A new form of prayer
Steven Spielberg and Paul Schrader were both born in 1946. This week I watched two movies by these two old men freaking out about the state of the world.
Spielberg's 2005 adaptation of War of the Worlds is a nightmare fever dream, a series of worst-case scenarios fuelled by post-9/11 panic, barely held together by a thin plot. There is a strong sense of artifice throughout. The characters often stand in place doing nothing while stuff happens around them, just so the camera can move and capture a spectacular shot. The actors remain frozen in place for the sake of the shot even when it makes no sense narratively. The chaos that surrounds them made me think of these lines from Yeats's "Second Coming":
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
Schrader's 2017 masterpiece, First Reform, is also about the end of the world, in a way, but the storm takes place entirely within the characters. The devastating act of violence that propels the plot forward in the first act takes place offscreen. We see only its aftermath. The threat of an imminent global climate catastrophe looms enormous and we are constantly reminded that it's real, but it remains on the horizon. In contrast to Spielberg's directorial prowess, Schrader's camera almost never moves. There is almost no music in the first half of the film, until Lustmord's dark ambient score creeps in. Every shot is precisely composed and every cut is perfectly timed, but unless you're paying attention to that sort of thing (like I was), you won't feel the heavy hand of the director.
I guess I haven't really said what the movie is about. Ethan Hawk plays a priest who is having a crisis of faith. That's probably all you need to know. I wish I could write 1,000 words on how sharply that crisis is explored, how incisive the script is, how astonishing the whole thing is. "I have found a new form of prayer," Hawk's character says in the narration. I think maybe for Schrader this film is a new form of prayer. I was moved by it in a way that I don't have the patience or the inclination to put into words.
Earlier this evening, I went to a meeting with a group of researchers that formed out of an "interdisciplinary ideas lab" that I was part of last semester. Funding for the project was cut by the university, so my cohort was the last one. Some of us decided to try to keep the open collaboration and discussion going by meeting every two week at a café to do "lightning sessions," where everyone brings to the group a question or problem from a project they're working on. What's great is you get insights from people with different perspectives and expertises - an engineer, an economist, a philosopher, a computer scientist, an urban planner, etc.
Someone at the meeting today said that reason alone can often lead us astray, but that so can emotion. She was asking what is this third thing that guides us in making smart decisions? Intuition? Will? God? Those are three words she offered. Someone else said "discernment." I couldn't come up with an answer on the spot, but now I think I would say it's our imagination. Specifically our ability to imagine the future, or a different world, or someone else's reality. (In that last sense, imagination and empathy are the same thing.) Imagination is also what drives creation (artistic or otherwise). In an early scene in First Reform, Hawk's characters says it's necessary to hold two contradictory feelings at the same time, despair and hope. I think hope also requires imagination.
At the end of Spielberg's War of the Worlds, Tom Cruise reunites with his family, who have all miraculously survived the alien invasion. This tacked on happy ending is almost laughably bad, as if Spielberg was simply unable to commit to his nightmare vision of the apocalypse. It's not that I would have preferred he succumb to despair, but his version of hope is a failure of the imagination. It doesn't inspire, because it feels like he just gave up. Schrader's film ends on a hopeful note that I prefer not to spoil.
