Faith in Film

Religious Themes in Contemporary Cinema

Christopher Deacy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351937245
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

How plausible is it to examine the medium of film through a Christian lens? Are there any grounds for supposing that, in 'going to the movies', one is participating in a religious activity? Faith in Film identifies and explores these key questions. From the unprecedented and innovative perspective of Christian theology, this book investigates how cinema audiences wrestle with religious beliefs and values. Through a reading of films as diverse as Groundhog Day, Billy Liar, Fight Club, Nobody's Fool and The Passion of the Christ, Deacy reveals that the movies raise vital questions about the spiritual landscape and normative values of western society today.

CHAPTER 1
Christianity and film in conversation

While the last five or six years have seen a rapid growth in the number of academic publications on religion and film, this is still a relatively embryonic area of scholarly discourse, albeit one which has already made crucial inroads into the relevant academic disciplines – most notably, theology, religious studies, biblical studies and film studies. Just a decade ago, it was rare for a university faculty or department of theology and religious studies, in particular, to run courses on various facets of the relationship between the movies and religion. Now, however, the question is not so much ‘Can or ought the theologian bring one of the most powerful manifestations of secular, popular culture into the classroom?’ as ‘Which films, or genres of film, are most susceptible to religious or theological enquiry?’ A cursory glance at the syllabus of a degree course in Theology in a British or American university perhaps best bears this out. While the prospective student will have the opportunity to pursue modules in various aspects of Christian history, from the New Testament through the Patristic period, the Middle Ages, Reformation and the Enlightenment, as well as to examine the philosophy or psychology of religion, ethics, Christian doctrine, liturgy and systematic theology, it is not uncommon for the student also to be able to choose to study a course, or even a range of courses, on religion and contemporary, popular culture in general, or, as in the case of my own teaching in the University of Wales, on religion and the medium of film in particular. This course proved popular with students – both in terms of student numbers, and as evinced by the nature of the mandatory feedback from students that is now required for teaching quality assessment purposes. Moreover, many of them achieved their highest marks of the year in this course, finding that the opportunity afforded them to study films in the classroom was refreshing, and enabled them to apprehend in a new light a medium with which they were already acquainted.

But, whatever the merits of studying film in the theology lecture hall, is this not to overlook the crucial fact that the study of film is not the preserve of the academic? There may be multiple articles in journals or chapters in books – or, with ever-increasing frequency, on internet sites such as the Journal of Religion and Film¹ – on the way films such as Niki Karo’s Whale Rider (2002), Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003), Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003), Jonathan Mostow’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) or Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004) have pertinent value for the theologian or religious studies scholar, but were these films ever meant to be open to serious scrutiny? What is film if not a part of the international entertainment industry, competing as it does for global marketing shares alongside soft drinks, sportswear and popular music, often within the same commercial, multinational enterprise (Browne, 1997, p. 9)? Their ostensive aim is to entertain audiences, and make money. Whether or not films are amenable to intellectual scrutiny, it is a rare film indeed that is conceived with that function in mind. At least as far as popular film is concerned, the experience of ‘going to the movies’ is simply, as Richard Maltby puts it:

An alternative leisure-time experience to eating at a restaurant or spending an evening with friends in a bar or a pub. Like food or drink … the entertainment of ‘going to the movies’ is a transient experience; when we finish consuming a movie, we have only a ticket stub to show for our transaction. (Maltby, 1996, p. 39)

It could therefore be surmised that, given its function as a primarily escapist and entertainment medium, to study the medium of film from an academic perspective ‘is to perform a perverse, unnatural act’, in so far as ‘it involves reading movies ‘‘against the grain’’ of their declared absence of seriousness’ (ibid.).

