Stanley Fish’s December 27 review of Ethan and Joel Coen’s latest film (“
Narrative and the Grace of God: The New ‘True Grit’”) ends with the startling observation that
The new “True Grit” is that rare thing — a truly religious movie [emphasis mine].
Of course,
The Robe,
The Ten Commandments,
Ben Hur,
Jesus Christ Superstar, or
The Passion of the Christ it’s not.
In the Coen Brothers’ movie, Fish points out, “the universe seems at best indifferent, and at worst hostile.” Narrator-heroine Mattie may say the words that appear in both Charles Portis’s novel and the original film, but in the Coen Brothers’ film, “There is nothing free with the exception of God’s grace” seems to say that grace’s distribution exhibits no discernible pattern.
Fish writes:
In the novel and in the Coens’ film it is always like that: things happen, usually bad things (people are hanged, robbed, cheated, shot, knifed, bashed over the head and bitten by snakes), but they don’t have any meaning, except the meaning that you had better not expect much in this life because the brute irrationality of it all is always waiting to smack you in the face. This is what happens to Mattie at the very instant of her apparent triumph as she shoots Tom Chaney, her father’s killer, in the head. The recoil of the gun propels her backwards and she falls into a snake-infested pit. Years later, as the narrator of the novel, she recalls the moment and says: “I had forgotten about the pit behind me.” There is always a pit behind you and in front of you and to the side of you. That’s just the way it is.
For Fish, the religiousness of the Coens’
True Grit seems to inhere in Mattie’s heroic response to the indifferent universe. She “maintains the confidence of her convictions even when the world continues to provide no support for them.” And Fish takes at face-value the “message” of the movie’s closing song: “Leaning On the Everlasting Arms”:
Oh how sweet to walk in this pilgrim way
Leaning on the everlasting arms
Oh how bright the path goes from day to day
Leaning on the everlasting arms
What have I to dread what have I to fear
Leaning on the everlasting arms.
But I heard that song as pure, wry comedy, ironic through and through, the movie’s last laugh. I can agree with Fish’s “religious” label for
True Grit only if I interpret his final sentence, “In this movie [religiosity] is everything, not despite but because of its refusal to resolve or soften the dilemmas the narrative delivers up,” as extolling a heroic acceptance of the
material nature of a
purposeless universe.
While not the usual sense of “religious” and “religion,” which the dictionary says “esp.” consider the universe to be ”the creation of supernatural agency or agencies,” the terms are permitted to cover simply “a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe,” even if those beliefs are literally naturalistic (stripped of the supernatural) and deny purpose.
While I’d have to accept that use of “religious” as narrowly permissible for
True Grit, I wouldn’t offer it myself, any more than I’d submit to having my own views of the universe and our place in it labeled “religious.” The term’s “esp. supernatural” connotation would misrepresent what I believe.
