Civilization Teeters on Brink as Long-Feared Film Version of "Atlas Shrugged" Premieres

Paul Harvey

Just a brief note to recommend David Bentley Hart's hilarious take-down of the new Atlas Shrugged movie (high on my list of film-adaptations-of-novels that the world could best do without). Big HT to Janine.

A brief taste:

The world survived the filming of The Fountainhead (if only by the skin of its teeth), and it may yet survive this. And Ayn Rand always provokes a rather extravagant reaction from me, and probably for purely ideological reasons. For instance, I like the Sermon on the Mount. She regarded its prescriptions as among the vilest ever uttered. I suspect that charity really is the only way to avoid wasting one’s life in a desert of sterile egoism. She regarded Christian morality as a poison that had polluted the will of Western man with its ethos of parasitism and orgiastic self-oblation. And, simply said, I cannot find much common ground with someone who believed that the principal source of human woe over the last twenty centuries has been a tragic shortage of selfishness.

Still, I like to think my detestation of Rand’s novels follows from more than a mere disagreement over differing visions of the universe. What’s a universe here or there, after all? I prefer to think it’s a matter of good taste. For what really puts both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead in a class of their own is how sublimely awful they are. I know one shouldn’t expect much from a writer who thought Mickey Spillane a greater artist than Shakespeare. Even so, the cardboard characters, the ludicrous dialogue, the bloated perorations, the predictable plotting, the lunatic repetitiousness and banality, the shockingly syrupy romance—it all goes to create a uniquely nauseating effect: at once mephitic and cloying, at once sulfur and cotton candy . . .

Continue reading here

What to Do With God in America

Paul Harvey

While we're in catch-up blogging mode, I meant to link to this piece earlier, "What to Do with God in America," over at A Lively Experiment, David McConeghy's blog. McConeghy summarizes and provides links to various of the summaries/reviews/academic critiques of the PBS series, and then proposes an elaborate classroom exercise over a period of week in which students would examine the narrative of the film on their own, and get involved in making a proposed film of their own.

With all the discussion about PBS’ God in America series, it occurred to me that it might be possible to use the series as the basis for a course that privileges deconstruction of the (maligned) narrative that PBS built and therefore employ remixes as a way for students to create counter-narratives that explicitly engage the primary source. Perhaps the documentary would provide a shortcut allowing us to manage both content and technical mastery.

We had some discussion here earlier about the pros/cons of blogging, especially for younger scholars and graduate students. This kind of post certainly fits in the "pro" category, as it provides the kind of reflection on teaching and innovative proposal on classroom work that should be impressive to any search committee.

God of Liberty: BookTV

To follow up on Paul Harvey's earlier post about Thomas Kidd's God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution, this weekend BookTV is airing a lecture Kidd delivered recently at Indiana Wesleyan University. (Incidentally, as Paul also posted, Indiana Wesleyan is hosting a conference organized by religion scholar Rusty Hawkins, Divided by Faith: A Decade Retrospective, next week.)

Find additional information and show times of Kidd's lecture here.

Speaking of Faith in the New York Times

Paul Harvey

Today's NY Times features a nice piece about Krista Tippett, host of the engaging radio program Speaking of Faith (which we've featured a number of times on the blog, including reflections on the show's programs about evolution and religion on television). Tippett and I both grew up in Oklahoma (at almost exactly the same time), the product of conservative Baptist backgrounds, so while we've never met I feel some kinship with the sense of searching that is always palpable on the show. Here's a taste of the article:

Despite being broadcast in most markets in the God ghetto of 7 a.m. on Sunday, “Speaking of Faith” draws nearly 600,000 listeners on 240 stations across the country, a sixfold increase in both measures since 2003. The show also gets 1.3 million downloads a month.

With both a Peabody Award and a best-selling book to her name, Ms. Tippett has become identified with a particular public-radio program the way, say, Ira Glass is with “This American Life” or Terry Gross with “Fresh Air.”

The Tippett style represents a fusion of all her parts — the child of small-town church comfortable in the pews; the product of Yale Divinity School able to parse text in Greek and theology in German; and, perhaps most of all, the diplomat seeking to resolve social divisions.

“My background as a diplomat is as important for this subject as my training as a journalist,” Ms. Tippett, who contributed reporting to The New York Times from Germany in the 1980s, said in an interview in her studio in St. Paul. “Religion is a touchy subject. You’re really getting at the core of people’s identities, an intimate place. This religious sphere in our public life is very charged, and I want to disarm that.

Tippett's recent book Einstein's God features a selection of her radio conversations about religion and science. It's very nice to see Tippett and the program doing so well.

Lost in Thought About Lost

Art Remillard

(Warning: Lost spoiler alert!)

Yesterday, Lost resolved six seasons of mystery not by bluntly revealing every secret, but by emphasizing that the road to individual redemption passes through a community. In a Flannery O'Connor-esque manner, many of the characters reached this point of enlightenment only when facing death. In transcending their own interests, characters made individual sacrifices for the common good. I think there's something to this O'Connor connection, since in a previous season we saw one character reading Everything that Rises Must Converge.

Anyway, the finale concluded with a mawkish family reunion, bearing all of the traces of a heavenly scene, but avoiding heavy-handed theological prescriptions. (So will Newsweek's Lisa Miller's Heaven will get a post-Lost boost?) While I went to bed ambivalent about this scene, I awoke thinking otherwise. The writers left us with an emblem of Lost's central theme: "live together, or die alone." Yes, they were literally dead, but they were metaphorically reborn through their bonds of friendship.

At first, I was tempted to see Lost as a jab at Jean-Paul Sartre--"Hell is other people." There's no lack of philosophy in the show. But I learned that Sartre had something else in mind when he wrote this, something very Lost-ish.

"Hell is other people" has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because . . . when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves, . . .we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves. Into whatever I say about myself someone else’s judgment always enters. Into whatever I feel within myself someone else’s judgment enters. . . . But that does not at all mean that one cannot have relations with other people. It simply brings out the capital importance of all other people for each one of us.

