Falling - Notes on Richard Dutcher’s Tragic Mormon Film
By Guest Contributor on Aug 21, 2007
Guest post by Bruce Jorgensen
I attended the private screening (and later discussion) of Richard Dutcher’s Falling at Sunstone on 9 August 2007, spoke very briefly about it with two friends later that afternoon, summarized it as best I could for my wife that evening, wrote a paragraph of somewhat more articulate thoughts to one friend the next evening, and have since then read longer and shorter comments online and have been composing some longer notes. I’ve valued the SunstoneBlog discussion as an instance of what our late friend Wayne Booth called “coduction” (see The Company We Keep; not deduction, not induction, but “drawing together” what we have drawn from our experience of the film, offering our perceptions and judgments in dialogue or congenial argument), and thus also as a case of the development of what Booth called a “critical culture.” This all strikes me as healthy and hopeful. These notes are my offering toward that coduction and culture. This will be my first blog, therefore a baptism of fire (perhaps in more ways than one). The notes are extensive and only sometimes directly quote previous comments, but I think many discussants will find me concurring or demurring or just commenting further on something they’ve addressed.
SPOILER ALERT: these notes will discuss important plot points of the film, sometimes at the level of the single scene or shot (at least as well as I remember those).
I’ll begin with an excerpt from the email I sent one friend on Friday evening, 10 Aug 07 (unedited, which means it retains my habitual lightly-capped and lightly-punctuated e-style):
i’m still sorting out what i think/feel about Dutcher’s film. i think it’s unquestionably his strongest and best-made film [i’ve not seen God’s Army]. and he gives a strong performance as the protagonist. it’s a much harder film to “like” than either Brigham City or States of Grace. but then “like” doesnt seem the word to apply. it’s a violent film about filming violence; about how the culture and cultivation of violence consumes and destroys everything we normally regard as good in our lives. early on, the news anchorwoman who uses the crime and disaster footage shot by the protagonist Eric, has a line something like “we’ve got to feed the beast,” and i thought, right on, that’s what this is about. it’s a tragedy in which Eric and his wife Davey, as he says to her of himself, have gotten “too far off” from their better selves [my clumsy language here], their innocence [they are now not at all “harmless” people], their own capacity for goodness. and Eric is discovering this, but too late, because he’s set something loose, by filming real violence on the street, that he cannot stop from flinging violence wider and wider. it’s also, in ways somewhat like and somewhat unlike Dutcher’s earlier films, sacramental. i think it would not be amiss to call it a religious, and specifically Christian and Mormon, tragedy. a hard genre for most Mormons to encounter. we [a we that sometimes includes me] want our art sweet and consoling, not harrowing. it comes terrifically close to Kurosawa’s idea, “to be an artist is never to avert the eyes.” that makes it hard to watch. but perhaps it also says that to live compassionately as a Christian means never to avert our eyes from suffering. [hm, that might go too far; sometimes the sufferer may need us to turn away as a kind of mercy.] it’s also a cry against and finally a cry to God. de profundis clamavi.
I’ve slightly misquoted Kurosawa there (at least as the remark appears in my source, Robert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream): “To be an artist means never to avert your eyes.” It’s not hard to see me, in this first precipitation of sentences, coming close to reading Falling as a sort of morality play—that “culture of violence” stuff, which is another version of a fairly “orthodox” Mormon take on Hollywood—before I call it a tragedy. To see it as a morality play might be to avert my eyes. I think that’s a common pitfall in perceiving tragedy because tragedies, to work at all as represented actions, do evoke our value judgments of good and bad, better and worse, on the characters and their words and thoughts and deeds, and on their situations as changed by the action. There’s a strong temptation to schematize the world of a tragedy into categories like good and bad, “deluded” and “amoral,” or whatever, and in the confidence (or over-confidence) of that schematization to arrive at the “overall message.” But while morality play may be a didactic genre intended to illustrate a message, I do not think tragedy is. What tragedies attend to, as I understand this, is what pitifully and terribly happens to moral agents in a contingent world when something turns against them (“adversity,” to use a Latinate word; bad luck, in the Greek understanding of “luck” [tuchē] as anything not within the control of the agent). Their lives get worse (less “good,” less “happy,” less worth living for a human being); and worst of all, they themselves may become worse people. This is what is “pitiful” and “terrible” about a tragedy; and the telos or “final cause” of a tragedy is to move us to the keenest sense of what is pitiful and terrible in the action and the agents we witness, and thus in the possibilities of our own lives. (Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness is the best single source I know on these matters. On religious or specifically Mormon tragedy, one might begin with P. A. Christensen’s “Tragedy as Religious Paradox” in Of a Number of Things, Marden J. Clark’s “Paradox and Tragedy in Mormonism” in Liberating Form, and Eugene England’s “Joseph Smith and the Tragic Quest” in Dialogues with Myself.)
I suspect a hankering for “redemption” in the stories we read or hear or watch (I often hanker for it too) may be related to, or a component of, our tendency to read tragedies as morality plays. If we read a story as a morality play with a “message,” and the message is one we don’t agree with (say, “God is dead, and therefore smart people will just take what they can get right now”), it’s obviously a bad morality play, though it might help if somebody in it had the good luck to be “redeemed” or “redeeming” in a way we approve of. In fact, Attic tragedies as Aristotle witnessed and understood them did not all end in death and devastation; some even had what we might call “happy endings” for the protagonists. Shakespearean tragedies, influenced by later Greco-Roman works but also by the medieval de casibus view of tragedy (“about falls” of people from “high” to “low” station), always end with death and devastation, though one or more surviving characters (Horatio, Kent, Macduff, et al) may give us a sense that something has been “redeemed” or spared out of all the waste we’ve seen, even if that “redemption” consists only in some form of cognition, like a so-called “epiphany” in a modernist short story, or what Milton at the end of the final chorus of Samson Agonistes called a “new acquist / Of true experience.” If we want more “redemption” in our Shakespeare, we can turn to Nahum Tate’s amended versions.
Unrelieved tragedy is fairly rare in the literary and dramatic tradition. But disaster without a visible “good” result (in mortality) is at least a possibility in human experience. (I’m thinking of the Crandall Canyon mine disaster right now; one of the dead rescuers, Gary Jensen, apparently comes from my mother’s birthplace.) Even scripture offers at least a few instances. Think of Jephthah’s daughter: she’s a purely innocent victim of her father’s rash pledge to God; and if he loves her, surely his victory can be no recompense for having to slaughter her. It’s an intolerable story, to me (harder to take than the analogous story of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia to get a fair wind for sailing to Troy). Or think of Saul at Gilboa: I don’t see much “redemption” in that, though it’s fairly easy to read Saul’s tragedy (a “mixed” character becoming worse) as a morality play. Think of the tragedy of David, too (which we can also read as a morality tale): who’s “redeemed” in that story? Of course, because history does go on, the survivors of such disasters will, perhaps must, find ways to make something “good” out of their destruction and loss, or at least make feasible lives for themselves. I suppose the Book of Job is “redemptive” enough for many readers; but I can’t help but feel that new crop of children cannot replace the lost ones, because to me no child is fungible (you can’t just trade one for another). Think of the Gospel of Mark as it appears in the earliest manuscripts we now have: empty tomb, scared women running from it—what are we to make of that? Its last, subordinate clause, in Greek, ends in the word translated as “afraid.” I’m grateful we have the other gospels, for the sake of “redemption” in a literary as well as other senses of the word. But I am constrained to suppose that in some human lives in this world, there is no visible “redemption.” I think that is at least partly why we have a redeemer and the options of repentance and forgiveness. But some people do die without completing those: think of the husband in the story Pres. Hinckley told in the October 2004 Priesthood Session of General Conference, which he called “pathetic and tragic”; I think he meant those words. (On “disaster” without “result,” see John D. Caputo, Against Ethics, chapter 2: “Between Good and Evil”; the last chapter of his brief and much less daunting On Religion also pertains.)
