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.

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).

The Sound of Music: Marital Roles and Inner Transformations

Fifty years after the film’s initial release in 1965, viewers of The Sound of Music could measure the imprint of the women’s movement of the 1970s by how very different—antiquated actually—the film is in terms of marital roles. Whether Liesl in the first half of the film or Maria in the second, their acceptance of the dominance of husbands over wives stood out like a blade of grass needing to be cut in 2015 for all but a minority of viewers. Yet the internal changes that Maria and the Captain have the courage to undergo resonate in any age, being so much a part of human nature, as distinct from sociological artifacts.

Through roughly the first half of the film, Maria is an individualist bristling first against the conventionality of the convent and then the Captain’s authoritarianism. She refuses, for example, to come to his whistle on principle. In fact, the rebel asks him what signal she could whistle to call him. Meanwhile, Liesl, the captain’s oldest at 16 going on 17, sings of wanting to be needing “someone older and wiser telling [her] what to do.” She will depend on Rolf, she adds. “I’ll take care of you,” he sings in return. In 1965, this exchange would not have sounded odd in the least to most American and European audiences—yet how odd to the ears listening fifty years later. That a cultural understanding can seem like common sense in one era and yet so contrived just fifty years later ought to convince us that what we take for granted as given may be anything but.

Even within the film’s story, Maria changes remarkably from rebel to passive wife. She leaves all decisions to the Captain, including whether and when they would leave Austria. She even refuses Max Detweiler’s request that she try to move the Captain off his opposition to his children singing in public. “I can’t ask the Captain to be less than he is,” she tells Max. The internal shift is remarkable. Like that of the Captain, it happens in an instant.

When the Captain professes his love for Maria, she quickly realizes in song that in her miserable childhood, “I must have done something right.” That added self-confidence may enable her to stop fighting her negative self-image that took form in her miserable childhood. How do you solve a problem like Maria? She does, by feeling worthy of being loved. She does not have enough self-confidence to feel this herself, in spite of her singing, “I have confidence in confidence itself” on her way initially to the family’s formidable mansion. Someone must love her as she is, when her self-confidence is insufficient to kick off her negative self-image and the related rebelliousness. She gets the needed boost when the Captain tells her that he has loved her since her first day with the family—when she sat on the pinecone at dinner. In fact, the inner transformation is instantaneous. From then on, she is radically different—fully in line with the era’s values and customs and not at all independent.

Similarly, when the Captain first hears his children singing, his harsh, formal demeanor melts away instantly and he is a changed person too. He has forgotten what music was like in his house before his wife died—and it is the sound of music that instantly melts away his mourning. Only once he has undergone that inner change can he feel the love he has for Maria, which in turn triggers her realization that she had not been such a bad kid after all. In achieving an inner freedom from her self-hatred, which was fueling her rebelliousness, she willingly subjects herself to her husband’s will and command. Having dropped his command at home, he in turn leads the Von Trapp family out of love rather than from autocratic rule.

During the filming, Christopher Plummer, who played the Captain, said the story is too saccharine; he even referred to the movie’s title derisively as the sound of mucous. On the one hand, that the film is a musical means it is not cinema verité; no one should expect a musical to mirror real-life because people don’t pause several times a day to sing a song. On the other hand, Plummer had a point in that the inner transformations of both his character and Maria occur instantly and without any effort. Besides being utterly unrealistic, glossing over the process of the change compromises the character-development aspect of the film. In other words, the two main characters are rendered too plastic, and thus not readily believable.[1]

Viewing the film in 2015 rather than 1965, the film would doubtless feel even more unrealistic, given the antiquated stances of Rolf and Liesl on marital roles and Maria’s wholesale deference to the Captain as his wife. Standing between these characters and the viewer in 2015 is the women’s movement that transformed the role of women in society as well as in marriages seemingly overnight in the 1970s. Of course, this transition was hardly instantaneous, and neither was it without struggle on the individual, interpersonal, and societal levels. Interestingly, the sense of fakeness in the antiquated views and conduct would only compound the apprehension of fakeness in the inner transformations of the Captain and Maria. One day, the film may even be viewed as a fairy-tale—as a piece of art rather than a film based on a true story. 

Nevertheless, internal change freeing a person from grief or a negative self-image is of timeless value because such change is a feature of human nature itself, and therefore the story is apt to be engaging in any era. Hence the film can be said to have a timeless aura befitting such a classic of cinema.

