Laurence Fishburne) who is leader of a rebel band and convinced that Neo is "the One," the long expected Messiah who will free humanity from its plight. Morpheus extracts Neo from his enslaved existence. He reveals the deluded nature of the Matrix and trains Neo in how to enter and manipulate the Matrix for his own purposes. "The Matrix is everywhere," Morpheus informs Neo. "It's all around us, here even in this room. … It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth." But Morpheus can take Neo only so far; Neo’s identity as a Messiah is a growing one and he must complete his own rite of passage and discover the path for himself. He is not even convinced he is "the One."

[7] Two other key figures are worth noting. One is a woman named Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), Neo’s closest companion within the rebel group. She also is convinced, because of an oracle once received, that Neo is the One. The second is Cypher (Joe Pantoliano), an angry member of the rebel group who eventually betrays Morpheus and Neo to the cyber enemy. In the fast moving conclusion, Neo rescues Morpheus, battles virtual agents of the cyber enemy, is killed, resurrected, and finally appears to conquer the Matrix. The final outcome is left ambiguous as Neo warns the entity controlling the Matrix: "I know you're real proud of this world you've built, the way it works, all the nice little rules and such, but I've got some bad news. I've decided to make a few changes." In the final scene, Neo ascends to the sky like Superman. We must await the sequel to find out what those changes will look like.

Christian and Buddhist Parallels in The Matrix

[8] The Christian messianic parallels are rather obvious. Neo, like Jesus, is the long-expected Messiah who is ultimately killed only to resurrect as a fully "divine" creature. The final scene even evokes the bodily ascent of Jesus to heaven. Also, Morpheus seems every bit the equivalent of John the Baptist, even to the point of baptizing Neo in a graphic scene in the liquid bowels of the human battery chambers. Trinity might be compared to Mary Magdalene and Cypher clearly parallels Judas. But where is God in all this? And what, we might ask, is the fundamental human problem suggested by this epic narrative?

[9] Phenomenologically, most religious foundation myths suggest a basic existential problem of human existence. Confucian accounts of the idealized Chou dynasty, for example, inform its understanding of the fundamental problem—social disharmony due to the human tendency to neglect ritual and social propriety. For Hindus, it is bondage in the perpetual cycle of samsara, life after life, as illustrated in the Bhagavad-Gita and other mythological narratives. And for Christianity and Judaism, the fundamental problem is alienation from God due to our sinful nature and egoistic tendency toward trying to be like God, symbolized best in the Priestly Genesis creation narrative. The soteriological (relating to salvation) claim of Christianity is that God has offered his own son, the messiah, as a means to overcome that alienation. While The Matrix echoes the messianic motifs of the Christian narrative, the "human problem" is clearly not alienation from God since God is nowhere present in the story—or at least not a personal creator God. Conrad Ostwalt sees this omission of the divine and the rejection of the supernatural as agent for the apocalypse as symptomatic of "the contemporary apocalyptic imagination."4 God will not bring about the apocalypse—something else will. But The Matrix need not be understood only as a "contemporary" adaptation of the Judeo-Christian apocalyptic view; there are other ancient mythological perspectives that also omit the "divine" entirely. It is here, I think, that Buddhism offers an illuminating mythological parallel.

[10] The most fundamental problem according to Buddhism is our ignorance of existential reality. If we could perceive the true nature of reality and the path to enlightenment, condensed in Sakyamuni teaching of the three marks of existence (impermanence, no-self, and suffering) and the Four Noble Truths, then we could overcome our ignorant state and achieve the insight of a Buddha (the “awakened one”). This “problem of the mind” is reflected in the first two verses of the Dhammapada, an early collection of sayings attributed to the historical Buddha:

[11] All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage…. If a man speaks or acts with pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him.5

[12] This is further and perhaps best articulated in the fourth century C.E. Mahayana philosophical school known as Yogacara, which resonates strikingly with The Matrix.6 Yogacara, also known as the “Consciousness Only” school (Vij�avada), asserts that the objective world we perceive to be real is ultimately a product of our minds.7 As with the Western Idealist tradition, this is not necessarily an ontological assertion (the objective world does not exist), though many observers have drawn this conclusion.8 Rather, this is more accurately an epistemological insight.9 That is, Western and Buddhist "idealism" emphasizes that every "object" is significantly altered by our perception and understanding; we know it second-hand as idea and we cannot know it before it is so transformed. "What is real?" Morpheus asks as he introduces Neo to the Matrix. "How do you define real? If you're talking about your senses, that you feel, taste, smell, or see, then all you're talking about are electrical signals interpreted by your brain." This quote might just as well appear in the philosophical dialogues of Vasubandhu, a fourth century founder of Yogacara.

[13] While there may be striking similarities between Yogacara and Western Idealist statements concerning the relationship between objective reality and out perception of it, a fundamental difference lies in the soteriological aim of such an insight. Western Idealists strive to discern an � priori, absolute moral sense (Kant) or an "Absolute Mind" (Hegel) through rational analysis. In contrast, Yogacarins emphasize the essential path and process toward to discerning the world free of delusion. This necessarily entails various meditative and visualization practices—hence, the name of the school (“practitioners of yoga”). Meditation techniques were developed to, in a sense, deconstruct one’s conditioned way of seeing the world and help one awaken to the way the world truly is. The manner in which one is able to create and control images in the mind through various visualization practices only serves to reinforce the notion that everyday conscious perceptions, like dreams, are no less "created." The practitioner comes to realize the illusory nature of the self and the external constituents of reality (Dharmas). Ultimately, one transcends subject-object dualism and abides in pure consciousness, an ineffable state of transcendent bliss. This is the soteriological goal of a Yogacara practitioner. According to tradition, as one progresses along this path, one procures powers to manipulate the perceived "objective" world. A Buddha actually attains the power to create his/her own cosmic realm.10 Perhaps this is the destiny of Neo in future episodes. That is to say, since Neo now possesses the power to control and manipulate the matrix, perhaps he will create a new world for beings to experience.

[14] The parallels between The Matrix and this Yogacara Buddhist analysis of the human problem should be apparent by now. In both cases, the issue is one of the mind. In The Matrix, Morpheus informs Neo the he is a slave: "…you (like everyone else) were born into bondage...... kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind." Moreover, humanity’s state of ignorance is largely of its own making in both accounts. In Buddhism, we are karmically conditioned, both individually and collectively, by our past choices and behavior. The life one is born into is determined by one’s karma, and one’s present "worldview" is conditioned by one’s context and volitional choices. According to The Matrix, humanity is controlled by an artificial intelligence it created. Thus, humans bear significant responsibility for their enslaved state.

[15] In The Matrix, the perceived reality is literally "programmed" into our minds. Neo, despite his clear Messianic qualities, seems more like a Buddha or bodhisattva who comes to reveal to humanity its state of ignorance and, presumably, the way out. Perhaps the sequels (two to be shot simultaneously in the fall of 2000) will reveal more about this soteriological path, but the integration of martial arts with its yogic emphasis on discipline and mind control are noteworthy. The very process of Neo’s training is a techno-cyber version of meditation. New software is input yielding a complete transformation of mind just as meditative practices are intended to transform one’s perception and experience of reality.

[16] As with any myth, this narrative is metaphorical and begs some kind of interpretation. How are WE "programmed," it seems to ask? What aspect of OUR reality is artificially constructed and enslaving us within a conceptual prison? Is technology liberating or imprisoning us? Is materialistic capitalism leading to true happiness or unrequited addiction? Do our cherished religious views bring us together or divide us? From a pedagogical perspective, these are fruitful questions for stimulating students to conduct their own interpretation of this modern myth and its relevance to our social reality. In addition to the mesmerizing action scenes, it may well be that this implicit skepticism toward "institutional" control explains the popularity of this film for young adults.

[17] Beyond these parallels to Buddhist and Christian worldviews, it is also important to note how this "myth" diverges from core values of these traditions. For example, in many respects The Matrix is a glorification of violence and patriarchal dominance. The one token female is, on the surface, notably androgynous or even masculine. And the graphic violence merited an "R" rating for the film. One might argue that the killings are not actual but analogous to killing the demons of one’s mind or destroying the symbolic manifestations of hatred, greed and delusion (i.e., Sakyamuni’s encounter with Mara beneath the Bodhi tree on the eve of his enlightenment). But the mesmerizing process of destruction, amplified by the technology of VFX or "bullet time" photography, transcends metaphorical license and clearly cultivates a more literal form of violence. It is here, as with all mythology, that we must pay due attention to the context of this myth and especially its commercial aims. The glorification of violence has clear commercial appeal to one of the primary target audiences of Hollywood producers—young teenage boys. So while on an abstract level, The Matrix indeed evokes many "religious" parallels to Christianity, Buddhism, and other mythological traditions, it also integrates arguably contradictory values of violence and male dominance for commercial (or other) ends. Might we say it reifies some of the "social matrices" it allegedly purports to undermine?

[18] This evident "disconnect" between the "religious" dimension of the sacred, on the one hand, and the "Hollywood" and cultural elements of the film, on the other, speaks directly to the contextual nature the mythologizing process. Myths are not the product of an individual author but a collective representation developed over time. Myths are always produced in "institutional" contexts. Thus, they are the by-product of a dialectical process that often yields internally conflictive elements.

Peter Berger and the Dialectic of Myth-Making

[19] Sociologist Peter Berger asserts that the inherited worldview of any culture or society is a created one.11 Humans do not come into the world with a given relationship to it; we create our purpose and impose our own significance upon the world. This insight into the "constructed" nature of culture is, indeed, a fundamental insight of post-modernism. Berger proposed a three-step process by which we create (and re-create) our own socio-cultural reality. First, there is "externalization" or the initial outpouring of our conceptualizations onto the world. Berger cites language as an example of the first order here. I often use historical social structures based on race or inherited privilege to illustrate this point to my students. In the realm of religion, one might cite the different conceptualizations of the "transcendent" in various contexts such as Yahweh, the Tao, Brahman, or kami.12 The second step involves the "objectivation" of this externalized reality. At this point, the externalized concept becomes objective reality. We experience it as though it has always been there and forget that we actually created it ourselves—e.g., "of course monarchy is the natural form of governance;" "isn’t it obvious this racial class is inferior;" and so on. Finally, there is the "internalization" of this objectified reality. Berger writes that culture (including religion) "is a dialectic phenomenon in that it is a human product, and nothing but a human product, that yet continually acts back upon its producer."13 As I tell my students, this is the process by which each of us individually and as a society is "socialized" by a certain worldview. Education, ritual, and "family upbringing" all facilitate this internalization.

[20] Significantly, Berger emphasizes that this process is not deterministic. We, as individuals and as a society, are in constant dialogue with our inherited "objectified" reality. And through an ongoing dialectical process, we may "externalize" new conceptualizations that, in turn, are objectified and internalized. The process is ongoing—and myth-making, I contend, is a significant dimension of this dialectical process. Myths often appropriate symbols or metaphors from different, sometimes conflicting, "objectified realities" and transform their meaning. The Biblical account of Noah and the flood borrowed significantly from the Babylonian tale of Utnapishtim within the Epic of Gilgamesh. At the same time, the Biblical authors radically transformed the story by integrating the Hebrew god into the narrative. Similarly, the chronicles and interpretations of Jesus were influenced by the Messianic expectations of the time. But the Messiah that came was not the Messiah expected; thus, the gospel writers and Paul appropriated prophecy from Isaiah and the familiar metaphor of the sacrificial lamb to "externalize" another existential understanding of the Messiah. In this way, epic foundation myths often reflect Berger’s dialectical process. They help transform the "objectified" reality and are vital instruments for "internalizing" a new (if only slightly) worldview.

[21] The Matrix can be seen as a modern, self-conscious example of this myth-making process as well. In an interview with Time magazine, Larry Wachowski stated their mythological intent directly:

[22] We’re interested in mythology, theology and, to a certain extent, higher-level mathematics. All are ways human beings try to answer bigger questions, as well as The Big Question. If you’re going to do epic stories, you should concern yourself with those issues. People might not understand all the allusions in the movie, but they understand the important ideas. We wanted to make people think, engage their minds a bit.14

[23] Mixing metaphors from Christianity, Buddhism, Greek mythology, and even cyber technology, The Matrix as myth may be seen as an analysis of the contemporary existential condition. It appropriates the decidedly Christian messianic mythological framework but imports a form of Buddhist idealism to radically transform the (Christian) existential understanding of the human condition. In this respect, it dialectically produces a new worldview through myth.

[24] It is impossible to know what narratives will become the foundation myths of our culture. But epic films like The Matrix are the modern day equivalent of The Iliad-Odyssey, the epic of Gilgamesh, or various Biblical myths. Indeed, one might well argue that popular epic films like The Matrix and Star Wars carry more influence among young adults than the traditional religious myths of our culture (The Biblical illiteracy of most of my "Christian" undergraduates would certainly attest to this.) It remains to be seen how influential The Matrix will become; the sequels may determine its longevity. At this point, I find it a useful and resonating example of our inherent proclivity toward myth-making and world-building in the cinematic medium. Beyond the abstract and "important ideas" that the Wachowski brothers wanted to tackle, The Matrix also illustrates the culturally imbedded nature of myth with respect to issues of gender, violence, and entertainment.

Notes

1 I am grateful to colleagues who have offered helpful suggestions and insights on earlier drafts of this paper. In particular, I would like to thank Charles Kimball, Steven Boyd, and most especially Ulrike Wiethaus.

2 See, for example, Raymond Firth’s "The Plasticity of Myth," Ethnoligica 2 (1960), 181-88.

3 Lauri Honko. "The Problem of Defining Myth" in Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 49-51.

4 There are, of course, other perspectives within the Christian tradition. Justo Gonzalez identifies and traces three different theological strands from Christianity’s early period. This "substitutionary" version, which emphasizes inherited sin and necessary expiation/forgiveness, traces to Tertullian, the Synoptic Gospels and Paul. It is clearly most evident within the Protestant tradition. A second strand, tracing from Origin and perhaps the Gospel of John, defines the fundamental human problem more in terms of ignorance (in the sense that we have lost the necessary vision to see God), rather than sin. According to Gonzalez, this perspective is more characteristic of the Eastern church and later liberal theology. See Christian Thought Revisited (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), especially pp. 50-64.

5 See "Armageddon at the Millennial Dawn." The Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 4, No. 1, April 2000.

6 Max Muller, editor and translator. Sacred Books of the East, Vol. 10. The Dhammapada, Part I (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1965), 3-4.

7 I do not mean to suggest that the Wachowski brothers intentionally borrowed from the Yogacara philosophical perspective. They have apparently been reluctant to reveal their sources, though they have acknowledged some Buddhist influence. See Time magazine, Vol. 153, No. 15 (April 19, 1999), 75.

8 For a coherent overview of Yogacara thought, see the appropriate chapter in Paul Williams, Mahayana Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations. London: Routledge (1989), 77-95.

9 For representative examples of this debate with respect to Yogacara Buddhism, see John Keenan’s The Meaning of Christ: A Mahayana Theology (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1989), 169 and 209, and Paul Griffiths’ On Being Mindless: Buddhist Meditation and the Mind-Body Problem (La Salle, Ill. : Open Court, 1986), 83.

10 Conrad Ostwalt has interpreted this idealistic dimension as a "contemporary revisiting of Plato’s famous allegory of the cave and of neo-Platonic dualism of real and ideal…" See "Armageddon at the Millennial Dawn." The Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 4, No. 1, April 2000.

11The most famous example here is Amitabha (Japan: Amida), the central Buddha of the Pure Land tradition of Buddhism in East Asia. Amitabha, while a bodhisattva, vowed to create his own Pure Land upon achieving Buddhahood. All who invoke the name of Amitabha with a sincere heart can be reborn in that majestic realm where enlightenment is more easily attained.

12 Clearly, one could interpret the message of Jesus in similar terms though ignorance is not traditionally defined as the fundamental problem. See endnote four.

13 See, for example, The Sacred Canopy (New York, Anchor Books, 1967) and The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (with Thomas Luckmann. New York: Doubleday, 1966).

14 It is perhaps worth noting that Berger claims not to presume that humans "created" God. In fact, he acknowledges that the various conceptualizations of the "sacred" may very well be authentic responses to something truly real in the same way, he notes, that mathematics, though created, clearly corresponds to a given reality. Working this out, however, is an issue for theologians. Interestingly, the Wachowski brothers have acknowledged their interest in higher-level mathematics.

15 The Sacred Canopy, 3.

16 Time. Vol. 153, No. 15 (April 19, 1999), 75.

*The Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 4, No. 2, October 2000

The Birth of a Nation as American Myth

2007-08-13T13:38:00.000-07:00

By Richard C. Salter

Abstract

[1] The Birth of a Nation was one of the most important films of all time, both for its technical and aesthetic achievements and for its enduring legacy of racism. This paper uses Bruce Lincoln�s approach to myth as a form of discourse and Robert Bellah�s notion of civil religion to show how Birth might be understood as a mythic component of American civil religion. From this perspective, Birth serves as a paradigmatic story of American origins rooted in ideas of white supremacy. At the end of the article Oscar Micheaux�s work, Within our Gates, is used to briefly demonstrate filmic strategies for countering Birth as myth.

Article

[2] The release of The Birth of a Nation (1915) forever changed the movies. The director, D. W. Griffith, set a new standard for film aesthetic by synthesizing new types of shots and cutting techniques, improving production quality and fidelity to historical sources, integrating music into film more comprehensively, and employing narrative conventions still widely operative in film. Birth�s enormous success proved the financial viability of the new medium throughout the nation. The Birth of a Nation was also an exceptionally controversial film because of its grotesque depictions of blacks (generally played by whites in blackface), its racism, and its valorization of the Ku Klux Klan as savior and midwife of the new nation. To this day there is tension in criticism of Birth over whether to separate evaluations of its aesthetic achievement from its racist depiction of the American epic.1

[3] It is precisely as an American epic, a national heroic myth, that religious studies approaches can help illuminate The Birth of a Nation and its relationship to American self-understanding. In general, however, scholars of religion have not explored how film contributes specifically to constructing a sacred sense of �Americanness,� or what I will refer to here as �civil religion.� Most studies of film and national identity have instead focused on questions of ideology.2

[4] Perhaps more than any other medium of the twentieth century, film has worked to construct civil religion by presenting idiosyncratic images of the nation as reality. A mythological approach to The Birth of a Nation can help us see it as an American myth asserted in an argument over what constitutes American identity. By American myth, I mean it is a strategic discourse (Lincoln 1990) aimed at producing a particular sense of American identity and purpose by presenting as paradigmatically true an idiosyncratic account of America�s origins. From this perspective The Birth of a Nation is not simply a reflection of a racist America, or an exploration of race in America, it is also a strategy for constructing America.

[5] My argument proceeds as follows. After first summarizing Birth�s plot and themes, I use Robert Bellah (1975) to define civil religion. I use Bruce Lincoln�s (1990) definition of myth to show that myths are a source for civil religion because they make claims about the ontologically true nature of particular societies. I then explore Birth and D. W. Griffith�s comments about Birth to show that Griffith, though he often spoke in terms of historical truth, also considered Birth to be true in the mythic sense, and therefore a source for civil religion. In a penultimate section I use Oscar Micheaux�s Within Our Gates (1919) as an example of a counter-myth deployed in response to Birth.

The Birth of a Nation: a summary of plot and themes

[6] On the surface, The Birth of a Nation tells the fate of two families just prior to, during, and after the Civil war. It is important to note that the film actually opens with scenes of the slave trade, predicting future discord in the nation with the first gnostic intertitle: �The bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion.� Thus, the film�s character development and plot are immediately contextualized by transcendent themes of disorder and order.

[7] The central characters of the story are the Stoneman family of Pennsylvania and the Cameron family of South Carolina. Austin Stoneman is an abolitionist politician and the Camerons are cotton plantation owners. The young lads of both families have become chums at boarding school, and the story opens with the Stoneman boys off to the Cameron�s estate in Piedmont, South Carolina, for a visit with the Camerons� �kith and kin.� In Piedmont, Griffith portrays a prelapsarian order by showing the boys enjoying the Edenic life of the South, complete with visits to the happy cotton fields and the slave quarters, where the slaves do a joyful dance on the occasion of the white folks� visit. While the boys bond, Phil Stoneman is smitten with Margaret Cameron (Ben�s sister) and Ben Cameron is taken with a photo of Elsie Stoneman (Phil�s sister) which he has snatched from Phil. Though news of war soon interrupts the idyll, and the boys are forced to fight for their respected sides, Phil and Ben pledge fidelity to their loves before leaving. The separation by war, reunion, and marriage of Cameron and Stoneman families will serve as a surrogate for the separation and ultimately restored bond of South and North. As Wood argues (1984, 127), the fundamental plot of Birth affirms the belief that �the meaning of American history can be read best, or even exclusively, through domestic themes.�3

[8] Griffith does not glorify war in the Civil War scenes that follow. Instead he shows us the desperation and futility of war with moving intertitles like �War�s peace� to describe body strewn battlefields. Throughout the film Griffith never allows the viewer to forget the common humanity of both (white) sides; by emphasizing that each side performed acts of wartime gallantry and humanity towards comrade and enemy, Griffith shows us that even at their most wretched, North and South can recognize humanity in one another. For example, when Ben Cameron, �the Little Colonel,� leads a final charge against the Union, he pauses to �succor a fallen comrade� and is cheered by the on-looking Unionists. As he finishes his last heroic charge Ben almost dies, but he is saved when the Union commander, who happens to be Phil Stoneman, recognizes him. Ben is sent to the hospital to recover, and there he meets Elsie Stoneman, whose photo he has carried for nearly three years.

[9] Griffith makes Ben a metonym for all Southern men, pushed to the limit of endurance by the circumstances of war, but still honorable and noble. After the war he is slated for execution on false charges, just like the South he represents. When Ben�s mother hears of the charge she saves him with a direct appeal to �the Great Heart,� President Lincoln. Lincoln�s mercy to Ben reflects the President�s gracious attitude toward the South. Lincoln vows that he will deal with them �as if they had never been away,� despite Austin Stoneman�s own desire that �Their leaders must be hanged and their states treated as conquered provinces.�

[10] The tragedy of Lincoln�s assassination marks the rapid descent of the South into death and chaos. Austin Stoneman, megalomaniacal mulatto mistress at his side, becomes �the greatest power in America,� an �uncrowned king,� and uses his power to champion equal rights in all respects for blacks. Griffith makes plain the significance of Austin Stoneman�s call for equal rights in the placards held by blacks at a political rally in the film, which read �Equality: Equal Rights, Equal Politics, Equal Marriage.� These terms foreshadow the trajectory of the rest of the film. The thoughtless good intentions of abolitionists lead to a pollution of the body politic and ultimately to rape of white women and a pollution of white American blood that can only be restored by ritual blood sacrifice and a savior. Griffith continues to remind the viewer of his mythic metanarrative through references in the intertitles to biblical passages which were most likely recognizable to viewers at the time. For example, as Austin Stoneman�s mulatto Lieutenant, Silas Lynch, organizes the black vote, the intertitle reads �Sowing the wind� (Hosea 8:7) to prepare us to �reap the whirlwind� (8:7) in another intertitle prior to the upcoming rape scenes. Significantly, the biblical passage refers to a punishment brought on Israel, the chosen nation, for its illegitimate government (8:4), its idolatry (Hosea 8:4) and most tellingly, for its incapacity to remain pure (8:5).

[11] When Austin Stoneman sends Lynch to organize the black vote the descent down the slippery slope quickens. First �New found freedom turns to rude insolence� in a number of scenes; for example, black soldiers have the temerity to claim as equal a right to the sidewalk as Ben Cameron. The insolence quickly becomes the predicted call to equality in politics. Griffith shows increasing disorder in the Republic with images of unqualified and stupid blacks registering for the franchise. As one disheveled black man says, �Ef I doan� get enuf franchise to fill mah bucket, I doan want it nohow.� Blacks are shown cheating in the election, while the most respectable white citizens are denied the right to vote. It is not surprising that with this sort of voting chaos, Silas Lynch, the mulatto, is elected Lieutenant Governor and the state House of Representatives becomes overwhelmingly black. Shots of the clownish assembly are carefully intertitled to project historical verisimilitude, and show liquor swilling, barefoot, chicken-leg eating representatives cheering wildly and dancing as they pass �a bill providing for the intermarriage of blacks and whites.� Equality as humans has snowballed into equality as citizens, and its predictable d�nouement will now be equal claims to white women�s bodies. Thus, with his new found power the mulatto Lynch�s �love looks high� toward the pale skinned, blond haired Elsie Stoneman, an indication of worse disorder to come.

[12] In his despair Ben Cameron takes a walk in the woods to mull the fate of his nation. There he sees two white children put a sheet over their heads and scare a group of black children by pretending to be ghosts. Ben is inspired to make his own sheeted costume to scare the local intransigent blacks, and thus the Ku Klux Klan is born. In the midst of chaos, they are a spark of hope for the nation, but the millennial battle of good and evil is still ahead.

[13] As the KKK begins to address injustices against whites, one of their own members is killed by Lynch�s band. In the meantime, Flora, the youngest Cameron sister, who has come into sexual maturity in the course of the story, heads to the spring to fetch water. Gus, a �renegade negro� captain spots her, pursues her and declares �I�se a captain now, an� I want to git married.� Chaos has reached its nadir here as status, class, and racial order collapse in one profane moment: the rape of Flora = rape of the South = emasculation of white men = loss of all order.

[14] Flora rejects Gus and flees, but he pursues her undeterred to the edge of a cliff. There, learning the �stern lesson of honor,� she throws herself off. Ben finds Flora and she dies in his arms, but not before he has wiped her blood-stained brow with the Confederate flag she had girding her waist. Ben and the KKK find and lynch Gus (in earlier versions of the film the Klan castrates Gus � reversing the threat of �equal marriage�).4 Then Ben hears the news that his parents, sister Margaret and Phil Stoneman are under attack � in this topsy-turvy world the former masters and the kin of abolitionists are now mercilessly at the hands of former slaves. Ben summons the Klan to restore order, and in a ritual consecration to their mission the Klan raises the �fiery cross of old Scotland� and extinguishes the flames with water that has been commingled with Flora�s bloody Confederate flag. Ben tells the other Klan members, �Brethren, this flag bears the red stain of the life of a Southern woman, a priceless sacrifice on the altar of an outraged civilization.� The imagery is clear, invoking both the Eucharist and the Gettysburg Address. Flora�s body and blood give life to the new nation. Earlier an intertitle told us not to mourn her for �finding sweeter the opal gates of death.� As her blood consecrates the Klan we know why, for as Lincoln told us at Gettysburg:

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

To strains of Wagner�s �Flight of the Valkyrie� the newly empowered the Klan rides off to save Piedmont, the Cameron family, and the nation.

[15] Unaware that his own demise is near, Silas Lynch confesses his love to a horrified Elsie. He is furious at her incredulous rejection and turns instead to tempt her: �See, my people fill the streets. With them I will build a black empire, and you as Queen shall sit by my side.� Elsie, another Christ figure alone in the black wilderness, rejects the mulatto tempter and threatens him with a horsewhipping. In the meantime Austin Stoneman arrives. He is delighted to hear that Lynch wants to marry a white lady, but his delight turns to outrage when he finds out that the lady is his own daughter. His outrage is met by the tip of a bayonet as Lynch begins to take Elsie away. But the KKK arrives to save the day before Elsie or Austin Stoneman is hurt. The Klan then rides off to save the Cameron household, which has taken shelter in the small cabin of two Union veterans.

[16] Griffith again takes pains to point out the humanity shared by white North and white South, and in case the viewer misses the symbolism, the intertitle tells us that �The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defense of their Aryan birthright.� Later versions are less racially explicit with their intertitles: �The former enemies of North and South unite to resist the mad results of the Carpetbaggers� political folly.� Besieged on all sides, it looks as though the Klan won�t arrive in time; father Cameron is even ready to bludgeon poor Margaret to death to spare her the dishonor of being caught by the black troops. But at the last moment the Klan arrives and saves everyone.

[17] The film ends with a victory parade through Piedmont and images of restored order (e.g., Klansmen supervising elections) followed by the marriages of Ben and Elsie and Phil and Margaret. The earliest versions of the film also reportedly showed �Lincoln�s solution:� the deportation of blacks back to Africa. In all versions of the film the North and South are bound together in a new way now � a new nation, a new family, has been born. That this new nation is a chosen nation, a millennial nation, is brought home with an image of reestablished unity, harmony, and peace under Jesus in the final scene. Perhaps even more incredibly, the 1933 version contains a waving flag and a call for the audience to sing together the national anthem (and thus to participate ritually in the new nation). Birth makes no attempt to hide its celebration of American millennial aspirations or its articulation of America�s sacred identity. It is in the latter respect that the film can properly be said to attempt to provide a foundational myth for American civil religion.
Civil Religion and Myth

[18] In 1967 Robert N. Bellah published his landmark article �Civil Religion in America,� where he argued that in addition to specific denominational religions, there also exists in the United States a general religion, rooted in the documents, characters and events of American history that shapes America�s self-understanding. Though many others have written about various formulations of the concept,5 in this article I use the term in Bellah�s (1975, 3) sense of � � that religious dimension, found I think in the life of every people, through which it interprets its historical experience in the light of transcendent reality.� Civil religion provides a transcendent framework for understanding what it means to be an American, thus it not only reflects American self-understanding, but also stands as a guide for what American behavior should be and provides a normative mold for who we become. For example, American civil religion often links American identity with particular constructions of the idea of �freedom;� consequently certain notions of �freedom� become normative for American behavior. Even if American practice does not adhere to American identity as put forth in civil religion (and it seldom does), civil religion continues to provide a basis for identifying and modeling what is distinctively American.

[19] In The Broken Covenant Bellah (1975) uses American myths to explore what is American civil religion. The key structural element of American civil religion that emerges from these myths is an ongoing tension between inclusion and exclusion, expressed religiously as covenant and conversion, expressed politically in republicanism and liberalism, and carried in biblical imagery and themes of chosenness and closeness to God. But although Bellah uses myths to elaborate the structural dimension of American civil religion, he does not systematically explain how myths contribute to civil religion other than as narratives conveying American values. A more nuanced understanding of myth suggests that it is not just the narrative structure of myth that conveys Americanness, but the truth claims implicit in myths that make the mythic dimension of American civil religion so important. In other words, myths not only convey values, they also claim that those values are true at the most fundamental level. This broader sense of myth derives from Mircea Eliade�s (1963, 1) sense of myth as �true story,� where truth is understood not only in terms of facticity, or historical accuracy, but also in terms of ontic reality and, therefore, meaning. That is, myths claim to take us beyond what seems to be the case to show us the truth of existence. As an ontologically true story, a myth claims to be both a model of and model for ultimate reality; myth claims to be paradigmatic.6

[20] Eliade�s approach to religion has been criticized for being tautological, a-historical, and failing to account for the social functions of myth (McCutcheon 1997), but that does not detract from his essential phenomenological insight: myth narrates (what it claims are) realities. That is, myths claim to tell us what is true or real at the ontic level � what is �really real.� Myths tell us about �origins,� describing what reality was before it started to degenerate. What Eliade does not tell us is that all attempts to narrate reality are inherently political.

[21] Bruce Lincoln (1990, 3) recognizes the political nature of myth when he locates it in the realm of discourse, which can be used to reproduce, deconstruct and reconstruct society. For Lincoln, society is a synthetic construct held together primarily by sentiments elicited from discourse. �And like all synthetic entities, a society may either recombine with others to form syntheses larger still, or � a highly significant possibility ignored in most Hegelian and post-Hegelian dialectics � it may be split apart by the persisting tensions between those entities that conjoined in its formation, with the resultant formation of two or more smaller syntheses.� (Lincoln 1990, 11) Therefore, part of the political nature of myths is their ability to elicit sentiments that mobilize people into specific social formations, conserving or reworking the social synthesis, by virtue of claims to paradigmatic truths.

[22] In Bellah�s account, the underlying myths of American civil religion are undifferentiated from American history, but Lincoln (1990, 24) offers us a taxonomy that lets us consider the point at which history and myth diverge. Lincoln�s taxonomy revolves around three questions. First, does a particular narrative make a truth claim? If not, it can be considered �fable.� Second, is the narrative�s truth claim credible to a primary audience? If not, it can be considered �legend.� If so, it can be considered �history.� Third, does the truth claim possess �authority?� By authority, Lincoln means that truth assigned to the narrative is paradigmatic for, or a model for, society. If a narrative is accepted as paradigmatically true (that is, worthy of being a model for the present and future) it can be considered �myth.� In other words, myth is a form of discourse that claims to be and is accepted as paradigmatically true. �Thus, myth is not just a coding device in which important information is conveyed, on the basis of which actors can then constitute society. It is also a discursive act through which actors evoke the sentiments out of which society is actively created.� (Lincoln 1990, 25) Myths, then, not only narrate reality, they can also be used to narrate alternative realities that maintain, deconstruct or reconstruct social groups. The mythic dimension of American civil religion narrates the reality of national social boundaries. It is precisely such a narration of social boundaries that D. W. Griffith attempts in The Birth of a Nation.

The Birth of a Nation as Myth

[23] The meaning of The Birth of a Nation is clearly overdetermined. At one level, Birth is Griffith�s personal odyssey writ large � an attempt to free himself from an oppressive father and domineering women through castration, lynching and redemptive violence (Rogin 1985). At another level, Birth marks the beginning of a project to make the Southern understanding of the nation (the myth of �the Lost Cause�) an understanding of the nation as a whole. 7 At yet another level, Birth reverses the South�s loss in the Civil War by making the South, in the guise of the KKK, the true midwife and savior of the nation (Scott 1994). Perhaps most obviously, Griffith�s film tells the story of the origins and identity of the United States: though the life of the nation was peaceful in its early years, the presence of blacks has been a persistent source of disharmony. The Civil War and Reconstruction marked the nadir of America�s internecine fighting, but out of that struggle, and by virtue of the blood of honorable sacrifice and redemptive violence, the new nation, a true Union of North and South, is born. In the original version of the film there was a corollary: the black seeds of disunion should be expelled back to Africa so that the nation could now live its millennial destiny.

[24] Following Bruce Lincoln�s taxonomy, two routes for analyzing Birth as myth are to explore the type of truth claims it makes and who accepts those claims. I will bracket who accepts the claims made in Birth because that question has more to do with whether the film was successful as a myth than whether it tries to present itself as myth. Since the film was controversial from the start, and clearly appealed to (and repulsed) different audiences, it is not possible to know for whom it succeeded and why without detailed historical reception studies.8

[25] On the other hand, the truth claims made by the director and by the film remain salient to the question of how the film attempts to work as myth. On the surface Griffith and the other promoters of the film seem to confuse claims for the film�s historical accuracy (historical truth) with claims for its ontological truth and meaningfulness (mythic truth). But Griffith was aware of these ambiguities in the concept of truth. At the least he became aware of the difficulties of defining truth after the controversy that surrounded the film. In a 1930 filmed interview of Griffith, Walter Huston asks him about Birth, �Do you feel as though it were true?� Griffith responds by both asserting and problematizing Birth�s truth: �Yes, I think its true,� he says, �But as Pontius Pilate said, �Truth? What is the truth?�

[26] In this case and others Griffith spoke about the film�s truth in terms of both historical accuracy and in terms of ontological truth and meaningfulness. According to Lillian Gish (1969, 131), the actress who played Elsie Stoneman, Griffith initially told the troupe about his interest in championing historical truth: �I�ve bought a book by Thomas Dixon, called The Clansman. I�m going to use it to tell the truth about the War Between the States. It hasn�t been told accurately in history books. Only the winning side in a war ever gets to tell its story.� When the film sparked controversy Griffith responded by emphasizing the film�s historical accuracy, offering one critic $10,000 if he could prove that there were historical distortions in the film (cited in Cripps 1963, 354). Even after he was forced to cut parts of the film, Griffith fought censorship of film, �the Laboring Man�s University,� on the grounds that it limited access to truth (Griffith 43).9 Griffith�s intentions to produce an historically accurate account of the emergence of the new nation after the Civil War are further borne out in reports of his attention to detail and research.10 In each of these instances Griffith uses the term �truth� to refer to historical accuracy. But Griffith�s fidelity to detail in production is a vehicle for the other type of truth-claims made by the film, mythic truth claims.11 On a closer view it is clear that Griffith�s larger purpose was to convey a sense of the ultimate meaningfulness of the Civil War in terms of American identity. The medium of film was, in Griffith�s mind, central to that task.