True though this may be, however, the evidence would suggest that there may not be such an unbridgeable chasm between religion and film. This is not just because a case could be made for excluding certain types of film – for example, escapist, fantasy spectacles, such as The Wizard of Oz (1939) or It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), or the current propensity for popular packaging of what Les Keyser calls ‘mindless chases and duels, cardboard villains, clear victories and happy endings’ (Keyser, 1992, p. 123), which has reached its apotheosis in holiday blockbusters along the lines of The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003) or Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed (2004). Rather, all five films nominated in the Best Picture category by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1999 – not to mention such nominees in other categories as Magnolia (1999), The End of the Affair (1999) and Being John Malkovich (1999) – have received unprecedented attention from theologians and religious studies scholars. Charles Henderson, executive director of the American Association of Religion and Intellectual Life, even goes so far as to attest, ‘I can’t remember a year when God figured so prominently in the annual ritual of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’,² that is, the Oscars. Why is this? Could it be because one of the films nominated for Best Picture was Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile (1999), whose pivotal character can be read as a Christ-figure, who can heal the sick and resurrect the dying, and who ultimately suffers a wrongful and ignominious death for the sins of another? Or because another nominee, The Sixth Sense (1999), concerns a young boy who is able to communicate with, and even facilitate the redemption of, the tortured souls of the deceased?

Moreover, the film that the American Academy voted its Picture of the Year, and which was the recipient of five Oscars in total, has been especially singled out by scholars, critics and film viewers for bearing witness to an inescapably religious dimension. That film is American Beauty (1999), the debut motion picture of British theatre director, Sam Mendes. Is it not of particular significance to the theologian or religious studies scholar that the protagonist in this film, Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), provides voice-over narration from a post-mortem perspective, in which he reflects upon what he has accomplished in his life, the final year of which is realized on screen, and questions whether his earthly existence has been imbued with any real sense of spiritual value, happiness or enlightenment? As with the similarly themed Fight Club (1999) which was on release in the same period, whose somewhat more abrasive and brutal delineation of one man’s rebellion against the material culture and lifestyle to which he has become enslaved, effectively sealed its fate in the Oscar stakes (it received just one technical nomination), it is certainly not impossible to see why American Beauty might be open to a fertile religious reading. Moreover, as I have demonstrated elsewhere (Deacy, 2002), American Beauty could even be said to amount to a potent religious parable, which raises vital (and, in commercial cinema at any rate, all-too-infrequently asked) questions about the spiritual landscape and normative values of western society at the turn of the millennium. This is by no means an aberration, however. It may be the case that the 2000 Oscar nominations have been accorded much less attention than their counterparts a year earlier – although, to be fair, the Roman Catholic Church plays a pivotal role in one of the 2000 nominees, Chocolat (2000), while it is not impossible to encounter on the internet religious readings of both Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000) and Erin Brockovich (2000) along the lines that the protagonists of these pictures amount to Christ-figures (for example, Lansingh, 2000b) – but there is no shortage of religious or theological or biblical or spiritual or existential readings of all manner of contemporary movies. Jennifer Lopez might not be an actress who one would necessarily associate with religiously fecund movies, but according to John Pater, in his review of what is essentially a star vehicle for Lopez, The Cell (2000) is about a chosen saviour, the defeat of evil, the cleansing of guilt, self-sacrifice, atonement and ‘a form of incarnation where [Jennifer Lopez] risks losing herself in order to save others’ (Pater, 2000). Pater concludes: ‘Here we have a movie which is highly marketed, using a million dollar star, and a sensational story-line and yet it turns out a product which allows quite serious religious reflection.’ Consequently, in spite of what Pater calls ‘the low Hollywood stereotype’, movie stars and directors ‘can do impressive theology’.

How distinct, therefore, are religion and popular culture? When New Testament scholars such as Robert Jewett find rich religious meaning in films such as Tootsie (1982), Forrest Gump (1994) and Mr Holland’s Opus (1995), and when entire textbooks have been published on the interface between theology or religious studies and film, as in the case of Joel W. Martin and Conrad E. Ostwalt Jr’s Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth and Ideology in Popular American Film (1995) and Clive Marsh and Gaye Ortiz’s Explorations in Theology and Film: Movies and Meaning (1997), it does not seem too wide of the mark to suppose that substantial common ground – albeit one that has hitherto been largely untapped – lies between the two. At the very least, it would surely not be prudent for the theologian or religious studies scholar to dismiss out of hand the potential veracity of the kind of claim made by Mary Ann Beavis that, with respect to the Coen Brothers’ Oscar-winning black comedy Fargo (1996), ‘a supposedly non-religious – some might say irreligious – film is shaped not only by classical Christian concepts of virtue and vice, but, at an even deeper level, by a world-view and value system with profound affinities to the law and wisdom traditions of the Jewish Testament’ (Beavis, 2000). Of course, one is entitled to disagree over the particular claims made by someone such as Beavis – one might feel that some of her claims go too far and are not supported by a close reading of the film text – but the general picture is clear. While there is no onus on any theologian, or scholar of religious studies or film studies, to take seriously the claims made by those working in the field of religion and film, to dismiss out of hand – as do many in my own field of Christian theology – the insights that are reported by those who do, would be an act of considerable naivety. Whether one likes it or not, there has been a sea change in recent years, to the extent that, rather than being a merely peripheral, marginal or even spurious endeavour, work undertaken on the dialogue between religion and film has much to offer to scholarship. As Larry Kreitzer puts it, ‘Students who are interested in exploring the borderlands of theology and film can rest assured that their chosen field of study is not viewed with quite the same suspicion that it once was’ (Kreitzer, 1999, p. 193).

My aim in this book is to build on the premise, already established in works such as those of Marsh and Ortiz, Martin and Ostwalt, Jewett, Kreitzer, and my own Screen Christologies: Redemption and the medium of film, that it is possible to read film as a viable and fertile repository of religious significance in contemporary, western culture. Since Christianity is one of the most obvious manifestations of religion in the west, and informs much of its popular culture, the focus in this book will be on the Christian tradition. Accordingly, although the terms ‘religion’ and ‘theology’ are often used interchangeably, the reader should note that the specific remit of this book is on the manner and extent to which the medium of film constitutes a rich site for undertaking creative Christian theology. This is not intended to be an overly methodological or technical discussion, though invariably there are times where the reading of certain themes in certain films will require at least a modicum of background contextualization and information – for instance in any discussion that may arise with respect to themes such as ‘redemption’, ‘atonement’ or ‘sacrifice’, and, indeed, the very term ‘religion’ itself vis-à-vis film. There is, however, one crucial difference between the objectives of this book and those of most of the others in circulation on this subject, and this pertains to the significance accorded to the role of the film audience. It is one thing to argue, as many of the scholars working in this field have done, that because a particular film contains a particular theme, or because a certain character in a film utters a particular word, that might be of interest to the theologian – a good case here being the appropriation of ‘shame’ and ‘prophecy’ in The Prince of Tides (1991) or the understanding of ‘eschatologically-filled time’ in Groundhog Day (1993) that informs two of the chapters in Jewett’s Saint Paul Returns to the Movies (1999) – that the film is therefore theologically (or religiously, or redemptively, or eschatologically) significant. I have serious reservations about such an approach. While it is important to give due consideration to the themes that arise in a given film, and to look at the agenda or motivations underlying its production by the film director or producer or screenwriter, or even to the role of the film’s actors, insufficient attention has been accorded hitherto to the vital sense in which the film audience contributes to a ‘religious’ reading of a film.

As Conrad Ostwalt puts it, there is evidence to suggest that ‘a good portion of the millions of people who watch movies are affected or changed in some way and that films can exert influence on attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors’ (Ostwalt, 1995, p. 157). Indeed, if a film was simply perceived as the idiosyncratic vision of its director or producer, it would be difficult to make sense of why some films perform well at the box office and others do badly. If an audience responds to a film in a way that goes ‘against the grain’ of its director’s aims and intentions in creating that particular picture, do we simply ignore that audience response? This is certainly the way film studies has traditionally been practised. Among the academic community, the study of film has tended to focus on the film text and the director, with only a subsidiary and derivative role accorded to the function of the film audience. In Robert White’s words, ‘The audience is assumed to be seeking to understand and re-experience as closely as possible what the author has experienced and ‘‘written into’’ the text, and the text is the point at which the audience and author meet’ (White, 1997b, p. 197). Accordingly, the role of the audience is merely one of passive compliance, whereby, regardless of the film, ‘the audience has little to say’ and needs, moreover, ‘to be educated and uplifted’ by the so-called ‘great artists’ (ibid.). If this is the case, though, are we to conclude that an audience is incapable of undergoing any kind of ‘religious experience’ when watching a film unless the filmmakers have already decreed that their film is going to induce just such an experience in the hearts of their audience? This sort of approach is no longer popular, especially in the light of poststructuralist thought, which understands the meaning of a ‘text’ to be transitive rather than inherent, and so to inhere in the film’s destination – that is, the audience – rather than in its director, or auteur, and so in what Roland Barthes refers to as the ‘disentanglement’ rather than the ‘decipherment’ of the text.³ Yet, it nevertheless remains the case that, as Jostein Gripsrud explains, ‘An interest in contemporary movie audiences is still relatively rare in film studies’ (Gripsrud, 1998, p. 208). Scholarship may have moved on, but it is astonishing that in the year 2000 alone there were 142.5 million admissions made to British cinemas, and nearly £600 million was taken at the United Kingdom box office,⁴ yet consideration of the role played by the film audience is nothing more than peripheral.

The absence of work undertaken on the role of the film audience would be almost forgivable was it not for the fact that a number of scholars have purported to speak on behalf of the audience, without citing, or having assembled, any empirical evidence to corroborate their claims. Thus, we have the bizarre situation where it is implicitly recognized that audience interpretation matters, yet at the same time no serious attempt is made to find out what an audience is actually thinking vis-à-vis a given film. In particular, the assumption underlying Peter Fraser’s Images of the Passion: the sacramental mode in film (1998) is that, once one ‘embraces’ a film such as Robert Bresson’s The Diary of a Country Priest (1950), one is ‘brought into a sacramental experience with the living God’ (Fraser, 1998, p. 11). Likewise, with respect to Chariots of Fire (1981), Fraser attests that ‘the film audience will be immediately drawn in as the redemptive community by virtue of an especially strong identification created with the main characters’ (ibid., p. 9). And, regarding Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1946), Fraser posits: ‘The audience takes the familiar position of worshippers vicariously enacting a liturgical celebration … we respond with the shared hope that our own silences and redemptive longings will be played out in the narrative of Rossellini’s film’ (ibid., pp. 52–3). How does he know this? With this shortcoming in mind, this book will address the division that exists between the assumptions (or, rather, the presumptions) of the author or critic – for whom the fact that a film may be immensely powerful to them often prevents them from recognizing that not everyone will respond in a like manner – and the actual film audience, who might of course respond to a film in a variety of different ways, but who may not so simplistically approach a film from a specifically or straightforwardly theological perspective. In essence, I will ask whether or not there is a dichotomy between what many theologians, biblical and religious studies scholars are claiming about the reception of films and what actual film audiences are thinking and believing.

Of course, this is in no way to imply that audiences are in any sense homogeneous, that they speak with a single voice. The movie Changing Lanes (2002) is a case in point. On one level, this is an action-centred thriller about two New Yorkers who collide – literally – when their cars crash into one another on the freeway while they are both on their way to pivotal court appointments; and the film charts the deadly battle of wills between the two men who stop at nothing to exact revenge on the other for the losses that are subsequently incurred. Indeed, upon its release in Britain in November 2002, Empire magazine summed up Changing Lanes with the line, ‘Ben Affleck and Samuel L. Jackson take Road rage to Road revenge and things get a little bit messy’ (Smith, 2002). However, anyone expecting a mindless, visceral, adrenaline-pumping, testosterone-charged movie about car chases and road rage may come away from the movie somewhat disappointed. As Olly Richards’ DVD review of Changing Lanes for the July 2003 edition of Empire succinctly puts i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Christianity and film in conversation
• 2 The heart of the matter: escapism vs. religion
• 3 Theological currents in contemporary cinema: seven case studies
• 4 Movie gods and goddesses: the role of the celebrity
• 5 The ‘passion’ of the audience
• 6 New ways forward
• References
• Index