Not all films in the new wave of LDS cinema blatantly embrace Mormon themes and characters. Saints and Soldiers (2003) is in this regard an effort to address more universal themes and experiences through the lens of an LDS sensibility.
Winner of more than fifteen awards, this independent film, directed by Ryan Little with entirely professional production values, chronicles the odyssey of a small band of Allied soldiers fighting their way back to their own lines to deliver critical intelligence during the Battle of the Bulge. The title itself is a coy emblem of the film's double voice.
To a general audience, the “saints” refers to those who valiantly struggle to maintain human integrity and virtue in the midst of the hell that is war. To those in the know, it is a clear reference to the third term of the abbreviation LDS.
The dramatic complication is two-fold. The religiously devout Corporal Nathan “Deacon” Greer recognizes a German soldier, who is on the verge of being shot by the Americans, as a man he baptized before the war while he was a missionary in Germany. The dramatic and emotional revelation, which abruptly humanizes a nameless, faceless, and despised enemy, starkly reveals war as the ultimate perversion of human interaction and fellow-feeling.
At the same time, the resilient humanity of Nathan (Corbin Allred) is gradually wearing down the misanthropy and encroaching nihilism of Brooklyn-born medic Steven Gould (Alexander Polinsky). Almost the sole survivor of the band, Gould finds himself at story's end (or is it a beginning?) prompted to retrieve the pocket Bible from the dead Greer's pocket. Only, of course, LDS viewers will recognize in the unnamed scripture a pocket version of the Book of Mormon, which will, presumably, continue to do the miraculous work of conversion it has been doing since 1830.
With audiences still largely polarized by recognizably Mormon subjects, themes, or treatments, filmmakers can alienate or exclude the non-Mormons, or employ enough humor or subtlety to entice them into the audience. Saints and Soldiers screenwriters Matt Whitaker and Geoffrey Panos choose instead to rely on a text coded in such a way that its meanings can be read in both particular and universal ways.
This film is about a Mormon ex-missionary (and ex-deacon) whose proselytizing experiences allow him to save a convert's life as well as his soul, while planting the seeds (Book of Mormon) for yet another conversion even as his life ends. But it is also about a noble everyman, “Deacon” Greer, whose inherent goodness, in its capacity to transcend human evil, ignites the latent goodness of a fellow human being, ensuring the survival of that which is best in human nature and human civilization.
Such strategies may prove one of the best ways to resolve the tension between celebrating Zion and lamenting lonely exile, affirming what is both culturally specific and what is culturally shared. Finding an artistic voice that exploits an authentic Mormon grammar but also builds rather than burns bridges is no easy feat.
Walling Zion
In his second film, Brigham City (2001), Richard Dutcher addresses thematically what Little has addressed strategically — the uneasy demands of Zion-building on the one hand and accommodating life in Babylon on the other. He asks some of the most urgent questions a Christian can ask in this regard, questions with special resonance for a people whose gathering was, for generations, literal.
Can Eden survive if her borders are permeable? When does the quest for purity become a flight from responsible participation in the world we are called to serve?
The sheriff (and bishop) of small town Brigham is so determined to defeat the encroachments of worldliness into his life and community that he refuses even to countenance news broadcasts on his car radio. Because he is still profoundly stricken over the tragic death of his wife, his studied introversion is as much a credible response to grief as it is a plausible manifestation of saintliness. Whether such efforts to shield himself and his flock from the ugliness and sordidness of Babylon represent transcendence of the world or flight from the world is the vexing question his young deputy poses.
In this film's unusually profound engagement with this central problem of Mormon faith, we hear echoes of an older and more traditional version of the dilemma: “Must we lose our innocence,” as a character asks, “in order to gain wisdo m?” Nothing is so attractive to a serpent, another character presciently observes, as a little paradise.
But the question here is not how long Eden can forestall the inroads of the devil. The question is, what is the price we pay, and is the cost too high, when we put a wall around Zion?
Ultimately, the sheltered community suffers the horrible ordeal of a string of serial murders. Initially, this would seem to be just another variation on an old theme, recapitulated time and again in Mormon history. The Saints build their refuge in Ohio, Missouri, Salt Lake City — only to find that dissenters, mobbers, and the railroad enter the garden bringing death, destruction, and sin in their wake. Only in this case, the sheriff finally confronts and kills the murderer — and it turns out to be his own deputy.
The solution emerges only after the sheriff faces the terrible truth that the savage killings were possible only because of his own stubbornly trusting nature and insistent generosity of spirit. A little worldly savvy and skepticism would have avoided a gruesome string of tragedies. The ingredients that constitute the city of Zion made possible the destruction of innocence.
The film's final scene is as emotionally wrenching as anything Hollywood has produced. The sheriff attends Sunday service, where he also serves as the local bishop. Aware of his naïve complicity in and responsibility for the town tragedy, he finds himself unable to partake of the emblems of the sacrament (Eucharist).
A shaken counselor (whose daughter was one of the murder victims) watches the bishop-sheriff in empathic discomfort, then likewise declines. So do the other communicants to whom the bread is next offered. We watch in pain and amazement as one by one, every member of the congregation declines to participate in the most sacred ordinance of a Mormon's weekly devotional life.
One reading of this shared gesture of self-punishment is that it represents a decision by the collective to share the burden that willful isolation from the world and its values entails. But — and here Dutcher is at his most provoking — to acknowledge the cost is not to repudiate the cost. The refusal to allow the sheriff to take upon himself the guilt of the group is an implicit reaffirmation even as it may be a recognition of the community's choices that precipitated the tragedy.
