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Fair usage quotations from this essay are acceptable, but any reproduction of these materials is forbidden without express permission from the author. Published in the week of May 12, 2003 on the ChristianityToday.com website in the Books & Culture Corner under the title "Books & Culture Corner: Are Movies Fundamentally Inferior to Books? Two responses to Ralph Wood's claim that 'biblical tradition elevates word over picture.'" http://www.christianitytoday.com/books/features/bccorner/030512.html The day before I left for the March 2003 Art & Soul conference at Baylor University a colleague handed me a copy of the March/April issue of Books & Culture which featured a review of The Two Towers (Peter Jackson’s film) entitled “The Hungry Eye.” I read the article and felt enough disagreement with some of its contentions that I was motivated to write a letter of response. So I took the article and a yellow pad with me on my trip from Kentucky to Baylor in Texas. I was two hours early to the Lexington airport and my flight delayed an hour. I wrote the bulk of my “response” letter then. Part of what motivated me to write was the freshness of ideas bubbling in my own head: I was heading to Baylor to present on C. S. Lewis’s theory of meaning and its positive implications on film. The B & C essay had taken a slightly more negative view of film. What I didn’t notice at the time was that the author, Ralph C. Wood, was a professor at Baylor University, and I didn’t find out till the next day that Dr. Wood would be presenting at the conference! I saw the happy coincidence as an opportunity to raise some questions. I sat with Dr. Wood for ten minutes. It’s difficult to argue any longer than that with a man who keeps constantly agreeing with you (which is not to say that Dr. Wood gave up his position). He was kind, enthusiastic, and showed great humility to an upstart young English prof. I told him I’d send the letter which follows; he told me he’d send an essay of his that related to our talk. I’m looking forward to it. * * * I gather from his essay that Dr. Wood recognizes what some book lovers still do not: that a film version can never capture the depth, subtlety, complexity of great books and should not be judged as such. His critique of The Two Towers, however, while recognizing differences in the media, offers a preference for the literary art which doesn’t give film its theological due. Dr. Wood expresses concern over our being “an increasingly visual culture where the aural word, whether written or spoken, is steadily devalued.” Of course he is right, but I’m not convinced that this is as bad a thing as he suggests. His first complaint is that movies are a “fundamentally passive medium,” forming images for us where books (even bad ones) demand active use of the imagination. I agree that people view films passively but not because movies are passive by nature. Before people can read a book, they must be taught to read: letters, phonics, vocabulary. We call it literacy. But because movies can be watched without any education in “film literacy,” we have assumed that none is necessary. The result: passive viewing. This is not, however, in the ‘fundamental’ nature of film. The printing press made literacy a necessity within a few hundred years of its creation. “Computer literacy” became an educational must within ten years of the computer becoming “personal.” Film has been with us for a hundred years, television for fifty, and we are only now beginning to see the need for education in their language. But when we do so educate our students, it works. They begin to read film texts actively and habitually. Dr. Wood next points out Tolkien’s dislike of stage plays, “fearing that they coerced the imagination.” Contra Tolkien, though, is C. S. Lewis’s view of myth which suggests that, in some instances, the image is more important than the word: We all agree that the story of Balder is a great myth, a thing of inexhaustible value. But of whose version–whose words–are we thinking when we say this? For my own part, the answer is that I am not thinking of anyone’s words. No poet, as far as I know or can remember, has told this story supremely well. I am not thinking of any particular version of it. If the story is anywhere embodied in words, that is almost an accident. What really delights and nourishes me is a particular pattern of events, which would equally delight and nourish if it had reached me by some medium which involved no words at all–say by a mime, or a film. [ . . . ] In this respect stories of the mythical type are at the opposite pole from lyrical poetry. If you try to take the “theme” of Keats’s Nightingale apart from the very words in which he has embodied it, you find that you are talking about almost nothing. Form and content can there be separated only by a false abstraction. But in a myth–in a story where the mere pattern of events is all that matters–this is not so. Any means of communication whatever which succeeds in lodging those events in our imagination has, as we say, “done the trick”. After that you can throw the means of communication away. [ . . . ] In poetry the words are the body, and the “theme” or “content” is the soul. But in myth the imagined events are the body and something inexpressible is the soul: the words, or mime, or film, or pictorial series are not even clothes–they are not much more than a telephone. (George Macdonald: An Anthology 26-28) (When I read this passage to Dr. Wood he noted that Lewis and Tolkien disagreed on many issues and he had just written an article on that very idea—this is the article he said he’d send to me; he thanked me for finding one more difference.) Elsewhere Lewis says that, when we use language to abstract truths out of myth, we are allegorizing the myth, not allowing it to be the concrete experiencing of universal principles which is so important to complete knowing (“Myth Became Fact” in God in the Dock 65-66). My greatest concern is with Dr. Wood’s claim that there “is little doubt that the biblical tradition elevates word over picture, hearing over sight.” He offers two arguments: 1. The Israelites were not allowed to make representations of God, and no one has ever seen God. 2. The Israelites were constantly called to “hear” His word. I take the second point first. The people were not simply called to hear, they were also called to see, in fact they were even called to be visual performers. Examples: the rituals surrounding passover (eating standing up, loins girded, staff in hand) and the feast of booths (living in tents for a week) are reenactments of key historical moments (as is the Lord’s Supper for Christians). God told Joshua to build an altar after the crossing of the Jordan so that, in later years, when parents and