Movies about philosophers and theologians reflect as much about the powers that created them as the thinkers that technically inspired them. Students of religious ethics should become more defensive about this point by brushing up on auteur theory instead of posting defensive screeds on blogs, promoting the study of nuance via a publicly available syllabus, or subjecting our classes to righteous digressions.
Whereas Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) earned its filmmakers a prize at the Cannes International Film Festival for “Best Artistic Contribution,” Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. (2024) failed to gross even half its budget at the box office.
The story of writer, Shintoist, and ultra-nationalist Yukio Mishima is gold in the hands of a competent filmmaker. Under Paul Schrader’s direction, Mishima’s “life… work… (and) obsession have finally become synchronous” according to Roger Ebert, the revered critic. A futile suicide to restore Japanese militarism and the rule of the emperor leaves audience members wondering about the circumstances under which they too might die for their principles. Viewers are implicated by the experience.
Similarly compelling on paper, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s story was originally rendered under the title God’s Spy but rechristened by Angel Studios, the distribution company based in Provo, Utah that innovated a pay-it-forward strategy that pushed Sound of Freedom to the number ten spot on the highest-grossing films of 2023. Bonhoeffer robbed viewers of the chance to interpret anything about it. It has more in common with “content” in a crass commercial sense than cinema as a visual medium probing humanity’s biggest questions.
To better translate the force of that critique, we should crib liberally from Andrei Tarkovsky. Sculpting in Time, the Soviet filmmaker and theorist’s meditation on the craft, gets at the wedge we should drive in broader cultural conversations about the figures with whom we have the most affinity and expertise. Tarkovsky felt “one of the saddest aspects of our time is the total destruction in people’s awareness of all that goes with a conscious sense of the beautiful. Modern mass culture, aimed at the ‘consumer,’ the civilization of prosthetics, is crippling people’s souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.”
Film critics take seriously the notion that the work of the auteur is reconciling audiences to life; Mishima and Bonhoeffer are not role models we as scholars should be uncritically championing anyway. Again, Tarkovsky carves out a niche for religious ethicists. “The allotted function of art is not,” he wrote, “as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.”
“The good” is ultimately another question for religious ethicists to ponder, but not in the time allotted for this paper.
Not all students of religious ethics are film buffs and not all film buffs indulge heavily in theory. This paper introduces students of religious ethics to insights gleaned from film theory to (1) better untangle what is at stake in the depiction of theological thinkers and (2) better ground their critiques of those cultural products. Observing the tension between art and commerce is a crucial first step to our work. Real art, according to Andrei Tarkovsky, is produced by the artist’s pursuit of truth. It is thus dialogical like Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. But commercial interests also drive cinema as a vehicle for entertainment. “What do filmgoers want,” asked D. W. Griffith: “A girl and a gun.” This understanding of spectacle informs how Angel Studios flattened the movie originally titled God’s Spy into the far more digestible Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin.