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Editorial:
Spring Fever Comment:
What is Reconciliation? From
the Director: Ireland is changing and so are we! The
Whole Gospel for the Whole World (and beyond...) Rwanda
Ten Years On Anglo-Irish
Relations The
Hard Gospel Interview
with Robin Eames: RECONCILIATION - A View from Armagh Interview
with Sean Brady: RECONCILIATION - A View from Armagh Church-based
Peacebuilding Evangelism
& Reconciliation - are they irreconcilable? Dogville
and the Drama of Redemption Blessed
are the Peacemakers? Review:
Bitter Fruit Review:
The Colour of Darkness Review:
The Lost Message of Jesus Review:
The Futures of Evangelicalism Review:
Evangelicals in Ireland: An Introduction |
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DOGVILLE AND THE DRAMA OF REDEMPTION While Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ was stirring controversy and drawing huge crowds to cinemas last year, an independent film called Dogville quietly snuck in and out of the Queen’s Film Theatre. It now has a second life on DVD, and is worth renting alongside the Passion. If Christians want a film that stimulates serious dialogue on some fundamental issues at play in Christianity, argues John Kiess, their time is better spent in Dogville. A SKILLFULLY EXECUTED, if slightly disturbing film, Dogville addresses many of the same themes as the Passion (violence, suffering, sin and salvation), but in a far more indirect, understated fashion. Viewed together, Dogville emerges as the superior film, more thought provoking and challenging because it is content to say less, and let the viewer respond to the questions it poses. Where the Passion overwhelms, Dogville disarms, nudges, and invites. Stylistically, the two films diverge along two very different paths. Gibson’s Passion is a thoroughly realist tale; Lars von Trier’s Dogville is allegory in the style of the old Brecht plays. Gibson is focused on presenting the world of the gospels as authentically as possible, from the clothing to the language, architecture, and, most important of all, the many sufferings of Jesus. While we rarely hear much about the suffering Christ in today’s churches, especially the Jesus who still suffers with the poor and hungry (I’d like a movie on that one), Gibson aims to right the ship… and then some. As has been discussed as great length, Gibson’s film is filled with violence, from the sword fight in Gethsemane to the brutal whippings by the Roman legions to the Stations of the Cross. There is a sense of spectacle, even titillation in the way Gibson relentlessly uses close-ups and sounds effects to enhance the gore and misery. He’s passionate about his Passion. My concern with the violence is not its excess, but the distorting effect it has on the arc of the Gospel story. Even though Gibson has made very clear that he was making a film only about the last days of Christ, the exclusive focus on the violence becomes a way of re-narrating the Gospel itself. Gibson’s story is not so much about the person of Jesus (his divinity or humanity, his purpose on earth, his ethics, his radical Kingdom), but the violence He endured. Jesus becomes incidental to the ordeal. In watching scene after scene, we wonder, ‘My God, how could anyone go through that?’ instead of asking, ‘Who is this man undergoing all of this?’ (It doesn’t help that Jesus is bloodied beyond all recognition.) If we are moved, it is not toward Christ, but away from the violence. To his credit, Gibson does try to break up the intensity of the passion scenes with little vignettes that tell us more about the person of Christ (I was particularly struck by the scene where Jesus draws his finger in the sand in defense of Mary Magdalene). But the inclusion of these scenes only underscores the point. Major parts of the gospel are re-ordered and narrated from the point of view of violence. Every flashback happens at some point in the ordeal, such that we only get access to healings, preachings, humor or the Last Supper through the lens of violence. Violence is Gibson’s gospel optic. Jesus’ ministry is literally an afterthought from this point of view. Violence is rendered the condition of possibility for God’s saving act, which is to say, violence itself becomes salvific. Gibson is treading on dangerous ground here. In relation to this, I find it telling that so many people came away from the Passion talking about the violence. It was as if the violence was one of the main characters. It drove the plot and shaped the narrative. The arc of the Gospel narrative we know, however, is not shaped by violence, or even peace or love, but Jesus Christ. Christ is front and centre, and it is not what he underwent that grounds the narrative, but His being, His identity as Son of God, maker of heaven and