Sartre and Lost almost have a similar message. The relationship between the individual and community is hard work and sometimes hellish. But it's also necessary and fundamental to life. More than any show that I've seen, Lost captures this message.

One final note... I've spent far too much time this morning thinking and reading about Lost. By far, the most insightful analysis I've seen comes from S. Brent Plate over at Religion Dispatches. It is worth reading even if you know little about the show. He concludes, "The greatest fiction of Lost is the apocalyptic tale that we are individuals, that it is survival of the fittest. Lost then, is the antithesis of Lord of the Flies, but also of the so-called reality television shows that extol the individual 'dancers,' 'idols,' and 'survivors.' Those are the real fictions. Lost reveals itself as reality."

Filmmaking Beyond the Film Classroom

Filmmaking Beyond the Film Classroom

by Everett Hamner

We're approaching the lovely season when department chairs start asking for next semester’s textbooks, and while the syllabi themselves may still be months away, it’s never too early to dream up something different. In the spirit of collegial inspiration, and partly to build on recent journalistic treatments of unusual teaching approaches in The Chronicle of Higher Education and The New York Times (not to mention Michael Pasquier’s post from Tuesday), I want to share a nontraditional seminar project I undertook this time last year. While few readers of this blog may work in bioethics, the methodology is easily transferable to American religious history, or whatever else rocks one’s boat.

On the first day of my Genetics, Ethics, and Narrative seminar last spring, I looked around the room at thirteen students and saw not only reasonably strong academic abilities, but also moderately high computer skills and levels of personal responsibility. One student worked part-time cutting video at a local television station; another had shared several short films with me during the previous semester. I had already planned for students to do some kind of creative work in the course alongside their major research papers, and my idea was simple: why not collaborate on a documentary film instead of doing individual projects?

Some may respond, “Why not take your students on a field trip every week and drive them for ice cream, too?” Sure, this is beyond-the-call-of-duty stuff, and it requires that a professor generally likes her students and is willing to deal with surprises. It also helps if one’s institutional context welcomes rather than frowns upon innovation. Given these criteria, though, there are excellent reasons to risk such an unorthodox endeavor. Paramount for me was the way it motivated my students’ curiosity about the subject matter. Knowing they would be screening the film for their peers at an end-of-semester reception, they wanted it to be good, and they had to understand the subject matter well for that to happen.

How does one begin such an undertaking? Fearlessly. Confidently. Even when one feels grave doubts. It is amazing what students can achieve when their professor believes in them. I also think they respond well to a professor working not just in front of them, but also beside them. Too often we hide the boundaries of our expertise, expecting students to collapse in dismay if there is something we do not know. Watch what happens in class, though, when the learning direction occasionally reverses, even in casual chats outside of class time. When my students have a minute to instruct me on the finer points of motorcycle engines, the logic of a baseball trade, the experience of raising children while a spouse is stationed in Afghanistan, or the going rate at local egg donation centers, we become people to each other, not just roles. They begin to care what I think rather than merely submitting to my authority for a time.

There must be a downside to such creative collaboration. Indeed: time. The investment here can be immense, especially on a first go and insofar as one cares about the result. I did, and though the final cut of our film retained minor flaws, it was accurate and cohesive. I moderated discussions, distributed tasks, and signed off on most components. According to my email client, this involved more than five hundred messages. Even so, my students owned the project: they parsed the relevant ethical questions, arranged and conducted interviews, wrote more than ten screenplay drafts, created five times more footage than we used, researched copyright laws and acquired the rights to soundtrack music, completed several edits of the whole, and advertised the screening at nearby campuses.

I’ll add one other thought: even if the final product had self-destructed after the screening, the project would have been worthwhile for its impact on the more traditional academic aspects of the course. When students work together on something they think is cool, it significantly strengthens the course’s more ordinary components. Having decided to look each other and their professor in the eye, it is no longer an option not to do the reading or just to phone in the research paper. Not every essay submitted for the course achieved all it could, but almost. .

For those who would like to view the result, here is our fifteen-minute claim to fame, Imagining Genetic Enhancement. You’ll notice how extensively bioethics and questions of American religion intersect, and that while the future is the explicit focus, past contexts remain inescapable. Whatever decisions we make about testing or modifying human genomes, we need to do so in light of the history of science and technology. And for better and worse, whether we are discussing eugenics or stem cell research, cloning or IVF, these debates have almost always involved American religion.

For those interested in the pedagogical minutiae, I’m happy to provide further details. I’d especially enjoy hearing other ways people have used collaborative or individual art in “non-creative” courses; conversely, I’d welcome skepticism about its ultimate value. Perhaps I’ll follow up in the months ahead with a post on the less time-intensive but still promising creative project I’m trying this semester.

The Scripture of Nature, Part 2

by Phillip Luke Sinitiere

Last fall, Paul offered an insightful post (and others chimed in with equally thoughtful comments) on the ways that religion intersected with the first episode of Ken Burns' latest documentary on national parks.

For those who missed it the first time around (like me), or for those without an extra $100 to purchase the series (like me), the series begins (re)airing tonight.

Did anyone incorporate the first episode into religion or history classes last fall? This spring? I have not done so yet, but did use a short clip about the relationship between John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt.

The Dude Abides -- Or Is He Just Stoned?

Paul Harvey

Cathleen Falsani's The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers, featured yesterday on NPR, takes up the question of the moral order to the movies of the Coen Brothers -- The Big Lebowski, Fargo, O Brother Where Art Thou, Barton Fink, and most recently A Serious Man. A little excerpt from the interview:

The hero of The Big Lebowski is portrayed by Jeff Bridges as a meditative — or perhaps stoned? — fellow with long hair and a beard. He might evoke the traditional representation of a messiah, though he spends the entire movie clutching either a joint or a White Russian.Though he may look like a slacker, says Falsani, "there's a deep centeredness to him."

