THE LONE RANGER & HEAVEN'S GATE - Or How Underrated Wisdom Is Never Heard Til After The Speaker Has Gone

Two of the greatest films about American nation-building and the sins of the past hit town last year, but almost no one noticed, which is a loss, because they're profoundly wise entertainments that contain wisdom for the ages.  The Lone Ranger (whose failure at the US box office has led to a $190 million write-off for Disney, despite being perhaps the brainiest blockbuster action film since Raiders of the Lost Ark) and the re-released Heaven's Gate (a film that bankrupted a studio and whose box office failure has largely concealed from the public the most amazing light ever committed to film) are ready to be engaged away from the hubbub of snarkier-than-thou, average-fits-all circus of mass opinion.

Their stories are about the hands that built America on top of genocide. The Lone Ranger radically re-imagines the story we think ourselves familiar with: John Reid is a strait-laced Harvard man, returning to the Texas of his birth to participate in what he might convince himself is a 'civilizing' process, but is ultimately conquest. He just about learns this from Tonto - played by Johnny Depp (of all performers to play this Cherokee, the one with the clearest Native American heritage) - a character more fully written, more complex, and more human than the typical idiot savant/magic charm typically reserved for such archetypes. Director Gore Verbinski's comedy action aims for Buster Keaton heights - and actually almost gets there; the drama is redolent with genuine pathos (Tonto's back story is not just moving, but politically provocative); the cinematic references (not least to Sergio Leone's granddaddy of nation-billing Westerns, Once Upon a Time in the West) are a delight; and the framing device - of an elderly Tonto telling the story to a boy visiting him in a museum - perfectly fits a tale which is partly about how we tell the story of the past.  It might sound simplistic to say that Disney has made an art film for the masses, but it's true: The Lone Ranger is the smartest, most exciting, funniest, most moving, and philosophically rich Western since Heaven's Gate. 

That earlier film, notorious in reputation, astonishing in experience, also embarks from Harvard, where the preacher's presidential address ordains cultural imperialism: “It is not great wealth alone that builds the library; it is to diffuse a high learning and culture among a people; it is the contact of the cultivated mind with the uncultivated.” The class orator, played by John Hurt, follows to speak of a world in which everything is just fine as it is, which, of course, for the professional class in the 1860s, it was. These men were about to take the land—the intelligentsia grabbing fields and taking human lives, just as Pol Pot gathered his thoughts in Paris, and the more recent bloody Iraq misadventure began partly at Yale. Heaven's Gate is based on the real life story of 'ethnic cleansing' of immigrants by business in Wyoming in the 1890s It is some kind of sick joke for a white American pilgrim descendant to tell a recently pogrommed Eastern European Jew to “go back where you came from,” while the desperation and powerlessness of the population movements that built this nation are confronted as if they were something out of Schindler’s List.

And so we have Wyoming, from where both the torture advocate Dick Cheney and the gay martyr Matthew Shepard hail, where the land is so beautiful it makes you feel like crying: because the emotional resonance of being at home in the presence or absence of God sometimes can’t be expressed any other way. Wyoming, where Jackson Pollock was born to splash paint in dynamic vibrancy, where the carpenter-pilot Harrison Ford carves tables and flies small planes, and where Buffalo Bill learned to sell Western culture back to itself, creating the town of Cody for that very purpose. Because of Buffalo Bill, you could say that Wyoming was where American celebrity was born. Bill knew the power of an over-sell, and he made the country his own. He could learn something from Cimino's Harvard president who, despite inviting imperialist ambition, managed to evoke humility too, speaking of a rather different way to imagine America’s founding, and perhaps an answer to the crises in America’s future:

“Do you wish to write better than you can? We must endeavor to speak to the best of our ability, but we must speak according to our ability.”

The Lone Ranger and Heaven's Gate together speak according to the ability that is granted with the benefit of historical hindsight: this land was never your land, nor mine.  Attention must be paid.

My book CINEMATIC STATES explores these themes in more detail - if you like, you can pick it up here.

CINEMADVENT: TWELVE ANGRY MEN

Henry Fonda gets to wear a white suit, speak the truth, convert a room, and save the world, which is kind of easy, I guess, if you're Henry Fonda, so as with many of these kinds of things, the unfolding is more important than the end: 'Twelve Angry Men' is today's invitation to consider the advent of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you: if all it takes to destroy a life is to fail to pay any attention, then sometimes all it takes to save one is to pay some.

CINEMADVENT: RUSSIAN ARK

And now, a little experiment in iconography.  I'm suggesting a film every couple of days of the Advent season in my tradition, and everyone's welcome.  The point is invitation - not annunciation or validation - but invitation to consider something more than usual in this period in the year, the one where some bearers of the divine image choose to complain of persecution because other bearers of the same image have decided to respect human diversity, the one where people tear their family gatherings apart so they can run down to a large metal box to push past other people wrecking their family gatherings and buy smaller metal boxes, the one where we may devote more time to arguing about 'the true meaning of Christmas' than we do experiencing the meaning of anything...Yeah, that one.

