Colin Farrell's Theology

'I can't separate the word 'God' from the man with the white beard' - Colin Farrell, April 2009

RTE has a genuinely fascinating interview with a man who seems to think beyond the surface of life; is grateful for what he has; and knows who he is: 'just a man, nothing more and nothing less'.  Gay Byrne - the elder statesman of Irish television interviewers - has a knack for making subjects feel at ease, and in his new series 'The Meaning of Life' tries to go a little further into people's beliefs than we're used to seeing on TV.  Colin Farrell's the same age as me, and we're from the same island; that's where the similarity ends, I suppose - but, if his self-presentation in the interview is anything to go by,  it's easy to be impressed with how little he seems to care about fame, and how much he wants to be a decent man.

His comment about the image of the divine that we were almost all raised with also names something hugely important about our generation: we're convinced  that institutional religion has been found wanting, and we heavily suspect too that God cannot possibly be reducible to being a slightly nicer (but scarier) large version of Santa Claus.  Farrell suggests that a decade of fame nearly killed him, and that its trinkets are all ungraspable mist when placed alongside being a part of a family.  I never expected that I'd take a lesson in spiritual discipline from Colin Farrell (and that's, I guess, a form of spiritual elitism that could compare with the trap of celebrities thinking they're more important than the rest of us.  Please be patient with me; I'm sincerely trying to change.), but after watching this interview, here it is:

Today's challenge from a lapsed Irish Catholic, unsure of whether or not he believes in God, benefitting from being post-rehab,  climbing the twelve steps, and suggesting that he might have learned the secret of life:

to transcend the limitations of anthropomorphised visions of God without ignoring the inevitable personal dimensions of an Ultimate Being, stop chasing other people's dreams for your own life, and, at least once in a while, shrink the scope of your activity to the small community around you of people whom you actually know and who know you.  Thoughts?

Discount Atheism

Andrew O'Hehir has a characteristically smart and helpful review of Terry Eagleton's response to Dawkins and Hitchens (whom he delightedly re-christens 'Ditchkins'; images of an amusing roly-poly pretend intellectual in 'Alice in Wonderland' come to mind) at Salon.

When 'The God Delusion' and 'God is not Great' were first published it seemed strange how any thinking person of faith could not agree with the core of what Ditchkins could prove - (drum roll please):

SOMETIMES RELIGIOUS PEOPLE DO BAD THINGS

Anyone with a degree of exposure to the Catholic Worker, the progressive Christian movement, or to take an example from my own locale, the Church of Ireland's reflection on its own sectarianism, and countless other humble attempts to challenge religious imperialism in the terms that Jesus offered already knows that sometimes religious people do bad things; but, remarkably enough (though not enough for Ditchkins) sometimes they also do heroic things, because of their religion.

The fact that these and other books had such cultural impact was another surprise.  On the one hand, it was pretty clear that Dawkins knew a lot less about church history and intelligent theology than was necessary to write a credible book about them; on the other, Hitchens, a gutsy writer whose work is often the best take on any particular issue on which he chooses to throw the spotlight,  seemed to be more committed to finding the witticisms and aphorisms in religious denunciation than actually saying something we didn't already know.

Terry Eagleton's review of 'The God Delusion' in the New York Review of Books was one of the few pieces published in a 'secular' journal that dared to criticise Dawkins' approach.  This has been expanded to book length, and in 'Reason, Faith and Revolution' Eagleton presents the case that, while religion deserves to be critiqued, it's not best done from a place of ignorance.

