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ZENIT News
Agency, The World Seen from Rome
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Why Hollywood
Needs a Spirituality of Its Own
Barbara Nicolosi
Looks Through a Window of Opportunity
VALENCIA, Spain,
MAY 27, 2004 (Zenit.org).- Is there life for Christian cinema in the wake of
"The Passion of the Christ"? Barbara Nicolosi thinks so.
The founder of
Act One, a Christian scriptwriters group in Hollywood, gave an overview of the
movie-and-television industry, and the hopes she sees for the Church in its
mission of evangelization. Here is an excerpt of an address she gave at the
Catholic University of Valencia in mid-May.
* * *
Reasons For Hope From Hollywood
by Barbara Nicolosi
I do not often
have the opportunity to speak to audiences that bring together both sides of my
personal reality as both a Catholic and a filmmaker. Sadly, there have been far
too few of this kind of discussions in the Catholic Church. For many reasons,
including a kind of intellectual elitism, Catholic scholars have been slow to
appreciate the power of cinema as both an art form and as a means of
evangelization.
I will talk today
about a few recent movements in the secular entertainment industry, and how
these might be positive for the Church. I want to demonstrate why the Church
should embrace this art form as a powerful gift of God, using as an example
"The Passion of the Christ." Then, I will suggest some areas in which
the Church can help mainstream cinema.
In January 2003,
I got a call from a woman who was recently profiled in the Writers Guild of
America magazine as one of the top 10 women in television. As the executive
producer and head writer on a hit TV show, this woman belongs to an elite club
of people on the whole planet. Her prime-time CBS show gets a weekly audience
in the States of around 20 million people, and globally probably twice that
many more.
The gist of her
call to me was that after 20 years of a completely secular life in mainstream
show business, she wanted somebody to talk to her about Jesus. She said to me
in our first meeting, "Frankly, I'm just exhausted with unbelief. I just
can't keep it up anymore."
The attack of
9/11 certainly played a role in this woman's search for meaning, as it has for
countless others particularly in the American entertainment industry. But
beyond the simple urge to seek answers to the murderous hatred of Islamic
terrorists half a world away, this woman was reflecting a positive sea-change
that is sweeping through the American baby-boomer generation in general, and
the Hollywood entertainment industry in particular.
After 40 years of
being ravaged by the license of the Sexual Revolution, and just as many years
rejecting any and all connection to any authority -- whether it was the Church,
state, or just the simple wisdom of the ages -- there is a growing exodus in
search of rest. They are exhausted with unbelief and its ideological
stepchildren: hedonism, cynicism, alienation, isolation.
This exhaustion
is being manifest on the sound stages and in the executive offices of Hollywood
as a new openness to spiritual themes. A friend of mine is the creator of this
season's biggest new television hit "Joan of Arcadia." When she
pitched the idea to CBS, she said to the network executives with some
trepidation, "Now, there is a lot of God in this show." The
executives shocked her by replying with enthusiasm, "God is good. We like
God." Believe me, even just four years ago, God was not "good" at
CBS or any other major network offices.
All of the major
prime-time dramas have been exploring more and more overt religious themes. Any
prime-time special that features any kind of religious angle is certain to
garner good to great ratings.
The cinema side
has also been experiencing a spiritual awakening. "Bruce Almighty"
was one of the top five movies of 2003. "A Walk to Remember," a
positive portrayal of a Christian teen-ager, brought in a huge profit at the
box-office. And of course, the
box-office success of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and now
"The Passion of the Christ" (which, in Hollywood, we all just call,
"The Movie") are the stuff of industry legend. Other recent films
while not being overtly religious, do demonstrate a profound rejection of the
lies of postmodernism. Films like "In America," "Lost in
Translation," "Changing Lanes," "In the Bedroom" --
are just a few examples of this new exhaustion with the legacy of unbelief.
From a creative
standpoint, this is a happy trend for filmmakers like us who unite our passion
for cinema with a passion for God. Any producer can get a hearing from
Hollywood right now if they say, "I have a movie for the audience who
loved 'The Passion.'"
