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GOD in the MOVIES GOD in the MOVIES GOD in the MOVIES Albert J. Bergesen Andrew M. Greeley with a preface by Roger Ebert I~ ~?io~!~~n~~:up LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2000 by Transaction Publishers Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2000 by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 00-034406 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bergesen, Albert J. God in the movies / Albert J. Bergesen, Andrew M. Greeley ; with a preface by Roger Ebert. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7658-0528-6 (alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures—Religious aspects. I. Bergesen, Albert J. II. Greeley, Andrew M., 1928- III. Title. PN1995.5 .B44 2000 791.43'68231—dc21 00-034406 ISBN 13: 978-0-7658-0528-7 (pbk) Contents Preface Roger Ebert Vll Introduction 1 1. God in the Movies 5 2. Movies as Story and Metaphor 15 3. Always a Lover: Audrey Hepburn as Lady Wisdom 27 4. Life, Love, and All That Jazz: Jessica Lange and the Passion of God 39 5. Babette's Feast of Love: Symbols Subtle but Patent 49 6. Is This Heaven? No, It's Iowa 55 7. Pale Rider 71 8. Ghost 79 9. Flatliners: Forgiveness Stronger than Death 87 10. Jacob's Ladder: God in the Nightmare 97 11. Angel Angst and the Direction of Desire 107 12. A Note on Purgatory in the Movies 119 13. How to Put God in a Movie 125 14. Magical Realism and the Problem of Evil 137 15. European Novel, American Movie, Japanimation: The Evolution of Storytelling 157 16. Conclusion 173 Index 179 Preface Roger Ebert The authors of this book are quite right that most people are blind to the religious symbolism in the movies they see. They do not look for God when they go to the movies, although it would be odd indeed if She (as Andrew Greeley often refers to Him) was not reflected in the dominant art form of the twentieth century. Recently I have been en­ gaged in a running battle with those who feel Martin Scorsese's Bring­ ing Out the Dead is one of his lesser films--even a failure. I believe it belongs with the best of his work. What has amazed me in my discus­ sions is that no one ever refers to the spiritual content of the film, and yet it is specifically Christian from beginning to end, and not just be­ cause its action incorporates the cardinal acts of mercy and all of the seven deadly sins, takes place over three days and has a Christ-figure for its hero. It is Christian because it considers with the question of what a good man can accomplish in a world that seems to be the devil's playground. (It is not a coincidence that the action all takes place in Hell's Kitchen.) The film was written for Scorsese by Paul Schrader, the author of all his most specifically religious work (Ta.xi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ). Schrader is a Calvinist by birth and upbringing, a man occasionally overtaken by clouds of gloom and the conviction that he has made his last film, that there is no longer room for his work in today's crass commercial climate. One day a few years ago, as we sat in the shade of some California trees, he said that he and Scorsese were existentialists in an age of irony. "I'm really of the existential tradition, the twentieth century tradition," he said. "Tarantino is tying into the vii viii God in the Movies ironic hero. I know the existential hero's in trouble and I know this century is almost over. But I don't know how nourishing the ironic hero can be .... The existential dilemma is, 'should I live?' And the ironic answer is, 'does it matter?' Everything in the ironic world has quota­ tion marks around it. You don't actually kill somebody; you 'kill' them. It doesn't really matter if you put the baby in front of the runaway car because it's only a 'baby' and it's only a 'car."' The film he was working on just then was Touch, an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard story about a stigmatic, a former Franciscan, who can help people by touching them. I honor Schrader's impulse in making it. It basically asks: What do you do when your religion calls your bluff and turns out to be real, and you can't get away with safe, middle-class piety any more, but are called to behave like those fanatics in the Lives of the Saints? How then should you behave in the real world? A woman in the hero's life offers to do his laundry, and then pauses, and wonders if it's all right to put stigmatic blood through the wash. The films considered by Andrew Greeley and Albert Bergesen in this book all put the blood through the wash, in one way or another. They dare to consider the divine in the context of the carnal-not only in their stories, but in their very form, which is the Hollywood enter­ tainment film. Most people, as the authors observe, do not consider these movies from a religious point of view. Even when a character is clearly considered to be God, as Audrey Hepburn is in Always, most audiences, I imagine, think of her not as God but as "God," a char­ acter in a movie. Or as an angel, which was my impulse. One of the most awesomely spiritual films I have ever seen is Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves, in which, as Greeley observes, the dour Scot­ tish church elders remove the bells from their church tower as too festive, and get their comeuppance when the peals of celestial bells ring out from the very heavens. The impact of this film was so pow­ erful that when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, one of the American critics, from a very secular New York weekly, fled to the ladies' room in tears. Janet Maslin of the New York Times went in to comfort her, and both were locked inside the Palais des Festivals. Yet when the film went on to win prizes at Cannes and Academy Award recognition, most of the reviews described the frankness of its sex, not the frankness of its spirituality. It was as specifically and obviously and deliberately spiritual as any film I can think of, but it was not discussed in those terms. Preface ix Maybe we are embarrassed to discuss religion and the movies at the same time. Perhaps when we have spiritual experiences we translate them into mundane terms as quickly as we can. I know that I have been shaken to the depth of my existence by a few movies (Do the Right Thing, Cries and Whispers, and Ikiru for example), and I also know that even broadly popular films like Ghost, Field of Dreams, and The Sixth Sense got people worked up. The studios can never understand it when a film like The Sixth Sense, which is mostly downbeat, contem­ plative, and deliberately confusing, attracts enormous audiences and repeat business. It is because it gives people something to talk about and think about, and they appreciate it. One of the values of this book is that it considers the ways in which those films may have touched many of the members of their audiences-whether they were prepared to ad­ mit it or not. Andrew Greeley and I have conducted a long-running discussion about God and the movies over the years. Not long ago we were sitting late in a Middle Eastern restaurant near the Michigan shore, lamenting the inaccuracies of so many of the movies about angels. (Whenever an angel appears in a movie and starts talking about how long he's been waiting for a pizza, I want to take him aside and break the news that as an angel he is not a reincarnated human as Hollywood seems deter­ mined to believe, but a spiritual being who never has and never will possess the equipment to eat a pizza. Wings of Desire has it right-you have to turn in your wings, and along with the pizza you have to accept such human indignities as disease and death.) Greeley told me about his university courses on God in the movies, and indeed I think the course had its inspiration in his thoughts after seeing Jacob's Ladder (his thoughts on the subject in general I gather followed from All That Jazz). What is so valuable about his courses, and about this book he has written with Bergesen, is that it reminds readers and students that movies really are about something. They re­ ally are. They are not simply devices to distract us for two hours, al­ though that's all a lot of audience members get out of them.
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