[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iY5YMshpCcw]January 10, 2012
War Horror
Joey the “War Horse” galloped into my life this week and I remained corralled in the Grandview Theater for over two hours.
I first encountered Joey on the stage at New York’s Lincoln Center last summer in the theatrical version of the story. However, then he was a magnificent puppet, propelled by three master puppeteers from the Handspring Puppet Company. It was a work of elegance and grace, most of all for the restraint that respected the imagination of the audience. It was decorated with dozens of awards.
When I heard that Stephen Spielberg had won the race for the film rights, I was worried. I was also angry he had galloped in when the play was still running, cantered off with the film rights, then immediately raced into production with this delicate piece so that it could make good with the Christmas crowds. With all the other works he had in process, harnessing Joey, too, seemed greedy, both artistically and financially.
Restraint is not Mr. Spielberg’s strong suit, and his movie transformed Joey’s story into something I barely recognized. His “War Horse” is full of gory violence, with swords plunging into human bodies, hundreds of impaled corpses adorning the battlefield, and horses being shot when they become too exhausted to pull the artillery. Joey himself is tortured again and again by cruel captors, with countless close-ups of his bloody hooves and battered body. Yes, he is a “war horse,” but gratuitous violence defines this movie. It is kind of an equine “Saving Private Ryan” (ironically, one of my favorite movies) – or at least the thirty-minute segment of such graphic war violence that sent sensitive viewers reeling out of the theater.
Ironically, the set was as pretty as the action was violent. The hardscrabble Cornwall farm of the boy Albert and his family is Disneyesque, with flower-filled window-boxes and sunlit fields. One reviewer says that the lighting made it seem like something from “Gone with the Wind.” I laughed out loud at the Tara-esque final scene that seemed comic in its ridiculous perfection.
Our popular culture has trouble with restraint. More is preferable; explicit is better than implicit; graphic trumps nuance. Mainstream media of all types leave little to the imagination.
Yet we know the real thing when we see it; we respond instinctively to authenticity. We don’t have to be manipulated out of our minds to get the point, and a puppet and a skilled actor may tell us more about love than an epic extravaganza of excess.
For most of us, the religious journey is rarely epic, seldom explicit, and almost never well-lit. The writer Frederick Buechner puts it this way: “The word ‘religion’ points to that area of human experience where we sense beyond and beneath the realities of every day a Reality no less real because it can only be hinted at in myths and rituals, where we glimpse a destination that we can never fully know until we reach it.”
Church helps us trust this journey, navigate it, and celebrate it.
See you there.
Barbara