In the film's last moments, the young boy whose sister was the final victim of the sheriff's dogged blindness re-urges upon the bishop the sacred bread. Weeping, he partakes. And then, gratefully and tearfully, his flock follows suit. For even in a Zion remote from the world, none are worthy without grace, and none are unworthy with it.
Parallel Universes
Another feature film of brilliant quirkiness and deceptively serious intention is Greg Whiteley's New York Doll . The premise of the film is so absurdly outrageous that the result is a documentary virtually indistinguishable from parody.
Arthur “Killer” Kane was a founding member of the New York Dolls, a protopunk (also called glam-punk and mock-rock) band that was enormously influential in the New York club scene of the early 1970s (and upon subsequent generations of musicians across a broad spectrum). Sporting flamboyant makeup and drag and playing exuberant music in frenzied performances that reminded one fan of “Jagger and Richards on a bad-acid trip,” the band flared briefly like a shooting star before dissolving in 1975.
Kane sank into alcoholism, depression, and oblivion. Then, at the nadir of his life, he responds to a Reader's Digest ad, hears the missionary discussions, joins the LDS Church, and becomes a volunteer at the Family History Library adjacent to the Los Angeles Temple. (About as plausible a development, remarks one friend, “as Donny Osmond becoming a New York Doll.”)
The conversion is already a done deed when the film opens; even so, the film is a kind of conversion narrative — only it is ours, not Killer Kane's. The central, brilliant irony of the film is the complete nonchalance of the protagonist, his comfortable evolution into his new life and role, and his obliviousness to the shock this transformation engenders in anyone observing the radical disjunction between the “before” and “after” photos.
Like the ingenuous Peter Sellers in the 1979 film Being There (and with the same Christly overtones), or like the absurdly sanguine Old Testament character Balaam (who responds earnestly and without a shudder to his miraculously talking ass), Killer Kane unblinkingly glides from one construction of reality into another.
As the film's central plot gets underway, Kane must enact an even more daunting transition: back to glamrocker. But this time it is without leaving behind his worldview, his demeanor, his values, and all his newly acquired cultural baggage that seems at an infinite remove from the raucous Babylon he left behind. He is offered the opportunity to play a reunion concert with the two surviving Dolls in the London Royal Festival Hall.
Through this process that is resurrection rather than conversion, Kane's gentle voice and tranquil speech betoken a steady calm at a swirling vortex of contradictions. In fact, there is something almost violently incessant about the director's montages and juxtapositions and substitutions, all conducing to the same purpose: the visual and auditory and thematic dismantling of boundaries that keep the sacred and the profane safely demarcated and apart.
We see Kane the church worker, with missionary attire and nametag, morph on the screen into a lipsticked, fishnet stockinged, flowing-maned punker, and back again. We hear church hymns interspersed with pulsing beats and screaming guitars, we hear Kane fondly described by septuagenarian missionary friends who don't know what a bass guitar is and by admirers from the Clash, Blondie, and the Pretenders.
We see him in a dressing room casually and comfortably responding to David Johansen (also known as Buster Poindexter), who asks what he would have to do to follow “John Smith and all those lovely Brigham Young people,” and who likens tithing to “an agent's fee.”
We see Kane compare personal revelation to “an LSD trip from the Lord” and hear him give a prayer that sounds like an invocation to any Mormon meeting, only this is to assembled Dolls and colleagues as they prepare to dash onto stage before ten thousand screaming fans. And we realize that the guitar he is playing was taken out of hock with funds that the Church provided “so he would have something to practice with.”
The real message is articulated so quietly it is easy to miss. Sir Bob Geldorf is lamenting the imminent return of Kane to Los Angeles, to obscurity, and to his pedestrian existence as a volunteer in a church library. “He looks at home ... on the stage,” he says. “He shouldn't go back to that library.”
As he mourns the music career that might have been, and still might be, Chrissie Hynde, lead singer of the Pretenders, softly mutters, “There is room for both.” At the concert's finale, the band has carried it off brilliantly: the strobe lights are flashing, the thousands of fans are cheering, and the band members are an exuberant blur of delirious singing. Then, almost imperceptibly, the music fades and the soundtrack — but only the soundtrack — is replaced by the poignant, sacred strains of a Tabernacle Choir hymn.
Surprisingly, there is no discomfort, no discordance at all between the image and the music. And that seems to be the point: the universe is not merely capacious enough to embrace diversity but is a universe in which the real and palpable possibilities of infinite transformation make today's differences negligible.
Kane returns to Los Angeles and his library. Twenty-two days later, he is diagnosed with leukemia and dies two hours later. It is hard to avoid the impression that a deity scripted the prolongation of his life just enough for him to complete this morality tale. In our last view of him, he plays on the harmonica a simple Mormon hymn, the kind, he says, he would play for his friends at the Family History Center. Indeed, it would seem there was room for both.
A Hopeful Sign
All art forms have their highbrow and lowbrow manifestations, but the temptation to sacrifice aesthetic standards for popular success is especially strong in a medium of mass appeal like film. Little and Dutcher have resisted those allures and found at least a limited national success while engaging serious themes in serious ways. And with “indie” films becoming increasingly popular, enterprising Mormon filmmakers are likely to find the resources and audiences to continue investigating and depicting Mormon culture in highly original ways, as in the work of Whiteley.
The critical praise accorded the work of Whiteley, Little, and Dutcher, and their successful reconciliation of serious moral purpose with real aesthetic merit, is a hopeful sign for all who would shatter the monopoly of Hollywood-based cultural representations.
