Literary Giants Literary Catholics (49 page)

The final film in the handful selected to justify the “three cheers for Hollywood” is altogether different.
Network
, starring William Holden, Peter Finch and Faye Dunaway, was released more than twenty years after the other movies that have warranted our praise. Released in 1976,
Network
is separated from the other films by that abyss that was the 1960s. In many respects it signifies and symbolizes the hangover with which the world awoke after its flirtation with the narcotic delusions of the hallucinogenic debauch. The film can even be seen as a reply and a riposte to the libertine liberties taken, alongside the drugs, by that decadent decade.

The three central characters in the film, indeed
all
the characters in the film, are hopelessly “mixed up” and “messed up”. Confused. Disoriented. Egocentric. Lost. They are filled to the brim with the negativism born of the negations of the previous decade. They are locked up in their libertine worlds, the servants of relativism and the slaves of the virtual reality that has replaced the real thing in their lives. The character played by Peter Finch, a television newscaster, suffers a breakdown and vents his spleen on the air. He is “mad as hell” and wants the world to know. The world, or at least the viewers, clearly want to know. They are also “mad as hell” and tune in by the millions to watch his rantings. The television executives, prompted by the sexually aggressive but emotionally impotent character played by Dunaway, are delighted at the increased audience tuning into the deranged demagogue. The more Finch raves and rants, the more the television moguls rave about the ratings.

Predictably, unpredictability comes at a price. The “bull” being spoken by the proverbial bull in a china shop eventually causes the credulous executives to have more than proverbial egg on their faces. When Finch’s rants become xenophobic and anti-Semitic, in the anti-Arab as opposed to the anti-Jewish sense of the word, something has to be done. The deranged dupe is summoned to a private meeting with the mysterious Mr. Big, who heads the network. This disturbing character, an ironic blend of Chesterton’s elusively surreal “Sunday” in
The Man Who Was Thursday
and Orwell’s menacingly real O’Brien in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, spouts off an Ayn-Randian antigospel in which he proclaims the new gods of globalization. These demigods obey the ultimate god of Mammon, who has laid down, in letters set in stone, the irrepressible law of omnipresent and almighty market forces. These laws overwrite the right to democracy, to individuality, to freedom. The market is the law before which every knee must bow. The deranged dupe is duped by this new antigospel of hopelessness and proclaims it to his increasingly bewildered viewers.

Mercifully,
Network
is not all doom and despondency. It is lightened by a grimly pervasive irony, darkened delightfully by a countercynical sardonic humor, and, best of all, contains a penetrating morality. This morality, which represents, quite literally, the film’s saving grace, is founded on the disturbing vacuum presented by its absence. This paradox is, however, powerful only because of the inkling of something with which the vacuum could and should be filled. The inkling is provided in a memorable scene toward the end of the film, in which the disillusioned character played by Holden confronts the character played by Dunaway with her own superficiality. In the modern terminology, itself the product of the artificiality of modern life, he tells her to “get real”. She is living a virtual, virtueless life in an unreal world—an artificial life, defined by television and therefore devoid of any meaningful definitions, through which she is seeking to escape the ultimate realities of life. These ultimate realities, Holden insists, are rooted in love and cannot be divorced from pain and suffering. The glory of life resides in the indissoluble marriage of joy and sorrow. The acceptance of suffering is the beginning of wisdom. Oh, what joy to see such wisdom emanating from Hollywood!

Watching a film like
Network
might encourage people to follow the advice of Malcolm Muggeridge, who, in old age and after having spent many years as a television personality, announced gleefully that he was having “his aerials removed”. Having had this particular operation myself, I can confirm that it is relatively painless and allows more freedom and time to live in the real world. Liberated from the televice-like grip of the television networks and their televicious secularism, it is pleasant to spend time enjoying the best of Hollywood on video. Take my advice—have your aerials removed but keep the VCR!