I was annoyed by Dawkins and Hitchens because they seemed arrogant.  Bill Maher's 'Religulous' was even worse - in which a very smart and powerful man asks academic theology questions of people who haven't studied the discipline.  You might as well ask me to understand the Latin Mass...But then, well...here's what I wrote at the time:

" I have to pause here, for as I re-read this article I realize that I may have fallen into an ancient trap, and in the process perhaps have simply reinforced Maher’s legitimate concerns.  If religious people can be made so easily to look boring, it is partly because we have not articulated a better story.  If people of faith are held in low regard because we are seen to be primarily concerned with issues of private morality and Puritanical codes, it is partly because we have not paid enough attention to reason and human experience as guides to interpreting our faith.  If, in short, it is easy to portray religious believers as stupid, dangerous, and spineless, it is partly because we have failed to be loving, peaceable, and brave."

There might just be a third way between the twin ideological fundamentalism of Ditchkins and unthinking religion.  Terry Eagleton seems to be presenting it, as O'Hehir says,

"Having banished such embarrassing metaphysical matters as God and love to the private sector, and having put its faith in an economic system that seems much less eternal than it used to, Western civilization finds itself in quite a pickle. As Eagleton sees it, late-capitalist society believes in nothing except a limited marketplace vision of tolerance, which has spawned a surfeit of irrational belief systems, from fundamentalism to neoconservative imperialism to do-it-yourself New Age spirituality. He even agrees with the neocons and fundamentalists that we cannot successfully combat Islamist zealotry without any core beliefs of our own.

But the cures proposed by the fundies and neocons are worse than the disease, Eagleton makes clear, while the childish and arrogant idealism of the Ditchkins crowd bears no relationship to human history or contemporary social reality. He sees the potential for hope in a "tragic humanism," one informed by the likes of John Milton and Karl Marx but not necessarily religious or socialist in character, one that "shares liberal humanism's vision of the free flourishing of humanity," but believes "that this is possible only by confronting the very worst." We were sent a man who preached a message of love and we killed him; we were given a beautiful blue-green planet to live on and we killed it. What do we do now?"

One part of Eagelton's response, as O'Hehir has it, is that

"He seeks to reclaim the transformative and even revolutionary potential of Christian faith."

To which I can only say, in the words of one of religion's more recent public faces, who is now fading into post-Presidential twilight, bring it on.

'Sita Sings the Blues: Art Should Be Free, but Artists Need to Eat

The film with this image as one of its centerpieces is currently available to watch for free at Reel 13.

I'll say it again.

The film with this image as one of its centerpieces is available to watch for free at Reel 13.

The creator (director, writer, animator, editor, pretty much everything else-er), Nina Paley is some kind of genius.

To fuse ancient Hindu literature with postmodern New York relational angst, mingled with 1920s sultry blues and contemporary competing narration from delightful (and delighted) semi-experts makes 'Sita Sings the Blues' the most imaginative film I've seen this year.

The fact that Paley has made it available through a creative commons license (partly due to the copyright labyrinth) not only speaks volumes about her generous nature (it shines through in the light touch of her movie) and the future of film distribution, but makes 'Sita' probably the most fully realised cinematic incarnation yet of the paradox the poet and cultural critic Lewis Hyde is getting at in his book 'The Gift'.   Art should be free, if it is to be faithful to the place from which creative urges come; but artists need to eat.

That paradox is at the heart of how market economies diminish the quality aesthetic. (Best current example: A friend tells me that the version of 'Wolverine' he downloaded is far better without industrial special effects than the one that will be released to cinemas ever could be: for the spectacular explosions that are the reason for its absurdly high budget only serve to diminish the human/hybrid story.) Even this blog exists at the axis of this paradox - writers need to make a living as well as making a life - but, to reflect on only the part of my work that is film criticism, the potential for economic bonding among cinema's impoverished professional fans has never been greater. Nor the potential for envy toward those who actually get paid for their work.

'Sita Sings the Blues', therefore, is one of the most inspirational works of art we could see right now. Nina Paley has given us a gift, a beautiful, smart, often hilarious film that we can watch for free.  Forever.  It's free, but I'm going to send her a donation, because I have consumed her gift, and I want her to be able to make more films. I'll write to her after posting this, and maybe she'll write back; and a community will come into being, maybe just for the duration of one email and its reply. But I'll have had a direct relationship with the person who made this film and deserves my thanks - not just for the work of art itself, but for her risky decision to be in the vanguard of a new movement that can only be good for the world.

