WITHIN A YEAR, two blockbuster films have featured fugitives who seek refuge in a surprising place: a convent of religious women. In Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, the daughter of a revolutionary hides out with the fictional Sisters of the Brave Beaver. In Stephen Speilberg’s sci-fi thriller Disclosure Day, a government whistleblower carrying stolen information about alien life takes shelter at the monastery of St. Clare of the Dawn.
This trope is not new. Sixty years ago, The Sound of Music immortalized it in the fictional account of the von Trapp family hiding from Nazis in the crypt of the Nonnberg Abbey while the nuns quietly sabotaged the pursuers’ cars. The fascists in Sound of Music, much like the white supremacists in One Battle, didn’t suspect the God-fearing, habit-wearing women would defy law enforcement. And as audience members, we’re amused because we didn’t suspect it either. But we should’ve seen it coming.
For centuries, convents have offered women a way to break from cultural norms. In Medieval Europe, many entered religious life in defiance of societal expectations of marriage and motherhood. Convents were one of the few institutions where women could administer property, govern communities, and pursue scholarship. Today, the consecrated life continues to defy values that organize modern society. Is that why artists and film directors return to convents? There, women exist outside the ordinary societal scripts of romance, ambition, and motherhood.
A slew of boundary-breaking, on-screen nuns have appeared in the past few years, including in Conclave, Mrs. Davis, and The Ritual. In her book Visual Habits, Rebecca Sullivan investigates Hollywood’s fixation with religious sisters (mostly Catholic) in the 1950s and ’60s (see The Nun’s Story, The Flying Nun, and The Singing Nun). Nuns, Sullivan argued, “had a unique role to play in the embryonic stages of second-wave feminism because of their dual identities as both fiercely independent and devoutly chaste.” They seemed simultaneously radical and respectable.
It’s too simplistic to say we like nuns because they’re rebellious. We’re drawn to them because they’re paradoxes: Catholic sisters subvert social norms but submit to God—and to a church that reserves its highest offices for men. They embody both rebellion and devotion. Devotion to what, exactly, varies widely depending on the particular beliefs of the woman. But faith particularities are rarely explored in cinema.
As the number of women religious declined, Sullivan wrote, Hollywood increasingly treated nuns less as people than as symbols. “The popular culture of nuns was too easily reduced to a form of cultural waste, an icon that is no longer relevant to contemporary society but provides pleasure in the form of ironic or kitsch appropriation.”
We avoid such kitschiness by allowing nuns to be complex characters instead of convenient symbols. Rebel nuns are fun to root for, but rebellion untethered from conviction is little more than a plot device. In One Battle, no one asked the nuns why they made the dangerous choice to shelter a fugitive. Maybe they would have responded something like real-life Sister Norma Pimentel, a Missionary of Jesus who has spent years welcoming asylum seekers in the Rio Grande Valley: “We must be fierce as lions to do God’s will. But we also must be gentle souls as we reach out to those who need our compassion.”
Jenna Barnett is the culture editor at Sojourners and the producer of the award-winning podcast Lead Us Not.
Did this article have an impact on you? Tell us how! Whether you’re moved to take action, have a question, or want to share a comment (good or bad), we value your feedback!