Arts and Faith Top 100 Spiritually Significant Films

The Arts and Faith discussion group has published its revision of the Top 100 Spiritually Significant Films. A good list. Although, personally I prefer the list done last year.

Bee Season

—1. Overview (multimedia)
—2. Overview Basic (dial up speed)
—3. Reviews and Blogs
—4. Cast and Crew
—5. Photo Pages
—6. Trailers, Clips, DVDs, Books, Soundtrack
—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.

—Overview
—Reviews and Blogs

The Chumscrubber

—Overview
—Spiritual Connections

The idyllic suburb of Hillside is decorated with banners heralding “Carefree living.� The sad thing is that it is true. Here is a suburb in which everyone is so self-absorbed that they don’t care about anything or anyone else.

The Chumscrubber is something of a light-hearted, noirish look at this suburban life. It walks the edge between comedy and tragedy. Certainly the characters and events are laughable, but they also have a solid bite.

The film is primarily divided into a world of adults and a world of children (teens actually). The adults are all portrayed in a somewhat cartoonish manner. They all have one dimension – a mother selling herbal dietary supplements, another mother planning her perfect wedding, a father who is a psychiatrist who writes popular self-help books using his son as illustrations. The young people are more realistically portrayed, but they are just as self-centered as their parents. The various family stories of all the adults and teens interlock in the manner of Magnolia.

The two worlds are connected, but separate; they are similar, yet different. In the beginning of the movie we see this complementary and disparate nature when we learn that the teens all get “feel good� pills from Troy, and then we see Mrs. Stiffle packaging and selling her Veggie Force supplements to boost energy and provide “a new life system.� Everyone is looking for a way to feel better. They never consider that actually addressing life could bring them happiness; instead they look for the magic pill, be it drugs, supplements, fame, power, money, or any of the other ways we try to compensate for our lack of happiness.

The plot begins with Dean going over to visit his best friend Troy (the school’s drug dealer). At Troy’s house his mother is hosting a party. When Dean gets to Troy’s room, he discovers that Troy has hung himself. He leaves without telling anyone because he doesn’t think anyone would care. (This is, after all, the community of carefree living.)

Soon some of those who helped Troy dispense all the feel good pills, come to Dean to force him to retrieve the drugs. For leverage they kidnap Dean’s brother Charley. Well, they try, and then end up not with Dean’s brother, but another Charley. This is a pretty lightweight kidnapping. It’s more like just letting a younger kid hang out with them. But as time goes on, the kidnapping slowly takes on a darker feel.

At various times, the teens all mention to adults that there is a kidnapping going on. But all the adults treat it as a joke. They can’t allow their lives to be sidetracked by anything so mundane. Over and over, the adults fail to communicate with the young people. The teens, by the same measure, fail to communicate by trusting in their parents to ignore them.

Although this film can be seen as a commentary on the need for adults and youth to be able to communicate, it is really more of an indictment of the self-centered world in which we live. Maybe life isn’t meant to be “carefree.� Maybe life is meant for us to care about others.

Back in the 60s Melvina Reynolds wrote the song “Little Boxes� (popularized by Pete Seeger) about suburbia. The song made the point that it wasn’t just the boxes (houses) made of “ticky tacky�. One verse went:

And the people in the houses all went to the university
Where they were put in boxes, little boxes, all the same.
And there's doctors and there's lawyers, and there's business executives
And they're all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.

To be sure, The Chumscrubber exaggerates the situation. But we know when we watch the exaggeration, that there is a truth underlying it all. As long as we allow ourselves and our communities to be self-absorbed, we may think we are on our way to happiness, but in reality we are merely fooling ourselves with false ideas of happiness. Only when we finally come into honest relationships with others (as eventually happens between Dean and Troy’s mother – both of whom are seeking to avoid grief) that we can find real happiness.

