What is God?

Last weekend, I pulled into a closed bank parking lot on 23rd Street where Girl Scouts were selling cookies.

As I stood there looking at the familiar boxes, wondering why Samoas weren’t among them, and asking how sells were going, I heard the following:

“What is God?”

“What?” I asked.

“What is God?” the tween Girl Scout asked me again.

It may very well be the most important question each of us asks and answers—determining all our other questions and answers—and it was interesting to hear it from a little girl selling cookies.

It’s the question I’ve been asking myself , one I’ve been answering and not, since childhood, and for a fraction of a second I wondered why she was asking, then it hit me.

I realized the reason for the question in the same moment she nodded toward my arm.

I was wearing a short sleeve shirt, and peeking out from beneath the cuff, written on my left bicep in black ink the words “is God” were visible.

“What is God?” she was asking, emphasizing the “what” because she could see the “is God.”

Most talk about God in our culture is simplistic, sexist, silly, and downright juvenile. God is reduced to that which we project our fears, biases, hopes, and dreams onto. God likes what we like, hates who we hate because we have created what we call “God” in our own image.

But God is a mystery—beyond us to such an extent we’re only left with myth and metaphor, story and poetry.

Transcendent. Ineffable. Sublime. What is God is what we should be asking all the time. Unfortunately, many among us are taught from an early age exactly what God is. We live with a rigidity and certainty, so convinced we know what God is we stop asking, keeping us from any hope of ever glimpsing what God is—which, by the way, is the best we can ever hope to do. A glimpse of ultimate reality, of the ground of being, of the great mystery, is rare and humbling and worth everything—and probably won’t happen as long as we believe we already know what God is.

If we would continually empty ourselves, be open, and ask, as my cookie salesperson did, “What is God?” we might just get a glimpse.

I take seriously the question my own arm inspired the Girl Scout to ask. If you do, too, and would like to join me in the asking, I’ve pulled a few books off my shelves to help us ask the questions (don’t trust any books or gurus that claim to have the answers).

“The God We Never Knew” by Marcus Borg is the most accessible and easy to understand of the stack of old friends I’m looking at as I write this. He’s a Jesus scholar and an active person of faith who takes modern scholarship and non-literal ideas of religion and makes them easy to understand.

Karen Armstrong is another writer who takes scholarship and interprets it for the masses. Not as personal or devotional as Borg, Armstrong takes a more historical and academic approach. Her books, “A History of God,” “The Battle for God,” and “The Case for God” are excellent—wise, learned, brilliant, thorough, profoundly thought-provoking.

“God: A Biography,” by Jack Miles approaches the God of the Hebrew Bible (or more accurately the gods) as a literary character, combining narrative, literary criticism, and modern scholarship into a fascinating look at the most famous and most written about character in human history.

“The Disappearance of God,” by Richard Friedman looks at the presence and increasing absence of God in the Bible. In many ways, a mystery story, “The Disappearance of God” is engaging and insightful, revealing, as all books about God do, far more about us than God.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly for our male-dominated, sexist culture, I highly recommend feminist theologians, Sallie McFague, Elizabeth Johnson, and Rosemary Radford Ruether, who challenge our ridiculous and limiting masculine concepts of God. “She Who Is,” “Sexism and God-Talk,” “Models of God,” and “The Body of God” are excellent aids in restoring the lost feminine face of God, and it’s difficult to imagine anything we need more. Losing the metaphor of Mother God has made us orphans capable of hating our own siblings.

I’m not just recommending each of these books, but recommending you read them all.

In most of the ways our culture judges such things, I’m not a religious person. And because of the ways our culture judges such things, that suits me just fine. But
I’ve spent my life emptying and asking the questions and will continue to. And I’m continually frustrated by how little the most religious (as our culture judges) among us know about their own religion or its sacred texts—not to mention religion
in general or theology.

The best way each of us can keep from being ignorant and arrogant, defensive and violent, is to, in humility, ask the questions, emptying ourselves of all we think we know and questioning everything—including the questions.

Over the years of my decades-long quest, I’ve come up with a few answers—answers I still continue to question, except for one. The only answer I am completely convinced of, the one that, if I am wrong about, I want to be wrong, is the one tattooed on my left bicep, the bottom part of which led the Girl Scout to ask, “What is God?”