Eric and Davey Boyle in Falling are what Plato or Aristotle would call “mixed” characters: neither perfectly good nor perfectly bad. (In the Republic, Plato presents Socrates warning against representing “bad” or even “mixed” characters, as corrupting to the poet, the actors if the mimesis is in dramatic form, and the audience.) Both Eric and Davey are entangled in, or complicit in, things we rightly judge as at best “mixed” (it’s not categorically bad to be an actress, or to film accidents or violence on the streets and sell the film to the news media). But when Eric finds Davey dead (before we know what brought this about), he becomes a worse man: he curses God (this would appal the chorus in a Greek tragedy, as it should appal religious viewers). Even before this most devastating event, brought about partly because of his own agency and choices but perhaps more by factors in his world that he cannot control, and bringing on him disaster in excess of his or Davey’s worst deserts, when Eric films the murder on the street, we will see him to have become a worse man; we judge him wrong not to have stopped filming and tried to help the victim, or at least to have taken his supplicant hand when he cried out “Help me.” But at the end of that pitiful and terrible scene we may also perceive Eric himself as knowing in his guts, in his body, his soul, the evil he is already giving himself over to. He ought to destroy the tape or, better, give it to the police; but he does not, and in turning it in to the broker who will sell it to the TV news team, he makes another choice, takes another action, that makes him a worse man and will bring upon him and Davey consequences far worse than either of them deserves.
I won’t try to carry though a complete “reading” of Falling as religious tragedy here, though I think it invites that reading and that such a reading is eminently feasible. To the degree that a viewer cannot “identify” with a tragic character and thus stands off at a judgmental distance (as I think is likely with many in a Mormon audience), I suspect a tragedy will be read as a morality play—if it is not simply condemned for representing terrible things or pitiable things about which nothing is done, disasters without “redemption.” We do want our art to console or reassure us; some tragedies will not do that. But in any case, as I see it, the defining habits, the very ethos, of Mormon or Christian criticism must be justice and mercy; or in one word, charity. (Aren’t justice and mercy the obverse and reverse faces of one thing which it is hard to name, unless as love or charity?) All of us may be in some degree complicit in the evils that entangle Eric and Davey Boyle: we watch movies (fictive or documentary) or television shows and news; we (at least in a structural sense) voyeuristically peer into the privacies of real or fictive others, without ourselves being seen by the objects (or victims) of our gaze; we watch, rather often, their pain for the sake of being “informed” or “entertained.” So for me, though I’ve never wanted to be an actor or a filmmaker, it’s not hard to identify with both Eric and Davey; I belong to the same culture, the same world, of watchers and watched. It’s hard to watch what they do and suffer, as it’s hard to watch any tragedy well-played; but it’s not quite so hard to try to be just and merciful toward them; and though an ontological gap, a “great gulf” (Lk 16.27), separates me from all fictive (including all filmed) persons, so I can do nothing but watch them, it’s not hard to wish I could help or warn them. Like all human beings who manage to remain somewhat human, I’m wired that way, with a functioning assembly of mirror neurons. Like the priest and the Levite on the road, I can deflect my mirror neurons’ impulses; or like the passing Samaritan, I can see a wounded man and have compassion. The Samaritan in the parable “saw,” “had compassion,” and “went”to help (Lk 10.33-34); I cannot go to help Davey or Eric, or the newswoman or the video broker or the gang members, but I can see and feel something for all of them, and I can include that in my understanding and judgment of their story. (On the troublesome ethics of fictively observing the pain of others, see Walter J. Slatoff, The Look of Distance, which I’ve not yet read through.)
I find it regrettable and uncharitable to characterize Dutcher’s facial expression, when he discussed the climactic fight scene, as “grinning with devilish satisfaction.” No expert on “devilish satisfaction,” I’m at a loss to adequately describe or interpret Dutcher’s expression during that discussion. Mobile, mutable, quickly shifting, as perhaps befits a writer, director, and actor discussing his film with some of its first audience, especially a film that matters to him so much as this one does. He’s clearly proud of the film, hopes at least some viewers will value and understand it as he does, knows many will not, knows many will misunderstand or misjudge the film and vilify him for it. We learned in that discussion (some of us, before it) that he’d already faced one viewer who wanted him to “burn in hell” and apparently threatened to make that happen, and that this viewer had, soon after, apologized for that outburst. Experiences like those would leave me badly shaken, and I doubt I’d be in full control of either my words or my facial expressions. I’ll cut Dutcher a lot of slack on this. I want to avoid ad hominem language as much as I can; and yet at the same time I don’t think any of us can avoid taking personal responsibility for our reactions to the film and the ways we express them. For me that is one burden of ethical criticism, and another defining habit of a Christian or Mormon criticism.
About Davey I have a couple thoughts. From her demeanor in the acting class scene, the screen-test scene, and the immediately following scene with the casting director, I strongly doubt that she’s yet had sexual relations with anyone who might help her get a part in a film. The brief scene with the casting director outside the stage door, and then her later lie (as we will learn it was) to Eric about a meeting with the director, made me fear that she was about to “sleep with” him. Given my doubt, I read her declaration to Eric in their fight scene, that she’s not sure the child was his, as cruel retaliation for his cruelty to her about the abortion she’s just had and just confessed. My reading of course may say more about me than about Davey: I’m trying hard to be both just and merciful, and not to go too far beyond the evidence I have (which I may not fully have after viewing the film only once). I suspect that my uncertainty about this (rather, my strong doubt) matches rather closely with Dutcher’s intention. For Davey, in that context, to tell Eric she’s not sure if the child was his, is a much crueller infidelity to him than her disrobing for the screen test. I take it that was the point. Her lie to Eric (if it was a lie) ignites his murderous rage toward her, as ferocious as—or more ferocious than—anything in Shakespeare (Othello, Leontes). Eric’s attempt to kill her, by the way, was for me (or seems on reflection to have been) a much harder scene to watch than his climactic street fight (also harder to watch than Othello strangling Desdemona). He really does want to kill her. And that shows just how tragically awful their lives have become. As Aristotle implies in chapter 14 of his Poetics, the most tragic deeds are those that occur within families.
