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Why the Gospel Isn’t a Romantic Comedy
BY: Brian Watkins |
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Answer:
"It was too violent."
"It was too depressing."
"There wasn't enough hope."
"All I remember is that they cursed a lot."
"There was nothing redemptive about that story so I didn't like it."
Question:
What are common statements made by Christians after experiencing one of Hollywood's many violent or grotesque films?
Right you are, Dick.
We've all made these comments, or at least known someone who has, after watching a particularly violent or shocking film. And it got me wondering: Why are we so put off by violence? It seems to me that there are two main reasons. The first reason is good. The second reason is bad.
The first reason is that, simply put, violence is violent. At its core, it is damaging. It is stress inducing and cruel. It destroys the things we love. This reason makes sense.
The second reason stems from the fact that we often impose an incorrect version of the Christian narrative onto our stories. This belief states that the Christian narrative is clean and devoid of violence. This belief is wrong. In fact, the Christian narrative contains imagery far more violent than popular cinematic and fictional expressions. But the issue goes deeper than just violence.
If fictional stories are intended to be reflections on the state of the human condition, which centers on our heart-wrenching separation from God, why do we continually demand spotless fairy-tales? Why do we so often play the abominably dangerous game of "What is Christian and What is Not?"
Stuck in the annals of modernity we too often subscribe to talking about and referencing the cleanest stories for the cleanest people. This method of filtering out stories that don't smack of the latest upbeat worship song is a form of watering down the Gospel, polarizing to the secular world, and is far more dangerous than the art we are so quick to shy away from.
Scripture could be considered the original horror film. Just read Leviticus. Burning ague and diseased bowels abound generously. Our oldest stories involve entire cities being annihilated in one divine fell swoop. Deception, incest, talking donkeys, men living inside whales. This is the stuff of the summer blockbuster.
This is not to say that the Christian community hasn't embraced violence in cinematic form before. It's just only been when the subject matter is spot on, in a direct representation of the bible. But why do we apply a different line of logic to fiction?
With studios like Fox and Sony creating divisions solely committed to producing "Christian" or "faith-based" films, it's apparent what the secular world and private sector think Christians are "in to." The studio heads have implemented a philosophy that says Christians want their movies and entertainment to be cozy factories of feel-goodery, tucked away from the outside pitfalls of relativistic culture and foreboding evil. And, generally speaking, they are right. What we oftentimes fail to realize is that the practice of limiting our tastes to what we call "safe" and "redemptive" actually separates us from the outside world, dragging us away from the cultural discussion table and therein sacrificing opportunities to speak up merely by having a piece of imagery to commiserate with in a great piece of art. Requiring art to always be entertaining and happy is like praying to win the lottery. It is narrow-minded and shallow and should be avoided at all costs.
If we limit our idea of hope in the artistic world to “something that makes us feel good” then we are completely missing scripture’s very definition of the word. In Romans chapter 8 Paul tells us "[a] hope seen is no hope at all." Our logic doesn't line up if we expect our representational stories to be fulfillments of the hope that Paul explains to be a future glory that the whole creation waits for with eager expectation, "inwardly groaning with the pains of childbirth." Later on in the chapter, he reminds us from Psalm 44:22 that this condition is perpetual: "[for] your sake we face death all day long, we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered." Hope is found in the lack of glory, more so than in its fulfillment; otherwise, it wouldn’t be hope at all.
The Coen brothers' grippingly first-rate film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men is one of the most realistically violent and Gospel-centered films in the last decade. From the beginning, No Country... stares us down with a directly Christian predicament that is remarkably straightforward: This is no country for old men. In fact, this is no place for anyone. Themes of the "inward groaning" flourish in the barren and seemingly hopeless landscape of the Texas border. In its extremely violent characters, we are affronted with an old-testament-esque tenor of incessant damage. The character of Sheriff Bell articulates this early on in the story: "Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I don’t want to confront him. I know he's real. I have seen his work."
We find a similar sentiment all throughout scripture: we don't belong here. There is a gap. Yet there is something deeper inside of us that hopes for something unseen. There is a future glory unrealized and we live as foreigners in this current world that has been broken by sin.