Oh yeah, the title. All through the film, the youth are reading comics or playing video games featuring a character called “The Chumscrubber�. This is a post-apocalyptic zombie-like character who wakes up one day to discover his head has come off his body. He travels around carrying his head, fighting the other monsters. He says of his existence, “I’m not dead, but what kind of life is this.� Indeed. The film calls us to consider if we are in effect zombies wandering the world fighting off other demons, but not really living any kind of real life.

—Overview
—Spiritual Connections

Paradise Now

—1. Overview
—2. Reviews and Blogs
—3. Cast and Crew
—4. Photo Pages
—5. Trailers, Clips, DVDs
—6. Posters (Islam)
—7. Production Notes (pdf)
—8. Spiritual Connections
—9. Presentation Downloads

News of suicide bombers has (sadly) become commonplace. It seems that each day we hear how many were killed or injured in Israel or Iraq or some other place in the world. What in the world makes people willing to become such a terrorist – or more, to think they are heroes for blowing up themselves and others?

Paradise Now is an international production that gives us a look at the kind of person that can become a suicide bomber. The amazing thing is not that we meet people willing to kill so wantonly, but that we actually like them. This is not, however, an apology for or glorification of terrorism. Rather it shows us the various circumstances that come together for someone to make the decision for terrorism or to reject that method. We see both options. Hopefully, we will gain some understanding of how people make such choices so that the case against terrorism can be made.

The film tells the story of Said and Khaled, two boyhood friends now working in a garage in Nablus. Much of their life is just marking time, because there is so little potential of things to do under the Israeli occupation. The one bright spot is that Said has a budding romance with Suha, the daughter of one of the early heroes of the Palestinian struggle.

One day, Said and Khaled get word that they have been chosen for an operation in Tel Aviv. They have committed to acting together and dying side by side for the Palestinian cause. They have prepared for this day, but now that it is here, will they carry through? Will their conflicted consciences overcome their sense of responsibility to their people?

A key scene is when Said and Khaled make their “martyrs’ videos�. These videos will be sold and rented by other Palestinians after they have become martyr-heroes. They read their statement giving God glory and calling for freedom for their people. But they also include some very human concerns, such as one of them telling his mother about what kind of water filter she should be buying. Such a serious event, yet it has a certain amount of humor. Not because this is a laughing matter – but because it is a human matter.

Interestingly, it is Suha that brings the argument against violence. She has, in her own way, been the victim of the violence that her father helped bring about. She notes, when someone mentions how proud she must be of such a hero, that she would rather have him alive than a hero. The dichotomy of Suha and Said’s perspectives give us two sides of the issue to consider.

What is not a part of this film is the Israeli view of terrorism, nor is their role as occupiers given much inclusion. This is a film that is really concerned with the Palestinian option of violence that is played out in suicide bombing. It does not treat the terrorist as the monsters we want them to be. They seem human and reasonable. But in spite of that, it never condones the choice they make. It shows us the cost of that choice.

Directed and co-written by Palestinian Hany Abu-Assam, the film is produced by companies in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Israel. The crew represented various nationalities, including Palestinians and Israelis.

To create the characters of Said and Khaled, Abu-Assam read transcripts of interrogations of suicide bombers who had failed. We get a believable picture of young men who seem willing to sacrifice themselves. Some quotes that lay out their position: “Death is better than inferiority.� “Whoever fights for freedom can die for it.� “I’d rather have the paradise in my head than live in this hell.�

The film has some similarities to the 1965 film, The Battle of Algiers, which long ago gave us a look into the world of terrorism (even if few have actually taken the time to seek the insights it gave us.) Both films help us to see the desperation that leads some to do acts that we rightly condemn.

Religion plays a much bigger part in Paradise Now. It is almost absent in The Battle of Algiers, but God is invoked over and over in a variety of ways throughout Paradise Now. One of the issues that needs to be addressed in any examination of the issue is the role that religious fervor plays in violence – whether it be Islam or Judaism or Christianity.

The purpose of Paradise Now is not to make any point – it is to invite us to understand a little more and to create more of a discussion about the issues that all come together to make terrorism seem like an option. Perhaps through understanding and discussion we can come closer to peace.

—Overview