A Fortunate Man

Religion plays a prominent role in the film, Lykke-Per, or A Fortunate Man (2018). On the surface, Peter Sidenius, a young engineer, must navigate around an old, entrenched government bureaucrat to secure approval for his ambitious renewable-energy project. The two men clash, which reflects more general tension that exists everywhere between progressives and conservatives regarding economic, social, religious, and political change. Although pride may be the ruin of Peter and his project, the role played by religion is much greater than pride manifesting as arrogance, if indeed it is arrogant to stand up to abuse of power, whether by a government bureaucrat or one’s own father.

Peter’s dad is a Christian pastor whose meanness to Peter belies any claim to know God’s judgment as well as to have an authentic Christian faith. Kierkegaard’s chastisement of the Lutheran clerical hierarchy in Copenhagen in the nineteenth century by emphasizing the need and primacy of subjective, inner piety resonates in this film. In fact, Peter’s angry reaction to his dad’s meanness when Peter is leaving home to go to college is similar the reaction that Kierkegaard must have had to hardened clergy in his day. Peter’s father begins by saying that although he gave money to Eybert, Peter’s older brother, when he left home, “you will get no money.” Adding insult to injury, the malevolent father gives Peter a watch that Peter’s grandfather had given Peter’s father. The “strings” attached to the watch that undo the giving spirit that runs throughout the Gospels is his dad’s hope that the watch will “sooth your hardened heart and open your stubborn mind.” Just in case Peter misses the point, his dad notifies his son that he is on the “road to perdition.” Peter is right, of course, in calling out his dad for his “cold intolerance” and “false piety.” That his dad demands an apology without having apologized for insulting Peter and then slaps his son’s face hard reveals the Christian minister’s abject hypocrisy, which we know has been longstanding because Peter says that he felt “like a homeless stranger” growing up in his dad’s house. Faith without love is worse than naught. Interestingly, after being slapped, Peter tells his dad, a Christian minister, to hit him properly. It is as if Jesus were saying to the Roman guard who scourging Jesus, lash me again—this time do it properly. In retrospect, Peter’s line anticipates his integrity and spiritual nature that come out as the narrative evolves.

Peter can be excused from rejecting his dad’s deity even though Peter has no idea that the Jesus in the Gospels would reject the hypocritical piety of the judgmental and hateful pastor. “Get behind me, Satan,” Jesus would likely say to Peter’s dad, and to Peter himself, Jesus would likely advise, “kick the dust off your sandals” and don’t look back. Peter has no idea that the Jesus in the Gospels is innocent and yet willingly suffers by judgmental and hateful men who are like Peter’s dad.

Following the death of Peter’s dad, Peter’s mother less harsh though just as judgmental when she meets with Peter, as if she, like her husband, were omniscient and thus entitled to judge their son’s soul. She presumes that her son has rejected God, when in actuality Peter has rejected his parents’ conception of God, and for good reason. His mother, unlike his father, however, grasps from the Gospels the value of humility and selfless love, and she is clever enough to urge Peter to be humble and selflessly love other people rather than demand that he recite the Nicene Creed. I suspect that his mother’s softer message of humility and selfless love is what enables Peter in grieving the death of his parents to face and reject his own sin of pride.

Peter asks the Christian pastor who officiates at the funeral of Peter’s mother for forgiveness for having hurt so many people. In the humbly asking the pastor for forgiveness, Peter accepts and values the Christian message underlying the Incarnation in the Gospels, where God’s selfless, or self-emptying love (agape), is in God becoming lowly flesh in order, again in selfless love, to redeem humanity from itself, and especially its pride. In other words, Peter does not need to make a profession of faith by reciting the Nicene Creed. In fact, that pastor, who associated with Peter’s dad when he was alive, abandons Peter by walking away rather than comforts the young, grieving son who is literally on his knees begging for forgiveness from God through the pastor. “You can cry more if you want to,” the callous cleric says as he turns to walk away as Peter is still kneeling. That pastor does not absolve Peter, or even say that God forgives him. But this is not necessary, for God is present not in that pastor, but, instead, in Peter’s change of heart that is triggered by his grieving. To be sure, Peter may go too far in his embrace of institutional Christianity, for he deeply hurts Jakobe Salomon, his fiancée, by breaking off their engagement because she is Jewish and he now views himself as officially Christian. Perhaps in grieving his parents, Peter internalizes some of their judgmentalism, which, along with omniscience, is associated in the film with institutional religion.

The irony may be that Peter, who dies a few years later from cancer even though he is younger than 45 or so, may go to heaven whereas both of his parents are likely in hell, but, lest I fall into the trap of presumed omniscience like Peter’s parents, I must remind myself: who am I to judge those characters? I can only stand perplexed as to the staying power of the stubborn presumed rectitude of Peter’s parents while I admire Peter’s willingness to confront himself spiritually to the point of willingly putting himself in a vulnerable position, literally and figuratively, that reveals the hurtful hardness of heart of yet another Christian pastor besides Peter’s dad.

 

Confucius (Kongzi) said, "A cap made of hemp is prescribed by the rites, but nowadays people use silk. This is frugal, and I follow the majority. To bow before ascending the stairs is prescribed by the rites, but nowadays people bow after ascending. This is arrogant, and, though it goes against the majority, I continue to bow before asccending."  The Analects 9.3 

 

Farha

The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, being in the wake of the Nazi atrocities, was arguably viewed generally then as something that the world owed to the Jewish people. Perhaps for this reason, the UN did not take adequate measures on the ground to safeguard the Palestinian residents. In retrospect, the possibility, even likelihood, that people who group-identify with (or even as) victims consciously decide to become victimizers should have been better considered. The film, Farha, made in 2021, illustrates the sheer indeterminacy, and thus arbitrariness, of human volition when it issues orders to the body to be violent against other rational beings. Channeling Kant, it can be argued that the decision to shoot a family that poses absolutely no threat impurely out of hatred based on group-identity fails even to treat other rational beings as means—to say nothing of as ends in themselves. The unadulterated deplorability in being unwilling even to use another person as a means to some selfish goal, preferring instead to kill rather than respect the otherness of another person, grounds the verdict of the culprit being less than nothing. In another film, The Brutalist (2024), Laszio, the Jewish protagonist, erroneously concludes that Jews must surely be less than nothing, given how they were treated not only in Nazi Germany, but also in Pennsylvania even after the news of the Holocaust had reached the other shore. Whether brutality or passive-aggressive prejudice is suffered, however, turning one’s victimhood into victimizing is ethically invalid, for such a callous reaction fails to treat other rational beings as ends in themselves, and may even be so severe as to fail to treat them even as means.

Near the beginning of Farha, an Islamic teacher of girls looks on approvingly as one of the girls reads that the words of an unbeliever are the lowest. I submit that this line sets the tone for the film, and underlies how the Israelis and Palestinians have treated each other as groups historically, and most egregiously in how the Israeli government killed and decimated in Gaza in 2023-2024, interestingly just after Farha had been made. The unprovoked willfulness, or volition, that the film depicts of an Israeli commander deciding to have two of his subordinates shoot an unarmed Palestinian family and leave the just-born infant to die because a Palestinian baby is not “worth a bullet,” can be interpreted as the prima causa that, aggregated, lead to Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023, which in turn led to the disproportionate Israeli decimation of Gaza, with as many as 55,000 killed and over a million residents rendered homeless and suffering a famine. In other words, the pivotal incident of the film can be heard has the proverbial first shot. As it was not heard around the world, the filmmaker of Farha performed that service for the world.

Myopia circling self-identification based on groups perpetuates cycles of hatred and violence. In Farha, the Islamic teacher objects to Farha’s father, who decides to allow his daughter to attend school in the city. She already knows the Koran, the teacher says. “What else is there to learn?” Closing the loop, as it were, can lock in antagonism based on group-identity, for the Koran not only states that the words of the unbeliever are lowest, but also that if a nonbeliever living in the same village refuses thrice to convert, it is better that that person be killed than risk that one’s false beliefs pollute the believers. I read this line while I was spending a Spring Break at Yale reading the Koran for a term paper. In Christianity, the Apostle Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 6:14-18 that Christians should avoid close contact with people who do not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. To be sure, merely avoiding contact is ethically superior to killing, but an Islamicist could point ironically to the story of Abraham as teaching that divine commands (and thus revelation) trump even universally-accessible moral principles.[1]

In Farha, the Israeli group-commander is not following a divine command when he uses his free will to give the order to shoot the Palestinian family; he is thus culpable. He even knowingly breaks the promise he made to Farha’s uncle, who was anonymously helping the Israeli commander, that women and children would not be harmed. Even though the commander’s group-identification-saturated paradigm backs up his volition, he is blameworthy as an individual, for his volition is his alone and so, as the Americans say of the U.S. President, the buck stops with him.