[27] As Griffith himself said (Geduld 1971, 29), �I believe in the motion picture not only as a means of amusement, but as a moral and educational force.� In his 1915 interview with Richard Barry (in Silva 1971, 10) he is even more explicit about the role of film in teaching history: �The time will come, and in less than ten years � when the children in the public schools will be taught practically everything by moving pictures. Certainly they will never be obliged to read history again.� He continues, �There will be no opinions expressed. You will merely be present at the making of history. All the work of writing, revising, collating, and reproducing will have been carefully attended to by a corps of recognized experts, and you will have received a vivid and complete expression.� One gets the impression that Griffith understands that historical stories require editing, yet somehow he sublimates consciousness of his own politics into a fantasy of photographic accuracy as historical accuracy and mythic truth.12

[28] We can be sure that Griffith wanted to convey mythic truths because he and the film�s distributors also attempted to frame the film�s accuracy with political and ecclesiastical authority. For example, Birth was framed as historical truth and true national myth through, among other things, repetition of the famous statement President Woodrow Wilson made to Dixon after an initial screening of the film at the White House: �It is like history written with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.� The White House later repudiated that the comment had been made, but only after the story had been widely circulated for three months and Griffith and Dixon had used it for publicity. Since Wilson was not only President, but also former president of Princeton University and a widely respected historian, his comments carried extra weight. Similarly, in the longer versions of the film Griffith includes caveats that he intends no disrespect to any race, then follows those caveats with excerpts from book five of Wilson�s History of the American People that defend the historicity of the racist images. In other words, Griffith mobilizes history in support of myth. That is to say, Griffith presents and defends the historical details of his film as accurate, and in doing so he implicitly defends as accurate his presentation of the ontological truth of the nation (i.e., as white).

[29] The desire of Griffith and the film�s other promoters to convey more than just historical accuracy is also visible in their attempts to frame the film with an aura of moral and religious authority by �obtaining statements from ministers, teachers and other prominent citizens to the effect that they liked The Birth of a Nation and recommended it to others� (Aitken 1965, 61). Dixon (Dixon in Silva, 75) provides a clear example of this strategy when he responds to an editorial in the New York Globe by claiming to have recorded history faithfully in his novel. He warrants his claim by describing how the film was submitted to an ecumenical jury of clergymen who agreed with the praise given the film. Among other things they said:

1.

[The film] united in common sympathy and love all sections of our country.

2.

It teaches our boys the history of our nation in a way that makes them know the priceless inheritance our fathers gave us through the sacrifices of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

3.

It tends to prevent the lowering of the standard of our citizenship by its mixture with Negro blood.
4.

It shows the horror and futility of war as a method of settling civic principles.

5.

It reaffirms Lincoln�s solution of the Negro problem as a possible guide to our future and glorifies his character as the noblest example of American democracy.

6.

It gives Daniel Webster for the first time his place in American history as the inspiring creator of the modern nation we know today.

[30] With this letter Dixon asserts the historicity of the film, but like Griffith he elides his defense of the film�s historical accuracy with a defense of its relationship to the mythological goals of preserving a particular national identity and white bloodline.

[31] Though the story of the Camerons and the Stonemans is fiction, Griffith�s statements and techniques demonstrate that he viewed, and he wanted others to view, The Birth of a Nation as both historically accurate and ontologically true. That is to say, for Griffith and others close to the film, Birth showed how the United States came into being and of what it really consisted. It is in this sense that Birth can be seen as a myth, a form of discourse that makes a paradigmatic claim for truth.

[32] Birth claims that at an ontological level the United States is a white nation, and it explains problems in the United States as resulting from a black presence. It thus attempts to arouse sentiments (through imagery, narrative and music) that will lead to a reconstitution of the national identity as explicitly white. At the minimum, the end of the film shows white supremacy and white familial order as the keys to restoring the nation�s God blessed millennial role. The earlier versions of the film, and Dixon�s comments above, which advocate deportation of blacks to Africa, also show a model for reconstituting the sacred space and character of the nation in its pure state. If we accept Bellah�s (1975, 3) definition of civil religion as �� that religious dimension, found I think in the life of every people, through which it interprets its historical experience in the light of transcendent reality,� then Griffith�s film is clearly a discursive strategy for altering American civil religion and reestablishing it on another basis. Birth reinterprets the meaning of the Civil War and Reconstruction in the light of an ontologically white nation.

Counter-myths in Response to Birth

[33] Many audiences loved Birth. Reviewers tell of audience members cheering wildly when Gus is lynched or when the Klan rides to save Elsie and the Cameron family. Schoolchildren were even taken to view the film as history. But not everyone loved the film. Even before Birth was released in most markets, controversy surrounded it. The protests came from quarters where people disagreed with Griffith�s vision of American identity, and they took two forms: calls for censorship and production of films to counter it.

[34] Calls for censorship were widespread and of mixed success. More interesting from the perspective of how film is used to create civil religion were films that portrayed a different view of black Americans, a different view of what it meant to be American, and thus a different truth of American identity.13

[35] Oscar Micheaux, the most well known and most prolific producer and director of �race films,� released at least two films that directly countered Griffith�s film. 14 Symbol of the Unconquered (1920), for example, directly challenged the moral legitimacy of the KKK. Another of Micheaux�s films, Within Our Gates (1920), challenges The Birth of a Nation even further. For example, in Within Micheaux reverses the black on white rape scenes in Birth with a near rape of a black woman by a white estate owner. Not content to merely reverse the claims of victimization, this scene ends when the white estate owner realizes that he is the father of the black woman, thus blurring the boundaries of race and uniting the two antagonists with a common history and destiny in the end. Within also challenges Griffith�s mobilization of Christian religious symbols by presenting its own parody of an Uncle Tom black preacher. In contrast to the lynching scene in Birth, which depicted the Klan�s lynching of Gus as a limited application of deserved justice, Within shows clearly innocent men, a woman and (though he escapes) a child being lynched by an enthusiastic white crowd. Within also challenges Birth merely by showing a range of black characters, from deceitful crooks to upstanding doctors. Finally, Micheaux explicitly presents a counter-claim to what constitutes American identity in the final soliloquy of Within:

Be proud of our country, Sylvia. We should never forget what our people did in Cuba under Roosevelt�s command. And at Carrizal in Mexico. And later in France, from Bruges to Chateau-Thierry, from Saint-Mihiel to the Alps. We were never immigrants. Be proud of our country always.15

Micheaux claims Americanness through shared sacrifice in the military, and he openly constructs his version of Americanness against immigrants as �other.�

[36] Micheaux�s efforts to present a different truth about black Americans represent a counter-discourse to D. W. Griffith�s vision of American identity rooted in whiteness and his portrayal of blacks as the source of disharmony in the nation. From one perspective, then, it would seem that American cinema at the start of the 1920s was poised for a great debate on the nature of American identity. At the very least, we might have expected that the streams of myth in The Birth of a Nation and Within Our Gates would continue to develop separately in Hollywood and independent black cinema. But no debate over race emerged in the cinema; Hollywood did not continue with Griffith�s myth, considering it far too controversial. As Bogle (1973) has pointed out, Hollywood did not want the controversy that Griffith generated, and it therefore self-censored villainous representations of blacks. Instead it opted for stereotypes, such as Toms, Coons, and Mammies, that were less blatantly racist and that would persist for decades. Official censors were even more restrictive with Micheaux�s films than they had been with Griffith�s, prompting him to turn increasingly to less controversial films. As the 1920s drew to a close and film costs increased with sound pictures, independent black cinema was largely absorbed into the Hollywood production system.

Conclusion

[37] The Birth of a Nation offers us a glimpse into how film works as a form of discourse that can be employed to assert truths about American identity. In this regard film functions like other sources for American civil religion. Birth clearly presents a limited vision of American origins as the paradigmatic truth of American identity. But Charles Long (1974, 212) has written about this tendency in the context of civil religion more broadly: �The religion of the American people centers around the telling and retelling of the mighty deeds of the white conquerors.� He continues, �Indeed this approach to American religion has rendered the religious reality of non-Europeans to a state of invisibility, and thus the invisibility of the non-Europeans in America arises as a fundamental issue of American religious history at this juncture.� American civil religion is not white supremacist by nature; by creed (e.g., the Declaration of Independence) American civil religion is egalitarian and universalist. But if we examine the production of American civil religion we find another story: there are discursive practices which ground some ideas of American identity in myth and exclude others. The Birth of a Nation was among the most influential myths of American identity Hollywood every produced.

References

Aitken, Roy E., as told to Al P. Nelson. 1965. The Birth of a Nation Story. Middleburg, VA: William W. Denlinger.

Angrosino, Michael. 2002. Civil Religion Redux. Anthropological Quarterly 75 (2): 239-267.

Auster, Albert. 2002. Saving private Ryan and American triumphalism. Journal of Popular Film and Television 30 (2), 98-104.

Bellah, Robert N. 1974. Civil Religion in America. In American Civil Religion, edited by Russell E. Richey and Donald G. Jones (New York: Harper and Row Publishers). First published in Daedalus (Winter 1967).

Bellah, Robert N. 1975. The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial. New York: The Seabury Press.

Bellah, Robert N., and Phillip E. Hammond. 1980. Varieties of Civil Religion. San Fransisco, CA: Harper and Row Publishers.

Bogle, Donald. 1973. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. New York: The Viking Press.

Carter, Everett. 1971. Cultural History Written with Lightning: The Significance of The Birth of A Nation. In Focus on The Birth of A Nation, edited by Fred Silva. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. First published in American Quarterly (Fall 1960).

Ciraulo, Dina. 1998. Narrative Style in Oscar Micheaux�s Within Our Gates. Wide Angle 20 (4), 75-91.

Cripps, Thomas. 1963. The Reaction of the Negro to the Motion Picture, �The Birth of a Nation.� The Historian; a journal of history 25, 344-362.

Cripps, Thomas. 1996. The Making of The Birth of a Race: The Emerging Politics of Identity in Silent Movies. In The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of US Cinema, edited by Daniel Bernardi. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 38-55.

Cripps, Thomas. 1997. Race Movies as Voices of the Black Bourgeoisie: The Scar of Shame. In Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video, edited by Valerie Smith. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Eliade, Mircea. 1963. Myth and Reality. Translated by Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper and Row Publishers.

Geduld, Harry M. 1971. Focus on D.W. Griffith. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Gish, Lillian, with Ann Pinchot. 1969. The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.

Greene, Eric. 1998. Planet of the Apes as American Myth: race politics and popular culture. Forward by Richard Slotkin. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.

Griffith, D. W. 1971/1916. The rise and fall of free speech in America (selections). In Focus on D.W. Griffith edited by Harry M. Geduld. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc.

Henderson, Robert M. 1972. D. W. Griffith: His Life and Work. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lincoln, Bruce. 1990. Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Stuies of Myth, Ritual, and Classificiation. New York: Oxford University Press.

Long, Charles H. 1974. Civil Rights � Civil Religion: Visible and Invisible Religion. In American Civil Religion, edited by Russell E. Richey and Donald G. Jones. New York: Harper and Row Publishers. 211-221.

Martin, Joel W., and Conrad E. Ostwalt, Jr. 1995. Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth and Ideology in Popular American Film. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

McCutcheon, Russell T. 1997. Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Oxford University Press.

Miles, Margaret R. 1996. Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Richey, Russell E., and Donald G. Jones, eds. 1974. American Civil Religion. New York: Harper and Row Publishers.

Rogin, Michael. 1985. �The Sword Became a Flashing Vision�: D. W. Griffith�s The Birth of a Nation. Representations 0, Issue 9, Special Issue: American Culture Between the Civil War and World War I: 150-195.

Sampson, Henry T. 1977. Blacks in Black and White: A Source Book on Black Films. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, Inc.

Scott, Bernard Brandon. 1994. Hollywood Dreams and Biblical Stories. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.

Silva, Fred. 1971. Introduction. In Focus on The Birth of a Nation, edited by Fred Silva. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.

Staiger, Janet. 1992. Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Taylor, Clyde. 1996. The Re-Birth of the Aesthetic in Cinema. In The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of US Cinema, edited by Daniel Bernardi. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Wilson, Charles Reagan. 1990. �God�s Project�: The Southern Civil Religion, 1920-1980. In Religion and the Life of the Nation, edited by Rowland A. Sherrill. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, pp. 64-83.

Wood, Gerald. 1984. From The Clansman and Birth of a Nation to Gone with theWind: The Loss of American Innocence. In Recasting: Gone With the Wind in American Culture, edited by Darden Asbury Pyron. Miami, FL: University Presses of Florida. 123-136

Films Cited

The Birth of a Nation. 1933 (1915). Directed by D. W. Griffith. (Epoch). Indianapolis, IN : Kartes Video Communications, 1984.

The Birth of a Nation. 1930 (1915). Directed by D. W. Griffith. (Epoch). US: Video Yesteryear Recording, 1984.

Intolerance: love's struggle through the ages. 1916. Directed by D.W. Griffith. Paul Killiam film classic presentation. Los Angeles, CA : Republic Pictures Home Video, c1991.

The Birth of a Race. 1918.

The Realization of a Negro�s Ambition. 1916.

Within Our Gates. 1919. The African American cinema I [videorecording] : Oscar Micheaux's Within our gates / written, directed and produced by Oscar Micheaux. [Washington, D.C.] : Library of Congress, c1993.

Symbol of the Unconquered. 1920. Produced, written and directed by Oscar Micheaux.

*Vol. 8, No.2, October 2004, The Journal

of Religion and Film

Beautiful Necessities: American Beauty and the Idea of Freedom

2007-08-13T13:34:00.000-07:00

by David L. Smith

Abstract

[1] A central theme of American Beauty is the disjunction between the quests for liberation undertaken by its characters and the discoveries at which a few of them arrive. The world of the film is carefully structured as a culturally deterministic system. Nevertheless, a kind of freedom�epitomized by the experience of beauty�becomes possible for some of the characters even in the grip of fatal necessities. The Buddhist concept of mushotoku (non-attainment) and Emerson�s idea of Beautiful Necessity are used to explicate the film�s complex exploration of freedom and fate.

Article

[2] The mystery of American Beauty is the way it takes some of the most familiar themes in modern American popular culture�the attempt to change one�s life, to achieve liberation from constraining circumstances, to become oneself�and gives them fresh and surprising life. What saves the film from clich�, I will argue, is its fine sense for the paradoxical nature of the quests for freedom it depicts. Paradox arises because the world of American Beauty is a closed, culturally deterministic system. Its characters are perfect creatures of their social locations. They may hope for something �more,� but their very conception of this �more� derives from the culture that confines and defines their desires. Their stories are correspondingly bleak and self-defeating. And yet, American Beauty is not a bleak or pessimistic film. Possibilities of meaning and freedom emerge from its deterministic world that have little to do with its characters� conscious intentions. The film, we might say, is a meditation on the disconnect between the narrative quests of its characters and the meaning that, in a few cases, happens to them. My purpose in this paper, then, will be first to explicate the film from this point of view, showing how it plays with ironic disjunctions between quest and attainment, freedom and fate, and second, to suggest how certain analogues from religious thought, especially the Buddhist concept of non-attainment and certain themes from Emerson, can help us to unpack its paradoxes.

[3] Admittedly, many of the film�s reviewers have not shared my sense that the film succeeds in avoiding the undertow of clich�. For nay-sayers, American Beauty is simply another version of the numbingly familiar story of individual liberation from social convention, with a few extra elements of sensationalism thrown in to up the commercial ante (masturbation! recreational drugs! borderline pedophilia!).1 Like films from The Graduate to Pleasantville,2 it sets its drama of emancipation in suburbia, rehearsing the message that life tends to go stale within the confines of a picket-fence, consumerist, career-driven version of the American dream. Its particular characters and story-line are drawn in broad, even �cartoonish"3 strokes: man quits dead-end job in disgust, loosens up, and finds new life in adolescent fantasy; career-obsessed woman comes to a bad end; boy and girl, drawn together by hatred of their respective families, make plans to take off for the city. This tale of liberation through non-conformity is by now so familiar, so co-opted, so devoid of any real critical edge, that it is natural to wonder why anyone would be interested.4

[4] Positive reviews of the film, on the other hand, have had a hard time identifying the secret of its power or substantiating the reasons for it�s extraordinary critical and popular success.5 Good acting is part of the answer; inspired cinematography likewise. But many viewers and reviewers also point to �something else.� Kenneth Turan in the LA Times, for example, writes of something �undefinable� about American Beauty that makes its satire seem �more familiar than it is."6 In the same spirit of puzzled wonder, the terms �mystical� and �spiritual� frequently crop up in connection with the rapt aesthetic of beauty that inspires some of the film�s characters.7 Vague as such terms may be, I propose to take them seriously, and to try to explicate the �mystical� or more broadly spiritual aura of American Beauty as clearly as possible. This dimension of the film comes into focus, I will show, when we notice how American Beauty establishes two distinct critical or interpretive frames around its story which produce the film�s deepest impressions through their interplay. One of these frameworks is social-psychological, the other broadly spiritual or religious.

[5] First, the film is carefully structured to put its characters� social and psychological motives in critical perspective. Specifically, it shows how the characters� quests for freedom are, in every case, symptoms of their starting points, expressions of the complexes from which they are trying to escape. The formal organization of the film, including its �cartoonish� simplification of character, is designed to make this point. The story focuses on two families, the Fitts� and the Burnham�s, who are next door neighbors and who inhabit two distinctive complexes of cultural values and personality types�two architectural and sociological boxes. The Fitts family represents what we might as well call the military-industrial complex. The head of the family is a retired Air Force Colonel, identified in the script consistently as �the Colonel� rather than by name. The code of life he imposes on his family is a caricature of military discipline: relentless self-control above all, with a dedication to drawing and enforcing boundaries exemplified by his homophobia and violent response to rule-breaking. Next door, the Burnham household represents another typically contemporary complex of values. Robert Bellah might want to call it �expressive individualism,� but I will call it the consumerist-entertainment complex. Lester, the father, works in advertising. Carolyn, the mother, is a kind of manic Martha Stewart who struggles to succeed at selling real estate, schools herself with self-improvement tapes, and dotes on material symbols of her achievement (Italian silk upholstery, a Mercedes SUV). The guiding light of the Burnham household, then, is desire�the drive for success, the drive for pleasure, and the drive towards a more perfect arrangement of appearances. (�See the way the handle on those pruning shears matches her gardening clogs?� says Lester in reference to Carolyn. �That�s not an accident.�(2)8 If the Fitts illustrate the tragic effects of the repression of desire, the Burnhams represent the pitfalls of its pursuit.

[6] The paths to emancipation taken by members of the respective families, in turn, reflect the complexes that nurtured them. Ricky Fitts, son of Colonel Fitts, uses and sells marijuana, but significantly, the variety he prefers was �genetically engineered by the U.S. Government.�(46) That is to say, the culture of control, now taking charge of the blueprints of life itself, gives Ricky the means by which he seeks to transcend his family, to escape the culture of control. Another way in which Ricky finds a kind of freedom is through the view-finder of his video camera. Ricky casts himself as a professional observer, a student of other peoples� lives with no compunctions about peeping through their windows. He transforms ordinary experience by distancing it on film, asserting a kind of control over life through the neat rows of tapes that line his bedroom. But here again, the influence of the military-industrial complex is clear. Who is more adept at surveillance than the military? And who engineered the sophisticated equipment by which Ricky engineers his detachment? Ricky is thus caught in a bind that is familiar to anyone who has reflected on the paradoxes of contemporary popular culture, where anti-technological life styles are celebrated with electric instruments and anti-capitalist rock bands are promoted by AOL Time Warner. The wildly mixed messages compel one to wonder how far emancipation by such means can go.

[7] The rebellious members of the Burnham family are in a similar bind. They seek to mitigate or change their circumstances through drives, values, and impulses acquired from the cultural complexes they seek to escape. As products of the consumerist-entertainment complex, they seek satisfaction in raw desire�the yearning for self-completion through acquisition, through novel experience, and through the manipulation of appearances. Thus, young Jane builds for the future by saving up her baby-sitting money for a �boob job.�(72) Carolyn, whose kitsch romanticism extends to her choice of �Bali Hai� as dinner music, yearns her way into an affair with Buddy Kane, �the Real Estate King,� who represents everything she longs to become. (His �personal philosophy� provides the perfect mantra for her preoccupation with appearances: �in order to be successful, one must project an image of success, at all times.�[51]) Finally, Lester, in the film�s main plot line, quits his job in order to get back his life, to renew himself by falling back on his instincts.9 His instincts turn out to be pretty regressive, however. He develops a crush on a teenage girl; devotes himself to working out because he wants to �look good naked;�(44) and buys on impulse a 1970 Firebird, the car he �always wanted.�(68) (It�s red, of course�the color of desire, like the Burnham�s front door, Carolyn�s roses, and Lester�s own rose-petal fantasies). Lester�s pursuit of the girl, Angela, becomes the center of attention in the film for a number of reasons, not the least of which is pure prurience. Nevertheless, we can see how it fits the themes under discussion here. As in Lolita, the hyper-romanticism of a tabooed attraction becomes a symbol of the culture that nurtures it�a culture of yearning, for which real life is always elsewhere. Lester Burnham is no Humbert Humbert, but his middle-class desires are a match in both intensity and inappropriateness for those of Nabokov�s cultured �migr�.10

[8] This analysis of the characters� motives points to a conclusion that has become rather routine in academic Culture Studies: in short, no exit. Culture is a totalistic system that affords no leverage point by which a genuine project of emancipation could get itself off the ground. Every apparent way out is already subsumed, already co-opted. The system may offer mitigations and palliatives�ways to keep hope alive�but no real alternatives. Ricky gets his drugs; Jane, Lester, and Carolyn get their romantic visions; but these are too deeply implicated in the system for us to even imagine an �elsewhere� to which they might lead. The conclusion of the story makes the futility and fatality of their choices clear. Lester is dead. Carolyn has lost her lover, her family, and probably her sanity. Jane�s plans for escape are about to be thwarted and the Fitts��father, son, or both�will soon be picked up by the police for Lester�s murder. (Lester�s blood is on the Colonel�s shirt; Ricky is on film offering to make the hit.)11 In the end, then, history fails as a realm of freedom or source of meaning for any of the characters. It is rather a system of strict cause and effect, a karmic wheel, in which doing what one wants is equivalent to bondage under the iron law of one�s conditioning.12

[9] What hope is there, then, for freedom? The remarkable thing about American Beauty is that it does not take that question as rhetorical. Instead of settling for one of the stock contemporary responses to meaninglessness (playful nihilism, apocalyptic nihilism, existentialist posturing, or blind faith) it simply and honestly treats the question as worth raising. If meaning is not to be found through emancipatory projects, then where is it to be found? If freedom does not consist in doing what one wants, then what is it?

[10] To address these questions, the film constructs another critical frame around its story, loosely built of the moments in which various characters find their lives lit up by beauty. As noted above, the world of the film is not devoid of meaning. The kind of meaning its characters stumble across, however, is oblique or even irrelevant to their stories, to self-understandings that remain bound and blinkered by their circumstances. It has little to do with what anyone intends or thinks they are doing. And yet, when beauty emerges, it makes a difference, somehow transforming or opening up the realm of necessity from within. Thus, the world of American Beauty may offer no chance for freedom in the sense of escape, autonomy, or triumphant self-creation. It does, however, suggest something that Emerson discovered meditating on the similar themes in his essay �Fate:� namely, that necessity, without our knowing how or why, can sometimes appear as �Beautiful Necessity."13 For Emerson, this arose through the realization that �freedom is necessary"14 � that there is no gap between the conditions that seem to constrain us and the values we hope to realize. The trap is transformed, we might say, through the insight that the trap is what we are, and through the sense of aesthetic appropriateness or �beauty� that accompanies the realization. A similar transvaluation of the problem of life through beauty is, to my mind, the real subject of American Beauty.

[11] I have called this aspect of the film �spiritual� for a number of reasons. First and most obviously, I do so because beauty enters the film in moments the characters themselves find intense, extraordinary, and revelatory which they sometimes characterize in explicitly religious terms. Ricky Fitts is the source of the two clearest cases of religious interpretation. With reference to a video he once took of a homeless woman frozen to death on the sidewalk�a touchstone for him of the world�s beauty and sadness�he says �When you see something like that, it�s like God is looking right at you, just for a second. And if you�re careful, you can look right back.�(57) Second, there is Ricky�s film of a plastic bag whirled by the wind, the film�s central icon of beauty. About this Ricky says: �That�s the day I realized that there was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid. Ever.�(60) Less explicitly religious, but bearing a strong family resemblance to mystical literature through its theme of self-overcoming, is Lester�s final comment in voice-over:

�Sometimes I feel like I�m seeing it all at once, and it�s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that�s about to burst�.and then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can�t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life�.�(100)

Comments like these put the viewer in mind of fairly familiar notions of transcendence, suggesting alternative horizons of meaning that place the film�s cynical take on history in a wider perspective.

[12] A similar point is made through the literal �framing� of the film between Lester�s voice-overs. We know from the start that our narrator is a dead man. He soars with the camera above the neighborhood whose formal layout shaped his life. He floats free of time. His story is over; he knows what the dead know. And so his presence at the edges of the film hints at a dimension beyond the story, even while it is being told.15 That dimension, however, has nothing to do with a literal promise of life after death, let alone with the stock Hollywood motif of the intervening angel. Rather, what Lester�s perspective brings to the film is the suggestion of a larger structure of selfhood�a life �both in and out of the game,� as Whitman put it.16 We are cued that the stories about to unfold are not going to tell us everything there is to know. Thus, like Ricky�s God-language, the voice-overs introduce the promise of alternative sources of meaning.

[13] Two episodes in the film stand out as fulfillments of that promise, moments in which the power of beauty becomes palpable to the audience as well as to the characters. First, there is Ricky�s video of the dancing plastic bag�the film�s most haunting visual image. Beauty, as epitomized in this scene, is an intrinsic value that is everywhere but seems to come out of nowhere. It emerges here from a situation that is utterly deterministic�a scrap of plastic caught in a vortex of cross-winds�and utterly ordinary, encountered �in an empty parking lot on a cold gray day�� (echoing Emerson�s similarly fortuitous moment on �a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky�).17 (10) Ricky�s other encounters with beauty are similarly quotidian and similarly fatal: in a dead bird, in an old woman frozen on the curb, and in the sadness of the girl next door. Whatever its occasion, though, beauty is intrinsically meaningful�a satisfaction unmatched by anything else represented in the film. It brings the characters who �get it� (Lester, Ricky, possibly Jane) a sense of meaning that is absolute and unquestionable�complete in a way that even threatens to cancel out the rest of life. As Ricky says, �sometimes there�s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can�t take it�and my heart is going to cave in.�(60) A close neighbor of death, beauty is at once eschatologically and ontologically ultimate; it interrupts or puts an end to the stories we struggle to sustain and speaks from beyond them.18 It is thus appropriate that beauty is what evokes the film�s only God-language. In those moments when Ricky feels that God is looking at him, beauty is what he sees when he looks back.

[14] Insofar as beauty stands apart from the characters� intentional quests�as a gratuitous interruption of the life of desire rather than a moment within it�it is strictly useless. It is simply a way of seeing the world clearly, apart from what we would make of it. Nevertheless, this kind of clarity can also have consequences for how life is lived. So in the film, a second focal moment in which meaning becomes palpable is a moral event: Lester�s last-minute renunciation of his pursuit of Angela. Like the epiphanies of beauty, this moral epiphany is a simple matter of seeing clearly. Lester�s desire for Angela had been driven by illusions and wishes�represented for us in the film�s lurid fantasy sequences. Granted: his illusion about Angela is not too different from the illusion that Angela held about herself and tried, rather awkwardly, to project to others. This whole network of projection and self-deception dissolves, however, when, just as the flirtation is about to be consummated, Angela lets Lester see who she really is�admitting to her inexperience, changing her story. Lester, in turn, responds with poise, generosity, and tenderness. He does the right thing. It is not a triumph of principle, but a triumph of natural compassion and clear, unclouded perception. Lester in the end thus finds and exercises freedom�not the freedom to do what he wants, but the freedom to deal mindfully with what is real�and so discovers the beauty in his necessities.19 He has not found a way out of his circumstances, but he has found a way to own them that makes possible his final affectionate review of the moments of joy that punctuated his �stupid little life."(100)20

[15] What sort of freedom is possible, then, in a deterministic system? What sort of liberation from the trap of culture is possible if the trap is what we are? What American Beauty suggests, I believe, is first of all that freedom, although it is not likely to be achieved by intentional effort, nevertheless may occur to us as an experienced quality, like the beauty that emerges from the dance of the wind-driven bag. It is not found beyond fate (i.e. we do not become who we are by becoming other than we are). Rather, it comes as an affirmative moment within fate, as in Emerson�s Nietzschean tribute to �Beautiful Necessity� or Lester Burnham�s joyful post-mortem embrace of �every single moment of my stupid little life�. Freedom is the discovery of beauty in our necessities, even as the trap is sprung and (in Lester�s case, literally) the gun is put to our head.

[16] What is �attained� in such freedom is thus paradoxical, because it brings nothing that one did not previously have. What is recovered is something from which one was never really separated. The spiritual �discoveries� of characters in American Beauty thus need to be understood on the model of something like what Soto Zen calls mushotoku or �non-attainment.� According to this view, enlightenment, as an unconditioned reality, is outside all trains of cause and effect: not attained, not lost; neither an addition to life nor a subtraction from it. By its own seamless nature, it cannot come as the result of a quest or project in time; it cannot �come� at all, for it is not possible to be apart from it. Thus, as the Buddha reportedly says in the Diamond Sutra, �When I attained Absolute Perfect Enlightenment, I attained absolutely nothing. That is why it is called Absolute Perfect Enlightenment."21 Religious life may seem like a quest, a journey to the other shore, and may actually be structured as one. However, the actual relation, if any, between effort and attainment is not constrained by this narrative logic. The way keeps to its own ways, or as a Ch�an poem puts it:

�Sitting quietly, doing nothing,
Spring comes and the grass grows by itself."22

[17] This is not to say that the characters� quests in American Beauty are completely irrelevant to the meaning they find. Ricky�s pursuit of beauty on video-tape is in some sense a means to his discovery of beauty in odd places (as is, perhaps, his use of marijuana). Lester�s growth in moral insight is a clear though unintended consequence of his restlessness. Because he quits his job, he loosens up; because he loosens up, he pays attention; and because he pays attention, he recovers his world. Nevertheless, my point in this paper has been that the genius of American Beauty is the way it places these relatively conventional narrative quests in the context of a wider skepticism and a wider promise. Time, in the world of the film, is a fools game, but not all of the characters are fools. Some of them manage to draw on sources that precede, exceed, and evade their own habits of self-reflection. They find themselves �both in and out of the game,� and would not be themselves apart from this doubleness. In the end, it is the interplay between these perspectives�between the inescapable logic of the cultural game and the equally commanding moments in which we find ourselves apart from it; between the fatality of our traps and the possibility of freedom that persists within them�that constitutes the mysterious achievement of American Beauty.

NOTES

1. Dismissive reviews from respected critics included Stuart Klawans in The Nation ( �The Boys of Summer,� 269 no. 11 (October 11, 1999) pp. 34-36; J. Hoberman in the Village Voice (�Boomer Bust�); and Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic (�In Search of an Author� 221 no. 15 (October 11, 1999) pp. 36-38.

2. My quick survey of other films and television shows with which American Beauty was compared by early reviewers turned up the following: Sunset Boulevard (for the dead narrator voice-overs), Lolita, Sex, Lies & Videotape, Happiness, Election, The Apartment, Network, Blue Velvet, After Hours, It�s a Wonderful Life (for the �angel� motif), �Married with Children,� Welcome to the Dollhouse� and The Ice Storm.

3. The cartoon quality of several of the characters, especially Carolyn and Colonel Fitts, is lamented by Richard Alleva in �No �Leave It to Beaver�,� Commonweal 19-20 126, no. 19 (November 5, 1999). Jay Carr in The Boston Globe (September 17, 1999) Arts & Film C4, refers to Carolyn as �a Stepford Wife on acid.�

4. Like several otherwise appreciative reviewers, Janet Maslin in The New York Times saw the film as little more than a celebration of non-conformity. (�Dad�s Dead, and He�s Still a Funny Guy� September 15, 1999, Section E, page 1.) If this were all there was to be said about the movie, I would agree with its negative reviewers.

5. Within a year of its release, the film had grossed over 130 million dollars, starting from a 15 million dollar production budget. (See www.boxofficemojo.com/americanbeauty.html) It won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1999.

6. �The Rose�s Thorns� September 15, 1999, Part F, p. 1. David Denby, �Transcending the Suburbs,� New Yorker 75, no. 27 (September 20, 1999): pp. 133-135, for a sense of wonder at how well the film works.

7. See David Denby, �Transcending the Suburbs,� New Yorker 75, no. 27 (September 20, 1999): pp. 133-135, for a sense of wonder at how well the film works.

8. Page numbers for quotes from the screenplay by Alan Ball refer to American Beauty: The Shooting Script (New York: Newmarket Press, 1999).

9. Kevin Spacey develops this view of Lester, the character he plays, in an interview with Jay Stone in The Ottawa Citizen, September 15, 1999, B8, Front.

10. N.b. Angela�s last name is �Hayes,� echoing Nabokov�s Dolores Haze.

11. An early version of script is available in the Internet which begins with Ricky in prison.

12. A similar theme of entrapment is apparent in the conventions Alan Ball has established for his latest project, the TV serial �Six Feet Under.� Each episode begins with a death, a fatality that can�t be escaped but simply dealt with. Each of the regular characters, moreover, faces intractable confining circumstances, placing them in situations very much in keeping with the implications of the title and the visual theme of boxes in the show�s opening credits.

13. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays & Lectures (New York: The Library of America, 1983), p. 967.

14. Ibid., p. 953.

15. Reviewers have frequently compared this device to the famous use of a dead narrator in Sunset Boulevard. The comparison is close, but it only serves to highlight the differences between the films. In Sunset Boulevard, the voice-over is a tool of irony, allowing the narrator to crack jokes at his own expense and come to terns with the inevitability of his downfall. But something far more positive and spacious is achieved in American Beauty through the same device.

16. Walt Whitman, �Song of Myself,� in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York: The Library of America, 1982), p. 191.

17. Emerson, op. cit., p. 10.

18. To invoke Emerson again, �Beauty is the creator of the universe� (op. cit, p. 445)�present before time

19. Significantly, I think, one catches an echo here of the slogan used on the film�s publicity posters: ��look closer.� The way this phrase is presented in the ads, layered over a close-up of Angela�s naked belly, plays rather shamelessly on the prurience of the plot. Its second level of meaning, however, is a fair summary of the film�s deepest theme��Examine the motives that are drawing you to these images. Pay attention!� American Beauty is a film about prurience�about all that we find so desirable and entertaining in this world�that aims at disenchanting prurience. It is a film about desire in which desire is ultimately dissolved in clarity. And always, seeing is the key. Eyes and vision are recurring motifs throughout the film: notably, in Ricky�s reference to the eye of God; in the unblinking, fearless intensity of Ricky�s gaze, which so impresses Jane; and in the final look in Lester�s eye at the moment of his death, which so impresses Ricky. (What is it that the dead know?)

20. Like Gregor Samsa in Kafka�s �The Metamorphosis,� Lester dies still in the grip of his predicament, but nevertheless in a state of �vast and peaceful meditation,� thinking back on his family life with �tenderness and joy.� Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), p. 135.

21. Diamond Sutra, A. F. Price translation, quoted in The Enlightened Mind, Stephen Mitchell, ed. (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991) p. 35. For other examples of the logic of non-attainment, which is closely related to non-dualism, see David Loy, Non-Duality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988; Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1998).

22. Quoted in Alan Watts, The Way of Zen, p. 134.

*Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 6 No. 2 October 2002

Jesus in Film: Hollywood Perspectives on the Jewishness of Jesus

2007-08-13T13:33:00.000-07:00

by Adele Reinhartz

Abstract

Article

[1] Jesus of Nazareth is arguably the most ubiquitous figure in western culture. From the first century to the present, he appears in thousands of literary, visual, and aural representations. As new media were developed, these too became vehicles through which to consider and reconsider the story, the characteristics, and the impact of this central figure. In our own era, it is the film medium which has made the most visible and popular contribution to the body of media representations of Jesus. Jesus movies are popular in two senses. First, they are directed primarily towards the general population, and hence tell the story in a way that is designed to appeal to and be comprehended by any viewers no matter what their background and education. Second, they receive broad circulation, in movie theaters, on television and on video.

[2] The cinematic portraits of Jesus differ considerably from one another, just as Jesus portraits have done from the very beginning of the Christian movement. The New Testament itself, which in one way or another is a source for these cinematic portraits, contains a large variety of such depictions, from the detailed narratives of four different gospels through the portraits implied by the epistles of Paul and his successors, and the book of Revelation. The variety of film depictions reflects a number of factors, including the individual proclivities of directors and producers, the specific purpose of each movie, broader social trends, and, to some degree, scholarly developments as well. One feature that these movies have in common is the assertion, either direct or indirect, of Jesus’ Jewishness. That Jesus was a Jew might seem so obvious as to warrant little discussion. The New Testament sources are unanimous on this point; New Testament scholars are similarly convinced.2 But this unanimity is deceptive. The claim that Jesus was a Jew has a different content and significance within each of the Jesus portraits.

[3] The purpose of this article is to survey a number of Jesus movies with respect to the portrayal of Jesus’ Jewishness. As a New Testament scholar, I am curious to see how these celluloid representations of Jesus compare to academic depictions. For this reason, I begin by presenting briefly three trends in current historical Jesus research that construct Jesus’ Jewishness in different ways. As a Jewish New Testament scholar, however, my interest in this question is fuelled by a conviction that the cinematic representations of Jesus both reflect and also affect cultural perceptions of both Jesus and Judaism. My survey of the films will therefore also consider issues of reception, and specifically, the image of Jesus and Judaism that emerges from each.

I. Trends in Historical Jesus Research

1. The Eschatological-Apocalyptic Jesus

[4] For Ed Sanders, Geza Vermes, S�an Freyne, Paula Fredriksen, and a host of other Christian and Jewish scholars, Jesus’ Jewishness is central to their construction of his identity and earthly career.3 These scholars picture Jesus as a Jew like most of those around him in Galilee. He observed both the ritual and the ethical requirements of the law,4 including the laws of Sabbath, purity, sacrifice and atonement.5 His teachings were similar to those of the Pharisees,6 and he subscribed fully to the notions of election and Torah. Most important to Jesus’ mission were eschatology and apocalyptic thinking, which led him to see and portray himself as a prophet of the eschaton. He foresaw an end to the current world order when God would step in to create a radically new order. Like other prophets before him, he strongly protested what he saw as the corruption of true worship in the Temple and hence both spoke and acted against the priests who had authority there.7 In this model, Jesus, and Jesus scholars, have a positive attitude to Judaism. Jesus is situated firmly within a Jewish context that bears a strong resemblance to rabbinic Judaism and indeed remains familiar within the framework of traditional Judaism today.

2. Jesus the Jewish Cynic

[5] A second scholarly trend in the current quest of the historical Jesus focuses not on what was specific to Galilean Judaism but rather on the features which Galilean Jews shared with other groups in the Mediterranean area. Jesus’ pithy sayings and aphoristic social critique resemble in form and content the "wit and wisdom of the wandering Cynic sage."8 Like Gentile Cynics, Jesus and his disciples traveled light, lived on the road, and challenged others to live as they did. Jesus’ message may have been more communally-oriented than that of the Gentile Cynics, and he may have frequented rural rather than the urban areas in which Gentile Cynics operated, but otherwise there was little to distinguish between them.9 For Jesus the Jewish cynic, the kingdom was not a future cataclysmic event but was present now in the quality of people’s relations with on another. His willingness to eat with sinners and touch the sick was a direct challenge to the laws, mores and social boundaries of common Judaism. Jesus’ message was symbolized above all in Jesus’ opposition to the temple.10 This opposition, however, is not to be construed as eschatological in any way. The Cynic hypothesis does not deny Jesus’ Jewishness but rather argues that his placement in first-century Galilee and his Jewish identity did not keep him from being critical of or even unconcerned with certain aspects of his culture including religious ones.11

3. The Anti-Nationalist Jesus

[6] The third scholarly model, represented by Marcus Borg and N. T. Wright, pictures Jesus in decidedly anti-nationalist terms.12 While acknowledging that Jesus used apocalyptic language, this model argues that such language was understood metaphorically rather than literally.13 Jesus was a prophet engaged in radical social criticism expressed through his opposition to the Temple-centred purity-obsessed society and through his practice of inclusive table fellowship. His vision was the formation of an alternative community that sought to live in history under the kingship of God. But the kingdom of God was not an eschatological construct. Rather, it was expected here on earth in the time-space world.14 In contrast to other leaders within Jewish Palestine, who engaged in the politics of purity, Jesus preached and lived the politics of compassion.15 Jesus called Israel away from the rules of Deuteronomy which had been only a temporary phase in God’s purposes, and he acted out against the Temple which was the symbol of Judaism’s violent nationalism.16

4. Conclusions

[7] All of these models present a Jewish Jesus. The importance of Jesus’ specific ethnic and religious identity varies, however, alongside the differing exegeses of the primary sources and the constructions of Jesus’ Palestinian context. All have in common an attempt to present Judaism in neutral or positive terms. To some extent this attempt simply reflects the norms of historical-critical scholarship, which aims for objectivity even while acknowledging the difficulties in achieving it. But this approach is also influenced by the specifically post-Holocaust context of current New Testament scholarship which on the whole is sensitive to the Gospels’ susceptibility to anti-Semitic readings.17

II. The Cinematic Jesus

1. D. W. Griffith, Intolerance, 1916

[8] This lengthy silent film interweaves the so-called Judean story of Jesus with three other narratives from different time periods. The Judean story is not a full Jesus story but discrete scenes which emphasize the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees. Griffith’s portrayal of the Pharisees focuses on their role in persecuting Jesus and the general population, their hypocrisy, and their intolerance of wine and revelry. Jesus is shown as a Jew insofar as he participates in Jewish rites -- such as the wedding at Cana -- in which wine is important.

[9] The movie betrays some evidence of historical research. Relying on the expertise of advisors such as a Rabbi Isadore Myers, the film explains Jewish groups and customs in a way which at least sounds scholarly, while at the same time conveying Griffith’s strong ideological agenda. Hence the Pharisees are described as "a learned Jewish party, the name possibly brought into disrepute later by hypocrites among them." This intertitle may have been intended to absolve the Jews as a whole, and the Pharisees as a group, from the charge of hypocrisy. Another note explains that "Wine was deemed a fit offering to God; the drinking of it a part of the Jewish religion." At the same time as it explains the context of the Cana miracle, when Jesus turned water into wine, this note also promotes Griffith’s anti-temperance agenda which is prominent elsewhere in the film.

[10] Although film-makers in the early part of this century were not as sensitized to the issue of anti-Semitism as were their post-holocaust counterparts, Griffith did engage in some efforts to avoid negative Jewish reactions. Following upon strong protests by B’nai Brith, Griffith excised those segments that depicted the Jewish leaders as crucifying Jesus. These changes reduced the Judean story to a mere twelve minutes of this three and a half hour opus.19

[11] These efforts, while laudable in the historical context of the film industry in the early years of this century, are largely ineffective in neutralizing the anti-Jewish tone of the "Judean story" within this film. The note which praises Jewish worship for including wine does not convey a sincere appreciation of Judaism so much as a promotion of Griffith’s anti-Temperance agenda. The note that not all Pharisees were hypocrites barely conceals Griffith’s condemnation of this group. These and other comments strike a pseudo-scholarly tone that fails to convince. The omission of the Jews from the Passion account, and the inclusion of a number of explanatory points are overshadowed by the overall depiction of Jesus as the victim of Pharisees, who are supercilious and intolerant hypocrites at some remove from the common people.

2. Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 1966; Italian with English subtitles.

[12] As its name implies, Pasolini’s film is an artistic rendition of the Gospel of Matthew. It is set in a generic Mediterranean context that has no specifically Jewish features. The use of black and white rather than color dislodges the story from its specific geographical context, while the generally nondescript costuming does the same with respect to the social and ethnic context. Both plot line and dialogue are taken exclusively from the Gospel, although some scenes are omitted or rearranged. Like "Intolerance," the movie draws a sharp distinction between Jesus and his followers on the one hand, and the Jewish authorities on the other. This distinction is emphasized through the visual presentation. One striking aspect of this presentation is headgear. Throughout the film, individuals and groups are differentiated from one another by their hats, or the absence of hats. Jesus, his followers, and the peasant crowds all have bare heads, and hairstyles which look more modern than ancient. The Jewish authorities, in contrast, are characterized by much elaborate and even preposterous looking headgear -- copied from medieval Italian art -- that clashes visibly with their contemporary hairstyles.

[13] The similarities between the Jesus of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1966 film and the later scholarly portrait of the Mediterranean cynic who wanders around the Galilean countryside preaching and healing are no doubt coincidental. Indeed, there is no evidence that Pasolini drew on the work of any historical Jesus scholars for this portrait. Pasolini explicitly disavows any interest in exactitude and deliberately did not consult scholars for his Gospel According to Saint Matthew.20 He admits to omitting political and social factors that would be central to a historical portrait. Such omissions are justified by his purpose, which was not to reconstruct Jesus as he really was but to "reconsecrate" or "remythicize" him.21 In Pasolini’s film, the conflict between Jesus and various groups is intended not as a historical reference, nor as a way of blaming twentieth century Jews for the death of Jesus. Rather, the conflict is intended to be an analogy to, or perhaps even an allegory of, contemporary conflicts. Pasolini’s stated goal was to compare the conflict between Jesus and the Jewish authorities in first century Palestine to religious conflict in twentieth century Italy.22

[14] Nevertheless, of the contemporary Jesus films, it is Pasolini’s Gospel According to Saint Matthew which most clearly and unequivocally places the blame for Jesus’ death on Jewish shoulders. In contrast to other Jesus movies, Pasolini presents Matthew 23, the woes against the Pharisaic hypocrites, in full, including Jesus’ seven-fold repetition of the judgment, "Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites." Parenthetically, his personal comments on Jews and the State of Israel are no less disturbing than their portrait in his film. Pasolini remarks: "The kibbutzim although they are profoundly sad and recall the concentration camps and the Jews’ tendency towards masochism and self-exclusion are at the same time something extremely noble, one of the most democratic and socially advanced experiments I’ve ever seen. Moreover, I have always loved the Jews because they have been excluded, because they are objects of racial hatred, because they have been forced to be separate from society. But once they’ve founded their own state they are not different, they’re not a minority, they’re not excluded: they are the majority, they are the norm.... They, who had always been the champions of difference, of martyrdom, of the fight of the other against the normal had now become the majority and the normal and that was something I found ... a bit hard to swallow."23

3. Franco Zeffirelli Jesus of Nazareth, 1977

[15] Zeffirelli’s Jesus is the cinematic Christ who most closely resembles the eschatological or apocalyptic messiah of contemporary historical Jesus scholarship. By his own admission, Zeffirelli intended this film to be rigorously didactic, and he gathered scriptural experts to help him avoid errors and inaccuracies.24 Widely considered to be the best Jesus film in the harmonizing genre,25 Jesus of Nazareth expresses Zeffirelli’s conviction that Jesus was a Jew, probably a Pharisee, immersed in the most Jewish practices and customs imaginable.26 Zeffirelli’s Jesus holds to the central Jewish understanding of election, scripture and Messianism.27 He does not set himself apart from the Pharisees, though they occasionally object to the company that he keeps, such as Matthew the tax collector and Mary Magdalene. This understanding of Jesus’ Jewishness is apparent both directly, through the words and deeds attributed to Jesus, and indirectly, through details such as Joseph’s extravagant side curls, that are reminiscent of those worn by men of certain orthodox Jewish groups today.28 It is also indicated in the lavish depiction of the Galilean Jewish setting, and in particular, in the many synagogue scenes which depict Jewish rituals utilizing familiar prayers in English and Hebrew.

[16] These scenes resonate with familiar Jewish liturgy without precisely duplicating it. In the opening scene, for example, the rabbi reads from a scroll, replaces it in the ark, and recites the priestly blessing (Num 6:24-27). In the background to Jesus’ circumcision is the central prayer known as the "Sh’ma" ("Hear O Israel, the Lord thy God the Lord is One;" Deut 6:4) chanted in Hebrew. Zeffirelli’s Jesus comes to fulfill the eschatological hopes of a downtrodden people whose despair is expressed in biblical terms. For example, the scene highlighting the Jews’ grief in the aftermath of the Romans’ slaughter of the innocents (Matt 1:16-18) is followed by the return of Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus to Nazareth (Matt 1:19-20), as it is in Matthew’s Gospel. But the visual juxtaposition of the death scene in Bethlehem and the pastoral landscape of the Galilee, and the abrupt change in musical soundtrack, from dirge-like to cheerful, accentuate the implied message that Jesus is God’s response to the Jews’ lament.

[17] Zeffirelli’s film reflects his considerable efforts to avoid anti-Jewish representation. Zeffirelli testifies to having been deeply moved by "Nostra Aetate," the declaration of Vatican II absolving the Jews as a people of collective guilt in the death of Jesus.29 Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth aims not only to portray a Jewish Jesus but to evoke the tragedy of blaming the Jews for Jesus’ death.30 For example, Zeffirelli’s portrayal of the Sanhedrin makes it clear that Jesus has both accusers and supporters within the Sanhedrin, as Nicodemus, a Pharisee himself, informs Jesus.

[18] These efforts are not altogether successful, however. In the first place, Zeffirelli’s two positive Pharisees are positive precisely because they are secret followers of Jesus, or at least, Jesus’ supporters. Though Judaism is described sympathetically, the film implies that the "best" kind of Jews are those who believe Jesus to be the messiah. Second, for all the emphasis on Jewish background and identity, the film does not avoid a supersessionist ideology according to which Christianity is thought to surpass and even to replace Judaism as God’s chosen people. Supersessionism emerges particularly in the Last Supper scene in which the wine and unleavened bread of the Passover festival are reinterpreted as the tokens of Jesus’ redemptive mission. Zeffirelli himself remarked that "the Last Supper was set up according to traditional Jewish ritual and marked the moment when Jesus superseded the ancient rite and gave his disciples and all humanity the Eucharistic mystery."31

4. Monty Python’s Life of Brian, 1979

[19] A striking contrast to Zeffirelli’s pious rendition is Monty Python’s spoof of the Jesus movie genre. That The Life of Brian (of Nazareth) is not in fact about Jesus is stressed in the opening scenes. The movie begins with the adoration of the magi, who return hastily to retrieve their expensive gifts to the infant Brian when they learn that the manger they were seeking was a lit their, in which the three magi come to adore the infant Brian only to discover that the manger they were seeking was a bit further down the road. A few brief glimpses of Jesus reciting the sermon on the mount establish that Brian is not Jesus but a compatriot who, like Jesus, gathered a following, became embroiled in local politics and conflict with the Romans, and suffered crucifixion. The fact that Brian patently is not Jesus allows the Monty Python gang to parody the genre in their typically outrageous manner without being guilty of blasphemy. At the same time, the parallels between the contexts and lives of Brian and Jesus do allow the film to make at least some indirect statements about Jesus.

[20] Brian’s Jewishness is asserted frequently in the film. For example, Brian responds with anger and dismay to the news that he is a Roman because his father was one: "I’m not a Roman, Mum, and I never will be! I’m a Kike! A Yid! A Hebe! A Hook-nose! I’m Kosher, Mum. I’m a Red Sea Pedestrian and proud of it!"32 When hauled into Pilate’s presence for his part in a failed attempt to kidnap Pilate’s wife, Pilate greets him with the words, "Now, what is your name, Jew?"33 These examples do not establish Jesus’s own Jewish identity so much as they draw on common knowledge of Jesus’ Jewish identity to set up Brian as a comic messiah figure.

[21] The comic nature of the film, and its focus on a character who is patently not Jesus, absolves the film of any need for historical accuracy. Accordingly, the dialogue and many of the scenes are pure fabrication, intended for their humor primarily. Nevertheless, there is explicit evidence of historical research. For example, one member of the crowd listening to the beatitudes hears Jesus say, "Blessed are the cheesemakers." This mishearing recalls the Tyropoeon ("Cheesemakers") Valley, which runs through the center of the old city of Jerusalem and is mentioned by Josephus in The Jewish War 5.140. A second example concerns the putative father of Brian, who is described as a Roman soldier. This assertion is reminiscent of the rabbinic jibe that Jesus is the illegitimate son of Mary and a Roman soldier named Panthera.34 Finally, at the same time as the film satirizes religious and political fanaticism, "big noses," feminism, Latin, and numerous other topics, the film studiously avoids critique of the Christian story and Christian beliefs per se. Further, its jibes at the Jewish characters are not to be mistaken for anti-Semitism.

5. Martin Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).

[22] Like The Life of Brian, The Last Temptation of Christ does not claim to be a story of the historical Jesus. Rather, it is an adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel, The Last Temptation. Nevertheless, it is a Jesus story of sorts, and invites comparison with the other Jesus films.35 The Last Temptation of Christ situates Jesus in first century Palestine and features a cast of characters similar to that of the Gospels, including Jesus, his Jewish followers, Jewish authorities who are perturbed and challenged by Jesus, Roman officials who enact and carry out the sentence of crucifixion with some misgivings. Although there is no explicit reference to the Cynic peasant theory, Jesus himself does look rather peasant-like, in his garb as he and his followers wander around the countryside.36

[23] Jesus’ ethnic identity is not a major theme, however. The film focuses not on Jesus’ objective historical and spiritual identity but on the inner struggle between the demands of God and the temptations of the flesh. This central theme is made explicit in the quotation from Kazantzakis’ novel which precedes the title frame: "The dual substance of Christ -- the yearning so human, so superhuman, of man to attain God...has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me. My principle [sic] anguish and source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh...and my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met."

[24] For Scorcese, Jesus’ crucifixion does not mark the advent of the kingdom, but rather his personal resolution of this inner conflict. Of greatest concern in this movie is the universal human dilemma and not a particular historical conflict or its theological ramifications. But the movie does refer to one corollary of historical Jesus research, namely, the relationship among historical facts, Christian faith, and theological truth. The extended dream sequence experienced by Scorcese’s Jesus contains a confrontation between Paul, who preaches Christ crucified and raised from the dead, and Jesus, who has left his wild youth behind and now leads an uneventful domestic existence with Mary, Martha, and their children. In shock and dismay, Jesus demands that Paul stop preaching that Jesus was crucified and came to life again. To this Paul responds that the only hope for the despairing people around him is the resurrected Jesus. "I don’t care whether you are Jesus or not," states Paul. "The resurrected Jesus will save the world and that’s all that matters.... I created the truth out of what people needed and what they believed" (emphasis in original). The irony, of course, is that the extended dream takes place while Jesus is hanging on the cross. Who knows the truth, the dreamer or the apostle?

[25] Scorcese shows some sensitivity to the anti-Semitic potential of the Gospel story by omitting Jesus’ trial before the Jewish authorities.37 On the whole, however, such historical issues are beyond the purview of the film itself.

6. Denis Arcand, Jesus of Montreal, 1989

[26] Roughly contemporaneous with Scorcese’s film, but much different in style, content and focus is Denis Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal. Arcand’s movie, as the title implies, is set in modern-day Montreal. It features a small troupe of under-employed actors who are hired by the priest of St. Joseph’s oratory, the major religious site situated on top of Mount Royal, to revitalize the tired Passion Play that has been performed there for years. The result is a powerful new play that presents a Jesus so vital and compelling that at least one member of the audience believes him to be real.

[27] The Passion Play asserts emphatically that Jesus was a Jew. But this assertion is given little content in either the Passion Play itself or the frame narrative in which it is embedded. Within this frame narrative, the actors become involved in the drama of their own lives which mirrors the characters, content and structure of the Passion Play which they perform. In the modern day frame narrative, acts and words that echo the Gospels become symbolic of contemporary issues. Daniel Coulumbe, the actor who plays Jesus in the Passion Play, overturns the tables and shatters the high-tech equipment of those who have turned the theatre into a vulgar temple to the advertising industry, when Mireille -- the Passion’s Mary Magdalene -- is asked to bear her breasts in an audition for a beer commercial. Just as Jesus is offered the kingdoms of the world and their splendours in exchange for worshipping Satan (Matt 4:9), so is Daniel offered a tempting glimpse of power and wealth by a smooth talking lawyer in a tall tower overlooking downtown Montreal. At Daniel’s death -- caused when the cross to which he is strapped at the climax of the Passion Play topples -- his corneas and heart are transplanted into others, giving literal meaning to the notion that Jesus is the source of new sight and renewed life.

[28] These events and many others like them imply a symbolic interpretation of the seminal actions of Jesus in the Gospels. The confrontation with Satan is an indictment of contemporary values rather than a struggle with a powerful, superhuman adversary. The cleansing of the temple is not a prelude to or a symbol of the coming eschatological crisis but a protest against the exploitation of women and the exaltation of crass commercialism. The resurrection is not the promise of eternal life for those who believe but a healing of the physical body through the miracle of modern medicine and the generosity of Daniel/Jesus’ companions. Symbol, metaphor, and allegory reign supreme as in Wright and Borg’s portraits of the anti-nationalist Jesus.

[29] The movie claims that historical research was employed by Daniel and his followers in the writing of the Passion Play. Daniel Coulombe receives precious secrets from a theologian in a parking garage and does research in a library. The theologian’s plea that Daniel not tell anyone about the information he has been given evokes the theme of the messianic secret so prominent in Mark’s gospel. But to those viewers who actually know something about first century Palestine and historical Jesus research, the so-called historical facts as presented in the Passion Play are problematic. The Passion Play comments that ancient Jews identified Jesus as the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier Panthera. It also refers, however, to the discovery of a text containing the name Panthera, implying that this text substantiates the identification of Jesus as Yeshu ben Panthera. To viewers unversed in life of Jesus research, this latter detail might suggest that this identification is an accepted historical fact rather than the anti-Christian polemic of rabbinic literature of some 1500 years ago.38

[30] Jesus of Montreal draws an analogy between the scriptural Pharisees and the Catholic church in modern Quebec and uses Matthew 23 to give passionate expression to the corruption of the church. In contrast to Pasolini, however, Arcand avoids the anti-Semitic potential of this passage by omitting explicit reference to the Pharisees in "Jesus’" rendition of Matthew 23. In the Passion Play, Jesus angrily confronts the clerics who have curtailed the successful run of the Passion play by applying the invective of Matthew 23 to the priests and "reverend fathers"

[31] The film not only avoids anti-Jewish language but actively portrays Jews in a positive way. The final scenes of Jesus of Montreal contrast the crowded halls and inhumane attitude at Montreal’s St. Mark’s Hospital with the serenity of the Jewish General Hospital and the compassion of its staff people. Contributing to this point is the visual detail of the Star of David on the uniforms of the hospital workers which subtly evoke the Jewish badge worn by Jewish residents of the ghettos and concentration camps of the Nazi regime. This scene powerfully asserts that the Christians -- St. Mark’s -- have rejected the dying Jesus whereas the Jews have taken him in. Furthermore, it draws an analogy between Jesus and the Jews as innocent victims of persecution. To Montrealers, however, the scene is a source of some humor; it seems that the real Jewish General is not nearly so serene and uncrowded as its portrayal in this scene.

Conclusion

[32] Like historical Jesus scholars, filmmakers are convinced of Jesus’ Jewishness, but they construct this aspect of his identity in different ways. The precise place of his Jewishness in these depictions reflects their overarching purpose. Films in which the main purpose is to present the historical Jesus tend to rely more directly upon research and hence to reflect one or another trend in Jesus scholarship more directly. Films whose main purpose is psychological, allegorical or analogical tend not to focus on the ethnic or religious specificity of Jesus and hence his Jewishness is similarly eclipsed. Like Jesus scholars, filmmakers are also sensitive to cultural values, such as the general abhorrence of anti-Semitism in our post-Holocaust era. This sensitivity is no doubt also effected by concern for the "bottom-line," that is, the financial success of the films.

[33] Some film-makers are reluctant to lay the death of Jesus on the Jews as a whole, or even on particular factions among the Jewish authorities.39 Whereas many New Testament scholars emphasize that both the Jewish authorities and Roman government contributed to the events which culminated in Jesus’ crucifixion,40 some film-makers emphasize the Roman role so as to avoid any possible charges of anti-Semitism. According to film historian Gerald Forshey, "To choose any interpretation other than one that mitigated the scriptural contention of Jewish culpability was to risk being a bigot."41 The deflection of responsibility to the Romans is criticized strongly by some film reviewers, most notably by Dwight Macdonald, who refers to the Romans of the Jesus films as "fall goys."42 Although Macdonald strongly refutes accusations of antisemitism,43 he insists that the story of the Jesus should be told with reverence for the New Testament text but with irreverence for the sensibilities of contemporary religious groups including Jews.44

[34] Even those films which explicitly attempt non-historical or ahistorical interpretations of the gospel narrative(s) convey and reflect particular views of Jews and Judaism, however. The allegorical intentions of Pasolini, for example, do not diminish or undermine the identification of the Pharisees as hypocrites. And even a film like Jesus of Nazareth which bends over backwards to portray Jews positively is not able to convey a full appreciation of Judaism apart from faith in Jesus Christ. Perhaps it is too much to ask of Jesus films that they both treat the primary sources with respect and with awareness of contemporary scholarship and that they also show sensitivity to the anti-Semitic potential of the primary sources and the ways in which they have been interpreted in Christian exegesis and theology until relatively recently. These difficulties define the challenge that anyone who aspires to contribute to this genre must face.

Appendix: Recent Studies of Jesus Movies

[35] The Jesus movie genre has come under much study in recent years. The following is list and brief description of the major studies.

[36] Baugh, Lloyd. Imaging the Divine: Jesus and Christ-Figures in Film. Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward, 1997. The first part of the book is an analysis of the Jesus-film tradition, from beginnings of genre to present day. The second part is dedicated to "filmic Christ-figure" found in such films as Jesus of Montreal, Babette’s Feast, Dead Man Walking, and Shane.

[37] Kinnard, Roy, and Tim Davis. Divine Images: A History of Jesus on the Screen. New York City: Citadel Press, 1992. This survey of the Jesus movies from the early silents (1897-1919) through to the 1980s provides full details of the credits and cast of each movie as well as brief commentaries, excerpts from movie reviews, and photographs.

[38] Tatum, W. Barnes. Jesus at the Movies. Santa Rosa CA: Polebridge Press, 1997. This book is a detailed and very useful study of thirteen major Jesus films, including background notes regarding production, critical analysis, and summary of movie reviews.

[39] Telford, William R. "Jesus Christ Movie Star: The Depiction of Jesus in the Cinema." In Clive Marsh and Gaye Ortiz, eds., Explorations in Theology and Film, 115-139. . Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997. This article focuses on the portrayal of Jesus in the Jesus films from Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927) through Jesus of Montreal (1989).

[40] Also relevant are Martin, Joel W. and Conrad E. Ostwalt, Jr., eds. Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth, and Ideology in Popular American Film (San Francisco: Westview, 1995), which examines the religious and iconoclastic impact of film in American culture; Miles, Margaret R., Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies (Boston: Beacon 1996), which looks at the transmission of religious values through popular film; and Scott, Bernard Brandon, Hollywood Dreams and Biblical Stories (Fortress: Minneapolis, 1994), which considers the ways in which the Christian gospel finds expression in film media.

*Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 2, No. 2 October 1998

Archetypes on Screen: Odysseus, St. Paul, Christ and theAmerican Cinematic Hero and Anti-Hero

2007-08-13T13:22:00.000-07:00

By John Fitch, III
Abstract

[1] Within the national cinematic gestalt, we are continually offered portrayals of the individual redemptive journey. Filmmakers repeatedly give us versions of the hero and anti-hero. These figures have their roots in age-old mythological and religious characters, and are easily identifiable in the traditional Western and more recent Road Movie. This paper compares the mythic Odysseus and the Christian gospel�s St. Paul, with a look also at the Christ-figure, in an examination of the cinematic use of the hero and anti-hero archetypes and their meanings.

Article
[2] Transformation in many contemporary American films occurs within the journey of the protagonist. This tendency has deep roots in traditional storytelling. In his Anatomy of Criticism, Northrup Frye observes, �of all fictions, the marvelous journey is the one formula that is never exhausted.�1

[3] There are several current writings that explore the connection between religion, myth and film. One purpose of this paper is to find as much common ground as possible between Christian and secular writers, while attempting to maintain a theologically independent viewpoint. The concern is not so much with the orthodoxy of a particular epistemological criticism, but rather with advancing a series of remarks based on a personal stance and a number of sources, including Joel W. Martin and Conrad E. Ostwalt�s Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth and Ideology in Popular American Film � a comprehensive theological criticism of film as a cultural mass medium.2 John Izod�s Jungian analysis of contemporary filmic icons in Myth, Mind and the Screen provides insight into the cultural implications of identity.3 Lloyd Baugh�s investigation of the person of Jesus Christ as represented in cinema in Imaging the Divine: Jesus and Christ Figures in Film is a dependable source for the often neglected instances of the sacred in the ordinary.4 And the hero�s traditional journey is examined by Susan Mackey-Kallis in The Hero and the Perennial Journey Home.5

[4] What is a cinematic hero? What is an anti-hero? Are these merely ephemeral terms that we assign to leading characters in filmic roles? Or are they simply reflections of what and who we want to be, or how we imagine ourselves in the best or worst of all possible worlds?

[5] In cinema, the hero/heroine is usually depicted as one delivering salvation, enacting positive change, and bringing relief from suffering or oppression. He or she usually possesses the positive traits common to the traditional notion of a hero: emotional, physical, and moral strength as well as charity and fortitude. On the other hand, the anti-hero is defined as �a protagonist who lacks the attributes that make a heroic figure, as nobility of mind and spirit, a life or attitude marked by action or purpose.�6 The anti-hero is often a reluctant savior � the one that we follow and adore if only because of his own fallibility and fundamentally flawed human nature. He or she is someone who resembles ourselves, reminding us not only of the ambiguous morality of existence but also the possibility of redemptive change and transcendence.

[6] Historically, the delineation between the archetypal hero and the anti-hero has not always been clear. From Percival of the Grail legend to the Fisher King, King David to Hercules, and Odysseus to Saint Paul, the hero is usually depicted as unmistakably mortal at heart. Yet the image and mythology of Jesus Christ insists upon a combination of flesh and spirit, human mortality and divine perfection. Is Christ the hybrid of the hero and anti-hero? How do our cinematic heroes address the dual nature of His presence � that of personal doubt and physical suffering coupled with inspired, omnipotent ability and conviction? Perhaps by questioning the idea of the Christ-like hero in cinema, there can be a collective search for spiritual identity and a re-examination of the idea of righteousness within our own experience and culture.

[7] The stories of St. Paul and Odysseus parallel the hero-myth cycles and the spiritual dimensions of a physical journey abundant in Western literature � and more recently, in American cinema. The predominance and contemporary cultural relevance of this ancient story-cycle has been manifest in a very specific film genre, the �road movie� � essentially a contemporary continuation of the traditional �Western.� The characters that populate these films are continually complex, yet seemingly familiar. The perennial rise of the cinematic anti-hero and the Christ-figure punctuates the resemblance between these newer forms and the ancient epics.

[8] The traditional Christian story of St. Paul provides an example of the prototypical anti-hero. He was a sworn enemy of Christians. While on a journey he experienced a divine revelation and was temporarily blinded by the bright light that accompanied the voice of Christ. The experience transformed Paul and he became Christ�s foremost apostle and one of Christendom�s earliest and most influential theologians. His passivity (not actively seeking transformation) is typical of the cinematic anti-hero.

[9] Odysseus (the proto-typical journeyman) was a warrior who left his home place and family to wage war, but after the battle he was delayed and beset by many life-threatening ordeals and trials. Despite his difficulties, when he finally does return home Odysseus is a stronger force than when he departed. The journey shaped and defined his character.

[10] It is notable to observe that Odysseus�s fame does not come from his ethical or moral stature, but rather from his craftiness, stealth and dangerous cunning. In the end, when he returns home, he is not a triumphant warrior, but rather a clever murderer.

Even Odysseus�s name is indicative of his nature. It has been associated with the Greek word odyne, meaning pain � and pain not just for oneself, but pain extended to others. This reciprocal sado-masochism reverberates in the definition of the cinematic anti-hero, the hero who is considered heroic only through receiving and in the end distributing pain.

[11] The anti-hero, like Odysseus, is rarely happy in situations that would please other men; he is usually an outlaw type who seeks conflict and struggle over comfort and certainty. In fact, his sense of self-actualization or righteousness is only achieved through war and strife. In Homer�s story of Odysseus, as in so many contemporary films, the goal of the warrior/anti-hero is not long life, but glorious life followed by glorious death.

[12] Odysseus also resembles the cinematic anti-hero in that he often travels alone. Homer compares him to lions and eagles, animals that usually hunt apart from their families. Ultimately, the journey of Odysseus takes on mythic and spiritual dimensions by virtue of the destination. He, like the anti-hero, is not just striving for Ithaca but also for a metaphysical sense of place. Just as the anti-hero or cowboy travels west seeking to escape his past in a new home, Odysseus flees Troy for the home of his imagination. Several times in the poem, his quest is described in terms of a desire for re-birth � a rising from the dead that can only occur when he reaches his home.

[13] The flawed and undeniably ambiguous heroic/anti-heroic nature of Robert DeNiro�s character in Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980) is not so far removed from the character of Odysseus. Both men are famous warriors � DeNiro�s character is a well-known prizefighter � both are coming to terms with their physical decline, both of them have to confront the expiration of their former power and embrace a new kind of distinction, and both possess a desire to return to the glory and fame they once enjoyed. In the end, after much self-reflection and examination, these two fighters are forced into a new kind of action and determination in order to recover what they have lost. Susan Mackey-Kallis writes of this mythic process: �The Hero�s journey...is both a descent into the world of liminal and passive unconscious and an ascent into consciousness and the world of action.�7

[14] The distinctions between the varying perennial characters � the traditional tragic hero, the anti-hero, the Christ figure, and the reluctant savior � are rarely clearly defined or identified in modern cinema. The occasional exception is the filmic Jesus. The difference between the Christ figure and Jesus is that the latter is usually a literal interpretation or reinterpretation of the religious person of Jesus Christ as articulated in the Biblical New Testament, while the Christ-figure often possesses characteristics of Jesus under varying secular and religious narrative constructs. In some cinematic incarnations, however, Jesus himself is represented as an enigmatic, self-doubting and more human presence, as for example in The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1998) and Jesus of Montreal (Denys Arcand, 1990). In many cases, on-screen characters take on the traits of Jesus, St. Paul, King David, Odysseus, and Judas all at once, reflecting the uncertainty and universality of the Christic hero-image itself.

[15] From David to Odysseus to John Wayne, the ethical and moral substance of heroic figures is fraught with inconsistencies � just as the mythology of Paul could be seen as a troubling study of aborted vengeance and reluctant redemption. A film like Dead Man Walking (Tim Robbins, 1995) underscores the ambiguity of the nature and moral character of our cultural heroes. The main character in the film is a confessed murderer, full of hate and confusion � yet, in the end, he is portrayed as a beatific Christ-figure, one who is perhaps wrongly executed for his sins following absolution by a Catholic nun. An interesting element of this depiction is that the character resembles Paul more closely than Christ. Paul was a killer who was redeemed by the intervention of the Divine. On the other hand, Jesus Christ is purported to be blameless and without sin � and therefore his wrongful execution was intended to be a self-sacrificial event by which others would be freed from their sins.

