Bee Season

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—2. Overview Basic (dial up speed)
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—4. Cast and Crew
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—7. Posters (Richard Gere)
—8. Production Notes (pdf)
—9. Spiritual Connections
—10. Presentation Downloads

There are many films with spiritual aspects, but Bee Season explicitly deals with spirituality. Spirituality per se may be such an internal matter that making a film about spirituality is a challenge that will almost certainly fall short. In some important ways Bee Season does come up short. But in spite of its shortcomings, the film also has some spiritual insights worth considering.

The Naumann family looks very typical when we first encounter them. Saul, the father, teaches religious studies at a college. Miriam, the mother, is a scientist (although the film really doesn’t give us much to establish her professional life). Their two children, Aaron and Eliza seem to fit the roles they play in the family. Saul is the center around whom the family exists. To be invited into his office is to be brought into the Holy of Holies. Early in the film, we see him taking Aaron there so they can play music together. When Eliza has news from school, rather than knock, she meekly slips the envelope under the office door.

Things begin to change when Eliza becomes a Spelling Bee champion. In his pride, Saul brings her into the study to tutor her, leaving little time for Aaron. Amid all of this, Miriam continues to struggle with her demons dating back to her parents’ death when she was young.

Saul’s interest in Eliza’s spelling skill is not just a matter of pride. He senses in her a gift. She seems to be able not only to spell the word, but senses the very nature of the word and what it describes. (This aspect of the story is really nicely done. Through the visuals we see of how she sees the words she spells.) Saul begins to introduce her to the Jewish mystical concepts of Kabbalah, which finds special meanings in words and letters within the Hebrew scriptures. Soon, Eliza hungers to move deeper into the spiritual waters much faster than her father thinks she is ready for.

The rest of the family is falling apart. Aaron is seeking meaning in other religions (and in a beautiful Hare Krishna follower). Miriam is coming home late, and going out at night without telling anyone.

In reality, all of them are on a spiritual journey. Saul has intellectualized his idea of the spiritual. For him, spirituality is like a book that can be closed and put away for another time. Miriam is looking for something that will restore happiness to her life. Aaron is looking for something that will replace the loss he feels of his father who now spends his time with Eliza. Eliza is being encouraged to try to experience the divine in a way only a few ever have.

One of the concepts from the Kabbalah that Saul mentions in his class is tikkun olam, literally repairing the world. It holds that creation is a shattered vessel (similar to a Christian idea of a fallen world). The goal of humankind is, through good works, to bring the shards together so that the creation can be restored to its original divine state.

This family, we soon see, represents some of the broken shards. They are in need of tikkun olam in their own lives. The quest for the spiritual that Eliza is embarking on is really what they all need and want, but don’t know how to find it.

Perhaps what I miss most in this film is a sense of the spiritual. Certainly the film talks about spirituality and notes the emptiness within lives that have no spiritual anchor, but we never really discover any way to access a spiritual life. Rather, spirituality is portrayed as something that is really only available to a special few who know the secrets of finding God; others will only find inadequate substitutes.

Even though all in the film are in search of some spiritual fulfillment, we really see little of the ways of finding that fulfillment. We see a brief scene of Aaron chanting in the Krishna temple. Saul teaches Eliza a Kabbalistic exercise designed to clear her mind to be receptive to God. Later, she does this on her own to reach a major (and scary) mystical state. The relationship between these two spiritual exercises could well be explored (and related to other exercises such as lectio divina.)

Perhaps one of the difficulties in dealing with this subject (especially through the lens of tikkun olam), is that the film treats the spiritual quest at a personal level, while tikkun olam really has a more cosmic focus. It is hard to take wide ranging concepts and portray them in a single life. To be sure, spirituality is often personal and internal, but its greatest value is that it plays itself out not only within a life, but in the world around us as well.

Miriam’s story is not sufficiently developed for us to understand her spiritual longings. We only see that she is unhappy and unfulfilled. Even when we come to understand what she is doing in the strange scenes in various houses and at night, we really don’t quite get her compulsion. A better development of Miriam’s story would also help us to understand the gift of a kaleidoscope she gives to Eliza. That gift is her way of passing on her vision of the world (broken), but we never get to discover Eliza’s understanding of what she sees through it.

Even though the film fails to show us the way to find spirituality (and may not even trust that spirituality can be found), it does give us the chance to consider our own sense of the spiritual in our lives. Do we think spirituality is hard to achieve? Do we see spirituality as something that should be approached with care and caution? Which of the characters are we most like?

The film ends at a point that leaves open the idea that tikkun olam will come to the Naumann’s world, but we don’t know if that comes or not. It is hard to repair the world. The shards are many and scattered. Perhaps there is hope, though, that if this family can be restored, the rest of the world can be as well.

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