Coming away from the film, a viewer might wonder why it is that the village had to be evacuated immediately. The loud-speakers repeatedly threaten that any (Palestinian) villagers who do not leave the village immediately will be shot. Why such a hurry?  Ironically, the Israeli military could cite Paul’s no-contact dictum; the possibility of sharing the village is never brought up in the film. The dire urgency is undercut visually in the last scene, as Farha sits on a swing next to that which her friend had sat—that other swing is now broken. The village is deserted—no Israelis have moved in. Flies swarm the dead baby in the courtyard—the corps not having been worth even a bullet.

Is it such an Augustinian, Hobbesian, Pascalian, and Machiavellian world that peace is only possible once all humans have been removed from the equation?  For only finally, at the end of the film, is the village at peace; Farha walks away in silence and no one is left. She leaves the village in desolate peace. If the Age of Reason did indeed fall to the Holocaust and Gott ist tot as Nietzsche claimed, such that all we have left is human subjectivity, as the decimated philosophical phenomenologists of the decadent twentieth-century erroneously concluded, how will humanity pull itself together, especially if group-identification is permitted to continue to have such staying power in human consciousness?  Until her world was needlessly turned upside down, Farha just wanted to be a teacher; she wanted to break through constrained knowledge and help others to do so too. She ends up just trying to survive long enough in a small pantry-room to escape the arbitrariness of an antagonistic human will. Perhaps a little Buddhism might be helpful in dissolving the grip of group-identification; a group’s name can be understood as just a label, rather than as corresponding to an actual group-self, which does not really exist. In other words, “Israeli” and “Palestinian” may be interpreted as labels in a nominal rather than a realist way in terms of whether anything existent corresponds.  

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1. See Soren Kierkegaard’s book, Fear and Trembling, on this point: namely, the divine command to sacrifice Isaac trumps the ethical charge of murder even though only Abraham knows of the command whereas the ethical principle not to murder is accessible to anyone.

The Brutalist

It is easy to conclude that Adrien Brody “steals the show” in his depiction of Laszio Toth in The Brutalist (2024), a film about a Jewish architect (and his wife and niece) who emigrates to Pennsylvania from Hungary after World War II. As I was stretching my legs after watching the very long yet captivating film in a theater, a woman doing the same declared to me that Adrien Brody had definitively stolen the show. I wasn’t quite sure, though I perceived Guy Pearce’s acting out Harrison Van Buren to be emotionally fake, even forced. In understanding the film, it is vital to go beyond the obvious characters (and actors) to acknowledge the roles of two silent yet very present characters as definitive for the meaning of the film. Before revealing those characters, the proverbial elephant in the room must be discussed: Being Jewish even in the modern, “progress”-oriented world.

It is not long after Laszio sits down to talk with his initial host—Attila, the cousin—that the religious question comes up. Although Attila is Jewish, his wife Audrey is Roman Catholic and Attila has converted. Laszio shocked not only at this, but that Attila has changed his last name to the Americanized Miller. In the next scene, set outside, we see a large “Jesus Saves” lit sign in the background; in the foreground is bread-line, which is out of bread. Jesus may save souls, but apparently not hungry bodies. The implication is that Attila sold his soul in giving up his religion to fit in.

It is not that Laszio carries any grudge against Christianity; it had not been the force behind the Nazi’s Final Solution, and thus behind the concentration camp where both he and his wife Erzsébet had (separately) been sent. “Dreams slip away,” Harrison observes. Laszio can of course relate; he says at one point that he had no choice but to come to America. No longer a working architect, and unfairly deprived of housing by his cousin once in Pennsylvania, Laszio must stay in homeless shelter and shovel coal for work. To him, America is no shining city on a hill; he tells his wife at one point, “They don’t want us here. We are nothing; we are worse than nothing.” He has internalized the external prejudice against Jews, and perhaps may feel on some level that his internment in a concentration camp to have been justified. The Brutalist is not a light film.

To be less than nothing may be justified by the infliction of suffering and even death on others, as the Nazis did; to be forced to endure the sting of such intense hatred is on the contrary not to be less than nothing. Interestingly, we could say that the innocent civilians in Gaza in 2023-2024 were not less than nothing; less than nothing is applicable instead to the Israelis who can be implicated in and killed 55,000 Gaza residents and made more than a million homeless (even bombing in a tent camp). As these numbers far exceed the 1,200 Israelis who died and the couple hundred Israeli hostages, justified natural justice was also far exceeded by vengeance. That the Jewish deity saves that for itself makes this verdict all the more damning.

Just the president of Israel was wrong in his insistence that every resident of Gaza was guilty and thus deserved to suffer, so too it would be wrong to conclude that every Jewish person was culpable for the horrendous over-reaction in killing tens of thousands of Gaza residents and making many, many more homeless and facing famine and a shortage of medicine. Jewish people generally need not be in the awkward psychological position of both presuming to be the chosen people and a people that is worse than nothing.

Just as Laszio suffers wrongfully in interiorizing the sentiment of prejudiced people that Jews are worse than nothing, he does not have to carry his memory of the death-camp into his architecture. A drawing of one of his buildings is labeled, “The past in the present,” which conflicts with his intention that his buildings not only endure stylistically, but are apart from time. The underlying problem is that a human artifact cannot both hold on to the past and yet have an ambiance of eternity. The huge, cement building that he designs for Harrison looks like a giant tomb, such as the ones constructed in ancient Egypt. At the same time, the dark, hard-solid walled rooms could pass for the gas chambers used by the Nazis to kill people at the concentration camps. Laszio carries his dark past into his architecture in the “new world.” That he intentionally uses light to show a Christian cross in the distinctly Christian chapel in the building may connote the hope that had been utterly absent in the death camps. Laszio’s pride in this architectural achievement is ironic, given both his skeptical reaction to his cousin’s conversion to Catholicism to fit in, but it is not as if Laszio might convert to Christianity. After all, “Jesus Saves” is associated in the film with no bread left in the bread-line.

I submit that Christianity and the Holocaust are the two silent partners, or characters, in the film. That the consulting architect is a Protestant is no accident, for the city wanted assurance because Laszio is Jewish. Christianity is also present in Attila and Audrey’s bedroom in the form of a crucifix on a wall, and perhaps most explicitly in Harrison’s insistence that the chapel be distinctly Christian, rather than a prayer room as Laszio initially proposes. The light shown in the chapel from the cross on the ceiling cannot be missed in the otherwise gray tomb-monstrosity of a building.

As for the Holocaust, its subtle imprints can be found throughout the film. Perhaps that character is most felt—most present—not in the tomb-like rooms in the partially constructed community center—and it is odd that the public would want to spend leisure time surrounded by walls, floors, and ceilings of cement—but when slabs of cement are loaded onto a freight train. The heavy, almost deafening thuds on a drum, the iron tracks, and the train itself conjure up the trains on the way to the Nazi death-camps. When the train crashes, the fire may even evoke the ovens in the camps. It is perhaps no accident that the film has Harrison fire and evict Laszio (recall that his own cousin, the Christian Attila, kicked Laszio out earlier). The sudden freight of having to fend for oneself (and one’s family) is felt existentially, and such a fear must have been felt by the victims of the Holocaust. To subject anyone to such freight is to render oneself, rather than the victim, as worse than nothing.

Both Christianity and the Holocaust are very much present in the film, and yet obliquely so. The implicit message may be that as much as we want to be free of the past, it’s imprint can be found all around us. Why didn’t Christianity come to the rescue of the Communists, Jews, and gays in the Holocaust? Both hope and despair seem to coexist without cancelling each other out. What lies beyond Laszio’s attraction to the cross in the context of the tomb, and his unconscious interest in reimaging the dingy inner sanctum of a death camp? Why didn’t “Jesus Save” as the neon sign in the film insists?  To be free of the past does indeed lie in Laszio’s free-will, as it does for the rest of us, even though existential trauma, if left to its own devices, can reverberate through time if the severity is sufficiently intense to leave imprints in not only the human mind, but also its constructed artifacts. The human mind is perhaps too fragile for what people are all too willing to inflict on others. Not even our religions seem to be enough.

The Devil’s Arithmetic

The Devil’s Arithmetic (1999) can be classified superficially as a coming-of-age film, for Hanna, the protagonist, starts out being immaturely contemptuous of her family’s ethnic and religious heritage and current practice. She tries to skip the Passover Seder at her grandparents’ house. That her aunt Eva had been a prisoner at a Nazi death camp makes no difference to Hanna—that is, until she is transported back as her aunt’s cousin (for whom Hanna was named) and experiences the camp herself. Whether she is really transported back in time (and if so, how?) or is merely dreaming is answered in the end but not so blatantly as would insult the viewers’ intelligence. Then again, it’s not every film that has allusions both to theology and The Wizard of Oz. The different ways in which that movie is incorporated and alluded to in this film are actually quite sophisticated in extending the viewers’ sense of synchronicity beyond the film’s narrative.

In the first scene, Hanna is getting a tattoo; it’s a flower; the tattoo she gets later is of something else altogether: a number at a Nazi death camp.  At the tattoo parlor, she derides Passover as “a cracker thing;” driving home, she turns the radio from a station immediately when a man starts to describe what Passover is. Been there; done that. She is so over it. At home, she asks her mother if she has to go to the Passover Seder at her grandparents’ house. Her mother replies, “We’re going because it’s important; it’s important because I say it’s important.” In other words, the ritual is important to Jews, and she is Hanna’s mother. Period. But not end of story.

Hanna does go with her parents, and once at her grandparents’ house, she asks her aunt Eva why she never talks about her experience at a death-camp. Her aunt explains that the experience at the death camp was so far from Hanna’s world that it would mean nothing to her. In other words, Hanna has no idea how good she has it, and how bad it can get—how astonishingly bad humans can treat each other out of hatred. This can be taken as the baseline for Hanna’s character arc (i.e., to measure how much she is to change).

During the Seder meal, Hanna’s grandfather says, “We would still be enslaved had God not brought us out of Egypt.” This is of course figurative; even if historical evidence were to be discovered of Moses (and that he was in Egypt), no Jews alive in the 20^th century were old enough to have lived in ancient Egypt. So it is not “they” literally who would still be enslaved. Aunt Eva’s lived-experience of being enslaved, however, is quite literal in the film’s story-world, and quite consistent with historical accounts by actual prisoners. It is important, I submit, to distinguish story from experience. This is not to deny that stories cannot have valid religious and ethical meaning; it is to say that the film goes beyond that.

During the Seder, Hanna doesn’t want to get up to open the front door to let Elijah in. Prodded to do it, she goes to the front door of the house, opens the door, looks outside, then slowly walks backwards before turning sidewise to walk down a hall that heads away from the dining room, where the people are. The hall becomes the dream, if it is a dream. After walking a bit, she is in another house. The camera doesn’t look back, so we don’t know if there is a portal that closes, or if she walked through a wall, or suddenly appears in the room. He aunt Eva is there as a teenager and is with her mother. Hanna inhabits Eva’s cousin, who also lives there, as her parents were taken away by the Nazis. Hanna is of course surprised when Eva tells her that she has been sick and that they are first cousins, and she has no idea that Eve is the same person as her aunt in New York. Hanna was named after Eve’s cousin and is said to have a similar appearance.

The two young women go to an outdoor wedding, and Eve’s mother joins them there before the Nazi SS shows up to take all of the Jews immediately to Auschwitz. “You don’t need to go home to get your things; all your needs will be provided,” the commander lies. At the camp, Eva and Hanna stay in the same bunkhouse for some time. To calm the fears of the young children, Hanna tells them stories at bedtime. Hanna tells part of the story of The Wizard of Oz, an American film released in 1939 whom Eva’s cousin could not possibly have seen; hence Eva thinks her cousin has a very active imagination in telling such a story. At one point, Hanna tells the kids that Dorothy said, “There’s no place like home.” Everyone in the room could relate. There’s no place like home. Aware of her distant “other life” in America, Hanna says out loud, “I used to think this is a dream; now, I’m not so sure.” Eva seems to question her cousin’s sanity at that point. This is an instance of excellent screenwriting, for the film not only loosely follows the framework of The Wizard of Oz in that the protagonist is transported to distant place in what might be a dream, but also has Hanna explicitly reference the earlier film in the dialogue!

Film has great potential in terms of multiple layers, or levels traversing both dialogue and a basic framework in that this gets the mind thinking beyond what the narrative itself can stir up. A sense of synchronicity can be experienced by the viewers that goes beyond the narrative because something empirically extant is being referenced. More on this later, so hold onto this idea.

Hanna’s character arc is moving while she is at the camp, and this arc does not revert when she “wakes up” back home in her bed surrounded by her relatives (which Dorothy does too!). At the camp, Hanna asks the guy who asks her out, “Will you teach me to pray?” He is not sure how to pray. This is perhaps the film’s indictment of modernity. Of course, a religious topic is not the typical dialogue one would expect from two teenagers discovering their mutual sexual attraction. The guy tells Hanna that he and some other men will try to escape. Now, Hanna’s uncle Abe, Ava’s brother, said during the Passover meal that an escape attempt had failed in the camp, so Hanna, now at the camp, makes the connection and tries to stop her new beau from going. In fact, she warns all of the guys planning to escape. They don’t believe her, just as Eva doesn’t believe that she lived in America. How the guys or Eva know any of this about Hanna? Her “previous life” could only be known to her. Similarly, in the Book of Genesis, to everyone else, God’s decree to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac is not revealed to other people, so they would naturally doubt Abraham’s theological claim; accordingly, Abraham could only be guilty of attempted murder. Hanna could hardly convince anyone in the camp what letting Elijah in led to or that the escapees would be caught and killed.  

The escapees are indeed caught and hanged. Hanna is distraught and the rabbi wails in Hebrew, calling out to Yahweh in existential anguish. Back in the barrack, Hanna tells Eva, “It’s too painful!” Eva tells her not to wish she were dead. “Your stories are keeping us alive; they give us hope.” Victor Frankl writes that even in such a dire, elongated circumstance, the human mind still seeks after meaning.

Three of the other prisoners are stretched to their emotional limit when the camp’s commandant comes into the barrack to take one woman’s baby away from the mother. “If you don’t let me go with my baby,” she tells the man, “I will kill you.” Another woman, Eva’s mother, tells him that he will burn in hell. He admits that he probably will, without caring much at all about that. She tries to attack him physically, but is too weak and falls into him. The Nazis take the baby, the mother, and Eva’s mother. Eva is obviously beside herself.

The next day, Hanna tells the rabbi that she wants to have a Seder later at the barrack. Hanna’s character arc is really moving! In the meantime, a Nazi guard teaches another guard how to shoot at close range to kill by having him aim his rifle at Hanna’s bent-over back at close range as she works outside. Eva talks the guard out of killing her cousin, saying, “She’s a good worker.” That night, Eva tells Hanna, “I call myself Rivka.” This is her secret name; no one else knows it. Hanna gives Eva hope, saying “You will survive; I promise you.” At her Seder that night in the bunkhouse, Hanna actually volunteers to open the door to Elijah. Before, at her grandparents’ house, she resisted going to the door because she wasn’t into the whole religion thing; at the camp, she is hesitant because she is risking her life in doing so. She is risking her life for religion. Sure enough, when she opens the door, a Nazi guard is right in front of the door and sternly tells her to shut the door.

The next day, while the prisoners are outside working, Eva is coughing. If the Nazis notice, they will assume not only that she would no longer be able to work, but also that her continued sickness could compromise the health of the workforce. Knowing this, Hanna coughs so she rather than her cousin will be taken to be gassed. Hanna even walks up to the Nazis to take their attention off Eva. The sacrifice is made; Hanna is gassed with the sick prisoners and Eva survives. The selfless compassion that Hanna feels and acts on while she is at the camp stands out, especially to Eva, whose compassion is also evident. Similar to how Gandhi’s compassion, or at least helpfulness, extended even to individual British officials even while is was strongly opposed to their policies, which included putting him in jail, the film’s screenwriter could have had Hanna and Eva extend their innate compassion to individual Nazis at the camp. The human need for meaning can be met by such inconvenient compassion and helpfulness. It would be interesting to see how such a movie would play out.

In the actual movie, Hanna wakes up as soon as she is dead in the gas chamber. Like Dorothy, Hanna is in a bed surrounded by her relatives. Black and white film is used in Hanna’s scene, just as it is when Dorothy wakes up back in Kansas. Admittedly, there are some notable differences. The scene of Hanna waking up gradually goes back to color, whereas Kansas is always in black and white in The Wizard of Oz. Also, whereas Hanna wakes up from having just experienced dying, Dorothy wakes up having just discovered that it was in her power all along to go home; she just needed to click her ruby red slippers three times and say, “There’s no place like home.” Hanna was vanquished by the Nazis, whereas Dorothy vanquished the Wicked Witch of the West.

Nevertheless, the allusion to The Wizard of Oz is conveyed—the macro “dream plot” and Hanna telling part of Dorothy’s story at the camp being the other two allusions. Being three different ways rather than only in the dialogue, the cinematic devices are more profound in terms of viewer experience. Qualitatively different modes (i.e., different in kind) expand the significance of a film to the viewer while it is in progress because the film becomes transparent in being a film and is related to “the real world.” The Wizard of Oz exists empirically, rather than just as part of The Devil’s Arithmetic. The synergy thus extends beyond evoking some of the narrative of the former film in the latter. The drawback, or cost, is that the suspension of disbelief—being in the story world psychologically—is breached.

Once back, Hanna realizes that her aunt Eva is the same person as Rivka at the camp, so Hanna reveals to her aunt the secret name that Eva only used when she was young. There is no way that Hanna could know it, and Eva knows this. Hanna provides even more proof to her aunt (and to the viewers who are trying to figure out if Hanna, like Dorothy, merely had a dream). Referring to Eva’s cousin, Hanna says, “She saved your life and went . . . “Eva interrupts with jaw-dropping astonishment, “instead of me. How do you know this?”  Hanna replies, “Maybe it’s from my imagination; maybe it’s from a dream I had. I don’t know. But what I don’t understand is how so many people could be punished: men, women and babies.” The compassion that Hanna has discovered deep within amid dire circumstances of immense suffering transcends her metaphysical curiosity—and perhaps even any curiosity she might have about whether letting Elijah in means that Elijah used a supernatural miracle to save Hanna from herself, in which case she was really at the camp, transported back in time to inhabit (or possess) another person (Eve’s cousin). Aunt Eva seems to sense something supernatural has occurred, so she asks Hanna, “Do you know how to talk to God?” Hanna answers, “So quietly that only God can hear me.” Eva says in a profound tone, “Oh yes.” Both women realize that it was no dream; that she was actually at the camp. “And I will always remember what happened. Always,” Hanna says. Her aunt admonishes her, “Yes, remember always.”

Perhaps in opening the door at her grandparents’ house to Elijah, Hanna opened the door to something supernatural, which is commonly associated with religion via myth. The film’s narrative is a story that contains a supernatural element, and this can be a powerful way of conveying deep meaning. As much as the supernatural makes for a good story, I submit that it is Hanna’s selfless compassion for the other prisoners, including Rivka, that in the end defines and differentiates Hanna not only from the other prisoners, but also from the person whom she was at the beginning of the story. In her own mind once she is back home in her grandparents’ house, her compassion transcends questions of the supernatural. To some extent, this might be because finite beings bound by the laws of nature (i.e., natural science) cannot know whether a certain event is supernatural; it may also because the point of the supernatural in stories is to inculcate compassion. It is no accident that the film ends with Hanna happily singing at the dining room table with her relatives. She may have died at the camp, but her compassion lives on.

Golda

In introducing a screening of Golda (2023) at Yale, Shiri Goren, a faculty member in the university’s Near Eastern Languages department, told the audience that “the non-Israeli, non-Jew Helen Mirren” plays Golda Meir in the film. Rather than evincing gratitude that the excellent actress would play an ugly character, the implication is that an actor can, or even worse, should only play characters of the actor’s own background. Goren’s basic ignorance of the craft of acting belies her credibility in teaching a course called Israeli Society in Film. That another of her courses was Israeli Identity and Culture may explain why her knowledge of film was eclipsed, namely by an ideological agenda or orientation. I contend that underlying her delusion concerning acting (and film, moreover) is a much larger problem: that of the artificial monopolization by one group identity. In actuality, each of us has more than one group-identity, so to allow one to envelop one’s very identity is problematic.

The craft of acting lies precisely in being able to inhabit a character in spite of the fact that its background is other. Hence actors do research in advance on a character to be played, whether it is fictional or nonfictional. Such research includes, for example, the character’s occupation and even the location where the character lived or is set to live in the film. Emotional work is also involved as an actor considers what within oneself can be drawn on in playing a given character. Johnny Depp, for instance, said in an interview that he regularly draws on more than one person (or character) in coming up with how to embody a character. To claim, therefore, that an actor can only inhabit characters having the actor’s own background is to deny what acting is, namely, inhabiting someone else. No one would criticize Depp for not having grown up in a crime family in Boston in playing Whitey Bulger in Black Mass (2015). In fact, quite the contrary. That I realized that Depp was the actor playing the role only well into the film attests to the actor’s skill precisely in inhabiting a character of a personality and background so different from Depp’s own. Moreover, that Depp had such versatility as to be able to play a pirate, the owner of a chocolate company, and a serious mobster demonstrates just how wrong it is to claim that an actor can only play a certain kind of character—one in line with the actor’s own background. This is such an obvious point concerning acting that that any claims to the contrary must surely involve false-belief and even delusion: qualities that ideology can have, according to Raymond Geuss in his book, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School.

An ideology, such as one stemming from a suffocating group-identification that seeks to foist itself over a craft such as acting, can be “dependent on mistaking the epistemic status of some of [the ideology’s] apparently constituent beliefs.”[1] In other words, an ideology may hinge on a false-belief. Indeed, the human mind seems to be vulnerable to circuit-failures as an ideologically important false-belief is presumed to be true as if it could not be false. In other words, the mind doesn’t seem to do a good job at flagging its own false beliefs especially if an ideology being held is dependent on them. Hence, a group-identification ideology can get away with utterly misconstruing the craft of acting. Geuss even includes delusion as pertaining to ideology pejoratively.

I contend that delusion pertains to an ideology in which one group-identification is established monopolistically for an individual. To be sure, Geuss insists that “(h)umans have a vital need for the kind of ‘meaningful’ life and the kind of identity which is possible only for an agent who stands in relation to a culture.”[2] The kind of identity is here that which is informed by a person’s relationship to a culture. Each of us is connected to more than one cultures, and, relatedly, more than one group-identity applies.

I’m a Midwesterner; that’s my ethnicity. Identifying as an American in terms of culture is a looser or more general and even secondary ethnicity for me, whereas my group-identity as an American is foremost politically. My vocational group-identity as a scholar goes beyond vocation, and I have more than one religious group-identifications informing my religious identity. Other group-identifications apply to me as well. My racial group-identification as a Caucasian, or “White,” is actually not one that I an conscious of very often, so other people who are constantly referring to themselves and others by race strike me as unnaturally obsessed with the racial group-identification at the expense of others.

Seldom do we realize that one’s group-identification and that of another person may be different not only on the same axis (e.g., being of different racial groups), but also in emphasizing different types. One person might say, “I’m a Black person,” and the hearer might reply, “I’m a Catholic.” The types, or bases, of the two group-identifications are different: race and religion, respectively. This essentially relativizes a person’s favorite basis because others could alternatively be the person’s favorite. The choice seems arbitrary. The hearer could have replied, “I’m an American.” It is not self-evident that a Black person should view oneself primarily in terms of race rather than nationality (or religion or ethnicity, which is yet another category rather than isomorphic with race). More than one Black person has told me that only in leaving the U.S. and living in the E.U. has that person been able to de-prioritize his race-identity to other bases on which to self-identify. It seems to me, however, that a person has more control over which basis upon which to predominately group-identify, even if one basis is foisted upon oneself by a group to which one is accustomed to identifying with primarily.

