Film - Think

Above all, documentary must reflect the problems and realities of the present. It cannot regret the past; it is dangerous to prophesy the future. It can, and does, draw on the past in its use of existing heritages but it only does so to give point to a modern argument. In no sense is documentary a historical reconstruction and attempts to make it so are destined to failure. Rather it is contemporary fact and event expressed in relation to human associations.

Paul Rotha

Give us adequate images. We lack adequate images. Our civilization does not have adequate images. And I think a civilization is doomed or is going to die out like dinosaurs if it doesn't develop an adequate language for adequate images.

Werner Herzog

"But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness.”

Matthew 6:23

For a film about people talking about a book about a pretty specific set of ideas, The Ordinary Radicals does a good job of maintaining its identity as a documentary. The tendency of documentaries is to become overly reliant on the monologue money shot, the spaces between talking heads crammed with montaged equivalents of what remains to be "said." At the best of times these spaces bear witness to states of affair in deconstructable ways, helping us to see something more effectively. At the worst of times, we find our eyes pinned on target like Alex in A Clockwork Orange – or stuck in an inescapably self-conscious Kaufman way, Being Michael Moore. As it is a documentary about a book tour on a vegetable oil powered bus, most of the spaces of The Ordinary Radicals are filled with travel images. Different towns, different roads, the innards of different churches. Though innocuous at first, the natural sort of filler produced by a road trip, the effect of these transitions is to present The Ordinary Radicals as a movement, something growing across North America. If the film wants us to see anything, it is that prevailing winds in American Christianity are changing, and this veggie-powered bus has something to do with it – its movements regularly tracked with a line like those maps of Paul's journeys in the back of most Bibles.

The book tour is connected to Jesus For President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw. Generally, the book and tour are about getting people to think about how Christian faith and political affiliation relate. A host of interviews with people like Jim Wallis, Ron Sider, Tony Campolo, and snippets of lectures by Claiborne and Haw, define their problems with traditional election-year American Christianity. This in essence is a skillful evocation of social justice as it has been increasingly redefined by people outside the evangelical and liberal Protestant mainline. We have become too reliant on the political process, handed our ethical and communal identity over to related state or federal structures, and have been suckered into Bush doctrine concepts like "redemptive violence." Our citizenships are conflicting. We can't place our hope in the lever we pull on election day, but need to "vote" every day by committing to the social tasks the church has been called to do at a local level. Throughout the film we meet people who have embarked on this kind of work.

This is all pretty familiar stuff to people who have even just barely kept up with contemporary American theology, which has sought ways to wed a theologically shallow social gospel with the biblical and historical depth of more traditional Christian thought. And critiques of Claiborne and Haw abound. For some Claiborne's ethics seem more Mother Teresa than they do Jesus (he refers to his experience with her fairly often). For others, his ideas are too connected to guys like Wallis and Campolo, who argue for increased Christian involvement in legislation rather than a Hauerwasian establishment of the Church as an alternative society to the empire. A few interviews towards the end made me think that The Ordinary Radicals are still open to seduction by the Constantinian impulse. And there is a heavy emphasis in talks by Claiborne and Haw on the gospel narratives as a resistance to and subversion of the Roman Empire. This is a hot topic in New Testament studies right now, as it provides so many clear parallels to our current cultural landscape. But the verdict on prioritizing this framework in our reading of the New Testament is still out, as it neglects additional formative ethical and eschatological sources of early Christian practice. It may run into the same reductions post-colonial readings of bible texts have encountered in the past. But these aren’t criticisms, just questions. The documentary is specific in what it wants to expose, the surface level content of Jesus for President. It isn’t interested in being a theological treatise as much as it is a nudge in a direction of Christian thought and practice that serves to get a conversation going. In this way, the film is an excellent resource. (And I have the sneaking suspicion that Claiborne would be a good conversation partner on all these points.)

Without more reference to Claiborne’s other books, and further conversation with him about the ideological mechanics of Jesus for President, I can’t legitimately muse on anything other than the title. My first thought when seeing Ordinary Radicals on the DVD cover was James K.A. Smith’s review of What Would Jesus Deconstruct in The Global Spiral. Here he says:

"My claim is relatively simple: that despite all the bad press and caricatures from supposedly enlightened liberals, it is in fact orthodoxy that constitutes the most radical appreciation of "deconstructibility.” To put it a little more stridently and provocatively, I would suggest that the Jesus of Pope Benedict XVI represents a more radical hermeneutic than the Jesus we get from Schillibeeckx, that the church of Francis Cardinal George is a more radical institution than the sort of church you'd get from Gary Wills, and that the Gospel according to Stanley Hauerwas is more radical than the Gospel according to Jim Wallis."

