I’m just off a weekend retreat and U2charist with the wonderful Trinity United Methodist Church, Austin, and this spring I’ve been talking about how we might find God moving in the music of U2, in movies, and in the Harry Potter story, among other things. We read Psalm 19 before my sermon yesterday, which talks about the heavens showing forth the glory of God, and I feel strongly that we can discern God in creation–which includes us, since we are part of creation–a creating part.
I’ll always have things to say about this, but it struck me that although religious people have sometimes worried that the culture tells stories that detract from the Christian message, and secular people have sometimes worried that trying to read culture through a Christian filter imposes Christian ideas upon it, the truth seems to me to be this: While not every piece of culture radiates obvious spiritual value, when we read with discernment, we can find spiritual value in movies, music, films, TV, and elsewhere.And that most people don’t need out permission to do this, since they already consciously or unconsciously draw their spiritual understandings from culture, not from organized religion.
This is both exciting–and daunting.
It’s exciting, because I know that in my own journey, culture was a big part of what kept me going even though I had no formal community of faith to fall back on for sustenance and meaning.
And it’s daunting, because while I knew when something was life-giving or soul-sucking for me, I couldn’t usually have told you why, so I think a great challenge for people of faith now is to help people read culture well, to let them know why these stories matter for good or ill, and that’s been a big part of my writing, speaking, and preaching work in recent years.
As I’m thinking about being the guest this week at Sunday Forum at the National Cathedral, I was revisiting one of the best things I’ve written about this, from the introduction to The Gospel according to Hollywood, and I want to share it with you now:
The first time I saw Pulp Fiction in the fall of 1994, I had the feeling that I was watching something miraculous. It wasn’t just that I was watching an entertaining and inventive work of art, which the movie certainly was, but as I sat there in the darkened theater, I had a strange and paradoxical thought: I felt that I was in the presence of something holy.
As I watched Quentin Tarantino’s violent and often vile film about gangsters, junkies, crooked boxers, armed robbers, and other folks who make up the unpleasant underbelly of the world, I was amazed to discover in each of the film’s major stories the light of something I could only call grace, and I was spiritually moved in a way I hadn’t been in a church since—well, maybe ever.
When the movie was over, I sat quietly through the closing credits, as is my practice, and then remained seated thinking long after the lights came up, which isn’t. To paraphrase Jules (Samuel L. Jackson), one of the film’s gangsters: In the words, images, and action of Pulp Fiction, I felt the touch of God.God got involved.
Although the movie made its name in the world as a cleverly-written film about gunplay, drug use, profanity, and forced sodomy, what I took away from Pulp Fiction was not the violent action, dark humor, and crudity, but embedded themes of grace and redemption and the belief that God was real and powerful. For me, Pulp Fiction was a deeply spiritual film, and its use of theological language made it, despite its troublesome content, deeply religious as well. About two thirds of the way through the film, for example, when Jules and his colleague Vincent (John Travolta) survive an attack at point-blank gunpoint, he rejects Vincent’s judgment that they were simply lucky. No, he says:
JULESThat was . . . divine intervention. You know what divine intervention is?
VINCENT
Yeah, I think so. That means God came down from Heaven and stopped the bullets.
JULES
Yeah, man, that’s what it means. That’s exactly what it means! God came down from Heaven and stopped the bullets.
Whether Quentin Tarantino the writer and director of this scene believes that God came down and stopped the bullets is irrelevant. Despite Vincent’s skepticism, Jules does believe it, and the filmed scene creates an undeniable effect of awe and mystery. Jules is a character we like and respect, and his belief in the miraculous ultimately spills over onto the audience. Whatever Tarantino’s own take on the action, this is one of many spots in Pulp Fiction
that offers us what Connie Neal, author of The Gospel According to Harry Potter, likes to call “glimmers of the gospel,” moments in popular culture narratives where we can find inspiration and spiritual illumination.
Pulp Fiction is crammed full of these moments that illuminate Judeo-Christian teachings, whether in its story of Jules’ redemption, its account of Vincent first receiving the wages of sin and then experiencing a miraculous second birth, its depiction of people behaving with uncharacteristic kindness and generosity in difficult situations, or its use of an actual vehicle called “Grace” to convey some of its characters to a new life.
The first time I saw Pulp Fiction
, I noticed some of these things, but I had no idea then that the movie would be discussed in books on the Bible and film, film and spirituality, or even film and prayer. I didn’t know that people were going to spend thousands of hours on the Internet and in coffee shops debating such topics as whether the briefcase Jules and Vincent had rescued contained the soul of Marcellus Wallace, the gang boss played by Ving Rhames. I didn’t know that I’d actually be opening my dust-covered King James Bible for the first time in years to examine Ezekiel 25:17 and see how much of that verse Jules was actually quoting to the people he was getting ready to ventilate. I didn’t know that the venerable American Academy of Religion, this country’s foremost organization of theologians, would devote a special session of their next annual conference to the discussion of Pulp Fiction.
All I knew was that when I left the theater, it was as a slightly different person than I went in—slightly more hopeful, slightly more open to the possibility that there might be a God (and to the possibility that he, she, or it might be moving in my life), and more than a little anxious to have that kind of experience with the holy again.