I lifted my sleeve so she could read the answer to her question and she did.
“God is love is God,” she read, and there was nothing else for either of us to say on the subject.

Romance and Rhetoric

“The Russia House” is a romance—of rhetoric as much as relationship, with ideas as much as individuals. It’s about a scientist with the soul of a poet, a heroic drunk who finds it in himself to become a decent human being, and the bewitchingly beautiful woman who makes them both better men.

“The Russia House,” based on the John LeCarre novel, stars Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer as two people caught in a web of spies and politics, whose love could prove fatal to them both. When Katya (Pfeiffer), a beautiful Russian book editor, attempts to send British publisher Barley Blair (Connery) a manuscript written by a noted Soviet scientist, she unwittingly draws them both into a world of international espionage. The manuscript, which contains information that could alter the balance of world power, is intercepted by the West’s spy-masters who then send Blair to Russia to gain more information on the mysterious document. But after Blair falls for Katya, he finds himself torn between his mission and the woman whose passion for her country and for Blair knows no bounds.

This is one of those rare films I return to time and again—twice a year on average—that continues to affect me deeply. I love its idealism. I love its romanticism. I love that it takes these two ways of being in the world and juxtaposes them with cynicism of the benighted, fearful men running the world.

“The Russia House” is a romance I can believe in, one that resonates with me, one that has credibility, one that is grounded in reality. It miraculously manages to be wise and profound, about real issues of honor and justice, of love and hate, of life and death, yet remains wondrously, wildly romantic.

The events of “The Russia House” are set into motion because of these words by Barley at a writers retreat in Russia during the Cold War:

Barley: I believe in the new Russia. You may not, but I do. Years ago, it was just a pipe dream. Today, it's our only hope. We thought we could bankrupt you by raising the stakes in the arms race. Gambling with the fate of the human race.

Russian writer: Barley, you won your gamble. Nuclear peace for years.

Barley: Oh, rubbish. What peace? Ask the Czechs, the Vietnamese, the Koreans. Ask the Afghans. No. If there is to be hope, we must all betray our countries. We have to save each other, because all victims are equal. And none is more equal than others. It’s everyone's duty to start the avalanche.

Russian writer: A heroic thought, Barley.

Barley: Listen, nowadays you have to think like a hero just to behave like a merely decent human being.

Later, a writer named Dante, who turns out to be a scientist as well as a poet, asks Barely to promise him if he ever manages to act heroically, Barley will respond as a decent human being. Barely does, but when Barely discovers what Dante wants his help with, he wavers. Dante tells Barley that his thoughts on world peace have inspired him, which causes Barley to be confronted with whether he is willing to die for what he claims to be his most beloved beliefs.

Barley: I'm not the man you thought I was.

Dante: You do not have to remind me that man is not equal to his rhetoric.

None of us are equal to our rhetoric, but both Dante and Barely manage to be when it really matters, making them decent and heroic, and reminding us that being brave isn’t the absence of fear, but remaining resolute in spite of it. This, for me, makes “The Russia House” a profoundly inspiring film. If Boozy Barely Blair can be a hero, so can I, so can you.

Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer are absolutely brilliant in their roles as Barely and Katya, and though in general I hate the way Hollywood too often casts young women and old men, because of the characters and the casting, it works here. But as good as Connery is, Pfeiffer completely disappears into the role of Katya—something difficult for such an extremely beautiful woman to do. With her accent and mannerisms and the persona of the old Russian soul she’s become, Pfeiffer is Katya.

“The Russia House” vividly and convincingly shows how few people—mostly scared, paranoid, small-souled men—keep the world from peace. It also shows the power of love.

Love, as the most powerful and powerless force in existence, gives us the inspiration and the ability to change, to become.

Love is the ultimate act of faith, of trust, and Cold War espionage provides a perfect backdrop of distrust to test the resolve of Dante, Barley, and Katya—lovers of truth, lovers of life, lovers of ideas, lovers of literature and art, lovers of people more than countries, of love and peace more than might and power.

Even in the face of certain death, Dante, Barely, and Katya hold fast to love, risking all for it—including their very lives—for they know what the author of the biblical book of the Song of Songs knew: “Set me as a seal upon your heart. For love is as strong as death.”