This topsy-turvey perspective on what constitutes something as “radical” is attractive. I encounter this continually in my discipline, finding that the Jesus described by traditional stalwarts such as Adolf Schlatter persists as a more provocative model for political activity than the one enlisted by socially-minded writers like Albert Schweitzer. If ordinary is “the regular or customary condition or course of things,” then how are we to think of Christian activism as ordinary? Is it “ordinary” in that it is connected to early Christianity, and thus hardwired into a once “customary” Christian way of thinking that has gotten lost in the liminal mists of modernity? Is it “ordinary” in that they are advocating the everyday work of making the world a better place to live rather than pontificating on change from suburban pulpits? There are a lot of directions this word “ordinary” points us, many of which peter out when disconnected from the extra-ordinary condition of early Christian theology. I get the image: ordinary things, small things, base things, weak things, 1 Corinthians 1:27 things, all doing Kingdom work. But I can’t help but want to insert an “extra-” every time I read this title. Social justice is an ordinary task. Christian social justice, prefigured by a Jesus that could pass through locked doors and cook his disciples breakfast on the beach, is an extraordinary task. If we look in earliest Christianity for an indication of how we can start being radical in American culture, the first thing we are going to see is Paul making his way across the map, planting churches. That is a radical approach to social justice.

Despite this digression, I am glad to have a documentary that pushes us to think through these issues. This is a film I want to show to other people, part of a conversation I think we need to be having at many different levels. I wish more churches would buy copies of this to share with people – and I look forward to handing mine off to someone else. In the past, I have always pointed people to Errol Morris, Marker’s A Grin Without a Cat, or Varda’s The Gleaners and I for documentaries that have a similar handle on issues near and dear to Haw’s and Claiborne’s heart. What we need in American Christianity are more films like this, well-planned and produced essays on the pulse of our theological crises. The Ordinary Radicals is a well-conceived, directed, and edited documentary. While I wish it would have had a few interviews with people not on board with their mission, it is a lyrically organized description of what they are all about. It is a thrilling thing to see produced by a little group of people living in a rough part of Philly. We need more essay films, visual and self-reflective meditations on what it means to struggle in the church, narrated records of engaging these tensions between our citizenships. We need more films that true to the documentary spirit manage to both talk and listen. What Herzog says above has a great deal to do with the Church, which has lost its cultural and political way in large part because we don’t even know how to talk about ourselves by means of contemporary media. So many of our identity markers are doomed to extinction because we have trouble producing images that will enact or rehearse them as formative ideas. (Or “performative” ideas?) Because it is effective, The Ordinary Radicals shows us that there is a need for more Christian documentaries and essay films, which in light of Matthew’s language would be better eyes for the body.


Note: I am really interested in the film as a step towards better "Christian" filmmaking. But this is difficult to do as the director doesn't self-identify as a Christian, and thus doesn't think of the film as a "Christian" film. Which makes it a good documentary about a bunch of Christian stuff. I suppose it would be better for me to say something along the lines of: this is a good example how we should be thinking about Christian issues in documentary terms. Moffett pushes us towards the kind of filmmaking that could be a church activity, even though it doesn't necessarily need to be so. In an email that I hope he doesn't mind me alluding to, Moffett said the film is a bit like Maher's Religulous in that both are films by "recovering Catholics." The Ordinary Radicals just takes a much different tone and direction. Bottom line: I look forward to more of the same ilk.

