if we had but faith

BAIRD WHITLOCK AS AUTOLOCHUS: This Hebrew is son of the one God, the God of this far-flung tribe. And why shouldn’t God’s anointed appear here, among these strange people, in this strange place? Here, Gracchus, in this sundrenched land. Why should he not take this form — the form of an ordinary man? A man bringing us not the old truths, but a new one.

GRACCHUS: A new truth?

AUTOLOCHUS: A truth beyond the truth that we can see. A truth beyond this world, a truth told not in words but in light. A truth that we could see if we had but … if we had but — but —

DIRECTOR: Cut. CUT! Faith. Had but faith.

BAIRD WHITLOCK: Faith. Faith! FAITH!! Goddamn! Isn’t it —

DIRECTOR: They changed it.

ACTOR PLAYING GRACCHUS: You got most of it, man. You’re all right.

BAIRD: All right, hang on.

ACTOR PLAYING GRACCHUS: Can I get a patdown, I’m sweatin’ like a pig in this thing.

BAIRD: Ahhh, son of a bitch!

It was a complicated 24 hours for Baird Whitlock. The oddities began as he completed a scene from the movie Hail, Caesar! by quaffing a goblet of “wine” — it was actually water, but water with a little something added to it by one of the extras — and headed for his dressing room, where found himself getting sleepy. A while later, there was a knock on his door. He answered it, his head spun, and he pitched face forward into the arms of two strangers — extras in the scene he had just completed.

When he woke up, who knows how many hours later, he was half-lying in a folding lawn chair in a closet, in a house that, once he was up and around, proved to be on the Pacific. It was a lovely house. There he met a group of men who were, it appears, his kidnappers. They called themselves “THE FUTURE.” After a while, he discovered that they were scriptwriters in Hollywood who did not feel that their efforts were properly rewarded. In fact, they felt that the entire system was economically, socially, and politically unjust. They rebelled against it. As evening came on, they disappeared, apparently to stage the next event in their rebellion, and they left him there in the living room, overlooking the darkening Pacific, reading, having a cocktail. He was discovered there by another actor and brought back to Hollywood.

So the next morning he turns up at the studio, still in the costume as a Roman centurion that he had been wearing the previous day.

Baird Whitlock is a professional. He knows his lines. The next scene is one of the climactic scenes in the movie — both the Hail, Caesar! that he is filming and the one that we are watching. He speaks his lines very well. They are vivid words, and he gives them power. As the speech quoted above moves gathers rhetorical momentum, the people on the set sit up and take notice. The script girl, the grip, cameramen, sound men — they hear this message delivered eloquently, compellingly. Like Gracchus, they respond in their souls to this “new truth,” this promise of a beautiful revolution in their lives and in the world. “It is a truth,” Antoninus Autolochus says, “that we could lay hold of, had we but…”

“Had we but…” And then we realize that Baird Whitlock is a wonderful actor, but to him, the words he’s been given to speak are just his lines. They do not sink any deeper into his consciousness than that. He says them very well; he says them as though he means them. But he doesn’t mean them. He can’t remember what it is that would enable us to lay hold of this new truth — and indeed, the filmmakers aren’t so sure either, because when Baird learned his lines some other word had been there in place of “faith” — “trust,” perhaps? We’re not told. Could be “belief,” or maybe “righteousness,” or maybe even “circumcision” — depending on the theological equipment of the writers. (Hire a Catholic screenwriter, then bring in a Jewish script doctor — theological and probably cinematic chaos ensues. The conflict could make for a funny book.)

As Baird Whitlock speaks, people are moved primarily by words and voice. Some screenwriter(s) wrote these words, and then Baird Whitlock says these words with conviction and eloquence. He’s an actor; he inhabits the language, and that alone is enough to draw the audience in — the audience in this case being simply the crew. But the Coen brothers play a little trick on us here, because as Baird Whitlock is speaking, we start to hear music, swelling orchestral music that undergirds and amplifies his words. But of course, that wouldn’t be audible on set — indeed, the score wouldn’t yet have been composed.

Film scholars make a distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic sound. Diegetic sound is sound that the characters in the movie hear along with the audience — the characters’ spoken words, the rustle of leaves, explosions — and non-diegetic sound is sound that only we the audience hear. Typically the musical soundtrack for a movie is heard by us, but not heard by the actors. Here, the Coen brothers blur the line between the two. You get a sense that the crew are imaginatively supplying an orchestral score appropriate to the scene. And when you add that music to well-chosen words enunciated skillfully by an actor with real personal presence, well — disbelief doesn’t stand a chance, does it?