Because each of us has several group identifications, any one of which a person could perceive as primary, allowing one to monopolize one’s group-identity temporally or geographically can be seen as dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary. In getting into character, a good actor does not ignore the subordinate group-identifications. In the case of Golda Meir, she was actually from the Ukraine in the Soviet Union, so the claim Helen Mirren’s portrayal suffers because the actress was not Israeli can be understood to be fallacious. In the film, Golda tells Henry Kissinger, the U.S. Secretary of State, that during her childhood in the Ukraine, people would beat up Jews in the streets with impunity. The character doesn’t even identify mostly as an Israeli. Furthermore, her ethnic and religious group-identity as a Jew, while salient, does not monopolize her self-identity.

In fact, the film shows actual television footage of Golda Meir and Anwar Sadat in which Golda says, “As a grandmother to a grandfather, . . .” She could have said, “As a Jew to a Muslim,” or “As an Israeli to an Egyptian,” or “As a politician to a politician,” but her group-identification as a grandmother is on top at that moment. I submit that in her depiction of Golda Meir, Mirren draws significantly from her own group-identity as a woman and a mother.

Three times in the film, Golda empathizes with the typist whose husband is fighting in the war. It is clear from her facial expressions that Mirren is having the character react as a woman to another woman’s experience. Golda is even crying when she watches her assistant inform the typist that her husband has been killed. In listening to a soldier being attacked in battle, Mirren has Golda react as a mother would: to the boy’s anguish. Even in urging Henry Kissinger to eat borscht, a Ukrainian soup, Mirren portrays Golda as a mother—admittedly, as a very Jewish mother. But even in that scene, Golda’s Jewish group-identification is not the only one in play.

To be sure, Mirren does a great job in playing Golda’s specifically Jewish group-identity.  In a scene in which Golda is talking with Ariel Sharon, then a general, she tells him that all political careers end in failure. She even adds fatalist, “huh,” at the end of the sentence. Mirren portrays Golda’s Jewish ethnicity most stridently and explicitly along with Golda’s identification as a mother in the scene in which Kissinger is eating the soup.  As an immediate context, Golda makes explicit the primacy of being Jewish in Israel to Kissinger (e.g., “In Israel, we read right to left”) and even says that her cook is a survivor (i.e., of the Holocaust. It is the posture that Mirren adopts while watching the Jewish American eat the Ukrainian soup that may be Mirren’s most Jewish statement, and, given her skill as an actress, she didn’t need to be Jewish herself.

So, the rather pedestrian, non-intellectual comment of the faculty member at Yale that the non-Israeli, non-Jewish actress would be playing Golda Meir in the film says more about the sordid motive to impose an ideology containing a false-belief (and a delusion) as a weapon than it does about the actress or her (ability to play the) role. The group-identifications of Golda Meir that Helen Mirren uses most are actually as a woman and a mother. Even in this respect, whether Mirren was a mother at time of filming is not terribly important because her craft would have included the ability to play a mother regardless. To be sure, being able to draw on a common background or group-identity is an asset for an actor, but the viability of the craft does not depend on having a common background. That any given character has more than one group-identity makes it more likely that an actor can draw on personal experience in some respect and thus have an experiential connection with the character. This is not to say, however, that such experience is necessary, and even less that experience in one of the several group-identifications of a character is necessary. Besides, the most obvious group-identification of a character to an observer may not actually be primary either to the character (or the historical person on which the character is based) or to the actor in portraying the character. Part of Mirren's talent may be to assess which of a character's group-identities really drives the character, and, relatedly, which is decisive in pulling off the role. As observers, we bring our own ideological agendas, and this is especially problematic if we allow one of our group-identities a monopoly over our self-identity.

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1. Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 13.
2. Ibid., p. 22.

Valley of Peace

In Valley of Peace (1956), a Black American pilot and two Slovenian children head towards a valley in which the boy’s uncle lives—a valley of peace. In military terms, the valley has been designated as a “no-man’s” land, which means it is off limits to both the Nazi army and that of the Slovenian partisans.  As such, the peace of the valley is something more down to earth than the Biblical Garden of Eden. Even so, this ideal is a leitmotif in the film. For one thing, the two children repeatedly characterize that valley as not just where the boy’s uncle lives, but also as a utopia. I contend that the film makes a theological statement regarding the fallen world and the Garden of Eden. While only implicit, this statement is still more central to the film than is the significance of the race of the American pilot. I turn first to the fact that the American pilot who survives parachuting from a shot-up plane is Black.

The pilot’s name is Jim, which also happens to be the name of the escaped slave in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1939). Both Jim-characters are fleeing violent people: Nazi troops and Southern slave hunters, respectively. Both characters are seeking freedom, so liberation is indeed a theme in The Valley of Peace. Even so, the Jim of this film, which was made after Huckleberry Finn, differs significantly from the ex-slave, who although moral did not show the strength of leadership and fight that the American pilot shows. The latter, for instance, fights along with a White partisan (Slovenian) soldier on an equal basis, whereas the ex-slave is never portrayed as commensurate with the Caucasians. So I think the emancipation theme is muted in Valley of Peace. Moreover, that theme is not central to the film, so claims to the contrary may be more about advancing an ideology than in being true to the film on its grounds.

More salient than the race of one of the characters is the contrast of the world of aggression in which the two children and Jim are trying to flee and the idyllic valley of peace that seems so utterly beyond strife that war could never interlard the serene mountain scenery shown in the last scene. The war-torn lives of the two children does not exhaust the aggression; even a dog bites the head off of the girl’s doll. This expansive application of aggression in an already war-torn film-world is more important than Jim coloring a doll-head black for the White girl. To be sure, the fact that she hugs that doll sets off American society by contrast, as does the fact that a partisan soldier quickly, almost instinctively welcomes Jim to the fight, in a “Hi . . . hi” quick exchange. But such cultural differences should be seen as being within the same paradigm: that of a fallen, deeply aggressive world where violence extends to other species (i.e., the dog decapitating the girl’s doll).

Step back from the internecine conflicts within cultures that themselves can be characterized as aggressive, and the wider chasm can be seen in the valley that lies between the fallen world and the mythic Garden of Eden. The film makes the point that the aggressiveness in the fallen, war-prone world that is populated by human beings is so strident that not even a valley of peace can withstand it and hold on for long. For the two armies do battle at the uncle’s farm in the valley of peace. The German commander says that the valley was merely a no-man’s land and, just like that, it is no longer off limits. The caprice of a mere decision can open the flood-gates of war over the hills into the valley of peace. 

The human instinctual urge of aggression must surely be salient in human nature, whereas any instincts supporting religiousity, which studies have shown are impacted by genetics (e.g., studies of biological and adopted kids), must sure pale in comparison. The Garden of Eden is itself just a no-man’s land in the film except to a child’s imagination. That archetypal emotion (peace)/image (fecund garden) is no match for the human propensity for violence. This, I submit, is the underlying message of the film. The valley of the (decapitated) doll dominates the valley of peace, which, it should be noted, is desolate. The horse is alone, and the uncle is gone. 

The implication is that peace is only possible where human interaction, and thus society, are absent. But it is not a case of moral man, immoral society, for the human being is an aggressive species, closely related to the chimp. Even within society, people can be isolated due to it. 

In Fassbinder's film, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Emmi and Ali are isolated by the hostility of their neighbors, friends, and even family due to auslander (foreigner) prejudice (he is Turkish), agism (she is older than him), and racial prejudice (he has dark skin). In that film, the nature of prejudice does play a major role. The passive aggression from all sides gets to Emmi, whose adult children won't even speak to her upon hearing of her intermarriage to a much younger man, so the couple vacation to get away from all of the anger surrounding them yet at a distance. 

Being alone within society is not like being alone in the valley of peace, yet in both cases the verdict runs against our aggressive species. If our species is a social animal, then perhaps only within a narrow compass. Whether we like it or not, strife is the human condition, as constituted by 1.8 million years of hunting and gathering and populating, over whose vast expanse natural selection gradually adapted our species to an environment not at all like our modern society with its artificial institutional security.

