Three professors, six students, and six R-rated films. What was the common thread between all of them? A famous–and infamous—chapel talk at a conservative Christian university. The leader of this chapel “talk,” which consisted of all nine people acting as panelists, was the dramatic arts professor. He had recruited a religion prof and me, a literature prof, to speak about the worth of at least some R-rated movies in a culture that thought R-rated movies, by their very identification as such, were sinful. I was game; I was exhausted with hearing my students praise PR-13 films that were little better than window-dressed NC-17 or X-rated films while bashing some really good films that, of course, they had not seen because they were R-rated.
My two student-assistants and I had chosen to talk about American Beauty (Dir. Sam Mendes) and Magnolia (Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson), both 1999 releases. Both films deserve their R-ratings for sex, violence, drug use, etc. But both films, beautifully executed, show the universality of the human condition in all its brokenness and tragedy, and, ultimately, all its resilience and hope of redemption. How could a conservatively religious student body not love to hear that phrase—hope of redemption?
I am always a sucker for any film or book or short story that even appears to have a hope of redemption at its end. I was caught by the beauty of the main character’s realization of the worth of his life at the end of American Beauty. And I knew that every individual in the strange inter-locking stories of Magnolia, would not struggle in failure forever, but would find purpose and peace in life. At the end of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I felt hope, along with the dad, that the son would be able to pass the fire on to other human beings. There would be a future for him and others. When I read the final words of J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, I had no doubt that the narrator, who wasn’t sure the road he was on was leading anywhere, would encounter a good destination, simply because he had the hope to continue.
This inborn “hope of redemption” that I look for (and, therefore, find) in so many postmodern books and films that others eschew, must come, I believe, from my own hope for redemption. When others mourn the loss of the absolute truth associated with Modernity, I am content that the relative truths of Post-Modernity contain a hope of redemption, too. Out of relativity has come our ability to embrace the other, to find a truth in the other that echoes the truth we find in ourselves—that as lonely and lost and unlovable as we may be in our human condition, we find hope in redemption, a hope beyond ourselves, a hope that transcends the restrictions of the human condition and that can unite all of us as brothers and sisters who share the same blood, the same DNA, and the same hope for the future.
At the time I participated in the scandalous chapel panel on R-rated movies, I presume all nine of us, regardless of the range of our ages from 18 to 53, were naïve to think that our well-conceived arguments and examples would be broadly well-received. None of us expected, however, the rapidity with which the vitriol of the religious establishment would rain down upon us. The dramatic arts professor, of course, took the brunt of the attack, having been the creator of the topic for the panel, but all of us felt the wrath, not just of the board of trustees and the administrative heads, but also of many regular students who really did not want to be awakened to good films that were R-rated.
Within two years, all six students were gone from the school, as well as the other two profs. I alone was left to witness the transformation of the university’s policy against R-rated movies. It came because the Department of Religion wanted to use clips from R-rated movies to illustrate certain points within their curriculum. Granted, the policy was not a total rejection of the former one: now some films could be shown with objectionable parts removed; other films could pass the ”vision” test because the R-rating was given for something other than sex and language. Arbitrary? Probably. Progress? Definitely. I sometimes wish that both the decision makers and the general student population had been on the timeline with the nine of us instead of on one that was three to five years later.
But the experience did not deter me from seeking—and finding that hope of redemption in all kinds of places. I am still finding it. Now I am finding it in all of the protests that have recently occurred here in the U.S.—and in all of the protestors—with their glorious diversity: white, black, brown; old, young, and every age in between; male, female, trans; religious and not so religious. Finally, or, perhaps, better stated, again, we have hope for a different future, a better future, a future without nonsensical divisions, a future that will bring a kind of redemption to all of us.
We may not recognize it as the redemption that we thought we hoped for, but it will be the redemption we need. In “Little Gidding,” T. S. Eliot writes about arriving at a place which you might find, regardless of the way you head towards it, and, having found it, realizing that “what you thought you came for is only a shell, a husk of meaning. . . [and] the purpose is beyond the end you figured and is altered in fulfillment” (ll. 30-35). We must be open to such a place, to such a meaning, to such a purpose. Eliot goes on to say that in our coming to this place, which for him, in his job of fire-watcher during World War II, was the village of Little Gidding, with its restored Anglican chapel. To this place, he says to the reader, “you come, not. . . to verify, instruct yourself, or inform curiosity or carry report. You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid” (ll. 43-46). We could do worse than find our own place, where we watch for “fire,” to be a place where prayer is valid. We pray for the coming of the hope of redemption, here and everywhere.
Works Cited
American Beauty. Dir. Sam Mendes ; distributed by DreamWorks Pictures, 1999.
Eliot, T. S. “Little Gidding.” Four Quartets: An Accurate Online Text. http://www.davidgorman.com/4quartets/4-gidding.htm
Magnolia. Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson; released by New Line Cinema, 1999.
A Myriad of Things 