[16] According to the Christic example, to which all of his followers are subsequently called, a man should do no harm to any other man, which means actively denying a fundamentally flawed human nature. The active direction of Christ�s example lies in direct contrast to the passive experience of Paul � who was maimed and brought into submission by the calling of Christ. It is Paul�s inactivity, or lack of direct action in achieving redemption, that we see in most American cinematic heroes/anti-heroes. They are men and women of violence, of revenge and reparation � essentially, purely human. Unwittingly, they are brought to a kind of �holy aggression� by circumstances beyond their control, as seen in the dilemmas faced by the main characters in The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928), Glory (Edward Zwick, 1989), Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988), The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999), and The Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson, 2001). As with Odysseus, their redemption is marked by the blood of their enemies. Like the pre-Christian St. Paul, their pious rage is predicated by the fact that they are �fighting for the right side,� or following a �higher calling,� or protecting their own embattled loved ones.

[17] Perhaps these themes resonate within the American psyche, to qualify and redeem the many moral indiscretions that accompanied the creation of the nation. There may indeed be a nagging desire to quell the collective guilt of a society that displaced the original residents of the land, enslaved an entire race for its own financial gain, and introduced nuclear warfare to the world. The idea that the hero had to do �what he had to do to get the job done� is certainly not Christ-like in the traditional sense, yet postures as a righteous stance by virtue of its dedication to a high ideal, coupled with the embrace of self-sacrifice. Such idealism is continually evident in most American cinematic heroes. They avoid barbarism and violence until pushed into a corner by insurmountable odds and desperate circumstances. In almost every case, though, when the hero does finally resort to violence he is just as vicious and ruthless as his adversaries. Many times, the hero is absolved of past sins and indiscretions through a resolute dedication to violence and vengeance, much like Odysseus. In his book, Hollywood Dreams and Biblical Stories, Brandon Scott cites Levi-Strauss:

The purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming contradiction...We use myths to hide contradictions in the beliefs of our societies...That is, we approve of violence in our need to keep order. But the contradiction is overcome in film when the violence is evacuated from civilization after its occurrence: hence the need for the hero to leave after he saves the family in �Shane,� �The Searchers,� and innumerable other westerns.8

[18] This kind of faux moral redemption � of blood and retribution, not of spirit and conscience � and its recurrence in the American cinematic Road Movie or Western is troubling, for no real change or spiritual transformation occurs. Examples are plentiful. From First Blood (the first installment of the lucrative Rambo franchise, directed by Ted Kotcheff in 1982) to Clint Eastwood�s Unforgiven (1992) to Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994), Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (Kevin Reynolds, 1991), Lethal Weapon (Richard Donner, 1987) and Die Hard, the good guys seldom wear white hats and frequently murder their way to this kind of nebulous spiritual freedom which may be culturally sanctioned by a social system that still seems to reward a sadistic response to danger or any kind of threat. In American film, the spirit of Odysseus�s bloody return to Ithaca seems to prevail over Paul�s transformative journey to Damascus.

[19] The fundamental moral/social reasoning for this kind of retribution relies on a selfless defense of friends, family, and country. Usually the hero allows or endures many persecutions of self, but when presented with the mistreatment of others, carnage most certainly follows. The apparent selflessness of this modus operandi provides the hero with redemptive accolades and indulgences from his peers and society in general. Thereby, the anti-hero is wedded to the hero and the idea of absolute morality is lost; the Old Testament law of equal retribution continues to propagate itself upon the movie screens and home movie systems of America.

[20] The Road Movie/Western, in various incarnations, has tenuous links to the �Mission Movie.� In fact, the latter may be simply a sub-genre of the former. The mission movie is not a story of hopeful travel-borne enthusiasm; neither is it simply an escapist abandonment of difficult circumstances. The mission movie is usually a directional story with a singular, imperative goal: the attainment of something or someone that has been lost and must be rediscovered at all costs. This kind of filmic narrative resembles the legend of Odysseus as well as the ill-fated Christian crusades � and in a contemporary sense, the journey of the Army Rangers in Saving Private Ryan. In the mission movie, the hero�s journey is less about escape than of acquisition and recovery � indeed reconnaissance, that is, reclaiming something lost. Mythologist Joseph Campbell writes that the hero�s journey �is a labor not of attainment but of reattainment, not of discovery but rediscovery. The godly powers sought and dangerously won are revealed to have been within the heart of the hero all the time.�9

[21] The idea of homecoming is more important in these cases than of existential or physical flight. The mythological theme of this type of story resonates throughout the history of narrative form. One early example is that of Moses and the tribes of Israel, who wandered through the desert in search of a �promised land.� This exedotic journey finds significant yet uneasy parallels in the character of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and Odysseus � that of returning home, after traveling into distant magical lands. Like the medieval search for the Holy Grail and the crusades, the hero/protagonist cannot return home with honor until the prescribed assignment of recovery is completed. There are many modern correlations from the American screen, including The Searchers (John Ford, 1956), Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991), The Fugitive (Andrew Davis, 1993), The Verdict (Sidney Lumet, 1982), Kalifornia (Dominic Sena, 1993), Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998), The Mission (Roland Joffe, 1986) and 12 Monkeys (Terry Gillam, 1995). The deeper, more fundamental message of this kind of narrative focuses not on the obtainment of the intended goal, but rather upon the lessons learned upon the road � the process of re-attainment itself. The transformative power of the iconic wilderness in terms of the seeker�s spiritual/psychological state becomes the main focus and primary benefit of the story.

[22] Between the two journeymen, St. Paul and Odysseus, we find stark disparity: Paul is made into something greater, while Odysseus remains the ruthless warrior he has always been. Odysseus returns in disguise to violently punish his foes, while Paul has become a benevolent force, advocating peace among his former enemies. The result is easily observed: Odysseus has gained nothing from his journeys but pain and a desire to draw seemingly justifiable blood from his and his wife�s tormentors. Paul is a changed man, bent upon righting his past sins through forgiveness and a peaceful embrace of a new, benevolent calling.

[23] Paul�s type of rediscovery has few correlations in American cinema. Indeed, there are not many films about the �bad guy� becoming the �good guy� without much spilling of blood (and the violence justified as �righteous action�). The few examples that exist concern Christ � as a template of peaceful yet willful and dedicated change, as in Jesus of Montreal and The Greatest Story Ever Told.

[24] Films about Joan of Arc evidence a cinematic piousness in the portrayal of violence for a greater cause. Such mission movies usually end in a blood bath. Consider Robert DeNiro�s character in The Mission. Even though the hero is shamed and shackled into a true spiritual redemption, he participates with relish in a final battle for what we are asked to consider a just cause. The hero/warrior is transformed, but only briefly � only until his previously tested savage skills are needed to aid others in a desperately violent struggle.

[25] In many American films, the killer remains true to his natural predatory instincts, though they may be temporarily suspended. This pattern is so abundant in American cinema that an attempt to cite examples may become tiresome. Consider Apocalypse Now, which begins as a kind of road/mission movie where our hero has the opportunity to rediscover himself and his role in the Vietnam conflict through many disillusioning events, ennui, and a fuller understanding of his own fruitless mission. But, true to the form of most American cinematic journeymen, in the end he takes up a sword and completes his assigned homicidal mission without remorse or regret. The implicit message here is that the American hero/anti-hero, under duress, has no choice but to ruin and destroy the enemy according to the directives of his superiors � regardless of his own conscience or his own moral/spiritual doubts. If his own well-being or that of his comrades in is danger, he will do what he has to do to complete the destruction of his enemy.

[26] In contrast, the journeys of St. Paul and Christ have more to do with surrender to a spiritual calling � a calling to self-sacrifice and spiritual re-awakening. Paul originally takes to the road as a self-proclaimed zealot, pledging to quell the threat of the spiritual separatists, the Christians, and their threat to the orthodoxy of Judaism. At this point, Paul is a religious warrior, a crusader driven by a calling to purge the promised land of these new �infidels.� By his own later admission, his desires were not purely fueled by religious fervor; he also desired a bit of fame and notoriety, which would surely be bestowed upon a young passionate devotee by the Jewish religious elite of the time.

[27] The hero and anti-hero continue to show up in contemporary American film. Stories of cinematic protagonists appear fluid over time, for the details of the stories must reflect a changing cultural landscape � in this era to fit the multi-plex and its patrons. However, the perennial and abiding significance of the leading man or woman borrows heavily from a pattern set down long ago: a pattern born of myth, scripture and an enduring narrative form. St. Paul and Odysseus are enduring models of heroism and anti-heroism. They resemble American moviegoers, who participate in the continuing epic journey of life itself.

[28] The mythical models addressed here � the journey, transformation, redemption, revenge � find their universality in the human heart. The journey of self-discovery occurs and reoccurs in the individual�s secret spaces, and on the movie screens of America.

Our films manifest the human journey set within the tenuous fabric of our contemporary society. As stressed by scholars such as Joseph Campbell, the challenge for the individual is to learn from the mistakes and triumphs of the archetypal figures. Certainly, cinematic audiences of today identify with the presented incarnations of the archetypes. Amidst all the violence, one cannot help but wonder if there is a point ahead, on the cinematic horizon, when filmmakers will give equal screening to the hero who achieves a non-violent transformation.

*Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 9, No. 1 April 2005

Apocalyptic Visions

2007-08-13T13:15:00.000-07:00

by Amir Hussain

Abstract

Article

[1] On November 20, 1999, I was privileged to chair a session of the Religion, Film and Visual Culture group at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR)1. The session was entitled "Film and the Apocalypse", and consisted of the five papers that are collected in this volume. The word "apocalypse" comes from a Greek root meaning to reveal or uncover, which is precisely what I understand films to do, reveal something about the world. In these five papers, much is revealed about the apocalyptic visions of a number of contemporary Hollywood films. This essay will be a summary of and reflection on those five papers.

[2] Susan Schwartz writes about one film, What Dreams May Come, directed by Vincent Ward and released in 1998, starring Robin Williams. She begins her paper with the story of Orpheus, and sees the film as "yet another Orphic trope." However, she believes that South Asian traditions, most notably, Hinduism, have a strong influence in this film. While she does not make the comparison in her paper, I immediately thought of the new novel by Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, which also combines Greek and Indian myth, putting the "Indo" back squarely in "Indo-European." Rushdie begins the novel with an epigraph from Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, and names one of the main characters Ormus Cama. In the text, the character is a Parsi (a member of the Zoroastrian community living in India), and is named after Ahura Mazda2. However, one also hears a blending of the names "Orpheus", "Kama" and even "Camus" (who was himself a blend of North African and French) in this delightful name.

[3] On the surface, Schwartz argues, the film is of course "western". It gets its title from the western author, William Shakespeare, in the following line from Hamlet: "For in that sleep of death what dreams may come." And the stunning visuals in the film are all based on western paintings. However, beneath this western surface lie the eastern traditions of the world as illusory and the play of the divine. Schwartz sums this up beautifully (and playfully) in my favourite sentence from her article: "What Dreams May Come is therefore a work of the imagination (a film) about a work of imagination (life and death), which constructs a western illusion about an eastern illusion, all the while addressing western apocalyptic paranoia at the end of the millennium, which is, of course, irrelevant in the east." It is this point that needs to be emphasized, that the end of the millennium is irrelevant to those of us that follow different calendars.

[4] There are other films discussed in this collection of papers that incorporate western and eastern motifs in their portrayals of the apocalyptic. One of these films is The Matrix, which will be discussed later. The other is the Star Wars series.

[5] In his paper, John Lyden analyses the apocalypticism in perhaps the most popular of film series, the Star Wars tetralogy directed by George Lucas. At this point I must remark that those who did not have the privilege of hearing Lyden read his paper at the AAR missed an opportunity to hear a gifted mimic. He recited many of the lines in the voices of the characters, adding something to his presentation that is unfortunately lost when one only has a written text.

[6] Lyden begins with the observation that Lucas was influenced by the work of Joseph Campbell, the popular mythologist. He gives an excellent, succinct summary of some of the problems that the scholar of religion has with the work of Campbell. For this summary alone, Lyden is to be commended.

[7] Campbell interpreted the Star Wars films in his own way, but Lucas had a different interpretation of the films. In an interview, Lucas stated that he "...wanted to make it so that young people would begin to ask questions about the mystery." Lyden discusses the term "apocalypse", and connects the films to Jewish and Christian ideas of apocalypse, particularly their emphasis on a saviour/messiah figure. He also introduces Zoroastrian notions of a battle between good and evil.

[8] The ideas that Schwartz raises about eastern and western influences coming together are immediately relevant to the Star Wars films. They contain not just the western motifs that Lyden discusses, but eastern themes as well. One thinks immediately of comparisons to Taoism, and the Force in the films as being analogous to the Tao. It would be very easy to put Yoda in the role of a Taoist master, with lines such as "Do or not do. There is no try." In the first film of the series, The Phantom Menace (released in 1999), one of the main characters is a Jedi knight named Qui-Gon Jinn (played by Liam Neeson). While this name immediately brings to my mind the terms "ch'i" (energy) and "ch'i-kung" (energy work)3, it also makes me think of Central Asia, and the traditions of Taoism, as well as Buddhism and Islam, (not to mention Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity and various "folk" religions) that are found there. Lyden does bring in ideas from Hinduism, connecting Luke Skywalker to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita4. However, while Arjuna fights his enemies, Luke does not fight Vader.

[9] Frances Flannery-Dailey discusses the apocalypticism in the 1995 film Twelve Monkeys, directed by Terry Gilliam. She focuses on the messianic role played by the star of the film, Bruce Willis. In the film, Willis' character, the time traveler James Cole, says "I know some things you don't know, and it's going to be very difficult for you to understand." In this way, the character reveals to the people of 1990 what will happen to them in the future, when a virus will kill five billion people. In reading this quote, I was reminded of another film, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (originally released in 1982, and re-released as a "director's cut" in 1992). In that film, the android Roy Batty (played by Rutger Hauer) says as his dying words "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die." Michel Desjardins has discussed the gnostic themes in Blade Runner, as well as in the writings of Philip K. Dick, on whose 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the film was based5.

[10] Flannery-Dailey situates Twelve Monkeys in ancient Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature. However, the film is also connected to the literature of modern science fiction. As Flannery-Dailey mentions, the notion in the film is that apocalyptic seers are time-travelers. In a lengthy footnote, she discusses another film starring Bruce Willis, Armageddon.

[11] Armageddon (1998, directed by Michael Bay), along with Contact (1997, directed by Robert Zemeckis), Deep Impact (1998, directed by Mimi Leder), and The Matrix (1998, directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski) are discussed by Conrad Ostwalt. He begins with the assertion that these "...cinematic end of the world dramas focus on the eschatological part of apocalyptic texts", and not on the "...revelation of God's sovereignty..." Ostwalt explicitly connects these films to contemporary science fiction as well as ancient apocalyptic texts. In these films, humans are able to change their future, and are not simply spectators to the divine unfolding. Again, the gnostic filter that Desjardins provides for Blade Runner helps us to understand these films as well.

[12] In his discussion of The Matrix, Ostwalt also introduces eastern as well as western themes. Neo, the main character in the film (played by Keanu Reeves), is certainly a western messiah. However, Ostwalt reminds us that Neo literally "wakes up" to the true nature of reality. In this way, he emulates the act of the historical Buddha. The Greek element is also present, with another main character named Morpheus, after the god of dreams (although one suspects that most teenagers watching the film know Morpheus not through Greek myth, but through the stories in Neil Gaiman's masterpiece of comics, The Sandman). Of course, there is a connection here with What Dreams May Come. In both of these films, the relationships between "the real" and "the dream" are explored6, and both incorporate eastern as well as western elements into the exploration of what it is that is truly real7.

[13] In his discussion of Contact, Ostwalt brings up the relationship between science and religion. He writes that "In our secular eschatological dramas, science has wrested control of cosmic cataclysm away from religion..." This really is an important point, particularly when one remembers that Contact was based on a novel by Carl Sagan, whose last book, The Demon Haunted World, reflected Sagan's hopes for the role of science at the end of the millennium8.

[14] Joel W. Martin takes a different approach in his paper. He examines a number of apocalyptic films for what they tell us about the role of women. Unfortunately, the picture that emerges is not often a positive one. After an excellent analysis of the opening sequence of Contact, Martin examines the American perceptions of reality after the Cold War. He mentions the shift that took place, from Cold War films in which we had to be shown how to live by aliens, to post Cold War films, where aliens become the new enemy.

[15] Martin begins his analysis of the social reality in films with a discussion of The Lion King (released by Disney in 1994), a film that involves not aliens but animals. He examines the gender roles in the film, and how the young hero, Simba, is first overpowered by the lioness Nala, his playmate from happier days. However, once Simba can establish his masculinity by ending up literally on top of her, only then can he go on to defeat his nemesis, Scar. Martin presents a compelling case for Scar being a stereotypical homosexual, thus adding to his "villainy". With the female subdued and the homosexual defeated, the heterosexual male is once again on top.

[16] Martin also has a clever interpretation of the "circle of life". The Pridelands, where Simba lives, is a gated community. Within the borders, all is well, but outside, the ethnic barbarian hordes prevail. This is a wonderful observation, particularly for those of us who live in a world where gated communities are becoming more and more popular.

[17] Martin notes the anti-feminism in films such as Armageddon, Deep Impact, The Fifth Element (1997, directed by Luc Besson), and Independence Day (1996, directed by Roland Emmerich). In all of these films, there are disturbing plots about women. In the first two films, the message is that "Women who are fertile and heterosexually bonded survive." In The Fifth Element, one would hope for something different. After all, in this film, the perfect being (played by Milla Jovovich) is female. However, she needs the white heterosexual male (played yet again by Bruce Willis) to rouse her (from her crying, no less) to action and save the earth. And in Independence Day, the First Lady might have avoided her death by following her husband's wishes.

[18] The anti-feminism that Martin describes is not of course limited to the movies. He mentions an episode of the animated Fox television show Futurama9 where a single professional female (a self-parody10 in turn of another Fox show, Ally McBeal) is yet again linked to the possible destruction of the earth. Martin concludes his paper with a discussion of Contact, where at the end of the film, the heroine (played by Jodie Foster) ends up on the beach talking to her "father". As Martin wryly remarks, "Evidently, at the end of time and space, a girl just wants her Dad."

[19] The male, heterosexual nature of apocalyptic traditions, both textual and celluloid, is insightfully addressed by Tina Pippin, especially in regards to the biblical book of Revelation. She writes: "I am more interested in what happens to the body of the female in [Revelation] the Bride is made into polis, city, the Whore gang raped and burned and eaten, the Woman Clothed with the Sun is a reproductive vessel who is exiled subsequent to giving birth, and Jezebel is destroyed. What is positive about this vision? ...This message is still not liberating for our late twentieth-century feminist and pro-gay liberation movements11."

[20] In fact, the book of Revelation, regardless of one's understanding of it, remains the "mother of the book" in western thinking about apocalypticism. Movies based on this book have often pointed to the themes noted by Schwartz, Lyden, Flannery-Dailey, Ostwalt, and Martin particularly the "eastern" flavour (e.g., Ingmar Bergman=s 1956 classic The Seventh Seal, which one now needs to see in the context of the writings of Edward Said, particularly Orientalism) and the shifts in time (e.g., The Last Wave, directed by Peter Weir and released in 1977, which nicely weaves in Australian aboriginal beliefs). And of note are The Seventh Sign (1988, directed by Carl Schultz) in which the main character, played by Demi Moore, stops the divine end-time clock at the eleventh hour and saves the world and The Rapture (1991, directed by Michael Tolkin), in which the Mimi Rogers character at the end defies a perverse God. Both films make significant steps in adding strong female leads. "Perhaps only the Hare Krishnas will be saved in the end," quips a priest sarcastically in The Seventh Sign. Perhaps it is not too late to convert!

[21] It was a great pleasure for me to have first heard these presentations at the AAR. Those reading them here for the first time will find an excellent collection of papers, each of which stands on its own merit. Together, they provide some interesting revelations about how Hollywood views the end of the world in the latter days of the twentieth century.

Footnotes

[1] This group was organized by Bill Blizek and Rubina Ramji, who are to be commended for their choice of papers.

[2]Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, New York: Henry Holt, 1999, p. 26.

[3] The comparison is even more obvious if one uses the Pinyin system of transliteration as opposed to the older Wade-Giles system. The relevant terms become, respectively, "q" and "qigong."

[4] Lyden writes of "...the ethic of the Bhagavad Gita in which the Hindu notion of ahimsa is developed." This is the only line in his paper with which I would disagree, as my reading of the Gita doesn't support a notion of ahimsa in the way that the term was understood at the time of the Epics.

[5] Michel Desjardins, "Retrofitting Gnosticism: Philip K. Dick and Christian Origins," in Violence, Utopia and the Kingdom of God, ed. Tina Pippin and George Aichele, London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 122-33.

[6] One of the characters in What Dreams May Come says "thought is real...physical is the illusion...ironic, huh?"

[7] I am indebted to Tony S. L. Michael for his help and insights on this point.

[8] These hopes are made explicit in the subtitle of the book. Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, New York: Random House, 1995.

[9] I am compelled to comment on the timeliness of this in Martin's presentation. This episode aired on November 7, 1999, and he was able to incorporate it into his presentation on November 20. Cutting edge indeed!

[10] Or perhaps it is simply an example of product placement." One is never quite sure

[11] Tina Pippin, Apocalyptic Bodies: The Biblical End of the World in Text and Image, London: Routledge, 1999, p. 119.

*Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 4, No. 1 April 2000

The Apocalyptic Cosmology of Star Wars

2007-08-13T13:02:00.000-07:00

by John Lyden

Abstract

[1] The paper analyzes the saga of Star Wars as a text that has borrowed extensively from biblical apocalyptic. There is a cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil; a great cataclysm is foretold, but the faithful will survive with the help of God (The Force); a messiah figure (Luke) appears; and a new world order will come about in which justice triumphs and wickedness is punished. This myth is made relevant to modem viewers by being framed as a battle of technology vs. the natural human: the machine Vader vs. the human Anakin, the Death Star vs. the Force, Imperial walkers vs. primitive Ewoks. The films' apparent technophilia is cover for a technophobic message: we must remember our humanity lest we be absorbed or destroyed by our machine creations.

Article

[2] In a year which has featured the first new Star Wars movie in 16 years, media critics have finally begun to notice the religious themes in this most popular of all film series. And while the religious elements may be more obvious in The Phantom Menace, they have in fact been there from the beginning of the series (in episode four). Indeed, the incredible success of the Star Wars films is not due only (and I would argue, not primarily) to marketing or special effects, but to their ability to tap into basic religious or mythological concepts with which viewers can connect.

[3] It is well-known, for example, that George Lucas self-consciously constructed the screenplay for the first film under the influence of popular mythologist Joseph Campbell. In an address to the National Arts Club in 1985, Lucas noted that he was entirely without direction until he stumbled upon Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces.1 And the stages of Campbell's monomyth, outlined in that book, do indeed suggest the structure of Lucas' screenplay: the hero (Luke) is called to the adventure; he initially refuses the call; supernatural aid is supplied (Ben Kenobi), which enables the adventure to proceed; he passes the threshold (Mos Eisley) and enters the belly of the whale (The Deathstar). He meets the goddess (Leia) whom he must rescue, and loses the father-figure (Ben) who becomes a spiritual presence to him. After escaping the Death Star, he must return to it, this time to destroy the monster.2

[4] However, it is my contention that reading Star Wars through the lens of Campbell's philosophy does not do justice to all that is in the films, religiously speaking. Although the basic storyline does indeed replicate Campbell's categories, Lucas did not intend to be a mouthpiece for Campbell's thought, which diverges from Lucas's own religious sensibilities in a number of important ways. Lucas used a variety of religious sources to construct the world of Star Wars, including biblical apocalyptic. It is not my intention to demonstrate that Star Wars is chiefly an apocalyptic text or only that, but to show that Lucas utilized apocalyptic ideas, among other religious notions, in the construction of the Star Wars universe. To do so, I must first spend some time showing the inadequacy of the Campbellian interpretation of Star Wars, due to the fact that many people have interpreted the films' religious elements solely through those categories.

[5] To understand Campbell's view of Star Wars, one must have some sense of his overall philosophy of religion. Campbell had very little formal education in religious studies. He studied Medieval European literature, Romance philology, and modem literature, especially the works of James Joyce and Thomas Mann. His main encounter with religion began through editing the posthumous writings of Indologist Heinrich Zimmer and through working with Swami Nikhilananda translating and editing the Upanishads. On the subject of mythology, he was an autodidact without formal training.3 When one looks at Campbell's assessment of religions in his published writings, this background is evident. Many of his examples come from modem or medieval literature with little explicit reference to religion. When he does speak of religions, he shows a decided preference for Hinduism's conception of the divine and salvation, and in particular, the traditions of monistic Vedanta. He degrades the western religions, Judaism in particular, for sharply distinguishing God from the world. "The Biblical image of the universe simply won't do any more,4 writes Campbell, and he also claims that in eastern religions the ultimate divine mystery is sought beyond all human categories of thought and feeling, beyond names and forms .... Anthropomorphic attributions of human sentiments and thoughts to a mystery beyond thought is--from the point of view of Indian thought--a style of religion for children."5

[6] One may note that this judgment even preferences non-dualistic Vedanta over the devotional forms of theistic bhakti practiced by most Hindus. In any case, the "proper" religious teaching of identity with the Godhead is not taught in the West, according to Campbell, because it is viewed as heresy or blasphemy; Campbell even claims Jesus was crucified for claiming identity with God.6 This is the sort of oversimplification of historical and theological matters in which Campbell revels. He generalizes about religions, concluding all that do not preach monism are superstitious and parochial. He reserves particular venom for the Jewish claim to be the chosen people who have received a unique revelation from God.7 That this denigration of Judaism is tied to Campbell's own anti-Semitism has been well documented by Robert Segal and Maurice Friedman.8

[7] Campbell's monism also represents a "psychologizing' of religion and myth, and here he is under the influence of Karl Jung in particular. He tries to reduce all religion to a journey of "self-discovery" brought about by identification with the story of the "hero" reproduced in every myth. One of the most striking things one finds in reading Campbell's works is his amazing ability to ignore the points of the individual tales he is telling; all are made to fit the mold of the one 'true' story of the "Hero with a thousand faces" mapped out in the book of that title.9 There as well he concludes that the end of the hero's journey is a union with the divine in which all personal identity and difference is annihilated.10 But finally, this identity is not interpreted as the union of the individual with a transcendent absolute, for there is no transcendent; rather, the identity of all is interpreted in immanentist categories, in that the individual realizes he himself is the absolute, the creator, the center of his own universe.11 Each person is to realize this, that each of us makes our own universe and so is responsible for all that happens in it. This is why Campbell cannot take the problem of undeserved suffering seriously; we deserve everything that happens to us, for we make our own universe.12 In this he sounds more like Jean-Paul Sartre or Friedrich Nietzsche than the great religions of history. This view also represents a reduction of reality to that which we experience and perceive, and so it cannot take seriously any external mystery of transcendence.13 The only "mystery" is what lurks in my own unconscious, which can be plumbed via depth psychology and interpretation of my myths and dreams. In this Campbell has also very much influenced the New Age movement in its use of mythology and religion.

[8] After George Lucas invited Campbell to Skywalker Ranch to view all three Star Wars films in a single day, Campbell gave his approval to the message of the films in interviews with Phil Cousineau and Bill Moyers. In his interpretation, we again see the hallmarks of his own philosophy of religion. Darth Vader is a "bureaucrat, living not in terms of himself but in terms of an imposed system." Like him, each of us must learn to develop as a human individual by "holding to your own ideals for yourself and, like Luke Skywalker, rejecting the system's impersonal claims upon you.14 Immorality comes when we do not listen to our own inner voices and instead listen to others. "The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are they should be living for.15 Again, this message resembles Nietzsche's philosophy more than that of George Lucas, I would argue, as this is Campbell's own moral philosophy.

[9] Campbell also gives an immanentist interpretation to the idea of the Force. The Force is "within" us, he points out, and for him this means not that the sacred is both beyond us and within us (like the Holy Spirit in Christian thought, or Brahman in Hinduism), but only that which lies within us. The Force is "what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life," and as such it is not a "first cause" or a "higher cause," but "a more inward cause." "Higher is just up there, and there is no 'up there.' We know that. That old man up there has been blown away. You've got to find the Force inside you."16

[10] That Campbell's interpretation of Star Wars need not be the only one is clear even by an examination of Lucas's own words about the meaning of the films. In a recent interview with Bill Moyers in "Time" magazine, he said that he did not intend Star Wars to be a replacement for the old religions, nor does he say that the eastern religions are "closer" to the truth than the western (as Campbell does).

[11] I don't see Star Wars as profoundly religious. I see Star Wars as taking all the issues that religion represents and trying to distill them down into a more modem and easily accessible construct--that there is a greater mystery out there .... I put the Force into the movie in order to try to awaken a certain kind of spirituality in young people--more a belief in God than a belief in any particular religious system. I wanted to make it so that young people would begin to ask questions about the mystery.17

[12] The mystery is clearly transcendent for Lucas, not merely a reflection of some internal psychological structure. "I think that there is a God. No question. What that God is or what we know about God, I'm not sure." Lucas would seem more at home with John Hick's philosophy, that there is a Reality which transcends all the religions and which each is trying to describe as best it can, rather than Campbell's reductionist view that all religions can be boiled down to a single psychological process of auto-suggested divinity. Lucas also believes that his films do not supply religious answers, but ask questions that are then given various answers by the different religions. This seems to echo Paul Tillich's method of correlation, which claimed that culture can ask the questions of existence but only revelation can answer them. Lucas actually likes the fact that a number of religions can find their own ideas reflected in the Star Wars films; they fill in the answer to the question with the content of their own faith.18

[13] In the process of asking basic questions about the meaning of life and how we should live, however, the Star Wars films do give some guidelines about the ways in which those questions might be asked or answered. Lucas has taken ideas from numerous religions of the world and combined them into a syncretistic mix which works. Just as he freely borrowed from various genres in constructing Star Wars--the western, swashbucklers, samurai films, film noir, world war two films--so he also shows his skill as a filmmaker in his ability to synthesize mythological and religious concepts from around the world. Again, this is not Campbell's monomyth, I would claim, but a polyglot of religious languages in which each contributes something to a pluralistic whole of diversified parts--albeit with a western interpretation. I will focus on Lucas' use of apocalyptic ideas, in particular.

[14] There is considerable consensus among scholars about the basic elements which define apocalyptic, especially the apocalyptic of biblical religion. An "apocalypse," of course, is a disclosing of secrets, especially the plan for the destiny of the world to which the divine power will bring it. A radical discontinuity between the present and future ages is envisioned: as C.K. Barrett puts it, "History would, as it were, take a leap to a new level, on which the judgments of God would be more plainly visible; or, better, God would, by entering history, either personally or through a representative, introduce into it a new factor which would revolutionize its [15] course."19

[15] God is in control of history; it has a destiny which will be fulfilled, though it requires radical change accompanied by considerable turmoil. In other words, before things get better, things will get much worse.20 This tribulation leads to a cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil in which these powers are envisioned in starkly dualistic terms; there is no ambiguity about which is which. Humans are called upon to make their choice for good or evil, or as Persian apocalyptic puts it, "truth" or "the lie"21--and depending on their choice, they will either be rewarded or punished by God in the end. A final resurrection of the faithful follows in which they are re-united with God and each other in a restored communion of the faithful. All of this may be accomplished with the aid of a Messiah figure who acts as God's intermediary.22

[16] Apocalyptic functions religiously, scholars tell us, as a comfort to the faithful in times of persecution. The current persecution is viewed as the tribulation which must precede the final judgment and restoration of the faithful. The faithful are told of their future reward to encourage them to remain steadfast and not give in to the powers of evil or the temptation to forsake their faith.23 Apocalyptic also functions politically as a critique of the established order which is denounced as an incarnation of evil; the predicted future order, that which ought to be, calls for "cataclysmic change: the humbling of the mighty and the exaltation of the meek." Hope for this new order is a remedy to anxiety and frustration, conveying a sense of confidence and one's own righteousness.24

[18] How many of these features are found in the Star Wars films? A number of them are instantly recognizable. There is certainly a cosmic battle between good and evil, clearly envisioned as opposites, and the fate of the whole galaxy hangs on the outcome. The evil is personified first by Darth Vader, and later by the Emperor who is trying to eliminate self-determination of the planets and bring all in accord with his will. There is some parallel here to the situation of the early Christians and other politically oppressed groups which have found the authorities unsupportive of their self-determination--in the case of the Christians, there actually were Emperors who persecuted them for failure to honor and obey. Events are also spiraling towards a cataclysmic battle, which can be seen both at the end of the first film (episode 4) as well as to a greater extent at the end of the first trilogy in episode six. Though all appears to be lost at a certain point, the faithful win the day by trusting in the Force--a higher power which is in fact controlling all events. A savior-messiah figures into the plots as well; this figure is Luke in the original trilogy, but in episode one it is Anakin Skywalker, referred to as "the chosen one" whose birth was foretold--a virgin birth, no less. Qui-Gon Jinn maintains that Anakin is the prophesied one who will bring "balance" to the conflict, citing as evidence the fact that his blood contains a higher concentration of "midichlorions" (which allow a Jedi to access the Force) than Yoda's.

[19] The role of faith is quite clear in the movies as well, in particular, episode four (A New Hope). Here Luke has not yet developed the ability to see dead people, move objects, or know the future, and so what he sees of the Force's power is more limited. He observes Obi-Wan's Jedi "mind-trick" (used on dim-witted stormtroopers to evade confiscation of R2-D2); he learns to fight a combat training droid without seeing it; and he hears Obi-Wan's voice after his death. Outside of these few examples, he has little to go on other than his belief that there is a Force which will help him when he tries to blow up the Death Star without computer assistance. Obi-Wan also shows tree faith in his willingness to give his life for no discernible purpose; he tells Vader, "if you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine," and it is only this belief that he will be of more help as a spiritual presence to the forces of good which justifies his apparently futile martyrdom. Han Solo, in contrast, opts not to believe in the Force, for as he says: "Kid, I've flown from one end of this galaxy to the other; I've seen a lot of strange stuff; but I've never seen anything to make me believe there's one all-powerful force controlling everything. There's no mystical energy field controlling my destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense." He attributes to luck what Luke and Ben attribute to the Force, and he trusts in his own abilities rather than any transcendent power. (In fact, in this he sounds a lot more like Joseph Campbell than Luke does! Of course, Solo actually fights for the Force without realizing it; a sort of "anonymous Jedi," if you will, whose skepticism about ultimate matters does not prevent him from aiding friends in need.)

[20] Darth Vader is also depicted as a figure who paradoxically bears witness to the power of faith in the Force. When his "ancient religion" is ridiculed by one of the Imperial officers as inadequate next to the technological power of the Death Star, he uses the Force to choke him and asserts that he finds his "lack of faith disturbing." Throughout episode four, Vader appears to be an anachronism in the Empire, as no one else seems to believe in the mystical dimension he does; his faith is a peculiarity in the otherwise secularized and technologized empire. As Governor Tarkin puts it: "The Jedi are extinct; their fire has gone out in the universe. You, my friend, are all that is left of their religion."

