Chronic Murmuring

Schraeder on The Passion

Paul Schraeder, the Calvin College graduate who grew up in a calvinist home and a member of the CRC in Grand Rapids, Michigan and who later went on to pen Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, and who adapted Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ for the screen, comments on Gibson's The Passion. I've been waiting to hear either him or Scorsese say something about the film since before the movie opened a month ago, if for no other reason than the two movies are similar in that they generated a lot of controversy but were theologically quite different in their movies' respective views of Christ. I actually did not like The Last Temptation, but I also fell asleep during the last half hour, so I never saw the Last Supper nor the Crucifiction. I thought, going into it, that it would be great if one took the movie to be talking about the struggles of following Christ, rather than a literal depiction of Christ. The self-doubt and the self-hatred work that Scorsese's Christ has works better when you consider his Jesus as embodying simply "the believer," but is more troubling if you take the movie to be Jesus himself. But, after viewing the film, it seems like a bit of a stretch to interpret the film like that - at least uniformly. But I didn't not-like the film because of blasphemy or anything. It just never really connected with me. There were a few lines in it that did, but the movie as a whole missed me. I'd need to watch it again to explain myself better.

Anyhow, Paul Schraeder comments on the film. He has several interesting comments. He more or less repeats a lot of criticism - that it's fundamentalist religion and therefore ignorant. But he also reveals some biographical details about his Calvinist upbringing, which is something that I'm fascinated by. He says:

The problem [that Schrader has with Gibson's film], one suspects, is that Gibson is faith-driven and Schrader is not. "I was raised as a Calvinist, which is doctrine driven," he says. "And though there are many things wrong with Calvinism, you are at least encouraged to argue about things. But once you get into a faith-driven belief system there's not much you can do. They can say to you, for instance, that women have three breasts. And even when you line up 100 women and show them that they only have two breasts, they still say that women have three breasts because they were told it in a dream. And there's nothing you can do about that."

If ever you get a chance, you should rent a movie called Hardcore, which Schraeder wrote and directed and which stars George C. Scott. When I was beginning to feel the rumblings of frustration inside me about being a "theological prick," and started to believe that certain aspects of my Christian beliefs had become ideological and system-driven, I was watching Schraeder's films and trying to see if it could at all shed light on some of the things I was feeling. Hardcore is, at the very least, an interesting narrative - moreso if you're a Calvinist privy to all our myopic obsession theological minutiae. The movie opens with a shot of a cold winter in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Snow is everywhere - more snow than I've ever witnessed. The coldness, I think, is meant to reinforce the coldness in the community's calvinistic beliefs, because we immediately move into the house of a Grand Rapids businessman, played by Scott, where several people are gathered for food and discussion. It's probably after church on a Sunday. The conversations are intense. You can hear two people arguing vehemently over the five points of Calvinism in the kitchen, for example. I think they're either arguing about limited atonment or unconditional election - I can't remember. But it's fascinating to watch, given Schraeder's penchant for violent films and notoreity and importance as a screenwriter in the emerging "new Hollywood" period of the 1970s. He actually gets so many details about Calvinist doctrine correct - that's what is so interesting to me. Anyway, the movie is about Scott's daughter who runs away from home. Scott hires a private investigator to find her. The PI finds her alright - in a hardcore pornographic film. So Scott moves to Los Angeles where the distributor is located and begins to search for her. He befriends a hooker who apparently knows her, or knows of her, and there is some fascinating exchanges with her. In fact, it's primarily his relationship with her that is the best part of the film. She is everything he is not, yet they develop an intimate father-daughter like relationship as she assists him. And you can sense that for her, this is deeply important, which makes the ending all the more tragic. But, there's several humorous scenes between those two - like the one in the airport where Scott explains "the gospel" to her. He basically tells her an extremely fatalist version of the five points of calvinism, which causes her to start laughing about how that's the stupidest thing she's ever heard, and at which he point he agrees.

In the end, the movie wasn't as illuminating to my own life as I was hoping it might be. Of course, that is an awful lot of responsibility to place upon a movie. It's not the greatest film, by any means, but is a personal film by a former Christian that contains many not-so-subtle criticisms of the Calvinist ethos which was nonetheless valuable to watch and understand. I think the main lesson was a tad bit on the sentimental side, though. In the end, the coldness of Grand Rapids is the coldness of Calvinism, and Schraeder seems to have been particularly injured by the lack of love he experienced by the religious people he grew up with. That is, at least, what the daughter expresses to the father, in so many words. And this is, I think, the most important, the most obvious thing that one can say about the ideological mentality that dominates many young Reformed believers (and even old ones). But, the problem I think I've learned is not so much in believing something strongly - which for a while there, was the conclusion I came to - but rather in something else. There's definitely a problem with Calvinism when what it becomes is principally a set of doctrinal beliefs one believes, and that via believing, one is therefore saved. To the sensitive artist, this is unbelievably oppressive. To the introverted, relationally stunted, loner, this is liberation.

So I think Schraeder is great, in other words, and that Hardcore, while flawed and weak on many levels, is nonetheless an interesting film - especially if viewed by Calvinists to whom some of the movie's jabs are directed. Schraeder is haunted by God, though. You see it in all of his movies. He cannot get past him, which is one reason his rebellion against him fascinates me.