Hildegard of Bingen

Yesterday, Roger and I saw the movie Vision: From the Life of Hildegard of Bingen, directed by Margarethe von Trotta. Hildegard was a 12th century nun and mystic, known for her visions.

The movie juxtaposes a 1950s-style Hollywood technicolor "Catholic" aesthetic with a feminist portrayal of a nun. The convent/ abbey is a somber place--lots of gray stone and women swathed in identical habits marching down corridors holding thick lit candles or surrounding the beds of dying like blue-clad vultures. Hildegard, who becomes its abbess, is a strong and serious leader and also an herbalist and healer. Some scenes show her in the convent garden gathering herbs with her nuns as she sternly quizzes them about which herb heals what ailment. In a feminine divine moment, the nuns act out Hildegard's play, Play of the Virtues, with the nuns playing the virtues, Hildegard as Anima, or the soul, and a friendly priest playing the Devil. The young nuns and Hildegard, their hair free and festooned with flowers, dressed in soft white shifts like May Day dancers, defeat the Devil and tie him up. An old nun who refuses to participate condemns the women for showing their hair.

Setting a bleak tone, the movie opens with villagers huddled in a cold church on New Year's Eve, 999, awaiting the end of the world. However, as we know, the world does not end--nor is Hildegard born for another 98 years. Following that, the opening sequences show flagellations juxtaposed with the young Hildegard being taken under the wing of the saintly and somewhat saccharine "mother" Jutta, the abbess, scenes which could easily have been lifted from a church-approved 1950s film. Not long after, Jutta dies, and we find that she has been mortifying herself with a metal mesh sash tied around her waist and working its way into her flesh under her habit.

Hildegard's visions serve to forward her own agenda. She is powerful and determined. But while she achieves her goals within the larger church hierarchy, such as establishing her own convent apart from the men, she is thwarted when her favorite nun and protege, from a noble family, is taken from her to become abbess of her own convent. Hildegard fights the transfer with all her might to no avail. This adds to the complexity of Hildegard's character. She undoubtedly is in love with the nun and selfish in wanting to keep her, as the young woman points out to her.

The film, a German production, is in German, and for anyone post-Nazi (ie., all of us) the emphasis on order, hierarchy and faceless uniformity, not to mention "mountaintop visions," carries a chilling layer of reference and serves as an implicit condemnation of the Catholic church. I have to imagine this was deliberate on von Trotta's part.

The movie was beautifully filmed, well acted and despite a slow pace, seemed shorter than it actually was.

I'm ambivalent about it however. Is it a cliche to add flagellation to a movie about medieval nuns and priests, especially when its not integral to the plot--and when flagellation did not burst into vogue until after Hildegard's death? Is it a cliche for a nun to fall in love with her protege in a strange, repressed way? Or are both realistic? Does anyone know anything about Hildegard? As a mystic, she seems a person who would be of interest to Quakers.

Avatar and Star Trek

Have you seen the movie Avatar?

Beautiful special effects and all the women, as a friend pointed out, are strong characters. Cameron understands powerful women and almost always--maybe always--does a good job portraying them.

But the film is thin, thin, thin in terms of story. Noble savages living at one with nature and the nature goddesses on an alien planet are saved from a rapacious military-industrial-complex Earth invasion by a strong, good white man. I was reminded of 1985's time travel movie, Back to the Future, in which WASPy white Michael J. Fox "gives" rock 'n' roll to a black band ... and as I watched the swaying aliens praying to the goddesses, I thought: 1930s Tarzan movies.

I was also reminded of a Star Trek episode from 1968 in which Captain Kirk is hit on the head and loses his memory while on a planet populated by aliens who are very much like Native Americans (we find out later that a master race has seeded these simple natives throughout the galaxy; hence the similarities.) Anyway, the driven organization man-- Kirk --embraces the simple life and falls in love with the chief's daughter, Miramanee. The natives take him for a god when he uses mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to revive a young boy who has drowned. Because of his status, he's able to marry Miramanee. Well, things end badly, as you might imagine .. but what struck me was how much better this mediocre Star Trek episode was than Avatar.

The Star Trek episode was better because Kirk has an articulated inner struggle, and in this episode, as in others, he's embracing a gentler, happier, non-striving life, which he wants but would never seek while serving as captain of a starship. You believe in the anguish of his conflicting desires and root for him as he, temporarily, achieves his suppressed goal of domestic bliss. Even while he's suffering amnesia, Kirk is experiencing inner conflict, dreaming anxiously of the "great lodge in the stars" and feeling he should be there. In Avatar's hero, you have none of that. The hero seems entirely unconflicted about throwing his lot in with the nature-loving aliens. All through the movie, I kept saying to myself--perhaps the Quaker in me coming out--don't you see you are killing HUMANS? Wouldn't making that choice be a natural vehicle for some kind of questioning, anguish or self-doubt? Wouldn't you be at least a little torn between your own species and aliens? Wouldn't there be at least a little concern over being a Benedict Arnold?

Additionally, the Star Trek episode, with a few camera shots, shows us the jealousy and torment of the man who is displaced by Kirk in Miramanee's affections, setting up the conflict that will come to a head at the end of the episode. This man is a real character and you can't help but feel his pain, just as you can't help but have an uncomfortable sense that Captain Kirk is trodding roughshod into other people's lives. In Avatar, there's also a jealous displaced alien, but you don't feel his pain in any realized way. He's just another obstacle in our hero's path--a thing.

So what is the point of this? That it takes soul more than money to create art? Did you like Avatar?

American Movie, social class, Kierkegaard, despair

I recently saw the film American Movie. It's a 1999 documentary about Mark Borchardt, a 29-year-old with a passion for movie making. The film documents his struggles to finish a black and white horror film called Coven.

Struggle he does. Perhaps the most overt theme in the movie is how every card in this working class high school drop-out's life is stacked against him. Mark is intelligent, energetic, determined to succeed, funny and personable. He has a vision and a passion. Yet because of his class situation, there's almost nothing to support him. Certainly very little money and almost no access to people with the education and expertise to smooth his path.

His Wisconsin world is bleak, from the barren, frozen landscape to the small, drab house he shares with his mother (and sometimes his three children from a former marriage) to the cramped trailer where his uncle lives in a mobile home park. Mark supports himself by delivering newspapers and doing janitorial work in a mausoleum/cemetery (at one point this involves washing defecation off a bathroom wall). His best friend is a cheerful, overwieght recovering alcoholic and acidhead whose main activity in life involves buying scratch-off lottery tickets, which he justifies as a better use of his money than drink or drugs.

As for Mark's family, they are less than the American Family Values ideal: His brothers say disdainful things about Mark: he won't finish his film, he's a hopeless dreamer, he's a loser, he has about enough brains to work in a factory. His father, who is separated from his mother, won't help him with the film. He self-righteously doesn't like the "language" in it. HIs mother doesn't think he will ever complete the movie, which he has been working on for years. People come to production meetings, then melt away when he needs them. Luckily, he has a girlfriend who actually doesn't undermine him. Possibly his best supporter is his shrunken old uncle in the trailer, who gives him $3,000 to complete the film and makes it through 31 takes of a scene in which he has to say four short lines that he keeps botching. The uncle is no great enthusiast however: At best, he is a verbally abusive skeptic, the unwilling underwriter of a project he doesn't believe in and has been bullied into financing.

With friends like these, who needs enemies? Yet the grace in the movie is the way Mark works with the people around him. He's largely patient and good-humored through what must be enormous frustrations. He's able to laugh. He's able to see the good in what seem like the biggest collection of misfits ever assembled. He's able to inspire them to be better than they are. He's able to pull them together, however imperfectly, into a community that transcends itself. Through his passion, he draws them in and releases their energies: Near the end, it's amazing to see them all working feverishly against a deadline to edit the movie in the hours--even minutes-- before its premiere.

His mother gives him a place to stay and though often unwilling and largely unable, she fills in as an extra and does camerawork. His acidhead friend is nothing but loyal. He even gets his young children to help with the filming from time to time.

You wonder how Mark keeps on. He gets depressed sometimes--and lashes out bitterly at the safest people in his life, his mother and uncle--but he never despairs.

Kierkegaard and Mark

About the same time I watched this movie, an essay ran in the New York Times written Gordon Martino about Kiergegarrd and despair (happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/kierkegaard-on-the-couch/?scp=1&sq=kierkegaard&st=cse.) This essay, I thought, describes Mark.

According to the Times piece, Kierkegaard distingushed between depression and despair. Despair is the state of not wanting to accept who you fundamentally are, of wanting to get rid of yourself, as Kierkegaard put it. It's a malaise of the spirit. Depression is the blues, the self being out of sorts. Ironically, accepting who you are can lead to depression--if you fancy yourself a wealthy extroverted businessperson but your soul cries out that you are truly an avant-garde musician-- that can be depressing, given the mores of the culture. Yet that very depression--the struggle of the self-- can lead to spiritual growth. Though we've collapsed the spiritual and the psychological in our culture and see despair as a form of depression, a malady of the self, in fact, a person can be depressed and yet spiritually healthy; happy and yet spiritually ill.

Mark, it seems to me, enacts this Kierkegaardian distinction between despair and depression. For as depressed as he gets--and who wouldn't, with his bleak, miserable prospects--he is not a figure of despair. He's fundamentally doing what he was called to do--fundamentally expressing his deepest, most creative self as he enacts his filmmaking. Bad as everything in his life is, including his movie, we respond to his spiritual health and vitality, his integrity. And the rawness, pain and vulnerability of his desire.

At one point in this film, Mark, in many way this most spiritual of people, drives around looking at Macmansions and talks about aspiring to the American Dream of material success. He discusses having a Christian ethic but also wanting money, about being torn, about being half a Christian. It's funny in its naivete of expression, but we're drawn, again, to his integrity, his awkward passion to express who he really is.

In the end, his irony is our irony: Reaching his goal of material success might be the very thing that drives him out of depression and into despair. At the same time, in seeking his goal, he is fully, authentically alive.

Do you agree with Kiergegaard's dinstinction? What blocks us--many of us probably more privileged than Mark--from finding and expressing our authentic selves and how do we do this in a way that isn't narcissistic?

A Law Abiding Citizen

Yesterday, I went to the movie "Taking Woodstock." Before it came on, I saw a trailer for a movie called "A Law Abiding Citizen."

This is what I gathered the movie to be about: A man (the law-abiding citizen) loses his pretty elementary-aged daughter and his wife to a home invasion. Apparently, the two are clubbed to death, as the trailer shows one of the invaders swinging a thick wooden bat as soon as the front door is opened to him.

The murderers are caught and as best I could gather, due to a plea or a deal, one got the death penalty, but the other a lighter sentence. The law-abiding citizen was upset. The prosecutor told him this is how justice is served in the United States.

The trailer cuts to the electric chair on the day the condemned murderer is to die. When all the witnesses have assembled to watch the execution, they find the condemned man already strapped to the chair, already dead, his body contorted into a pose of agony, as though he had been tortured. Then we see what is presumably the other murderer strapped to a table, with the law-abiding citizen approaching him with a circular power saw whirring.

Then we cut to the law-abiding citizen back in the prosecutor's office, this time presumably arrested for murder. For a moment, it doesn't look good for the citizen but soon there's an explosion, and all the cars in the courthouse parking explode in a dramatic chain reaction, apparently orchestrated by the citizen. A law enforcement person asks, what was he, a spy? and someone else answers that he was more than a spy, he was the brains behind the spies. Someone also says, if he's in jail, that's because he wants to be. The citizen himself tells the prosecutor that he is going bring the system crashing down on his head.

This is not a movie I plan to go to see. It seemed to me, from the trailer, that it was channeling the frustrations of many, especially males, who might feel powerless and unsafe in a society that seemingly cannot protect their families or bring justice to criminals. I was disturbed that we seemed to be expected to identify with the ironically named law-abiding citizen as he orchestrates a spree of ultra-violence to enact the justice denied him. I was unsettled, but not surprised, that violence was the one and only avenue explored for confronting injustice or changing the system and that the "lone hero" was, once again, Rambo style, going to singlehandedly bring the system "down." Clearly, we already have enough people out there with guns and not afraid to use them. Do we need to encourage this behavior? And what kind of powerlessness do people feel when they indulge in these vicarious fantasies of almost supernatural power and violence?

