Finding Reel Religion 2 comments

By Bradford Winters

When I received the invitation this past winter to contribute to the nascent blog for Image, with my field of (non)expertise being the business of TV and film, the first thing I did upon responding in the affirmative was reach for my copy of the “Screening Mystery” issue of the journal (#20), published back in the summer of 1998 and devoted, as its subtitle indicates, to “the religious imagination in contemporary film.”

While the entire issue is a revelatory guide to the sacred structures—be they physical or philosophical—that form a skeleton to the secular and largely carnal beast known as Hollywood, it was one essay in particular, “Looking for Reel Religion” by Michael Morris, O.P., that had stuck with me over the years. In tracing the cultic parallels between the ancient temple and modern cinema, Morris provided me with something of a shock of recognition that I had always sensed but never been able to quite articulate, exploring with equal fluency in both realms the religious impulse that lies at the heart of the moviegoing experience.

Beginning with a description of the temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel in Egypt that bears comparison to the atavistic features of the movie theater which William Randolph Hearst had built in the castle at San Simeon, Morris illumines his thesis:

“The motion picture industry began as a less than impressive sideshow in penny arcades. But in just a short time, it learned to vest itself in the trappings of religion, and in doing so, the movie palace became a temple for the modern era. A visit to an American picture palace built between World War I and 1940 could be a numinous experience.... The similarity to a house of worship was evident: a cavernous interior cloaked in semi-darkness, the whispered conversational level of the people inside, the strain of organ pipes, the eye-popping magnificence of the elaborate décor, the pew-like regularity of seats...and last but not least, the curtained holy of holies.... When the heavy curtain of that sanctuary lifted, the two-dimensional screen gained depth and came alive with male and female characters, seen literally bigger than life. They could transcend the human confines of time and space, a prerogative heretofore reserved for the gods.”

As I’ve been meaning to write a blog about his essay containing extensive excerpts like this—to try to say it differently than Morris does seems as pointless as trying to say it similarly, since he says it so well—there is no better occasion to do so than now, in the wake of a recent vacation in Mexico followed by business in Los Angeles.

On a trip that straddled Mayan ruins one day and pitch meetings the next, I had ample opportunity to ponder the cultic parallels that Morris highlights. From the crumbled remains of a pagan temple to the plush headquarters of a cable channel I’m not at liberty to name yet (that may change by the next blog), it was all too clear that the ancient paradigms, as Morris notes, lie far closer in spirit than they do in geography or time:

“The studio heads, in this parallel world of reel religion, became the controlling high priests of the film industry with a battery of acolytes to assist them. They could make or break stars, control the press—and the police—in the process of myth-making. Like all the ancient priesthoods, they were exclusively male, and like the Levites, practically all of them were Jewish.”

Morris, of course, is here talking about Hollywood in its heyday, an American Dream factory hatched by “refugees from a European world that had excluded them,” and the exclusivity these days is not nearly as male or Jewish as it was then.

But when I think back on a meeting with a different network last fall (I’ll let you figure out which one), whose tent-like entrance to “Television City” bears the gigantic all-seeing eye of its logo—a symbol whose origins lie, you guessed it, in early Egypt—his central point comes through all the more resoundingly.

Temple or Tabernacle, the trappings of Hollywood don’t exactly square with its professed distaste for religion.

In his closing lament for the demise of the movie palaces of old and the subsequent rise of “the totally functional multiplex, with stark, plain curtainless rooms, exhibiting all the charm and magic of a warehouse,” Morris rightly points out that “[t]he invention of television helped desacralize the cinema,” as “[e]ntertainment piped directly into the home lessened the necessity of making a pilgrimage to downtown movie shrines.”

But given the trends in domestic technology since Morris wrote the piece, with HD flat-screen TVs getting bigger and better and ever more like home altars, I wonder if we’re already trying to recover what he claims has been lost.