Barley: I love you. All my failings were preparation for meeting you. It’s like nothing I have ever known. It’s unselfish love, grown up love. You know it is. It’s mature, absolute, thrilling love.

Katya: I hope you are not being frivolous, Barley. My life now only has room for truth.

Barley:You are my only country now.

Love conquers all. It changes us. It changes the world—toppling empires, removing regimes, lasting, remaining, enduring. Long after the Russian and American empires are ash-streaked heaps, love will still be changing hearts and minds, giving hope and strength, comforting, inspiring, transforming. Boozy Barley Blair acted heroically in the way only decent human beings can because of love. Love gently leads us to become our best selves, gives us the best hope of being equal to our romance and rhetoric. These three remain: faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love.

My Perfect Moonlight Movie

It occurred to me recently that I watch movies the way I read books—alone.

True, I don’t watch every movie alone. Occasionally, I brave the theater (with its mouth-breathing popcorn crunchers and screen talkers—harsh and unkind, I know [and I’m known for being neither], but I genuinely love film and these people prevent me from fully entering its world). Sometimes I even take a move-watching companion, but mostly I watch movies in high-def on my Sony 55 inch HD TV in my study, reclined in my leather Stressless chair surrounded by my books.

Not only do I watch movies alone, but I mostly watch them late at night when the world is sleeping—a trend that goes back to my adolescence as the only night owl in a house of early birds.

There’s no better way to get caught up or swept away than alone with a good movie on the dark side of the witching hour. And some movies are just meant to be watched this way—“Frankie and Johnny” foremost among them. It’s a movie about loneliness in which the crises-ridden climax takes place on a long, lonely Saturday night as Clair de Lune, which is French for moonlight, plays in the background.

Garry Marshall (“Pretty Woman”) directs the screen adaptation of Terence McNally’s 1987 play “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” the story of an ex-con, short-order cook (Al Pacino) who drives a waitress (Michelle Pfeiffer) crazy with his intense courtship and professions of love. McNally adapted his two-character play for the screen and has expanded and rearranged his original story, adding a variety of settings and extending the narrative out over a longer period of time, while surrounding the lovers with additional characters. Kate Nelligan, another lonely waitress, and Nathan Lane, a gay neighbor, really standout.

This exchange between Cora (Kate Nelligan), a waitress standing at the order counter trying to get the old, overweight cook, Tino, to finish her customer’s food, is an example of the movie’s good-humored humor.


Cora: Tino! Who do ya gotta %$#@ to get a waffle here?

[Tino points at himself, Cora looks back at a customer]

Cora: Forget the waffle!


“Frankie and Johnny” is a sweet story—but not overly so. There’s a real sadness present, too. These are people whose lives haven’t turned out like they had hoped—for those among them with enough hope to even dare to hope. They are living lonely, little lives of service and subsistence, but doing so with humor and dignity, and the desire to make real connections.

As charming and funny as “Frankie and Johnny” is, it’s Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer’s performances that elevate it—him, as a middle-aged man so desperate, he’s needy and obnoxious, her, as a sad and wounded woman so gripped by fear she’s hardened and defensive. Here are two examples of their typical interactions:


Frankie: I feel like you’re too needy.

Johnny: Oh, come on. What does that mean?

Frankie: I just feel like you want everything I am. You know?

Johnny: Yes, I do. Why not?


Frankie: I’m retired from dating.

Johnny: What does that mean? Something happen to you as a kid? What happened?

Frankie: You know. Why is it that anytime a woman doesn’t want to get involved in a relationship, men think they were messed with as a kid. Wrong. They were messed with as a woman.

Each time I watch “Frankie and Johnny,” I feel the same way—connected, compassionate, happy and hopeful. The movie is not without sadness and darkness, loss and lovelessness, but it’s because, and not in spite, of these things, that an earned sense of hope appears, grace out of the grime and grittiness.

In addition to the witty writing, charm, sweetness, wonderful performances, “Frankie and Johnny” has a strong, complimentary soundtrack—the best piece of music by far, “Clair de Lune,” third movement of Suite bergamasque by Claude Debussy, a piano depiction of a Paul Verlaine poem.

