Literary Giants Literary Catholics (48 page)

What, then, do all these grandparents of science fiction have in common? Apart from their predilection for strange places and “new technology”, they are united in the
morality
of their message. In each case, the strangeness and novelty are only means to the moral end, the “science” in the fiction being merely a servant of the morality that the author wishes to convey. Of course, the morality may vary from author to author. In some cases, the fiction will be a servant of good morals; in other cases, it will become a slave of bad morals. Since, however, morals, whether good or bad, are always present, the fiction is to be judged accordingly—that is, according to specifically moral criteria. And, of course, it is the morality that roots the fiction in the facts of everyday life. Morality is the very ingredient, the spice of life, that makes a story relevant to the real world. Its application
within
a story makes it applicable to the world
beyond
the story. This being so, it is chilling to see how truth is often more real, and more terrifying, than science fiction.

Take, for instance, C. S. Lewis’
That Hideous Strength
, the final book in his Space Trilogy. One might think that its plot is fantastic beyond the realms of all possibility. Surely no government organization could be as cruel and as sinister as the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.). Yet today, in the United Kingdom, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (N.I.C.E.) has called for in vitro fertilization to be made freely available to any childless couple that wants it. Such a policy, if adopted, will mean the slaughter of countless innocent babies, discarded in the test tube as inferior specimens.

Returning to
That Hideous Strength
, surely nothing in the real world could be as bizarre as the N.I.C.E.’s decision to use the scientifically “revived” head of the executed murderer Alcasan as the “head” of their organization. Yet today, in the United States, the head of a former baseball star, Ted Williams, is being preserved, floating in a stainless steel can kept in a freezer vault, by a company called Alcor (
zan
?). Meanwhile, his decapitated corpse is suspended in a nine-foot-high tank of liquid nitrogen.

In life, Williams was a dashing athlete who served in the Second World War and fought as a fighter pilot in the Korean War. As a star player with the Boston Red Sox, he achieved the highest batting average of the modern baseball era. In death, his corpse casts morbid light on the practice of cryonics, the “science” of freezing bodies in the hope that one day scientists may be able to revive them. For a reported fee of $136,000, his body has been stored along with sixty others at an industrial park in Scottsdale, Arizona. The facility is run by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which has more than six hundred subscribers paying a monthly fee so that they can also be deep-frozen when they die.

It is indeed a weird and frightening world in which we live, a world that would stretch the fertile imagination of Thomas More, Mary Shelley and C. S. Lewis to the very limits. In pursuit of a scientific
utopia
, Frankenstein Inc., trading as Alcorzan, prepares to revive corpses from the dead while the N.I.C.E. calls for widespread experiments on unborn babies. Truth is indeed stranger than science fiction.

52

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“
E
VERYONE KNOWS WHAT DAMAGE
is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. They are occasions of sin; they seduce young people along the ways of evil by glorifying the passions; they show life under a false light; they cloud ideals; they destroy pure love, respect for marriage, affection for the family” These words, written by Pope Pius XI in 1936, have lost none of their potency. On the contrary, with every passing year they seem to cry out more plaintively than ever to a seemingly heedless humanity.

There is no denying that motion pictures represent an important weapon in the culture war that is gripping the world in the first years of the new Christian millennium. In the battle of ideas and the struggle of contending faiths and philosophies, the medium of film remains a powerful and formidable weapon. Islam, resurgent and resilient, has challenged the fundamental tenets of the West’s dominant and decadent materialism. The terrorist attack by Islamic militants on the United States might not be sanctioned by the vast majority of the world’s one billion Muslims, but it does highlight the gulf that separates and alienates Islam from the liberal secularism of Britain and America. The two
Weltanschauungen
are ultimately, and profoundly, incompatible.

Where, however, does Christianity place itself in this struggle between contending faiths and philosophies? Do we, as Christians, have a moral duty to side with one side or the other?