Subordinate plotlines and depictions of characters should not be hyperextended at the expense of the central leitmotif of a film. In the case of Valley of Peace, an ontological truth regarding the human condition transcends emancipation. Of course, as far as the human race is concerned, Christians insist that the stain of original sin mutes or limits any real liberation but for salvation in the risen Christ. The film obviously does not venture that far, but stays with the leitmotif of an aggressive world and a valley of idyllic peace that eludes the two children and us. We will never (again?) enter into the mythic Garden of Eden.

Even contending ideologies on race, which can stimulate the illusion that race is the central theme or intent of a film, are and have been mere fodder for the human instinctual urge of aggressiveness. That urge itself, plastered on the walls of a paradigmatic world known as the fallen world, can be juxtaposed with the calmer, peaceful inclinations that project a mythic place, whether that be the Garden of Eden or Oz, but the latter elude us as if separated from us by, as Augustine wrote of revelation reaching us, a darken church window made of distortive colors. I once looked up at golden angels in a high stained glass church window as the sun shined one Sunday morning, but then I looked down at the other people in the choir. 

In the last scene of The Wizard of Oz (1939), Dorothy wakes up back in Kansas, shown in black and white rather than in color. The witch has been melted in Oz, so peace is presumably permanent there, but Miss. Gulch is presumably still alive in Kansas and she will most likely bike over again to take Dorothy's little dog, Toto, to the sheriff. Once when I was young, I saw the actress in person sitting on a giant rainbow chair on a lawn. Margaret Hamilton looked like any grandmother—no hint of Oz even in its dark side. The Emerald City was of course nowhere to be seen. 

Hail, Caesar!

For anyone interested in filmmaking, a film that features the internal operations of a film studio—especially one during the “Golden Age” of Hollywood—is likely to be captivating. After all, as Eddie Mannix, the studio executive in Hail, Caesar! (2016), says, the “vast masses of humanity look to pictures for information and uplift and, yes, entertainment.” This film provides all three for its audience on what film-making was like in the studio system. With regards to the Christian theology, however, the result is mixed.  The film makes the point that theological information best comes out indirectly from dramatic dialogue rather than discussion on theology itself. In other words, inserting a theological lecture into a film’s narrative is less effective than an impassioned speech by which entertainment and uplift can carry the information.

Mannix’s meeting scene with clerics is harried and thus difficult for the viewer (and Mannix) to digest, but Baird Whitlock’s emotional speech on a studio set as the Crucifixion scene is being filmed conveys religious ideas in an entertaining manner. The speech centers on what is so special about the person being crucified. The information is carried on Whitlock’s emotive warmth, and thus the acting of George Clooney who plays the character. In contrast, emotion is sparing in Mannix’s meeting with a rabbi, Catholic priest, Greek Orthodox priest, and Protestant minister. Instead, the scene is energized by fast-moving theological points, but this is unfortunately of little use to the viewers as demonstrated by Mannix’s confused reactions as the clerics debate. This is ironic because the scene’s role in the film narrative is to make the point that Capital Studio’s management takes the informational role the film being made seriously. Whereas Mannix just wants to know if any of the clerics are disturbed by the Jesus portrayed in Mannix’s film, the inclusion of the clerics’ discussion of theology begs the question: can’t film do any better in expressly handling theological concepts through dialogue? The viewer has not yet seen the scene of Whitlock’s emotional speech at the Crucifixion, but that scene does not address whether theological dialogue is viable in film. After watching Mannix’s meeting, the viewer likely answers, not well. The example may not be a good one, however.

How good is the medium of film in portraying Jesus Christ and the story that encapsulates him? I contend that this is precisely the question that Hail, Caesar! (2016) attempts to answer, but falls short. The scene of Mannix’s meeting not only relegates theological dialogue as being beyond the reach of viewers, but also assumes quite explicitly that the best portrayal of Jesus is that which is the least controversial. Because Whitlock’s reverential articulation of Jesus is appreciated universally on the movie set on which the film within the film is being shot, the message is that impassioned meaning itself is enduring; it is also the least likely to offend. Does not the strategy of coming up with a portrayal that does not offend anyone run the risk of being drab? Is such a portrayal merely a copy of the default, which may contain problems? Moreover, does the inclusion of something controversial take away from the uplift and entertainment value?

Even though avoiding anything controversial fit the 1950s—the time when the film takes place—especially in American society, and thus Hollywood, viewers watching the film in 2016 likely perceived the strategy to be antiquated and even suboptimal. Some viewers may have seen controversial films on Jesus such as Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) for trivializing the story with pop music, Jesus of Nazareth (1977) for emphasizing Jesus’ human characteristics at the expense of his divine Sonship, The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) for its moral stances and conflicted Jesus, and The Passion of the Christ (2004) for taking Jesus’s suffering beyond that in the New Testament. By 2016, the assumptions that explicitly theological dialogue is inherently beyond the grasp of viewers; such dialogue itself is too controversial; and films should rely instead on impassioned speeches could be reckoned as nonsense. Surely the controversy of King of Kings (1961) over the decision to show Jesus’ face would be deemed anything but controversial in retrospect. Hail Caesar! may be making the same point regarding the conformist era of the 1950s.

Perhaps the disappointment of Hippie idealism and the ensuing criticism of American government and society beginning in the late 1960s had accustomed Americans to viewing controversy as acceptable, and even finding it to be entertaining and uplifting in terms of ideational freedom (i.e., thinking outside the box). Studios may have been absorbed the cultural criticism in producing films like Jesus Christ Superstar that were certainly outside the box relative to the earlier films such as King of Kings. It could even be said that the medium was ushering in a new wave of historical theological criticism after that of the nineteenth-century Germans such as Feuerbach and Nietzsche. Put another way, perhaps their thought had finally percolated through or resonated with American society after 1968 such that studios could take chances precisely that are anathema to Mannix in Hail Caesar! and therefore 1950s Americana.

Of course, entertainment and uplift could not suffer; they were no longer assumed to be mutually exclusive with religious controversy.  Entertainment had been a mainstay of film since even before the medium partook of narrative. Fifty seconds of an oncoming train in Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896), for example, thrilled audiences. Sound would only have added to the fright. Both uplift and sadness or fear can be entertaining. In its de facto insistence on happy endings, Hollywood has neglected this point. Relatedly, an insistence on avoiding controversy out of fear that it would detract from the entertainment-value of a film neglects the possibility that controversy could add entertainment-value while providing thought-provoking information. Even thinking about abstract ideas after viewing a film can be entertaining for some people because those ideas came out of a narrative.

Generally speaking, the information/knowledge element is most salient in documentaries, but even fictional narrative is capable of carrying heavy weight in this regard. In regard to the religious content of Judaism and Christianity, Mannix says, “The Bible of course is terrific, but for millions of people, pictures will be their reference point to the story.” He predicts that film would even become the story’s embodiment. In other words, he predicts that from his time in the 1950s, film would come to supersede even the Bible itself because of the film medium’s greater potential to provide information, uplift, and entertainment. One of my reasons for studying film is indeed the medium’s hegemony and thus role in transmitting abstract ideas and even theories.

While I do not doubt the medium’s tremendous potential to present an experience in the story-world by means of visuals and sound, whereas a book is only text that must be read, Mannix omits the pleasure that can be afforded only by the human imagination without visuals and sound to constrict the imagination to a story world presented by film. Especially in the multi-layered genre of mythology (i.e., religious narrative), imagination can be stretched in a myriad ways and on many levels, given the scope for interpretation in myth.

On the other hand, even though film constrains imagination to within the contours of a story world, the mind’s ability to suspend disbelief allows for immersion into such a world, resulting in greater understanding as well as uplift and entertainment. A viewer can “enter” a film’s audio-visual story world cognitively, perceptually, and emotionally such that a sense of experiencing can be had. Experiencing the Biblical world can enable a viewer to better understand Jesus’ dialogues because they are in their contexts. To the extent that the ancient world historically can inform our understanding of the Biblical world, film can make use of historians and anthropologists in order to improve on how that world is being portrayed. To be sure, the Biblical world is distinct from history, and our knowledge of the ancient past is limited. Film carries with it the risk that viewers might take a portrayal as the world that a historical Jesus would have known rather than that of a faith narrative. The use of abstract dialogue does not suffer from this problem because the ideas being exchanged transcend the dialogue’s context. So the assumption that narrative-specific impassioned speeches are superior to such dialogue is flawed. Of course, this assumption in Hail, Caesar! supports the problematic assumption that controversy must at all means be avoided in order to maximize the entertainment value and uplift, which in turn relate to profitability.

I turn now to a scene analysis of Mannix’s meeting with the clerics in order to make several points, including that the scene is a bad example of how a religious film can effectively use abstract dialogue. The studio executive wants expert feedback both from within Christianity and outside of it to make sure that no viewers whatsoever will take offence to the Jesus being portrayed in Mannix’s movie—the film within the film. When Mannix first asks his guests whether they have any theological objections to the movie being made, the Greek Orthodox priest complains that the chariots in one scene go too fast. Even a cleric has difficulty turning to religious dialogue! The message to the viewer can only be that such dialogue is neither natural nor befitting a film-viewing. This point supports the film’s solution by means of an impassioned speech even if the implications regarding the use of abstract dialogue in film are wrong.

At the studio executive’s urging, the clerics finally focus on the task at hand. “The nature of Jesus is not as simplistic as your picture would have it,” the Catholic priest says. He is speaking theologically. “It is not as simple as God is Christ or Christ is God,” he explains. The portrayal should go further. It should show that Jesus is “the Son of God who takes the sins of the world upon himself so we may enter the Kingdom of God.” Indeed, the Jesus of the Gospels announces that his mission to preach the mysteries of the Kingdom. Unfortunately, the screenwriter did not have the priest say anything about that kingdom (e.g., how to get in it). Instead, the priest’s focus, consistent with the history of theology, is left at Christ’s identity (i.e., Christology) in salvation (i.e., Soteriology) even though the less abstract teachings of Jesus on how to enter his Father’s kingdom, such as benevolence even to detractors and enemies, would be more easily comprehended by viewers.

After the priest’s abstract theological point, the clerics rapid-fire contending points so fast and without sufficient explanation to Mannix (who seems clueless even though he goes to confession daily) that the viewers are clearly not deemed able to follow a theological discussion. Yet the film makes a straw-man’s argument by presenting the dialogue at such a fast pace that little could be gained from the ideas expressed.

The Protestant minister says that Jesus is part God. The rabbi counters that the historical Jesus was a man. Mannix, a Roman Catholic, asks, “So God is split?” to which the Catholic priest answers, “Yes and no.” The Greek priest says, “Unity in division” and the Protestant minister adds, “And division in unity.” Such word games do not advance a viewer’s comprehension of the dialogue. As if standing in for the viewer, Mannix loses his concentration and admits, “I don’t follow that.” The best line of the movie comes when the rabbi replies, “You don’t follow it for a very simple reason; these men are screwballs.”

From the Jewish standpoint, the Christian clerics have gotten themselves tied up in knots because they are claiming something that a human being is both fully human and fully divine. Aside from a historical Jesus, the god-man character in faith narratives goes against the Jewish belief that a chasm separates human beings from God. The belief that God has an incarnate human form (i.e., a human body) smacks Jews as a case of self-idolatry.  As confirmed at the Council of Nicaea (325 C.E.), Christian theology upholds that Jesus has two natures in himself—the divine and the human (except for sin). The two natures stay distinct in Jesus, so the divine is of the same substance (consubstantial) with the other two manifestations (or “persons”) of the Trinity; the human nature is unaffected by the divine except for the former being without sin. This is necessary so Jesus’ self-sacrifice on the Cross can be for other people rather than to pay the price of his own sin.

For the viewers, an analogy would have served better than the abstractions in the dialogue. Oil and water in a cup, for example, would have been more easily understood. The screenwriters fare better when the theological discussion turns to God (i.e., the Godhead). The Catholic priest claims that the Jews worship a god who has no love. “God loves Jews,” the rabbi retorts. Reacting to the unloving way in which Yahweh treats other people, the Protestant minister insists that God loves everyone. Yahweh’s statement that vengeance is His does not square with God being love. In his writings, Nietzsche argues that this incongruity discredits the conception of Yahweh in the Bible. It is the discredited conception that Nietzsche refers to in writing, “God is dead.” Fortunately, as St. Denis points out in his writings, God transcends human conceptions of God. The screenwriter could have had the Rabbi make this point, and moreover, that the Christian clerics are too obsessed with theological distinctions that assume the validity of the operative conception wherein a vice belongs to God, which is perfect goodness (omnibenevolent).   

As if channeling Augustine to refute the rabbi, the Catholic priest says, “God is love.” Calvin’s writings contain the same point, which can be construed as the core of Christianity. Whereas Augustine’s theological love (caritas) is human love raised to the highest good (i.e., God), Calvin’s is the divine self-emptying (agape) love. Whether or not human nature, even Eros, is part of Christian theological love, it manifests as universal benevolence (benevolentia universalis). In the film, the rabbi could have asked the other clerics whether humans are capable of self-emptying divine love (i.e., agape), and how the god of love handles the evil people, given that God is all-powerful (omnipotent). The clerics could have pointed very concretely to how a person can enter the Kingdom of God.

Instead, the Greek priest gets existential, insisting that the basis of God is love is, “God is who He is.” The screenwriter missed an opportunity for the rabbi to say, God is I Am. The implication is that theological love is divine existence, which transcends existence within Creation. God’s nature and very existence as love may thus be wholly other than human conceptions and experiences of love and existence. St. Denis made this point in the sixth century, and yet, as David Hume pointed out in the eighteenth century, the human brain is naturally inclined to view the unknown by attributing human characteristics to it.

The theological dialogue in the meeting scene could have brought the viewers to the point of appreciating God’s wholly otherness as transcending even the polished theological distinctions that we make. However, Mannix, who goes to confession daily, personifies the assumption that even religious viewers would get lost in theological dialogue in a film even though the rushed dialogue is rigged to support this assumption. The studio executive, for whom profitability is important, states up front in the meeting that he just wants to know whether the portrayal of Jesus in the film being made offends “any reasonable American regardless of faith or creed. I want to know if the theological elements are up to snuff.” Given the rabbi’s statements, however, the portrayal of Jesus as a god-man would be controversial at least to Jews. So Mannix really means to Christians. That’s all Mannix wants from the meeting, so to him even the theological bantering is a distraction. In fact, it could invite controversy for the film, Hail Caesar!, even though the film within the film is not controversial. On this meta-level, the religious dialogue is written as comedic perhaps for this reason, though by 2016 avoiding controversy would not likely be a concern. To be sure, even then for a cleric to suggest that divine mystery goes beyond the Christian understanding of Jesus being of two distinct natures would invite controversy. St. Denis’ claim that God transcends even our conception of the Trinity would certainly be controversial even in the early twenty-first century.   

Regarding the 1950s film within the film, Mannix asks at the end of the meeting scene, “Is our depiction of Jesus fair?” Without questioning Mannix's underlying assumption that fairness means non-controversial, the Protestant minister, answers, “There’s nothing to offend a reasonable man.” By implication, to present anything that offends a reasonable person would be unjust even if controversy would likely occur from presenting advances in theological understanding, including alternative views, which alter or question the default.  A reasonable person is almost defined as one who holds the orthodox (i.e., doctrinal) belief on Jesus’ identity (i.e., Christology). By implication, it is fair if an unreasonable man—a person who has a “deviant” Christological belief—is offended. Such fairness, it turns out, is not so fair; it is at the very least biased in favor of the tyranny of the status quo both as it applied to theological interpretation and the wider heavily-conformist American society in the 1950s.

Mannix represents the position that theology can and should be filtered through the lenses of business. That of the sacred that reaches the viewers must survive the cutting board of the profane. Because the Catholic priest says that the portrayal of Jesus in the film being made in Hail Caesar! is too simplistic, perhaps the message is that only simplified theology survives. While this point applies well to 1950s Hollywood cinema, the plethora of controversial films on Jesus since the utopian convention-defying days of the late 1960s in America suggests that controversial films can indeed be profitable, at least if a wider society is no longer so conformist. Indeed, societal judgments on what is controversial have varied over time. 