When it begins to play on the small radio in her apartment, Frankie says, “That music is nice. Makes me think of grace.”

I can’t think of anything better than that, and as it turns out, it is a grace for Frankie and Johnny.

As Frankie once again begins to crawl back inside her distrust and defensiveness, Johnny calls the radio station’s DJ and asks him to play it again in hopes it will save their relationship.

Johnny: Now, there's a man and a woman. He's a cook. She's a waitress. Now, they meet and they don't connect. Only, she noticed him. He could feel it. And he noticed her. And they both knew it was going to happen. They made love, and for maybe one whole night, they forgot the 10 million things that make people think, I don't love this person, I don't like this person, I don't know this—instead, it was perfect, and they were perfect. And that's all there was to know about. Only now, she's beginning to forget all that, and pretty soon he's going to forget it, too.

Does he play it again? Does Frankie come out of her shell and risk love? Is it possible for two people to find later in life what was so excruciatingly elusive earlier when they were younger and more hopeful and more sure?
Watch the movie or read the play, preferably alone and late at night, and let the Clair de Lune shine its grace on you, as you witnesses to their story.

Bloodletting Brilliance

Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” is a vicious, violent, relentless literary bloodletting masterpiece of American fiction—an apocalyptic prose poem.

It’s as well written as anything I’ve ever read—the writing itself, better than even McCarthy’s other peerless works, is a dark, devastating delirium of alchemic anarchy.

The novel chronicles the brutal world of the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the mid-nineteenth century. Its wounded hero, the teenage Kid, must confront the extraordinary violence of the Glanton gang, a murderous cadre on an official mission to scalp Indians and sell those scalps. Loosely based on fact, the novel represents a genius vision of the historical West, one so fiercely realized that since its initial publication in 1985 the canon of American literature has welcomed Blood Meridian to its shelf.

As a novelist, as a student of literature, even when I’m reading for “entertainment,” I’m not. This is especially true of a writer like McCarthy. I can’t fathom anyone purporting to have literary aspirations or claiming to be a student of American literary fiction, not studying this great American novelist.

In recent years, thanks to film adaptations and Oprah, McCarthy’s audience and influence has increased. With “No Country for Old Men” and, especially, “The Road” he has moved more into the mainstream, and while these are more accessible, more contemporary, “Blood Meridian” is the masterwork, that which will surely endure even if no other work does.

I was first introduced to Cormac McCarthy by literary critic, Harold Bloom, whose books have taught me so much over the years.

Here is a bit of his introduction to “Blood Meridian.”

“‘Blood Meridian’ seems to me the authentic American apocalyptic novel, more relevant even in 2010 than it was twenty-five years ago. The fulfilled renown of “Moby-Dick” and of “As I Lay Dying” is augmented by “Blood Meridian,” since Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and of Faulkner. I venture that no other living American novelist, not even Pynchon, has given us a book as strong and memorable as “Blood Meridian,” much as I appreciate Don DeLillo’s “Underworld;” Philip Roth’s “Zuckerman Bound,” “Sabbath’s Theater,” and “American Pastoral;” and Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “Mason & Dixon.” McCarthy himself, in his Border Trilogy, commencing with the superb “All the Pretty Horses,” has not matched “Blood Meridian,” but it is the ultimate Western, not to be surpassed.”

But the relentless brutality of “Blood Meridian” can’t be denied. It’s not an easy book to read. Listen to Bloom’s confession.

“My concern being the reader, I will begin by confessing that my first two attempts to read through “Blood Meridian” failed, because I flinched from the overwhelming carnage that McCarthy portrays. The violence begins on the novel’s second page, when the fifteen-year-old Kid is shot in the back and just below the heart, and continues almost with no respite until the end, thirty years later, when Judge Holden, the most frightening figure in all of American literature. So appalling are the continuous massacres and mutilations of “Blood Meridian” that one could be reading a United Nations report on the horrors of Kosovo in 1999.

“Nevertheless, I urge the reader to persevere, because “Blood Meridian” is a canonical imaginative achievement, both an American and a universal tragedy of blood. Judge Holden is a villain worthy of Shakespeare, Iago-like and demoniac, a theoretician of war everlasting. And the book’s magnificence—its language, landscape, persons, conceptions—at last transcends the violence, and convert goriness into terrifying art, an art comparable to Melville’s and to Faulkner’s.

