Film Comment: Sunday Bloody Sunday

The key to this excellent film is the music, the repeated melodies of Cosi fan tutti (1790), an operatic comedy by Wolfgang Mozart. The phrase translates into English as “They are all like that,” or “Thus do they all.” A literal translation of the phrase into English would be “so does all.” The opera is about an older man showing two young men that their girlfriends are unfaithful to them and then telling them that all women are like that.  In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the opera was considered to be highly vulgar and immoral. Some modern viewers would consider it to be misogynistic.

The lovers in Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) are a divorced woman in her thirties (Glenda Jackson), an older Jewish homosexual physician (Peter Finch), and Bob (Murray Head), the handsome, shallow, and totally vapid bisexual young man with whom they both have sex. All three are aware of the others but the physician and the divorcee have never met. They each pretend not to care about the other lover.  Everything is kept on the surface, there is no depth to the relationships. The film critic, Roger Ebert, called the situation “psychic amputation.”

The Bloody Sunday reference comes from the fact that on Sunday Bob is leaving for New York City in America to promote his meaningless invention, which will almost certainly be a commercial failure. He is not involved enough with either lover to stay. He would rather pursue a wild and useless whim.

She “loves” Bob and would rather share him than lose him. He “loves” Bob and would rather share him than lose him. Bob does not love, he is too shallow for a real emotion. He simply does not even care. To quote Roger Ebert again, “This is not a movie about the loss of love, but about its absence.”

There are billions of lost people in the world, chasing after sex, love, money, power, pleasure, recognition, relationships, fame, fulfillment, and hundreds of other false gods. It is our responsibility to present them with the good news of the gospel.

The Voice of the Bible

The process of understanding films is like the process of understanding any other human knowledge.  The key is repetition and quantity of exposure until one begins to see patterns.  This is why a skilled physician sometimes knows what is wrong with you before you finish describing your symptoms.  The offensive tackle on the line of scrimmage in an American football game knows the play the other team is about to run by the way in which the opposing team’s players are standing.   The chess master knows the next six moves you are about to make and how he will respond to each.

In film theory, a theory popularized by director/actor Francois Truffaut is the auteur theory.   The theory posits that the author of a film is the true author of a film, putting his or her unmistakable stamp on the final product.  The theory holds that while great actors or producers can, and occasionally do, elevate films, the major artist of a film is the director.  The “voice” of a director is discernable when viewing the director’s output as a whole over the course of their career.

When you listen to Mozart every piece of music is different but every piece is also the same, and every piece yells “Mozart!”  It is the same with film directors: Alfred Hitchcock (an innocent is caught up in events outside of his control), Akira Kurosawa (the master and disciple, heroic champions, and cycles of extreme violence), Jean-Luc Goddard (Marxist themes), Luis Bunuel (opposition to organized religion and to traditional morality),  Naruse Mikio (female protagonists caught in bleak and pessimistic situations, with emotions raging under a calm surface), Martin Scorscese (morally ambiguous protagonists who are often prone to violence and feelings of guilt),  Ingmar Bergman (mortality, loneliness, sexual desire, religious faith),  Tim Burton (the misunderstood outsider who unintentionally hurts those for whom he cares),  David Cronenberg (the uncomfortable merging of mankind and technology),  Jacques Tati (the humor in normal everyday events), etc.

Just like a film director's body of work, the Bible has an identifiable voice, even though it was written by at least forty different people.  It is remarkably self-consistent.  Doctrine derived from the Bible can be judged as to its orthodoxy by its consistency with the total body of scripture.  It truly can be said that the Bible has multiple authors and one author.

Those who claim that the Bible contains contradictions fail to understand a basic principle: God's ways are not our ways.  Our understanding is limited; God's is infinite.  Rather than contradictions, the Bible is full of paradoxes in which both answers are true.  The Bible has multiple authors and one author. True freedom comes from submitting oneself as a slave to the Lord.  Both free will and predestination are clearly taught in the Bible.  Christians are strict monotheists but God exists as Three Persons.  Jesus is fully human and fully divine.  Jesus was at the same time a poor man and also the king of the universe.  God demands perfection but we are incapable on our own of ever fulfilling the demand. We are to be in the world but not of the world.

What We Can Learn from Wolfgang Mozart

There is a 2008 documentary about the electric guitar entitled It Might Get Loud. It often does inside my car.

Today, I was driving up US Highway 31 to get supper at Habaneros and playing "Why" by Joe Satriani, loud. The thought came to me that "Mozart would love this." To those unfamiliar with the composer, put it this way: he was all music all the time. Sure, many thought he was silly and immature; some were probably jealous of him (the movie, Amadeus, certainly declares that Antonio Salieri was; and he had absolutely no money sense (today he would be a multi-billionaire anyway with Oscars for his numerous big-budget film scores).

Mozart is universally recognized as one of the top five composers in history. He was everywhere, composing in every musical style and for every instrument known to his culture (so there were no Mozart compositions for the sitar, the samisen, the huaca, or the didgeridoo). Think what he could have done with a Moog Synthesizer, a theremin, a set of electric drums, or a tricked out Fender electric guitar! I think he would have loved Swing, Jazz, Country, Heavy Metal, and even, shudder, Rap.

We can't all be geniuses like Old Wolfgang (actually he died young) but I think that Christians could learn something from him, at least in his attitude about what was most important to him. He was obsessive about music from the time he was a small child, playing the piano, violin, clavier, and organ and writing symphonies, chamber music, church music, masses, sonatas, concertos, operas; in total, over 600 works. If we studied our Bibles as hard or worked at our callings or ministries, the things we say we love, with as much vigor and determination as Mozart gave to his, just imagine what we could do.