I am baffled that Mary was not distributed in conjunction to either The Passion of the Christ or The Da Vinci Code hysteria after it played to acclaim at the Venice 2005 festival, even taking the SIGNIS award there. It would have been a helpful point of reference for either film at the time, putting their spiritual and aesthetic excesses into surprisingly authentic perspective. In a past Ferrara blog-a-thon, Girish referred to Ferrara’s good films as a “wondrous messiness.” The points at which they inevitably stumble in artistic credibility are where they emerge punch-drunk with Ferrara’s overtly Catholic sense of sin and grace. I have never actually liked Ferrara’s work, but I have also had a difficult time forgetting some of his most memorable images - such as the bad Lieutenant at the feet of Christ, which as a Jungian prefiguration of Gibson’s Jesus is one of the most effective Christ images in modern American cinema. Mary is likewise burdened by Ferrara’s “messiness,” but this time that messiness works with the grain of his characters in a realistic scramble for faith and redemption. Faith is messy, the search for the historical Jesus is messy, and fortunately, so is Ferrara’s film.

The film opens in the tomb of Jesus as described in John 20. Mary Magdalene is weeping, she sees the two angels, and then she sees the risen Jesus. She cries: “Rabboni,” and the scene closes, the cameras cut back to reveal the set and Marie Palesi (Juliet Binoche) having a difficult time stepping out of her character as these last scenes are shot. Tony Childress (Matthew Modine), directing the film This is My Blood in which he plays Jesus, is dismayed that she won’t hop on the plane with him back to New York. The film cuts to a Charlie Rose type talk show hosted by Theodore Younger (Forest Whitaker), running a series of talks about the life of Christ. He is talking with Amos Luzzato about Jesus as a controversial Jewish figure, problematic for a people at the edge of an empire. In this first group of scenes, the different settings and characters that cycle through the rest of the film are introduced. There are three characters: An actress, a director, and a talk-show host. There are three settings: a film, a talk show, and the real world events that bring these three characters together. And there are generally three cinematic modes: the real world story in a crisp, deep focus, footage of people on TV or in Childress’ film, and documentary footage of current events in the Middle East. As the film burrows deeper and deeper into its three characters, these different cinematic modes begin to slip, often overlapping each other in transition shots and unexpected parentheses.

The Three Characters:

Much like Maria Falconetti after Dreyer’s Passion of the Joan of Arc, Marie Palesi is overwhelmed by her experience as Mary. After the film’s last scenes are shot, she gets lost among the sites in the Holy Land, only connected to the world through her cell phone. When she does talk to people her language is cribbed from her performance, steeped in the Gnostic thought forms latent in the texts she has been reciting verbatim in the film. In the Gospel of Mary, which is the predominant source text for Childress’ film dialogue, Mary is posed as apostola apostolorum(apostle to the apostles), an intermediary of a more comprehensive revelation of who Jesus was. Marie progressively takes on Mary’s mantle, exhorting the few that she comes into contact with to realize their Gnostic Christological potential. Tony Childress is a broad reference to Mel Gibson. The historical revision of This Is My Blood is considerably different than that of The Passion, but what connects the two is the director’s manic insistence the film is necessary, a corrective to a prevailing secular sentiment that has sidelined the core significance of Jesus as an historic spiritual icon. As controversy grows and the detractors begin to appear, Childress begins to buckle beneath the weight of his own vision. And there is a sense in which both of these characters are simply there to support the story of Theodore Younger, a talk show host who becomes personally involved in his series on Mary and the Historical Jesus. He is at the top of the ratings heap and has a child on the way with his young wife, but an affair sends him into a tailspin that exposes points of contact with this Jesus he has been intellectually considering with public radio aplomb. He has been talking to scholars, watching Childress’ film, speaking intermittently with Marie/Mary over the phone, and wandering through the hospital chapel. The centrifugal force of all these connections eventually brings him to his knees, and in a remarkable John 17 prayer he begs that God would intervene. This scene closes on the first (I think only) glimpse of the crucified Christ in the film, Theodore bent in anguish before the icon now bulging with significance.

The Three Settings:

1. The Film: This Is My Blood is a literal rendition of the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Mary. There are five separate cuts of the film interspersed throughout Mary that are thematically linked with the progression of each character arc. The first scene is the Johannine account of Mary in the Garden, Binoche memorably gasping “Rabboni” when she recognizes Jesus. The second scene is that which we see in the Gospel of Mary, during which Mary shares a vision and the other disciples argue about its significance and her relationship to Jesus. This dialogue is straight from G Mary 5:8-11 and 9:2-8. The third scene is Mary speaking from G Mary 8:10-11. I am not sure what the fourth scene corresponds to, Mary and a group of disciples in a boat, I am assuming on the Sea of Galilee. I feel unscholarly in not tracking this down. The fifth scene is right from John 14 and other imagery scattered throughout the Upper Room Discourse. This Is My Blood seems fairly unremarkable excepting Marie’s performance, her personal interest in the narrative is easy to see. Binoche also acted as an actress in Haneke’s Code Unknown, and the same eerie parallax she developed in Haneke’s film is also layered here over Mary’s presence in the film as a spiritual compass. As Ferrara hops frenetically back and forth between the film, the talk show, and real life, This Is My Blood serves as its quiet center - its metanarrative for lack of a better term.

