Pace e Bene

Film and Nonviolence

By Ken Butigan

Originally published in The Wolf, Spring 1999

Featured in Living With the Wolf: Walking the Way of Nonviolence (Pace e Bene Press, 2009)

The Oscars have come and gone for another year. If, as University of South Florida historian Dell deChant claims, our society’s hyper-materialistic celebration of Christ­mas represents the great holy feast day of capitalism, the annual Academy Awards ceremony can be said to represent this society’s version of divinely-sanctioned story-telling. It is the night when the tales that reflect, inform, drive, and sometimes program our post-modern culture are reviewed, legitimated, rejected, or sacralized.

Even the most trite film implies in its con­tent or its form a kind of answer to the key questions of existence, including: ‘What are we willing to live for?” and “What are we willing to die for?

Like the distortion that an economically fueled Christ­mas creates, the centrality of Big Business filmmaking can sometimes crowd out other means of imaginatively arid creatively articulating and interpreting human expe­rience. Even more sobering, most Hollywood movies precipitously narrow the range of fundamental ways of “seeing” and “telling” our lives by consciously or uncon­sciously drawing on a basic cultural script that champions violence and gives short shrift to true and active non­violence.

To focus it, a meaningful way on a topic like “film arid nonviolence” is not, therefore, only to single out films that have explicitly taken peace or conflict resolu­tion or even social change as their theme. This es­say, for example, does not specifically reflect on such films as Gandhi: The Long Walk Home, or Beyond Rangoon, all offering much food for thought about non­violence.

Even more, I am not thinking here about the plethora of fine documentaries on active nonviolence, including From Montgomery to Memphis, Weapons of the Spirit, The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Greenpeace’s Greatest Hits, Where There is Hatred, or The Color of Fear. These are important works that need to be seen and studied. These and others like them can expand our vision and toolbox to critique and chal­lenge domination.

Here I am interested in something a little deeper. The point of my remarks is not to argue that we should give up going to the movies. They are an important part of our cultural life and what Robert Bellah calls our civil religion. For better or worse, they are important indica­tors of who we are and where we might or might not go. I hope instead to offer a few thoughts about how to in­terpret the stories we are offered in the public movie houses, where we huddle with strangers in a kind of ad hoc temple, or in the coziness of our own living rooms. Specifically, I would like to reflect briefly on the basic story we are almost endlessly served up on the silver screen.

A Fundamental Myth

Like mythological narratives in traditional societies, movies often function in contemporary culture as the conscious or unconscious vehicles of meaning and orientation for its members. Even the most trite film implies in its con­tent or its form a kind of answer to the key questions of existence, including: ‘What are we willing to live for?” and “What are we willing to die for?” In other words, a world-view is always imbedded in the choice of script, music, performance, techniques, lighting, editing and the strategies and logistics of distribution and interpretation.

This world-view, this horizon of meaning, this spirituality with its set of theological or philosophical assumptions, often gets worked out in the form of a master narrative that constitutes the basis for a film story-line and its almost endless variations.

Amid the Oscars’ bedazzling if sometimes tedious spec­tacle populated by an ever shifting pantheon of deities, this event often trumpets the “master narrative” of a culture that, while ostensibly longing for peace, is committed, as the U.S. military says, to “violence with extreme prejudice” when its interests are threatened. With scripture scholar Walter Wink, we can name this master narrative ‘the myth of redemptive violence.”

This myth is rooted in the fundamental cultural paradigm of scarcity that promotes competition and “zero-sum thinking.” That is, life inexorably is divided between winners and (many) losers, and thus the purpose of life is to “win.’”

Such a universe implies threat and counter-threat— and the endless quid pro quo of the will-to-dominate and control. This paradigm gets worked out in a basic myth which holds that control and security come through marshalling and exercising violence. In such a scheme the opponent— the one perceived as a threat — is seen as un-redeemably evil. In fact the only way to establish order is to conquer the en­emy by any means necessary. One is justified in using verbal, emotional, physical or structural violence against the enemy because she or he is no longer human. Rather, they personify disorder, and thus are to be crushed. 

The curious thing, however, is that this combat never ultimately vanquishes the enemy. The enemy continues to emerge, and the spiral of violence continues ad nauseum.    The age-­old story of retaliatory violence with its bad old ending is perpetuated. This is redemptive or sacred violence because such destructiveness is seen as a fundamental religious task of upholding the order of the cosmos.

Wink sees this myth reflected in the Babylonian world-view of 5,000 years ago but it is as “new’ as the war films honored at this year’s Oscars or the almost endless string of action movies pioneered in such films as Rambo, To­tal Recall, and the Lethal Weapons series. But this pattern is seen not only in explicitly “violent’ movies. Often, the “conflict” in movies- rooted in a millennia-old approach in the West to dramaturgy— turns on self-justified violence perpetrated against a perceived threat.

 Star Wars — and Real Peace?

 One example is the Star Wars series, which this spring will return to the nation’s movie theaters. Its creator, director George Lucas, recently explained that, in developing these films, he tried to stay with universal themes apart from violence and sex, which are the only other two universal themes that seem to work around the world.

“My films aren’t that violent or that sexy. Instead, I’m dealing with the need for humans to have friendships, to be compas­sionate, to band together, to help each other and to join together against what is negative.” (“I’m a Cynic Who Has Hope for the Human Race,” New York Times interview conducted by Orville Schell, March 21, 1999.) As Schell puts it, most film goers have shared Lucas’ interpretation, seeing this “modern day fairy tale” as a “nontoxic alterna­tive” to the gore and mayhem of much movie fare.

Yet it is important to recall Lucas’ original pitch to Hollywood for the first Star Wars movie. He told studio execu­tives that he wanted to film a Western— but a Western in space. And, of course, that’s what he did. The Force-imbued good guys justified using violence against the ti­tanic bad guys of Darth Vader and his crew. Lucas inge­niously combined archetypal myths, historical narratives of the “conquering” of the U.S. West, and motifs that touched the American psyche at its most vulnerable and sensitive spot in that post-Vietnam War era. However com­passionate this film may have been, it reinvented an ancient narrative of competition, demonization, and as Gil Bailie puts it, “unanimity minus one.”

Such films continue a preoccupation with duality. This is not to say that there are no enemies or opponents in the world, or that there is no threat. Nor does it mean there is no conflict. Rather, the question is: How will we wage and resolve this conflict—- in a dehumanizing way that per­petuates divisions and the cycle of violence, or in a way that heals these wounds - which means making a journey to the enemy—sees that she or he is human and finds a way to address our mutual woundedness? In short, how can we see dramatized and enacted before us a process that encourages true nonviolence: that is, where the desire for the well-being of all is worked out in the often harsh and narrow parameters of the world?

We would like to encourage films which struggle with such complexities, and do not take the easy way out that vio­lence pretends to offer, whether through the barrel of a gun or at the edge of a Jedi master’s laser sword. One such film is Dead Man Walking, the account of the spiritual journey of a man on death row. The power of this film does not rest with the tension between the killer’s original violence and the state’s counter-violence of capital execution which is simply a contemporary example of “unanimity minus one.” Rather, it is the process he goes through accompanied by Sr. Helen Prcjean, to come to his true self in a non-sentimental and powerful way. We would like to encourage more of this kind of cinematic truth—telling.

During the run-up of this year’s Oscars event, so much relentless and expensive campaigning was done for the leading films —including the Second World War sagas Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line, that host Whoopi Goldberg quipped “they fought World War III over World War II!” 

This one-liner captures how even the process of the Oscars themselves reinforces a world­view of winners and many losers. We encourage the pro­duction of many more films that overcome this simplistic—even make-believe— allure of the myth of redemptive vio­lence in favor of works that reveal the difficult but immeasurablyrewarding process of creating a world where the nonviolent alternative is not only right, but effective.

To order Living With the Wolf: Walking the Way of Nonviolence, click here!