Interestingly, when I read about the film on the Internet, apparently the law-abiding citizen, whom I was led to believe was the hero, is a dangerous sociopath who must be stopped. The real hero of the story is the prosecutor, who was apparently forced by his superior to make the deal with one murderer to get his testimony against the other. According to the Internet, he must match his wits to the citizen's to stop him, especially after his own family is targeted. However, the trailer depicts him as a cold tool of a corrupt system.

I imagine I should have identified the citizen as a sociopath when he went after the strapped-down murderer with a circular power saw. Certainly, I found that disturbing. But I am so used to being out of sync with the rest of the world on the subject at violence, that I thought, OK, it must be me. The rest of the world must be OK with the powersaw revenge scenario. I was glad to find that apparently this is not so, and that the actions of the citizen are not meant to be heroic.

I wonder why the trailer gave a distorted view of the movie, leading me, in any case, to assume the narrative was on "the side" of the citizen? I also wish, as I often do, that we could produce more movies which explore alternatives to violence and in which the showdown doesn't come down to who can better mastermind using the various weapons of destruction that happen to be at hand. Also, I wish so much we could move beyond the "home invasion" scenario, which, I understand, is rare in real life but seems to inspire all sorts of ideas about stockpiling arsenals of weapons.

I think we have all seen this movie before, in one guise or another. Why do you think this movie keeps getting made?

Relationships and Art

Two quotes from the Andrew Stanton interview on Wall.E in Christianity Today:

You could blame consumerism as one thing that's happening in this film, but there's a million other things we do that distract us from connecting to the person next to us and from furthering relationships, which is truly the point of living. So I came up with the idea that as WALL•E was picking up trash, it would have all these signs of humanity for him to rifle through, to get him interested in what humans were all about. I loved the idea of WALL•E finding something real. He was fascinated with the idea of living. And what's the point of living? Something real. He was a manmade object with something real inside him. And he found something real while surrounded by manmade objects. That just was poetic for me.


He goes on to say that a great story or movie makes you care:

And typically that's because you've tapped into some truth. Truth isn't always pretty, truth isn't always fair, and truth isn't always inviting. But when you tap into it the right way you can't ignore it, and it touches you to your core. That's what I'm a junkie for when I see a great movie or hear a great story told, and that's what I'm really trying to go for when I'm doing any kind of story.

© Christianity Today International. All rights reserved. Click for reprint information.

I'm interested in what books, works of art or relationships have touched people to the core. What distracts you from relationships? How do books, poems, works of art, etc. help your relationships?

Wall.e's director is a Christian

Roger read my review (I finally wrote it!) of Wall.e last night, in which I mention parallels between the movie and the Noah's ark story. He searched around the web for other mentions of this parallel and found the following interview with Wall.e's director in Christianity Today: http://www.christianitytoday.com/movies/interviews/andrewstanton.html

Wall.e's director is a Christian, it turns out. (He also directed Finding Nemo). Like many Christians in the arts today, he doesn't want to preach or be heavy-handed but he said that the Adam and Eve story informed the movie. Wall.e, like Adam, longs for an end to his loneliness and dreams of a mate, who comes in the form of the robot "Eve." The Noah's ark theme was unplanned, Stanton said, but as it emerged, he went with it.

One of my exciting finds as a religion reporter was encountering a number of people doing art from a Christian world view and faith perspective (because they are Christians) but deliberately avoiding the world of schlocky, sentimental or heavy-handed Christian genre art. Joey Tomassini, for example, who has an MFA in art from, I believe George Washington, goes to Latin American countries and creates collaborative murals with children from orphanages, using art to help empower them. For his master's thesis, he collaborated with a homeless man on paintings, even letting the man sleep in his studio. When he presented his project, he said half the class loved it and half the class condemned him for engaging in risky behavior.

Do you know of other examples of people expressing their faith through art, but in a way that is not heavy-handed?