Maybe because there is such a constant flow of information and ideas through my computer, once in a while a surprising juxtaposition comes along. Day before yesterday I watched “There Will Be Blood” and yesterday I watched “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” seemingly two movies that are totally different. Then my eSubscription to Martin Marty’s U of Chicago religion website, called “Sightings,” plainly tied the two together in a discussion of religion and movies with emphasis on the creation of new things by putting together two pre-existing things. This is a theory of “creativity” that has had wide popularity in the past. I have a half-shelf of books proposing this theory.
S. Brent Plate, Hamilton College, proposes in an essay called “The Altar and the Screen: Filmmaking and Worldmaking” that the two processes are very much alike and share motives. That is, explicitly religion is the same sort of bricolage as movies, and implicitly there is an auteur who recognizes the power of symbols and organizes them into something meaningful. The theologian as film editor. Religion as something that is provided by a “priestly class” which is a description that specifically doesn’t fit with the Umeda cassowary dance I just described.
The other quite interesting Abramic assumption in the essay is Plate’s suggestion that the opening “splash” of movie production companies signal that they are dealing with “cosmic” matters by showing sky and mountain imagery -- things up high in the sky, like heaven! The Umeda don’t bother about heaven -- hard to see the sky from jungle. The “heaven” trope is a desert concept with an inserted Alps, you might say. Movies are for Europeans. Plate feels that they see movies as religious.
These two movies, which are really intended to be social criticism, very much fit Plate’s idea that one of the functions of religion is to warn against bad behavior. (Neither movie suggests a better way. Each has a rather narrow 19th century frame as a worldview.) In a twist, each of these two movies also criticizes institutional religion and cultures that pretend their morality and security is God-given. These are very modern points of view, coming in part from political criticism like the socialist Upton Sinclair’s original book and in part from the modern inability to come to terms with sexual matters, to say nothing of geology.
This astute essay is quite relevant for a modern world where there are far too many alluring choices that can quickly become obsessions. In that case, an authority figure bicoleur who can offer a coherent critique is a welcome relief from the ambiguity of our ordinary lives. But often there is ambiguity inside the worldview of the movie itself. Or is it an awareness of irony? Is irony an acceptance of ambiguity, an admission that one never REALLY knows? Or that there is always behind the bricolage the “wink-wink” higher knowledge of the authority figure? (I once saw a movie director friend bring to heel a Marine officer who got a little out of line. That’s AUTHORITY!) Is this auteur theory related to the Abramic convention that God is the Omniscient One who “really” knows? (At worst, he’s gaming us by not giving us clear rules.)
So, briefly, because this is not really about the movies themselves, “There Will Be Blood” is at first about the Protestant/frontier work ethic that any risk, any damage to the self, is worth it IF there is finally a profit that can provide security and growth to communities. Any mortal damage can be healed by a compensatory good act: that is, the man who dies at the beginning in service to the Power Man has his son adopted by the Power Man. But even those good acts can be corrupted: the Power Man begins to use the boy for his own ends, partly to persuade people that he’s reliable and sympathetic, and then -- rather scarily -- using him as though he were a woman, with overwhelming tenderness and control. But when the boy, accidentally made defective (redeemed?) by an act of the Power Man, becomes a rival, he’s thrown out. The hint is that his very defect (he cannot hear the sirens’ call, maybe) and his marriage to a proper wife (a healthy and affectionate girl escaping a family twisted by religion) will keep him more healthy. Plenty of irony.
The biggest one is probably that the Power Man’s opposition is a Power Religious Man. It is the corruption of Power itself that Sinclair was after and I would maintain that the murder at the end is really suicide. Understanding all this depends heavily on irony, realizing that the overt plot is actually opposite to what it is saying underneath, and maybe that’s why the imdb.com responses split out into two groups: those who “get” irony and those who don’t, with those-who-don’t feeling that they have been cheated two ways: there was no Christian or psychological redemption scene, just the steady bring-down of corruption, and the discrediting of power and wealth. Few say anything about the false brother, who is no better and about the only other character who is more than a fleeting appearance. His evil is Powerlessness.
“Picnic at Hanging Rock” is ambiguously a critique of Victorian over-structured and opportunistic girls’ boarding schools which purport to guarantee safety from the dangers of burgeoning female sexuality while all the time creating a Petri dish of female-on-female relationships almost irresistible even to young inexperienced men, the assumption being that the girls would welcome a “real” lover. But erupting up through all that is the primordial cosmic force of the volcanic extrusion called “hanging rock,” not a rock that’s hanging from someplace or that hangs down itself, but in the sense of the colloquial “he was really well hung.” So the whole movie is a pretense that these “little” girls in white dresses are innocent while “wink wink” the rawest kind of physical phallic-ness, full of holes and clefts, a labyrinth of quest in which one is not seen as soon as a corner is turned, simply gobbles them up. One underlying idea is that if they were simply low-class and sensible enough to go to bed the normal and healthy way, like the servant, their lives would be happy and easy. And also that a girl like that who has no fortune or prospects is discardable.
BUT some of the girls are enterprising enough to strike out on their own. And maybe the missing weren’t forced into white slavery or thrown into a volcano (instead of a greenhouse) as a human sacrifice after all. Maybe there were three handsome princes with carriages waiting for them on the other side of Hanging Rock. Doesn’t transcendent beauty in women entitle them to something? Doesn’t it become a kind of wisdom, or at least access? The “dumpy” are doomed to go back to the dorm.
Both of these enticements, great wealth and great beauty, are probably so over-valued in our ordinary contemporary society -- globally and esp. in the media’s world -- that they richly deserve some debunking. But “wink, wink” these movies make them attractive even as they point out the dangers. That way we can, as Plate suggests, step into an exciting and relieving world before we come back to our worries.
Though I sharply understand that religion can just provide relief from the quotidian sometimes, I’m not persuaded this is the way it “ought” to be. Plate uses the phrase “poking holes in the Sacred Canopy” which is supposed to shelter us from exposure to the primordial rawness of actual existence. Okay, but note that if you poke holes in something, it doesn’t work very well, esp. if it’s only an umbrella. It is revealed for the construction it is. And it may take time to create a new religion, because there is no Auteur umbrella maker. Religious consensus either develops from the people over time, or it doesn’t. And the “doesn’t” means a lot of people die because of the holes, while all the time claiming the Holy.
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