Incidentally, I subscribe to the view that katharsis means not “purgation” of our emotions but clarification of what is terrible and pitiful in human actions (see Gerald Else, Leon Golden, Martha Nussbaum, and perhaps others on this question). I left the private screening of Falling wrenched and harrowed and not “purged of” but filled with pity and terror for Davey and Eric and other characters, and for the terrible possibilities in all of our lives. I think that was what the great tragic dramatists meant their audiences to suffer in witnessing their plays. We don’t—or at least I don’t—see very many tragic films; that’s not Hollywood, usually (recent exceptions do come to mind: In the Bedroom, House of Sand and Fog, Million-Dollar Baby, Crash).
On Davey’s screen-test scene, I largely concur with other responses. I thought I saw brief, but almost complete, lateral nudity just at the end as Davey leans to pick up her clothes. For me the most chilling images in that scene were the brief shots of the woman running the camera. She’s another counterpart to Eric, of course. But although Eric early on films Davey while she sleeps, raising the terrible and pitiful possibility that she too is mainly an object of his cinematographic gaze, it seemed clear that he regrets the filming, loves her and seeks to connect with her as husband to wife; and I think they are connected that way, though their separate agendas have them swiftly diverging even at the moment they begin to connect. How many husbands and wives enact versions of this bedroom scene, on how many mornings of their lives, one or the other or both having to do something else, go somewhere else? Anyway, in the screen-test, the camerawoman’s gaze seems as icily impersonal as the camera’s, where (to me) the men visibly restrain their leering and mostly look jaded; they’ve seen all this before (and more: those bigger boobs on the other women trying for the part); it’s nothing very new to them, it will work in the film because it does have a girl-next-door quality, and so on. What I’ve not seen before in a scene like this (at least that I can recall) is the pitifully undefended, adolescent or almost pre-adolescent quality of Davey’s body: she is what standing naked in an unloving gaze feels like. And it’s not pleasant. It’s desecrating. I like some nude paintings (Bonnard, Picasso, Modigliani, Wyeth, others) and some nude photographs (Edward Weston, for instance). And I don’t categorically disapprove of nudity in films (though I’m put off by its cliches and its general unreality). I suspect this has a lot to do with the fact that it’s normal for most human beings to like human skin; it’s our earliest mode of knowing human connection and love, and touch is essential to the health of our souls (without enough touch, newborns can die or get sometimes irreparably crazy). The men studiously avoid seeing Davey’s eyes; Dutcher’s camera tries not to let us avoid her eyes, though of course we can choose not to look. Davey’s body is also un-retouched, un-airbrushed; we see flaws in her skin. She’s human, ordinary, singular, terribly vulnerable. And if we (perhaps mostly men) are tempted to wish to see her complete nudity, we may also be (as I was) more strongly drawn to wish to clothe her nakedness. In a way, not seeing her in full frontal nudity, we see her, especially because we see her face, all the more naked, all the more needy of cover. (“When saw we thee . . . naked, and clothed thee?”) (On this, I might want to re-read Levinas, not only on the face, but also on nudity and on the faiblesse, the frailty, of the Other. It’s worth noting that, although this might be largely an accident of my own backgrounds, Dutcher’s film repeatedly provokes me to invoke not only scripture but also philosophers and great writers and artists; for me, that’s a sign of, among other things, the intellectual seriousness and intensity of his cinematic imagination).
So far, I find all the scriptural references in the discussion pertinent and interpretively useful. How could we, Mormon Christians thinking about a film made by another Mormon Christian (now self-described as “no longer practicing,” whatever that means; and I don’t wish to go into that if I can help it), avoid using scripture to help us think about the film? I do want to add a few suggestions and extensions along this line, because I believe Dutcher’s cinematic art may be at least every bit as grounded in the scriptures as our interpretations. To me it seems entirely right to cite Job, and precisely because of the strong differences. Job is a righteous man afflicted, with God’s permission, by Satan; and though early on he does refuse his wife’s urging to “curse God, and die” (2.9), he later does demand to confront God as if in a court of law; God does come down, and, after shutting up both Job and the comforters, in the last chapter he says that Job has spoken “right” about him, where the comforters have not (42.7). It’s not so much that Job keeps his testimony—indeed I’d say he changes it—as that the content of his testimony differs radically from the conventional “wisdom” of the comforters. Eric Boyle is not Job (who suffers boils). He’s not a man that “escheweth evil” (1.8; cf 1.1) but rather so entangled in evil that, when he realizes too late what he’s set loose in the world and races home to protect the wife he tried to kill, he finds her dead, the victim of the evil he’s set loose. That’s when he curses God. Of course, since an all-powerful and all-loving God could choose to protect Davey. Dutcher is putting a harder case before us than Job’s (also a Christian rather than a pre-Christian case): what about a man who does evil and who suffers more than he deserves, who does curse God and does try to die but cannot push himself to suicide, who does finally, in a desperate fight to save his own life, bash in his brother’s head with a brick (yes, think Cain and Abel here), who at last drags himself along a busy LA street where all the cars just keep passing (yes, think the man beaten by the side of the road between Jerusalem and Jericho, as if indeed the prodigal son fell among thugs on his way home), and who finally (in his mind, in his soul) falls prostrate before a blank white statue of the wounded and resurrected Christ and cries out “Help me,” but who (it seems) may not “know that [his] redeemer liveth”? If you were God, if you were Christ, would you help? You haven’t seemed to help much so far (except in that never-before-seen scene of Eric and the kid chasing birds on the temple grounds), but at this moment of uttermost extremity, would you? I think that’s why the film ends where and as it does. If I were Eric, I suspect that is where I would be and what my cry would be: de profundis clamavi (Ps 130.1, as the Vulgate renders it). But the ending also puts me into the position of a godly or angelic onlooker (not quite the same thing as a voyeur) to the most private and harrowed and exigent moment of Eric’s soul (think Alma the younger here, “in the darkest abyss” [Mos 27.29]): if I were God, if I were Jesus, would I help now? Eric did not help when the gang victim whose death he was filming cried out “Help me.” Sure, he likely could not have prevented the man’s death, but he could have stopped filming and taken his bloody hand. Well, if I am God, if I am Jesus, will I help Eric now? My answer is Yes. But that answer may say more about me (even about my sentimentality?) than about God or Jesus or Richard Dutcher’s intentions. For me, trying to think about Falling as religious (Christian and Mormon) tragedy, that seems right too. Dutcher should not, cannot presume to know what God will do at that moment, just as Jesus does not presume to know what the lost son’s older brother will do at the end of his parable. The question is mine to answer for me. The film (like the parable) questions me: Who are you anyway?