2. Talk Show: In the talk show Theodore interviews Amos Luzzato, Ivan Nicoletto, and Jean Yves Leloup (who is an eminent French scholar on the Gospel of Mary that had written an earlier dramatization declined by Binoche). These interviews drill down into the historical context of Jesus and the many gospels written about him, and we start to get a sense of why the Gospel of Mary is so important. This historical subtext to the film is underscored by an appearance of Elaine Pagels, one of the most widely published scholars on non-canonical Christianity. She describes Mary's role in the Gnostic gospels as an alternative figure to the one presented in the canonical gospels. The good news in the Gnostic gospels is that Jesus is not as ontologically distinct from you or me as he is presented and self-described in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John; he embodies an attainable spiritual ideal distinct from the high Christology and ecclesiology embedded in dominant forms of early Christian practice. In the Gospel of Mary, Mary is posed as an antithesis to Peter as founder of the institutional church, in which revelation and information about Jesus is controlled by apostolic pedigree. Mary Magdalene, however, is the figurehead for an alternative historical and theological tradition in which continued inspiration beyond the proto-orthodox gospel traditions described Jesus as a Gnostic redeemer, an ideal model of Gnostic spirituality. In the ascendancy of Petrine orthodoxy, Mary, her visions, and a feminine brand of early Christian thought were lost in the mist of abraded papyrus. (Koester’s Ancient Christian Gospels is the first book one sees on Pagel’s desk, like a footnote to her monologue. One can quickly see the degree of breadth and variance in the Mary tradition in a debated logion of G Thomas. 114: Simon Peter said to him, "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life." Jesus said, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.")

It is this Mary that Childress’ film is intent on reclaiming, along with her redefinition of Jesus’ abiding significance for society. In the final talk show Theodore interviews Tony. But now that Theodore has in his own way now experienced suffering, he can only respond to Tony’s ideological bravado with incredulity. Childress exclaims, "It’s me getting nailed to the cross, it's the whole society getting nailed to the f-ing cross" Whitaker unexpectedly turns the tables on him, asking, “Have you been nailed to the cross, Tony?” – suggesting that Tony in real life doesn’t equate to his role as Jesus, at least not the Jesus that Theodore has recently encountered. When Tony complains that all the picketing outside his film displays a general lack of intelligence among the public, Whitaker calls it a statement of faith, a recognition that we don’t need to keep reworking the story of Jesus because the basics remain regardless of the language we use to express them. Right on cue, Marie calls in and interjects a few Marian aphorisms about her conversion. In this final talk show exchange we can see that Theodore has come full circle with Marie. He started out as an interested bystander, but has now ended up as a fervent apologist for a de-institutionalized Jesus, a figure cheapened by Tony’s directorial antics.

Real Life: In real life, Marie is wandering through Christian and Jewish traditions, Theodore is dealing with his sin and confusion, and Tony continues to indulge his misguided zeal. Mary lurches on desperate for peace.

The Three Modes

The real world storyline is crisp, bound in deep focus, and transitions in brilliant dissolves. In many shots of traveling through the city at night, the camera slopes off in reflective angles, Lynchian rumbles in the soundtrack. The TV and movie footage are as expected, at the beginning an aloof universe of history and discussion that are distanced from those who are talking about it. They are framed by shots of production assistants and set changes. But lurking throughout the film are bits of hand held news and documentary footage of recent events in the Middle East. One of these interludes is that famous footage of an Iraqi man caught in a crossfire, shielding his child behind a small wall. Over time the modes that mark out what is real, what is film, and what is random documentary footage become blurred. In a phone conversation between Theodore and Marie, Theodore is in a tight, deep focused shot while Marie on the other end is in a medium hand held shot as she walks down a Jerusalem alley. This nonsense disparity between their two represented realities is part of the messiness of Ferrara’s direction. When bombs go off during a Sabbath ritual, Binoche runs out of the house into grainy night footage of the street in disarray. The increasing frequency of this kind of shifting seems clumsy, but it provides an intense foil to the cool tones of the Upper Room Discourse stuck into the latter half of the film. As this slippage in the film increases, so does its potential for effectiveness as a spiritual journey - Theodore becoming lost before he can be found. Ferrara makes us experience this dislocation with him.