The sapient and salient words of Pope Pius XI would suggest that Christians must spurn the overtly agnostic, and often covertly atheistic, assumptions of the prevailing secularism and scepticism of the postmodernist West. Indeed, such is the cultural or anticultural power of Hollywood that the very concept of “the West” sometimes seems synonymous with little more than the west coast of California. Does that mean, however, that we should sympathize with the view of many Muslims that the United States is the “Great Satan”? The desolate decadence, posing as culture and regurgitated from Hollywood, is worthy of the contempt of all Christians—and, indeed, is treated with contempt by millions of good Americans. The United States might not be the “Great Satan”, as Muslim fundamentalists would have us believe, but there seems little doubt that the prince of lies has found a very powerful mouthpiece, and foothold, in much (though not all) that emerges from Hollywood. If, however, the prince of lies has gained a foothold in Hollywood, the “Holy Wars” of militant Islam have precious little claim to any communion with the Prince of Peace.

Perhaps the position of Christianity in relation to the war between Islam and secular humanism is best summed up in the words of the Bishop of Como in an interview with the
Saint Austin Review (StAR)
. “There are, it seems to me, clear signs of decay . . . exposing Catholicism to the threat of being swamped by violent religious forces, such as Islam; or by the sort of mushy relativism that often goes hand in hand with the widespread availability of a comfortable lifestyle.” Certainly these are somber and sobering thoughts.

Are Christians therefore caught between the devil and the deep blue sea? Or, considering the Bishop’s evocative description of relativism as “mushy”, are we caught between the fierce and formidable deserts of Islam and the stinking and stagnant swamps of postmodernity?

Furthermore—and here is the crux of the matter—if we are caught between these formidable enemies, should we be forced to take sides? The deep blue sea might be more desirable than the devil, but is the desert more desirable than the swamp? Do we have no choice except dehydration of the spirit or drowning in the dregs of decay?

In truth—and “truth” is the operative word—Christians find themselves in the middle because Christianity is the Center. Christians have, as their infallible Guide, Him who is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Through Him, and through the infallible guidance of the Church, His Mystical Body on earth, we can and shall prevail.

In the war between emergent Islam and declining decadence, we must arm ourselves with the weapons of the cultural and spiritual struggle. Apart from prayer, always the most potent of weapons, our army includes the holiest of saints, the mightiest of philosophers and, last but not least, the giants of art and literature. Our army includes Saint Michael, Saint Dominic and Saint Francis; Socrates, Aristotle and Plato; Giotto, Michelangelo and Da Vinci; Palestrina, Mozart and Mahler; and Dante, Shakespeare and Cervantes. Thus is the army of God assembled, rank after rank beneath the radiant splendor of our Lord’s and Lady’s banner. Called to arms, the Church Militant prepares for what could prove the mother of all battles.

53

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T
HREE CHEERS FOR HOLLYWOOD
? Surely not. There must have been some mistake. . . . How can any conscientious Christian initiate a chorus of praise for such a den of iniquity and vice? Has he lost his senses? Or, worse, has he passed from the purgatory of life to the inferno of the living death that currently squats on the edge of the City of Angels, spreading its filth to a worldwide audience? Has he traded in his true inheritance in the City of God for a few sordid scenes in Tinsel Town?

Fear not. He is merely giving credit where credit is due. He raises his voice in praise for that which is praiseworthy, even though his three rousing cheers might be barely audible amid the deafening hiss that is the usual serpentine chorus emanating from the hell of Hollywood.

The recent release of the first installment of Peter Jackson’s bold endeavor to bring the wonder of Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings
to the silver screen serves as a reminder that the medium of film need not be counterproductive to the life of the soul. On the contrary, it illustrates the film medium’s enormous potential, its power to edify audiences. The fact that the potential is all too often squandered, and the fact that the power all too often pollutes the soul instead of assisting in its desire for purity, is not the point at issue. Film, unlike the One Ring in Tolkien’s epic, is not intrinsically evil. It has the power for good as well as evil, the power to raise souls heavenward as well as the awful potential to assist in the downward spiral of the hellbound. It should, in fact, be a sobering thought for all producers, directors and screenwriters that Justice will make them accountable for their influence upon audiences. The realization that they are contributing to the raising or the razing of souls should cause them to pause and ponder. The failure to do so is itself a sin of omission screaming for justice.