54

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Examining the Sacred Heart of Mel Gibson’s
The Passion of the Christ

I
T SAYS SOMETHING
about the meretricious spirit of our age that the only “passion” considered controversial is the Passion of Christ. Movies, magazines, newspapers and television programs are full of other, less controversial, passions. They are, in fact, so full of depictions of graphic violence and pornographic sex that these particular passions are no longer considered controversial in the least. On the contrary, voyeurism is not merely acceptable, it is positively de rigueur; it is almost compulsory if one wishes to avoid the heinous charge of prudishness. Prurience is fine; prudishness is not. Vice is fine; so-called Victorian attitudes are not. Vice is victorious, and Victorianism is vanquished. Or so it would seem.

Even the word “sin” has become an expletive, not to be uttered in polite company. Sin has had its day, or so they say. It has been eclipsed by cynicism. And cynics have no time for sin. Or so they say . . . In fact, of course, they have no time for anything else. Unable or unwilling to banish sin from their lives, they seek instead to ban it from the language.

It is in the very midst of this stale and putrid scene that the figure of Mel Gibson’s Christ staggers onto the stage. He stumbles, bruised and bleeding, into the midst of the party, intent, so it seems, on spoiling the fun. The party-goers, comfortably drunk and heedless of the hangover that awaits them, do not welcome this unwanted and uninvited gate-crasher. Who is He, anyway? And what right does He have to tell them what to do? They are angry. They mutter among themselves that His presence in the midst of the debauch is a scandal. It is intolerable. It will not be tolerated. Who invited Him, anyway? Increasingly angry at His silent reproach, they become violent. They start to bustle Him around. Soon they rain blows upon his battered and defenseless body. He falls to the ground. Unwittingly they have become stars of Gibson’s film. It is they who are demanding that Christ be put to death. Crucify Him! Crucify Him!

If this analogy appears a trifle too dramatic—melodramatic, even—we should remember that it is the precise analogy at the very heart of Gibson’s movie. It is Gibson’s precise point that those calling for Christ to be crucified are not merely historic personages in an obscure corner of the Roman Empire a couple of thousand years ago. They are us. It is we who scourged Him, we who placed the crown of thorns on His head, we who nailed Him to the Cross. It is our sinful hearts that pierced His Sacred Heart. And it is from His Sacred Heart that His mercy pours forth to us—in spite of our sins. This film, and the deep theology it portrays, is nothing less than Gibson’s Christian faith poured out as an oblation and as a penance for his sins. In this context it is supremely significant that Gibson’s only part in the film itself is to hold the nail as it is hammered into Christ’s sinless flesh. As he stressed during a recent interview, the choice of his left hand for the part signifies his sin, figuratively speaking, and the sinister, literally speaking (
sinister
in Latin means
left
). Far from his being, as some suggest, an “anti-Semite” who blames the Jews for crucifying Christ, Gibson is quite clearly blaming himself. He is responsible for the worst crime in human history. And, sobering thought though it be, so are we. This is Gibson’s point.

It matters not whether the cynics who find the film so controversial fail to share Gibson’s faith. Its truth or falsity has nothing to do with their belief in it. What matters is that Gibson has made a profoundly moving movie depicting the last bloody hours of the life of Christ. He has courageously brought the truth of the Gospel to movie theaters around the world. The fact that many people find the Good News bad news is neither here nor there. It is to be expected. Indeed, the fact that many people find the Good News bad news is not news at all. It has always been thus. The Gospel has always been controversial. It was so controversial that the scribes, Pharisees and hypocrites put its Founder to death. Nothing has changed. We continue to crucify Him. Yet He continues to live. This is the Sacred Heart of Gibson’s film. It is a bleeding Heart, but a beating Heart also. It bled for us. It beats for us. And this, for Gibson and millions of other Christians around the world, is not merely controversial, it is incontrovertible.

There is no hope that Mel Gibson will ever win an Oscar for
The Passion of the Christ
. No matter. He has his heart set on an infinitely greater reward.

55

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A Grief Observed

A review of Blackbird Singing: Poems and Lyrics 1965-1999
⁺

L
OVERS OF POETRY
could be forgiven for steering clear of any volume of verse by a well-known pop star, even one as generally and genuinely respected as former Beatle Paul McCartney. At the very least, they could be forgiven for approaching such a volume with trepidation. To a degree, their fears and prejudices would be justified. McCartney has written a number of surprisingly good poems, but they are embedded like precious stones in the basest of rock (if the pun be permitted). Indeed, all too often the rock weighs heavily on the blackbird’s wings, a millstone around the poet’s neck.

