Literary Giants Literary Catholics

by Joseph Pearce

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  THREE CHEERS FOR HOLLYWOOD

  THREE CHEERS FOR HOLLYWOOD? Surely not. There must have been some mistake. . . . How can any conscientious Christian initiate a chorus of praise for such a den of iniquity and vice? Has he lost his senses? Or, worse, has he passed from the purgatory of life to the inferno of the living death that currently squats on the edge of the City of Angels, spreading its filth to a worldwide audience? Has he traded in his true inheritance in the City of God for a few sordid scenes in Tinsel Town?

  Fear not. He is merely giving credit where credit is due. He raises his voice in praise for that which is praiseworthy, even though his three rousing cheers might be barely audible amid the deafening hiss that is the usual serpentine chorus emanating from the hell of Hollywood.

  The recent release of the first installment of Peter Jackson’s bold endeavor to bring the wonder of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings to the silver screen serves as a reminder that the medium of film need not be counterproductive to the life of the soul. On the contrary, it illustrates the film medium’s enormous potential, its power to edify audiences. The fact that the potential is all too often squandered, and the fact that the power all too often pollutes the soul instead of assisting in its desire for purity, is not the point at issue. Film, unlike the One Ring in Tolkien’s epic, is not intrinsically evil. It has the power for good as well as evil, the power to raise souls heavenward as well as the awful potential to assist in the downward spiral of the hellbound. It should, in fact, be a sobering thought for all producers, directors and screenwriters that Justice will make them accountable for their influence upon audiences. The realization that they are contributing to the raising or the razing of souls should cause them to pause and ponder. The failure to do so is itself a sin of omission screaming for justice.

  Over the years, there have been producers, directors and screenwriters who have taken their moral responsibility seriously. Their films have exalted the noble, denigrated the ignoble and uplifted the spirit. Perhaps indeed they represent an exalted nobility of film, outnumbered perhaps by the ignoble but shining forth in purity like candles in a darkened room. It is these few, these happy few, that warrant the “three cheers for Hollywood”.

  Thankfully, the Few are not so few that they can be discussed in a solitary article. As such, the following will be a short guided tour of a few of the Few.

  A good place to begin any tour of the best of Hollywood is in the presence of Gary Cooper, a fine actor whose understated style belies his natural abilities. Sergeant York, High Noon and Friendly Persuasion represent a healthy trinity of films starring Cooper, each of which deserves three cheers of its own. The first, a romanticized retelling of the life story of a “real-life” hero of the First World War, dramatizes the subject’s prodigal youth, his repentance and conversion to Christianity, his efforts to become a conscientious objector on the grounds of a pacifist reading of Scripture, and his final emergence as a war hero who saves the lives of many of his comrades through selfless acts of bravery. High Noon is probably so well known that its plot, revolving around the hero’s self-sacrificial sense of duty regardless of its personal cost in terms of the loss of happiness, scarcely needs elucidating. Suffice to say that its masterfully paced ascent to a consummating climax is perambulatory in its persistent patience yet tension-tightening with every successive scene. A cinematic masterpiece!

  The final piece in our Cooperian trinity is Friendly Persuasion, a film about a family of Quakers questioning their principles in the midst of America’s civil war. Should they fight for the cause that they believe to be right, or should they refrain from fighting in accordance with their pacifist principles? Interwoven with this dramatic tension between principled pacifism and the concepts of a just war is the tension between two warring concepts of Christianity, namely, the puritanical and the Catholic. Although the Church, as such, does not so much as warrant a mention, the efforts of Cooper’s character to overcome the puritanical strictures of his wife epitomize the battle between the iconographic and the iconoclastic vision of the Faith. Slowly, resolutely and always lovingly, the character played by Cooper introduces beauty and gaity into the life of the family, symbolized by his acquisition of an organ, in defiance of the wishes of his wife, which brings the icon of art, in the form of music, into the life of the family. This theme is played out in various guises, not least in the characterization of the puritanical elder of the Quaker community, whose joyless adherence to his faith finds expression in a pharisaical approach to the letter of the law, particularly in his harshly phrased refusal to question the Quaker position on the war. The hardness of heart is highlighted still further by his sudden volte-face following the destruction of his own possessions by the enemy. In a moment of poignant symmetry—one of many in this wonderfully scripted tale—we see the erstwhile pacifist’s harshly worded defense of the need to fight and are reminded instantly and insistently of his earlier harsh words against the war. In his defiant insistence on pacifism and in his later rejection of it, there is, in both cases, an evident absence of love, the Real Absence that renders both viewpoints null and void.

