Film as Religion, Second Edition. John C. Lyden
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some social-scientific accounts have attempted to do. Rather, utilizing a semiotic approach, he insists that one must understand the meaning intended by a religious behavior in order to understand its function in a religion. A nervous twitch and a wink may look the same, but one has no intended meaning, while the other does—a meaning, furthermore, defined by its context and the set of assumptions that accompany it.19 Geertz is interested in the set of meanings implied in religion, and his definition of religion reflects this.
Geertz’s definition of religion is found in his 1966 essay “Religion as a Cultural System,” which defines it as consisting of five aspects: “1) a set of symbols which acts to 2) establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by 3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and 4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that 5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”20 He then unpacks each of these five aspects to spell out his conception of religion and how it functions.
First, as a set of symbols, religions provide both models “of” reality and models “for” reality. The difference is reflective of that between a worldview and an ethos—that is, the way the world is believed to be and the way it is believed the world ought to be. Models “of” reality describe the way we think the world really is, while models “for” reality describe how we would like it to be. We might also say that religions provide both beliefs and ethical values.21
Second, these symbol systems establish both moods and motivations in us. Motivations incline us to do certain things in certain situations—and so are a cause of our actions—while moods do not incline us to act so much as indicate our emotional reactions to certain situations.22
Third, these moods and motivations are based in “conceptions of a general order of existence.” Here Geertz specifies how religious feelings or inclinations differ from other sorts of feelings and inclinations: they are “directed toward the achievement of an unconditioned end” and are “symbolic of some transcendent truths.” By this he does not seem to mean that a “belief in spiritual beings” is the central characteristic of religion but that something greater than the ordinary is referenced. (Note that he also does not assume that there ought to be a single transcendent referent, as Tillich does.) Religion involves conceptions of the “all-pervading” that affects all life and not just a part of it. Geertz even whimsically allows that golf might be a religion to some but only if it points to some higher truths for the player and not merely because one is passionate about it.23 It is not, then, that religion is simply one’s highest concern but that it relates to one’s view of life’s purpose and meaning grounded in a general concept of reality.
In elucidation of this point, Geertz suggests that the primary purpose of religious symbols is to deal with the encroachment of chaos on our lives and to offer a sense that life is meaningful and orderly in spite of the challenge of chaos. In three fundamental areas are we threatened by chaos: at the limits of what we can explain intellectually, at the limits of what we can endure in suffering, and at the limits of morality, with the need to deal with the injustice of life.24 Although all three may be related to what is sometimes called the “problem of evil,” they are distinct in that they deal with different mental faculties and the different challenges posed to each by chaos. It is worth noting that in Geertz’s view, religion does not “explain away” the problems of life as if they did not exist; rather, in response to the very natural suspicion that the world has no order or coherence, religion offers “the formulation, by means of symbols, of an image of such a genuine order of the world which will account for, and even celebrate, the perceived ambiguities, puzzles, and paradoxes in human experience. The effort is not to deny the undeniable—that there are unexplained events, that life hurts, or that rain falls upon the just—but to deny that there are inexplicable events, that life is unendurable, and that justice is a mirage.” Religion then recognizes “the inescapability of ignorance, pain, and injustice on the human plane while simultaneously denying that these irrationalities are characteristic of the world as a whole.”25
Fourth, religion also clothes these conceptions with an “aura of factuality.” This means that religion deals with the “really real” in asserting that its conceptions are not fictions but are descriptive of (or, in the case of ethics, normative for) the actual nature of the world. This assertion of reality is not achieved simply by an act of faith but is expressed in religious life through ritual—the third key component of religious experience, alongside worldview and ethos. Rituals unite the conception of how the world is with the conception of how it ought to be, for “in ritual, the world as lived and the world as imagined, fused under the agency of a single set of symbolic forms, turn out to be the same world.”26 For religious people, rituals are “not only models of what they believe, but also models for the believing of it. In these plastic dramas men attain their faith as they portray it.”27
Geertz gives an example of this in the Balinese ritual dramatization of the mythic battle between the evil witch Rangda and the benevolent and comical monster Barong. Members of the audience participate in the drama by attempts to restrain Rangda or (sometimes) through being possessed by demons and actually entering into the performance. The ritual is therefore “not merely a spectacle to be watched but a ritual to be enacted. There is no aesthetic distance here separating actors from audience and placing the depicted events in an unenterable world of illusion.”28 In this way, the enacted myth becomes real to the participants; as Geertz observes, “To ask, as I once did, a man who has been Rangda whether he thinks she is real is to leave oneself open to the suspicion of idiocy.”29
Fifth, this aura of factuality makes the “moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” This point actually explicates the previous one, noting that religious assertions utilize a different set of assumptions from the commonsensical perspective, effectively introducing a new “language game” (to utilize a term developed by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein).30 Having moved into the ritual context and then back to the commonsensical again, there is a slippage from one context to the other so that the ordinary world is now seen “as but the partial form of a wider reality which corrects and completes it.”31 The man who played the part of Rangda, for example, realizes he is no longer her after the ritual, but having played that part and having felt the reality of it affects how he sees himself and the world, for example, as involved in the struggle between good and evil in the world or in himself.
Can each of these aspects of Geertz’s definition be found in the religion of film? First of all, films do provide a set of symbols, both visual and narrative, which act to mediate worldviews as well as systems of values—and in accordance with Geertz’s second point, these establish both certain moods (e.g., of reassurance or hope) as well as motivations (e.g., to “do the right thing,” to be true to yourself, or to love your family). When films are called modern “myths,” I take this (in part) to refer to a set of stories that represent the two functions Geertz calls “models of” and “models for” reality. (In the following chapter, the concept of myth and its applicability to film will be examined in greater detail.) That film narratives act this way should be clear: the world is claimed to be a certain way, and it is simultaneously claimed that it should be that way. The world is believed to be a place where good conquers evil, for example, as it tends to in all but the darkest of motion pictures (at least, those made in Hollywood). And if films do diverge from this convention, audiences may find themselves annoyed and even upset.
As one example of this, when I showed Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) to one of my classes, most of the students seemed to think that Allen was somehow saying that Dr. Judah Rosenthal (played by Martin Landau) deserves to get away with murder because he is never caught and even overcomes the tortures of his own conscience for having arranged the death of his mistress. They were incensed that Allen should make a film showing the wicked going unpunished, even though Allen’s point (as I took it) was not that this is the way things should be but rather that this is the way things are. Allen presumably wanted audiences to reflect on the lack of justice in the world and how this creates an existential situation in which people must choose good or evil even though it appears that good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. I was surprised that my class seemed so reluctant to accept this viewpoint, supported as it is by common sense. The worldview they expect to see