When you combine all the things that movies do to affect your senses — when you think about sets, costumes, vocal performances, the attractiveness of the actors, the words (if they are well written, which they aren’t always), the music, the imagery, the colors — in a skillfully made film everything reinforces the experience. The movies — and here I quote Sanford Schwartz on Pauline Kael — “release us from our normal emotional and social guardedness”; whether we’re watching ”an epochal masterpiece or a tinny Hollywood product,” we have “spontaneous and sensory reactions” that can really do a number on us.

Many of these strategies have been borrowed from the theater, of course; and, also of course, the debates over which artistic medium is the most powerful, which comes the closest what what Richard Wagner called the Gesammtkunstwerk, the total work of art, continue endlessly. The theater has the advantage of putting us in the actual presence of other human beings, while the movies have the advantage of being literally larger than life (often in sound as well as image). I will not stake out territory in that debate here, simply because I do not know what I think. But I will say that if movies have their origins in the theater, then theater has its origins in religious ritual.

When Aeschylus’s trilogy The Oresteia was first performed in 458 B.C., something strange happened at the outset of the third play, The Eumenidies. The first two plays of the trilogy had taken place in Mycenae, but this third one begins in Athens. Orestes, having killed his mother for having killed his father Agamemnon — they’re not a happy family — has been pursued by the Furies, terrifying spirits of revenge, and has collapsed in exhaustion upon an altar. The Furies lie around him, having had a spell of sleep cast upon them by Apollo. When the audience saw this scene — in particular, when they saw the Furies — they started screaming. People fainted, and one report from the time says that several pregnant women went into labor. But why?

Because it all seemed so real to them. And it seemed real to them largely because they were sitting in the Theater of Dionysos, a place where the earliest European dramas were performed, but which had been built as a place of worship for the god Dionysos. The altar on which the exhausted Orestes lay was an actual altar on which Dionysos’s devotees made sacrifices to their god. And it had long been rumored in Athens that Dionysian worship was not content with the sacrifice of goats or even bulls, but had occasionally demanded the slaying of human beings on that altar. Aeschylus had cleverly taken advantage of this by having the killing of Agamemnon in the first play performed in a highly ritualized way, according to the approved procedures for slaying a bull. Add to this dark and bloody atmosphere the presence of the Furies — beings that Athenians had previously seen only in their nightmares — and you begin to understand the panic.

Right from the beginning, then, European theater borrowed the energies and resonances of religious worship. And a similar story occurred around two thousand years later when the theatrical world of Elizabethan London was built from raw materials provided by the medieval morality plays and mystery plays. The morality plays, which offered allegorical dramatizations of common human conflicts, are implicitly used by Christopher Marlowe in his 1592 play Doctor Faustus: he has Faustus exhorted to good by an angel on one side of him and tempted to evil by a devil on the other side of him. And a few years later, when Shakespeare’s Hamlet rages against overacting by saying “It out-Herods Herod,” he’s referring to mystery plays that dramatized the Massacre of the Jewish Innocents, as described in Matthew 2: on medieval stages Herod was always slavering in blodlust. Marlowe and Shakespeare alike knew that these plays were among their audience’s formative experiences, and drew on the inevitable and powerful resonances.

By the time the movies come along, people had long since ceased to be aware of the religious sources of drama — but that doesn’t mean that the resonances just described have not still been at work. Even Star Wars devotees who have never sat in a church to hear a preacher in skinny jeans drop a Luke/Jesus truth bomb are affected by the vibes. However those vibes are explained — in a Christian way or according to the mythic/archetypal explanation articulated in various forms by Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Jordan Peterson — they’re real and they’re permanent. And consciously or unconsciously the people who make movies know that. When the pioneering director D. W. Griffith died in 1948, James Agee — the finest writer ever to review movies for a living — wrote in The Nation that Griffith “was a great primitive poet, a man capable, as only great and primitive artists can be, of intuitively perceiving and perfecting the tremendous magical images that underlie the memory and imagination of entire peoples.” Something like this is true for all those — directors, yes, but also, working with them, producers and cinematographers and screenwriters and composers and actors and many others in this most extensively collaborative of all art forms — who make memorable films.

Coleridge, trying to describe the effect that poems and stories have upon us, famously wrote of “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” The chief purpose of the total work of art, and especially I would argue the cinematic total work of art, is to remove willingness from the equation. Where’s my will? I lost it at the movies. “If we had but faith”? Sitting before the big screen I scarcely have anything else.