When I teach the book, many of my students resist it initially (as I did, and as some of my friends continue to do). Television saturates us with actual as well as imagined violence, and I turn away, either in shock or in disgust. But I cannot turn away from “Blood Meridian,” now that I know how to read it, and why it has to be read. None of its carnage is gratuitous or redundant; it belonged to the Mexico–Texas borderlands in 1849–50, which is where and when most of the novel is set. I suppose one could call “Blood Meridian” a “historical novel,” since it chronicles the actual expedition of the Glanton gang, a murderous paramilitary force sent out both by Mexican and Texan authorities to murder and scalp as many Indians as possible. Yet it does not have the aura of historical fiction, since what it depicts seethes on, in the United States, and nearly everywhere else, well into the third millennium. Judge Holden, the prophet of war, is unlikely to be without honor in our years to come.

“Even as you learn to endure the slaughter McCarthy describes, you become accustomed to the book’s high style, again as overtly Shakespearean as it is Faulknerian. There are passages of Melvillean-Faulknerian baroque richness and intensity in “The Crying of Lot 49,” and elsewhere in Pynchon, but we can never be sure that they are not parodistic. The prose of “Blood Meridian” soars, yet with its own economy, and its dialogue is always persuasive.”

I agree with Bloom. As interesting, fascinating, engaging as its characters are, as much as their journey is epic and suspenseful, it is the language of “Blood Meridian” that elevates it to the lofty position of art, of enduring, timeless, literature. Mastery of language like this happens so seldom, a work like this is published so infrequently, all of us who hold story sacred, who claim to care about culture, about art and literature, should buy it, read it, study it, reread it, repeat.

Like Bloom, I esteem Roth, Delillo, Auster and others, but, for me, no writer since Shakespeare has so tapped at and tested the limits of language as Cormac McCarthy. Of all the heady and humbling things said about my last novel, “Double Exposure,” nothing meant as much as when reviewers and readers compared it to McCarthy’s work.

“Blood Meridian” is just what the title says—the highest point or stage of development—and not just for Cormac McCarthy, but for literature. It’s a midday zenith of world literature, a peek, a meridional masterpiece written in blood.


A Few Notes:

Thanks so much to all of you have sent such warm and generous congratulations on “Double Exposure” winning a Florida Book Award. I’m truly grateful for both the award and for your kind support.

I’m very happy that “Hurt Locker” took best picture and Kathryn Bigelow won best director at the Oscars. Well deserved! It gives me hope. In the end, I think “Avatar” is little more than an amazing technical achievement and stunning visuals.

Walking into the theater to see a movie recently, I had to pass the two enormous gray garbage cans filled with the trash from the previous audience and it made me sick. We’ve got to do better—not only with what we put in our bodies, but with all the waste, all the garbage we’re creating. Throwing something away doesn’t make it really go away—whether it’s plastic bags or deadly chemicals (and nearly all chemicals ultimately are). I challenge you as I am challenging myself. Consume less, waste less, discard less, reuse more.

Wide Open Spaces and the Sound of Silence

Quiet.

Slow-paced.

Character study.

Not words you’ll hear used to market many movies—especially in the era of blockbusters and Cineplexes—but for a film to truly be affecting, to give us, its audience, the opportunity to connect with its characters, it must involve no small amount of moments that involve just such things.

In the same way each of us need time, silence, and solitude to become our best, deepest, richest, most inwardly complex selves, a film needs a certain pace and space for characters to live and breathe. A life fitted with time to think, space to meditate, to contemplate, to be, is essential for soul building. A story imbued with quiet not only allows character to develop, but enables us to connect.

And nothing’s more important.

Stories are magic, are sacred things, because they give us multiple lives, infinite incarnations, endless opportunities to so indentify with a character that we become that character, that we experience existence from inside another.

Of course, this can be done during the quiet moments between action sequences or battle scenes, but the more the moments, the more deeply we experience the other, and if an entire story is thus, well then, all the mo’ betta’.

“Crazy Heart” is just such a story—a quiet, slow-paced, character study. Affecting. Moving. More.

