Movies make worlds unto themselves and then let viewers peek in, audio-visually participating from our own darkened rooms. We sit in one world and access another, primarily through our eyes and ears but also through our entire bodies: we sit on the edge of our seat or recoil in disgust, belly laugh at the jokes or cry at the departures.
Religious traditions also create their own worlds, with their own senses of space and time, their own valued objects, and unique ways of seeing and hearing. We live our lives in one world, while participating from time to time in the other world through myths, rituals, symbols, and community engagement. Religions are bodily enterprises too, full of disgust and anger, scents and sounds, joy and commitment, touch and sight.
In this way, religions are like the movies. Movies are "religious" not because Jesus (or Noah, or Moses) is the protagonist, or a couple romantically meets in a synagogue, or the heroine gets on her knees to pray in the despair of night. Movies and religions are much more holistic than that, establishing worlds with specific rules and morals, and inviting people to participate in them, body, mind, and soul.
This relation is not lost on David O. Russell, director of the multiple Oscar-nominated American Hustle. Speaking with Neal Gabler in the New York Times, Russell discussed the ways he creates worlds on film, and how this was influenced by particular religious interactions.
Worlds are everything to me. When I would see my Bronx relatives or my Brooklyn relatives... I'd be on the outside of it, whether it was a bar mitzvah or a Catholic confirmation. My parents had renounced both their traditions. So I'd watch these events from the outside with great fascination. I said, "They had a 'thing.' They're inside of a 'thing.'" Some of my relatives in the outer boroughs became my greatest resource -- because their worlds were so specific --and I now say, "This is magic." Those people are living life so passionately. They're living something real.
Russell gets the inside-outside of worlds, how we humans can live in separate "things," and we can look in on the other's worlds, but remain "outside." And he notes the parallel processes between Catholic or Jewish rituals and the created magic of worlds on screen.
This is a place of passion, provoking fascination. Such connections shed light on the production of religion and the production of cinema, including the Academy-award nominated films from 2013.
This year's big films come back to small worlds, magic worlds that viewers gain access to in theaters and living rooms. Again and again, the macro-cosmos unfolds from the micro-cosmic world of the film's protagonists. Something of the magic of cinema itself, on a minimalist and manageable scale, has crept in, even when CGI is fully-employed. The worlds of American Hustle, Blue Jasmine, Enough Said, or Nebraska are bounded by a handful of people interacting with each other. Or the single individual struggles for survival within a highly condensed, chaotic, claustrophobic world, in Gravity, Captain Phillips, 12 Years a Slave, and All is Lost.
These worlds on screen allow glimpses of the ways our worlds could be, might be, or hopefully never will be.
Plate's Picks for Religious Oscars
Best Hero's Journey: (tie) 12 Years a Slave, Gravity – Every other film in the world is a hero's journey, but this fact doesn't negate the amazing ways it can be retold.
Best Sense of the Sacred in the Everyday: Enough Said – This film just felt "real," as if its world was not, in fact, all that separate from the viewers' world.
Best Portrayal of the Complexity of Tradition: Grandmaster – Wong Kar Wai's martial arts tale of honor and revenge subtly shows the ways traditions are always in process of being remade, remixed, and shuffled.
Best Creation of Mythology: Epic – Wild and wooly characters bound together in the battle of chaos and cosmos, through the congruence of worlds.
Best Ethical Compunction: The Wolf of Wall Street – Makes us wonder if justice only occurs in the worlds on screen; made by one of the most famous ex-Catholic filmmakers.
Best Re-Use of Ritual: Nebraska – A pilgrimage story where the journey is as important as the destination. Payne's film takes its place in a line of familial pilgrimage films: Smoke Signals, Le Grand Voyage, and The Straight Story.
Best Iconography: The Wind Rises – May be Miyazaki's last film, but like all his works, the images stick long after the show is over, bridging the gaps between worlds on screen and off screen, even when animated.