Eric’s outcry against God at the end of the film’s first, proleptic segment (among other things Dutcher fairly but, yes, if you will, brutally puts us on notice here: this film will not shy away from a suffering character who cries “F you” to God three times, somewhat as Jesus on the cross cried out in abandonment) is precisely blasphemy against God. The Greek word blaspheme might literally translate as “badmouth.” That’s what Eric does. And some viewers will find this unforgivable in both Eric and the filmmaker. Here another scripture pertains: “All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come” (Mt 12.31-32). This declaration of Jesus is reiterated in a latter-day revelation to Joseph Smith (D&C 132.26-27), with the additional specification that “The blasphemy against the Holy Ghost [. . .] is in that ye commit murder wherein ye shed innocent blood” (132.27). On those firm scriptural grounds Eric is forgivable, not least because (as I see it), he repents at the end (again, think Alma the younger calling on Jesus for mercy [Al 38.8]: a desperate metanoia). Some viewers may not incline to forgive either him or Richard Dutcher. I do incline, not least because I know God “will forgive whom [he] will forgive,” but I must “forgive all men” lest “the greater sin” remain in me (D&C 64.9-10). In fact, I don’t think I have anything to forgive Richard Dutcher for; I’m more inclined to thank him, and to urge him to go on making films as seriously and as well as he can.
Our readings of the statue and its expression in the final shots of the film may also tell us more about us than about either Dutcher’s intentions, or Thorwaldsen’s, or the Church’s in adopting that sculpture. (Think of the “doubloon” chapter in Melville’s Moby-Dick: I look, you look, he looks. The Christus is this film’s doubloon; the film is our doubloon.) If we read a Nietzschean message, “God is dead,” well, that’s us (and we might not be reading Nietzsche well enough, but that’s another matter). The face is the face. Dutcher did not make up those blank eyes; Thorwaldsen made them that way, and the LDS church has chosen to use his representation on its temple grounds and on thousands, maybe millions of Articles of Faith cards, and so on. It’s as hard for me to read that face as it is to read any other face. I can harden my interpretation of another human face into something like stone, like an idol; or I can patiently and charitably interpret it, and wait for it, like an ikon, to reveal more. I prefer to think the face of Thorwaldsen’s Christus is compassionate, merciful; but the statue’s eyes are blank. And a suffering human being can wonder, “Does God Exist and Does He Care?” (the subtitle of Reynolds Price’s Letter to a Man in the Fire). (On idols and ikons, see Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being.)
The older I’ve gotten (I’m now 63) the more viscerally sensitive I’ve become to cinematic violence; I flinch or wince when an actor takes a punch or a fall (I must have healthy mirror neurons). I sort of like the first two “Die Hard” films (haven’t seen the others), but the violence, (especially the wounds inflicted on Bruce Willis) is flatly unreal, as is most violence in films, and can’t be taken seriously. It’s cartoon violence (think Coyote vs. Roadrunner). Most films—certainly most “action” films—decline to take human flesh seriously. Dutcher takes flesh seriously, as one might expect a Mormon to, because we believe “the spirit and the body are the soul” (D&C 88.15). Physical violence hurts, wounds, spills blood all over, maims or disables if it does not kill (think of that anchorwoman’s face as she beholds herself in a cracked mirror: she’s ruined and living to see it). Whether or not Dutcher and his friend should have given and taken actual physical violence in four days of filming that climactic fight scene, and whether or not that should count in how we think about it, I can’t say. And we could wrangle till Jesus comes about whether or not that scene is too long and not settle the question (we could wrangle the same way about scenes in Tarkovsky or Dreyer, though their established canonicity might rein us in). It was a directorial judgment call. Were its length and techniques “gratuitous and unnecessary” (a phrase that neatly enacts what it names)? I can’t say with confidence. Whenever I meet phrases like “gratuitous sex” or “gratuitous violence,” I want to say, “You would prefer, then, the dutiful, obligatory, ‘necessary’ kinds? Okay.” Isn’t the point about a lot of (especially good) sex and (especially bad) violence precisely that it is gratuitous? The scene was long and relentless and felt like (though it was not) a single take. I don’t think I averted my eyes; trying to remember now, it feels like I could not. I cared whether Eric “won” or not, though he would “win,” if he did, at the cost of yet another man’s life (after the two gang members his bullets killed) and perhaps of his own. I don’t think the scene was as long and relentless as it was in order to show us what we already know, that there is such violence in the world, that street fights can be long and brutal (and maybe “ridiculous except [they are] mortal,” to borrow from Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man). I think its relentless continuity and absence of dialogue and soundtrack music gave me to feel the sheer heavy haul of suffering violence and of doing violence to another human being. It made violence hurt, made it hard to bear, wearying. Made it look and feel excessive, ugly, horrifying, terrible, pitiful. Tragic.
Within that scene, I particularly noticed how that semi-automatic pistol took on a life of its own, spewing bullets all over the place: a neat “symbol” (if you like that language; I do not) or rather synecdoche for the violence in the film, how it does have a terrible, excessive life of its own, flinging wide and indiscriminate like the consequences of Eric’s filming. I didn’t count how many times Eric hit his assailant’s head and face with the brick, almost but not quite obliterating the face (which Levinas says commands us not to kill); but I did notice how he drove a thumb into the man’s bullet wound to hurt him harder. I admit I’ve never seen that before: the marrow of man-to-man violence. Sophocles would not have shown the violence of this scene, though he did have a character “graphically” report both Iokaste’s suicide and Oedipus’s self-blinding; and Shakespeare invites (if he doesn’t indeed oblige) directors and actors of Lear to directly present the blinding of Gloucester on stage (I’ve never seen a stage performance, and don’t recall how the blinding was presented in the 1971 Peter Brook film I did see).
If Orson F. Whitney was right, that “we shall yet have . . . Shakespeares of our own,” we might as well expect that, even if they do not reach that stature, their art will not always adhere to our “standards” of decorum, of what’s presentable and what’s not. It’s interesting that Richard Dutcher as a boy was inspired by President Kimball’s “Gospel Vision of the Arts” (Ensign, July 1977) to want to make serious Mormon religious films. People who quote or allude to that text overlook that President Kimball did not say that the “brilliant stars” that he implied would arise from our culture would all remain mainstream members of the church. He clearly hoped they would, clearly declared they “must be” to tell specifically “the story of the Restoration”; he must have hoped that their art would never contain anything “offensive” to the most tender sensibilities among church members (though the art of many of his examples does). But if I believe we have living prophets, and I do, I may also be constrained to believe that their words are the words God would have them say, and that God means what the words say, not what we or the prophets wish they meant. Richard Dutcher has arisen from among us—in my mind, is one of us—to become a serious maker of films, who risks showing us his soul (Mormon if not practicing?) in what he makes. I will not presume to say how bright a star he is or might become, or what his relation to the church may yet become, much less how God may judge him. I continue to wish him and his work well. I expect that I will watch any film he makes, and will have to think long and hard about it.
Bruce Jorgensen teaches literature and writing at BYU. His current Mormon literary anxiety is that he has turned up as a character in Levi Peterson’s new autobiography.
Bruce, that’s an incredibly thoughtful review. Your considered critical skills are a tremendous benefit in attempting to understand this film better.
Comment # 1 by Dallas Robbins | Aug 21, 2007 | Reply
Bruce, I enjoyed your thoughts as well. [However, some of your thoughts appear (at least to me) to be a response to opinions I had expressed, which I’ll admit is very unnerving, especially coming from someone I’ve admired for so long, and from someone so knowledgable and well-versed in the language of story/art.]
I especially liked your thoughs re tragedy vs. morality play. Falling as tragedy is an interesting interpretation, one that moved the goal posts, at least for me, and made me aware of my own biases and hangups. One such bias is the degree to which I relate to both Richard Dutcher and Eric Boyle in temperment and worldview (at least as far as I understand them), and therefore my unconscious need to see Dutcher, the “Mormon insider-outsider” writer/director, and Boyle, the good-but-no-longer-”practicing” character, redeemed in some way. So you’ve got me rethinking my initial interpretation, which saw the basic “message” as simplistic, black-and-white, deluded-or-fallen. Tragedy removes the “message” variable entirely, if I understand you correctly, and renders Falling more poignant and, well, “tragic”. I wonder how many others saw it this way? I wonder if Richard sees it that way? (In the Bedroom, House of Sand and Fog, and Million Dollar Baby are great examples, by the way. The Sweet Hereafter also has some fine tragic qualities, I think.)
My comment re Dutcher’s “grinning with devilish satisfaction” was not meant to be uncharitable or ad hominem in the least. As an avid(!) admirer of both Richard Dutcher and all of his films, that would be the furthest from my intentions, let me assure you (and Richard). By using the lame phrase “grinning with devilish satisfaction,” I hoped to invoke a Calvin-like (from the cartoon Calvin and Hobbes) image of a boy caught being naughty, but clearly proud of his naughty accomplishment. Like, “Yes, I put the tack on Mrs. Wormwood’s chair, but wasn’t the execution of the scheme genius?!” I equated Richard’s violent scene with “naughtiness” twofold: 1.) in the sense that screen violence is often seen as “naughty/bad” in coventional Mormon thought, and 2.) that Richard knew he’d put us (the audience) through a visceral, emotional ringer, and exposed some of us to something we had not seen before and would likely not easily forget. So, to paraphrase my imaginary statement by Calvin, “Yes, I know that scene upset some of you, but wasn’t the execution genius?!” That is what I meant by “grinning with devilish satisfaction,” but I clearly didn’t communicate it very well.
I have a few other thoughts, but will leave off for now and get back to work…
Again, enjoyed your literate, maiden blog post. Hope to see you post again…
Comment # 2 by Matt Thurston | Aug 21, 2007 | Reply
Dallas and Matt–
thanks for your kind responses. forgive me if, having met either of you before, i confess that i dont have a clear memory of that. you’ve made the baptism, so far, feel rather like the font in the basement of the Salina 2nd ward chapel, way back about 1953. i still wonder if i’m a frog in a pot of water on an old cookstove and will discern too late that i’ve volunteered to be parboiled. also i dont know if i wrote a genuine blog: i composed it over a week or so [mainly one weekend] using WP12 on my laptop, and gave myself plenty time for second thoughts and revisions. i added some “last” tweaks this morning, then discovered Dan had already posted the version i sent him yesterday. the emendations were small, but some were substantive. getting the words right is hard.
all the previous comments had some part, i think, in what went into my notes. i really do think the discussion so far was a good job of coduction, and hope it will go on at whatever rate suits anybody. i’d like to hear more about what Dallas thought immediately after the film, or during the discussion.
Matt, yes, i was responding more directly to some of your comments. you and Stephen Carter [whose published writing that i’ve so far read, i’ve liked and admired] both made thoughtful and useful statements. i hope i didnt come across as overbearing or intimidating, or even aggressively argumentative [though i dont think that’s categorically a bad thing]. maybe “Calvinish” would have been a good word; yet even then . . . .
i dont think tragedy exactly rules “message” out. but this entails a longer discussion of a distinction i try to maintain between “didactic” and “mimetic” works; an Aristotelian [or neo-] distinction that i think Booth blurred a little in his great book. i’m fast running out of space here it looks like, so i’ll stress again that, for me, all “learning” aside, i do think charity is the core attitude of any responsible Christian or Mormon criticism. it’s not easy, but it will take us a long way into understanding not only other persons [not to mention helping them] but also works of art. for me, every work of art is a severe test of my justice and mercy; only daily life is more severe. [that may not be the best word.]
[hm, looks like this space expands rather seductively.]
you’re right about The Sweet Hereafter; it’s been too long since i saw it; it made me want to see more of Atom Egoyan’s work, which i’ve not yet done. i’m mildly embarrassed to have it occur to me belatedly that some of the films i mentioned might be indies rather than “Hollywood” [a name i was using perhaps too generically or emblematically to stand almost for media in general]. and Crash represents a mixed genre, maybe a tragicomedy, or something we dont have a name for yet [not even in Prince Hamlet’s winsome list]. sui generis?
well, just as i feared, if you start doing this stuff, before long you’re getting hooked. i’m gonna stop for tonight. [i think.]
bwj
Comment # 3 by Bruce Jorgensen | Aug 21, 2007 | Reply
Bruce, I agree that we should be charitable and understanding when it comes to Mormon or Christian criticism, not just because charity is a hallmark of Mormonism/Christianity, not just because well-reasoned analysis makes for a better argument than ad hominem attack, but also because the arena of Mormon Art is so small and Mormon Artists must overcome all sorts of challenges (some unique to Mormons, but most common to all artists) to get their work “out there” in the first place.
Having said that, I’m a little unclear where you think we should draw the line? For example, the violent fight at the end of the film (or the fight between Davey and Eric that precedes it) will be very polarizing for audiences. By all means, lets discuss how we felt about the scenes, what they meant to us, how the story interacts and/or expands on the pantheon of artistic work that came before it, as well as what we think Richard was trying to say… but is it being overly “critical” to discuss whether we think various scenes actually work? Is such a question not part of “coduction”? I agree that we could “wrangle till Jesus comes home” about such questions, and that there is no “correct” answer, but such questions still seem relevant and interesting. But the question feels (at least to me) like an important part of “congenial argument” and “drawing together.” Besides knowing how those scenes made you feel, I want to know if you actually liked them or not. And if not, what you might do to make them better.
Aren’t we all “armchair artists” in some respect, and isn’t this interactive, or this comparison of artistic vision, part of the artist-audience give-and-take? Part of our enjoyment of art is vicariously partaking in the process of artistic creation by putting ourselves in the director’s shoes and “directing” the scene as we might have directed it.
[Following added later]: September Dawn, the new MMM film directed by Christopher Cain, is currently being eviscerated by the critics. See Rotten Tomatoes, for example. One Brian Orndorff says, “Cain has turned the Mormons into baby-eatin’ Nazis to suit his argument, parading around these black-clad, chin-bearded, testicle-slicing gunslingers without any thoughtful consideration.” One Dan Lybarger says, “Cain has co-written and directed a film that only the most bigoted of Mormom detractors could enjoy. Most viewers, if any are willing to part with their money or time, will simply laugh derisively.” Chief among these various critics problems is that September Dawn, as a piece of art, or even as entertainment (if a movie depicting a slaughter could ever be called “entertaining”), for a variety of reasons, just doesn’t work.
