The Bible: Almost 1 Dmension Chapter 4 Part 2 of

THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA

by James Whitlark, Ph.D.

THE BIBLE (1966): ALMOST ONE DIMENSION

The previous characters torn between the Shadow and their waking lives were significantly less-than-one-dimensional, making their self-division extreme. It thus resembled a curse, a spreading blight as when a blade from Mordor draws Frodo into the Dark Lord’s realm, a foreshadowing of other plunges into it, both figurative and literal. Frodo’s being a hairy-footed “Halfling” (termed significantly less than one by his very species name) does not diminish his nobility. Indeed, we sympathize with the vulnerability of these beings with great holes in their lives such as the werewolves who wake to wonder what they have done that night.

In contrast, being only slightly less-than-one dimensional (minor diminishment) is humorous as in “[The] Fairy Tale of One who Went to Learn Fear” (Märchen von einem, der auszog, das Füchten zu lernen). The Cantor’s Dust of the protagonist’s occasionally broken line is punctuated by gaps where what is called to the reader’s attention is his ignorance of danger. Despite stylistic awkwardness (as in the title), the Grimms leave him without a name, as if his very nature were a lack. Indeed, his father thinks of the protagonist as “seine Not” (his need, want, deprivation).

From Don Quixote to Italo Calvino’s Nonexistent Knight (whose body is also missing), such not-quite-all-here heroes flourish in comic literature. Dino De Laurenti’s lavish production The Bible: In the Beginning extends this ironic approach to the patriarchs. The transitional state of Adam, dust brought to life, seems to have been inherited by all his deadpan descendents because, to its director John Huston, they are barely rational primitives—reflections of the fundamentalists who revere them. Distancing himself from the latter, Huston told Cahiers du Cinema, “I think all churches, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, all except perhaps some rattlesnake-eaters in the South, agree today that The Bible is a mixture of myth, legend, history” Kaminsky 168). Calling himself a “philosophical atheist,” he expressed his credo thus: “The truth is I don’t profess any beliefs in an orthodox sense. It seems to me that the mystery of life is too great, too wide, too deep, to do more than wonder at. Anything further would be as far as I’m concerned an impertinence” (Huston 329).

A highly intellectual Christian, its scriptwriter Christopher Fry worked from a slightly different perspective: “Genesis moves from poetry into the beginning of history.....But what do we mean by ‘poetry’; what do we mean when we say that the earlier chapters are in the form of “myth”? What we certainly don’t mean is that God and His creation and His relationship with man is untrue. But spiritual truths have to be conveyed in ‘images’ to be expressed at all; the universal has to be crystallized into the particular” (Fry 5). In other words, for the scriptwriter the film was to be poetically true, and for the director, not true at all, so that both approach the conventional images by interspersing them with pointilistic gaps of mystery.

Harmonizing with the ironic blandness in the characters is that in the settings. In his screenplay (written with Jonathan Griffin and Rev. W. M. Merchant), Fry calls for light and shadow, first resembling a pair of hands (a common synecdoche for the Judaic Creator), next a luminous bird (the Holy Spirit, a Christian metaphor), then hands again (Seton 15). As Huston screens this symbolism, however, it resembles murky chaos.

A narrator reads from a condensation of the opening of Genesis. The visuals develop from a blur into nature shots celebrating creation. The sequence, though, is not without buried mockery. Its great cinematic predecessor is that paean to Darwinian evolution, “The Rite of Spring” in Fantasia. Thus, for instance, the film includes shots of molten lava, a staple of scientific guesses about earth’s origin, but hardly Genesis.

Concluding this section, the creation of mankind, contains strategic omissions. Particularly since the late nineteenth century when Julius Wellhausen and other scholars did so much to date the verses of Genesis, secular universities and non-fundamentalist seminaries have taught the documentary hypothesis: that Genesis is a composite of disparate sources. According to it, there are two contradictory accounts of human creation. Genesis 1:1–27, compiled about 850 B.C.E. in Northern Israel, has men and women made (in the plural) after creation of the animals (Harris 53). Genesis 2, compiled about 950 B.C.E. in Southern Israel, has the creation of but one man and woman, this occurring before reference to creation of the animals (Harris 53).

Fry conflates the two Creation accounts in Genesis, omitting and rearranging verses. Even in the original, Adam is a fractal character, created in the image of God, yet of clay, so that he is both of earth and Heaven. He is self-similar to the whole human race, which reflects his link to the divine but also his original sin, bringing all to death. In the film, golden glow colors shots of Eden, perhaps suggested by the Golden Age that plays a part in Greek and Roman mythology comparable to that of Eden in the Judaic. Suffused in that glow, the filmed Adam walks mindlessly in a tale that has much of its particular Biblical detail glossed away.

In the movie, all his descendents appear equally mindless, particularly Noah. After failing to sign Charlie Chaplin or Alec Guiness as Noah, Huston took the role himself. “As he gently shows his last passenger, a sublimely unhurried tortoise, on board, the effect is of a curiously personal glimpse of the man himself right in the midst of one of his most impersonal movies.… It seems to mockingly echo the theme that critics have been most eager to define as the central one of his career: that of the eccentric engaged in an impossible quest” (Hammen 110). Huston also plays the role of God. Admittedly, in deMille’s remake of The Ten Commandment, the Voice from the Burning Bush is Charlton Heston’s, but aside from a hint of subjectivity in having Moses talking to himself, this is not disturbing. Heston’s Moses is sublimely dignified. In contrast, Huston’s Noah seems stupid and ridiculous—hardly the most traditional image of Deity!

To have a happy ending for the Noah episode, Fry deletes the patriarch’s drunkenness as he subsequently leaves out Lot’s incest and the even stranger episode of Sarai being introduced as her husband’s sister. Comparably, consonant with his life-long fascination with pacifism (Wiersma 24), Fry powerfully simplifies presentation of violence. His condensations transform problematic narratives of Genesis into tales of holy, patriarchal Gemeinschaft (tight–knit community) versus the evil Gesellschaft (urban looseness) of Babel and Sodom. The Bible, however, has gone on to become a staple offering by Christian video clubs, whose members are willing to fill in the strategic omissions with their own beliefs.

Continue to THE BIG PICTURE Chapter 4 Part 4

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