It's a little experiment, like I said, and a small act of resistance, and something I hope you'll join me in.  I'll tweet the films I'm watching each day, and be glad to be in conversation about them.

Today it's RUSSIAN ARK - in which a floating camera takes us into the past, and questions are posed, and the great art on the walls, and the great art OF the walls, of the Hermitage are opened up like no curated space before.  The whole film is an invitation to think about the creation that every act of human decision is.  Advent, for me, is an invitation to reconsider the miraculous offering that each day is - RUSSIAN ARK takes 99 minutes to evoke a world entire - three centuries of Russia's past that are like reverse-chronology echoes of the tragic future; when I'm watching, I'm reminded that every single day contains exactly enough time in each day to create, or to diminish the human.

CINEMA 2013: What Seamus Heaney Taught Me About Movies

I was in Belfast when I read the news that Seamus Heaney, our national poet, singer of hope, and a spiritual father, had died. It's hard to think of a more significant, and certainly there was no more widely loved, cultural figure in my homeland of northern Ireland than Heaney. If by invention we mean the process of taking two or more things that had not previously been mingled, and leading them into alchemy, then Seamus Heaney didn't just speak my language, he invented it. He took the raw material of the Ulster culture, the landscape, the sorrow amidst political struggle, and fashioned a lexicon of desire: to be heard, to make sense of, to wonder why, to define boundaries and to commit to a life of service to the unique vocation to which each of us is invited. 

Cinema is poetry, not prose, so there is no contradiction about invoking Heaney in an article about the movies. Indeed, I wish his voice had been put to direct use in film criticism; I would have loved to read his thoughts on what Norman Mailer called the 'spooky art' (so called for the resemblance of the recorded human image to memories of the dead). But poems we have, and they will be read forever - I learned about mortality from his 'Mid-Term Break', of the story of his wee brother's death at four years old; I was comforted by the melancholic prescience of 'whatever you say, say nothing' as applied to the secrecy ironically acknowledged by everyone in my country's civil conflict; I received an icon through which to interpret the very world in 'The Skylight'.

'The Skylight' is the best poem I've read about cinema that isn't about cinema: Heaney writes about his reluctance the time his wife arranged for a hole to be cut in their roof to let the light in.  He declares himself to be grateful once the old ceiling was opened up, moving from skepticism about the project to comparing the experience to nothing less than witnessing a miracle of healing from paralysis. His work does that to readers, of course; and his death has stirred up for me the poetics of movies that leave me feeling the same way.

Read the rest at the Reel Spirituality Blog

CINEMA 2013: THE EXORCIST's 40th Anniversary, JFK's return

I grew up in a branch of Christianity that even now, ten years after I migrated elsewhere, still confounds me.  How could something so beautiful be so crazy?  How could otherwise rational people, people who were doctors and architects and teachers and caregivers, assert that the reason why some of us were depressed or scared was that demonic forces with personalities, strategies, and even names were attaching themselves to us because our great-grandparents had once played used drugs/gambling/a ouija board?  Because that’s what we were doing: telling people that their pain could be explained by demonic possession.  Sure, we modified it - turning ‘possession’ into ‘demonization’, wherein Christians couldn’t be totally overcome by the little imps, just overly affected by them; and it was a long way from the times when we might have burned or drowned people - especially women - just because they liked herbal tea.  But perhaps it was still on the same evolutionary continuum - and, to be fair, not that much different from what most people believe, some of the time.  There are folks who think that the policies of the current Democratic Party will bring about the resurgence of Stalinist collective farming; there are people who think that you shouldn’t purchase items with barcodes otherwise you’re giving yourself over to Satan; there are people who think friends of George W Bush engineered 9/11 because America needed a war.

Thankfully, in those moments when I get frustrated enough with the madness of Christianity’s shadow side to be diagnosed with a demon of anger, I can turn to an expert for help.  The 40th anniversary of William Peter Blatty and William Friedkin’s ground-breaking horror film ‘The Exorcist’ is fast approaching, so I gave it an umpteenth viewing the other day.  The first time I saw it, I was a teenager and I hid behind the sofa, which was more frightening, as the imagination always allows for worse than what’s on screen.  The next time I was fully immersed in the demon-seeking subculture of the charismatic movement, so the experience of Regan, the teenage girl who floats and screams and vomits and whose head spins round, seemed half-plausible.  The third time was in conjunction with viewing Paul Schrader’s prequel ‘Dominion’; a film written by a former Dutch Calvinist and co-scripter of ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’, and so unsurprisingly it’s one of the more thoughtful treatments of religion on film; it also deepened my appreciation of Blatty’s conservative Catholic approach: he really does believe that a little girl could be consumed by the devil, and that there is power in the name of Jesus.  For my part, ‘The Exorcist’ has become something like an old friend - it reminds me of the light and shadow of my religious heritage, and achieves something rare: a work of art that is preoccupied with death always leaves me feeling more alive.

Continue reading at the Reel Spirituality Blog