Religion in the Movies

On May 1, Beacon Press published Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies by Margaret Miles, Bussey Professor of Theology at the Divinity School. Gazette senior writer Marvin Hightower recently spoke with Miles about the new book.

How did you decide upon your book topic?

It really came from a course that I teach on the History of Christian Thought, which uses religious pictures as primary "texts" along with readings to help us understand what the society of origin might have seen in those pictures. That course comes down to the present, looking at various current uses of religious art. But I would skip from the art that had been publicly accessible in historical church buildings that were the center of communities to museum art in the 20th century.

That posed a methodological problem. So it occurred to me that instead of looking at contemporary museum art, one should look at media, the popular art that is, similarly to medieval art, publicly accessible. It's not the images we see once in a while or the odd image -- the museum image or the coffee-table-book image -- that really helps to shape a society and its relationships, but the images with which we live daily, those that are very repetitive in their designations of who is valuable and beautiful.

So I began by teaching a course, Religion and Values in Popular Film, and then got a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to be on leave for a year [1994-95] to write the book. I had taught film about 30 years ago in California at a junior college, so I knew something about cameras and the technical aspects of filmmaking. But I needed a leave to catch up with the critical literature in film.

What framework did you adopt?

As I taught the film course, I arrived at a method that I thought was sufficiently distinctive from other approaches to warrant publishing a book about it. In the first couple of run-throughs of the course, students learned three different approaches to film criticism: psychoanalytic, Marxist, and feminist. Gradually I came to see how a cultural-studies approach integrates those three without privileging any one in particular.

I became convinced that placing a film in the cultural moment in which it was produced and had a first-run circulation helped us see what made a film popular -- namely, a box-office success. I didn't work on blockbusters so much as films that presented themselves to the public as treating certain issues which may attract a broad audience. I also looked at advertisements, previews, posters, interviews, and reviews. I start with a circuit from funding through production and distribution to a broad spectrum of reviews. I stayed within the last decade [ca. 1983-93], so that I could assume a more or less common framework, and examined only North American films.

I looked at two different things. One section is on films that treat Christianity [e.g., The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Jesus of Montreal (1989)], Judaism [e.g., The Chosen (1981), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)], and Islam [Not Without My Daughter (1991)]. I looked at films' treatment of religion and found some patterns. The second section deals with films that focus on values, especially those related to race, class, and gender. I examined films like Jungle Fever [1991] and Paris Is Burning [1990].

You must have spent a lot of time in the dark!

I did! I have to first see a film in a theater because videos are cut toward the center and leave out a lot of things at the edges that sometimes change one's perception.

How many movies did you see?

I didn't keep count. But for several years, I saw everything, trying to get a sense of the big picture. In a way, this was not a fun project. It became painful to see how reiterative films are. We go to a film because its advertisements tell us that it's going to treat some radical new topic. It's discouraging to see how often it will then take that topic and "colonize" it, so that at the end, the message is quite conservative.

But I didn't write this book in order to trash Hollywood film. I wanted to see what was interesting about it. One thing that this range of films does do well is to take matters that a broad spectrum of the American population is concerned about and play them out on the big screen, so that we can contemplate them and see, well, what would it look like, for example, if we had a domestic man and a career woman?

But films like 3 Men and a Baby [1987] and Look Who's Talking [1989] collapse at the end into the idea that women are really happier at home, men are really happier out there working, and things really work better with traditional nuclear families -- when, in fact, only a very low percentage of Americans live in anything like a nuclear family. Yet we're still idealizing it on the screen.

What other patterns did you notice?

Let me say first that I take films to be treating, in some very basic senses, ways of relating with other people. In this sense, film resembles religion, which is fundamentally about how one relates to a larger universe: a natural world, people within one's communities, and who is framed as "other" in order to say who "we" are. All of those things are central -- even more central, I would claim, than particular beliefs or practices.

I asked, for one thing, when does religion become box office? I discovered that this happens when religion is cross-referenced in other media. For example, when liberation theology was treated on talk shows and in the newspapers frequently because the Vatican was censoring various theologians [who advocated it], there were several films that treated themes of liberation, like The Mission [1986] and Romero [1989].

Yet in every instance, these films have a single hero: Romero or Fr. Gabriel or some other "fearless leader." But the point of liberation theology is the base community, and the sharing of leadership and responsibility. Shared leadership makes liberation theology work, but it doesn't make an exciting film. Hollywood films consistently altered the character of the religious movement to feature sensationalism or a single hero rather than the sort of daily practice of religion that doesn't make for a large box office.

In the second part of the book that focuses mainly on values, I found an immense reiteration of the comfort zone of white, middle-class heterosexual Americans, even in films like Paris Is Burning, which documents a community of gay men of color and their practice of dressing up and having balls. Their lives were reduced to those sensational balls. The editing was fast-cutting and made their existence a spectacle. Attention to a broader concern over families, work, and their treatment in society was precluded.

By contrast, Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied [1991] is a film by a black gay man about his own experience, but it's so much broader. Riggs didn't think of his film as being in any first-run theaters but rather more for his own community, to document a moment in history. Outside the gay press, it was pretty much ignored.

Did you find any other films that tried to do something different but enjoyed better distribution or better reception?

Yes. It's very curious to see when a particular topic can be shown, like the film Go Fish [1994], which was about lesbian experience. During the same year, there were several successful films about lesbians. That topic had previously been considered absolutely dead at the box office. But it suddenly seemed to be something that white heterosexual Americans were curious about. So those films did pretty well.

Did you get any sense of why certain Hollywood approaches to religion and values have become so persistent?

I think it must always come back to the presumption that the major box-office audience is white, middle-class, heterosexual Americans that want to be reassured in who "we" are. Even though we'll entertain a topic on something "other," we want to see in the end that it's "we" who are really OK -- still the designated, preferred persons in the society. I'm afraid that's a very fundamental tenet of Hollywood filmmakers. There is still a very subtle social consensus for preferring the people who have always run things and keeping on the margins the people who have always been on the margins.

You said you weren't out to trash Hollywood. What alternatives do you propose?

I think ultimately the answer has to be to empower and fund people to make films that are not reliant on box office and Hollywood conventions.

But even Hollywood films could do better at a range of things. What they already do well is to help Americans entertain concretely the question of how we should live. However, they reiterate, according to Hollywood conventions, a limited range of answers. We need films that help Americans picture religious, racial, and cultural diversity as irreducible and delightful. So many films picture diversity only to "transcend" difference by collapsing it into sameness.

Moreover, a society at risk of fatal infection through sexual exchanges needs to see images in which safe sex is sexy. You don't see safe sex in films, or it's very, very rare. Films also polarize men's and women's erotics, making men's erotics circle around casual sex and violence, and women's around gentle caring. Both of these are distortions. I think that large groups of Americans are trained by film to expect that these ought to be their erotics, and that expectation helps to make them so. I'd like to see a broader repertoire of erotics on screen.

Varied images of beauty on the big screen would help us to notice one another's beauty instead of always noticing the blond, rich, slender, young images. There are exceptions, of course, but most filmmakers still assume that audiences want to see a narrow range of images of male and female beauty. I like Daughters of the Dust [1991] because it showed -- and the director [Julie Dash] acknowledged that it was her intention to show -- a variety of black women, all beautiful, not necessarily because their faces were unusual but because the camera lingered and explored those faces in a way that made new images of beauty pop into the eye.