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[1] By means of comparison, Pray for Bobby (2009), a film about a gay teenager in an evangelical Christian family, highlights the mother’s arduous inner-struggle as she questions and then changes her religious view on homosexuality. Her entire demeanor changes in the process. The change is hardly instantaneous, unlike those of the Captain and Maria in The Sound of Music. 

Casablanca: What Makes a Film into a Classic?

Like books and songs, many movies have been made that cannot escape their particular time. In writing my academic book, for example, I aspired to speak beyond those living to generations not yet born because my aim was the production of knowledge beyond mere artifacts of the world in which I live. I knew that the verdict on whether the text passes that crucial test could only come long after my own death. Among films, even though Casablanca is a film immersed in, and thus reflecting its time—the context in 1942 being of course World War II—the film transcends all that to resonate in the following century. In his oral commentary, Rudy Behlmer argues that the film “transcends time.” He goes on to provide us with a list of the usual suspects behind what lies behind the making of a classic.

Firstly, the interplay of the characters still resonates, in that it means something to people outside of that context and is thus still able to illicit emotional responses. In this sense, the film still lives. For example, being torn between two lovers is hardly a dated concept, as the experience renews itself in each generation. Rick’s dejected mood following being betrayed while in love is also something that resonates with many people, and undoubtedly in generations to come. Unfortunately, even a corrupt public official, personified as Louis in the film, is all too familiar to us today, whereas Laslo’s willingness to sacrifice for a higher purpose is largely lost in all the tussle of the business-oriented, consumerist cultures today. Yet the salience of the ideals—sacrifice and renunciation in fighting the good fight against the bad guys—still resonate because ideals themselves are timeless.

Secondly, although Laslo and Louis may be too cliché, Bogart’s character (Rick) is both complex and dynamic (i.e., follows a character arc). As Behlmer puts it, “he is not a bad guy . . . He was an idealist, lost it, and then regained it.” Additionally, Elsa is not some stereotypical love object, and she undergoes changes as well. She becomes caught in the emotional struggle of loving two men in different ways or for different reasons. Rick too is conflicted, most notably whether to send Elsa on with her husband. In fact, as Roger Ebert points out in his oral commentary, the German-expressionistic lighting being associated with the two characters on screen sends a message of emotional turmoil to the viewer’s subconscious. Both this multi-layered approach and internal emotional conflict itself help the film resonate with viewers in any era.

Lastly, the build-up of suspense, owing in part to the difficulty a first-time viewer has in predicting the ending, points to the plot itself as contributing to the film having become a classic. Weaving together strands from melodrama (i.e., plot-driven), drama (i.e., character-driven), comedy, and suspense-thriller helps the film itself avoid stereotyping and provides it with a certain multivalency—a term that Margaret Mead applies to symbol. Perhaps having a multidimensionality renders a film more interesting, and in this respect too makes it more likely that a film will survive into succeeding eras.

In Socrates’s dialogues, both narrative and dialogue of course are salient. In reading them, I noticed that very little that only an ancient Greek would be familiar with is in the texts. The orientation being philosophical, timeless ideas are major players, and, in The Apology at least, the narrative of an innocent man being put on trial and sentenced to death still resonates. In fact, early Christian theologians such as Jerome and Tertullian wrote of Socrates as anticipating Christianity as a “Christ figure.” In fact, the notion of the immortality of the soul comes from Socrates’s Meno (pre-bodily existence being necessary for us to be able to recall knowledge not taught). In short, avoiding things that people in other epochs could not know and privileging ideals and principles that transcend a particular time and place may be vital ingredients to making a film into a classic.

Dallas Buyers Club

The maturation of a story’s protagonist—as “growth” eventuated through the progression of the narrative—provides a source of dynamism that can keep a film from being static, or falling flat for lack of character development. At the same time, a good screenwriter is careful not to overdo it, lest a character’s internal transition occur too quickly in terms of the story to be believable. In Dallas Buyers Club, Ron Woodroof—played by Matthew McConaughey—“turns on a dime” in his attitude toward gays. The flip is hardly believable. The question is why.

When a physician informs Ron that he has AIDS—beyond being HIV positive—the rodeo enthusiast and electrician by trade reacts vehemently against the implication that he had contracted the disease from sex with another man. Even from that point, he refers to a gay man as Tinkerbell. The implication is that Ron is severely prejudiced against homosexuality, and his context being that of rodeos in Texas makes this interior state very believable.

Yet without giving the viewer a sense of sufficient story time having elapsed, Ron latterly chokes Tucker, one of his rodeo friends in a grocery store for refusing to shake hands with Ron’s business partner, the cross-dressing, AIDs infected Rayon, played by Jared Leto. Even for Ron to have lost his strong prejudice is hard to fathom, as he could have worked with, and even come to like Rayon without losing his distaste for homosexuality; for Ron to violently force Tucker to shake Rayon’s hand is apt to strike the viewer as sheer artifice on the part of the screenwriter and director. It is as though Ron were a Janus-like fictive caricature rather than a character based on an actual person.

Taken to an extreme, a character’s quick “about face” can leave the viewer wondering where the antagonist went. Indeed, the distinction between a protagonist and an antagonist can become confused, infecting even the structural integrity of the narrative itself. In the 2014 film Godzilla, Godzilla loses all his monster lore built up through preceding films to become—all of a sudden—the savoir of San Francisco. What had been a fight between Godzilla and two other dinosaurs is all of a sudden Godzilla protecting the city and its human inhabitants from the radiation-eating male and female animals invented in this film-version. The switch from antagonist to protagonist simply is not believable, and the story itself suffers as a consequence.

Fortunately, remedies exist. Using story-time rather than short-circuiting can be part of the mix. Lincoln says in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, “time is a great thickener of things.” A montage can give the viewer a sense not only of time passing, but of a character undergoing maturating learning as, for instance, from sustained suffering in the process. Signs of an interior change vital to the narrative can begin in the montage, or otherwise patently as the story resumes. Staggered thusly (like a recurring, subtle melody in the string section of an orchestra) and so only gradually anticipated by the viewer, when the change finally manifests full-blown as vital to the story, the realized “growth” or change is credible. This credibility can actually contribute to the suspension of disbelief that is so vital to the believability of the story and thus its constructed world and characters. 

Narrative Catching Up to Technological Eye-Candy: The Return of Substance

Even after the century known for its astonishing technological advances, the human inclination to revert to a childlike state in innocently going overboard with the new toys proffered by still more advances as the twenty-first century gained its own footing. With regard to film, revolutionary special effects based on computer technology far outstripped any directorial investment in depth of story, including the characters. Even before the advent of computer special-effects way back in the 1970s, Charleston Heston starred in Earthquake,  a film worthy of note only for the creation of an “earthquake-like” experience for viewers thanks to surround sound with a lot of base. The narrative was bland and the characters were mere cut-outs.

Years later, as part of a course at a local public-access cable studio, I concocted a music video out of footage the instructor and I had shot of a salsa band playing in-studio. After too many hours in with the computerized editing machine, I proudly emerged with my new Christmas tree only for the instructor, Carlos, to hand the tapes back to me. “Now make one without going over-board on all the bells and whistles,” he wisely directed. I had indeed put in just about everything I could find. Back in the small editing room, I used the fun fades sparingly, as good writers use adjectives.

For years after that course and some experience shooting and directing public-access programming, I would recall the lesson each time I saw yet another film sporting the newest in film-making technology yet otherwise empty of substance. James Cameron was a notable exception, centering Titanic (1997) not just on the obvious—the sinking (by means of a real ship in-studio)—but also on a romance undergirded by substantial character development. The next film to successfully do justice to both technological development and depth of characterization along with a darn good story was Cameron’s own Avatar (2009). That Cameron accomplished such a technological leap in film-making without sacrificing characterization and narrative says something rather unflattering about all the technological eye-candy that has brought with it huge cavities in narrative and characters.

In spite of the release date of Avatar 2 being in 2016, David Cameron has put out a preliminary trailer.

It was not until I saw Gravity (2013) that I discovered a litmus test for determining whether a film-making advance has come at the expense of narrative substance. Sandra Bullock gave such an authentically-emotional performance that at one point I found myself oblivious to the stunning visuals of Earth from orbit. In watching Avatar, I had become so taken with Neytiri’s eye-expressions that the technologically-achieved visuals on Pandora receded into the background. As a criterion, the re-integration of dazzling technologically-derived visuals back into the background as emotional-investment in a character re-assumes its central place in the foreground of the suspension of disbelief can separate the “men from the boys” in terms of film-making.