The interview doesn't get much into the most obvious parallels, in O Brother, Where Art Thou, the film that turned Man of Constant Sorrow into a national hit and revived the great Ralph Stanley's career. Much of the latter part of the interview explores Marge Gunderson's role in Fargo, her moral centeredness amidst the chaos she finds around her as she uncovers the petty but gruesome murders in Brainerd.

As for The Dude, having known a few borderline mystics/definite stoners from my Berkeley days, I'd say there's a fine line between mysticism and stoner-ism -- the line between, say, Jeff Bridges's Dude and Judd Apatow's anything.

God's Architects: A Documentary by Zack Godshall

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER

I’m always looking for documentaries to screen in my classes. Zack Godshall’s latest film “God’s Architects” will definitely find a spot in my syllabus next semester. Godshall, currently writer-in-residence in LSU's Department of English, was recently named the 2009 Louisiana Filmmaker of the Year by the New Orleans Film Society. He’s also the co-writer and director of the film “Low and Behold” which premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. DVDs of “God’s Architects” are available for purchase at the film’s website. Check out the trailer and read the synopsis and backstory below.



Synopsis:

God's Architects is a documentary that tells the stories of five divinely inspired artist-architects and their enigmatic creations.The film details how and why these oft-marginalized creators, with neither funding nor blueprints, construct their self-made environments.

Backstory:

In the spring of 2005, Emilie Taylor, then a graduate student at the Tulane School of Architecture, received a travel grant to research and document self-taught and visionary builders around the south. After visiting and documenting a number of builders, most of whom professed some degree of divine inspiration, Emilie shared her findings with filmmaker Zachary Godshall. Immediately attracted by Taylor's stories, drawings, and photographs, Godshall decided to visit the builders himself.

And so in November 2005, Godshall set out from south Louisiana with a camera, tripod, and microphone to interview and document the work of Floyd Banks Jr., a divinely inspired castle builder living in the east Tennessee hill country.

Three years later, Godshall completed a feature-length film that both examines and celebrates the work of Banks along with four other solitary builders who have constructed similar monuments. Beyond the builders and their work, the film functions as a personal essay that explores the nature of inspiration and one's dedication to a creative project, no matter how absurd or mysterious the circumstances may seem.

Recreating a Lynching, Part I

Kelly Baker

In Screening a Lynching: The Leo Frank Case on Film and Television, Matthew Bernstein, a professor of Film Studies at Emory, examines the retelling of the Leo Frank trial (1913) and Frank’s subsequent lynching (1915) in film and on television. (For a quick primer on the Leo Frank trial and lynching, see "Marietta's Shame" and "The Trial of Leo Frank"). Like many others, Bernstein writes about the lasting interest in the trial as well as documents the difference between historical record and dramatic renderings of the story. The fascinating book begins with a discussion of this particular lynching. Frank, after all, was white and Jewish, and the usual victims of lynching were African American men. It still befuddles some that Frank became a victim of such a horrific crime. Speculation about the case and what actually happened still runs rampant with popular claims now that Jim Conley, a janitor at the pencil company where Phagan worked and Frank managed, as the responsible party. (However, the grandniece of Mary Phagan previously made claims that Frank was the murderer).

For Bernstein and other scholars of this particular case, Frank’s fate was sealed because of his religion not because of class or geographic location. Moreover, Bernstein categorizes the “obsession” with this historical event as overwhelming considering the other events of the time period. Bernstein rather than rehashing the case for analysis instead looks at artistic representations of the trial to see how the Frank trial was perceived in both cinema/television and popular culture. The recreations illuminate why trial has such lasting quality. Why were audiences from the 1920s to the 1980s (and now 2009) interested in the lynching of a Northern Jew? What does this story highlight about the American South? Or what does it suggest about the nature of the South that still holds appeal/disgust? Screening answers these questions and provides illuminating discussion of how history is portrayed and the consequences and advantages of these portrayals. Additionally, Bernstein meticulously points about inaccuracies in recreations as well as reasons for creative license taken with the story.

The Frank trial’s allure comes from the sensationalism as well as the ability for the story to be represented so well visually. Bernstein writes:

It is a murder mystery, a detective story, and a tale of cynical and sensational journalism.It has courtroom drama and features an extraordinary sacrifice by a politician. It involves a devoted married couple torn apart by external events. It features the perturbing qualities and multiple ironies of a “wrong man” story…(21).

The Frank trial appeals especially to modern audiences who watch CSI: and its many competitors with something akin to devotion. More importantly, Bernstein’s work questions the dichotomy placed between history and film. Historians like to dismiss the docudrama, but Bernstein pushes historians to realize that are so different from their film counterparts. Rather historians and “visual storytellers” both shape the historical record to present their tales, and this shaping includes representation and elaboration. What I find most interesting about this discussion is Bernstein’s claim that film is able to take “idealized facts of the case” make them authoritative. This would not fly in published accounts but gives the film “greater power and resonance than one based on a fictional work” (23).

The four recreations of case highlight the trauma of the event in an attempt at comprehension, and each tells a different version of the story. For instance, Bernstein notes that Frank’s Jewishness does not appear in either of the films but appear in the television versions. In addition, the story becomes more complete as directors had more access to historical resources. Jim Conley’s role in the trial moves from witness to the actual guilty party of the rape and murder of Mary Phagan that The People Vs. Leo Frank (2009), not included in Bernstein’s work, suggests very strongly. In the early 1960s, the portrayal of Governor John Slaton suggests that he was a selfless white hero, who braved the angry mob calling for Frank’s death. The portrayal of Southerners in these visual retellings sometimes turns to caricature and other times downplay sectionalism all together.