What we've been given in the work of the Coen brothers and McCarthy is an honest (yet fictional) depiction of a broken world. A place so thickly riddled with the contaminant of the Fall that we can't help but admit to the universality of evil. In her essay "Catholic Novelists", Flannery O'Connor writes:
I don't believe we shall have great religious fiction until we have again that happy combination of believing artist and believing society. Until that time, the novelist will have to do the best he can in travail with the world he has. He may find in the end that instead of reflecting the image at the heart of things, he has only reflected our broken condition and, through it, the face of the devil we are possessed by. This is a modest achievement, but perhaps a necessary one.
When a "secular" piece of art admits this radically objective truth, it should be lauded and praised. Yet even when we're given such creative spiritual fodder we tend to toss these types of stories away because they aren't palatable to our strict moral movie-going standards, typically because there was "too much violence" or "too much foul language" or because “it was depressing.”
By doing this we are telling the artists who created the piece that we would rather them gloss over the evil they see and commit to the good. This censoring of vision is ultimately something a true artist is incapable of doing, as their primary task is to interpret the world in front of them. To mutate the artist's perception is not possible. In fact, by inadvertently subscribing to a more sugary brand of fiction we in turn exacerbate a growing sense of relativism. Though our aim in personal censorship might be well-intentioned, it is a fruitless effort that keeps us far too safe and distances us from the rest of society and biblical truth itself. We must no longer treat our artistic standards like a moral compass.
Now surely these are gross generalizations, made to emphasize a point and there are, of course, exceptions to be made. Sensationalism, for one, has become a pop-culture favorite in the form of horror flicks and quasi-snuff films and is not the dramatic form I am trying to endorse. Although in rare cases effective, sensationalism is an anti-art in practice of great immoderation and any thinking person should be able to identify it at their local video store as "not worth their time.” And surely there is content inappropriate for children and others that needs to be avoided, but a redemptive story with hope and happiness is not the one we should always be looking for.
The surface idea that films today are devoid of redeeming qualities is a near-sighted stricture in practice of personal piety and misses the point entirely. The reality is that displaying a void of hope or lack of redemption in a film actually serves as a beautifully tooled juxtapositional device in which there is no hope seen, but a hope sought after. These grotesque displays of violence, foul language, and relationships wrought with sin might be difficult to sit through, but more importantly, they are universal declarations of the brokenness we live in and the limits of our capabilities for grace and compassion; a truthful affirmation, made through imagery and parable, of the need for something larger than ourselves.
Flannery O'Connor explained this reality by saying, "[violence] is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace… This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world."
We should not be squeamish or put off by such shocking stories. In turn, we should try lining up with our bible studies to see films from the Coen brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Martin McDonagh and discussing in our small groups the fiction of Cormac McCarthy and the plays of Tracy Letts and Adam Rapp, squirming and retching in community with one another. As a past article from this very publication reminds us: If we truly believe what we believe as Christians then we shouldn't be shocked by anything.
At the end of No Country…, after two hours of devastating violence, we are given a glimpse of this yearning for a hope fulfilled. McCarthy beautifully manifests it in an image of father and son that is wrought with spiritual implication:
It was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.
This same quote was cited in Critique’s earlier review of this movie, but given its sheer beauty, I think its something we all need to read more than once.
McCarthy's body of work, and the work of artists like him, serves as a reminder that the world of scripture is far bigger than the normal path to positive inspiration we often make it out to be. To not seek out its different manifestations would be a gross disservice to our neighbors and to ourselves.
Copyright © 2008 Brian Watkins.
Questions:
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Source:
Flannery O'Connor. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969), p. 112, 171;
Cormac McCarthy. No Country For Old Men. (New York: Vintage, 2007), p. 2, 309.
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Brian Watkins
Brian is a writer and actor living in Brooklyn, NY. His most recent play High Plains was produced this May at Emerging Artists Theatre in New York City. Other plays include The Bison of Kiowa and Harold and Nettie.You can see more of his work at www.fivecentwhiskey.com
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On my desk is a little vase of flowers cut from our yard, a little reminder of the beauty that is all around if we only have eyes to see. I've needed that reminder after reading the latest news of the horrific oil spill in the Gulf. Such glory in this world, such brokenness. Such hope, such deep need for redemption. These are the realities of life and death we seek to explore on this web site. Thank you for visiting.
Denis & Margie
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