In any case, I’ll leave off on this question. I’ve enjoyed the thoughtful ideas both you and Stephen have brought to bear on Falling. I agree with most of your interpretations, and I’ve expessed my own admiration for the work. When discussing the art of “one of our own,” it is certainly more charitable to extend the benefit of the doubt and focus on the positive. But I don’t think constructive criticism or artistic second-guessing is off limits, and I think Dutcher would agree. After all, Dutcher has probably been one of the most vocal critics of Mormon Cinema over the past 5-6 years. Thanks.
Comment # 4 by Matt Thurston | Aug 22, 2007 | Reply
The essay I always return to when I think about tragedy is Arthur Miller’s “Tragedy and the Common Man.” My habit is probably one born of ignorance since I really haven’t studied tragedy all that much. But I went back to it again as I read Bruce’s insights (which I very much appreciated).
Miller talks about tragedy thus:
“I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing–his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggles that of the individual attempting to gain his “rightful” position in his society.”
I think Miller’s view is well suited to the beginning of Falling. Because Eric and Davey are certainly both locked in mortal combat with Hollywood. They want to gain what they conceive as their rightful places as a movie director and an actor. Eric says he’s been trying to gain it for 10 years. Quite a lot of work and suffering. And the suffering has led Eric and Davey to the positions we find them in early in the movie.
In the discussion of tragedy, you often hear mention (or belaborment) of “the tragic flaw.” I think this is where we, as Mormons, begin wanting to turn tragedy into a morality play. When Mormons, and Americans in general, think of flaws, the first thing that springs to mind is how to overcome them. Flaws connote a weakness in character in the popular mind (including mine). But Miller gives us an entirely different interpretation. “The flaw, or crack in the character, is really nothing–and need be nothing, but his inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status.”
What an interesting twist. The tragic flaw is simply a strong will. Something we, as Mormons, admire. Most of our heroes possess it. Joseph Smith certainly did.
Again, this goes right along with Eric’s character. For ten years he’s been working his tail off despite general rejection. In one of Davey’s first scenes (where she’s alive anyway) she’s shouting at an acting coach that she’s going to be the best f-ing actress the world has ever seen.
And suddenly opportunity presents itself.
This is where I think we can make a good case for Falling as a tragedy (though Bruce certainly put that whole question to rest). The difficulty of reading Falling as a morality play is that the innocence or goodness that Eric and Davey once possessed is so far in the past that it is essentially irrecoverable even at the beginning of the movie. Its true that Eric brings a little boy to the temple grounds and listens to a missionary bear her testimony next to the Christ statue, but the sentiments expressed in that scene seem to only be there to help us see how far removed Eric’s character is from his former self.
It seems to me that a morality play vouchsafes the audience the conviction that if the main character would only do such and such, only realize, only apologize, only repent, he could get out of all this trouble. But such a choice isn’t given to these characters. The context we see them in doesn’t allow an easy escape. They can’t just go back to Utah.
What escape route does Hamlet have? Everything that defines him is bound up in the murder of his father, the betrayal of his mother and uncle, the loss of everything that once stabilized his life. If Willy Loman had just sat down and read the Bible each night, could he have avoided years of soul destruction and eventual suicide? Not as far as I can see. The tragedy by its very structure doesn’t give us an escape. It doesn’t give us the option of rising to smug heights saying, “if only the character would act as I would.”
As Bruce says,
“The film […] questions me: Who are you anyway?”
Tragedy reifies Hamlet’s words, “Use every man after his desert, and who shall ’scape whipping?”
From this point of view, I think Falling works well. Those who wish to sit back and say, “Well, if Eric and Davey had only kept the commandments” are rejecting the story in favor of their preconceptions. They will never actually see the story. Which, I think, is why Richard had to invoke such violence, to jolt the audience out of its tendency to interpret this film as a morality play. To break the audience, if you will.
I was certainly broken by this movie. The juxtaposed images of Davey’s face in the midst of lovemaking and her asphyxiating face still gnaws at a dark wall in the back of my mind.
It reminds me of something David Mamet wrote in Three Uses of the Knife. “Myth, religion, and tragedy approach our insecurity somewhat differently. They awaken awe. They do not deny our powerlessness, but through its avowal they free us of the burden of its repression.”
It’s certainly a wrenching freedom.
Comment # 5 by Stephen Carter | Aug 24, 2007 | Reply
Matt–
forgive my slow reply to your comment [4]; I’ve been working on my syllabi for fall courses (sullabysses I sometimes like to call them), doing yard work etc etc. I urge charity as a defining habit of Mormon criticism because, first, it should be a defining habit of all Christian conduct; and second, I think if we learn to practice it as Paul describes it in 1 Cor 13 (patience, longsuffering, kindness, not thinking evil, enduring all things, etc—I’m not checking the text closely here), we will more fully & clearly discern what is in front of us, and thus have a better chance of judging it more justly and mercifully. I see a lot of LDS members (some of my students of course) who discuss books, films, etc as if art & popular culture were a space within which we’re permitted to indulge our vindictiveness, mean-spiritedness, self-righteousness, and so on. I don’t think so. Why would it be right to treat my neighbor’s creative expression less well than I should treat my neighbor? Indeed, practicing charity in relation to works of art might help me practice it better in daily life (which God knows is more exigent, usually, than watching a movie).
I don’t think this means that LDS writers, artists, and filmmakers—or rather their works—should be coddled or insulated, though I do admit that at times I can feel somewhat like the “hot-headed Carolina cousin” Melville in his famous review of Hawthorne presented as willing to praise “Pop Emmons” (author of the Fredoniad, whatever that was and whoever he was) as a great poet just because he was American. Mostly I think our artists should meet the highest standards expected of artists—and set by the acknowledged “best” works—in their genres. If the HaleStorm comedies about Mormons aren’t as good as the best comedies we know, we should candidly (and, if we can, kindly, patiently, etc) say so. (That’s a whole nother discussion of course. If Richard Dutcher and I and others had the patience and were willing to take the time, we might pursue it fruitfully. I for one would like to see a great deal of Mormon comedy that I could enjoy and value as much as I do the best I know. But what I’ve seen so far, which must be a lot less than Dutcher has seen, looks fluffy and trivial. It’s hard to be patient, longsuffering, etc with trivial art. Eric Samuelsen has recently gone farther than I could in that direction in a backward look at Saturday’s Warrior.)
About drawing lines, I guess I’d say that, in coduction and the nourishing and tending of a critical culture, I’d draw as few as possible. At least of the kind that separate “my turf” (the right turf) from “their turf” (the wrong turf) or whatever. Of the other kind, the connect-the-dots kind, well, connect-the-dots is what I think we do when we “interpret” a work of art. And that’s the problem that won’t go away: our descriptions of art works are clumsy caricatures, flat and lacking detail and nuanced responses. Not even the best criticism (as interpretation, before we come even close to judgment) can escape this. So I favor drawing ever more connect-the-dots lines: connecting this shot or scene with that, this speech with that, this event in a filmed story with that event in a literary or scriptural story; and so on.