I don’t even know where to start actually talking about Mary. As someone who has spent years in the historical issues addressed by the film (I wrote my masters thesis as a critique of that book right there on Pagels’ desk), I am connected to its subtext. And as someone who has spilled a lot of ink on “non-canonical Jesus films,” I am drawn to Ferrara’s religious conscience as it reveals itself in the passionate visual structure of the film. It is born in Kazantzakis’ religious imagination; it is rooted culturally in Scorcese’s Last Tempatation. And it is one that I completely disagree with on historical, theological, and ideological grounds. The film’s discussion of the Gospel of Mary is correct historically, it is an excellent representation of that movement in early Christianity. This is what makes it such an important film. But it is not one that I think has a greater theological significance than that of the canonical record. The Gospels of Mary and Thomas force one to take a confessional stance on the historical records, and mine accords to that which through so many streams is deposited in the rich delta of Irenaeus’ apology. (Summary: I am a conservative, Schlatter-reading, Papias-musing NT critic.) But rather than dissuade me from representations of Jesus that refer to sources other than the canon, or occur in contexts that have little to do with Christian thought, this historical assessment of the gospels has driven me to appreciate the ways in which culture and history talk about Jesus. Jesus’ historical identity is bound up with his textual identity, and many of these texts were born in conflict. I don’t think we can distance contemporary representations of Jesus from the same canon-forming and identity-forming processes that occurred in the first few centuries. Rather we must be engaging, deciphering, and categorizing the ways that culture describes Jesus and his ideas. Ultimately, we know little about what we think about Jesus until we know how it fits into the way culture is currently talking about Jesus. This, I think, is the kind of cultural criticism that the canon logically points us towards. One emboldened by difference rather than made defensive by it. (I am tempted to say even realized in difference, but that is a harder discussion.)

Mary is not just about a Marian reading of Christian spirituality either. It is literally about the possibility of making a Jesus film. Marie is a character caught in the throes of Christian art, having been irrevocably formed by that which she only sought to imitate. Likewise, Mary charts the way a Jesus film affects those that are in creative and commercial proximity to it. And Mary begins to address why I think these “non-canonical Jesus films” I am always blabbering about are so important, as they tap into the difficulty of talking about Jesus in contemporary terms. Even when attempts fail, or diverge significantly from my ideology, they provide new contours and leave empty tracks that broaden our perspective of how the gospels can be read today. If Ferrara's film hadn't turned out so messy, it would not have been a film about Jesus.

I have always been troubled by Slacker, as it is been the only Linklater I haven't been able to enjoy immediately. It is an hour and a half of disconnected dialogue, each scene focused on a conversation or monologue that ends as the character from the upcoming scene appears and then wanders out of the old frame into a new one. This cycle repeats from the first scene, a young Linklater talking to an oblivious cabby about dreams, choices, and parallel universes (ideas which crop up again in Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly). From there on out, each scene tracks Linklater's obsession with the idefinite nature of moral choice and philosophical conversation. The erratic structure of the film flits through people and conversations, either unwilling or unable to let itself sit still long enough for a narrative to settle in.

In a later essay on "Slacker Culture," Linklater defined a slacker as someone "who is striving to attain a realm of activity that runs parallel to their desires," often by abandoning cultural norms in terms of career and authority. This then would make Slacker the charter for most of Linklater's other films, as they are all populated by characters wrestling with the difference between their desires and their activities. The theme is easy to see in the Hawke and Delpy films, the rotoscoped films, and Tape. But to argue from greater to lesser, we could even pick something like School of Rock and talk about Jack Black's character as a slacker with a Hollywood ending. It is easy to imagine Jack Black searching Austin's rock scene for AC/DC glory, Ethan Hawke talking your ear off about a lost love, or Matthew McConaughey passing out on someone's couch. And Slacker also introduces us to Linklater's long takes. These shots are like eavesdropping in a cafe, where you know that if you turn away even briefly you will probably lose track of the conversation. I guess it took this kind of listening to actually film slackers in their natural habitat for the first time.