Two things in particular from Bernstein’s work are of interest to our readers. First is the troublesome issue of how to portray anti-Semitism. Some of visualizations ignore the issue entirely. In Profiles of Courage (1964), an episode devoted to Governor Slaton downplayed anti-Semitism as the cause of the lynching but this rendition was one of the first to even present anti-Semitism at all. Instead, the episode highlighted demagoguery of Tom Watson who created “phobias” in the Southern populace. What is striking here is the inaccuracy with the historical record because Watson’s sentiments about the trial highlighted his virulent anti-Semitism. Interestingly, The Murder of Mary Phagan (1988) toned down Watson so that the miniseries was not overwhelming about prejudice against Leo Frank as a Jew. Anti-semitism appears in the miniseries in trial scenes. The docudramas presented by Bernstein illuminated the unease at how to portray the trial and lynching with prejudice as the basis. Thus, playing down prejudice to make audiences more comfortable was acceptable. Yet highlighting the shocking fact that Jim Conley, an African American man, was believed over Frank, a white man, seems to be central for all the recreations. Perhaps, Frank’s Jewishness gets in the way of retelling by complicating presentations of race and ethnicity. It might just be easier to suggest that Frank was white, and only present his Jewishness as religious affiliation.

Second, the focus on how to recreate a lynching and discuss such violence is also central to Bernstein’s book. Visualizing a lynching proved difficult for the films and television programs. To present the trial, directors also had to present a lynching. Thus, they provided glimpses of the act and Profiles showed a picture of Frank’s body, though The Murder of Mary Phagan recreated the whole act. Moreover, audiences might not be able to stomach the recreation. Yet audiences might like to imagine the chaos and spontaneity of a lynching rather than to see the planning and organization by firmly middle class leaders of Georgia communities. If we only see Frank hanging, we are somehow able to avoid thinking about the careful precision of his demise. The Murder of Mary Phagan illuminates the precision, which, I think, enhances the brutality. This miniseries, however, shows a much smaller crowd that gathered to see Frank’s body. People watched and “consumed” lynchings, and the death of Frank was no different. For those interested in the Frank trial or simply interested in how film renders history, Bernstein’s book is a worthy read.

Next week, I’ll continue the discussion of Leo Frank while reviewing the new docudrama, The People Vs. Leo Frank.

The People Vs. Leo Frank

Kelly Baker

The lynching of Leo Frank remains a subject of historical and popular interest. Frank, a Northern Jew, was accused of the rape and murder of Mary Phagan. For crime show buffs, the case contains mishandled evidence, questionable testimony, and good old fashioned prejudice. Modern audiences might have a hard time believing the mismanagement of the case, but the historical record clearly shows the political as well as social pressures that the judge, jury and prosecutor faced to find Phagan's murderer.

The trial and the resulting lynching have been dramatized in film and literature since the 1920s, and the most recent dramatization, The People Vs. Leo Frank, airs on PBS tonight at 10 pm EST.

The new film combines reenactment and interviews to shed light on this case. CNN describes the film:

It's a classic whodunit, starting with the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl and ending in a lynching. It was grist for a prosecutor's political aspirations, a case that was appealed all the way to the country's highest court and a story hotly debated in the national press.

At the center of it all was Leo Frank, a northern Jew who'd moved to Atlanta to supervise the National Pencil Company factory. When the body of Mary Phagan, a white child laborer, was found in the basement, law enforcement homed in on Frank. He was tried and convicted, based on what most historians say was the perjured testimony of a black man, and sentenced to death. But when the governor commuted his sentence in 1915, about 25 men abducted Frank, 31, from the state prison and hung him from a tree in Marietta, Georgia.

Considered one of the most sensational trials of the early 20th century, the Frank case seemed to press every hot-button issue of the time: North vs. South, black vs. white, Jew vs. Christian, industrial vs. agrarian. In the years since, it has inspired numerous books and films, TV programs, plays, musicals and songs. It has fueled legal discussions, spawned a traveling exhibition and driven public forums.

The answers to these questions, or theories, keep coming.Who murdered Mary Phagan? What forces were behind the lynching of Frank? Why should we still care?

"Leo Frank was not a good ole Southern boy. He was different and not ashamed of being different," said Ben Loeterman, whose new documentary, "The People v. Leo Frank," will air Monday on PBS. "The test of us as a society is not necessarily how we treat the best among us but how we treat the most questionable."

Later this week, I'll post my thoughts about this particular film and the current scholarship on Leo Frank. I encourage other contributors (especially Art Remillard) to join in the discussion on why this cold case has such popularity still and what Frank's lynching says about the religion and intolerance in 1920s America.

Faulkner, Dirty Harry, and My Disappointing Summer Break

Art Remillard

Summers always begin with high ambitions, and end with crushing disappointments. Case in point: this summer—as a “side project”—I had hoped to read a handful of Faulkner novels. Yet last week, I managed to finish only one, The Unvanquished. I started here since, as Faulkner once remarked, it is “the easiest to read.” (I have the “lazy gene”—don’t judge me.) Born from a series of short stories, Faulkner introduces the names (Sartoris and Snopes) and places (Yoknapatawpha County) that populate his other novels. More significantly, The Unvanquished is an accessible entry into a central theme in Faulkner’s body of work, that people posses, as he summarized in his Nobel Prize speech, “a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”

Indeed, in the novel’s opening pages, as the Civil War rages, we find the twelve-year-old Bayard Sartoris “playing war” with Ringo, his black slave-friend of the same age. This image of youthful ignorance represents a moral point of departure for Bayard, who would slowly resist many of the norms of the white “southern way of life.” When he first sees a “Yankee,” for example, he remarks with incredulity, “He looks just like a man.” The “stranger” is thus humanized, if only for a brief moment.

The final chapter punctuates Bayard’s moral transformation. His father, Colonel John Sartoris, had been a Civil War hero and a “redeemer” during Reconstruction. But Sartoris the Elder is murdered by his rival Ben Redmond. And Sartoris the Younger is bound by an Old South honor code to enact vengeance. Earlier in the novel, Bayard avenges his grandmother’s death, killing off the “murdering scoundrel” Grumby. But the war had since ended, and a new era was emerging. Even Colonel Sartoris, whose past was defined by death and warfare, tells his son before his murder, “I am tired of killing men, no matter what the necessity nor the end.”

