“WHERE DID WE get this capacity to imagine that horribly complicated messes have been ironed out just because someone has looked us in the eye and told us so? I don’t know about you, but I keep getting it from the movies.” So says novelist Jim Shepard in his provocative new collection of essays on movies and making the American myth, smartly (and depressingly) titled The Tunnel at the End of the Light.
In Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Shepard sees sociopathy at the root of the desire for celebrity. He also reflects on how Saving Private Ryan was a “war movie found pleasing by conservatives and liberals, and it’s not hard to figure out why: ... more than enough war is hell to satisfy the left, and ... an even greater helping of well, it may be hell, but it sure brings out the best in us, doesn’t it? raw meat for the right.” Shepard makes a useful point— something can be remembered by one group of people as the antithesis of how another sees it.
Of course, all movies are interpreted in the eyes of the beholders, and the motivations of their creators may not bear on the audience’s experience. You can watch Avatar and see an anti-colonial adventure or a recruitment poster for the myth of redemptive violence, a winsome invitation to attend to Indigenous wisdom or a condescending advertisement for spiritual practice as a fashion accessory.
I like Avatar because it invites identification with underdogs, and does so with extraordinary visual imagination, recognizing that cinema’s power rests largely in how the images move (or don’t). I don’t like how it offers no alternative to the use of force to get rid of oppressors. Large-scale moviemaking finds it hard to apply the same levels of creativity to storytelling and moral complexity as they do to visual spectacle, and not only because of the (assumed) risk of box office failure. Walter Wink wrote that in a world utterly used to the deployment of force to bring order out of chaos, nonviolence needs to be rehearsed.
It’s much easier to imagine something we’ve seen before, so those of us who value a third way beyond fight or flight must champion stories that will help us imagine it. Call it third way movie-going.
Shepard calls himself “an apocalyptic,” meaning he tends to think that things are going to get worse first. But his book isn’t without hope: It serves as an invitation to learn from wise lament. We aren’t here just to be entertained, but to change how we live.
Gareth Higgins is an Irish writer and storyteller based in North Carolina. He is the founder of www.moviesandmeaning.com, and you can also find him at www.garethhiggins.net.
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