Beautiful Light

Religious Meaning in Film

Roy M. Anker

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781467446792
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

Though "religious" films usually don't get much respect in Hollywood, religion still regularly finds its way into the movies. In Beautiful Light Roy Anker seeks out the often unnoticed connections between film and religion and shows how even films that aren't overtly religious or Christian in their content can be filled with deep religious insights and spiritual meaning. Closely examining nine critically acclaimed films, including Magnolia, The Apostle, American Gigolo, and M. Night Shyamalan's Wide Awake, Anker analyzes the ways in which these movies explore what it means to be human—and what it means, as human beings, to wrestle with a sometimes unwieldy divine presence. Addressing questions of doubt and belief, despair and elation, hatred and love, Anker's work sheds "beautiful light" on some of Hollywood's most profound and memorable films.

CHAPTER ONE

“NOT ALL ANGELS HAVE WINGS”

Wonder, Light, and Love in M. Night Shyamalan’s Wide Awake

The quest of a well-dimpled and well-heeled ten-year-old private-school boy from a very traditional family does not sound like the stuff of exciting filmmaking, especially for adults. Usually Hollywood waits till puberty to find children interesting, or at least profitable (hormones help a lot). There are kid films, of course—like Charlotte’s Web, Bridge to Terabithia, the Harry Potter franchise, and yes, the Pixar many—but those films are mostly for the young. The odd and really happy thing about M. Night Shyamalan’s Wide Awake (1998), his first post–film school picture, is that while it is indeed about a young boy, its writer-director pitches the boy’s history very much at adults (or perhaps young adults), and it works—really well. It is at once amply poignant, terribly funny, playful, fully earnest, religiously searching, affecting, and even cogent. When all is viewed and done, the viewer departs having experienced a modestly complex, and very fetching, rendition of the sources and consequences of religious possibility and understanding. Overall, it is probably Shyamalan’s best film, better even than his box-office smashes, The Sixth Sense (1999) and Signs (2002), other tales that, like Wide Awake, are soaked in genuine religious angst. That is hard to pull off, regardless of the protagonist’s (or director’s) age or circumstance.

In Wide Awake, the rambunctious novice Shyamalan walks a remarkably thin line between plentiful humor and dead-serious grief. The main character, ten-year-old Joshua Beal (Joseph Cross), has recently lost his beloved grandfather (Robert Loggia), who dies slowly (in flashbacks) of bone cancer. The widowed grandfather lived with Joshua’s family in a sprawling Philadelphia Mainline manse. The old fellow became Joshua’s best friend and chief parent, for father and mother are both amply frazzled in their physician careers. In the aftermath of the grandfather’s death, Joshua misses him terribly and simultaneously wants to know that his grandfather, gone to what Shakespeare called the “undiscovered country” (Hamlet), is indeed all right. In a wild, cockeyed “mission,” as Joshua calls it, the boy undertakes a search for palpable, sure evidence that confirms his grandfather’s postmortem well-being. For Joshua, that means contacting God by any means possible. Shyamalan’s stroke of genius here refracts a heavy-duty religious inquiry about immortality and divine care through the sense and perception of a precocious, though still innocent and inexperienced, ten-year-old. And here, viewers of all sorts, religious and otherwise, engage in what amounts to a simple but in many ways still sophisticated wrestle with the question of how one can “know” even some slight portion of a divine reality. That is, historically at least, the great noetic riddle of modernity and all of human life.

In addition to his inherited Roman Catholic Christianity, Josh will try more routes than a GPS device: Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and even a boyish kind of sorcery. And lo, by the end, Josh comes to very big, remarkable surprises, wholly unexpected and wondrous, ones that reside in places he never ever dreamed of looking, such as right in front of him in the ordinary course of people and events. So surprising and strange are these recognitions that Josh has to run into them repeatedly before he catches their gist, and even then it takes a special assist from a bosom friend to yank around, finally, his perception of just where the holy might in fact dwell after all.

The same might be said for any viewer, because by and large hardly anyone, at least according to this film, attends to the very remarkable strangeness of the ordinary wherein Shyamalan locates a major part of the mystery of divine presence within this world. It is not too far a stretch, to borrow from Irish poet William Butler Yeats, to say that Josh finds that “Love has pitched” its “mansion” where one least expects it, smack amid the ordinary physical life of being alive in human skin.¹ Only when Josh comprehends and embraces that central paradox does he find anything at all akin to the spectacular “sign” or tangible, indisputable proof for which he has so long searched. In fact, he finds something far more profound than mere empirical proof of a supernatural reality. He comes upon not only the reality of the divine but also its core nature and meaning. At last, then, Joshua Beal comes to relish the mystery of God as manifest in consuming love, and especially, and improbably, among the very least of those all about us, a vision of meaning that his devout grandfather exhibited in all he did. In this regard, the film seems a perfect exemplum of Jesus’s “least of these” parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25. There Jesus locates his presence with the mundane and outcast—“the place of excrement,” in Yeats’s words—and he demands his followers go and do likewise.

To arrive there, though, Joshua must undertake a journey, pilgrim-like, a dead-serious venture that comes close to ending in despair. And though sensitive and smart beyond his years, Joshua goes about that enterprise of finding religious certainty just as any ten-year-old would—by looking for conspicuous “signs and wonders” of divine presence to confirm that God exists and, by extension, that his grandfather has found safety and even welcome in his dying. That seems a childish sort of reaction, but in fact Josh’s “research,” however simple and impressionistic, resembles the ways adults and philosophers undertake the same, especially amid the vast smorgasbord of religious options now contending with one another, sampling this and dabbling in that, from Buddhism to suspect movements such as Scientology. As a means of loving his grandfather still, keeping him close, Josh will attempt just about anything, try any route, worry his parents, and exhaust his sweetly concerned teachers.

Sometimes desperate people grasp at straws, hungry for any omen or portent, sign, or wonder; they take what they can get and sometimes make too much of small or plainly mistaken “clues.” Confused and thirsty, just about everyone who hungers for a supernatural Something does so, and often promising routes and clues prove mistaken, empty, or just plain bogus, even within accustomed, deeply cherished avenues, such as Josh’s inherited Catholicism. People languish and yearn, especially amid the desolations of tragedy and loss. For Josh’s query there are no easy answers, and as he will soon find out, life is that way, full of vexing riddles and puzzles.

By the end, after a great deal of lurching about, Joshua actually does come across the sure, even miraculous “proof,” present and palpable, for which he so long struggled, of his grandfather’s eternal well-being. That, however, is almost anticlimax, for first Josh learns something far more necessary and profound, and that is the great dazzling surprise of his young life. That insight is likely to shape the rest of his days, and it is preparatory to and part and parcel of whatever he learns about the reality of immortality. Here Josh, perhaps like Moses, comes upon a different sort of holy ground, one that he previously did not recognize, lost as he was in an imaginary kingdom of space heroes and the like (just as adults get lost in a world of glitzy thrills and causes). Josh himself is slow to recognize what his own experience tells him about a central dimension of the reality that comes from a place Josh never thought to look. In a great metacognitive leap, belated though it is, Josh comes to recognize the dense, shining richness of ordinary life, infused with remarkable beauty and the necessity of love for life and all humankind. From that apprehension of a radical divine caritas infusing all things flows quite naturally the possibility of immortality as a logical extension of divine love for the entirety of the created carnal world. As such, Wide Awake venerates ordinary life far more than any afterlife. Very much a gift from somewhere, the “answer” is located by Josh in a place he never thought to look—the ordinary world right before him—and a stunning answer it is.

The Questions

Shyamalan lays out this story of intellectual and spiritual maturation in discrete units, helpfully supplying instructive chapter headings to make sure that viewers “get it.” As the story begins, Josh is in deep funk, swallowed by the loss of his grandfather, who is, as he tells in voice-over, “his best friend.” “September: The Questions” begins on the first day of the fifth grade (which is also the beginning of Fall, that time of seasonal dying), and Joshua is, as his mother says, “almost a man,” though he sure does not act like it—he sleeps with plentiful “comfort objects” (stuffed animals). On this morning he is deeply sleepy, showing no relish at all for the first day of school, even falling back to sleep while brushing his teeth.

And here, as he does throughout the film, Shyamalan employs effective visual humor and surprise. Almost all the considerable gentle humor in the sequence derives from Shyamalan’s visual smarts; this strategy works extremely well in critical parts of the story where Shyamalan does more showing than telling. Some of Joshua’s sleepiness is no doubt an avoidance reaction to the august place to which he journeys for schooling, Waldron Mercy Academy, an upper-crusty Roman Catholic school for boys, to which he goes dressed in short pants, tie, and blue blazer. Before leaving for the first day of school, however, having finally gotten dressed, Joshua detours to visit his grandfather’s room, where he takes time to don his grandfather’s favorite flannel shirt, sit in his rocking chair, and even suck on the old man’s pipe. Here begins the boy’s retrospective voice-over narration, both sweet and pungent, explaining that he and his grandfather “watched out for one another.” No small part of Joshua’s grief derives from the fact that though the old fellow promised that he’d never ever leave Joshua, clearly, having died, “he lied” (4:00). That crushing truth instigates Josh’s gloom.

So Josh has got some mysteries before him that inspire very good, haunting queries, for which easy answers do not avail. In this case, the sort of boy Joshua already is at a mere ten years of age prepares the way for what follows. We get the first hint of this when his physician father (Denis Leary) drops him at school. In his usual tone of long-suffering exasperation, the dutiful doctor reminds Joshua not to aggravate his teachers by asking so many questions, a habit Joshua cannot, as the next sequence will show, bring himself to relinquish. And so it will be. In his religion class, taught by sports-loving Sister Terry (Rosie O’Donnell), wearing a baseball cap in a classroom where pictures of sports figures mix with those of saints (and no quizzes on holy days or during the playoffs), Josh sets off an intellectual riot. At one point, he interrupts Sister Terry to ask if the unbaptized, like his aunt Denise, are going to hell, just as the inane catechism workbook, Jesus Is My Buddy, says they are. Of course, everybody in the room knows someone who’s not baptized, and pandemonium breaks out, prompting Sister Terry to announce that “No one is going to hell,” after which she is saved, in a nice pun on the discussion, if not by baptism, then by the bell, telling her departing students, in full sardonic flair, that no one should “inform any of their friends, neighbors, or relatives of their impending doom” (8:20).

Given Josh’s deep curiosity, a churchy setting, and the still painfully fresh loss of his grandfather, it is no small wonder that the small boy, emotionally blasted and feeling very much alone, soon comes upon the question that will shape his quest. This takes place in curious fashion in imagery that will repeat, tellingly and gorgeously, at the very end of the film. He escapes class with his buddy Dave O’Hara (Timothy Reifsnyder), and the pair walk down the august wood-lined halls of Waldron Academy when Josh’s attention fixes on lovely shafts of light pouring in one of the hall windows, a central metaphor in the biblical record. The scene clearly suggests a bent in Joshua toward the mystical, or at least attentiveness to beauty amid the ordinary (the light here is maybe foreshadowing or, in this case, fore-lighting). He stands there looking at the light in a posture of quiet wonder and amazement, an instance of unexpected, pressing beauty here leading to questions of God. So he asks Dave if he believes in God, to which Dave replies in the negative, explaining in pithy terms that “Too many bad things happen to people for no reason” (11:30). He does not mind, though, if Josh believes; after all, as he explains in a nice turn of cognitive humility, “I drink chocolate milk through my nose. What do I know?” Then, to emphasize the point, after the two boys exit, the camera lingers briefly on those shafts of light, and finally, as rarely happens in the film, the image fades not to black but to an entirely white screen.

Here, in this random meditation on light, emerges Joshua’s quest, though his voice-over does admit that the idea birthing in his head is perhaps not such a good one. On the other hand, that Josh’s venture is perhaps in some way blessed is suggested by that closing fade to a screen of stark white light: asking questions of beauty is a good thing, and one path to the divine. In any case, wondering at the light (or, the Light, given the scene and the question it inspires) shows young Josh’s unusual aesthetic and religious sensitivity, one that melds instances of exceptional beauty with the notion of God. Clearly brainy, observant, and curious, Josh is not an ordinary kid but one already birthing an acute awareness of the strangeness and beauty of human experience. That is not a bad place to start—or end up, for that matter, as will indeed prove the case.

The dither of the new school year does little to divert Josh from either grief or curiosity. Though very undersized for his age, and against the clear warnings of his physician parents, the diminutive Joshua wants to play football because, as he tells them in a clincher, “Grandpa played football” (14:40). For Josh it seems that football promises a sure path to both his grandfather and hope. After all, as Josh later explains, “My grandpa was a really great football player. He ran for two hundred yards in one game. He believed in two things: always keep both hands on the ball, and always hold on to your faith. Faith will get you through” (16:00). Unfortunately, as Josh soon realizes, “football isn’t the answer” (and neither, apparently, is religious faith), and the film comically shows exactly why with his oversized and very ill-fitting equipment, especially a helmet that falls off continually (18:45). And so comes another route, a “mission, a real mission,” as opposed to football and the spaceship play fantasies imagined by Josh and friend Dave (20:00). That is, looking for God in order to talk to God “to make sure my grandpa’s okay” (20:22). A useful foil, Dave asks all the hard questions, such as, in this case, “where in the world you gonna look?” (20:47). And so begins Joshua’s quest, a long series of strategies, one after the other, handled by Shyamalan with both humor and dead seriousness, that Josh hopes will finally link him to the divine so he can get an answer to the question of whether his grandfather is “okay.”