[21] Several things, however, are different beginning in episode five (The Empire Strikes Back). We encounter the Emperor for the first time, and discover that he represents the Dark Side of the Force more powerfully than Vader; he is not simply a bureaucrat like Governor Tarkin was. In addition, Vader seems to have more power: In episode four, Leia makes a crack about Tarkin holding Vader's "leash," likening him to a henchman; now, Vader has his own star cruiser and crew just for the purpose of chasing Luke's friends, and he is free to execute imperial officers whenever they disappoint him. Also in episode five, Luke begins to discover the power of the Force and actually sees some of the things he has only believed up to this point. Obi-wan appears to him and delivers messages; Yoda shows him how to move objects around and see the future. At the same time, Luke lacks the total belief required to be a Jedi; when he says it is impossible to lift his ship out of the Dagobah swamp and Yoda does it for him, he can only say "I don't believe it!" to which master Yoda replies: "That is why you fail." Luke also confronts the power of the Dark Side in a new way, not only through Vader's attempt to capture him but through the revelation that Vader is his father. In this way, Luke confronts the possibility of evil in himself, in that even his Jedi father turned to the Dark side. Luke's vision in the cave on Dagobah, in which he kills Vader only to find he wears Luke's own face, reinforces this idea that the only evil one needs to fear is the hatred and anger that lurks within oneself.

[22] Episode six of the saga (Return of the Jedi) brings all its elements to a conclusion. We see the final apocalyptic battle and Luke faces Vader again. He now accepts Vader as his father, and attempts to redeem him by appealing to his former nature as Anakin Skywalker. In this Luke fails and he is brought before the Emperor for a final testing. Can he resist hate and fear, even when confronted with the destruction of his own friends and the rebel cause? His attempt to remain non-combative breaks down when Vader threatens to turn his sister to the Dark side. In a fit of anger, he chops off his father's hand, just as Vader had chopped off Luke's hand at the end of the previous film. But when the Emperor exhorts Luke to kill Vader and "take your father's place at my side," Luke throws down his weapon. "I am a Jedi, like my father before me," he says. He is able to come to this decision, as he sees himself about to suffer the same fate as his father; in particular, he looks at the stump of Vader's electronic hand and then at his own machine hand which he was given after he lost his own. He resists the temptation to lose his humanity to a technologized and de-personalized identity.

[23] Luke's decision not to fight may appear to be one place in which the film borrows from eastern religious notions of ahimsa, non-violence. But there is a significant difference between his actions and the ethic of the Bhagavad Gita in which the Hindu notion of ahimsa is developed. In that text, Krishna advises Arjuna to fight to preserve the world-order of dharma, but to do so without selfish desire or hatred. This is basically the same advice Yoda and Obi-Wan give to Luke; to kill his father, but without giving in to hate or anger. Yet Luke ignores their counsel and refuses to fight him at all. He abandons the "eastern" philosophy of detachment advocated by Ben and Yoda for a more Christian ideal of attachment to those whom one loves. And oddly enough this is what saves them all, as he manages to redeem his father from hatred and violence. Here again, Christian concepts of redemption clearly take center stage, as Luke's willingness to non-violently sacrifice himself(much like Obi-Wan's self-sacrifice in episode four) becomes the key to turning his father back. Granted, in his "conversion" Vader does use violence against the Emperor, but in so doing he eschews the path of violence he has been following since he turned to the Dark side.

[24] In the end of the film, Luke sees the spirit of his redeemed father accompanied by those of Yoda and Obi-wan, an otherworldly salvation of the righteous analogous to the final resurrection of the dead in biblical apocalyptic. It is also worth noting that these figures retain their individuality even in this apotheosis, contradicting Campbell's monistic vision which would require their dissolution into the absolute. If Obi-wan can sit on a log in the Dagobah swamp and discuss Luke's family tree with him, it appears that the departed are not simply manifestations of some abstract oneness which does away with their personalities.

[25] Much of this tale also transcends the structures of apocalyptic, it can be seen. The future is not completely set; although faith in the Force should bring success, even Yoda does not guarantee this. The Dark forcemasters tend to speak of "destiny" in a way that suggests free will is non-existent; but the good side always allows participants to choose their own destinies, granting that free choice can and does contribute to the direction of events. When Luke asks Yoda (in episode five) if Han and Leia will die, he replies, "Difficult to say. Always in motion is the future." What will happen depends on the choices that individuals make, and this cannot be foretold with complete certainty. That this is so is shown by the errors the Emperor makes in predicting the outcome of Luke's testing, as well as in the fact that Anakin, even as "the chosen one," was corruptible.

[26] Perhaps the most significant difference from traditional apocalyptic, though, is that the function of the Star Wars myth does not seem to be to give comfort to the politically persecuted. If Star Wars is primarily a myth for United States citizens, it is hard to see how we fall into that category. Of course, if apocalyptic categories are used to describe a battle that has already taken place, it can actually serve to support the status quo, rather than question it. In this case, the evil has already been vanquished, and represents the previous political order rather than the present one.25 Apocalyptic form would then be used not to critique the powers that be (the U.S. Government, for example), but rather to support them as the just victors over evil. Star Wars does tap into some of this by portraying the Empire as resembling both Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, authors of Camera Politica, support just this interpretation of Star Wars. They hold that the films express a conservative ideology that supports the American ideals of individualism, elitism, antistatism, agrarianism, and anti-rationalism.26 However, their attempt to interpret the films entirely in traditional Marxist terms seems to fall short by reducing the films to their supposed political message of support for western capitalism. Their own survey of viewers seemed to suggest that most did not see the Empire or the rebels in political terms, and even when they did, there was no consistency in assigning a political identity to them--e.g., more viewers believed the Empire resembled a right-wing dictatorship than communism, but most also believed the rebels resembled right-wing freedom fighters more than left-wing revolutionaries.27

[27] What Ryan and Kellner are unwilling to grant is that the films have used apocalyptic concepts not primarily for political purposes, but for some other end--and it is in this that the Star Wars films may differ most markedly from traditional apocalyptic. For the "enemy" is not a political "other," but ourselves, or at least the threat that we will lose our humanity to greed and a selfish quest for power--symbolized by the Dark side, and even moreso by the technology of deathstars, imperial walkers, and Vader's own robot body. Virtue triumphs over evil technology, however, not only when the "natural" Ewoks beat stormtroopers and their imperial walkers by "primitive" jungle tactics, but when Darth Vader becomes Anakin Skywalker once again. When we see him unmasked and his humanity restored, even at the moment of death, he is "saved," as he says himself.

[28] All of this, it can be seen, serves to reveal some basic virtues Lucas wants to highlight: the importance of family, the redeeming qualities of love and forgiveness, loyalty, friendship, and faith. These are what viewers like to see, as in so many Hollywood films. And although these values are labeled banal or anachronistic by many critics, these are the virtues the fans appreciate and presumably hope to emulate in their lives. The continual whining about how Star Wars is trying to replace "real" religions28 might subside a bit if we realized that the values it portrays are not entirely negative. As viewers, we are caught up in the struggle between good and evil framed in apocalyptic terms not because we hope for release from political persecution, but because we can relate the story to our own struggles to do good in our personal lives. On a small scale, we all try to be like Luke rather than like Vader. As George Lucas himself puts it:

[29] Heroes come in all sizes, and you don't have to be a giant hero. You can be a very small hero. It's just as important to understand that accepting self-responsibility for the things you do, having good manners, caring about other people--these are heroic acts. Everybody has the choice of being a hero or not being a hero every day of their lives. You don't have to get into a giant laser-sword fight and blow up three spaceships to become a hero. 29.

Notes

1 "It was the first time that I really began to focus. Once I read that book I said to myself, this is what I've been doing .... It was all right there and had been there for thousands and thousands of years, as Dr. Campbell pointed out .... It's possible that if I had not run across him I would still be writing Star Wars today." Phil Cousineau, The Hero's Journey: The World of Joseph Campbell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990), p. 180.

2 Andrew Gordon, "Star Wars: A Myth for Our Time," in Screening the Sacred: Religion. Myth. and Ideology in Popular American Film (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), pp. 73-82.

3 Cousineau, pp. Xxv-xxix. (Curriculum Vitae for Campbell)

4 Joseph Campbell, "The Confrontation of East and West," in Myths to Live By (New York: Viking, 1972), p. 89.

5 Ibid., p. 93

6 Ibid., p. 95

7 This claim privileges one group's proximity to the divine whereas (in his view) all have the divine "within" them, already. Since Judaism seeks a "relationship" with a named God rather than identity, it claims that relationship is only available "through membership in a certain supernaturally endowed, uniquely favored social group." Ibid., pp. 95-96.

8 Robert A. Segal, Joseph Campbell: An Introduction (New York: Garland, 1987); Maurice Friedman, "Why Joseph Campbell's Psychologizing of Myth Preclude the Holocaust as Touchstone of Reality," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66/2: pp. 385-401.

9 "It seems to be a temptation that many modem thinkers cannot resist--to put forward their own central discoveries as the core of all the world's religions .... Even when they know something about the world's religions, they do not hesitate to ignore all the phenomena that do not fit their personal perception ...." Friedman, p. 395; "[Campbell] cites hundreds of myths and extricates from them hundreds of archetypes...but he analyzes few whole myths .... He is interested less in analyzing myths than in using myths to analyze human nature." Segal, pp. 137-138.

10 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), pp. 365-378.

11 Here I must agree with Friedman against Segal. "Campbell seems to want a unity of inner and outer, as Segal says, yet it is not the actual outer but a mysticized and universalized outer that comes from his projection of his inward philosophy on it." Maurice Friedman, "Psychology, Psychologism, and Myth: A Rejoinder," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67/2, p. 471.

12 Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988), p. 161. Campbell speaks of "loving one's fate" even if it involves suffering, and quotes Nietzsche in support of this ideal. He also quotes the Buddha's dictum that "all life is suffering," ignoring the fact that the Buddha sought a way to escape this, not an affirmation of it.

13 In an address he delivered shortly after the first men walked on the Moon, Campbell cites the Kantian notion that space and time are mental constructs rather than objective realities, and claims that the "moon flight as an outward journey was outward into ourselves." Even the conquest of outer space is finally only the conquest of another inner mystery, and its significance lies in its ability to tell us more about ourselves. Campbell, "The Moon Walk--The Outward Journey in Myths to Live By," p. 239.

14 Campbell and Moyers, The Power of Myth, p. 144

15 Ibid., p. 147

16 Ibid., p. 148

17 "Of Myth and Men," Time, April 26 1999, p. 92.

18 Ibid., p. 93.

19 C.K. Barrett, The New Testament Background: Selected Documents (New York: Harper, 1956), p. 227.

20 "Children will be born with the white hair of old men, miscarriages will increase, and women will cease to give birth at all. The earth will fail to bring forth fruit .... One nation will rise up against another, wars will tear mankind to pieces, within families fathers will oppose and quarrel with sons, and brothers with brothers.., everything is devastated and destroyed. When at last even the cosmic order disintegrates, the stars will no longer follow their regular courses..."

21 Eduard Lohse, The New Testament Environment, tr. John E. Steely (Nashville: Abingdon, 1976), p. 57.

Bruce Lincoln, "Apocalyptic Temporality and Politics in the Ancient World," in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, vol. 1, ed. John J. Collins (New York: Continuum, 1998), p. 459.

22 Norman Perrin, The New Testament: An Introduction (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), p. 71.

23 Willi Marxsen, Introduction to the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974), p. 273.

24 Lincoln, p. 467.

25 Ibid., p. 466.

26 Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 228-236.

27 Ibid., p. 235.

28 For just one example of this, see Maclean's, May 24, 1999, "The Second Coming," pp. 14-18.

29 Time, p. 94.

::source: The Journal of Religion & Film, Vol. 4, No. 1 April 2000

Any Gods Out There: Perceptions of Religion from Star Wars and Star Trek

2007-08-13T12:58:00.000-07:00

By John S. Schultes

Abstract

[1] Hollywood films and religion have an ongoing rocky relationship, especially in the realm of science fiction. A brief comparison study of the two giants of mainstream sci-fi, Star Wars and Star Trek reveals the differing attitudes toward religion expressed in the genre. Star Trek presents an evolving perspective, from critical secular humanism to begrudging personalized faith, while Star Wars presents an ambiguous mythological foundation for mystical experience that is in more ways universal.

Article

[2] Science Fiction has come of age in the 21st century. From its humble beginnings, �Sci- Fi� has been used to express the desires and dreams of those generations who looked up at the stars and imagined life on other planets and space travel, those who actually saw the beginning of the space age, and those who still dare to imagine a universe with wonders beyond what we have today. In all of science fiction displayed on theater and television screens, none are more popular or mainstream than Star Wars and Star Trek. These two influential franchises are the focus of this brief comparison study of their perceptions of religion.

[3] I have chosen Sci Fi to look at religion because the genre discusses the problems and blessings of the future. It also discusses the problems of today in fantastic settings, using symbol and allegory. In this discussion of perspectives on religion, I have decided to narrow the subject matter down to the film �canons� of the two franchises, as the other source material is so vast as to require an entire book. Some references must be made to other material (such as the Star Trek television shows, which form the basis for the films) where applicable.

[4] In the case of Star Wars, we have the five (soon six) films, including the first trilogy (1977-1983) and the prequel trilogy (1999-to the present). The Star Trek canon is a little more complex and much larger. Unlike George Lucas�s Star Wars, Star Trek�s founder, Gene Roddenberry has passed away, with other writers and directors taking over his legacy. Roddenberry originated the series, though he is said to have exercised less creative control than he would have liked over the material created before his death in 1991, with the exception of the first film, and �The Next Generation.� Later incarnations of Star Trek provide interesting contrasts and developments that shall be examined later in the discussion.

[4] Star Trek encompasses five live-action television shows: the first affectionately known as �The Original Series,� (1966-1969) followed by �The Next Generation� (1987-1993), �Deep Space Nine� (1992-1999), �Voyager� (1995-2001), �Enterprise� (2001- ) which is in its third season as of this writing; and ten theatrical films: Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), Star Trek IV: The Voyager Home (1986), Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), Star Trek Generations (1994), Star Trek First Contact (1996), Star Trek Insurrection (1998), and Star Trek Nemesis (2002).

[5] The tales of the �Original Series� featuring Captain Kirk, Mister Spock, and Doctor McCoy with supporting characters Chekov, Sulu, Uhura, and Scotty are continued in the first six films, followed by a �passing of the torch� story to the new crew of the �Next Generation� in the seventh film. The Next Generation (TNG for short) series tells the story of a new cast of Federation explorers, with the primary focus on Captain Picard and Lt. Commander Data, with supporting characters Commander Riker, Doctor Crusher, Counselor Troi, Worf, and Geordi LaForge.

[6] Star Trek first debuted in the mid 1960�s and embodied what many considered progressive and liberal social values such as inter-racial equality represented by the multi-cultural crew and the ideas of fighting for freedom against injustice even when it meant disobeying orders. This was accomplished on the backdrop of the bold exploration of space and the expansion of the human mind. The Next Generation is said to have embodied more of Gene Roddenberry�s vision of what he considered humanity�s �ideal� future and put more emphasis on secular humanism and socialist collectivist values. These values were slightly modified and take on a new direction in later shows (Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise) after Roddenberry�s death, though the films seem to retain much of his original emphasis in The Original Series and The Next Generation.1

[7] The various crews encounter aliens and new civilizations and try to make peaceful exchanges with them, though sometimes they have to fight against injustice or confront their own weaknesses.

[8] Star Wars, in the first trilogy, in contrast to Star Trek�s band of explorers and diplomats, follows the tales of a band of rebels fighting against the evil Galactic Empire: Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Lando Calrissian, and the sentient robots R2-D2 and C-3PO. The Empire�s oppression is personified in Darth Vader, the Dark Lord of the Sith, a figure in black armor, mask and cape. The second trilogy travels back in time to the period before the Empire, when Darth Vader was a young man, then known as Anakin Skywalker, tracing his fall from grace to evil. Ultimately, the films are about the cosmic Force, which guides the destinies of the main characters, with the effect of leading Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker to redemption after his fall.

[9] In order to understand the philosophies and values conveyed in Star Trek and Star Wars, it may help to first examine the backgrounds and beliefs of the creators, Gene Roddenberry, and George Lucas respectively.

[10] Both men were raised in American Protestant households, Lucas�s parents were Methodist, Roddenberry�s Baptist. Lucas disliked Sunday school and enjoyed the Lutheran services of his family�s German housekeeper far more. His religious inspiration2 was perhaps sparked by his survival of a near fatal car crash when he was a young man.3 After this he went on to study film and myth (following the works of Joseph Campbell). He also had a love of science fiction, comic books, and other fantasy, a hunger for stories that had meaning.

[11] Roddenberry on the other hand was greatly inspired by his father, who urged him to be skeptical of everything, including preachers. As a teenager Roddenberry paid more attention in church, and came to realize he thought that religion, especially Christianity, was superstition and nonsense.4 He also continued to observe in life that religion itself seemed to cause divisions and problems for mankind,5 reinforcing his rejection of it. This rejection seems to have led him to substitute a humanist philosophy, one that inspired people to bond together and to improve themselves through their own efforts putting aside dangerous or limiting beliefs.6

[12] On the surface the two men sound very different, but their beliefs are too complex to summarize in a few sentences. Suffice to say that both were seeking men, who did not take what they grew up with for granted. Instead, they had to re-invent their own belief systems and attempted to put that message out in the forum of science fiction. Sci Fi, being a form of fantasy, allows for difficult subjects and controversial topics to be put into terms that are easier to understand, allowing the imagination to fill in the blanks and propose solutions that we may not have considered. Both Lucas7 and Roddenberry8 claimed to believe in �God� but they understood God differently, as their works help to illustrate.

[13] First let us examine the attitudes toward religion expressed in Star Trek. In the Original Series, the principle ship, Enterprise had a Chapel. This was seen twice on the show.

[14] The first time was in the episode �Balance of Terror� in which Captain Kirk was about to perform a wedding ceremony for two of his crew members. This chapel was unadorned with familiar religious icons. It featured a podium rather than an altar, decorative yet strange �glyph� designs (not recognizable from any modern day tradition) and an �infinity� symbol on the door as one entered. The service was attended by all the crew in their standard uniforms, but not their dress uniforms (seen later in the show at formal hearings and on diplomatic galas). It was of note that no clergy persons were present, but Kirk himself was the celebrant, evoking popular maritime tradition. Before the ceremony is interrupted by an emergency, he mentions �our many beliefs� evoking an ecumenical flavor to the proceedings. Indeed the future bride is seen kneeling (we assume in silent prayer) while the groom is not. The second time we see the Enterprise chapel occurs in an episode where Kirk is thought to have died, and Spock and the others are gathered for a memorial for him there. Again, the chapel is an inclusive symbol of non-denominational ecumenism. However rather than express any common beliefs, we assume the crew is allowed to express themselves silently to themselves, while sharing the common bond of being human beings (with the exception of Spock of course).

[15] The ship�s chapel would not return in future series�; leading us to speculate that religion itself has been largely phased out from human society in the next century (the later shows take place in the 24th century). In The Next Generation we have Counselor Troi, who is not a clergy person but an empath (one who can read a person�s emotions) and a psychologist/psychoanalyst. Clergy persons have apparently been replaced by secular self-help guru�s in the 24th century.

[16] Another important encounter with religion occurs in the Original Series episode �Bread and Circuses,� where Kirk, Spock, and McCoy discuss the Prime Directive of non-interference in primitive cultures and encounter a group of proto-Christians. In dialogue with them, one of the Christians states that �all men are brothers,� to which Kirk agrees �yes, all men are brothers.� This seems to be Roddenberry�s way of saying that he agrees with certain aspects of religious belief, when they affirm human dignity. Of course, theology is not examined too deeply, and in fact by episodes end, Kirk and company are still confused as to why the group worships �the Sun� (as the Christians refer to themselves). Lt. Uhura informs Kirk that she has been listening to further broadcasts from the planet and believes that they are actually followers of �the Son of God.� One could interpret this to mean that Christianity does not exist in the 23rd century leading to their confusion. However, Kirk expresses the sentimental wish to be there to �see how it all began.� In its primitive, non-threatening (and in this case persecuted and underground) state, Christianity has some sentiments and aspects that Roddenberry agrees with.

[17] A more important and recurring theme in the Star Trek shows is that of the False God or the Strongman.9 The crew encounters a being that at first appears to have incredible powers, perhaps even god-like abilities, but end up being exposed as a fraud. While the being may dazzle even some of the crew with showy tricks and apparent miracles, one person (usually the Captain) will see through the illusion and expose flaws in the society this �god� has setup or the plan they have in mind. Let us look at some of the examples of this scenario from the various shows.10

[18] In the Original Series episode, �Return of the Archons, � the crew encounters a society that is rigidly controlled and puritanical (with bouts of hedonism and wildness at certain times of the day). They discover that Landru, a powerful computer, reads the thoughts of the people and makes them �of the Body.� Clearly this is a reference to the �mind control� nature of certain cults and oppressive social codes enforced by religious authority. Members who try to defy the will of Landru are �punished� severely, and brainwashed to obey without question while turning on those who disobey. Kirk discovers the central control center and talks Landru into destroying himself. The Prime Directive forbids interference with primitive cultures, but in this case the culture is stagnant and will never grow while it is kept under the thumb of the theocracy. Landru sees the logic of helping the culture by removing his destructive influence and the people are left to fend for themselves.

[19] �Who Mourns for Adonais� picks up the motif again by having the crew of the Enterprise forced to land on a planet where the god Apollo from ancient Greece resides in his temple. Apollo welcomes them and invites them to live with him forever and worship him. Kirk�s initial statement of defiance towards Apollo is telling but qualified, �Mankind has no need for gods. We find the one sufficient.� Scotty and the others resist but are painfully subdued by Apollo�s powers. While impressed, they speculate that Apollo is an alien who visited Earth long ago masquerading as a god. When mankind stopped believing in him and his brethren, they fled to this planet and now Apollo is the only one left. Kirk and the others formulate a plan to defeat Apollo. They get the attractive female crewmember that Apollo has fallen in love with to reject him and make him angry. Then they trick Apollo into straining his power. Finally, the Enterprise destroys Apollo�s temple. Devastated that his children reject him, Apollo spreads himself on the winds to join his fellow gods in oblivion. At the end of the show, Kirk expresses some regret about what they had to do. Perhaps it would not have hurt to �gather a few laurel leaves,� says Kirk. To allow human progress to move forward it seems that sometimes painful steps have to be taken, even to destroy the gods.

[20] In the fifth Star Trek movie �The Final Frontier� the cast of the Original Series encounters Spock�s long lost brother Sybok. He is atypical of Vulcans, Spock�s stoic people who suppress all emotion. Instead Sybok believes that embracing emotion is the key to enlightenment and he uses his mental powers to brainwash the crew (except Kirk) into allowing him on a mad quest to seek after God. Hijacking the Enterprise and kidnapping the Federation, Klingon, and Romulan ambassadors they head through the �Great Barrier� of the galaxy to a mysterious planet. The ambassadors call it names for Heaven and Eden, but the planet itself is desolate and forbidding.

[21] Once on the surface, Spock, Kirk, Sybok and McCoy encounter a being identifying himself as God. This being appears in the stereotypical Westernized figure of the �Father God� as depicted in art. He has a giant head, disembodied, depicting an older man with a kind face, flowing white hair and booming voice. This �God� claims to be all of the gods that mankind has believed in and is the one that Sybok seeks. God wishes to carry his glory to the universe in the Starship Enterprise. Kirk is punished when he asks, �What does God need with a starship?� This shocks the others out of their delusion and they see �God�s� true colors. Sybok is the last to catch on when he sees his God appear with a face identical to his own. God is merely an alien who has been imprisoned in this far-away place and used the ruse to get himself out. Vengeful and angry, God tries to destroy our heroes, but is gunned down by a Klingon warship, with Spock at the controls. Formerly the villains of the series, the Klingons form a temporary alliance in order to stop the alien menace. Indeed, in later shows we learn that the Klingons in their mythology killed their own gods, as Worf says in Deep Space Nine, �They were more trouble than they were worth.�

[22] The idea of the Strongman ties in with the idea of the False God as a recurring theme in Star Trek. The Strongman is a being that is not a god per se but highly advanced and self important, who, despite his power, is flawed and a menace to be defeated or outwitted by his supposed inferiors. The character of �Q� in The Next Generation is such a character, although he overlaps into both categories.

[23] �Q� is a super-being encountered by the new Enterprise crew in the pilot episode of The Next Generation �Encounter at Farpoint.� Humanoid in appearance, Q can snap his fingers and do all sorts of incredible things like change his shape, create illusions, transport the ship halfway across the galaxy and time travel. He is part of a �Continuum� of super beings that act like Cosmic Tricksters. Q expresses his contempt for humanity and its failings, to which Captain Picard protests that �rapid progress� is being made. It is later revealed that Q secretly envies humanity, having grown bored with his own omnipotence. The Q Continuum as a society is in decline and values human beings and their adaptability, individuality and creativity. Though Q constantly threatens and provokes human beings, he also seeks to protect them and challenge them to be better. In a way Q is more like Satan in the Biblical Book of Job� an agent of God that provokes people to face their personal problems head on and test their faith. In Star Trek, the faith being tested is in the goodness of human beings and their potential to overcome problems. Q himself is flawed, and despite his claims to the contrary, not nearly omnipotent.11

[24] Khan Noonien Singh, Kirk�s nemesis from the Original Series episode �Space Seed� returns in the second Star Trek film �The Wrath of Khan.� Khan is a genetically engineered �superman� from Earth�s past when the Eugenics Wars were fought between normal human beings and genetically enhanced men like himself. Khan is consumed with his desire for revenge against Kirk, whom he blames for the death of his wife and being marooned on a desolate planet. Khan uses a doomsday weapon, the Genesis Device (originally intended as a terraforming project to create habitable worlds from barren planets), to try to destroy the Enterprise. Mr. Spock sacrifices his life to save his shipmates by fixing the Enterprise�s reactor in time for them to escape destruction. Khan is finally defeated, and Kirk and company perform military burial in space as tribute to their fallen comrade.

[25] Khan�s character is mirrored in The Next Generation film (the tenth overall in the series) �Nemesis� in the person of Shinzon of Romulus. Like Khan, Shinzon is a genetically engineered man, who considers himself superior to everyone else. He blames the Federation for his predicament, a genetic disease he inherited as part of an experiment by the Romulans to clone Captain Picard for purposes of political intrigue. Shinzon hates everyone, including himself, tries to rape Counselor Troi and destroy the Enterprise, Picard, and the Earth. Ultimately Picard defeats him, and Data is forced to sacrifice himself to save the Captain�s life, transporting him out of Shinzon�s ship before it explodes.

[26] In The Next Generation series we encounter Lore, the identical but evil twin �brother� of Data, the android Starfleet Lieutenant. While Data respects human beings and seeks to imitate them (in order to become "more human"), almost to the point of worship, Lore seeks instead to gather power for himself. He tries several times to commit genocide against human beings and anoints himself as an overlord among a group of renegade Borg.12 Lore sets himself up as a messianic leader of a fascistic cult. As a complete machine, Lore is worshipped by the Borg (who are only partly machine) as an example of the perfection and purity they can seek to emulate. Data rejects his brother�s nefarious ways and reaffirms the dignity of serving and embracing mankind rather than attacking it.

[27] In Deep Space Nine, the third television series of Star Trek, produced after Roddenberry�s death, more Strongmen and False Gods appear. A race of aliens known as �The Founders� who rule a portion of space called �the Dominion� is encountered by Captain Sisko and the crew of the Federation Space station Deep Space Nine. The Founders are shape shifting aliens (whose ability to change form at will could be viewed as truly godlike if it weren�t such a common thing in the Star Trek galaxy) who rule their sector of space with an iron fist. They hold other alien species, the Vorta and the Jem-Hadar as their slaves. These two slave races worship the Founders as gods. Both races are genetically bred for servitude. The Jem-Hadar are ruthless soldiers kept under control through the use of drugs (�Ketracel White�) that they are addicted to from birth. Both the Vorta and the Jem-Hadar are genetically programmed to lay down their lives for their gods. The Founders are obviously not gods in the true sense, but they, the leaders of their society, use religion as a means to control their subjects and act much like the Strongmen seen elsewhere in Star Trek with their megalomania and racism.

[28] The Klingons,13 a race of violent warriors and the foil for the Enterprise crew throughout the Original Series have their religion further developed in The Next Generation and beyond. It is revealed that the Klingons have a patriarchal culture based on the worship of Kahless, a male Klingon prophet. In Klingon belief there is an afterlife, a devil figure, and various blood rituals and other ceremonies. They glorify suffering, battles, and honorable death. In contrast to the enlightened principles of Federation secular humanism, the Klingons appear barbaric and backward with their warrior religion. The character of Worf on The Next Generation Enterprise finds himself culturally conflicted, having been raised by human parents after he was orphaned in a Romulan attack on his home at a young age. He wishes to become �more Klingon� but doubts his faith. Finally he seeks a vision of Kahless and meets him face to face. Worf doubts his senses until the man challenges him to a fight. Worf accepts that Kahless is indeed real, but has lingering doubts about his religion. Finally it is revealed that Kahless is in fact a clone, created by the Klingon priests using blood from an ancient artifact of the historical Kahless. Worf agrees to keep the secret for the good it may do in uniting his people and the clone Kahless is crowned Emperor of the Klingons. While technologically similar to the advanced Federation, the Klingons are portrayed as morally backward, and in keeping with a theme of post-Roddenberry Trek shows, it expresses the notion that religion is a crutch for backward peoples. Apparently, faith in something is better than faith in nothing. Of course the more rational and enlightened faith of the Federation humans is faith in the goodness and potential of humankind, not in external deities, prophets, or ancient texts and rituals. Human beings do not convert to the religions of other aliens, but aliens may become �more human� by imitating their philosophies. Thus so-called �Human Values� such as compassion, self sacrifice, generosity, and notions of individual liberty (tempered by social collectivist values) begin to rub off on certain worthy aliens, such as Spock, Worf, and others.

[29] Deep Space Nine, in addition to further exploring Klingon religion, introduces us to the religion of the Bajorans, a humanoid race seeking Federation membership. Like many of the alien species portrayed in Star Trek, Bajorans certainly look and act very human, but they are portrayed as monocultural. Their society is many thousands of years old, yet their technology has only recently caught up with the Federation and others. They worship gods known as �the Prophets� who reside in a wormhole (which the Bajorans refer to as �The Celestial Temple�) in space near their home planet of Bajor. The Federation dismisses their gods as �powerful aliens.� Captain Sisko goes through the wormhole and has an encounter with the aliens. At first the aliens don�t seem to realize that they are being worshipped and indeed do not understand humans at all. Sisko does not believe in them and yet he comes out of the wormhole hailed as �The Emissary of the Prophets� by the Bajorans. As the show goes on, more and more Sisko comes to accept his religious role (much to the chagrin of his Star Fleet superiors) and the Prophets become increasingly integral to the plot. This turning away from the secularism of past shows demonstrates the waning influence of Roddenberry�s philosophy on the franchise. However, it should be noted that the Prophets (and their demonic counterparts �the Pah-Wraiths�) are ultimately advanced aliens that some backward people perceive as gods. The Bajoran religion is seen as limited to the cultural life of the Bajorans rather than a universal faith. Sisko would seem to be the exception, until it is revealed that his mother was possessed by a Prophet when he was conceived and when he dies, he goes to live with the Prophets in the wormhole.

[30] Another issue brought up by Deep Space Nine is its treatment of clergy. In the Bajoran religion they have a leader called �the Kai:� essentially the Bajoran equivalent of a Pope. This religious leader is always shown as female (although a man runs for the office, he loses). The first Kai who shows faith in Sisko as Emissary is a good and wise woman. She gives herself in the cause of easing the suffering of others even to the point of having to give up her office. The Kai who takes her place is corrupt, greedy, and self deluded. Known as Kai Win, she is constantly shown as a selfish hypocrite seeking after power, but is eventually redeemed in the show�s climax. By contrast, the main Bajoran character, Major Kira is depicted as a doubting, but honest and dedicated follower of the religion. She is devoted to helping the secular Federation and her own people, and she has constant clashes with the over-bearing and oppressive influence of Kai Win. Deep Space Nine shows a primitive culture that is still dealing with religious issues (since human society has apparently freed itself from religious influence) and the inherent problems with having clergy. The private practices of the individual and their beliefs are more important than an institution or hierarchy.

[31] In the world of Star Trek, religion in the human realm has largely faded away, as more enlightened secular humanist principles have taken over. Even the miracles of religious faith have been achieved through technological progress. Answers once sought from heaven are now available from more mundane sources. For example several religious traditions look forward to a millennial kingdom of peace on earth, or of the gods returning to make things right. Christians of all kinds and Muslims await the return of Jesus to usher in God�s kingdom (though in different ways of course). Many Jews still await the coming of God�s Messiah. The New Age Movement itself takes its name from a coming Age of spiritual enlightenment. Many Buddhists and Hindus seek an end to the cycle of death and rebirth, and even a more perfect re-creation of all that exists.

[32] Star Trek however, tells us that this new age will be heralded by the invention of �warp drive,� the ability to make a space ship travel many times faster than the speed of light (enabling interstellar travel and communication). The Messiah will not be Jesus, Buddha, or any divine person or prophet, but rather a race of enlightened aliens, the Vulcans. Impressed by our achievements and by our potential to better ourselves, they will share vast scientific knowledge with us. Together the human and Vulcan races forge a united �Federation� of planets that seeks to bring peace and harmony to the galaxy. Starfleet replaces the priestly castes of old, as the new ambassadors of their philosophical enlightenment. Representing the proverbial cream of the crop, they are the defenders of the humanist faith to the galaxy.

[33] In the near future, Star Trek tells us, science will eventually put an end to the problems we face in our world today.14 Hunger, war, poverty and class distinctions will disappear, and Earth will be united under one government and standard of living. Starfleet will protect and expand the Federation for the betterment of all. Of course, in the story our heroes will find that the rest of the galaxy does not share our magnanimous vision of the future. Thus cultural clashes occur with totalitarian governments like the Klingons, Romulans, Borg, and the other alien races. Yet technology continues to solve problems and the characters show faith in it, despite many setbacks. Holodecks provide endless entertainment; transporters make travel fast and painless. Replicators can prepare just about any meal one could desire, without the necessity of killing animals. Warp drive allows journeys that would normally take decades or centuries accomplishable in months or years. Medical science has progressed to the point wherein scars can be removed in a matter of seconds. Artificial limbs are identical to the real thing and there is even a magical �cure� for radiation.

[34] Star Trek is not completely one sided in its appraisal of technology, there are countless episodes that depict transporter and holodeck malfunctions, starship engines exploding, and the Borg, the very embodiment of technology gone wrong. The Borg are part machine and seek to assimilate people and technology by force into their �Collective,� a socialist-nightmare utopia of control. Still, through it all, there is a prevailing attitude that progress will inevitably continue. Despite the dangers, nobody gives up their transporters, their holodecks or their warp drive. A few shun technology, but these persons are portrayed as superstitious and backward, looked down upon much like some technologically savvy people look down upon the Amish.

[35] In the second Star Trek film, The Wrath of Khan, the eccentric southern physician Doctor McCoy says �According to myth, the world was created in six days, now watch out! Here comes �Genesis!� We�ll do it for you in six minutes!� Indeed the �Genesis Device,� created by a team of human scientists, is capable of turning a barren planet into an Earth-like paradise, through the use of technology, wholly apart from divine intervention. However, despite science�s triumph over God, the technology has a flaw. Kirk�s son points out that in their rush to complete the project, they used an unstable proto-matter as a shortcut. This makes any planet created with the Genesis Device dangerously unstable. Early on the potential use of the Genesis Device as a weapon of mass destruction is realized. In the film�s climactic battle, the villain Khan tries to use the Genesis Device to kill Kirk and his crew but ends up terraforming a nebula instead.

