Movies for the Recovering Fundamentalist
By David L Rattigan
I'm an avid watcher of
movies. My favourites are those about vulnerable, fragile people finding
redemption. They resonate with me as an ex-fundamentalist, as one who's
lived with depression and anxiety, and simply as a human being,
sometimes scared and weak just like everyone else. When I started the
journey out of fundamentalism, the blinkers started falling off and I
began to see grace everywhere, not least at the movies.
On a theological level, by
"grace" I mean something like "God's limitless self-giving", and for me
that encompasses first and foremost his love, forgiveness and
acceptance. But if you don't share my theological outlook, think of
grace as the fact of your acceptance and place in the universe, that
someone or something is holding you and including you. That's something
that as fundamentalists we were never given without strings attached: We
had to act a certain way, be a certain way, think a certain way and
believe a certain way before we could feel accepted and worth something.
When I left behind the narrow confines of that world, everything opened
up for me, and I saw evidence of the grace of God everywhere.
And so, I want to share
with you a few films that have been steady companions to me on the
pilgrimage: Films I like to call "cinematic parables of grace". (Links
will take you to Amazon.)
As Good As It Gets (1997)
Artist Simon (Greg Kinnear)
is painting a portrait of rent-boy Vincent, and he describes the
experience of watching someone who doesn't know they're being
watched.
"When you look at someone long enough," he tells him, "you see their
humanity." Vincent's eyes widen as momentarily he catches a glimpse of
something beyond the seedy, degrading world of male prostitution.
This is a film about three
very different people who begin to recognize the humanity in themselves
and in each other: Melvin, a spiteful, reclusive writer with
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and on the wrong side of bigotry; Carol, a
hard-up Manhattan waitress and single Mom with a sick son; and Simon, a
gay artist who finds he loses not only his home, but his dignity when he
is attacked and robbed in his apartment. "Where'd I go?" asks Simon
tearfully, looking at his beaten and deformed face in the mirror. Like
all the characters in As Good As It Gets, he needs to accept and be
reconciled with not only others, but himself.
And so, throughout the
course of the movie, the motley trio come to share a mutual respect for
each other's humanity and worth. I heard someone say that Melvin
"becomes human" as the film progresses, but that observation is
off-target. Beneath the bitter and warped exterior, Melvin is already
human: We just don't realize it.
I think the words of Paul
might give an interpretive lens through which we can interpret the
events of the movie: "And so we no longer see each other from a worldly
point of view ... for in Christ God has reconciled the world to himself,
not counting the world's sins against them."
Shirley Valentine (1990)
A friend of mine was bowled
over by this film, and she admitted she had avoided watching it for
years, until I practically forced her into it. Her problem was that she
thought it was just a superficial sex comedy about a middle-aged woman
having a holiday fling. If you look at the way it's often been marketed,
you'd be forgiven for thinking that was the case, but that's a great
shame. The fling is just a plot device, where the real heart of the
movie lies in Shirley's journey of self-discovery. It's usually thought
of as a woman's film, albeit not a "chick-flick" as such, but when I
revisited this film following my exit from fundamentalism, it could have
read as an allegory for my journey.
Shirley is a 40-something
Liverpool housewife who suddenly realizes she isn't living. The real
Shirley has been swallowed up by the demands placed on her, the roles
she's been squeezed into and her thankless efforts to fit the mould. She
realizes she was created for something better. "Why do we get all this
life if we never use it?" she asks. Her life becomes a battle between
her old world and the new world that's opening up to her, and the
biggest obstacle is the fact that everyone around her still inhabits the
old world, with all its assumptions and expectations. She becomes like a
stranger in a foreign land; to friends and family she's gone over the
edge; no one understands her any more. (Sound familiar to any fellow ex-fundies?)
Shirley Valentine is a very
funny film, but also very poignant. It's about trying to change and
break out of the mould when everyone around you thinks you've lost the
plot.
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
I could have recommended
Wes Anderson's earlier film Rushmore (1998), or indeed any of his films,
because they all revolve around the dual theme of grace and
reconciliation. In Anderson's world, even a deceitful old schmuck like
Royal Tenenbaum has some love and humanity worth looking
for. It's a world of disjointed relationships and situations, but where
something somehow propels the characters to muddle through and find
resolution.
I love films like these because
they show us the radical, boundless dimensions of grace and
acceptance that we never knew as fundamentalists. In the book Reel
Spirituality, Robert K Johnston argues that everything in life can
have sacramental value, including the cinema, ie it can become the occasion
for a meeting with God. If you're no longer a believer, think of it as a
meeting with "grace", that acceptance and sense of self-worth denied us
by fundamentalism. To fellow wayfarers on the ex-fundy trail, I heartily
exhort you: Pull up a seat, switch off the lights, turn on the DVD and
make an appointment with grace.
©
David L Rattigan 2005