earth, the Word made flesh. A film that sets out with an exclusive focus on the violence Christ underwent cannot be anything other than just another movie about violence. The real questions, which the Passion is purportedly about – sin and salvation – are lost. Dogville, a film more about the soul of America than anything to do with Christianity, raises precisely these kinds of questions, and does more to stimulate hard thinking about the Gospel than the explicitly Christian Passion. The film is directed by Lars von Trier, a Dane, who previously directed the critically acclaimed Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark. He was a founding member of the Dogme movement, a group of young directors who banded together in the early 90s to renounce the glossy, overproduced methods of filmmaking that had come to dominate contemporary film. While Dogville strays from some of these principles, it remains highly unconventional. The Depression-era American town is set on what appears to be a large sound stage surrounded by blackness, lending the film an eerie, claustrophobic air. Houses and streets are depicted by chalk lines, and townsfolk mime most of their actions, from opening doors to cooking and cleaning. That is not a real dog you hear barking, that’s the dog’s chalk outline. Early on in Dogville, a character named Grace (played by Nicole Kidman) enters the town, on the run from a group of mobsters on the other side of the mountains. She befriends a young idealist named Tom Edison, a kind of Emersonian lecturer/preacher figure, who convinces the townsfolk to provide Grace safe haven. The community initially appears benevolent, and accepts the stranger into their midst. But after Grace volunteers to earn her keep by doing small jobs around the town, the local folk begin to take advantage of her, and the veneer of goodness lifts to expose layers of greed, envy, lust and malice. She starts as a cook, then tutor, then a friend to the blind, then babysitter and day labourer, and ends up becoming the town’s slave and scapegoat. All of the community’s fears and sins are thrust upon her, and she is subject to enormous cruelty, which she bears with an almost superhuman degree of strength. Sound familiar? Grace for most of the film fits the mould of a Christ-like figure, despised for her virtue, a sacrificial lamb for a fallen humanity. But there’s a twist to von Trier’s story. The mobsters come back in the end, and we learn that the boss (James Caan) is also Grace’s father. Father and daughter have a pow-wow in the back of his limousine, and a memorable exchange ensues over the classic questions of justice and forgiveness, suffering and healing, life and death. Her father says at one point that people are like dogs, and she replies that dogs act according to their nature and that we must understand and forgive them. And her father replies: ‘Dogs can be taught a lot of good things, but not if we forgive them every time they follow their nature.’ Her father gives Grace a choice: to spare Dogville, or seek revenge for all the harm they’ve done to her. Grace is human, not a saviour, and cannot resist vengeance, and the mobsters are given the order to wipe out the town. The film ends with real life images of farmers and drifters, reminding us that those despicable characters who spitefully used Grace are not just Americans, but us, all of us. I learned more about my solidarity with those who called for Christ’s crucifixion at this moment than the actual scene in the Passion. Von Trier leaves us there, in the emptiness and starkness of the vision. The nihilism burns, and is viscerally unsatisfying. For some, it will be a highly disappointing finish, but I think it fits the thrust of the narrative. Von Trier’s film is a negative gospel: he gives us the bleakness of our situation, as to put a mirror in front of us, and dispel the high romantic notions of a pure and limitless horizon to our humanity. It is a hyperbolic picture, but it works, and in such a fashion that violence does not become a form of rhetoric, or the arc of the story. Answers to the questions the final scenes pose are not thrust upon us. We are left to wrestle with them. And what are those questions? I came away asking: Is humanity worth saving? What does it mean to even think of a wager like this? Did God think in terms of a wager when he sent his Son? Where does justice end and mercy begin? How am I complicit in Christ’s suffering? And how is it that Christ still opens His arms to a wretch like me? It is not often a film raises such profound questions. When a film does, it is worth celebrating. JOHN KIESS is a former Research Assistant with ECONI and is currently undertaking a Masters Degree at Peterhouse College, Cambridge. |
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