First off, there is a humorous take on the problem of evil. A quick look at the graphic catalogue of car wrecks and natural disasters on the evening news demonstrates that the deity will not be found there, giving some support to friend Dave’s earlier counsel that there’s too much evil to allow for a god who runs the world or even allows the carnage. So much for conspicuous public displays of divine presence.

Josh then attempts “knowledge by proxy,” for lack of a better term. Josh searches out another conspicuous venue for God, namely, the local Roman Catholic cardinal. If anyone could speak authoritatively, he speculates, it is a religious eminence, both powerful and knowledgeable, and as a young Roman Catholic, he turns to the obvious (alas, many seekers of all kinds pursue gurus and revivalists to whom they can hand over their souls and very often, unfortunately, their brains). When Philadelphia’s cardinal visits his sister’s equally fancy school, located across a fence from his own, Josh escapes school, with institutional diversion supplied by Dave, so he can query the cardinal for an answer.

Josh does manage to get very close—in the restroom to which the cardinal has fled amid some sort of medical attack—but there Josh finds a man of considerable age and frailty, looking, in fact, “like somebody’s grandpa” (28:18).

“I don’t think God talks to him,” concludes Josh (28:32). For the literal-minded ten-year-old, it simply cannot be that this man knows God or can offer answers to the big mysteries, for his very human limitations seem more than obvious. Here Josh makes the commonplace mistake of thinking power or prominence ensures knowledge or some magical charm that protects one from the inexorable diminution of very mortal flesh. Clearly, cardinals are not all-powerful and immortal superheroes. Again, decay and death make themselves known. For Josh, it seems, there is no escaping the brokenness that evil sponsors.

Here though, as is his temptation throughout, typical enough in a ten-year-old in a scientific age, Josh is tempted to trust in indisputable empirical reality, palpable evidence that will speedily and conveniently prove God’s reality and presence. In this thirsty credulity, though, he’s not so different from those hordes of grown-ups who wish to see in order to believe. It will take the whole film for Josh to move beyond this sort of empiricist reductionism in recognizing how God shows up in human affairs. The episode concludes with Josh recognizing, with a bit of dismay, that “this mission could take days” (28:45).

December: Looking for Signs

That Shyamalan is aware of the wrongheadedness of much of what Josh will soon test out as routes to God becomes clear in the film’s second chapter, “December: The Signs.” It is now a long way from September, and Josh seems no closer to any sort of answer or consolation about his grandfather’s (and his own) well-being. It is no wonder, then, that in the schoolboys’ obligatory monthly confession to Father Peters, Josh breaks decorum by asking, “Can we just talk?” (30:30). Peters himself seems more than a little depressed, though the film does not explain why. Perhaps it is his disappointment in not finding sufficient seriousness among schoolboys, or, as the film strongly hints, his own sense of spiritual abandonment. With beguiling innocence, Josh comes right to the point: “You ever feel like giving up? Since it’s been so long and all [and] you haven’t met him? You do...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Through Wonder to Veneration
• 1. “NOT ALL ANGELS HAVE WINGS”: Wonder, Light, and Love in M. Night Shyamalan’s Wide Awake
• 2. AND THE BLIND SHALL SEE: Grasping the Radiance of Being in The Color of Paradise
• 3. THE EDUCATION OF A ONE-MAN PREACHING MACHINE: The Realization of Love in The Apostle
• 4. LOVE’S PURE LIGHT: Moral Light and Reconciliation in Dead Man Walking
• 5. WHEN HOPE BREAKS OUT: Love and Redemption in The Shawshank Redemption
• 6. “IT’S TAKEN ME SO LONG TO FIND YOU”: Search and Rescue in Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo
• 7. “HOW HIGH CAN I FLY?”: Murder and Sacramental Ascent in Tom Tykwer’s Heaven
• 8. “IT CAN HAPPEN”: Frogs, Deliverance, and Reconciliation in P. T. Anderson’s Magnolia
• 9. “THE GLORY SMILING THROUGH”: Wonder and Beauty in The Thin Red Line
• Filmography
• Index