From Plato’s Cave to Ike’s Church

Most of my quasi-religious experiences have happened in movie theaters, not churches. It’s no mystery, really. One sits in the dark, preferably a cavernous space, where one senses the presence of other souls, only you and they are focused on the visions before you, as intimate as dream, or memory. Or, in the case of the popular re-tellings of the Exodus story, as intimate as God speaking to you from out of a Burning Bush.

Actually, the first time I heard God at the movies He was awesome and terrifying. It was the late 60s, and my father had taken me to see a holiday revival of De Mille’s The Ten Commandments at the Loews Paradise on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, one of the five Loews Wonder Theaters in the New York area. The decor of the place was impossibly lavish, even pagan. It was an “atmospheric” movie palace, meaning that the vast barrel-vault ceiling of the auditorium was designed to imitate the open sky, a deep blue which faded to night when the show started, tiny electric lights winking on to evoke the stars. The audience of thousands sat in the midst of a ruined Roman villa, its broken columns silhouetted against the artificial twilight along the walls on either side. My dad and I sat in the lower of two balconies piled high above the orchestra seats. After the film was over and the house lights went up, or rather, when the artificial dawn arrived, I looked down over the brass rail on the teeming, milling masses below. It was a sea of people, like De Mille’s Israelites, huddling under the towering walls of water in the cleft of the Red Sea.

That was the point of the Wonder Theaters. You didn't go to the Paradise for Cassavetes’ earthbound human dramas, but for De Mille's spectacle, for Ford's sweeping vistas, even for the tortured camera angles of Hitchcock. You went to have an out-of-body, almost spiritual experience, helped along by the temporal displacement of being in an ancient outdoor ruin, or a pagan temple. The movie palaces of the 1920s were going for the vestigial memories of mankind unreeling their imaginations in ritual spaces, what was known as theater to the ancient Greeks but which still had an odor of burnt offerings. It's no accident that the earliest movie theaters, the nickelodeon arcades and bijous, were essentially magical caves.


In fact, the very history of the 20th Century movie theater resembles a super-compressed history of western religion: the caves and grottos gave way to lavish temples and imperial palaces, which fell into neglect and ruin during the Dark Ages of the Great Depression. Many of the palaces were razed to the ground to make way for purely secular office towers, but a few, including some of New York's Wonder Theaters, survived to become places of Christian worship.

The transcendent sensory experience of early 20th Century American moviegoing found a ready counterpart in the postwar religious revival. Reverend Ike, for instance, purchased the Loews 175th Street Theater (see picture at the top of the post) and transformed it into his United Palace Church, keeping this most elaborate of the Wonder Theaters in a state of near perfect preservation. Its gilded interiors are an appropriate setting for exalted states, whether of enthralled movie audiences or ecstatic evangelicals. Today, it is rare to see a movie in such grand surroundings; but I still believe the big screen offers a better chance at epiphany than our home theaters, laptops and iPods, the Lumiere Manifesto notwithstanding.

The second time I heard God at the the movies, it was in the featureless black box of a modern multiplex. His voice was gentle and soothing. Once again he called to Moses from the Burning Bush, but this time it he was a God of persuasion, not of command. De Mille's blinding atomic bush had become a gently iridescent shrub. "Moses," God whispered, almost inaudible in the desert breezes. And while I don't consider myself a religious person, per se, I wept. Because of the intimacy of scale, it was a powerful little scene in an otherwise run-of-the-mill animated musical (Dreamworks’ The Prince of Egypt): on the big screen, in that dark room, the message is aimed right at you, only at you.

POSTSCRIPT
While researching this post, I found a clip of the scene on YouTube ... only to find no trace of the original power. The flame, it seems, burns brightest in the temple.

Thanks to Strange Culture for hosting the Film + Faith Blogathon, November 7-9, 2007.

The Schreibers Strike!

“The writer is the most important person in Hollywood. But we must never tell the sons of bitches.”
– Irving G. Thalberg, legendary production honcho at Universal and MGM

Every few years the film industry feels the wrath of its unsung auteurs — or schreibers, as author David Kipen calls them. We are now in the midst of a new screenwriters strike, and the effect has been immediate, at least on television, as the late night talk shows (scripted — who knew?) go into reruns. I think this is as good a time as any to recommend Kipen's little manifesto The Schreiber Theory, which bestows ultimate creative ownership of a film on the screenwriter — a formal refutation of the auteur theory (director-as-auteur) popularized by American film critic Andrew Sarris, which of course is as solid as the theory of evolution amongst film critics and fans alike. The few writers with any real recognition or following are themselves directors or have, like David Mamet, made a name for themselves outside of film altogether.

Needless to say Kipen's thesis is controversial (even "perverse" as a film/culture critic friend has suggested). Yet his detractors seem to brandish the same pantheon figures (Hitchcock, Ford, Fellini, Bergman) in defense of the auteur theory. One could counter that these are in essence dependable "blue-chip" directors, who would never even begin to plan a film without a solid script. It's worth looking at Kipen's examples of celebrated directors who ultimately fall from grace through acts of hubris such as coming to rely on style over content, or employing editor as fixer and partner-in-crime. Ultimately, even if you don't agree with the Schreiber Theory, Kipen's index at the back of the book listing classic studio films by screenwriter rather than director is a fascinating cross-reference of Hollywood history and will have a salutary effect on your Netflix queue.

The Writers Guild of America's list of 101 Greatest Screenplays