So Bayard confronts his father’s murder, armed only with a “turn the other cheek” ethic, cultivated in part by his deceased grandmother. In a surreal series of events, the surprised Redmond stands, fires two shots into the air, and “went away . . . from Mississippi and never came back.” A gathering of bloodthirsty men witness Redmond departing, dumbfounded yet also aware that “maybe there has been enough killing.” They see in Bayard a new kind of courage, which is both counterintuitive and effective. Still, lingering in the background is Ringo, whose skin color puts him on the periphery of Bayard’s imagined sacred community of the New South. Ironically, Bayard’s moral code—and by extension the moral code of the New South—alienates his black friend, but acknowledges the humanity in his father’s murderer.

Alongside this irony, The Unvanquished left a powerful image of active non-violence in my head. Fortuitously enough, a day after finishing the novel, I watched Gran Torino. For those who haven’t seen Gran Torino, I will only say that Dirty Harry's film is sufficiently Faulknerian. Keep an eye out for two contrasting confessions at the end—one is perfunctorily delivered through a confessional screen to a pasty and persistent Catholic priest; and the other is passionately delivered through a screen door to his young and astute Hmong neighbor. These scenes in themselves capture the film’s close inspection of compassion, sacrifice, and endurance.

So perhaps my summer of crushing disappointment wasn’t so disappointing after all. Oh who am I kidding, of course it was.

Where There Is Death, There Is Religion

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER


Two recent publications—Vincent Brown’s The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (HUP 2008) and Amy Louise Wood’s Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (UNCP 2009)—pay close attention to the relationship between death and religion in the history of the Americas. Taking a cue from anthropologist Katherine Verdery’s claim that “Death is the quintessential cosmic issue,” Brown shows in terrible detail how death dictated life for Africans of Jamaica, the island at the heart of British colonial slavery during the seventeenth century. Wood advances to the twentieth century in her portrayal of the cultural practices associated with the spectacle of lynching in the United States and the ritual performances that resulted in thousands of deaths.

Whether in colonial Jamaica or the Jim Crow South, the connections between death and religion seem so pervasive, so obvious, so quotidian, that Brown and Wood hardly labor to unite the two experiences. Making sense of death, at least in these two cases, required rites and practices that rarely occurred in the institutional confines of churches or fell under clearly defined categories of denomination. As Wood demonstrates, the “symbolic power” of lynching was a consequence of the “deliberately performative and ritualized” actions of white mobs and “their sensational representations in narratives, photographs, and films.” Similarly, Brown tracks how “intense disputes about custom, authority, and religion play out within final rites of passage,” while at the same time capturing how “mortuary politics mediated group cohesion, property relations, struggles to give public influence a sacred dimension, contests over the colonial moral order, and efforts to politicize local geography and history.”

While illuminating much about the relationship between death and religion, Brown and Wood also demonstrate the interdisciplinary effectiveness of combining history and anthropology to make sense of the past. Wood puts the two methodologies to outstanding use in her chapter entitled “A Hell of Fire Upon Earth: Religion,” wherein she confounds the traditional distinction between the sacred and the profane in her description of the 1885 lynching of Harris Tunstal behind the Methodist Episcopal Church of Oxford, Mississippi. With comparable effect, Brown’s prologue begins with the story of a group of black women singing a song to Europeans arriving for the first time at Jamaica. The song went, “New-come Buckra/He get sick/He tak fever/He be die/He be die.” “Buckra,” it should be noted, meant both “master” and “demon” in West African usage. I could go on, or you can just read more for yourself. Suffice it to say that The Reaper’s Garden and Lynching and Spectacle capture both the ordinary and extraordinary dimensions of death in ways that blur definitions of religion and academic discipline.

Side note:
Check out these links for more on the history of lynching in America, many of which can be put to use in the classroom.

Amy Louise Wood, “They Never Witnessed Such a Melodrama,” Southern Spaces (Apr. 2009).

Mississippi Quarterly’s special issue on lynching and American culture, edited by Amy Louise Wood and Susan Donaldson (Winter-Spring 2008).

Donald Mathews, “The Southern Rite of Human Sacrifice,” Journal of Southern Religion (2000).

“Without Sanctuary,” an online gallery adapted from the book Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America edited by James Allen, Jon Lewis, Leon Litwack, and Hilton Als, and reported about on NPR in 2004.

Practical Matters, Prayer Pawns, and A Chat on We Shall Remain

Paul Harvey

Emerging briefly from the depths of senior theses and graduate seminar papers, before taking a deep breath and diving back down. Notes of interest on new opportunities for online explorations.

First, Practical Matters, an online journal of religious practice and practical theology published out of Emory, has just posted its first issue, on the theme "Engaging Imagination." Articles and reviews range from photography to dance to "ritual praxis inside the classroom," and a host of other ways to open up the religious imagination. The editors introduce the journal here, and explain further:

In this journal you will find digital scholarship that utiliz­es the capacities of the internet to ask and provoke new questions about religious prac­tices and practical theology. You will also find here a variety of content: peer-reviewed scholarship in several media and genres, reflections and essays by practitioners and teachers, video and audio interviews with scholars, reviews of current work in religious practices and practical theology, musical performances, photographic essays, and more.

Next, Katie Lofton has emerged from her cubbyhole at Princeton to deconstruct the recent nonsensical tit-for-tat about the "National Day of Prayer":

The irony of debates about national prayer is that they transform the experience of nationalism (worthy, perhaps) into a prescription of nationalism (failed, always). Despite our stories plurality (or perhaps because of them), the landscape of American hope and American need has become stunningly arid, silenced by prayer box sets and by rationalist relativism. What now to say before the dying soldier? What now to do during an epidemic of economic dismay? We reach for prayers, but they have become too precious by half, made by both squabbling sides something to demonstrate that you have done (he in the Oval Office, they on the sidewalk of Pennsylvania Avenue), rather than something that you seek to do. Beyond the glare of this hollow exhibitionism, we stretch for something real, we seek a prayer that isn't a pawn. And so I do what most mothers and fathers, lovers and workers, believers and atheists do: I squeeze the hand harder, and ask what I can do to see you better, to know you better, to serve you better. Then (I promise, I pray, I swear, I stand), I will do it.