[36] In the subsequent sequel �Search for Spock� another man-made miracle occurs. In the previous film, Spock had died saving his friends, echoing Vulcan philosophy with his statement that �The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.� Kirk says in his departed friend�s eulogy �Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels� his was the most human.� Yet when Spock�s coffin is shot into space, it is not the end of him. Kirk returns home to find Spock�s father reprimanding him for leaving Spock�s �soul� behind. As it turns out, Spock had done a telepathic mind-meld with Dr. McCoy before his death, allowing Spock�s spirit or essence to reside in the mind of the good doctor. On the surface of the newly born �Genesis planet,� Spock�s coffin has landed and been affected by the technology. His body is �reborn� as a small child, who matures to adulthood at a vastly accelerated rate. Having finally mind-melded (sharing his thoughts) with McCoy, Spock regains his sense of self. Though his personality seems slightly altered, his friends accept him as the real Spock. The Genesis planet destroys itself, but Spock emerges whole, like a chick hatching from an egg. This evokes a metaphor of the individual being worth more than an entire world. Indeed Spock�s statement is reversed, in this case, �The needs of the few or the one outweigh the needs of the many.� The individual�s importance is affirmed alongside the Star Trek philosophy of collectivist harmony.

[37] Through these and other examples, Star Trek shows that what we once considered miracles may one day be duplicated by science and the immortality we seek in religious belief perhaps does not reside in the hands of a deity or some supernatural force, but rather through natural or technological means that are in our hands. The true gods may simply be ourselves.

[38] Another religious concept, the idea of a paradise, or heaven, has played out countless times in the shows and films. Usually the paradise is an illusion or trap, one in which a culture is stagnated.

[39] In �The Return of the Archons� the computer Landru holds his people under his thumb until Kirk can free them. The perfect society is far from idyllic with no freedom. Apollo�s promise of a paradise in �Who Mourns for Adonais� is too limiting for human beings and the god must be destroyed so that humans can prosper. Continuing with this concept and extending it to the idea of a heavenly paradise, the seventh Star Trek film and the first to feature The Next Generation crew, confronts this idea with the concept of the �Nexus.�

[40] The Nexus is an immense band of energy that appears at various times in the galaxy and travels about sucking in people and things. Great disasters herald its appearance and a man named Soran continues to appear wherever it goes. As it turns out he is a fanatic, a man obsessed with being drawn into the Nexus. Belonging to a race of long-lived humanoids, he has spent over 70 years trying to get back into the Nexus from which he was cast out (making him somewhat like Lucifer who was cast out of heaven for his disloyalty to God). Soran is willing to kill billions of people to get back into the Nexus. He plans to destroy an entire star system with a super weapon (a tri-lithium torpedo) in order to draw the Nexus close enough for him to step inside and into a blissful state of existence.

[41] Captain Picard tries to stop Soran from launching the weapon and in the process his crew is killed and he is sucked into the Nexus. Inside he is delighted by a vision of himself with what he had always wanted but never had in life� a loving family. Picard resists when he realizes it is �not real� and he still has a mission to accomplish. Admonished by his friend Guinan for his weakness, he seeks out and enlists the help of (the now long dead) Captain Kirk who is also residing in the Nexus (having been enveloped in it 70 years ago). Kirk too is at first enamored of the delightful visions of the Nexus, but is convinced by Picard that temporal matters are more important. They return to a point in time before the star system�s destruction and stop Soran, but Kirk is killed in the process. Dying a second time, Kirk realizes that �making a difference� is what really matters. With his last breath, he mutters �oh my!� as if he sees something that we the audience cannot see. Perhaps this is a hint of a real afterlife, or perhaps it is simply Kirk coming to fully realize the moment of his own death. In any case, the audience is left to make up their own mind, perhaps as Roddenberry would want them to (in keeping with the agnostic spirit he pioneered on the show).

[42] Moving on to the science fiction universe of George Lucas, that of Star Wars, we see a different picture painted of the world and the role of religion in it.

[43] Star Wars does not take place in our future, but rather in a �galaxy far far away,� a long time ago. Technology is seen less as a shiny new cure for all things, but as an old and familiar part of everyday life that doesn�t always work like it�s supposed to (like an old car). Technology has the potential for both good and bad, but it is not a panacea.15

Traveling about the galaxy is as common a thing for people in Star Wars as driving the family car across the country for modern people.

[44] Unlike Star Trek, with its many authors and contributors who have modified the story and characters after Roddenberry�s death, Star Wars continues to be a franchise controlled ultimately by one man. In this discussion I will not focus on the �expanded universe� of novels, comics, interactive games or other media that form a lesser part of Star Wars continuity. In the canon films, we see two major threads. In the original trilogy, we see the story of a rag-tag band of idealistic Rebels fighting against an oppressive totalitarian government known as the Galactic Empire and their ultimate triumph over that evil. In the prequel trilogy (with two films completed and the last one expected by 2005), we see the events in the twilight decades of the Old Republic, a democratic but corrupt government that ruled before the Empire. The prequels tie both trilogies together by weaving a common thread, the story of the rise, fall, and redemption of Anakin Skywalker.

[45] In the first film (story order speaking) �The Phantom Menace� a small political incident (a dissident trading faction starting a war with another planet) occurs and some Jedi Knights are sent to resolve the issue. In the Old Republic, the Jedi Knights are a religious order of warriors. They have the innate ability (apart from technology) which lets them tap into a mysterious cosmic �Force,� that grants them superhuman abilities such as telekinesis, mind control, increased stamina in battle, levitation, and other incredible skills. They wield glowing energy swords known as Lightsabers with amazing skill. While the Jedi are certainly powerful, they are not invincible, and they do not seek power for themselves. The Jedi Order is located in a Temple on Coruscant, the capital city of the Galactic Republic and is under the authority of the Supreme Chancellor of the Senate.

[46] Thus the role of religion in Star Wars is established as one of service, but viewed negatively; it is the tool of the state. However, the Force itself is an interesting concept. It could allegorically be viewed as a metaphor for all religious faith, yet it is something that is universal, testable and empirically verifiable (unlike the religious beliefs of our modern world) even to unbelievers. Microscopic life forms that reside in the cells of a body known as �Midichlorians� are said to be an indicator of Force sensitivity. Qui Gon Jinn, the elder Jedi sent to negotiate the dispute says that without Midichlorians life could not exist �and we would have no knowledge of the Force.�

[47] Qui Gon Jinn is often at odds with his superiors in the Jedi Council over various matters of their faith. The Jedi Order adheres to strict rules in a �Jedi Code� (which is not fully expounded on screen). A Master chooses a �Padawan� (apprentice) to train as a Jedi and they are all celibate. In fact, all Force sensitivity seems to be selected by nature, and Jedi are recruited soon after birth. Jedi are very rare in the galaxy, numbering about ten thousand out of hundreds of thousands of star systems. One such person is discovered on a backwater desert planet quite by accident.

[48] Qui Gon and his party escape from an attempt on their lives by the treacherous Trade Federation but are forced to land their disabled starship on the backwater planet of Tatooine. There they encounter young Anakin, a slave who is skilled with machines. He helps Qui Gon Jinn, the Jedi apprentice Obi-Wan and Queen Amidala by giving them comfort in his mother�s home (their master is Watto, a greedy alien junk dealer). Anakin shows off his impressive skills and superhuman reflexes by winning a dangerous Pod Race (reminiscent of the chariot race in the religious epic �Ben Hur�) which wins him his freedom and the money that his newfound friends need to rebuild their ship and escape back to their home planet.

[49] Seeing Anakin�s potential as a Jedi candidate, Qui Gon tests his Midichlorians (which are unusually high) and decides that this boy fulfills an ancient Jedi Prophecy of �the Chosen one� who will �Bring balance to the Force.� His idea is controversial among the Jedi Council, and they at first reject Qui Gon�s request to have Anakin trained as a Jedi. Anakin is proven to have Force Ability, able to see things before they happen and read the backs of cards with his mind. Yoda, an ancient Jedi Master says that he senses �much fear� in the boy Anakin. �Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering,� he tells the frightened child. The Jedi philosophy is that one must be �calm, at peace, passive� and control one�s emotions in order to feel the Force and use it for the service of others.

[50] Events are set in motion so that when Qui Gon is killed in battle with a deadly �Sith Lord,� Obi-Wan takes his master�s dying wish that Anakin be trained to heart. Obi-Wan decides to train Anakin whether the Council allows him or not, and they grudgingly accept. During the course of the film another figure is continuously present, that of Senator Palpatine. Viewers of the original trilogy of films recognize him as Emperor Palpatine, the tyrannical ruler of the Empire years later. This ambitious man himself has control of the Force, yet he is so powerful, he can keep this fact secret from the Jedi, overshadowing their powers. We learn that Palpatine is actually a member of a rival Force sect, known as the Sith. These Sith were thought to have been exterminated a thousand years ago, around the time of the formation of the Republic. Yet they have lingered on in secret, plotting their revenge. Palpatine�s secret apprentice, Darth Maul is sent to kill Qui Gon and Obi-Wan, but only succeeds in killing the Master before he is himself slain by Obi-Wan. Palpatine, like his apprentice and all Sith, uses the �Dark Side� of the Force, tapping into emotions like anger and hatred in order to achieve power. The Senator manipulates the Trade Federation into their disastrous battle with the defenseless planet Naboo in order to cause a political crisis. This crisis generates sympathy for Naboo, Palpatine�s home planet, and he gets himself elected Chancellor of the Senate. Palpatine vows to clean up the corruption that prevents peaceful planets like Naboo from being protected from the likes of the Trade Federation.

[51] In the next prequel film, �Attack of the Clones,� we see ten years later that Chancellor Palpatine has continued to secure power for himself, through the Dark Side of the Force. Clearly the abuse of religious and spiritual authority is shown, and the weaknesses of a stagnant and arrogant institution like the Jedi Order, who is powerless to stop it. The Sith Lord Palpatine has recruited a new apprentice, Count Dooku (known as Lord Tyrannus to his master), a Jedi Knight who has left the Order. Together they organize another plan to cause a state of emergency in the galaxy, allowing Palpatine to gain more power.

[52] Dooku leads a Separatist movement of star systems and planets that break away from the Republic, including the Trade Federation and other galactic corporations. This begins a galactic civil war which comes to be called the Clone Wars. We know from the original trilogy that this devastating war heralds the birth of the Empire and the destruction of the Jedi Order. The Separatist threat is all the excuse Palpatine needs to gain emergency powers and create a galactic army. The army is made up of cloned soldiers, secretly grown in a lab on the far off planet of Kamino. The Jedi, who are to lead them into battle against the Separatists, thus become soldiers and officers in the Republican army.

[53] Meanwhile Anakin, who has become a young man, is tempted by the Dark Side of the Force. Incredibly gifted and powerful, as well as emotionally unstable, he grows apart from his master Obi-Wan due to several factors. Anakin�s great power in the Force makes him increasingly arrogant and frustrated with his master, whom he feels is an impediment to his progress as a Jedi. Anakin continues to pine for his mother whom is still living on Tatooine. As a boy he vowed to return and free the slaves including his mother, but never followed up on that promise. He also falls madly in love with Amidala (now a Senator and no longer Queen) which grows out of his boyhood crush when he meets her in The Phantom Menace. Since the Jedi are celibate, they try to keep their affair a secret and this sense of guilt continues to erode his sanity and control of his emotions. Palpatine of course seizes full advantage of this and seeks to place them together at every opportunity.

[54] Anakin is troubled by dreams of his mother suffering and finally disobeys the orders of his master in order to find her. He returns to discover that she has been freed and married a Tatooine farmer named Clieg Lars. Anakin encounters the man, but is told that a band of warlike tribal aliens called Sand people (or Tuskens) have kidnapped her. Anakin finds his mother dying from torture and is powerless to save her life. Enraged, he gives in to hatred and massacres the entire village, including women and children. While he tearfully confesses to Amidala this terrible act of genocide, he apparently feels little remorse except for his temporary loss of control. Headstrong and arrogant, Anakin continually loses his temper and talks back to his master. In battle, by disobeying Obi-Wan�s orders he loses his right arm to Count Dooku�s lightsaber. This is symbolic of Anakin�s loss of self. He gains a machine arm, but has lost a part of his being through his poor choices.

[55] At the end of Attack of the Clones Anakin and Amidala are married in a secret wedding and Palpatine watches as his armies march off to crush his enemies, according to the conspiracy he controls. The events of the final prequel film are not fully known, but suffice to say, Anakin�s fall to the Dark Side will be completed and Palpatine�s power will be secured as Emperor.

[56] Moving ahead to the original Star Wars films (filmed 20 years ago) we see events taking place two decades after the prequels. In this age, the Empire is in control, but more and more star systems are breaking away in a desperate attempt to throw off the yolk of oppression. In the first film (originally titled simply �Star Wars� in 1977) �A New Hope,� a super weapon, known as the Death Star has been created to destroy entire planets and thus terrorize the galaxy into submission. The plans for this weapon were originally obtained by Count Dooku from one of the alien races that had joined the side of the Separatists. Now Palpatine commands this stolen knowledge to kill billions of people. This event galvanizes the Rebel Alliance, a community of guerilla fighters to mount an attack that destroys the hated weapon.

[57] In this time the Jedi are all but extinct, except for three individuals. One of these is Obi-Wan Kenobi, a hermit living on Tatooine in obscurity. Obi-Wan, now known as �Old Ben,� is disparagingly called �that wizard� just a crazy old man� by Owen Lars, son of Clieg Lars. Owen and Beru are the Uncle and Aunt of Luke Skywalker, a farm boy who has been lied to about his past. He has been told his father was a spice miner when in fact his father was a Jedi Knight named Anakin Skywalker, who fought in the Clone Wars alongside Obi-Wan.

[58] When the family purchases some droids to help out around the farm, Luke discovers one of them holds a secret message from an Imperial Diplomat who is secretly helping the Rebels, Princess Leia. This clue leads Luke to Obi-Wan Kenobi, whom Leia asks for help. Agents of the Empire also follow the clues and Luke�s relatives are murdered. This prompts Luke to follow Kenobi on a mission to rescue the Princess and recover the Death Star plans to the Rebels.

[59] Obi-Wan reveals to Luke that not only was his father actually the Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker, but Luke himself also has potential in the Force. Kenobi begins to train the youth in the ways of the Jedi as best he can. Finally Obi-Wan is killed in battle with Darth Vader, a Sith Lord, and the new Sith henchman of Emperor Palpatine. Darth Vader was once a Jedi, as an Imperial Official states, �The Jedi are extinct, their fire has gone out of the galaxy, and you my friend are the last of their religion.� Vader is a cruel and mysterious figure, creating fear as the Emperor�s representative. An Imperial general insults Vader, calling him a �sorcerer� who�s �sad devotion to that ancient religion� has not helped the Empire stop the Rebels. At this Vader uses the Force to telekinetically choke the unfortunate man nearly to death until he is stopped by order of his superior, Moff Tarkin.

[60] Obi-Wan allows himself to be killed by Vader in a lightsaber duel so that Vader and the other Imperials will be distracted long enough for Luke and his new friends, a pair of smugglers known as Han Solo and Chewbacca, the Princess and their two droids to escape the Death Star and deliver the plans to the waiting Rebel fleet. Luke is emotionally shattered when he sees Obi-Wan die, as he loses the closest person he had to a father in life, but runs when he hears the voice of Obi-Wan in his head say �Run, Luke, run!� Despite the death of his physical body, Obi-Wan�s influence on galactic events through his guidance of Luke continues throughout the films, thanks to the power of the Force.

[61] A desperate attack on the Death Star ensues, with many Rebel pilots being killed. Luke is one of the last remaining pilots. As he nears the weak-point of the Death Star, an impossibly difficult target, he hears the voice of his dead master urging him to �use the Force� and stretch out with his feelings. Turning off his ship�s computer, Luke trusts in the Force and is able to successfully hit the target and destroy the Death Star once and for all. The Rebels are victorious and escape the Empire once again. However, during the battle the Lord Darth Vader senses Luke using the Force, and takes this knowledge with him as he too escapes the Death Star�s destruction.

[62] In the next Star Wars film, the �Empire Strikes Back� we see perhaps the most overtly religious of the films. While the prophecy of the Chosen One in the prequels, and statements about �the Will of the Force� conjured up images of monotheistic and Judeo-Christian overtones, now the Force is described more nebulously. It has been compared to Buddhism, Taoism, or other eastern religious beliefs.

[63] The Rebels continue to fight the Empire, and we learn that Darth Vader, the evil lord is actually Anakin Skywalker.16 A cyborg, Vader has been wounded many times and relies on a breath mask and respirator to keep him alive. The boy who once enjoyed fixing machines has now become nearly one himself. As the man has become more machine, he has also become metaphorically less human. His voice is deep and ominous and his body is hidden beneath a black mask and cape. Vader is ruthless in his desire to crush the Rebels, killing his own men when they make mistakes. In the Empire Strikes Back, he has gained a new obsession� finding his long lost son Luke and turning him to the Dark Side of the Force. Emperor Palpatine is seen as well, and we see that he is Anakin�s master, guiding him to do his bidding as an agent of evil. According to Obi-Wan it was Vader who wiped out the Jedi Knights, but he also lied to Luke, saying that Vader �betrayed and murdered your father.� When Luke learns the truth, he becomes suicidal, his quest for vengeance now utterly meaningless. After losing his hand in battle with his father, he jumps from an incredible height, but is saved at the last moment by his friends.

[64] Earlier in the film Luke encountered master Yoda, the other surviving Jedi, who trains him more fully in the Force. Yoda�s platitudes include the warning to �beware the Darkside... fear, anger, aggression, the Dark Side are they� and �A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack.� In �A New Hope,� Obi-Wan had described the Force as �what gives a Jedi his power� an energy field created by all living things, it surrounds us and binds the galaxy together.� Yoda tells Luke further that �life creates it, makes it grow� and that one can �feel the Force around you� between �you, me, the tree, the rock�.� This notion of a universal Force everywhere has several religious parallels, both in the notion of Brahman and karma in Hindu and Buddhist thought, as well as the omnipresence of God in various monotheistic traditions. Luke tries to use the Force to pull his crashed starship from a swamp in which it has become stuck, but gives up. His lack of faith is admonished by Master Yoda. To Luke�s statement, �I don�t believe it,� he says �that is why you fail.� Yoda demonstrates his power by levitating the massive vehicle through the air and landing it safely on the ground. Luke is shown a vision in a cave by Yoda of Darth Vader. Luke attacks the specter and cuts off its head with his Lightsaber, only to find his own face beneath the helmet.

[65] Luke trains with Yoda for a time, but then breaks off the training when he has a vision of his friends (Han Solo, Leia and company) �in pain.� He rushes off to help them; despite Yoda�s warnings that he is not yet ready. Obi-Wan�s spirit admonishes Yoda that Luke�s reckless nature was also a flaw he himself possesses. Yoda and Obi-Wan act in the manner of many parents who finally let their child go off into the world, to make their own decisions. They give him parting advice, to bury his feelings deep down, to remember his training �save you it can.� The notion of salvation comes into play in a much greater way in the third and final film of the original trilogy and the last film in the series.

[66] In �Return of the Jedi,� the Star Wars finale, the Rebels have been steadily gaining victories against the Empire. Luke Skywalker is now nearly a fully trained Jedi and very powerful in the Force, like his father. Yet he succeeds where his father fails, much as Galahad passes the tests his father Lancelot fails in the Arthurian romances. Luke fights for the Rebellion and for their freedom. He uses the Force to fight evil but does not give in to the anger and the hatred linked to the Dark Side. Rescuing Han Solo from an evil crime lord, they return to the Rebels to discover that another Death Star has been built. This even stronger super weapon presents an ideal target, because the Emperor himself is onboard. By assassinating the evil leader of the Empire, it is hoped that freedom can at last be won for the galaxy. Luke Skywalker is the only Jedi Knight in the Rebellion; the rest are ordinary people from various alien races, humans, and droids, all with the common goal of freedom from oppression. Interestingly enough, the phrase �May the Force be with you� is always a part of the Rebel philosophy (even going back to A New Hope). Though they are not Jedi, they believe that the Force is on their side, in their battle for liberty.

[67] Of course the Force (The Dark Side of the Force) is also on the side of the Empire, in the persons of Vader and Palpatine. As the events unfold another subplot emerges, Luke�s desire to save his father�s soul.17

[68] It turns out that the second Death Star is being used as bait to capture and exterminate the Rebels, by drawing them into a trap. The Emperor has foreknowledge of the events through the Dark Side of the Force and he uses Vader as a trap for Luke. Vader�s son allows himself to be captured and brought before Vader, in order to bring him back �to the good side.� Luke says to his father, �There is still good in you, the Emperor hasn�t driven it from you fully� I feel the good in you, the conflict.� Vader responds that �there is no conflict... I must obey my master.� Vader fatalistically tells Luke that �it is too late for me, son.� A battle of wills occurs, alongside a battle of Lightsabers as the Emperor goads Luke into attacking him. Luke finally gives in, perhaps sensing that the fate of the Galaxy rests in his hands. With the Emperor dead, the war could be ended then and there. Vader is forced to defend his master and he and Luke begin a death struggle. In Empire Strikes Back, Vader expressed the notion that Luke could destroy the Emperor, and offered Luke the chance to join him and they would �rule the galaxy as father and son.� A secret rivalry thus exists between Palpatine and Vader. Palpatine has again used the Force to manipulate his pawns into position. If Vader wins, he will have slain the last Jedi Knight and destroyed the Rebellion. If Luke wins, he will have killed his own father in anger and thus become Palpatine�s new Dark Side apprentice. Plus Palpatine will be rid of the treacherous Vader and have a new young pupil to mold to his will.

[69] Luke remembers his training and resists both options, by refusing to kill his own father. Enraged, the Emperor tortures Luke with the Force, throwing lightning at his body. The suffering of Luke willingly for the salvation of a guilty man evokes parallels with Christ. Overcome with the sight of his son�s suffering, Vader finally kills his master, and in the process sustains mortal injuries himself. In his last dying moments Vader comes to terms with himself and finally allows his good side return. He allows Luke to see his true face under the mask, horribly scarred. Luke leaves the Death Star before it is finally destroyed by the Rebel Fleet and burns his father�s body on a funeral pyre.

[70] Good triumphs over evil when the Emperor�s technologically advanced army is defeated by a primitive tribe of small furry aliens, the Ewoks that the Rebels have whipped up support for against the Empire. In fact, the turning point of that battle occurs earlier when C3PO, the golden droid who has been following our heroes along since the beginning, is declared a �god� by the Ewoks. This unlikely alliance allows them to destroy the Death Star�s shield generator on their planet, and destroy the invincible super weapon at last.

[71] Luke comes away from the burning pyre of his father to rejoin the other Rebels in celebration with the Ewoks of their victory over the Empire and we see him smile, as he witnesses the ethereal Jedi spirits of Obi-Wan and Yoda joined by that of Anakin, indicating that his father has found peace and redemption after all. The sacrifice of father and son has finally brought Balance to the Force. We hold hope that a new generation of Jedi will be raised to serve the galaxy when we learn that Luke�s sister Leia also has the Force. Finally we see the various planets liberated from the Empire, including the image of a statue of the Emperor falling over in Coruscant, ironically a statue that had been erected in his honor when he was elected Chancellor after the events of The Phantom Menace.

[72] Star Wars portrays religion in vague, allegorical terms. In the prequels it seems to be saying that religion does have a role in the affairs of the world, including in government, as a service to the people, but that it can also be abused by those who seek power over others. The Jedi represent those who use spiritual gifts for the benefit of mankind, while the Sith show the abuse of those same gifts to oppress others. The Jedi are shown as flawed individuals who are too set in their ways to see the danger of the Sith until it is too late. But in the end �The Force� triumphs and sorts out the problems of the galaxy by empowering individuals to do good in the face of evil. It allows ordinary people like Han Solo, a smuggler who cared only about money to accept responsibility and help the Rebels achieve their goals. It helps a man like Lando Calrissian, another criminal who was desperately seeking to become a legitimate business man, to throw off the Imperials who were bullying him and try to make up for the people he hurt by cooperating with the corrupt authorities. It also guided a tribe of primitive aliens to defeat a much more powerful foe, even if the means to achieving that end was an accidental deception (C3PO the droid as their god).

[73] The message of Star Wars is in more ways universal 18 in that it does not evoke a particular sectarian belief, but espouses the notion that there is another dimension to life and that spirituality has a place in achieving good in the world, and not just for a select few. Star Trek disregards religious matters for the most part as a crutch that may help primitive people, but is ultimately something that should be outgrown in favor of more mature secular humanist principles.19Though later Star Trek in the post-Roddenberry era continues to be more �pro-faith� it still attacks institutions as corrupt and portrays religious beliefs as something that may be positive for some, but not for most. It teaches us to be suspicious of institutions, miracles and deities, and rather to trust in the goodness of humankind and our potential to use science and secular philosophies to solve our problems.20 Star Wars shows the potential for both good and evil to come from religious practice and belief, but it tends to emphasize the good (especially in the original films, and the ultimate resolution of the saga) and the transformative and lasting power of religion as it grows to encompass new ideas and to face new challenges and so perhaps this is a more realistic view, than Star Trek, which envisions religion as a passing thing, that human beings will eventually have no need for. One way to sum it all up would be to say that while Star Trek declares the death of the gods and where to go from there; Star Wars espouses the everlasting role of the gods in our lives.

[74] Looking at Star Wars and Star Trek one can see that in science fiction, issues such as religion, which form an important part of life for billions of people in our world, can be discussed in an allegorical fashion, which is less likely to offend people�s sensibilities and offer solutions to problems as well as to create thought experiments about the future. By bringing up these important issues, the genre serves an important function to spark debate and discussion, while also entertaining. By viewing science fiction with this in mind, we can come to a better appreciation of the genre and help to understand the ideas being presented by the creators of the material. We need not accept their conclusions at face value of course and should continue to evaluate them critically.

*Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 7 No. 2 October 2003

Anti-feminism in Recent Apocalyptic Film

2007-08-13T12:53:00.000-07:00

by Joel W. Martin

Abstract

[1] As the second millennium winds down, apocalyptic themes inform many Hollywood plots. Several recent popular films and television shows depict epochal threats from space. This essay focuses on the films Independence Day, Armageddon, Deep Impact, Contact, and The Lion King and an episode from "Futurama." Extremely popular--"Armageddon" was the highest grossing film released in 1998--, these films and shows beg for attention. Strikingly, three of them give prominence to father-daughter relationships (in Armageddon, the oil driller hero dominates his coming of age daughter; in Deep Impact, the journalist hero, although estranged from her father, elects to join him on the beach as a fatal tidal wave sweeps the east coast; in Contact, the radio astronomer mourns her lost father and miraculously meets him again on a magical beach at the ends of the universe). What is all of this about? Clearly something vital is going on.

[2] This article examines what the social status and fate of these cinematic daughters say about contemporary gender politics, what this focus on father-daughter relationships reveals about the political unconscious. The article highlights the odd mix of initiative and passivity that characterizes the female protagonists of these films. It traces how these works link feminism with the threat from space, showing how these films suggest that the former causes the latter. This leads to a troubling conclusion, repugnant politically and ethically. According to the politics of these films, to avoid the apocalypse, women must be re-subordinated. The article employs theoretical approaches developed in Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth, and Ideology in Popular American Film and advanced by scholars such as Douglas Kellner, Michael Ryan, and Janice Rushing.

Article

[3] Apocalypses reveal. They envision heaven or deliver a heavenly message.1 This remains the case in Hollywood.

[4] I want to call attention to an apocalyptic trope present in several recent films. It consists of a long tracking shot that traverses a great expanse of the universe. I call it the cosmic magic carpet ride, because it takes viewers on an intergalactic journey no human could ever experience. The journey may begin or end on earth. It may move centifugally "outward" to alien spaces or centripetally "inward" to our home planet. In either case, it flows seamlessly from earth to the cosmos or from the cosmos to earth. An exemplary example occurs at the beginning of the film Contact. Examining it closely, I will argue that it conveys a religious message worthy of theological reflection. As I will also show, most apocalyptic films, including those that feature a similar shot, are less inspiring.2

[5] They choke the spiritual message with ideological ones. In particular anti-feminism clouds our visions of the stars.

[6] Contact begins with a view of earth from near space. The scene centers on the southeastern United States at night. Close enough to make out the glow of coastal cities in Florida and Texas and the contrastingly dark pool of the Gulf of Mexico, we are, nevertheless, far enough away to see the curvature of the earth set off against the blackness of space. The soundtrack consists of snatches of music from the era of the movie's production. We hear, among other things, a line from a song by the Spice Girls. As the camera backs out and away, the whole of the earth becomes visible, a sphere surrounded by space. Just as the moon comes into the picture, we hear slightly older songs, including the theme from the late 1970s television show "Dallas." The conceit here is that we are overtaking the soundwaves of radio and television broadcasts that radiated outward years ago from earth. At Mars, we hear the candy bar jingle, "Sometimes you feel like a nut..." The Van Allen asteroid belt brings Nixon defending his honor, "I am not a crook." The Sixties sound off beyond Jupiter: Martin Luther King, Jr. exults "Praise God Almighty, we're free at last," a journalist reports President Kennedy's assassination, and the theme song from the "Twilight Zone" plays. Somewhere in the rings of Saturn we hear Dean Martin singing, "Volare!" And beyond Neptune, we hear the Lone Ranger cry "Hi Ho Silver," FDR declare the attack on Pearl Harbor "a day that will live in infamy," and Hitler rant auf Deutsch, a rare instance when the language spoken on the soundtrack is not English. The last discernible statement belongs to FDR, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." And the last trace of our civilization--some very faint dots and dashes of Morse code--vibrates just before the camera leaves our galaxy.

[7] The shot does not stop there, but the sound of the soundtrack does. This transition warrants remark. It divides the shot into two distinct parts, a noisy prelude and a silent feature. The effect is profound, a sonic equivalent of the shift from black and white to color in the Wizard of Oz. We have shifted from the mundane familiar to the strange and wondrous. Before this moment, Top 40 songs, American Presidents' speeches, and Madison Avenue slogans crackled on the soundtrack and helped domesticate the novel visual. For media-saturated Americans, this noisy trip through the solar system resembles a drive down a new highway with our favorite tapes along. After we leave the solar system, however, things change. Because the soundtrack no longer anchors us in the familiar detritus of everyday American mass culture, the strangeness of the visions before us shine forth that much more brightly. The silence tells us we are no longer in Kansas. The silence compels us to pay attention.

[8] We are swept along on a grand tour of the universe. We glimpse distant, primordial phenomena like the ones first revealed in the 1990s through spectacular color photos from the Hubbell telescope. These sights resemble those described by Carl Sagan in his novel Contact. "Everywhere she looked there were stars, not the paltry scattering of a few thousand still occasionally known to naked-eye observers on Earth, but a vast multitude--many almost touching their nearest neighbors it seemed--surrounded her in every direction. The sky was blazing with nearby suns. She could make out an immense spiraling cloud of dust, an accretion disk apparently flowing into a black hole of staggering proportions, out of which flashes of radiation were coming like heat lightning on a summer's night.3

[9] This entire vision proves most exhilarating and moving. We are truly "flying." But, because of the silent soundtrack, the experience carries deeper meaning. As in some forms of meditation and prayer, the absence of sound here connotes profoundity and indicates awareness of mystery. Far from the noise of earth and commerce, we enter a space where the proper human response is awe. Later in the film, the beauty she sees in the depths of far space overwhelms the scientist Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster). She responds like biblical prophets suddenly brought into God's presence. "No words," she cries, indicating that speech cannot do justice to this revelation.

[10] May we not likewise see in this shot something apocalyptic? When viewed in the manner of a constructionist theologian, the shot's existential effects might be compared to those of the God-concept. Like this concept, the shot indicates our position in a larger grander order that contextualizes without crushing our significance. Because this shot is space-oriented, it relativizes and humbles us and suggests our insignificance in the big banged world. It provides a popular religious vision of the universe revealed by science: 400 billion stars in each of 50 billion galaxies. It evokes an unfathomable, mind-boggling reality whose units of temporal and spatial measurement defy ordinary human comprehension even as its beauty, power, and inexhaustible mystery draw us. And it invites ethical and spiritual reorientation.

[11] On the other hand, because this visual shot is also earth-anchored, it reminds us of our precious specialness in the vastness of nature. This humanizes. The visual equivalent of the child's game of nesting addresses--my address is such and such a street in such and such a town, state, and country, on planet earth, the Milky Way, in the universe--this shot suggests the earth still counts. This is a traditional function of apocalyptic, according to Eugene Weber. "Self-centered, self-fascinated, humanity is loath to concede that we are not central to the cosmic scheme of things...Apocalypse, however tragic, reassures.''4 Similarly, although we know earth is no longer central, the visual magic of this shot suggests our home planet is still very important. If for no other reason, this makes the shot supportive of human meaning making and anthropomorphic affirmation in the manner of classic apocalyptic.

[12] Thus this bipolar shot serves a useful iconic role, suggesting the two sides of God that Gordon Kaufman distilled years ago. As he summarized in An Essay on Theological Method, "the genius of the word 'God' is that it unites the relativizing and the humanizing motifs and holds them together in one concept? A similarly compelling genius resides in this grand image of the earth in the universe.

[13] Contact's version of the shot is exemplary, most likely to induce this type of reflection, but the shot occurs elsewhere with similar, if subdued, effect. Robust versions show up in some films in the Star Trek franchise, Deep Impact, Armageddon, and others. Attenuated versions color Apollo 13, Independence Day, and the Fifth Element. All imply the same basic theological message: earth, a very small place in a very large universe, still has special value. Banal when written, this truth shines when delivered via the superb special effects of a contemporary film. For moderns long accustomed to earth's decentering, this shot nonetheless reassures, assuaging on a deep level a metaphysical crisis that began hundreds of years ago and has accelerated in the last several decades.

[14] This is not to say that Hollywood directors are systematic theologians, that they worry about contemporary viewers' existential questions or that they attempt to answer them. They certainly do not worry about whether they are doing "first order," "second order" or "third order" theology. They are most concerned with creating entertaining narratives, not touching people spiritually. Not surprisingly, they often employ the shot I am analyzing in predictable plots of social crisis and imminent catastrophe. In most of these films, the vastness of space does not induce awe as in Contact, it simply threatens. The threat comes in a literal, concretized, concentrated form: an asteroid, a comet, an evil ball of fire, and big plasma-farting bugs. A spectacle of destruction follows. Indeed, so filled are these space-aware films with images of imminent and actual disaster, they may seem to deliver, indeed, to be, nothing else.

[15] Why does this pattern seem so strong in recent Hollywood film? Could it be a residual effect of the Cold War? As G. Simon Harak, Ira Chernus, Caron Schwartz Ellis have argued, fear of nuclear war, civil defense drills, and maps featuring ground zeros of instantaneous urban holocausts taught us all to fear the skies as possible "corridors of chaos" and destruction.5 Aware of the real possibility that we could die within a few minutes of an ICBM launch, it is not surprising that many of us in the 1970s sought solace in films featuring beneficent alien visitors. These cuddly extraterrestials helped us view the skies with something other than terror. We needed E.T., the Star Man, the Brother from Another Planet, and the kind folks in Cocoon. Now that the Cold War and its mad arms race are over, we are free to imagine the sky as truly menacing. It's ironic, but now that our fears of nuclear winter seem more remote, we can tolerate and may on some level actually need visions of chaos and destruction coming from above, viz., fireballs, comets, asteroids and implacably hostile alien invaders. Seeing things blown up provides a post-Cold War catharsis to generations who lived in terror. But here's the rub: the great majority of men and women in the audiences flocking to these films came of age after the depths of the Cold War. What do they know of the Bomb? These films do more than release pent up Cold War fantasies of destruction.

[16] Douglas Kellner and Michael Ryan's insights regarding the ideology of disaster and crisis films seem apropos.6 In Camera Politica, these cultural critics argue that disaster and crisis films invoke and address contemporary social tensions. Moreover, they argue that films do more than mirror these tensions, films teach viewers how to respond to them. According to Kellner and Ryan, one of the essential ways American learn their politics, values, and roles is through exposure to cinematic narratives, stories in film. Films transcode or translate the social order into images and narratives, teaching us through screen representations which boundaries we must honor and which we might be able to transgress. When the social order is stable, the dominant discourses, value-systems and accompanying symbolic representations are also secure. Men are men, and women are women. When the social order is in crisis, a simultaneous crisis occurs in the realm of representation. Disaster films abound.