  In 1955, the year before the release of Friendly Persuasion, another western, of sorts, was released that, subsequently and sadly, has slipped into relative obscurity. Seven Cities of Gold, starring Anthony Quinn, Richard Egan and Michael Rennie, recounts the pioneering days of the Spanish settlement of California. Specifically, it shows the struggle of a determined Franciscan priest to establish missions among the Indians in the face of the lust for gold and women of the soldiers among whom he is ministering. The fearless faith of the friar acts as the moral motive force of the film. Paradoxically, however, the movie’s ultimate power does not reside with the man of faith and the converts he gains, but with the solitary conversion of a faithless man, whose sin and cynicism have served as a foil to the friar’s piety throughout. The climactic conversion of this solitary sinner represents a truly glorious moment in the history of cinematic art.

  The final film in the handful selected to justify the “three cheers for Hollywood” is altogether different. Network, starring William Holden, Peter Finch and Faye Dunaway, was released more than twenty years after the other movies that have warranted our praise. Released in 1976, Network is separated from the other films by that abyss that was the 1960s. In many respects it signifies and symbolizes the hangover with which the world awoke after its flirtation with the narcotic delusions of the hallucinogenic debauch. The film can even be seen as a reply and a riposte to the libertine liberties taken, alongside the drugs, by that decadent decade.

  The three central characters in the film, indeed all the characters in the film, are hopelessly “mixed up” and “messed up”. Confused. Disoriented. Egocentric. Lost. They are filled to the brim with the negativism born of the negations of the previous decade. They are locked up in their libertine worlds, the servants of relativism and the slaves of the virtual reality that has replaced the real thing in their lives. The character played by Peter Finch, a television newscaster, suffers a breakdown and vents his spleen on the air. He is “mad as hell” and wants the world to know. The world, or at least the viewers, clearly want to know. They are also “mad as hell” and tune in by the millions to watch his rantings. The television executives, prompted by the sexually aggressive but emotionally impotent character played by Dunaway, are delighted at the increased audience tuning into the deranged demagogue. The more Finch raves and rants, the more the television moguls rave about the ratings.

  Predictably, unpredictability comes at a price. The “bull” being spoken by the proverbial bull in a china shop eventually causes the credulous executives to have more than proverbial egg on their faces. When Finch’s rants become xenophobic and anti-Semitic, in the anti-Arab as opposed to the anti-Jewish sense of the word, something has to be done. The deranged dupe is summoned to a private meeting with the mysterious Mr. Big, who heads the network. This disturbing character,
an ironic blend of Chesterton’s elusively surreal “Sunday” in The Man Who Was Thursday and Orwell’s menacingly real O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four, spouts off an Ayn-Randian antigospel in which he proclaims the new gods of globalization. These demigods obey the ultimate god of Mammon, who has laid down, in letters set in stone, the irrepressible law of omnipresent and almighty market forces. These laws overwrite the right to democracy, to individuality, to freedom. The market is the law before which every knee must bow. The deranged dupe is duped by this new antigospel of hopelessness and proclaims it to his increasingly bewildered viewers.

  Mercifully, Network is not all doom and despondency. It is lightened by a grimly pervasive irony, darkened delightfully by a countercynical sardonic humor, and, best of all, contains a penetrating morality. This morality, which represents, quite literally, the film’s saving grace, is founded on the disturbing vacuum presented by its absence. This paradox is, however, powerful only because of the inkling of something with which the vacuum could and should be filled. The inkling is provided in a memorable scene toward the end of the film, in which the disillusioned character played by Holden confronts the character played by Dunaway with her own superficiality. In the modern terminology, itself the product of the artificiality of modern life, he tells her to “get real”. She is living a virtual, virtueless life in an unreal world—an artificial life, defined by television and therefore devoid of any meaningful definitions, through which she is seeking to escape the ultimate realities of life. These ultimate realities, Holden insists, are rooted in love and cannot be divorced from pain and suffering. The glory of life resides in the indissoluble marriage of joy and sorrow. The acceptance of suffering is the beginning of wisdom. Oh, what joy to see such wisdom emanating from Hollywood!