But I have still always had a problem with the film, put off by the amount of planning and concentration that went into most of the scenes. Many of them are as ham-fisted as senior art shows. I wonder now, though, how relevant that is. This particular segment of Austin society seems a few more apples shy of a bushel than the rest of town, but many of Slacker's stories and conversations are biographical. Unlike Gummo, which with Slacker could be what Herzog called the "entertainment of the future," Slacker isn't just posing. It is real posing, authentic posing, and in this way it is one of the first documented ironies of Generation X. It was so well received because its first audience was just as lost in post-college digestions of cultural theory, religion, and philosophy. It had already adopted the pose Linklater was developing in a cinematic way, his direction partaking in the sense of narrative time enjoyed by a Slacker Culture disconnected from the 9-5 grind. It seems that my problem with the film was that in being about Slacker Culture, it became a slacker aesthetic. The way this aesthetic merges a cinema high, referencing the gaze of other directors historically linked with spiritual/political reflection, with a narrative and conversational low is not as offensive as I thought. (And may have something to do with how much I like Van Sant.) In hindsight it is prophetic, as Slacker is like a blog that I would definitely put on my rss feeder. Each conversational episode is like a blog post in a community of similar voices.

The last episode of the film is a hike up a trail to a rocky overlook, like Brakhage's Dog Star Man shot in a grainy and mythical low millimeter stock. In between two dizzying sweeps of the lens we see a copy of Paul Goodman's Growing up Absurd (the the Slacker roadmap) lying next to the Southwest Fiction Anthology by Max Apple. This brief glimpse of these books is telling, identifying their reader as a certain kind of person with certain kinds of Slacker thoughts. Like a blog post this shot is an off-hand Twitter on life referencing a number of sources at the same time. The reader is tuning in and turning on. He is dropping out, but he is doing it in the Southwest, in Austin. Like Percy's Moviegoer he has a keen sense of place but nowhere to go. Immediately after the shot of the two books, Linklater throws his camera off the cliff, the frame spins around as if we are seeing the last few seconds of life from the point of view of the camera, and the film is over. This is an unexpected finale, but it is playful and exuberant, Linklater throwing his hands up and exclaiming: What more can I say? This is a slacker conclusion.

The old words of grace are worn smooth as poker chips and a certain devaluation has occurred, like a poker chip after it is cashed in. Even if one talks only of Christendom, leaving the heathens out of it, of Christendom where everyone is a believer, it almost seems that when everyone believes in God, it is as if everybody started the game with one poker chip, which is the same as starting with none.

(Walker Percy, The Message in a Bottle)

So I met a friend the other day that I haven’t seen for a long time. Years ago we converted to different religions which historically have been relatively incommunicado. We went different places, thought our way to different spiritualities, became adults. As this is the case, I was surprised at the ease with we were able to talk. And not about the things that people talk about when they are catching up (the weather in Boston, etc…), but we talked about things we are both naturally inclined towards: first things, “solving for pattern” stuff, all the big thoughts. For me these would be God and language, which seem to have analogues in Buddhist doctrine. I was struck by his articulation of our experience of the world, a world precisely like the one described by Kierkegaard that has so informed Protestant speculation on living in modernity. I was struck by his commitment to life, Catholic in its intense appreciation of prenatal dignity, one that extends farther and more coherently into his daily routine than mine. (In Christian theology, man is granted ontological authority to eat and use animals for survival. In Buddhism, life seems valued in such a foundational way that such distinctions can’t be made.) I was edified by his self-identification as a liberal, one that has points of contact with Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor, who as leftist Christians critiqued the husk of an American liberalism that drifted from its ethical connections to moral theology and teetered towards Orwellian sloganeering. I think he would enjoy Milbank’s distinction between liberalism and liberality.

I was happy to discover a mutual appreciation for the perils and blessings of religious language, which while slippery and opaque becomes active and possible in its very speaking. Time didn’t permit much more than these surprises, which like Percy’s bottled messages were unexpected in a formative way. And of course, I was interested in hearing him talk about Buddhism and grace, grace being where Christianity begins and ends. But I suppose we did think about it informally, it was present in the setting of two friends who haven’t seen each other for a long time making connections. It was present in the possibility that we could sit at a table outside in the breezy evening and talk about god/God/whatever. I forgot to tip the guy across the street playing the saxophone, an act that now strikes me as a regrettable offense to his gracious presence. When I converted to Christianity, I was quickly schooled in a combative way of talking to people about faith, handed a stack of Percy’s poker chips, and pushed out the door. It took me a long time to realize that grace was not just a concept, but an event, rooted in what New Testament historians often call the “Christ event” (which starts with his birth and ends with the early church), an event like a stone in a pond now rippling through our interactions with other people regardless of their ideological affiliations. God-talk is always an act of grace. I am sure that we can find some things to disagree about, and probably should, but it will always be worth reveling in encounters with people interested in things that are true.

(And since this blog is about film and stuff, it is startling to note how easily the previous few sentences apply to our interaction with culture as well.)

The thrill of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and what ultimately makes it a seminal film of modern American spirituality, is the way it drills down through religious experience and finds a character both mythic and contemporary. He is mythic in the sense that his experience is common - he is a convenient caricature of all who have been lulled by the wonder of religious experience. He is contemporary in the sense that his path of spirituality leads through a number of pop-cultural fascinations with aliens and government conspiracies - the secularization of traditional Judeo-Christian images of revelation and heaven. Roy Neary is as close as the American cinema had gotten to its own Moses or Elijah, a character that led us up the mountain to an unprecedented special effects revelation and then vanished in a whirlwind of CGI, taken up into the glory of Spielberg’s version of transcendence.

Roy as a mythic figure has a lot in common with the end of 2001, a point at which Close Encounters becomes an exposition of spirituality no longer connected to traditional concepts of divinity, but now linked to a science-fictional appreciation of outer space and its possible inhabitants as metaphors for the evolution of man. At this point we could easily wander off into the great debate between science and theology, Close Encounters being a text that could be closely read as a parable of modernity. But at the end of the day, it’s a Pilgrim’s Progress for those whose religious imagination is formed by Star Wars and Indiana Jones.

As a figure of contemporary spirituality, which is a term so broad that it is just shy of meaningless, Roy is a precursor to the X-Files bait and switch in which traditional concepts of divinity get transposed with a numinous idea of the “unknown” that reveals itself in fleeting glimpses of aliens and monsters. In 1950’s science fiction aliens were anti-religious figures - menacing, dominating, little regard for nature or capitalism (Russians, basically). In the 70’s they became more abstract, secularized versions of angels that in the Jewish and Christian traditions are connected with revelation and the presence of God. Through what Rosenbaum calls “dopey Hollywood mysticism,” all traditional Judeo-Christian ideas have similar analogues in Roy’s pioneering journey. Early in the film a young boy accepts his alien abduction with childlike faith. Marked like Moses coming down from Sinai, Roy’s Damascus experience with the alien ships leaves his head half-sunburned, implanted with a recurring image that leads him to Devil’s Tower. The construction of this image out of mud and trash in his living room is referenced by an earlier glimpse of DeMille’s The Ten Commandments on the television. Forsaking career and family he makes pilgrimage to the tower in spite of a litany of Pilgrim’s Progress-like hurdles, including a gas of sleepiness. By faith he makes his way through a wilderness littered with animals seemingly dead from “accidentally released nerve gas,” which turns out to actually have been the aforementioned sleeping gas. On the mountain top he tells his companion to leave and not look back, as Lot’s wife, and makes his way down to the landed alien ship. An antiphonal liturgy of tones is recited. Finally, he stands like Ezekiel before an ophanic space chariot, and like Elijah or Enoch is taken up into the ineffable. In a later version of the film, Speilberg extended the ending so that we get a glimpse of the heavenly interior of the ship, an attempt to further visualize the end of Roy’s journey as an afterlife analogue. In this version the process by which all these Jewish and Christian references are steadily replaced by Roy becomes clear – the aliens are the culmination of Roy’s religious script, overwriting all of its references with technology, self-revelation, and a vivid sense of universal connectedness. Roy's journey is not just contemporary in its use of aliens and government conspiracies as metaphor of faith, but it espouses a mysticism that is only possible now that we have the special effects technology to actually produce it. It is a mysticism only possible in the cinema. As this is the case, its value vanishes with the CGI - its heaven only accessible by DVD.