[17] Following Fredric Jameson, Kellner and Ryan argue that ideology succeeds in maintaining order not through outright domination, but by pacifying, channeling, and neutralizing the forces that challenge the status quo. Since ideology cannot ignore these forces, but has to respond to them, their presence and power will be registered even in those cultural representations that oppose them. Kellner and Ryan's approach, then, suggests that we take very seriously the current apocalyptic films. Rather than see them only as entertainment or the residual cathartic release of Cold War anxieties, we might interpret them as essential efforts to respond to ongoing social tensions. These reel crises address real ones.

[18] To illustrate and develop this approach, let's interpret a recent apocalyptic film, the Lion King. This enormously popular animated film is apocalyptic in both the erudite and popular senses of the term. And, although its action is almost all on earth, the stars do figure in the film. The great king Mufasa tells his son Simba that the stars are all the rulers who ever lived; they watch over earth. Other characters offer differing theories about the nature of stars. Most important, the film depicts at its center a heavenly vision.

[19] The dead king Mufasa appears as a massive apparition in the night sky and chastens Simba for forgetting him. Simba, mistakenly convinced that he was responsible for his father's death, has been guilt-ridden and stagnant. Rather than getting on with his life and fulfilling his duty as the heir to the throne of the Pridelands Kingdom, he has retreated to a multi-racial counter-cultural oasis. While Simba lollygags with his male friends, the Pridelands kingdom has turned into a wasteland. A land that once had color is now ashen. Most horribly, due to the corrupt leadership of the regicide Scar, lions must live alongside hyenas. Thus we have within Lion King a doubled apocalypse, one spiritual and one social. Mufasa's heavenly appearance will lead to the reversal of the earthly catastrophe. But that can only happen after another kind of reversal takes place.

[19] A lioness ventures out from the wasteland and attacks one of Simba's frat brothers. Simba defends his brother, but the lioness, clearly stronger, pins him down. Fortunately for the prince, it turns out that this lioness is Nala, his cubhood playmate. One song later, they have fallen in love. Playing one day, they literally tumble down a hillside in the jungle, and he ends up on top of her.7 This time, she does not bear her teeth, but instead, shows "bedroom eyes." This reversal of positions establishes male dominance and clarifies the prince's sexual orientation. At last revealed to be heterosexual, Simba returns to the Pridelands and confronts Scar, his evil, impotent, darker hued uncle, the second son born to rebel, the true killer of Mufasa. Scar is a pro-immigration integrationist, and he is animated and voiced in a manner that suggests stereotypes of a gay man's speech patterns, mannerisms, and moods. He lisps, sashays, and broods.' Physically weaker than other male lions, he fights dirty. He deserves and receives defeat.

[20] After Simba sends Scar to a fiery death, Simba expels the hyenas and assumes the throne. He and Nala reproduce and the entire kingdom come to see their cub. The film indicates the cub is male by showing him then interjecting the title the Lion King. Just as this conclusion recapitulates the film's opening scene, we have every reason to expect the future to bring more dynastic struggles, border wars, and gender tensions.

[21] Freud would have a field day with the Lion King, but let's stick with Kellner and Ryan. Their Jamesonian notion of ideology explains why the Lion King, which seems determined to glorify heterosexual romance and a middle class family pattern, must allude to the possibility of a life outside of heterosexuality and without the nuclear family. Again, in order to undercut feminism, the film must show a female possessing real strength, only to subordinate her to a male. And so on. In the manner of a vaccine, the film exposes us to alternative ways of life in order to inoculate us against them.

[22] Kellner and Ryan further argue that we can speed our decoding by paying attention to the way metonymy, with its reference to the specific, material context, undermines metaphor, with its invocation of some higher transcendent meaning. Take the Lion King's mantra of a 'circle of life.' As a metaphor, it provides the comforting knowledge that nothing ever ends, that parents live on in their children, that time is not linear and death not final, that all things cycle around in a great and magical economy of repetition. As a metonymy, the circle of life has a different, because materially based, meaning. It coincides with quite specific, rigidly enforced material borders that divide races and marginalize certain peoples. The circle of life, to put it crudely, refers to a gated community called the Pridelands. Within it one finds happy nuclear families that stick to their own kind. Beyond its borders, however, one finds fields of death and deserts of privation, ghettos and barrios populated by unruly hordes. Out there leaders speak in dialect (Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin) or slobber to communicate. In the Pridelands, the good king Mufasa sounds like a Shakespearean-trained actor (James Earl Jones). Not surprisingly, when the two realms mix and social classes get out of their proper place, disaster results. Fascism springs up; nature itself declines. The metaphor of the circle of life is not innocent.

[23] Ideology drives other 90s apocalyptic films, including those that focus more resolutely on the stars. Turning these films inside out, we can now argue that the crisis they resolve derives not from space itself, but instead reflects apprehensions about feminism. These films respond negatively to the real and symbolic instability introduced into the gender system by feminism. It is not a coincidence that each of these films' narratives enacts the re-subordination of a woman and connects this process of subordination directly to the struggle to overcome a threat that contact with space, space rocks, and space beings supposedly represents. In Armageddon, for example, it is a daughter's sexuality that needs to be contained. Only after the father has transferred his authority over her to her male lover can the father perform the sacrifice that will save the earth.

[24] Anti-feminism percolates in Deep Impact. The world's number one journalist earns a spot in a subterranean city where a remnant of earth's population will survive earth's collision with a comet. At the last moment, however, she gives up her seat on the rescue helicopter and elects to reunite with her father on the beach in what will be a suicide hug beneath a great tidal wave. Metaphorically, her actions signify decency, grace, and forgiveness. Metonymically, however, it may be a different story. She yields her seat to a woman who has a child, to a mother. And it seems important to note that the father she rejoins is the man who left her mother for a much younger woman, an action that we are led to think contributed to her mother's suicide. If these material facts do not change our interpretation, other things in the film suggest it renders a judgment against feminism. A young man, really a kid, leaves the safety of the cave city to save a young woman left on the surface. Thanks to his heroism and against great odds, they reach it to the top of a mountain and escape the deluge. There presumably they will enter into a new covenant with God, marry, and repopulate the earth. Overall, I think we detect a disturbing pattern in this film. Women who are fertile and heterosexually bonded survive. Death comes to highly competent professional women and those who are post-menopausal. One wonders if the film was really about a comet after all. What is really being blasted here?

[25] In the Fifth Element, humanity's rescue depends upon the action of a perfect being. Unfortunately, the perfect being is female. At the critical moment when she must act, she becomes too emotional and starts crying. Overwhelmed by the duality of humanity, she hesitates. Only after the Bruce Willis character tells her that he loves her does she blast the evil ball of fire and save earth. Coincidentally, the only other men present are two celibate white priests and an emasculated African-American man. It takes a white heterosexual male to save the earth even when you have a perfect being on your side.

[26] In Independence Day, one of the early casualties is the First Lady. The film implies she would have survived had she followed her husband's admonition to flee L.A. Males, in contract, not only endure, they prevail, even when they behave recklessly. Late in the film a male pilot and computer hacker fly a captured alien vehicle into orbit, enter the gargantuan alien mother ship, and disable its computers. They escape unscratched, although enemy ships pursue them, a massive explosion engulfs their vessel, and they crash in the desert. When we next see them, they are walking back to their base, puffing cigars. Their women greet them with renewed respect. It seems likely that these women will abandon their careers--one was a stripper and the other the President's press secretary-- and assume more traditional, less visible roles.

[27] The anti-feminist pattern dyes this genre so strongly it shows up clearly in a parody of the genre, an episode of the Fox network's animated television show "Futurama" (premiere broadcast, 8 November 1999). Parodies derive their humor by playing with the conventions of well-established genres. Because parodies depend upon viewers consciously recognizing the pertinent conventions, they tend to exaggerate and foreground these conventions. Think of Blazing Saddles, Spaceballs, and Scream. "Futurama," as its title indicates, spoofs science fiction and its images of a technological future. It chronicles the picaresque adventures of a young man named Frye, a slacker frozen in the 1990s, then thawed a millennium later. In this episode, we see Frye in the 1990s hanging out with a friend in the broadcast control room of WNYW, the Manhattan headquarters of the Fox network. A technician, seated in front of a bank of monitors, asks him if he wants to watch the show "Single Female Lawyer." Frye responds, "Oh, I don't know. That's a chick show. I prefer shows of the genre 'world's blankety-blank.'" His buddy responds with a sexist comment, "She is wearing the world's shortest skirt." Convinced, Frye says, "I'm in."

[28] A short parody of "Ally McBeal" follows. It begins with a close-up of a middle-aged man wearing a judge's black robe hitting on a young woman. "Counselor," the man says, "I remind you that it's unethical to sleep with your client. If you really care about the outcome of the case, you should sleep with me."

]29] "Your Honor," the woman responds, "it's bad enough to proposition a single female lawyer in court, but this is a unisex bathroom." The view expands to show that these characters are standing in a large tiled bathroom, much like that featured regularly on the television show "Ally McBeal."

[30] "Overruled counselor," the judge says, kissing the woman on her lips.

[31] She pushes back against him momentarily, then embraces him, moans, and deepens the kiss. One of the stall doors pops open and a stenographer, seated on the toilet and typing on her machine, comes into view. She asks, "Could you repeat that last part?"

[32] The scene shifts back to the control room where Frye and the technician are watching the monitor. Yawning and stretching, Frye spills his "Lobrau Beer" on the control panel, short-circuiting the machinery. Static fills the monitor screen. "Oh my God! You knocked Fox off the air," the technician cries. Unfazed, Frye says, "Pfft, like anyone on earth cares?"

[33] At this point, the scene segues into a letter-perfect copy of the opening scene from Contact described above. Looking down on a skyscraper capped with the call letters "WNYW," we ascend, rising high above Manhattan. Red concentric rings pulsing from an antenna atop the building indicate broadcast signals. We move with them through clouds and beyond, passing the moon, Mars, belts of asteroids, Jupiter, Saturn, interstellar dust, and the Voyager space probe. Finally, a green mottled planet comes into view. A label identifies it as "Omnicron Persei 9, 1000 Light Years Away, 1000 Years Later." The television signal reaches the planet. The scene shifts to the interior of a room where two large brown aliens sit watching "Single Female Lawyer." The aliens are gendered--one of the aliens has horns, the other wears a pink bra. Each looks rather like Alf gone to seed. On their television set the lawyer and the judge from "Single Female Lawyer" kiss in the unisex bathroom.

[34] "Could you repeat that last part?" the stenographer asks again. Then static fills the aliens' screen.

[35] "This is an outrage," the male alien shouts. "I demand to know what happened to the plucky lawyer and her compellingly short garment."

[36] The static disappears, and the Fox icon appears. An announcer states, "Due to technical difficulties, we now bring you eight animated shows in a row."

[37] "Aargh," the alien spits. He lifts a laser and blasts the television. In the remainder of this episode of "Futurama," the aliens travel to earth and attack it, reproducing scenes of destruction identical to those in "Independence Day." They will stop their devastation only if earthlings show them how the 1000 year old television episode concluded. Accordingly, Fry and his friends stage a courtroom scene. The lawyer is to marry the judge, but the incompetent actors fail to follow the script. The result barely satisfies the aliens' need for narrative closure, but, after giving the performance a mediocre review, they leave earth.

[38] This parody provides a perfect reduction of a whole genre and it clarifies a leitmotif in contemporary apocalyptic film, the tendency to link feminism with catastrophe. The cosmic shot in this episode of "Futurama" not only moves seamlessly from earth to space, it shifts directly from a focus on a professional woman and her sexuality to the aliens who will devastate earth. The shot joins her story to theirs. In this parody we have an almost explicit recognition that it is a crisis in the gender system that has produced the genre of 1990s apocalyptic films. If space threatens, it has something to do with a professional woman. The apocalypse comes about because of a single, female lawyer. Once upon a time, "heaven was a screen where signs appeared by which God premonished humankind. Disorderly activity in the heavens anticipated greater or lesser disorder on earth.''10 Now disorder on earth leads to disorder in the heavens, at least in those heavens projected on Hollywood's screens.

[39] Finally, let us look at a more subtle film, one that contests the same conventions "Futurama" parodies. Unlike more conventional films in this genre, Contact resists equating traffic with space with danger. In fact, it celebrates contact with space. It provides one the best magic carpet rides of all films and features other scenes glorifying the beauty of celestial events. In short, it affirms the apocalypse provided in the new vision of the universe provided by science. And, not coincidentally, it judges anti-feminism negatively rather than enacting it uncritically or parodically. In this highly cerebral film, those who find space to be a threat are considered pinheads and bureaucrats. Religious fundamentalists--who are portrayed stereotypically-- and national security hierarchies fear contact because it undermines their sources of authority, their claims to know what's real and what's not. They want to stop the apocalypse, even though it's a good thing, not a destructive one. Uniting forces, they repress the lead SETI scientist's experience of actual contact with aliens; the film culminates in an interrogation that combines motifs from the trials of Joan of Arc, Galileo, and Anita Hill.11 Ellie Arroway, the scientist played by Jodie Foster, becomes a prophet who speaks truth to small-minded men and she pays a price. The apocalypt, who gained an awesome perspective on the heavens, a wondrous message for humanity, is partially silenced, but by small-minded people, not the film itself.

[40] And yet, there are two odd scenes that do not fit this generous interpretation. Ellie Arroway risks her life to travel a billion light years to the end of the universe only to land on a beach and have a chat with her Dad. It's not really her Dad, but he looks and talks like him and fits her memories of him perfectly. They hug on the beach. This scene echoes the one featured in Deep Impact. Evidently, at the end of time and space, a girl just wants her Dad. I leave this to the Lacanians to explain, but does it not seem out of place or forced in the film Contact?

[41] Similarly puzzling is the scene immediately after the trial. Ellie, who has shown no interest whatsoever in teaching, is shown talking enthusiastically about space to a group of children near the radio telescopes in the desert. Why was this scene with children inserted? Does it show she is completing her own circle of life, passing on to the next generation the curiosity her father instilled in her? Or is she opening up to other human beings as the alien advised her to do? Or is she performing some court-mandated sentence of community service? The film leaves this unclear.

[42] In any case, this scene, like so many others that punctuate this genre, functions to return a single, professional, and in this case romance-resistant woman to a traditional role. This may be why this particular film could not stop there but continued on to show the scientist by herself on the rim of Canyon de Chelley contemplating a handful of earth and the majesty of the night sky. That ending fit the spirit of the film more truly, and shows again that Contact itself does not conform perfectly to this genre or reproduce its conventions. It resists the anti-feminism that fuels the other films and distorts how they respond to space. Contact shows that mystery need not always give way to misogyny. Apocalypse need not always turn into catastrophe.

END NOTES

1 See the definition of "apocalypse" provided by the SBL Genres group and quoted in Frances Flannery Dailey, "Bruce Willis as the Messiah," in this volume. I thank Flannery-Dailey for calling this to my attention and sharing a copy of her article with me before its publication in the Journal of Religion and Film.

2 Lynn Schofield Clark provided helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I also want to thank my fellow panelists and the audience at November 1999 session of the AAR where I first presented these ideas.

3 Sagan, Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), 341.

4 Eugene Weber, "Apocalypse Through History," The Key Reporter, Vol. 65, Number One (Autumn 1999), 7. See also Weber, Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults and Millennial Beliefs through the Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

5 Gordon D. Kaufman, An Essay on Theological Method (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1975) p. 56. My comparison is not perfect. In discussing the relativizing side, Kaufman stresses that God is "not subject to our direct investigation" (p.50). The universe is subject to investigation; among other things, scientists theorize its origins, mass, and rate of expansion. However, the point here is to deal with the images before us. It is these that imply infinity and invite awe. Finally, in suggesting this comparison, I may be partly influenced by Kaufman's subsequent work, which dwelt more on integrating scientific visions with theological construction.

6 G. Simon Harak, "One Nation, Under God: The Soteriology of SDI," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 56 (Fall 1988); Ira Chernus, Dr. Strangegod: On the Symbolic Meaning of Nuclear Weapons (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1986); Caron Schwartz Ellis, "With Eyes Uplifted: Space Aliens as Sky Gods," in Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth, and Ideology in Popular American Film eds. Joel Martin and Conrad Ostwalt, Jr. (Boulder: Westview Press, t995), 83-93.

7 See Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), esp. pp. 1-16, 49-75.

8 Tamara Goeglein called this reversal to my attention.

9 Lisa Bellan-Boyer alerted me to this pattern.

10 Eugene Weber, "Apocalypse Through History," The Key Reporter, Vol. 65, Number One (Autumn 1999), 6.

11 See Bryan P. Stone, "Religious Faith and Science in Contact," Journal of Religion and Film Vol. 2, No. 2 (1998).

*The Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 4, No. 1 April 2000

Angels Carrying Savage Weapons: Uses of of the Bible in Contemporary Horror Films

2007-08-13T12:50:00.000-07:00

by Mary Ann Beavis

Abstract

[1] As one of the great repositories of supernatural lore in Western culture, it is not surprising that the Bible is often featured in horror films. This paper will attempt to address this oversight by identifying, analyzing and classifying some uses of the Bible in horror films of the past quarter century. Some portrayals of the Bible which emerge from the examination of these films include: (1) the Bible as the divine word of truth with the power to drive away evil and banish fear; (2) the Bible as the source or inspiration of evil, obsession and insanity; (3) the Bible as the source of apocalyptic storylines; (4) the Bible as wrong or ineffectual; (5) the creation of non-existent apocrypha.

Article
Introduction

[2] As one of the great repositories of supernatural lore in Western culture, it is not surprising that the Bible is often featured in horror films. Without the biblical repertoire of Satan, demons, exorcisms, plagues, curses, prophecies, apocalyptic signs, false messiahs, pagan sorcerers, evil empires, etc., horror movies would be impoverished. In the academic literature on the horror film, however, the role of the Bible has gone virtually unnoticed.1 This paper will attempt to address this oversight by identifying, analyzing and classifying some uses of the Bible in horror films of the past quarter century.

[3] Of course, not all horror films have explicitly religious, let alone biblical, content. Movies in which the horror is the result of violent insanity (psycho-horror/slasher films), science-fiction inspired horror (alien possession/metamorphosis movies), films with �mad-scientist� themes, ecological horror (where the danger is the unintended consequence of human activity), and alien invasion films are generally what Andrew Tudor classifies as �secular horror.�2 With the exception of the psycho-horror subgenre, non-supernatural horror films are relatively unlikely to refer to the Bible. However, according to Tudor�s 1989 study, at least one-third of horror movies made in the 20th century belong to the genre of �supernatural horror,� which reached its peak in the early 1970s, but is still very much with us. To this category belong vampire movies, films with apocalyptic/Satanic/demonic themes, �haunted house� movies, etc.�all of which might be expected to refer to the Bible in some way. In addition to the many horror themes identified by Tudor, I would suggest the category of �spiritual horror� movies; films in which the most fundamental and cherished religious beliefs of a character or group are undermined by some new discovery or insight, threatening spiritual damnation or chaos; the latter can be classified as religious psycho-horror films.

[4] Supernatural and spiritual horror movies (which could be lumped together under the rubric of �religious horror�), then, are the horror sub-genre that would be most expected to feature the Bible in some guise. Adele Reinhartz has identified some of the roles played by the Bible in recent Hollywood films:3

* as an artifact or prop (Reinhartz cites such diverse examples as Coneheads, The Apostle, Slingblade and The Shawshank Redemption; a more recent addition would be Memento, in which a two shots of a Gideon Bible in a motel-room drawer are featured);

# Bible-related dialogue, i.e., conversations about the characters� beliefs about the Bible, or where the Bible is quoted (e.g., Sling Blade, Dead Man Walking, Nell, Pulp Fiction; and more recently, Chicken Run and O Brother, Where Art Thou?: �consider the goddam lilies of the field�);

# biblical plot structures, where biblical narratives more or less explicitly structure a film, from biblical epics (The Ten Commandments, Jesus of Nazareth), to contemporary retellings of biblical stories (Jesus Christ Superstar, Jesus of Montreal), to plot structures with an underlying biblical source, e.g., The Lion King (where a �Moses-like hero . . . flees the land of his birth, wanders in the desert, begins life anew in a foreign land . . . and is persuaded to return as leader after experiencing a theophany,�4 or Deep Impact, which Reinhartz calls �a modern day rendition of the flood story, animals, ark and all, with the priestly blessing, apocalypticism, and a messiah rolled in for good measure�.5

[5] As the following pages will show, all of these uses of the Bible are found in contemporary horror films: Bibles often appear as props; the Bible is frequently quoted (or misquoted) and its meaning is discussed; biblical narratives�especially eschatological timetables alleged to be from the Bible�structure the plots of many horror movies. However, due to the supernatural and horrific nature of the genre, the Bible is used in several distinctive ways in horror films:

1. In a minority of films, the Bible is seen purely positively, as the divine word of truth with the power to drive away evil and banish fear.6

2. One of the most frequent uses of the Bible in films of the past 25 years has been as the source of apocalyptic plots; in such films, the Bible both structures and explains the terrors of the end time as they unfold.

3. Some horror movies represent the Bible as the source or inspiration of evil, obsession and insanity.

4. In opposition to those films which hold up the Bible as the source of eternal truth and goodness, several recent horror films question the reliability of the biblical account of the supernatural world, or reject it as ineffectual.

5. Finally, an interesting horror phenomenon is the appeal to non-existent scriptures to buttress cinematic plots.

Below, a selection of horror films from 1970 to the present that relate to the Bible in one or more of these ways will be discussed and analyzed: (1) in order to explore an important medium in which the Bible is frequently represented in popular culture, horror film; and (2) in order to identify trends or changes in portrayal of the Bible in horror films, and to correlate them, if possible, with broader cultural developments.

1. The Bible Against Horror: Scripture as a Weapon against Evil

[6] In Western culture, the Bible has long been considered to be �a unified text, God�s eternal, infallible, and complete word�,7 and, as such, the epitome of goodness, able to dispel false doctrine and repel the attacks of the evil one (see Eph 6:16-17; Heb 12:12-13; 2 Tim 3:15-17; 2 Pet 3:16). The classic horror film Alias Nick Beal (1949), in which a politician sells his soul to the Devil, expresses this conventional understanding of the Bible when the title character Nick Beal�really the �Old Nick�, Beelzebub, in human disguise�is unable to read a passage from the Psalms at the invitation of the director of an orphanage. In the end, Beal is prevented from collecting the soul of a compromised politician when a Bible is accidentally dropped in his path. The minister to whom the Bible belongs concludes the film with an assertion that the Bible will always be there to drive away evil.

[7] In more recent horror films, the Bible continues to be portrayed as a prophylactic against horror, albeit a less effective one. In the first Omen movie (1976) , the priest (Father Spiletto) who tries to warn the Thorns that their adopted son, Damien, is the antichrist, papers the walls of his room with pages from the Bible to ward off the evil outside. A similar scene in the more recent The Body (2000) shows the archaeologist-priest Father Lavelle, his mind unhinged by the apparent discovery of the remains of Christ, in a room plastered with Catholic devotional items and pages of scripture to protect him from the unthinkable truth that the resurrection never really happened.

[8] In Children of the Corn (1984), the true interpretation of the Bible is held up as a foil for the false interpretation promoted by the evil child-preacher Isaac. Isaac, along with his disciple Malachai, is the leader of a demonic cult who has incited the children of Gatlin, Nebraska to murder their parents and bury them in the cornfields to appease the mysterious �he who walks behind the rows.� When the young doctor who ultimately destroys the cult (at least until the sequel) confronts the children in a desecrated church (with biblical verses like �And a child shall lead them�8 and �Ye shall worship no other gods�9 scrawled on the walls in blood), he challenges their assertion that they are doing �as it is written� in the Bible: �So what do you mean, as it is written?�, Dr. Stanton cries, �Written where? Are you rewriting the whole thing, or just the parts that suit your needs?� The hero finds the key to stopping the demon of the cornfields in Rev 20:10: �And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever�;10 the evil is turned back by a conflagration fueled by ethanol from the local distillery.

[9] Left Behind (2000) is the cinematic version of the bestseller11 by popular Christian novelists Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. The premise of the story is that the Rapture has occurred,12 and the Christian faithful have been caught up to be with Christ in heaven before the appearance of the Antichrist and the end-time tribulations. For the four core characters (airline pilot Rayford Steele, his daughter Chloe, journalist Buck Williams and minister Bruce Barnes), all of whom have been �left behind� with the rest of unsaved humanity, the Bible is not only the key to the unfolding of world events, but the infallible source of information on how to attain personal salvation.

2. The Bible as Horror: Apocalyptic Films

[10] In a movie like Left Behind, made for the purpose of publicizing �Christian truth,� apocalyptic timetables derived from the prophetic and apocalyptic books of the Bible (especially Daniel 7, Ezekiel 38, and Revelation) not only structure the plot, but are believed in implicitly by at least some of the filmmakers and viewers. However, in the vast majority of the apocalyptic films that have been produced since The Omen (1976), most of which feature events surrounding the appearance of the Antichrist, the Bible is simply the alleged source of lurid and horrific storylines.

[11] Contrary to pop culture tradition, no figure called �the Antichrist� is mentioned in the Book of Revelation (almost invariably called �Revelations� in the movies). The term actually appears four times in the New Testament, in two of the letters of John (1 John 2:8, 22; 4:3; 2 John 1:7). In these references, an antichrist is one whose doctrine of Jesus Christ is defective (one who denies that Jesus is the messiah; one who does not acknowledge that Jesus Christ came �in the flesh�). Elsewhere in the Bible, monstrous opponents of God expected to appear in the end times include �the little horn� (Dan 7); �the lawless one� (2 Thess 2:8); Belial (2 Cor 6:15); Gog and Magog (Rev 20:8); the Dragon, the Beast and the False Prophet (Rev 13:2-14:11; 16:13; 19:20; 20:10). In The Omen, where the newborn Antichrist (Damien) is adopted by the unsuspecting Robert and Katherine Thorn, there is only one actual quotation from the Bible at the end of the movie, where the words of Rev 13:8 appear on the screen, allegedly explaining the identity of the evil child, who bears the �mark of the Beast�13: �And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him [the Beast], whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world� (KJV).

[12] Two other representatives of the apocalyptic genre are The Seventh Sign (1988) and, more recently, Lost Souls (2000). The former film is creative and original in its use of the Bible, which is interpreted through the lens of Jewish folklore regarding the pre-existence of souls. A stern and mysterious man named David Bannon appears in the first scene of the movie, where he opens a sealed scroll, and drops it into the ocean on the coast of a small Haitian village; the water begins to boil, and dead fish are washed up on the shore, alluding to Rev 16:3: �The second angel poured his bowl into the sea, and it became like the blood of a dead man, and every living thing died that was in the sea� (RSV). The man, who is not an angel but the second coming of Christ, has returned--not as a lamb but as a lion14 � to initiate the events of the end-time. The last sign of the end will be the birth of a child without a soul; this child has been conceived, and his mother, Abby Quinn, is nearing the end of her pregnancy. The idea that the birth of a soulless child will be the end of the world is, of course, not a biblical doctrine, but an obscure bit of Jewish folklore, which teaches that when the number of the pre-existent souls of the righteous (the guf) is exhausted, the messiah will appear (Syriac ApocBar 30:12; Yeb. 62a).15 With the help of a teenage yeshiva student called Avi, Abby unravels the mystery of the apocalyptic events that are taking place around them, and brings about the replenishment of the treasury of souls by sacrificing her own life for her newborn son�s.

[13] A more recent offering in the antichrist/apocalyptic genre is Lost Souls (2000), which opens with an ominous prophecy purported to be from �Deuteronomy, Book 17", which appears on-screen:

A man born of incest

Will become Satan

And the world as we know it

Will be no more.

Any viewer with even a vague knowledge of the Bible would easily recognize that the quotation bears no resemblance to anything in the fifth book of the Pentateuch, or to any other part of the canon. The invented prophecy introduces the story of a young Catholic woman named Maya Larkin who discovers that Peter Kelson, a psychologist famed for his research on serial killers, is destined to be possessed by Satan on his thirty-third birthday. Like Abby Quinn in The Seventh Sign, Maya takes it upon herself to prevent the final cataclysm, although in a less benign way. After convincing the unsuspecting Peter that he is due to become the Antichrist, she shoots him in the instant before the transformation.

[14] As Carl Greiner argues,16 Michael Tolkin�s film The Rapture (1991) can be interpreted either as a tale of madness, or as a tale of apocalyptic prophecy.17 Either construal can be defended; the psychological interpretation will be presented in the next section of this paper. Greiner argues that when interpreted as a prophetic narrative of a woman�s encounter with the divine rather than as a tale of religious obsession, The Rapture has challenging theological implications because it portrays God as malevolent and destructive,18 a perspective that is alien to �mainline� Christianity. As illustrative of divine malevolence in the Christian tradition, Greiner cites the example of Kierkegaard�s �Fear and Trembling� and the �problem of God�s call to Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac�;19 to this list, dozens of biblical examples could be added: the cursing and expulsion of the primal couple from Eden; the plagues of Exodus; the sacrifice of Jephthah�s daughter; the rape and dismemberment of the Levite�s concubine; the meaningless sufferings of Job; the horrors of Revelation and other apocalyptic writings. Greiner observes �If the �prophetic version� is accurate, we confront a horror more devastating than the psychiatric one. One might be reassured that a psychiatric illness is limited to a life time and that the afflicted one would be released by death�20�in the apocalyptic version, Sharon�s punishment is eternal. While Greiner tries to moderate the harshness of this interpretation by observing that �great religious symbols have profound elements that require extended meditation, reflection, or practice to approach�,21 the idea of eternal torment for the damned is not, alas, alien to Christianity.

3. The Bible and Psychological Horror

[15] The portrayal of the Bible as the source of murderous obsession is not new; in the Gothic comedy The Old Dark House (1932, remake: 1963), the mad Saul Femm believes that he is possessed by the spirit of the biblical King Saul, and attempts to kill the hapless Roger Penderell, whom he mistakes for David, while paraphrasing 1 Sam 18:10-11: �But Saul was afraid of David because the Lord was with him and was departed from Saul. And it came to pass on the morrow that the evil spirit came upon Saul and he prophesied in the midst of the house. And David played upon the harp with his hand. And there was a javelin in Saul's hand.�

[16] Several more recent films feature characters who commit acts of horror inspired by the Bible. For example, psychologically interpreted, The Rapture is a film in which the main character, Sharon, is a mentally unstable woman who seeks relief in sex, excitement, and, finally, dangerous religious obsession. At the end of the film, Sharon flees to the desert with her daughter to await the Rapture, and when it fails to materialize, she murders the child in despair. On this interpretation, Sharon�s erratic and violent behaviour, her vision of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse (Rev 6:1-8) and her final encounter with an unjust and unsatisfactory God are �a psychiatric horror story�generated by Sharon�s �familiarity with the Bible.�22

[17] In the classic Stephen King film Carrie (1976, 2002), the title character is abused, isolated and manipulated by a mother whose shame over the birth of her illegitimate daughter is grounded in a religious obsession supported by the Bible. For Carrie�s White�s Bible-toting mother, menstruation is the curse of Eve, the original sin was intercourse, and Carrie�s plan to go to the senior prom is the act of a Jezebel: �As Jezebel fell from the tower, let it be with you . . . And the dogs came and licked up the blood. It�s in the Bible!�, mother screams. In the 1976 movie, Carrie�s mother both physically and verbally assaults her daughter with an otherwise unknown scripture called The Sins of Women:

And God made Eve from the rib of Adam,

And Eve was weak and loosed the raven upon the world,

And the raven was called sin,

And the first sin was intercourse.

And Eve was weak,

And the Lord visited Eve with the curse,

And the curse was the curse of blood.

Of course, Carrie�s telekinetic powers are interpreted by her mother as witchcraft, forbidden by Exod 22:18: �Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.�

[18] Thomas Harris�s thriller Red Dragon23 has been made into two films, Manhunter (1986) and Red Dragon (2002). The plot revolves around the hunt for a serial killer, Francis Dolarhyde (the �Tooth Fairy�) who is obsessed with William Blake�s painting The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun24, based on Rev 12:3-4:

And another portent appeared in heaven; behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems upon his heads. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child, that he might devour her child when she brought it forth.

Dolarhyde has an image of the Dragon tatooed on his back, and his prized victims are women with young children. He is killed after a pursuit reminiscent of Rev 12:13-17, where the Dragon chases the woman in the wilderness after being thrown down from heaven.

[19] The FBI investigation of the Dragon�s crimes includes a newspaper ad placed by Hannibal Lecter from prison to communicate with the murderer. The ad is made up of a series of biblical references: Gal 6:11; 15:23; Acts 3:3; Rev 18:7; Jonah 6:8; John 6:22; Luke 1:7. The detectives soon realize that the biblical verses are a red herring: Galatians only has six chapters; Jonah only has four. FBI codebreakers discover that the bible verses really refer to p. 100 in The Joy of Cooking, a book that �Hannibal the Cannibal� could be expected to have in his cell, and the chapters and verses refer to lines and words on the page, spelling out the home address of the lead investigator, Will Graham.

[20] The most graphic, gruesome and gory of the films considered here is Resurrection (1999), whose biblical tagline is: �There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, and it is common among men� (Eccl 6:1). The serial killer, Demus, is a descendant of Judas Iscariot, trying to atone for the sin of his ancestor by �reconstructing� the body of Christ from the severed parts of his victims. The murderer leaves behind a series of bible verses which allude to the names of the victims (Peter, James, John, Andrew, Matthew, Mark, Thomas). John Prudhomme, a burnt-out police detective who has lost his faith in God after the death of his son and played by Christopher Lambert, leads the race to stop the murderer before he reaches his last victim, a baby about to be born (to a mother named Mary) whose innocent heart, the madman believes, will bring the body to life on Easter Sunday.

4. The Bible as Wrong or Ineffectual

[21] Several recent horror films explore the idea that the biblical account of God, humanity and salvation might simply be wrong. Stigmata (1999) is the story of a young, atheist woman named Frankie who is possessed by the spirit of a dead priest who wants the existence of a new Gospel, containing the authentic words of Jesus, to be revealed to humankind. Because of the powerful spiritual secret she harbours, Frankie is under attack by a demon who only oppresses the holiest and most devout of saints with the stigmata, the five wounds of Christ. With the help of a sympathetic priest sent from Rome to investigate her case, Frankie learns that there are dozens of ancient Gospels in addition to the four canonical ones, and that the Roman Catholic church has systematically suppressed them because of their revolutionary implications for Christianity. The film ends with the ominous notice that:

In 1945 a scroll was discovered in Nag Hamadi, which is described as �The Secret Sayings of the Living Jesus.� This scroll, the Gospel of St. Thomas, has been claimed by scholars around the world to be the closest record we have of the words of the historical Jesus. The Vatican refuses to recognize this gospel and has described it as heresy.

Ironically, according to Stigmata, the truth about Jesus is contained not in the church-sanctioned Bible, but in a scripture that has been maligned and censored by cynical religious authorities throughout church history. Of course, in real life there is a Gospel of Thomas which may even contain some authentic sayings of Jesus, but it is hardly considered by biblical scholars to be the closest of the gospels to the historical Jesus; nor has it been covered up by the Vatican!

[22] In The Prophecy (1995), the bible is not rejected as a source of truth about cosmic realities, but it is represented as incomplete and misinterpreted. The film is based on the premise that the primeval war between God and Lucifer/Satan has broken out again, this time led by the archangel Gabriel, who resents God�s decision to elevate human beings (�talking monkeys�) above the angels. The police detective Thomas Daggatt discovers a second-century manuscript of the Bible among the effects of a mysterious, eyeless corpse. Fortuitously, Daggatt is also a former seminarian and the author of a �Thesis on Angels in Religious Scripture.� The newly-discovered Bible contains a 23rd chapter of Revelation, which reads:

And there were angels who could not accept the lifting of man above them, and like Lucifer rebelled against the armies of the loyal archangel Michael, and there rose a second war in heaven. . . . And there shall be a dark soul, and this soul will eat other dark souls, and so become their inheritor. This soul will not rest in an angel but in a man, and he shall be a warrior.�25

The angelologist-cop Daggett�s exegetical comments on the role of angels in scripture are striking:

Did you ever read the bible . . .? Did you ever notice how in the bible when God needed to punish someone, or make an example, or whenever God needed a killing he sent an angel? Did you ever wonder what a creature like that must be like? A whole existence spent praising your God, but with one wing dipped in blood. Would you really want to meet an angel?