Even theologians’ views of profit-seeking have changed through the centuries of Christianity. Until the Commercial revolution, the dominant view was that salvation and money are mutually exclusive.[1] The rich man cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Willowing down theology to suit profitability would have been deemed anathema. With greater importance being attributed to Christian virtues actualized by profit-seeking followed by the belief that God rewards Christians monetarily for having true belief (i.e., that Jesus saves souls), Christian clerics in the twentieth century could be more accommodating of studio executives. The end of reaching a large audience, for instance, could have been believed to justify unprofitable scraps of theology on the cutting-room floor. The historical uncoupling of greed from wealth and profit-seeking, having been accomplished by the end of the Italian Renaissance, made permissible such an accommodation. Indeed, if God is believed to reward faithful Christians monetarily, as is held in the Prosperity Gospel, then a profit-seeking studio executive would be seen as being favored by God in using profit as the litmus-test for theology. 

Although in the film's period of the 1950s any explicit questioning and criticism of the operative assumptions in Hail, Caesar! would likely have been squashed like bugs, the screenwriter could have included such material (even the squashing) so the viewers in 2016 could have a better understanding of just how narrow, and even arbitrary, the film's historical assumptions are. Therefore, both in terms of theology and the related societal context, the screenwriter could have delivered more to both inform and entertain, with the uplift including what naturally comes from putting a theology and social reality (i.e., of the 1950s) in a broader, contextual macro- or meta-perspective. 

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1. Skip Worden, God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth (2015).

Anne Frank Remembered

While studying at Yale, I took a seminar on documentaries following two other, more pertinent film courses on narrative itself. I even took a preaching seminar on story-telling. The documentary choice was off my trajectory. The opportunity cost was large, considering that I was otherwise taking courses in Yale’s better-reputed humanities fields of philosophy of religion, theology, and history. Now perhaps my excursion into the documentary genre can bear some fruit, for I analyze here the documentary, Anne Frank Remembered (1995). The strength of this documentary I take to be its reliance on witnesses even at the expense of narration to tell the story. People could say with definiteness what had happened to Anne Frank since she and her sister and parents left Amsterdam. Their journey evinced the mentality of the Nazis as one not just as dehumanizing the Jews, but as treating them worse than livestock. Even when Nazi Germany was losing the war, the Nazis foreswore the use-value of the Jews starved or gassed.

The eye-witness account of the Franks’ train trip from Vesterborgh, a transfer camp in The Netherlands, to Auschwitz in southeast Poland. The trip for the 1,019 “passengers” began on September 3, 1944 and lasted three days. The Jews onboard were in cramped livestock cars that uncomfortably held forty to fifty people. The “passengers” had to sit mostly, though some had to stand even while “sleeping.” Urination and defecation make the trip worse still. The Jews felt completely powerless. “We felt the end would not be good,” the eye-witness said. Even so, “we refused to imagine the worst.”

The worst was Auschwitz. The Nazis there told the new arrivals that they would die there. “Our brains functioned differently,” the eye-witness from the train said. It was a matter of survival. Crucially, she added, “We were less than beasts—less than animals.” This is reflected not only at the camp, but in the train ride as well. At least animals would have been fed en route. At Auschwitz, the food consisted of a piece of bad bread.

On October 28, 1944, the two Frank sisters were sent to Bergen Belsen Camp in Germany. New buildings were under construction, so the Jews had to spend the upcoming winter cramped in unheated tents. On November 7, a fierce storm destroyed some of the tents. The Jews were being deliberately starved, frozen, and racked with disease even though the medications were not far away. In this sense too, the Jews were not only dehumanized, but also treated less well than beasts. After all, who would starve an animal that could otherwise be of some use? Both Margret and Anne succumbed to disease late that winter. The subsequent publication of Anne’s diary vindicated her potential “use-value” to German society as a notable writer, yet she was intentionally starved and not treated.

Without a doubt, being at a death camp triggered changes to the occupants’ minds so they could adapt to survive in a context in which survival was forbotten. So too, the minds of the men who decided to treat certain humans worse than animals must also have been warped. The variability of the human mind is perhaps here the real culprit. Specifically, that a mind could find meaning in a situation that was essentially a slaughter house, and another mind could think of other people as having worth less than that of livestock, tell us that this species, homo SAPIENS, cannot safely rely on its mind as a safeguard or reality-tester. Especially as time passes, the documentary may hopefully become more and more estranger in the sense of being not only foreign, but strange as well. The mentalities discussed from up close may be so far from those of the viewers that the inescapable inference will be that the mind itself cannot be trusted; it can treat as valid some of the most horrendous notions and related ways of treating other people. Even the way the brain seeks to preserve its sanity in an awful situation attests to the mind’s willingness to leave reality behind. In the documentary, even the Jews themselves who were in the Holocaust look back at how their minds changed and remarked at how strange (and dramatic) the change was. Watching the Israeli court’s coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961 can give the viewer an eerie sense of the mentality on the other side, which, in being preoccupied with making the trains run efficiently, merely assumed that the living cargo was less than animals. It is the mind’s presumption to being right when it was so utterly wrong that was perhaps really on trial. 

Christian Films as Distinctly Theological: A Theological Project

Should films with a distinctively religious theme and narrative water down the theological dimension so to be more acceptable in modern, secular society (i.e., a broader range of movie-goers)? The success of films like The Last Temptation of Christ, The Nativity Story, The Passion of the Christ, and Son of God suggest that theology should be embraced rather than tempered if box-office numbers are at all important. The genre should thus be distinguished from historical drama. Screenwriters and directors engaging in the religious genre would be wise, therefore, to distinguish the theological from the historical even in handling religions in which the historical is salient in the theological.

Adam Holz, an editor at the Christian pop-culture site, Plugged In, warns against making a Christian film as a historical piece. “I think we live in a culture right now that isn’t particularly interested in history, so with historical epics, you almost need some {hook}.”[1] That hook is none other than a distinctive take on the theology. Mel Gibson, for instance, emphasized the violence in the Crucifixion in The Passion of the Christ. Last Temptation notably challenged some fundamental theological assumptions. Both films are set in a historical context, but history itself is not the issue. Neither film is a historical biography like the relatively unsuccessful film, Paul, Apostle of Christ.

In the cases of Judaism and Christianity, the concept of salvation history makes it difficult to ply apart the theological as distinctive. God makes a covenant with Israel at a certain point in its history—in the exodus from servitude in Egypt—and Jesus makes the vicarious sacrifice for mankind when he is crucified when Judaea was a province of the Roman Empire. Even just in using the present tense in referring to theologically-rich moments in the past, I am expressing the tension between the theological and the historical—that the theological in such cases is not simply history. Because the Exodus and the Passion Story were both written as faith narratives, they cannot be taken as historical accounts. No historical evidence exists, for instance, of a historical Jesus, and yet, Jesus is depicted as such in the faith narratives of the Gospels. It is indeed difficult to view the theological in such a case as distinct. Even though the historical Jesus movement sought to get back to the historical, I submit that the proper task of the Christian religionist is to uncover the distinctiveness of the theological. This doesn’t mean divorcing it from history; the two are so intertwined in the Gospels. Rather, the task, of which screenwriters and directors can partake, is to depict in moving pictures how theology is its own stuff—how, in other words, it can come into its own even when it is mixing with other domains like history, psychology, science, and even metaphysics.

My favorite scene in The Greatest Story Ever Told eerily depicts the whipped and thorn-crowned Jesus carefully walking down a hallway toward Pontius Pilate. The Roman’s facial expression suggests that something very different—a different, unknown kind of strength—is in the frail man who is remarkably still intact. The strength being depicted so well by the images and the music gives the viewers a glimpse of something distinctly theological. The historical setting is thus transcended; the film is not really about history. This example illustrates how filmmakers and actors can wrestle with the distinctive nature of the theological and how it can be depicted and heard onscreen.  

An elaboration of the distinctiveness of theology, with implications for relations to other domains, is in the booklet, "Spiritual Leadership."

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1. Patrick Ryan, “Christian Films’ Success Deserves More Faith,” USA Today, March 28, 2018.