children walked by that place, the children on seeing the altar could ask what it meant and their parents could tell them (Joshua 4:1-7). God designed the “look” of the tabernacle down to the smalles embroidered detail. (In our conversation, Dr. Wood added the visions of Isaiah to this list.) Ezekiel begins with a detailed description of the chariot of God and ends with a detailed description of the temple to come (no commentary, no explanation, just the picture, though I freely admit that it’s described in words), and Ezekiel himself “performed” his prophecies several times: the seige of Jerusalem shown with the O.T. version of legos (4:1-3) or the acting out of going into exile (12:1-6). Now to Dr. Wood’s first point: The Israelites were not allowed to make representations because only God could do so successfully, and He indeed intended to. It’s true that no one has seen God, but “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). Jesus was the ‘Word become flesh’ (John 1:14) so that we could see as well as hear Him. Hebrews 1:3 says Jesus is “the exact representation” of God, not a picture of God, of course, but yes a picture because God Himself, the visual essence of the Father, the word “representation”, here, is an interesting one: the transliteration of the Greek into English produces the English word “character” almost letter for letter. In English this word can refer to who we are internally, our personality, or to a role in a play. This double definition captures Hebrews 1:3 perfectly: Jesus as God is God’s character, performed for us to see. I am not arguing that the visual is more important than the aural in the biblical text, only that Dr. Wood’s Two Towers review undervalues it. Finally, I must raise a point of definition in the claim that “the biblical tradition elevates word over picture, hearing over sight.” The unstated connections between word and hearing and picture and sight implied in the syntax may muddle our thinking. Certainly pictures are to be seen but words can either be heard or read. Thus to hear God’s Word spoken aurally is not the same thing as reading it. In speaking of the relationships among book, movies, pictures, words and God’s Word, such a distinction may prove important. Thankyou for taking time to review this response. I hope that a portion of it may be added to the discussion in your letters column. Sincerely,
Charlie W. Starr Professor of English and Humanities 100 Academic Pkwy. Kentucky Christian College Grayson KY 41143 (606) 474-3195
P.S. I have attached to Dr. Wood’s copy of this letter an essay version of my Baylor presentation, “Signs and C.S. Lewis: The Meaning of Meaning and the Value of Film” which begins with Lewis’s theory of meaning, turns to his theory of myth, and then shows his ideas exemplified in the films of M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs). I understand you do not take unsolicited submissions and so I’m including here only the abstract from the conference and ask that you consider the full essay for publication. Abstract Lovers of Lewis frequently say his power as a fantasist and apologist is his understanding of the importance of imagination in human knowing—its emotional impact, experiential quality, intimate connection to both faith and our longing for encounters with mystery. Behind Lewis’s understanding of imagination is his awareness that meaning precedes language and therefore truth. Lewis unlocks the power of art, myth, and language in realizing that meaning is connection and that many “meanings” are experiential, intuitive, imaginative, and semi-conscious.
Lewis understood that the epistemological problem is not with knowing truth but with knowing reality. Central to the problem is a dilemma of thinking versus experiencing where experience allows concrete knowing that is intense and immediate, but critically vague, while reason allows careful contemplation that is clear, but abstract and time bound. How can reality be known with the clarity of reason but without the space of abstraction, of separation? And how can reality be experienced intensely but with a knowing that is complete?
Myth is a partial solution: a mode of languaging without words, where image speaks as pure form. What Lewis saw in myth was a method of communicating meaning that circumvented the problem of abstraction and mimicked the heavenly mode of knowing in a fallen world. His complex ideas can be illustrated in film, especially the movies of M. Night Shyamalan, each of which is a commentary on language and the meaning of meaning.
In The Sixth Sense, Night conquers Lewis’s thinking/experiencing dilemma in a brilliant “eucatastrophe” (to borrow Tolkien’s term). At the moment the hero realizes he is dead, the audience is presented a montage of fleeting images from throughout the film that cause us to remake its meaning in an instant. New knowledge arises with the clarity of reason, but the speed and intensity of direct experience.
In Unbreakable, Night offers a theory of myth, of a concrete picture language that precedes modern language forms in which sign abstracts the signified. The image form, surviving in a kind of collective human unconscious, intrudes itself into contemporary culture through comic art. What it reveals is an archetypal pattern of the hero, Joseph Campbell’s “monomyth.” Night further intuits a quality of communicating of which Lewis was made aware by Owen Barfield in his Poetic Diction. A careful study of linguistic history reveals that a strong distinction between sign and signified, between the literal and the figurative, is new to human thinking. For people before the modern era (even up through the medieval period), to name a thing was to invoke it; speech had physical consequences in the world; words were what they signified; metaphorical meanings were possible because their connective representation was in some way literal. Film resonates with Barfield’s view of past language. What it says is what it is, and what it shows is what it means.
In Signs, Night asks, does life mean anything at all? The surprisingly refreshing answer lies in the existence of a God who not only exists but loves. The protagonist, having lost his faith because of his wife’s supposedly meaningless death, finds that her final words to him were not simply the random firing of neurons in her dying brain but a prophetic revelation he will later need to save his son’s life.
Though film uses language to communicate, the best film makers are relying increasingly on pure form in image and sound to communicate meaning that is experientially concrete yet rationally clear. This emerging (or perhaps re-emerging) mode of knowing is a key descriptor of postmodern thinking and a new literacy for our educational institutions to foster.
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