Together with a small-town schoolteacher named Catherine (and with some help from Lucifer himself), Thomas uses the new-found biblical prophecy to unravel the cosmic mystery behind a series of bizarre murders, and the mysterious illness of one of Catherine�s young pupils.

[23] In the understated haunted-house film The Others (2001), the very accuracy of the biblical account of the afterlife is radically questioned. Grace, the deeply religious young mother of two children afflicted with a severe sunlight allergy, teaches them about the �three hells� of the Bible: Sheol, Gehenna and Hades. The children, Anne and Nicholas, later reveal to a servant that they only believe some of the things that the Bible teaches, but not all. The children�s suspicions are confirmed at the end of the film when it turns out that the �ghosts� who have been haunting the mansion are really living human beings; it is Grace, Anne and Nicholas and their servants who are dead, and destined to haunt the house forever. The biblical hells do not exist; nor does the Christian heaven.

5. Pseudapocrypha: Invented Scriptures in Horror Films

[24] While the claims made about it in Stigmata may be false, the Gospel of Thomas exists, and it is quoted accurately in the film. However, as in The Prophecy, with its extra chapter of Revelation, movies sometimes refer to scriptures that are not only non-canonical but non-existent. In Carrie, Mrs. White�s appeal to the Book of the Sins of Women reflects on her diseased mental state, and on her warped desire to control her daughter; the author, Stephen King, is obviously well-versed in the contents of the Bible, and makes use of them quite frequently in his work. The campy A Return to Salem�s Lot (1987), where a town inhabited by vampires hires an anthropologist to write them a �bible� of their own, speaks to the ongoing respect for scriptures in 20th century America, where even vampires need an inspired text to legitimate their culture. The fake quotation from Deuteronomy in Lost Souls may simply be a device on which to hang a storyline, but it reflects negatively on the biblical literacy of the intended audience of the film, and perhaps also of the filmmakers. However, even in a film that shows no real knowledge of the content of the Bible and expects its viewers to be equally uninformed, there is still an appeal to a �scriptural� basis.

[25] Of all the movies examined in this paper, the two that make the most extensive and creative use of invented scripture are The Prophecy (discussed above) and The Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981). The Omen III is notable, among other things, for being the movie where Sam Neill made his cinematic debut as the Antichrist Damien Thorn. Although canonical scriptures are quoted throughout the film (e.g., 2 Thess 2; Rev 21:4), Damien�s main key to the events preceding the dreaded second coming of Christ is the (non-existent) Latin Book of Hebron, which he calls �one of the more obscure backwaters of the Septuagint Bible.� The book predicts that the Messiah will come from England (the �Angel-Isle�), and Thorn quotes the prophecy at length:

And it shall come to pass
that in the end days
the Beast shall reign one hundred score and thirty days and nights,
And the faithful shall cry unto the Lord
Wherefore art thou in the day of evil?
And the Lord shall hear their prayers,
And out of the Angel Isle he shall bring forth a deliverer,
And the holy Lamb of God shall do battle with the Beast
And destroy him.

Unhappily for the Antichrist, he misinterprets this prophecy (which compares favorably to many extant apocalypses) to mean that Christ will be reborn as Damien was, in the form of a human child. Thorn�s evil plot to murder all of the male babies born on the day calculated to be the date of the rebirth is foiled when the Messiah returns not as an infant, but as an invincible supernatural hero. If only Damien had read further in the Book of Hebron, presumably the source of the quotation that appears at the end of the movie, he would have been better prepared:

Behold the Lion of Judah
The Messiah, who came first as a child
But returns not as a child
But now as the King of Kings
To rule in power and glory forever!

Conclusions

[26] If the 15 or so films covered in this paper are any indication, the Bible is alive and well in contemporary horror movies. The 21st century has even seen the emergence of a new subgenre: the Christian horror film, as typified by the Left Behind series, designed to promote a fundamentalist, millennialist interpretation of the Bible.26 Within the narrative world of most of these movies it is assumed that the Bible�including imaginary scriptures�is a reliable source of information about the supernatural world, and contains accurate predictions of eschatological events. In most of the supernatural horror films, knowing and understanding the contents of the Bible is regarded as a way of warding off evil, or of dealing with the dreaded events that its pages foretell. Although the emphasis is on the Bible�s horrific aspects, the assumption is that God, goodness and truth will ultimately prevail (if only the cinematic antichrists would read to the end of Revelation, they would realize that their causes are lost).

[27] Some supernatural horror films, like Children of the Corn, recognize that the Bible, while essentially benign, can be used for perverted ends. However, most of the horror movies that portray the Bible in this way belong to the psycho-horror genre, where mentally unstable characters like Carrie�s mother, Demus or Frank Dolarhyde are obsessed by a distorted view of scripture. Psychologically interpreted, The Rapture also belongs to this group. In such films, the authority and basic goodness of the scriptures are not questioned; it is human error or psychosis that makes the Bible dangerous (to rephrase a slogan from the U.S. gun lobby, �the Bible doesn�t kill people, people do�).

[28] More radical views of the Bible are expressed in films where the scriptures are seen as fundamentally and ultimately, as opposed to partially and temporarily, horrific (The Prophecy, The Rapture, prophetically interpreted). Interestingly, the explicitly Christian Left Behind belongs to this group, insofar as the vast majority of humanity is consigned to eternal damnation according to the supposedly biblical vision of �the Rapture� that it espouses; the idea that God�s love is universal is represented as a comforting liberal fantasy27. Other films, like Stigmata and The Others, question the completeness or accuracy of the Bible, as opposed to alternative scriptures (the Gospel of Thomas) or religious philosophies (spiritualism).

[29] Finally, the cinematic penchant for citing non-existent scriptures�either spurious quotations from actual biblical writings (e.g., Lost Souls� �Deuteronomy Book 17", the non-existent quotation from Paul about �angels with savage weapons� in The Prophecy), imaginary apocrypha (e.g., The Book of Hebron, The Sins of Women), or lost chapters (Revelation 23)�speaks to an ongoing fascination with, and credulity about, biblical writings in popular culture. As a biblical scholar, I am delighted by the postmodern playfulness of these invented scriptures. However, as a teacher of biblical studies, the imaginary apocrypha of the horror movies also evidence a horrifying lack of knowledge of the basic contents of the Bible on the part of their intended audiences, and/or their willing suspension of disbelief when it comes to the Bible and horror.

*Vol. 7 No. 2 October 2003, Journal of Religion and Film

Ancient Egyptian Religion on the Silver Screen: Modern Anxieties about Race, Ethnicity, and Religion

2007-08-13T12:48:00.000-07:00

by Caroline T. Schroeder

Abstract

This essay examines the depiction of religion, race, and ethnicity in four films: The Mummy, Stargate, The Ten Commandments, and Prince of Egypt. Each film�explicitly or implicitly, deliberately or not�uses ancient Egyptian religion as a foil to dramatize American concerns about race and ethnicity. The foil is the mysterious, and often false, religiosity of an often Orientalized religious and ethnic �other.�

Article

[1] In the 1932 classic The Mummy, we first meet the heroine Helen Grosvenor twenty minutes into the movie as she sits on the balcony of the famous Shepheard�s hotel in Cairo. Gazing out at the great pyramids, she sighs, �The real Egypt.� Then the camera cuts to an urban skyline dominated by the domes and minarets of mosques, and she mutters, �Are we really in this dreadful modern Cairo?�2 In this brief yet revealing scene, Helen�s character, her dialogue, and the film�s cinematography work together to present a contentious theme that reverberates throughout this film and others about ancient Egypt: the intersection of religion, race, and ethnicity in the �Western� view of the �Orient.� In this scene, dirty, modern, Islamic Egypt is contrasted to the classical civilization of old. But as the story progresses, the boundaries between primitive modernity and classical antiquity become blurred; the frightening superstitions of the ancient polytheists literally come to life and walk the streets of modern Cairo, enchanting anyone whose veins course with Egyptian blood. As the story is told, the ancient Egypt for which Helen longs is seductive yet dangerous. While it leads Helen and her British associates to great archaeological discoveries, it also draws them into the primitive and vengeful desires of the ancients and their superstitions. As differences between Islamic urban Cairo and superstitious ancient Egypt collapse, the film draws increasingly firm boundaries between East and West, science and religion, whiteness and non-whiteness. Helen�s personal struggle with her own British and Egyptian ethnicities is the medium through which The Mummy presents the political, cultural, and religious struggles of the soon-to-be �post�-colonial age of the Orient.

[2] Hollywood�s love affair with ancient Egypt did not end with The Mummy, and neither did its use of ancient Egypt as a vehicle for cultural commentary about religion and race. This paper will examine the relationship between religion, race, and Western culture through the lens of two classic Hollywood films and their contemporary successors: The Mummy and Stargate, and The Ten Commandments and Prince of Egypt. Each film uses religion and race or ethnicity to naturalize Western ideals � e.g., democracy, science, �Judeo-Christian� monotheism �at the expense of an ethnic "other.� The foundations on which the Western self and the "other" are built are religion and ethnicity (or race).

[3] The first pair of films explicitly participates in what Edward Said has called a discourse of the Orient which constructs the archetypal Western society in opposition to a superstitious and authoritarian East. The Mummy and Stargate use ancient Egyptian religion as the vehicle for constructing modern narratives about the conflicts between the "authentic" discourses of Western science and Judeo-Christian monotheism on the one hand and "false" discourses of Eastern spirituality and polytheism on the other. Race is the visual codifier of these dualisms, in which the educated and cultured white Westerners fight against or seek to liberate the superstitious �Egyptians.� In the second pair of films, monotheism functions as an important cultural imperative over and against a socially dangerous false polytheism. Religion is mapped onto ethnicity in the construction of the figure of Moses.

[4] One might argue that these films concern dead religions�the myths and cultic practices of the ancient Egyptians�and thus can offend no one. Yet these films are quite openly about the present�the disjuncture between religion and science, the triumph of democracy over tyranny, or the continuing struggles of Jews to maintain their religion and culture in the face of an often-hostile dominant culture. Though many viewers (including myself) might find some of these modern lessons extremely valuable, in three of these films (Prince of Egypt being the exception), they are nonetheless made at the expense of a reiterative "othering" of an equally real, modern, and present East. As Said argued in his book, Orientalism, the intellectual, political, economical, and artistic cultures of the West have all produced a discourse of �hegemony of European ideas about the Orient� which then reiterated �European superiority over Oriental backwardness." 3 The �Orient� tells more about the �West� than the �real� East: Orientalism is a system of political doctrines, economic policies, literary and artistic images, and historical narratives that create an �East� that is the opposite of �Western� virtues, and an East produced in the context of Western colonization and imperialism over the East. The Orientalism that has emerged from the political and academic landscape of the nineteenth-century is �the distillation of essential ideas about the Orient�its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habits of inaccuracy, its backwardness�into a separate and unchallenged coherence." 4 To Said�s list of �essential ideas� I would add the Orient�s perceived superstitions. Said was originally most concerned with the European production of a Near Eastern �Orient,� but today the United States has an equally large political, economic, and cultural investment in the Orient Said deconstructs.

[5] These films reflect this American investment in the Orient. Although the geography may be Egyptian, the characters battle for particularly American values. It is, I am sure, no surprise to hear me argue that these films tell us more about American sensibilities than about ancient Egyptian religion. 5 What I also argue, however, is that the ways in which ancient Egyptian religiosity is presented reflect not only American values, but American values about race and ethnicity in which the foil is the mysterious, and often false, religiosity of an often Orientalized �other.� Some of these films explicitly draw on the colonial and Orientalizing discourses Said has identified to produce an East that serves only to support Western, and in this case American, imperialism over it. On the potentially explosive subject of religion, race, and cultural difference, all of the films produce celluloid dragons for Americans to slay.

[6] I will begin with The Mummy and its ideological sequel, Stargate. The Mummy opens at a 1921 British Museum field expedition in the Valley of the Kings, where archaeologists Sir Joseph Whemple and Dr. Muller have discovered a mysterious mummy named Imhotep and an accompanying box. A young assistant secretly opens the box and reads the enclosed �Scroll of Thoth� which contains the spell by which the goddess Isis brought the dead Osiris back to life. Imhotep magically awakes, scares the young man witless, and disappears with the scroll. Fast-forward to 1932, when an Egyptian man named Ardeth Bey, who bears a striking resemblance to the lost mummy, points the British archaeological team�now led by Whemple�s son Frank�to the tomb of Princess Anksenamen, Imhotep�s former love. Once the artifacts are ensconced in the Cairo Museum, Ardeth Bey attempts to revive Anksenamen�s mummy with the Scroll of Thoth. Instead, he bewitches the young Helen, who physically resembles Anksenamen. Across town, Helen feels compelled to leave the Shepheard�s hotel and join Ardeth Bey/Imhotep at the museum. Imhotep decides to revive Helen�s ancestral Egyptian blood so that she becomes a reincarnation of the Princess. He plans to kill Helen and then resuscitate her as a mummy with the scroll. Young Frank Whemple, in love with Helen, interrupts, distracting Imhotep long enough for the heroine�who thinks she is Anksenamen�to appeal to a nearby statue of the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis. Isis comes to life and destroys Imhotep, saving Anksenamen and restoring Helen to "herself," Helen.

[7] Throughout the film, East and West are compared through the elements of religion and race. Egypt is a place of dark mystery and superstition, contrasted to the West�s allegiance to the clarity of science and logic. Dr. Muller, called a �master of the occult,� plays the believing foil to the skeptical and scientific Joseph Whemple. Upon the discovery of the mummy and the scroll, Muller warns Joseph to investigate no further, �The Gods of Egypt still live in these hills....The ancient spells are weaker but still potent....Put it back. Bury it where you found it. You have read the curse�you dare defy it?� Joseph replies simply, �In the interest of science, even if I believed in the curse, I�d go on in my work for the museum.� Muller leaves the site, refusing to condone an �act of sacrilege� with his presence. Despite the subsequent mysterious disappearance of the mummy and the scroll, Whemple maintains his faith in the logic of science and ultimately dies because of his failure to acknowledge the Egyptian �ancient spells.�

[8] Muller�s warnings draw our attention to one of the main narrative devices of the film: the collapsing of ancient and modern. The Mummy contrasts Western science and rationality with not only ancient Egyptian magical religion but also modern Egyptian mysticism and superstition. The ancient spells are still powerful. Ancient and modern are tied together by the bonds of race. Race is defined as a biologically essential category, through blood. With only one exception, the Egyptians of the film all have darker complexions than the Europeans and are easily identifiable through their skin color and clothing. The exception is Helen, who appears of white European heritage but is in fact British and Egyptian. But, prosaically, Helen is the exception that proves the rule, for although she does not appear to be of Egyptian descent, her Egyptian ancestry ultimately betrays her identity. Helen�s Egyptian �blood� is mentioned several times, most notably when Imhotep first sees her. She is mesmerized by his gaze, and he recognizes that she is of the same �blood� as he is. In fact, all of the film�s characters of Egyptian �blood� are subject to Imhotep�s hypnotic spell and fall under his magical power. For example, Joseph Whemple�s Nubian servant falls prey to Imhotep�s charms, as well, as soon as he lays eyes on Ardeth Bey. The Nubian immediately assumes a servile position, reenacting a status his ancestors at times held with respect to the ancient Egyptians; he bows before Imhotep, abandons his British master, and becomes Imhotep�s dutiful slave.

[9] Race here is biologically essentialized, and the vehicle through which it is essentialized is religion. As the prescient Muller foretells, the spells of ancient Egypt remain potent over those of Egyptian blood. Through the racial hybrid Helen, they threaten the rational world of the West. Upon his epiphany about Ardeth Bey�s true identity, Joseph Whemple fears aloud that the curses of the ancients will destroy his family because of young Frank�s love for Helen. Though the Egyptian archetype Imhotep dominates the seemingly powerless Brits, ultimately the Egyptian race is proven to be the subject race. 6 For inside Helen the Egyptian and the British do battle with each other. At one point, Helen begs Frank to prevent her from going to Imhotep at the Museum again when she next succumbs to Imhotep's spell. She cries, �There�s death there for me. And life for something else inside me that isn�t me, but it�s alive, too, and fighting for life. Save me from it Frank, save me.�

[10] Here Helen exemplifies what Homi Bhabha has called the post-colonial phenomenon of �hybridity�: the �shifting forces and fixities� of colonial and colonized identities, in which �the assumption of colonial identity� (here, British identity) is revalued, displaced, subverted. 7 Helen�s Egyptian blood, her colonized self, rising in the form of Princess Anksenamen, threatens to destroy Helen�s more �true� British colonial self. In the end, it is not the dashing young Brit, Frank, who rescues Helen. Only by acknowledging the power and mystery of her Egyptian heritage by invoking the goddess Isis does Helen save herself from herself. Though some might read this as a subversive element to the otherwise dominant colonial message of the film, I see it as the opposite. 8 Through Helen, the ancient Egyptian mysteries (and by association the Egyptian race) are finally subjected to British rationality and sensibility through their own complicity in the colonial project. Isis colludes with Helen�s British self to obliterate her Egyptian self. Though the threat of the Egyptian other�both Islamic and pharaonic�continues to hover in the colonial consciousness, its rebellion has been quelled, for now.

[11] Stargate, released over 60 years after The Mummy, is nonetheless its ideological and political sequel. 9 victorious out of the ashes of European colonialism. What Stargate�s imperialism inherits from its black-and-white predecessor are the twin cornerstones of race and religion. In Stargate, as in The Mummy, Western culture and values battle with an irrational, superstitious, and racialized other. In this homage to the military build-up during the Reagan-Bush era, penniless Egyptologist Daniel Jackson is recruited by the armed forces to assist in deciphering a giant artifact found decades before at the pyramids of Giza. 10 The artifact proves to be a portal, or �stargate,� that propels the team to other side of the galaxy. There they encounter a primitive desert community descended from inhabitants of earth�s ancient Near East who were brought to this planet as slaves.
[12] This culture bears all the hallmarks of the Oriental other: they are illiterate and superstitious; they are a millennia-old, non-industrial society enthralled by technology as simple as a cigarette lighter; they are enslaved to their gods, who resemble in name and iconography the gods of ancient Egypt; and their complexions and clothing bear marked similarity to stereotypical Arab Bedouins. While Daniel works closely with a lovely �native� woman to decipher the Stargate on the desert planet, commanding officer Lt. O�Neill prepares to blow it up in case they fail in their efforts to return home. Meanwhile, the alien tyrant, Ra, who has been masquerading as a god, is displeased with his people�s friendship with the heavily armed and obviously threatening Americans. Ra has perpetuated the enslavement of the desert people by presenting himself and his entourage as gods with the power to destroy all who disobey. His key soldiers appear in high-tech costumes and resemble the gods Horus and Anubis. Though Ra�s technology is superior to the American�s, O�Neill and Daniel reveal to their new friends the scientific underpinnings of the objects of their previously blind faith and expose their religious system as a fake. The Americans prove these gods to be anything but invincible. They convince the indigenous people to revolt against their false gods, and America participates in the spread of democracy to the far reaches of the galaxy. Daniel is the �natives�� savior, having even been brought back from death in Ra�s resurrection machine. Ultimately, Daniel decides not to return to earth, but �goes native� and falls in love with the beautiful tribal chief�s daughter, who has already been (quite literally) given to him as his bride.

>[13] As in The Mummy, the ancient mysteries of Egypt represent a threat to the Western virtues of science and rationality. Western technology and scientific knowledge refute the Eastern (and seemingly Arab-like) superstitions, this time successfully. As in The Mummy, race and religion are inextricably linked�the Americans are the white liberators of an oppressed and backwards ethnic other. Christianity also makes a not-so-subtle appearance, with the resurrected Daniel as the true savior who literally rids the temple of false gods and false beliefs of polytheism. Polytheism, tyranny, and false religion are constructed in opposition to truth, democracy, and an unspoken Christianity. To The Mummy�s litany of Western values, Stargate adds freedom and democracy.

[14] Stargate, of course, is not the first film to juxtapose the false polytheism and tyranny of ancient Egyptian culture with the true faith and liberty of the West. The film that most loudly heralded this moral lesson was, of course, the Ten Commandments, released in 1956. 11 In this epic, religion is the vehicle for spreading the values of truth and democracy. The social backdrop to the film is the United State�s war against communism and the burgeoning civil rights struggle. 12 The solution to both of these problems, for DeMille, is �Judeo-Christian� monotheism, the foundation for a free society. In his unusual �forward� to the film, DeMille describes the subject of the film as �the birth of freedom, the story of Moses.� �The theme of this picture,� says DeMille, �is whether men are to be ruled by God�s law or whether they are to be ruled by the whims of a dictator like Rameses. Are men the property of the state? Or are they free souls under God? This same battle continues throughout the world today.� Freedom against tyranny is the mantra of the film, and throughout Moses is the agent of liberation of his people. Even before Moses learns of his Hebrew background, he is an advocate for the oppressed and a believer in the equality of peoples. His supposed brother Rameses serves as his fascist foil. This is evident less than twenty minutes into the film, when upon Moses� return from supposedly conquering Ethiopia, he brings an African man and woman to court. This scene marks the audience�s first glimpse of the adult Moses. Rameses orders Moses, �Command them to kneel before Pharaoh.� But Moses replies, �Command what you have conquered, my brother. I bring the Ethiopian king and his sister in friendship, as an ally to guard our southern gates.�

[15] DeMille�s Moses does not enslave other peoples. Moses also grants the slave Joshua a reprieve from a death sentence. He orders more food and rest for the Hebrew slaves and remarks, �It is not treason to want freedom.� Competing constructions of race and religion exist in this film. On the one hand, DeMille clearly wishes to present a fairly typically liberal view on race, that all people are equal regardless of race, and that therefore racial differences are less important than other differences�such as moral differences. DeMille seems to wish for racial and ethnic differences to be subordinate to differences of faith: the differences between believers and non-believers. Moses knows the truth of �Judeo-Christian� values even before he knows that he is a Hebrew. Moreover, as many others have noted, DeMille tries to universalize these values so that they do not seem strictly �Jewish� or �Hebrew,� but more broadly �Judeo-Christian." 13 On the other hand, however, DeMille�s depiction of difference is decidedly religious�monotheism versus polytheism�and these religious differences inherently draw on essentialist constructions of race and ethnicity. Religion is tied to ethnicity, for Moses� continual respect for the Hebrews�as well as all others who are �different��and his advocacy of fairness and equal treatment stand in stark contrast to the views of all other Egyptians portrayed in the film. The only explanation for Moses� views seems to be his ethnicity and his as-yet unknown identity as the deliverer of his people. It is as if Moses� true identity, his Hebrew identity, is bubbling just beneath the surface of his jewel-adorned Egyptian skin, waiting to break through. And when it does, Moses becomes who he always was meant to be. Upon learning of his identity, Moses expresses little shock or confusion, but embraces his Hebrew ethnicity and its accompanying religion.

[16] Opposite the faithful, egalitarian Moses is the tyrannical Rameses. Rameses� religious beliefs rarely make an appearance, but when they do so, his gods are powerless before Moses� unnamed god. Rameses� libations of sacred water to purify the bloody Nile fail. When his prayers to Horus to revive his dead son go unanswered, his wife, Nefertiri, comments with disdain, �He cannot hear you. He is nothing but a piece of stone with the head of a bird.� In contrast to The Mummy and Stargate, the �other� of this film is not the shady, superstitious Arab, but the godless communist to whom DeMille alluded in his introduction. The boundaries of East vs. West have shifted, but the Orientalizing discourse nonetheless aligns race and religion by polarizing godlessness and tyranny on the one hand with monotheism and freedom on the other. Moses� ethnic identity as Hebrew explains the culturally inexplicable affection for liberty and freedom that Moses has always had, even before knowing his ethnic ancestry.

[17] In The Ten Commandments, monotheism provides the foundation for a democratic and egalitarian society in opposition to the fascist regime held together by an insincere worship of pagan gods. Prince of Egypt draws on this epic�s exegesis of the Exodus story in depicting Moses� liberation of the Hebrews as a battle between a true monotheism and a false polytheism but adds to it the complexities of late twentieth-century identity politics. 14 Whereas in The Ten Commandments, Moses� true identity as Hebrew and�thus egalitarian and democratic�is manifest from the beginning of the tale. In Prince of Egypt, Moses struggles to come to terms with his authentic identity. His ultimate embrace of his people narrates religious identity in terms very similar to recent identity politics movements. Religion is a fixed and natural ethnic identity, and recognizing that identity is the springboard for liberation.

[18] Thus, Prince of Egypt is as much the Ten Commandments� ideological sequel as Stargate is The Mummy�s. For despite the filmmakers� attempts to celebrate racial, religious, and ethnic difference, the film nonetheless essentializes notions of ethnic identity and perpetuates religious stereotypes. Skin color is not the codifier of race, since the characters� complexions exemplify a realistic Mediterranean and Near Eastern palette of many shades of brown. Nonetheless, the film�s depiction of religion and culture constructs ethnic differences as biological and essentialized, and promotes the faith of the films' protagonists only by othering and by ridiculing the faith of the Egyptians.

[19] This young Moses is not the benevolent prince of DeMille�s film. As Rameses� brother, he participates equally in Rameses' youthful pranks and in an elitist ignorance of the plight of the slaves. This Moses� ethnic identity, however, is nonetheless just as fixed as the first, and it also trumps his pharaonic heritage. This Moses must come to grips with his true identity in a kind of coming-out story. He stumbles across the truth of his birth when he runs into Miriam and Aaron, whom he does not recognize. When they tell him of their shared heritage, he is unwilling to admit his real ethnicity. Once he does, he is shocked, and confused. He must confront his own internalized racism and anti-Semitism before he can become an advocate for his people.

[20] Like Helen in The Mummy, Moses embodies the conflict between two peoples. Like Helen, he struggles throughout most of the film to decide which is his true identity. Upon learning of his birth from his newfound sister, Miriam, Moses runs back to the palace and sings a song about how he is a great prince of Egypt, and that is all he ever wanted. He then dreams of a giant wall inscription in the palace that comes to life and narrates the tale of his escape from death as an infant. When he confronts his father about the slaughter of the Hebrew children, Moses recognizes and is disgusted by his own father�s hatred for the Hebrews. As he walks through the construction site of a new temple, he sees for the first time the oppression of the slaves, an oppression that has always surrounded him but that he never before acknowledged. Moses must then decide who he truly is�Hebrew or Egyptian.

[21] Like Helen�s choice, Moses� choice represents the morality tale of the film. Moses� true identity is the same as the film�s true religion. For the film�s most prominent exegesis on the Exodus narrative is its juxtaposition of the Israelite religion with the �false� polytheism of the Egyptians. The ancient text of Exodus emphasizes the power of the Hebrew God but does not claim the falsity of the Egyptian gods and religions. In the Ten Commandments, the conclusion reached by Rameses and Nefertiri that the Egyptian religion is false and powerless comes only at the end of the film. In Prince of Egypt, however, Egyptian polytheistic religion is consistently ridiculed and undermined, even by its practitioners. Only Rameses� father, the pharaoh, has any real respect for the Egyptian traditions. Huy and Hotep, the priests in the movie, are the stock buffoons of all cartoon movies, with voices provided by Steve Martin and Martin Short. When Moses returns to Egypt to demand the release of his people, the �miracles� and �wonders� of the Egyptian priests literally amount to no more than smoke and mirrors and resemble a Vegas floor show more than a miracle. After he turns his staff into a serpent, Rameses (now the pharaoh) instructs his priests to respond to Moses� �game.� They commence with a song and dance routine complete with jets of colored smoke and mirrors reflecting the light from outdoors. They, too, turn staffs into serpents, but only behind a thick veil of smoke. In another scene, they attempt to turn water into blood, just as Moses does, but in fact, their �magic� is just a sleight of hand. Behind Pharaoh�s back, the priests use a special powder to turn the water red. Though Pharaoh thinks they have answered Moses� challenge, it is obvious to the priests and to the viewing audience that unlike Moses, they have performed no miracle.

[22] Like Helen Grosvenor, Moses must choose between two conflicting identities, and like Helen, he chooses to reject the Egyptian one, the identity that stands in opposition to enlightenment and true religiosity. Yet, unlike Helen, in choosing to reject his Egyptian heritage, Moses chooses to stand not on the side of the colonizer but to stand with the colonized, the Hebrew slaves. In this sense, the film presents a welcome political reversal when compared to The Mummy or Stargate; the hero validates the religious beliefs of the oppressed peoples. Yet, when Moses� choice is read in the larger context of American religion and politics�in which the shadow of the conflicts in the Middle East loom large and in which Christian (and to a lesser extent Jewish) monotheism dominates�we see that the film participates in some of the same kinds of discourses American films about ancient Egypt have presented for decades. Egyptian religiosity is a foil for idealized Western beliefs�idealized Western beliefs that have much more to do with modern political concerns than ancient ones. Moreover, the film conveniently ignores the problems posed by Moses' people worshipping a golden calf at Sinai. And by ending at Sinai, it sidesteps the delicate question of whether Moses� people went on to become colonizers themselves.

[23] The film thus sends an odd message about religious difference to an American film audience already inundated with media accounts of the violence and strife caused by intolerance to religious difference around the world. The truth and power of Moses� monotheism is always constructed in opposition to a false religious �other.� The religious �other� is a now dead religion, but some aspects of it resonate with ritual beliefs and practices of very live religions today. When I screened this film in a class, a Hindu student was appalled at the way the film ridiculed religiosity that involved the worship of gods that took animal form. While this student was fully aware that Hinduism was not the subject of mockery in the film, she nonetheless believed a fundamental element of her faith was being caricatured. From her perspective, the film perpetuates stereotypes of religious �others� in the eyes of American Jewish and Christian viewers who are asked to identify with the film�s Moses. Unlike the makers of Stargate and The Mummy, the filmmakers scrupulously avoid making the �other� resemble Arabs or Muslims. The film nonetheless draws on discourses in American film in which superstition or false religion are opposed to an enlightened Western monotheism, and accompanying that enlightened Western monotheism (as in The Ten Commandments and Stargate) is freedom. In fact, the truth of Western monotheism is constructed through the very process of falsifying and ridiculing the religious �other.� At the same time that Moses learns that his life as an Egyptian prince has been nothing but a lie, the audience learns that the religiosity of its �other� is also a lie.

[24] I acknowledge the difficulties and dangers in invoking post-colonial theory in the same space as a discussion of Exodus and the Ten Commandments. Edward Said�s public arguments with Michael Walzer over his book, Exodus and Revolution, have been well-documented, and critiques of Said�s criticisms of Israel and Zionism are well-founded. 15 I also would strongly resist any attempts to compare my analyses of these films to the well-documented and long history of anti-Semitic sentiments directed at the American film industry. 16 Instead, I argue that one reason some films like Prince of Egypt or The Ten Commandments can be discomforting to watch is precisely their promotion of a politics that might otherwise be applauded�for example, Prince of Egypt�s celebration of freedom from bondage and of the history of Jewish heritage. But these core values are presented simultaneously within the context of discourses that are all too prominent in other Orientalizing American films, discourses that associate ancient Egyptian religiosity solely with superstition and tyranny and in doing so, implicitly question, if not outright denigrate, the religiosity and culture of contemporary non-Western �others.�

[25] To varying degrees, through the depiction of religion and race or ethnicity, each of these films promote decidedly Western values at the expense of an ideologically subordinated other, primarily the East. The ancient world becomes a cipher for the modern problems of defining and negotiating religion, ethnicity, and cultural.

Vol. 7 No. 2 October 2003, Journal of Religion and Film
Link source: http://www.unomaha.edu/jrf/Vol7No2/ancienteqypt.htm

Digital vs. Film

2007-08-13T12:21:00.000-07:00

By PAUL F. GERO - The Wedding Photojournalist Association

Recently there is no topic that creates as much impassioned conversation when it is discussed among photographers. There are impassioned supporters of both film and digital. As a photographer who has used film for over twenty years and digital for the last six years, I would have to say that, at the time of this writing, it’s just about a dead heat.

At least fairly recently (the last two years and especially this past year), film did surpass the quality of digital capture, in my opinion. Film does still handle certain situations better than does digital, but for all practical purposes, they will both produce professional results IN THE HANDS OF A PROFESSIONAL.

Some of these professionals are 100 % digital while others still prefer film only or a combination of the two. (I still like to shoot a little 3200 Kodak Tmax for the look it gives).

Digital, though, is revolutionizing the photographic industry in a way that has been nothing short of astounding. It is here in the present and will be down the road. And like computers, it will only get better, faster and cheaper (at least the cost of the tools).

When researching a photographer who shoots digitally it is important to discern if that photographer is relatively new to the technology or has been using it for a longer period of time (and thus should have the bugs worked out).

Examine photographs made by the photographer using digital capture. Most likely, that photographer will have work that was also captured with film. Compare them and see if you can tell the difference.

When I discuss digital vs. film with prospective couples these days, I find much less resistance than I did a year ago. Couples are usually pretty technologically savvy and often follow the developments in our industry, at least on the periphery.

Any opposition some might have to digital goes away when I show them images that are captured on digital (on a Canon 1d - 4.1 megapixel chip camera) that are quite large (14” x 22” full bleed in an 11 x 14 inch album).

They also see many images that have been captured on film, though scanned. Some folks are able to notice the differences, but most really don’t care. What they care about are the images and the feelings that they capture and evoke. That’s really what it comes down to and the main reason we are hired.

Digital does, though, offer several advantages to the photographers while working:

1) The ability to see the image right away. This is my favorite reason for using digital capture. It gives me a level of comfort because I can see if my lighting, expression, exposure, etc. are correct right away rather than wait to see the film back from the lab in a few days.

2) The ability to change the ISO ( or the equivalent of film speed) on the fly. This allows the photographer to go in and out of a myriad of lighting situations without having to suddenly change film to match the light levels from place to place at a wedding.

3) A virtually unlimited number of photographs can be captured at an event. This can be the boon and the bane of the photographers’ existence, though, because if you shoot them, you've got to edit them. But it frees the photographer from thinking “I can only shoot 10, 12 or whatever number of rolls of film at this event in order to keep it within budget.”

4) The ability to make black and white and sepia toned photographs from the digital capture. When one shoots digitally (unless they are capturied in a black and white only mode on the Fuji S2) every photograph can become a black and white and/or sepia image. Parents may want an image in color, the couple may want to have it in black and white.

5) Digital workflow. Many photographers now offer what is often called a magazine style (or flush mounted) album. Images shot on film would have to be scanned in order to produce this type of album. While it is totally doable, it adds time and another step in the process. Digital capture elimnates the scanning and often the time spent dust spotting the scan made from negatives. (Though I know of a very talented photographer -- George Weir, who is a WEDDING PHOTOJOURNALIST ASSOCIATION member -- who prefers film and has his images scanned to disk to allow him to still post images online and then create images for his lab. He has created a digital workflow without using digital capture and is very pleased with the results).

6) Freedom to experiment. This is a corollary to reason one. I will often shoot images that I would not even try with film because I know I will be able to erase it if it doesn’t work and modify it because I’ll be seeing the results immediately.

I was on a foreign trip last year and stuck in the bus on a rainy day. I literally pointed the camera out the window and just made some exposures just for the fun of it. And it was fun! Some of those images were totally unexpected and I would not have “wasted” film on it. But because I had the immediate feedback I could see what was working, modify it as I shot and make some different images.

Despite all the buzz about film vs. digital what it gets right down to when selecting a photographer are the images and personality.

Do you like the feel and the style of the images that the photographer shows? Do you LIKE the photographer? Do you trust him or her? Do they exude confidence about the work they do and the tools that they use? Do they have raving fans who will share testimonials with you?

© 2003-2005 The Wedding Photojournalist Association