Fifty-seven year old Bad Blake is a minor legend as a country singer. But that status only nets him gigs in bowling alleys and bars. Bad is an overweight, chain-smoking alcoholic. He is informed by a doctor that his self-destructive lifestyle will send him to an early grave. This self-destructive behavior has also led to several failed marriages and a grown son who he has not seen since he was four. While performing in Santa Fe, Bad meets newspaper journalist Jean Craddock, who wants to do a piece on him for her newspaper. Despite the differences in their ages, Jean and Bad begin a relationship. Jean and her four year old son Buddy become the closest thing to family Bad has. Not coincidentally, during this time, he experiences a resurrection of sorts in his career, but what looks to be a promising professional and personal future may be jeopardized by his hell-bent self-destructiveness.

“Crazy Heart” is a good enough film, but it’s the performances that elevate it into something worth recommending. Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhaal are quietly mesmerizing.

As I watched “Crazy Heart,” I kept thinking that what I was seeing was a remake—or at least the spiritual offspring—of “Tender Mercies.” And then Robert Duvall made an appearances (and later I find out he produced it), and it confirmed the connection between the two films for me.

“Tender Mercies” stars Robert Duvall (in an Oscar-winning performance) in a touching story of a down-and-out country singer named Mac Sledge who meets Rosa Lee, a young widow (Tess Harper) in a small Texas town. But as their relationship blossoms, Mac’s years of hard living resurface when his music star ex-wife (Betty Buckley) appears bringing his estranged daughter (Ellen Barkin) with her. It’s a low-key, contemplative film directed by Australian Bruce Beresford (“Driving Miss Daisy,” “Breaker Morant”), written by Horton Foote (“To Kill a Mockingbird”), who won an Oscar for his screenplay.

“Tender Mercies” is that rare film that is far, far greater than the sum of its parts—a simple story told simply, its understated performances pitch-perfect for this masterpiece of quietude.

Both “Crazy Heart” and “Tender Mercies” are redemption stories set in the sad, alcohol-soaked world of country music, where the music itself is a character. Bad sings (and lives) that “falling feels like flying for a little while” and Mac keeps reminding himself over and over that no matter how painful he must “face reality.”

Though film as a medium is limited in showing it, simplicity in one’s outer life often leads to richness and complexity in one’s inner life. It’s what Walden is about—going to the woods to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, to learn what it has to teach, and not, when we die, discover that we had not lived.

It’s a big part of why I live where I do (on a lake in a small town) and an even bigger part of why I live the way I do. Without time to think, without space to breathe, without stillness and solitude, we’re like plants in a windowless, smoke-filled office dying without sun and rain and fresh air. Whether we’re confronting alcoholism or existentialism, we, like Bad Brad and Mac, need time and space and love.

Love changes us. It’s the only thing that can. Actually, it’s far more accurate to say that love gives us the opportunity, the environment, in which change can occur. Jean’s love for Bad Blake, Rosa Lee’s love for Mac Sledge, provide a milieu for the men to change—any substantive change they do.

Unconditional love is the greatest gift we can give ourselves and others.

Acceptance.

Being accepted—completely and utterly accepted—just as we are. No judgment. No rejection. No expectations. Nothing but passionate compassion, understanding, appreciation, kindness.

Rosa Lee’s love for Mac is unconditional. She is constant. She is patient. She is giving. Mac experiences God’s tender mercies through her—which is what makes this small, quiet film profound. She gives Mac something Jean isn’t quite able to give Bad. The capacity for love each woman has is different. They are different and have had very different experiences.

Life is suffering—much of it unnecessary and self-inflicted—but, as Mac discovers, being loved, truly loved, makes even tragedy and trauma bearable. Trusting in, resting in, being secure in another’s (and ultimately God’s) love enables us not to survive life, but to experience it with hope and joy.

Mac tells Rosa Lee, “I don’t trust happiness. I never have and I never will,” but despite his claim, and the way his self-destructive decisions have so often caused it to be true, her unconditional love is showing him day by day, moment by moment, he can trust goodness and good things.

And it’s not just washed up, alcoholic country singers who need unconditional love. We all do. Unfortunately, too often when fronted with it, we find it so foreign, so inconceivable, we run from it. Mac jumps in the old pickup truck, buys a bottle, and runs as fast as he can, but something, thankfully, mercifully, brings him back.
What was it that brought him back? The kind, loving, and oh so tender mercies of a good woman (and the God loving him through her).