Of course, part
of this is because nobody in Hollywood understands who the audience for The
Movie is, and what it was about The Movie that they so loved so much. One
studio executive confessed his frustration about "The Passion" at a
recent party I attended. He said, "I don't get it. Aren't Christians the
people who hate violence in the movies? Well, this movie is a two-hour
execution, and they like it?"
There is a
warning for us religious filmmakers in this moment. While this new openness to
spiritual truths is an exciting opportunity, it also carries a huge creative
challenge.
The fact is, movies
about transcendent realities, that are not really great works of art, tend to
be really, really terrible. Movies about faith and spirituality that are not
haunting and profound, tend to be insulting over-simplifications. Movies about
the conflict between good and evil that are not intense and grueling, tend to
be sickeningly sentimental and easy. Movies about the search for meaning that
are not probing and insightful tend to be laughable and pretentious.
This kind of
movie is best made by those who are mature as filmmakers and believers. One of
the reasons "The Passion" is such an overwhelming film, is because it
has both technical mastery and profound content. Despite Hollywood's eagerness
to serve "the audience of 'The Passion,'" we aren't going to see
another film like it until we see another filmmaker who, like Mel Gibson,
actually believes this God stuff.
Another reason
for hope in Hollywood is related to the search for the spiritual, which comes
down to a rejection of the idea of a completely material universe.
A hundred years
ago, the greatest American poet, Emily Dickinson, made a journey through doubt
and materialism to come to the conclusion, "This World is Not
Conclusion." She was talking about more than simply the notion of
immortality. She meant that reality goes beyond the stuff we see, the material
things that surround us. There is an artistic movement crowding in on Hollywood
which is pushing this idea more and more. It is changing cinema, or in many
ways, restoring cinema to its roots in the lyrical, poetic imagery of the
Silent Screen.
I call this
movement the "Don't Show How Things Look, Tell Us What They Mean"
Movement. It is being driven very much by a young crop of directors who made
their way into the business through the music video world. Music video is all
about what things mean, as opposed to how they look.
The best music
video directors freely distort real colors, shapes, dimensions and points of
view, in an effort to complement and interpret a song. Rejecting the gritty
demand for realism of the baby-boomer filmmakers, these young filmmakers are
pushing for a cinematic lyricism that could mirror and echo the emotional power
of music. Films that reflect this movement include "Donnie Darko,"
"Levity" and TV shows like HBO's "Carnivale."
The films we are
starting to see from this new generation tends to reject the suggestion that
limitless sex leads to freedom or happiness. They tend to have a sadness about
relationships that is appropriate considering what they have been through as
the children of "sexually liberated" parents. My friend, screenwriter
Craig Detweiler, calls these filmmakers "a generation in exile, singing
sad songs of Jerusalem." Films that exemplify this movement are "Lost
in Translation" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."
This is a great
opportunity for the Church. We are all about the sacramental sense in which
everything we see points to a reality we can't see. Chesterton said that,
"The secular writer is confined to what he sees. The Christian writer
speaks about what is really there."
It is for us to
respond to this new generation of filmmakers yearning for meaning. We need our
theologians and then educators to translate the "theology of the
body" for the creative community, so they can bring it to their art, and
then expand our understanding, in the way that Pope John Paul II has called art
"a source of theology."
Undeniably, the
release and astounding global success of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the
Christ" has been the most significant event for the Church in Hollywood
and in cinema probably ever. "The Movie" has everybody in the
industry rethinking many long-standing assumptions about the global audience.
It has many
people in the Church rethinking their long-held assumptions about screen
violence and the potential power for good of cinema. It is outside my scope to
spend too much time here on this, but I do want to run down some of the ways
the movie is opening doors in Hollywood and in the Church that could be very
positive in the long term.
Three days before
"The Passion" opened in the States, the industry trade magazines
predicted, "This movie might even make $30 million in its first
week." Actually, the movie made $27 million on its first day. It went on
to make $127 million in its first week.
The main impact
of the film in the industry is that it has created an awareness that there are
huge numbers of people out there who went to this movie, but who generally
don't go to the theaters. How to get "the audience of 'The Passion'"
back to the theaters is now an agenda item for all the studios. Of course, they
don't know what we Christians want to see, but they will be open now to create
product for our consumption. This is probably good.