There is, in fact, little doubt that McCartney’s reputation as a poet would have been enhanced considerably if his reputation as a pop star had not gate-crashed its way onto the pages of
Blackbird Singing
. If the poems had been allowed to stand alone, they would have stood secure. As it is, they have been forced to shuffle uneasily beside a large selection of McCartney’s song lyrics. These, stripped of their musical accompaniment, make embarrassingly bad verse, even where they remain eminently memorable as lyrics. It is certainly comical, yet sadly tragic, that legendary and truly lyrical lyrics, such as those in
Penny Lane, The Long and Winding Road, The Fool on the Hill
and many others, fall flat and lifeless on the dead page, as though, when stripped of their music, they have been stripped of their life.
Hey Jude, Back in the USSR, Band on the Run
. . . one by one, the lyrical icons of one’s youth crumble to dust on the impotent silence of the page. Like an uninvited voyeur, the reader looks on with embarrassed awkwardness at the pathetic sight of the sublime becoming ridiculous.

There are exceptions.
Paperback Writer, She’s Leaving Home, Lady Madonna
and
Eleanor Rigby
all salvage some respect as verse even after the musical Muse has been exiled. In each case, however, they were stronger when happily married to their respective musical spouses than when forced to live as aesthetically impoverished divorcees. Only the unforgettable
Yesterday
survives as a poem of true merit, as pristinely pure and sublimely simple in verse as it is on vinyl.

Nonetheless, and leaving these reservations aside, Paul McCartney
is
a genuine poet. He is a poet
in spite
of his reputation as a songwriter, not because of it. It is in the final section of the book, entitled “Nova”, that McCartney finally excels. Containing nothing but new verse and mercifully free of old song lyrics,
Blackbird Singing
reaches a late but refreshingly impressive climax. With the rock belatedly removed from around the poet’s neck, he begins at last to fly and sing like the bird that gives the volume its title.

Comprising a mere fifteen short verses, the final section is candidly autobiographical, intensely personal, and charts McCartney’s enduring love affair with his wife, Linda, following her death from cancer. It is, in fact, the diary of a soul’s grappling with bereavement—its feelings, its thoughts, its suffering, its questioning. It is strongly reminiscent of C. S. Lewis’
A Grief Observed
, though it speaks to and from the heart, whereas Lewis spoke to and from the head. It also charts, and chants, a soul’s confusion and its eventual conversion, albeit a conversion colored by confusion. The final poem in the volume is a hymn of praise to a long-sought and longed-for God. In the company of other and greater poets, such as Dante, Bunyan, Coleridge and Sassoon, McCartney is a poet on pilgrimage, seeking that he might find. Perhaps, however, his particular pilgrimage is not yet over. Having discovered God, he has still to rediscover His Mother. Across the years, one hears the insistently haunting refrain of one of McCartney’s finest songs:

     When I find myself

     In times of trouble

     Mother Mary comes to me

     Speaking words of wisdom,

     Let it be.

56

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The Poetry of Praise

A review of

Lion Sun: Poems by Pavel Chichikov
⁺

O
N FIRST LAYING MY HANDS
on a copy of Pavel Chichikov’s poems, I was reminded, somewhat incongruously, of C. S. Lewis. The association of the one with the other had nothing to do with any perceived similarity in their poetry. On the contrary, although Chichikov dedicates one of the poems in
Lion Sun
to “C.S.L.”, they are as different as the proverbial, or poetical, chalk and cheese. The association arose from the delightful cover art depicting the “Lion Sun” of the book’s title as an Aslanesque personification of the Sun or Son, leaping toward the reader from its heat-haze halo. The blending of Lewis’ Aslan with Chichikov’s “Lion Sun” is itself emblematic of the evocative evolution of ideas that proliferate in Chichikov’s work. His imagery leads one from the nature-prophetic to the supernature-profound in a progressive stream of associated ideas pointing to something deeper. Such Franciscan mysticism fused into verse is very reminiscent of Roy Campbell’s sonnet sequence “Mithraic Emblems”, and, most particularly, his sonnet “To the Sun”.