Dennis Lehane's “Shutter Island” Shows Scorsese to be Master of Dark Art

Back in November at the Miami Book Fair, while telling Dennis Lehane how much his books have meant to me, I asked him if he had seen Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of his novel, “Shutter Island.” He told me he had and that it was a masterpiece.

I couldn’t agree more.

At 67, Martin Scorsese is at the height of his powers as a filmmaker.

And for the third time—three for three—Mr. Lehane has had one of his novels adapted successfully (the others being “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone”).

It’s rare for an author to have one good film made of his or her work, but three? It’s unheard of. I asked him why he thought he’d been so fortunate, and he said it was because in each case, a true auteur was involved—an artist with a vision to serve as author of the film. In the same way Mr. Lehane is the author of his books, Clint Eastwood was the author of “Mystic River,” Ben Affleck, of “Gone Baby Gone,” and, now, Martin Scorsese of “Shutter Island.” Just as a great novel must have a visionary artist, a great film needs a single-minded director, an alchemist who takes all the disparate elements and makes magic.

It’s 1954, and up-and-coming U.S. marshal Teddy Daniels is assigned to investigate the disappearance of a patient from Boston’s Shutter Island Mental Hospital. He’s been pushing for an assignment on the island for personal reasons, but before long he wonders whether he hasn’t been brought here as part of a twisted plot by hospital doctors whose radical treatments range from unethical to illegal to downright sinister. Teddy’s shrewd investigating skills soon provide a promising lead, but the hospital refuses him access to records he suspects would break the case wide open. As a hurricane cuts off communication with the mainland, while more dangerous criminals escape in the confusion, and the puzzling, improbable clues multiply, Teddy begins to doubt everything - his memory, his partner, even his own sanity.

I have been an admirer of Dennis Lehane since, while doing a book signing for my first novel at Murder on the Beach in South Florida back in1997, Joanne Sinchuck, the store’s owner, recommended I read “Sacred,” which had just come out. It was so good, I had soon read everything he’d written, and have continued to read each new work as it has been published (though I’ve yet to be able to get to his latest “Remains of the Day,” because of deadlines). Of Mr. Lehane’s books I’ve read “Shutter Island” is my favorite just behind “Gone Baby Gone,” but I highly recommend all of his work as some of the very best contemporary crime fiction being written.

With “Shutter Island” the film, what Scorsese has done is take a great novel and do it justice by making it into a powerful cinematic experience. He uses the language of cinema to offer a film that, to me, is more translation than adaptation. It’s faithful to the book in many literal and all spiritual ways.

Sitting in the dark theater watching Scorsese’s “Shutter Island,” I kept thinking this is a masterwork by a true master filmmaker, that the movie is a class—Cinema 101. Every frame is full and rich and flawless, every shot stylish, every angle adding to the story being told. This is classic filmmaking by an elder statesman cinephile who here realizes the promise of his potential—and obviously has fun doing it.

“Shutter Island” doesn’t just show a director doing his best work, but a film student—perhaps the most serious film student of any working director—who has become a scholar, and his teachers, his influences, are everywhere present. No doubt we are seeing the tutelage and inspiration of Truffaut, Wilder, Kurosawa, Fellini, and many, many others. But the two filmmakers I continually saw in frame after frame, shot after shot, in the mise en scène, in the camera placement and movement, were Hitchcock and Kubrick. Perhaps it can be argued that this is a result of the film’s gothic material and crime genre, but I think that’s only part of why these great directors came to mind. For decades, Scorsese has been film’s most eloquent spokesperson. In “Shutter Island” the film itself becomes the spokesperson, eloquently, exquisitely speaking the language of cinema.

Some have called the film too gloomy, too atmospheric, too dark. For me, the film, like the book, captures perfectly, if painfully, the psychological, spiritual, and physical condition of its time, place, and people. There’s a world of difference between mood and emotion. Too many filmmakers go for emotion—manipulating audiences into a momentary emotional reaction, but here, the master, creates a mood, a relentless, pervasive experience that creeps in like a fog off Boston Harbor into a man’s marrow. And stays there. It’s the difference between an immediate effect and a being truly affected by a work of art.