Finally, I received this email about the PBS series We Shall Remain, a multi-part exploration of Native American History, which will interest some of you.

We would like to invite you to join us for a live chat with Julianna Brannum, co-producer of “Wounded Knee,” the fifth film in PBS’ “We Shall Remain” series. The films explore pivotal episodes in American Indian history. Tomorrow (Tuesday, May 12) at 2pm EST we’ll host a conversation about the film and Julianna’s behind-the-scenes perspective on this moving film. She'll answer your questions live in our hour-long chat.

Go to www.pbs.org/chat on May 12th at 2pm to join the discussion or leave a question for her today.

Catholicism in the Movies

Paul Harvey

I'm gearing up, with great anticipation, for our next Young Scholars in American Religion meeting, April 2-5. Very regrettably, that meeting happens to coincide with a conference that sounds like too much fun: Catholics in the Movies, to be held at the Cushwa Center, Notre Dame, April 2-4. Here's a description, in case anyone living in/around South Bend doesn't know about it but might want to attend.

April 2-4, 2009. Catholics in the Movies. Cusha Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame.

Cinema is arguably the most understudied and potentially enlightening lens through which to examine the historical trajectories of Catholics in the United States over the previous century. This conference will explore how American Catholics produced, acted, viewed, boycotted, and were depicted in film. The starting point for the conference is the outstanding volume Catholicim in the Movies (Oxford, 2008), to which the conference speakers contributed essays.

Register for the conference at www.nd.edu/~cushwa, or call (574) 631-6691. The program is below -- wish I could be there!

Catholics in the Movies
Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism

University of Notre Dame
April 2-4, 2009

“At the movies, Catholicism – rather than Protestantism – is the American religion.” Colleen McDannell

Focus
Cinema is arguably the most understudied and potentially enlightening lens through which to examine the historical trajectories of Catholics in the United States over the previous century. This conference will explore how American Catholics produced, acted, viewed, boycotted, and were depicted in film. The starting point for the conference is the outstanding volume Catholics in the Movies (Oxford, 2008), to which the conference speakers contributed essays.

Thursday, April 2
Film Screening (7:30 p.m.)
On the Waterfront
Discussion to follow with James T. Fisher, Fordham University

Friday, April 3
Session One (9:00 a.m.)
Race and Ethnicity

Moderator: Paula Kane, University of Pittsburgh

The Celluloid Melting Pot: Catholic Ethnicity on the Silent Screen
Judith Weisenfeld, Princeton University

The Catholic Singer: Ethnic Performance, American Dreams and Going My Way
Anthony Burke Smith, University of Dayton

Starting All Over Again: Mid-Century Catholics Confront Race
Jeffrey Marlett, College of St. Rose

Session Two (2:00 p.m.)
Masculinity

Moderator: Colleen McDannell, University of Utah

J. C. Superstar and the Streets of Dock City, 1938
Thomas J. Ferraro, Duke University

A Couple of Harps: True Confessions and the Brotherhood of Irish American Ethnicity Timothy Meagher, Catholic University of America

The Strong, Vulgar Type: Images of Masculinity in Dogma
Amy Frykholm, correspondent for The Christian Century

Film Screening (7:30 p.m.)
Santitos
Discussion to follow with María Amparo Escandón, novelist and screenwriter

Saturday, April 4
Session Three (9:00 a.m.)
Ritual and Devotion

Moderator: Jeffrey Marlett, College of St. Rose

The Production Code and the Production of Devotion in Wartime Hollywood
Paula Kane, University of Pittsburgh

Passage through the Borderlands: Transformation in the Devotional World of Santitos
Darryl Caterine, LeMoyne College

The Devotional Life of St. Mel: The Passion of the Christ
Colleen McDannell, University of Utah

Session Four (2:00 p.m.)
Film and American Catholicism
Moderator: Thomas J. Ferraro, Duke University

Playing Catholics: Who’s Zooming Who?
Tracy Fessenden, Arizona State University

The Spiritual Front in Postwar American Film
James T. Fisher, Fordham University

Catholic Crime Stories
Carlo Rotella, Boston College
Cover image: Courtesy Oxford University Press

The Wrestler and Religion

Where's the meat?
Kelly Baker

Over at Religion Dispatches, S. Brent Plate wonders why didn't movie reviewers pick up on religion in Darren Aronofsky's film, The Wrestler. In "Pop-Eye: Meat the Wrestler," Plate argues that secular and religious reviewers overlooked religion because religion was material in the film. The spirit-body dualism that many take to be at the heart of some religions obscured obvious religious symbolism. Randy is meat. The body is where his religious suffering and devotion occurs. Plate writes:

More specifically, it’s curious how few religious-oriented reviewing outlets were able to see possible symbolic references to, say, Abraham and Isaac, Jesus, or others. So, I’m left wondering, did the reviewers blink their eyes, reach down for another bite of popcorn, at the images of a tattooed Jesus Christ on Randy’s back? Or the “Job” (pronounced with long “o”) inked into the skin of his middle finger? Or the white fleece vest he wears on his entrance into his final fight?

A couple of reviewers did pick up on Cassidy’s heated endorsement to the blissfully-ignorant Randy of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, exclaiming, “Dude, ya gotta see it! They throw everything at him: whips, chains…” to which a confused Randy replies, “tough dude.” Cassidy sees Jesus as a real wrestler, showing both her investment in the fiction of the violence, but equally her invested belief in Randy as a tough dude. Theirs is a physical Jesus, a body that could take it, á la Gibson’s Christ; unlike Gibson, Aronofsky’s tale is disinvested of tacky teardrops falling from the sky and cheap-trick resurrections.