And whether or not you buy my logic, please do yourself a favour and see this wonderful film 'Sita Sings the Blues'. Its director couldn't have made it easier if she came over to your house and showed it herself.

Eddie Adams An Unlikely Weapon

You’ve seen Eddie Adams’ photographs before.  You’ve turned away from the one that made him famous; that of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan  executing a Vietcong prisoner, an image that some people credit with creating a turning point in the Vietnam War.  Woody Allen covered a wall with the photo as a way of satirizing the tendency of some artists to wallow in self-pity while the world burns; at least one musician used it as home décor to remind – he says – himself of the tortuous nature of how other people live.

You’ve seen some of Adams’ later photos too – Clint in a longcoat, gun held behind his back in the ‘Unforgiven’ poster image, Ronald Reagan pumping iron, Bill and Hillary when they could look happy together and no one asked if they were faking it.  I've used the Ali portrait above because I think Adams would prefer his most famous image to take a sabbatical.

And if you watch ‘An Unlikely Weapon’ you’ll see Eddie Adams; walking from his home to his studio, talking about the life of the mind, the power of photography, the bullshit detector that may have constituted his worldview.  He doesn’t want you to know him or to want to know him because he once photographed a man being killed.  He wants to capture the essence of a human being, and allow the possibility of compassion to arise in his audience.  He doesn't want photography to harm anyone; even if he does want it to tell the truth about human frailty.

‘An Unlikely Weapon’ is the kind of documentary that knows how to reveal a story as it goes along, rather than having everything tied up neatly before it begins.  The walk from home to studio is a nice structuring device, and director Susan Morgan Cooper has fashioned a compelling version of a life story, a man troubled by what he saw, and wedded to a particular idea of American masculinity.

But it’s also about the power of images to affect the world – today I can find a photograph in seconds of the street where the prisoner was killed, staring down from space, the crowded street, the pathos, the moral universe of this story mediated – and therefore ignorable - through the distance of satellites.  You get the sense that Eddie Adams would not have enjoyed Google Earth.

No one Photographed Red Like Jack Cardiff

Jack Cardiff has died, at the magnificent age of 94. He shot his last motion picture work only two years ago; and not only was he working til very late on in life, according to people who knew him, was one of the film world's true gentlemen.

It's hard to think of anyone else who worked with Marilyn Monroe, Sylvester Stallone, Frank Langella, David Niven, Deborah Kerr, Stephen King, Arnold Scwarzennegger, Laurence Olivier, Ned Beatty and Ernest Borgnine; not to mention the fact that he participated in both the 1935 and 1984 versions of 'The Last Days of Pompeii'. Must have had a thing for volcanoes - and I'm not kidding, for Vesuvian reds were a specialty. Of course, the work that Cardiff is best known for is that done with Powell and Pressburger - 'A Matter of Life and Death', in which heaven's black and white stasis mingles with life in earth in glorious hues; 'Black Narcissus', whose visual garishness apes its vision of religious sexual repression; and, most of all, 'The Red Shoes', which manages to feel both emotionally real, despite its melodrama, and appear to take place in a Disney cartoon villain's psyche (and I mean that as a compliment).

Looking at his later credits, it's easy to imagine he loved working so much that he would take whatever job was going (I'm not sure he did 'Rambo II' because of the aesthetic qualities of the script), and he was known for going beyond the call of duty to support younger film-makers, not long ago agreeing to shoot, and encouraging Martin Scorsese and Michael Nyman to attach their names to, a Scottish director's vision of a film about Freud and Jung. Alas the funding fell through, but what a film it would have been. It's a measure of the beauty of Cardiff's images that I fully intend to watch 'Rambo II' for the first time as soon as I can.  Though I might give The Red Shoes' another dip first.