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The Mystery Dialectic in Cinema:Paradox, Mystery, MiracleBy Joseph G. Kickasola

Introduction: Louis Dupr Goes to the Movies

He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells withhim.No wise man, enchanter, magician or diviner can explain to the king the mystery hehas asked about, but there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries. Daniel 2:22, 27-28 (NIV)

God, the blessed and only Ruler, the King o kings and Lord o lords, who alone is immortaland who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see. To him be honorand might orever. Amen. 1 Timothy 6:15b-16 (NIV)

The large question looming over this essay is how does one express, ap-proach, and/or convey religious transcendence through the cinema? This has

proven important as the religion and lm discipline moves to a new stage o

maturity.1 Likewise, there is a rising interest in questions o spirituality in Ameri-

can culture,2 and, unsurprisingly, the antastic and supernatural have become

dominant themes in contemporary media. The rise o this new supernaturalism

is precisely a general ascination with the extraordinary, antastic, and broadly

spiritual dimensions o human experience and it has not escaped critical attention.3

This essay provides a stepping stone toward an answer or that larger question

by engaging the philosophical theology o Louis Dupr, and ocusing on a morenarrow argument: that mystery should be a key term in any real consideration

o the transcendent in media. Considering how much Christian theology turns

on Divine paradox, it seems that all eective lms approaching the unapproach-

able should engage a mystery that bafes yet enchants, appears counterintuitive

but rings utterly true.

There are no talismans; neither theology nor cinema will solve these mys-

teries, and no medium, including lm, is guaranteed to give one a transcendent

experience. However, what some lms can do is point, encourage, nudge, and

Mystery, saysJoseph G. Kickasola in this essay, is a key component in any lm seeking to

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Christian Scholars Review

open up a transcendent view. They can bracket away the distractions, reocus our

spiritual vision on what we have missed or suppressed, and/or ormally convey

something like the transcendent experience, provoking spiritual refection.In this light, such lms refect a negotiation with spiritual hope, either in the

diegesis, in the audience, or both. Mystery is the primary sign o this negotiation.

It is not an expressly theological commitment, but it is a step away rom a mate-

rialist, atheistic, and autonomous perspective, as the coming dialogue with the

theologian Louis Dupr will reveal. We might say that the process, i it can be

called that, is a dialectical one, moving between paradox on one hand and miracle

on the other, with the key term mystery constantly mediating between them.

A paradox is a contradiction and, perhaps, nothing more. It dees present

rationality and is perceived as a problem that will, eventually, be rationally ex-plained. Paradox may also be just weird, as in the unky screenplays o Charlie

Kaumann (Being John Malkovich), oering pure ancy and conventional tinkering,

but little impulse to ollow it all through metaphysically. A miracle is a ull-fedged

gesture toward the supernatural, a temporal contradiction expressly as index

o Transcendent order (though the nature o that order may remain hidden and

little understood). Mystery is a paradox with a suggestion, even a whisper, o the

supernatural or transcendent order.

In the rst section o this essay, I will consider Duprs Religious Mystery and

Rational Refection, or the setting o boundaries on our terminology, receiving guid-ance as to the place o Divine mystery in contemporary culture, and consideration

o its ramications or the cinema. In the nal section, I will explicate the mystery

dialectic through two scenes rom a popular lm: Paul Haggis Crash, which won

the 2005 Academy Award or Best Picture. This is not to say that this lm is the

ultimate transcendent lm, but rather to show that the religious mystery rubric

can operate in even the most popular works o culture.