Of course there is or should be some line (at least a dotted one?), in critical discussion or coduction, between unsupported claims and supported claims; supported claims are better, first of all because we can see where they come from and thus begin to assess their justice. But in a good discussion we can always ask of a claim, “What evidence supports that?” and trust or hope the claimant will respond. And of course I would prefer to “rule out”—draw a line excluding—from coduction any ad hominem language. Again, patience, longsuffering, and so on. It really is, as Paul says, “a more excellent way” (and I’ll just about bet the Greek text has a superlative adjective related to the word aretē, “excellence,” which is often rendered “virtue”).
I can’t think of any sort of question I’d rule out of critical discussion, at least not before I heard it. I tell every class, in every syllabus, that the only dumb question is the one that doesn’t get a voice; I add that some questions do take us farther than others. Some, of course, we’re not informed enough to answer, and can only speculate about. Interpreting and judging art works, after all, are a kind of guesswork. Like most (all?) acts of faith?
It does seem to me that “I like” and “I don’t like”—unless backed by attentive discussion of details—don’t get us very far in critical discussion, though they’re ok as starting points if we can ask “Why did you like or not like?” “I do not like thee, Doctor Fell. / The reason why I cannot tell. / But this I know and know full well: / I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.” That’s both witty and very smart about liking and not liking: it’s hard to get past that bare and self-circular fact. (I think that nursery-rime is actually a version of an epigram of Catullus or Martial; forgive me, classicists.) So I think when I’ve told you how a scene, or an entire work, made me feel, and given you, as well as I can in a brief space, my best account of what in the work did that, and how and why (both mysterious, finally), you stand to know much more than “I like” or “I don’t like” could possibly tell you; and to say either one, after that, would be to reduce or over-simplify my response. As I said near the outset of my “Notes,” “like” seems hardly the word to apply.
I do think that, to experience a work of art at all, we (mysteriously) co-create it with its maker (as we perhaps co-create, in perception, the world with its maker). I’m acutely aware of this when I read poems or stories; watching a film, I tend to feel less “active” in co-creation. (On this, see Sartre’s “Why Write?” in What Is Literature?) I’m not strongly inclined to imagine how I might have directed a scene differently, at least not before I’ve tried to think hard about how it affected me and what in its script and acting and direction and filming and editing contributed to that (I’m really a novice in thinking this way about films). Of course I do this all the time with my students’ poems and stories: my job there is very much to think hard about how this line or that sentence might have been written otherwise (especially if something about it bothers me), and to try out how this or that “otherwise” might work better or not so well. But even there I have to first try hard to see how the line or sentence is working. I spin in hermeneutic circles like a dervish.
This feels like it’s getting unpardonably long. Gadamer says “we understand differently, if we understand at all.” So we’re talking about our different understandings. Having a yard-wide streak of pedantry in me (well-earned), I’ll mention two more important sources of my thinking about all these things: Simone Weil’s discussion of “attention” in her “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” in Waiting for God; and Iris Murdoch’s discussions of art and morality in the three essays in The Sovereignty of Good. I’m nothing if not curricular.
bwj
Comment # 6 by Bruce Jorgensen | Aug 24, 2007 | Reply
Bruce (#6), thanks for those thoughts. (By the way, I posted an addendum to my comment #4 above, but it looks like I was writing it while you were writing your response, and I posted it before reading your response.) You’ve answered my question well and I agree with your response. You’ve set bar appropriately high. Two obstacles, unfortunately, stand in the way of the kind of charitable coduction you (and I) would like to see more of.
The first obstacle is simple ability. Teasing out the nuance, meaning, interpretation, etc., to say nothing of full-blown literary/filmic analysis is difficult for most people. At some gut level, most viewers feel “something” when watching or reading a film or book, but efforts to translate such feelings end up coming out in simplified “I like” or “I didn’t like” shorthand. But I agree that the rewards of deeper analysis are worth the effort.
The second obstacle is limited time and space. Most newspaper or magazine film critcs, I imagine, have time and word constraints. They get in and get out, essentially offering their opinion of whether the film was good or bad. The best critics might include a paragraph or two of the kind of coductive analysis you espouse. The thoughtful, literary, (and lengthy) film analysis of Pauline Kael seems to be rare these days. Unfortunately, blog readers are probably even more fickle and have shorter attention spans than readers of newspapers. You have certainly taken blog writing to a whole new level, but my fear, unfortunately, upon finishing your fine blog post was, “Man, I sure hope people take the time to read this!” Again, the rewards of the investment in time to read, at least in this case, were worth the effort. Wish I could say the same about all blog writing.
Stephen (#5), well said, and proof once again of why I continue to nominate you, when anyone asks, as the bloggernacle’s best blogger.
Comment # 7 by Matt Thurston | Aug 24, 2007 | Reply
Stephen–
you posted your reflections bringing Miller’s “Tragedy and the Common Man” into the discussion [comment #5] while I was writing my prolix response [#6] to Matt [#4]. I do think it’s good to bring in Miller’s ideas, since Eric and Davey, like Willy Loman, belong to recognizable recent American worlds; they too are “common” in Miller’s sense. And if “character flaw” is a valid notion (see below), then, to use Miller’s figure, it’s a “crack” that goes deep, maybe all the way to the core of what we call “agency” (if agency can be said to have a core, and is not something like an irreducible elementary subatomic particle, or a quark or a superstring: whoa, I’m way out of my depth here). It has often struck me that, if Oedipus has a “character flaw,” it’s what is most admirable or “heroic” about him: his ferocious insistence on knowing the truth (it’s also his duty as king, as shepherd of his people, to seek out the pollution that is calling down plagues on Thebes).
But one problem with this notion is that the Greek word it translates, hamartia, seems not to have meant quite what Miller seems to mean by “the flaw, or crack in the character,” though as he discusses it, it doesn’t appear that he means exactly a “weakness” or vice (Latin vitium: weakness). (I don’t really know Latin or Greek but wish I did; I can recognize most of the Greek alphabet, plus a few words; I use the glossaries provided by good scholars of the languages and literatures for some of the texts that matter to me.) The word means “error” in the sense of “missing the mark” or “going astray,” as an arrow may miss the target due to a small “flaw” of the wind or to a failure of the archer’s aim or technique. I’ve heard it’s the word the New Testament translates as “sin.” Which of course all the more invites moralizing readings and judgments of the errors of tragic characters (“If only they behaved as well as I would,” etc). And apparently hamartia did mean something like that: transgression, in the sense of straying off the path. Anyway, this seems to me a sizeable problem in terminology or conceptual vocabulary. On the other hand, perhaps it’s a good thing to have a concept like hamartia “enriched” even by “errors” of translation that extend it beyond its “original” senses. In any case, hamartia as a concept captures something important, maybe central, about being an agent in a contingent world where things “just happen” (luck, tuchē) and you cannot control all the consequences of what you do, even the consequences in your own heart and mind.