A few critics have dismissed both the book and the film as hokum, as some sort of parlor game unworthy of writer and director, but, to me, this reveals a genre prejudice, an unwillingness to even consider that a work with some certain genre conventions can also be art. Some have actually indicated that Scorsese has invested too much craft, too much attention to detail, too much cinematic art in “Shutter Island.” They seem to be saying that if a work can be classified in a particular genre, if it has twists and turns, an actual plot, and a devastating dénouement, it should be made with less care, less skill, less everything in order to justify their unsupported belief that it is indeed somehow less.

“Shutter Island”—both the book and the film—is a haunting, affecting story with both substance and thrills. It’s entertaining and enlightening, a genre work and a work of art, and the two men responsible—Lehane and Scorsese—are very, very good at what they do, masters of their mediums, artists and craftsmen, entertainers extraordinaire to be sure, but also provokers of thought, nourishers of soul. Read the book. See the film. Preferably in that order.

Audience Participation

This past weekend, I had an experience in a movie theater that connected to a similar experience I had some twenty-three years ago.

I was in a huge, packed theater in Tallahassee with my daughter because I’m a good dad and she wanted me to see “Valentine’s Day” with her. The movie itself is okay—a little obvious with weak writing, but a stellar cast and some real charm. Meleah, my 19 year-old daughter loves it and has seen it three times so far. This makes me love the movie, too. It just doesn’t make the movie any better.

A little background:

Back in 1986, I left the small town of Wewahitchka, Florida, and moved to the big city of Atlanta, Georgia, and going from a place with one traffic light to a place with six-lane interstates was just one of the differences I encountered. Some things were definitely different, true, but not everything. I thought I had left the bigotry and small-mindedness of small Southern towns behind, but I was wrong.

After living in Atlanta for several months, I went with a friend to a theater in the Atlanta suburb of Conyers (this was circa 1987). The movie was, “Fatal Beauty,” and at the end of it, after surviving several acts of violence and a couple of shootouts, Sam Elliott and Whoopi Goldberg kissed. The audience reaction that followed was a horrible, ugly display of racism. After boos and groans and angry expressions, someone shouted, “Just shoot them both right now.”

Twenty-three years later, in a filled-to- capacity theater in Tallahassee, in “Valentine’s Day,” Jamie Fox and Jessica Biel kissed and no one said a word or made a sound—except happy ones.

This made me happy. It’s real progress. (Even if it can be argued that most audiences would find Mr. Foxx and Ms. Biel far more palatable than Mr. Elliott and Ms. Goldberg no matter what they were doing). And it came about because of people like Sam and Whoopi—and so many writers and directors, novelists and painters, and artists (not to mention activists and martyrs; I’m dealing with arts and entertainment and its cultural impact here) who express both how the world is and how it can be.

Don’t get me wrong. I have long since been disabused of my belief in the moral progress of man. Even as a segment of the world’s population is growing and evolving in love and oneness, in wisdom and understanding, another is growing even more militant in its ignorance and fear and hatred.

Still, these two experiences in movie theaters in the South are linked in my mind, and I do see my most recent theater experience as progress of a kind. But the two experiences are linked in another way as well—in a far more discouraging way. Sadly,
both are also linked by expressions of bigotry.

True, no one moaned or groaned when Jamie Fox and Jessica Biel kissed, but they certainly did when the two gay characters did.

When Eric Dane and Bradley Cooper kissed, the bigoted, homophobic reaction was just as bad as the bigoted racist reaction had been at “Fatal Beauty” two decades earlier, and I sat there thinking how sad humans are in the nearly universal tribalism that wants an “us” and a “them.” Why do we need a group to despise, to identify ourselves by, a group for which we say our god loves us but hates them?

The negative reaction was even more poignant because, based on the comments from the women in the audience, the two men were the most attractive on the screen, and long before it was revealed that they were gay, many of the women around me were whispering their approval of and desire for them.

The hopeless optimist in me believes (or badly wants to) that we are evolving, becoming (culturally) our better selves, but another voice inside me says that human history shows not progress so much as a shuffling of bigotry from one group to another. Please, please, please, please, please, please help me prove that voice wrong.