1See Robert Johnstons edited collection Reraming Theology and Film: New Focus or an Emerg-ing Discipline (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007) or an excellent survey o the discipline and itscurrent trajectory.2Just one o the many interesting discoveries in Christian Smith, Soul Searching: The Religiousand Spiritual Lives o American Teenagers (Oxord: Oxord U.P., 2005).3Consider the many supernatural-themed lms and television shows like Lost, The Event,etc. (progeny oThe Sixth Sense and The X-Files). To give one o many critical examples othis sort o ocus in lm, consider Margo Jeersons review o Pedro Almodvars Talk toHer: Suddenly Onscreen, its All about Wonder, TheNew York Times (online), February 8,2003, accessed April 9, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/08/movies/revisions-suddenly-onscreen-it-s-all-about-wonder.html?scp=1&sq=Suddenly%20onscreen%20its%20

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The Mystery Dialectic in Cinema: Paradox, Mystery, Miracle

Dupr on Religious Mystery

Dupr opens his book on religious mystery by calling it essentially ungrasp-able.4 Essentially, this is all flm can do as well: flm is no better equipped than

Duprs philosophical theology to explain the mysteries o God and existence.

It does, however, help us understand our relation to/with those mysteries, and,

in certain very remarkable flms, it can help us to engage those mysteries, as the

only way to grasp an aspect o a mystery is to live in it. That aspect might be

called the beckoning, which is the call o the transcendent, the hint o temporal

meaning as synecdochal or larger, metaphysical transcendent order.

Dupr considers the heart o any religious act to be that truth is given, not

projected by the subject. In other words, we experience truth as received rom anoutside source. Dupr, drawing on Henri Dumry, calls this a radical receptivity

that lies at the ground o all active projection o meaning.5 This is where mystery

starts, where the Source is not only given, but experienced as surpassing the

mind.6 Religious rituals, myths, and institutions serve as privileged symbols

allowing the transcendent meaning to penetrate all o reality.7

Symbols or Dupr are the conduits or mystery, and symbolic vehicles

like flms may encourage a donning o the religious mind Dupr describes.

Symbols are the way we articulate religious mysteries, not to represent them

comprehensively, but to concretize them, so that we might experience aspectso them in ocused ways. In this light we might consider cinema a living symbol

that is closer to a phenomenological enterprise than a semiotic one. Michael Bird,

drawing on Mircea Eliade, has suggested we employ the term hierophany, an

instance o the transcendent penetrating the immanent in particularly revelatory

flms.8 In the same way, Rudol Ottos (1958) classic description o the mysterious,

Divine numinous may be the consummate Other, but it still lurks among us

as the mysterium tremendum.9 Dupr suggests traditional religious symbols

allow the numinous to penetrate temporal reality. It seems that the cinema, as

living symbol, can recast our vision o that reality.

4Louis Dupr, Religious Mystery and Rational Refection (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans,1998), vii.5Ibid., 11.6Ibid., 18.7Ibid., 17-18.8Michael Bird, Film as Hierophany, in Religion in Film, eds. John R. May and Michael Bird(Knoxville: University o Tennessee Press, 1982), 3, 21-22.9Rudol Otto, The Idea o the Holy (London: Oxord University Press, 1958), 13. Otto: Let usollow up with every eort o sympathy and imaginative intuition wherever it is to beound, in the lives o those around us, in sudden, strong ebullitions o personal piety and

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428 One o the oldest arguments against transcendence is the notion that cinemareally only gives us the material world, and an approximation o it at that. Yet,

Duprs position on the fnite/infnite theological opposition leaves room ormysteries perceived within the fnite and material reality, and declares that the

discovery o reality is not so much a matter o circumventing materiality or

culture as it is a type o receptive posture. Vulgar mysticism largely orsakes the

fnite or the infnite, yet: [I]n Christianity all unitive mysticism moves beyond a

mere denial o the fnite. Instead, God appears as the ultimate dimension o the

fnite, the inaccessible within the accessible.10 Dupr likewise reers to God as the

ultimate dimension o the real.11 To clariy, and avoid a major pitall, Dupr states:

[I]t does not sufce to embrace the fnite as i it were infnite. Abolishing the distinction

between one and the other can merely result in an aesthetic pantheism incompatible withthe transcendence so essential to all genuine religion. What actually happens appears to bethis: the spiritual person comes to view the world in a dierent perspective. Underneathordinary reality he or she recognizes another dimension. At the very core o each creature,the contemplative fnds an otherness that compels him or her to allow it to be itsel and toabstain rom the conquering, objectiying attitude that we commonly adopt. This does notreveal a new idea o God; rather, it allows reality to reveal itsel.12

Regardless o whether one assents to Duprs phenomenological and mod-

erately negative theology, one must bear in mind that even the most orthodox o

theologians have always had a conception o religious mystery, particularly inrelation to Gods Being. One must consider even some basic Scriptures that, when

taken together, express the Divine infnite/fnite paradox:

In Him we live and move and have our being. (Acts 17:28, NIV)

Oh, the depth o the riches o the wisdom and knowledge o God! How unsearchable hisjudgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! Who has known the mind o the Lord? Orwho has been his counselor?Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him?For rom him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory orever! Amen.(Romans 11:33 36, NIV)

So, what does religious mystery have to do with our largely secular age? Ac-

cording to Dupr, ater modernism we are let with two general types o people,

reacting to a massive cultural sense o radical contingency:

This awareness, almost universal in a world whose awesome complexity and unimaginablevastness modern science has revealed, discourages many rom probing beyond the mysterythat science itsel discloses. For others, the mystery o inexplicable gratuitousness pointsto a transcendent horizon.13

As G. K. Chesterton once pointed out, using the newound vastness and complex-


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429ity o the universe as an argument against Theism is a bit like telling the prisonerthat his prison is more vast and sprawling than he ever imagined. It is the reedom

that counts, not the material dimension o things,14

and Dupr sees little evidenceo spiritual reedom in our age.

This may explain why religion, against all odds (it seems), survives, and

supernaturalism continues to be entertained in the culture. In this vein, Dupr

sees an essential connection between the emptiness in the secular heart, and the

Transcendent emptying process o the Christian mystic. The paradox is that los-

ing onesel is the best way to gain onesel; emptying onesel is the best way to

nd ulllment:

It is precisely the private and refective nature o religion in a secularized culture that explains

its inward trend, as well as the present interest in mystical literature. [W]hat attracts themodern believer to the masters o spiritual lie is, I think, less anity o disposition thanthe act that in an atheist culture there is nowhere to turn but inwardly. The mystics starttheir spiritual journey rom within, and that is the only place where the believer must begin,whether he wants to or not. But a major obstacle arises at once, or what the believer encoun-ters in himsel is the same absence that surrounds him. His own heart remains as silent asthe world in which the creatures have ceased to speak in sacred tongues. Yet it is preciselyin the deliberate conrontation with this inner silence that I detect the true signicance othe believers current urge toward a spiritual lie. For only ater having conronted his ownatheism can the believer hope to restore the vitality o his religion.15

In other words, the inward, mystical path is the only road let or a culturethat is radically suspicious o institutionalized religion, and the desert o modern

atheism provides the only space in which most o them are orced to encounter

the transcendent.16 We do not orsake ourselves because we despise our identities

and seek a loss o individuality or a union with the cosmos. Rather, we orsake

ourselves because we do not know who we are, but sense that God does. In this

light, even the ironic mysteries that end in tragedy are given an apologetic call:

will you suppress the intuition that such occurrences are not random?17 In the

spirit o Ottos overwhelming creature-consciousness, inward eeling plays

a primary role in beholding the numinous: you cannot explain the mystery, butyou may eel compelled to bow beore it. So, ironically, in this age o inormation

and control, the way o humility and mystery is the order o the day.

Encounter: Cinema, Mystery, and Paradox/Miracle Dialectic

So, the hallmarks o the encounter with religious mystery include:

Creature-consciousness and a sense o radical contingencyin a world o

increasing knowledge, our sense o control oten paradoxically eels less, not more


14G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy: The Romance of Faith (New York: Image Books, 1936), 62.

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430 Ineabilitywords oten ail us A mingling o the fnite with the infnite, the immanent with the Transcendent

A cosmic measure o time and spacethat the signifcance o time and spaceis not adequately assessed by the clock or the map

A paradoxical Divine presence through absence

Consider the paradox-miracle dialectic as it plays out in a ew scenes rom

Paul Haggiss Crash (2004). The hallmarks o mystery emerge here through the

aesthetics o intersection and time and space modulation. The mystery is present

in the why questions present in the narrative, but also in the orms o cinematic

Being (time and space, sound image, narrative). What matters is not that the

process results in a miracle onscreen, or in the viewer, nor that the narrative

produces a happy, redeemed ending or the characters. Indeed, some miraclesprove not to be quite as supernatural as we frst thought, and others seem bitterly

ironic in their tragic coincidence. What is important is the beckoning, the

call to reconcile our diverse metaphysical intuitions, the call to order rom Order

itsel, the beckoning that emerges rom our sense o the radical contingency o

things. This results in a negotiation with spiritual hope.

The Aesthetics of Intersection

The flm does not open with a typical establishing shot, but a series o pulsing,amorphous, and abstract images, ending, in ocus, on a mans ace (Figures 1-3).

Man: Its the sense o touch


Figure 1.

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Man (contd): In L.A., nobody touches you

Man (contd): always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much,we crash into each other just so we can feel something.

A policeman and a woman come into view next to him.

Figure 2.

Figure 3.

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432 Woman: Well, I think we got rear-ended. I think we spun around twice. And somewhere inthere one o us lost that rame o reerence. Im gonna go look or it.

By denying us a standard control eature o the classic Hollywood stylethe

context-orienting establishing shotthe audience is already placed in a position

o vulnerability and bewilderment, and so we are primed or mystery. We do

not know where we are, we do not know our context, and the conversation we

witness can only be understood within the widest possible rame o reerence

(hence, possibly, even unto the spiritual realm). Indeed, we come to see that this

accident is precisely what is needed or this character, as the rame o reer-

ence to which he is expected to adhere is too limiting. The car accident serves

as a shock to his materialist system, a bracketing o the everyday approach, and

an openness to the whispers o the Transcendent. He needs a miracle, outside

the standard temporal rame. By the end o the scene, he is to witness a dark

coincidence that may be conceived as a dark miraclea judgment, or, at least,

a tragedyon a metaphysical scale.

I have argued elsewhere that abstract images are particularly valuable or

expressing the transcendent, in that they subvert our categorical, sense-making

cognitive patterns and orce us to re-conceive time and space in more open terms.18

In a metaphysical context, we would say these terms are cosmic, eternal. Note

how the scene ends with a wide, overhead shot o the Los Angeles streets, criss-

crossing, intersecting, in the same way that our characters plot lines will intersect

at various points in the story. The aesthetics o intersection is the description

Glen Man has given or this sort o story, which David Bordwell has labeled the

network narrative.19 This narrative structure has seen a revival in the last 20 years,

initiated by lmmakers such as Robert Altman and Krzyszto Kielowski, and it

immediately ushers in the question o providence, as we unavoidably wonder

why things happen when they happen, and why they happen in the manner they

happen.20 Note how the lm ends with a similar image. The act that we do not

know who these characters are (yet) also orces us to see them in more open terms,

synecdochal o the whole o humanity.

We note here, at the beginning o the lm, the hallmarks o religious mystery:

a sense o the radical contingency o things, the unexpected accident (later to be

revealed as a network narrative, where characters are more thematically con-


18See Joseph G. Kickasola, The Films of Krzysztof Kielowski: The Liminal Image (New York:Continuum, 2004), ch. 2.19Robert Altmans Multiple Narratives presented March 3, 2006 at the Society o Cinemaand Media Studies conerence, Vancouver, Canada, and David Bordwell, The Poetics ofCinema (New York: Routledge, 2009), 191. My thanks to Glen Man or permission to quotehis excellent paper. I might add that the idea o a trac intersection (and car accident) waspresaged in several lms o superior quality (in my judgment): Kielowskis No End, Blue,

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433nected than happenstance would lead us to believe), a cosmic measure o timeand space (encouraged by the abstract images), a certain ineability (suggested

in the communication disconnect between the main character and his partner),and a paradoxical breakthrough o the transcendent perspective in this most im-

manent o car crashes. We can explain how this crash came about, and the lm

will show us the event in detail later, but we must rst consider the signicance

o the event, and that is a matter science cannot ully explain.

Mystery of Existence (Time, Space, Sound, Image)

Later in the lm, a locksmith, Daniel, gives up trying to x the lock o a

shopkeepers store. That night, the store is utterly ransacked. The shopkeeper,Farhad, loses everything, and seeks revenge, as he believes the locksmith set

him up or the crime. He ollows the locksmith to his house, conronts him in

the yard, and attempts to shoot him. As the gun is red, the locksmiths young

daughter jumps in ront o him. Numerous cinematic techniques come together

here to orm the dramatic moment, and it is eventually revealed that the child is

unharmed. Amid everyones stunned silence, the girl alludes to the really good

cloak that her ather had given her (an imaginary trinket he gave her one night

when she was araid).

Again, the act that a rational explanation or this miracle is revealed lateris not an argument against mystery, as the narrative structure oregrounds and

prioritizes the signicance o the event experienced as mystery. The questions that

make this scene work, or us and or the characters, still remain: Why did this

unexpected chain o events happen in this order, just when each o these characters

needed this miracle to occur? In other words, the screenwriters and directors

recognize that the important thing is not whether or not a supernatural suspen-

sion o physical laws occurred. Rather, they recognize that the desire or personal

intervention, and wonder regarding a larger control o events beyond our local

volition, will never be completely demystied. Belie begins on this ground, asDupr has noted, out o the desert o the real, where all is materially explained,

and, ironically, the need or Transcendent Order looms larger.

By contrast, we might note that Quentin Tarantinos cynical Pulp Fiction

(1994) ironically does preserve a miracle in a very similar scenario (a miracu-

lous intervention with a bullet with no material explanation given), but remains

a paradox (that is, it does not graduate to the realm o religious mystery). This

is largely because the signicance o the event is underplayed and undervalued

amid the carnage. There is no doubt that the bullet is a miracle o sorts, but it is

also clearly plot convention that the postmodern Tarantino garishly highlightsas such. The character development that it spawnsthe conversion o the as-

sassin is equally acile That is not to say it has no value or cannot be seen as


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434 To return to Crash, two additional cinematic elements in this scene are worthyo short explication, as they help us understand the mystery the scene engenders.

First, at the climactic moment, the natural ambient sound o the scene drops awayto silence (culminating in a large, silent scream o agony rom the ather).21 Walter

Ong amously notes that sound interiorizes the world, unites our experience, and

phenomenologically places us in the center o the cosmos.22 By stripping sound

rom image, we are stripped o our sense o control, and pushed into the blunt

encounter with radical contingency. We lose our diegetic place o observation, our

cinematic security, i you will. Paired with the provocative aesthetics o intersec-

tion, we look or somethingor someoneto order our existence. In this case, a

miracle intervenes, and a later scene shows the would-be assassin acknowledging

this miracle: Shes my angel.One might also notice the dolly/zoom, a technique made amous by Hitchcock

in Vertigo (and many others since). It generally preserves the size o the primary

object (in this case, the athers ace), but warps and distorts the environment

around it through a simultaneous dolly-in and change o perspective (telephoto

to wide-angle lens) (Figures 4-7). We experience this moment as a temporary but


21It is true that non-diegetic music swells into the vacancy. It is debatable whether or notthis stylistic choice enhances the eect. In the work o more austere flmmakers o the

Figure 4.

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435


Figure 5.

Figure 6.

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436

dramatic rit in the space-time continuum. Given all the hallmarks o mystery

noted so ar, we can see this as a transcendent gesture, pulling the subject rom

the everyday temporal world into a charged, subjective zone o metaphysical

agony. The scream here bears iconic, transcendent signicance precisely becauseit is silent (ineable), and suspended in a non-Euclidean dimension o space.

The great lmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky once wrote that cinemas greatest

virtue was to take an impression o time,23 and, indeed, the other, crucial ele-

ment in this scene is times alteration, largely accomplished through slow motion.

Again, given all the previous markers o transcendence, we can justiably see this

eect as a suggestion o eternal time, a zone o cosmic metaphysical signicance

unhindered by local temporality.

And behind this scene lies an enormous amount o contemporary speculation

on the chronological element o existence. The mystery o time has only growndeeper and more enchanting in the ace o contemporary eorts to understand,

harness and control it. There is not space here to digress into all the ways we have

sociologically complicated (and accelerated) our experience o time, nor can we

survey all the enchanting paradoxes o time quantum physics presents us. We

should only note that both o these themes are abundant in contemporary media,

showing up ubiquitously on both television and the theatrical screen.24

In this light, it should not surprise us that the philosophy o Henri Bergson

is making a comeback, given that his view o time was unusually fuid, to say

the least. The philosopher most responsible or Bergsons revival, Gilles Deleuze,also wrote two o the most important books in contemporary lm theoryCin-

ema 1 The Movement Image and Cinema 2 The Time Image which largel hinge


Figure 7.

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437on Bergsonian theory. In eect, Deleuze returns to Bergson as a oundation orunderstanding experience, and diering, fuid, multiple, simultaneous experi-

ences o time (sheets o time) orm the core o the theory.25

Though Deleuzeseeks to examine the multiplicity and polysemy o existence rom a decidedly

atheistic, postmodern perspective (exemplied in his argument or a Rhizome

vs. taproot modelan argument that connections are celebrated, but do not

point to metaphysical order), some have suggested Deleuze is actually more

metaphysically classical than he is typically conceived in his pursuit o a non-

scientic, subjective, interior truth structure.26 Others have argued this is akin to

a type o post-postmodern mysticism that cannot be completely divorced rom

religious mystic history.27

However, the theologian Dupr very directly connects Bergson with ourcontemporary longings or (and intuitions o) the eternal:

Bergson has shown that time, essentially a mental process, reluctantly submits to the homo-geneous measuring o movement in space. The experience o internal duration incessantlyresists its spatial projections. No experience o duration entirely resembles another. Themind grudgingly accepts the fattening homogenization o a standard time imposed by thebodily need to move around in a homogeneously spatial universe. Human beings internallyresist this fatness and eel compelled to express duration in gestures that, though spatialthemselves, nevertheless break through the continuous structure o the spatio-temporal.28

Whether or not we are willing to commit to Bergsons ull conception o reality,his conception o subjective time experience does explain the impact o cinematic

slow motion, as exhibited in our chosen clip.

So what does this mean or media that aim at the spiritual realm o experience?

The ormal characteristics o this clip (the slow motion, the rupture in image and

sound, the spatial distortion) all couple with the metaphysically-laden narrative

context to express something that dees modern, temporal explanation. This scene

potentializes hope even as it, paradoxically, cosmicizes tragedy. It provides no

dogma o certainty, but still transcends its own temporal shackles or the restora-

tion o chronological/historical brokenness.

Conclusion

There is a danger in this sort o analysis: that we might begin to see the ormal

elements analyzed here as a recipe or cinematic epiphanies. As mentioned, no


25This idea pervades both o the Cinema books: Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image(Minneapolis: University o Minnesota Press, 1986) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minne-apolis: University o Minnesota Press, 1989).26See Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (Minneapolis: University o Minnesota Press,

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438 scene or technique can bring the miracle o belie into being. Indeed, our problemmay be one o poor posture, a techno-uturist desire or control, be it through

theological explanation or simple naming, labeling, or categorizing themysteries we encounter, with no expectation o a miracle. I we are not careul,

the cinema, as a technological product, could very well unction in this trend, a

commodifcation o mystery that temporalizes and neuters it, placing it beyond

any position o spiritual power. Dupr warns us:

The frst task here is not one o recreating a more viable system (i that were sufcient,theology would have solved our problems long ago) but o a dierent outlook on the real.It is hard to describe what does not (yet) exist. But I can think o no better characterizationthan the one implied in the Latin term pietas, an obedient attention to possible messages,or the one Simone Weil has appropriately defned as waiting in expectation. We must frstremove the principal obstacle to the perception o the transcendent dimension o the real.We must not expect to come up with a new name or the merging transcendent, but only toacquire a new perceptiveness or detecting it.29

The process o transcendence in media cannot be reduced to a prescription,

but, rather, emerges as a dialectic, as mystery plays the mediating role between

paradox and miracle. In the end, we may believe, but may we not take the miracles

or granted, as mystery emerges again and demonstrates new paradoxes that

challenge our narrow conceptions. As the Apostle Paul suggests, His ways are

beyond tracing out (Rom. 11:33, NIV), but it is within them that we encounterHim. Yet, as Crashs admirers will attest, many fnd themselves persuaded o the

mystery, and that is the frst step toward miracle.

But what o the uncanny tragedies that have lurked around this discussion? As

mentioned, Crash presents us with mysteries that are tragic as well as redemptive.

Could God be a Designer with a sadistic streak, even as the young man carrying

a St. Christopher fgure ironically meets his end by this very religious trinket,

intended to protect him? There is not space here to address the problem o evil,

but Duprs remarks suggest a start: that the absence o God is the paradoxical

beginning o an encounter with His presence. In the same way, the uncannycoincidence in contemporary flm, be it redemptive or tragic, is a marker o the

radical contingency o the universe and the mystery that abides within it. The

walk o aith is one o strugglein Christian terms, the crossa dialectic and a

negotiation with spiritual hope.

Cinema may oer us even less o that aspect o mystery than real lie does,

but it can also re-present us with aspects we overlook in ordinary experience.

For instance, by living through suering, we can sometimes grasp the mystery

o sueringthat the suering itsel is spiritually valuable. I one reaches that

extraordinary, mystical moment, no cinematic rendering o the experience willdo it justice. However, many (i not most) o us miss that opportunity. We fnd


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439ourselves overcome by the experience such that we are blind to the grace abidingwithin it. The philosopher Gregory Currie, in his simulation theory o cinema,

states that lms are opportunities to run our emotions o-line;30

that is, theypermit us to experience danger saely, suering, joy, and so on, without the risks

involved in those emotions in real-lie contexts. Cinematic representations may

give us just enough room to replicate the emotional suering without enduring

its overwhelming elements. In other words, we may learn the grace abiding in

suering, or might come to the experiential realization that such grace is there,

through the cinema.

Such is the mystery o evil in the world; Dupr declares all eorts toward

theophany impossible, but, on the contrary, holds the experience o living through

the mystery o evil to be an extraordinary spiritual experience, much in the mannerthat Isaiah describes the suering servant (Is. 52-53, NIV).31 It may be said that

the cinema gives us an open orum to run our own experiences o these mysteries

o-line and over once again, to call our attention to what we missed the rst

time, and to ampliy the beckoning call.

Rudol Otto wrote about the rational and non-rational as the warp and

woo o the religious abric,32 without both together you have threads and tat-

ters. Mystery is notsucient in itsel, but or our inward-looking, cynical, and

sensorially overloaded culture, it may be the best place to start.

And the mystery is just a start, a step beyond mere paradox toward the direc-tion o miracle and ull-fedged belie; it is a middle ground o questioning, even

as it begins to acknowledge the human inability to understand and control ully.

There are miracle lms, but they are ew and ar between. This is partly because

aith is a matter o now and, yet, not yet. Films that trac in mystery oten present

us with a rst step toward the miracle o aith. As Dupr notes:

Faith will, more than ever, remain what it always was: a leap beyond experience. But, contraryto what deists oten claim, that leap was never blind. It always led rom partial insight tototal acceptance. The same structure is maintained today when the believer, dissatised

with the shallowness o a closed, secular world, abandons the conquering, grasping attitudeor a more receptive one.33

In the end, mystery is most satisying when it is articulated, not explained;

given, not taught. The mystery is not a pantheistic, New-Age suggestion that God

is all and smiles on everything. It is a marker o His Otherness and His iden-

tity in and through the immanent world. It is a wrestling with the miracles and

tragedies o our existence, a negotiation with Being, and a call to worship: As

Hegel once remarked, only in actual worship are believers capable o overcoming


30Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cam-

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evil.34 The best flms show us the mysteries that charm and vex us, but also the

reasons to hope, and keep waiting.

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