One of my teachers, Arthur Mizener, many decades ago published a brief essay (I’ve now forgotten the title) in which he deplored the kind of literature in which the author and (if they accept the invitation) the readers are Christ harrowing a Hell full of all the people who disagree with them. He proposed, or at least implied, that better literature is a hell not for other people but for the writer and the audience. That might be one way to talk about my experience of Falling, and before it, of States of Grace and Brigham City (which were not Hell but this world, of course, as Falling takes place in a darker zone of this world): a Hell for Dutcher and me and you and some others, though also a place some in the Mormon and the wider audience will not want to go. It sounds as though this new film September Dawn (which Matt mentions and quotes criticisms of in his addendum to comment #4) is a Hell for Mormons, while its makers and those who share their view want either to harrow it or stoke the fires. Well, that’s another discussion, and I doubt I’ll see that film (which disqualifies me from comment except as to my reasons for that doubt).
I really don’t think I put any question(s) to rest (that sounds fatal), but rather hope I woke them up and got them on their feet. Your use of Miller to start unfolding more scenes of Falling seems to demonstrate that. You’ve made me think farther about Davey’s acting class scene. When she finally bursts out with enough emotion to persuade the teacher she means it, we also judge her to have crossed a line with the word she uses, and we rightly wonder what this means about her soul. Though her use of that word will not carry the charge for non-Mormons that it does for us (given our culture’s prohibitions and resultant inhibitions), I’d suppose or hope that no one in an attentive audience would miss that “transgression” or “stepping-across” a line. I’d have to watch the scene again to be more sure of this, but I think that Davey is surprised and shocked by her own language there, unless we see her as making a somewhat calculated choice to use the word she judges the teacher wants from her. (Again our readings may tell us more about us than about the character.) Either way, we watch an already somewhat “sympathetic” character in the act of seeming to make herself a worse person, while also “proving” that she wants passionately to be an actor and might be good at it. And we (both Mormons and Gentiles) may also wonder if the claim in her outburst will prove literally prophetic. The screen-test scene seems to demonstrate that it might be (she gets a part in a film that includes nude scenes, which might also mean sex scenes).
I think there’s more to the Temple grounds scene than “help[ing] us see how far removed Eric’s character is from his former self,” though I fully agree it does that. It also, if we “identify” or “empathize” with Eric there (or in Sartre’s conception of what happens when we read fiction, lend him our consciousness and our feelings, co-creating and feeling-with him), shows a live possibility for him, and to him, and moves him in its direction: turn to Christ, give up the too-nearly predatory work of filming violence and destruction, help the widow and the orphan (which he’s actually doing in this scene: his best or better self isn’t lost, it’s there, alive). Too late, as it turns out. But isn’t it this scene that provokes (as we infer its causal connection to) his midnight confession to Davey that he’s “too far off”? (I hope I recall the sequence right.) And of course it partly follows from the earlier scenes in which he helps the boy take off his tie and (maybe half-heartedly) promises his friend’s widow that he’ll quit the business.
Yes, “every man after his desert, and who shall ‘scape whipping”: nobody is without “flaws” or weakness of character, or will escape making errors in this world, sometimes damaging and deadly ones. Hence, again, a Redeemer and repentance. Which makes the spectacle of people in an audience condemning the characters or the maker very strange and painful to me. There but for fortune and the grace of God go you and I. Or at least I.
And yes, “tragedy by its very structure doesn’t give us an escape.” I forget which philosopher of the tragic said that in the fewest words, that absolute and radical tragedy means “there is no way out.” As Christian and Mormon I want to contest that notion, or at least closely examine its fit or misfit with my beliefs, my theology. (I’m sure I read that in one or another essay in Richard B. Sewall’s collection on Tragedy, some 40 years ago in a good grad course I had.)
William Blake once addressed a couplet “To God”: “If you have made a circle for man to go into, / Go into it yourself, and see how you would do.” God had already answered that, as most Christians see it; and Mormons own a scripture that says Jesus “descended below all things” (no “bottomless pits” for him; he dives still deeper). I sometimes think moralizing readers decline to “go into” the circle of the characters, while tragic readers descend as far as they can. And come up and out broken or shaken. (After I saw Falling I could hardly speak about it, gradually got out a few mono- and di-syllables. Well, I seem to be over the worst of that now.)
bwj
Comment # 8 by Bruce Jorgensen | Aug 24, 2007 | Reply
Matt–
from the online critics of September Dawn that you quoted [addendum to #4], it sounds to me as if the film, in a sense, did “work” for them, but it backfired: like the old morality-play westerns that entertained so many of us with slaughter when I was a kid, it invites its audience to cheer the good guys and boo the bad guys; but for those critics, though they “read” it correctly (the Mormons are the bad guys), it appealed to simplistic moral judgments they could not share. Similar problem with reading Falling as a morality play with a Nietzschean message? Not quite, I guess, since to me that reading of Falling is incomplete or a misreading. (All readings are to some degree misreadings: “we understand differently,” and so on; and add Harold Bloom on “misreading” as how literary history works.) So I guess this raises a question: is it feasible to read September Dawn as a tragedy (which has long seemed to me the genre that stands a chance of treating the Massacre with the justice and mercy it requires). A question I’m not likely to answer, but which I hope will come up in LDS discussion of that film.
I certainly would not rule out “constructive criticism or artistic second-guessing” as useful elements of coduction or a healthy critical culture; it’s just that I’m slow to get there (except in writing classes) because I work hard and long at understanding what I’m reading.
I think you’re quite right about the “two obstacles”: ability and time; the obstacles to every effort we make. In good coduction or a healthy culture, we try to find room not to stop at “I like” or “I don’t like,” and discussion goes on into “deeper analysis” or, as I might prefer to say, more patient and thorough attention to details. The more we do this, one can hope, the better at it we become. But always within limits.
Which is indeed the problem for reviewers: they have to work fast, and they have little room to do their jobs in. They shoot from the hip. And their statements may start longer and more thorough and careful lines of coduction. I too appreciated Pauline Kael, even when I mistrusted her judgments or simply disagreed with her (if I’d seen a film before reading her review): I felt I could know not only what she thought but a good deal of why (usually with strong reference to aspects and details of the film), and I could discount or correct for her biases.
Alas, I’d hoped that with the flexibility of blogs as to length, timing, etc, one might expect similar flexibility of attention in blog readers. But I’m a novice (who must confess that the first time I heard the word “blog” I thought it was French “blague” and wondered what the joke was). I suspect I’ve not carried blogs here at SunstoneBlog to new levels, so much as pushed them toward unprecedented and exhausting lengths. My wife would likely tell you that my two longest-cherished and most assiduously practiced vices are reading and explanation. As Henry James said, “There is really too much to say.” (One of his briefer sentences, that.)
I’m going to (not exactly repent but) retreat a bit now, and try to say less and say it less often for a while. Still, I’m sorely tempted to comment on Mother Teresa’s letters (the bits I’ve read in the Time article and heard on NPR): not so much a “crisis of faith” as a very long dark night of the soul (as the article said). That does make one ponder, and it’s a thread I’ll want to follow.
bwj
Comment # 9 by Bruce Jorgensen | Aug 25, 2007 | Reply