When Jules discusses the miracle they witnessed (“You
witnessed,” the skeptical Vince says; “I witnessed a freak occurrence”), he uses those words I mentioned earlier, words I’ve co-opted over and over in the intervening years to explain the feeling I have gotten from Pulp Fiction, and from other works of popular culture that didn’t set out to witness to the Gospel but do so anyway: “What is significant is I felt God’s touch.”
I ultimately saw Pulp Fiction
in the theater seven times, six times in the States, once in London. I bought the movie, first on videocassette and then on DVD, read and re-read the screenplay. Pulp Fiction became a touchstone in my growing faith, more meaningful than most sermons I’d heard and most church services I’d sat through.
Like many in church and even more outside it, I have found that God can speak to me as powerfully sometimes through elements of the culture as through a formal religious service or in a religious setting.
I’ve learned lessons about my faith and about my life through the depiction of joy and beauty in musicals like Top Hat and Singin’ in the Rain, by witnessing a selfless messiah figure and a redeemed Barabbas in Casablanca, in the complicated interplay of guilt and justice in Rear Window, by following the chilling progress of a man losing his soul in The Godfather, in the paradigm of irrational and unshakable faith put into action in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, through the meditations on sin and violence in Unforgiven, in the sacrificial love displayed in Titanic, and in the scenes of divine intervention and inspired forgiveness that animate Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.
My spiritual journey has been marked by many cinematic rest stops, and I’m hardly alone in this.
When Chris Seay and I wrote The Gospel Reloaded about the religious elements in the Matrix films, we were partly inspired to do so because of 1000 websites and who knows how many people on the web discussing faith and philosophy in the original Matrix, a phenomenon unseen, perhaps, since the first Star Wars films. Many of those people so interested in learning what kind of savior Neo (Keanu Reeves) was and how the Biblical references helped explain the film’s conflict were “irreligious” or “unchurched.” But every human being is a spiritual being, and we all thirst for something beyond ourselves, however and wherever we can find it, and that book and others like it served a real and growing need.
These days, almost every mainline Protestant church with sufficient resources seems to do “popcorn theology” nights and teach classes on faith and film. In the past five years, secular and religious publishers alike have sent forth books examining the relationship between movies and faith, and popular websites like Hollywood Jesus and media sources like the radio shows hosted by Dick Staub and Bill Hogg likewise focus on the intersection of popular culture and Christianity. And in what would have seemed amazing twenty years ago, leaders in many churches now show Hollywood films during sermons and use them in video installations, and universities and seminaries alike offer wildly popular courses on film and theology.
Not everyone is jumping on board this fast-accelerating bandwagon, of course.
While Pulp Fiction
is a movie that was an essential part of the faith journey for me and for many others, it’s important to note that a vast number of Americans consider this movie not only un-Christian but sinful, both in itself and as the potential occasion of sin in others. The Office for Film & Broadcasting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which rates films for the millions of American Catholics, actually condemned Pulp Fiction when it came out in 1994, rating it as “morally offensive,” thus making it off-limits for Catholics to view.
In fact, the Office for Film and Broadcasting has given their condemnatory rating of “morally offensive” to a number of films that I’ve discussed with audiences in churches, universities, youth camps, and seminaries for their moral and religious content, among them American Beauty
, Dogma, Kill Bill, and the Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby, which I have taught fruitfully for its main character’s active engagement with God, but which the OFB condemns as a “somber meditation on assisted suicide with a morally problematic ending.”
This review points out a central distinction between what a spiritual reading of culture attempts and what many Christians seem to expect from Hollywood: while every year Hollywood releases movies than can fruitfully illuminate the life of faith and draw us closer to the divine, very very few commercial movies are ever intended as some sort of religious experience. They’re stories, some better told than others, and many of them are going to lack an easy moral or be “morally problematic.” That’s why they require interpretation and our own engagement in the problems they present if we’re to gain some sort of enlightenment.
Hollywood films, even in whatever Golden Age people imagine they remember, have always been an uneasy combination of art and commerce, of personal vision and corporate product, and while they can tell mythical stories that touch us deeply, with rare exceptions (like Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ)
, our experience of the sacred in a film doesn’t come because the filmmakers have consciously devoted themselves to that proposition.Instead, as my Baylor colleague Ralph Wood writes in The Gospel According to Tolkien, a popular culture narrative approaches the sacred—if indeed it approaches it at all—through “its plot and characters, its images and tone, its landscape and point of view—not from any heavy-handed moralizing or preachifying.”
That makes for good art but bad evangelism, which is why if you go to the movies looking for evangelism, you’re almost certain to be disappointed.
Because of the tension between the surface content of a film and its possible deeper spiritual meanings, many movies that for me have strong moral and even religious content are off the shelf for many Christians, one of the things I hope to remedy; we Christians do ourselves few favors by refusing to engage the culture, especially when it regards culture that could help lead a broken world in the direction of faith and wholeness.
I’ll gladly admit that discernment is a necessary element in approaching popular culture for its sacred content, and movies like Starship Troopers
or Pootie Tang may in fact have little or no value as anything but DVD Frisbees. But if we truly believe in incarnation—that is, the Judeo/Christian belief that God both created the world and willingly entered into creation as a human being—then the world is indeed, as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “charged with the grandeur of God,” and with wisdom, prayer, and persistence we can discern God both in the works of God’s creation and in our creations as well.
Accessed at http://www.usccb.org/movies
This entry was posted
on Monday, April 26th, 2010 at 1:08 pm and is filed under News of the Spirit, Culture.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Leave a Reply