The reason reviewers passed over the religious is not simply, I suspect, because of religious illiteracy, but because of the received wisdom of late-modern culture that continues to dwell on a body-soul dualism, with the soul in power, the body a mere marionette. Several of the religious-oriented review sites described Randy’s body in metaphorical terms: Randy’s heart attack was really a comment on his loneliness, a broken heart over his daughter’s estrangement and the utter lack of any other community. Reviewers persisted in maintaining this dualism, that the double identities Randy and Cassidy both share ultimately want to get to some core non-physical identity, some materially transcendent spirit, some individuality that is more about the myth of modern individualism than about anything religious. Therein they miss the (religious) point.

Doc Watch: Journeys with Ted and Kid Preachers

By Randall Stephens

The current issue of Newsweek tips us off to the forthcoming Alexandra Pelosi documentary, The Trials of Ted Haggard, now being advertised by HBO. Wow... If Pelosi's whimsical Friends of God and Journeys with George are any indication, this should be a real treat. Set your DVRs. I've used Friends in my Religion and American Culture class, and it's worked very well.

In the not-so-recent-film category. . . I encourage blog readers to get a copy of Marjoe, an Oscar-winning 1972 documentary that will knock your socks OFF!!! I had not seen it until recently. What a revelation. A sleeper, for sure, the movie is about a one-time child pentecostal preacher who, as a jaded twenty-something, starts to test the boundaries of authenticity and holy-rolling antics. Marjoe Gortner later achieved some fame as a B movie actor--he starred in Earthquake, a classic disaster film from the Me Decade. But this picture takes us back to his days as a conflicted evangelist . . . “Should I stay or should I go now.” Marjoe's Mick Jagger-esque chicken dancing down the aisles in tent meetings and tabernacles is something to behold. The music that accompanies the former kid preacher’s Leap-of-Faith swagger could melt the heart of even the most stolid atheist. This one merits in-class viewing, for sure.

What is it with child preachers anyhow? It’s like watching very precocious/frightening child actors, right?

Religulous and the Problem of Belief

Kelly Baker

Over at Religion Dispatches, S. Brent Plate has a thoughtful opinion piece on Bill Maher's documentary, Religulous, and the "antiquated" definition of religion that Maher uses to ostracize religious people. (Also, check out his newest book, Blasphemy Art that Offends.) Plate argues that Maher's belief-centered vision of religion ignores how practice defines religious life and presents religion as an individually centered enterprise. By parodying and ostracizing what people believe, Maher misses the communal and ritual aspects of religion and how both define why religious people believe and act in the ways that they do. Plate questions why Maher sticks to such a definition, and he concludes that Maher would probably garner a "C" in his Intro to Religious Studies Course. Here's an excerpt:

Bill gets this low grade because his definition of religion appears to have been culled solely from Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary in which religion is essentially defined, in solid US-Protestant style, along the lines of a set of beliefs in God. (To give credit where credit is due, the problem also lies with the director Larry Charles and whatever half-baked research team they assembled; and while Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens are all susceptible to the same critique, in these pages I’ll confine myself to Religulous.) This is the kind of thing a fair number of my students, raised in the Protestant-dominated United States (even Catholics and Jews have assimilated this definition), come to university thinking about religion; the two key components of which are “belief” and “God.” Religion is some cryptic interior, individual thing that exists in one’s own head, and is only understood in relation to a God. I don’t blame my students for the deficiencies in their cultural upbringing; rather, I see a chance to expand their horizons, to get them, as my wise colleague Andy Fort says, to “mentally migrate,” to come to terms with the radical diversity of religions as they historically and presently occur around the world. ... It's somewhat unfortunate, given the film's title, that Maher and Charles never offer a working definition of religion. But the mode of questioning lays bare the thinking that went into Religulous. Except for an early scene at the “Truckers Church,” Maher interviews individuals, alone, as if he’s on his HBO talk show (but even there, there’s a panel . . .). It’s a great strategy for TV but that’s not the way life, to say nothing of religious life, operates. This is the first key problem with the modus operandi for the film: it functions like a talk show, imagining that religious life can be reduced to a few sound bites, told via spoken words, by a single person, in an artificially constructed environment. Maher’s question to the “ex-Jew for Jesus” about suicide (“If heaven’s so great, why not kill yourself now?”) only underscores the individualistic framework of the film: religion is about solitary individuals and their own pleasures and desires. No traditional rituals are shown—almost no communal gatherings at all in fact—nor do many of the realities of religion, either good or ill, make much of an appearance.
...
So, here’s the thing: Maher mocks people for their antiquated beliefs though he never moves beyond an antiquated definition of religion himself. He borrows the same viewpoints of religion that all the way-out interviewees have. He is indignant that people actually believe in an existing Adam and Eve and the attendant talking snake, or in a man (Jonah) swallowed by a whale (or, really a “big fish”). These are the problems he keeps seeing: conservative religious people actually believe the myths of their traditions. But then Religulous splices in images of explosions, violent street demonstrations, and other aggressive activities. So, what’s the relationship between people who actually believe that Jonah was swallowed by a whale and suicide bombings? The film doesn’t really make those connections, nor could it, because they don’t connect. The broader connections between belief and violence could have (and, I’d say, should have) been made, but it would have taken some much more careful consideration of the topic at hand.

What Maher and filmmaking cohorts don’t appear to understand is that a person can be a Jew, have an enjoyable evening around the Sabbath table, and not believe that God actually created the world in seven days; that a Christian can stand up with her community, recite the 1700-year-old Nicene Creed, not believe a word of it, but still be moved by the experience of collective recitation; that a Muslim can make the pilgrimage to Mecca, touch the Kaaba, and still realize that at its base it is, indeed, a meteorite and not a holy rock from God. Maher even goes so far as to claim that “Christians believe” they are drinking the blood of a man who lived 2000 years ago. But he never asks anyone if they believe that. It’s a straw man argument. Even if this theological idea of “transubstantiation” has been written into Catholic dogma for centuries, I’ve yet to meet a Catholic who believes what Maher claims they believe (though I’m sure he could find a couple if he just kept throwing money at the film).