Over the years, there have been producers, directors and screenwriters who have taken their moral responsibility seriously. Their films have exalted the noble, denigrated the ignoble and uplifted the spirit. Perhaps indeed they represent an exalted nobility of film, outnumbered perhaps by the ignoble but shining forth in purity like candles in a darkened room. It is these few, these happy few, that warrant the “three cheers for Hollywood”.

Thankfully, the Few are not so few that they can be discussed in a solitary article. As such, the following will be a short guided tour of a few of the Few.

A good place to begin any tour of the best of Hollywood is in the presence of Gary Cooper, a fine actor whose understated style belies his natural abilities.
Sergeant York, High Noon
and
Friendly Persuasion
represent a healthy trinity of films starring Cooper, each of which deserves three cheers of its own. The first, a romanticized retelling of the life story of a “real-life” hero of the First World War, dramatizes the subject’s prodigal youth, his repentance and conversion to Christianity, his efforts to become a conscientious objector on the grounds of a pacifist reading of Scripture, and his final emergence as a war hero who saves the lives of many of his comrades through selfless acts of bravery.
High Noon
is probably so well known that its plot, revolving around the hero’s self-sacrificial sense of duty regardless of its personal cost in terms of the loss of happiness, scarcely needs elucidating. Suffice to say that its masterfully paced ascent to a consummating climax is perambulatory in its persistent patience yet tension-tightening with every successive scene. A cinematic masterpiece!

The final piece in our Cooperian trinity is
Friendly Persuasion
, a film about a family of Quakers questioning their principles in the midst of America’s civil war. Should they fight for the cause that they believe to be right, or should they refrain from fighting in accordance with their pacifist principles? Interwoven with this dramatic tension between principled pacifism and the concepts of a just war is the tension between two warring concepts of Christianity, namely, the puritanical and the Catholic. Although the Church, as such, does not so much as warrant a mention, the efforts of Cooper’s character to overcome the puritanical strictures of his wife epitomize the battle between the iconographic and the iconoclastic vision of the Faith. Slowly, resolutely and always lovingly, the character played by Cooper introduces beauty and gaity into the life of the family, symbolized by his acquisition of an organ, in defiance of the wishes of his wife, which brings the icon of art, in the form of music, into the life of the family. This theme is played out in various guises, not least in the characterization of the puritanical elder of the Quaker community, whose joyless adherence to his faith finds expression in a pharisaical approach to the letter of the law, particularly in his harshly phrased refusal to question the Quaker position on the war. The hardness of heart is highlighted still further by his sudden
volte-face
following the destruction of his own possessions by the enemy. In a moment of poignant symmetry—one of many in this wonderfully scripted tale—we see the erstwhile pacifist’s harshly worded defense of the need to fight and are reminded instantly and insistently of his earlier harsh words
against
the war. In his defiant insistence on pacifism and in his later rejection of it, there is, in both cases, an evident absence of love, the Real Absence that renders both viewpoints null and void.

In 1955, the year before the release of
Friendly Persuasion
, another western, of sorts, was released that, subsequently and sadly, has slipped into relative obscurity.
Seven Cities of Gold
, starring Anthony Quinn, Richard Egan and Michael Rennie, recounts the pioneering days of the Spanish settlement of California. Specifically, it shows the struggle of a determined Franciscan priest to establish missions among the Indians in the face of the lust for gold and women of the soldiers among whom he is ministering. The fearless faith of the friar acts as the moral motive force of the film. Paradoxically, however, the movie’s ultimate power does not reside with the man of faith and the converts he gains, but with the solitary conversion of a faithless man, whose sin and cynicism have served as a foil to the friar’s piety throughout. The climactic conversion of this solitary sinner represents a truly glorious moment in the history of cinematic art.