  Watching a film like Network might encourage people to follow the advice of Malcolm Muggeridge, who, in old age and after having spent many years as a television personality, announced gleefully that he was having “his aerials removed”. Having had this particular operation myself, I can confirm that it is relatively painless and allows more freedom and time to live in the real world. Liberated from the televice-like grip of the television networks and their televicious secularism, it is pleasant to spend time enjoying the best of Hollywood on video. Take my advice—have your aerials removed but keep the VCR!

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  PURITY AND PASSION

  Examining the Sacred Heart of Mel Gibson’s

  The Passion of the Christ

  IT SAYS SOMETHING about the meretricious spirit of our age that the only “passion” considered controversial is the Passion of Christ. Movies, magazines, newspapers and television programs are full of other, less controversial, passions. They are, in fact, so full of depictions of graphic violence and pornographic sex that these particular passions are no longer considered controversial in the least. On the contrary, voyeurism is not merely acceptable, it is positively de rigueur; it is almost compulsory if one wishes to avoid the heinous charge of prudishness. Prurience is fine; prudishness is not. Vice is fine; so-called Victorian attitudes are not. Vice is victorious, and Victorianism is vanquished. Or so it would seem.

  Even the word “sin” has become an expletive, not to be uttered in polite company. Sin has had its day, or so they say. It has been eclipsed by cynicism. And cynics have no time for sin. Or so they say . . . In fact, of course, they have no time for anything else. Unable or unwilling to banish sin from their lives, they seek instead to ban it from the language.

  It is in the very midst of this stale and putrid scene that the figure of Mel Gibson’s Christ staggers onto the stage. He stumbles, bruised and bleeding, into the midst of the party, intent, so it seems, on spoiling the fun. The party-goers, comfortably drunk and heedless of the hangover that awaits them, do not welcome this unwanted and uninvited gate-crasher. Who is He, anyway? And what right does He have to tell them what to do? They are angry. They mutter among themselves that His presence in the midst of the debauch is a scandal. It is intolerable. It will not be tolerated. Who invited Him, anyway? Increasingly angry at His silent reproach, they become violent. They start to bustle Him around. Soon they rain blows upon his battered and defenseless body. He falls to the ground. Unwittingly they have become stars of Gibson’s film. It is they who are demanding that Christ be put to death. Crucify Him! Crucify Him!

  If this analogy appears a trifle too dramatic—melodramatic, even—we should remember that it is the precise analogy at the very heart of Gibson’s movie. It is Gibson’s precise point that those calling for Christ to be crucified are not merely historic personages in an obscure corner of the Roman Empire a couple of thousand years ago. They are us. It is we who scourged Him, we who placed the crown of thorns on His head, we who nailed Him to the Cross. It is our sinful hearts that pierced His Sacred Heart. And it is from His Sacred Heart that His mercy pours forth to us—in spite of our sins. This film, and the deep theology it portrays, is nothing less than Gibson’s Christian faith poured out as an oblation and as a penance for his sins. In this context it is supremely significant that Gibson’s only part in the film itself is to hold the nail as it is hammered into Christ’s sinless flesh. As he stressed during a recent interview, the choice of his left hand for the part signifies his sin, figuratively speaking, and the sinister, literally speaking (sinister in Latin means left). Far from his being, as some suggest, an “anti-Semite” who blames the Jews for crucifying Christ, Gibson is quite clearly blaming himself. He is responsible for the worst crime in human history. And, sobering thought though it be, so are we. This is Gibson’s point.