Funny thing is, had he watched Tim Burton’s Big Fish, he could have garnered some insight about how stories operate within human life. Here’s a hint, Bill: The big fish doesn’t have to be real! It’s a great story.

Inheritors of Unwanted Legacies

Today's post comes to us from our friend and occasional guest poster Judith Weisenfeld, Professor of Religion at Princeton University and author of the recent and excellent volume Hollywood be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949. Judith discusses some recent documentaries on the entangled history of race, slavery, communal myths, and religion in American history.

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Inheritors of Unwanted Legacies
Judith Weisenfeld

On July 29, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the non-binding respolution H.Res. 194 (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=hr110-194) formally “apologizing for the enslavement and racial segregation of African-Americans” and committing to rectifying “the lingering consequences of the misdeeds committed against African-Americans under slavery and Jim Crow.” Predictably, my reading of responses posted on online news sites turned up many people arguing that this as far too little and far too late and many insisting that these sins of the past have nothing to do with them. Some, however, took the opportunity to respond at length to the question of what kinds of responses to the legacies of slavery and racism are useful and appropriate.

Coincidentally, I recently saw two new documentaries made by white women dealing with the implications of their families’ histories as participants in America’s long traditions of racism. Katrina Browne’s Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, which premiered on PBS’s POV in June, follows ten descendants of the DeWolf family of Bristol, Rhode Island as they struggle to come to terms with their ancestors’ tremendous success as slave traders from the mid 18th century through the early 19th century and slave plantation owners in Cuba well into the 19th century. The film follows this group as they retrace the steps of the slave trade from Ghana to Cuba to Bristol and consider the economic, political, and moral consequences of their ancestors’ business in each location. In addition to building the economy of Bristol through their active traffic in people, the DeWolfs were important figures in the local Episcopal Church. Many of the descendants featured in the film are active members of churches and see their work as fundamentally religious. The information the film presents about the profound ways in which Northern communities were implicated in the Atlantic slave trade and American, Caribbean, and Latin American systems of slavery is compelling and makes clear that, while the documentary began as a personal project, it is not simply the story of one family. At the same time, the focus remains on the individual emotional journeys of participants, with Browne serving as narrator and commentator. I sometimes found it difficult and at other times moving to observe their struggles, but was generally made uncomfortable by Browne’s sighing, worried narration which contributed to a certain aura of self-indulgence on the part of the DeWolf descendants.

A good deal of screen time is devoted to conversations among the ten participants about what, if anything, their inheritance enjoins them to do and, although no single path emerges, we do get a sense at the film’s end of the actions various family members take. One of these was a campaign to get the Episcopal Church to apologize for its involvement in the slave trade and in slavery. A dialogue project has emerged from the film and discussion materials and information about screenings are available (although I was a little taken aback by the division of viewing guides into ones for African Americans, “European Americans,” “multi-racial” people, and “other race groups and ethnicities”). Traces of the Trade is just out on DVD soon and so easily obtained.

Margaret Brown’s The Order of Myths chronicles the 2007 Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama, where she grew up. The oldest Mardi Gras in America, Mobile’s celebration remains racially segregated, with an all-white association crowning what they understand to be the true and only King and Queen of Mardi Gras. An all-black group, founded in 1939 in response to Mobile’s black residents only having access to the celebration as servants, musicians, or fire carriers (this remains the case today), crowns its own King and Queen. 2007’s white Mardi Gras Queen descends from an infamous slave trader who brought an illegal shipment of Africans to Mobile in 1860 and, as it turns out, that year’s black Mardi Gras Queen descends from one of the Africans on board that ship. The mystic societies that sponsor balls and parades – The Order of Myths is one of these – remain inaccessible to black members and many of the white participants Brown interviews insist that they simply want to maintain their traditions and, besides, the “coloreds” like it that way.

What makes this film so compelling is the skill with which Brown accomplishes observational, cinema verité documentary – she chose informational title screens rather than a voice-over narration – and refuses easy resolution. This is not to say that her perspective is not apparent. Her emotional presence informs everything, especially the editing, which moves the film along quickly primarily through juxtaposition of scenes of the separate black and white events. It did seem to me, however, that the editing sometimes relegated the black participants in service of Brown’s desire to show the separate but unequal nature of the celebrations rather than allowing these people’s stories their own integrity. We learn late in the film precisely how Brown is connected to Mobile’s Mardi Gras and it seems to me a good decision for her to have withheld that information for so long. It is clear that the filmmaker has an investment in the past and future of Mobile’s rituals and, despite a few missteps, she does a remarkable job of presenting a complicated vision of one small portion of contemporary American race relations. In his review in New York Magazine, David Edelstein sums up the source of the film’s power and effectiveness well: “In the telling, The Order of Myths sounds obvious, and its underlying racial politics might be. But Brown is scrutinizing the surface, the tension between individuals and their ways. You try to read their faces, and it’s as if they’re wearing Mardi Gras masks, held in place by… what? Fear? It’s no wonder. Without the order of myths, what’s left?” The film’s website has information on the limited schedule of screenings, but I sincerely hope that we will see a DVD release soon. [Editors' note: my Netflix queue gives a January release date for the DVD).
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Update: We have received the following information on getting the DVD, especially to show for classes and the like, for The Order of Myths: "it is available for purchase on DVD with Public Performance Rights. You can order it online through our website, at www.cinemaguild.com (select New Releases along the top), or by calling or faxing us directly at Tel: (212) 685-6242, or Fax: (212) 685-4717.

Teaching American Religion Through Film

KELLY BAKER

The H-Amrel listserv currently has an ongoing discussion about useful films for teaching American religious history. The most popular suggestions seem to be Black Robe, The Apostle, anything by PBS's American Experience, and Malcolm X.

So following this discussion, I would encourage our blog readers to post their favorite films in the comments section. I currently like to use a documentary on Appalachian snake handlers called the Holy Ghost People, available here, and I am toying with Jesus Camp and Jonestown: The Life and Death of the People's Temple. (Also, Internet Archive has great resources, including documentaries and video clips, for class.)