This article was first published in Second Spring
The Cave of Enlightenment
By Dwight Longenecker
As I enter a darkened cinema I'm
sometimes reminded of
Plato's myth of the cave. There people sat in darkness watching
the shadows of the real world shimmer across the wall before
them. In the cave of the cinema audiences are also entranced as
bright images of the world flicker before their eyes.
Plato's cave dwellers had only shadows.
The cinematic
caveman, on the other hand, enjoys technologically brilliant
interpretations of reality. Out of the flickering light real
people appear who enact the conflicts of society and the terrors
and joys of the human heart. In the cinema Plato's cave is merged
with that other Greek legacy-- the theatre. As a screenwriter and
film critic I find that the darkness, drama and discovery of the
cinematic experience runs parallel to my religious experience.
It is no co-incidence that the earliest
drama was part of
the tribe's religious cult. When primitive people don masks and
dance out the stories of the gods they are being religious.
Likewise the Greeks attended the theatre as part of their
communal religious observance. There they experienced a
redemptive catharsis as the dreadful stories of human destiny
were played out before them. In successful drama a transaction
takes place between artist and audience. By identification with
the hero they are taken beyond their subjective experience into
the realm of universal verities and unchanging values.
This lifting from the individual
to the communal; from the
personal to the universal and from the petty to the heroic is
also one of the functions of liturgy, prayer and catechesis. In
a unified society, drama and religion are sisters. They
complement one another--the religion specifies what the drama
left implicit while the drama incarnates and enacts the religious
truths.
I'm not the only one to sense the
religious quality of the
cinematic experience. The film director
Martin Scorcese wanted
to be a priest when he was a boy. He writes, "...I
soon realised
that my real vocation, my real calling,
was the movies. I don't
really see a conflict between the church and the movies ...I can
see great similarities between a church and a movie house. Both
are places for people to come together and share a common
experience."
What I find frustrating is the yawning
chasm between the
world of cinema and the church. When I offered to write an
article for a major film magazine on how Jesus had been treated
in the cinema, the editor commented, "If
I took an article like
that my ordinary readers wouldn't be interested and I would
offend the religious people." His
stark assessment was right.
Typical movie fans are not interested in Christianity while
Christians seem down on movies.
This suspicion of cinema is part
of the Puritan curse on our
culture. Before the Reformation popular drama and popular
religion were complementary. If the mystery plays were sometimes
bawdy and gory they were only communicating the human realities
of the faith in an entertaining, down-to-earth way. Like all good
drama the mystery plays fleshed out the religious truths. But
Puritanism put a stop to that, and the Puritan distrust of drama
has been woven into our culture in both Catholic and Protestant
circles.
Religious folk usually complain about
cinema on three
counts. The clever ones regard movies as beneath them. The
moralists object to the sex and violence in movies, and the
earnest grumblers believe movies communicate anti-Christian
values. But these criticisms are often made by people who do not
understand drama and rarely attend the cinema. Too often the
judgements are superficial and shrill. Instead of understanding
and affirming this influential art form too many Christians stand
aside and turn up their nose.
In doing so they reject a form of
social communication which
has the power to express moral values in a popular way. For
millions who do not 'connect' with organised religion, the cinema
may be the only place where they share a communal experience and
confront the eternal questions of good, evil and redemption. One
writer has observed that 'the cinema is the modern confessional'
for there in the darkness the film-goer participates in the
struggle to overcome evil. While this is an overstatement, it is
true that a great film affirms moral truths and helps the cinema-
goer see himself and the world in a fresh way. This process is
engaging and deeply personal. When it works the chemistry can
produce a shattering moment of enlightenment.
In Shawshank Redemption Andy Dufresne--
a detached and
dispassionate man-- is wrongly jailed for murdering his wife.
After decades of wrongful imprisonment, torture and abuse he says
to his friend, "I killed her. I never
pulled the trigger, but I
killed her because I didn't love her enough. That's why she went
off with that other man. Her death is
my fault." When the hero
comes to that point of terrible self-awareness every soul in the
audience suddenly remembers the people they haven't loved enough,
and how that lack of love is a tiny act of murder. There in the
darkness we haven't seen shadows of reality, but reality itself.
Such filmic moments transform individuals
and society. The
communication of one such truth redeems all the shallow, base and
foolish moments of cinema-- towering over them like a colossus
in the desert. When a film works effectively it hammers truth
into my head through my heart and I leave the darkened cave
purged--having shared in an implicitly religious experience.
Scorcese agrees: "I believe
there's a spirituality in films,
even if it is not one which can supplant faith. I find that over
the years many films address themselves to the spiritual side of
human nature... movies answer an ancient quest for the common
unconscious. They fulfil a spiritual need
that people have."
Aristotle said a society could be
judged by the state of its
storytelling; and cinema is our form of storytelling. In my
experience of at least one movie a week, the judgement is on the
positive side. As in any art form there is much dross, but from
the dross more and more gold is being produced. Behind all the
glamour of Hollywood I believe more film-makers are attempting
to create entertaining films which score high in positive human
values. If they are to succeed they cannot be cut off from
religion. The two sisters need to hold hands: cinema must be
enlightened by religion and religion must be delighted and
challenged by cinema.