I never thought I
would live to see Jesus, beautifully and devoutly rendered, carrying his cross
on network television. I was astounded every time I saw a commercial for The
Movie run at any hour of the day. I was at a restaurant with some friends one
night and they had a television over the bar. Suddenly, an ad for "The
Passion" came on, and everyone in the bar fell silent in a weird kind of
awe and respect. I started to cry.
Beyond the power
of the film itself, "The Passion" brought God out of our churches and
into the center of mainstream culture. He was front and center, in his most
compelling posture as Lamb of God, and many millions of his sheep heard his
voice -- some for the first time.
Undeniably, this
has been an opportunity for dialogue and evangelization that the Church has
rarely experienced before. As the Pope has said, "The Church would be
sadly remiss" if she were to ignore the potential of the cultural
marketplace, and I would add especially after "The Passion" phenomenon.
Last year, I was
interviewed by the magazine of the Writers Guild of America. The reporter asked
me, "What do Christians bring to the table in Hollywood, such that, we
non-Christians would miss if you were gone?"
It is a great
question that Christians in every discipline need to ask themselves. "What
defines a Christian as a doctor? As a scientist? As a teacher?" If our
faith is true, it has something to say about every aspect of human life.
I have noted
above, that the Church can help the industry find real meaning for realities
like human sexuality, violence, good and evil, the yearning for the
transcendent, human personhood, the importance of the family, etc. I want to
end with two specific things that the secular industry needs from the Church,
that, to answer the question of the journalist last year, will be sadly missing
from the world of entertainment if we do not bring them to the fore.
The first is a
specific spirituality for artists. There are very specific spiritual challenges
that creative people have to go through to bring, what the Pope calls,
"new epiphanies of beauty" into the world. Their first cross is their
craft which will demand many sacrifices of time, labor, study, isolation.
In order to bring
beauty into the world, an artist will have to descend to the darkest, loneliest
places in themselves. Their art will have more power insofar as it is, what
writer Flannery O'Connor called, "A wrestling with their angels and
demons, not certain if they will come out of the struggle at all."
Artists have to
abide in the suffering of insufficiency, that the work of their hands is never
as potent as was their original vision. Their lives will be characterized by
instability, poverty and then possibly the burden of celebrity. In an average
year, a professional actor, writer, singer or artist will face more rejection
than most people do in their lifetime. It is a lonely and painful process
especially because artists tend to be more sensitive souls as it is. Many of
them find ways to cope in drugs, sex, alcohol, because they have no Jesus to
whom they could bring their burden.
We need to help
these artists carry the cross of the vocation to beauty. We need to give them
spiritual strategies, a practical theology, ethical training and then, we have
to be big enough to let them be who they are -- a little crazy, a little needy
sometimes, but also the bearers of many wonderful gifts to the whole world.
Secondly,
Hollywood needs help from us in crafting an ethics of art and entertainment.
Without giving artists a list of "Thou Shalt Nots" that they will
just ignore anyway, we can still have an impact by reminding them of the huge
potential for good that is in their hands through the cinema.
The cinema can
make people want to be heroes. It can connect us to each other through the
pathos of drama and the joy of comedy. The cinema can draw us into solidarity
with those who suffer and leads us to want to make a better world.
The ethical
question to put to artists is, "If you have the power in your hands to do
all these good things, isn't it an ethical problem if you choose not to do
them? Isn't that the secular man's biggest complaint against God -- that he
doesn't use his power to circumvent evil?"
We need to help
the industry move from the famous "right to privacy" towards a sense
of sacredness for the human person that is both the object and then the
receiver of cinema. The Church could posit a definition of healthy
entertainment that would flow from the desire to promote authentic human
freedom and development. What kind of cinema helps humans grow? What kind of
cinema coarsens the human soul and retards our development?
The corporate
machine that drives Hollywood will never stop to brood over these questions,
but the artistic community which also has tremendous power is hungry for
guidance, and has a passionate longing to make a positive impact on the world.
There are many opportunities for the Church in this moment. The only question
is, do we have the energy, hope and pastoral love to take them?
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