  It matters not whether the cynics who find the film so controversial fail to share Gibson’s faith. Its truth or falsity has nothing to do with their belief in it. What matters is that Gibson has made a profoundly moving movie depicting the last bloody hours of the life of Christ. He has courageously brought the truth of the Gospel to movie theaters around the world. The fact that many people find the Good News bad news is neither here nor there. It is to be expected. Indeed, the fact that many people find the Good News bad news is not news at all. It has always been thus. The Gospel has always been controversial. It was so controversial that the scribes, Pharisees and hypocrites put its Founder to death. Nothing has changed. We continue to crucify Him. Yet He continues to live. This is the Sacred Heart of Gibson’s film. It is a bleeding Heart, but a beating Heart also. It bled for us. It beats for us. And this, for Gibson and millions of other Christians around the world, is not merely controversial, it is incontrovertible.

  There is no hope that Mel Gibson will ever win an Oscar for The Passion of the Christ. No matter. He has his heart set on an infinitely greater reward.

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  PAUL McCARTNEY

  A Grief Observed

  A review of Blackbird Singing: Poems and Lyrics 1965-1999+

  LOVERS OF POETRY could be forgiven for steering clear of any volume of verse by a well-known pop star, even one as generally and genuinely respected as former Beatle Paul McCartney. At the very least, they could be forgiven for approaching such a volume with trepidation. To a degree, their fears and prejudices would be justified. McCartney has written a number of surprisingly good poems, but they are embedded like precious stones in the basest of rock (if the pun be permitted). Indeed, all too often the rock weighs heavily on the blackbird’s wings, a millstone around the poet’s neck.

  There is, in fact, little doubt that McCartney’s reputation as a poet would have been enhanced considerably if his reputation as a pop star had not gate-crashed its way onto the pages of Blackbird Singing. If the poems had been allowed to stand alone, they would have stood secure. As it is, they have been forced to shuffle uneasily beside a large selection of McCartney’s song lyrics. These, stripped of their musical accompaniment, make embarrassingly bad verse, even where they remain eminently memorable as lyrics. It is certainly comical, yet sadly tragic, that legendary and truly lyrical lyrics, such as those
in Penny Lane, The Long and Winding Road, The Fool on the Hill and many others, fall flat and lifeless on the dead page, as though, when stripped of their music, they have been stripped of their life. Hey Jude, Back in the USSR, Band on the Run. . . one by one, the lyrical icons of one’s youth crumble to dust on the impotent silence of the page. Like an uninvited voyeur, the reader looks on with embarrassed awkwardness at the pathetic sight of the sublime becoming ridiculous.

  There are exceptions. Paperback Writer, She’s Leaving Home, Lady Madonna and Eleanor Rigby all salvage some respect as verse even after the musical Muse has been exiled. In each case, however, they were stronger when happily married to their respective musical spouses than when forced to live as aesthetically impoverished divorcees. Only the unforgettable Yesterday survives as a poem of true merit, as pristinely pure and sublimely simple in verse as it is on vinyl.

  Nonetheless, and leaving these reservations aside, Paul McCartney is a genuine poet. He is a poet in spite of his reputation as a songwriter, not because of it. It is in the final section of the book, entitled “Nova”, that McCartney finally excels. Containing nothing but new verse and mercifully free of old song lyrics, Blackbird Singing reaches a late but refreshingly impressive climax. With the rock belatedly removed from around the poet’s neck, he begins at last to fly and sing like the bird that gives the volume its title.

  Comprising a mere fifteen short verses, the final section is candidly autobiographical, intensely personal, and charts McCartney’s enduring love affair with his wife, Linda, following her death from cancer. It is, in fact, the diary of a soul’s grappling with bereavement—its feelings, its thoughts, its suffering, its questioning. It is strongly reminiscent of C. S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed, though it speaks to and from the heart, whereas Lewis spoke to and from the head. It also charts, and chants, a soul’s confusion and its eventual conversion, albeit a conversion colored by confusion. The final poem in the volume is a hymn of praise to a long-sought and longed-for God. In the company of other and greater poets, such as Dante, Bunyan, Coleridge and Sassoon, McCartney is a poet on pilgrimage, seeking that he might find. Perhaps, however, his particular pilgrimage is not yet over. Having discovered God, he has still to rediscover His Mother. Across the years, one hears the insistently haunting refrain of one of McCartney’s finest songs: