Lyden, John C. New York: New York University Press, 2003. 287 + x
pp. $19.00 (US). ISBN 0-814-75181-4.
[1] John C. Lyden makes a valuable attempt to take the study
of religion and film in a new direction. Rather than uncovering religious
themes, figures, or symbols in various movies, he analyzes the "religious"
way that audiences apprehend films, based on their adherence to or
subversion of specific genre conventions. Following Clifford Geertz,
the book argues for a broad definition of religion that avoids reducing
it either to functionality and ideology or to a set of doctrines about
the transcendent (42). This enables Lyden to analyze the content,
symbolism, mood, realism, and audience reception of film in terms
of the descriptive and normative world-picture that film creates.
Much in the same way that myth and ritual interpenetrate to produce
a narrated, believed, and practiced apprehension of reality (as well
as a narrated, believed, and practiced vision of an ideal), filmed
narratives offer audiences powerful explanations of the way things
are and the way things should be. Audience responses measured by box
office (and, to a lesser extent, the evaluations of critics) reveal
which filmic myths and rituals resonate most strongly with Americans.
Lyden can then produce a picture of the cinematic "religion"
of the audience by describing the worldview that the films inculcate.
[2] Part I, which comprises the first third of the book, is
an extended argument for this method of viewing film. Lyden describes
and critiques the current approaches to the study of religion and
film with a literature review of key texts in the field. He correctly
points out the limitations of religious approaches to film that merely
identify and circumscribe overt or hidden Christian narratives and
sacrificial protagonists. Similarly, theological critique of anti-religious
messages in the movies tends to become simplistic and reactionary.
What these approaches miss, according to Lyden, is the fact that audiences
are receiving all the messages of film "religiously,"
not just the ones that have something to do with what we all recognize
as religion. In this section Lyden also takes to task the discipline
of film studies for relying too heavily on ideological criticism -
tending to view all movies in terms of Marxist dogma, for example,
or reducing all heterosexual relationships in the movies to the exploitation
of women.
[3] Part II enters into "interreligious dialogue"
with seven genres of film: westerns and action movies, gangster films,
"women's films," romantic comedies, children's films and
fantasy, science fiction, and thrillers and horror movies. In each
case, Lyden narrates a brief history of the genre along with some
speculation about the reasons for its waxing or waning popularity.
Then he takes a representative (and usually recent) sample film (or
films), describes the plot in depth, and concurrently offers analysis
of the attractiveness of its "religious" message to audiences.
Hits like Die Hard (1988), Titanic (1997), and The
Silence of the Lambs (1991) make up the bulk of the examples.
[4] Lyden's achievement is his recognition that he must develop
a specific and defensible rationale for choosing what films to analyze.
The universe of film is too large to approach without an explicit
methodology for the selection of data points. Lyden argues that "audience
response" reveals what "filmed religions" are significant
and worthy of study - presumably because the mass audience is receiving
the message of the film and responding in a na've, natural fashion.
In order to understand the religious import of the film, we must see
it through their eyes, not "as scholars are wont to do"
(137). In the absence of broad anthropological or sociological data
on audience response, Lyden must rely on popularity as a measure of
religious importance, leading to repeated and largely unsupported
claims that the particular movie he is analyzing is "immensely
popular" (216), "the most successful"(194), "a
tremendous hit" (176), "extremely popular" (183), and
"among the most popular and the critically acclaimed films of
all time" (156).
[5] The flaw in this methodology is evident. While it is defensible
to claim that, in a mass medium, impact and therefore import is based
on the number of consumers, it is dangerous to allow popularity to
dictate what artistic works we should take most seriously. Lyden is
acquainted with the discipline of film studies, as evidenced by his
accurate summary of the formalism/realism debates among twentieth-century
critics. Yet he is spooked by its claim to see what is not immediately
evident to the untrained eye. In fact, the idea of making aesthetic
judgments or analyses is entirely absent from his book, leading to
a reduction of the medium of film to the stories it tells. The question
always in the background for the reader is: why film? If the religious
nature of the medium is entirely reducible to its narrative content,
why is Lyden not discussing popular fiction, television, or any other
set of widely distributed stories?
[6] Although Lyden's book is scholarly in tone and organization,
his methods reveal a deep distrust of film scholarship. Religious
studies is valuable, he asserts, because it reveals the inadequacy
of commonsense views of what religion is, means, and does; but film
studies is destructive because it teaches deeper modes of apprehension,
searches for subtexts, and undercuts commonsense view of what film
means, is, and does. Despite the positive steps Lyden takes away from
easy "theological readings" of film texts, the field of
religion and film is still waiting for a book as conversant with and
appreciative of film theory and criticism as it is of religious studies.
Donna Bowman
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
University of Central Arkansas, Conway, Arkansas, USA
donnab@mail.uca.edu
